by D. D. Chance
“Then I can teach them,” Zach said, without hesitation.
“No.” Reverend Williams spoke with finality, in the manner of parents everywhere who were used to getting their way. Not only parents, I suspected, but preachers accustomed to leading a flock of wide-eyed believers. I got the impression that not too many people crossed Reverend Williams—even though something about this entire scene stank to high heaven. Something was going on here, below the surface, nagging at me like a piece of seaweed wrapped around my ankle. “Commander Frost is right. Your job is to get your classes finished and to stay safe,” the preacher ended heavily.
“If not us, who?” Zach pushed, turning to Frost. “Fighting monsters is what we’re supposed to be doing.”
“But you haven’t graduated,” Reverend Williams repeated. He scowled at Frost. “What sort of backup do you have, beyond these five students?” He emphasized students like we were barely out of monster hunting kindergarten. “Are there any fully trained resources you can tap?”
“Actually, no,” Frost bit back, his beard twitching in equal parts annoyance and dismay. “Given what happened last week and the new reports of paranormal activity, the calls have gone out to past students. But no one has yet responded.” He grimaced as Williams threw up his hands in disgust. “I know. That’s not ideal for a couple of reasons.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I thought monster hunters were on retainer for life. Like, the academy gives them a ton of money specifically so they’re at your beck and call pretty much forever.”
Frost’s jaw tightened, but it was Reverend Williams who responded. “Now you understand why it’s a problem that they aren’t responding.”
Liam’s expression had grown more thoughtful during this exchange, and he spoke with a frown. “Well, that’s something we can solve, right? Can we track them?” he asked. “Is it that they can’t respond or simply that they’re choosing to ignore the academy?”
Frost shrugged. “At this point, nobody outside this room and a few highly placed academy administration types know they haven’t responded. Either way, it doesn’t bode well. If the graduates’ cohort is willfully choosing to abandon the academy, that argues for disbanding the program.”
“And if they’re not responding because they’re already dead, that also argues for disbanding the program,” Tyler said, as Grim grunted a laugh. “What a mess.”
Frost passed a hand through his shaggy hair, making it stand even more on end. “So, it seems you understand the problem clearly. I would suggest you keep any discussion of the issue to a minimum. I don’t need to remind you that the walls have ears, nowhere more so than in a magic academy.”
He grimaced, looking more irritated than tired. “Finish your classes, watch each other’s backs, and keep a sharp eye and shut mouth. You run into Dean Robbins, don’t give him any reason to look twice. Especially you.” He said this last to me.
Beside me, Tyler bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean? Nina’s part of our collective now.”
“Your collective?” Reverend Williams asked. His brows lifted as he took us all in with a gaze that had gone slightly sharper. “What’s that, exactly? We didn’t have collectives when I went through.”
“It wasn’t a thing back in our year, not while you were here,” Frost said smoothly. “Think of it as an informal study group.”
“Which started when?” Reverend Williams pressed.
I held my breath, knowing exactly what he was after. But Frost merely shrugged.
“Earlier this year—much earlier,” he assured the man, shifting his attention to Tyler. “Still, we need to keep a low profile. We don’t need anyone paying too much attention to the collective or the minor, especially if we will be tasked with a demon fight. Make sense?”
Tyler backed down. “Makes sense,” he agreed, and the rest of us nodded along, none of us looking at each other too closely. The collective was way more than an academy study group, and Frost knew it…which meant he was trying to hide the truth from Zach’s father. But why? Had he learned newer, even crazier information about collectives that he hadn’t told us yet?
“A collective…” Reverend Williams said again thoughtfully, and I felt his gaze on me as Frost outlined the basics of the collective for Reverend Williams, keeping it all very surface. He should keep it surface. There were certain aspects of the collective none of us had fully understood prior to undergoing the ceremony. I’d thought I was simply throwing my hat into the ring both to help the guys out and accept their protection as well. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.
Whatever the situation, the reverend seemed satisfied. “Very well, then. I’m glad they have you looking out for each other. We should all do more of that.”
The tension in the room remained palpable, and no one said anything for a moment. Tyler straightened, gesturing to me.
“Well, I don’t have any classes left,” he said. “I’ll walk Nina to class.”
“I think I should stay here,” Zach said.
“No,” Frost and Reverend Williams said at once.
“Shouldn’t you be tending to your finals, to stay on the right side of this Dean Robbins?” Reverend Williams continued.
Zach frowned at him. “Since when do you know my class schedule? Or care?”
For the first time, a flare of real irritation rose in the reverend’s fair cheeks. His vivid blue eyes narrowed. “I will thank you to keep a civil tongue—”
“Whoa,” Liam said. He stared down at his phone. “Asshole alert. Text from Robbins, incoming.”
Zach sighed with real feeling. “Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.”
7
Tyler and Zach dutifully whipped out their phones and swiped them on. I didn’t, because as far as I knew, Dean Robbins didn’t have my burner number. Grim didn’t pull out his phone either, but I didn’t know if he knew how to use a phone, so there was that.
“What does he want?” Frost asked, distracted by whatever he was reading on his laptop.
“I don’t know, but apparently, he wants it with all of us,” Liam said. “One after the other too. I don’t like that.”
That made Frost sit up straight, his heavy brows bunching together. “Really.”
He turned and gestured impatiently for Liam’s phone. Liam obligingly handed it over, and Frost scowled down at it. “Tyler, Zach, Liam, Grim. Not Nina. It’s probably another review of your actions during the Boston Brahmin altercation the other day—or possibly something to do with the protests on campus. He keeps it open-ended, of course.” He handed Liam’s phone back. “You’ll need to be careful.”
“Another game of divide and conquer,” Tyler said. “And I’m up first. Aces.”
“Well, your family is the super specialist,” Liam gibed, and Tyler shot him a dirty look. Those two had been friends long enough that their jabs at each other ended up being more joking than insulting, but that never stopped them from trying.
Tyler turned my way, clearly dismayed. I shooed him off.
“I can walk myself to class,” I assured him. “I’m uniquely skilled at walking. I’ve been doing it most of my life.”
“I can go with her,” Zach said. A zing of panic sliced through me, but I managed not to blush. Smooth and subtle, that was me. “Just give me a minute to finish up here with my dad.”
“Actually, you and Matthew can take over my office,” Frost said, surprising me. He had an office? “Grim and Liam—I need you downstairs.”
“But I—oh,” Liam started, breaking off when he realized what Frost wanted them for. The basement of Lowell Library had turned out to be a hidden repository for artifacts that sent his nerd heart pounding. If Frost was looking for a way to distract the guy, he’d hit the jackpot.
“Fair enough. We’ll see you outside.” Tyler reached for my hand as Zach turned back to his father. I couldn’t say I was unhappy to have Tyler to myself for another few minutes, and I welcomed the touch of his hand against m
ine as we exited the library and reemerged into the bright late-spring morning.
“I don’t like that Dean Robbins didn’t ask to see you,” Tyler groused as we moved off the steps of Lowell Library.
I blinked at him. “Really? I’ve been on campus for barely a minute.”
“You’re part of our team. A big part.”
“A team he doesn’t know about. And from what Frost says, the less he knows about me, the better. Besides, the way you guys talk, he’s nowhere near as skilled as Frost when it comes to monster hunting.”
“Massive understatement,” Tyler scoffed. “That guy wouldn’t be able to identify a monster even if it was in the process of eating him. How he got to be in charge of our minor, I’ll never know.”
“Hey!” We looked up to see Merry Williams trotting our way, her arms filled with poster board and stakes, but her grin wide as she swung her ponytail back and forth. One of the few students I knew at Wellington Academy outside of the guys, Merry was a self-contained tornado, bursting with energy. I’d met her when I’d first come to campus, bowled over by her enthusiasm and the speed with which she talked, which was almost a superpower in and of itself.
She also was a fervent believer in the equality of all creatures on this planet, up to and most especially including monsters. Tyler took in her poster board and fixed her with as dark a look as he could manage, given that he was trying to hide a grin of his own.
“Merry,” he said severely. “There is no protest scheduled on the monster quad today. You’ve got your dates wrong.”
“These aren’t for you, I’ll have you know,” she sniffed, giggling a little at the end of her otherwise stern set-down. She believed enthusiastically in her causes, but she wasn’t going to let it stand in the way of flirting with the cutest guy at Wellington. I appreciated that about her. “You should let the monsters you keep captive in their underground lairs go free, but there are all sorts of oppressors on this campus. It makes my head spin trying to keep up.”
He grimaced. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not,” she said, laughing over her shoulder as she whizzed by. “Nina, if you ever want to drop these guys for a real major, veterinary studies is the best thing you can possibly do! I’m serious!”
“Okay!” I called back, laughing as she sped on, her long legs eating up the sidewalk.
Tyler shook his head as he watched her, but he hadn’t forgotten his mad entirely. He slid his gaze back to me. “I don’t like this whole separation thing Robbins is trying. It’s not going to work. He’s worried about controlling us, but he’s going to have to get over that.”
I studied him more carefully. Tyler had changed in the few days I’d known him—partly because of me joining the collective, though we were all still working out the why of that. But the changes were definite and becoming more obvious. While I suspected he’d always been the life of the party, the natural leader in any group, he’d gotten stronger, more forceful. Physically filling out, yes, but more than that, developing a sense of command no one could fail to notice.
“Do you think Dean Robbins realizes you’ve leveled up?” I asked quietly, as if the walls really did have ears—along with the trees and walkways of Wellington Academy.
“Maybe,” Tyler sighed. Then he winked at me. “Though I can tell you right now, he’d never guess why.”
I flushed, remembering what had happened before Tyler’s transformation—him and me and a bedroom that looked like a bomb had gone off in it by the time we were done. Even kissing Tyler had made the world legit shake around us, but actual sex…
As if following my thoughts, Tyler changed direction and tugged me into a shady stand of trees, a few steps off one of the neat cobblestoned pathways that wound their way through Wellington’s campus. We’d barely gotten into the shadows when he pulled me close.
That was all it took. A swift and unmistakable surge of need erupted within me, the way it did whenever I got too close to Tyler. His lips came down on mine, and I met him more than halfway. Lifting my hands, I tangled my fingers in his thick, dark brown hair. I wanted to practically crawl inside him, and I groaned with real need as his arms went around me. He pulled up the hem of my shirt and pressed his palms against the small of my back, a low growl starting in his throat.
“Nina,” he muttered, kissing me hard. His strength surrounded me, his muscles tightening as he held me close. In fact, everything on his body stiffened in response to our embrace, and I dragged my mouth away from his, trying to catch my breath as the trees began to quiver around us in earnest.
“Do we have time?” I found myself asking, blood rushing to my cheeks a second later. Had I seriously just asked Tyler if it would be okay for us to have sex in public? Did I have zero boundaries now?
He stared down at me, his own breath an unsteady whoosh as he sighed. “Not if I have any hope of getting to Dean Robbins before he expels me, no. I don’t know how you do this to me, Nina. But it’s freaking amazing.”
I couldn’t help myself, I let my hand drift down the front of his body, tracing the shape of his shaft through his jeans. The trees shook harder, the breeze kicking up as several newly blossomed flowers scattered around us.
Tyler shivered, a gust of wind making the trees shake in earnest, and I dropped my hand away. “I don’t know why you have this effect on me, either,” I sighed. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Well, that works out. Because we’re going to figure it out together—and it’s going to be awesome. I know it.” He kissed me again, long and deep, before stepping away. “I’ve gotta bolt. If you want Zach to find you, just put your hand over the mind-blocking bracelet. He can track you then.”
“Oh.” I lifted my wrist, my brain scrambling with renewed awareness of tall, vampire-beautiful Zach, all dark eyes and pale skin and mirror-bright energy. “Right. Zach.”
“Don’t give him a hard time, okay?” Tyler chuckled, shaking his head. “With his dad here, he may be off his game more than usual, and he’s kind of the sensitive type. If he’s picking up on our weird collective mojo, he may not know how to process it all that well. Liam hasn’t said anything to him about the energy transformation thing we unleashed bringing you in, and neither have I. You can bet Frost hasn’t spilled the beans either. Not given how cagey he was being back at the library.”
“Right,” I said again, trying not to wince. I needed to get a handle on all that “weird collective mojo” like, right now. Because if Tyler thought I was going to have the same strange, wild connection with Zach that I felt for Tyler, he was out of his mind. I didn’t care what wild-assed magic or ancient collective lore there was in the books at Wellington Academy, or how randomly attracted I was to Zach. It wasn’t going to happen.
“You know, you’re beautiful when you’re fierce,” Tyler said, startling me back to the moment. And with a final kiss hard enough to send the trees quaking in their roots, he was off.
I squared my shoulders watching him go. I was fierce, I decided. And no more strangeness was going to happen. Not with Zach, not with any of the guys. Like Liam, for example, and dear God, not with Grim. I was in Boston to find my mom’s family. I was at Wellington to learn how to fight monsters. That’s it. That was plenty.
Chasing those thoughts away, I lifted my hand to get a better look at the bracelet. The guys had given it to me the night we’d met, after it had become painfully clear to me that one of Zach’s abilities was that he could read minds. As long as I had the blocking bracelet on, I was safe from him hitting up my brain on speed dial.
Unless I didn’t want to be safe, that is, like when the poor guy had been assigned as my babysitter to walk me across campus. Maybe that was what Tyler meant about me giving Zach a break. I should make it easy for him to find me, not force him to work for it. I was willing to go with that.
“Earth to Zach,” I tried, slapping my hand tight against the bracelet to press it to my skin.
My mind exploded.
8
Zach’s father spoke with such patent outrage, my entire body vibrated. I ripped my hand away from my wrist. Silence swamped me once more.
I didn’t hesitate. Emerging from the trees, I made a quick scan of the quad to make sure Tyler was nowhere in sight, then beat it back to Lowell Library, running at top speed. Fortunately, Tyler and I hadn’t made it very far from the building, and I was up the steps and into the main portion of the library in a few minutes.
Zach and his dad were still going at it, their voices only barely muffled by the thick walls. They were talking about me, obviously, but I had no idea where Frost’s office was, and I didn’t trust myself to connect to Zach directly by putting my hand on the bracelet again. Would he be able to sense I was listening in? I didn’t want that.
Following the sound of their arguing, I angled back toward the war room in the corner of the main chamber of the library. I stepped inside the room, its lights now shut off, and strained to hear Zach and his dad. They’d dropped their voices to a more circumspect level, and I narrowed my eyes at the far wall. Was Frost’s office seriously right on the other side of our monster hunter war room? If I tried hard, I could hear someone breathing in there. No wonder he’d hustled Liam and Grim downstairs.
What sucked for privacy made my job easier, though. I crept forward along the central table, pausing as Zach’s voice rose again.
“For the last time, Dad, it’s not like that. I don’t love her.”
My pause graduated to full-on frozen as my eyes shot wide. Um, what?
“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” his father shot back. “The energy between you two is obvious. I don’t need to be a mind reader to pick it up. Give me some credit.”
“You were picking up on her relationship with Tyler. Tyler, who is my friend,” Zach insisted, and I winced. Truth be told, I did have some unexplained and highly inappropriate energy for Zach. I just hadn’t thought it was that obvious. “What kind of asshole do you think I am?”