by D. D. Chance
“Okay, we start with a Dear Mom and Dad kind of feel, though there’s no name used. Then she immediately goes into Nina’s exploits as a little girl, all of it normal—walking, talking, learning fast, typical Mom shit… Kind of strikes me as a ‘look how normal my little girl is’ speech.”
“Maybe I was normal then,” I suggested. “The first time I saw a monster, I was old enough to know what it was—or at least that it wasn’t ordinary. I could definitely talk and understand my surroundings.”
“Yup, agreed. Second entry seems to be several months later, and then we’ve got a break, here.”
He flapped a hand at no one in particular, and Frost stepped forward, handing him a stack of cards. Tyler tossed a pen across the table, and Liam picked it up, his gaze never leaving the letter as he scrawled a note. “Same entry, but her handwriting shifts, gets more intense. Nina’s first monster attack outside the house, looks like.”
“How old?” Grim asked abruptly. I looked up to find all the guys staring at me.
“I honestly don’t know. That one I remember, but not well. It was some sort of giant spider—we had several of them in the shed behind the house that I’d always thought were enormous. But this one kept coming for me, and once it got all the way into the light, I figured out it was anything but normal.”
Liam whistled softly beneath his breath, scanning the page. “Maybe four years old? It’s not dated, but given the way she’s describing your motor skills, even if you were an early bloomer, four sounds about right.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Is that significant?”
“No. Your Mom is writing with more agitation, but pride. A lot of pride. And then we’ve got some math equations outta nowhere that make zero sense…” Liam scrawled down more notes. “Then we have another fight, this one talking about a concerted response on your part, Nina. Mom was pissed here.”
I smiled a little ruefully. “I got hurt pretty bad. I…can’t remember that one at all. Those scars are some of the ones that never healed.”
I could feel the guys’ focus on me, but I kept my gaze on Liam. “I don’t remember her being as mad as she seemed in that letter, for the record. She started training me more after that, finding YouTube videos, getting weapons, but that’s it. I was maybe…six or so?”
Liam made a note and kept scanning. The rest of the letter read more of the same. Reports of my improving skills written sometimes with defiant tones, sometimes almost apologetic, and then more equations and even bits of gobbledy-gook words that Liam duly recorded as he encountered them. Nothing, in all of it, indicated who Mom was writing to or anything about her past.
He’d almost gotten to the twelfth page when Zach huffed out a soft breath. “Don’t move. We’ve got monsters at the door.”
I froze. The guys did too, only our eyes swiveling. “How in the hell…” Frost growled. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“On several levels,” Liam agreed. Once again, he sounded more excited than concerned, but then—Liam.
Given where I was standing, it took me longer than the others to fully pivot toward the door. As I did, the thing shifted forward. Grim muttered a curse, and Tyler gave a low, dark chuckle.
“Looks like your spiders missed you, Nina,” he murmured, and I stared in absolute shock as a spider the size of a smart car spilled into the doorway to the war room, its long, hairy legs waving, its mandibles clicking with sharp, percussive urgency.
Tyler spoke a harsh-edged Latin curse. Fire slashed toward the door.
“No!” I shouted, but it was too late. The abdomen of the spider ripped open—and a dozen spiders the size of bowling balls hurtled into the room.
14
“Crap!”
That exclamation was all I could manage before the spider tsunami engulfed us. I couldn’t even pull my athame out—let alone free up my real knife—before I was forced back against the table, the spiders churning, crawling, leaping over each other to gain purchase on my boots and legs. Scrabbling up onto the tabletop, I grabbed the nearest heavy crystals weighing down the last few pages of my mother’s letter and started whacking at the creatures as Tyler continued shouting in Latin and Liam’s hands burst into flames.
Did Liam have insertables in his wrists that allowed him to shoot fire? If so, I was definitely a fan, as he let fly with two jagged flaming bolts that swept the floor, incinerating the nearest spiders. Unfortunately, they kept coming. Only Grim and Frost could make meaningful headway toward the mother spider as they punched baby spiders to the left and right, fists flying as they struggled forward. The two of them converged on the giant spider in the center, pushing it out into the main library and sending it sprawling across the floor.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of our troubles. As the spider flopped over, a second wave of arachnids poured out of it, these barely larger than our fists, and twice as fast as their bowling ball cousins. I squeaked in alarm as this new tide flowed out, racing not just toward the four of us, but spreading out over the room, crawling up the stacks of books and skittering across the shelves.
“You’re gonna need one hell of an exterminator,” Zach shouted, his grim humor punctuating the fight. I finally ditched the crystals and went for my blades—both the athame and my regular iron knife. We kept bashing, stomping, and murdering spiders while Tyler’s Latin spells grew longer and more complex. More effective too. Spiders started erupting in a grid-like pattern, blasting upward and then dissolving in a shatter of sparks.
“Mind the books!” Frost reminded him.
Tyler huffed a sharp laugh. “Everyone’s a critic.”
“Guys!” Liam said, drawing our attention back to him despite all the whacking, burning, and exploding going on. He stood over the corpse of the spider mother, a corpse that gave every appearance of still being alive. It twitched and convulsed toward him, making him jerk back, his hands going up in defense.
“I don’t think she’s finished yet,” he warned, and sure enough, a new ripple shuddered across what was left of the spider’s abdomen. From the gaping rip in her belly, a sea of tiny heads and scurrying legs broke free.
“Wait a minute,” Liam blurted, and he turned and sprinted back into the war room, leaving us to contend with the third wave of spiderlings. He was back within seconds holding a blinking electronic gadget high. “I bet…” He depressed a button on the gadget and…the spider disappeared.
Not just collapsed or expired, but disappeared, along with all its baby spiders, from the itsy-bitsy bastards to the few remaining bowling ballers.
As quickly as the battle had begun, it was over.
Liam looked across the room at us.
“Anyone hurt?” he asked.
“Other than my heart about stopping, no, I think I’m good,” Zach said, checking his arms for spider bites. To my surprise, I hadn’t been bitten either, which, considering the swarm and the size of our attackers, was kind of remarkable.
Grim put a name to it first. “Illusion magic,” he said, sounding disgusted. He excelled at that.
“Powerful illusion magic,” Liam agreed. “Able to be cast inside the library. Which, I gotta tell you—”
“Is warded to its foundation,” Frost bit off.
“More to the point,” Tyler said slowly, “illusion magic is forbidden on campus.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean, forbidden?” I asked. “I thought you guys were an equal opportunity magic academy.”
Tyler shook his head. “That sounds like a good idea, but think about our original charter, to fight monsters. Back in the day, we had lots of other magical disciplines on campus as well, and some of our founding fathers were gifted illusionists. It’s considered one of the highest forms of magic to create something that isn’t there and make someone believe in it.”
“I’ve had entire relationships based on that principle,” Liam said drily, and Tyler grinned at him, then kept going.
“But on a monster campus, it was all too easy to create monsters,
much like what we just had here, to distract the hell out of the students, and once that was done…”
“The illusionists took advantage? Like, what—they stole stuff?” A sharp jab of anxiety poked at me, and I glanced over to the war room. “Oh, no.”
Everyone had the same idea I did, and we all pivoted as one. Liam, the closest to the door, dove into the room. His curse told the story.
“What the actual fuck?” he snarled. “Someone has stolen Nina’s letter.”
We all crowded in behind him as he emerged from behind the table, holding up two pages. “These were on the ground, blown off somehow.”
I grimaced. “I took the crystals off them at the start of the fight. Sorry, I needed weapons.”
“Don’t apologize—at least we still have these.” Liam scowled down at the sheets. “Fuck.”
“But who?” Zach demanded. “How?”
“How is right,” Frost followed up, sounding even more pissed.
“That’s the entire nature of illusion magic,” Tyler put in, sounding thoughtful. “To distract you and then strike.”
“No. You don’t understand,” Frost said angrily. “Nobody can break down the wards of Lowell Library. This building has existed since the academy was founded. It has the best security of any building on campus other than the main administration building and the arena. You just don’t waltz in here and throw magic around.”
“I hate to be the contrarian here,” Zach put in, “but we just had a full-on demon attack in the library, like, yesterday. I doubt that was allowed in the original charter either.”
“That’s different. The horde came in on the backs of students and their professor,” Frost said. “Students and staff are trackable. Eventually, we would be able to go through and identify which ones were possessed, but possessions aren’t really a danger to the library as much as they are to the persons being possessed. The demons had limited power over anything except the students. The library wards were created primarily to protect the contents of the building, not its occupants at any given time.”
“Well, good to see that we have our priorities in order,” Liam observed drily.
“You’re missing the point,” Frost began, but Liam waved him off.
“Oh no, I get exactly what you’re saying. We’ve had a breach in a place that shouldn’t be able to be breached. By an individual we didn’t see, and who I’m betting won’t show up on the cameras, if their magic is as good as I think it is.”
“Our necromancer?” Tyler asked. “The asshole behind the Boston Brahmin attacks from last week? Those originated out of Boston Public Garden, so right in our backyard.”
“Very possibly, but it’s worse than that,” Frost said. “I don’t think anyone strong enough to breach the halls of Lowell Library constrains themselves to one type of magic.”
“So you’re saying we have a multihyphenate. How very first family of us,” Liam drawled.
Once again, Liam’s sense of humor pricked Frost’s nerves. He glared at Liam across the room. “I’m saying that the only person who could do such a thing is either a member of the first families or someone hired by a first family. Either way, it’s not a good situation. The academy wasn’t built to defend itself against its own.”
We all digested that for a second. It wasn’t a tasty consideration.
“Who on campus will know about this breach, or who would ordinarily know?” Tyler asked at length.
“The board, typically,” Frost said. “This one, of course, won’t show up on any computer scan since it didn’t trip any of our wards. The intruder was essentially a ghost. Not an actual ghost,” he snapped as Liam opened his mouth, then shut it with a smirk.
Tyler considered the doorway to the war room. “So the only people who know we’ve been breached are in this room and the bad guy.”
“Correct,” Frost said. “I don’t see how that helps us, though.”
But Liam was already turning toward Tyler, his eyes gleaming. “You think we can set a trap,” he said.
Tyler nodded. “We still have the last two pages of Nina’s letter. Whoever stole the rest of it may well realize that, especially if it cuts off in the middle of a passage.”
“Which it does,” Liam said, studying the letter. “Unfortunately, it cuts off at a kind of important moment, all about how Nina is going to grow up to be the biggest, baddest monster hunter the world has ever seen. Depending on the mood of the person reading the letter, that could be good or bad news. Anyone reading that would assume there’s gonna be a clear and present danger with Nina coming to Boston. That might pull someone out of the woodwork on its own, no trap required.”
“But they already know about me, right?” I protested. “I mean, the illusionist came into the library for a reason. Wouldn’t that reason be to steal my mom’s letter?”
“Possibly, or it was just a crime of opportunity. Somebody trying to mess with us.”
“Well, they succeeded,” Frost muttered.
“I mean, think about it,” Liam said, returning the final two pages of the letter to the table, then tapping them. “Bad guy makes it into the library, sees us all heads down over this thing, and devises a plan on the spot. Once he or she reads the letter, maybe he’ll sell it, maybe he’ll contact us for ransom, maybe he’ll burn it in effigy on the central quad.”
“Oh my God,” I muttered. I hadn’t thought about the letter being destroyed. The very idea of that made my stomach pitch.
“You think they’d do that?” Tyler asked, and Liam shook his head.
“Not even remotely. Most likely this guy is from a very old, very badass family, given his mad skillz at breaking down the library’s wards. He may know who Janet Cross was or have the magic to suss it out. And that, unfortunately, puts him a giant step ahead of us, which isn’t great, but he won’t destroy the letter. If anything, he’ll kick his own ass for not securing the whole thing.”
He dropped his gaze to the remaining pages of the letter, scanning quickly. “More of the same—proud, almost defiant warnings about Nina’s developing skills, and even a note of hope here, that…hmm. This doesn’t make sense.”
I nodded, knowing this part of the letter by heart. “She’s not what you think she is. She’s more, she’s stronger. She could change everything—for us, too. Think about that,” I finished for him. “I have no freaking idea what that means. It’s almost, I don’t know…”
“Mercenary,” Grim put in, and I winced, my cheeks heating as I endeavored not to look at anyone in the room.
“It does sound…kind of calculating,” Zach agreed. I felt him push at the barriers in my mind, seeking to comfort me. I didn’t want comfort, though. I only wanted answers.
“Yeah, I know.” I nodded. “It didn’t exactly leave me warm and fuzzy. And that’s the last thing she said. The letter ends after that.”
“Hmm…” Liam said, his gaze back on the sheets, rereading.
Frost’s phone chimed, an insistent, high-pitched alert tone I hadn’t heard before, impossible to ignore. He issued a sharp, expressive curse as he fished the device out of his pants pocket. His mood didn’t improve as he scanned the screen.
“What in fuck’s name are they thinking?” he groused.
Before Liam could provide a potential response, Frost gestured his phone toward us. “We’ve been called into a meeting with Symmes and his cronies at Wellesley Hall. All of us. Let’s go.”
15
This was my first visit to Wellesley Hall, a small, unassuming building just off the main quad of campus. By my reckoning, it was the exact center of the old campus, including the monster quad. The building was made of gray, rugged-looking stone and possessed only one story with a high pitched roof. Gargoyles presided over the two visible corners of the roofline, and were positioned over the front door as well. As with many of the other buildings on campus, embedded strips of wrought iron flanked the doorway and lined the porch.
“This is nice,” I allowed as we approached. Liam n
odded beside me, looking up with a similar air of appreciation, though I had no doubt he’d been in and out of this building dozens of times during his years on campus. He seemed to study everything as if for the first time, no matter how familiar it was to him. It was a good trait.
“Believe it or not, this wasn’t the first building they built on campus. That was a barracks for hunters, which they put up right after the wall,” he said. “When Wellington Academy was founded, Boston was in the middle of being overrun with magic. Something about the city proved particularly tasty to monsters, and the academies evolved to handle it. First Twyst, then Wellington, then a handful of others. Some of them still exist, some have died out, and some have gone underground.”
I slanted him a glance. “More underground than Wellington Academy? It’s not like you guys do much advertising.”
He snorted. “No, but those who need to know can find out about us easily enough. You did, after all. And maybe your mom before you, even if she wasn’t a student. It’s just not reasonable that someone with your monster hunting abilities doesn’t have any connection with the academy. That may be why we’ve been called here now.”
Frost huffed an irritated sigh beside us, the first noise he’d made since ordering us to Wellesley Hall. “I sincerely wish that were the case. It would be far more useful. Still, I expect there will be something to learn here. Just don’t argue with them, and let’s get through it. We need to return to Lowell Library as soon as possible to secure it. I don’t like the idea that its wards were so easily breached.”
“Maybe not so easily,” Liam countered. “Maybe we’re just facing a magician of epic skills.”
“As always, Mr. Graham, your insights fail to uplift me. I suggest you endeavor to listen more than you talk.”
Behind Frost’s back, Liam and Tyler exchanged a smirk, but they didn’t say anything more as we entered the building. There was no attendant to greet us and barely any sound at all in the old building, except for the faint murmur of conversation deeper within. We moved down a long hallway, and I noted several sitting rooms off to either side, all of them decorated in a stuffy Victorian style. Exactly what you would expect in an academy that had been founded in the 1800s and maintained by people who wished we were still living in the 1800s, I suspected.