Entrance Exam

by Ivy Hearne

  Unless, of course, Mina can also time travel.

  “And after I talk to him, you’ll take me home?” I asked.

  “If you still want to go. But I’d really like to show you the rest of the campus first.”

  “Okay,” I said, but I was less easygoing about it than I was pretending to be. The idea of touring the rest of the school frightened me a little. I wasn’t even certain why. Just looking at the place didn’t mean I had to attend.

  For that matter, I wasn’t sure that attending was such a terrible idea, either. Especially not if they really could get rid of my migraines.

  But I had so many questions and they were all bubbling and simmering in my brain. I bit my tongue, determined to listen first and ask questions second.

  I followed Mina into the clock tower building—the administration building, I corrected myself. In some ways, this building was just like the other. It, too, had shiny gray marble floors and dark oak doors. But here, the hallways were wider, and the doors bore nameplates of administrators as opposed to the school-spirit signs of students.

  Mina led me to one of the main office doors and opened it, poking her head inside.

  “Hi,” she said whoever was within. “I’m here with Kacie DeLuca to see Headmaster Finnegan.”

  From inside, I heard a voice say, “Thanks, Mina. I’ll take it from here.”

  Mina opened the door wide, and I walked past her into an outer office with a woman I presumed was the headmaster’s secretary.

  “I’ll be right out here when you’re done,” Mina said. I nodded and turned to the secretary.

  “Hello, Kacie.” She began moving toward the inner door. “Headmaster Finnegan has been waiting for you.”

  Suddenly, my stomach clenched. For some reason, I was nervous talking to the headmaster. I didn’t know if I wanted to attend Hunters’ Academy at all, and besides, I wasn’t entirely certain that this wasn’t all a big, fat hallucination.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered to myself. If it was real, I wanted to make the best of it. If it wasn’t real, it wouldn’t hurt to be polite.

  So I stepped to the doorway and greeted Headmaster Finnegan with a smile.

  The smile he returned was so genuine, I couldn’t help but like him immediately. He kind of reminded me of Santa Claus. He had white hair, pink cheeks, and bright, sparkling blue eyes over his snow-white beard.

  “Come in, come in.” He gestured expansively. “We’ve been looking for you, Kacela.”

  “I prefer to go by Kacie,” I said, remembering how much I loathed the first day of class for just that reason—correcting all my teachers was exhausting.

  “Kacie. Take a seat. Let’s talk about the Hunters’ Academy and your place in it.”

  The chairs he motioned toward were in the corner of the room, two armchairs facing one another at an angle over a small table that had already been set for tea.

  “Would you like a cup?” Headmaster Finnegan asked.

  I wasn’t used to the sort of places where people offered tea in china cups before having a conversation about school. But I knew better than to decline. “Yes, thank you.”

  I took the seat he pointed toward and sat wringing my hands. This felt far too much like going to the principal’s office.

  But the headmaster’s expression when he leaned toward me to hand me my tea was kind and friendly.

  “I’m here to answer any questions that Mina might not have answered.”

  I thought back over my conversation with Mina. She had answered a lot, but none of it made any sense, and I was left with only more questions. “I don’t even know where to start.” I thought about what I might want to know, and he waited. Finally, I began with, “Why me?”

  “We’ve been looking for you for quite some time,” he repeated.

  “You’ve been looking for a crappy student with terrible migraines and an inability to do anything other than lie in dark rooms?” The tea cup shook in my hand.

  He laughed. “Well, we might not have known the particulars, exactly, but we knew you were out there somewhere.” He paused. “Your migraines aren’t exactly what you think they are.”

  I glanced around the room, then out the window at the mountains rising in the distance. “I’m beginning to think maybe nothing is what I think it is,” I murmured. I turned back to face him again. “If they’re not migraines, what are they?”

  “Oh, they’re migraines, all right. It’s their source that is not what you’ve been taught to believe.”

  I nodded, unsure of how to respond to that. Doctors didn’t seem to know what caused the headaches, so I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

  “They’re not caused by anything physical,” he continued, noting my confusion. “You see, you don’t have typical migraines, because these headaches are a side effect of a block that was put on your mind many years ago, probably when you were merely an infant.”

  I took a sip of my tea now that it had cooled off. It was bitter, astringent. I had expected tea dispensed by this round, kind-looking man to be sweeter. “What kind of block?” I finally managed.

  “A magical one.”

  We stared at one another for a long time. Finally, Headmaster Finnegan said, “At some point when you were a child, someone put a magical block on your psychic powers, and that caused you to have debilitating migraines and rendered us unable to find you for many years.”

  I froze, glanced around the room, out the window, back at headmaster Finnegan.

  “I think I get it. This is a dream. I’ve watched too many movies about boy wizards. And now, I’m dreaming that I am one. Except, I’m a girl. I think.”

  Headmaster Finnegan shook his head. “No, my dear Kacie, this is no dream. And although you are about to enroll in school that teaches some magic—among many other things—I assure you, you are neither a boy nor a wizard.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “You are here to join the exalted ranks of our graduates.” He paused dramatically. “You are here to become a Hunter.”

  Chapter 3

  What did that even mean, that I was here to become a Hunter?

  When I asked, the headmaster said, “It means we are fighters on the side of good.”

  Great. That gave me almost no information. I was pretty sure even some of the worst people in the world thought they were doing the right thing, too.

  “Who do we—you—fight against?” I blinked at my near-slip, wondering if I’d already made up my mind without realizing it.

  No. I needed more information. I listened carefully to Headmaster Finnegan’s explanation.

  “We do battle with monsters. Really, though, they are almost all members of the Lusus Naturae. That loosely translates to ‘freaks of nature.’ It’s an organizational name, not a descriptive one, though its members include vampires, werewolves, and other similar creatures of legend. But we have some of those here, too, fighting on our side. So it really has less to do with biology and more to do with affiliation.”

  I stared at him as if he had lost his mind. And I would have been thoroughly convinced he was nuts, if I hadn’t recently stepped through a door in Kansas and ended up at a school in Colorado.

  I had about a million questions, but I didn’t even know where to start. So instead, I said, “Mina told me I could get rid of my migraines forever if I came to school here. Is that true?”

  “We would remove the blocks from your powers, and that would, indeed, eliminate the migraines.”

  “Why can’t someone just do what Mina did? She touched my forehead and the pain was gone.”

  “That’s a temporary measure only,” the headmaster said. “Any permanent solution would require removing the block entirely.”

  “I just don’t know if I can manage private school.” I thought about how much I hated the idea of leaving my parents. “Anyway, I don’t know my parents would agree.”

  “That won’t be an issue,” Mr. Finnegan assured me. “There are, however, a f
ew caveats,” he continued.

  “Caveats?”

  “Warnings, if you will.” He waited for me to acknowledge him with a nod before he continued. “All of our matriculating students are required to pass an entrance exam.”

  “What kind of entrance exam?”

  “It varies from student to student. In your case, although I cannot make any promises at the moment, I expect that it would involve proving your ability to overcome your lack of early training using your psychic powers.”

  “How would I do that?” I wasn’t even sure I believed I had psychic powers—requiring me to prove that I knew how to use them might be beyond me.

  “As I said, it varies from student to student. Most students take their entrance exam at midterms during the first year of study at the Academy. However, as you would be coming in almost a month late, you’d be granted an extension until finals.”

  “And what would happen if I didn’t pass?”

  “That depends upon the severity of the failure. Some students who are unable to pass their entrance exams are simply sent home.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “Being sent down from the Academy also involves having one’s memory of the entire experience here wiped.”

  If this was for real—if, in fact, this was a school for people who hunted monsters, if monsters even existed—memory wipes made a certain amount of sense. I nodded.

  Headmaster Finnegan continued. “In your case, however, I suspect that failure would lead to the blocks being reinstated.”

  “The blocks that cause my migraines?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the migraines would return?” I shuddered as he nodded. Even one afternoon without them, and already, I was imagining what the rest of my life could be like if I weren’t hampered by horrific headaches. I wasn’t stupid. I had gotten good grades right up until the migraines started hitting in the seventh grade. I could have a real life again, with the right intervention. “You said in some cases that’s what happened. What happens to the ones who don’t pass and don’t go home?”

  “Other cases are less felicitous in their outcome.”

  Less felicitous. That did not sound good.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Our school motto is Latin for ‘Survive or Die’.” He shrugged as if that explained everything.

  “I’ve seen the motto,” I said absently, considering the implications of his comment. “You’re telling me that if I don’t pass my entrance exam, I might die?” That seemed more than a little extreme.

  “I’m afraid so. It’s not a penalty that we impose, of course. Our preference is to send failing students home. In some cases, however, the test itself is fatal if it is not passed.”

  I stared at him in horror. When I had first seen the motto, I had thought it was ridiculous. Survive or die—those are pretty much the only options, right? Now, however, the words seemed ominous. Terrifying, even.

  “My options are pretty much stay here and risk dying during my entrance exam, or go home and spend the rest of my life in miserable pain?”

  “I’m afraid so, Ms. DeLuca.”

  “That’s not much of a choice.”

  “And I fear it gets worse. There is even a chance that the migraines themselves will cause brain lesions, and eventually, they will kill you, too.”

  Oh my God. “So really, my choices are stay here and risk dying during the entrance exam, or go home and risk dying of migraines?”

  Is there a lesser of those two evils?

  Headmaster Finnegan nodded. “If you asked my opinion, I would say that your best option is enrolling and taking the entrance exam. Talking to you now, I believe you have the inner fire required to become a hunter. Despite having all this information thrown at you without warning, you have adapted very well. You haven’t shut down, or begun to gibber, or panicked in any way. Those are all good qualities for any hunter.”

  Oh, I was panicking plenty on the inside. But I wasn’t about to let him see that.

  Anyway, I had more questions. “What happened if I do pass the entrance exam?”

  “You’ll be trained with other hunters and when your training is complete, you will be expected to join our version of our armed services. In this case, they are mostly armed with swords and stakes and magic spells. You will participate in patrols and hunts and in tracking down the members of the Lusus Naturae.”

  “So I sign my life over to the hunters?”

  “There are other jobs to be had for a thoroughly trained hunter. However, by the time you get to that point, there’s a good chance you won’t want any of those other jobs. Most trainees who go through the Academy wind up as hunters, at least during the early part of their lives. The majority of our instructors have been hunters in our ranks. It’s a noble calling. As is evident in our choice of school colors.”

  Here was the spiel Mina had briefed me on. I tried to look attentive, though my mind was swirling with all his information.

  “Our colors are black, white, and maroon,” he said. “Black is for the evil we seek out. White is for the light we work to protect. And maroon is for the blood we shed in service of our calling.”

  There sure is a lot of maroon on those banners.

  I let his words roll through me, though. And of course, I said I would enroll. I didn’t really have any other choice. Not if refusing to attend the Hunters’ Academy meant living with migraines the rest of my life, and possibly even dying from them. Not if the Academy gave me a chance to actually live—which I had not been doing for the last four years.

  “We are delighted to have you aboard,” Headmaster Finnegan said, rising to shake my hand as he ushered me out of his office. “A representative from the Academy will be by your house to speak with your parents tonight. You should spend this weekend packing whatever you plan to bring—but no more than two suitcases, please.”

  I nodded. There wasn’t that much I’d want to bring with me, anyway.

  I had no idea how they were going to convince my parents that this was a good plan, especially since I doubted they were going to announce the whole we kill monsters business. But that was their problem, not mine. All I had to do was show up, pass a test supposedly tailored just to me, and not die.

  Simple, right?

  I shook my head as I walked out to meet Mina in the hallway. It felt like I had been in Headmaster Finnegan’s office for hours, but Mina was waiting outside for me patiently. I blinked when I saw her. Although she stood perfectly still, she somehow gave the impression of being in constant motion.

  “Are you ready for your tour?” she asked.

  “You know I’m planning to attend?” I asked.

  She shrugged and tilted her head. “I know what will happen if you don’t.”

  “Did Headmaster Finnegan tell you?’

  “He didn’t have to tell me anything. I’ve been searching for you for over four years.”

  I frowned. She didn’t even look old enough to have held this job for that long. It seemed rude to ask her age, though, so I simply turned and motioned for her to lead the way. “What do you think I should see first?”

  “Well, you’ve already seen the upper-levels’ dorms, so perhaps I could actually show you the room that will be yours. Then you meet your hunting partner. And—”

  “My hunting partner?”

  “Yes. Each student is assigned a hunting partner. You will take all your classes together. Think of it like having a lab partner. You are expected to practice and work on your lessons outside of class.”

  “Do I get to choose my lab partner?”

  “Hunting partner,” Mina corrected.

  “Whatever.” I waved her correction away. “Do I?”

  “Yes, to some degree. We help students match up with partners at the beginning of the first year. However—”

  “I’m starting late.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So I get the hunting partner no one else wanted?”

  “
Souji had a hunting partner. Until recently.”

  I looked at her suspiciously. “What happened?”

  “Let’s not get into that right now,” Mina said, her voice unnaturally bright. “Let’s go by your dorm, and then you can meet your hunting partner and learn all about him.”

  “Him?” For some reason, I had assumed I would be partnered with another girl.

  God, this is going to be awkward. Having to be hunting partners with the guy—probably the geeky guy—that nobody else wanted to work with, who also had a previous partner that no one wanted to talk about.

  “Maybe I could hunt alone?” I suggested.

  “It’s far too dangerous for that,” Mina said. “One of the main goals of the Academy is to get students matched up with appropriate hunting partners. Some of the most famous hunting pairs began working together at the Academy.”

  “I don’t need to be famous,” I said. “I just need to get rid of my headaches and be able to stay alive.”

  Mina narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s not the kind of attitude that will get you very far here.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not, but it gets me out of here alive, it’s good enough for now.”

  I sure hope I can get out of here alive, anyway.

  Chapter 4

  I was still reeling—too overwhelmed to really take in anything—but Mina showed me all over the campus, anyway. The buildings were arranged around a central open area. They were all made of gray stone, with spires pointing up into the bright blue sky. It looked like a courtyard surrounded by cathedrals. It was a cross between photos I’d seen of the famous universities in England and the mythical ones I’d read about in fantasy novels. Sidewalks crisscrossed the lawn, leading from one building to another. Students moved from building to building or stood in groups chatting. They all looked normal enough, though seeing students in uniforms was a strange change for me. And a few of them looked older than I would have expected. But for all I knew, those were teachers. Or maybe the upper-level students Mina had talked about.