Chapter 5 #2
And it’s quiet. Blessedly, peacefully, mercifully quiet. Heightened hunter hearing means that’s a rare find—sometimes, even at my desk, I can hear car alarms going off six streets over.
But for a moment, all I hear is my own Mary Janes clomping on the lobby floor.
I stroll past all the water fountains and the ticketing machines.
I don’t allow my eyes to linger on the utility closet down the hall nor my mind to snag on the fact that there really is one there in the first place. Anyone could have known that.
I take the elevator up to the sixth floor and smell nutmeg and coffee. Fiona’s always in before me, even when I’m in before everyone else. I don’t know when that woman sleeps or how Nora puts up with her hours.
“Morning,” I call out, wincing as I sit down at my desk.
My back is still kind of killing me after the subway fight, and now my foot is sore too.
Hunters have accelerated healing and strength—we can lose a lot of blood without passing out, wounds become scars pretty quickly, etc.
—but the gash on my foot hasn’t sealed all the way up quite yet.
“Can you come in here?”
I limp into Fiona’s office to find her on the floor, surrounded by papers, a leathery book cracked wide open in her lap. Three discarded coffee cups have all missed the trash bin. Her slight nose and wide eyes are hidden behind some kind of antique glasses, and she’s got her exhibit gloves on.
“What are you wearing?”
“Eighteenth-century bifocals. I’m trying to get this quote about them just right for the exhibit.”
“Have you been here all night?”
Fiona stares up at me with a frown. She looks kind of like an animated bug in those things.
“This new wing is nearly five years in the making. It’s not something that can be done within regular work hours. Maybe you should take a page from my book. I know how much it would mean to your mother if you worked opening night.”
Perhaps Fiona thinks all assistants show up at seven in the morning, but I let it slide because she seems a bit jittery. “Copy.”
Fiona removes the bifocals and sets them inside an antique case, where there’s something golden and round wrapped in cloth. As she rubs the bridge of her nose and temples, I move to get a better look at it.
“Don’t touch that,” she snips, eyes still closed. “Christ above.”
“Wasn’t gonna,” I breathe out. Sheesh. “What is it?”
“Gnostic censer. Just found by our archaeological team a few weeks ago around the rim of the Chasm. We’ve been looking for this piece for ages.”
“Nifty,” I deadpan.
Gnosticism is a little-known second-century religion. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of ancient religious artifacts in this Chasm exhibit—and in museums all over the world—are actually deviant relics, but I guess it’s a good thing historians like Fiona will never know that.
“Viv, why do you think I’m always in the attic?”
She’s not talking about the space between the ceiling and the roof. Those of us who work at the Windsor lovingly refer to the museum as Half City’s attic due to its equal influx of dusty manuscripts and baubles no one wants.
“I don’t know. Rough homelife?”
Fiona’s sigh sends wisps of strawberry blonde hair fluttering.
Between her long, lanky limbs, cheeks crowded with soft freckles, and hair the color of apricots, you’d think she’d be sweet as pie, but the glare she’s giving me right now is downright sour.
“You know you could never get away with saying things like that if I wasn’t married to your sister. ”
I pick up her newest coffee and take a sip—mocha almond latte. Dessert in a to-go cup. “She is the worst, though.”
“She loves you. She worries about you all the time.”
I know it’s my fault we’ve arrived here, but this is not a conversation I want to be having. “Why are you always in the attic?”
“I have committed to this role. I have a responsibility to this building. To the research. To the board. I take it seriously.”
Oh god. Not the responsibility speech again.
Fiona gives me this schtick every once in a while because about a year ago she walked in on me poring over one of my dad’s lymantrian scrolls with an ancient chalice in one hand and an amulet in the other.
I’d been trying to do a ritual to trap a succubus inside the amulet, but I told Fiona I was praying for Penny to dump Claude.
She asked me if I felt like Penny’s happiness was my responsibility, which I guess I shouldn’t have said yes to.
After that she seemed to think it was her job to guide me or mold me or something, starting with getting me this gig.
And the worst part is I actually do hate disappointing Fiona. Somehow my sister-in-law is the only member of my family who cares more about how I’m doing than how I’m making them look.
“The work is important to me, Viv. Even when I’m exhausted. Do you think I’m always thrilled about gnostic censers?”
I answer rapidly. “Yes.”
Fiona opens her mouth, only to close it again, rethinking. “Fine. But there are other parts of the job that tire me out. And I’m still here every morning and every night, away from my wife, because it’s my responsibility. My duty. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
But my mind is elsewhere.
It sounds a lot like what Reid asked me. If you’re going to fight for this city all on your own, don’t you think you owe it to yourself to be the best hunter you can be? Isn’t that your responsibility?
That’s why my dad taught me all he did. Not just because we’re from a lineage of aeons and we’re burdened with the compulsive, visceral need to kill things with fangs and horns and claws but because of our responsibility to this city.
I have followed in my dad’s footsteps my whole life.
Even long after he wasn’t here to guide me.
And now I have the chance to uphold my duty to him.
I allow myself, standing there in Fiona’s office, to indulge this thought for just the briefest of moments: Harker, if it’s real, will offer me the chance not just to walk where he walked, to study what he studied, to see the place that molded my father into the hunter he was—but also maybe to get some answers after all these years.
And perhaps Harker is fake. Perhaps I’ll make a fool of myself trying to insert a faux-lymantrian coin into a broken ticket machine. And perhaps I’ll never know why Reid the handsome Brood demon stalked me or let me live or tricked me into having hope.
But if Harker Academy for Deviant Defense exists…it might be the only place in the world where I can find out not only why my father kept this school from me but maybe who he recognized the night he died.
It’s that possibility alone that sends me out of Fiona’s office with a made-up stomachache and sprinting down to the Windsor lobby.
The morning’s tranquility has been devoured by the expected 8:00 a.m. rush: Two security guards frisk a surly kid.
A teacher attempts to corral an entire sixth-grade class.
A shrill woman complains to guest services about the preorder ticket prices for our upcoming exhibit—The Chasm of Astera: Crown Jewel or Jagged Scar?
I turn down the hallway and find the utility closet.
Inside I’m met with the smell of industrial cleaning fluid and mothballs.
Before me, a single broken kiosk beckons.
Reid’s lymantrian coin is already warm in my palm…
but there’s no coin slot. Broken or not, this is a twenty-first-century machine, and there’s only space for paper bills or a credit card.
I step closer and squint at the payment mechanism, though I know it’s useless—hunters have perfect eyesight.
There’s no crease, no divot, no space for a coin to slip into.
But I’ve come this far. I drop to my knees and look underneath, sliding my hands along the sides and curves. Nothing…
Until I feel it.
A tiny slot, like you’d find on a plastic carnival ride, tucked right under the lip of the machine. Too small for a quarter, too large for a nickel. The size of the coin in my hand. I slip it inside and am engulfed in blinding light.