Authors: Meg Collett
Tags: #coming of age, #action, #fantasy, #asian, #myths, #folklore, #little red riding hood, #new adult, #retellings, #aswangs
Monster Mine
M O N S T E R
M I N E
Book Three
The Fear University
Series
By Meg Collett
Copyright 2016 Meg Collett
Smashwords Edition
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Cover Design by Najla
Qamber Designs
Editing by Jessica West
([email protected]) and Red Road Editing / Kristina Circelli
(www.circelli.info)
Table of
Contents
“
Some nights are made for
torture, or reflection,
or the savoring of
loneliness.”
-Poppy Z. Brite
O N E
Sunny
A
cough rattled out from the backseat of the Four Runner and I
tried not to cringe. It sounded thick. Sick. Like something
reaching up from Luke’s insides and trying to tear him inside
out.
Almost instantly after the
cough came the
tap-tap
of a finger against the syringe. Luke let out a breath of
relief as he injected himself.
In the front seat, Hatter and I both
tensed. Luke had been injecting himself with straight aswang saliva
since leaving the cabin and the burnt body. For nearly a week
since, we’d been chasing Ollie’s ghost. Luke fueled himself on rage
and adrenaline, on the special fury created by his reaction to
’swang saliva. He said sometimes, right after shooting up, he could
almost feel her. Sense her. Taste her.
She’s
dead
,
Luke
, I wanted to scream.
But my best friend’s lover hadn’t
given up on her and neither could I. So when Luke said south, we
went south. Hatter had flown us from Barrow, Alaska to Anaktuvuk
Pass to Hughes. When Luke felt east, we went east, over to
Fairbanks. When he said Max would take her back to a place he knew,
to the lower forty-eight, we flew into Seattle and picked up a car.
We followed Luke’s growing madness like a compass.
“
Maybe we should stop for
the night,” Hatter suggested.
I was already nodding before he
finished. “I am pretty tired, actually. What do you say, Luke? Call
it a night?”
“
Keep going.” He snapped
open the break-action of his shotgun, checked the rounds, and
clapped it closed with a flick of his wrist.
Hatter’s grip tightened on the wheel,
his eyes never leaving the unlit Oregon road we’d been traveling
since leaving Washington that morning. He hated it when Luke took
the saliva around me, but Hatter had lost that argument. Luke
hadn’t been in a compromising mood lately.
“
Sunny said she’s tired.
We’re stopping.”
I sensed Luke’s
attention—dark and crawling, like a cobra through tall weeds—shift
to me. I pretended not to notice, but I knew what he was
thinking:
Sunny doesn’t care enough. Sunny
isn’t looking hard enough. Sunny thinks she’s dead.
He thought this even though I was the
one who’d convinced Hatter to go with him.
“
We’ll all be safer
together,” I’d said to Hatter right before we left Barrow. We
needed to protect Luke. He was too sick. I’d hoped he’d let me
treat him on the road. I didn’t know he’d already grabbed a stash
of saliva from the base.
Sunny thinks she’s
dead.
He thought this even though my heart
was broken and I still heard her whispering in my ear when things
got real quiet, real still.
Sunny
, she’d say,
if people know what I
am, they’ll kill me
.
And I would say
back:
They’ll have to get through me
first
.
Then her eyes, in my mind,
would get all shiny with tears as she asked,
How can you say that, knowing what I am?
“
Fine,” Luke said, his
voice frightening me. “Let’s stop.”
“
Thank you.” I murmured
the words to the window. Maybe he hadn’t even heard me.
“
You’re welcome,” he said
to the darkness beyond the car, the trees blurring by and the moon
shining down from high in the night sky.
* * *
The motel had a flickering vacancy
sign out front, though only a few letters still lit up. One blue
Ford sat parked in front of the office, which was dark, with only
the glow of a television inside. The doors to each room were
painted in a chipped orange, and the siding was pale and
faded.
I bit my lip. “Looks . . .
homey.”
The Four Runner crunched over the
pot-holed parking lot and came to a stop next to the office. Hatter
didn’t look over at me and didn’t glance back at Luke. I’d caused
that too, this tension between them, between two best
friends.
“
It’ll have to do for
tonight,” he said before stiffly unfolding himself from the
driver’s seat. He walked over to the office door, shoulders tired
and hunched.
I didn’t relish being alone in the car
with Luke, especially after he’d shot up a vial of saliva, but his
pneumonia seemed to lessen the saliva’s powerful effects on him; it
was the only reason Hatter had allowed us to keep going.
“
Do you think she’s still
alive?”
I’d known he was going to ask before
he opened his mouth. His question permeated the air between us in
an Ollie-shaped breeze.
Ollie
.
Question or accusation, I couldn’t
tell. I’d never been able to read Luke the way Ollie had. She’d
always managed to understand him somehow and see the softer, better
parts of him. I wondered if he would have any of those parts left
after this.
“
There was a burnt body in
the cabin.” My evidence.
“
It could have been
anyone.”
“
She’d been with Max for
weeks.” My probability.
“
He might not have wanted
her dead.”
“
We haven’t heard from
Thad.” My weakest defense. Even I knew he wouldn’t contact
us.
“
He’s part . . .
part . . .” Luke still couldn’t say the word. “He
would’ve tracked her. He said he could do that.”
“
He said he
might
be able to. That
was a bad storm.”
“
You’re saying she’s dead,
then.”
Swiveling around in the passenger
seat, I forced myself to look at him. The saliva had helped him
fill out a bit in the last couple days, but his shirt still
crumpled into the hollowed-out cavity below his ribs. His pneumonia
counterbalanced the saliva’s effects in a way that evened him out,
leaving him in some limbo state between extreme illness and
aggression. He sat in the back, staring blankly out the window,
with Ollie’s puffy black jacket carefully folded in the seat beside
him.
“
I think if anyone could
have survived, it’s Ollie. But I also know we found a dead body in
there. I know that storm was impossible. I know we think Ollie is
invincible, but she’s just—” I stopped myself. We both knew what
I’d almost said. Ollie wasn’t just human. She was a halfling, and
her father was the most powerful aswang who had ever
lived.
“
She survived.” His
fingers found the hem of Ollie’s jacket and held on.
“
Luke . . .” I
started, my voice trailing off as it always did when I tried to
broach this particular subject, but I forced myself to continue.
“If she is alive—”
“
She is.”
“
Okay, but—”
“
I would’ve felt it. If
she died, I would know.”
A shadow shifted outside. My first
thought was aswang, but Luke’s hand remained on Ollie’s jacket, not
his gun, and his eyes were calm; he’d noticed Hatter walking back
from the office moments before I had. Reason number one million and
two why I would make a horrible hunter.
Hatter had crossed almost halfway back
to the car, so I hurried on. “If we find her . . .” I
scowled and readjusted my train of thought. “She’s been through
hell. It wouldn’t be fair to add anything else to her plate. If you
have any issues with what she is, you need to figure that out now,
you know?”
Hatter opened the car door, and Luke
fell back into silence.
“
Lucky us,” Hatter said.
“We got the penthouse suite.”
My hopes soared. Maybe I wouldn’t need
my sanitation kit. “Really?”
The corner of his mouth twitched—the
scarred corner where the long, jagged black scar cut down the side
of his face, over his right, discolored eye, to the edge of his
mouth, mangling it. “No, not really, Sunshine. Get your kit and
let’s go.”
Dreams of clean sheets and a warm
shower dashed, my shoulders slumped.
The guys unloaded the SUV’s stash of
weapons—guns, knives, Hatter’s sniper rifle, and a crossbow Luke
tended to stroke—from the back and tucked them into a large duffel
bag, like precious toddlers ready for sleepy time.
I waited for them at the back of the
SUV, my eyes scanning the dark parking lot.
“
Here,” Hatter said and
tossed the hotel keys over his shoulder.
I fumbled them. The metal clattered at
my feet. Another reason I’d never make a good hunter: lack of quick
reflexes.
Together, Hatter and Luke each took a
handle of the duffel bag and started toward the room we would call
home for the next few hours—or until Luke got too twitchy. I went
first and unlocked the door. It stuck as I tried to shoulder it
open. From behind me, Hatter gave the door a push with his free
hand. It popped free and I stumbled inside, hitting a wall of warm,
stale air that smelled like a trucker’s hairy, sweaty pits. I
gagged.
Hatter took a long whiff as he and
Luke deposited the bag in a corner of the room. “Smells like my
apartment back at the university. Luke, remember when that rat got
loose in the back of the van and I put it in my coat pocket? Left
it there for a month or so. This smell reminds me of
that.”
Luke unzipped the bag and pulled out a
few guns without answering.