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

2

  There, standing among the trees, were easily a dozen figures—all tall, slender, and impossibly beautiful. Definitely human-esque, yet not exactly right. Like Tolkien’s wood elves come to life, complete with the slightly pointed ears.

  Were these a real-world incarnation of the Fae? I didn’t know, but they seemed way more dangerous than they should. And way too familiar for comfort. Either they or their equally tall, dark, and forbidding cousins had been lurking in the woods beside my off-campus apartment since I’d blown into town a few weeks ago. Never getting any closer, but never fully stepping away.

  And now they were here, on Wellington’s campus. Something about that struck me as impossibly wrong.

  “Because they’re not supposed to be on the campus,” Zach murmured aloud, taking advantage of our restored connection to read my mind and confirm my unspoken worry. “Wellington Academy is warded against monsters of all types, even pretty elf-like ones. They shouldn’t be here. Not within the walls. And definitely not so many of them.”

  “Maybe Wellington’s wards are starting to suck? Your demon buddies seemed to have an all-access pass.”

  Zach shook his head. “Different kind of monster, different rules. With demonology as a major, we couldn’t very well have a campus that didn’t allow demons. And we know how to handle them, more or less. I mean yeah, there were more of them than usual, but they weren’t barred from campus. These guys are.” He slanted me a look. “You keep saying the name ‘Fae’ in your mind, and—you’re not wrong. I don’t know that they’ve read all the same Celtic mythology books we have on campus, but they’re no doubt the inspiration for those stories. And they’re warded against my touch. I keep trying to reach them, but it’s like climbing through vines, thick branches surrounding me, the forest growing closer, tighter. Drawing me to them. It’s like they want me to come closer, but I don’t…I don’t know why.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Uh…Zach?” I didn’t like the odd note that had crept into his voice, even as he drew his fingers away from me, dropping my hand. He took a step forward, and I moved as well, stopping only when he gestured sharply.

  “No, can’t you hear?” He waved me off. “They want to talk to me. They’re here to warn us, not to attack. But they can only talk to one of us. Me.”

  I bit my lip, looking rapidly from him to the figures in the trees. Zach had dropped my hand, but I could still see what he saw. We’d stepped nearer to the watchers, almost despite ourselves, but I wasn’t getting any sense of warmth or helpful vibes from them. They looked as cool and feral as they had every time I’d seen them watching me from a distance, their long lean bodies held tight to the shadows, their eyes slitted and silvery.

  Silvery. Just like Zach’s eyes currently were.

  I blinked hard, surprised to see that Zach had moved several strides ahead of me. He was almost at the border of the woods, and far worse, though his mouth was moving, I could no longer hear what he was saying. Something had come between us, despite me opening up my mind wide to him. I couldn’t hear his thoughts anymore. I couldn’t hear his words.

  “Zach,” I managed, but his name came out as barely a squeak. Panic rushed through me, and I lurched toward him, trying to make up the ground between us. A flash of silver among the lamplit cobblestones of the street caught my eye, and I blinked at it, momentarily distracted—

  The trees exploded.

  A dozen projectiles shot toward us—not arrows, exactly, but thick, pointy rods. With shocking speed and force, they struck Zach and knocked him flat, landing in his shoulders, his legs, pinning him to the ground. I raced forward and could see the archers more clearly, a line of warriors standing behind the first line of figures who’d seemed so silent and watchful. The second line of elves notched another round of arrows as Zach struggled upright, blood streaming from wounds that…

  I stumbled to a stop as I reached him. The wounds were still there, but there were no arrows, no pointy rods. Nothing stuck in him at all.

  “What the hell?” I managed.

  “Magic,” he gasped, as if that solved everything. It didn’t, of course. Magical attack or not, he was still spouting blood. I dropped to my knees, then flinched back as he grabbed my hands.

  “Protection,” he growled, more harshly this time, and I blinked. Was he asking me for help or throwing some kind of spell?

  Zach’s best skills weren’t in spell casting, but there was a certain capacity for the work in all monster hunters—all of them besides me, anyway—and he was bringing it fully to bear. I offered him whatever energy I could and felt him strip it away from me as he spouted Latin, Akkadian, and other languages I didn’t know, an alphabet soup of arcanum I couldn’t hope to follow. I hunkered down beside him, covering as much of his body as I could with mine. I could practically feel a new wave of arrows notching, notching—then the creatures fell back.

  For a moment I was with them, feeling their thoughts, experiencing their surprise. Their interest. Their reaction to us wasn’t at all dismayed, but more…intrigued. Excited. These were ancient warriors, creatures who had been sent on a mission and were going to see that mission through because it was required of them. Because it was their vow.

  Their vow? I turned back to Zach, confused, and then jolted as something sharp and hard pierced my right shoulder.

  I whipped around as another barrage of sharp pointy things shot out of the tree line. Sharp pointy things that hurt. At least this time, they seemed to only be hitting me, not Zach. My shoulder took a couple of hits, and so did my waist. The magical arrows disappeared as soon as they buried themselves in me, but that didn’t make them hurt any less.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Zach roused himself, his sudden anger surprising me even more than the pain lancing me. The fire he’d called upon to fight the demons was back in his eyes, replacing the silvery echo of the Fae-like creatures’ gazes. He flung out his hands, and a wave of blistering heat swept across the open courtyard and pummeled into the trees, sending up plumes of smoke, though there was no fire. The creatures in the woods keened in sudden, violent agony.

  “Run.” Zach turned to me, reaching for my hand. Together, we staggered forward, bleeding from several different places.

  Within thirty strides, the pressure lifted, the blood quit gushing, and we stumbled to a stop, gasping. I twisted back around, straining to see our adversaries. But there were no more plumes of smoke, no shadowy figures trapped in the woods. Even our wounds seemed to be closing up. There weren’t any students either, thank God. In this hidden pocket of the campus, we were alone in our crazy.

  “What’s going on?” I hissed as Zach’s grip tightened on my hand. “Was that all an illusion? Did it not really happen?”

  “Oh, it happened,” Zach said. “Look.”

  He pointed back the way we’d come, and I saw it. Silvery drops of blood that shimmered like moonbeams caught in the water. Our blood, mixed with whatever had been in those bolts from the trees.

  “We’ve been marked,” Zach gasped. “We need to get out of here, make it to the chapel. Liam will know what to do.”

  “He’d freaking better.”

  We lurched forward as a new chill rolled through me. I didn’t feel terrible—which had to be a bad thing. If I hadn’t been brutally aware of what had just happened to me, I don’t think I would notice the strange, otherworldly sensation shimmering along my nerves.

  “They didn’t expect you to approach,” Zach said. “They were sent here to watch. That’s what their job was, to watch. When you moved forward aggressively, fighting against their illusion, their defensive line stood up and took action. They weren’t planning on that. They weren’t planning on you.”

  I blew out a sharp breath. I hadn’t thought I’d been all that aggressive, frankly. I’d just been trying to reach Zach. “So is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But you can feel it, right? You can feel the drain on us. We’re being tracked. They’re going to know
we’re heading for Bellamy Chapel.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure that out. But why aren’t they still attacking us? How did we get away?”

  “Because I served them up some personal protection wards, some of Wellington Academy’s finest.” He slanted a glance to me, giving me a smile that was unabashedly filled with wonder and maybe a little shared pride. “Which I only succeeded in casting so well because you let me use your strength. In other words, it looks like congratulations are officially in order. I don’t know how, since it didn’t happen with Tyler, but when you hooked up with me…you totally leveled up.”

  “Yeah?” I turned to look back at the silvery drops of spelled blood that now trailed us across the campus, dread curdling in my stomach. “What’s that get us, though? Besides becoming elf meat?”

  A thin whistle sounded along the breeze behind us, making me shiver while Zach huffed out a breath. “Let’s not wait around to find out.”

  We turned again toward Bellamy Chapel.

  3

  Moving as quickly as we could without drawing attention to ourselves, we passed through the ancient wall that ringed Wellington Academy. This was the barrier that supposedly protected the centuries-old academy from all the monsters of the world, though I remained unimpressed with its track record on that front.

  Worse, as we neared Bellamy Chapel, we started springing more leaks.

  “This…sucks,” Zach wheezed. He didn’t argue when I pulled him close to lean more of his weight on me. He’d been struck far harder than I had.

  Fortunately, the faintest light gleamed from a narrow slit amid the charred ruins of the front of the old chapel. The fire that had swept through the tiny chapel had left the church door blackened and warped, but it still stood, and someone had propped it open for us. Liam, had to be.

  We crept inside and shoved the door closed, Zach gritting his teeth so hard against the pain, I was surprised he didn’t crack something.

  “Hey, I was wondering when you—whoa.” Liam Graham emerged from a section of charred pews, his hands going up as he saw us. “Jesu—sorry, Zach, but, what the hell happened to you guys? Get in here, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Fix this.” Zach staggered forward. Liam caught him, turning to me as I moved up to help.

  “You got hit too? By what, protesters?”

  “Elves,” Zach gritted out, practically draping himself over Liam in an attempt to stay upright. “Might as well just call them that until we figure out the truth. In the woods. They’d been watching Nina before, and now they’re here.”

  “On campus?” Liam asked with such outrage, it almost made me smile. His dark brown hair now stood on end, and his river-stone hazel eyes gleamed with worry. In the flickering light, his dark tan deepened, making him seem almost swarthy, a whimsical smith interrupted at his forge, crafting arcane weapons and totems of absolute power. Liam wasn’t as big as Zach and definitely not as buff as Tyler, but his lean body gave him the air of strength and flexibility that only added to his air of capability. Combine that with his whip-smart intelligence, dark humor, and keen appreciation for puzzles, and the challenge of a new brand of monsters landing on Wellington’s doorstep should have been right up his alley.

  Instead, he mostly looked put out to learn that the wards had failed. These guys believed wholeheartedly in the academy’s protections. Too bad they clearly were screwed on that count.

  Liam’s attention zeroed in on Zach, his mouth twisting as he scanned his friend’s new assortment of wounds. “Okay, okay, here we go, my man,” he said as he eased Zach down into a pew, one of the few sections in this area of the chapel that hadn’t been damaged by fire. “Nice and slow.” Then he stepped away, his hands remaining up as if Zach might keel over at any moment.

  “I’ll be right back. Do not move. You either,” he said to me. His gaze went to my shoulder, his eyes narrowing.

  “You’re hit, but you’re not hurt as bad, not by a long shot,” he said, then his mouth quirked into a grin. “Pun intended.”

  “I didn’t draw on her strength at first,” Zach said, laying his head back on the pew. His wavy black hair was drenched with sweat, and his skin seemed drawn too tightly against his skull. “Once I did, she was left unprotected. She got hit on the second wave. Then we blasted them back and started running.”

  “Her strength?” Liam’s eyes widened at this information, but he shook his head hard, as if forcing himself to stay focused on the situation at hand. “I’ll be right back,” he said again. He turned on his heel as I moved over to Zach.

  “How’re you doing?” I sat beside him in the pew, able to assess him more objectively in the dim light. Liam was right, Zach had started bleeding again at all the points that the arrows had struck him. Strangely enough, there were no open wounds there, just bubbles of blood trailing down his body. “This is so weird,” I muttered.

  Zach chuckled, low and raspy. “It doesn’t really hurt that much,” he said, though he couldn’t quite hide the strain behind the words. “I don’t think I want to keep feeling this way, though, I can tell you that.”

  “Yeah.” I reached up to wipe away the trace of my own blood dribbling down my arm, but Zach weakly raised his hand.

  “Don’t touch it, not with your fingers. There’s something in the poison that’s…important. It’s linking me to them. I can sense their thoughts, their resolve. Like I said, our attack was unexpected.”

  I shot him a sharp glance. “Attack? You walked four feet in their general direction, and I hustled to catch up with you. I’d hardly call that an attack.”

  He shook his head wearily. “I don’t know…”

  Liam rushed back up the stairs, distracting us. “Elves, you said. They shot you with crossbows, didn’t they? Like some sort of Fae stepping out of the green forest? That kind of thing?”

  “Sure,” Zach grunted, shifting uncomfortably in his pew. “You have something for that?”

  “You bet your ass I do,” Liam said, throwing his pack into the pew in front of us and turning our way. He held a silver vial and what looked like a surgical sponge in his hands, and he waved them both at me.

  “You’re less injured, but we’re gonna need your help when this gets bad. Take your shirt off.”

  I blinked at him, but he spoke with such focused intensity that I pulled off what was left of my blouse and stripped down to my sports bra, wincing only slightly, and not from the pain. Who wears a sports bra under a dress blouse? Who does that?

  Someone who hasn’t needed to put on a pretty bra for any reason for way too long, that’s who.

  I lifted my chin, daring Liam to make any sort of comment. He didn’t say a word. A flare of some emotion I couldn’t quite identify crossed his face as he advanced on me, but he stared me resolutely in the eyes.

  “This is going to sting like a bitch, so suck it up.” Without further explanation, he dumped some of the liquid from the vial onto the sponge and pressed it against my shoulder.

  I screamed.

  The pain was absolute, a white-hot ripping sensation that shot through my body from the point of the injury all the way through my chest and torso and down to my core. As quickly as the arrow of pain had penetrated, it wrenched itself back out, leaving another strip of agony in its wake. I jerked back, and then it was done.

  “What the hell was that?” I gasped.

  “Consider it a magical form of leech.” Liam grinned as I struggled back into my blouse, reeling from the pain a second more before it cleared completely. “No bugs required. But you can see why I might need your help for Mr. Demonslayer here.”

  We turned to Zach. This was a guy who’d stared down curly horned demons bristling with fire, but he gaped at us with genuine horror. “Are you serious?”

  Liam stepped forward, his expression brooking no bullshit. “Nina,” he ordered, and I instinctively knew what to do.

  My connection with the guys was ever evolving, but with Zach, the one thing I could do to keep him ou
t of his own mind long enough to heal was simple and direct. I swung toward him, cupping his face with my hands as Zach bit out a curse. He reached up and shackled my wrist. “Nina, no. You’re becoming an empa—” he began.

  I didn’t let him finish. Leaning forward, I covered his lips with mine.

  Pain ripped through me.

  4

  When I’d kissed Zach in the past, we’d managed to leave this current plane of existence and go someplace else, sometimes good places, sometimes bad—but we didn’t go anywhere this time. Instead, no sooner had I covered his lips with mine and felt time and space shifting than Liam moved forward and a burst of white-hot pain branded my legs.

  Zach had been pierced there by the Fae’s arrows, I hadn’t. But his fear about my growing empathic nature wasn’t entirely off the mark. Our connection was so absolute that I felt his pain as my own, took on his wounds as my own. We were locked in a horrific symbiotic give-and-take of wounding and healing as Liam moved quickly from leg to leg, to Zach’s torso, to his shoulders and arms.

  It was an endless echo chamber of agony, and at some point, Zach passed out. What seemed like a lifetime later, Liam peeled me off Zach’s inert form and held me as I sagged against him.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s over. He’ll be okay.”

  “You got all the poison out? The tracking stuff?” I gasped, turning toward Liam, not even remotely self-conscious at the fact that I was leaning heavily against him in nothing but my bra.

  Well, fine, maybe a little bit self-conscious.

  But it felt right. It felt important, and Liam’s surprisingly strong arm came around me, hugging me close. He drifted his lips over the top of my head, brushing softly against my hair, the gesture so intimate it made me catch my breath.

  “I got the poison out, yeah,” he murmured. “Did Zach tell you anything he picked up from them? Specifically about the tracking agent?”