Monster Mine Read Online Free PDF Page B

tall-ceilinged space with nothing more
than a few cabinets lining part of one wall. Water-damaged boxes
filled the back quarter of the space and lent the air a musty
quality that made my nose burn.
    I couldn’t imagine Thad liking himself
better when he was at the university, not with all the halfling
propaganda he’d spouted off in Barrow after I discovered his real
identity. But whatever he’d felt during his time there must have
been powerful for him to take a stand against the halflings over
something like a name.
    It made me wonder if he really was
sorry for waiting to save me. If he regretted what he’d had to do.
Maybe he really had been a better person at the university. Maybe
he even missed it a little.
    I wanted to turn around and go back
upstairs. I wanted to not care about Thad’s name or what I was, but
I felt a niggling curiosity, and I couldn’t stop myself from
returning to our previous conversation about my mother and why
she’d created this place. “If everyone is trying to keep this place
a secret, why hunt at all?”
    “ Part of the rules. Thad
says we have to pull our weight. Well”—he scrunched up his nose—“he
says I’m too young, so they lock me inside.” His eyes swept
mournfully to the three bay doors that likely led out onto the
loading bay. Everything was sealed up.
    “ Who do you hunt? Aswangs?
It doesn’t seem right to kill your own kind.”
    “ Only the rogues. Human or
aswang,” Ghost said, growing excited again. “Thad says it’s part of
the rules we operate under. If a ’swang kills instead of taking
only what they need to survive, we hunt them. If a human kills one
of us or a good ’swang, we kill them. But mainly we just defend
against rogues who want us dead. Thad says it’s all about balance
and that we don’t have to be the monsters people think we are. He
says it was Irena’s vision for this place. Can I ask you a
question?”
    I doubted he’d breathed once during
that entire explanation, even if the explanation sounded like a
justification to hunt whoever they wanted, though I didn’t say that
to Ghost. “Sure.”
    “ Can you really hear a
’swang in its night-form? Lauren says it’s bullshit.”
    It had been a long time since I’d
thought about communicating with ’swangs, but the feeling of a
voice slinking through my head came back in a rush. “I can talk
back too.”
    Ghost’s mouth popped open.
“How?”
    I shrugged. “In my head. Must be some
halfling thing.”
    “ None of us can do
that.”
    “ Have you
tried?”
    “ Never seen one,” he said.
“Lauren said if she saw a rogue, she wouldn’t waste time trying to
chat with it. She’d kill it.”
    “ Lauren’s a
twat.”
    “ With an ugly broken
nose.” Ghost snickered and elbowed me in the side. I almost felt
like smiling again, but the urge went away when he checked the
plastic, neon-green watch on his thin wrist. “We should probably go
back upstairs. Sometimes the patrols come back early if things are
quiet.”
    As we walked back upstairs, Ghost
chattered on about Thad and this place, but my thoughts kept
returning to Irena. She’d created a haven for halflings so they
could hunt and protect themselves from humans and aswangs alike.
Her vision had been one of balance—not of killing every single
aswang, but only the ones who killed. She’d turned her back on the
university over this radical idea and paid the ultimate price for
it too.
    I wondered if that was the path I was
on: to come here and pick up where my mother had left off; to fight
alongside my father against the university’s hunters and the killer
aswangs; and to protect innocent halflings. It felt like a purpose
that should have ignited me, but I only felt hollow.
    “ Is Thad going to let my
friends in here since this place is supposed to be a big secret?” I
asked to distract myself.
    As I followed Ghost down the hall
toward my room, I saw the tips of his too-large ears turn red.
“They fought about that too.