by Eden Beck
“What do you mean?” Owen asks with faux innocence.
I point to one of the particularly bad cuts on my face, which I can feel is still bleeding. “This shit.”
Piers steps forward, trying to close the distance between us, but I take a step back. He spreads his hands with a smirk.
“Look. The worst-performing student gets dropped at the end of the year, yeah?”
“And none of us want that to be us,” Owen adds.
Bennett folds his own huge arms. “We’re at the bottom of the pack.”
“And you’re probably our biggest threat,” Piers finishes.
I glance between the three of them and scoff. “Biggest threat? How do you figure?”
The smile melts off Piers’ face. “Number one—Samson and Riley Black. Need I say more?”
“What about your dad, Piers?” I ask. “I saw him up on the stage next to the headmaster.”
“We already told you,” Bennett says, suddenly growing protective of his friend. “That isn’t the same.”
An annoyed expression flits across Piers’ face, but he doesn’t correct Bennett.
“Secondly,” Piers continues. “You’re a girl.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?” I snap, fists clenching.
“Hold your horses, Black,” Owen says, raising a hand to calm me. “Not like that. Look around you. You see many girls in our class?” he asks. There’s no point in answering. I know as well as they do that there are less of us than I can count on one hand this year. “They’ll wanna keep the few girls they have.”
“See, the odds are against us,” Piers says with a shrug. “Third, it was your stupid idea to fight the ogre that got us in this position in the first place. If anyone is going to get punished for it, it should be you.”
Punished. There’s a certain triumph in their faces as their leader speaks the word. I grit my teeth. Great. This school is already going to put me through one hell, and now these boys are determined to put me through another.
I’ve seen their type before. Sexist, ego-driven masochists with no regard for anyone but themselves.
“Eat your own dicks,” I spit, and I turn on my heel and march stiffly away from them. I don’t deserve this bullshit.
Surprisingly, Sawyer is waiting just a little ways away and catches my arm as I walk by, forcing me to slow my pace. He falls into step beside me. I’m still fuming, but I try not to let it show. This isn’t Sawyer’s fight, and the last thing I want is him trying something heroic.
“Avery,” he says soothingly, and I look up at him. He’s smiling gently. “Look, don’t worry about them, okay? Just do your best.”
I raise my eyebrows. I remember the score screen at the end of the trials. Sawyer didn’t score too well himself, just above Piers, if I recall correctly. That means if I and the other boys do well, then he could be the one on the chopping block. He would profit off me doing poorly, maybe even more so than the others.
But he’s by my side. He’s right here, encouraging me, smiling at me like he doesn’t care at all that my success might mean his failure.
It’s for this reason that I force myself to smile up at him through my anger.
“Thanks,” I say quietly. He grins and loops an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against him in a short one-armed hug. His body is warm, and he’s still shirtless too. I have to fight to keep a blush off my cheeks.
“We’ll get through this,” he says.
I smile. I know I will. Piers and the others have made their first mistake by underestimating me.
I am not to be underestimated.
Chapter Six
Erin stands next to me as I stare at myself in the mirror of the residence wing’s bathroom.
I look absolutely frightening.
“Just hold still,” she says soothingly as she dabs rubbing alcohol on my cuts. It stings, but I try not to react. I have to clench my fists until my fingertips leave little red half-moon marks on my palms to keep from crying out and swatting her away. After all, she’s just trying to help.
One cut above my eye has so much dried blood caked around it that it makes my eyebrow look twice as thick.
Erin finally steps back to survey her handiwork, but just shakes her head. “You should shower,” she says, twisting the cap onto the bottle of rubbing alcohol. “It’ll get most of the mud and blood off, and then we can look at your other cuts. I have some sticky bandages, too.”
I take her advice, even if it means I won’t have time to eat before the next set of afternoon classes.
I wince as the hot water hits my cuts and gashes, but it feels nice on the bruises. And there are many of them. One on my arm is already turning purple, so I give it some extra time under the water, which is turning brown as it goes down the drain. From dirt or blood—I try not to think about it. None of these injuries are life-threatening, anyway.
Erin helps finish patching me up after I dry off, even though I tell her to go on without me. She puts adhesive bandages over the smaller cuts on my back, where I can’t see while I dab more rubbing alcohol on those across the front of my legs. By the time we’re done, I look like I was attacked by a small creature made of long, whip-like arms.
If anyone asks, that’s what I’m gonna say happened. Not, I think, that Piers and his posse have decided it’s a good idea to rough up the girl they’ve determined is the biggest threat to their existence here.
There’s just enough time to grab a couple of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches on our way to our next class. Sawyer spots us heading down the hall towards Creature Studies 101 and jogs over.
He’s chosen the opportune moment to approach, what with the half a ham-and-cheese I just shoved in my open mouth.
“That one looks like it hurts,” Sawyer says sympathetically, touching one of the particularly bad cuts on my cheek. I nearly spew meat and cheese all over him.
I have to clench my fist to keep from recoiling from his touch.
“Shit, Sawyer,” I snap through my mouthful of food. It does hurt, but his touch is surprisingly gentle. It’s almost … nice … even. It could just be the contrast between this tenderness and the violence from the other boys, but I feel a little spark ignite inside me. I have to look away from Sawyer’s clean-shaven face as I try to swallow the rest of my food before I make an even bigger fool of myself.
Sawyer is just shaking his head. “Those cowards. I’ll try to look out for you tomorrow. Just try to avoid those guys for now.”
We pause outside the next classroom and peer inside. It’s a pretty standard class; lined with neat rows of desks and narrow, barred windows looking out at the tree-lined mountains to the west.
Most of the seats are already filled, but it isn’t hard to spot them amongst the crowd. Piers, Owen, and Bennett have already pulled a clump of desks close together at the back of class. Piers is stretched out, his arms crossed over his head and his feet resting on the back of the chair in front of him. Bennett, meanwhile, is just struggling to fit into the restricting desk while Owen keeps organizing and reorganizing the pens on his desktop.
I stop short in the door, and all three look up at me.
There’s a slight pressure on the back of my elbow as Sawyer guides me away to some desks on the other side of the small room, as far away as possible, before we can cause a scene. They aren’t the only eyes on me as a settle in. A couple of the other new recruits straighten up and train their eyes forward, all the while watching me from the outer corners of their vision.
They might not be outright bullying me, but the rest of this class is certainly determined to find out what stuff I’m made of. I find myself shrinking into my seat. Up until a year ago, I didn’t even know this world existed, but everyone is already treating me like I’m some kind of threat to be summed up and destroyed.
Piers and his boys are staring at me still, but I focus on my notebook, trying my best not to stare back. Sawyer helps by leaning forward and blocking me from their view until the professor
finally sweeps inside and draws everyone’s eyes forward.
“Good afternoon!”
I look up too. Professor Waldman, the female professor I met last night on the way back to the dorms, is at the front of the room writing her name on the whiteboard. Her voice his high and almost sing-song, like that of a nursery-school teacher.
“I hope everyone’s here,” she says, clapping her hands together and waving the long, bohemian sleeves of her dress around under the marker in her hand, “Welcome to creature studies. You lucky kids get me this year!”
I bristle at being called a kid. I glance at Sawyer, who also doesn’t seem to like it. I’m one of the youngest students here, and I’m eighteen. Professor Waldman’s smile grows even wider, and something tells me she’s going to be making me bristle a lot.
“I know I might not look like your typical monster hunter,” she’s continued, her eyelashes batting under heavy makeup, “But I can promise you, I’ve seen nearly every creature in these books we’re going to be studying … and here I am, lived to tell the tale. That must tell you something.”
“Yeah,” Sawyer says, leaning closely to whisper under his breath, “It tells us she didn’t work alone.”
Professor Waldman looks up sharply from where she was supposedly picking a name from random off her attendance list to pass out textbooks. For one second, I catch something dark on her face as she searches out the source of the comment.
But then her eyes land on me, and they soften. “Ah, Avery. Why don’t you do the honors?”
Her eyes meet mine. She’s beaming, but I can’t get the image out of my head of how she looked. It might have been just for a second, but there was something … unsettling … in her gaze. I scoot my chair back and stand up to do as she asks before I get the chance to see it again.
She’s still grinning at me as I walk to the front of the room to pick up a stack of thick paperback books off her desk. A Beginner’s Guide to Creatures and Monsters. The image on the cover looks like it could belong to any old book on mythology I could pull from any library shelf. One quick flip through the first couple pages, however, and it’s already clear this is something more. A knot tightens in the pit of my stomach.
It was nearly impossible to get my hands on real monster books before the start of the year. I had to reply on piecing together half-fictionalized stories from the internet and mythology textbooks. I’m aching to learn the truth at the foundation of this new world.
The world of monsters is finally within my grasp.
I start passing out the books as quickly as possible, starting with the row nearest the door—Piers’ row. His eyes are trained back on me, their pupils tiny dark pits of black trying to draw me in.
“While she’s doing that, I’ll tell you a little bit about what we’ll be doing today—this may be an introduction, but it’s still important you pay attention.”
I make my way up the row. Piers, Owen, and Bennett watch me.
“For this first quarter, we’ll be learning about the easiest monsters and creatures to handle; this class is meant to be a sort of companion to creature handling, which you’ll have tomorrow afternoon.”
I place a book on Piers’ desk. He grabs it and immediately knocks it onto the floor with a loud thump.
“Professor,” he says, his gaze locked on mine as all other eyes turn to look at the source of the commotion, “Avery dropped my book on the floor.”
Professor Waldman is in the middle of writing something on the board. She’s the only one who doesn’t stop what she’s doing to see what’s going on.
Her voice stays warm and friendly, as she tells Piers, “I’m sure Avery meant nothing by it. Now, class, if you would take note of this schedule here—”
“Wow,” I whisper to Piers as she continues on as if nothing happened. “What are you, twelve?”
“Pick up my book,” he hisses, one finger pointing down at the offending object by his foot.
“Pick it up yourself, asshole.”
I place a book on Owen’s desk. He, too, knocks his to the floor. I could smack him across the head right now.
“Professor, Avery dropped—”
“Just pick it up, Mr. Collier. I don’t have time for petty interruptions.” Professor Waldman is smiling as she faces us, but her voice has a note of impatience in it.
“Backfired,” I whisper as Owen, scowling, reaches down to pick up his own book.
I give Bennett his book, expecting him to continue the saga of book-dropping. He simply nods up at Professor Waldman at the front, and quietly opens it to the first page. It’s a small victory, and not one I’ll be taking to heart any time soon. Let Bennett be nice to me here all he wants, he could crush me with one hand the next time we’re out on the practice course.
Nobody else seems keen to throw their books on the floor like children, so I hand out the rest without incident and return to my seat. Sawyer has already opened my book to the proper page and he pushes his notebook at me so I can quickly copy the small amount of notes he’s had time to take.
“The first lesson of creature studies is to forget everything you think you know about monsters,” Professor Waldman says. True to the general motto of the school, she’s wasted no time diving into her first lesson. No wasted syllabus days and going over class requirements. Here, it’s quite simple. Perform well and your survive, perform poorly … and you don’t. “Before you can learn to handle larger, more dangerous monsters, it’s important to understand where we stand,” she’s saying. “Humans, in their most natural state, are most akin, at least in my opinion, to pixies.”
She reaches up to the top of the board and, in one fell swoop, tugs down a large, oversized photo of a tiny human-like creature. While a couple students have started muttering around me, I just lean forward in my seat and drink in the sight.
It’s bald and wrinkly; with a face screwed up like it’s smelling something foul. The camera is a little blurry around the edges, but I can still make out the soft shape of fast-moving wings attached to the creature’s shoulder blades. From the size of the grass blades in the background, it can’t be much larger than the length of my thumb.
“Pixies?” I hear Pier whisper to the other boys in the back. “She’s got to be kidding us.”
Professor Waldman turns again and fixes her gaze on Piers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dagher … did you have something to say?”
Piers sits up a little, but tries to look unruffled. “Nothing, they just don’t seem very dangerous, that’s all.”
Bennett’s arms flex menacingly across the top of his desk. “I could crush one of those things with one hand.”
Professor Waldman smiles, but it’s a secret, knowing smile that makes the smug look on Piers’ face falter.
“I’d very much like to see you try,” she says, then turns back to the rest of class. “I say ‘humans in their natural state’ because unlike us, the chosen few, most humans can’t even see monsters. Not anymore.”
She reaches up to pull down several more screens. I’d wondered about this—how all these monsters supposedly existed under human’s noses this whole time. In the stories my aunt used to tell me as a child, she always said that my parents were special—that they could see things that other people couldn’t, but I’d always just assumed that was another half-truth meant to make the actual truth go down easier.
But now, as Professor Waldman points out several scenes of carnage thanks to those same supposedly harmless pixies, I discover one more piece of the truth I took for a lie.
“The mind sees what it wants to see,” Professor Waldman says. “By the time they reach adolescence, most adult humans couldn’t see an iratxoak, or galzagorriak as they’re sometimes called, if they were looking right at them.”
Sawyer leans in closer again. “It’s why monster hunting runs in families,” he says. “Most people who see monsters end up in asylums otherwise. I mean … imagine seeing one of those things and no one believing you?”
I have just
enough time to catch a glimpse of the tiny blue-skinned man on one of the screens before Professor Waldman rolls it back up and tells us to turn to the next page as she moves on with her lesson on pixies. My mind is still reeling over what she said. It makes sense, I guess. If there really are this many monsters in the world, the only place to hide would be in plain sight.
“These pixies are indigenous to the Pyrenees,” she says, pointing out the border between France and Spain on a map tacked to the wall. “This is Basque country. Anyone here Basque?”
One boy raises his hand and Professor Waldman smiles at him.
“So, you’ve probably seen iratxoak before?”
The boy opens his mouth to answer, but she talks over him before he gets the chance.
“Many talented monster hunters have met their end at the hands of the iratxoak. Like most pixies, they’re only a danger if you fall prey to their tricks. You’ll find the smaller the creature, often, the more cunning you’ll have to be to defeat it.”
I scribble down notes as fast as my pen will allow, but I’m soon lost. There are so many different kinds of pixies and each one of them has such particular tastes … I see why Professor Waldman issued us such a solid warning. All it would take is for a hunter to mix up the harmless but impish pixie of the Scottish Highlands with the nearly identical, but deadly, pixie of the nearby Welsh moors.
The end of the lesson rolls around quickly. Professor Waldman lets us leave, but not before telling us to write a small essay on the identifiable traits of different pixies. I’m in the middle of gathering up my books when she calls me over to her desk.
“Miss Black, could you hold on a moment? You too, Miss Singer.”
Erin and I look at each other. I’m a little annoyed, sure this has to do with the little stunt the boys tried to pull earlier—but Erin looks positively terrified. Her face pales almost as badly as it did this morning after the obstacle course.
