Read Online Monster Mine by Meg Collett - Free Book Online

was everything. It was my way out of the dark. When I realized
that promise was broken, I felt broken too. Parents shouldn’t enjoy
hurting their children that much. I know you experienced something
like that when you were in foster care. You know how it can fuck
you up. But you got through it. We both did. This matters now
because it happened to you and you deserve to feel what you feel
about it, but in time, it’ll become just another thing that gives
you strength.”
    No one spoke. There just wasn’t
anything to say. In my head, I heard Hatter’s words, but they were
too bright and shiny to hold on to. They didn’t make me feel
better, but they calmed me down and soothed me with a hope that
things would get better—in time.
    A long time passed. Sunny wiped her
face and cleared her throat. She was the first to speak, to pull
things back around. “What did you want to talk about? You have a
plan for all this?”
    She gestured around the room, meaning
Thad and the halflings—and my father.
    I skimmed over that thought and forced
myself to focus. “I need to tell you guys everything that happened
the night Max took me. Coldcrow and Killian told me a lot of things
about my mother and the university. You need to know
them.”
    And so I told them everything. I held
nothing back, and my voice grew hoarse as the story unraveled, from
Coldcrow’s manipulation, to the lies Dean set up, to the fear
switch research, to Killian’s big reveal that my mother turned her
back on the university when she fell in love with Hex, to Dean’s
final experiments on her. I took a deep breath when I
finished.
    The others were silent as I looked
from one face to another, though I only managed to catch Luke’s
profile.
    “ Dean was trying to create
a fear switch in humans,” I added to emphasize the point. “To sell
to the government.”
    “ Is that such a bad
thing?”
    My mouth fell open at
Luke’s question. He should have been equally as horrified as I was.
“You used to tell me all the time that humans weren’t meant to live
without fear. You said people not experiencing fear would create
another kind of monster. You said Dean should never have an army of
soldiers like me. You said war should never be easy.”
    I flung his words back at him, but he
barely reacted as he shifted from the shadows and looked at me. “I
said those things a long time ago. I’m not the same idealist I used
to be.”
    “ You said them last
semester,” I shot back. I looked between them all again. I was
losing them. I grasped at the information Ghost had told me
yesterday. “Irena started this place because she believed in a
balance—a coexistence between humans and ’swangs. What if that can
be achieved? What if there are some good ’swangs?”
    “ You don’t need to justify
being part aswang,” Sunny said. “You’re not a monster,
Ollie.”
    “ No,” I said slowly,
frowning. “I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about Irena
Volkova and why she started this place. Why she left the
university. Don’t you think it’s important to understand why she
turned her back on the school and Dean? What if she was right?
Maybe the university is wrong.”
    “ Ollie,” Sunny started,
her eyes shifting to Hatter. Whatever she’d been about to say, I
saw her push it back and pull up something else. She smiled a
stilted, propped-up smile that never reached her eyes. “I think
discovering your mother’s history is a great idea.”
    I narrowed my eyes. “No, it sounds
like you don’t.”
    “ I think what Sunny is
saying,” Hatter said from across the room, “is that you’ve been
through a lot and you need time to heal and figure things out. You
have a mother now that you didn’t know you had before. It’s normal
to want to understand her.”
    “ Exactly.” Sunny’s face
went slack with relief and I knew they were handling me, passing me
back and forth between them like I was a child. “All that matters
is that you’re okay and