by D. D. Chance
Frost had been right. Fifteen hunters fell into the room, some dropping to their knees, some turning around and around, all of them shaking their heads like bears coming out of hibernation, clearly disoriented. If they had come out during a monster attack, they would have already been food.
“On your feet,” Tyler ordered. There was no mistaking the command. The hunters stiffened, turning toward him, and more of the gray shadows dropped from their faces and bodies, their figures becoming more distinct. A good dozen of them were men, and the three women looked every bit as hardened as they focused on Tyler.
“What the hell is this?” the closest guy asked, maybe only thirty years old. Probably the youngest in the bunch.
“You’re Jasper?” Tyler asked, scrolling through something on his phone, possibly the images of all the hunters.
“I am. Who the hell are you?”
“Today, and let’s hope for only today, I’m command central,” Tyler said. “Listen up. We’ve got a monster outbreak happening right now at the academy. This isn’t a drill. They’re all over campus, coming fast, and we just liberated your asses to help us fight them, at the cost of the academy’s wards. We fail here, the whole school goes down, and that’s only the start of our problems.”
“The whole school?” one of the women asked, and for the first time, I noticed that her hair was steel gray. “What the hell am I doing back at Wellington? I’m supposed to be in Bolivia.”
“Life’s full of unhappy surprises,” Liam offered. “What year do you think it is?”
She stared at him. “What year?” She glanced around at her fellow hunters, all of them figuring it out at the same time. The numbers they blurted out made me wince. They’d been trapped in the halls of Wellington Academy for anywhere from one to five years.
Names started getting shouted out, but not those of the hunters. The people they’d left behind in those faraway locations. Friends, lovers, husbands and wives. Children. While the Hallowells had siphoned their accounts and built their own stockpiles. And killed any outliers they couldn’t contain. This was a well-thought-out operation for all that we’d stumbled into trying to stop it.
“Enough,” Tyler ordered, stopping the outcry. “We’ve got to—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish. With a screeching fury, the long, streaming trails of the Magla Gušter flowed into the room through its single door, the powerful pounding forms of a half dozen minotaurs right behind them.
“Weapons up!” Liam shouted, ripping open his bag and turning in a tight circle, a bright flash exploding from it. A dozen blades shot out of the bag, the hilts of some of them finding the open hands of the hunters. Two blades winged their way toward me, short flat blades of iron. A good thirty more buried themselves directly into the first wave of monsters, disintegrating some of them immediately, clattering to the floor in other cases, as the screamers whipped around the room.
Shouts of excitement and anger commingled as the hunters reoriented themselves, drawing into tight formation and shouting out everything they knew about what was coming toward them, recalling the training they’d received in these hallowed halls as a new wave of monsters crashed into the room: caralons, rat bats, and spiders.
The fight was on.
29
For once, the caralons didn’t dive directly for Liam. His power was no longer buried within, but fully on display. That didn’t stop him from going after them, though. He swept his hands forward, fire shooting out, catching the first wave of them in an inferno. As he swept back the second time, though, Tyler shouted.
“We’ve got breaches at all four gates. We’re going to have to split up.”
I could barely hear him, but Zach lifted his hands high.
“Okay, everyone listen up!” Tyler tried again, and this time, my head jerked back, his voice loud and resonant in my mind. Not only mine either—throughout the room, hunters tensed, the combination of Zach and Tyler creating an instant connection in their minds.
Tyler split the group into four sections, our team and three others, two that would stay here and fight whatever came through, one that would head for the library to support Commander Frost, and then us. The library group would need to fight their way through and out, but from the expressions of unbridled joy on their faces, they were happy to hit that job. They were probably happy to do anything to keep themselves free of the wall.
Meanwhile, Liam shouldered his pack and gestured for us to follow him. “Tunnels down below,” he said, shooting a glance to Grim. “Do you know where the Hallowells will come through, if they’re not here already?”
“They’ll aim for the academy’s center of power. Maybe not where that power is currently, but where it began.”
“Gotta be Guild Hall, then, right?” Liam asked with a frown. “Lowell Library is where all the magic happens now, but Guild Hall is where they’ll host the presentation and graduation, if we ever get there.”
The nearest hunter turned to us in surprise. “You haven’t graduated yet? You haven’t received your commission?”
“Not yet,” Tyler said. “We’re working on it.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” The guy kept coldcocking caralons with one hand as he peered at us more intently. “You shouldn’t be this strong, getting us out, that mind-trick thing you did. How did you pull that off without having your commission?”
“What’s our commission? I’ve been able to find jack squat about graduation other than the usual garbage they use for PR,” Liam blurted. “What’s the commission? Is that something the board does?”
“Not exactly,” the guy said. “You go through the process of graduation, and then…I don’t know, it’s like the academy does it. Some magic in its bones. You just know what your assignment will be—that triggers the money too.”
Liam scowled at him. “What are you talking about? How is there nothing written down about this? How is that even possible?”
“We gotta roll,” Tyler said, shouting over him. “Thanks for the intel, but we’re gonna have to forge on without it for now.”
“Well, you’re doing a pretty good job so far,” the hunter agreed, and he turned back to the fight. Liam led us through the trellis gate, our group forming a wedge through the oncoming monsters, eventually catching up with the advanced Lowell Library group and shearing off to the side. We ended up in a dark unused passageway, but Liam didn’t falter. He turned to Grim. “You need anything from Fowlers Hall that I maybe don’t have in my bag?”
“No,” Grim said. He looked at me. “The Hallowells took your letter and your place wards. Do you have anything else you need there in your room?”
“No.” I sighed, remembering the small menagerie of animals that I’d carried with me since I was a little girl. The Hallowells had stripped them from me. I was gonna miss those little guys.
“Well, as far as the letter goes, remember, I’m all about redundancy,” Liam said. He fished around in his bag and came up with a small sheaf of papers, wound tightly into a scroll. “You’re experiencing a critical lack of pockets, so I’ll keep hold of this, but I’ve got it if you need it when all this is done.”
My heart swelled. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed having this small reminder of my mom. Pieces of her were slipping away, lost in the jumble of long-ago deceptions and current chaos. Liam stuffed the letter back in his bag, then we were moving swiftly, close enough that we could still pick out each other in the limited light. Liam tried the door, found it locked, and picked it open with quick, efficient movements. We entered the tunnel.
Frost kept up a steady stream of reports, new breaches, students hunkering down in dorms, while the academy’s first families switched to high alert.
“So far, it’s all been contained, but if we get monsters running in the streets of Boston, first the families’ private news channels will cover it, then somebody’s going to get killed, and somebody else is going to see something that doesn’t make sense, while the third person is going
to swear they saw a zombie or werewolf or the straight-up devil.”
“Well, why don’t the Hallowells start with all that?” I protested. “Monsters are already all around us, and with the illusion magic they have, they could create a lot of problems.”
Tyler scowled at me. “You’re right,” he said. “Then what the hell are they doing unleashing all these monsters inside the school?”
“Critical mass,” Grim said. “The monsters that the Hallowells have been able to smuggle in are thoroughly under their control, but that takes years of captivity and training. They’re being held at the ready as generals, lieutenants in the army, but they’re not the foot soldiers. The foot soldiers are the mob that’s flowing through the campus.”
“Kinda tough to control a mob,” Liam put in, but Grim shook his head.
“For the thousandth time, stop thinking of monsters as humans. Monsters can be directed by their own kind. It goes back to ancient alliances that are hardwired into our bones. A human can only control a monster with maximum effort, but once that link is established and maintained, things get easier for them. They can herd the monster mob long enough to convince the families that there’s a better way, and better monster hunters, than what Wellington has to offer. And then they’ll take over everything.”
“So we’d better get on that,” Zach said grimly.
We reached the oldest part of the academy, where the walls were hewn out of solid rock. Liam paused and pointed up. “That’s where we fell through from Guild Hall, though there definitely weren’t formal stairs. Just a hole. But there have to be other ways up.”
“There are,” Grim said. “This way.”
“You bastard,” Liam countered good-naturedly to his back. “Must be nice to have had all the original maps at your disposal as opposed to having to chart the entire freaking academy from scratch.” Liam kept up a running streak of accusations as we all moved forward. I started out, but Tyler laid a hand on me, making me stop.
“Hey. I need to know what your capabilities are,” he said. “I don’t even know what you can do now, and I have a feeling it’s pretty awesome.”
I grimaced, but rattled off what I could. “I can make portals open, but only between here and the monster realm. It’s not like I can make gates to different parts of the academy. I can sort of make things happen if I want them bad enough, but that’s been a little tough to gauge.”
Zach nodded from Tyler’s other side. “Like my mind pushing. Not one of my best skills, but it’s a thing. And you could take it further.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. This wasn’t the time to talk about healing Grim, but…maybe someday. “But what we really need is monsters. Like, monsters willing to fight on our side. It’s not like I can manifest those out of thin air.”
“I don’t know, you’ve been doing that your whole life,” Tyler pointed out, and I laughed, the sudden joke breaking the anxiety that was ratcheting up inside me.
“Bottom line, you lead, I follow,” I said. “You tell me to go somewhere, I go. You ask me to do something or make something happen, well, I’ll do my best. And we’ll see where that goes.”
“Works for me.” He grinned. We ran to catch up with the others, the five of us moving swiftly up the stairs and into a basement room that was laden with bottles and shelves.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how did I not know there was a wine cave down here?” He glared at Grim again. “How could you not have told me?”
“You would have stolen the bottles and replaced them with worthless junk,” Grim pointed out.
“Only a few of them,” Liam protested.
“Any of this magical?” Tyler asked, scanning the shelves. “Is there anything we can use?”
“No,” Grim said. “It’s just a storage area for wine that they use at the special events.”
“Special events?” Zach asked, pulling a bottle off a shelf. “Well, it seems to me that we’ve gotten cheated out of our special event. We never got our fancy commission, and we still need to graduate.”
“Pretty sure you can’t just wave a magic wand and say we’re graduated,” Tyler pointed out.
“Why not?” Liam said. “If it’s the academy that makes it so, why can’t we just announce that we’re graduated and see what happens? I mean, we’ve got the wine and everything.”
“Okay, okay,” Tyler said. He waggled his brows at me. “Ready for your first task?”
I blinked. “Um, we’re graduated?”
“Maybe once more, with feeling?” Zach piped up. “Something totally moved inside this bottle.”
“Sames,” Liam agreed, as Grim muttered something that sounded a lot like Imbeciles.
I grimaced, envisioning the five of us standing in the room above, not dirty, sweaty, and bloody as we were now, but in our fancy clothes, surrounded by the beaming faces of the academy’s board of monster hunter directors.
“We’ve graduated,” I announced, with much more emphasis. The bottles in Zach’s and Liam’s hands popped their corks.
“Boom,” Liam said. “That’s good enough for me.”
He took a long swig out of the bottle and passed it to me, while Zach did the same with his and passed it to Grim, and then to Tyler. But I hesitated, staring hard at the bottle for a long minute until I could feel the guys’ focus shift to me. I flushed, but raised my chin.
“I just wanted to, um, say something here.” I held up the bottle, turning first to Tyler. “Tyler, I ran into your life, like, less than three weeks ago—and you saved me before you even knew my name. You were an arrogant asshole, and gorgeous and smart and skilled and—I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t taken me home that night and gotten me to tell you my story. I owe you everything for that. I love you.”
“And I love you.” Tyler grinned at me, nodding. I turned to Zach.
“My demon slayer,” I whispered, my heart shimmying a bit as heat stained Zach’s amazingly perfect high cheekbones, his dark blue, almost purple eyes flashing with heat. “You understood me—what it was like growing up fighting monsters, what it was like having a secret you couldn’t share with anyone. You healed even the parts of me I didn’t know were broken without asking for anything in return. I love you.”
“Always,” Zach said, and in that one word, time slipped its track for a moment, so that we held each other’s gaze for a long and quiet breath, without even a second passing. I blinked away tears hard as I turned to Liam…but they spilled over on my cheeks anyway.
“Oh, great, I’m the one that makes you cry,” Liam protested, but his voice wavered too, and I grinned through my half sob.
“And you always made me laugh,” I said, raising the bottle to him. “You gave everything you had—everything you were—to succeed at finding magic. To protecting us with tools and tricks and anything you could cobble together. But you are magic, Liam. And you made me believe that dreams really could come true. I’ll follow you anywhere, for that. I love you.”
“Same,” Liam said, and he brought his fist to his chest, then pressed it against his heart. “You’re my heart, Nina.”
“You’re mine.” I nodded back. My gaze was practically swimming as I swung my attention to Grim, who held himself stock-still, his pale-gold eyes riveted on me, blank and expressionless, as if he had no idea what I would say…or how he would react.
“My wild and terrible Grim,” I said, surprised I could even get the words out, though my voice gained strength as I spoke. “You hunted me before I even understood what I was, you protected me before I ever knew I needed it—and you fought right up to the very death for me. I…” I swallowed the lump lodged in my throat. “I was made for you.”
“Harbinger,” Grim rumbled, the word low, resonant, and strangely intimate in the small room. I nodded, blinking fast.
“Asante,” I whispered back. Then louder, I said, “To us.”
“To us,” the guys agreed, the words sharp and true. Then, before I could completely lose it, I tilted the bottle up, drinking de
ep.
When I lowered it again, the guys all eyed each other expectantly.
“Well…do we need to do anything else?” Tyler asked.
Liam made a face. “I guess we’ll see—and now I know what wine brands not to steal when I’m down here again, so there’s that.”
We clambered up the stairs, then burst into a hallway of Guild Hall, expecting to land right in the teeth of more monsters. But the hallway was empty. We ran down the length of it, and all the rooms were empty as well.
“What the hell?”
“They’re not here,” Tyler had his phone out, glaring at it. “I’ve got nothing from Frost, nothing from the teams at the arena.”
“The teams are fighting,” Zach confirmed. “We got Lowell Library filled with monsters, and the arena team is almost to the front doors.”
“Then what the hell,” Tyler said again. “This is the oldest part of Wellington Academy. Why aren’t there monsters here?”
“It’s not the oldest part,” Liam said abruptly, and Grim nodded.
“The wall,” he agreed. “The original wall.”
“Shit.”
We took off running.
30
We raced out of the front doors of Guild Hall and took off heading west. It didn’t take us long to hear the chaos. Under the cover of darkness, the monsters ran with unbridled glee, then threw themselves against the wall over and over again.
“Spread out,” Tyler ordered, but I pivoted in a full circle, staggered by the sheer numbers of the horde assaulting Wellington Academy.
“There’s too many of them,” I gasped.
“Oh, good. I wondered when you’d figure that out.”
I froze for half a second, then turned to see Elaine Hallowell standing by the ancient wall of Wellington Academy, half hidden in the shadows. Beside her was…my dad.