Chapter 16
In the hallway, a massacre is exactly what I find.
Students are being slammed into walls, screaming in agony. The scent of blood and decay permeates my senses. I can taste the iron in the air. Swords and knives sing past me—
I’m acting on animal instinct before I can even take in what’s attacking.
I grip my blades, and I’m diving for creatures in hoods, my silver sinking through ancient bone and muscle.
Glossy black blood spews, and the creatures moan, but nothing is dying and none of these deviants are slowing, and I don’t know—
“They’re wraiths,” a familiar voice grits out beside me.
I spin to find Peter, long sword drawn like a medieval knight—if medieval knights slept in gingham boxers and Batman T-shirts.
He’s splattered in shimmering black blood, but a quick scan tells me that’s the only blood on him.
He’s not injured, and I exhale roughly. If he’s afraid, it hardly shows. “You need—”
I don’t get the chance to hear the rest. A ghostly-looking creature in a tattered shroud shoots toward me and I barely dodge in time.
With gnarled fingers, it wrenches open a dormitory door and glides inside.
I’m already running when the scream sounds, and my blades are hacking through primeval flesh just in time.
“What is that?” the half-asleep student cries, slamming on the lights and clutching the fresh wound in his side.
I’m rendered speechless when I yank back the weathered fabric over its face and finally get a good look at the thing. I’ve never fought a wraith before. Call it good luck or bad luck—given the current situation, I’m not quite sure which—but I do wish I’d known to leave the shroud on.
Beneath the ragged fabric is a face devoid of features.
Mottled gray flesh with no eyes, no nose, no ears.
But I know it’s a face because of the gaping mouth.
Split from one side to the other, crowded with too many teeth.
I don’t have time to look for a tongue as its snapping jaws aim for my face.
I drive my blade into the wraith’s skull and scramble free, even as it chases me out.
In the hall, the specters are everywhere. There are more and more of them—
And the silver doesn’t seem to be doing jack shit.
Dodging two students who are taking one down together, I realize these wraiths might require something more specific, like a vampire with a wooden stake, or a strzyga with fire.
Surely most of these students know how to kill them—these kids have had hunter parents guiding them on what’s to come for the last decade of their lives—but there’s too much violence blooming all around me, too many untrained first years holding their blades wrong.
Too much chaos and too many different weapons and too much goopy, black blood.
I’ve lost Peter in the fray, and as my blades cut into anything they can, I don’t have a spare second to catch my breath, let alone to take stock of what’s working.
And these wraiths have got the numbers on us.
For every student there are three faceless, mournful monsters attempting to rip skin from bones, turning the hallway carpet slick and red.
My dagger is carving through the torso of one when another takes me down to the ground. My tailbone sings in pain against the wood, but I’ve got bigger problems. It’s gotten those bony fingers around my neck, and no matter how I slam my dagger into its side, the grip won’t loosen.
I can’t get in an inhale. I can’t fucking breathe.
Shit, shit—
Kicking and clawing and choking, I recoil from that smooth gray face bare of features, that dripping mouth with all those decaying teeth—still suffocating, lungs still burning.
The wraith shrieks a sound like steam from an angry kettle and collapses in a spray of black blood atop me. Air rushes back into my lungs and, with it, the putrid scent of carrion. I gag as I shove the soggy fabric off me.
There, standing in a wide-open dorm doorway, next to a shirtless dude in boxer briefs, is Sophia. She’s wearing a men’s button-down and white panties, barefoot, with post-sex hair, and gripped in her hands is a mighty crossbow aimed right at us.
I fish the soaked bolt from the heap of black goo and stand. Her arrowheads can kill the wraiths…
“Thanks,” I call to her, my voice a little hoarse.
But she’s already slipping past the useless hunk beside her, descending into the chaos, firing her crossbow at two wraiths—headshots, both of them.
I scan the room for Peter before I’m even back on my feet. He’s not only alive and well, he’s watching a pantsless Sophia take out wraiths with the precision of a CIA black op. I fear the distraction may cost him his life.
“Look alive,” I tell him, slashing down a wraith in front of us with Sophia’s arrow. It spurts into a pool of liquid black. My maroon sweater is no longer maroon.
Peter shakes his head and drives his sword into another screeching creature. “She is something else.”
He’s not wrong. But so is he—and I refuse to let anything happen to either of them.
I tell myself there’ll be time later to analyze how fucked I am if I already care about these two.
It’s awful enough going through life wondering if sweet-as-sugar Penny is going to round a corner in Babylon one night and come up against a werewolf asking for directions.
Now I have to worry about new friends on the front lines too?
I’ve discovered the first weakness in befriending other hunters: Their lives are in as much jeopardy as my own.
“Why do her arrows work? My blades—”
I use the arrowhead once more as another wraith descends on us. Peter slides his sword just past my hair to get one behind me. “It’s the salt, Viv,” he says. “Sophia’s arrow”—another slice—“my blade…they’ve been dipped in salt.”
Of course. I’ll feel hideously stupid later. For now, I make the mental note to get a jar of salt and add it to my personal armory in the closet.
Peter slices through two more sinewy gray-skinned creatures.
We help a concussed kid into an open dorm room.
Together we try to hack the wraiths back, farther and farther away from wounded students, but there are just too many of them.
And they had the element of surprise—they’ve incapacitated more than half the floor.
We’re grossly outnumbered and confined to this narrow hall.
And I’m fighting with one fucking arrow, and students are still screaming, and this school is supposed to be impenetrable, and why has nobody come to help us—
Like a gust of wind barreling through fog, every single wraith explodes in a puddle of black gunk.
I’ve still got my arrow poised, only the specter I was about to shank is now liquid at my feet. When Peter and I turn, Reid Graveheart is standing at the end of the hall.
He’s in nothing but low-slung Harker sweats, with a severe case of bed head, and I can tell by the carved V at his hips that he’s slept in neither boxers nor briefs.
But Reid’s perfectly chiseled chest and the spare dusting of brown curls below his navel are, shockingly, the least interesting sight before me.
He’s holding a leaf blower.
“You guys okay?” he asks. He sounds winded, like he sprinted through the campus at four fifteen in the morning looking for a leaf blower to fill with salt.
The collective mumbles and groans sound something like yeah. The hallway is splattered with black like a colorless Jackson Pollock.
Peter says, “The other floors—”
“They’re all fine,” Reid tells him as pale green beings in uniforms hurry up the stairs behind him and into the hall to tend to the wounded.
Pointed ears and slight features, quiet whispered words.
Nurses from the infirmary, and…pixies. Makes sense, due to their healing abilities.
Some do chest compressions, but others use glowing blue light from their hands and conjured ointments to seal up wounds and set broken bones.
I count at least three kids with life-threatening injuries—severed arteries, head trauma—and riotous nausea swells in my stomach. It’s my job to protect people, and I failed because I didn’t know about fucking salt.
Reid heaves a sigh. “We’ve secured the perimeter. The Citadel is already looking into this. You can all go back to sleep.”
“Are you kidding me?” I say to Peter.
He frowns. “We’re the only school that trains hunters. Deviants are probably always trying to break in and get their fix. Wraiths crave our flesh as much as werewolves do.” When Sophia wanders over, still without pants, Peter clears his throat and averts his eyes.
“You both all right?” When we nod, she tells us, “Elliot’s fine too. He’s on the top floor.”
“You’re…” Peter swallows hard. “Bleeding.”
Sophia touches her forehead where there is, indeed, blood dripping down the side of her face. “Oh, yeah.”
And then she wanders back into the dorm room she came out of, dragging the shell-shocked beefcake in briefs along with her.
“I’m going to make sure Kitty’s okay,” Peter tells me, his eyes still on the door Sophia just closed.
As he shakes his head and walks away, I spot Reid heading back down the hall, and I’m met with new anger.
There is wraith goo all over this dormitory.
There are unconscious, bleeding students.
We have an entire gaggle of pixies tending to the fallen like it’s a World War I battlefield.
And Reid, one of our professors, is returning to his beauty sleep? He’s lucky nobody was killed tonight.
I’m stomping over to him before I know what I’m going to say.
“Hey,” I snap at the hard planes of his muscled back.
I can see the bracing inhale he takes before he turns around.
Talking to me requires all his energy, I suppose.
When he does face me, I remember our height difference and try to stand a bit taller.
I’m five seven, so for me to feel short next to someone is rare.
I add this to the phone book–size list of reasons I can’t stand the guy.
Reid’s eyes run over me as if he’s looking for something specific. The curve of my jaw, the side of my neck, the scrapes on my hands. I’m acutely aware that I’m drenched in oozing black blood and smell like the inside of a carcass.
“You can’t just walk away,” I tell him.
“You always sleep in a miniskirt?”
“How can you be so glib at a time like this?”
Reid’s face hardens. “At a time like what?”
“Students—your students—almost died tonight.”
“We teach these kids how to hunt. Death at the hands of deviants is in the job description.” He moves to turn, but I yank him back by the arm. His skin is hot under my hand.
“How could you let—”
“I didn’t let anything,” he snaps, grasping my wrist just this side of too tight and removing it from his body. “And you’d be wise to get your emotions under control. I’m your instructor.”
Shit. I take a slow breath in through my nose. Aeons are notoriously moody. The last thing I need is this fucking demon figuring out what I am. “Harker doesn’t even let students hunt alone. They weren’t prepared for this.”
“I didn’t make those rules.” He says it like if it were up to him, he’d do things differently.
But with his sigh he seems to think better of the notion.
“Harker does the best it can to keep the students here safe. We can’t allow kids to hunt down danger alone the first few years after they gain their abilities.
Doesn’t mean the danger won’t come to them.
We have wards and spells and hexes, round-the-clock hunters on guard…
This was an anomaly. And one I just told you the Citadel is looking into.
But if Harker’s going to try so hard to insulate their students, incidents like this may be the only way for hunters to learn exactly what they’re up against.”
“You’re wrong.” My voice comes out reedy. Too emotional. I try to rein in my frustration. “This ability—this hunter gene—it’s a curse. Nobody should have to learn this way. Nobody here asked for this.”
I didn’t ask for this. The words might as well be spray-painted on my forehead. Shame heats my cheeks.
Reid studies me, and it feels like he’s looking beneath my skin. “Hunting is a privilege. Whether these students asked for it or not, they should be honored to fight. Even those with fancy museum gigs, miniskirts, and blond trust-fund pets are still hunters. They will always be hunters.”
I want to tell him that something about feeling inadequate in every single way, trapped in the nebulous post–high school haze, can lead to all kinds of peculiar romantic choices that people hope will impress their mother, but I go with the far more mature, “Hey, that pet is my boyfriend.”
“You need to make peace with who you are, huntress.” My eyes focus on his, and I find them churning like a storm-battered sea. “Trust me. I know a thing or two about fate dealing you a hand you didn’t ask for.”
“Do not give me some sob story about being a demon. You joined the Brood. You’re at fault for that, not fate.”
Reid clenches his jaw, his ruthless gaze drilling into me. But he says nothing. And try as I might to remember the point of Dean Driscoll’s story, I just can’t buy into this demon’s bullshit.
“You must get some sick satisfaction out of playing the good guy. Knowing you took probably, I don’t know, thousands of human lives in your time, and now you get to dress up as a teacher, and cute blondes bring you apples for your desk.
Don’t kid yourself, Reid. Everyone here knows you’re still a demon. You’ll never be good.”
Reid studies me for a beat. I fight the urge to shift on my feet.
When he speaks, his voice is lower, quieter than I expect.
“Do you think your words have any effect on me? You think I don’t know the students, the professors, all feel as you do?
” He exhales roughly, coming back to himself.
“You can put down the daggers, huntress. Focus on actually learning something here. My place at Harker isn’t your fight. ”
He doesn’t wait for me to respond before he walks through the hall and down the stairs.
But he doesn’t get it. He never will. He has no idea what is or isn’t my fight.
That more often than not I dream of men with his same brand ending my father’s life.
He doesn’t know the aeon rage that boils inside me, like a pot left over a flame until everything inside has evaporated into furious mist. Reid Graveheart doesn’t know me. And he never will.