The Hunter's Snare (Monster Hunter Academy Book 3)

  At the academy, funny is the new black…magic.

  Reckless, brilliant and incredibly resourceful, Liam Graham can handle any crisis with a devilish grin—but his razor-sharp sense of humor hides a desperate truth. In an elite society where magic is the most coveted commodity, he’s been judged as second-rate, a castoff. Weak.

  Liam hasn’t let his lack of inner magic slow him down, of course. He’s mapped all the secret passageways beneath Wellington Academy, he’s stolen the most arcane lore, and he’s managed to siphon energy out of the very air. When he touches me, we light up the room, and when we kiss…it’s pure fire.

  We need that fire, too. A new threat has stormed into Wellington Academy, an illusionist magician who threatens to destroy our team of monster hunters and take down the whole academy once and for all.

  Even worse, the only way Liam can access his full magic is if he and I fully bond…but he’s determined not to take advantage of me. So if I want to get this party started, I’m going to have to take control.

  …Not a problem.

  The Hunter’s Snare

  Monster Hunter Academy, Book 3

  D.D. Chance

  Contents

  Liam

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About D.D. Chance

  Liam

  What’s a girl want?

  I scowled at the rough stone wall six feet from my face, the blood rushing to my head. Strung up like this two stories below ground, locked in a spike-ridden snare that Houdini wouldn’t have dared attempt even at the height of his fame, I’d already worked out a half dozen impossible equations in my mind to pass the time. But I always ended up back here.

  The life-or-death question I couldn’t ignore. The riddle buried in the puzzle locked within the enigma that was Nina Cross.

  Harbinger. Monster bait. Cipher.

  The answer to all my deepest desires and biggest fears wrapped up into one completely unexpected package. She’d run into our lives not two weeks ago with a monster on her tail and an entire lifetime of mystery surrounding her very existence. A mother who’d lied to her. A father who’d left her to rot, so far as we could tell. A power so incredible, she would lose her ever-loving mind if she had any idea of who and what she really was.

  But I knew.

  I’d read the ancient texts, found the forbidden knowledge. I knew everything there was to know about the harbinger…everything Nina had yet to learn.

  And oh, what I could teach her, if I could find a way to tempt her into letting me. Lure her into being willing to reach her full potential. But how?

  What’s a girl want?

  I blew out a long breath, glancing at the gleaming LED stopwatch on the floor. Four minutes past the official record set by my late Great-Uncle Spencer Graham, the family’s most prolific and blindingly rich magician in five generations. He hadn’t been able to endure the suspended magical tourniquet for longer than two minutes and forty-four seconds. I’d blown him away nearly three times over today. He was no longer the boss of me.

  Not that anyone would ever know that.

  My family had written me off a long time ago—too weak to be a spell caster, too mercurial to be an enforcer, too talkative to be a ward for the family secrets, too much of an ass to be a negotiator or diplomat. They’d done everything to improve my chances, to help me live up to the powerful magic that was my birthright. They’d even buried tuning rods beneath my skin to pick up any errant supernatural currents that might be floating around in the atmosphere, but nothing had taken.

  I’d remained stunted, muted. My magic a shrunken husk.

  So I’d studied. I’d learned. I’d fashioned tools to pull power out of the air, created concoctions, devices, and weapons of intricate and stunning beauty. And I had suffered. Oh, yeah, I’d suffered.

  Then a harbinger had hit Wellington Academy and set my world on fire.

  I twisted in my vicious tourniquet, feeling the blades cut deep, swinging in a lazy arc as the blood traced familiar trails down my skin.

  What’s a girl want?

  As I turned slowly, the trove of glorious arcanum slid into view, soaking in its pool of oil. It was time, I knew. I’d studied the pages I’d stolen from the Apocrypha long enough. I had memorized every inscrutable prognostication, dire warning, and taboo ritual specifically proscribed…yet still included in that friggin’ book as if the old wizards couldn’t help themselves. I knew everything there was to know, now.

  A little knowledge might be a dangerous thing. But too much?

  Magic.

  I rotated another quarter turn. With a flick of my fingers, I tripped the nearly invisible metal trigger trapped in the crease of my palm, causing a spark to flare, then drop to the trail of oil. The fire caught immediately, throwing shadows against the wall that made me look like a slowly swinging slab of meat. Not a bad analogy, really, considering how I’d been carved up over the years.

  But this wasn’t about me. It was about the tongues of fire that now lanced greedily into the carefully oiled maze. Racing along the snaking lines I’d traced, a complete replica of the Wellington campus map of subterranean byways. I watched with eager eyes to see if this, finally, would reveal the path I needed to take, if this, finally—

  But no.

  The fire guttered out, dead-ending far short of catching the forbidden pages on fire.

  The secrets of the academy would live another day, it seemed. I hadn’t solved the riddle. I hadn’t earned the right. I would need Nina Cross to walk those dire pathways with me blindly, foolishly, if she was willing. If she dared. If she agreed to finally break me free of the trap of my own life.

  I contracted my muscles, straining my joints to the max, and breathed out a long, shuddering breath.

  So, what’s a girl want?

  I didn’t know…but I’d do anything to find out.

  1

  Nina

  It’s the monster you don’t expect that you have to watch out for.

  “Hold up,” Zachariah Williams murmured beside me, his whispered words brushing past my ear and filling my mind. I slowed, sensing more than seeing what had alarmed him. Because there was something out there, pacing us. Tracking us.

  Being followed by a person or persons unknown would cause alarm for most college students, no matter who they were. For monster hunting minors facing their school’s first major monster outbreak in a hundred years? Tack on a whole new layer of crazy.

  I scanned the path ahead of us as casually as possible, but the cobblestone streets and neatly manicured sidewalks weren’t quite ready to give up their secrets. The night was dark and warm, streetlights cheerily providing cones of safety at regular intervals. Up until a few seconds ago, Zach and I had been holding hands as we made our way across the campus of Wellington Academy. Despite our PDA bei
ng accessorized by legitimate prep school attire—Zach in dark pants and a dress shirt, me in a blouse, plaid miniskirt, and knee-high black boots—the display of intimacy was way more than I would ordinarily go for, no matter how close Zach and I had become over the past couple of weeks.

  But the romantic gesture was deliberate, designed to make us seem more normal to the other students—or really, to anyone who happened to be watching who wasn’t a member of the academy’s deeply mistrusted and increasingly reviled monster hunter minor. Wellington might have gotten its start as a monster hunting institution, but that aspect of its past definitely was not aging well.

  Otherwise, the academy was holding its own. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that Zach and I were heading toward a haunted campus chapel recently incinerated by demons, Wellington Academy could have been any exclusive, upscale private college in Back Bay, Boston. Perfectly trimmed trees lined every quad and street corner, while square, staid buildings in dusky stone formed dark angles against the starlit sky. The residence halls looked as haughty as the classroom buildings, but at least they were cheerily lit at this hour, and laughter flowed across the open spaces and darted through the trees.

  It was any college, anywhere, with an extra dose of things that went bump in the night.

  “You have any idea…?” I murmured, but Zach shook his head as I slanted him a glance. A bloom of quiet reassurance flowed out from him, comforting despite his evident wariness, and I couldn’t help my smile. He was only slightly capable of psychic mind pushing, though he for sure could read my thoughts, since I didn’t have my warding bracelet on.

  But Zach’s gift of reassurance was more innate than any sort of magical ability—it was what a preacher’s son did. Especially a preacher’s son who moonlighted as a demon hunter in the only remaining monster hunting collective at Wellington…regardless of the fact that, once upon a long-ago century, the academy had been founded with the express purpose of graduating scores of monster hunters a year.

  Not so much anymore. Worse, even the ones the academy had managed to graduate over the past fifty years had gone distressingly MIA.

  But if we were down to our last few monster hunters, at least Zachariah Williams carried the banner proudly. Silhouetted by the competing beams of streetlights, he looked like he’d been born to the night. His dark hair tumbled around his ears, offsetting his fair skin and deep blue, almost purple-hued eyes. He’d struck me as vampire-hot when I’d first met him a couple of weeks ago, on the run from the latest monster trying to turn me into a midnight snack, and since then, he’d become even more supernaturally beautiful. Now his gothic-angel face had hardened, and his intense blue eyes scanned the quad with more than passing worry.

  “No clue,” he finally answered. “It’s not a demon or a blood-sport monster. Doesn’t smell right for that.”

  I made a face. “Monster smelling is a thing for you now?”

  His laughter huffed in the semi-darkness. “It’s always been a thing. I just didn’t talk about it. That skill never played well with the ladies.”

  “Uh-huh. But is it sharper now, do you think? More well honed?”

  He shot me a quick glance, but didn’t deny it. “It’s sharper now. Something else I have you to thank for, yeah?” He scowled. “I’ve lost them again. Let’s keep moving.”

  I nodded, and we turned forward, my mind ranging ahead to what awaited us at Bellamy Chapel. Not exactly a monster, but not a bouquet of roses either. I mean, what kind of psychopath commissions a headstone for a woman who wasn’t dead?

  “It’s not necessarily a real headstone, you know,” Zach said, reading my thoughts as he gave my hand a squeeze. “There could be some completely normal explanation for it.”

  The flow of his comforting warmth allowed me to take in a short breath—but only a short one. I exhaled quickly, not yet willing to be kicked out of my defensive cocoon.

  Still, I offered him a grateful smile. “Thanks for saying that. But there’s no way this isn’t something seriously screwed up.”

  “Nina—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “There’s no coincidence that can explain the existence of a headstone with my mother’s name on it, sitting in an abandoned crypt that magically opened up for us to explore barely a few days after I show up on campus…a campus I didn’t even know existed until, like, two weeks ago. I know that headstone wasn’t made for my mom twenty-two years ago, no matter what date’s carved on it. More likely some asshole ordered it made after I showed up here. It’s not like I’ve hidden the fact that Mom’s dead—or that I’m trying to find her family.”

  Zach didn’t argue with me. In the days after I’d arrived in Boston with a letter from my mother that she’d never sent, addressed to a mailing address that didn’t exist, it hadn’t occurred to me to be circumspect about my interest in finding her family…the same way it’d also never occurred to me to ask about the possibility of there being other relatives out there while my mom had been alive. Like most kids, I accepted what she’d presented to me about our little two-person household as absolute fact. We were alone, my dad had no clue I existed, and that was that.

  I had other things to worry about, anyway. Since I seemed to attract monsters wherever I went, most of my days were filled with trying not to get eaten.

  Nevertheless, the arrival of a headstone bearing my late mother’s name, even one carved as some sort of sick joke, wasn’t exactly reassuring.

  “We’re going to find out who did this,” Zach said quietly, and I shook my head, my stress ratcheting up a notch.

  “That doesn’t make things any better, you know,” I protested. “Someone is trying to mess with me—and with you guys, through me. And I have no idea why.”

  “Then they’re taking on all of us, not just you,” Zach said. “You’re a part of our collective now. Don’t forget that.”

  I grimaced and turned my attention forward, wishing I still had my mind-warding bracelet on. I’d ripped it off during our last fight, but at the moment, I really didn’t feel like having Zach crawl around inside my anxiety-ridden—

  “Whoa.” He stopped short, glancing down at me as he turned my hand over, peering at my empty wrist. “You just cut me off, and you don’t have your bracelet. How’d you learn how to do that? Did you, um, level up when we… I mean, because we…”

  I pulled my hand free of his, peering at it as well, as if it might spontaneously sprout a new mind-blocking bracelet on its own. “I…guess so,” I allowed. “Maybe?”

  Leveling up, as Zach had put it—spontaneously increasing one’s magical or monster-fighting abilities—was the nifty gift with purchase I’d discovered after joining the collective. Basically, any intimate bond I forged with the other guys on the team resulted in an automatic upgrade to their skills and abilities. I hadn’t had any reaction after I’d, ah, bonded with Tyler, but when I’d hooked up with Zach, things had changed for me. I wasn’t sure exactly how, but if one of the bonus results was an on-demand cancellation of Zach’s mind-reading intrusion, I’d take it.

  Because Zach was right, of course, about me being part of the collective. I’d come to Boston to locate my mother’s family, but I’d found a different kind of tribe here at Wellington Academy, and I’d embraced it with open arms. Never mind that my mom had warned me specifically to avoid a group exactly like the academy hunters—four guys, uniquely bonded, who hunted in a pack. Check, check, and check. She’d absolutely warned me to run the other way…

  I hadn’t.

  “They’re back,” Zach said, interrupting my unruly thoughts. He turned his head, his sculpted profile catching the light as he focused on something in the distance. “There’s more than one. They’re moving fast, tall and thin. Can you see that? Over in the trees. Look now. Act natural.”

  I coughed a short laugh at his last request as I shifted my gaze toward the far-off tree line. I didn’t see anything at first, but I felt them, all right. Feral and cold. Watching us. “So you say they’re not bloodsu
cking creatures, but can you get any more specific than that? Maybe use your mind tricks on them? I kind of doubt they have any protective bracelets against you.”

  Zach blinked at me, then arched both of his preternaturally perfect brows. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

  He turned back toward the tree line, reaching for my hand again, and this time gripping it tight. Zach was nervous, on edge, in a way I’d never seen before. I frowned at him. Was he okay? Given his mental outreach capability, was it painful for Zach to get up close and personal with monsters this way? Was confronting the creatures watching us the right move?

  “Okay, here goes nothing.” Zach’s eyes narrowed. A strange, unsettling light entered them. While I’d watched his eyes go blood red when he fought demons, I’d never really paid attention when he was squaring off against other monsters. So now the silver glow that flared deep in his beautiful deep purple irises took me by surprise. As it gained brightness, I turned toward where he was looking and focused more intently, opening my mind once more to Zach. I needed to be a part of this.

  Images flashed in my mind’s eye, an overlay that gilded reality and elevated it to the next level. As I stared, the far tree line lit up in full and vivid color, and I could see exactly what Zach saw.

  Oh…crap.

  I knew these guys.