The Hunter's Vow (Monster Hunter Academy Book 4) Read online

  Cyrus had to have known her—loved her. He had to have! Even if he was shocked by her deception, rejected the idea of her even being able to have his child, there had to have been something there. Right?

  Inexorably, Grim’s words came back to me. Don’t try to put your emotions or intentions upon our kind or any kind in the monster realm. We are not you.

  I sighed, still unable to tear my attention away from the beautiful painting. How could he not love her, no matter what? Even if he was a snail at heart?

  “Found it.” Zach’s announcement cut across my thoughts, and I shook myself hard, swaying back. The moment my face edged back from the threshold, the room returned to its same boring cell-like interior. Skinny windows, a single bench shoved up against the wall. No flowers, no light, no painting of my mother. I longed to sway forward again, to see the illusion that Cyrus had left for me. Instead I faced forward, resolute.

  Grim was right. This place was a trap. The sooner we found out what the gray wizard’s intentions were, the better. We needed enough ammunition to fight the man, not to understand him.

  Tyler stood at the doorway at the end of the hallway, gesturing me forward. The other guys were nowhere in sight.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  I grimaced, forcing myself not to look back at the other room.

  I hurried forward and let Tyler usher me into the room. The fact that the guys were already in there made me confident that this room, at least, wasn’t completely a trap. That didn’t make it any less incredible.

  The gray wizard’s office was downright amazing. A large wooden desk sat in the center of a perfectly circular room. A semicircle of bookcases lined the wall where we entered, while the other side was taken up by open windows that stretched floor to ceiling, somehow not buffeted into sparkling fragments by the winds that had to be swirling around the turret this high up.

  Before the window sat a dozen or so magnifying devices and telescopes, an ornate astrolabe, and books open on small tables, footstools, and chairs. It was the office of a man who loved learning and loved books. I tried to reconcile that image with the tall, thin, furious wizard who had ordered the horde of Tasmanian devils to chew their way across the landscape toward us during the battle above Lake Bashai.

  “Nina,” Zach said, drawing my attention, and as I glanced at him, he gestured to the wall behind the large desk. Cut into the bookshelf was a small ledge, which held another painting. The view was the same as the painting in the room that had transformed into the solarium, but this was only of my mother’s face, bright eyed, smiling, and mischievous.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” Zach asked, clearly not having realized what I’d seen down the hall. “That’s your mom?”

  “Um…yeah. It sure looks like her.” I glanced at Grim. “Can I touch it?”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. He stood in the center of the room, his hands out. “This room is heavily warded. We touch anything, we’ll have an army of wraiths descending on us.”

  “But how does that make any sense?” Liam protested. “We’ve literally walked right into the guy’s fortress of solitude all the way to his office. Surely he should have put up the velvet rope before now.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting to see what we’ll do.”

  “From across the veil?” Tyler asked. “You think he’s monitoring us from the other side? Like he’s with the Hallowells right now?”

  “No,” Grim said with finality. “When you’re on the other side, you lose most of your connection with this side, seeing only the faintest images, and that’s only if your magic is very, very good. You don’t know what’s going on in this realm until you cross back through a portal. Then, depending on your level of magic, you may know everything that has happened or nothing at all, but the barrier is complete. Time passes differently here than it does on Earth.”

  “No shit?” Liam asked, surprised all over again. “That’s both interesting and potentially crazy.”

  “Wait a minute. So how old are you really, then?” Tyler asked. “Like in years that you actually count?”

  Grim shook his head. “Focus. You’re hunters of Wellington Academy. Is there anything in this room that you recognize, anything at all? Anything you would identify as markers from the academy?”

  “Wait a minute, I understand what you’re doing here. You’re searching for the hunters, aren’t you?” Zach asked, peering at Grim. “The other hunters of Wellington Academy. You figure Cyrus has them? Or stuck them somewhere?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Grim said. “There’s a lot of money tied up in supporting the monster hunter minors, not the least of which was the money funneled to the hunters themselves. They die, that money goes away. But if they’re alive, the money fills their coffers year after year. And by extension, the coffers of whoever controls them.”

  “Yeah, but…” Tyler countered, glancing around the room. “They have to exist on our plane. If their life force disappeared…” He frowned.

  Grim nodded. “If their life force disappeared, the money would stop. It hasn’t stopped. That would have clued in the board earlier than these past few weeks. They’re getting information now that these hunters have died, but they’re not thinking about the money. Not yet. Whereas the Hallowells, that’s all they thought about. They created the perfect prison, or at least I hope they did. If they killed all the hunters outright, if they were able to do that, then they’re stronger than even I’ve prepared for.”

  He gestured around the room. “Meanwhile, the gray wizard is known for many magical abilities, but one of those is his skill with portals. The Akari can tend portals, and many magic wielders can create them, but Cyrus? He can make one out of thin air and point it to wherever he needs to go. That’s very powerful magic.”

  “And it’d make it super easy for him to pluck an unsuspecting monster hunter out of whatever corner of the world he was fighting in and transfer him to a cell of the Hallowells’ choosing,” Zach said, nodding. “That’s pretty slick.”

  “I don’t see how…” Tyler shook his head, not finishing his thought. Meanwhile, I scanned the room as well, trying to focus on anything but the tiny painting of my mom, but not knowing at all what I should be searching for. I had been a member of Wellington Academy for only a couple of weeks, and though I’d picked up a lot in that short time, I certainly wouldn’t recognize the arcane tools of the trade. I didn’t even know if there were arcane tools of the trade, especially those that might be used to hide monster hunters.

  Of course, I knew that the hunters of Wellington Academy used iron knives and implements—but not the silver beads, or anything like them. Those had come too much as a surprise to the other guys. And then, of course, there were the books. I cast a glance over the enormous bookcase behind the magician’s desk. There were any number of possibilities here, either legitimate tomes of magic or false fronts where they could have hidden precious objects.

  Where would the gray wizard hide something so important? Or maybe more importantly, what would motivate him to work with the Hallowells?

  I glanced at the devices on the floor in front of the large window, the open books. I thought about my mother, her natural curiosity, her delight in anything that grew. I’d never seen her as happy as she had been in the painting both in the solarium and the miniature that this strange wizard had enshrined on his shelf.

  What had brought Mom to this realm, and what had chased her away? These weren’t the most important questions that needed to be answered here, maybe, but they were the most important questions to me.

  “What would a magician want?” I asked suddenly. “You’ve got all this, you’ve got everything. What would make you betray the other remaining two magicians in the realm and throw your hat in with an entirely different race? Like, who would do that?”

  “Maybe they offered him something he couldn’t refuse?” Liam answered first. “Maybe they offered to give him something he cou
ldn’t get otherwise?”

  “Maybe, but what would that be? And don’t say my mother, because if the Hallowells had known about Mom hooking up with a mighty magician from another freaking realm, Elaine wouldn’t have been so surprised that she’d survived. And she definitely wouldn’t have let me live.”

  “They didn’t know,” Grim agreed. “If your mother had been a part of the gray wizard’s life, she was a secret. There’s nothing a magician likes more than a secret.”

  “So what other secrets was he keeping?” Zach asked. “Both for the Hallowells and against them?”

  None of us had any answers, and Tyler eventually sighed. “Zach, you got anything? Liam?”

  “There’s plenty of energy here, but it’s a jumbled mess,” Zach said, while Liam only shook his head, slightly lifting a hand as he scanned the room. “There’s something here, something out of place, but I don’t know quite what it is. I haven’t studied the history of Wellington Academy enough, and this trap was sprung a half century ago—or at least that’s when the numbers of the hunters started to dwindle. Anyone surviving much longer than that wouldn’t be much good to us anymore anyway. Way too old.”

  “Right…” I said, but before I could ask him anything more, a thin, high-pitched whistle sounded from Liam’s bag, so faint as to be the cry of a baby bird, but loud in the silence of our collective frustration.

  Liam pulled open the bag, rooting through it. “Frost? Can he be trying to reach us?”

  “Ha,” Tyler said, peering around at the windows. “There’s that portal in Lowell Library. Maybe he found it?”

  “Well, he’s not an idiot,” Liam drawled. “And we did leave a stairway right in front of the damned mirror. But that was targeted toward Grim’s domain.”

  “No,” Grim said. “It would be targeted to anyone from Wellington Academy. You found Nina and me, Frost finds us.”

  Liam’s brows went up. “Could we find the hunters, then? Potentially?”

  “Only if they were stuck in the monster realm,” Tyler reminded him. “Which again would cut off the connection. They wouldn’t be considered living.”

  Liam lifted his hands to his temples, pressing hard. “They wouldn’t, no. That’s important.”

  The shrill whistle sounded again, and Liam muttered something, then crossed the room to his bag and pulled out a small device I didn’t recognize.

  “Frost’s triggered every alarm he has access to in Lowell Library. He needs help.” He sighed. “We’ve gotta go back.”

  “But how?” I asked.

  “That, at least, is no mystery.” Grim gestured toward the tall open windows. “We jump.”

  “Jump?” Zach peered over the edge of windowsill. “It’s an awful long way down.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m a portal tender,” Grim said. “This one is solid.”

  As the guys talked, I strolled as casually as I could manage over to Cyrus’s desk, then slipped behind it, totally selling the idea that I was studying the books on the shelf…or so I hoped. I could feel the whispering and scurrying of wraiths as they gathered in the corners of the turreted room, but I couldn’t help myself. How much harm would it do to pick it up—look at it?

  Take it?

  “Nina,” Grim said quietly, so quietly I almost doubted he’d spoken at all. But his next murmur sealed it. “You’ll have about four seconds to get across the room. Okay?”

  I nodded quickly as the tension of the other guys ratcheted up another notch, but no one spoke as I leisurely scanned the books, taking another step forward…

  Reaching up as if to tap one of the nearby books, I could hear the hiss of excitement from the corners of the room, the coiled pressure of the wraiths waiting for one wrong move. I was so close, though. My mother’s face, her smile, her eyes—

  I darted my hand forward, grabbing for the miniature.

  21

  The walls, ceilings, and floors practically detonated, shooting streamers of smoke whistling in all directions as the wraiths of the gray wizard’s castle burst into action.

  Jerking to the side, I scooped up the miniature of my mother, realizing belatedly that it was shaped like an egg cut in half, encrusted with gems and heavier than I expected. I bobbled the bauble, then gripped my fingers around it and whirled toward Grim and the others—Grim had taken three steps toward me and lunged for my free hand. He yanked me to him with brutal strength, but I needed no urging. He might be the rogue leader of the Akari, and I might be the harbinger, but I would follow him anywhere, even over the side of a cliff—

  Especially with a whirlwind of screeching wraiths on our tail.

  We made no attempt to fight the things off either, just bent beneath the raking claws, the biting teeth that cut and ripped with surprising pain for creatures that were made out of smoke. With Tyler shouting spells of protection to cover us as best as he could, we lurched forward, not breaking stride as we reached the window. At the last second, I squeezed Grim’s hand tight and he refocused on me, his grin wild and fierce.

  Then we jumped.

  The makeshift stairway of tables was still in place in the library, but it wasn’t prepared for five bodies landing on it at the same time. Grim and I crashed down hard enough to send the table skittering forward, falling off the second table and crashing sideways to the floor. Liam leapt completely over the tables, while Zach and Tyler went careening off to the side, colliding hard into the nearest bookshelves.

  In the center of all this, Commander Frost stood in his usual work shirt and heavy pants, his bushy beard a touch unkempt, his even bushier eyebrows drawn tight, and his bulky arms folded over his broad chest, like some sort of a long-suffering grandfather lumberjack, even though he wasn’t quite that old. I got the impression we may have added a few years to his age with this move.

  Grim rolled to his feet, then helped me up, keeping his hand braced under my elbow as I steadied myself. I still gripped my mother’s painting in one fist, which I kept tight against my side.

  Frost glared at him. “Were you ever planning to tell us the truth about your past?” he demanded, sounding as weary as he looked. To my surprise, Grim sighed.

  “I’m not as strong as I would want to be in this realm. All my energy was directed to protecting the harbinger, both her existence and, when she arrived here, herself.”

  “Yo, the harbinger is right here,” I offered. “You don’t need to speak about me in the third person.”

  Grim and Commander Frost kept glaring at each other. “You shouldn’t exist,” Frost said, though he kept studying Grim for a long moment before shifting his gaze to me. Did he mean Grim or me in this particular case? It was so hard to keep track.

  Grim didn’t respond, in any event, which left me holding the why do you exist bag. “Well, so, good news…we found my dad?”

  “In the monster realm, yes, I gathered that,” Frost said. “Which is a problem. At the founding of the academy, there were deep, magical laws put in place to prevent such things from happening. In other words, your existence breaks the most fundamental rules between the realms,” Frost explained. He scowled more deeply. “You need the full briefing. Easier in the war room, and the wards are better.”

  Without further discussion, he headed for the small antechamber that extended off the main hall of the library. The war room of the monster hunter minor was a small unprepossessing room with a long central table, several laptop computer stations set up, and all four walls covered with screens. For the moment, the screens were dead, and the room felt dead, I realized. I peered around with a frown, and Liam noticed it too.

  “Magical dead zone?” he offered. “Hey, maybe this time it will work.”

  Commander Frost grimaced. “Not a dead zone, but an enhanced spell of protection. Words can’t adequately explain how duped we were by the Hallowells. Symmes and the board are still reeling.”

  “How much time has passed since I left the campus?” I asked.

  “Nifty feature of the monster realm,�
� Liam put in. “Time moves differently, and not predictably if I’m picking up the subtext, which is also super handy. No one was willing to square the exact space-time continuum question with me, and don’t think I didn’t notice that, Grim.”

  Grim didn’t respond to that jibe, so Frost did. “It’s been three days since you first left. We were only minorly concerned that first night, as we received textual verification that you were okay, even if we’d lost other means of connecting with you. By the next morning, things went south quickly, and our efforts to locate you proved fruitless. Then came the alert from Elaine Hallowell on that afternoon, where she outlined Grim’s deception. That admission set off a firestorm of activity that hasn’t abated, even as we maintained Grim’s innocence, more or less.”

  “More or less,” Grim said drily. “Given the way the guys attacked me when they came through the portal, I’d hate to see what would have happened had you thought I was guilty.”

  “Dude, you could have told us,” Tyler reminded him, as if that were obvious to all. “And I get it, I get you couldn’t tell us because you couldn’t risk breaking the seal on your brain, but we would have figured out a way to make it work.”

  Grim shrugged. “Maybe, if we had the luxury of time. But from the moment Nina set foot on campus until where we are now, it’s been less than three weeks. That level of speed has been to our detriment, but also to the detriment of the Hallowells. They weren’t prepared for Nina.”

  “And that’s because of you,” Frost said. “You and Rose McKinley, some twenty-four years ago.”

  The weight of the painting in my hand intensified, so I loosened my hold on it. Blocked from Frost’s view by Grim’s big body, I tucked it into a pocket in my silvery Akari leggings. I adjusted my long tunic over it, hoping the bulk of it wasn’t too obvious. I’d probably never get over hearing my mother referred to as anything other than Janet Cross. Rose McKinley sounded like a ninety-year-old schoolteacher, or some spinster aunt who shuttled her lonely way between private libraries and her appointments. Not the beaming, vivacious woman I’d seen smiling out of the painting in the gray wizard’s solarium. Not even the quieter but happy woman I’d known my whole life. The woman who’d done everything for me, and who had told me so little of what she’d endured to keep me safe.