Chapter 7
The crowd claps for their beloved dean of few words, and people begin to funnel out of the amphitheater.
I’m wondering if I have enough film at home to go take some pictures at NTC Park, since I’ve already bailed on work for the day, when my narrow-eyed, dark-haired captor says to me, “Sorry about that. I didn’t want you to get called out in front of the whole school. I’m Kitty, by the way. Kitty Briggs.”
The leap in emotion from intensely focused to warm and chatty is very aeon of her. I narrow my eyes, assessing the sharp-featured girl. She’s angular and focused as a fox. Could she be like me? “Why’d they all cheer like that for the dean? He barely spoke.”
Kitty’s eyes go wide. “You don’t know about Dean Driscoll?”
“Nope.” I want to tell Kitty, I’m not from around these here parts, but the puppylike guy she was sitting with jumps in, his overgrown hair flopping as he walks.
“He’s a legend. Killed a high-ranking Brood demon back in the seventies and he’s not even a hunter.” Lanky Guy pushes his hair from his face with a grin. “He’s a warlock.”
Not a hunter? “How’d he end up at Harker?”
“Driscoll and some of his hunter friends saved an entire town from an ogre,” Kitty tells me. “They championed the school to let him attend.”
“He domesticated a wyvern while he studied here,” Lanky Guy adds. “He told us about it when Kitty and I took his summer program on spells and hexes.”
“And he’s a great dean,” Kitty adds. “Takes care of his students and keeps Harker safe. He’s the only witch currently employed by the school, given their tendency to…you know.”
“Turn,” the guy supplies. “Unless you believe the old rumor that the groundskeeper’s a warlock.”
“Which I don’t,” Kitty says tightly. She kind of reminds me of Nora.
I’d imagine for most lymantrians, turning is as big a fear as death.
But for hunters, whose sworn responsibility it is to kill deviants and not add to their numbers, it’s far worse.
And the risk is there for us as much as any mortal: A werewolf bites you?
Turned. Drained by a vamp? Turned. A demon takes your soul?
Turned and, worse, relegated to hell. The only kind of turning that also punishes you for eternity.
But witches are the trickiest—they can be turned by any of the above, but can also swear fealty to the High Thane and, through dark magic, turn deviant and gain immortality.
Since they can do this to themselves without any fangs or werewolf bites, witches get side-eyed in even the most welcoming of lymantrian circles.
At some point as we amble down the grassy hill and back toward the main drag of Harker’s campus, we lose Kitty to a squealing group of girlfriends, but the long-limbed, floppy-haired guy makes no move to abandon me, which I appreciate.
“Peter Roydon,” he tells me, thrusting out his hand. “Kitty’s cousin. I take it you’re new?”
And while every instinct in my body is urging me to say something dry and disinterested, I can’t find it in myself to be rude to Peter.
There’s something terribly earnest about him.
And not in a pitiful way. It’s like he’s too good to be mocked.
Like he wouldn’t even realize you were mocking him, and you’d be the idiot for not taking Peter Roydon seriously.
I shake his hand. “Viv Abbot.”
“How come you were going to leave mid-orientation?”
I debate lying, but the truth is, if I’m going to stay…
if I’m going to learn enough about my dad’s time here to find out who the deviant was who killed him, I need someone like Peter.
Someone who can help me begin my search.
“I’ve been hunting on my own for…” I’m about to say years when I remember only aeons develop their abilities early.
“A bit. I’m almost twenty-two.” Which is true.
“Never even knew there were this many hunters in the world, let alone that this place existed.”
Some guys are tossing a football back and forth down in the quad at enough miles per hour to crash clean through the brick behind them.
They jump like dogs high into the air to catch the ball and smack one another on the backs in success.
A fresh-faced girl is watching them as she sharpens a long sword dutifully on the lawn.
“I’m just not sure this is the right fit for me. ”
“That’s a bummer,” Peter says easily. “I bet we could learn a lot from someone who’s been doing this solo.”
It’s a kind thing to say even if it’s lip service. I had no idea I cared whether anyone saw value in the way I hunt. “Thanks.”
Peter shrugs a shoulder, and I follow him through an arched pathway because I don’t really know where I’m going. “Want my two cents?”
“Do you know how few men ask that before they give advice?”
Peter’s grin comes equipped with a sweet little snaggletooth. “Can you tell Kitty that for me?”
“What are your two cents?”
“My mom was the only hunter in my family and she passed away before she taught me about Harker. I was recruited by an instructor, Reid Graveheart. He’d found me in the spring trying to take down a troll with my newfound strength.
It wasn’t going so well…” Peter cringes at the memory.
“I was on the fence too. It sounded daunting and dangerous and…” He shakes his head at himself.
“It wasn’t until I signed up for the summer program that they found me in the Citadel’s records.
Learned I had a cousin here who was as orphaned as I was.
” His eyes survey the bustling campus. The cobblestones and varied students.
“You might realize you’re also not as alone as you think. ”
“I doubt I have a long-lost cousin hiding out in Harker’s bookshelves.”
“All I’m saying is you might as well give it the day. See if this place surprises you like it did for me.”
Peter’s grin is so earnest, it pulls at my heart. But I’m not ready to commit nor disappoint him, so I pivot to a lingering question. “What’s the Citadel? What kind of records do they have?”
Peter frowns and we resume our walk. “The Citadel is a massive palace well past the Fickle Thicket.” When I show no sign of knowing what a Fickle Thicket is, he adds, “The woods that surround the campus. Basically, the Citadel is the White House for the Elders and everyone who works for them.”
“Cool, cool. And what are the Elders?”
This time Peter just laughs. “The oldest living lymantrians and our governing body. Dispensing inter-lymantrian justice, regulating hunting, ruling on conflicts. That one’s basically in the title.”
“You seem to know a lot. You’re only a first year?”
“Kitty and I both. Same grade and everything. Lived five miles away from each other in the Pacific Northwest but never met. How about you?”
“I’m from Astera, actually.”
“No way.” His eyes light up. “That must have been an exciting place to grow up.”
I grimace, dodging his question. “So Harker students are from all over the country?”
Peter guides us back inside those mossy brick walls and down a cobblestone path. “Yeah. Harker’s the only demon-hunting college that I’m aware of. Pretty sure all hunting roads lead here.”
I get the impression that if there were another school for deviant defense, Peter would know about it.
“There are gateways across almost every major city to get into Harker,” he tells me. “But the gateway here within Old Campus only leads out into the Windsor. Most hunting by students and teachers is done in your city, given the Chasm.”
I clock it as odd that the gateway out of the school is set to lead to the exact museum where I work.
I’ve never been a suspicious person, but it’s a strange coincidence.
Still, I don’t know Peter well enough to tell him I’ve worked in that exact museum for a year, so I go with a different question. “What’s Old Campus?”
Peter gestures to the walls we just walked through. “Everything within the old brick. It’s all from the mid-thirteenth century. That’s why it looks like the Basilica of Saint-Denis or Canterbury Cathedral.”
He looks at me expectantly like I’m meant to understand thirteenth-century architecture references, and I’m too scared of hurting his feelings to admit I’m not his target audience. The phoniest nod ever spasms out of me, but Peter only smiles.
“The name ‘Old Campus’ would imply that everything else is younger, right? But actually everything beyond the gates is older. The amphitheater, the coliseum, the Fickle Thicket. I think the campus was built under a Roman emperor, maybe Vespasian, and then the center of it was renovated in the thirteenth century, and then again every hundred or so years. That’s why the commons all have flatscreens. ”
“So…where are we, exactly?”
Peter shrugs. “No clue. Maybe the old lymantrian plane.” He tips his head up toward the heavens.
When I was growing up, my father showed me some texts implying our ancestors once lived on a higher plane that was destroyed by the deviants when the lymantrians came down to seal up the Chasm.
The whole concept is so foreign to me, I don’t pry for more.
“Wherever Harker is,” Peter says, eyeing the lush hedges and gothic architecture, “it’s the best-kept secret in these ancient walls. ”
Harker’s entire existence is still a shock to the system, but Peter has certainly taken the edge off. I clock my own defensiveness and try to store it somewhere else. “That’s pretty cool.”
“Yes, it is.”
We come to a stop under the ornately designed rotunda that the gateway spat me out of this morning. Carvings of warriors and winged beasts battle overhead. Next to the imposing steel gateway doors is a wall of relics, figurines, and war trophies from various deviant kills.
But I’m less interested in the fossilized werepanther claw or Van Helsing’s original journals.
On the far right is a grainy black-and-white photo of a cheering college kid, lacrosse stick raised in victory, being hoisted onto the shoulders of two other boys.
They’re all in the same checked jerseys, numbers displayed proudly on their backs.
They look like the greatest of friends. I squint at the photo until tears grow hot in my eyes.
“Pretty moving stuff,” Peter says on a reverent breath. “That’s when the Marksmen were at the top of their game.”
I don’t tell him that’s my dad they’ve got raised on their shoulders. I don’t tell him it’s the first time I’ve seen that photo of him. I don’t tell him how much it hurts to have confirmation that the only person who ever really gave a shit about me kept an entire chunk of his life a secret.
Peter allows me to study the photo for a beat too long before I wipe my cheek and ask him hoarsely, “Where to next?”
Under lofted ceilings, we make our way into a building at the edge of the redbrick wall. Inside, we climb a creaky staircase that smells of old wood, and Peter says, “This is Elkfore Hall. First-year housing.”
“Oh, I won’t be staying on campus. I have an apartment…” But Peter’s already wandering down a wood-paneled passage to find a chalkboard filled with names.
“There you are,” he says with triumph. Sure enough, he’s pointing at my name and my room number. Vivienne Abbot, Sophia Valentine—Room 314.
“Sophia Valentine. You know her?”
Peter shakes his head. “Nope. Pretty name, though. Look, I’m just down the hall from you guys. Room 319.”
I peek at his room number. “And in a single too. Lucky duck.”
“I wonder where Kit is…”
As Peter hunts for his cousin’s assignment on the board, I think of that photo of my dad.
I can’t find it in me to be angry with him.
He looked so happy with his friends. Hunter friends.
Hunter friends he never spoke of to me. Digging into his history at this school is going to be my best shot at finding out not only why he kept me away from this place but also whether anyone who knew him then knows anything about the night he died.
“Hey, Peter, do you know where I can find information on the school and its alumni? There’s so much I don’t know about Harker. I just want to get caught up before I fall behind.”
Peter looks like he knows exactly what I mean. “The library has plenty of books in the Harker History section. It’s in Mortimer Tower.”
“And those records you were talking about?”
“Those are with the more classified resources in the archives. But that room requires a staff member’s key card.”
I store the information away for later. “That’s fine, the library will work.”
Peter’s smile is so sincere I almost feel bad—for what, though, I’m not sure.
I don’t even know this kid. Or his cousin or any of the students here.
None of them are like me. None of them can relate to what I’ve been through.
None of them are at Harker only to figure out why they were never supposed to be.