Monster Exchange Program

by Mark Albany

  Even without wanting to draw attention to myself, this was about as much bullshit as I could stomach. Let the professor state his philosophical case about how some of the most useful materials in the world were a symptom, whatever the fuck that meant. I wasn’t going to be party to it. I quietly closed my laptop, slipped it back into my backpack, and tried to sneak out of class.

  I wasn’t much good at it. The professor caught me almost immediately.

  “Excuse me… Mr. Ellison, is that right?” Wyllis said as he scanned a piece of paper, bringing the attention of the whole class onto me. “Are we boring you? Do you have some kind of pressing appointment?”

  He was trying to bait me. I wasn’t going to let him. But, if he was trying to get a rise out me, that meant I could turn the tables on him. I wondered if he had been specifically waiting for me to do this.

  I noted that Kelly was watching me closely as I placed my backpack on the floor. “No, sir, no pressing appointment. I didn’t realize that I’d wandered into the Quantum Mechanics class instead of Pre-Engineering. I’ll see if I can’t fix that, now.”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Ellison?” Wyllis asked, looking amused as he crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  I pointed at the screen. “This is a Quantum Mechanics class. No offense, but it seems like you’re trying to pass it off as Pre-Engineering, hoping that none of your students realize that you spent too much time drinking… oh, sorry, chaperoning your parties to prepare a class of your own.”

  Wyllis kept that smile on his face, but a hint of annoyance crept into his body language.

  “If that’s what you think—” he started to reply, but I cut him off.

  “For instance, your claim that semiconductors are the most overrated materials in the world is ignorant at best,” I said, letting my voice boom through the classroom. “In reality, they’re the basis for every phone, chip, computer—y’know, pretty much everything that the twenty-first century is built on. If that’s what you call overrated, I’d love to see what you call underrated.”

  Some of the other students chuckled at this. Wyllis’s smirk disappeared. “That’s one point of view. My point of view is that people are reliant on semiconductors, ignoring all other possible advancements.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not true, sir,” I replied. “If there were materials that are better at the job of electronically transmitting data with that kind of precision, enough to bring all of this to life and more, you know that we would be chomping at the bit to use it. However, if you argued that our society is defined by the use of semiconductors, that would be a more interesting debate, bringing up the question of what our society would look like if we designed our world around the use of another kind of material.”

  “Are you finished?” Wyllis asked, finally showing his annoyance with me in full.

  I sucked in a breath. Kelly was smiling. “Yep, I’m done.”

  With that, I moved out of the row of seats and headed toward the exit before I became any more pissed. Most of the time, I would have spent in class was spent outside instead, repeatedly studying the details of the case. Nothing changed, and I had almost everything committed to memory. I wasn’t likely to find anything new, but I was trying to assume another point of view each time, hoping for some kind of prescience. But nothing was coming. The power that I’d inherited from my mother was weak and unreliable.

  The bell rang, and people flooded out of the lecture hall. Too many humans that I wanted very little to do with. There were names attached to the witness reports, but hunting the people down, girls mostly, wouldn’t go over well with the local authorities. I couldn’t just approach them. Although if I did, there might be more progress with the case. Maybe the Bureau should have sent someone else. Someone human, more of a people person, who could get others to trust them and tell them things.

  No. I wasn’t going down the ‘what if’ rabbit hole. I was here to do a job, and I’d do it to the best of my ability.

  “Hi.”

  I looked up from my laptop, eyebrows raised, expecting to see Kelly give me a hard time for losing my temper with the lecturer. Instead, it was someone else. She was taller than Kelly, although that was literally a low bar, and her hair was a frizzy red instead of black. Blue eyes stood out against her dark skin, and she had freckles on her cheeks. She was wearing mostly black clothing, making her look like a bit of a goth, and had a Hello Kitty backpack slung over her shoulder for contrast.

  “Hey there,” I said, tilting my head to study her.

  She dropped into a seat next to me. “I’m Jessica Bailey, but you can call me Jess. I thought it was really awesome how you talked back to the professor like that. I mean, I know it probably won’t score you any popularity points with the rest of the professors, but you had it pretty much on point, there. I’m one of those sophomores, and I’ve been around Professor Wyllis. He likes to pass himself off as one of the cool professors, but I just see him as creepy, preferring to hang out with and impress kids instead of people his own age.”

  I nodded. “I don’t know him well enough to make that kind of commentary. What I do know is that he was presenting someone else’s class as his, and was making jokes about being at a party the night before. I didn’t like how he tried to put us in our place by presenting a topic that we weren’t there to study. When he engaged me, I fought back.”

  Jess chuckled. “Well, that will be burned into his brain for a while. I’d say that he’ll think twice before trying that again 3. Look, you seem to know your stuff, so do you want to go over the subject matter of our next class after lunch?”

  Her sudden shift in topic got a raised eyebrow from me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, considering how Kelly might feel. Hell, considering how I felt about her. There was an attraction from my end. There was…teasing on hers, and a definite physical attraction, judging by the way that her eyes tended to linger, but I wasn’t sharp enough to know what that meant.

  That said, I was here to do a job. And if talking to Jess would help me to get that job done, there was really no argument that I could think of to go against it.

  “Sure,” I said, smiling and tapping lightly at my left tusk. “I’d like that. I missed out on most of my first class, anyway, so I might as well get caught up.”

  “Cool,” she replied, offering me a flirtatious smirk as she jumped up, gathered her shockingly pink backpack and headed off, presumably to her next class. Hell, I had all the classes I needed to maintain the ruse that I was simply another student here on a scholarship. Kelly hadn’t returned to the room. I wondered if my outburst might have had something do with it, even though she had left me a text message that said she was hanging out with some friends and might even spend the night with them. I didn’t remember giving her my number at any point. Then again, she might have looked it up on the room registry. They had everything on those damn things.

  Either way, it was an opportunity to investigate without being missed. I needed to use it. I assumed that these opportunities wouldn’t happen often, so I needed to take advantage of them. The evening offered me the best time to study the campus without being observed, and it was also the time of day when the abductions had happened. I lacked the skills to go unnoticed by the world when there were a lot of people around me, but there were still some primal abilities in my blood that allowed me to become almost impossible to see, especially in the dark.

  I ducked into the shadows of some bushes and froze. My chest moved with each breath and my heartbeat steadily, but aside from that, nothing else on my body so much as twitched.

  The thudding of loud music sounded in the distance—more parties being conducted in the frat and sorority houses at the edge of the campus. I assumed that Professor Wyllis was at one of those, too, forgetting to prepare any classes and deciding to keep on plagiarizing. Men like him had a certain arrogance that made it difficult for them to learn their lessons, especially when the teaching came at the hands of a student.

 
; Once I was sure that I was alone, I reached over to the pack I’d brought along. It contained equipment provided by the FBI for their field operatives, especially those working undercover like I was. I pulled a pair of special night-vision goggles from inside. They were the type that the FBI used to identify the various shifters that had tried to infiltrate their agency. The goggles had received a couple of modifications from the tech experts back in Quantico, and a few alterations of mine as well. I fitted them over my eyes and flicked the switch, hearing a soft whine as it turned on.

  I’d tried to fix that. When you were surveilling someone in the dark, the last thing you wanted was a little whine revealing that they were being watched. However, nothing I did fixed it. I had at least managed to muffle it a little.

  I moved through the wooded areas of the campus, making sure to stay low and keep my pack close to me. I intended to inspect the crime scenes but needed to be subtle about it. On the bright side, I had most of the campus layout memorized by now. I was headed toward the latest crime scene in no time.

  I hadn’t really expected much to begin with, so I wasn’t too disappointed when the night-vision goggles didn’t show anything that couldn’t be seen in broad daylight. If there had been a proper investigation run immediately, a different story might have come to light.

  I froze in place, waiting for a rock goblin cleaning crew to pass by. There weren’t too many non-humans on campus, and most of them held menial jobs that were contracted by third-party companies. New laws stated that a person’s species, race, gender, sexual preference, or religion could not be used as a reason to deny them work. I assumed that USC didn’t want to start a fight with the mostly-liberal court system of the state.

  As I froze, I realized that something glowed on one of the nearby lecture halls. I waited for the team to move past before stepping closer. I had passed the building a couple of times during the day—it was between my dorm and the mess hall—and nothing had been written on it before.

  In fact, I thought as I looked with my regular sight, I couldn’t see the writing without the goggles.

  They looked like magical sigils of some kind. I didn’t recognize the style or specific meanings, but then, I hadn’t studied that sort of shit at the academy. Magic studies of any kind were mostly prohibited until some scientific research was completed on them first.

  These sigils though… They felt wrong. Looking at them make my stomach roil. Occult symbols were usually used as protection, especially on the buildings they were inscribed on. That was pretty much all I knew.

  There it was, I realized. The first solid chunk of evidence that something sinister was happening on campus—something potentially huge, and definitely supernatural.

  I froze in place when I heard one of the lecture hall doors open. My eyes darted around until I found a bench nearby. I dove over it, scrambling to stay hidden as someone stepped out of the building. It wasn’t dignified, but it was better than being caught wearing night-vision goggles.

  It was Jennifer. She was probably studying late or maybe helping a professor with a project. She looked tired. She had her phone in hand and studied it intently as she rapidly tapped on it. I thanked the gods for that since otherwise, she might have seen me.

  I remained frozen in place, keeping the bench between us as I studied her movements for any sign that she had heard or seen something. It wasn’t like I was going to wait around here for long. Jennifer…the girl whose phone I fixed. What was her last name again?

  I caught a small hint of movement out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look at it, there was nothing there. Or, that was what it seemed like at first. The movement was still there, but it was black on black. It hugged the shadows and avoided the lights cast by the nearby streetlights.

  That’s when I saw the vaguely humanoid form with unnaturally long limbs. The thing had hooked hands, yellow eyes, and a mane of spiked hair that made it look like it wore a crown.

  Just watching it move was enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It was easier to see with the naked eye than with the goggles, so I put them in my pack and withdrew a long, thin blade instead—my elemental knife.

  Elemental knives were almost exclusive to trolls, although a couple of goblin tribes had varieties that they had probably copied. The knives were capable of killing pretty much anything but considering how difficult it was to infuse the knives with elemental magic, they ended up being short, which meant that you needed to get up close and personal with whatever you wanted to kill.

  Not something that most trolls shied away from.

  I quickly vaulted the bench, watching the creature that seemed to suck the light from the nearby lampposts into itself before attacking. Jennifer was completely oblivious to it until the darkness suddenly overwhelmed her. She looked up, eyeing the lights. I imagined her confusion. She could see that they were still on, but they weren’t casting any brightness beyond their bulbs.

  Only one creature was capable of this. I’d never actually met one, but my mother had been chock-full of stories about them.

  The…. “Assassin Demons,” essentially. Summoning one required an Adept, a person who was well-versed in the dark arts.

  “What the fuck?” Jennifer asked, and then the demon was on her.

  It didn’t kill her right away, which I supposed was lucky. With her vision, all she would see was shadow-on-shadow, but as it ran her down and pushed her to the ground, she let out a piercing scream.

  I was sprinting at full speed now, elemental knife in hand as I rushed in and tried to stab the creature. It saw me coming and jumped out of the way at an impossible speed. The knife missed, but my other hand connected. It felt like I’d grabbed a rotten piece of meat that was covered in oil. The stench that followed the thing smelled like garbage and feces that had been set on fire. My nostrils curled as the thing slipped from my grasp, but I’d interrupted its attack and that was enough for the moment.

  Jennifer screamed again, and the beast turned its ferocious eyes toward me.

  I scrambled to my feet and roared as I charged at it, flashing my knife. My fist launched first, which the creature evaded easily. I heard a painful cracking sound from the monster that felt like laughter as I quickly followed my strike with a knife slash. I missed again, but this time the creature pressed its advantage, hammering me hard in the jaw and knocking me off my feet.

  As I lay flat on my back, watching the demon surge toward me and bring a clawed hand back to strike a death blow, I suddenly realized why it hadn’t killed Jennifer with its first strike. It was trying to kidnap her, like the other girls.

  The bastard clearly had no desire to kidnap me. Nope, the fucking thing just wanted to snuff out my life as quickly as possible.

  I bellowed again and raised the knife as the demon’s hand came down at my throat. I flinched at the last second until I felt the hand stop at the blade. It didn’t appear to realize what I held, and it let out an ear-piercing shriek as it impaled its hand. It jerked away with enough force to break the blade, leaving me with only the handle.

  I shot to my feet, the ruined knife in one hand and the other clenched, ready to keep fighting. The demon staggered backward, staring down at the blade still jutting out of its ruined hand. Yellow blood pumped from the wound and splashed on the ground.

  The blade had enough of an effect that the thing lost its ability to bend the light, exposing it in its full glory. Glory wasn’t the right word, though, as all I saw was a shimmering, vaguely humanoid-shaped blob of black. Then, greasy ringlets and tentacles with suckered mouths erupted from the sides of the demon.

  “What the fuck?” Jennifer screamed, suddenly able to see what had attacked her. She scrambled backward, away from it. I grinned and charged forward. I wanted that blade back. But, as I landed a single punch on what looked like its jaw, it snapped out of its knife-induced momentary daze. The demon screeched and jumped away, fading back into the shadows too quickly for me to follow.

  I moved c
loser, not wanting to see what the creature could do when it was surrounded by shadows. It was gone for the moment, a black slick on the ground and a pool of yellow blood the only signs that it had even existed.

  “Can I a-ask a q-question?” Jennifer stammered.

  I turned to her. “Shoot.”

  “What the fuck was that thing?” Jennifer shouted at me, trying to hold back sobs. I realized that I now had another responsibility—babysitting the witness.

  “Damn it,” I grumbled under my breath, knowing that campus security would arrive soon and, seeing a half-troll near a girl who was attacked, jump to conclusions.

  No time for that now.

  I jogged over to her and squatted near where she was sprawled on the ground.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, quickly inspecting her arms and shoulders to make sure there weren’t any wounds. There was a lot of lore about assassin demons, not all of it accurate, but the one thing I knew was true was that their claws contained a lethal venom that ate you from the inside out. Thankfully, she was unharmed.

  “No…I’m not!” she whispered as she shook her head and grabbed me, pulling me closer to her—or rather, herself closer to me—and pressed her face into my shoulder as she started sobbing.

  I wasn’t good at this comforting stuff, but I gently wrapped my arms around her and patted her on the shoulder. My keen ears picked up on the sound of people running toward us.

  This was going to be fun, I thought sarcastically.

  6

  I watched as a variety of security personnel flooded the area. The story of another attack being thwarted right here on campus was starting to spread, and I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was just sitting around and waiting for them to decide what to do. I witnessed their choice of priorities firsthand in this scenario, watching as they decided whether to investigate or obfuscate everything to keep the university’s reputation intact.

  The fact that they hadn’t called the police yet told me that they were leaning toward the latter. It wasn’t promising, especially with the way that they’d started to look at me.