by D. D. Chance
Another rustle at the door caught everyone’s attention then, and the fourth and final Hallowell—at least I prayed it was the fourth and final Hallowell—emerged from the corridor. A tall, slender, near-mirror image of Elaine, with dark hair, pale skin, flashing eyes, and the physique of a zipper, this was the son-brother-husband I’d seen at the monster hunter presentation, someone else whose name I didn’t know.
Fortunately, that mystery was quickly solved.
“Philip, what have you learned?”
The question from Mr. Hallowell surprised me, as he hadn’t bothered to acknowledge Elaine yet. Elaine noticed the slight as well, her energy quickening along with her irritation, though her face remained perfectly placid. I blinked, surprised at how attuned I was to her. Was I truly picking up on her energy patterns like Zach would, or was this some sort of weird family connection I’d developed? I dearly hoped it was something more than a good gut feel. Not that I wasn’t a big fan of my own intuition, but I needed all the help I could get.
Philip swept the room with haughty disdain. “We’ve still found absolutely nothing on the mother, this Rose McKinley, that you, Elaine, supposedly chased off two and a half decades ago. She did a damn fine job hiding her tracks. Such a fine job, it makes me nervous.”
Elaine snorted. “Everything makes you nervous.”
Philip kept going. “We do have a record of her teaching in the Back Bay area, a temporary post in one of the local prep schools, but we have zero indication that she had any sort of interaction with Wellington Academy, its teachers or staff members. Even the instructors who remained at the school where she worked didn’t recognize her photo. More alarmingly, she’d been stripped from most of the databases and only existed in a random redundant paper trail I was able to uncover. Granted, it’s only been a couple of days, but the information we’ve gotten from the lack of data on this woman tells enough of the story. She had help.”
“Oh, please,” Elaine scoffed. “She was able to disappear because she was meaningless. Those kinds of people hide so well in the shadows because they’re already gray. Don’t try to make her into some sort of powerful magician.”
“We couldn’t do that now, could we?” Philip said derisively. “Because that would imply that she bested you. Of course, then again, she did best you. This little mouse of a high school teacher managed to disappear into the wind when she decided that life was too dangerous in Boston, not only for her, but for her unborn child.”
With this, he focused on me. I didn’t appreciate the attention.
“Ordinarily, I would credit a mother’s protective instinct in her desire to keep you away from us, but there’s more going on here. After all, she wrote the letter.”
I barely resisted a groan. That damned letter. If Mom had never written it, if I’d never found it, none of this would be an issue. I would still be back in Asheville, North Carolina, putting the pieces of my life back together. I’d be missing my mother, sure, but spending most of my time figuring out how to finish up my college education and get a job while fighting monsters on the side. Instead, I was standing in the hidden fortress of a diabolically evil magician-filled family, probably not long for this world. I didn’t know why my mother had written that freaking letter, but I seriously wished she hadn’t. Family like this needed to stay firmly in the rearview mirror, not smashing headlong into my windshield.
I got the distinct impression that the Hallowells were waiting for me to say something, but I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. This was a pageant they had dreamed up for themselves. I was only a minor part of the show. And what was the show for, anyway? Who was the audience?
“She knows something,” Elaine announced, and I jolted at the realization that her attention was once more fixed on me. “I can see it in her face. We should interrogate her more formally and stop wasting time.”
“You’ve already read Grim’s report,” Philip said dismissively. “Not to mention Dean Robbins’s assessment, which was pulled from Commander Frost’s personal files. She knows exactly what we’ve been told. After a lifetime fighting monsters in a backwater college town, her mother dies, she finds a letter, she comes to Boston to seek her long-lost family. It was just her poor luck that her long-lost family wanted to kill her.”
He grimaced, refocusing on me again. “Sorry about that.”
There was no real remorse in his gaze, of course, but I found myself liking Philip Hallowell the best of this entire twisted clan. I had no doubt that he’d still try to kill me, as that was apparently the order of the hour, but at least he wasn’t going to be a douche about it. I respected that.
“Well, if that’s the case, then she truly does serve no purpose,” Elaine said. “She’s a harbinger. She goes.”
“What if she’s not the only one?”
The sharp question was cold and clinical, but that wasn’t why it surprised me so much. I jolted with surprise to see that Grim had joined our merry little crew. I hadn’t heard him enter, but Elaine and Philip nodded to him eagerly enough, so maybe they had.
“Explain,” Mr. Hallowell ordered. And that simple command, more than anything that had happened so far, chilled me to the bone. Grim was an accepted part of this group. A known and reliable informant. I hadn’t wanted to believe that, still couldn’t wrap my head around it, but they weren’t treating him as if he was some sort of mercenary they brought in to do a singular job. He carried himself with almost a swagger, comfortable and self-assured with these people. He had worked for them for a long time, no question.
Now he spoke without looking at me. “I haven’t been able to search the surrounding territories for some time. If one of your line was able to break free of the binding spells and create her, it can’t be discounted that there are more out there. That could be a problem.”
My brows shot up. Others like me? Like a whole Society for Creative Harbingery? That would be interesting.
“You’re wrong,” Elaine said with convincing finality. “They would have cropped up, just like she’s cropped up. And regardless, we don’t have time to take on a search for other harbingers. We’ve got maybe twenty-four hours before Wellington figures out that we’ve captured their favorite daughter.”
“Less time than that. Your wards aren’t as strong as you think,” Grim said, and though he spoke with his usual bored tone, the words smacked ever so slightly of censure. Both Elaine and Philip reacted.
“What do you mean?” Philip demanded, no longer addressing Grim, but his mother and father. “What’s he talking about?”
Mr. Hallowell already had his phone out, however, his wife as well. Grim continued unperturbed. “The reports won’t show it unless you search for it. But I haven’t spent the past three years with these people to not know their tricks. The monster hunters of Wellington Academy are coming, and they’re coming fast.”
3
Grim’s words were like pouring gasoline on a fire. Elaine and Philip launched into each other immediately.
“I knew it! I was right there. I could easily have taken out one or two of those idiots, and no one would have been the wiser.”
“Sure you could have,” Philip sneered. “Only you didn’t do that. In fact, you went in the entire opposite direction from what I heard, telling that stupid Graham kid that he was being suppressed. That his mother had tricked him out with devices to stunt his magic…which, of course, led him to clean out his hardware and level up by a factor of four. What in God’s name possessed you to do that?”
“What are you talking about?” Elaine screeched. “I did no such thing.”
Now it was my turn to gape. Although I had never seen Elaine Hallowell in the subterranean rooms beneath Fowlers Hall, I’d most definitely heard the disembodied voice of the illusionist taunting Liam. Telling him that the tuners his parents had embedded beneath his skin were not, as he had long thought, intended to augment his magic, but to suppress it. Now that I thought about it, though, it really would have been stupid of Elaine
to share that piece of information, other than to needle Liam’s parents. Which had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, given how obnoxious these families were to each other, and yet…
Mr. Hallowell lifted a hand, cutting off all other conversation. “This is not the time to discuss that. Grim, where did you get your information? Have you maintained your psychic link with the other hunters?”
Grim shook his head. “No. As directed, I terminated that connection as soon as the magic dead zone was breached. But I have fought alongside this team long enough. They’re more resourceful than you give them credit for. Regardless of how Liam was able to unshackle himself, he’s stronger. The three of them are more powerful than they were even a short time ago.”
“They are, but you’re not, are you?” Elaine asked, and I didn’t miss Grim’s flinch. She laughed. It was an ugly sound.
“Even the harbinger recognizes you for what you are, doesn’t she?” she cooed. “Don’t fret, though. If you’d been forced to consummate that particularly unholy marriage, you’d already be dead.”
There was no way I could keep from gawking at this, but fortunately no one was watching me.
“We’ve got activity at the south border,” one of the guards standing near the door announced. I watched as he covered one ear with his gloved palm, clearly trying to hear some communication. “Two armored cars. They were hidden from our radar up until they breached the gates.”
“Hidden?” Philip protested. “That’s illusion magic. Wellington doesn’t have illusion magic.”
I barely swallowed my grin. Liam. It had to be. Tyler may have been a master at spell craft, but Liam had an innate magic he was only now getting a true handle on. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if throwing illusions was part of it.
The others must have sensed a shift in my energy, because they looked my way, and I shrugged, projecting a confidence I was slowly allowing myself to feel. I couldn’t help needling them a bit more, adding what fuel I could to the fire of their annoyance. “You said yourself, you don’t know what they’re capable of now that they’ve leveled up. And who made that leveling up possible? Not me. You did. You’re the ones who let me live. You’re the ones who didn’t find my mom. I’d say if anybody had a hand in leveling up the monster hunters of Wellington Academy, it was you.”
Grim muttered something repressive beside me, as clear an indication for me to shut up as I was ever going to get, but screw him. I was on a roll.
Unfortunately, so was Elaine. She stepped toward me with a hiss of displeasure.
“You stupid fool,” she snapped. “Your precious hunters weren’t supposed to be part of the plan, a plan that’s been in motion for longer than you’ve been alive. We didn’t want them dead. We wanted to close out this unfortunate chapter of Wellington’s history with some modicum of grace, and with any luck, we’ll still be able to do that.”
“Right,” I countered. “I somehow doubt grace is your key motivator here.” Nevertheless, this was useful information. The Hallowells didn’t want to kill the current crop of monster hunters? Why not? Because of the families’ reaction or…was there something else?
Elaine addressed the guard. “Have we confirmed the trucks are from Wellington?” she asked as Grim grunted in displeasure beside me, softly enough that no one else heard him.
“No, ma’am,” the guard said.
She waved a hand. “Then someone is toying with us. These aren’t the student hunters. And it’s not the academy, I suspect. We would have heard about that through other channels by now.”
I blinked, but of course, she was right. My hopes deflated as quickly as they had blossomed, and Mr. Hallowell apparently agreed with her.
“Take them out,” he ordered sharply, and my heart stopped in my throat as two things happened simultaneously. A loud, percussive boom sounded from off in the distance, almost before he finished speaking, while Mrs. Hallowell shouted, “No!” obviously a second too late.
Mrs. Hallowell threw up her hands. “You blew up the trucks without stopping them first? Seriously? That will leave us without any evidence of who was behind this attack. That information could be useful in our negotiations with the other families. When will you think before you act?”
“The message will be sent,” Mr. Hallowell said firmly. “It’s a foolish leader who expects no insurrection early in the process. If it happens again, tracing responsibility for this attack as well would be child’s play.”
I considered that. He wasn’t wrong. But Mrs. Hallowell continued to mutter in dismay, which only confused me more. What could they possibly be negotiating? And what other families were involved?
“What exactly is the end game here?” I demanded. “You said that Wellington Academy wasn’t part of the plan, so what is the plan?”
The Hallowells obviously had no concern about me knowing the truth, possibly because the truth was so obvious. Or maybe because they were planning on me being dead shortly. Either way.
“There remains a need for monster hunters, Ms. Cross,” Mrs. Hallowell said. “A core of hunters who are properly trained to manage monsters appropriately, according to our evolving use for them. Wellington’s hunters are no longer the best solution for that.”
I curled my lip. “Monsters aren’t meant to be managed.”
Even as I said the words, I was reminded of a conversation I’d had with Tyler when I’d first come to campus, about a class on animal husbandry. The academy had attempted to apply those principles to monsters. It hadn’t gone well. “Haven’t you people tried this before? I thought the consensus was that monsters weren’t meant to be controlled, they were meant to be killed. Because they are monsters.”
“No human remains,” the guard at the door interrupted, his hand still slapped over his ear. “Plenty of debris from the explosions. Toxic chemical emissions too. The vehicles were real. But no apparent drivers or passengers, dead or alive.”
“Remote control?” Mrs. Hallowell asked, but the guard shrugged.
“No way to know. But that’s most likely the case, according to the team on the ground.”
“Collect what’s left see if there’s any analysis that can be done,” Mr. Hallowell said. He glanced at me.
“The team on the ground, Ms. Cross, is not your ordinary team. They’re a team we feel comfortable sending into a toxic environment to gather debris that could be lethal to a human. And they have, in some cases, a mental capacity that outstrips a drone.”
I understood what he was saying, of course, but stared at him in horror. “You mean monsters. They’re your cleanup crew? Your guards?”
I glanced around in sudden alarm. I hadn’t gotten any monster vibes from the helmeted men and women in the black uniforms, but then again, I hadn’t realized there were monsters in the neighborhood surrounding Wellington Academy unless I was touching something of Grim’s. His tracking mojo was enough for me to break through the monsters’ glamour, but I hadn’t sensed them here.
“We don’t usually allow them in the house,” Elaine drawled, noticing my concern. “That level of trust is hard-won. But for boots on the ground? The first line of offense or defense? Low-level workers that require no maintenance or upkeep and do what they’re told once they’ve been properly trained?”
I recoiled. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Oh, spare me your outrage,” she sneered. “You’re the one who believes that monsters should be killed the moment they cross your path.”
“Because they’re trying to eat me. That is a distinct difference, yeah. It’s not like I’m trying to eat them. And let me tell you, I’ve run away from plenty of monsters in my time. I don’t kill them if I don’t have to anymore, because some of them are just going about their business. But if they attack me or someone I love, or they’re a threat, then of course.”
“Whereas what we propose with Hallowell Academy is that monsters will no longer be perceived as threats—ever. They’ll be welcomed and rehabilitated and given positions in
society. They’ll be part of our community.”
I made a face. “If you consider slavery a part of the community, sure, but nobody’s gonna go for that.”
“In that, happily, you’re wrong,” Mr. Hallowell put in. “We have been working with some of the most powerful families in the world for generations now, doing exactly this. Moving toward the point where a new academy of monster hunters, for lack of a better word, is necessary. Both to manage the creatures we’ve already introduced into society, but also to gather more from the monster realm. Sadly, the demand far exceeds our supply.”
I winced. “The demand. For monsters. As house staff.”
“As staff, certainly, but there’s a rich multitude of ways monsters can be used,” Mr. Hallowell countered. He gestured lazily toward Grim. “Grim, here, is under the belief that an individual such as yourself, a harbinger, might be uniquely skilled to serve as a general over an elite squadron of monster hunters. It’s one of the few reasons why, once we were made aware of your existence, we decided to keep you alive instead of killing you outright. You owe him a debt of thanks.”
I pulled a face. “I’ll keep that in mind. But he’s wrong. That doesn’t at all sound like something I’d be good at.”
“Perhaps not you personally, but your bloodline, your DNA. That’s a different story altogether. And one, Grim thought correctly, that is worthy of testing.”
I curled my lip. I couldn’t even look at Grim, but the guy had to feel the revulsion pouring off me in waves. What the hell was he doing working with these people?
“Sir,” the guard spoke again. “There’s another disturbance.”
“Well, if we keep having to bat these flies away, sooner or later the idiots at Wellington are going to get their act together and figure us out,” Elaine protested. “Because somebody clearly has.”
“Agreed,” Mr. Hallowell said. He refocused on me. “We will have to continue this conversation at a more suitable—”