by D. D. Chance
“Of course, first thing.”
“Good.” Grim turned and picked up one of the heavy iron boxes that lined the shelf beyond the headstone. Without any warning, he swiveled back and crashed it down onto the slab of granite.
6
The headstone cracked down the middle, but Grim wasn’t finished. He hauled off and smashed it four more times, moving so quickly, I barely had time to draw in a breath to protest. And by the time I had, it was far too late.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded, surging forward, then stopping short in front of the pile of rubble. “Why did you do that?”
“For the exact reason you’re reacting the way you are,” Grim retorted, his words sharp and harsh. “This slab of rock was a trap. A lure. You carry it with you, even if you take it into Fowlers Hall, or Lowell Library, it’ll serve as a beacon to whoever put it here. It’s garbage, and you should treat it as the trap it is. Any credibility or significance you give to it simply means they win.”
“But who are they?” I demanded, rounding on him. As always, his face remained flat, impassive, though his pale-gold eyes now seemed to burn with interest, an emotion I’d never before seen in them.
Any response he was going to give was cut off as Frost’s booming voice called down. “Liam, what do we have? How many trucks am I going to need to smuggle this shit out of here?”
Liam scowled, then yelled back, “All of it should go. You know that.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.” Frost said something quietly to someone near him, and I felt Zach’s energy lift. I heard more murmured conversation as the sound of feet on the ladder filled the space.
A few seconds later, three guys entered the space, which suddenly seemed very crowded. Frost was rocking his usual Paul Bunyan look—dark shirt, work pants, and big bushy beard that hid most of his craggy face—while Zach looked far steadier than he had passed out in the pew, and Tyler merely grinned at me, tall, strong, and sexy as usual from his tousled dark brown hair to his whiskey-colored eyes and easy smile. The sheer energy of all of them together was overwhelming. I edged closer to Grim, and immediately regretted it. The power of him pulverizing the stone slab still emanated off him in waves, feral and intense. But there was nowhere else for me to go.
Frost gestured Zach and Tyler forward. “All right, so what do we have here, specifically? Hit me.”
The guys looked at him in surprise, but Tyler caught on first. He breathed out something in Latin I couldn’t quite catch but that Liam clearly recognized, if the grin on his face was any indication. Tyler and Zach had recently leveled up, with Tyler’s skills in spell craft rocketing off the charts, while Zach could now sense any magic or emotional resonance in a room far more deeply. It looked like they were getting the chance to show off what those skill improvements could mean in real time.
Meanwhile, Zach lifted his hands and turned around to view the space, his eyes narrowing. He frowned a second later and glanced at Tyler, but Tyler shook his head.
“I’ve got nothing,” Tyler said. “There are absolutely zero items of interest down here, at least not in this room.”
“Junk,” Grim agreed.
“But this is interesting,” Zach continued, stepping over to the remains of the headstone. “There’s energy here, an echo I can’t quite pick up anymore. I may not ever have been able to,” he amended as Grim scowled.
“Do I want to know what happened to this?” Frost asked, striding across the room.
“It’s exactly what you think happened to it,” Grim growled with an underlying sense of menace. Frost didn’t seem to notice the extra anger and merely nodded.
“Spelled, there’s no question,” he said. “Better to leave it here and in such a state that nobody else could recognize what it is.”
He turned to Liam. “What else do you want us to look at?”
Liam had already shouldered his pack and turned deeper into the undercroft. “This is fantastic. I’ve never had two bloodhounds to assist me with research. Come on, guys.”
He disappeared into the next room with Zach and Tyler, while Frost turned to me.
“Liam texted me the same picture he undoubtedly sent you,” he said. “It’s not every day that you get to see a headstone you didn’t commission inscribed with your mother’s name.”
I grimaced. “It would’ve been easier if it had been inscribed with my dad’s name, at least we would’ve learned something.”
“Oh, we learned something,” Frost countered as Grim grunted in agreement. “We learned that our enemies are drawing closer. I’ll give all of you a fuller briefing when the guys are done, but the cleaners are on the way and I don’t want to waste their time. Unfortunately, we’ve got new and more complicated problems to solve.”
My brows went up. “Another monster outbreak?”
“I wish it were that easy.” Frost sighed. “Word has gotten out to the families that a number of the academy’s monster hunter graduates have been killed—and still others are missing. So that puts Wellington Academy at a distinct disadvantage in the balance of power between human and monster. According to our charter, we can deputize additional fighters, but Dean Robbins has ruled that out. Which means—”
“Hey.” The call came from deep in the basement, with enough urgency that Frost broke off. Grim pushed past us, and I was hot on his heels. It was Liam’s voice, threaded with excitement, and when we reached the final chamber in the undercroft, which was little more than a closet, it was easy to see why.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, staring at the metal rectangle. It glowed as Zach passed his hand in front of it, looking like a mirror that had been broken out, its interior replaced with static electricity.
“My first thought is it’s a portal,” Liam said. “But we’d have to test that.”
“We are not testing that now,” Frost countered. “It goes to the cleaners, then the library. Anything else?”
“These,” Tyler said, indicating several boxes that glowed with the same faint aura of electricity. “It was definitely worth us coming down here. There’s some great stuff down here, magical artifacts, records, and boxes we can’t open.”
“Can’t open yet,” Liam corrected. “It’s not going to take long once I can focus on them.”
“This is the mother lode, then,” Frost said, looking around the closet. “Not a lot of cleanup required.”
“So we don’t need a fire?” Liam asked, sounding disappointed.
Frost huffed out a short laugh. “No, Mr. Graham, we do not need a fire. We need to get these items out of here and to the cleaners, and they can reassemble them in Lowell Library when it’s safe to do so. We’ve got eyes on us tonight. Better hope your wards hold.”
“Of course my wards are going to hold,” Liam scoffed. As he turned away from me, his arms laden with boxes, I noticed that the collar of the shirt had dragged down—revealing a surprising sight. The same static electricity that danced along the boxes and the knocked-out mirror skittered over his shoulders, flickering in the gloom. I opened my mouth to ask him about it, then shut it just as quickly. The other guys doubtless already knew about it, and now wasn’t the time.
Given how few boxes there were, the guys mobilized quickly, carrying things up out of the undercroft as Frost and I stood by. Grim positioned himself at the bottom of the ladder and, rather than haul loads to the next level, merely tossed things up through the opening in the floor for Zach and Tyler to catch. He seemed to get angrier with each new box, but then again, that wasn’t anything new. The guy made grumpy into an art form.
As they worked, Frost turned to me again. “We’re going to have to accelerate the search for your mother’s family. Somebody went to some trouble to taunt you with that headstone, possibly trying to incite a reaction. Maybe they’re just trying to jerk your chain. The question is, why?”
“I wish I knew,” I said as Grim glanced over to me, his pale-gold eyes flat and emotionless, though his manner still managed
to be faintly judgey. “There’s too much I don’t remember.”
Frost flattened his lips, considering that, then seemed to come to some decision. “Well, we’re not going to figure out anything tonight. Tomorrow morning, I need you all front and center at Lowell Library. Tonight—Nina, I think you should stay at Fowlers Hall. Grim, make sure she gets there safely. I’m going to need the others with me to unload these boxes.”
A flare of panic skittered through me. “I can—”
“I’ll take care of it,” Grim said, cutting me off.
I glanced his way, shivering as a chill slipped along my arms. His face was set in stone. “Sure,” I heard myself say as internal warnings slammed against my brain like zombies at the kitchen door, setting off every hardwired alarm in my body. “That sounds great.”
7
New voices sounded overhead, and all of us glanced up, despite the fact that they were neither extremely loud nor forceful. But there was something chilling about the conversation, even when Liam’s louder, more excited voice cut in to offer directions.
Frost stared at Grim. “How did you get in here?” he asked, with the kind of certainty that indicated he knew Grim hadn’t come in through the front door.
Surprisingly, Grim didn’t evade the question. “Chapels like this cater to the dead as well as the living. There’s a passageway from the edge of the cemetery to the undercroft, used when they needed to carry bodies out without anyone noticing activity. It wasn’t hard to find.”
I kept my face carefully neutral, though in my mind’s eye, I imagined Grim surveying the desolate graveyard and using his almost feral sense of direction, maybe even smell, to sort out where the door might be.
Frost nodded. “One of the larger markers?” he asked. Grim merely shrugged.
Apparently satisfied, Frost refocused on me. “Stay in Fowlers Hall until tomorrow. It’s safest for everyone.”
I made a face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He waved his hand at the now-empty room around us. “It means I don’t know what’s going on, I just know that it’s centering around you. That makes you a liability to our team and a risk to yourself.”
Embarrassment and real hurt surged up within me, but I managed to nod as Frost refocused on Grim. “Get her out of here. You know we’re being watched.”
Grim pivoted without another word. I didn’t need any encouragement to follow him back into the shadows, where, despite his bulk, he seemed to slip easily between the haphazard stacks and overloaded shelves of the undercroft. Moldering fabrics, decrepit tools, and rows of iron boxes leaned out into the space, adding a sense of claustrophobia that only worsened as the light dimmed. Soon we were walking in pitch-darkness, my hands drifting up and out to try to anticipate direction or obstacles.
Grim stopped so abruptly and with such little warning, I crashed into his back. Awareness flared through me, setting off a firestorm of reaction—excitement, danger, power. It was like this every time I touched the guy, part and parcel of the crazy reactions I had to all the guys that it almost seemed normal…except nothing with Grim was normal.
Grim drew in a long breath, then exhaled in a slow hiss. “We have about fifty yards where I’ll be bent over to get through the narrow passage and you’ll need to watch your head. It’ll be easiest for you to hold on to the back of my shirt. No talking.” As he spoke, I could hear the slide of fabric, and I imagined him loosening the hem of his shirt from the heavily belted waistband of his work pants. A soft aroma of heat and cinnamon surrounded me as he bared his skin, a welcome change from the heavy, loamy scent of the passageway.
Except now I was imagining Grim’s naked torso. Which was less than ideal.
“No problem,” I blurted, trying to stay focused. “But who’s going to hear us down here?”
He glanced back toward me, and though there was no light that would allow me to see him clearly, I could almost feel his feral eyes glittering in the darkness. I rolled my own eyes at his glance.
“Right, right, the walls have ears. Got it.”
He huffed a surprised chuckle, then turned back, waiting until I tentatively reached forward and grabbed the hem of his shirt, which I realized he’d already knotted into a ball. Had he led other people through dark passages before? The question assailed me as Grim moved forward, but I couldn’t focus on it for long as his swift strides picked up pace almost immediately, and I found myself trotting in short hopping steps to keep up.
The passageway was dark, damp, and seemed to press in on us both—but Grim didn’t hesitate, even when, as promised, he was forced to bend over nearly double at one stretch. There was absolutely no sound other than his measured steps and my more frantic ones, and I found my heartbeat slowing, the chaos of my mind easing because of it. For this strange time out of time, I didn’t have to think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other, with a single objective of breaking back into the night. I had no choice but to trust Grim instead of my own rioting reactions and panicked resourcefulness. It was…actually kind of restful.
We went on like that for what seemed like far longer than the cemetery warranted until Grim slowed again, reaching back in an apparent attempt to keep me from crashing into him again. Instead, his hand connected with my chest, his fingers setting off a thrill of sensation along my collarbone. He pulled back almost immediately, leaving me rocking back on my heels. We’d come to the end of the road. A faint gloom illuminated the dank passageway, and I could almost pick out the stairway beyond Grim, carved into the earth and reinforced with concrete.
“The dead won’t harm us, not here,” he said quietly. “But if the Laram have reached the campus walls, they’ll know about this passage too. I’m hoping the activity at the chapel will distract them, but there’s no guarantee.”
I didn’t miss the strange word. “Laram? The elves—that’s what they’re called?” It didn’t surprise me that Grim had identified the creatures before Liam could—he’d seen them once or twice with his own eyes and hadn’t seemed surprised by their existence.
He pressed his lips together. Was he upset that he’d let the name drop? I didn’t know, but he didn’t dispute my conclusion. His eyes gleamed in the faint light. “They’re here for the same reason all the monsters are. To see the harbinger. To come to where she’s called them.”
“You know, you guys keep calling me that, but nobody knows what the hell it means.”
Grim grunted a harsh laugh. “Liam does. You should ask him.”
With that announcement, he turned more fully toward me, his jaw set as hard as the rock steps in front of us.
“I can mask your presence, but I’ll need to carry you until we get past the cemetery and to the main wall. Can you let me do that without losing your shit?”
I made a face that I suspected he could see in the darkness. “Of course I can.”
“Good. Follow close behind me until we reach the top of the stairs. Then keep your mouth shut.”
He spoke with such derision that a low boil of irritation bubbled inside me as he moved down the corridor a final few paces, then shifted up. The stairs were unexpectedly steep, and my fingers dropped from the knot of his shirt hem to the thick leather belt circling his waist. Curling around the belt, the front of my fingers grazed his lower back, and an unexpectedly sharp ridge of scar tissue pressed hard against my skin. I managed not to gasp as awareness flooded through me, but I didn’t miss Grim’s low grunt, his own shudder. Still, he pressed on, and a few seconds later, he paused. He turned back to me, lifting his arm for me to move forward, against his body.
“Keep your eyes closed, your mouth shut,” he warned me again. “It will seem brighter than it should, chaotic.”
I nodded, then barely suppressed a squeak as his arm dropped around me, heat and fear rocketing through me in equal measures. Grim hiked me high against his body. “When we get through the door, it’ll be faster if you can move to my back. But I need you surrounded for the first few steps. You
got it?”
I wanted to ask surrounded by what, but I knew the answer soon enough. Surrounded by him. He wrapped both arms around me and pulled me tight, bracing me against him. He opened the door and shouldered through it, then took half a dozen long strides.
I screwed my eyes tight as directed, but then he muttered “Now,” and shifted, shoving me behind him and leaving me to clamber higher on his back. My eyes naturally popped open to get my bearings, and I had to bite my own lip hard not to scream.
The graveyard was aglow with light, and a full-on army of monsters pressed in from all sides. All sizes and types—some I recognized, way too many I didn’t. There were minotaurs and winged lizards, not to mention stomping fire bulls with full-on flames crackling along their shoulders and legs, their bulky, horned heads shaking back and forth. A burst of slithering eels shimmied in one corner of the cemetery, while smoke-footed succubi writhed in another. And other animals too—lions, tigers, wolves, all the size of smart cars, their eyes gleaming white. The entire horde of creatures swayed, howled, roared, though there was no sound. Their fists pounded the air, their wings flapped, their powerful legs stomped the earth. All of it silent, all of it horrifying. I bent my face forward into Grim’s shoulder as he ran, willing it all to go away.
And just like that, it did. I blinked my eyes open and realized we’d breached the more modern, reinforced wall of Wellington Academy. Grim stopped short, allowing me to slide down his body and back to the ground. I stepped away as he turned to me, my nerves on fire, my heart racing as I struggled to breathe.
His face was resolute. “I told you not to look.”
“Was that real?” I demanded, my entire body trembling as I wrapped my arms hard around my torso. Grim made no move toward me. “Is that what you see all the time? My God, all those creatures. I don’t even know what some of them were.”
“The time of reckoning is coming,” Grim said. “Frost and Liam know, but they don’t want to believe it. That snake Dean Robbins knows, but he doesn’t understand it. The administration of Wellington Academy knows too. They just don’t want to face the truth.”
