The Hunter's Snare (Monster Hunter Academy Book 3) Page 12

  Liam seemed to be struggling with no such concerns. “I’m telling you, it’s gotta be one or the other. Either your mom was somehow connected to a long-lost remnant of the Hallowells and she believed you were a throwback to their former greatness, or her connection is much more recent than that. She didn’t just pick this school out of thin air to mention to you. She didn’t write that letter for no reason. That letter makes perfect sense if you wanted to impress a family that was known as one of the top magic makers in Boston. Believe me, I’m a member of such a family, and we love nothing more than to impress each other and ourselves. Like Reid said, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense that she’s some randomly missing daughter, like from the last twenty years. The Hallowell family wouldn’t exactly lose their own kid.”

  “But there’s that headstone,” I reminded him.

  “Somebody knew about her, yeah. But the more I think about that, the more I’m convinced that’s also the work of our friendly neighborhood illusionist. The rock itself was real, but how closely did we look at the thing to make sure the name was etched on it or merely affixed there as an overlay glamour? Some of those can be pretty sophisticated, and Grim beat the shit out of the headstone before we got a chance to look too closely.”

  “He did,” I agreed. “But back to Mom. Why the cloak-and-dagger, then? If she wanted her family to know about me, why didn’t she just tell them? They sound like they’re kind of rich and awesome.”

  “That would be the million-dollar question,” Liam agreed. “Because you’re right. The Hallowells are rich, awesome, and insanely powerful. That said, if your mom had done something to piss them off, like oh, say, steal their granddaughter away, she may have been a little uncertain of their reception of her. Especially since she didn’t try to reach out when she got sick.”

  I stumbled, Liam’s comment catching me off guard.

  “Crap, you’re right. She had cancer. She was the daughter of a magical family and she got cancer, and she didn’t reach out for help. Not even to her family who, at a minimum, would have been able to get her the best care money could buy.”

  “That and more,” Liam agreed. “They may even have been able to magically reverse the illness, though cancer is a bitch no matter what your superpowers are. She also didn’t reach out to your dad, assuming she knew who he was, which I’m betting she did.”

  “She didn’t contact him,” I agreed. “Or anyone, really. She didn’t even like going to the doctor, because she didn’t like people in her business. They told me that she had a high concentration of heavy metals in her system they couldn’t quite explain, but that wasn’t what killed her.”

  “Heavy metals,” Liam said. “Huh.”

  That train of thought was effectively derailed as we came around the final corner to the disheveled section of Beacon Hill that housed the Beacon Hill Preparatory Academy. In the daylight it looked only slightly more civilized than it had when I’d used it as a backdrop for hacking up a ghoul. The rioting overgrowth that spilled over the stone wall looked merely quaint, not creepy, and the metal placard that announced the name of the academy remained barely visible where I’d pushed away the greenery.

  Liam moved up to the gate and tried it. It was, of course, locked tight.

  “I don’t suppose you have a lockpick that works on century-old gates, do you?” I asked, only half joking. Liam nodded, which was why I was only half joking.

  “It’s an equal-opportunity lockpick set. Something else I need to put a patent on, the moment I get a chance.”

  He brought his pack around and pulled out the small set of tools. It took him longer to find the lock on the rusted old gate than it did to jimmy it free, and he pushed the gate open with a rebellious creak.

  “This is where things get a little trickier,” he said as we stepped through. “I’ve got my own set of personal wards, and they’re good, but these are the Hallowells we’re talking about. They would have some protections in place to keep out any assholes.”

  We continued walking, our steps slow and measured along a cobblestone street that was now overgrown with weeds sticking up through the seams in the stones. The air was close and quiet here, the trees pressing in from either side of the narrow lane.

  “What sort of protections?” I asked. “Like a security team? Some sort of alert system?”

  Liam shook his head. “Nothing that obvious,” he said, stepping from stone to stone. “The Hallowells prized secrecy over everything else. They didn’t want anybody in their business.”

  I snorted. “They’re sounding more and more like my mom all the time.”

  “Exactly. So anything they would put in place would be tailor-made to hide the evidence. Something like…”

  He stepped forward, and a strange whoosh of air burst up as he sank ever so slightly down.

  “Oh, shit—” he began.

  The street dropped away beneath us.

  17

  We fell for what seemed like way too long and landed hard on a floor that thankfully had a blessed amount of give to it. In fact, it wasn’t even a floor, but more like…

  “Wood chips,” Liam blurted, feeling around in the dark. I heard the shooshing of fabric that betrayed him pulling his pack around, and a second later, a powerful flashlight flared to life.

  “Wood chips,” he repeated, “and I can’t tell how old they are. But clearly, the Hallowells didn’t want to kill anybody from the fall alone, so score one for them.”

  I peered up, confused at the inky blackness that arched over us. “There was a hole. We fell into a hole,” I protested. “How come it’s dark?”

  Liam angled his light up, revealing that the roof was very much intact over us.

  “Hmmm. It must have been a hinged mechanism. We didn’t hear it snap shut, maybe because we were too busy wondering if we were going to die.”

  He flashed his light over toward me, making me flinch. “Hey, congratulations to us. We didn’t die. Though this wasn’t exactly what I meant when I said I wanted to get to the bottom of things.”

  I grimaced. “Okay, but…how do we get out of here?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d say we wouldn’t. The groundskeepers would have sent up the alert to the Hallowells the next time they did their rounds, and we’d be collected in due course. I suspect this particular property hasn’t had groundskeepers for a long time. That argues for a more mechanized alert system, probably with cameras, because if some sort of wild boar…wait a minute. No.”

  I could almost picture Liam tilting his head in thought, while my gaze tracked the flow of the beam as it swiped across the featureless walls. He continued, his tone more thoughtful.

  “I bet the stones were geared for human weight, not kid or animal weight, so anything over, like, a hundred pounds. It would be interesting to see if they were counterbalanced against something heavier, like a car, but then again, we are talking magic…”

  “Earth to Liam,” I said a little sharply. “How do we get out of here?”

  The insistence in my tone brought him back to the present and more pressing issue.

  “Once again, my first thought is that we don’t,” he said. “This is an oubliette. It’s where you stick somebody if you want to forget about them, as the saying goes, but certainly the intention is to keep them trapped until you make the decision on what to do.”

  I stared at him. “An oubliette? That seems…not awesome. I don’t want to stick around here waiting to be found.”

  “Agreed,” he said, sounding way too cheerful. A second later, I understood why. He pulled out a gadget from his pack that looked like one of those stud finders my mom had used to hang paintings.

  I peered at it. “You planning to decorate while we’re here?”

  Liam’s response was a little rueful. “I have a habit, you could say, of getting lost in dark places. But this isn’t one of those times. Little-known fact about my growing up, I spent a lot of time in basements. My folks stuck me down there because they didn’t know what
else to do with me, and I frustrated them to look at.”

  He spoke the words easily, but I stared at him in the darkness, unable to see his face past the glare of the light. “Your parents did that?” I asked, aghast. I bit my lip, wanting to cry. How was it that every time Liam let drop a detail of his past, it was more awful than the one before?

  “Yup,” he said, though he’d already stood and was feeling his way along the nearest wall. “But it wasn’t all bad. Those basements led to subbasements that, happily enough, led to the tunnels the first families and their masons had carved into the bedrock of Boston.”

  “Let me know when you get to the part about them not being so bad.”

  He snorted. “I know I make them sound like monsters—”

  I made a face, though I knew he wasn’t looking at me. “Honestly? That’s kind of doing a disservice to monsters.”

  “Well, bottom line, they really weren’t all that bad. And I really did frustrate them a lot. But anyway, I also had no issue with not doing what I was told, especially when it came to cooling my heels in a basement.”

  He leaned down, and from the shushing sound that followed, I decided he was brushing wood chips away from the wall. “I started to explore those lower levels, and then I started to create better tools for exploration. Now I’m never without them, because, well…”

  He broke off, and the answer to whatever he was going to say flowed into my mind as if I was talking to Zach, not Liam. I might not be mind melding, but I knew I was right.

  “You never knew when they were going to do it, did you?” I asked, my heart twisting all over again. “That’s why you always carry that backpack with you. Because you never wanted to be caught unprepared for when your family decided to be a bunch of dickheads.”

  “Again, it’s not like I didn’t understand where they were coming from. I just didn’t necessarily agree with their solution to the problem.”

  “Ya think?”

  The device in his hand gave a tiny, hushed beep, and Liam wagged his flashlight, beckoning me over.

  “Bingo,” he said as I hurried to his side. I peered into the darkness, seeing, well, nothing but a stone wall in front of my face.

  “And bingo would be…?”

  Liam tapped the softly beeping gizmo. “This little guy likes to find holes behind walls that shouldn’t be there. Most of these old passageways that were man-made have false fronts, exit doors, if you will, because well, my family wasn’t the first set of rich old magicians to be a bunch of douchebags. A lot of times, they’d forget people were down here working for them, hollowing out the subterranean passages of Boston’s richest neighborhoods, and people could die before somebody remembered to go check on the help. Workers weren’t stupid, especially those who had the modest level of power needed for these kind of jobs. They put back doors in place to protect themselves.”

  Well, that certainly explained why he hadn’t been nervous about the fall. But the wall looked pretty solid to me, solid and made of rock, not wood.

  “Okay,” I allowed. “So do you have a lockpick for a bunch of stones jammed together?”

  “I do not, as it happens, but we don’t need one. Our guys were smart enough to realize they might get stuck here without the benefit of tools. If they were really smart, or really stupid, take your pick, they might also have thought they might come back one dark and murky night and hit the school for ransacking, in which case they’d want to give the combination to their buddies who were going to help them.”

  “Ransacking? Was that a thing?”

  “More than you might think. My family might have been obnoxious, but again, it wasn’t like they were the only rich people with shit to hide. What ended up happening was an old family would move out of a house and not share its secrets with those who came next. In the interim, if they’d been foolish enough to leave anything behind, maybe forgetting it altogether, which also happened more than you might think, people could get in and steal stuff they didn’t understand. That’s how most magical totems get set loose in the world, and it could be a bitch to get them back. Think about the necklace that caused Zach’s family all the trouble with the demon horde right along with giving them supernatural skills.”

  I frowned. “That was a necklace his great-great-grandfather had gotten from a tinker or something, I thought.” Though Liam was right. That chance acquisition had become a life-changing event for the Williams clan, creating a line of cursed demon hunters that had extended all the way down to Zach.

  “Sure, but how do you think the tinker came across it? Somewhere along the line, that thing was stolen, and a lot of times it was by the people who’d been contracted to work for the rich and spoiled. Step a little closer, and I’ll show you.”

  While he’d been talking, Liam had been tapping the stones one at a time, moving upward in a straight line. Or not quite a straight line, actually—he was alternating stones, almost like…

  “Footsteps,” I blurted as he tapped the same stone he had before.

  “Yup,” he agreed. “Double-checked for safety, but this is the right block.” He pressed his palm into the stone. It pushed in easily. A second later, a rusty set of gears turned, and a door opened in the glare of the flashlight beam with an exhale of moldy air.

  “Boom,” Liam said. “Measuring from the ground up, this stone marks the number of steps it took for us to get from the iron gates to the point in the street where we fell through.”

  I stared at him. “You were tracking the number of our steps while we were walking?”

  “Not consciously, but yeah. Everything is a pattern, a series. When you break it down that way for as long as I have, it just becomes second nature.”

  “Maybe for you,” I said, and he chuckled.

  “Bottom line, there’s a reason why it’s always good to find a guy who’ll hold the door open for you.” He waggled his brows. “Only in this case, I’m going to need a little extra help.”

  He gestured me forward, and together we pushed the door open the rest of the way, then stepped into a dank passageway. We closed the door behind us, my heart giving a little lurch as the door clicked shut. “Okay, then,” I muttered.

  Liam flashed his light around. “You don’t have anything to worry about. Where we are is infinitely better than where we were, which was a hole that could be opened up by a bad guy at any time. So we’re already making progress. Best I can tell, we have about two hundred yards to the front door of the school, and I’m betting there won’t be much in our way between here and there. You ready to find out?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer, but tucked his gizmo back into his pack, then reached for my hand. I felt the spark of energy arc as we connected, like a string of Christmas lights flaring to life, but Liam didn’t hesitate. He set off at a fast pace, hunched over with one hand carrying the flashlight, his arm stretched high and in front of him. Not only did that position the light at an ideal angle, it turned his hand into an early warning system in case the passage got tighter—which it did, twice. Score one for the benefits of experience.

  “All right, here we go,” he murmured. By now, we were moving more slowly, almost hunched over, but the corridor terminated in an actual door this time, complete with a lock. “Not a complete back door—these people expected to be bringing whatever fell through the street back, just not in a way that anyone could tell. That’s…interesting.”

  I made a face in the gloom as he fished out his lockpicks. “You mean the girls, don’t you? Some of their young women who maybe were tired of being exceptional and wanted out?”

  “Maybe. Though I’d expect word would get out pretty quickly to the students to avoid the main entry street if they were going to make a break for it. But this passageway is too uniform and long—and it ends in a door. It had to have been used all the time.”

  He made short work of the lock, and this time when he opened the doorway, there was an actual floor on the other side. We stepped into a cool, mildew-smelling basement
lined with empty metal shelves. There were windows set high into the walls that let in a thin trickle of light through the thick, dirty glass, and Liam clucked as if recognizing an old friend.

  “You never forget that smell,” he muttered, and I squeezed his hand in solidarity.

  The gesture seemed to catch him off guard, and he stopped, swiveling back to me.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask. Are you okay? This isn’t freaking you out, is it?”

  “Not at all,” I began, though I was so happy to have his undivided attention, I regretted my words immediately. Liam stared at me, his cheeks flushed, his body practically quivering with excitement. “I think it might be scary if you weren’t here, but—you are.”

  “I am,” he murmured, and, as if he suddenly realized we were alone, safe, and out of the dark and cramped passageway, he gave me a slow grin. “Don’t get me wrong, though. Things could still get dangerous here—”

  The ceiling dissolved into a sea of screeching bats.

  18

  “Duck!” Liam didn’t have time to say any more as the creatures from the ceiling descended upon us. They were less bats than winged insects, but insects the size of small rodents, their segmented bodies and flying legs creating a gruesome counterpoint to their rapidly buzzing wings.

  “What the hell?” I shrieked, bobbing and weaving to avoid the creatures’ sharp stingers. I yanked my knives out again, but they weren’t all that useful. Unlike the spiders in the library, these bastards had some bite to them, and every few feet, I yelped in pain as one of them scored a direct hit.

  “This way!” Liam directed, and I followed him willingly, blindly, some distant part of my brain registering the fact that no matter how great a monster hunter I thought I was, it was impossible to combat a swarm with a couple of knives. Even if I graduated with the guys the way Symmes seemed to think we would, I needed those classes in spell craft.