Chapter 9
The courtyard outside Professor Lisette’s basement classroom is dimly lit; it’s too early for the lanterns to flicker on, too late for ample sunshine, but the heat has died down and the grounds no longer bustle with hundreds of students.
I spy both the setting sun over the hills in the west and a sliver of shy moon cresting in the still-blue sky, and I feel the corners of my mouth tick up. I love when that happens.
“Dining hall for dinner?” Elliot asks Sophia, then looks to Peter, Kitty, and me, extending the invite to us as well. “I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving,” Soph says, fanning herself with a notebook. “But I’ll go anywhere with AC. I cannot take another minute of this heat.”
“It’s kind of brutal, huh?” Kitty asks, tucking her hair behind her ear. I get the sense new friends aren’t common for her, either, and my heart gives an empathetic squeeze.
“Very brutal,” Sophia agrees. “We could all watch something in the commons after?”
Kitty’s brows lift with interest, and Peter eyes his book bag anxiously before nodding at Sophia with guarded enthusiasm. I fear Puppy Eyes may be a goner.
“We don’t hunt in the evenings?” I ask the group. “Even with an instructor?”
“Very few first years are selected for Field Training,” Peter says. “They want you to learn a bit before they toss you to the wolves.”
“Literally,” Sophia jokes.
“I already can’t wait to graduate,” Elliot muses, running a hand through his wavy hair. “Freedom to go take out deviants whenever I please.”
“No babysitters,” Sophia agrees.
“And a Citadel hunter salary,” Kitty adds brightly.
Sophia and Elliot look at each other like that’s a bit more ambitious than anything they’re hoping to accomplish, and Kitty shifts on her feet. Peter just looks like the thought of hunting in general terrifies him.
“That what you want to do?” I ask Kitty without judgment. “Work for the Citadel?”
“I’d be happy to be stationed somewhere cool after this.
Japan or Romania or Salem, Oregon…” These must be deviant hotspots.
Places where the average alum is sent as an expert hunter after graduation.
I nod along as if it isn’t news to me. “But being able to work for the Elders, to help maintain order…to hunt in Astera. I think I’d be good at that. ”
She definitely reminds me of Nora. A classic type A with the ruthlessness of an aeon to boot. I can’t imagine Kitty’s childhood was an easy one.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you,” Peter tells her.
He says it like working for the Citadel—hunting in big, bad Astera, where the Brood lives—is an incredible feat.
I almost want to tell them Kitty could kick ass at that tonight, before I remind myself I started hunting when I was seven, as did my dad, and his mom before him.
Nobody I’m standing with has hunted on their own, except maybe here and there in this last year before school started.
I also remind myself none of these people have the bloodlust I do.
Maybe to Elliot it’s a sport. To Sophia, an adrenaline rush.
To Kitty, a challenge to excel at. But to me it’s a razor-sharp need. A compulsion.
“Harker’s laxer about people hunting back home during winter and summer breaks,” Sophia adds, and I remember I’m the one who asked about hunting tonight.
“Probably because they’ll have taught us the basics by then.
And because nobody is going home to a place like Astera.
” Sophia catches herself right as she says it. “Except you, I guess.”
I’ll just tack it onto the seventeen other reasons that even among a literal school of hunters, I’m still the odd one out.
“We could spar, though,” Elliot suggests, eyes lighting. “In the coliseum. My bothers told me they never clean the blood from the floor after battles.”
Kitty’s nose scrunches. “That can’t be right…or hygienic.”
“Elliot’s brothers are rarely either,” Sophia muses.
“They went here before you?” Kitty asks him.
Elliot grins. “All five of ’em.”
Peter says, “I don’t think there are any classes being taught in there tonight. Might not be open.”
“Do you have the entire curriculum memorized?” I ask.
“Of course he does,” Kitty says. “He’s like a walking registrar.”
“Then the gymnasium,” Elliot concedes. “We can spar in there.”
After what has to be one of the longest days of my life, I was hoping to find that Harker History section of the library Peter was telling me about, but maybe sparring isn’t a bad idea.
If I’m going to stay enrolled at this school long enough to figure out more about my father’s death, that means giving up hunting in Astera.
Which means I need to take every opportunity I can get to let off steam.
Still, the thought of accepting this rule—letting deviants slither all over my city with nothing to stop them but some stationed Harker alums I’ve never met—goes down about as well as a doorknob, but I tell myself it’s only temporary.
That I’ll be even better at what I do when I’m allowed to hunt over the winter break, less than four months away.
Who knows if I’ll even make it here that long.
“I’m in,” I tell them.
“Sick,” Sophia says as we amble toward the gym. “I got these new arrowheads last week—”
“Shit.” I stop short. “I forgot. One of my daggers is broken.”
“Which one?” Sophia asks.
I shrug. “My left?”
The look on her face is one of grave disappointment. “You haven’t named them?”
“Named them?” My eyes cut to Elliot, Kitty, and Peter, but nobody seems to find this sentiment as absurd as I do.
“Most warriors and knights name their blades,” Elliot tells me. It’s strange to hear something so silly coming out of the mouth of someone so cool.
“And all the best superheroes too,” Peter adds. “Thor named his hammer Mjolnir.”
“Peter’s obsessed with comics,” Kitty says with an eye roll. “He can recite every Spider-Man issue alphabetically.”
Peter opens his mouth and I wince. “Maybe some other time?”
“Go to the armory,” Sophia tells me. “They’ll fix your dagger for you in like twenty minutes.”
Elliot’s already walking again, a smirk on his face. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you an ass whooping.”
“Want to bet on that?”
His entire face brightens with my words. “Twenty bucks says you can’t get me to the mat.”
I grin at him, a warm, excited buzz lighting in my chest. “You’re on.”
On my way to the armory, I stroll past low stone archways wreathed in decadent ivy and soaring buildings that resemble cathedrals, just as Peter said.
My map from earlier leads me around classical columns and wide-open courtyards, tufts of soft hydrangea and quiet peals of student laughter.
I find my pace quickening—try as I might to fight it, I’m eager to get back to the group.
Today wasn’t just manageable, it was…kind of a relief.
No covering for broken bones or strange scars.
No lying to people. And I actually made new friends.
Something I haven’t done since I met Penny.
Shit, Penny!
I fish my phone out of my back pocket and shoot her a quick text. Stuck at the Windsor under a mountain of work. Might just sleep on Fiona’s couch tonight.
And suddenly the truck-size weight this afternoon removed from my chest returns, twice as heavy—the lies are going to increase tenfold now that I’m enrolled at Harker.
If I’m really going to give this place a chance—at least until I get some meaningful answers—I can’t half-ass it.
These classes are no joke, the hours, the workload, the rules…
And I haven’t even done any physical training yet.
I’m going to have to come up with some kind of longer-term lie for Fiona, James, my family…But none of those will hurt as badly as lying to Penny. I don’t think Penny’s lied to anyone once in her life. Certainly never to me.
But it’s not like I have a lot of options.
Even if humanity wasn’t better off not knowing about deviants—even if it weren’t safer for society as a whole—I’d still never want Penny, of all people, to know how horrific the world really is.
Her sunny outlook is a rare and precious thing.
To wake up every single day and genuinely believe that people are good?
That things will be okay? I’d yank out my own front teeth Novocain-free for that peace of mind. I never want to take that from her.
And more selfishly, when I’m not having nightmares about the docks where my father was killed or being turned against my will, I’m having nightmares about Penny learning what a monster I am.
So I have to lie to my closest friend to protect her and our friendship.
A lovely hunter classic. The most heartbreaking catch–22.
By the time I reach the armory, a shabby little cottage amid sturdy oak trees with a steeply sloping gray-tiled roof, my frustration’s simmering.
I’m irritated all over again by Harker’s inane rules against hunting.
If I could, I’d explain to the gruff dean that I need the fight—the kill—to remain stable.
That I’ve been taking down deviants—and in Astera, no less—since before I could reach the top shelf of my pantry.
But I know it would out me as an aeon, and we can’t have that, now can we?
By the time I yank the armory door open, I’m looking for a fight.
And lucky for me, I get one.
Amid racks of glinting spears and sharpened long swords, rows of Harker-brewed oils and salves, I find the demon all these weapons exist to destroy.
I’d have known even if I hadn’t clocked his perfect loose brown curls or the wide expanse of his lean, muscled back.
The way my body buzzes—alerting me that I’m in the presence of danger—would’ve been enough.