by D. D. Chance
But Tyler had seen what happened. Not only seen it, but he’d hauled me out of a monster while it was trying to eat me. I refocused on him, forcing myself to meet his eyes, and trying to ignore the fact that he’d kept his shit-eating smile dialed up to an eleven. His name was Tyler, for pity’s sake. What did I expect?
“Sure,” he agreed. Then he leaned closer, his eyes narrowing in speculation. “But back to my question. Did Frost pay you to do this? Commander Frost? Did he put you at risk, faking like you were some kind of real monster hunter, to force us to test our skills?”
“No.” Faking like I was a monster hunter? Seriously? Remember, this entitled asshole pulled you free from a cuttlefish. I could afford to be gracious. No, really. “But I guess—thank you. For killing that thing. Whatever you said it was.”
“A Tarken land worm.” Tyler repeated, this time with more emphasis. “Way bigger than it should have been, too. So big, it got a good fifty feet inside the walls before I could light it up, which was about forty-five feet too many, you ask me.”
“That’s for sure. It practically reached the center of campus,” Vlad the Vampire piped up, his voice clear, full, and strangely resonant as he turned to look behind us, back toward the wall. Then he refocused his dark eyes on me. “I’m Zachariah Williams, by the way. Or Zach, if you prefer. And you are?”
“Just passing through,” I replied automatically. He didn’t flinch at the harsh angles of my words.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, holding my gaze. “You’re safe here.”
I blinked at him, my breath evening out as my pulse slowed down. In that moment, I actually believed him. How was that possible?
“A lot safer in here than out there, for sure,” Tyler agreed, breaking Zachariah’s grip on my brain and replacing it with his own, this one hot enough to make my cheeks flush. “You’re honestly telling me you weren’t hired by Frost?”
“For the last time, no. I don’t know anyone named Frost.” I was beginning to wonder if maybe this was some kind of a screwed-up dream. That would explain a lot.
“Not a dream,” Zachariah said, which struck me as odd, but I couldn’t place why at first. He held out his hand, and I instinctively wiped mine off first, though it was now free of monster guts. We shook, and a flare of energy sizzled between us, making me jerk my hand away.
“Ouch,” I managed. “Quit that.”
Zachariah gave me a sad half smile. “I can’t, I’m afraid. I’m psychic. That also means I can read your mind. I’m sorry for that intrusion, Nina Cross. I truly am.”
I stiffened, renewed panic zipping through me. Not a dream, he’d said. “You know my name, too?”
“He’s pretty friggin’ annoying with the mind-reading thing,” Liam put in, completely without rancor. “None of the rest of us do that, promise. Nice to meet you, Nina.” He hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and rocked up on his toes, still surveying the ground. “A twenty-foot-tall Tarken land worm. There’s all sorts of crazy to unpack about that.”
Despite his easy words, a new surge of anxiety bloomed deep inside me, chased by an oddly familiar chill. I glanced around, my nerves pinging with danger.
Zachariah was wrong. I wasn’t safe, even on a monster hunter campus. I was beginning to think I wasn’t safe anywhere. I’d always fought alone, survived alone. That hadn’t changed. I’d come to Boston for a single, focused purpose: to find my mom’s family, if they still existed, and give them her letter. I needed to accomplish that task, then split town.
“Ah… I think I probably better be going,” I said.
Tyler turned toward me, surprise blanketing his face. “What? No way. You can’t.”
“Watch me.” I turned on my heel—
And crashed straight into a warm, solid, and remarkably well-muscled chest.
“Masturbate,” Guy No. 4 rumbled.
That did it.
I snapped.
4
Without taking so much as a breath, I leaned down and yanked my knife out of its sheath. I came up slashing, hard and sure, ripping the blade across a left biceps the size of a watermelon. The guy taking the hit barely gave a guttural oof, his arms coming up in self-defense as Tyler shouted something sharp and Latin sounding.
My knees buckled, my vision exploding into a million different colors, and the world went upside down. I was falling, falling—
I came back to consciousness with a jolt. The air filling my nostrils was thick, vile, and reeking of ammonia. I flinched back, my hands lifting in a sharp karate chop as I rolled to the side, scrambling up—
And was stopped again, midair. Held fast in the grip of a muscle-bound linebacker whose left arm had sprung a sizeable leak.
“Smelling salts,” Liam announced cheerfully beside us, waving a packet at me before dropping it back into his pack. “No magic required, honest. And Tyler only spelled you to keep you from knifing Grim again. No hard feelings, right?”
“What did you say to me?” I demanded, shoving against the thick chest of the guy holding me—a chest that was decidedly not Liam’s, nor Tyler’s, nor Zachariah’s, I decided. Had Liam seriously called him Grim? Whoever he was, his chest was way too big.
The beast let me go and stepped back, his laughter rumbling somewhere deep beneath his soft brown T-shirt as I tried to take him all in. I got the sense of thick, corded muscle under faded, worn clothes, long, braided white-blond hair, and a chiseled jaw. The cut on his arm wasn’t nearly as deep as I remembered it being, but I couldn’t cope with another gorgeous guy, so I focused on his collarbone and scowled. Even the jerk face’s collarbone was sexy, peeking out above the frayed collar of his shirt.
“Who are you?” I demanded, shaking my head. Why am I so dizzy?
“Grim,” he confirmed. “And you’re monster bait.”
“Monster—oh,” I said, blinking hard. “Right.”
I forced my gaze up, not nearly as offended by the guy’s apparent assessment of my fighting abilities given what I’d thought he’d said. I met his flat, pale-gold gaze, and squared my shoulders. While the other guys were hot enough to roast marshmallows off of, this guy was different. Imposing and super manly, but not as pretty. Big, rough, and massively built, with sun-bronzed skin and white blond hair, he looked like he should be competing in a Mr. Universe competition for Mother Russia, not hanging out on some tony college campus in Boston’s Back Bay. At least he’d missed my meet puke.
“Oh, he saw it,” Zachariah assured me.
The blood rushed to my face as I wheeled on Psychic Wonderboy, mortification flashing to outrage. “You fucking get out of my mind right now, or I swear to Christ—”
To my surprise, Zachariah’s face blanched, and he stepped back. “No,” he said, lifting his hands. “No, Nina. I can’t help it. I mean, it’s something I can’t stop on my own, but you can. There’s a ward you can use…” He shot a desperate look to Liam, who’d already slid his bag around to the front of his body again, the move so automatic, I wondered exactly how long he’d had that pack.
“Well, actually…” Zachariah brightened, and I lifted my hand, palm out to stop him.
“Don’t you dare answer that question,” I warned as Liam pulled free a bracelet that looked like a medic-alert tag.
Liam shook the bracelet at me. “Best solution is to get a tat, but this will stop Zach from crawling around inside your mind unless you want him to,” he said, affably enough. “And he can’t help it, he’s right about that. It’s part of who he is.”
“Gimme.” I held out my wrist, and Liam chuckled, while Zachariah—Zach—did a good job of looking abashed. His eyes had an almost bruised character to them, and I realized they weren’t blue at all, but more of a dark purple. I’d never seen anyone with eyes quite that shade, and I blinked even as the skin of my wrist prickled where Liam was touching me.
A deep and abiding awareness I had of all these guys swept over me like an incoming tide, and I practically snatched my hand away from Liam once the bracelet
was secure. He nodded reassuringly, as if I was some kind of frightened foal, and I swung my gaze to Zach.
“What am I thinking right now?” I demanded, and—completely out of left field, I imagined him naked and in a shower, hot water streaming over him, slicking his black hair to his perfectly formed face, his mouth open, his eyes closed, his—
What the hell? I shook myself back to sanity, but Zach looked neither embarrassed nor amused. “I don’t know,” he said, with feeling. “I swear, I don’t. That’s how the wards work.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Tyler said, and I glanced back to him and lost all interest in either Zach or Liam, which was freaking saying something. But they weren’t Tyler. They weren’t as tall, or as hot, or as maddening, or as…
Wait a minute. I narrowed my eyes. “Did you put some sort of hex on me? Is that why I’m so dizzy?” I demanded, and now it was Tyler’s turn to raise his hands—half mockingly, half way too impressed with himself.
“Nope. It was a quick disorientation spell, that’s all. To keep you from slicing up Grim.”
I scowled at him as Grim snorted something I couldn’t quite pick up—then it hit me. Math had a way of doing that sometimes.
Oh…shit.
There were four guys here. Four guys who were obviously friends. More than friends? Some kind of team? It was a team—a gang—a group of guys that I needed to watch out for, I thought, though I couldn’t remember why. I mean, who would have warned me about such a thing? It had to be Mom, right? She was the only one who warned me about anything. But what had she said?
I couldn’t pin it down, and I didn’t want to think too hard about it, honestly. Not here. Not with Zach able to read minds and Liam studying me like I was a puzzle to solve and Grim practically quivering with feral heat and Tyler…dear holy crapsicles, Tyler—
Focus.
Tyler opened his mouth to say something else, but I cut him off, plastering a guileless smile on my face. “No, wait,” I said, putting a little gush into my words. “I keep getting sidetracked, and I don’t want to be. You saved my life. You got that thing off me, pulled me out. Thanks for that.”
“Tarken land worm,” Liam offered again. “Normally they don’t grow that big. And by that big, I mean usually they’re about the size of a hamster.”
“And they shouldn’t be on academy property,” Beast-Mode Grim said, beside me. I refused to look at him. I didn’t really want to look at any of them, other than Tyler right now. Tyler who’d reached inside the mouth of a monster and hauled me out by the ankles, then set the thing on fire. That had to count for something, right? These guys couldn’t be that bad…
“They shouldn’t exist at all,” Zach muttered, scattering my thoughts as he scuffed his foot through the nearest ash pile. “You totally smoked this one, though.”
“Well, you know what they say. You never forget your first.” Tyler winked. “I was happy to be of service.”
I blinked, this new piece of crazy further piercing my rumbling anxiety. “Um, that was the first time you’d ever seen one of those things? Ever?”
Liam jumped in as if he couldn’t help himself. “Wellington Academy is the country’s only monster hunting school, with one glaring flaw. There are precious few monsters around to fight anymore.”
I snorted. Yeah, right. “So how did you know what to do? How is it I’m even still alive?”
Tyler’s smile kicked up a few watts. “You had a couple of things working in your favor. Thing one, you were covered in guts, and that protected you when my incineration spell kicked in.”
Before I could respond to that, he kept going. “Thing two, I could see you and see the monster chasing you because that’s what we do here. Like, more than anybody else in the entire academy, that’s exactly what we do. It’s kind of something you have to be taught, you know? At least, to do it right. You were pretty good with your knife, but you definitely weren’t doing it right.”
“You know…” I began, but Liam cut me off.
“Don’t let him bust your balls too much,” he said drily. “There’s barely even a Monster Hunter minor at Wellington anymore. The way we’re going, in another few years, every monster hunter is gonna have to be self-taught.”
“And how did you come to be self-taught?” Zach asked. He’d gone back to brooding vampire mode, but eyed me with a new, curious speculation. That, more than anything, convinced me he couldn’t read my thoughts.
“Don’t cover the bracelet with your other hand,” Grim offered beside me, unasked. “It negates the ward. Handy if you need to communicate, pain in the ass otherwise.”
I believed him, but I didn’t think he was reading my thoughts either. He just struck me as very…observant. Glancing at him as briefly as possible, I decided I wasn’t too keen on him observing much more of me. His lips curled in a satisfied smirk, and I shivered again, a new round of chills rolling over me.
Yep, I needed to leave.
“The question stands,” Tyler said, folding his arms as if he’d officially appointed himself the boss of me. Which was never gonna happen. “How’d you learn how to fight monsters so badly?”
Screw this. “I didn’t, at least not intentionally. I had a cuttlefish on my ass, Tarken land worm, whatever. I didn’t even know there was an academy here.” I squinted around, shrugged. “It’s kind of pretty, I’ll give you that.”
“Do monsters chase you around Boston often?” Liam asked, going for casual and utterly failing. All four guys were now studying me with a weird sort of energy, something I couldn’t quite figure out. What was I supposed to watch out for…it was a strange groupish-sounding word, something my incredibly smart mother would have used—because she had to have been the one who’d warned me. No one else knew how I spent my days. But had she called it a cohort? A consortium?
The guys were waiting for an answer, though, and despite my profound but profoundly vague fears, there didn’t seem to be any immediate threat. So, I segued smoothly into lying about the monster attacks. Because that’s what I did.
“Oh, gosh no. It’s only happened once before, and that was yesterday. Up the street the other way. Nobody saw it happening, so I assumed maybe I’d had some sort of, I don’t know, out-of-body experience? That’s why I was so surprised you guys saw it.”
“It’s never happened before yesterday,” Grim repeated. He reached out a finger to trace the bare skin of my shoulder where my shirt sleeve had burned off. I flinched away.
“Don’t touch me,” I warned, but the smirk was back on his ruggedly handsome face. I knew what he’d seen. A long thick jagged scar that ran from my shoulder to my elbow. These days, I only ran from monsters to lead them away from people they could hurt. That hadn’t always been the case. “Not every monster’s from a fairy tale.”
Grim’s expression shifted, becoming unexpectedly dark, almost mutinous. A surge of emotions rolled through me, but I couldn’t exactly place which ones. Fear, certainly, wariness, but something else as well. Something more dangerous. I shivered again, forcing myself not to rub my arms. What was he thinking? And why did I want to know so badly?
“Well, if you haven’t been targeted before, then shit. We are probably to blame for this attack tonight,” Tyler sighed, sounding almost like a regular guy for the first time since he’d pulled me out of the cuttlefish’s mouth.
I blinked at him. “Huh? You just saved my life.”
“Yeah, but…” He waved vaguely at the large stone buildings that stretched off into the distance, their imposing size and timeless beauty distracting me for a second as he continued talking.
“Like I said, we’re kind of a specialized academy here. Boston’s got a few of them, but here at Wellington, we tend to fly under the radar. We focus on spell work, practical magic, and a couple of very old majors that you’re not going to find anywhere else.”
“Like monster hunting,” I offered.
He nodded. “Like monster hunting, which is now a minor, Liam’s right. I know it sound
s kind of strange, though probably less strange after what you just experienced. But yeah. It’s a pretty small concentration. You’re looking at the entire junior class—nearly seniors, actually. We’ve got a handful of freshmen who came on this year, but…”
“But they suck,” Grim said.
Tyler grimaced. “The university has undergone a change in direction. Monster hunting isn’t a popular focus anymore.”
“Speaking of,” Liam said, and he stepped away from us, rummaging again in his knapsack.
Zach shook his head. “You’ll want to stand back a little. Liam loves this part.”
To my surprise, what Liam pulled out of his knapsack next was a book, a well-worn leather-bound tome, with rough-edged pages, some of which were falling out. He thumbed through the book and straightened sharply when he found a particular passage.
“Here we are.” He held the book up closer to his face and started speaking in a low murmur. The ashy sludge on the ground started to smoke. I glanced down in surprise. Was that…?
“Monster-cleanup spells,” Tyler confirmed. “This will take a minute.”
Then he reached for my hand.
5
Of all the things Tyler had done so far, this probably surprised me the most. I stared at his outstretched fingers, unsure what to do. He didn’t seem to mind, merely wiggled his fingers a bit. I belatedly reached out my hand as well.
The touch of his skin was warm, tingly, and the air seemed to hold its breath around us, shimmering with anticipation. And I was only holding the guy’s hand, for heaven’s sake! I’d never been so on edge in my life, and these guys weren’t even monsters.
