Paper Tigers Page 3
Tick, it hissed in my mind, in the part of me that writhed for fearlessness to flood my veins. I gasped at the undercurrent of desire that surged beneath the flood of pain.
Tock
The desire cleared my head at the last second. I ducked and rolled away from the teeth coming for my throat. My hand holding the knife found its tender belly, and I slashed, long and deep, a thin line from its chest to its back legs.
For a moment, the wound didn’t bleed. I stared up at the thin, pink flesh of the creature and saw the lumpy black bag being carried into the west wing lab and heard the screams. I wondered if those creatures felt this same pause right before blood surged and if they held their breath against the pain, knowing, as I knew, that life was over for them.
The blood gushed, and I tried to roll away, but I was too late. The blood was on me, in my eyes, nose, and mouth.
I gagged and shuddered as the ’swang collapsed, twitching and whimpering beside me.
The virtual reality headset came off my head, and I blinked into the muted lighting of the fear sim, my eyes slowly adjusting to this new reality without tick tocking ’swangs and dark shadows and pouring blood. It took me a moment to come around, as it usually did whenever Mr. Clint pulled me out of the simulation.
He reached a hand out to help me to my feet. His eyes were warm brown, the stubble of his beard thicker than yesterday. He’d lost his boyfriend in the school attack, and the weight of it showed in the dark circles beneath his bloodshot eyes, the slackness of his mouth, the emptiness.
“That was faster than last time, Sunny,” he said, blinking at me. The headset dangled in his hand, and the room—padded, windowless walls—absorbed his soft-spoken words.
“Still not fast enough.” I stepped away from him and his empty sadness because it had a taste of its own and I didn’t want to think about that. I straightened my rumpled clothes, ones I’d been wearing since yesterday, and tried to think about something else, anything else, than how I’d be faster with saliva in my blood.
If I were fearless.
“We can condition your pain reaction. Your—”
I was already shaking my head. I needed the pain to keep me centered. I knew that much from my time during the attack, with the bane and saliva battling in my blood. I remembered how the fearlessness had warped my mind, turning everything black and white. The decisions had been easy, the actions easier. I could do anything.
The pain was the only thing that had centered me, and the bane had fought back the saliva enough to keep me from unleashing my fearlessness. I’d felt the hair trigger I’d been navigating. Just a bit more saliva, just a bit less bane, and I would have torn the world apart.
That tiny part of me danced with excitement, but my head—the scientist in me—shrank in fear.
“I need to get to training,” I said, cutting off Mr. Clint. “Luke hates when we’re late.”
Mr. Clint’s eyes slid away, and he nodded. When I left, he’d put the headset on and battle countless ’swangs, fighting and killing as many as possible, feeling pain and fear, and experiencing his death over and over. That was how the fear sim worked. If you failed, you experienced your death, and inevitably, Mr. Clint would die. Afterward, he would take off the headset, reset the settings, and start all over again, fighting and dying.
I wanted to tell him it wouldn’t bring his boyfriend back, but we were all fighting and dying for something. I slipped from the sim room, closed the door as he put on the headset, and headed to training before I was late.
The gym should have been packed with all the first- and fifth-year students. The air should have been buzzing with youthful excitement and the low drone of constant chatter. Students should have been lounging on mats and playing with the punching shields while we waited for the older hunters to arrive for defense class.
Instead, the students were grouped in patchy clusters, their whispers quick and darting as if someone might hear them. The first-year class was the smallest group by far at barely fifteen students. The reason for their scanty numbers was messed up. Their rooms had been on the first and second rings of the dorms—easy pickings for the ’swangs during the attack when Lauren had destroyed the generator, springing open the cell doors. By the time the ’swangs had reached the second-years, the students had been awake enough to fight back.
Jolene, my biggest bully, stood amongst the first-years. Her arms were wrapped around her middle, her pretty face hollowed. Allison, her best friend, had been killed in the attack. Jolene hadn’t been the same since. She hardly bothered to sneer at me anymore. In truth, this version of Jolene scared me. I wanted the old, mean Jolene back. It would have meant things hadn’t changed that much.
I hurried to change in the girls’ locker room before joining the third-years in their corner of the gym by the back windows overlooking the vacant courtyard below. The guards patrolled atop the wall. More guards than I’d ever seen in a single shift walked through the freshly repaired watchtowers and rook’s nests with guns slung across their chests.
I peeled my gaze away and started stretching.
At the top of the hour, the gym doors swung open and the hunters strode in. The students fell silent. Luke came in first, jaw set and eyes snapping with danger; he and Ollie must have fought today. My attention skipped over him—he always made me nervous—and landed on the Barrow duo of hunters: Bloody Eve and Haze Hussar. In springtime, Alaska was slow, so the duo had returned to help restore stability to the university, though I didn’t know how much reassurance they provided. A ’swang’s bite had crushed Haze’s mouth, leaving only mangled skin and bone behind. He signed to Eve, who wore tight leather pants and a black corset. Her laughter rang across the silent gym like death tolls. Last through the door was Hatter.
My gaze lingered on him. The scars running down the side of his face looked stark against his pale skin and shocking red hair, which was held back by a purple, backward baseball cap. He dressed in loud, brash colors that always entered a room before he did. When he spoke, he was always joking, sarcastic and brasher than the colors on his back. He played up the Mad Hatter persona he’d given himself and hid behind the notion of a wild, insane hunter with scars and a barking laugh. Most of the time, it kept people at bay.
But I spotted his hand twitch—a small tic—the low hang of his pants on his tapered hips, and the paleness of his face. He’d been eating and sleeping almost as much as I had since the attack.
His two-toned eyes swept over the meager crowd and picked me out. The lips that had been forming silent answers to the voices’ questions in his head stilled and turned upward in a crooked hint of a smile.
He’d gone hunting with Luke last night. His apartment had been empty when I went to try, yet again, to explain my side of things. The corner where he normally piled his gear had been empty. Luke refused to stay far from Ollie when she left with her pack to bring in rogue ’swangs, and Hatter refused to stay far from Luke. They were brothers in every sense of the word but by actual blood, and where one man went, the other followed.
But hunting was killing Hatter, and Luke thought his brother’s slow death was noble and honorable for a hunter. Luke had promised to put him down when the saliva finally drove Hatter into a manic state so deep he could never recover.
It was complete and utter bull crap.
I turned my face away from Hatter without smiling as Luke called the class to attention.
The hours passed in an agonizingly slow grind. Eve worked with the third-years, and I disliked her for many reasons beyond her love for push-ups and squats. Mainly, my intolerance stemmed from Eve’s constant glances at Luke, who was working with the first-years.
If Gran were here, she’d admonish me for frowning and warn me about wrinkles, because my face was set in a stony glare directed straight at the raven-haired, tattooed hunter.
“He’s not gonna magically become single the longer you stare,” I muttered under my breath from where I stood at the back of the sparring line.
I turned my perpetual glare on the yellow-haired girl and let her marinate in it for a moment. The girl held up her hands and shifted farther up the line to get away from me.
I sighed. I should have been in the lab with Nyny working on the antidote. The hours I wasted up here training were pointless. My purpose was the science, even if part of me yearned for the violence.
While I waited for my turn to spar, my thoughts drifted back to the precarious balance of bane and the unknown solvent needed for the antidote, and my eyes slipped back to the windows overlooking the courtyard.
Twilight draped long shadows across the repaired brickwork. The tall floodlights blinked to life along the fence line, the black silhouettes of guards slipping in and out of beaming pools of light. Two figures walked across the courtyard toward the patched-up wall. I recognized Ollie’s blonde hair and swagger. She was talking to Dean and wildly motioning to the barbed-wire patch. Fighting and arguing, most likely. Everything was a fight these days, and I missed, with an aching fierceness, the days when Ollie and I used to study in her dorm room late at night and hang out in the rook’s nest overlooking Tick Tock Bay.
Those days were long gone now, and I wondered if they would ever return.
Quick movement along the fence toward the corner watchtower drew my attention. The guards continued walking along at the same pace, their eyes scanning the ground, ever vigilant. I frowned. I could have sworn—
There. Again, a flash of darkness through the pools of light that moved too fast for human eyes. It was slight. A wisp of smoke, perhaps? But the guards would surely smell a fire if it was that close. My eyes swept to Ollie and Dean. They would have heard something, but they were still lost in their conversation. I scrubbed my eyes; I needed to get more sleep.
But when I looked back, the darkness rippled again, this time close to a guard near the main gate. I watched, mouth falling open, as he twisted atop the fence line. Even from this distance, I knew what it meant when his neck flopped over at that impossible angle. In slow motion, he toppled from atop the thirty-foot fence.
His body hit the ground feet from Ollie and Dean. I didn’t witness their reaction because my attention was on the other side of the gate where another flash of darkness wrapped around a guard. When he stumbled into the beam of a floodlight, I spotted the blaze of red spreading down from his neck and across his shirt.
I was pivoting, mouth open to scream at the hunters, when the siren sounded.
Everyone in the gym froze. Panic worked its way into their bones. Fight-or-flight instincts took over and dumped fear through their veins, so thick I had to blink to clear it from my eyes so I could find Luke. The students flooded toward the gym doors, pushing and shoving each other. Memories of their friends’ screams as they were eaten alive were still fresh in their minds.
I spotted Luke picking up a first-year about to get trampled. “Luke!” I shouted. His attention snapped to me. “Courtyard! Ollie’s down there!”
He was turning before I’d finished my sentence. Behind him, Hatter was shoving through the crowd to get to me. I spun back to the window.
Down in the courtyard, Ollie had her stingray whip out, blonde hair flashing as she spun, searching for the attack. She was thinking ’swang and waiting for a flesh-and-blood monster to come at her. But the threat was darkness. Shadows. Smoke and murder.
She needed help.
I folded into the river of screaming students and slipped through the gym doors, passing Hatter without him noticing.
T H R E E
Ollie
A third guard fell from above, and his body hit the ground with a soft, sickening thump inches from my foot. He stared at me with blank eyes, his guts spilling across the ground by the toe of my Converse.
The siren rang in my ears as I trained my sights on the hole in the wall, waiting for the ’swang to come through, but it wasn’t quite right. It was too early and too bright out. The aswangs would be in their human bodies, and there was no way a random person was killing guards on top of the fence without someone shouting for the alarm sooner. Even if it had been dark enough, a ’swang couldn’t have climbed thirty feet up to breach the top of the fence.
Something else was happening. Something that prickled the skin on my arms and set my brain to one frequency—run.
“Get back inside,” I yelled, directing the words at Dean, his shadow looming behind me, cowering like the little shit he was and relying on me to protect him.
When he didn’t answer, I whirled around, ready to bark the order again. I froze.
Dean stared back at me, his mustache twitching with fear. My eyes traveled to the knife at his throat and the hand holding it.
The hand was floating in the air.
I blinked, and a person stepped through the shadow behind Dean, her eyes coming first then her skin, the darkness pulling away from her like satin sheets. Tendrils of shadows smoked around her features and wound through her long matted hair.
The girl was young—my age, perhaps—but her ebony eyes were dead.
Nothing was home.
“The Commander sends his condolences,” she whispered in Dean’s ear, but her eyes were locked on me. Her hand twitched, dirty nails flashing.
“No!” I lunged forward right as the girl pulled the knife across Dean’s throat.
The spray of blood hit me in the face as my hands slammed into Dean’s chest, shoving him back into the girl and knocking her knife hand wide. Dean fell to the ground, gurgling, his hands wrapping around his throat and his legs jerking like a hanging man.
The girl disappeared. She was just—gone. The shadows gobbled her up and spirited her away with a thunderstorm scent and a crackle in the air.
I spun around and dropped the slack in my mother’s stingray whip. My left hand dipped into my leather jacket pocket and came out adorned with my father’s silver, diamond-encrusted knuckles. I pressed the diamond closest to my thumb, and the blade inset into the knuckles whisked out with a metal hiss.
I searched every shadow as I backed into the light cast by the floodlights atop the fence.
Hunters poured out from the barracks and the school, vests zipped up to their necks and weapons clutched in their hands. They ran toward the wall, ready to reinforce the barbed-wire-patched hole.
But the attack wasn’t coming from outside the fence. It was already inside.
“Stay back!” I shouted at them, waving my hands to stop them. “Stop!”
The hunters in the front stumbled to a stop. At first, I thought they were listening to me, but then the guns fell from their hands and they sagged to their knees, their faces blanching and their bodies shaking. They screamed as the capillaries beneath their skin turned black with pain and fear. They were being fed on as pain infused their brains, and there wasn’t a moment to lose. I dove into the surrounding shadows, whip cracking through the darkness.
I was fighting air. My movements were wild and desperate, my breathing shallow pants as I scraped back the darkness and looked for solid bone.
“Ollie!”
My stomach dropped. “No! Stay back!” I shouted at Luke.
No sooner had I spotted him barreling to the front of the hunters than he slumped forward, his arm wrapping around his middle. He fell to his knees, the veins along his neck bulging with effort. His gaze found me, and even from halfway across the courtyard, I felt his agony crash into me.
I went wild.
I launched into the darkness with only the cracks of my whip to orient me. Out of the light, my eyes adjusted, though my ears rang with the hunters’ screams. She was mind-controlli
ng them and warping their brains into thinking their bodies were flooded with pain. She was doing all this while hiding in the shadows around me.
I caught the occasional sliver of black skin or blank eyes. I followed her closer to the towering fence. She was backing toward the hole while dancing around my whip, but I was closer to the wall. I kept my body between where I thought she was and the darkness she would have to travel through to get up there. She could move through the shadows, but she couldn’t move through a solid wall. She’d have to go through the patch.
I searched the shadows for any sign of movement—a tell that would reveal where she was or where she was going—but one inking pool of darkness looked just like another. How could I fight her if I couldn’t even see her?
The memory of my first few weeks at the university hit me. Luke training me in the gym. Blindfolding me. The punching bag swinging at me. I’d learned to track it by sound and the weight of air parting as it moved through space. I’d learned to anticipate it like a breath held deep in my throat.
I closed my eyes and waited.
Most of her attention was on keeping the hunters back by controlling their minds. She couldn’t focus completely on moving through the shadows. She was close, if the smell of lightning was any sign.
But there—my head snapped toward the rush of air rustling across my skin. The shadows felt thicker here, and they moved over my skin in watery waves I had to push through. I hadn’t noticed it earlier in my wild fighting, but I felt the difference now, and I struck.
My whip connected with flesh, and the onyx-tipped point dug in. A new scream filled the courtyard. She stumbled out of a shadow and into the circle of light with me and dropped her knife.
Slivers of blood seeped through her clothing. I’d hit her more times than I’d thought. She blinked huge black eyes at me, her face slick with a fine sheen of sweat. Her lips were blue.
She looked half dead, and I couldn’t bring myself to use my whip again.