by D. D. Chance
I shook my head woozily. “He said they were surprised when we approached them, that we triggered some of their defenses. That’s why they attacked. But why would they need to track us? They didn’t seem to have any problem finding us in the first place.”
With a soft sigh, Liam set me away from him. “This isn’t the kind of tracking that involves a map. They’re tracking our thoughts and feelings, our reactions. Remember, these guys are monsters. Whether you think of them as elves or the Fae or tiny winged fairies dancing around on the head of a pin, they’re not us. They don’t understand human emotions or human reasoning, no matter how human they look. So they have to watch and do what they can to understand us in order to predict what we’ll do. But they can’t track you anymore, I’m pretty sure.”
“But why would they in the first place?” I pressed, pushing farther from Liam to stand on my own two feet. I missed the contact immediately, but he dropped his arms without apparent concern. “Why do they care about us?”
He snorted. “No friggin’ clue, though there are plenty of ideas floating around about it. Maybe we’re the assholes, and we’ve somehow knocked them out of their natural habitats and forced them to adapt. Maybe they’re guardians of portals to other dimensions, which I personally think would be awesome, and they need to make sure we don’t show up on their side of the wall. Or, hell, maybe they really are the Fae, ancient gods come back to hang out among humans, trying to bend us to their will.”
He said this last with a brow waggle that made me smile. “But they’re here now, in living color,” I pressed. “On Wellington’s campus. You don’t think that’s weird?”
“Au contraire, I think it’s batshit crazy.” Liam glanced over toward Zach, eyeing him critically before turning his attention back to me. His bright eyes gleamed with interest. “But it’s not the only thing we should be focusing on here. You, my friend, have clearly leveled up, based on your whole empath show back there and Zach being able to siphon off your energy. Which means we need to start figuring out what you’re capable of.”
“Oh?” I felt uneasy with this assessment, though I already knew it was true. There was so much about the monster hunting collective that made no sense, but if anybody would understand it, Liam would…
Liam, who was practically bouncing on his toes now, waiting for me to connect the dots.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wait a minute. Do you know something I don’t?”
His return grin was cocky and almost made me laugh out loud. “Without a doubt. But we’ll get to that later. While I’ve got you here, though, and while Zach is down for the count, there’s probably something I should show you.”
I nodded. “You found that headstone with my mom’s name on it. It’s gotta be a fake, though, right?”
“Hang on, let me get a babysitter for our little bundle of joy,” he said, pulling out his phone. He keyed in a text and sent it. “Tyler isn’t gonna want to miss out on this, especially since Grim has probably already split campus for the night.”
“Yeah?” I pictured the largest, grouchiest member of our monster hunting collective, but I suspected Liam was right. “Doesn’t he sleep on campus? Why wouldn’t he be back at Fowlers Hall?”
“He’s got rooms at Fowlers Hall, way over on the far east wing. But I don’t know how often he stays there. He doesn’t like people all that much.”
I snorted. Grim was probably the most aptly named guy I’d ever met, big and stoic and not given to chatter. His bond with the other guys was absolute, and I believed he’d defend us all to the death…but that was more about him always being up for a fight than anything else. “That I can believe.”
Liam gestured to Zach, who lay perfectly still in his pew, his chest rising and falling easily. “Tyler will find him. I’ve warded the chapel against intrusion from anybody but one of us and Commander Frost, and as you saw, it looks abandoned from the outside. Just like a good crime scene should be.”
He moved down the aisle, and I followed him, frowning as we reached the nave. A ladder had been extended down into the undercroft through a charred hole in the floor.
“This was where the timbers fell, isn’t it?” I said, casting my gaze upward. In the gloom, it was impossible to tell what the ceiling had looked like before the fire had ripped through it during Zach’s epic demon confrontation earlier today. “How come the ceiling didn’t cave in completely?”
“According to my research, we were lucky it didn’t. It should have, but they made these old chapels strong. Back then, fire was a giant problem, like, all the time.” He waved my attention back to the room below us. “Check out all those shelves down there. That’s not where I found the headstone, but they’re still pretty damn interesting.”
I waited until he scrambled down the steps of the ladder, then followed. By the time I reached the floor, Liam had flipped on two portable lights, casting a dim glow around the area.
“I figure we only have tonight to get anything out of here that’s critical. I’ve already got Frost on the phone with the cleaners. They’re going to make a sweep as soon as we give the all clear. Which I was going to do, when I found…” He looked at me. “While I’m at it, is there anything else you haven’t told us about your mom that you can remember? Anything at all? Because, not going to lie, super creepy to run across the woman’s headstone. There’s no way it’s a coincidence.”
I sighed. “No, I’ve told you everything I can remember. We led a very simple life. She was a professor at a small college in North Carolina. We lived more or less off the grid, but not in any sort of strange granola way, and I grew up. Everything was pretty normal, if you don’t count the monsters.”
He snorted. “Yeah, if you don’t count those.”
“But you know what I mean? I didn’t think anything about a family or a history beyond what we’d created for ourselves until she died and I found her letter to someone in Boston, a someone who was clearly a member of our family that she’d never told me about.”
“Frost has that now. The lockbox is safe, and he hasn’t tried to open it. He wants you there.”
I shrugged. “At this point, I’d welcome anyone making sense of it. As far as I could tell, it was a letter about me and my development, along with a laundry list of the monsters that attacked me and how I fought them off.”
He nodded, tilting his head slightly, as if the gesture could trigger a recording mechanism buried in his neck. I frowned. Could it? And why was such an idea not ridiculous when it came to Liam?
“All the attacks?” he pressed. “Did you report to her every time?”
“No, not every time. I didn’t want her to worry. It was only if I got seriously injured that she seemed to notice. Then she’d help patch me up. She’d ask me a few questions, but it was never a big deal. She told me once that some kids were born to fight monsters, and that I shouldn’t tell anybody because they would tell other people, which would be bad. We didn’t want anybody in our business.”
Liam grimaced. He seemed about to say something when a new sound echoed from farther in the undercroft. He turned sharply.
“There’s nobody down here but us.”
“Maybe it’s the cleaners?” I didn’t know much about the shadowy service the guys had first tapped to help get rid of a monster corpse that wasn’t decaying fast enough, but they were quiet, thorough, and seemed to have a particular skill for discretion. It wouldn’t surprise me to find them already on the grounds of Bellamy Chapel.
But Liam shook his head. “Not yet.” He held up a hand and ventured forward, and I smiled as I fell in line behind him. He was so fearless, walking into the shadows, not knowing what would be waiting for him, but more interested in learning what it might be than worrying about it being dangerous.
Had he always been that way? Curious to a fault? Probably. But what had driven him to such a headlong dive into the dark?
I shivered, though not from fear, exactly. Something about Liam pulled at me in a different way from my
attraction to Zach or Tyler—something dark, forbidden, and strangely exciting. He’d always been the jokester of the group, the consummate clown, but now…
We crept forward together out of the range of the portable lights, deeper into the shadows. He didn’t reach for my hand—and I strangely wished he had, even though the thought made my cheeks flame with embarrassment. Above us, I still couldn’t sense any movement from Zach, his mind blessedly blank.
The strike of a match made Liam and me freeze. Without saying anything, Liam stepped forward almost silently into the far room.
It was now lit by a single flaring torch, and dominated by a white-blonde giant of a guy whose rugged jaw was clenched tight enough to crack marble.
“This is bullshit,” Grim announced, scowling down at the slab of stone sitting on the bench. “Someone is trying to fuck with you. With all of us.”
5
“But why?” I lifted my hands, palms out, as much to block Grim’s words as to slow the world down. “Janet Cross died months ago, nine hundred miles away from here. Why create a gravestone here?”
Grim turned and glowered at me, his normally cold, blank expression shifting through half a dozen emotions so quickly, I couldn’t track them. “Your mother died,” he agreed after a long hesitation. It felt like he was choosing his words with care—which shouldn’t be necessary, since I knew without a doubt that Mom had died. The cancer that’d taken her had been worse than any monster I’d ever fought. And unlike those creatures, it kept coming back no matter how many times we’d thought we’d killed it.
I bit my lip, forcing myself to focus on Grim as he continued. He’d already changed his clothes from our group dinner, I realized dimly, once more wearing heavy pants and a worn T-shirt, scuffed boots encasing his large feet. “But this stone wasn’t meant for her. It was meant for you. Someone knows you’re sniffing around, and they’re trying to tell you something. Poorly.”
“How’d you get in here?” Liam demanded. “There’s only one way in, down the ladder.”
Grim grunted. “There’s always more than one way in. You should know that better than anyone.” He glanced around. “What is all this junk? And when was it put here? Because this headstone is new.”
Liam sighed, already giving up on trying to determine how Grim had entered the undercroft. “You’re right on both counts,” he conceded, turning to me as I peered around the space. “Most of the crap down here is at least twenty years old. That’s the most recent record I could find, and a lot more of it goes back decades earlier. It’s mainly junk, as Grim said. Records from the church and other churches in the area, books from classes that went defunct, and a ton of cheap religious artifacts, nothing with any magical mojo to it. The kind of thing you’d find in any small-town chapel.”
“But this is a chapel on the campus of a monster hunter academy,” I protested, looking everywhere but at the headstone of Janet Cross. “Shouldn’t it have more interesting stuff?”
Liam shrugged. “Arguably, yes. Which is why we’re having all the potentially valuable artifacts taken out as judiciously as possible, then probably starting another fire.”
I blinked at him. “I thought you wanted to avoid attracting attention. Arson would seem like maybe not your best bet.”
He waved off my concern. “It’s a calculated risk. The likelihood of a burn site catching fire again isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, and again, nobody’s going to be looking too closely at this.”
“Because the message has already been received,” Grim said. He was back to scowling at the headstone, and I finally worked up enough nerve to approach it.
When Mom had died six months ago, she’d been adamant that she didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to have any marker indicating that she’d spent time on this world. I’d scattered her ashes in the woods and streams of our small college town and hadn’t found the letter she’d written to her family—or the people I assumed were her family—until days later. Her last entry on that letter had been more than four months prior.
But there was no way she could have forgotten it. So why hadn’t she told me she’d written it? Why had she left me to find it locked in an iron box, with my birthday as the password? So many questions I didn’t have answers to, and now never would.
Her funeral had been quiet, also by her request. A few members of the staff at the university had attended, along with some of my high school classmates, and that was it. My mother hadn’t formed relationships within the community outside the school, and even those who’d shown up to pay their respects didn’t have much to share about her. None of that had seemed odd at the time. Now it seemed glaringly obvious that my mother had deliberately cut herself off from the rest of the world, content to focus her attention on me, her beautiful garden with all its funky plants and flowers, and not a heck of a lot else.
But she had left the letter. Maybe by not acknowledging it, she’d fulfilled some kind of promise to herself, but by leaving it somewhere where I could find it, some tiny part of her hoped that I would find her family…so that someone would at least mark her passing. That had to be what she wanted, right?
My eyes blurred with tears as I stared down at the stone slab, with its carved letters, numbers, and the small, delicate spray of leaves on either side of my mother’s name. Grim shifted uneasily beside me. He wasn’t a guy who would know how to handle deep emotion, I suspected. Or, really, any emotion. I willed myself to pull it together.
“You said somebody was trying to screw with me,” I said, the words only slightly garbled. I cleared my throat. “Who? Who would give a shit?”
He scoffed a short laugh. “You might be surprised.”
Liam stepped forward and leaned close to the headstone, as if it might be willing to whisper its secrets only to him. Once again—I couldn’t discount the possibility.
“It’s a message, for sure. But to our benefit, there are only so many businesses locally who make headstones. And this one does look new. I don’t think it was carved a long time ago and spiffed up for us. I suspect we’ll find it was created within the last few days. Headstones get commissioned all the time, usually for legitimate purposes, but sometimes for pranks or jokes. The stonemasons don’t know one way or another, and they probably don’t care. They just do the job as it comes in.”
“But this date,” I said, jabbing my finger at it. “It’s twenty-four years ago, but it isn’t tied to my birthday, though it’s the same year. It’s eight months before.”
“Maybe that’s when your mom left the area?” Liam said. “Like if she was pregnant, but before she was showing, which she may not have been at a month?”
I flapped a helpless hand. “Maybe? I don’t know.”
“But it’s possible. Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe she felt like she had to leave town. That would explain why you never knew who your father was.”
Grim made a disgusted noise I had to agree with. “Dude, this isn’t the 1800s,” I said. “It’s not even the 1950s. People get pregnant all the time, especially professional women. There wouldn’t be that much angst over an unexpected pregnancy in Boston, Massachusetts twenty-four years ago. I refuse to believe it.”
Grim folded his arms over his chest, while Liam huffed a wry chuckle.
“Ordinarily, I’d agree with you, except for the Boston part. Especially if she was from around here,” Liam countered. “If she came from a prominent family who cared about such things, particularly a prominent magical monster-hunting family…”
“But she didn’t,” I protested, turning on him. “She never once fought against any monsters, she just sort of defended me long enough to get us home. She got hurt a couple of times max, and never badly enough to scar.”
I shivered a little, thinking about the scars I’d gotten that had disappeared over time, as well as the ones that’d never faded, including a few I couldn’t quite remember how I’d gotten. But Mom had carried no scars. Even if I hadn’t understood that to begin with, I learn
ed it well enough this past year when I’d taken on the task of helping her bathe. No matter how seek she got, she was beautiful to the end.
I cleared my throat again. “There’s gotta be a way for us to figure this out.”
Liam nodded. “I’ve been working on it. Frost too. It’s a mystery that doesn’t sit well with him, not with you being a harbinger. That’s a very rare genetic marker among the magical families, particularly in our neck of the woods. It hasn’t happened in so long, we don’t even know what it means anymore.”
“Yeah, well, up until now, my life has been pretty boring. I mean, yeah, I may have attracted my share of monsters to Asheville, but it’s not like I brought any sort of monster apocalypse there. Why wouldn’t I have? Why is it just happening now?”
“You hadn’t been triggered yet,” Grim answered for Liam. “Harbingers are a key, not the entire mechanism. The academy hasn’t dealt with a real monster invasion in over a hundred years.”
“He’s right,” Liam said. “Even then, it wasn’t an invasion so much as a parley, I guess you’d call it, a meeting of opposing forces where treaties were drawn up and power was split. Basically, the monsters agreed to go back to where they came from, and Wellington agreed not to chase them down.”
I snorted. “That sounds kind of one-sided to benefit Wellington.”
“Well, not exactly—”
Liam was cut off by a sharp exclamation above us. I looked up, recognizing the voice of Tyler Perkins, the head of our monster hunting collective. But he wasn’t alone. Another voice, deeper and older, carried over his. In my mind, I felt Zach stirring awake.
“Tyler and Frost,” Liam said. “That means the cleaners aren’t far behind. We’re going to need to figure out what of this we want to take.”
“Not that,” Grim said flatly, pointing to the headstone. “It should be destroyed.”
“Well, not right away,” I said in a rush, surprising myself. “We should investigate it, shouldn’t we?”
“You took a picture of it?” Grim asked Liam, who nodded.