by D. D. Chance
I started for them both, my hands coming up, but my father was faster. He lifted his hands and spoke words that I felt more than heard, and I was flung headlong into the pack of monsters.
For a few brief moments, I did what I did best. What I’d always done best. I fought: slashing, thrusting, cutting, shoving back the monsters that had come for me since I was very young. I watched almost as if from a distance as I lashed out, driving my knife into shoulders and necks, and slashing across arms and paws and wings.
The creatures that screeched and roared back at me as they attacked showed no humanity, because they weren’t human. The rage that drove them, the need to attack, to kill, to live and die, were part of who they were. Despite Merry’s most fervent wishes, even despite my own, Grim had had it right all along. Monsters weren’t people. And even those like Grim, who had decided to create societies, interact with others, and even build alliances, were very much their own beings. Monsters weren’t humans.
Not because they couldn’t be. Because they didn’t want to be.
None of this was killing more monsters, though, and one of them barreled into me from the side, a flurry of teeth and claws that had no midsection, just rolling along like a spiky ball of pain. It clipped me hard and sent me spinning, and suddenly, I found myself hurtling past the gargoyle-framed entryway of Wellington Academy, spilling out onto the same cobblestones where I had first entered the academy, covered in the guts of a Tarken land worm.
With a vicious uppercut arc, I managed to cleave the monster in two. It disappeared in a fiery poof of smoke and ash, followed by a brief rainstorm of greasy sludge, which coated my legs and steamed on the cobblestones.
“The barriers aren’t going to hold.”
I squinted up to see an old woman leaning against the wall with one hand, almost casually…but not quite. Belle Hogan, the bartender from the White Crane. I squinted beyond her and vaguely recognized a few other faces too. Some of the regulars from the White Crane, and maybe…was that one of the baristas from the Crazy Cup?
They lined the walls of Wellington Academy, several dozen feet apart from each other, each of them with one hand against the wall, the other either in their pockets or holding cell phones, which they idly scanned, seemingly without a care in the world. Any one of them would have looked normal, but the entire line of them leaning against the old stone wall conjured up images of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame cathedral, only much, much smaller. And human.
“What is this?” I asked, struggling to my feet. Out here, you would never know the chaos going on inside the campus walls. Even peering through the gateway to Wellington Academy, it appeared as it always did, with its serene and moonlit walkways, tidy manicured squares of grass, a hint of old stone buildings rising gracefully in the distance.
“Our part,” Belle said simply. “It’s not a big part. But we’re not completely useless out here, beyond the focus of the magical families. We’re not stupid either. We’ve always known the magic held within the bounds of the academies. There was a time, a long time ago, where we had our place among them. Rogue teams, mercenaries, hired to do the small magic work the academies couldn’t be bothered with. But we always took those jobs. Magic isn’t only the province of the rich.”
“What are you, anyway?” I asked. “You’re not from the monster realm, but you’re not entirely human either.”
“You’ve maybe got that last part a little backward,” Belle said, not unkindly. “But you’d better get back inside. We’ll stay as long as we can and hold the line. It won’t be easy. These old walls have been systematically weakened for decades. Sometimes by the academy itself, believing the lies that there are no more monsters.”
I gritted my teeth. “There are plenty of monsters. They’re all just being controlled by the Hallowells now.”
“Oh?” Belle asked, genuinely surprised. “Well, that’s worse than I expected. But it also explains the armored vehicles that we’ve seen heading into Back Bay and Beacon Hill. I guess the calvary is coming, right? The new academy hunters here to save the day.”
I glared at her, but I didn’t need to be a nearsighted witch to see the truth of what she said. Of course the Hallowells were coming; they’d told us they would be. “They’ll roll right in,” I agreed. “The walls won’t stop them either. They’re descendants of the same families that formed Wellington.”
“And the families that ring the academies are hiding in their houses, equal parts afraid and amazed. They don’t have what it takes to fight monsters. That’s why they made the academy with its mighty walls, but in the end, they just want something to make the monsters go away.”
I nodded. I didn’t like it, but that didn’t make her words any less true. “What will happen to you if the wall fails? All your people here…”
Belle shook her head. “These aren’t my people, and this is their fight too. They each have their own shot of magic. Some big, some small, but enough to sense a monster when they’re properly attuned.”
“And you tuned them up?”
She smiled. “Let’s just say we’ve been doing a brisk business out of the White Crane this morning. Folks have been getting a dose of discernment with their spiked coffee, and those who can see, do. They’re the ones here with me.”
“But if the walls fail, they could be hurt.”
“You can’t access your magic without opening yourself up to being hurt.” She shrugged. “It’s just part of the package.”
Her voice had become unexpectedly sad, and I nodded. Belle had the timeless expression of someone who had lived too long and yet not nearly long enough, no matter how old she really was. I understood the feeling.
A cry sounded from the other side of the wall, the first to penetrate the cheerful morning air. I glanced over to see another creature sail through the opening in the wall, another one of the spiky balls of terror. I bounded toward it, slashing and thrusting, but as I did, a flicker of chaos rippled across the opening of the wall. Belle was right. The walls weren’t going to hold.
“You’ve got to get back in there,” Belle urged as I rocked back to my feet. “They aren’t going to be able to do this without you.”
“Agreed,” I said, wiping the blade on my jeans. “But not just me. You have to come too. If the Hallowells are bringing people from the outside to fight their battle for them, we can too. Are you armed?”
“We are. Iron blades and bags of beads,” Belle said, pulling out a small bag, its cache of silver beads glinting in the sunlight through the mesh. “We found them piled up in the storeroom of the bar. Saved us some time.”
I peered from the bag to her. “Piled up?”
She grinned. “You gotta watch that stray cat of yours. He’s got a mind of his own.”
“Yeah, but—can you use those? Grim made it sound like only monsters could wield silver against their own.”
“He’s right, for the most part. But he also knows the truth can be twisted in the right circumstances. Witches operate in the fringes and the alleys of the city, where there’s a lot of good work that can be done. Bottom line, we can use these monster weapons for this battle, trust me. He gave them to me, and I knew what to do to make it possible.”
She whistled sharply, the sound threatening to pierce my eardrums, but carrying down the cobblestone street and around the corner.
From both sides, dozens of people surged forward, peeling off the walls to head our way. Not just the burly regulars of the Crane, but old and young, big and small, male and female. All of them either gripping blades or clamping their fists around a bag of beads, the knotted tops wound around their hands.
“Stay strong,” Belle said, watching me. “You were literally born for this, Nina. That doesn’t make it any easier. It just means that if anyone can win the day, it’s you.”
“Right,” I muttered, and with Belle’s ragtag team of small-magic fighters, I dived back through the opening of Wellington Academy’s fabled walls.
The fight had swelled
, the crowd of monsters easily doubling, and I recognized more, fighting back their own brethren. The Akari in their enormous snow leopard guises, leaping and tearing. The Laram standing in spiked formation, some with bows and some with swords. Even a pack of fire lizards, their scales reflecting the bright Boston sunlight, streaming gouts of fire from their throats.
As attuned to Belle’s group as I was, I didn’t miss their gasps, but to their credit, their shock wore off quickly as the monster horde scented flesh and bone and blood.
“Nina!” Tyler’s curt voice pounded in my mind. “What the hell?”
“The Hallowells’ reinforcements are here,” I shot right back. “We’ve got armored cars filled with soldiers, Hallowell-trained hunters, closing in. I decided to recruit some of my own.”
“They’ve got magic,” Zach chimed in, his voice rough, his breathing ragged. I couldn’t see him in the battle, but I could imagine him with his hands raised, turning quickly, getting the lay of the land. “They’re tuned to you, Nina.”
Not exactly, but there wasn’t time to explain. “They damned well better be,” Tyler said. “Keep them to the perimeters, I don’t want to have to explain them going down.”
“They won’t go down.”
A portal flashed open in the wall beside me, where there wasn’t one before. For a second. I feared that the armored cars of the Hallowells would come piling through, but then I remembered that wasn’t what portals did, at least not here. They only let in monsters.
And what boiled through next was pretty monstrous: bugs and insects and horrible combinations of creatures, all of them ranging from the size of my fist to as big as a horse, a virtual endless nightmare of creepy-crawlies, from flying, buzzing, biting, stinging, and stabbing things as vile and foreign to me as they apparently were to the creatures of the monster realm themselves.
“Fall back, fall back,” I yelled to Belle’s ragtag team. “Don’t engage.”
They didn’t have to be told twice. Something about the creatures that the Hallowells had custom-made, splicing together monsters for their own amusement and perverse delight, struck to the core of anyone human.
It also galvanized the monsters fighting with the Akari. Inhuman roars of rage sounded over the din of chittering chaos, and almost as one, the monsters turned to fight the new incursion. Not all of them, of course, but even some of the enemies we’d been losing ground to pivoted to fight this new wave of horror.
“No!” I heard the sound crack across the backs of the monster horde: Elaine’s voice. She was clearly seeing the same thing I did. But her command was swallowed by a rush of Latin, Greek, and maybe Akkadian as Tyler shouted with a earth-shakingly strong boom, his words directed toward the same creatures, strong and forthright enough that only more confusion was sown.
The battle began in earnest again, and I fought deeper into the melee. At one point, I thought I saw Grim, battling not in his glorious Akari form, but in his equally impressive human guise, long white-blond hair streaming, jaw set, muscles bunched and rippling as he knifed with one hand and punched with the closed fist of another.
Then I was swept away. There was no organization to this battle. It was kill or be killed. I banged through another knot of creatures, stumbling into a bright patch of sunlight, and then I heard my name.
“Nina?”
I staggered to the side, gaping with horror at who stood just inside the trees, draped in shadows.
“Merry?”
She stood straight and sure, her auburn hair flowing around her shoulders, her jaw set. With her were several students I vaguely recognized from the demonology department. “What the hell?” I demanded.
She gave me a grim smile. “Funny you should mention that. We can help.”
I shook my head, but her hands came up, her smile going even broader as her bright green eyes widened, and any darkness flashed away with the rush of her next words. “No, really, I mean like, seriously, we can totally help. You’re going to be amazed. This is going to be amazing.”
That was the Merry I knew and loved, but I still shook my head. “You can’t, my God, Merry—”
“You were closer the first time.” She grinned. She pivoted, and the demonology students stepped to the side, their voices raised in earnest cries of Latin and Greek.
With a crackling slash of lightning and the roiling stench of sulfur, a dozen fire-hurling demons poured into the fight.
31
“What in the…” Zach burst out of the churning battle, racing toward us.
“It’s your ball game, Zach!” one of the students called out, and Merry whirled back to me.
“They told me they could get the demons to the battlefield, but they didn’t know what would happen after that, right? But I mean, we had to try. Like, we couldn’t just not fight. This is our campus! We had to try.”
I gaped at her as she babbled on. “What? They can’t control these things?”
She flapped her hands at me, her gaze swinging back to the battlefront even as she crouched back into the trees. “It was a calculated risk!”
A risk that was going to pay off. As I stared in absolute wonder, Zach started shouting in Latin and Greek, and to my surprise, the demons lined up with military precision, surging forward like an advancing storm against the chaos.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Liam howled in my mind. “That is baller.”
Another surge of activity erupted from the near side of the battle, toward the center of campus. A wall of magic surging forward of its own volition. Then I caught the white-haired crew behind it, and I gaped.
Liam saw at the same time I did.
“Mom!” he demanded, and sure enough, in a perfectly shaded cashmere pantsuit, her arms held wide, Claudia Graham and the entire academy board drove the wall of magic forward. They stopped a short distance from the portal where the mash-up bug creatures were boiling through, and pushed what I realized now was a magical barrier of some sort up against the wall, effectively blocking off the portal.
“Well, that was kind of cool,” Liam said in my mind, and Tyler laughed.
“I didn’t know the old man had it in him. Like seriously, I didn’t know.”
No sooner had that part of the wall been reinforced, though, than a new rumble broke across the campus, coming from the bar district where the old wall had long ago been taken down to its foundational stones. The armored vehicles rolling through the campus had been more than a match for that level of barrier, and I stopped fighting a group of multiheaded hydras long enough to see the black delivery trucks coming fast. The vehicles stopped well in advance of the battle and disgorged their contents. Easily fifty soldiers, genderless and featureless in black combat gear and helmets, bearing guns and short, thick daggers.
For the briefest moment, it seemed as if the whole of Wellington Academy held its breath. Then, with cool precision, a half dozen of the soldiers fired directly at the board.
“Mom!” Liam shouted, loud enough to make my eardrums ring, as Tyler called for his dad as well. The board members dropped like stones, victims of the excellent marksmen’s shots, and with Liam and Tyler effectively distracted, the rest of the battalion surged forward.
“Nina.” Zach was in my head, right with Grim.
“Harbinger,” he growled, which did more to refocus me than the urgency of his tone. I knew what they needed, even as I caught sight of Belle and Merry side by side, fighting back a pair of eyeless caralons.
“Everyone at once,” I shouted. “Take them!”
There was no other choice. The uniforms that the soldiers were wearing looked bulletproof, knifeproof, fireproof, floodproof. Their masks were undoubtedly graded to combat gas, and for at least the next few minutes, I didn’t have my crack spell caster at the ready to create a distraction of magical proportions. Instead, almost without hesitation, every single monster converged on the soldiers—even the monsters that had been under the Hallowells’ sway. I blinked in utter shock at the solidarity they showed. That
was…way more effective than I’d expected.
“You’re the harbinger,” Grim growled in my head, sounding as foreign and feral as he ever had. “Order and we obey.”
The soldiers, to their credit, stood their ground against the onslaught of monsters. I might not like the Hallowells’ tactics, but apparently, their recruits were top-notch. Then I was swept into the fray, pushing forward until a bolt of fiery power thrust me back and out of the scrum.
I whirled to recognize that it was my father who had once again shoved me to the side, his magic pinning me against the wall behind me with such force that I could feel the old stones start to heat up. Clearly, he hadn’t been affected by my sudden rush of magic, more the pity.
The rocks warmed further, growing uncomfortably hot against my skin until I could feel my skin start to blister. Did this dickhead think he was going to cook me to death on the walls of Wellington Academy?
That wasn’t going to happen. He was the portal creator, and I had gathered that magic from him. But my mother was descended from the Hallowells. I couldn’t do much with her mad planting skills, but that didn’t mean I was defenseless.
“C’mon,” I said, drawing on the magic of Tyler’s spell casting, Zach’s empathic mind command, Liam’s raw and unbridled power, Grim’s authority over the united monsters of the monster realm—and my own inherited illusion magic—all of us stronger because we were bonded together. I riffled through my mental lexicon of the most beautiful, powerful, and devastating monsters I could imagine. “Help me out here.”
A screeching battalion of winged beasts appeared above, the sheer riot of sound forcing everyone to stare up, up—to witness an entire army of Winnebago-sized dragons exploding into the sky, their scales and wings shining with every color of the rainbow, their forms compiled from every fantasy novel I’d ever read and a hundred thousand more childhood daydreams—long, elegant snouts, powerful legs, and great soaring wings filled with the gusting wind.
Like any good illusionist, this was all the distraction I needed.
