by D. D. Chance
“No, it would make you awesome.”
To my surprise, it was Grim who spoke. His voice was low and menacing as he scowled at Liam, though who he was mad at, I wasn’t quite sure. “You, not the Grahams. The Grahams as a family would have been put at risk. Your father needed to protect his people, just as all the generations before him had. It doesn’t make him right, but it makes him understandable. Your parents should have told you. In the past, parents probably did.”
It was Liam’s turn to laugh darkly. “Yeah, well, that wouldn’t have worked in my case. I never would have accepted it. If I’d known they were suppressing my magic, I would have ripped those friggin’ tuners out the moment I’d gotten the chance.”
He sighed again, eyeing the devices. “I really don’t think my mom knew what these really were. Do you?”
“I don’t,” Frost said. “Or at least not on any sort of conscious level. I don’t think she would have allowed it. From what I know of Claudia Graham, she would have wanted to celebrate your strength, not suppress it.”
Liam coughed a laugh. “You’ve got that right. So now what?”
As if the library had been waiting for its chance, a hollow, keening note sounded deep within the building, almost as if it were coming from several floors beneath us.
Tyler shot a sharp glance to Frost. “What the hell is that?”
“And where is it coming from?” Zach added.
Frost had already turned, uttering a sharp command I’d never heard him use before.
Instantly, all the screens surrounding the room flared to life. They were showing the views of the surveillance cameras throughout Lowell Library, I realized immediately, and they revealed absolutely nothing of interest. Room after room of books, shelves, and tables, oversized furniture stacked up neatly, heavily framed works of art lined up against the wall and covered partially with tarps. But no monsters making keening noises that sounded almost familiar, for all that I couldn’t place them.
I didn’t have to wait long.
“Oh my God, are those caralons?” Tyler demanded, half turning toward Liam as he jabbed his finger at one of the screens, just as something slipped past, too quickly for me to identify. “Is that possible?”
“The way our luck’s been going, yeah. It’s possible,” Liam sighed. He flashed me a sharp look. “You remember the caralons? From the Run?”
I made a face, searching the screens for another glimpse of the creatures. “Like low-level succubi?”
“Exactly like that. They’re nothing to screw around with, though, and they’ve been on my nuts since I started training as a monster hunter. I have no idea why.”
“Of course you do. Now, anyway,” Frost said, while Tyler nodded vigorously.
“No friggin’ kidding, of course.” He turned to Liam. “Caralons, like succubi, need power. All they want is power. You had power. They didn’t care if it was being suppressed within an inch of its life, they knew it was inside you and they wanted to get it out. No wonder they’ve been all over you every chance they get.”
“And they’re coming back now?” Zach demanded. “How in the hell are they even on campus? Are our wards failing that much?”
“Different kind of monster,” Grim said. “The wards were set for the monsters that would have the most impact for the most people, but there are ways to get around that. There’s always a way to get around a ward. You just have to know where to look, and have been living long enough to know the ancient ways.”
He sounded particularly grumpy about that explanation, even for him, but my attention was immediately distracted by another haunting wail that sounded far below.
“It didn’t take them long to realize that your magic has amped up, did it?” Tyler groused. “You might as well have rung the dinner bell.”
“Friggin’ great,” Liam muttered as Frost barked out a shout.
“Look there. If they’re caralons, they won’t need an elevator to get around. They can dissolve right through ceilings and floors.” He pointed to a screen in the middle of the wall. I caught the movement as it flashed by, then new creatures appeared, female in appearance, easily a dozen of them, their lower halves lost in roiling smoke. Their faces were dominated by enormous gaping mouths, eyes sealed shut, hair a wild entangled mess. Whoever had dreamt up images of nymphlike beauties and applied them to the succubus myth had clearly never seen this variant.
“There was something in the frame before them,” Zach said urgently. “Someone else is here.”
“The illusionist,” Tyler said. “Has to be.”
“Agreed,” Liam said, as the guys spread out, obviously bracing themselves for an attack that could literally come from anywhere. “Maybe he’s the one leading them this way. He definitely knew the lay of the land already, given his spider attack.”
“And what’s up with the whole insect invasion, anyway?” I asked. They all turned to look at me, and I flapped my hands. “I mean, we’ve had spiders here and hornets in Guild Hall, and Liam and I ran into an entire nest of flying rodents—which were monsters but definitely screwed-up, buggy-looking monsters. You’re not picking up a theme here?”
“I…” Frost blinked at me, but before he could say anything more a dozen screaming creatures burst through the war room’s floors and walls, heading for Liam. The guys and I leapt into action. I yanked my iron knife from its sheath and turned as Grim shouted. I pivoted and lifted my hand to capture the small mesh bag he hefted my way. I knew what was inside it—another round of silver beads, the touch of metal cool through the loose weave. I welcomed them now as I swung the full bag at the nearest creature.
It screamed and dissolved into a shower of smoke and sparks, and I turned to greet the next caralon. Out of the corner of my eye, I realized that Liam wasn’t taking on the caralon that found him first. Instead, he let them come, his face a mask of focus.
“Liam, what are you doing?” Tyler shouted, and Liam barely reacted before the first caralon reached him. He turned his hands outward, a burst of flame no longer shooting directly from his palm, but seeming to come from all the way up by his elbows. It incinerated the creature at three feet, and the one following behind as well.
A blast of heat ripped through the room, and Zach yelped as the caralon he’d tackled disintegrated beneath him.
“Tamp it down,” Frost yelled out, sounding genuinely pissed, which seemed unfair because Liam was being awesome, but Liam dropped his hands anyway, and we continued the fight using more conventional levels of magic. I thought this odd until high, screeching laughter echoed through the great hall of the library, beyond the war room.
“What, you would repress him? You would step away from the strongest magic you’ve ever experienced? This is why you’re weak, you and your whole academy. This is why you’re destined to fail. This is why the management of monsters should never have fallen to anyone like you.”
The cry was high and piercing, and remarkably feminine. This was no monster. It had to be the illusionist.
Tyler had the same idea.
“Liam,” he shouted, and the two of them headed for the door, Frost barely getting out in front of them, his hands held wide. For the first time, I realized that magic fire crackled from Frost’s fingertips, and I felt a wave of energy spread out as our group passed through the door and into the larger chamber. Some sort of force field, had to be.
And judging from the enormous fiery dragonfly now hovering in the center of the library chamber, we needed all the protection we could get.
A second later the bug’s body disappeared and a stunningly regal woman stood in its place, still flanked by iridescent wings. She was tall and slender, with fair, flawless skin and dark hair flowing wildly around her face, obscuring her features but somehow not diminishing her beauty. She radiated power from the tips of her fingers to the billowing wings that flowed out around her, breathtaking in their span.
“Holy shit,” Liam breathed, the only words he could get out before the creature roared in pure, unfettered jo
y, and with her arms and diaphanous wings spreading wide…
She unleashed her power on us.
30
A fireball lit up the room, catching everything in a white-hot, shimmering blaze, and out of that fire sprang a half dozen fiery swarms of flying chaos.
Another thing about this dragonfly of destruction, she was the real deal. Before when I’d encountered monsters, I understood what I was facing. They were creatures of flesh, bone, and brains that I could get a knife into, that I could take down. I’d never once doubted myself, at least not since I’d gotten up my strength and speed to where I didn’t feel vulnerable.
But this wasn’t a monster, this was a human overlaying a giant bug, a magician, an enemy unlike any other I’d ever faced. Tyler started shouting Latin spells, while Liam stood next to him, practically levitating with power as he laid down ropes of his own internal fire to hem in the cloud of thrashing, slashing insect destruction. Zach kept up a litany of information about the magician’s thoughts and emotions. Every point around the room where she turned her mind and directed her swarm, he followed and reported on, until she finally snarled something and flung her hand toward him, arrows of light piercing Commander Frost’s force field, one of them breaking through to drive Zach backward. He sprawled into a bookshelf, his commentary cut off with a strangled scream.
Frost shouted a curse, and I recognized that something important had happened. The swarms winked out, but the illusionist expanded to almost double her size. There was plenty of room in the library chamber, with its soaring ceilings and wide open center space, but it was still alarming to see how much more mass she occupied. Her magic pressed against us in waves, and as she forced it forward, she shifted as well. First becoming the enormous multilegged spider, then the buzzing rat moths from the Beacon Hill Prep Academy, then a gloriously beautiful succubus, not a caralon, her face a vision of beauty, her hair black and wild and flying in the riot of light and wind.
“Frost?” Tyler shouted. I shot a glance over to him, surprised to see Grim by his side, momentarily as flummoxed by all the magic as I was. I hefted my bag of silver beads. The movement caught Grim’s attention, and he turned to me and shook his head in a hard no. There was something remarkable in his face that I couldn’t quite understand, an expression that almost pleaded for me not to show my hand. A second later, it was gone.
“We can’t hold her,” Liam called out. “Not the way we’re doing it. You’ve got to…”
“No,” Frost shouted, and it was clear to me he was also telling Liam not to betray his hand. What the hell was going on? This was a magician in our midst, a monster by any other name. We needed to take her out.
Not two seconds later, a loud chorus of shouts sounded from beyond the illusionist, easily a dozen voices, men and women alike, commingled in fury and excitement. Then Symmes and the board surged into the room, with Claudia Graham and Theodore Perkins at their head. Claudia’s hands were alight, and Perkins held up a gleaming sword that seemed to go brighter as Claudia cried out words I couldn’t understand.
Anderson Reid and, to my shock, Meredith Choate came around on the other side, also chanting something in an entirely different language. Behind them, more people filed in, academy board members I’d never seen before, but apparently strong enough that they’d passed Spell Craft 101. The illusionist turned, her beautiful face transfixed with anger, and then she was surrounded by a net of sparkling lights, which shot outward and then constricted just as quickly, trapping her diaphanous wings against her, binding her tight. She howled in fury, then twisted and twisted again, becoming ever smaller with each rotation. Then finally, Claudia stepped forward, and holding out a velvet sack that she’d apparently brought with her for the occasion of bagging her own dragonfly.
Liam stepped forward. “Use this instead,” he instructed. He whipped his pack off his shoulder, dumped its contents summarily on the floor, then threw the bag to his mother. With a final flourish, she stuffed the illusionist in the pack and zipped it up. All the rioting light in the room vanished.
We all stared, and Claudia straightened, staring at her son.
“Liam?” she asked a little breathlessly. “Are you okay?” It was a testament to a mother’s intuition that she knew something had changed, even if she couldn’t quite figure out what.
Liam didn’t have to see Frost’s hard look to smooth it over.
“I’m great—and wow, Mom. That was pretty awesome,” he said. I was startled to see Claudia’s cheeks redden at the unexpected praise.
“Well,” she sniffed delicately. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been called on to work together. It’s good to know we still can.”
She turned to Tyler’s father and handed him the pack. “We’ll need to figure this one out sooner rather than later,” she said, and he smiled—the first genuine smile I’d seen the man ever crack.
He slung the pack over his shoulder as if he were no older than Liam and nodded to her. “We’ve got just the place set up for that kind of interrogation. We’ll learn what we need to know, count on it. This bastard tried to embarrass my family, and that will not stand. The politics of Wellington Academy aside, we need to work together, not apart.”
Claudia nodded, and several of the men and women surrounding us did as well. “We’ll learn what we need,” she agreed.
They left, and the six of us stood looking at each other, the fatigue of the last several days seeming to catch up to all of us at once.
Frost blew out a long breath. “Thank you, Liam, for your discretion. This was the academy’s battle to fight, not ours alone. In some ways, they needed the win perhaps more than we did, and more to the point, they needed to remember the magic we have baked into the walls of the academy, not only what’s locked up in the very able forms of you all. They’ll determine the identity of the illusionist, and we’ll go from there. Meanwhile, you all need to get some sleep.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Tyler demanded, turning on him. “We should be there helping them. My magic and spell-casting ability alone probably outstrips half of theirs, and we don’t even know what Liam’s capable of at this point.”
He gestured to Liam. “I also noticed him going all inferno there for a second, in case you missed it.”
“Oh, I noticed,” Frost said. “And what I’d ask is that we have the opportunity to explore his newfound strength on our own terms, not under the scrutiny of the board. We’ve lost so much of the Apocrypha, there’s no way of knowing what we’re really looking at here.”
“You don’t think that’s the end of it, then?” Tyler asked. “If the illusionist is behind the Boston Brahmin attacks, and now we’ve got her—or him—locked down, is the academy in danger anymore?”
“It’s in danger,” Grim said. He sounded resolute, and Frost nodded as well.
“I’m forced to agree with Grim. The issues we face haven’t stopped while the illusionist played her hand. There are new, legitimate monster sightings coming through by the hour, especially now that we’ve worked out the glitches of the notification system. And there’s still the question of the other monster hunters, the previous graduates who are now quite inconveniently dead. Don’t think that hasn’t figured into the thinking of the administration to expedite your graduation process. The presentation brought out all the families, and it’s already paid dividends. Even the Hallowells are renewing their engagement with the academy. That can only go well for us.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “For now, though, you all need to get some rest. There’s much that will be coming and we’d better be prepared for it.”
“I still think we should be there to interrogate the illusionist,” Zach groused.
“Oh, we’ll be there,” Liam put in. We all turned to look at him, and he sat with one hip propped on a table, his manner not one of bravado but simple confidence, the confidence of a guy who no longer had to prove anything.
He gestured to the stack of stuff that’d spilled out o
f his pack, that he’d been reassembling as we’d talked.
“I may not have completely unpacked my bag prior to tossing it over to Mom,” he said with a grin. “There may have been a tracker involved, with audio. Video, I don’t think I managed to turn on in time, but at least we should be able to hear what goes on. That has to count for something.”
“You’re kidding me,” Frost groaned, but he couldn’t help the grin.
“I try,” Liam said with a wink, and he tossed another device Frost’s way. “Once they unzip that bag again, it’s go time.”
“And I’ll look forward to that,” Frost said, eyeing the small speaker. He waved it at us. “Again, get some rest. Report tomorrow when I notify you. I doubt quite seriously they’ll begin the interrogation process until after they’ve had a chance to shore up their magical reserves and possibly recruit some new hands to the fight, but when they do, you’ll be the second to know.”
His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out to look at it. A smile crept across his face.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Dean Robbins asking for an update. Apparently, word has gotten out that there was some excitement here at Lowell Library.”
“What will you tell him?” I asked.
Frost gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Exactly what he wants to hear. That the board was able to take care of it, no monster hunters required.” He glanced around. “Get out of here. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.”
31
Nobody seemed quite willing to turn in yet, and we argued about what family might have spawned the illusionist all the way to the edge of campus and into the White Crane bar. Apparently, such arguments were better over beer.
The bar was hopping more than usual tonight, and I wondered briefly if the outskirts of campus had picked up on the energy flowing through the academy, or if Wellington really was a city unto itself. Tyler went to the front of the bar where the bartender leaned against the counter, laughing with a few guys I’d come to think of as locals. They’d been in the place practically every time I’d been, no matter what hour of day. Didn’t they have jobs?