by D. D. Chance
“The paramedics said I’d probably gotten concussed in a fall,” she confided, confirming my suspicions. “But they couldn’t find any evidence of injury. They told me to go home and sleep it off, and I’ve just now rolled out to get some coffee.”
She raised her cup to me. “Great minds think alike.”
I nodded, but a strange unease drifted through me. Even with a knock to her head, Merry was far too subdued. “Maybe you should get some more sleep?” I asked, and she smiled a little wistfully, then glanced up toward the sun peeking over the tree line.
“No, I think I’m going to walk in the sunshine for a little bit. I don’t feel quite right.”
“Do you want me to walk with you?” I really needed to get back to Liam, but there was something forlorn about Merry that struck me to the core. The only reason she’d been at Bellamy Chapel yesterday was to protest the poor treatment of monsters. The monsters hadn’t treated her very well in return.
Now she offered me a distracted smile. “I’m good, really. I just sort of feel a little cold. I might be under the weather, or heck, maybe I did hit my head. I think the sunshine will help.”
I glanced around. It was an absolutely beautiful day, I had to admit. And I knew she was right. It would take some time for her to recover from her close encounter with demons, and sunshine sounded like the best tonic for that.
Still, seeing Merry so affected made my heart hurt. I stood for a while watching her wander off, her steps far less enthusiastic than I’d ever seen them before, and scowled. We needed to figure out why monsters were attacking Wellington. The old walls of the academy weren’t enough to keep them out anymore, and everywhere I turned, it felt like I was being watched. Studied. Assessed. If I was the harbinger of some great monster battle of the ages, then the fight needed to get here, and pronto.
I turned back toward the library, newly resolved. First we’d figure out if there was any real magic in the weapons I’d collected as a kid…and there had to be something there if they’d knocked Liam out cold. And then we’d make a plan. As long as that plan included taking down the monsters of Wellington Academy once and for all—without hurting any of the guys—then that was good enough for me.
It was time for us to kick some monster tail.
13
When I stepped back into Liam’s little hideaway room, I found him standing over the velvet pouch, his hands clasped behind his back. He looked up with a quick smile as I entered.
“Man, I totally passed out last night, didn’t I? Did you see it happen? I can’t decide if I was just wiped out, or if one of your weapons did me in.”
I glanced down at the table, noting the gleaming athame lined up with the other tools, looking as innocent as a magical RenFest blade possibly could. “I’m pretty sure it was one of the weapons, though I was pretty exhausted too. I zonked out just on general principles, but as for you—that athame was one of the things you were handling from the bag when you collapsed onto the table. I didn’t know if you were allergic to medieval festivals or something.”
“Aha! Ye olde dreaded cursed blade,” Liam agreed, reaching for it. I tensed when he picked it up, but as he rotated it in his hand, he seemed to suffer no ill effects. “I’m getting nothing from it now. Maybe a single-use blade? Or maybe it exhausted itself knocking me out?”
“Ahhh…maybe?” I offered, a little lamely. “I got it for protection back in the day. But I didn’t maintain it. It’s not even sharp now.”
“Well, that’s just disrespectful,” Liam chided, and though I knew he was joking, I frowned over at the athame. Did ceremonial knives have feelings? Did normal people ask these questions of themselves?
“I didn’t mean to make it feel bad—” I started, but Liam waved me off, reaching for the sandwich bag.
“Not to worry. You couldn’t know what you didn’t know, right? I’ve got a sharpener in my bag. We’ll get you set up.”
“Oh. Ah… Good.”
Liam took a giant bite of the first sandwich he pulled free of its paper, then gestured with it toward the lineup of weapons. “Pretty nice kit, but it’s not the athame that’s got the juice—or at least that isn’t what tripped my magical Geiger counter this morning.”
“You’ve got a…never mind.” I shook my head as he grinned. He downed half a sandwich in one bite, then pointed to a small separate pouch next to the weapons, with half a dozen little silver animals resting on top of it. “Where’d you get that?”
I frowned down at the bag. “I-I mean, they’re toys. I’ve had them since I was a little girl.” I picked up the largest of the animals, a leopard, and turned it over in my fingers. “I’m pretty sure Mom gave them to me for Christmas one year. They were gray metal, so they rated high for me. But I never used them in any sort of monster fight.”
“Don’t think that’s what they’re for,” Liam said around a mouthful of food. He picked up the coffee cup and took a generous swig, then made a face. “No sugar?”
“Sugar’s bad for you,” I said automatically, sounding so much like my mother, I jerked a little.
“Maybe in your world.” Liam chuckled. He moved over to his bag where, sure enough, he liberated a couple of sugar packets and dumped them into his coffee. He turned back to me, leaning one hip against the table. “Anyway, these little guys are packed with major wards. The lion, leopard, and wolf most of all, but all of them bring something to the party. They’re place wards more than people wards, and I’m thinking they’re why the cameras went kablooey in your apartment, not so much your harbinger-ness. Though your harbinger-ness probably didn’t hurt.”
“Really?” I lifted my brows. “Mom never said anything about them being protector animals, but—that’s kind of cool.”
“She probably felt safe knowing that you kept them in your little secret bag of weapons. You’d carry that bag pretty much anywhere if you moved somewhere different, and you were living at home on top of that. So you were covered.”
“That makes sense.” I pressed my lips together, trying to repress the surge of sadness that welled up within me. “It would’ve been a lot easier if she’d just told me, you know, any of this.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that,” Liam said, taking another impressive bite of his sandwich. “So there’s gotta be only two, maybe three answers to the question of Why the Big Secret, and none of them are awesome. Frost may know more by now, but to my mind, you’ve got option A, your dad was a shit and your mom was afraid of him, so she hid you away. Option B, your mom’s family was a bunch of assholes and couldn’t handle her getting pregnant, so she ran away. Either way, she was super proud of you, which is why she wrote the This is Nina’s Life letter, but never sent it. She wanted you to know that she understood you were awesome.”
“Yeah…” I frowned, shoving my hands in my jeans pockets. “Do I want to know what option C is?”
Having finished his sandwich, Liam waved his coffee cup at me. “Not really. But option C is that your mom was the bad guy in this equation, and she stole you away from your loving father and family, and raised you on her own. Assuming, you know, that she was your mother in the first place, and not some jealous nanny or batshit crazy bystander who wanted the cute little monster-hunting baby for herself.”
I coughed a sharp laugh, the tension easing in my chest. “I think we can pretty much rule out that last one. Nobody would have put up with me the way she did, all the monsters and everything, unless she was blood. There’s no way.”
Liam tilted his head, considering that. “Maybe. But don’t forget, you’re the harbinger. If she knew what that meant, that changes things.”
“Yeah, well. We don’t know what that means, so that doesn’t get us very far.”
Liam straightened and set down his coffee cup just as both our phones buzzed. “Oh, come on,” he muttered, diving for his pack. I looked down at mine as well, confirming the text had come from Frost. “He’s completely too early.”
“Do you think he knows you’r
e down here?”
“Not a chance. He’s good, but when it comes to place wards and sneaking around, I’m better. Only Grim has ever shown up someplace I didn’t think anyone could—like the chapel—but I don’t mind that so much. He’s a different kind of cat. But come on. They’re all upstairs.”
I gestured to the weapons bag. “Should I bring these? Will they be safe?”
“They’ll be totally safe down here. Upstairs, we’ve got the box and your letter. They’re the stars of the show, I’m thinking. These won’t matter much. They’re place wards.”
“Okay…” I moved toward the pouch anyway, putting all the weapons back in the velvet bag, patting the athame awkwardly. It didn’t feel right leaving them out. “You guys protect us,” I whispered to the tiny leopard, just like I had when I was a little girl, even hearing the high-pitched, earnest voice I’d used, as soft as a whisper in my mind. Liam was already at the door, and without him noticing, I stuffed the little bag into my own pocket. Even if it was a place ward and not a people ward, I just didn’t feel right leaving it down here. I turned to go—then turned back, scooping up the child-sized athame and tucking it into my back pocket. Hopefully I didn’t gouge myself to death with it, but at least it wasn’t sharp.
Liam didn’t notice my sleight of hand—or if he did, he didn’t comment on it. By the time we got to the war room of Lowell Library, the other guys had assembled. Tyler and Zach both had wet hair and looked like they’d gotten a good night’s sleep, while Grim looked as gritty as I felt. He didn’t look at me, though both Tyler and Zach grinned and gestured to a pile of food and coffee on one of the shelves along the wall.
As Liam had suggested, my mother’s iron box was set up on the long table in the center of the room, the books and laptops that typically occupied the space shoved to the side, but Frost lifted a quelling hand as Liam started forward.
“Hold up,” Frost said. “We need to cover some other issues first.”
This morning, the commander looked fit and a little fierce, his burly Paul Bunyan frame outfitted in a workman’s light denim shirt and heavy brown work pants. He’d trimmed his beard recently, something I hadn’t noticed the night before, and I wondered about the meetings Liam had mentioned.
“Dean Robbins,” Tyler put in, folding his hands over his chest, his brown eyes narrowing. “Namely, what the fuck was he doing in Nina’s apartment last night, not two hours after our meeting where he acted like he was our best buddy and that we’d be graduating early with full honors, per the Wellington board of directors.”
“Wait, what?” Liam turned toward Tyler, the box momentarily forgotten. “He said that to you? Who got that to happen?”
“It’s bullshit,” Grim muttered, and even Zach looked dubious, while Frost just heaved a sigh.
“I’m inclined to side with Mr. Lockton on this one, but the facts remain that Dean Robbins did put forth the assertion that the graduation ritual would be moved up, specifically to ensure that you were all prepared, and I quote, to defend the campus.”
I frowned. “Defend it from what? Monsters?”
“On the surface, that’s what they’re saying,” Tyler said, rocking up on his toes. “But I’m getting the feeling that it’s more some sort of weird internal first-families fight. It’s not in a monster’s nature to attack unprovoked. That means someone’s driving them to it. And think about it, the first monster wasn’t even a monster, but my Great-Uncle William called back from the crypt by some asshole necromancer who remains in the wind. Zach’s demons were their own special kind of crazy, but—”
“But it wasn’t just my own demons that hit campus,” Zach said. “They brought along a party, and they were amped. That whole scene at Bellamy Chapel, with the students protesting and getting sucked into the fight, I don’t think that was tied to my demons. It was more a collateral excitement of the horde.”
“Which would imply that something major is cooking,” Liam put in. “An uptick in the energy.”
I shot a look to Frost. He’d said much the same thing to me, and God knew I felt the uneasiness all over campus. I thought again about Merry and frowned.
“So, Dean Robbins is behind this?” I hazarded.
That brought a round of scoffs and rolled eyes. “No way,” Tyler said emphatically.
“I can’t really see that,” Zach agreed.
“He’s a douche,” Liam put in.
Grim merely breathed out a judgmental “hmmm.”
“The most likely scenario is that Dean Robbins serves more as an intermediary between the school and outside parties,” Frost said. “Mr. Bellows works with Mr. Symmes and the board of directors here at Wellington, but he gave Symmes no indication that either he or Robbins had been at Nina’s apartment last night. Bellows advised he’d been home the entire evening. So at a minimum, he’s working directly with Robbins, but I suspect there’s more to it than that.”
“Right, okay,” I said. “So Dean Robbins is a bad guy—except when he isn’t, like when he’s letting us know you guys might graduate early.”
“You too,” Tyler said, shaking his head as I turned to him. “I know. It’s insane. You haven’t even been here two weeks. But—something’s got them spooked.”
“Which takes us back, of course, to you and your family, Nina,” Frost said. “There’s still nothing on the facial recognition software to link you to any former students, nothing on the DNA scans.”
“You took a sample of my DNA?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “When—How?”
“Bellamy Chapel—we all got scraped up,” Liam put in with such a matter-of-fact nonchalance that I accepted it and moved on. When it came to today’s roll call of the bizarre, unexpected DNA sampling was way down the list.
“And you’re telling me I’m not in your database,” I said. “I’m a true, I don’t know, rogue. An outlier.”
“Bait,” Grim taunted, but I wasn’t going to let him push me into a reply. Instead, I swung my attention to Frost.
“We need to open the box,” I pressed. “Nobody’s ever bothered it. I didn’t know it existed until I found it after Mom died. She left the pass code on a Post-it note stuck to the box—and her handwriting was pretty shaky. It was near the end.”
My words were flat, clinical, almost like someone else was saying them, but I forced myself over to the box. It took me a couple of unsteady tries, but I got the combination correct. The lid popped open, and there they were. The pathetically few mementos of my mother’s life. A necklace with a semiprecious yellow stone in the center of a teardrop of diamond chips, some handmade earrings of sea glass, financial documents, a dozen or so photographs, and the letter.
This was my mother’s legacy. These pictures, this letter, these scraps of jewelry.
“Wow,” Liam said, edging closer. “I have a feeling we’re probably going to learn more from the box than we are from your mom’s letter, no offense. It’s a custom-made device. Now that it’s open, I can see the wards written into the corners. This box wasn’t bothered because it was set up not to be bothered. That’s a high-end piece of equipment you got right there.” He didn’t mention my magical Protector Zoo I now carried in my pocket, for which I was grateful, and I quelled a small sigh.
Liam wasn’t done, though. He’d leaned closer, his hands lifted in defense if the box would potentially bite him, and peered intently at it with an expression almost of awe on his face.
“This just gets better and better,” he breathed. “I hate to break this to you, Nina, but this is serious first-family shit. I don’t even have a lockbox like this at my house, and we’ve bought our way into just about every corner of the Magic Kingdom that we could. Can you take the letter out? Carefully?”
I nodded, feeling strangely apprehensive as I reached into the box, sliding the photographs to the side and picking up the letter. It seemed smaller than I remembered it, but I pulled the pages free of their envelope and counted them quickly. They were all there, fourteen sheets of closely scribed writi
ng in my mother’s academic hand.
“You want to read it?” I asked, and Liam nodded. He held up his phone. “First I want to photograph it. I’m surprised you never did.”
Now it was my turn to shrug, though my cheeks warmed a little with embarrassment at the obvious oversight. “The letter wasn’t for me. I don’t even understand it. It’s written in such a way that it’s not like a conversation from my mom. It’s more like, I don’t know, some kind of report. I don’t want to keep it, I just want to deliver it.” I made a face. “Or I did, anyway.”
“Fair enough.” Liam watched as I set the pages out in neat order, then he reached into his pack, bringing out two handfuls of quartz shards, each the size of my thumb. He transferred them to me, and I grunted with their unexpected weight. “Place one of these on each page, to keep them in place,” he directed.
When I did that and stepped back, Liam leaned over the first page, positioning his phone to take the first picture. He turned the device around and scowled down at the screen.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. It’s warded,” he complained. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s basically ink that doesn’t have enough contrast to be seen by a camera’s eye, even if it can be read by the human eye. You won’t be able to copy this unless you do it by hand, so that leaves reading it. I’m pretty fast, but—that’s what we’re looking at.”
“We can analyze it later in detail,” Frost said. “Hit the high points.”
“Noted.” Liam dropped his finger until it was only a couple of inches off the page and started skim reading the words I’d gone through myself more than a dozen times. I folded my arms, then unfolded them and shoved my fists into my pockets, reassuring myself that the small pouch was still there, then pulled my hands free and shook them out, hooking my thumb into my back pocket to feel the heavy weight of the dull-bladed athame as Liam finally spoke.
