Chapter 7 #2
I had an edge that a lot of people didn’t have due to my profession. I’d studied countless trapped burial tombs, so I had an in-depth knowledge of recognizing traps and creating them. If I set a trap, it almost always caught someone.
If my students ever paid attention to my lectures and were bell hunters, I’d know in a heartbeat because they’d be using my traps. Well, not my traps, but the ones I mention during lectures.
I’m obsessed with them.
This is how I know my students don’t pay attention in my lectures. If they did, then my identity as a hunter would be known immediately. Said realization doesn’t bother me, though. In fact, it helps me.
You see, I can speak freely if the information is memorized. Especially if it doesn’t really matter if people care when I’m talking. Fortunately for me, my memory is excellent. I can write a lecture one evening, memorize it, and then spend the next day monologuing for as long as necessary.
It doesn’t work outside of classes, though. You can’t memorize a conversation. People are simply too unpredictable.
So, anyway, happy in the knowledge that my identity was a secret, I dug out my gear bag and carried it out to my car.
It was only after I stowed my bag in the trunk, got into the driver's seat, and found my keys in the ignition that I realized that my car shouldn’t have been there. It should have been parked on a lonely, winding dirt road in the middle of the forest.
Aw, my deadbeat not-murderer rescued my car for me. It would have been sweet if I wasn’t so pissed off at him. If he was lucky, I’d get myself killed tonight during the hunt. If not, I was so going to find him tomorrow and get compensation.
Unless, of course, I came to my senses and went back to living in a fog of meh, I can just wait for death to find me when he’s ready. Whatever Apple had done to me had really made me make a hard U-turn in the direction of Crazypantstown.
Whatever the case may be, I was going all out on the first bell hunt of the season. Nothing was going to get between me and success.
I had to park a mile away from the church and lug my gear the rest of the way on foot. It wasn’t fun, but protecting my identity was vital, or else I’d be disqualified.
And potentially in jail, but that was far down the list of concerns for me.
It was daytime, so I had to employ some trickery to make it to the churchyard unseen. I slipped into the bushes and put on a hospital mask to cover my features, then pulled up my hood. It wasn’t uncommon for people to mask in the wintertime, so it was a decent disguise.
I spent the next two hours hiding from security while setting traps. The Patron of the Bells didn’t want to make it easy on us, so they hired security to make sure no one broke the rules.
Why was I out there during the day when I just told you we couldn’t be active until sunset?
Because I wasn’t going after the bells. I was engaging in vandalism.
Both illegal, but two entirely different things when it came to the rules of the bell hunt.
And since I wasn’t planning on getting caught in either case, I was hoping to avoid jail time for both crimes.
Once I’d trapped the landscape, I moved on to the tower itself.
I’d taken creative license on my tower traps, and I was especially proud of them.
I’d modified the old arrows coming out of the wall trap and made it less lethal.
Instead of arrows, I employed nets covered in sticky tar.
Once they wrapped around a person, they stayed that way unless the person got help.
Even if they did, it took ages to get free, which gave me plenty of time to sneak in and get ahead.
It was tricky to set up without the nets getting gummed together and being unable to deploy, but I’d managed a workaround.
I’m quite clever. Have you noticed?
I had a few more (mostly) non-lethal traps to set, so after getting the nets installed, I continued up the stairs. The next trap was a bit dangerous to set up, so I had to be careful.
I wasn’t going for my regular brand of laissez-faire carefulness, either. I was in-it-to-win-it for the bells, and I wasn’t going out until I gave it my all.
The trap involved me climbing the wall up to the second level of exposed beams supporting the massive bell tower.
Everyone expected the first level to be where my ambushes happened, because it was nigh-suicidal to set up traps in the higher levels, so they were wary of my usual tricks now.
But since I was going all out, I’d chosen to risk the forty-foot drop onto stone flooring to set a classic rope trap.
I didn’t usually go for those because they were so obvious to spot, but the tower had no electric lighting.
It was all restored perfectly to be as it was in the seventeen hundreds.
The tower was a huge tourist attraction, and the town council probably only allowed the bell hunt because we weren’t allowed to destroy the place and couldn’t operate during the day, so we couldn’t scare the tourists away.
So, I was hanging carefully from a beam by my legs, installing the mechanism that would yank the unlucky soul off their feet and straight to heaven (metaphorical heaven, hopefully, but there was a potential for it to be literal.) when I heard Vale’s silky voice above me.
“There are easier ways to die, you know.”
I slung an arm around the beam so I could look up, and there was Vale, standing in the window, silhouetted perfectly against the sun. His coat even flapped in the breeze.
“Hmph,” I said and let go of the beam to swing back down so I could focus on my trap.
Vale dropped down to land on the beam. He landed lightly, missing my feet by mere inches.
I swung myself back up to glare at him and then let go once more to continue working.
He crouched low to inspect me, leaning over in a way physics didn’t generally allow for, and asked. “Is it common for you to be here?”
“Are you common?” I hissed. I wanted to say so much more, but I was trapped behind a wall of wordlessness.
It had been a stupid thing to say, but it was a stupid situation, so fuck it, right?