by Eden Beck
The rest of the students file out as Erin and I stand awkwardly at Professor Waldman’s desk. Sawyer lingers by the door, but Professor Waldman gives him a pointed look and he slips out, closing the door behind him.
As soon as he’s gone, Professor Waldman perches herself on the edge of her desk and shoots us an overly familiar smile.
“Thanks, ladies,” she says, shimmying a little on the top of her seat. “I just wanted to let you both know that Friday evening I’ll be hosting a little party. A soiree, if you will.” She says the word with relish and a forced French accent, which makes me cringe inwardly. “It’s for all the girls at Saint Marcellus. There are so few of us, you know? It’ll be nice for us to all get together. We girls have to look out for each other.”
I think she means well, but it isn’t just the accent that feels forced.
I say nothing, but Erin nods shakily.
“It’ll be a good opportunity to meet some of the other girls. One week here, and the testosterone levels can get a little … overwhelming …” Waldman says, winking at us and nodding towards the now empty seats at the back of the class once occupied by Piers and the others. Clearly, she’s misread that situation entirely. “Whaddya say?”
I glance at Erin, who’s just staring at a spot on the wall over the professor’s shoulder. I didn’t come here to make friends, but I’m not keen on making any enemies either.
“We’ll think about it,” I promise.
“That’s all I can ask.” She hops off her desk. “Now off you go, you two.”
Sawyer is leaning against the wall beside the door on the other side, waiting for us. “Hey! What’d she want? You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“Maybe!” Erin squeaks. She looks about ready to bolt, just the prospect of possibly having to participate in a group social activity enough to make her fret.
I tell Sawyer about the invitation, and my misgivings about it. I consider telling them about the look I saw in Professor Waldman there, just for a second, but decide better of it. It was probably just my imagination.
“I’m just wary of any teacher who seems overly keen to be seen as so … approachable.”
“I agree,” Sawyer says. “She’s weird. She called us kids. Does she think we’re in kindergarten?”
Sawyer and I mimic Waldman’s airy way of talking all the way back to the dorms. Erin stays silent, but squeaks out that she’s going to lie down as soon as we get back. She offers to take my things inside, then disappears behind the door. I hear it lock.
“Guess she isn’t in the mood for company,” I say, as both Sawyer and I share a slightly-shocked glance. I’ve never been locked out of my own room before, and I have half a mind to try and knock it down out of principal.
“Give her a break,” Sawyer says, nudging me. “Not everyone can be as brave as you.”
I roll my eyes, but I do follow him back towards his room so he can drop some things off too. “So,” I say, my curiosity getting the better of me. “You’re pretty protective of my roommate, Erin.” I stop and nudge him back. “You like her or something?”
He laughs and shifts his books to his other arm. “Nah. Scared, nervous girls aren’t my type.”
I tell myself I don’t care how he answers, but a tiny part of me warms at his words. It’s been a long time since I felt a genuine, human connection, and it tugs at a soft part of me I thought I buried a long time ago.
Ever since I learned about the monsters last year … I had a hard time with my old friends. I withdrew, isolated myself while I prepared myself for this new life. It was the first lesson I learned; hunters hunt alone. Even with a partner, it’s up to you to keep yourself alive. The less people around you, the less people get hurt.
My parents are the perfect example of that.
However, just because I came here to learn to hunt monsters doesn’t mean I’ve lost the human part of me that tingles a little when a boy like Sawyer looks my way.
“I mean, she doesn’t seem cut out for this monster hunting thing, does she?” he continues, completely oblivious to the way I’m full-out ogling him. “She almost barfed all over me at PW this morning, and we hadn’t even started.”
“PW?” I ask, shaking my head to clear it.
He explains. “Physical and Weapons. Heard some of the older students calling it that at breakfast.”
Ah, that would explain things. I overslept and missed breakfast earlier.
Now that Sawyer’s confessed he lacks and feelings for Erin, I find myself growing a little defensive of her. Hypocrite. I know, I’m the worst.
“Erin might not exactly excel at PW, but she scored really high on the written test,” I say.
Sawyer cocks his head to the side. “I mean to ask about that,” he says. “She was in your group at the last trial, right? How’d she do?”
I sigh bitterly and tell him about the whole ogre ordeal.
He whistles. “Sucks to get the trick monster. We had to defeat a kappa. It’s this Japanese monster that has a little bowl of water on its head—but I’m an idiot. I tried to fight it, and I should’ve remembered that you have to bow to the damn thing. No one else in my team knew what it was, and I totally blanked.” He sighs. “Didn’t get very good scores. I did okay on the written test, but it was hard … and I went to a high school for this.”
I stop. “I wondered about that,” I say. “Has everyone else been studying this stuff forever?”
He stops too. “Some of us, but not all,” he says. “I actually went to school with Piers, Owen, and Bennett … believe it or not.”
“And?”
“And they’ve always been exactly the same,” he says. “But that Erin … I haven’t seen her before. I wonder what her connection is here.” He glances over his shoulder. “Maybe one of her parents is a monster hunter.”
“Well, you know all about that shit, right?” I ask, a little bitterly. “Don’t you know?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know everything. And Singer … I’ve never heard of any famous hunters with that name.”
He stops at a door and fumbles through his pockets, eventually extracting a key. “But who knows. Maybe she’s braver than we think.”
“Maybe.” I don’t want to talk about Erin anymore. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that she’s not going anywhere, but it’s nice not to keep an eye on her all the time. I’m afraid if she’s left alone she’ll just shatter into a million, tiny, terrified pieces. “Now that kappa,” I say. “I’d like to hear more about that.”
He laughs as he finally gets his door open. “Just watch out for any weird looking monsters with little bowls of water in their heads, and you’ll be fine.”
His dorm looks much the same as mine, but with different posters on the wall. I can tell which side is Bennett’s by the abundance of bodybuilding posters over the bed and at least a half a ton of protein powder stacked along the wall in little boxes.
Sawyer’s half of the room, however, is a kind of shrine.
All sorts of newspapers are pasted to the wall, biographies of hunters are pulled from magazines and tacked up, and replica weapons hang from every hook and sit on every shelf. I really hope this part of the world isn’t known for its earthquakes, or else this is a veritable death trap.
“Oh, hey, Avery.” He points to one of the weapon replicas on his desk as he throws down his things. “This is your dad’s axe!”
“What?” I freeze, my eyes dropping to the wicked-looking weapon cradled in his outstretched hands. It’s small, barely larger than a dagger, but the blade is curved and seriously sharp. Even from here, I can tell the replica would slice through my skin easy. These weapons are made to cut through hide, scale, armor—things much tougher than the human flesh that wields them.
“I mean, one of them. Axes were his specialty weapon, after all. This is just his most famous one,” Sawyer says, setting it back on its stand. He comes back into the hallway, beaming, and locks the door behind him before we head down
towards dinner. “I also have a replica of one of your mom’s daggers around here somewhere.”
“She used knives?”
“Sorry,” Sawyer says, smacking himself on the head. “Sometimes I forget you don’t already know these things.”
“It must be nice to forget,” I mutter, but not loud enough for him to hear me. Or, if he does, he doesn’t let on. He’s already gone glassy-eyed and started up on more of his favorite subject; my dead parents.
“Nah, she was more of an all-rounder. Daggers, spears, crossbows—you name it, she could kill with it. Your parents were amazing.”
Sawyer keeps going on, but I tone most of it out.
There’s something uncomfortable about Sawyer speaking so casually about my parents, but at the same time, I’m itching to hear more. This is the sort of stuff that Aunt Trish didn’t know because she simply didn’t want to; little details about what they actually did. I feel that slightly guilty stab in the pit of my stomach. If she hasn’t figured out where I am by now, she’ll be seriously freaking out.
It’s better this way, I remind myself.
Sawyer might be a welcome distraction, but that’s just it. He’s a distraction and nothing more. If I plan on becoming a hunter fit to fight the monster that killed my parents, it’s going to have to stay that way.
Chapter Seven
The week goes on. I try to avoid Piers, Owen, and Bennett, but they aren’t making it easy. I thought that having such small classes would create a kind of camaraderie, but the opposite is true. There’s heavy competition hanging in the air, and the fact that our real-time scores are displayed on a big screen in the foyer at all times. It’s a constant reminder of how close we all are—me, Piers, Owen, and Bennett—to being the last name at the bottom of that list at the end of the year.
We have a big gap to fill to catch up, even to Sawyer, but where I focus on being the best—the boys focus on me. More accurately, they focus on crushing me.
To make matters worse, I have an assigned seat right between Owen and Bennett in survival class with Professor Helsing. I know they’re going to cause trouble for me, and sure enough they do everything they can to make me look completely incompetent.
Our first class we have to practice a simple bandaging technique, and Owen does everything he can to make it difficult for me. I just have to grit my teeth and do the best I can. It’s needless to say that Professor Helsing is not pleased with my work.
He doesn’t say anything until the following class on Thursday, when Bennett keeps tightening the lids to all the jars in our food kits so when it comes to me I can’t get it opened. I can only handle so much snide chuckling at my expense before I just take the jar in two hands and smash the container open—sending splatters of olive juice all over the nearby desks.
Helsing just glowers at me darkly and dismisses the class. “Just like your parents,” he says, shaking his head. At least Sawyer, who in his misguided obsession with hunters ends up talking about my parents often, is always positive. He’s infatuated with them, but Helsing; any time he brings them up, he wrinkles his nose like he can smell them and doesn’t like their scent. I’m starting to recognize a similar expression whenever he talks to me.
It’s infuriating.
Sawyer keeps looking at me in our next class, creature handling, and I know he can tell something’s wrong. Helsing’s comment threw me off, and it takes everything in me not to knock Owen on his ass when he throws one last spitball my way.
Creature handling may be physically demanding, but it’s looking like one of my favorite classes. We actually get to see and interact with friendlier monsters like some of the pixie species Waldman went on about. Professor Jaxton, a soft-spoken man with several scars from his ongoing work with the creatures, tells us on our way out of class that next semester we’ll get our own creature to look after.
“They’re not pets,” he reminds us, but I can’t help being excited. Maybe they aren’t pets to him.
“Earth to Avery.”
Sawyer’s grinning at me in that doe-eyed way he does.
“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous,” he jokes, then steps to the side and watches as Owen walks by with the other boys, their voices making the hair on my arms stand on end. He sees this too and moves to block my view of them. “I was thinking of going for a walk around the school, exploring a little bit. You up for it?”
We invite Erin to come along, but true to form, she claims to have work to do back at the room. I don’t mind. We walk her back to drop off our things, and then head off on our own. I glance back once, and Sawyer reassures me she’ll be fine.
“She wouldn’t be here if she couldn’t take care of herself,” he reminds me. “When it comes down to it, I have a feeling she’ll surprise you.”
“Maybe,” I say, but I’m not convinced.
I don’t like leaving Erin alone. She’s been seen hanging out with me, and if Piers, Owen, or Bennett catch her on her own … I shudder. I don’t want to put her through that. Erin can barely make it through PW without vomiting on her own. I’m not sure she’d survive that sort of torment.
Sawyer and I leave the residence wing on our own and head down a few hallways we haven’t seen before. I keep asking him what things are, and where they head, and he has to remind me that he barely knows more than I do. There was a brief tour of the school before the trials, but most of it is still a labyrinth to the both of us; a surprisingly boring labyrinth that’s mostly mop closets, classrooms, and offices. For a long time, the most interesting thing we find is a giant bat skeleton hanging by fishing line in one of the closets.
Nestled somewhere behind the front desk, out of the way of the classrooms and dining halls, is another hallway. It’s finally here, on the first floor of the main building, that we pause.
Unlike all the others, this hallway is lavish. There are ornate columns spaced along the walls and only two doorways, one of which, to our surprise, has Professor Waldman standing outside it.
She sees us right after we see her. She looks startled for a moment, then smiles and calls out to us.
“Hey, you two! What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Exploring the school,” Sawyer says, at the same time. He shoves his hands in his pockets and shifts his weight lazily to the next foot.
I glance at him. I guess he’s just more easygoing about telling people his business.
“Well if you’re exploring, come take a look at this,” Waldman says, beckoning us over.
Sawyer heads right over, but I follow reluctantly. The very last thing I want is to get stuck in another conversation with our creature studies professor. She’s taken a liking to me, something that Piers and the others have taken note of. If Waldman asks me one more time to pass something around class for her … I might sit back down with a knife stuck firmly between my shoulder blades.
Waldman is friendly, to be sure, but there’s something strange about her that I can’t quite place.
Kind of like the door we now stop in front of.
Long glass cases line either side of the hall, showcasing prizes from hunts and photographs of past students. A couple quick glances at them, and I know my parents won’t be present in any of them. They’re too new, too glossy and brightly colored.
But there are no cases anywhere near this door. The hallway across and to either side is conspicuously empty aside from the one darkly colored door. Nowhere to hide.
It’s made of a reinforced steel fashioned to look like wood, but the metallic clink of a clip from my backpack against the door reveals its secret. In the very middle of the door is a tiny viewing window, a circle of thick glass through which to peer inside.
Which I do.
Professor Waldman stands so close, I swear I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.
“Is this what I think it is?” Sawyer asks, awe in his voice as he pushes up to peek in beside me.
The room is
empty except for a table in the center, on which stands some sort of urn. It’s metal and carved with intricate patterns, the largest of which is at the top—a deep oval with lines tracing gently from the bottom, looking somewhat like a closed eye. Sawyer pushes closer to me to get a better look until our cheeks are touching.
“This,” Waldman says, her voice drifting from behind us, “is the school’s most prized possession. It is our responsibility to guard and protect.”
“It’s a phylactery,” Sawyer whispers, his breath tickling my ear. “The phylactery.”
I stand up, pulling away from Sawyer so he doesn’t feel how warm my face is getting. I turn to Waldman.
“Phylactery?”
She nods. “It’s the only one of its kind. A phylactery containing one of the most dangerous monsters known to man—a djinn. A high demon, incredibly dangerous, captured and brought to us by a powerful monster hunter.”
“Piers’ dad, Mason Dagher,” Sawyer says, stepping away from the door. He looks at me. “I’ve heard about this thing before, but never got to see it.”
Professor Waldman smiles indulgently at Sawyer. “You know quite a lot, don’t you, Mr. Alman?”
“I try.” He smiles sheepishly. “I’ve loved monster hunters ever since I was a kid.”
I turn back to the door to look at the phylactery as they strike up a conversation about different hunters. There’s something about this ‘phylactery’ … it’s pretty, in a weird, dangerous kind of way. I wonder how many monsters Piers’ father captured and killed. I wonder how many monsters my own parents captured and killed.
I wonder if they’d been able to capture a djinn like this, if they would have ended up dead in the first place.
Sawyer’s excited chatter fades away behind me as I continue to gaze at the phylactery in the empty room. There’s something about it. I want to touch it, to pick it up, to feel its weight in my hands. My hand drifts toward the doorknob, half of its own accord and half out of a burning curiosity.
“Avery?”
Startled, I whirl quickly away from the door. Sawyer and Professor Waldman are both staring at me with concerned expressions.
