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

by D. D. Chance

  “And she threw illusions that were pretty convincing,” Grim said. “Including fire out of her wrists.”

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Liam asked with a grin.

  “You’re not just siphoning magic,” Zach said, shaking his head. His hands were up now, but in a more seeking gesture, less trying to stop anyone. “I can sense the fire within you. Maybe it needed to be triggered, but—”

  “Well, hey—” Both Liam and Tyler spoke at the same time, and my cheeks flushed as Grim sighed and even Zach reddened a little.

  “Will this never not be mortifying?” I muttered, but I pushed on before I lost my nerves. “Yes, for everyone keeping score…” I faltered, sensing the pitfall too late.

  “She scored again. She totally scored,” Liam finished for me. Chortling, he turned to Tyler. “And this time, she’s leveled up for sure. We don’t know what she’s capable of, but this has gotta help, and God knows we need it.”

  “We do need it,” Tyler said. “It’s honestly the best piece of news we’ve gotten today.”

  “Today? How long have we been gone?” I asked.

  “A solid twenty hours,” Zach said, making me blink. “Frost is losing his mind because the wards of the academy are starting to falter big-time. We’re having breaks all across campus, not in any way that a normal system would show, but the magical grid is faltering. The place where the grid is strongest is here. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Especially after what that chick in the bar said,” Liam put in.

  “That chick being Belle Hogan,” Tyler said. “Owner of the White Crane bar for going on fifty years now.”

  “Fifty years,” I said. “Well, she looks pretty good for that if she’s, what, pushing seventy?”

  “She’s also a legitimate witch, according to Frost, a solo practitioner who broke with her coven right around the time she came to Boston. The families knew about her, of course, but she stayed on her turf and they stayed on theirs and nobody much cared either way. Apparently, there was a witch academy in Boston that was founded at the same time Twyst and Wellington were, but the Hogans weren’t part of it, and it eventually closed. But being around the academy as long as she has, she knows some things, and as Nina found out, there’s a portal in the White Crane.”

  “One of many, I might point out.” Liam held up his small gadget again. “I thought this gizmo was only good for finding strange pockets of magic that I kind of took to be sort of like Easter eggs or possible strength builders. I never could figure out how to leverage them, and believe me, I tried. I had no idea it was actually picking up on portals until I started messing around with it near that broken mirror.”

  I grimaced, wondering about all the years Liam had been led to believe that he had no real magic within him, that he needed to rely on other sources, when all the time, his magic was being suppressed in some ill-fated practice to keep his family in their place. One of many things that Wellington got wrong.

  Liam kept going. “But with Belle’s tip that we could have a hunter concentration here in the arena, I pulled it out again—and boom. Portal central. This place is the friggin’ crossroads of the universe.”

  I squinted at the walls, the ceiling. “I guess it makes sense that they built the arena here, then.”

  “What doesn’t make sense, though, is why it’s not failing.” Tyler said. “We’ve got lapses in Guild Hall, Wellesley, and Cabot Hall, which is the administrative heart of the campus. Even Lowell Library is mission critical at this point. But this place is still holding, with barely a flicker.”

  “So they won’t attack here?” I frowned. “I guess that wouldn’t make sense. Not if this is the strongest part of campus.”

  “None of it makes sense,” Tyler sighed.

  I frowned at Liam. “There are four portals that you found? All on this floor, like all on four walls?”

  “Honestly? There are five, one below us too. That’s gotta be the pit that was used for the collective training, which is kind of ironic, and which also explains how Wellington could get monsters to attack us during the Run, back when they were letting more monsters through I guess.”

  I stopped short. “But Frost didn’t know about it? He didn’t know about these portals?”

  “That would be negative,” Tyler said. “He was as surprised as the rest of us to know there were so many entry and exit points throughout Boston, and especially here on campus—though generally our wards get triggered and we don’t have monsters popping out everywhere. But that explains how the monsters showed up and then magically disappeared in the past, that’s for sure.”

  “But there’s nothing about any of this in the library reference books?”

  “Not anymore. The Hallowells were thorough. All that was left were the portals themselves. Like these.”

  “And these are nonstarters,” Grim said, his gaze following the faint shimmer that rose along the walls. “They’re set to the monster realm, unused. I’ve never been through them.”

  “Agreed,” Zach said. “I’m not picking up on any recent energy for these. There’s more for the one downstairs, but we had the Run a few weeks ago, and a pile of monsters came through for that. Frost was convinced he’d spelled them into being, but it’s more likely his spell opened a handy doorway.”

  Liam nodded, gesturing to me and Grim. “Still, we should check it out. And now that you’re here, if there’re any other creepy-crawlies, you can help us fight them with your super amped-up monster-fighter powers. Frost gave us the lowdown on how to get there without dropping the floor.”

  He waved us to follow him, and we did, through a narrow doorway and down a tight and steep stairway. The passage ended in a small room that I recognized as the empty cistern where we landed during the Run. Liam consulted his gadget, but nothing flared, and he pointed through the iron trellis. “It’s in there,” he said.

  “What, like the Hall of Champions?” I asked.

  “Interesting,” Tyler mused. He went back to the doorway and hit some sort of mechanism, and the trellis lifted. We crowded in and found ourselves once more in the room where we ended our collective Run. Gold bricks lined the walls, representing the families and owners and other benefactors of the original Wellington Academy. I scanned the names, recognizing many of them now: Lowell, Cabot, Reid, Pendleton, Choate, Graham, Perkins.

  There were a dozen other names I didn’t know, of course, but then I figured there were lots of options for family relations. I even found a couple of McKinleys.

  “Portal’s here, in the floor,” Liam said, but Tyler didn’t turn from the wall.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Maxwell. What family was named Maxwell?”

  Liam squinted up at him from his crouched position.

  “None, there are no Maxwells of note in Boston. The name is familiar, but it’s not from the first families, and believe me, I wouldn’t be the son of Claudia Graham if I didn’t know every single member of the founding families and their many, many offspring.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Tyler said. “And here’s another one: Jasper. And Girard. Those aren’t family members. Right?”

  He turned back to Liam, and the two of them clearly had the same thought at the same time. “They’re hunters,” Liam announced.

  “Okay, then.” I nodded, latching on to the logic of it. “Well, that kind of makes sense that you guys would honor your fallen hunters here.”

  “You don’t know Boston society,” Tyler said as Liam snorted a laugh. “Hunters get their degrees and are paid handsomely for their work. That doesn’t make them part of one of the families.”

  “Guys, there’s an awful lot of energy in these blocks. You got any more of them?” Zach asked.

  Liam blinked, clearly surprised. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that there’s energy in some blocks more than others, a force of some kind, and not an insubstantial one.”

  “Batteries?” I asked. “Like maybe these are repositories for pow
er that helps support the grid of Wellington Academy?”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said, bouncing up on his toes. “It’s got to be something like that, but why put it down here, and why use their names? It’s almost like they’ve been stuck here…”

  He and Tyler stared at each other. “No,” Liam said. “They wouldn’t have done that.”

  Grim touched one of the bricks. “Believe me when I tell you that there’s very little that the Hallowells wouldn’t do. You believe this is where the living, presumed dead, hunters were stashed, whichever ones were still alive to begin with?”

  “There were fifteen of them, from what we can tell,” Liam confirmed. “Some others died legitimate natural deaths, though apparently, none of their associates had informed the academy of their demise. But fifteen completely disappeared.” Tyler scanned the room. “You’re telling me I’m going to find their names etched in gold? That is messed up.”

  “They’re powering the wards of the academy,” Liam said. “If we take them out, release them somehow, what happens to the wards?”

  Grim answered for us. “They fail completely. But if the monsters of the realm are coming to do battle against Wellington Academy, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  “We’re plenty strong,” Liam said quickly. “We’ve got the five of us, we’ve leveled up and we don’t know exactly how, and Nina is practically glowing in the dark over there. We’ve got plenty of our own juice without killing the wards altogether.”

  “Maybe,” Zach countered. “But there’s also the idea of not leaving these poor bastards stuck behind a wall. We don’t know how long they’ve been trapped there, and I suspect it’s a little cramped.”

  Liam winced. “Okay, fair point.”

  “But how do we get them out?” Tyler asked. “We can’t just crowbar off the gold bricks, right? It can’t be that easy.”

  “Au contraire,” Liam said, sliding his pack forward. “It’s even easier.”

  28

  While Liam sorted through the pack, Tyler’s phone buzzed.

  “We’ve got more breaches,” he reported. I moved to his side as Grim strode over to Liam, who chucked his phone to Grim so he and Zach could scowl down at the device.

  “Low-level monsters so far,” Grim said. “Caralons, Magla Gušter…” He lifted his face toward me. “The wraiths from the wizard’s fortress, I’m thinking.”

  “Well, they were up and ready to go, so probably pretty easy to mobilize.” I sighed. “But does that mean that they have familiarity with this plane? Is everyone as powerful on this plane as in the monster realm?”

  “They’re the same in terms of survivability, though their level of magic can be affected, and the ability to return in some cases is constrained to the portal of entry,” Grim said. “But those are the only restrictions.”

  “And we’re not going to want to shut those portals down either,” Zach said, peering down at his phone and scrolling through the pictures that Frost was sending over. “Worst-case scenario can’t be that these things escape into normal society.”

  “I don’t know, man, that certainly would provide us with some awesome job security,” Liam said as he whirled around in a tight circle, his eyes on his device. “I can tell you that the campus is lit up like a friggin’ Christmas tree right now. More portals I never knew existed are popping up everywhere. I have no idea how I missed that many.”

  “You didn’t miss them. The gray wizard can make them on the fly. He’s probably going around to various enclaves of monsters that the Hallowells either have allied with or control outright, and shoving them through.” I stared at one image after the other, caralons, screamers, spiders the size of rats, rats the size of dogs. They boiled out of doorways and gates and even shimmery spaces etched in the walls, milling around at the openings of each portal. “They don’t have a plan, though.” I glanced toward Liam. “Do we?”

  “Our first line of attack was to secure the outer borders of Wellington Academy, but some of those portals are being cut directly into that outer wall. We’re going to have to establish a new perimeter, but if we do that, the monsters run free inside the wall.”

  “The students?” I asked.

  Zach fielded that. “Most of them are off campus, but not all. The board started going through the residence halls with more urgency this afternoon, telling people to get the hell out without trying to sound the alarm. The students all indicated they understood, but we doubt most of them paid any attention. We’re looking at fifty, maybe a hundred still on campus. Probably another hundred staff members.

  As we talked, a loud clanging bell rang out, a fire alarm on steroids.

  “Lockdown,” Tyler clarified, not sounding surprised. “Wherever those students are, they’re going to need to shelter in place. But depending on where that is…”

  “Jesus,” Zach said, scrolling around a picture on his laptop on this phone. “Is that Wendy Symmes—what is she doing on campus? And Merry?”

  “No way.” I shifted over to Zach to stare at his phone, but he was right. Merry, Wendy, and a group of easily twenty students were huddled together in a cafeteria-like area. “Where are they?”

  “Let me see.” Liam’s eyes widened as he scanned the image. “That’s the caf on the monster quad. What in the world are they doing there?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Maybe that’s where they were storing all their protest signs to save the monsters?”

  “Yeah, well, slight problem with that…” He turned to Liam. “You gotta tell Frost. They’ve got to get out of there.”

  “Opening up a feed there now,” Zach said. “I can’t read their minds, though. There are some serious wards still in place.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because—”

  A new sound crackled to life around us, Frost’s voice coming through the speakers. “Guys, we’ve got a problem. There are portals being opened throughout campus, but it’s not only monsters from the outer realm coming through. Our internal habitats are being sprung too.”

  Over him, a long keening wail sounded, bone-chillingly mournful.

  “The dorn?” Zach groaned.

  “Why do I suspect this meetup isn’t gonna go as planned?” Liam asked.

  “Frost, we’ve got a situation here,” Tyler said over them both. He jabbed his phone around the room. “We’ve got maybe fifteen hunters trapped in the walls here, their magic or abilities or whatever the hell they have helping to fuel the wards. With all these claws and paws on the ground, we’re going to need any help we can get. But if we pull them out of the walls…”

  “The wards may fail altogether.” Frost cursed. “That’s why the arena stayed so strong? How did we miss that?”

  “Nobody tested the wards, not until the last few weeks anyway.”

  “The Run,” Zach said abruptly. We all looked up. “Was that the trigger?”

  “No,” Grim countered. “The Hallowells don’t have any access to the academy unless they’re physically here, which they only managed when they were invited. This was their plan all along. The specific timing of it was less important to them—it would happen when Wellington Academy could potentially launch an offense. They didn’t know about Nina until the presentation. Then they moved. Simple as that.”

  “Well, now it’s our move,” Tyler said. He addressed Frost. “Liam thinks he can get the hunters out, but we could be facing some serious monster issues if we do that.”

  “If we don’t do that, we may be overrun anyway,” Frost said. “I’ll notify the families, prepare the evacuation protocols and instigate the backup containment plans. The board has already sent out some preliminary communication so it won’t come as a complete shock, but it’s still going to catch some people by surprise. But get those hunters out—what are the names?”

  Tyler rattled off a half dozen names, and Frost came back with several more. “Look for those. They should still be alive, or at least we haven’t found any definitive proof of their remains. I’ll cross-re
ference any specific skills, but be aware that none of them are going to be as powerful as you five. You’re going to have to run the show.”

  “Roger that,” Tyler said. Liam was already turning for the wall, his portal finder stuffed back in his pack for the moment, and two new devices in his hands, looking like defibrillator paddles.

  I peered at him. “You gonna shock the walls?”

  Liam grinned. “Shock ’em, rock ’em, but you guys need to be ready. When these hunters come through, they may be hella traumatized.”

  “Well, they can join the club,” I muttered, wincing as a new sound broke over us from the loudspeakers and much closer too. The screams of monsters on the hunt.

  “Get a move on,” Frost said. “Last communications through this channel. If the wards dip any further, we gotta assume our communication has been compromised.”

  I half expected to hear Elaine Hallowell’s chilling laugh on the heels of that pronouncement, but there was nothing but static. Liam attached the paddles to two of the gold plates, then dug in his pack and drew out a similar set. He tossed them to me. “Opposite wall, four should do it. Mainly because I only have four.”

  I dashed across to the wall as the howls of the monsters grew closer.

  “What names?” I called out, but Liam shut the question down.

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re not pulling out the specific people behind the specific bricks. These hunters are trapped in the gray space between the realms, not actually in the walls. It’s just a matter of cutting a hole for them.”

  I nodded, though I had no idea what he was talking about. Still, I had some experience with opening up portals. I attached the paddles, then turned back to him. “You need my help?”

  “Not for this,” he said, flashing me a grin. “But hold that thought.”

  He flipped the switches on a handheld remote, and the space between the paddles lit up in a firestorm of electricity, bright enough that we all crouched back, driven to the center of the room. Probably not a bad thing, because the people who pushed out of the fiery doorways filled the chamber with rasps and groans and curses.