Chapter 10
My head slams into the mat hard enough to see stars, but Elliot doesn’t let his elbow crush my larynx, which I appreciate.
Despite his size and strength, Elliot is surprisingly gentle.
Like when Hound play-wrestles with a puppy.
Unfortunately for me, gentle does not mean pushover.
I may not be earning that twenty after all.
“Jesus,” Elliot grunts when I flip around and drive my heel into his rib cage. “Your feet made of lead or something?”
Unfortunately for him, I am not a puppy.
Kitty, who’s stretching on a dark mat in the corner, snickers.
Sophia has Peter locked in some kind of tactical hold that he looks to be enjoying far too much.
Neither of them has even noticed that I landed some decent hits on the strongman.
A good thing too—I’ve been trying to keep my experience slightly under the radar.
Pulling more advanced punches, dodging less deftly.
Anything to make sure they don’t know that I’ve been fighting actual deviants for the last decade.
“Sorry,” I breathe, bracing my hands on my knees. Elliot’s the best sparring partner I’ve had in…well, ever. I’ve never had a sparring partner before—me at ten against my aeon hunter father wouldn’t have been much of a fair match.
“Don’t be.” Elliot grins. His broad, shirtless chest gleams like polished metal beneath the low gymnasium lighting. “You’re even tougher than Soph. Don’t tell her I said that, though. She’ll prove me wrong. Painfully.”
“Yes, I will,” Sophia calls from across the room before her face smushes into the mat. Now Peter has her in a tactical hold. Elliot and I watch as he tries with as much gentlemanly courtesy as he can not to accidentally cop a feel.
“Damn.” Elliot shakes his head at me. “I keep forgetting she’s got the same hunter hearing I do now.”
I’ve been this way as long as I can remember, but for everyone else here, all the heightened senses are largely unwelcome twenty-first-birthday gifts. “Sensory overload’s intense, huh?”
“For real. I can see the blackheads on people’s noses from across the room.”
“I find twinkle lights helpful,” I tell him, getting a sip of water from the fountain near the rows of students running on treadmills. When I go to hand him twenty bucks from my wallet, he only shakes his head. “We’ll go double or nothing on the next round.”
The wood-floored gymnasium is open-air, built right into the center of campus, spitting distance from the amber-lit turrets of the great dining hall.
The treadmills sit before wide arches that face a shady alcove where a marble fountain gurgles with a few students perched around its lip.
One is reading a worn copy of Outsmarting Satyrs and Other Clever Beasts. Another, The Bell Jar.
“Back to it?” Elliot asks. “Or, Kitty, you want in?”
Kitty hops up, her short black hair pulled into tight space buns on either side of her head. “Don’t go easy on me like you did on Viv.”
“Whoa there.” But I’m laughing as I allow myself to stretch on the rubber mats and watch Kitty and Elliot circle each other.
She certainly moves like she’s been doing this longer than one summer program.
But that doesn’t mean anything for sure.
She was likely raised by hunters before she was orphaned; they probably taught her how to hold her arms and plant her feet long before she gained her abilities.
But Elliot is something else entirely. Even though he’s three times her size, he’s just as quick.
A powerhouse of physical strength and agility.
When Elliot lands a fast, light hit on Kitty, she lashes out, fists flying, losing form.
Temperamental, ambitious, controlling…My mind tries to put together how I could even begin to ask her if she’s an aeon.
I don’t think there’s any way to do so without giving myself away.
Somewhere, Peter howls in defeat. When the three of us turn toward the sound, we find Sophia with her thighs on either side of his head.
None of us shower before dinner. I learn quickly that despite the awe-inducing cathedral-style stained glass windows, lofted ceiling and rows and rows of endlessly long medieval tables, Harker’s dining hall is less Oxford dinner party and more battle-worn fortress banquet.
Hunters in all manner of athletic wear—navy Harker sweats, sports bras, leather fighting gear—eat and drink boisterously, sharing stories and lessons from the day.
The hall is loud and oddly cheerful, with students milling in and out of the swinging wooden doors that lead to the kitchen, where, Peter tells me, talented gnomes cook all three meals for us each day.
Matt, the baby-faced kid with the chip on his shoulder who Lisette referred to as Rambo, is sitting with some students who look older, pounding beers, interrupting one another’s gory stories.
A collection of beautiful third-year girls who have the viciousness of assassins and cheekbones of NTC moms are whispering about the group of lacrosse players sitting down the table from them.
One girl offers a delicate finger wave, and a good-looking guy mimes being shot in the heart and falls back into his buddies.
Across the hall, beneath a threadbare tapestry, sit a couple of the professors we met today, including Lisette, who is sharing a glass of wine with the fairy teacher with the gossamer wings.
They eat and talk quietly, used to the chatter of excitable young hunters, I’m sure.
And at the end of the table, beneath a wide, gold-framed landscape of a ship weathering rough seas—
My body tenses at the sight.
Reid. Sitting alone.
He digs silently into his dinner. No book, no phone out.
No teachers or students—not even his blond groupie—anywhere nearby.
A pariah, it seems. As he should be, I want to think.
But the visual is unsettling. I know loneliness.
I know it in my bones. In the roots of my teeth. And that’s what I’m looking at.
When Reid’s eyes cross the room to meet mine, I try not to take an obvious inhale. Those eyes, though…Like tracking missiles of cobalt blue.
I cut my gaze away and follow my new friends to a table a ways down.
I don’t spy a ton of first years, but I’d imagine a decent number of them are still struggling to withstand this many stimuli—the sounds of chewing and debating and raucous laughter, the flickering candlelight and airy stripes of moonglow turned lavender through the stained glass, the blended scents of roasted meat and starchy carbs, and the sharp tang of red wine.
“I don’t know if I can eat in here every night,” Peter says, rubbing his forehead.
“I think all my years of underage clubbing have desensitized me,” Sophia says, digging into her roast chicken without issue.
I take a bite and find it’s just as excellent as I’d expect. Gnomes are known for their craft—clockwork, baking, tinkering of all kinds. In fact, my favorite camera repairman in the city is a gnome.
“Same,” Kitty says to Sophia.
“You like to party?” Elliot asks, mouth overly full and brow raised. “You didn’t strike me as the type.”
“How come?” Kitty says, a bit tense. “Just because I’m dedicated to my studies and want to hunt for the Citadel one day means I can’t cut loose? People can be more than they appear, Elliot. Are you just a womanizing bag of hunter muscles?”
Sophia swivels her head to Elliot as if she deems this question interesting.
“Pretty much,” Elliot says with an easy shrug and another large bite. Kitty can’t help her laugh and the rest of the table snickers too. But I catch something in Elliot’s eye as he chews. There and gone before I can make sense of it.
“I bet you like to party,” Sophia says to me knowingly. “Like a raver or something.”
“Not so much, actually.”
“No, no,” Sophia says as if refining her understanding of me. “I’ve got it. You like a weird little bar that nobody goes to.”
Cobwebs and its taxidermy bats pop into my mind and I can’t help but laugh. “That’s kind of scary.”
Sophia flashes her magnificent smile. “It’s a gift.”
“Do me,” Peter says, sipping his beer. When he hears himself, his entire face flushes. “I mean…You know what I mean. Do that trick—the thing where—”
Sophia turns to Peter and narrows her eyes at him.
He grins back, studying the freckles on her nose, the clutter of gold winding up her ear as she tucks a copper strand behind it.
“You don’t like to go out at all,” she says after a minute.
“Maybe you play Dungeons & Dragons with your buds. No—World of Warcraft. No! Scrabble.”
“Close,” Peter says, unashamed. “The correct answer is all three.”
Sophia cheers at her success, does a faux bow for the table. But something a little mournful passes across his face.
“What is it?” Kitty asks Peter.
Peter tries to brush it off, reaching for his beer. “Nah. Nothing.”
“Nope.” Sophia, stronger than him, slams his mug down. The table jolts and the students at the other end shoot glares in our direction. “You have to tell us now.”
“The guys I used to hang out with…I don’t think it’ll be the same with them once I go back home. Not after being here.”
The sentiment hits me square in the chest. I’ve been fighting that feeling my whole life. Trying to be a version of me that fits with Penny and my mom and Nora. Trying to be the version my dad hoped I could be. Realizing those Vivs don’t even have the same taste in shoes.
“Those people will always be there for you,” I tell him, because it’s what I tell myself about Penny. “Regardless of who you become.”
“And what you love about them won’t change because of what you learn while here at Harker,” Sophia says. “Badass hunters can still play D&D.”
“And,” Elliot adds, “you’ve got us now.”
Peter grins at us, snaggletooth peeking out, and I can’t help but grin back.
We spend the rest of the night sharing stories about our lives back home, the classes we think we’ll like, the ones we know we won’t.
I revel briefly in a version of me I haven’t met until tonight.
One who doesn’t carry a backpack’s worth of pretending to be something she’s not everywhere she goes.
I decide to go to the library tomorrow night.
I’m too tired—surely I’d miss something.
And upstairs, in our dorm, I crawl into my twin bed across from a snoring Sophia and decide that Peter was right. I’m glad I gave it the day.