The Hunter's Curse (Monster Hunter Academy Book 2)

by D. D. Chance

  He turned forward, and I frowned. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I didn’t want to contradict Tyler—I mean, he had to know what he was dealing with, since he knew Zach, right?

  We entered the library behind the others. Commander Frost waited for us in the main foyer, apparently oblivious to the weird overtones, undertones, and side tones of the preacher’s arrival. Instead, he was all grins.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever step foot on campus again,” Frost said, and Reverend Williams finally broke into a smile.

  “You shouldn’t believe the brash words of the young,” he said, sending our group a wry glance. Once again, I found myself wanting to like this guy, and I didn’t know if I was being coerced to do so or not.

  “Wait, you went to school at Wellington?” Zach asked, clearly surprised. “You never told me that.”

  “I did, for a time,” Reverend Williams acknowledged, and Frost snorted.

  “By a time, he means less than a year. He had the same full-ride scholarship we all had, but he stayed only long enough to whip through every single demonology class the school offered, then split. Father LaRocca is still pissed.”

  “Father LaRocca, of all people, should know better,” Reverend Williams said mildly. “I had a very specific reason for attending Wellington. Once that reason was met, there was nothing for me here. I wasn’t trying to learn how to fight every monster in the world, just the kind that could be a threat to my adoptive father’s community.”

  “But you sent me here,” Zach protested. “Without any stipulation to stick to demon hunting or to leave early. And you didn’t tell me you knew Dad from way back,” he continued, turning to Frost. “You just made it seem like you met him during my application process, that the school had caught wind of my work at the church and contacted me because of that. How could you not have mentioned that Dad went to school here?”

  “Because I asked him not to.” Reverend Williams regarded his son again. “I didn’t want my experience at Wellington to have any bearing on yours. I asked for discretion, and the academy granted it. As they should have.”

  Frost nodded. “Your father holds a special place in the hearts of those few people who remember him. Not to mention a viable path out of a now-despised minor and into a more respectable calling. For a while, he was the poster child for monster hunting rehabilitation.”

  Liam huffed a laugh as Zach frowned. “Well, I didn’t leave the minor.”

  “You didn’t,” his dad agreed. “Nor did you return to tend to the church over summer breaks. If that had been your calling, you would have. So why do you think you remained at Wellington?”

  Zach shrugged, but for the first time, he seemed a little uncomfortable. “There was more to learn,” he said. “I found friends. Other interesting classes to take.”

  “Other interesting monsters to fight,” Reverend Williams agreed, and now I could discern the slightest hint of judgment. “You have fought demons, and successfully. You were born to it, as I was. But you didn’t want to stay with that exclusively. That’s where we differ.”

  “That, among other things,” Zach agreed.

  Their ping-ponging conversation seemed pleasant and easygoing enough on the surface, but I could feel the glugging of swamp monsters beneath. Unlike a lot of young twenty-somethings with a parent he clearly respected, Zach wasn’t backing down from his father. And his father, though clearly not entirely thrilled with Zach, wasn’t going all lord and master on him either. There was something weird going on here, but it wasn’t a lack of respect. Which made it…what? Too much respect? Was that even possible?

  Either way, there were layers upon layers of push and pull here, a mental and psychological gamesmanship that exhausted me, and I’d only experienced it for a few minutes. Were they even aware they were doing it?

  “Rest assured, I wouldn’t be here now, disrupting your schooling, unless I had no other choice,” Reverend Williams said, turning back to Frost as we moved into the main library room, with its towering stacks of books on polished shelves, gleaming marble floors, and enticing, shadowy study alcoves. In the week or so I’d been on campus, I’d never once seen anyone in the library other than the guys and Frost, but the place always seemed poised to fling open its doors and welcome droves of students. “We’ve been having some problems at my church that we shouldn’t be.”

  Liam checked his stride, brightening. “A monster outbreak?”

  Reverend Williams glanced toward him, his lips flattening into a grim smile. “For most folk, that wouldn’t be cause for celebration.”

  Liam, however, was undeterred. “For those of us who can help, though, it’s a chance to do so. No fireman ever hopes for a fire, but he’s got the tools to fix it if it happens, and he’s ready to use them when needed.”

  “Come this way,” Frost interrupted, and we trooped after him. When we entered the small antechamber I’d come to think of as the library’s war room, however, it wasn’t empty. Frost reacted first.

  “Goddamn—ah, hmmm,” he amended, shooting a glance toward Zach’s father. “Grim. What are you doing here?”

  He wasn’t destined to get a direct response. With his thick, white-blond hair lashed into a braid that fell past his shoulders, his granite-jawed face stern and unforgiving, Grim Lockton, the fifth member of our collective, stood with his burly arms folded, focusing his pale golden eyes on a map on the wall screen. I blinked at it too. For once, it wasn’t a close-in map of our area of Back Bay, Boston, home to Wellington Academy. This map had been expanded to cover the entire eastern coastline, from Maine to Florida, the Carolinas to the Mississippi River.

  “These are bullshit,” Grim rumbled, and I saw the other feature of the map. Green glowing dots up and down the coastline, focusing in a cluster in Massachusetts, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. “They’re not real.”

  “What’s the significance of this?” Reverend Williams asked, striding forward. He jabbed a finger at the border between South Carolina and Georgia. “Because this is where I’m located, and if this is a map of outbreaks, we should be on it.”

  “Dad?” Zach asked, a new note of concern underscoring the word. “What’s going on? Are the demons back?”

  “You could say that.” His father glanced at him. “What happened this morning—you’ve done that sort of summons before, yes? Did you experience any aberrations? A pattern shift?”

  “Well—I guess a little, yeah,” Zach said, lifting his hand to rub the back of his neck. He shot me a glance. “I mean, there were more demons than usual, and they dicked around a little more with the students, but in the end, they had no power within the sacred circle. They returned to the shadows.”

  “And they didn’t address you in any way?”

  Zach scowled. “Why?”

  His father rolled his eyes. “Just answer the question directly, Zachariah. For once in your life.”

  I fought the grin. Maybe Zach and his dad did have a normal father-son relationship after all.

  “I—I don’t know…” Zach said. “I thought they had, but the words made no sense, and then they left me and of course, everything fades so fast. I could’ve imagined it.”

  “You didn’t imagine it,” I blurted before I could rein myself in. Everyone turned to me, even Zach. “It said your time had come, or something like that. To make your sacrifice. Then you shouted at it in Latin or maybe Greek and Akkadian, binding spells, I think, and it went poof.”

  “You’ve already picked up Akkadian?” Tyler asked, while Zach frowned at me. My eyes were on his father, though. He’d gone sheet white for a moment, then his face went carefully neutral again. There was something Reverend Williams knew that he didn’t want to spill—at least not to all of us.

  “Okay, well, there you go,” Zach said, returning his focus to his dad. “What’s it mean?”

  “It means the horde is playing games with my family, and I don’t like it.” The other guys were all watching the preacher too, except for Liam, who I rea
lized was edging toward a stack of books Frost had left on the table behind where the preacher was standing. I slanted a glance toward where he was heading…

  Then I saw it. The second tome down, a thick text with a moldering, heavily seamed spine, emblazoned with a word I now knew, courtesy of my unusual affinity for learning Akkadian.

  Apocrypha.

  The word shimmered in front of my eyes, seeming to leap off the book. The Apocrypha. That was the text Frost had used to learn about the peculiar ramifications of me joining the monster hunter collective—a female pairing up with four male hunters. It was also the text that had completely freaked him out, revealing hints about my connection with the guys that went way outside the bounds of ordinary team building.

  I needed to get that book.

  Reverend Williams spoke again, sharply enough to pull my attention to him. “Why didn’t you contact me about these attacks?” he asked Frost.

  “Well, for starters, I didn’t know anything was happening to you, and second, Grim is right. These attacks aren’t real.” The commander gestured to the screen. “Our system is going haywire. We went from getting absolutely no information about monsters anywhere to a slew of false alarms. I’m relying on networks that haven’t been activated for a hundred years, and the infrastructure is profoundly broken. So maybe you should tell us what’s going on.”

  As he spoke, Frost moved over to the table and dropped into a chair, pulling a laptop close. Reverend Williams sighed heavily, then started speaking.

  “Understand, my church covers a wide range of mostly rural communities, some of which don’t have a tremendous connection to the outside world, by choice more often than not. These people aren’t recluses. They’re simply more comfortable living off the grid. They work in the cities if they have to, but they don’t stay there for any length of time if they can avoid it. More often than not, we go to them.”

  “Like tent revivals?” I asked, and Reverend Williams slid his warm gaze toward me. Could he seriously read my mind? If so, I needed a reinforced bracelet, I didn’t care what Tyler thought.

  “Exactly like that. We prefer that approach at my home parish. In fact, we plant a new church every weekend. We sometimes gather in larger buildings, lodges and the like, but if those aren’t available, we have shelter to spare. Whoever wants to hear the word of the Lord can do so without having to leave their communities and farms. But we’re based in a small town right on the border. Have been for generations. And sometimes people seek us out there.”

  “A lot of times,” Zach put in. “Dad’s sermons draw believers from a three-state area.”

  Reverend Williams nodded. “We welcome them all. But lately, it’s the healing sessions that have drawn more attention. What we’re being asked to heal…is disturbing.”

  “What do you mean, disturbing?” Zach asked before any of the rest of us could. “That’s not a word you use. Ever.”

  “Not with the afflicted, no,” Reverend Williams agreed. “But things are different now. The deceivers walk among us, as always, but their tactics have changed.”

  Frost leaned forward. “Explain.”

  Reverend Williams sighed. “Zach knows this, and I’m sure some of the rest of you have at least a passing understanding of what’s involved, depending on your coursework. There are several levels of demon possession, from the occupation of spaces—such as rooms, homes, crypts, buildings, and the like—to eventual infiltration of humans and the gradual breakdown of the soul within. But despite what Hollywood would have you believe, most demons don’t seek to create some sort of physical record of their attack, for the simple reason that they don’t want individuals to seek or draw support from anyone else. Isolation is a demon’s greatest strategy. But these demons aren’t being discreet. They’re driving their victims to my doors almost as soon as they lay hands on the unfortunate souls, and these people are fully at the horde’s mercy. Their souls are in anguish, agony. Beyond rational reach. Some even resort to self-harm in their urgency to get noticed.”

  “But why?” Zach asked. “And why are they targeting you?”

  Reverend Williams pressed his lips together. “They’re not targeting me,” he said. “They’re targeting you.”

  6

  “What?” Zach exploded, taking a sharp step back. “What are you talking about? I haven’t done a damned thing up here—literally.”

  I couldn’t help my smile at his dark humor, but I could tell his father didn’t believe him. He glared at Zach across the table. “You’re telling me nothing has changed in your situation in the past few weeks? Nobody new has entered your sphere, you’ve made no new friends…or enemies?”

  That last question wiped the smile off my face, and my brows almost leapt right off my forehead, they climbed toward my hairline so fast. Zach, however, played it completely cool.

  “Absolutely not,” he said, with such assurance that even I almost believed him. “I don’t have time to make new friends, and I sure as hell wouldn’t do anything that would put anyone at risk.”

  “At risk for what, exactly?” Tyler asked, interjecting the question with such calm, levelheaded ease that Reverend Williams blinked at him. Tyler had been raised to dominate any room, and those leadership attributes had recently leveled up. It was a good look on him.

  It also was something new. And exactly what Zach’s father was talking about, I suspected.

  The preacher blew out a harsh breath. “You want to explain it, Zach, or do you want me to?”

  Zach’s face darkened mutinously, and his lips curled. “I’m not you, Dad. What happened to you isn’t going to happen to me—or to this team. Did the demons come here to seek you out? Is that why you left the school so abruptly after your freshman year, without confronting them in a place where you’d actually have help to fight them?”

  “You still don’t get it,” his father snapped. “There is no help that matters for what we’re dealing with. We sacrifice, and others survive. It’s that simple. And we try to limit the damage as best we can.”

  “Ahh…” Tyler put in again, the other guys transfixed by the ping-ponging conversation, even Grim. Zach made a sharp, angry gesture with his hands.

  “I’ll tell you what Dad’s concern is,” he said, looking like he might reach out and throttle his father. “He’s right about demons coming after our family. It’s been going on for a long time now—generations. But there’s a catch, and it’s a fucking awful one. When we reveal our weakness, literal hell breaks loose, and the only way to stop is to make a sacrifice. We do that, and the demons go away, but only until the next Williams kid hits age twenty-one or so. Then they’re back.”

  “A sacrifice,” Tyler repeated. I glanced at him, taking in his set jaw, his steady eyes. “What kind of sacrifice?”

  Zach flashed an ugly smile. “Depends entirely on the generation. My grandfather lost his wife. Dad, here—”

  “That’s enough,” cracked Reverend Williams. I swung my gaze back to him. He’d gone white with fury, his big hands curled into fists. He glared first at Zach, then Tyler. “He’s right. The demons are coming. It’s Zach’s turn to face his challenge. But if he’s not formed any overriding attachment to any one person or organization, if he doesn’t place any of you above himself, then…I don’t know what’s stirred them up. Something triggered the horde, though. That’s how they work.”

  “Well, we just finished our first official monster fight. That had to have put every demon in Christendom on notice,” Liam put in, making Zach’s father jolt with surprise. When the older man glared at him, Liam shrugged. “We’re monster hunters, remember? That’s kind of what we do. We can take down this demon once and for all.”

  “Exactly,” Zach said through gritted teeth.

  “We could have helped you too, Matthew.” It was Frost’s turn to speak, and Zach’s father turned to him, his face shifting quickly through anger, sorrow—and then something else, equally profound. Resignation.

  “No,” Reverend Willi
ams sighed. “No, you couldn’t have. But that’s water long under the bridge.” He straightened then, and passed a hand over his face. “And ancient history, in any event. The trouble you’re facing is here and now. There’s work that needs to be done, especially if you’re already seeing increased demon activity on campus.”

  “We’re not seeing increased activity,” Zach protested. “I had a demonology ceremony this morning. That’s all.”

  “A ceremony that resulted in an unexpected reaction from the horde,” Reverend Williams countered. “Don’t let your pride make you foolish, Zachariah. It’s a family trait that’s gotten us in trouble more than a few times.”

  “And for the millionth time, I am not you,” Zach retorted, his voice edged with ice.

  “Hold up a minute.” Tyler lifted a hand. “Let’s say we are on the cusp of a demon attack—a real one, and not just our board going haywire. Where do we go from here?”

  “We don’t go anywhere,” Frost said. “Reverend Williams and I will discuss this, work out a plan of attack, and inform you when it’s appropriate. There’s also an entire department at Wellington dedicated to fighting demons, and we’ll need to loop them in. Furthermore, unless you’ve forgotten already, we are supposed to be keeping a low profile. That doesn’t change with this information.”

  The advice seemed innocent enough, but the guys practically erupted.

  “You can’t be serious,” Tyler began, turning on Frost.

  “No way,” Liam put in, electric with heat. “Those demonology guys are useless—Zach can kick their asses sixteen ways to Sunday.”

  “And it’s my family, my problem. Not Wellington’s.” Zach stepped forward, his hands also clenching into fists. “You had your chance twenty-some years ago, Dad, and you said it yourself. The demons are targeting me. Well, if they come here, I can take them—our team can take them. For good, this time.”

  “And how exactly do you plan to do that?” his father shot back. “You haven’t even graduated yet. You may have some basic demon hunter skills because of what we did back at the parish, but it is not like your friends here have had any of that training.”