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

  “No. But you know as well as I do, the experience they do have is every bit as compelling,” Grim said, speaking as if these were often-repeated words, used over and over again to explain the truth outside these walls. “Most of them have had their ranks infiltrated, their children stolen. They’ve also had their own kind go rogue, disappearing through the portals to the human world to hunt, kill, and die. They know the dangers of the human realm. They’ll resist or they’ll be enslaved. There’s no other choice. Because make no mistake, war is here. We must be ready to fight.”

  “At our peril.” That observation came from a woman I hadn’t noticed before, since she was sitting down. She was far older than even the scarred female. Her white hair was swept back away from her face, and alone among the Akari on the dais, she wore a heavy tunic of midnight blue, the same color as her eyes. It was the first dark-eyed woman I’d seen of the Akari, but she paid me no attention, focusing only on Grim.

  “I’ve seen the future,” she said. “You have always walked a dangerous path. But now you lead us down it as well.”

  Grim nodded. “I welcome your counsel, Sheori, but we can’t stand by a second time and watch our people die. We have to fight.”

  She nodded, her gaze swinging to me. Once again, I felt judged, though not exactly found wanting. I straightened my shoulders as casually as I could under Sheori’s sharp gaze. She smiled, glancing back to Grim.

  “I’ve seen the future,” she said again. Interest quickened in the group around me, though I couldn’t understand why. Grim curled his lip and made a disgusted sound deep in his throat. He refocused on me.

  “We should eat, then talk. There’s a lot to discuss.”

  I found myself oddly upset that he either didn’t notice my dress or didn’t care about it. As soon as I had those traitorous thoughts, I stuffed them down. I wasn’t here to flirt with Grim, for God’s sake. I was here because the Hallowells had tried to abduct me, and he’d managed to break me free. A little ironic since he’d also delivered me to them on a silver platter.

  The contradiction of those thoughts bubbled over in my brain. “Are you ever going to explain what’s going on here?” I asked, loudly enough to be heard by everyone on the dais. They turned to me as one, faces alight with curiosity at my sharp tone.

  Grim lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “We eat,” he said again. “The rest can wait. Sit.” He gestured to an open chair at the table, but Sheori clucked in immediate denial.

  “No. You two should sit together. Nina is alone here, and you are her protector.”

  The words made me want to flush, but I kept my focus on Grim, who looked like he wanted to hit something. Nevertheless, he offered his arm to me. I took it, nearly blown back by the force of the emotion rolling off him.

  He guided me toward a higher seat at the table, speaking so quietly that only I could hear him.

  “Where in the fuck did you get that dress?” he muttered.

  8

  Rather than a new round of servants or staffers coming out to serve the head table, the Akari dispersed to the other tables to be handed bowls and platters of food by the people sitting there. Grim and I joined in this ritual after the others had all stepped off the dais, the two of us the last in line.

  The Akari were polite to me, but I quickly understood that was only because I was with Grim. All faces turned his way; all questions were addressed to him after I was briefly acknowledged. There were surprisingly few about what was coming next, though the general population of this room probably wasn’t privy to the ruling council’s battle plans.

  It was mostly about what Grim had seen in the human realm, what he’d learned, what they should know. The questions were curious, the reactions mostly nods and contemplative faces as all the information was digested right along with the food and drink. We made it back to the high table and sat, my nerves jangling as Grim took his place beside me. I’d officially touched him more in the last twenty-four hours than I had since setting foot on Wellington’s campus, and every time I came into contact with him, my awareness of him ratcheted up about six notches. I was brimming over with questions as well, if only to keep my rogue butterflies from exploding completely out of my belly and flying around the room.

  “What?” Grim finally asked, taking a long draft of something from a flagon. “You’ve earned the right to know.”

  An intelligent person would have jumped ahead to her questions, but something in his tone set me off.

  “Earned the right?” I echoed flatly. “By what, not dying when I drank your monster water?”

  He grunted. “By not stroking out when you came through the portal and had to travel with us. By not falling down in a heap when the Hallowells took you in the first place, but remaining alert enough to act when the time came.”

  “Oh, so that’s what it takes to get your attention?” As soon as I snapped off this particular gem, I winced. There was something about Grim that drove me to make the most ridiculous comments at the worst possible time. He glared straight ahead, the only evidence of the effect my words had on him a slight jumping of the vein in his temple, beneath his swept-back white-blond hair.

  “The dress was a mistake,” he said.

  “It’s all I had. Merry Williams gave it to me as an option for the presentation.”

  He snorted. “That would have been a disaster.”

  I squinted down at the hot-pink fabric, defensive all over again. “What’s the big deal about it? It’s a dress. She said she got it from Twyst Academy, some sort of remnant sale, but she was way too impressed with it, and now you’re being all weird, and Niali—”

  Grim closed his eyes in long-suffering irritation.

  “How do you know Niali?” he asked, sounding tired.

  “I don’t know her. They sent her to wake me up or figure out if I was dead. She seemed happy enough that I was still kicking.”

  “She’s the youngest daughter of Sheori, who’s an Akari high priestess. She’ll be high priestess in her own right in time, and now she manages to get herself placed square in the middle of anything she finds interesting. Niali should be trusted even less than Sheori.”

  The words sounded harsh, but there was an underlying tone of affection there, even if he didn’t realize it. The expression on his face reflecting long-ago memories, and loneliness too, and a sudden surge of sadness arrowed through me.

  “So what happened, Grim?” I whispered. “Why are you involved with the Hallowells? How did you manage to get hired by them?”

  “I wasn’t hired by them. I was taken,” Grim said, the admission so stark that it made me sit back. He didn’t so much as glance at me. “Not by the current group. They’re far weaker than they’d like to admit. The curse of being the later generation of true tyrants. The attitude remains, but not the grit. Though, admittedly, Elaine has a bit of a throwback sense to her. She would kill, and has killed, and reveled in it. And she wouldn’t stop at monsters.”

  Elaine wouldn’t stop at monsters, I agreed. But for once, I wasn’t going to let myself get derailed. “They captured you?”

  He nodded, sighing as he met my gaze. he held his expression carefully still, but I could see the undercurrents of pain tightening the corners of his mouth, tensing his jaw as he dredged up memories I suspected he usually kept buried.

  “About fifty years after the portals were breached and humans started drifting into this realm, the Hallowells arrived. We’d already had some clashes with academy hunters, and, of course, the monsters that chose to enter the human realm did so knowing the dangers, craving the dangers, really. We’d always had access, but this was different—more portals, more activity. Some of the clans saw it as a new, interesting hunting ground. Make no mistake, we did not and do not come in peace. Most of us don’t even have much interest in your realm, with its stench of decay and pollution. Nor do we fear being overrun by the rank and file of humankind here. Only members of the magical families and their associates—and, of course, the hunters—
can enter our lands. Most ordinary humans can’t enter a portal. They can’t access their innate magic deeply enough.”

  I frowned. “But if most humans couldn’t enter except by mistake, how did the fighting start?”

  He shrugged. “The magical families got greedy, particularly the Hallowells. Some monsters they wanted to hunt for sport. They couldn’t very well do that here, so they took them or lured them out. Other monsters they wanted for their magical abilities or to make them over into servants. Once the Hallowells figured out how to do that, other magical families paid them for more—and still more. Monster trafficking became a booming business overnight. So a hundred years ago, the Hallowells made their move. They allied with the most powerful wizards in the realm, a trio of ancient magicians, to start.”

  I nodded. “Niali told me about them. They look human?”

  “They look human—that’s probably why the Hallowells felt so comfortable with them. They’re definitely not human, though. They’re from the sea, and they live exclusively near the water, though they’ve used their human forms for so long, they rarely revert to the tentacled creatures they once were. They have no capacity for compassion or love. Only learning and power—it’s who they are. And they don’t reproduce. When they die, they simply start over, back in the muck of the floor of Lake Bashai.”

  I stared at him. “You’re kidding me.”

  He smiled a little, the expression transforming his face into one of almost heart-stopping beauty. This was Grim’s home, and he loved it more than anything, I knew in a flash. For all its flaws and failings, it was his. And he would never betray it.

  Something deep and impossibly sad tugged at my heart. What would it be like to have him feel about me that way?

  I kept my face carefully neutral, and thankfully, Grim didn’t appear to notice my rabbiting thoughts as he continued. “It doesn’t take them long to evolve. Upon reanimating, they’re back to land dwelling within a few dozen years. Usually, they’re starting over from scratch, but they have great magic and manage to bend others to their will quickly enough. They return to wizard state after about two or three hundred years, and then they can rule again.”

  “That’s…kind of a long time.”

  “It needs to be,” Grim said matter-of-factly. “They’d be too powerful otherwise. As it is, their numbers have dwindled over the years, some finally relinquishing their desire to begin the cycle again, but the final trio of them had existed in more or less peace for centuries. Then the most powerful of the three, Cyrus, betrayed his own brethren and took their magic for his own. Now his enemies are somewhere at the bottom of Lake Bashai, embracing their inner mollusks.”

  I winced at the image. “This Cyrus guy was that much stronger?”

  “With the Hallowells’ help, he was.” Grim curled his lip. “Strong enough to enslave some of the oldest races of the realm, it’s rumored, though that’s never been proven. But he went all in with the Hallowells, and they used that leverage to break from the academy and pursue their interests in the private sector with the academy completely unaware. They also attacked the realm—with devastating results. Nearly every clan was routed and plundered, including the Akari. The assault was brutal and senseless—so much death. So much waste. The patriarch of the Hallowell family, the father of the man you met in New York, captured me. Tested me and trained me, and eventually accepted me as the family hunter.”

  “You let him capture you, you mean.” I knew this without a doubt. Grim might not be as strong as any of the Hallowells, but he wouldn’t allow himself to get taken, not unless it was part of some plan.

  He slanted me a glance. “Your opinions of me aren’t necessarily well-founded,” he warned, sounding a lot like Rhiannon.

  I wasn’t going to be denied. “But I’m right, aren’t I? You let yourself be taken, you agreed to be their spy, to hunt for them, to kill for them?” I wasn’t really expecting an answer to that, and he didn’t give me one. Somehow, I’d once more managed to piss him off. I appeared to be exceptionally skilled at that.

  “There’s a lot you still don’t understand, that you can’t understand. But let me be clear, monster bait. I’m not human,” Grim growled. “The Akari are not of your world. The choices and sacrifices we make are for our own kind. They’re not for you, they’re not even for any single one of us. Don’t try to find reason or explanation for the things we do. Don’t try to put your emotions or intentions upon our kind or any kind in the monster realm. We are not you.”

  I understood what he was trying to tell me, just as I understood I was rejecting his words as quickly as he spoke. Grim wasn’t a wizard without the capacity for love or loyalty. He might be a monster, but he wasn’t as cut off from emotion as he wanted me to believe. If anything, he was deeply bound up in it—but why?

  “Grim, what’s really going on here?” I asked again. “Everyone acts like they’re tiptoeing around some secret, something they don’t dare admit. What is it? What did you do—or what happened to you?”

  “You happened to me,” he lashed out, then his eyes widened as if he hadn’t meant to betray that. But the words hung between us, as damning as they were incomprehensible.

  Before I could come up with any sort of response, someone on the other side of Grim claimed his attention, and the rest of the meal continued in silence, at least between us. Which wasn’t to say there was no conversation among the rest of the group. They spoke in English, or at least I could understand them, and it was clear that the ruling panel of the Akari thought the Hallowells would be attacking soon. What was unclear was how they would go about it.

  When someone said the words Wellington Academy, I roused myself from my own twisting thoughts and refocused. To my surprise, it wasn’t Grim who had brought up the academy, but Sheori. Grim, however, responded.

  “No. The academy isn’t prepared to serve as any sort of line of defense against the Hallowells. I haven’t been able to find the missing hunters. They may well be dead. The best minds at the academy can’t track them down either.”

  “Not even their bodies?” one of the men asked, and Grim shrugged.

  “I know what you’re thinking, that they may be here, imprisoned until the Hallowells can figure out a way to use them. But we’ve never found any trace of them in the realm. They hold a great deal of magical ability within them—we’d be able to track that.”

  “They hold a great deal of money, right?” I surprised everyone, including myself, by speaking up. The ruling council refocused on me, and even Grim perked up, leaning on one elbow to study me. I manfully tried not to puff up with pride at his attention. Not being a man, I didn’t do so well.

  Still, I pushed on. “That’s one thing that Tyler and the guys kept impressing upon me when I first arrived at the campus. You get to be a monster hunter, and you’ll be set for life. You’ll get a huge chunk of cash coming your way, and it’ll keep coming. If those guys all died, the money stops, right? But if they’re still alive somehow…”

  “Then the Hallowells are magically diverting the hunters’ riches into their own pockets,” one of the older Akari males said. “And so the rich get richer.”

  “If the hunters are alive, they won’t do us any good, not in the short term,” Grim said. “Neither will Wellington Academy. The Hallowells have been setting up their own hunting academy these past hundred years.”

  I flinched, but recalled the interview in the library and nodded quickly. “That’s right. They said something about that—hunters that could manage monsters as well as kill them. I thought they were insane.”

  “They are, but they’re also not wrong. With their techniques, creatures from this realm could be taken, trained. Controlled. Sold to the richest magical families in your world. The Hallowells plan to open their academy on the ashes of Wellington once they shut that program down for good. Their timeline only moved up in the past several years, as whispers of an uprising in the monster realm began to reach their ears despite the care we tried to take. T
heir plan is simple too. Incite the monster realm to violence, allow that violence to spill out into the streets of the human realm, at least within the view of magical families, prove that Wellington Academy is no match for it, and then sweep in with their own elite squadron of hunters, privately trained. The Hallowells will take over the grounds of Wellington Academy and rededicate those grounds to their own specifications. The land of that school has a great deal of magic embedded into it. They’ll want to capitalize on that.”

  I didn’t want to believe it, but everything Grim said made sense. He knew more about the academy than I would have expected, but then again, he’d potentially been roaming the human realm for nearly a century before I was even born.

  “We meet again at dawn,” one of the older Akari said. “By then, the Hallowells will have shown themselves, and we can determine who among our allies and enemies is most at risk. And there’s also the question of you.” He said this last as he refocused on me, studying me with such expectation that I blinked in surprise.

  “What about me?”

  Down the table, Sheori gave a disgusted little sniff, and the older man glanced with some surprise first at me, then at Grim.

  “You haven’t told her?” he asked, though there was no censure in his tone.

  “There hasn’t been time,” Grim growled. “And there was the question of whether she would even survive.”

  “But she did survive,” another female Akari put in. “And now we have a battle on our hands. Best you keep her alive long enough to reach the field of war—and tell her everything she needs to know about what that war means. It’s time, Grim.”

  A bell sounded over the room, pure and crystalline in its beauty. The assembled party stood, but, to my vague surprise, didn’t start dancing or carousing. Instead, they leapt for the exits, in that moment flashing into their feline forms, streaking shots of light and movement, stunning in their grace and ferocity. Within thirty seconds, no one else remained but Grim and me.