Chapter 30
Fall arrives in earnest, bringing with it gloomier twilights that bleed into darkness all too quickly. The air on campus is thick with chimney smoke and the gentle spice of nutmeg. Book bags grow heavier, papers clutter the commons, and leaves litter the grounds.
Even from the moody, insulated library, where Elliot and I scribble notes on our essay for Lisette’s class, the last dregs of sun fight for our attention. Peeking through colored glass windows, gilding the iron candelabras, casting Elliot’s bronze skin in a honeyed glow.
“I can’t work anymore,” Elliot laments, dropping his pen. “Soon it’s going to be too cold to do anything outside. Let’s swipe some chips and beer from the Bat and Blood house and hit the lacrosse pitch. I’ll race you around the track. Twenty bucks says—”
“If every time we try to study together without Peter and Soph we end up racing or eating or betting on how many books the librarian can carry—”
Elliot shakes his head. “That woman is strong for her age.”
“—we will never pass Underworld Studies.” I keep my eyes on my notes as I speak. If I don’t look up, I won’t see the way the soft, autumnal sunshine beckons to us.
Elliot scoots closer and lowers his voice. “Any day now, whoever is trying to brew that spell is going to succeed and wreak some kind of havoc on the world. Maybe wipe us out of existence completely. Who cares about passing Underworld Studies?”
I hate that he’s right. Even though the lacrosse schedule has picked back up and the armory display case has been rearranged to look as if nothing is missing and the zombie and wraith attacks have been pinned on a disgruntled ex-student with access to the school, I can’t shake that gut-deep knowledge that something terrible is coming.
That another attack will seize Harker. That another student will go missing.
I allow my gaze to meet Elliot’s chocolate eyes.
“We’re not going to let that happen. I told you—I did what you said.
I asked Reid for help, and he’s going to find us the location of the garden.
Then we’ll know more about what’s really going on.
And maybe how to find Kitty…Until then, there’s nothing else we can do. ”
And it’s true. While I’ve been waiting for Reid or Peter to find the location of the garden, I’ve had to swallow the thought that any student I pass might be the one attempting to break open another gateway to hell.
I’ve been so used to being able to sense a threat coming my way.
But another hunter like me—a professor, even—plotting something so sinister?
Working with deviants? It’s almost more unnerving than the demons themselves.
And yet despite the sense of foreboding that hangs in the quiet, darkened halls of Harker, I’m…
grateful to be here. I study creatures in decrepit books, spar in the coliseum, read in the quad with Peter and Soph—all of us bundled against a crisp, woodsy chill.
Sometimes Elliot drags us to a party at his lacrosse team’s house, and I sip mugs of spiked cider with people I don’t have to pretend to be someone else around.
My photos have taken on a dreamy quality—fewer lonely portraits and abandoned bus stations, more peaceful shots of Hound sleeping under twinkle lights when I go home on a free weekend or hot tea steeping on Sophia’s desk or trees with no leaves in the foreground and the lights from the bell tower glowing in the background amid the foggy sky.
Not only have I yet to be fired from the Windsor despite barely doing anything outside of a few projects Fiona has emailed to me, but everything I’m learning at Harker is actually making me a better museum assistant.
Fiona was positively ecstatic when an archaeologist on a recent call couldn’t think of the word debitage and I supplied it.
And amid it all, I’m actually honing my hunting skills too.
Last week I bested two of the stronger kids in our class in the coliseum and witnessed a rare satisfied nod from Reid. Butterflies? Never heard of ’em.
“Well,” Elliot muses, leaning back in his chair. “He have any updates?”
I check my school email again, legs fidgeting beneath the library desk. “Not yet. But I know he’ll come through.”
“Even more reason to blow off this paper on harpies. Once we save the world, Graveheart can put in a good word for us with the dean.”
“You know, every time you flunk an assignment, you make yourself into a bigger cliché.”
“You sound like Peter. I don’t mind being a dumb jock.” Elliot flexes his enormous biceps at me in an effort to lighten the mood. “I’m comfortable with who I am. Now, let’s go race already.”
I can’t help my laugh even as other hunters in the library shush me. “You know I’ll whoop you.”
“I’m the fastest out of all my brothers back home.”
I study him for a beat, a golden gladiator in a gothic library. It doesn’t quite fit. “You don’t talk much about your family. Are your brothers cool?”
Elliot shrugs. “They’re like me, but on steroids.”
“Aren’t you on steroids?”
“Come on, Viv.” A begrudging smile. “You don’t want to rile up your competition like that.”
“So, what, they’re a supermasculine bunch? Muscles on muscles? Abs on abs?”
Elliot begins to pack up his backpack. “Pretty much. Fort Bragg’s not too far from our town. My dad’s a drill sergeant there. Even before we got our abilities, he raised us with plenty of respect for the craft. He calls us warriors, not hunters.”
“Is he mean?”
Elliot’s hands still as he thinks about the question. “No. Cold, though.”
“So you get all that warmth from your mother?”
He smiles at me, proving my point with the softness of it. “Actually, I credit Soph with that.”
“What do all these warrior brothers of yours think about your platonic female best friend?”
For the first time in the two months I’ve been friends with him, Elliot falters. “They, uh…” He clears his throat, gathers the rest of his papers, stands to leave. “They think she’s hot. Are you coming or what?”
“Yeah.” I pull my things together, a strange feeling nagging at me, like I asked something I shouldn’t have. “Elliot, if I—”
“Where are you two going?” Sophia asks, bounding over to us. Her bangs flutter as she moves, her loose T-shirt ripped along the side to show off her toned stomach. “Peter and I just finished a mountain of work for Cryptozoology.”
“She means I finished a mountain of work,” Peter tells us, coming up behind her, still stuffing books into his bag. “While she researched classic cars and vintage band tees for sale.”
“Sue me,” Sophia relents as they follow us out of the library. “Life’s too short for multiple-choice questions.”
Outside, dusk is slowly slipping into early evening, and the sky looks like a painting from the Renaissance.
Lanterns flicker to life across the campus and gild Sophia’s copper hair.
My eyes scan the chimneys dotting weathered roofs, pumping out tufts of warm smoke into the chilled air.
Leaves like flecks of amber litter the drying grass.
“Viv and I were going to race around the track,” Elliot tells them with a grin. “Wanna watch?” Whatever shift I noticed in him is long gone now.
“Sure,” Sophia says. “I always wanted to be a cheerleader. Did you have those at your fancy all-girls school, Viv?”
But I find that my throat is kind of tight.
These people—Elliot, Sophia, and Peter—are the reason, despite all the horrors we’ve faced, all the mysteries brewing, that Harker feels more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever been.
I knew getting close to other hunters would be as painful as it was rewarding for this very reason.
The more we look into Kitty, this school…
the more at risk they are. What if tomorrow one of them is gone, leaving nothing but a forged note?
Usually my nightmares are of the night my father died, but just last night I dreamed of finding Sophia’s twin bed drenched in blood and woke with tears in my eyes.
“What’s with you? You’ve been looking at me strangely all day,” Sophia says. “You been dreaming about me?”
That Sophia intuition, man. It’s no joke. I clear my throat to say, “Only nightmares.”
“I’m serious,” Sophia says, more concerned than playful. “You’ve been staring at me like I almost died or something.”
“Maybe I’m obsessed with you. Would that be so wrong?”
Sophia snorts and throws an arm around my shoulders, appeased. “We’d make the cutest couple.”
“Need a third?” Elliot asks.
“Sure,” Sophia says and licks her lips. Beside me, Peter chokes on his water. “Can we get Halloween costumes this weekend?”
“I was going to spend tonight in the city, actually.” And by was going to, I mean I just decided right now.
I haven’t seen Penny or Hound in weeks, and I need a little distance.
Some self-preservation. I was a lone hunter for a decade, and now I have three new people in my life whose losses would tear me to shreds.
“Oh.” Sophia’s face falls. “Okay.”
The way her disappointment makes me feel is exactly why I need this time alone.
On my way home, I call Penny to ask how work was, and she tells me she’s going to a business dinner with Claude and will likely stay at his place tonight.
I’m glad we’re on the phone so she can’t see my grimace.
He’s always using her as wealthy blond arm candy and never shows up for her in return.
I debate going back to school, but I haven’t been to the apartment in a minute, and I could use some warmer clothes.
Maybe I’ll take Hound on a moonlit walk through buzzy Babylon.