Chapter 21
I’m not such a rah-rah kind of girl—I think my dark wardrobe and resting bitch face, as Soph so lovingly puts it, could tell you as much—but tonight’s lacrosse game is decidedly kind of awesome.
Though perhaps that’s just because both teams are made up of superhuman hunters who are playing an already-contact-rife sport like they’ve been dosed with steroids.
Maybe this should’ve been held in the coliseum.
When I was at Belaire School for Girls, the only sporting event we had was ballet, during which I got rapped on the knuckles more than once for falling asleep. In my defense, I’d grown up in lower-middle-class Astera, where I’d known as much about ballet as I had about nuclear fission.
Once again, I find myself enjoying the collegiate experience I never got to have.
Cosplaying as a regular Harker student isn’t the first thing on my figure-out-why-my-dad-changed-his-name-after-going-to-school-here to-do list, but until I can get my hands on a staff member’s key card, I have no way into the archives.
My current game plan is to swipe one off a professor tomorrow during weekend office hours.
After we inspect Kitty’s room Scooby-Doo-style, that is.
So tonight there’s nothing more I can do on either front but watch the game.
On the field below, amid a pleasant fall chill, Elliot funnels his whip-fast predator speed into a stunning tackle that results in another goal for the Bat and Blood team.
The crowd stomps on the bleachers, and the power of thousands of hunter feet pounding shakes the earth like a seismic event.
The stadium lights glow against the swirl of violet sky fading into black, and I inhale salty snacks and freshly cut grass and think of my dad.
Now I know why this was his favorite sport—he was a champion here.
Sophia lets out a rowdy whoop at the next point and throws her hands in the air.
“Why do you think hunters love lacrosse so much?” I ask her over the roaring crowd.
Sophia turns to face me, and I notice that at some point during the game, she borrowed someone’s face paint and now has navy lines drawn across her cheeks. “It’s like football, but you get to wield a weapon?”
A brutal takedown results in a foul, and the entire crowd boos. “No other sports?”
“I’m looking forward to the regatta on Lake Hellebore in the spring. Rowers’ arms are…” She fans herself in mock lust.
“And everyone’s rooting for Bat and Blood?
” Lacrosse teams at Harker are like secret societies in the Ivy League.
Generations old, each with its own distinct personality, recruitment system, and track record.
The players even live in the same houses on the same avenue like frats on Greek Row.
Elliot moved out of Elkfore as soon as he was accepted onto B-and-B.
From what I’ve gathered, the Strikers seem to be the golden boys, while the craftier Bat and Blood are tonight’s underdogs.
“Kind of. I’m rooting for a good game and don’t really care who wins. But it’s always satisfying to see Bat and Blood hand the Strikers their asses. B-and-B’s the only team that recruits first years.”
Sophia and I scream for Elliot to score as he barrels down the field until our voices are raspy. He could have been Division I at a real college. “Do they teach anything academic here? Like math or science? None of these kids ever get to go to legitimate universities.”
“Eventually we’ll have to read Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, don’t you worry your little prep school heart.” I make a face and she laughs her sparkling, open-mouthed Sophia laugh. At least two guys in the stands with us can’t help their stares. “My mom says we’ll even have career day.”
“Career day?” I can’t imagine all these hunters taking aptitude tests to see if they’d be better nurses or marketing execs.
“Yep. To help us to find the best job to hide our hunting. Overnight security guard, web developer. Nothing that’s nine to five or requires too much personal info shared. You get the idea.”
When Bat and Blood slams another goal into the Strikers’ net, I’m convinced the game is over. The scoreboard reads 10–2, and the crowd is chanting, “Batty, bloody, batty.” It’s practically a slaughter.
“Where should we take Elliot to celebrate?” I ask Soph, motioning for her bag of chips.
“I’m sure the team will have a party tonight.” She takes a sip of her soda, which she spiked with vodka before we left. “First one of the year. Here’s to things getting wild.”
I raise a brow at her, my mouth full of salty, crunchy heaven.
“I don’t know what that face means.”
“Yes, you do,” I say, though it comes out like hes hoo hoo.
“Not wild like that. I’m not into Elliot. Never have been, never will be. Now that we’re best friends, you have to wrap your perverse mind around that.”
I clutch my heart in faux horror. “Perverse?”
“Yeah. You’re a little freak, I can tell.
” Sophia tosses a few chips into her mouth.
“You have all the makings of a sexual degenerate.” She begins to tick items off on long fingers tipped in red polish.
“Self-loathing, beauty, surly avoidant energy, trauma from probably both mommy and daddy issues…I get your whole thing, Abbot.”
I swallow dryly. The chip grease coating my tongue is like slick oil. I haven’t told Sophia about my parents. I certainly haven’t told her about the things I want in bed that I’d never ask James for. I’ve never told Penny that stuff—even before I was dating her brother.
Sophia stares at me with fiendish delight. “I’m right on the money, aren’t I?”
I debate brushing off the question. I’ve kept everything about my dad a secret from my friends just in case anyone at the school knew he was an aeon and could link me to him.
But Sophia already knows what I am, so…“My dad was a hunter,” I tell her.
I think of the picture of him and his teammates in the rotunda, the scoreboard announcing the win for the Marksmen.
“He was on a lacrosse team here too. And he died when I was ten.”
Sophia’s rich brown eyes shutter. This time when Bat and Blood scores and the entire crowd becomes a sea of cheers around us, she doesn’t flinch. “That fucking sucks.”
“And then my mom funneled her heartbreak into putting people behind bars. She had been a volunteer councilwoman in Lethe, where we grew up, trying to better the neighborhood and stuff. After my dad died, she worked her way up, eventually ran for district attorney. Fancy new job meant fancy new town, so she moved us over the hill to the Hesperides, and now she might be dating Caspar Harlock.”
“Caspar Harlock? Like, the guy who owns all the news networks? When he’s on TV, my parents throw the remote at his face.”
I wish I could throw things at him in real life. “He’s funding my mom’s mayoral campaign. Which my sister, Nora, is helping with now too when she’s not running this massively successful, fancy nonprofit. My whole family is stock photo perfect. Her wife, my boyfriend…”
“ ‘Perfect’ sounds like code for ‘medicated.’ ”
I snort. “They’re just all so…normal. And successful. And happy.”
Sophia pretends to fall asleep and then jerk awake. “Horrible. A fate I wouldn’t wish on the vilest of deviants.”
“Your turn,” I tell her, messing with the clasp of my locket and brushing some crumbs off my tights. I’m a little embarrassed by my overshare.
“Grew up in a kind of religious small town by the sea. Young hippie parents were rebels and had me—gasp—out of wedlock. They weren’t like everyone else’s parents, and that was on top of being hunters.
I’m sure I had some shame around that…” Sophia shrugs and her long hair cascades off her bare shoulder and down her back.
“But they love each other a nauseating amount. Probably more than they love me. We weathered the storm and people got over it. I spent so much time on my own because they were always hunting together. If I have any trauma, it’s my fault, not theirs. ”
I don’t push, because I wouldn’t have wanted her to push on my sob story, but I am curious. What kind of trauma could she be talking about?
Another merciless tackle on the field sends the crowd to their feet before Sophia can say anything else.
I try to see what’s happening but can’t quite make out who took down who.
Multiple lacrosse sticks have been tossed aside, and players from both teams hurry faster and faster toward the commotion.
I search for Elliot’s large frame and wavy hair but come up empty.
“What’s going on?” I ask. A brawl, maybe?
Sophia doesn’t say anything, eyes locked on the field below. That should’ve been my first sign. Note to Self: When Sophia is worried, you should worry.
Instead, I don’t feel my hackles rise until a harrowing scream slices through the night.
Then it all happens at once—someone two rows below us is knocked over, and their fall knocks over about six other people.
Chips and cans of soda burst into the air like confetti from a cannon.
Sophia and I both duck on instinct, and on the field I can hear the roar of students and teachers instructing kids to evacuate and protect themselves, but it’s drowned out by a chorus of groans from something else.
Whatever it is, it sounds like there’s hundreds of them.
“Run,” Sophia tells me.
Addendum to Note to Self: When Sophia is worried, you should *get the hell out of Dodge.
When I was a young and overzealous little hunter—probably just thrilled to know the relentless violence inside me had not only a name but also a purpose, and that purpose came with something special I got to do with my dad—he’d tell me time and time again: You gotta know what you’re fighting to fight it.
Professor Crowley puts it even more clearly: The first step in hunting is research.
However you say it, Sophia and I have the same instinct—we take off at breakneck speed.
Not down toward the chaos to help—if there’s anything I’m not worried about with Elliot, it’s whether he can fight—nor away to save our skins but up the bleachers to get a better look at what exactly is going on.
Yet all I can see on the field below is a war zone. Blood, limbs, bodies—
At first I think at least fifty students are dead. I picture the High Thane using his cloven hooves to crush Elliot’s skull like hard candy and nearly vomit.
Sometimes, amid calamity, mortals can’t take in everything at once. It’s impossible to see and hear and speak—there’s too much adrenaline in their systems. Their bodies only have space for one sole focus: Survive. But hunters have a different sole focus: Kill.
And that means I take everything in both quicker and slower.
I can scent the iron-rich tang of blood in the night air mingling with spray paint on the field and hot dog buns.
I can hear the screams of agony, the grunts of effort as swords are swung, the tight breaths pumping in and out of Sophia beside me.
And I can see clearly the stream of corpses hurtling toward the lacrosse pitch from the Harker cemetery not ten yards away.
Those bodies are not students. They’re reanimated dead folk, dying once again at the hands of Harker’s skilled hunters. I spy Elliot driving his lacrosse stick into an armless corpse until the Bat and Blood coach pries him up and helps him get away from the field.
But I’ve studied deviants for four weeks now, and a whole lifetime before that, and zombies are not deviants.
The undead only covers ghouls, ghosts, and wraiths, as Crowley has taught us.
Deviants are born in the underworld, not in graves here on the mortal plane. “Did I miss something? Are zombies—”
“They’re not,” Sophia says, reading my mind. “Must be a spell.”
Right. Which means instead of hacking up the rotting flesh of legacy students and tenured professors buried on campus, Sophia and I need to find a way to end said spell.
We must have the idea at the same time, because we both start for the cemetery before we realize we can’t make it past the chaos in the bleachers without losing valuable time.
“This way,” I tell her, and fling myself over the bleachers’ edge without a second thought.
I hit the grass hard and the impact sings through my ankles and knees.
Sophia and I bolt through the night-drenched campus, her bow raised, my daggers grasped tightly in my hands. We don’t stop in the foggy courtyards or along the torchlit path to catch our breath. We don’t stop until we reach the source.
Hanging lanterns flicker and sway over Harker’s cemetery.
Wrought-iron gates surround the rolling, grassy hills, low stone benches, and trickling fountains shrouded in mist. Among the hunched weeping willows and vines of creeping Jenny are classical monuments, stately mausoleums, and crumbling tombs. And crawling out from them all—
Hundreds of moaning, reanimated dead.