The Hunter's Call (Monster Hunter Academy Book 1) Page 11

  For half a second, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to have not one but four protectors dedicated to keeping the monsters away at night—not only from me, but from everyone. What would it be like to be a part of their unit, protecting others as well? They seemed to place a lot of emphasis on the requirements it would take for me to join up with them, but most likely it was some elaborate form of pinky swearing, and then— what? Instant Broville? That wasn’t for me, and yet…

  “They’ll—they’ll hurt you. Destroy you. Worse than monsters ever could. If you ever see them—you run.”

  I grimaced as the memory of Mom’s warning whispered through my mind. Okay, you really couldn’t get clearer than that. It was time for me to leave.

  “Hey, what you did back there during the fight, that was really brave,” Tyler said, interrupting my thoughts. He walked closer beside me beneath the sprouting trees.

  I shot him a look. “You mean offering myself up as a fire bull sacrifice?”

  “Yeah, but you did it trusting that you’d succeed in getting their attention. And you trusted us not to get you killed in the process. Both those things matter. It was kind of badass to put yourself out there like that. And I’m thinking you probably had a plan for how to defeat the fire bulls all on your own, if it came down to it. A dumb plan, you know. But a plan.”

  I warmed to his grudging praise even though I knew better. Praise didn’t come very often, and I would take it where I found it. “I had a plan, but it wasn’t a good one. Now that I really think about it, Grim wasn’t wrong. About a good two-thirds of the monster attacks I’ve survived are because I run like hell. It works better than it should.”

  “Maybe so, but the fact remains that when you have to, you fight. And when you fight, you do win, even if I don’t agree with your methods. Like I said: badass.”

  His tone had shifted again, and I looked up, caught by the intensity of his gaze. Without saying another word, he leaned forward to brush his lips over mine. And there it was again—the wild surge of excitement, the sense of coming home, the empowerment that I could take on the world and nothing could stop me, nothing would stop me. The whirlwind of sensation built within me, and it was Tyler who broke it off, Tyler who stood back with a hushed curse.

  “Damn, girl,” he said, and his eyes were wide, earnest. I glanced around, and in barely the span of five seconds, the space around us had changed. Dramatically. All the blossoms on the trees had been stripped off the still-quivering boughs, with piles of spent blooms mounded around us. He held out his hand, and I noticed it was shaking. “We’d better go find a class to sit in on, or there may not be much of the campus left by lunchtime.”

  I didn’t know if he was joking or not, but I slipped my hand into his, sinking into the sensation that had returned to simply feeling right, real. I needed to leave Wellington Academy—to get the hell away from all these monster hunters, even though I hadn’t known they’d existed before this week. But…maybe not today, necessarily. I had my whole life to be alone, after all. I could at least learn something while I was here.

  “So—what class first?” I asked Tyler, tuning out the fading cry of my mother’s long-ago plea.

  He hitched a shoulder. “Entrails magic is starting up in about five. There’s an awful lot of monsters you can ward off with a good bag of guts. That’d be a good place to start, I think.”

  I shot him a sideways glance, but the guy was totally serious.

  Maybe I was better off fighting on my own.

  14

  Entrails led to monster ethics, which gave way to fight strategy. Dinner was a quick bite at a bar close to campus called the White Crane, a hole in the wall with a long, gleaming bar and a dozen dimly lit tables, a dark-haired female bartender who looked like she’d just as soon deck you as pour you a drink, and a curious mix of older, grizzled locals and fresh-faced upperclassmen. While he put away two pints of beer and we both plowed our way through cheeseburgers and thick-cut fries, Tyler talked non-stop about every other class he’d had since starting Wellington, and why I needed to take them, too. By the time we finally headed back to meet the rest of the group, my head was spinning.

  No sooner had we breached the wall to the monster quad, however, than Tyler veered off toward a large vine-covered building that I hadn’t noticed yesterday when I’d visited the small hamlet. I barely noticed it now, surrounded by lengthening shadows the way it was, with only two flickering lights flanking its imposing front door.

  “Lowell Library and research lab,” Tyler explained as we mounted the steps. The front door responded easily to his key card and swung open onto an equally dark foyer. We stepped inside, crossed the short entryway, and entered a library wonderland.

  Rows upon rows of bookcases soared above gleaming marble floors, each of them lit by chandeliers hung from the ceiling. An enormous fireplace took up most of the far wall, cheerily lit despite the late spring evening. Marble-topped tables and polished study carols peeked out of every nook and corner, inviting you to curl up and read or drop down a pile of books for study. Of all the places I’d seen in Wellington, this was by far the most magical.

  Oblivious to my wonder, Tyler gestured me forward, and I saw Grim, Liam and Zach disappearing into a room at back corner of the chamber, past the fireplace. Peeling my eyes wide to try and take in every shelf and book, I let Tyler hustle me along until we also entered the brightly lit room.

  My first impression was: war room. Three giant screens dominated the walls, while shelves marched beneath, every surface stacked with paperwork and files. A wide table extended down the room’s center, with thick, intricately carved legs and a marble top. On it sat a row of open laptop computers, currently all silent, flanked by more stacked scrolls and books. The perfect marriage of old and new.

  “Well, this place is pretty cool,” I acknowledged, as the other guys slouched into chairs and Liam took a seat in front of the nearest laptop. I walked around the table to peer at one of the screens, which featured a map of Boston.

  “This place is awesome,” Tyler agreed. “Monster hunter HQ.”

  “Incoming,” Liam said under his breath, and a second later, Frost stepped into the room. I turned to take him in, wondering if he’d just finished splitting logs somewhere. He still rocked the Paul Bunyan starter set of flannel shirt and work pants, and this close, I could see the shimmering gray in his hair, and the fact that he had a thick scar over one brow that got lost in his sideburns. His bushy beard seemed to have grown a few inches since I’d seen him earlier, and I suspected that beard probably hid other scars as well.

  Frost scanned the room and stopped when he got to me, nodding with gruff resignation. “I owe you an apology, Ms. Cross,” he said. “I called you monster bait, but that’s not quite right, it seems. There’s a better term to describe you, I’ve learned. Harbinger.”

  I made a face. “How about I make up the nicknames from now on? You people suck at it.”

  Frost pushed on, ignoring me. “The nature of the harbinger is that he—or she, in your case—is a chosen child of the bloodline who’s hiding in plain sight. She isn’t sought out, because nobody knows she exists. Nobody still knows you exist, in fact. It would be to your advantage if that remains the case.”

  He picked up one of the folders stacked neatly on the table, and waved it at me. “Your mother, Janet Cross, isn’t in any of our family databases—I’m not surprised you’ve had difficulty tracking her down. As far as the magical world is concerned, she doesn’t exist. But there is a Janet Cross who worked here in Boston, on an equally specialized registry. I found her on a very exclusive employee database at one of the private early childhood education schools in Beacon Hill, less than three miles from here.”

  I opened my mouth to ask how he’d figured that out, then shut it. This was a magic academy. It stood to reason they knew stuff. That didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, all of this was starting to feel like a very bad idea, though I couldn’t deny the spark of
excitement. Despite Frost’s assertion that mom was magical…I honestly had never thought of her that way. She’d simply been my mom. But this new lead made sense—a super private school for rich little kids. I could see a college educated botanist getting hired on there, and then later landing a position at the university. That made sense.

  “So, what does this harbinger do?” Tyler asked. He’d stationed himself near me, while the other guys remained ranged around the table—Liam scooting suspiciously closer to the stack of books and scrolls scattered on the table by the laptops. His pack had slid forward ever so slightly, and I halfway got the impression that the room might be a little lighter of some of its research materials before we were through here.

  “In a nutshell?” Frost replied, still eyeing me. “She’s a universal “on” switch, trumping any magic that may have been hiding monster activity from us—which as you can imagine, won’t please Dean Robbins. I have a feeling his assertion that there are no more monsters to fight will be decidedly put to rest.”

  “Wait a minute—someone’s been blocking you from monster attacks?” I asked, frowning. “Or is it just that I came to town and declared it national meet your monster day?”

  Frost snorted. “In all honesty—I have long believed monster attacks have been dwindling. So no, I don’t believe that Robbins is completely out of line. That said, even a few such outbreaks a year wouldn’t fit his narrative. Now, I suspect we’ll become quite a bit busier.

  “Excellent,” Liam said, grinning at me when I turned is way. “It’s about time something happened.”

  “The second role of a harbinger is far more specific. Her arrival heralds a new attack of monsters, the next stage in what many consider to be our ongoing war with them.”

  Grim grunted a derisive laugh, and Tyler leaned forward.

  “Well, that’s not bad either. With a full-on monster war, the academy can’t shut us down,” Tyler agreed. He opened and closed his hands into fists. A centering technique, I suspected. If war was coming, he’d be more than willing to jump into the fray, I had no doubt.

  But was it coming? Had that been what had pushed me to come to Boston, not just the possibility of finding my mom?

  I blew out a long breath, trying to beat down the twin spurts of curiosity and anxiety bubbling up inside me by looking anywhere but at Frost. My gaze landed back on the digital map of Boston, expanded to focus on the section of the city bounded by the Charles River, from Battery Wharf to Fenway Park. Several locations in blue gleamed on it, along with several sections of green. Otherwise, it was a fairly straightforward street map.

  Noticing our attention, Frost turned toward it. “For the moment, the question of Ms. Cross’s family history can be set to the side, in favor of the reality of our present. We’ve had an…unexpected development that only now is beginning to make sense to me. You can see here that I’ve indicated the typical landmarks of this section of Boston—Fenway Park, Boston Public Garden, the museums—along with the magic academies in blue.”

  I leaned forward, staring at the blue dots. Only Wellington was indicated by name, and I nearly asked what the others were when Frost continued. “Over the past few weeks, this section of the city has been experiencing a surge in power outages. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it because the spring storms typically bring disruption to our power lines, and this year was no different. But our weather has remained stable for the past several days, while the outages continue. A brief check of the city’s power grid indicates no systemic problems. Discreet inquiries turned up nothing unusual, with the general theory being that the system is simply ‘glitching.’ The outages are brief and seemingly random. Or so I thought, until Mr. Perkins apprised me of your experiences, Ms. Cross.”

  I slanted him a glance. “You can call me Nina.”

  Frost nodded. “Per the information you shared with Tyler, you’ve sustained at least six attacks in the past three weeks, two when you moved here initially, and five in the past few days. Mr. Williams has done me the favor of charting those attacks, with the palest dot being the first, and the darkest one indicating tonight’s incident.”

  He turned to Zach, who was already moving to one of the computers. “Got it,” Zach said. He slid into the chair at the table and started typing. A few seconds later, he nodded to Frost, and with a click of the man’s remote, the map changed. A tight cluster of orange dots appeared on the screen, all focused between Newbury and the academy.

  “In green, then, these are the incidences of power outages the days of those attacks, the shading corresponding to the timestamp of each incident.” Another click, and I pursed my lips. Six gradually darkening lines of green dots wound through the city, ending at the attack point, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

  “The monsters all followed a path to me that started from Boston Public Garden?” I asked. “I’ve never even been there.”

  “Ordinarily, I would deem that a tourist foul, as would most residents of this part of Boston,” Frost said drily. “In your case, consider yourself lucky. Whatever has locked on to you, it’s originating on park grounds. There are several possibilities in the park itself, but I haven’t had time to explore them. Almost certainly, we’re looking at a monument or perhaps the lake as a source of origin.”

  “But what does that mean?” I asked. “We can’t exactly raze a public park.”

  Frost grimaced. “We cannot. We’ll have to be a good bit more sensitive than that. That said, it gives us a place to start, and it also gave me the opportunity to track another disturbing trend. One which, regrettably, predates your arrival in Boston, Ms. Cross, but will almost certainly involve you, I suspect sooner rather than later.”

  Zach turned sharply toward Frost, scowling. Clearly, this wasn’t a data point Frost had asked him to chart.

  Frost hit his remote again, and a dozen red dots, larger than the others, illuminated on the screen. “Boston, like most major cities, is not immune to lawlessness. Annually, we experience over forty-five hundred incidents of violent crime, including murder, rape, robbery, and assault. For a city that prides itself as being above average in every respect, I can say that we’re also above the national average in crime in all but one category, in which we tie the average. All that to say, violence—and violent perpetrators—can hide in this city perhaps more easily than most.”

  “You’re talking about the Boston Brahmin—that’s what they’re calling him now on the down low, based on the way he dresses,” Liam said, addressing this last to all of us. “The Victorian reenactor who capped that student at Boston College yesterday—have you seen the stories about him? That guy.”

  I jolted, remembering the newscast from the day before. “Fancy Victorian muggers were called brahmins? I thought that was an Indian term, like a high-level caste.”

  “Criminal tendencies notwithstanding, the Brahmins of Boston were very high caste. Just ask any of them.” Liam grinned, swiveling toward me. “They were the cream of the crop, top-shelf members of the city’s first families. Though Tyler would be the best to explain the significance of that.”

  “Liam,” Tyler said quellingly, but by now Liam was practically bouncing, clearly delighted that he’d scored a direct hit on his friend. Those two definitely had known each other a long time.

  “Well, you are a Perkins. Who better to tell the tale?”

  Tyler glanced my way, appearing more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him, and I recalled what Merry Williams had said when I’d first told her about Tyler.

  “Ah—first families are, like, the founding members of Boston, I’m guessing?” I offered, trying to help him out.

  He finally capitulated, sighing. “Some of them, yes. The richest ones, anyway. Basically, anyone who had enough money and barely enough social standing at a finite point in time in the 1850s got segregated into this unofficial caste.”

  “Not so unofficial,” Liam snorted. “Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the phrase Boston Brahmin, and it stuck.”

&n
bsp; “Never mind the cultural appropriation problems,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly.” Tyler grimaced. “The families who were included were known for being ungodly wealthy, insufferably arrogant, and sticklers for discretion—except for in their manner of dress. Which was…excessive.”

  “Deep reddish-colored velvet trousers, insane plaids and paisleys, brightly colored vests, top hats, pointy-toed lace-up boots, the works,” Liam volunteered, leaning forward to tap something into a computer. With a click of a button, the map on the screen changed to an elegantly dressed Victorian man with long, delicate features and pale skin. “Your basic Victorian baller.”

  I peered at the image. “That’s what the Boston Brahmin looks like? Like the current one hunting people down right now?”

  “Down to the tiny dots in his cravat,” Frost confirmed. “Based on firsthand accounts we’ve secured separate from police reports. But the connection to the first families goes deeper. The general public is only aware of one victim, but there have been others. Worse than that…they’re all related.”

  I turned to Tyler with surprise. “To you?”

  “To Boston’s one-percenters,” Liam corrected, as Tyler looked pained. “And not all of them either, but enough of them, as we’re slowly figuring out.” He glanced over to Frost. “It’s a obviously a focused attack, man. We’ve got to do something.”

  Tyler huffed out a breath. “The student who was assaulted yesterday—Billy Perkins—is my second cousin, once removed. The connection is distant, but it’s there. And he’s one of apparently a half dozen descendants of the first families who’ve been attacked so far. They were just keeping it on the down low. Because that’s what you do when in a first family. They’re not very big on scandal. At all. Which is why we need to handle this, pronto.”

  “Okay…” I allowed. “But I still don’t understand. Since when are monster hunters needed to stop ordinary…” I blinked. “No. No way. You think that mugger is an actual monster?”