Monster Mine Read Free Page B

stitches.”
    It explained the tightness in my skin,
the warmth, and the sudden flares of heat. I imagined it was likely
sore and bruised, painful too. I felt none of that, of course.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have needed stitches if you hadn’t
waited.”
    He had the good grace to grimace and
look vaguely guilty. “If it makes it any better, I argued to get
you faster.”
    So it was true, then. Lauren hadn’t
lied. They’d really waited to save me from Max on my father’s
orders. They’d simply left me, supposedly one of their own, there.
So much for being safer with people like me. I’d rather take my
chances with Killian at this point.
    “ It doesn’t. Not even a
little bit.”
    “ Ollie,” Thad started, his
attention drifting to the crystal in my hand, “do you want to put
down the crystal?”
    I glanced down at my hand. Blood
dripped from my fingertips onto the concrete floor, bright red and
shining. I’d clenched the crystal too tight and cut myself against
its rough edges. I set it back on the table and wiped my hand
across the white cotton scrub pants I wore.
    “ Why Anchorage? What’s
here?”
    “ Hex’s group of halflings
and his pack stay here. This place is secret. It’s a sanctuary for
halflings, if you will.”
    “ A sanctuary.”
    He nodded slowly. “We brought you here
to protect you. If anyone found out about you—”
    “ Sunny did, and she didn’t
care.”
    Thad’s brows rose. “We told Luke the
truth when you went missing. He had to know. And you think he
doesn’t care? You think it doesn’t bother him?”
    If Thad had been aiming to hurt me, he
succeeded. The pain in my chest had nothing to do with Max’s
torture. The one thing I’d feared most was how Luke would react to
the news of what I was. Thad didn’t come straight out and say it,
but I sensed the undertone in his words. Luke probably hated me,
probably wanted to kill me.
    “ I brought you here to
help you understand what you are,” Thad went on when I couldn’t
speak. “Who you are.”
    I glanced around at the room again, at
the window with the curtains drawn tight, though some sunlight
peeked through. How long had it been since I’d seen the sun?
“What’s so special about this place?”
    “ It belonged to your
mother. We’re standing in her old bedroom, and that’s her bed you
were sleeping on. There are so many things to tell you about your
mother and what she was doing here.”
    He was choosing his words and
structuring his sentences for impact. He wanted to knock me off
balance, strike hard blows only to soften them with what he
considered gifts, and from his contented expression, I knew he
thought I was considering my mother living here.
    I wasn’t.
    I’d slept in my dead mother’s bed. I
stood in her house with people who’d waited to save me from my
torturer. If I closed my eyes, I saw the pictures of my mother
strapped to a table during one of Dean’s experiments. I was slowly
drowning in it all.
    “ Let me explain why
we—”
    “ No.” I ran a finger down
the stitches holding my chest together. They felt jagged and hasty,
but warm to the touch. “There’s nothing to explain. Get Sunny on
the phone. If you don’t, if you come up with some shitty excuse for
why you can’t, you’ll regret it. Deeply.”
     
    * * *
    Sunny
     
    I sat alone in the SUV, which Hatter
had parked deep in the woods of Mt. Hood, Oregon, off Highway 26.
The doors were locked. Silly, I know, but at least a ’swang would
have to break a window to eat my fear. I had my throwing knife belt
strapped around my waist and a SIG Sauer P226 tapping out an
erratic, nervous beat on my knee. As I waited for the guys to
return, I chewed on my nails, alternating hands when my fingers got
too bloody.
    Nearly half an hour had passed since
the guys left to hunt the ’swang that was munching on isolated
townsfolk. We’d tracked it from the Warm Springs Reservation into
the forest. With nothing more than a few weapons, Hatter and