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

  “Who was she?” I asked.

  Frost refocused on me. “According to Margaret Pendleton, who’s been researching the subject nonstop, Rose McKinley was a member of the Hallowell family, and though she was a distant relation, her bloodline remained remarkably pure. Her branch of the family had dropped out of the common rolls because they hadn’t made the move to Boston at the same time as the main branch of the Hallowells. There was a short period of time in the 1700s where the magical families came together and deals were struck, arrangements secured, and confidences won. The McKinleys weren’t a part of those arrangements and agreements.”

  “They were probably better off,” scoffed Liam.

  “Perhaps. They didn’t do poorly for themselves, in any event. They lived in Baltimore, remained affluent, and even forged their own way in magic, though with a much lower profile than their more ambitious cousins. Their magic was quieter, more functional.”

  “Plants,” Tyler put in, and Frost nodded.

  “Plants, crystals, energy healing. Enough to prove their magic was real, but not enough to draw attention if no attention was desired. When Rose came to Boston to teach, she had aspirations of working at Wellington Academy or perhaps Twyst, both of which had classes in magical botany. But she met a young woman teaching at a private Montessori school and opted for that instead, contenting herself with merely walking through the streets of Back Bay and Beacon Hill when her schedule allowed.”

  “She always said she loved it here. But why did she say she taught at Beacon Hill Prep?”

  “For that, we reached out to Claudia Graham and the librarians of Wellington Academy,” Frost said. “We never thought to check our records for a researcher. Rose McKinley, who signed her name Rose Kin, visited Wellington Academy’s library several times under the guise of working for one of the magical families. She knew their names, of course, and their names were all that was necessary for entrée.”

  “There were no facial recognition cameras or words that were triggered by her…” I couldn’t even finish my own sentence before the answer occurred to me. “Illusion magic. She knew illusion magic.”

  “It ran strongly in the family line, yes. But we don’t believe Rose necessarily understood she was wielding it. It was her natural response to a threat. In any event, the research shows that the books she was most interested in were those dealing with the Hallowells and their history at Wellington Academy, including the Beacon Hill Preparatory Academy. It seemed likely she was screwing up her nerve to approach the Hallowells, when something changed.”

  “Elaine Hallowell,” Liam said, disgusted.

  But I shook my head. “No. No, that’s not it at all, is it? Elaine didn’t know anything about Rose, not at first.”

  I felt Grim’s eyes on me, but I knew it was right. I knew it in the way my mother had smiled at me from the portrait behind the gray wizard’s desk. His fury at her departure as he shouted at me across the cliff above Lake Bashai. My mother had hurt him by leaving him so abruptly, more than he thought he could be hurt. And that pain had calcified into anger, as most romantic hatred did.

  “There’s a portal in the genealogy section of the Wellington library, isn’t there?” I asked Frost, not needing an answer. “He tapped into it and saw her there. My mother. He saw her, and because she was a Hallowell, she was able to breach the portal and go to him. They carried on some sort of secret relationship. Maybe he never expected it to go as far as it did, maybe he never expected there to be any ramifications. She was a human after all, and he was from another realm.”

  “Nature finds a way,” Zach said softly, and I nodded.

  “Then she got scared. She ran off. Maybe she worried that someone would tell Elaine about what had happened between them, maybe she feared they would conspire together in some awful way to make her or me into some kind of test subject, I don’t know. But she was frightened—by her family, by him, by the Hallowells, by the whole lot of them. She may have written her letter to him, but she never could bring herself to send it, because she knew how dangerous he was. And she warned me away from Wellington Academy because she knew there would be nothing but tragedy for me here—that if I ever came across monster hunters, the whole ugly truth would come out, and I’d be found. Targeted.”

  I felt the attention of all the guys on me, even Commander Frost, and I sighed, lifting a hand and waving off their concern.

  “She was wrong. I wouldn’t trade what I found here for anything. I’ve never had a family—not really. And now I do. I’m just sorry that I brought so much baggage with me.”

  “The baggage of the Hallowells isn’t yours to carry any longer,” Frost said heavily. “It never should have been piled on your shoulders. They’ve gone so far over the bounds of propriety that there’s no return path for them. And they’ll be sanctioned to the fullest extent of the first families’ governance. They won’t be able to lift a finger without it being known by all the families in a five-hundred-mile radius. Their time of magical dominance is over.”

  “Strong words,” Grim said. “Have you got anything to back them up?”

  “The board’s on their way here right now. They’ll want to know what you’ve learned.”

  We argued on for a few more minutes until a soft beep sounded, and Frost’s gaze lifted to one of the screens. A strange flicker rippled across the camera, then it held, depicting the forms of the board members of Wellington Academy. Mr. Symmes, Tyler’s father Theodore Perkins, Liam’s mother Claudia Graham, and a few others I couldn’t pick out at first, but who were undoubtedly Anderson Reid and Meredith Choate.

  Grim narrowed his eyes. “It would be better if they didn’t see me yet. It’s too much to explain when we need to stay focused.”

  “What are you talking about?” Frost protested. “You’re as innocent in this as Nina is.”

  “Your discretion,” Grim countered abruptly, while Frost grimaced.

  “You gave it to my dad,” Zach reminded him.

  Frost rolled his eyes. “God save me from the conspiracies of the young.”

  Nevertheless, when we exited the war room and filed into the main chamber of Lowell Library, Grim stayed behind. As I glanced back, the shadows hung more thickly in the room. Whose magic was this? One of the guys?

  Maybe a little of all of them. Tyler’s mouth was moving, a soft shush of words falling from his lips. Liam was fiddling with his pack. Zach had his hands out, his senses attuned to every shift of energy in the room. Meanwhile, Frost strode ahead, burly and determined. Our protector to the end, even when he didn’t agree with us.

  The board assembled, looking remarkably cheerful despite the evident danger to the academy. They were dressed in their usual academy-appropriate attire—suits on the men, cashmere sweaters and linen pants on Claudia Graham, while Meredith Choate wore a subdued, dusky-purple dress and sensible shoes. While Claudia’s hair remained stubbornly frosted the color of fine champagne and perfectly coiffed, the rest of them showed various signs of graying—and their faces were lined, tired, but not defeated. The attacks on the campus were taking a lot out of them, but they weren’t giving up yet. Not by a long shot.

  “What have you learned?” Symmes asked eagerly.

  Frost lifted a quelling hand, then proceeded to lie through his teeth.

  “We were able to reclaim Nina, but there’s no sign of Grim. She was struck on the head almost immediately, and then drugged to keep her quiet.”

  He glanced at me, and I did my best to appear mildly concussed. “I’m sure my memories will come back,” I said, sounding as disgusted as I could. “I’m sure of it.”

  “They will,” Mr. Perkins said with remarkable assurance. “Memory is a tricky thing, particularly if you were taken across the veil to the monster realm. You’ll be fine.”

  Meredith Choate shivered. “Ghastly,” she murmured.

  “You’ve had time to talk, though,” Symmes said curtly, a general marshaling his troops. “What are your plans to take out the Hallowells
?”

  I blinked at the man’s determination. Clearly he and Frost had already had this conversation, but once again Frost’s response was measured.

  “We’ll do whatever the board directs. If the Hallowells are planning to unleash a tide of monsters against Wellington Academy, we’ll protect the academy with our lives.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you will,” Theodore Perkins said, with such upper-crust hauteur that even Tyler reddened. His father really could be an ass.

  “But what is your plan, specifically?” Symmes pressed. “What defenses do we have against something like this? You’ve had three days. Surely you’ve got something put together.”

  “Of course I do,” Frost said stiffly.

  “It will start with this,” Liam said. And he straightened, holding up a small device that I had seen once or twice before. My eyes shot wide. What in the…

  It was a detector of illusion magic. He’d used it against Elaine Hallowell, and now he tossed it high, as if to capture everyone’s attention before he grabbed it again out of the air.

  Instead, this tiny device exploded in a crackle of fire, and the air snapped tight around us, and suddenly, the board members had vanished…and five heavily armed Laram soldiers stood in their place, bows drawn.

  “Nina,” Liam shouted, and I turned to him as he yanked two fistfuls of small bags out of his pack and threw them at me. I knew immediately what they were: the silver beads. Something only a monster could wield against another monster, at least with any great effect.

  And I was just the girl for the job.

  22

  I rushed forward, but the guys weren’t without their offense either. Tyler began shouting, and with each new phrase, a series of electrical events took off around the room, shooting bolts, exploding lights, the sound of heavy locks rotating.

  The last had to be pure trickery, but it affected the Laram the most. They glanced around in sudden alarm, and I realized this was probably a group that wasn’t used to being confined. Freaking brilliant.

  The flanking warriors are your targets, Zach alerted me in my mind. Number one and number five. I blinked, not understanding at first, but these Laram had to be the more powerful ones. That meant they were mine. Fortunately, I was closest to number five, or at least the fifth one over from the right, and I hurled my first bag of silver beads at him, only half believing that this tried-and-true method would still really work. But sure enough, the fifth Laram staggered back, not disintegrating, but definitely hurt. He gaped at me in stunned surprise, and I hurled my second bag.

  This one hit the mark. Recognition flashed across the Laram’s face as he disintegrated.

  Meanwhile, Liam had rushed forward with implements of his own, focusing on the center of the group, close enough that it was hand-to-hand combat. I bounded for Laram number one as a roar sounded behind me, and I ducked in time to allow Grim to hurdle over me and land squarely on another Laram, the two of them rolling end over end, slashing and tearing at each other. The element of surprise was on our side, as someone had clearly not informed the Laram that Grim was back. I didn’t have my beads anymore, but I wasn’t completely weaponless. Between Tyler’s spell craft and my iron-bladed knife, we attacked the last Laram. He didn’t disintegrate, but flashed into a shockingly bright light, then disappeared.

  “What the hell was that?” Liam asked, flinching away in reaction as the Laram he was fighting also disappeared. “That’s new. I don’t like that.”

  “You shouldn’t like it,” Grim said. “We have no way of knowing if those Laram died, disappearing like that, or if they were taken back by whoever sent them, or if they somehow managed to escape back to the monster realm on their own, the same way the Akari learned to do. If they were dead, that’s one thing. If they were alive and were recalled, we can assume their mission will be completed and they’ll report back.”

  “Well, they won’t have much to say,” Frost decided. He stood to the side, and I realized he was glowing a bright blue, energy skittering off his shoulders and down his arms. He’d contributed his own magic to the fight. “We gave them no indication of how we were going after the Hallowells.”

  “Probably because we still don’t have a clue?” Tyler offered drily.

  Frost shrugged. “They didn’t know that, but more to the point—they got in. Which means something is deeply wrong with the wards of Lowell Library. Again.”

  Liam groaned, scanning the ceiling and far walls of the room in disgust. “How is that possible? We just shored them up. How can they keep failing?”

  Frost shook his head, more concerned than I’d ever seen him. “It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be happening. Everything is moving too fast.”

  “Well, that’s entirely their plan, obviously,” Tyler said, and Grim stood back, eyeing the floor where the Laram had attacked.

  “Those were long-term soldiers for the Hallowells, not new recruits. They knew what they were doing. They were disciplined and focused.”

  “Agreed.” Liam turned toward Frost. “What’s the point of illusion magic?” he demanded.

  Frost squinted back at him. “To distract you.”

  “The board,” Tyler blurted. “Where are they?”

  Frost jolted. “Wellesley Hall,” he said. “We’d planned to meet there, but they decided to risk coming here instead.”

  “Fuck.” Liam already had his phone in his hand and was texting furiously. “I’ve got no signal for Mom’s phone, and her tracker is registering no movement.”

  I started at him. “Tracker?” I demanded.

  Despite the gravity of the moment, he offered me a grin. “What can I say? Assholery runs in our family, and she’s a menace.”

  “The tunnels,” Grim said. “It’s faster.”

  He took off down a long line of bookcases, leaving us with no choice but to follow him. He cut a hard right and then a left at the end of the stacks, leading to a door. Pulling it open hard enough to make it bang against the wall, he dove into the shadows and clattered down a set of stairs.

  “What is this?” Liam demanded, though he sounded more intrigued than irritated. We all piled after them, running low and fast, the sound of our footsteps and huffing breaths enough to keep me oriented despite the gloom in the subterranean corridors. Within only a few minutes, we’d found another set of stairs, and pounded upward.

  The door into Wellesley Hall was probably warded, but that didn’t slow down Grim. He shouldered through it as if it were made out of wrapping paper, and we found ourselves in some sort of spare room in the building, little more than a coat closet. A second later, we all spilled out into the hallway.

  “How in the hell did you know that existed? I’ve been over the campus’s maps a thousand times,” Liam muttered, his irritation plain.

  “I redrew the maps,” Grim grunted, and Liam’s gasp of betrayal was quickly overcome by his shout of dismay as we rounded the corner to the main meeting room of Wellesley Hall.

  “Mom!” he called out, and rushed forward, Tyler at his side. I stood back for a moment and let the guys move forward, Grim coming to a halt by my side. The board of directors of Wellington Academy, the ruling body of the monster hunters, had been completely taken out. They were bound, gagged, and bleeding, and one body lay crumpled over on its side, a burly man made small in his defeat.

  “I’ll get him,” Grim muttered, and he took off for the collapsed council member, who I realized distantly was Anderson Reid. I didn’t know if Grim had any real magic in him to bring a man back from death, but I wasn’t going to argue. Instead, I angled toward a pair of shoes I saw sticking out from behind a table, and I rushed around the structure to see Margaret Pendleton, out cold with a shocking wound on her forehead. Blood had splattered across her light-blue cashmere sweater and matted her steel-gray hair, scuff marks and stains marring the creamy linen pants. Struck down like this, much like Anderson Reid, she could have been somebody’s grandma, a little old lady who should never have been set upon by armed
intruders. She should have been drinking tea somewhere.

  “Oh my God, what were you doing?” I gasped as I dropped to my knees. “What happened to you? How could you have been so careless?”

  My hushed rebuke pulled Margaret out of her stupor, and her eyelids fluttered, her mouth opening and closing, her careful lipstick grotesquely smudged, lending her even more of an air of frailty.

  I didn’t want to move her in case something had happened to her back, but she jerked awake with a bolt of awareness and sat straight up, her eyes wide, her mouth opening in a startled squawk.

  “Nina! Oh thank heavens you came. What on earth—”

  With that surge of energy, Margaret was once more winded, and she slumped forward, I caught her just in time, then helped her to her feet, my heart twisting as she clung to me. She seemed so much smaller than she had before.

  We shifted toward the others, Grim still bent over Reid, Tyler and Liam with their parents, and Zach ministering to Symmes and Choate with low, calming words. Exactly as this preacher’s son had been taught to do at his father’s side. Symmes finally brushed him off.

  “We were taken completely by surprise,” he said, turning to us. “We were expecting you, all of you, and you came in. Our cameras registered you with facial recognition, but the wards gave no indication whatsoever. It was only when the bastards reached this room that they shifted appearance, and then it was too late.”

  “Mind reading?” Liam asked Zach sharply. Zach sat back, shaking his head.

  “There’s energy here, but not that kind of energy. It’s been deflected. The wards held at least that well.”

  “We weren’t discussing anything of merit,” Symmes said. “We were waiting for you.”