by D. D. Chance
“There are several indicators this may be the case,” Frost broke in somberly. “First and foremost, according to information that has not been released to the public, the speed with which the assaults are being perpetrated have led the authorities to suspect a team of assailants working in coordination. However, the assaults are generally carried off in sequential clusters—one shortly after the other, with what looks like an identical methodology. The Victorian attire of the perpetrator isn’t completely out of the ordinary given the number of historical reenactors in the city, but every description I’ve found of the man’s costume implies a level of almost delicate fastidiousness. That, combined with the brutality of the assaults, I find difficult to assign to an ordinary assailant—let alone a team of similarly dressed attackers. It assumes a high level of coordination and discipline, yet every other indicator lends itself to chaos. And Mr. Graham is correct. On every evening of the assailant’s attacks, one member of a first family is targeted—all of them linking in some way to Mr. Perkins here.”
“And half a dozen other families,” Tyler countered, but he sounded grim. “That still doesn’t help us.”
“Perhaps not, but we’re not without additional avenues of information. Namely, the network of power outages.” Another button, and a new constellation of dots appeared, these in purple.
“Correlating the outages and assaults that all happened on the same night, we see a distinctive pattern,” Frost continued. A few more clicks told the tale.
I stared. Each night the Boston Brahmin struck, a long line arced out from the Boston Public Garden to the far reaches of the city. Then, in wide, lazy arcs, the outages ranged back again, each finally returning to the Garden. Each attack looked like a bat wing, the effect of the design swooping in a tight spiral toward the Garden. Over the past few weeks, the ranges had gotten tighter and tighter, circling closer to where the monsters had been targeting me in Back Bay.
“Notably, all the Brahmin’s attacks occur within the course of ninety minutes, no matter how far afield he strikes, and begin and end close to Boston Public Garden. At some point, usually late in the cycle of attacks, a descendant of Boston’s elite families is struck down,” Frost said. “The points here, here, and here, near Beacon Hill, represent a cluster of outages, but no bodies have been identified—which is how we determined that the attacks were going unreported. It’s quite definitely a pattern of attack, but given the escalating violence, the why of the attacks has become decidedly less important than stopping them altogether.”
“But how do we do that?” I asked. “If we don’t know who the monster is targeting…” I broke off as Frost turned to eye me pointedly. Monster, I thought. They thought this guy was a monster. And if I was really monster bait, I could draw him out.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tyler said, putting up his hands, apparently having already done the same math I had. “We’re making an awful lot of assumptions here. One, we don’t know if this Boston Brahmin is a legit monster or just your standard, run-of-the-mill asshole. We haven’t seen him. We haven’t categorized him. We haven’t talked directly to anyone who’s been hit by him, just received answers to some very polite questions. What’s setting him off? Monsters attack when you stray into their territory—they don’t actually target anyone.”
“Right, except for all the ones who’ve attacked Nina,” Liam pointed out. “Or the fire bulls who hit us during our fight training.”
Tyler looked like he wanted to argue, then shrugged. “Fair enough. But we don’t know if this Brahmin is a monster, or if it’s going to be attracted to Nina—”
“Every other monster is,” Grim put in, in his to-the-point way. He wasn’t wrong, but Tyler scowled at him, then turned to Frost, who stared steadily back.
“You cannot be thinking of using her as bait, man,” Tyler protested. “No way.”
Frost didn’t respond for a telling second, and I lifted a hand to stop Tyler from spluttering in outrage. “You think this thing will target me once it knows I’m out there?”
“Oh, it already knows you’re out there.” Frost moved his hand on the remote, taking away all the dots on the map for a moment and presenting us with a pristine street map of the city, a city I’d barely started getting to know. The Boston Public Garden really had been on my short list of places to see, but it was only one of many interesting sites in the city, from the quirky wonder of Newbury Street to the bustling wharf district to the industrial, funky shopping and manufacturing district of SoWa. Let alone how easy it was to simply get lost meandering through the beautiful tree-lined streets of Back Bay and Beacon Hill, ogling the gorgeous old houses and making up stories about the people who lived in them—people who included Tyler’s family, I now understood. My mother had told me more than once that she loved it here. I’d never thought to press her on why she’d left—accepting her pat explanation of a better job in a better town to raise a small child with the blind faith any kid would. But now…
I refocused on the map as Frost added new features, these simply numbers in a bright blue, one through eight, with small time stamps appended. “These are the Brahmin’s eight attack series recorded over the past few months. Notice a trend?” he asked.
Of course, I saw it immediately, verifying my earlier suspicions. While the original attack clusters ranged all over the city, that trend had changed a few weeks ago—right around the time I’d been moving into my cute little walk-up off Newbury Street. The Brahmin hadn’t hit me yet, but…
“They’re getting closer together in location.” Tyler nodded.
“Time too,” Zach pointed out. “He waited weeks between hits at the start. Now he’s cycling in. Once every three or four days now.”
“Which puts him on par with any serial offender anywhere,” Liam pointed out, reasonably enough. “He’s still displaying as a human, you ask me.”
He leaned back from the laptop, and there was a book at his fingertips. I scanned the pile of texts in front of him with a shrewd eye. Was there something already missing among those books and scrolls?
Liam pointed to the screen. “I’ve found several blue-blooded student forums that are running with a new Brahmin conspiracy theory, though. Mostly from Harvard and MIT, but also because of this newest attack at Boston College. Billy’s apparently a very rich, very entitled young man. He’s been busy since he was hit, though circumspect, naturally. He now says the guy insisted that Billy had stolen something from him, but given the clothing and all that, ol’ Billy thinks it’s all some kind of act. He and his buddies are convinced it’s a ploy to smear one of the city’s first families. An attempt to bring scandal to someone no one dares point a finger at in the light of day, that sort of thing.”
I frowned. “Seriously?”
“That’s what they’re saying. And that’s why they believe there haven’t been any murders yet—that’s not the point of all this.”
“As far as we know,” Tyler corrected. “There are several apparent attack sites that don’t have victims, right? It could be there are deaths that haven’t been recorded yet, that may never be recorded, if this monster’s smart.”
Zach stepped forward to peer at the map as if it held more secrets it was willing to give up. “And think about what we do know about this Boston Brahmin guy, whether monster or otherwise. We already know he’s fast and efficient. He—and I’m making an assumption it’s a he. Monsters don’t discriminate, and sometimes they’re gender neutral, but we’ll go with he for now—can cover a great deal of territory in a short amount of time. We know that he can modify his attack route based on stimulus, which we’re assuming is the arrival of Nina, but there definitely is something that changed his trajectory. And if he’s killing victims, he’s doing it selectively.”
“He’s primarily sticking to assaults,” Tyler said, scanning the information Frost had posted alongside the map. “Definitely with the first family descendants, but also the other victims. Battery, battery, knife, battery, knife, knife. No robbery,
at least not anything that he doesn’t throw back at the victim in outrage. No rape, thank God. Murder still questionable—we simply haven’t found any bodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”
“So mindless attacks—or at least attacks without a clear purpose,” Liam put in.
“He doesn’t need a purpose,” Grim said. A quick hush fell over the room, but of course he was right. Monsters attacked. It was what they did. Sometimes they killed too.
“I tend to agree with Mr. Lockton,” Frost said. “But even if this is a monster, we can’t rule out the possibility there’s a reason behind the attack. We also can’t rule out that someone human is behind it, pulling the strings.”
My eyes shot wide. “People can pull monster strings? That’s a thing?”
Frost chuckled grimly. “In the world of magic, there can be players at every level, acting in unexpected concert. Sometimes it’s just about the monster, but often there’s a second hand setting the play in motion.”
“But why…?” I began. Liam cut me off.
“Uh, guys?” he said. He’d pulled one of the other heavy-duty laptops toward him and was scowling down at it. “We’ve got some movement in the west sector of the hunter quad. Like, a lot of movement. Human movement.”
“What the…” Tyler muttered and Frost raised his remote again, clicking fast. A moment later, an entirely different image filled the screen—students, carrying torches and signs.
“Freedom for all!” the front line of the crowd proclaimed, and right there in the front was Merry Williams.
“Oh, shit,” Zach said, his eyes going wide. “They’re protesting at the monster enclosure again.”
“And we’ve got private media at the gates,” Liam said quickly, clicking through other screens. “Everyone—let’s go.”
“What?” I stared around as Zach and Liam pushed back from the table, but obligingly fell in line behind them. Grim had already left. “What’s going on?”
“C’mon,” Tyler began, gesturing to the door, but Frost held up a hand, stopping all of us.
“It would be better for Nina to remain out of the picture and off anyone’s radar, especially the type of media that’s covering this particular protest.”
We all stopped and turned, and Tyler scowled at him. “Why’s that?”
“A couple of reasons,” Frost said. Despite the urgency of the situation, he moved slowly, methodically, almost stalking us, and his expression was tight and focused, but not on us, I didn’t think. On an equation he was trying to solve in his head. “She’s here to find her family, a family of a young woman who apparently vanished without a trace—yet who was able to completely cover her tracks among arguably the most magical families in the United States.”
“Which matters, why?” Tyler asked. Then he blinked. “Oh. Oh shit.”
“Oh shit on a couple of different levels,” Frost agreed.
15
Frost turned to refocus on me, though I still felt like he was seeing through me, to a board of interconnected families only he could discern. “Your mother had to have been a high-level magician,” he said gruffly. “Given your abilities and…nature, there’s no other possibility. Yet Janet Cross wasn’t a student at Wellington Academy, she was apparently some children’s instructor. We have no record of any Cross in the database, and we absolutely should. There should be a legacy record here.”
“So what?” I frowned, half-imagining I could hear the distant shouts of the protestors. I didn’t want the guys to face a group of idiot students without me. I could help. I knew I could. “I already told you I’m willing to take classes.”
“And when you officially enroll, that may change things. You’ll be an actual student and not a member of the general public getting entangled in academy disputes. Wellington is as pathologically averse to scandal as Boston’s first families, and some of those families are the academy’s biggest donors.” Frost’s words were reasonable, but they irritated me all the same as he continued. “But the real issue is the fact that you’ve already garnered a fair amount of attention from dangerous quarters. I don’t want to encourage that. Or increase your risk.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think there are that many monsters watching the evening news.”
“No, no, he’s right,” Tyler said. He ran his hands through his already tousled hair. “We don’t know if it’s only the monsters we have to watch out for. There could be other predators out there who know what you are. Or maybe even who you are. Add to that, we don’t know if this Boston Brahmin character is a monster or just an asshole, but he’s locking on to you in some way.”
“And that’s bad,” Zach agreed. “Once you get locked on to, monsters sometimes won’t let go.”
He didn’t say anything more, but his jaw was set, his expression stormy. I got the impression this was a guy who’d seen more than he should have in his relatively short life. Tyler had said he was the son of a preacher, which would be scary enough, but was there more to his father’s congregation than met the eye?
“Okay, well, what about this collective thing?” I asked, ignoring the residual spurt of panic that rose up within me at simply saying the word. Why had Mom been so freaked about a group of monster hunters who’d already saved my ass several times? And how could I make my own decisions if I didn’t learn more about it? “What if I join that? Would that make a difference, either to the monster or—these other predator people?”
To my surprise, Frost winced a little. “I’ve begun doing more research on that, and it’s—more complicated than I originally thought. Joining the collective isn’t always an easy undertaking for relationships that haven’t formed organically over time.”
“What are you talking about?” Tyler turned to him, genuinely startled. “We formed a collective because we all showed up for freshman year at the same time, or more or less the same time, then Grim locked on to us and Liam found a reference to collectives in the archives. You were on board with us joining up after that, so what’s the problem?”
“We don’t have time to discuss it right now,” Frost said, glancing down at the laptop screen. “The students have reached the enclosure. You can take Nina to the wishing gate, Tyler, to ensure she gets off campus safely, but do not get her caught on camera. That could go poorly for everyone concerned.”
There was something different in his voice, and not merely ordinary-level concern for me, for my safety and protection. There was a nuance that screamed school politics. It would look bad if the wrong person discovered I was interacting with the guys? Was that the predator they were worried about? All that angst simply because I wasn’t a student?
I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to get them in any sort of trouble, full stop.
“It’s fine,” I said, lifting a hand as Tyler began to protest again. “Seriously. I don’t have to get involved, not this time. Maybe I’ll get another chance. It sounds like this is an ongoing problem.”
Tyler snorted. “You’ve got that right. Every time we turn around, it seems like someone wants to protest us.”
“Let’s get out there,” Liam said, now peering at his phone. “This is a bigger crowd than normal.”
We all headed outside and down the short steps, angling away from the library, which gave us the advantage of actually being behind most of the protesters. I could hear them shouting now, ongoing chants of “Back to the wild” and “Freedom for all.”
“Definitely not their first time,” Tyler said, hanging back with me as Liam and Zach ran on. The two of us diverted into a line of trees, picking our way through the shadows. “It’s been a thing that’s cropped up from time to time on campus, people wanting to free the monsters we have in the enclosure, thinking they’re basically wild animals and should have the rights of wild animals, specifically that they should be returned to their natural habitat. Only it doesn’t exactly work like that with monsters. These guys aren’t just domesticated. They’ve assimilated to living with humans. If we set t
hem free back where they came from, assuming we even knew where that was, we’d be signing their death warrant. The monsters know that on some level, but they do like the attention.”
“They what?” At that moment, a keening wail sounded out over the group, the most harrowing, bloodcurdling, sorrowful cry you could ever hope to hear. It brought tears to my eyes.
Tyler winced. “That would be Stella, our dorn.”
“A dorn?”
“Kind of like a Snuffleupagus on steroids. Big and furry, with enormous, sorrowful eyes. She lives for student protests, and she can keep up that kind of howling all night long. It’s like the soundtrack to torture porn.”
Another cry went up, and I forced myself not to laugh. “That’s terrible. But what are the guys going to do?”
“The usual,” Tyler said. “We stand in front of the closure not engaging, letting them have their say, but not letting them in. If they’ve got media on hand, it’s actually to our advantage, because they can’t use obvious magic against us, but we can use it to strengthen our wards. It kind of puts us at detente.”
I peered at him in the gloom. “Exactly how much magic is floating around this academy?” I asked. “I thought you were supposed to be monster hunters—and only a few of you at that.”
Tyler grinned, an echo of the smug smile I’d strangely begun to miss. “Everyone at Wellington Academy has some sort of magic. It’s just the rare few that get to hunt monsters.” He continued drawing me away from the crowd, and eventually, I saw the break in the wall and a glimpse to the streets beyond. Lights flashed rapidly outside the opening, cars and vans drawn to the activity.
“One of the drawbacks of being technically outside campus grounds, with old walls built two centuries ago,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of being completely invisible to the outside world. It’s still private property, but anyone who looks over the walls can see there are buildings here and a paddock and currently a whole mess of students. They can’t see the monsters, but they can see that something’s going on. Private media—which is what these guys are—are only able to see us because they’re aligned with the magical families. Still, they have a lot of pull. We need to steer clear of them.”
