Paper Tigers

By Meg Collett

Fear University has created a new monster ...

The infamous fear switch research started with me, Patient Zero. But I am a failure. My mind adapted and now I move through the shadows like the creatures I was created to hunt. I spent my entire life in a cage with scalpels in my brain, but I am finally free—thanks to the Commander.

I am Zero, and I will make the bad men at Fear University pay.

I, Ollie Volkova, have returned to Fear University to rebuild and restore the school to its former standard of protecting the world against monsters, both human and aswang. But something new is killing Original families all over Kodiak Island and nearly assassinated the president of my university. The hunters call it a ghost, but I know she’s something more. Something worse than monsters and men. Something like me.

Fear University is my home, and I will kill to protect it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meg Collett
• Release date: Jun 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370088522

Book preview

P A P E R

T I G E R S

Fear University IV

Meg Collett

Paper Tigers

Copyright 2017 Meg Collett

www.megcollett.com

All Rights Reserved

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the authors, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

Cover Design by Najla Qamber Designs

Editing by Arrowhead Editing (arrowheadediting.wordpress.com)

The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, to factual events or to businesses is coincidental and unintentional.

Z E R O

Zero

The shadows peeled away from me, and I slipped through as smoke might through an old wrought-iron flue.

My eyes—the first parts of my body to manifest from my shadow unfolding—blazed at the Commander. My skin followed, wisps of darkness clinging to harsh edges. Then I stepped fully into the light, keeping my face turned away from the light bulb swinging from the ceiling of the chilled freezer room, our breaths puffing in the air.

The Commander kept his head down, accustomed to me traveling through the shadows like they were my footprints. His nostrils flared around my movements’ scent. It smelled like lightning or an electrical fire or, if it had been a long day, a burning body.

Zero, the Commander said without looking up from his work on the young blond man hanging by two meat hooks dangling from the freezer’s ceiling. The skin of his shoulders pulled against the rusted hooks with each shallow breath.

The Commander wiped the bloody knife on his pants. A blood drop lingered on the tip of his finger, which he brought to his lips and tongued. Tasted. Smacked his lips. He angled his head toward me, away from the blond man suspended beside him. The young man moaned and tried to raise his head, thinking I was here to save him.

I was here to save no one.

Face tainted pink from blood spray, the Commander’s attention slid to me, noting my bare arms and shredded jeans and the precisely woven braid falling over my shoulder. His gaze swept over the knives I’d cleaned three times today and strapped to my thigh. The belt I wore in the third hole. The shoelaces I’d knotted three times. He couldn’t know for sure, but he might have guessed the three breaths I’d taken before coming into the shadows of his torture room.

But then, perhaps he did. The Commander saw all.

Commander, I returned.

The hanging man stirred again. Lifted his head higher. Tried to meet my gaze with his deep blue eyes. He was shirtless, and his broad chest bore the scars of old wounds, though the Commander’s bloodletting would leave new ones. The blond man’s muscles were ridges of tight muscle packed away beneath thin, tasty skin that led straight to his navel and the curls of hair beneath. His jeans hung low on his narrow hips. I looked away.

It’s time, the Commander said.

On the third pound of my heart against my sternum, I told my fear to go away. Yes.

You’re ready for this. The Commander brushed his hand against a cut on the young man’s chest and hooked his finger, scraping his fingernail deep into the wound. The blond man’s jaw clenched, but he did not scream. I decided I liked him.

You knew you were going back there.

My body shuttered against the shadow nearest me, flickering there and back like an afterthought. The blond man’s body jerked when he realized what I’d done. What I could do.

You knew you would see him. You knew you would return to where it happened.

I blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.

You knew it would always come to this when we left the white place.

I breathed in deeply and exhaled for three measured seconds. I could taste the shadows around me. They’d always felt like home on my tongue.

It was always going to come to this.

The man’s blue eyes were still on me, pleading. I couldn’t fathom what he saw in me that suggested I could save him. I couldn’t even save myself.

It’s your time to make them pay, the Commander said. He angled the knife against the blond man’s nipple. "Make him pay."

And he cut.

The man screamed. The hooks jerked with his body’s spasms. The skin tugged.

It was always going to come to this, I echoed.

The knife at the man’s skin eased back. A reward. The Commander knew I was sympathetic toward the tortured.

And you will rise because the dark always claims the light. The Commander tilted his head, his eyes lost beneath his black hair, his large body hunched in around himself like he was holding something in, something back. I rarely saw his face. You will take down those who threaten to extinguish your flame. It’s your duty, Zero. It’s why you’re here. Without that duty, you have nothing.

Nothing. Zero. Nothing. Zero.

Nothing. Zero, I murmured.

That’s my girl. It’s time. Go now before the shadows are gone and you’re slowed. Take what’s yours. Don’t come back until your father’s blood is on your hands.

He’s not, I hissed, my father.

He made you. His hands created you. You are Dean Bogrov’s daughter.

The blond man convulsed. A gurgling sound rattled in his throat. When he looked up, I noticed the deep gouges in his neck, like something had tried to rip out his throat, but he’d lived to tell the tale. Good. He would need to be hard to kill to survive the Commander.

The Commander would only let him live if he liked him.

Back in the white place, the Commander had loved me from the moment I’d smoked away and held a knife to his groin, my hand materializing through the shadows of my cage. He’d smiled at me and promised I would see the night again.

Kill him, Zero. This is what you’ve waited for. Remember how you felt during those fourteen years in the white place. Remember and kill.

Sixteen years. I had only known four years of freedom before my parents volunteered me. But I was learning freedom again. I was learning the night again. Thanks to the Commander.

I will. I ghosted past the blond man, trailing my fingers across his battered chest, and disappeared out through the back window. I understood his pain.

I always would.

Patient Zero, the first of Dean Bogrov’s experiments.

O N E

Ollie

The rats were screaming.

Blood rolled off their wet bodies and splashed across the early spring snow—white beneath the first blisters of sunrise. Their pink noses twitched in the cold, their round bellies ripe for a claw. The bells tied around their necks shrilled, echoing their terror. They had good reason to be afraid.

The ’swang came from the north. She was smaller than most, with a black coat so dark it almost appeared silver in the coming light. She hadn’t been easy to find. A.J., Squeak, and I had tracked her all night. But then, most aswangs were hard to track these days. The bad ones—the ones I came for—had gone into hiding.

Word had gotten out to all the aswangs who had attacked Fear University over a month ago at Hex’s bidding that Ollie Volkova was hunting them down, one by one, and turning them over to Dean alive. Alive and lying on his surgical table as a drill cut into their skulls and fished around in their brains.

That was the fate of every ’swang who thought it had been a good idea to attack my Fear University.

So they hid. And I hunted. And the rats screamed.

The woods fell silent when the ’swang finished her meal, swallowing down the last blood-marinated rat. Through my rifle’s scope, I watched as she licked her snout clean a hundred yards away. I was prone on my belly in a snow bank near the gravel hunting road. Somewhere north of me, A.J. funneled toward the ’swang in case she turned back.

A breeze rustled across my back, sending wisps of blonde hair tickling along my face—the side scarred black with claw marks. The ’swang lifted her nose to scent the air, her wolfish lips curling back over her fangs.

Her head snapped straight to me, black eyes locking on mine. I was too far away to see my upside-down reflection in her pupils, but she’d caught my scent of flesh and fear. I used to be fearless because I couldn’t feel pain, but I’d learned pain could manifest in many ways and fear could save a life. Fear was a friend. Fear was almost all I ever felt now.

Tick. She stepped over the rats’ bodies. Tock.

A shiver inched down my spine. I told my finger not to pull the trigger.

Ti—

I took the shot. The blast sent birds scattering into the crisp morning air, and the ’swang collapsed, sending up a puff of snow around her tiny body. I stood and brushed snow from my pants. Spring Alaskan snows were wet and thick, and I preferred the icy blasts of deep, dark winter.

The morning sun broke above the treetops and splintered across the snow in prisms of light, blinding in its brilliance. The frosted pine needles along the trees trembled, anticipating the new day. The birds settled back into the trees, and the forest hummed with a quiet sort of life. With the drive and the flight back to Kodiak Island, I was going to be late for class. Again.

With a loaded sigh that frosted the air before my face, I slung my tranquilizer gun over my shoulder and trekked toward the tree line, my boots packing down snow with wet cracks. I should have waited to shoot her until she’d come a little closer. The entire point of letting her scent me had been to lure her next to the road.

But I hadn’t waited. I’d panicked.

Beneath the trees, a naked woman lay atop the sun-kissed snow. Her mouth was bloody, her eyes blinking dully at the sun that had changed her from her night-form into her human day body. Her fingernails were broken back into the quick, and her ribs pressed against her thin skin like gravestones as she took a shuddering breath. She looked barely eighteen.

Her black eyes found me as I stepped up next to her and looked down. My reflection gleamed upside down in her blown-out pupils.

Olesya Volkova, she wheezed. The tranq dart containing wolf’s bane trembled in the spot right above her breast. Perfect shot. I was getting better. You look like your father.

The blood was drying rust-brown on her crack-pipe teeth as she smiled up at me.

Yesmina Kahn, you attacked Fear University. Do you deny it? I paused. A.J. always said it was best to ask first and feel them out. He said some ’swangs might regret their actions. To that, I said we all regretted our actions. I thought of Tully, his throat slit as he fell to the ground. Had he had a chance to regret trying to save me from my father? Never mind, I snapped. You don’t get to deny it.

Her smile grew at my words. I still dream about all the fear. It was so thick that ’swangs in Barrow could smell it. Her tongue slackened around her words. Your father promised the students would be the best we’d had, and he was right. They were delicious in their terror … She wheezed in a breath, and her eyelids fluttered closed.

Good enough answer for me. I took her by her ankles and heaved.

A diesel engine’s rumble filled the forest. I glimpsed black metal farther down the snow-covered hunting road. As the van drew closer, I kept dragging the naked ’swang toward the road, high-stepping through the deep snow so it didn’t spill over my boot tops and soak my socks.

I stopped beside the road and held out my thumb.

Drawing even with me, the van skidded to a stop. Squeak sat behind the wheel, with A.J. in the passenger seat. They were aswangs from my father’s pack, but they’d allied with me after the fallout in Anchorage.

A.J. rolled down the passenger window. Need a ride, little lady?

Call me that again and I’ll peel off your scrotum with a butter knife.

* * *

The airstrip in Juneau was a quick seaplane skip over the Gulf of Alaska and straight to Kodiak Island. Squeak drove the van to a quiet hangar in the back, where a plane already sat idling on a narrow runway. A group of people stood off to the side, waiting for us.

I immediately found him in the group and scowled.

Luke Aultstriver’s eyes, hidden behind his polarized sunglasses, landed on the van. He sucked on one of his caramel candies, his arms crossed over his chest. He didn’t look happy, but Luke rarely looked happy.

Beside him, Hatter’s electric red hair bobbed as he laughed with the local Juneau hunters. He gestured wildly, the black scars down the side of his face flashing in the morning light. Luke snapped something to the group and pointed toward our oncoming van, and the group disbanded. Hatter jumped into the plane to prepare for takeoff, and the rest of the hunters advanced toward the van as Squeak pulled to a stop a few yards from the seaplane.

Luke opened my door. His gaze burned a hot path across my body.

I’m fine, I huffed. No bites this time.

His jaw clenched. Did you wear a vest?

You know they just get in my way.

Ollie, he growled, a low warning.

I started climbing down from the van, but Luke blocked my path. To get by him, I would have to duck under his arm and brush past his side. A moment transferred between us, and I was glad for his dark sunglasses. I hated seeing the hurt flash across his pine-forest eyes.

He stepped back, and I hopped down, careful not to slosh my coffee in the thermos I clutched.

You aren’t supposed to be here, I said, chipping the words over my shoulder as I started toward the back of the van, where the guys were unloading the unconscious ’swang stuffed into a black body bag.

Hatter hates this, you know.

Stopping, I gritted my teeth but didn’t turn around. We’d danced this dance countless times before. The guilt won’t work. Imagine how Sunny feels knowing he’s out here hunting.

She’s close to perfecting the antidote.

I spun around, ready to fight. Not close enough to save him if he gets a few more bites.

He was born for this—

No. I glared up at him, my fingertips shaking with rage. "He was made for this. There’s a difference. And every time he leaves the university, every time you let him hunt with you, he risks falling into a manic state he can’t climb out of. I won’t do that to Sunny. I won’t be the reason he’s out here."

He might go permanently manic anyway, even without a bite, Luke countered, but the argument was tired. Sunny had argued its fallacies too many times to count. Saliva didn’t work like that in the body. It didn’t compound over time, no matter what Hatter believed.

He wants to believe he’s already broken so he can validate why he’s still hunting.

Someone has to fly the planes, Luke said, voice low and dangerous. Sexy, if I allowed myself to think along those lines. I didn’t, and I hadn’t. Not in a while. Not since touching became close to impossible for me.

That’s funny, I said, turning away again, because every time I plan to meet another team out here, you and Hatter show up in their place. Maybe you two shouldn’t be such bullies to the other hunters.

They should know better than to think they’ll be the ones bringing you home.

His words burned hot in my core, but I walked away to see to my ’swang.

* * *

Hatter landed the plane at the university’s airstrip. In the distance, the tall wind turbines slowly turned, their white blades shining in the crystalline air. A.J. unloaded the ’swang’s body bag and laid her across the back of a flatbed truck that would take them straight to the school’s west wing lab.

Want a ride? Squeak asked.

I waved him off. I’ll walk.

You’ll be late for class. Luke took a seat on the tailgate with Hatter in case the ’swang’s sedative wore off too soon. He never trusted my dosage, not since one had almost gotten away from us back before spring break …

I have a meeting with Dean.

Hatter snorted. What a way to start the morning.

And this isn’t? I jerked my chin toward the lumpy body bag. I thought I saw the fabric twitch.

Very true, Ollie-O. Very true. Hatter nodded sagely, his finger tapping his chin.

You’re still a student.

I ignored Luke’s biting comment and nodded at A.J. and Squeak. Head on back before the students get out of their first class.

Squeak slammed the truck into gear, and the tires popped over the frozen gravel as he pulled forward. My gaze locked back on Luke. He watched me, his mouth in a flat line, his eyes blank. I stared back just as dully, just as emptily. In the end, I had to turn away first before the truck was even out of sight. I couldn’t stand the look in his eyes.

I gave the truck a few minutes to get ahead of me. In all the times I’d brought back a live ’swang since the attack, I’d never helped A.J. and Squeak carry the body into the morgue. I couldn’t stand seeing the bulky west wing lab door swing closed and hear it lock, the skull and crossbones practically smiling at me, calling me a murderer. A monster. No matter how many times I reminded myself of the bad things the aswangs had done, it never worked.

I used to savor feeling like a killer. I used to need it. Now, I felt tired.

I walked down the road, the turbines oscillating to my left, the airstrip and back line of useless thirty-foot fencing behind me. Cottonwood trees rustled, and the sun peeked through their limbs. Back here, in this part of the school, I could almost breathe by imagining it was months ago, during my first couple of weeks here when I’d run the fence line each evening, my feet crunching over the frost, the guards walking along the fence above me and waving as I ran by.

But the feeling didn’t last. I broke through the copse of cottonwoods and came to the front of the school. It still smelled of burnt earth. The trees not knocked over or blown apart by the bombs that had taken out chunks of the fence’s front section were burnt hunks. They’d smoldered for weeks afterward. The courtyard, once the hub of student activity, looked like a meteor had struck it. A crew had been coming in every day to level the earth and lay the brick walkways back down, but students no longer came outside to study or eat.

At least, the students who’d stayed didn’t come outside anymore.

Barbed wire was strung over the fence’s gaping holes, and crews worked around the clock to repair the breaches in the university’s defenses. More guards, pulling twelve-hour shifts, patrolled the damaged fence line. Before the attack, their guns had rarely gone off. Now, barely an hour passed without the sharp retort of a bullet firing down at a ’swang trying its luck against the weakened school and the notoriously juicy students within its battered walls.

The attack had emboldened the aswangs, and we were all feeling the toll.

The mismatched school bricks were chipped, and bullets were still lodged in places. Workers had replaced the most damaged ones, but other blood-stained bricks remained as a grim reminder. I’d suggested to Dean that they leave them.

It’s time for things to change, I’d told him. They need to know the real dangers they’re facing. The time for made-up fantasies has passed.

I pressed my thumb against the new fingerprint reader on the front door, and the scanner warmed my skin. The titanium metal door hummed open. Across the entry, the same type of door barred access into the Death Dome of student dorm rooms. It was quiet in there. All the students were sitting through their first morning class, trying to keep their eyelids propped open.

No one was sleeping well these days.

I checked my watch. I had less than an hour to debrief with Dean before my second class, and I really needed to wash the rat blood off my skin and the smell of death from my hair. The students on campus tended to give me a wide berth these days. Once, they’d clustered at mine and Sunny’s lunch table, but now they hardly even waved. It wasn’t dislike that created the distance, but intimidation. Fear. They didn’t know my secret, but they sensed I was different.

They knew I’d played a part in the attack. They tasted the guilt around me.

Hex had come to cripple the university, and he’d won. I could have done more to keep him away, but I’d thought myself strong enough to fight him and save the school my mother had loved. I’d been wrong. I wasn’t strong enough. Fear University was meant to protect the world from true monsters, both human and ’swang. Yet Hex had proved we were nothing without our fences. That I was nothing.

I headed straight to the elevator banks and rode up to the third floor. The classroom doors were closed, the professors’ voices droning on from the inside. The long glass wall revealed the empty gym, though it would be packed later with all the students taking part in mandatory defense classes that had replaced their afternoon schedules. Another one of my ideas. Dean hadn’t argued with me on that one.

My footsteps rang off the concrete floor as I rounded the corner into the administrative offices. The window across from Dean’s office overlooked the university’s secluded corner of Kodiak Island. The sun beamed down on the late spring