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

  “What the…” Liam said at the same time. I looked up to see Grim at the far end of the ballroom, deep in conversation with Frost.

  “How in the world did he…” I began.

  “He didn’t,” Liam said tightly. “That guy in the doorway wasn’t Gri—”

  Before he could finish, every window in the room exploded, and a gale-force wind blasted across the floor.

  25

  It was a testament to the superior breeding of the first families of Wellington Academy that nobody screamed. I didn’t even scream, though I really felt like it. A swarm of six-foot-tall, winged creatures, like hornets with long, spindly human legs and arms, antennae flapping furiously as their multiple appendages shot out in all directions, attacked the first families. The abdomens of the hornets curled between their obscene-looking legs, dripping poison from a large, long barb.

  This also should have been scream-worthy, but it was nothing compared to the reaction when the closest hornet attacked an elderly woman with hair so frosted, it appeared almost blue beneath the lights. It buried the dagger-barb deep into her abdomen, and she definitely screamed then.

  “Is this real?” I cried, and it felt like a fair question given the chaos all around us. Across the room, Grim and Frost were punching their way through a swarm of insects that had cornered half a dozen people, their cries for help finally surpassing their need for decorum.

  “Sure looks real to me,” Tyler shouted. “Liam?”

  “Need to get my friggin’ pack,” Liam gasped, and he grabbed my hand, the two of us going electric with energy as we arrowed our way through the swarm toward the main door of the ballroom. Meanwhile, Tyler took off in the other direction, shouting a long, complicated stream of Latin that set the nearest bugs on fire. All the while, I got the sense that we were being watched, assessed. I didn’t like it.

  “Is this some new kind of test?” I hazarded, desperately trying to come up with any explanation that didn’t end with “we’re all going to die,” but Liam shook his head.

  “Not the kind of test that Symmes and his cronies are behind, I can guarantee you that. This whole building means too much to them. They’re not about to screw it up.”

  As if to punctuate his words, another window shattered as we ran past it, new shouts coming from the front of the building.

  We cleared a knot of insects only to plunge directly into the next, this one with an all-too-familiar face at its center, her arms spread-eagled in her gorgeous, glittering dress as two separate hornets tried to haul her off in different directions.

  “Mom,” Liam shouted, and something in his voice shifted through the room, dropping the nearest insects into heaps of scales. Not just his voice, I realized. He had brought his hands around, activating the fire chutes in his palm, apparently oblivious to the pain as he raked the streams of fire back and forth in short, quick bursts. The insects screeched and released Claudia, who crumpled to the ground. I raced forward, rolling her over, but as soon as she registered who I was, her gaze dropped to my neck.

  “The pearls, damn it! I knew it.” She struggled to her feet as Liam caught up to us.

  “The enemy was here the whole time,” she said. “I tried to keep you safe. Goddammit, how could I have been so foolish?”

  All this sounded a little too much like her slamming Liam, but he seemed to take it in stride. His hands still smoking, he ripped an arc of fire in a wide circle around his mother, keeping the insects at bay.

  “Keep them contained,” he shouted at her, then grabbed my hand, making me yelp with pain as the heat from his palms seared mine. The shock was instantaneous, but gone just as quickly, and I dashed with him through the door and down the hallway.

  We leapt over the body of one of the tuxedoed staffers, who hopefully was still breathing, but we didn’t have time to check.

  “They got the pack, they got the pack, they got the pack,” Liam muttered, but when we burst into a small antechamber halfway down the corridor, clearly some sort of coat closet on steroids, his concerns were proven at least partially false. A trio of flapping hornets had his backpack, all right, but they weren’t able to lift it, it appeared. They strained to pull it up off the floor, but it wouldn’t budge. The moment we entered the room, the farthest hornet spun toward the wall and screeched at us with an ear-shattering cry. A door opened in the wall where no door had been, and the first hornet rushed through it, leaving its fellows behind buzzing menacingly around the bag. Liam tried his fire palms again, his face contorting in pain as the mechanism failed to work, but our momentum still carried us forward.

  “What else you got?” I shouted, but no answer was forthcoming, leaving me to lean down and grab for my iron knife, which of course was not attached to my ankle. Instead, I had a pair of gleaming pumps, which would do nobody any good. I ripped them off my feet anyway and came up swinging.

  My first roundhouse punch caught one of the hornets somewhere shy of its head but just before the main portion of its body, the motion enough to knock it into its fellow. The two of them were far lighter than I expected, but then again, these things were intended to fly. Having a dense central body probably wasn’t a good idea.

  Either way, they screeched back upright, their wings pumping as they attacked me, and I darted to the side and then back again, trying to distract them as Liam finally collapsed on his bag. The left hornet was much more aggressive with his abdominal barb, and I screeched in real pain as it connected with my arm.

  “I thought these were illusions,” I protested, and Liam jerked his head up, pulling something from his pack and throwing it my way. Beads, I realized. A net bag of the shiny metal beads Grim had collected from the demonology department for me. I didn’t know how well those would work against the murder hornets, but I caught the bag, then turned and chucked it at the pair of insects—who exploded into bug parts.

  “It would appear that we are dealing with an illusionist who can also commandeer monsters,” Liam said grimly. “One who really has a thing for bugs.”

  “You got that right,” I muttered, leaning over and blowing out a heavy breath. We could still hear the sounds of fighting behind us, but both of us turned toward the door that had been cut into the wall.

  Liam shouldered his pack and strode over to the hole, peering down.

  “This totally connects to the subterranean passages. It has to. There probably was an actual door in this wall at one point that got covered over with all this paneling. Which means…”

  I was getting the hang of things now, so I finished for him. “Which means our illusionist bug wrangler knows Wellington Academy. He or she’s gotta be someone from the founding families. It narrows down the pool of possibilities a lot, yeah?”

  “Kind of stupid, though,” Liam countered. “Why expose yourself? Why put yourself at risk?”

  “Because you got what you needed? Your work is done here?”

  We looked at each other, a sudden chill striking us both.

  “You’re probably right, but that’s not good. We need to get that bastard and find out what he knows—and what’s coming.” He leaned over again, trying to peer through the gloom. “I don’t know what’s down there.”

  At that moment, a stream of insects burst from the hallway and into the coat closet, screeching toward us with flapping wings outstretched and barbs dripping poison.

  “I don’t care—let’s go.” I pushed Liam through the hole and followed immediately after.

  The fall was a bit farther than I had planned. Liam hit first with a noticeable oof and scrambled over onto his back, his arms going up to protect himself against my much less graceful tumble. His body ended up absorbing most of my weight, and we lay there, dazed for a second, breathing heavily and watching the angry buzzing swarm far above us. The insects apparently had not been given permission to follow us into the tunnel, which, frankly, was okay by me.

  “So now what?” I asked as we shakily brought ourselves to our feet. Liam clipped a light to the handle o
f his pack, cutting through the gloom.

  “You got jabbed by the things, right?” he asked.

  I nodded and held out my arms. The welts bubbling on my skin were visible in the dim glow of his pack lamp. “I don’t think that helps us, though. I mean, it was definitely a monster, not an illusion, but it wasn’t the illusionist himself.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe something,” Liam muttered, pulling out a cloth from his bag and pressing it down on my skin. I hissed in pain, but when he lifted the cloth, the welts had decreased markedly and the towel bore a deep purple stain.

  “That’s a manufactured poison,” he said. “A manufactured poison injected into a monster that likes to jab things. Pretty cool, pretty slick. Someone’s been dicking with monster parts. That’s all kinds of screwed up.” Once again, he was muttering, locked in some plane of analysis I couldn’t follow, but I let him ramble.

  “We’ve got to move,” I said when he finally stopped muttering.

  “Yup, we do,” he said, apparently having come to some conclusion. “I’ve got trackers that can help us with that.”

  He slid his pack forward and rummaged through it, coming up with a small key-fob-size device, much like the compass that had taken us back to Fowlers Hall.

  “The most basic tracker of all,” he confirmed. “It just picks up on magic. Hold my hand.”

  He didn’t have to ask me twice.

  With Liam and me linked, the tracker didn’t target us, but pointed to the shadowy passage ahead. We took off at a fast clip. The corridor ran without any turnoffs for a good fifty feet, then teed off to the right and left. Liam tried turning right, but the tracker insisted that he go the other way, so we did.

  “I’m thinking, and this is just a guess, that these passageways aren’t as familiar to the illusionist as he’d like them to be. I’m down here all the time, and I’m tracking all the time. There’s generally nothing down here but me. So if he took off in a blind rush, he’s going on old information and not expecting to find anything in his way.”

  I slanted him a glance. “What kinds of things might be in his way?”

  Liam shrugged. “I’ve laid so many booby traps down here, it’d make your head spin. I didn’t count on a bad guy who could fly, though. That cuts down on a lot of my toys, but maybe—”

  Far down the tunnel, someone cursed with sharp, staccato rage.

  Liam turned to me and grinned. “Bingo.”

  We pushed ahead in a hurry, but within only about fifty feet, I noticed that something else had gone wrong. Liam was grunting, trying to move forward but being dragged back. The corridor opened to our right, the new pathway veeing off in two directions, and the compass guided us up and to the right. But as Liam struggled forward, it was as if he was slogging through molasses.

  “What the hell,” he muttered, sounding disgusted as he pulled his pack around to glare at it. “Someone’s been messing with my shit.”

  “Your pack?”

  “Yeah. Which means the bastard got ahold of it before his bug posse was left to stand guard. He could have stuck anything in here. Fuck.”

  “Here let me grab it,” I said. I pulled it off him, and it was surprisingly light in my hands. “It doesn’t seem to be bothering me.”

  Liam perked up, straightening his shoulders. “Oh, excellent. You can follow, then?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He pulled a few things out of the pack as I held it, then he grinned at me. “I’ll be right in front of you. I just want to lay some perimeter traps. If that asshole is where I think he is, we’re going to need them.”

  “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He nodded. “Give me maybe twenty seconds, then start coming after, but walk at a normal pace, okay?”

  He took off without needing me to confirm, and I counted out the seconds, then stepped forward—

  And didn’t move.

  My eyes widened, and I opened my mouth to shout Liam’s name, but no sound came from my throat. The bag lurched backward, jerking in my hands, and suddenly weighed about a metric ton. I dropped it, and it detonated in a burst of light and sound around me, hemming me in, lashing me tight.

  I threw up my hands and cowered back.

  I was trapped.

  26

  My sight blacked out, then rushed back again, and I realized I’d fallen to the ground. I scrambled upright, but the light streaming from Liam’s pack still surrounded me in a pulsing stream. I reached out tentatively, breaking the flow with my hand, then ripped my arm back with a strangled yelp. It was like putting my hand on a live wire while being doused in acid. Not the way I planned on dying.

  I turned, then turned again, trying to get the bearings of my trap. Dimly, I could hear the sound of shouts in the distance, but I couldn’t help Liam. I couldn’t even help myself. Despite all my great and powerful monster hunting abilities, and even greater skills as monster bait, I didn’t have magic. I had energy, I supposed, I had a flair for Akkadian, and I could channel Zach and his mind-melding skills somewhat. None of that helped me right now.

  I couldn’t remember enough spells to know if I could channel Tyler’s most superior skill, and as for Liam…how could you channel somebody’s ability to be resourceful? I mean, the guy was awesome. He could do anything, create anything, build anything. He could find and store the coolest stuff…

  Speaking of stuff, I slanted a glance down at the backpack. Why had it turned on me? What had I ever done to it?

  The truth hit me like a load of bricks.

  Or, well, like a sack of magical gadgets.

  “You’ve been with him a long time, haven’t you?” I asked aloud, focusing on the pack. It seemed a little odd talking to a nylon-reinforced sack, but then again, no odder than being attacked by flying insects, spiders, and every other creepy-crawly that had crawled out of the woodwork this week. At this point, talking to inanimate objects was par for the course.

  The bag didn’t react to my anthropomorphizing opening salvo, but I pushed on. My attention was split between the pack, its swirling force field that currently trapped me in place, and Liam’s far-off distress, as he sounded like he was fighting his way through a jungle. I had no idea what all was down here in these subterranean catacombs. It could be a jungle, it could be a crypt. I deeply hoped it wasn’t the latter. I refocused on the bag.

  “Why would you want to keep me from going to him? I’m not going to hurt him. You have to know that.”

  The backpack seemed to shudder in response, and a wave of sadness snaked through me, almost a sense of regret. That couldn’t be a coincidence. There had to be a reason why the bag was fighting me, and I didn’t think it was because it had been booby-trapped by the illusionist. Liam was a master of wards, and his backpack was his most prized possession. He wouldn’t do anything that would leave it unprotected. Not something he cared about so much.

  A new thought occurred to me.

  “He does care about you, doesn’t he?” I asked. “I can’t believe you’re the original pack, but there’s some element of you that has carried on through all the iterations, isn’t that right?”

  As I spoke, I tentatively lifted a hand toward the light field, which dimmed, but only slightly. I might be making some headway, but not fast enough. “What is it?” I pressed on. “What is it you need me to know? I promise, I can take it.”

  That seemed to get me somewhere, as the color changed and became more urgent, more melancholy.

  “You think I’ll hurt him?” The colors dropped away from me, muting slightly. I wasn’t up a hundred percent on my backpack speak, but to me that felt like a no. Okay…

  “Are you afraid I’ll hurt you? Are you afraid?” Another change, this one almost playful, the energy practically dancing. Clearly, this nylon bag wasn’t afraid of me. I didn’t know exactly how to feel about that, but I pushed on. There was really only one option left.

  “Do you think Liam’s going to hurt me?” The pack’s glow turned warmer, but I didn’t see ho
w Liam harming me could be possible. As if drawn by my attention, Liam’s sharp cry rang out down the corridor, and a stab of fear knifed through me. I didn’t have time to play nursemaid to a backpack, for freak’s sake. I had to step up my game.

  “Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said more urgently. “The guy who made you his number one possession, who carries you everywhere he goes and would move heaven and earth to make sure you’re safe? That’s the guy we’re talking about here, and I know that deep down, he wants to keep me safe too. No matter what, I know he’s always doing the best he can with what he’s got to work with. Because that’s what he does. And he cares about me—maybe not as much as he cares about you, but a lot. I really believe that. He’d never hurt me intentionally. I won’t hold him accountable for anything he does. I promise.”

  More than anything else I’d tried so far, those final words made the backpack shake, the lights dancing almost in confusion. I didn’t wait for a better opportunity. Rather than simply sticking out an exploratory hand, I leapt over the bag, straight through the veil of light. A burst of white-hot flame broke around me, scorching my exposed skin, and then I was through. I plowed ahead a few steps, then circled back, swooping down to drag the bag forward. This time, it came easily, and I slung it over my shoulder, its message apparently at an end and not a moment too soon. As I bolted down the passageway, I skidded past an opening, suddenly unsure about which direction to take.

  Liam helped me out, in a way, by choosing that moment to scream bloody murder.

  “No!” he howled, and I changed direction, running up a new passageway and around a corner, finally catching sight of a room far in the distance, lit by what looked to be flickering torchlight. I slowed, lungs heaving, and barely avoided crashing headlong into the space. I stiffened as Liam’s long, slow moan reached me.

  “No,” he gasped. “No, don’t hurt her. Please.”