by D. D. Chance
And crashed into Liam, driving him to the ground. As we slammed to the pavement, Liam’s backpack exploded around us like a car’s airbag, an enormous balloon ejecting beneath him, extending out several feet in each direction. We bobbed on top of it for a heart-stopping three seconds, then it collapsed again—and completely poofed out of existence with a rushing gasp of air. Leaving me sprawled on Liam’s body as he arched awkwardly over the top of his pack.
He grunted, shifting beneath me. “You sure do know how to make an entrance.”
“Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked. I tried to roll off him, but he held me tight.
“Wards,” he muttered as he narrowed his eyes on the window far above us. Sure enough, two figures crowded into the window, then the blinds crashed back down, cutting off the view.
“Was that friggin’ Dean Robbins?” Liam hissed, and I sagged against him, grateful for the embrace for a second longer as he confirmed my own shock.
“That’s who I thought it was,” I said. “I mean, it could have been somebody with some sort of crazy illusion spell, but it looked like Dean Robbins, and the guy beside him was my landlord, Mr. Bellows. Which…I don’t even know what to make of that.”
“Same. But we gotta split. I’m going to roll over to my right until you’re beneath me, and then I’m going to get up while still holding on to you, okay?”
“Um…sure?” I didn’t see how that was going to work at all, but didn’t say anything more as Liam wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in tight. Once again, the flood of desire swept through me—quick, hot, and completely inappropriate for a public sidewalk.
With a strength I wouldn’t have expected, Liam did exactly as he’d explained, rolling me over and somehow managing to lift me in his arms as he braced his legs beneath him and stood straight again. Without missing a beat, he bent to scoop up his pack, then strode quickly across the street and down the sidewalk, ducking down the nearest alley. I stayed silent, willing myself to be as light as possible, but he didn’t seem to be concerned. Maybe he had some sort of levitation tool in his pack?
When he finally settled me onto the street, he lifted a finger to his lips, while his other hand held me fast. “Stay connected to me,” he murmured, and I nodded.
Together we crept back to the corner, and I waited until Liam had satisfied himself that we weren’t being followed. He turned back to me and lifted his brows at my expression. “What?”
“Ah…exactly how much weight lifting have you done and how is it your body isn’t as big as Grim’s with a move like that?” I asked.
He laughed. “I get a little help, and I’ve been lugging this pack around for a long time. You learn how to make momentum work for you.”
“Right.” It was becoming clear to me that Liam had made downplaying his own abilities into an art form, but as he glanced around the corner again, I frowned at his back. “How long do we have to stay connected?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Long enough to…hold up a sec. Shh.”
I pressed myself closer to him, peeking around the corner to see the front door bang open on the brownstone. Dean Robbins trotted down the stairs, looking fussy but unconcerned. He had a phone up to his ear, and even from this distance I could hear him talking with the kind of oily, soothing tones that were required for any high level university official. He was either apologizing or defending himself to somebody, but Liam straightened and stepped carefully backward, making me move as well.
“Slow and steady,” he directed. He turned and drew me close to him, the two of us arm in arm as we angled toward campus. “I’m not sure how long or how aggressively your weapons kit is going to protect us, but it’s doing a damn fine job so far. I haven’t had time to uncork any of the other goodies I have in my pack, so we’re not going to look a gift bag of toys in the mouth.”
I shook my head, trying to parse his words, but at the moment, all I could really think about was the fact that we were walking hand in hand away from my apartment, our mission accomplished, all my relevant worldly belongings safe in Liam’s pack and…we were holding hands. The connection between us fairly crackled with energy, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. It didn’t have the earth-shattering urgency of Tyler or the time-stopping otherworldliness of Zach, but it was full of possibility, potential…and, once again, danger, in a way I didn’t quite understand.
“Exactly what are your magical abilities—like your innate ones?” I blurted without looking directly at him, emboldened by our close embrace. “Zach can read minds and sense magic in the area, Tyler can hurl some serious spells, and Grim, besides being a one-man killing machine, can track like nobody’s business. So what’s your deal?”
Liam’s huffed breath sounded remarkably sad, and he didn’t say anything for another half a block. “Well, that’s a funny thing,” he finally sighed. “I don’t actually have any innate magical skills.”
I swiveled my head, narrowing my eyes at him. His profile was resolute, a small blood vessel jumping in his temple—I’d never noticed that before, but then again, I hadn’t been looking. It struck me that a lot of people probably didn’t notice things about Liam, by his careful design. “What? That’s totally not true.”
“Au contraire,” he countered ruefully. “I am, by all accounts the runt of my family’s litter. My folks and their folks before them and on down the Graham line have all been high-level wizards, but every once in a while, every few generations, in fact, there’s an outcast of the family tree, an apple that dropped too far away and kept rolling. I’m this generation’s bad apple. Gotta hand it to my folks, they weren’t quitters. They kept at me to see what I might develop, and even augmented me to the point that they could.”
“The electricity over your shoulders,” I said. “I saw it in the chapel.”
His lips twisted. “Insertables. They’re not just for rock bands anymore. I have a dozen different rods inserted at various points in my body that are supposed to tune me up, if you will. To help me access the ambient magic in the room.”
“Yikes. Did that hurt?” I asked, and he shot me a look.
“More than I wanted it to, but significantly less than not having access to any magic at all. Tyler has known about the tuners for a long time, and Zach figured it out before we all warded ourselves against him. Grim probably knows too, because he’s an asshole. But Frost doesn’t, and nobody else at the academy does either. The fam has kept it on the down low because, well, I’m an embarrassment.”
I couldn’t help myself, I rolled my eyes. “You’re insane. You are probably the most valuable member of this entire team. You have to know that.”
He let out a long sigh. “Definitely not the case,” he said. “But maybe, I mean…”
A new flare of awareness shot through me, and I understood exactly where his mind was going. Maybe if we hooked up, that could be the trigger to help Liam access his innate magic? A guy who I was already jonesing for so much, I was squeezing his hand to within an inch of its life? Sign. Me. Up.
Liam, of course, had no idea that my butterflies had started doing their own anticipatory Macarena. “I mean, it looks like you’ve already leveled up after your time with Zach,” he said, measuring his words out carefully. “So for reals, you don’t have any obligation—”
“Yes,” I cut him off. “Yes, absolutely we should. Immediately. Or as soon as possible. But yes, we should do that. Whatever it takes.”
He blinked at me, and there was no denying the interest flaring in his eyes. “You’re serious?”
“I could not be more serious—” I began, but Liam’s eyes had already gone slightly unfocused, his mind obviously spinning ahead.
“Because honestly, if we’re going to do this, we should approach it from a purely scientific standpoint. I mean, for the sake of research, we should do it the right way.”
Um, what? I frowned at him, but he wasn’t paying me any direct attention. “Ah… Scientific?”
He nodded quickly, and I realized his pace
had picked up too. We were speed walking through Back Bay at midnight, tucked together like two conspirators bent on a mission spiraling out of control.
“I mean, think about it, when are we going to have the opportunity to really test and see empirically exactly how the whole male-female collective thing works, right? I mean this is a fantastic opportunity. It’s epic!”
Epic. I frowned as Liam chattered on, roughing out a three-part testing protocol of different levels of intimate contact, emotional and physical, and ways to empirically test the outcomes of each in a controlled environment. Here I was experiencing a profound need to make out on a street corner while all he most wanted to do was set up an experiment suitable for peer review. Was he joking? He had to be joking.
I opened my mouth to respond—and our phones blared.
11
“Oh shit,” Liam groaned, shaking me loose to grab his phone. I shoved my hands in my own pockets, trying to focus. “I didn’t tell the guys you’re safe. My bad.”
His fingers flew over the screen, but he didn’t stop talking. “You’re going to need to reassure them as well. Let them know… Well, maybe don’t let them know, now that I think about it. If Robbins is in on the surveillance stunt in your apartment, he could be tapping into other networks. I haven’t debugged our phones in a while. Which, dammit, is a whole new thing we need to figure out.”
“Right,” I said, trying not to feel cheated that Liam and I had somehow already moved off the idea of kissing. Or touching. Or engaging in the scientific process. Because my body was still reacting to the very distinct and real possibility of all those things coming to pass, and Liam was right here, right now. I stuffed down my desire and reluctantly pulled out my phone, chiming in on the group text that Liam had reached me, and all was well, and that…
I looked up. “What should I say we’re doing? Are we going back to Fowlers Hall?”
To my relief, he hesitated. But not for the reason I wanted. “You know… I think that would be a bad idea. There’s a lot of crazy energy there, and we need to see exactly what weapons you’ve got in your kit.”
“My kit.”
He nodded with emphasis. “Absolutely. I mean, you said there were knives, right? And some totems?”
“Yeah…” I frowned. I rarely used anything but my standard iron knife, but there were other things in that bag, sure. “I mean, it’s all kinds of basic stuff.”
“Well, that’s what you thought—but something in there is heavy-duty, and I can’t wait to check it out. So let’s get to Lowell Library. Remember that basement room where Frost had all his toys hidden? I found a way to get in there, and that place is a freaking bunker. It would be perfect to test out your toys. I’ve even stored some of my own stuff down there.”
I peered at him in the semidarkness of the street. With his gleaming eyes and cocky grin, briefly caught in the glare of a car’s passing headlights, Liam was in his element. He looked like he’d been born to the half-light of streetlamps and shadowed corners, always poking his nose into the unexplored fringes that everyone else passed right by. “You have stuff? I mean, more stuff than your bag?”
“Dude, of course.” He stowed his phone in his pocket, and retook my hand. The move irritated me because it made me feel so much better, but I didn’t pull my hand away. One had to respect the scientific process, after all. “I’ve had to repack this bag eighteen different times in the last couple of weeks, it feels like. That forced me to take full inventory of everything I own.”
Something in his voice tipped me off, and I slanted him another curious look. “Because why, exactly?” I asked. Liam reddened, but I knew instinctively he was going to tell me the truth. He always answered when somebody had put a direct question to him. I’d never really thought about that before now, but while he would skirt a response with a joke or a redirection, he never truly lied. Was that a choice? A compulsion?
Those questions were chased away by Liam’s next words. “Well, mostly because of you. Things have stayed relatively stable in the monster hunting minor for the last couple of years. Ever since we created our collective, we’ve learned, we’ve fought, we’ve bitched about the administration, but we’ve sort of kept our heads down and ground through it. Then you showed up with a Tarken land worm on your ass, and everything went into overdrive.”
I made a face. “Because I’m monster bait.”
“You are so much more than that,” he assured me earnestly—then winked and gave me a knowing grin. “But the monster bait part is clutch. All of a sudden, Dean Robbins kicks everything up to a new level of harassment—and that was even before we noticed he may have had a hand in the academy’s unofficial off-campus neighborhood watch program. We’ve got monsters jumping out everywhere, even coming onto campus grounds. We’ve got old bluestocking donors popping up like daisies everywhere we turn. And that’s not all. There’s a weird energy going on around campus, something I can’t quite explain.”
I frowned at him. “Tell me about that,” I said as we headed away from Newbury Street toward the school. Somebody else had said something about a new energy. Commander Frost, maybe? “You think Wellington’s energy fluctuation is tied to me?”
“In this case, not exactly,” Liam said. “I don’t think it’s attached to you so much as you triggered it. Again going back to the whole harbinger thing. And there are books down in Frost’s basement. I found his archive. The answer’s got to be in one of them.”
“Right,” I said. Grim had said that too. That I was some sort of trigger. But if there was information in the library we could use… “You’re talking about the Apocrypha? The book that wasn’t there, given how much of it has been hacked out.”
Liam flinched. “Ah, well—not just the Apocrypha. Frost’s got a ton of old books from some highly interesting places, jam-packed with information. There’s gotta be more information about you in them.”
“Then why hasn’t Frost found it?”
Liam tugged me along, walking faster now. “Because Dean Robbins has been keeping him dancing as fast as he can, and we’ve had a few monsters to wrestle down in the past few days. You’ve been here less than two weeks, and I think Frost and Robbins have been in meetings for most of them, whenever we haven’t been outright fighting monsters. And it’s not just Robbins who’s all up in Frost’s grill. Our fearless commander’s getting emails and phone calls around the clock from the first families, and the search for the other monster hunters went so badly so quickly that he had to explain that as well.”
I pressed my lips together, the last embers of my attraction to Liam getting banked, at least temporarily. This was a mess. “We’ve got to find answers to all this.”
Liam cocked a brow at me. “Well, there is a way for us to do that, yes? There’s always a way. There’s always a tool, a trick, or a gadget to get the job done. Always.”
I snorted. “What is that, the Graham family motto?”
“No, just mine. The Graham family doesn’t have an issue accessing magic. I have to get more creative.”
“And you have.”
“I have,” he said definitively. “But first, we need to get your kit safely into Lowell Library and open that bad boy up. So let’s kick it up a notch.”
The campus was far quieter than it had been when I’d left it a few short hours earlier, though there were still some students roaming along the brightly lit sidewalks. As we passed beneath the gargoyle studded archway, I felt a strange chill steal over me. Liam’s phone pinged again, and he muttered a curse as he pulled it out, then glanced my way.
“Hang on a second,” he said and he moved off from me a couple of feet, letting me linger in the shadows. The trees had grown tall here, and I drifted toward them, wanting their embrace. I reached out my mind to see if I could determine any sort of amped-up energy like what Frost and Liam were talking about, but I felt nothing but a strange, hollow loneliness, the sense of feeling incomplete. An overlay of loss, despair, and aching pain. Distracted, I patted my
front pocket where I’d stuffed Grim’s lanyard…
I stopped. “Oh, shit,” I muttered, shoving my hand deeper into my pocket, but of course there was nothing there. Had I dropped Grim’s key card? Had it fallen out during Liam’s and my crazy trip to get my weapons? I’d thought it was pushed down pretty deep, and I certainly had it at the coffee shop. Had I lost it after I’d let Liam try to wrap his hand around it?
Another finger of cool breeze drifted across my forehead, and I angrily brushed it away, then caught a movement deeper in the woods. Light reflecting off a pale flash of color. Instantly, I thought of Grim. Was he back there? Had he pickpocketed me to get his key card back instead of, you know, coming up to me like any normal guy? I mean, seriously. What was wrong with him?
“Hey,” Liam said, and I turned back to him, surprised to see his manner tenser now, more focused. “Sorry about that. Let’s go.”
“What is it?” I asked, and he waved me off.
“Nothing major, just my family being my family.” He turned back toward Lowell Library, and I fell into step with him.
“I’m not really sure if I know what that’s like,” I offered, not knowing what else to say. “My mom and I had a good life, or I thought we did. But ever since she died, I don’t know anymore. It’s like she was this whole different person before I came into her world, and she never once shared any of that life with me, not even when she got sick and knew she was going to die. I guess I still have a hard time understanding that.”
Liam sighed beside me, and his hand closed over mine again, the heat that flared between us equal parts shared emotion and…something more. At least something more for me.
“I have a hard time believing it too,” he said. “Man, we sure ended up with a messed up group of parents. Yours with the secrecy, mine—don’t even get me started, Zach’s with his family curse...”