The Hunter's Snare (Monster Hunter Academy Book 3)

by D. D. Chance

  I huffed a soft laugh. “Yeah. None of us really ended up with parents of the year.”

  Liam squeezed my hand. “We don’t know anything about Grim though,” he said, a hint of a smile returning to his voice. “He might have had seven other brothers and sisters all as big and feral as he is, lined up around the kitchen table wolfing down cookies and hot cocoa.”

  I thought about the flash of pale white hair I’d seen against the trees, the soft chill that surrounded me. “Now that’s something I would like to see.”

  We reached the library a few minutes later, closed up for the night. Liam didn’t enter through the front door but moved around to the side of the building, sliding his pack forward. He pulled out a small device as we approached the door, and I lifted my brows.

  “You have a lockpick for the library? That has to be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Liam laughed, unperturbed. “When your library is as cool as Lowell, you’re damn right I have a lockpick. If I have to enter it from the outside, it’s the quickest way possible to get in—and that was before I knew about Frost’s secret hidey-hole in the subbasement. I thought I’d mapped out this place pretty well, but this was one case where I was happy to be wrong.”

  I quirked him a glance as he bent toward the side door to the library, nearly invisible in the shadows. “You’ve mapped the library?”

  A lock clicked, and Liam straightened again, gesturing me forward. “I’ve mapped the whole friggin’ campus—and believe me, what goes on beneath this place is a hell of a lot more interesting than what happens up top.”

  My further questions were stymied as we stepped into the darkened library and Liam lifted a finger to his lips. He waved for me to follow him and didn’t waste any time. Striding quickly and almost soundlessly, he hurried down the long polished hallway, not even glancing at the main section of the library, but heading deeper into the building. We made three left turns, then a right, cutting down a side hallway barely illuminated by flickering sconces set high into the wall. Then we emerged into a hallway I recognized and, a few moments later, arrived at the elevator bay. Liam summoned the elevator, and when the doors swished open, he stepped inside first. I followed, my heart beginning to thump with anticipation. We’d been down this elevator once before, all the way to a hidden basement, and he struck the B key three sharp times with authority.

  “You don’t have the key to get down to the secret storage room, do you?”

  He flashed the same device. “Consider this an all-access pass. Frost should never have let me see that room. I already had stuff hidden throughout the library, but down underneath, where nobody could get to it who didn’t know how the campus was originally set up, just makes so much more sense.”

  Sure enough, the elevator paused only briefly at the basement, then kept going down what felt like easily two more levels. When the doors opened, however, it was to a different room from the one that Frost had shown us earlier.

  I stepped out of the elevator, looking around. “What is this place?”

  Liam exhaled with genuine excitement as he joined me. “Best I can tell? Some kind of underground bunker, though not exactly intended to protect you against a nuclear attack. Not even really enough to protect you from a monster attack. It’s more of a storage place of last resort. There’s electricity and plumbing, but the accommodations sort of suck otherwise.”

  He gestured to the makeshift bed in the corner, little more than a few sleeping bags piled on each other, an electric lamp and clock, and a small refrigerator unit. Still, the space looked remarkably…cozy.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you sleep down here? Like on a regular basis?”

  Liam shrugged, then gave me a rueful grin. “I only found it the other day, remember. But since then, yeah. I’ve started spending a lot of time here, and it’s quiet enough for me to think. Plus, I have all Frost’s books and the entire library to access if I need to.”

  “And no observers for any mad-scientist experiments you might want to conduct as well, I take it?”

  The gibe was intended as a joke, but Liam turned toward me, his cocky smile returning.

  “I’ll have you know I am exceptional at mad scientist experiments, I have several in mind for us when the time comes.” I started with surprise, a flare of now-familiar interest tingling inside me, but Liam pushed on.

  “First things first,” he said. “Let’s check out your weapons of mass destruction.”

  Swinging his pack around, he moved toward the large wooden table pushed up against the wall. He set the pack on the table, flipped on a gooseneck lamp I hadn’t noticed hovering to the side, and unzipped the top of the pack. Slowly, almost reverently, he pulled the heavy cloth bag out of the pack, transferring it to the table with a loud thunk. He flipped open the top of the pouch and slid out the first thing his fingers could reach, a long, skinny blade, like an old-timey scalpel. It’d fit perfectly in my little-kid hands when I’d started striking back at the monsters that’d come after me, but it couldn’t cause much damage. I hadn’t used it in years.

  I folded my arms tightly to my stomach as he dipped into the bag again, pulling out a tin sheriff’s badge. Mom had gotten me that when I’d killed my first monster. A ripple of sadness slid through me, pricking my nerves. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to find in there. It’s just a couple of knives and some iron things I picked up. Nothing even expensive.”

  Something in my voice penetrated Liam’s science-guy fugue, because he looked up sharply, then pushed back from the table.

  “Hey,” he said, walking over to me and leaning down a little to look directly in my eyes. “It’s going to be okay. You know that, right? It’s all gonna be okay, no matter what’s in this pouch or what’s in that iron box upstairs. You’re part of us now. We’ll protect you.”

  “I don’t need your protection,” I snapped, then immediately felt bad when Liam grimaced with concern. “No, that’s not true. I hate needing your protection, I guess.”

  He gave me a sad smile. “There’s nothing wrong with asking for help sometimes.”

  “I know.” I blew out a sigh. “And I do think I was supposed to come here, I just…I don’t know. None of this should be happening. Mom should never have died, I should never have been designated as monster bait or a harbinger—any of it. We were doing fine. She was doing fine. How she could have had a family who never once tried to find her…”

  “Hey,” he said again. He lifted his hands to my face, brushing away tears I hadn’t realized had slipped free. Slowly, he leaned forward and his mouth touched mine, and everything horrible and broken in the world slipped away. For one impossible second, it was me and Liam with our lips touching, our breath mingling. Need, fierce and sure, scorched through my core, sizzling along my veins and practically electrifying my nerve endings. Nothing shook outside of us, and we weren’t swept far away and somewhere else, but I felt like I might explode.

  Liam jerked away, his sandy hair standing on end, his bright eyes wide and dazed. “Holy crap,” he breathed. “That was way more reaction than last time. Did you feel it? Does that happen—I mean, was it like that with the others?”

  “No,” I answered shakily. “No. With them, it was powerful, but…um, different.”

  “Oh, man. That is so awesome.” His gaze cleared, and he fairly danced on his toes. “But I can’t get distracted. We have to be serious here.” He turned back to the table with excitement. “We’ve got more tools to get through, and I happen to be a master at deciphering ciphers and unraveling mysteries. So don’t tell me anything about your stash, okay? I’d rather take it all in with fresh eyes.”

  I sighed. Apparently, unraveling the mysteries of our sexual attraction took second place to my childhood scraps and memories. “Have at it,” I said, standing back.

  Liam seated himself at the table and leaned forward, peering down at the knives. Then he leaned forward a little farther, his mouth moving, his eyes scanning back and forth
rapidly. With a startled huff, he pitched forward even more, his face dropping all the way down to the surface of the table, the move so strange that it caught me off guard.

  “Um…you okay?” I asked, stepping forward to touch his shoulder—before jerking back at the arc of electricity that leapt up from his body to my hand. “Whoa!”

  Liam lay slumped on the table, out cold.

  12

  “Liam!” I surged forward, stopping just short of touching him again, my hand poised over his back. Should I shake him? Wake him up? Would that cause some sort of problem?

  His head partially covered the velvet bag, his hands curled beside his head on the table’s wooden surface. I could see the barest edge of something shiny sticking out from beneath his mop of hair, and I gingerly reached down and teased the item out. As it slid into view, my brows went up.

  The hilt of my beloved Renaissance Faire-purchased athame stuck out from the bag. Seeing it made my heart tug a little, despite the fact that I should be worried about Liam. I glanced back at him, but he was breathing easily now, apparently dead to the world but not otherwise harmed. I took an extra second to pull the athame out of its pouch and study it.

  It was a pretty trinket, mass-produced by the thousands and sold around the country to gullible festival goers like me, but I didn’t care. When I’d been twelve years old and had saved up enough money and gone to the local Ren Faire to buy it, I’d been full of hope that it would not only take out the monsters in my path, but give me magical powers to make them go away for good. The woman who’d sold me the knife had been a festival worker, maybe twenty years old, dressed in swirling robes, with heavily lined eyes and bracelets that jingled whenever she moved. But it had been the store’s proprietor who’d stopped me on the way out of the colorful tent, frowning down at my purchase in its little organza bag.

  “You’re kind of young to be playing with knives,” he’d observed, and at the time, I hadn’t realized who he was. I’d bristled, my shoulders going back.

  “It’s not a knife,” I’d informed him with all of the authority of a twelve-year-old monster warrior. “It’s an athame, and it’s going to protect me.”

  He’d gotten a strange, almost angry look in his eye at that point, which had flustered me, and when he’d asked to see the blade, I’d given it up willingly. He turned it over in his hand, his gaze roaming from it and back to me as he weighed it.

  “What sort of things do you need protection from?” he asked carefully, and I realized my unintentional error.

  “Oh no,” I said, giving him a wide smile. “I’m not being bullied, my mother loves me, and I’m okay. I mean like protection from, you know…monsters.”

  I expected him to laugh that off, chalk it up to me being a kid. That was what generally had happened before when I’d slipped up around adults. Instead, he nodded somberly, looked down at the blade again, and murmured something to himself. Then he’d told me that for a job like that, the blade should be sharpened.

  To my surprise, he led me next door to a similarly festive tent, this one set up to show the process of making chain-mail armor. Shoppers could purchase everything from delicate little ankle bracelets to full shirts of mail, and sure enough, they sold old-timey weapons too. Axes and swords and even maces. All those were blunted, but in the back of the tent, there was a table with several long files. Using a round cylinder, he’d scraped the blade several times until by the time he returned it to me, it gleamed with a wicked edge. I had been over the moon.

  “You come back here next year if you need it sharpened again,” he told me.

  I hadn’t, of course. I’d learned quickly enough that while the athame was pretty, it was too light and the wrong size to be much use in fighting monsters. I had to be economical with the weapons I carried around with me. Still, I’d kept it in my stash because it made me smile whenever I looked at it.

  Now I slanted a glance toward Liam. Should I have warned him? How was I to know what random crap from my past would knock him out?

  I set the blade back down and hesitantly laid my hands on Liam’s shoulders. He sighed in his slumber as if somehow recognizing my touch, but he didn’t wake. I frowned, then pulled him back more or less upright in his chair, bracing myself to keep him from tumbling over. I couldn’t just leave him like that, so I heaved him out of the chair, stumbling over to the makeshift bed he’d built for himself and flopping Liam down on it like a rag doll.

  He still didn’t wake up.

  I knelt beside him, stretching out his limbs and smoothing the hair from his head. He appeared unhurt, but why wasn’t he waking up? Why didn’t I have more skills when it came to helping these guys?

  Not knowing what else to do, I settled with my back against the wall and angled his head into my lap. He sighed again, more contentedly this time, and I smiled. I wished I’d had the time to go through a few more classes before the semester ended. If I’d been able to take some sort of magical first aid class beyond getting the syllabus and a stack of books, I could be useful here. There had to be some sort of spell or magical whozit or…

  My gaze lifted to the table where Liam had dropped his pack. He’d had smelling salts in there the first time I’d met him, right? It was reasonable the pack had them now. Should I go through it? Was that some sort of breach of privacy?

  As I studied the pack across the room, it seemed to shiver a bit, a burst of sparks and some smoke flickering at its mouth. My eyes widened. Was that an invitation or a warning?

  Beneath me, Liam sighed again, turning over slightly to make himself more comfortable. I sank my head against the wall, unreasonably tired. Smelling salts would probably be a good idea. I’d close my eyes for a second, and then…

  When I awoke hours later, if my phone were to be believed, Liam and I lay in almost the exact same position. He’d curled into me more tightly and had somewhere along the line scored a blanket, but he was resting comfortably from what I could tell. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure I needed traction. I slid out from beneath Liam, muscles screaming, glad when he murmured something unintelligible but normal sounding, and stood. My entire left leg tingled with outrage at being woken up, and I was ravenous. I squinted around the small room, but there was no food here.

  I wondered if Liam would be aghast at the idea of eating in his secret lair. My stomach rumbled. Well, too bad. This wasn’t my secret lair, and I was starved. I had no idea how to get out, though, or how to get back in.

  I knelt down again next to Liam.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “How’re you doing?”

  “Mmmph,” he managed, making me grin. Then he opened his eyes and squinted at me. “Um…what’re we doing on the bed?”

  Not nearly enough, I wanted to say, but instead, I pulled the blanket up higher around his shoulders. “My childhood mementoes bored the crap out of you, I think. You passed the hell out, and I dragged you over here.”

  “Bored…?” He clearly wasn’t tracking fully, but at least he wasn’t in a coma. Progress.

  “Yeah—but now I want to get some food. How do I find this place again?”

  Liam grunted, waving vaguely at his pack. “Inside the cover of the pack, homing device. It’ll bring you back. To get out, use the elevator.”

  “Oh.” The elevator, of course. Another quick check of my phone verified it was only 6:00 a.m., a good three hours before anyone was supposed to assemble at Lowell Library. I could get out and back again before anyone noticed.

  Liam seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Coffee,” he sighed, apparently not that concerned about food in his hidey-hole after all. Or at least not caffeine.

  I set out on my quest, amused that it almost felt like a game. Then again, Liam made everything feel like an adventure, even when he’d apparently been knocked out.

  How often did he knock himself out when he was on his own? I suddenly wondered. I got the sinking feeling this might not be an unusual situation. Who found him—took care of him—when he got in too far over his
head? Did he have friends beyond the guys?

  None of the guys seemed like they had much in the way of friends outside of the collective, now that I thought of it. Then again, neither did I. Was that a function of being a monster hunter? Or just who we were as people? Which came first, the antisocial nature, or the monsters wanting to eat you?

  I stepped into the library’s gleaming hallway, rolling more questions around in my head. Did Liam get lonely? I didn’t think Zach did, with the constant murmur of voices in his mind. Then again, I knew all about being alone in a crowd. Was that how Zach and Liam felt too? All the guys?

  I frowned, mulling over these thoughts but not focusing long enough on any one of them to get pulled under. I’d made it all the way out to one of the cafés on the edge of campus and almost back again, with two coffees and breakfast sandwiches in tow, when a startled voice called my name.

  “Nina?”

  I turned around to see Merry Williams standing at the corner of Cabot Hall. Tall, willowy, and way too pretty for six thirty in the freaking morning, with bouncy auburn hair and striking green eyes, Merry sported her usual uniform of perfectly pressed academy attire—blouse, plaid skirt, knee-high socks and boots. Something was off about her, though. Her hands were clasped around her own insulated coffee cup, but she didn’t burst into her usual babble of chatter. In fact, she seemed a little lost.

  “Hey,” I said, changing my trajectory to head toward her. “How are you doing?”

  The last time I’d seen Merry, she’d been captured by demons while carrying a megaphone. We’d left her in the safe hands of the first responders to the fire at Bellamy Chapel, but I realized with chagrin I hadn’t checked up on her since then. Then again, had that only been yesterday? Time seemed to be rushing by way too quickly.

  “Were you hurt in the fire?” I continued when Merry didn’t respond.

  “What?” She refocused on me, as if my words had reached her from a far distance. “Oh. Oh, gosh no. Not really.” She shook her head, lifting a hand to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear, and I blinked in surprise. A thick band of white hair now shot its way back from Merry’s forehead, mingling with the heavy mane of rich auburn. The effect was undeniably stunning, but I wondered if Merry realized it’d happened yet. She seemed to be a bit in a daze.