The Killing Season (11 page)

I started to scream for help, to alert those sleeping that the ’swangs were inside.

A hand grabbed my arm. My scream choked off.

I reacted violently, quickly, with all the lethality Luke had taught me. Spinning, I twisted my wrist, ripping my arm free at the same time I reached into my shoe with my other hand and freed my switchblade. As I crouched in a defensive position, part of my brain told me the grip on me had been weak, too easy to break away from. The thought registered a split second before I slit Abigail Aultstriver’s throat. She stood like a vapor beside me, so pale and slight I might have seen straight through her. She didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to be breathing. I let out a hiss of air for both of us.

“Mrs. Aultstriver! What’s going on? Did you open the front doors?”

My voice trembled with adrenaline, eyes slicing back toward the entry. Was a ’swang already inside? I needed to sound the alarm, but Abigail’s hand had left a wet trail across my arm. I looked down. Red light spilled over me from the stained-glass window and turned the wet spot on my arm a thick, dripping black.

Blood.

“You look so much like her, you know.” Abigail reached for me again and ran her bony finger across my cheek. Her sheer nightgown ruffled in the breeze from the open doors, but she didn’t shiver. More blood coated her, from head to toe, making her gown cling to her legs.

A voice whispered in my head she might have opened the doors.

I grabbed her arm, ready to pull her back into a room should I spot the inky black of fur or hear the click of nails across the entry’s floor. “What happened? How did you get this blood on you?”

“You have her eyes. Her strength. She could kill anything with that whip.”

Decision made, I ignored Abigail’s ramblings and pushed her behind me, adjusting my grip on the blade. I would stay here and hold the stairs, to keep any creature from going up or down, and hopefully keeping Abigail and myself alive.

“Help!” I yelled. My voice cracked with the effort. “Someone help!”

Behind me, Abigail’s hand ran across my hair, the strands sticking to her bloody fingertips. “Even your hair is the same. When I saw you, I thought you were her. But she’s dead. They killed her. Just like him. He’s dead too.”

“Who’s dead?” I asked, my eyes roving across the entry and the halls around us. ’Swangs could be anywhere inside the base. I had no way of knowing how long the door had been opened. “Help!” I shouted again, blood dancing inside of me, ready for a fight.

Down the hall, doors opened and banged shut. Lights started whipping on all around me, flooding the base with light. I glanced back at Abigail. She wasn’t looking at me; her haunted gaze turned toward the entry.

Her blood snaked like tiny blue tributaries beneath her ghostly skin. “He’s dead. They killed him too.”

Pounding footsteps crashed closer to us. On the third floor, people shouted back and forth. The stairs vibrated beneath my feet. “Who are you talking about, Abigail?”

She pointed a long finger toward the entry, where a light had just turned on, illuminating the room below us. As I turned to look, I was already shivering.

There, above the open front door, Sin’s severed head replaced where the aswang’s had been mounted previously. His mouth was stitched shut with the same red velvet string, his eyes open wide. Bone and cartilage, severed arteries and veins still dripping blood, hung roughly cut from the base of his neck.

The rest of his headless, naked body slumped against the wall by the door, snow swirling across his bare toes.

S E V E N

Ollie

“O
llie!”

I turned toward the sound of my name, which was no more than a hoarse croak. Luke, pale and drawn, half limped, half ran down the hallway, cocking a gun as he went. He slipped an extra clip into the back pocket of his jeans. The denim—without their top button closed—hung low on his hips, revealing a trail of dark hair beneath his navel and the tight taper of his abs. Even with the shit storm happening around me, I couldn’t help but scowl; Eve was going to
love
that look on him.

“Get her in here,” Luke commanded, his voice clearer now. He swung open a bedroom door closest to us and grabbed his mother’s slim arm. I followed them inside after checking the hall one last time, my eyes lingering on the stairs. Sin laid just down in the entry without his head.

And Abigail was covered in his blood.

Luke closed the door and locked us inside the room, as if it would do any good against a ’swang attack. “Take this,” he said, offering me his gun. “I’ll get one from someone else. Stay in here. Don’t come out.”

I stepped away from him and bumped into Abigail, who cowered behind me. “I’m not taking your only—”

“Ollie, take it.” Only the desperation in his voice had me reaching for the gun. It settled heavy and cool in my hand as I automatically checked the safety. He handed me the additional clip too before jerking his chin toward his mom. “Keep her safe. I’ll be back.”

“Be careful,” I said quietly. He paused and glanced back at me, his bloodshot eyes settling on my cheek. He rubbed his thumb across my face, and only when he pulled away did I realize he’d wiped blood off of me.

“You too,” he said. Just like that, he was gone, the door slamming shut behind him.

The bedroom’s thick walls muffled any sounds from outside in the hall. I had no clue what was happening, but I took a deep breath and gathered myself. A locked door wouldn’t do much against a ’swang, but I locked it anyway. Then, after tucking the gun into the waistband of my jeans, I shouldered a tall, heavy dresser in front of the door, even though it blocked our only escape route. If anything managed to claw its way inside, we were screwed.

“I’m sorry.”

I turned toward Abigail, who sat on the edge of the bed, staring at her bloody hands. A look of comprehension replaced her normal dazed expression, and when her eyes met mine, for the first time I stared back at a person with real thoughts, real emotions. Not just hazy eyes and drunk giggles.

“What happened down there?”

“No, I mean I’m sorry for what I said earlier, to you. I shouldn’t have.”

She’d just been talking out of her head, and I doubted she even knew what she’d said. “It’s okay. You were just scared.”

“It’s just,” she bit her lip, looking decades younger, “you looked like . . . like someone I knew once. That’s all. Sometimes I just get confused.”

Heavy footsteps pounded past the door, making me flinch, but the noise carried past as fast as it’d come. With Luke’s gun back in my hand, I kept my body angled toward the door. “Do you know what happened to Sin? Did you see who opened the door?”

“I woke up in bed,” she said quietly. She picked at her soaked gown, her fingertips tacky with blood. “I was thirsty, so I went to get water from the kitchen. I saw his body right before you came down the hall. I think . . .” She wiped her hands together, her voice pitching higher. “I think I woke up with this blood already on me and I just didn’t notice. How did I not notice something like that? What’s wrong with me?”

Her eyes found mine, desperate and pleading, like she could pull an answer from me if she begged hard enough. She began to tremble and her teeth chattered so loudly I heard them plainly. With one last glance at the door, I said, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

She followed me to the en-suite bathroom, her skinny arms wrapping tightly around her middle. In that moment, she didn’t seem like Luke’s mother or Killian’s wife. Her fragility was obvious, her tendency to shatter plainly written in her delicate movements, the way her hands moved like feathers. Too precious to be in a place like this.

My thoughts snapped to Sunny and I prayed she was locked safely in her room. The urge to run to her overwhelmed me, but I would only put myself and Abigail at risk by leaving. Besides, I knew Hatter wouldn’t leave Sunny to fend for herself.

Inside the bathroom, I grabbed a small musty towel from the linen closet and wet it in the sink, where the pipes squeaked and rumbled. When I turned back to Abigail, she sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub, her eyes on the marble floors.

Not knowing what else to do, but knowing I would want nothing more than to have that blood off me, I crouched in front of her and started sloughing the blood off her hands and arms. I’d made three more trips to the sink to ring out the blood and re-wet the rag before she spoke. “You were a civilian, right? The one Luke found.”

I glanced up at her, instantly feeling wary. “That’s right.”

She patted the top of my hand with her now clean one. “It’s okay. I don’t share my husband’s beliefs about civilians. I think you’re very brave.” She paused, her eyes glazing over enough to make me think she’d gone back to her safe place deep inside her, but when she spoke again, it was with the same clarity as before. “I used to be brave like you. This life tends to take the good out of a person.”

Quietly, I walked back to the sink. Blood swirled into the drain and disappeared deep into the pipes. Still watching the pink-tinted water, I asked, “This life or your husband?”

Abigail sighed. “It would be a lie to say he wasn’t always like this, because he was. The truthful and honest thing to say is I’m the one who changed.” Her voice hitched, and when I turned back to her, her eyes brimmed with tears, which she swiped away with an embarrassed laugh. “I used to be like him. Driven. Determined. Then I had Luke, and things changed. I saw what Killian did . . .” The tears came in earnest now, and when she tried to sweep them away, she stained her clean hands with the blood streaked across her face. Quickly, I went back to her and ran the rag over her trembling fingers before starting on her cheeks, cleaning off the salty mix of tears and blood.

With a shaky, shallow breath, she started again, “Luke wasn’t allowed to be a child. We took that from him, but Killian just kept taking and taking. Luke was never good enough, never brutal enough. So we stole everything from that sweet boy. And h-he hated us for it. Hates us. He should. We’re monsters. Who does that to a little boy? Who takes their toys away and gives them knives? Who tells them they can’t have any friends because friends are a weakness? Or that he can’t ever fall in love because the monsters he must hunt will eventually kill everyone he treasures? We did that. We did all that. We broke hi-him.”

I gripped Abigail’s hands tightly in my own. She trembled too hard to keep cleaning her face. Her breathing turned to panic gasps and I worried she might hyperventilate and pass out.

“You did
not
break him,” I said with force. Abigail blinked, her eyes going between my face and our entwined hands. “You did not break Luke. Were you fucked-up parents? Yes. Did Luke have a fucked-up childhood? Yes. Is Killian the biggest fucker in the entire world? Yes. But Luke is not broken. You and Killian might have cracked him some, but he’s long since filled in those cracks with steel. He’s a good man, and he’s stronger for what you two did to him.”

Abigail stared at me, her face expressionless with her mouth hanging slightly open. I sucked at pep talks, but, hell, I could have told her she was a flaming C-You-Next-Tuesday and had better not even so much as look at her son if she didn’t want me to rip her face off, but I didn’t. I held back. I took the motherfucking high road.

After a moment, her shoulders sagged and the breath she’d been tightly holding laughed out. The corners of her mouth lifted up in a soft smile—the first real one I’d seen on her. “I like you, Ollie. I do. No one has spoken to me like that in years.”

I offered her a little smile in return and started back on her face. “In their defense, they probably assumed you were too drugged up to take it.”

She tensed beneath my hand, but a second later, she laughed again. “You’re right. Again. I don’t know why I drink so much. And I know Killian sedates me, but I let him. I just . . . I mean, this place, it . . .”

“Hey,” I said, meeting her eyes and holding her gaze, “you don’t have to explain shit to me, okay? Or anyone. You’re surviving up here in a hellhole with Killian Aultstriver. I’m not going to judge how you manage to do that. That’s on you, but if you need help, Luke will do everything he can. He can take you back to Kodiak if you want. You don’t have to stay here.”

She nodded, her lip caught between her teeth, but didn’t respond. She looked frail again, lost. I finished getting the blood off her face and mostly out of her hair. It still covered her gown, but at least she wasn’t drowning in it anymore. I didn’t bother rinsing the rag out again before I dumped it in the trash. I grabbed the thick terry-cloth robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door and helped her pull her arms through it. Once she was warm, I set the gun out beside me and lifted myself up onto the counter to sit down. With my arms crossed, I just waited.

“You like him, don’t you?”

I raised my brows. I hadn’t expected this. “Luke? Uh. No,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t betray the lie. “I don’t.”

“You do.”

“No, really. He’s an asshole. When I said he wasn’t broken that had nothing to do with him being a stubborn, rude, sexist dick. I really, really don’t like him.” There. That really had the ring of truth to it. Abigail heard it and smiled.

“So maybe you don’t like him, but you love him. Don’t try to deny it,” she added when I opened my mouth to argue, “I can see it in the way you talk about him.”