by D. D. Chance
“I see you’ve met Merry Williams,” he said, chuckling as he nodded her way. “We call her ‘the mouth.’”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, she calls you ‘the freak.’”
Tyler laughed without a hint of irritation. “And she would not be wrong,” he said. “I would’ve met you at the gate if I knew when you were coming. I should’ve given you my phone number. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that yesterday morning—oh, that’s right. I was distracted.”
I shrugged even though his teasing gaze made my cheeks heat. “It wouldn’t have done much good,” I said honestly. “I don’t share my number with anyone.”
That stopped him, and he scowled at me. “That’s kind of stupid.”
I smiled back sunnily. “And you’re kind of rude. I’m trying to overlook it, though.”
“Seriously, why the secrecy? Someone should know how to find you. Other than the monsters, anyway.” He scowled at me. “How’s your memory?”
“Decent.”
“I don’t believe you. Key my number into your phone. Now.” He rattled off some digits, then stared at me until I pulled out my phone and typed them in.
“Don’t expect me to be calling this anytime soon,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. There’d been something totally freeing about not being accessible, though of course I’d needed my burner phone and laptop for all my impromptu searches of postal drop points in the city.
“Well, if you do, know that I’ll be right there, waiting to answer you,” Tyler said, the intensity of his reply catching me off guard. He didn’t push me on it further though, or ask for my number. By now, he’d also moved off the stairs, but I stayed rooted in place.
“Where are we going?” I asked, frowning. “Merry said this was the building I need to go to if I was going to audit a couple of classes or whatever.”
“It is,” Tyler agreed. “But that’s only if you’re officially enrolling. I thought you might want to sit in on a couple to start, as a guest, but if you’ve already made the decision…”
“Oh.” I shook my head. Of course I hadn’t made any such decision. That’d be crazy. “No, no, that’s fine. That’s perfect. What classes are you taking right now? And they really won’t mind?”
“Not even a little.” He laughed. “But I’m not gonna lie, the class I was currently heading to is kinda lame. It’s a straight-up medical-triage course.”
“Ahhh…like regular triage, or triage for monster attacks?” I’d never really thought about it before, but it was reasonable that there would be unique techniques for patching up monster injuries. Up to now, I’d made up my first aid practices as I went along.
“Monster-injury triage, but it’s about the most boring thing you can possibly imagine. Way more interesting, though, is Grim and Liam duking it out in combat class over at the monster quad. Those are one-on-one courses most of the time, but theirs hit at the same time, so they’ve started doing tandem training with Frost. It’s pretty cool. We should go to see that one.”
“And they won’t mind us watching either?”
Tyler snorted. “Not hardly. Grim’s the one who told me you were here.”
That surprised me and unnerved me a little too. Just like at the coffee shop the night before, I hadn’t seen Grim when I’d first walked on the campus. I hadn’t seen any other students except for Merry until we’d hit the admin building. “How’d he know I was here?”
Tyler shrugged. “No clue. But don’t feel bad about not seeing him. He’s a big guy, but he can blend into damn near anything. It’s one of his best skills as a monster hunter.”
“Right.” I decided not to tell him about Grim’s impromptu appearance at the Crazy Cup. What the big guy did in his free time was his own business. I was ever so slightly freaked out that he seemed to have his own Grim GPS coordinates for me, but maybe he had that for everyone.
“So they’re fighting—where?” I asked, refocusing on Tyler. “Like here on campus?”
“The monster quad,” he clarified. “Which I am more than happy to show you—”
His words were cut off as a bone-rattling roar ripped through the air, a roar none of the other students milling around in the central quad seemed to notice.
“Like right now, in fact,” Tyler grinned, gesturing ahead. “C’mon—you’re going to love this.”
12
Tyler took off at a dead run, and I pulled my hand free to start pumping my arms in earnest to keep up. His long strides ate up the campus in no time flat, and eventually we passed through a break in the stone wall, heading hard toward a group of stone buildings that made up its own separate hamlet from the campus.
It felt strange to be racing toward what was undoubtedly a monster attack, and even stranger for anyone to be happy about it. Maybe Merry and the rest of the campus were on to something about the monster hunter guys.
As I ran, I categorized the supernatural howl—since there definitely had to be monster lungs involved. I didn’t know what the creature’s proper name was, but there were only a few things I’d run into that were broad chested enough to make that kind of noise.
The first option I discarded immediately—a short, bull-faced doglike creature that hunted in packs. Their roar was deceptively large for their small forms, and, more to the point, they always hunted in a cluster of eight or nine beasts, pretty much the number you might credibly believe could eat you as an appetizer before roaming on to find their next meal. But this had been a single creature. And that meant most likely—
“Balrog?” I offered up to Tyler, and he shot a startled look at me as we rounded the corner and came upon a small field about fifty feet wide and maybe twice as long, ringed by a low stone wall. It extended beyond the field’s edge, enclosing the entire hamlet, though at about half the height of the main school’s wall. So the monsters could come in, I theorized, but maybe they couldn’t get back out? I wasn’t sure I wanted to test out that idea.
We pulled up short as I spotted Zach hoisting himself up onto the stone barrier, balancing on the surface. He turned and waved us on.
“You made it,” he said, one brow arching as he noticed me. Something sparked in his dark blue eyes, then was gone again. “Good. Not much longer now.”
Tyler and I hurried up. “Not, like, Tolkien’s Balrog, but yeah, pretty close, now that I think about it,” Tyler said, hopping up onto the stone ledge before leaning back to pull me up as well. I could see Liam and Grim standing in the middle of a field of tall, swaying grass, their arms out, their bodies taut, as if they were waiting for something. Off to the side, a large, bearded, burly man in a flannel shirt and brown work pants stood ramrod straight, his arms folded over his chest. A heavy bow hung at his back, along with a quiver filled with massive arrows.
Tyler continued. “Their official Latin name is about sixty-seven syllables, but we call it a fire bull. Like Tolkien’s creature, it hurls a lot of fire, and it’s big, but it looks kind of more like a—”
“There,” Zach said, pointing as a creature burst out of thin air and into the middle of the field.
Despite the fact that I was safe on my side of the wall and sandwiched between two monster hunters, I lurched back. “I thought you said you fought holograms,” I said, the stench of the creature rolling toward us strong enough to make my knees knock. I’d only come across one of these assholes once, and I hadn’t been able to actually kill it. It’d loped off across the cemetery, howling with outrage, stuck full of nails from my brand-spanking-new nail gun that I’d learned to use in shop class the semester before. That had been a good summer.
“They are holograms. Fire bulls don’t exist in the natural—wait,” he said, and Zach had turned to me too, the attack in the field momentarily forgotten. “You’ve seen fire bulls in real life?”
“I mean, it was nowhere near this big—”
“Are you serious?” Tyler protested, sounding actually a little pissed off now, which amused me more than it should. “A fi
re bull attacked you?”
“Of course it did,” Zach said tightly, turning to Tyler without any of the irritation Tyler apparently harbored at my mad monster experience. “I told you. We need to get her to Frost. He’s going to lose his brain.”
I ignored them both, my eyes shifting to the creature snuffling and stomping in the middle of the field. The Balrog-like fire bull was basically a minotaur with a bad case of bedhead all over its body—and it was twice the size of the one that’d attacked me when I was a kid. The bull’s head was as shaggy as a buffalo’s, and its hind legs were yeti thick and covered with hair, while its forearms slash legs served both to brace it as it lumbered forward and to punch with fists the size of smart cars. Exactly like the one I remembered, the fire bull’s shoulders crackled with flames, and its pelt smoked with a curious mix of sulfur, sweat, and what I’d swear was urine—the stench strong enough to melt the paint off a street sign. My hands were sweating now, and I wiped them on my jeans. “How do you know that’s an illusion, not the real thing?”
“See the giant dude in the corner with the beard?” Tyler pointed. “That’s Commander Frost. He runs the monster hunter classes, and back in the day, he wrangled actual monsters. Academy commanders are the ones who traditionally summoned monsters, back when that was a thing, so they’re the ones who design the illusions to be as close to lifelike as possible. And Frost is the best commander the school has.”
“But…” I blew out a short breath. The stench made my eyes water—how could a hologram stink that bad? “You’re sure this one is fake? And that it’s alone? I managed to take it out before I got to you guys, but that land worm the other night was wandering around with his big brother.”
Tyler chuckled, clearly way more comfortable back in the role of know-it-all. “Well, you’re not completely off base. Fire bulls travel in pairs, if they can. Or if they could, I should say. They don’t ex—” He cocked an eye at me, considering. “You saw one, you said? Did it have a buddy?”
“Well, not at first. But yeah, it didn’t stay that way.” I forced myself to think back to the altercation when I was a teenager, while the creature in the pen looked around, cocking its head as if to smell the air. Another waft of fire bull stench floated my way. That was one impressively lifelike illusion. Frost knew his stuff. “I was maybe sixteen at the time, working at the cemetery. I had to mow the far field, which was still consecrated ground, but no one had been laid to rest there yet. So I guess it wasn’t as consecrated?”
Zach snorted, and I kept going. “I got all the way out to the farthest edge, right next to where the woods started up again, and boom. Monster central. One of those things came pounding out through the trees, huffing flames to clear a path, and stumbled out onto the open field, where it saw me. It disappeared at first, but then it came back. And attacked.”
By now, both guys were staring at me, but I still only had eyes for the creature in the pen. I kept waiting for it to fade in and out, to fizzle or something, but it stayed firm and straight, not so much as a CGI hiccup. “You sure this thing is fake?” I asked again.
Tyler glanced back to Grim and Liam, then peered at the small man in the corner. “Frost looks pretty relaxed. If there was something wrong, you’d know it first from him.”
“Yeah, but Bal—fire bulls, whatever—they’re illusion throwers, right?” I asked, still unreasonably nervous. “As soon as the thing saw me in the cemetery, it disappeared like I said, and I thought I was safe. Then the maintenance manager showed up on the side of the field, and I thought, oh, good, I’m even safer, and I stopped my mower and hopped off to go talk to the guy and—whammo. Bad guy number two.”
Zach’s brows went up. “Whammo?”
“Number two?” Tyler asked.
The sound of a door slamming caught my attention, and I glanced over to see another heavily built man with an identical beard to Commander Frost, also in a flannel shirt and work pants, step out from one of the small stone houses into the sunshine, stretch, and check his watch. He took a long slug of something from what looked like an insulated cup, glanced over to the practice field—and dropped the cup. Then he started running.
“Look out,” the man shouted. He didn’t sound petrified with fear, but he should’ve been, because a second fire bull appeared out of nowhere, while the image that had been the commander winked out of sight at the edge of the practice field. I didn’t think either Liam or Grim noticed this. They were squared off against fire bull number one, both of them whooping with excitement, and took off toward the thing they thought was an illusion.
“Whoa,” Zach blurted, and he lurched forward before Tyler pulled him back.
“Can’t enter without their request, man,” he reminded Zach. “You want Frost to sit you on your ass for good?”
“But Frost is still out here,” Zach countered, reasonably enough. And in truth, the real commander was now running hard, his face intent, his eyes blazing. As he ran, he somehow managed to rip his longbow off his back in one smooth motion.
“Move,” Frost shouted, and Zach, Tyler, and I scuttled to the side as the commander leapt up on the ledge, then went soaring into the open field, clearing way more distance than I would have thought possible for someone so short. He landed and was already pulling an arrow from his quiver and notching it when Grim reached the first fire bull.
Both of them roared at the contact, and a second later, Liam yelled as well, his hands moving almost too fast to see, hacking and slicing. The first fire bull caught Commander Frost’s arrow in the shoulder, and it howled, spinning around. That apparently startled Liam and Grim into pulling up short. Frost notched another arrow as more roars cascaded around us. “Get back,” he ordered. “Shit.”
Two more fire bulls burst onto the open field.
Zach and Tyler sprang off the wall so fast, I could barely track them. They raced forward, long, wicked knives appearing in their hands. The fire bulls paired off, focusing on Grim and Liam, even as Frost notched and loosed another arrow, then a third.
“Run,” I begged beneath my breath, though of course these people knew what they were doing. They knew how to kill the monsters. That was literally all they studied here. But I couldn’t help feeling that what they really needed was a distraction, something to catch the attention of the fire bulls, deflect it so that the slashing thrusts of the guys and their magical knives and Frost’s arrows could get close enough to do real damage.
Monster bait, Grim had called me. Sneering.
Had he been right? Maybe not bait, but something a monster could scent, could recognize, and want to go after? Something that could distract it?
Time to find out.
I jumped from the wall before I could give myself a chance to talk myself out of it and ripped off my red shirt, grateful for the industrial-strength sports bra I had on underneath. Force of long habit, right up there with the heavy jeans. Never bring an underwire to a monster fight.
“Yo!” I shouted. My cry had somehow picked up a curious resonance in the walled enclosure because it carried loud and long over the field, catching the attention of not only the monsters, but the guys as well.
Grim turned first, and I caught an expression of credible horror on his face when he saw who I was and what I was doing. Then all four of the fire bulls and even Commander Frost turned toward me, the fire bulls screaming with feral delight at the fresh meat. Or maybe they liked girls better? I didn’t have time to consider it as I took off running.
The problem with trying to outrun creatures that are three times your size is that they can cover a lot more ground with every step than should be reasonable. I’d barely taken four strides when I felt the breath of the creatures on my back, the rush of pain coming back in a flash, though my last encounter with these fire bulls had been nearly eight years ago.
“Drop,” I heard several voices command, or thought I heard them command. My brain was still processing that as the creatures converged on me. At that same moment, the beasts all gave a
collective huff of pain.
“Drop,” they shouted again, and pure self-preservation instinct took over. I hit the dirt as the first monster jumped, soaring over me, while two more dropped to the ground on either side, shaking the earth. The fourth flopped on top of me, pinning me beneath Mt. Fire Bull, and I nearly passed out from the stench.
“Go,” the now-mighty cry rang out, carrying a weird reverberation, as if the command wasn’t merely a shout but some kind of anti-monster spell being cast. A second later, fire swept all round me. I crouched on the ground, my arms up over my head, and tried not to burst into tears as I considered the very real possibility of being roasted alive right along with the fire bulls.
After that—there was nothing. The monsters vanished in a crackling pile of embers, much like the land cuttlefish had two nights ago, and I was left hunkering in the center of four guys, all of whom were hunched over, shoulders heaving, trying to catch their breath.
Tyler moved first. He reached forward and pulled me to my feet as the commander reached us.
“Who are you?” Frost demanded, and I recognized that he’d been part of the voice that had ordered the monsters away—part, but not all of it. Which meant the guys had helped as well. That was seriously cool.
“What are you doing here?” Frost continued, drawing himself up to his full height—which was pretty impressive, I had to admit. The guy was almost as big as Grim.
“Saving our asses, looks like to me,” drawled Tyler, gesturing between us. “Nina Cross, Commander Frost, head monster hunter trainer at Wellington Academy, and our official mentor.”
Frost narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not part of the program.”
I gave a queasy laugh. “I don’t want to be part of the program,” I admitted. “I just want not to die.”
