Chapter 23
After the wraiths infiltrated Elkfore hall, I expected a morose haze to drift over the school, but everyone had proceeded like business as usual.
It was an anomaly. A onetime occurrence.
A faulty gateway. Something that’s bound to happen eventually when you house all the young hunters across the world in one place.
But two students died last week at the lacrosse game. Harker students, ravaged by zombies. One was a third year on the Strikers who was eaten alive saving a first-year girl. The other was a kid whose name I recognized from two of my classes. They only found his arm.
So this is something new.
Harker is said to be impenetrable, but somehow wraiths broke in and a spell was cast on the cemetery that lead to two students losing their lives.
The dean held an assembly. All nonessential classes—everything but Underworld Studies and Combat Training—were canceled for the week.
We’ve only been told that they’re looking into who cast the spell and why, and how a witch could have used magic on the school from outside our wards.
But it’s not just that—it takes a lot to kill a hunter. With our accelerated healing, a wound that would be fatal to a mortal can cost us just a few days of bed rest. Still, a death blow is a death blow. Bullet to the heart. Decapitation. Removal of necessary internal organs…
It’s tough to be reminded of that. To watch it play out in real time on a lacrosse field.
To witness the grotesque, shredding, bloody end we’ll all likely endure at the hands of a deviant.
I’d say hunters do a pretty good job of fighting off the calling of that void.
That despair at the inescapable. My dad did so with our family.
Sophia, with drugs and drinks and boys. I do pretty well with denial.
But watching a classmate be disemboweled by zombies would knock anyone back a few steps.
“Morning, cutie,” Sophia says softly as we trek up the coliseum stands toward Peter. He’s sitting front and center, as he always is, five minutes before class starts. A pink flush crawls up his cheeks at the term of endearment.
“Mila willing to let us into Kitty’s room today?” Sophia asks, plopping down next to him.
She was injured in the attack and told us she’d need a few days before she had visitors. “Nope.” Peter shakes his head in frustration, staring down at his hands until Sophia interlaces hers with his in comfort.
Now that the horror of the reanimation spell is starting to fade, I was going to ask our walking library of a friend if he has any idea what the hell happened to my daggers last week, but I stow the question away.
Just for one more day. I know how scared and alone Peter feels right now.
Not only is it starting to look like Kitty really isn’t coming back, but the school he felt so safe at has been compromised twice in our first semester here.
My phone buzzes in my bag, and when I fish it out, there’s a text from James. Dinner tonight? I’m getting drinks with the guys after work but could meet you somewhere North for a late bite? I miss you.
It’s kind of good timing, since so many classes have been canceled. And James and I haven’t had a proper date night since I enrolled at Harker, and my Windsor exhibit excuse can only last me so long.
Sure, I write back. Sounds fun.
Can’t wait, he texts a nanosecond later. I’ll make a res at Abattoir for 9:30. Apparently they let you kill your own lobster. I frown. A second later he writes, I’ll handle yours for you, of course.
“You look like you’re going to puke,” Peter says. “Who are you texting?”
“My boyfriend.” The words come out like my executioner.
When Reid walks in, I’m surprised by two things. One, that he’s beat to hell—bruises like spilled port bloom up and down his arms, and he’s got a nasty gash in one brow, a split lip, and what looks to be a slight limp on his right side. And two…that it bothers me.
Just a month ago I would have gladly inflicted those injuries on him myself. I didn’t think anything had changed, but seeing him now…A protective urge aches in my limbs. He got those injuries saving people’s lives.
“How’s everyone holding up?” he asks.
Grumbles sound across the stands. Nobody’s in the mood to whale on one another today, it seems.
“Anyone want to channel their sorrows into swordplay?”
Sophia chews her lip. Someone coughs. Even Elliot, sitting next to us, just runs a hand through his Adonis hair. If he doesn’t want to swing a weapon around, you know spirits are low.
I brace myself for demon-level vitriol. Reid’s about to skewer us for being afraid and weak and timid. None of us are behaving like hunters today.
But all he says is, “I thought as much. So I brought a friend with me.”
That has us sitting up from our mournful, slouchy seats. Reid doesn’t have friends.
Reid signals to someone waiting in the passage that surely led to gladiator quarters centuries ago. Instead of an oiled-up Russell Crowe, we are surprised to see Professor Crowley walk out, wheeling in a crate covered with dark canvas.
Immediately, goose bumps scatter across my skin.
“Good morning, students.” Crowley grins, his metal teeth shimmering in the torchlight. It’s still early enough that the sun has yet to crest overhead. “A little surprise for you today. For those of you in my class this semester, maybe less so.”
And I already know. We experimented with different tonics on werewolf venom last week. The cage behind him rattles and clangs. Low snarls echo through the arena. My heart rate quickens.
Reid folds his arms across his chest. “Who wants to take a stab at Teen Wolf?”
My body hums with the allure of it. To sink my silver into matted, coarse fur.
And after being excluded from his sacred Field Training nights, I’d love to show Reid just how ready I am to tackle anything he throws at us.
But if my dad taught me one thing, it was that as much as we aeons crave the fight, you never make unforced errors.
There’s no reason to put myself in the line of danger out of ego or to scratch a bloodlust itch.
We fight deviants to save lives. This is something else entirely.
However, the rest of the students seem to have received a different memo. They shoot their hands up across the stands, eager to prove their worth, to forget last week’s horrors. Reid’s unforgiving eyes scan the crowd. Every hand is raised but mine…and Peter’s.
“Roydon,” he says. “You’re up.”
Peter blanches beside me. Sophia’s hand darts out to his shoulder on a reflex. But he stands, jaw tight, and pushes past her to jog down to the arena floor.
“You ever seen a were before, Peter?”
My stomach twists.
Peter nods at Reid, his throat bobbing with a swallow. “Watched my mom slay one once.”
He’s seen one once? I’ve fought at least thirty werewolves and still find my muscles clenching.
“Damn,” Elliot whispers to us. “I’ve never seen a were.”
“How?” I whisper back. “They’re everywhere.”
“Not by the ocean.”
“Even in the winters,” Sophia adds. “We don’t really get lycanthropes where Elliot and I are from.”
I guess that makes sense. I don’t know many wolves and panthers who like sand and surf. “Astera’s packed with them.”
Elliot rolls his eyes. “Your city is built on top of the Chasm. Astera’s packed with everything.”
“Get it?” Sophia half grins. “Packed?”
Down on the arena floor, Reid offers Peter a veritable buffet of weapons, polished and laid out nicely on the same kind of rack you’d find weights on in a gym.
He opts for a silver short sword, which is the right move.
Obviously Peter’s done his research: Werewolves are like demons—silver to the heart or head results in a surefire kill.
But unlike demons, werewolves can die from natural causes too.
When it’s not a full moon and they’re just regular people, an Astera taxi rounding a corner too fast can take one of them out just like the rest of us.
In fact, that might be the source of my queasiness.
I’m all for taking out beasts and ghouls.
Mindless, sinister monsters set on killing innocents?
No problem. That gets me going more than my own boyfriend.
Vamps and demons too. While they walk and talk and look like humans, they’re only interested in soul taking and blood drinking, and that’s a no-go in my book.
Even worse, when they aren’t using humans as their protein shakes, they’re delighting in the worst humanity has to offer—violence, cruelty, hedonistic depravity.
That’s why I struggle to buy into Reid’s I-don’t-take-souls, I’m-one-of-the-good-guys act. It’s just not in his nature.
But werewolves, windigos, all other lycanthropes—they have a purely human form.
Some have been turned against their will and have had to reconcile their new fate with their past life as human.
I don’t actually know anybody like that, but my father once told me he knew a turned werepanther.
He’d chain himself up every full moon and lived a relatively normal life as an insurance broker the other twenty-nine days of the month.
Of course, some aren’t turned. Some are born deviants.
And those fuckers shift not only with the full moon, but whenever they damn well please.
The problem is, you just don’t really know what kind of were you’re fighting until you do—which means I only kill them when there’s a human life at stake. No unforced errors, remember?
“Ready?” Reid asks Peter.
He nods, gritting his teeth. His fear is plain across his face as he stares at the rattling cage, and my stomach flips again.
Reid nods to Professor Crowley, who studies Peter himself, as if he doesn’t trust Reid’s judgment.
“Any day now, Maxwell,” Reid drawls.
Crowley doesn’t even sneer at him. He just locks eyes with Peter and says, quietly, “You up for this, kid?”
Peter nods, steadfast even as his hands shake, and Crowley yanks the dark sheet off the metal cage.
Inside, as expected, is a full-grown werewolf, foaming at the mouth.
Werewolves don’t look as much like wolves as Twilight has led us all to believe.
Weres walk on thin, sinewy hind legs, with glowing-yellow beady eyes and an arm span longer than a dining table.
Their faces and chests are hulking and hairy and yet still humanoid, in a blend of man and animal that even as a hunter I’ve never gotten used to.
And they certainly don’t look like hunky teens with CGI abs when they’ve shifted back.
Sometimes you’re just left with the gutted corpse of a portly older woman who you recognize as your local librarian.
Can you imagine how disorienting it is to realize you’ve just impaled the woman who helped you check out a book on your changing body?
The were I’m staring at looks mean too. Patchy brown fur, dripping fanged maw, scars, and bloodied nails that tell me he’s been in a few of these fights.
Crowley flicks the crate open and backs away.
But the beast has no interest in him or Reid’s demon flesh.
Not when there’s a shaking, gulping hunter pointing his sword right at him.
The were sniffs the air. Peter holds his ground. The arena is excruciatingly silent.
Until the werewolf charges.
Some of the kids sitting around me scuttle back up the stands in case this goes sideways, but I’m glued to my seat.
Peter makes the first swipe with his blade. It’s a technical, by-the-book jab, like when he fought the wraiths, and the stands break out in cheers for him. Instructions too. Go for the jugular! Watch your side! Get his paws first!
But to my relief, Elliot and Sophia are silent.
I’d actually have pegged Sophia as a cheerer, but she’s stone-faced as she watches Peter maneuver past the volatile beast. Maybe it makes us poor sports, but the three of us have grown to love our resident brainiac and don’t want to see him fucking mauled.
Peter takes one claw to the shoulder, and his shout of anguish has me standing before I know why.
“Sit down,” Sophia urges, yanking my sleeve.
But I can’t. My aeon blood is wailing in my veins.
Peter is getting pummeled by the thing. And he’s making rookie mistakes.
Only aiming for the heart and not focusing on incapacitating before killing.
Meanwhile, the wolf is enjoying playing with his meal.
Swiping his hideous claws down Peter’s back and over his calf.
Each yelp from Peter sets my teeth further on edge.
Reid calls out guidance that Peter struggles to follow. I cut my eyes to Crowley and notice he’s starting to pace, his half-silver hand coiled into a tight fist. But his eyes only dart over to Reid, who watches the fight with folded arms and a punishing gaze.
How is this teaching anyone anything? All I’m learning is how to die slowly at the hands of a deviant.
Peter manages one solid slice across the wolf’s matted forearm. He gets some rowdy cheers from the crowd, but it’s not enough. He’s only angered the thing. Wolves are very prideful creatures. If he was toying with Peter before, he’s set on the kill now.
It takes the creature less than a second to pounce. He bulldozes Peter down to the floor in one fell swoop, and a grim thud sounds. Next to me, Sophia sucks in a breath of sheer horror.
Peter protects his chest by lodging his short sword between the werewolf’s teeth, but his hands are shaking and his breaths are coming too fast. My fingers twitch at my daggers. My vision blurs scarlet red.
There’s no more cheering.
And Reid is doing fucking nothing. Even after last night, when we lost two students. One from this very class.
“He’s going to kill Peter,” I breathe.
I cut my eyes up to the sky, but it’s still a unified blanket of morning fog. No way to tell the time. Shit.
The wolf rears its head back and—
And I don’t even mean to leap from the stands. But when the beast knocks Peter’s sword from his hands, I’m already down on the arena floor, yanking the snarling werewolf back by his fur.