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

by D. D. Chance

  32

  Make this wall a door, dammit!

  With that desperate command, I pressed myself backward into the sizzling stone wall with more force, my arms spread-eagled, nearly crying out with relief as fire sprouted from my fingertips to trace lines along the stones in a rectangle twice my size. With all the chaos going on around me, it took a second for my father and Elaine to realize what was going on.

  My father’s face twisted into an ugly mask. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he began, but by then, the wall was already shifting around me, and I knew the truth. I was a portal maker by blood, and I was taking this party on the road.

  With a shout of pure exultation, I pushed the wall down. I landed on my back, scrabbling through the grass, trying to get my bearings. I’d half expected to land on the grassy plain of the Akari mountainside, or at the very least within the hallways of my father’s fortress. Instead, I’d dropped into a deep emerald glade, hemmed in with trees, the clearing almost perfectly round. Wildflowers grew in an unexpected profusion, their color striking me as all wrong. Colorful flowers didn’t grow in full shade. Not like that. How in the world…?

  While this question would have delighted my mother, I didn’t have time to explore it as the portal in front of me flashed again, and my father appeared in a blaze of smoking fire.

  “You dare!” he roared at me, spit flying as he jerked his head back and forth. “What is the meaning of this? How could you even come to this hallowed—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his question, as the portal flared a third time and a riot of noise and activity poured through. With a blast of swarm flying creatures, Elaine Hallowell swept into the glade, whipping her head around, her eyes wide with confusion. Clearly this place was a surprise to her, but not in the same way it had been to my father. She didn’t know where we were, or even what this place was. He did.

  “Maybe Grim was right,” Elaine said, drawing herself up. “Maybe we should have recruited you to the cause. Fortunately, we’re well beyond that possibility now.”

  She lifted her hands, and magic erupted between her palms, fire and thorns. Without any other word, she shoved her hands at me.

  I might have been aware of my badassery by now, but I was still a little rusty on specific magic spells. Imagining a shield, I jerked my hands up to counteract Elaine’s magic, and out of nowhere a hundred thousand silver beads appeared before me, glittering in the sunlight. Elaine’s fireball crashed against them and bounced back, the ricochet so violent that both she and the gray wizard were caught in it, not to mention easily half the swarm of bugs that surrounded her.

  Elaine gaped for the barest moment before another surge of power swept across the field, this one from my father. It eradicated the silver beads and scorched across the ground, though the verdant green grass wasn’t fazed.

  Another burst of light and sound rocked the space, and I rolled swiftly to the side, barely getting out of the way before four new figures crashed through the portal: Zach, Liam, Tyler, and Grim. They leapt to their feet and established fighting positions around me, Tyler shouting, Zach’s and Liam’s hands up, and Grim studying the glade with a mix of surprise and wonder on his face.

  “Plants,” he gritted out, but I had no idea of the word’s significance, and there was no time for clarification. Wraiths flowed into the space and then took form—initially, they surged toward us, but then they stopped and glanced back toward the gray wizard. The moment they did that, the wizard barked a command, and the glade became electrified with sudden magic, freezing everyone in place.

  “Okay, that’s kind of cool, not gonna lie,” Liam muttered.

  “What is this?” Cyrus growled, his voice low and strangled but sounding more surprised than anything. “How is this possible?”

  The wraiths shimmered and quaked, attacking neither me nor Cyrus, but Grim glanced toward Tyler. “Do you have a spell of release from enchantment?” he drawled. “You’ve got the power of the harbinger to aid you—whose commands must be obeyed.”

  “You know what? You’re right. I do.” Tyler grinned. Before anyone else could move, he strode over to me and grabbed my hand, holding it to his heart. He pivoted, and a quick stream of Latin later, the scene in the glade had changed again. Surrounding us now weren’t the sinuous shifting forms of wraiths, but two dozen Laram. Tall, dark, and silver-eyed, with hair lashed back from their chiseled faces, their bodies lean and powerful. Men and women alike and all of them…old. Not in terms of strength or capability, exactly. They were furious, bold, and ready for action. But I got the feeling they’d been trapped for an impossibly long time.

  “How?” my father asked again, his voice curiously flat now, but impatient, clipped. I didn’t know if his complete lack of emotion had more to do with his scholarly bent or merely the fact that he was a sociopath, but the tallest of the Laram strode forward two steps, then stopped, visibly restrained. I didn’t know by whom.

  “You are no longer the wizard you once were, Cyrus,” he said. “Your power has been lessened by your daughter, as your daughter’s power even now gains strength.”

  My father rolled his eyes. “You can’t defy me. You’re beholden to me.”

  The warrior’s brow arched in sneering dismissal. “We are beholden to your line, as long as you remain stronger than we are. Those are the terms. Singly, you always were. But now…”

  The truth came to me in a flash. “You were the ones.” I said. “You were the ones my mother was talking to. Who told her…”

  I had the sense to shut up as the Laram shot me a cold glance and Elaine sputtered with indignation.

  “What are you talking about? Nina can’t be your daughter,” she proclaimed. “Wizards can’t procreate. This is a lie.”

  “And the gray wizard isn’t the only monster who can read,” the Laram said. “In Cyrus’s home, we had access to the ancient texts. We knew the danger to your power that a child would bring, and the measures you took to keep any child from ever happening. We also knew far more about magic than you ever gave us credit for. A magician’s pride, his greatest failing.”

  “You drugged the weakling human,” Cyrus accused, his eyes widening. “You gave her something.”

  The Laram shrugged. “We did very little. But then, of course, we knew she couldn’t stay. You would have had her killed.”

  The statement hung heavily in the air for a long moment, and I turned to my father.

  This was it. This was his chance. To face the reality that my mother had conceived a child with him, one that had been kept from him, but still his child. I wanted him to deny what the Laram had said, to defend himself and the memory of my mother and their relationship, whatever it had been. I wanted it more than anything.

  But my father’s face remained cold and intractable. “Deceivers,” he hissed. “You tricked her. Used her. She was mine to study, not yours.”

  I recoiled at his cold fury. Not afraid of his anger, but repelled by his lack of concern. He had never loved my mother. The gifts he gave her had been meant to keep her entertained, amused, and in place. It had never occurred to him that someone else could have been courting her attention for reasons of their own, that someone else could have given her…plants. Pride, the bane of magicians.

  I addressed the tall, beautiful Laram. “You’re Regin, aren’t you?”

  He jolted, his eyes going wide, even as my father shouted something in a language I didn’t understand, and a bolt of magic shot across the space, catching the Laram in its spell. They attacked, their faces split between their elven forms and the shadowy wraithlike figures from the fortress. They leapt toward us just as another portal flashed, and the space was filled with yet another group of fighters, the Akari in their sinuous leopard guises. The two races attacked each other, while I swung toward Grim.

  “I can’t stop all this,” I screeched at him. Grim nodded once, then shifted toward me, his right hand grasping my right forearm. He pivoted and howled at Zach, not letting me go. Zach r
ushed over to us and reached out his right hand too, Liam and Tyler on his heels, and together, we formed the five-armed pentagon that we’d first made during our collective Run.

  “Stop,” I shouted. A new wave of power tore through the clearing, driving a wedge between the Akari and the Laram warriors, then shifting to flow straight toward Elaine and my father. Elaine pivoted, her hands going up, her face alight with excitement, as if this was the opportunity she was waiting for to catch my father off guard.

  “You’re weak!” she accused him. “You can’t even control your own slaves.”

  “You’re all fools,” my father shot back. “This is over.”

  He spoke in yet another language, and fire rained from the sky, the wind whipping through the trees as geysers of flame broke through the ground beneath us, encasing us in a living hell. For the Laram, it was a death sentence to every beloved growing thing, and even the Akari leapt and twisted in pain, trying to avoid the deadly flames.

  “I don’t know all these languages,” Tyler shouted. “I can’t counteract—”

  “Language!” Liam said, even as we maintained our hold on one another. “These are all just spells in foreign languages.”

  “Yeah?” I began, utterly confused, but his face was alight with wonder.

  “Math is a language,” he insisted. “Math.”

  Then it came to me. The long careful equations my mother had written so carefully into her letter, strings of numbers and symbols that made no sense to me, but maybe—

  “Go!” I ordered him, and Liam pivoted, his voice high and pure over the chaos of the battle as he recited from memory the mathematical equations my mother had placed into the letter, one after the other. At the front of the clearing, my father whirled toward us. He lifted his hands and swept them down. Everything went still except Liam.

  “What did you say?” he demanded, but Liam never stopped shouting, ripping off one equation after another as the clearing began to shake around us, the trees whipping violently though there was no longer any wind.

  “He’s faltering,” Regin called out.

  Grim growled as well. “If we’re going to contain him, we better do it now.”

  Without any further order needed, we struck: Tyler speaking spells, Zach pressing down on the minds of everyone in this field, Liam calling out the magical equations that held my father in a thrall. The guys broke apart, and Liam grabbed for his pack, yanking out a device I hadn’t seen before. He twisted back toward my father—and Elaine—and thrust the device toward them both as they turned on each other, taking up their own private battle anew.

  The dead zone detonated.

  The two of them disappeared. Liam yelped in surprise, nearly dropping the device as it shook violently in his hands, then went still.

  A second later, free of their spells, the Akari and Laram warriors were back at each other’s throats.

  “We can’t do this,” I groaned. “We have to fight, but not here and not against each other. We’ve got enough of a problem on our hands back home.”

  “We fight!” Grim shouted, and though he was in his human guise, his roar came out as pure Akari, finally arresting the monsters’ attention as he refocused his glare on me.

  “We fight,” I agreed. “For Wellington.”

  I imagined a door to carry us back home. The portal flared to life, and we pushed back through, diving into the ongoing battle. Elaine might no longer be part of a problem, but her family clearly ruled the soldiers of the Hallowell army without her.

  The battle of Wellington Academy swelled to even greater heights as the Hallowells threw every weapon they had into the fray. Monsters fell and disappeared, students fell and remained fallen, hunters battled on. But eventually, as day shifted to night and night followed day, there were no more enemy monsters left to fight.

  The battleground at last fell silent.

  The academy seemed to exhale all at once. The monsters disappeared, except for the Akari warriors we’d met and the Laram who had served my father. Grim glanced at me, his face resolute. “We have to close the portals,” he said.

  “No,” I whispered, “There has to be another way.”

  To my surprise, a ripple of magic flowed out at my words, swirling around us, skiffing over the fallen, making a few of them stir and still others groan.

  Grim scowled. “Nina,” he bit out, clearly pissed. Well, he needed to get in line.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, more emphatically. I wasn’t losing Grim to the mysterious monster realm. I wasn’t losing anyone. “There has to be another way… There will be another way.”

  A sudden rush of movement made me jerk to the side…and blink. Hard.

  “Whether there’s a new way or not, it can wait,” announced Claudia Graham, bustling up to us.

  33

  Liam’s mother gestured to the courtyard filled with wounded students and soldiers from both sides of the conflict. “We’ve called upon the cleaners to work hand in hand with a unique set of first responders. You may recognize a few of them, but possibly not.”

  I turned to see what she was talking about and was startled to see new people entering the walls of Wellington Academy who seemed vaguely familiar to me, but Liam and Tyler stiffened.

  “Holy crap,” Liam said. “Is that who I think it is?”

  I glanced toward where he was staring, and jolted too. An old man in a wheelchair being pushed along by a tall, slender assistant made me blink. It was the crotchety old man from Beacon Hill we’d encountered when trying to track down the Boston Brahmin. I studied the group more closely and realized that the other people coming in were neighbors and bystanders we’d seen only in passing—sometimes literally in passing—as we’d shot by them, trying to catch another monster or six.

  Frost strolled up to stand with us, his shirt streaked with blood. “The first families,” he said. Claudia sniffed, while the other board members joined us as well.

  “First, second, and even third-tier families if we could find them. We got into this mess because we were unwilling to see the value of sharing the knowledge and responsibilities of Wellington Academy with those who could benefit from it. Well, now it’s time for us to fix that. We owe these families a debt of thanks for more than lining our coffers all these years. They have stood with us, stayed near us, and provided a line of defense that we never knew how much we would need until now.”

  “But how did you get through to them?” I asked.

  “They came to us,” Symmes said. “We hadn’t realized the channel of communications had been so drastically compromised by Dean Robbins and a few of his compatriots, acting under the auspices of the Hallowell family. We’re launching an investigation into all that, but I suspect we’ll find that his most egregious flaw was his own pride and foolishness. The Hallowells have a verified position at the academy, so getting duped by them was not as difficult, regrettably, as we would have liked it to have been.”

  “Meanwhile, you all need to be officially graduated,” Claudia announced.

  “Already handled,” Liam told her.

  I winced. “Well, we don’t really know…”

  Frost humphed a surprised breath. “No, he’s right,” he said. “I saw that when we were besieged at Lowell Library. The magic levels of the academy suddenly elevated, the likes of which I’ve only seen during a graduation ceremony. How in the hell did you manage that?”

  “Let’s just say there’s a whole lot more to being part of the collective than anyone realized,” Tyler said. At this point, nobody outside our group knew of my connection with the monster realm or my family ties to a gray wizard there. That was maybe not something we needed to discuss with any amount of detail, at least not right away. I didn’t know where “gray wizard” would rank on Claudia Graham’s social scale of the first families, but I suspected it wouldn’t do me any favors.

  “What about the Hallowells?” Zach asked. “Where are they in all this?”

  Symmes fielded that one. “We ha
ve located some of the family through the fighting today, but there’s more work to be done there. We’ll need to trace their family line and their supply chain, along with the magical families outside the bounds of Boston who were involved in their rise to power.”

  “Did you see that armor they were rocking?” Liam demanded. “How come we don’t have nice things like that?”

  “You can be sure that will be part of the retooling of the minor,” Theodore Perkins said heavily. “We’re not alone in this process either. The other academies should be involved—and, in some cases, reopened. There’s deeper magic in Boston than we ever realized. We must be far more vigilant.”

  “The most dangerous problem has been solved, though.” Symmes gestured to Liam, who pulled out his pack and took out the dead zone device he’d used on the battlefield of the monster realm.

  “We had a couple of days to improve this while Nina and Grim were hanging out with the Hallowells,” he said. “Ain’t nobody getting out of this until we want them too, not even a gray wizard and Elaine Hallowell.”

  With the touch of a button, Liam toggled the unit into life. A burst of light showed two figures hurling fire at each other.

  “They’re fighting each other?” I asked, amazed, as Belle Hogan’s words about my father came back to me. “He does not lose.”

  “They don’t know the fight ever ended,” Liam confirmed. “They’ll never tire, and they’ll never age, and they’ll always be on the cusp of winning it all.”

  Grim grunted, staring at the tiny flickering figures. “Is that a prison?”

  “It’s the best we can do until we have a way to judge them,” Theodore Perkins said. “We have operated largely out of the eye of traditional magical governmental oversight, but this…crosses borders on several different levels. It will take some time to sort out.”

  “In the meantime, there’s the matter of your commission,” Symmes said, turning to us. “I overheard a little bit of what Grim shared with you all, the very real concern of the breach to the monster realm, and the reality is there could be other soldiers out there trained by the Hallowells, and other portals to guard. It’s a lot of work. Dangerous work. The kind of work that might be commissioned to a newly minted graduating class of Wellington Academy, in fact.”