Monster Mine (27 page)

* * *

Ollie

There was something I had to admit to
myself before I knocked on Dean’s door.

Something I hadn’t wanted to admit for
a long time, since Fields, but really, before that. Since the
Halloween party.

Dean Bogrov scared me. As in,
terrified me.

I let that sink in while I waited in
one of the alcoves in the university’s wing where all the offices
were located. The halls were mostly silent; the classrooms would be
used as temporary rooms for the visitors, but everyone seemed to be
outside, reveling in the entire community coming together. They
thought they were here to witness the fall of a great Original
family, but they were all just sitting ducks. Aswang bait. Fat for
the feast.

Dean was in his office. I knew by the
light beneath the door and the occasional passing
shadow.

He’d likely received word of my
arrival from the airfield the moment Hatter’s plane touched down on
the strip. I hadn’t expected him to meet us. There would be no show
for the people outside, no open arms for a returning student. No,
our battle had to play out behind closed doors. And he was waiting,
on his turf, for me to come to him.

That was how we played our
game.

And that was why he terrified me. He
knew exactly how to play me and which buttons to push. If he wanted
me on my knees, he only had to look as far as Sunny, Luke, and
Hatter. My family. My pack.

He had me dead to rights. There was
nothing I could do about it.

So I was scared, but then, a lot
scared me lately. I could handle it. I eased out from the shadows
and took a deep breath.

“
You’re fine,” I whispered
to myself.

My feet wouldn’t move.

“
You can do
this.”

My fingers started to
tremble.

I wondered how many times my mother
had been in this position. She’d come back from her hunts, from
gathering live rogues for Dean, and likely stand in a similar spot,
preparing herself. She knew what she would face on the other side
of that door. Toward the end, she’d pitted herself against Dean to
save the university. She’d done this dance for years.

I could do it tonight.

I wished for her red jacket. I wanted
to smell her scent and feel the comfort I’d grown so accustomed to
while in Anchorage. But it was lost, along with Ghost.

She had fought for kids like Ghost,
and that was comfort enough.

I strode to his door.

I didn’t knock.

The door swung open easily.

He’d heard me coming. His chair was
leaned back, a scotch in his hand. He’d been waiting.

A few lamps warmed the room. The large
window behind his desk, behind him, showed a glowing school, the
bonfires, and the mingling of thousands atop a snowy landscape. An
entire world existed below us.

“
Hello, Ollie.” He rocked
forward, draining his drink and setting it aside. “I’m glad to see
you’re not dead.”

I locked the door behind me. No
interruptions.

“
Glad to not be dead,” I
said as I crossed the room.

Almost imperceptibly, his shoulders
tensed; his fingers twitched toward the right, topmost drawer of
his desk. I suspected he kept a weapon there by the way he flicked
his gaze to it, counting the time it would take him to draw it on
me.

“
I thought after I lost
communication with Luke and Hatter weeks ago that you’d either
turned them against me or killed them.”

I took a seat in one of the leather
wingbacks and crossed my legs. “Not quite.”

Neither of us spoke. He kept quiet,
wanting me to overplay my hand the way I always had before. He had
no clue what this meeting was about or whether I’d come to kill
him. But I’d thrown him off by sitting down instead of leaping
across the desk and tearing for his throat. I let the seconds tick
by.

He broke first. “Contact regulations
aside, I think I can guess where you’ve been these past few
weeks.”

“
It would probably be a
good guess.”

The silence didn’t last nearly as long
as the last one before he spoke again. “You should know I never
intended for Max to find you. I had hunters on him twenty-four
seven, but he slipped our tail. He vanished. I thought he’d gone
back south.”

He talked fast, and I figured it out.
Dean was a little afraid of me too.

My eyes shifted to the window. From
here, I could just make out the walls bordering the school’s
property, the massive guard towers, and the rook’s nests dotted in
between. A few dots atop the fence shifted—the guards on
patrol.

I remembered running that fence line.
I knew every inch of it.

I turned my attention back to Dean. “I
now believe, you know.”

His hand went to his glass of scotch
before he remembered it was empty. “Believe what?”

“
In fate. Coldcrow talked
about it a lot back in Barrow before Killian murdered
him.”

A flash of pain crossed Dean’s face,
and I wondered if he and Coldcrow had once been good friends.
Close, like brothers, similar to Luke and Hatter.

“
I didn’t want to believe
in it because I thought it was a weakness. A liability, of sorts,
to put faith into something more than myself. But as Max tortured
me, I knew it could only be fate that brought us to these big
moments in our lives. These big crossroads. These decisions we have
to make for ourselves.”

Coldcrow had also told me I could be
the warrior Fear University needed, even if I didn’t agree with
Dean. I believed in that too.

“
What did you
decide?”

“
I decided to believe in
something more than myself.”

Dean leaned back in his chair again,
relaxing away from the weapon in his desk. As he moved, I smelled
leather and old books and lemons. This office had once soothed me,
just like he’d comforted me back when I first arrived here, the way
a father might have.

Now I knew just how bent he was. How
bad those ruined parts of him were. He’d fallen as far as Killian
had, but no one had caught him yet. I would never forget that when
I dealt with him.

“
I’m shocked Hex didn’t
change your mind.”

There it was, Dean’s big move. If this
was chess, then he’d just pushed his queen out onto the board,
ready to hunt me down.

I stood. He swiveled around in his
chair as I walked to the window behind his desk. I stared down at
the people who’d watched me walk through them like I’d risen from
the grave. Maybe I had. Maybe the fear I’d seen in their eyes,
right next to the awe, had been right.

“
That was fate too,” I
said, “him finding me.”

I left out Thad’s involvement. I had
no clue what Dean suspected there, but it had to be something,
since Thad had disappeared alongside me. Still, I didn’t need to be
the one who named him. I owed him that much.

“
How so?”

I put my hand to the glass. I knew it
was cold, the logical part of my brain told me that much, but I
didn’t feel the sting of it prickling against my fingertips. I
breathed against it, and my view blurred as my breath condensed
against the glass.

“
He told me the truth
about her, and the pieces came together about what had happened,
what she’d fought for, and why she’d died. I finally understood all
of it.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw his
eyes sweep to the door. Maybe he expected Hex to come barreling in
at any moment. I turned away from the glass and walked a slow
circuit around his office, looking at the things he’d collected
over his lifetime and put on his shelves. With each step, I felt
the thump of my father’s silver knuckles against my hip. In my
other pocket, my mother’s whip was clean, oiled, and wound
tight.

He kept quiet this time. I think he
understood this wouldn’t go any of the ways he’d thought it
might.

“
He was the first one who
didn’t lie to me about her, but he should have.”

I looked back at Dean. He was quick to
hide his surprise, but not fast enough.

“
Because now I’m back
here. That’s fate, you know. Not all this other bullshit. Fate is
fighting against something over and over and still finding yourself
back at the same spot you started at. Maybe it’s a little like
insanity in that sense.”

“
What are you
saying?”

“
I have to ask you
something first.”

“
Okay.”

His voice was tentative, more than a
little worried. “What happened to Peg Coldcrow? Did you kill
her?”

Dean’s jaw clenched, and I watched for
any sign that he was lying. If he lied about this, I might kill
him.

“
She died in the attack
against her home. We told her uncle she was alive and inside the
university hospital so he wouldn’t leave Barrow. He was the only
one you would trust, and we played the lack of information against
him. It was Killian’s idea.”

I doubted that, but I believed him on
the rest, at least for now, until I chose to learn something
different. Until then . . .

“
I’ll ask again. What is
this about, Ollie? What are you saying in all of this?”

I readied myself and dove in. “I’m
saying Hex is coming here with an army of aswangs and halflings to
attack Fear University on the night of Killian’s trial. I’m saying
he wants to kill everyone, all at once, in one big
bloodbath.”

Dean reacted as if I’d slapped him
across the face. He half stood from his seat, mouth open to speak,
but I went on.

It was time to push my queen out onto
the board, to attack and hunt him down.

“
I’m saying I’m here to
fight with you.”

I moved away from the bookshelves,
back toward his desk. He shrank, ever so slightly, and I knew I had
him.

“
I’m saying I’ll let you
study me. I’ll hunt your live subjects the way my mother did. I’ll
help with your fear switch research. I’m saying this because you’re
going to give me something in return, and you won’t like it. You’ll
hate it. It’ll probably turn every old, Original family against
you. It’ll probably mean you won’t be president much longer. But
you’ll do it.”

I put my hands, my burnt one still
tightly bandaged, on his desk and leaned forward.

“
You’re going to do it
because if you don’t, I won’t be in this office bringing you
everything you’ve ever wanted. I won’t be offering the validation
of your life’s research. You’ll do everything I ask of you because
you don’t want me on my father’s side, fighting against you. You
don’t want me outside these walls. Because if I am, you know what
will happen. You’ll lose everything.”

He stood and moved to the bar cart
next to his desk. After pouring himself another drink, he sat down
heavily, with an exhaustion he hadn’t shown me before.

After a long pull of amber liquid, he
asked, “What do you want?”

I sat down too, across from him so we
were at eye level. “Changes to the university and the way it
operates. Changes to whom it lets in.”

He closed his eyes for a second, took
another drink, and said slowly, “That won’t be easy. It will turn
the other schools and hunters and bases and families and everyone
against us. It’ll be Fear University versus everyone
else.”

“
Exactly. And we’ll take
them down one by one until they’re forced to change or risk
annihilation. It’s that easy.”

“
Not that I doubt you,” he
said, drinking again, “but how do you intend to go toe to toe with
some of our world’s greatest forces? There are universities all
over the world. Families with generations’ worth of resources.
Bases with hundreds of hunters. How can one girl take them
down?”

I smiled. I couldn’t help
picturing my mother. Couldn’t help the hope that I might make her
proud. “Not one girl. I’ll have an army. Hunters. Halflings.
Aswangs
. Humans and
monsters who all believe in balance and coexistence. The war won’t
be against every ’swang alive. It’ll be against the ignorant and
the close-minded. Against the fuckers who sit behind a desk with a
family name, a wad of money, and hunters, out fighting and dying in
their name, protecting them. We’ll make them change. They’ll change
or they’ll understand exactly why you let me take control of Fear
University, because I’ll crush them.”

He’d gone a bit pale, but to his
credit, he hadn’t started yelling or calling for guards to put me
in the cell next to Killian. He was smarter than that. I needed to
give him more credit.

“
Your mother used to speak
of balance and coexistence toward the end.” He swirled the
remaining scotch in his glass, his eyes on the liquid.

“
Right up to the day you
took her.”

He rubbed his temples. “I wish I
would’ve known back then how much I would come to regret that
decision.”