by D. D. Chance
“But the guys will be okay? And the monsters too?”
“For now, yes,” Tyler said. “But Frost isn’t wrong. The problem with attracting attention like this is that it adds fuel to the fire of the people inside the academy who want to get the monster hunting minor shut down.”
“But how could they possibly have that much power?” I asked. I remembered what Merry Williams had said about Tyler’s family connections, but I didn’t think this was the greatest time to bring it up. Still, I wanted to understand more. “I thought you said that Wellington was founded as a monster hunter academy. If you get rid of the monsters and the hunters, what does that do to your charter?”
“That would be the million-dollar question for sure,” Tyler said. “But you can bet that people are trying to get around it. There’s an awful lot of money that gets funneled into the monster hunter quad. We may be the core of the academy, but there’s a fair number of people who think that money should be spent in other places. More than a few times, I’ve been glad I hit the academy when I did, because I don’t know what the future holds.”
I pursed my lips as we continued picking our way through the trees, eventually coming to a low wall that we angled alongside. Merry had said much the same thing. Monster hunters at Wellington Academy truly did seem to be an endangered species. I sighed. “You and I both know there are plenty of monsters still roaming around, apparently even on the cobblestoned streets of Boston. They don’t simply disappear because you’re not looking for them.”
A distant crash sounded behind us, and Tyler pulled up short. We’d stopped in front of an opening in the wall, complete with an overly ornate, wrought iron gate that stood half-open. So much for the academy’s vaunted security, I thought, though Tyler only regarded the gate with a small smile.
Another crash landed behind us. “You should get back,” I said.
“Yeah, I should,” he turned to me, but made absolutely no move to leave. “But we’ve faced this kind of shit before. Whereas this is the first time I’ve stood next to you next to the wishing gate. It kind of seems like that should take precedence.”
I blinked at him, then down at the small gate, only now remembering Frost’s mention of it. “Ah…the wishing gate?” I offered. “Do I really want to know?”
Tyler’s grin only deepened. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You seriously do.”
16
I peered more closely at the small ornamental wrought iron gate, not even locked, that stood standing open in the hollow of the archway cut into the ancient stone wall. Then I met Tyler’s way too amused gaze. “Okay, spill it,” I said, trying not to giggle. “Enlighten me.”
“Well, gee, I don’t know,” Tyler said, his mouth tugging into a grin. “What if I were to tell you that if you kissed your true love here, you’d realize what it was you were truly wishing for—and you’d get it?”
“Hmmmm.” A fizzy slurry of excitement bubbled up inside me, and I could feel my cheeks heat. I gave Tyler a return smile, as arch as I could make it. We were flirting, I realized. Me and this gorgeous monster hunter, on the grounds of a one-percenter magic academy. How was any of this possible? “I would say there’d be a line a hundred people deep in front of us, waiting for their chance.”
“Well, maybe they don’t have the right kind of magic to make their wishes come true.” He leaned toward me, and it was the most natural thing in the world for me to lift up on my toes and meet his kiss. This time, there was no crockery around to break, no trees to lose their leaves, but the impact of Tyler’s lips on mine was every bit as powerful. I sucked in a sharp breath and lifted my hands to his chest as he crushed me to him. A jolt of energy rushed through me, quick and hot, catching my nerve endings on fire.
In that moment, I felt like I could take on all the monsters in the world, even the ones that lurked inside the academy, and show them a thing or two about crossing a monster hunter. In that moment, I thought I could stand with Tyler wherever he was, however he needed me, fighting with him, connected with him, wanting to practically consume him, body and soul, Tyler and all the guys—
Wait. All the guys?
Tyler chose that moment to pull away from me, lifting his head as I gasped in my own breath, struggling for oxygen. He stared at me with his intense brown eyes as if the earth had moved under his feet. It certainly had moved under mine, but not entirely in the way I’d expected. Why had I thought about the other guys while I was kissing Tyler? That was weird. That was beyond weird. It was wrong. It was—
“You felt it, didn’t you?” Tyler asked, interrupting my thoughts. “The pull of the collective?”
I jerked back from him, heat rushing to my face. The what? “What are you talking about?” I spluttered, trying to get my bearings. I glanced to the side, then blinked. “Um, Tyler—”
The wishing gate was now hanging off one hinge, its wrought iron bars looking decidedly…melted.
“Right?” he asked huskily. “Man, Nina, we’ve got some serious power going on between us.”
I forced myself to meet his gaze, even as his whiskey eyes flashed with heat. “Yeah, but…what does the collective have to do with you kissing me or…” I flushed and stepped back from him, not knowing how to ask the question burning in my mind.
“Hey—hey, it’s okay,” he said, but he didn’t reach for me again, instead driving his hands into his jeans pockets, as if he didn’t know where else to put them. “I know it feels strange. But like, the other guys and me, we have this really tight bond, you know? And that bond transcends any other relationship I’ve had up to this point. I kind of figured it would sit up and take notice given how I’m starting to feel about you, but that’s a cool thing, right? It shows that, I don’t know, this thing between us, it’s pretty great. It’s as powerful as my relationship with the guys, and you and I’ve only just met.”
“Oh—oh, right. That makes sense,” I agreed, but everything felt upside down and sideways to me. “But it’s not gonna take you away from them, is it? Because I wouldn’t want that.” And oddly enough, I didn’t. Despite how much I already was attracted to Tyler, I already knew in the core of my being that I wouldn’t do anything to disrupt the bond he’d formed with his friends. So maybe that was the problem with me getting tangled up with the collective…it’d, what, end up breaking me instead of them?
Mom had definitely made it seem worse than that. Ugh. Why couldn’t I be normal? Tyler was the first guy I’d ever truly been attracted to, and even that I was managing to screw up, never mind the possibility that, hey, his little secret coffee klatch could maybe kill me. Because that was always a fun twist to a relationship.
“You won’t take the guys from me—we’re monster hunters.” Tyler laughed, refocusing me. “And heck, if you join the collective…that would be pretty cool, right? We’d all fight monsters together.”
“Yeah, of course. That’d be cool,” I agreed. Except cool was exactly not how I was feeling at this particular moment, despite my best attempts to chill. Freaked out was more like it. I never had experienced anything like this, kissing one boy and simultaneously thinking of his three best friends as well. Or kissing a boy and thinking ‘hey, could this be a one-way ticket to Deadsville?’
For freak’s sake, what was wrong with me? When Tyler and I kissed, trees shook. Stuff broke, for heaven’s sake. Metal bent. Why couldn’t I enjoy this without thinking of the potential downsides or especially about his friends? Was I truly this screwed up?
While my brain tried to cartwheel its way out of my skull, Tyler grinned at me, looking as happy as I’ve ever seen anyone. “It’d rock,” he agreed.
Maybe I simply needed practice at this whole relationship thing. God knew I wasn’t an expert.
It wasn’t that guys didn’t like me. They did. But I’d quickly learned that explaining away my scars was harder than I would’ve expected, especially the ones I couldn’t remember acquiring, and then there was the ever-present monster potential. Even the few intimate relationships
I’d managed to score hadn’t lasted for long. And now, when I’d finally found a guy I couldn’t scare away, I started jonesing for his friends?
No. No, that wasn’t possible. More likely I was baselessly worried about Zach, Liam, and Grim all facing the campus protests, just like my mom had been way too worried about me taking on more monster hunters than I could chew. That had to be it. It was the only thing that made sense.
“What are you thinking about?” Tyler asked. “Besides being freaked out about the campus protest. Which is gonna be okay, I’m telling you.”
I gave him a mirthless smile. At least he was only half right. “I’m thinking it’s kind of nice being with somebody who knows me so well. Knows who I am, I mean,” I said.
“I do know that,” he said. “And I’m even more excited to be there to see who you’ll become.”
He spoke with such pride and expectation that it pulled me up a little short. Then another crash sounded behind him, and he winced, a newly worried look on his face.
“Go,” I said, pushing him away with a soft laugh. “Go save the monsters from the monsters.”
“Done,” he said. He kissed me again, hard enough to make the wind pick up around us and the gate to creak in complaint, and he was off. I chuckled as I walked under the archway, back through the wishing gate. Was that really what this was called? I’d have to ask one of the other guys. Ideally when I wasn’t bizarrely twitterpated over them.
Like I didn’t have enough complications in my life right now.
I moved up the street, careful to keep some distance between me and the private media trucks—and as I peered at them, I realized none of the trucks actually had channel designations. In fact, they were all super high-end luxury vehicles, looking more like a presidential entourage than ordinary media. Definitely private, I decided. Even from the other side of the line of vehicles, the protest was kind of impressive, with tiki torches and cell phone lights alike providing plenty of illumination to view the grievances of the concerned student body.
I hadn’t heard anything about campus protests at Wellington on the news before, I thought. Then again, I hadn’t really known this academy existed. Or any of them, for that matter, as I recalled all the handful of blue dots that had been scattered over this section of Boston. What was it about Back Bay that made it so suitable for magic? And why weren’t more people talking about it?
I stepped off the street and onto the far sidewalk—and froze.
There was nothing but silence around me.
I swiveled around, but sure enough—there were no cars, no lights, no cries of protestors. Sucking in a deep breath, I stepped back into the street, and chaos crashed around me again, so loud and abrupt that I quickly hopped back onto the far sidewalk, my gaze swinging wildly up and down the now completely empty access road. Were the wards of Wellington Academy that good when the school needed them to be? With no one but their own private media aware of what was going on behind academy walls, reporting on all things dark and magical?
Apparently, that seemed to be the case. So how could I not stick around to learn more about all this? I mean, what else was waiting for me out there in the wide world outside of Boston…a lifetime full of monsters that I’d never know how to effectively fight?
Stuffing down all my mother’s long-ago warnings, I made it all the way back to Newbury Street without incident, then debated for another few blocks about whether to get another cup of coffee. The Crazy Cup was still open, and late-night caffeine never seemed to bother me much. I was a light sleeper on the best of nights, a hazard of…well, I guess of my occupation, I supposed.
All this time, I’d thought of the monsters in the closet as some sort of deeply unfortunate curse, a particular freak sightedness I’d neither asked for nor wanted. But what if they were simply the signs of my vocation? Could I really be a professional monster hunter, with a degree and everything? Maybe mom’s warnings had been just the fears of an overprotective mother who didn’t want her daughter to face any danger. Maybe it wasn’t death and destruction that awaited me at a Wellington, but a whole new future of possibilities.
I thought of Tyler, and the guys, and this strange and foreign idea of a collective. Maybe I could find a family in Boston, even if my own kept slipping away from me.
Maybe everything would work out after all.
Those thoughts jangled happily in my mind as I crossed the alley, my distraction so complete that I almost didn’t hear the panicked whimper.
Almost.
I did hear it, though. A soft frightened squeak, a horror so complete that it stole the very breath from my lungs. I backed up to peer down the alley I’d just passed—and saw one of the baristas from the Crazy Cup, the girl I’d particularly noticed because she put her hair up like Amy Winehouse and she was always laughing.
She wasn’t laughing now. And it was at least theoretically possible that the creature in the top hat and tails who currently towered over her wasn’t auditioning for a Victorian play.
“You dare…” the creature hissed as the young woman cowered back, issuing another petrified squeak.
It was a man, or near enough a man that it would’ve been impossible to distinguish otherwise for any normal person, especially one scared out of her mind. As tall and broad as a man, certainly, but the similarities ended there. His arms were too long and thin, his face too gaunt, and he stank of earth and pungent cabbage roses long past their prime. This man was dressed in exactly the kind of outfit you would expect in someone who’d earned the nickname Boston Brahmin, now that I knew what that meant—a black top hat and matching cutaway jacket, a richly patterned plaid vest and a snow-white cravat puffing out from his too-narrow chin. His pants were a deep crimson, and his pointed-toe boots gleamed black. His long-fingered, ghostly white hands looked almost delicate—for all that he was dangling the barista a full foot off the ground.
Even worse, he was sniffing her. He held her up to him like she weighed no more than thirty pounds, his face bent over her neckline, where the bodice of the high-cut barista apron met the shoulder. She hung in his hands, limp as a rag doll, her glossy black bouffant ponytail nearly pulled free from its band and her neck craned away from the creature as if by sheer weight alone, she could slide away from his hold. It was the creepiest thing I’d seen in a long time, and that was saying something.
“Hey,” I shouted, and the creature lifted his face, giving me my second jolt, because he had no face at all. The blank oval stared at me for a second, then became the face of Tyler Perkins—assuming Tyler had been dead since attending the Billionaire’s Ball of 1853.
“Jesus!” I stumbled. No wonder this thing was able to get close to its victims. I shouted, waving my hands. “You wanna fight? I’ll give you a fight. I’ll give you all the fight you can handle.”
The creature dropped the barista like a sack of flour and raised his hand.
“Stop, you harlot,” he shouted, his voice high, thin, and oddly British sounding. He sounded credibly outraged too, as if he was the injured party. “You won’t get away with this.”
He lurched toward me, then abruptly wheeled around, as if someone else had called his name. “You dare!” he screeched again. He leapt toward the other invisible intruder—and disappeared.
“Hey.” I raced forward through the dissipating mist of the creature, which now smelled faintly of kerosene and rust, oddly enough. What self-respecting monster smelled of iron?
I reached the fallen young woman a second later, only to have her scramble away from me. “No,” she gasped, hysterical. Before I could grab her, she’d crab-walked halfway across the alley, so at least I knew she wasn’t seriously hurt.
Then her face cleared, her eyes going wide. “Oh my God. Did you see that guy? He like—he just showed up out of nowhere, right out of the alley, dressed like a…like a…” she broke off, nearly hyperventilating. “It was that actor guy everyone’s talking about. He had his hands on me.”
She burst into tears, and thi
s time when I approached, she let me come, throwing herself into my arms as she completely dissolved. I patted her awkwardly, shushing her as she tried to choke through her sobs, but she pulled back, her eyes shooting wide.
“He was looking for something,” she breathed, her hands frantically gripping my forearms. “He kept pawing at me, insisting that I’d stolen his ring. His ring and watch and some p-papers. Letters. He was convinced I had them, that I was holding out on him. Like I was trying to keep him from something that was rightfully his, that I was trying to embarrass him. What does that even mean? I don’t know what any of that means.” She burst into another round of hysterical sobbing.
“You’re okay, I’ve got you,” I whispered, holding her tighter as she fully collapsed against me. I helped her back up to Newbury street and down to the Crazy Cup, where the entire place exploded, pulling her from me, sweeping her into their embrace. I didn’t know what any of it meant, either…
But I knew who would. Commander Frost. The guys. And the entire freaking staff of Wellington Academy.
I stood in crowd of horrified patrons of the Crazy Cup, alone in the center of a storm. I wasn’t going to be monster bait anymore, dammit. Not even a little bit. And I wasn’t going to let my mom’s fear rule me.
I was going to learn how to hunt like a true Wellington Academy monster hunter. And if that took me joining the big, bad, maybe-deadly-to-my-person collective…I was in.
Before I could change my mind, I pulled out my phone and texted Tyler.
Just as he’d promised, he was right there to answer me.
17
Tyler met me at the edge of campus at midnight, practically buzzing with excitement. He didn’t ask questions, he didn’t press for details, he just pulled me into his arms and kissed me, hard and full.