Chapter 5
We both freeze for two full seconds. Not even breathing, just holding each other. And then Collin’s eyes clear, and his face snaps tight with determination.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be grand! The front door has a magical alarm—that’s probably why they’re here.
If they don’t hear us, they’ll search the downstairs rooms first. This way!
” Collin grips my wrist and points down at the floor.
His hand is warm and soft. I finally notice he’s speaking with an accent. British? No, Irish. (I think.)
In the direction of his finger, glowing blue footsteps emerge on the carpet and go out into the hallway.
The phantasms are shoe-shaped and look like what you’d find in an old-timey dance-instruction book.
The projection would be an impressive display of spellcraft, except I’m not sensing any magic at all.
Not from the shimmering guides or my new Irish buddy.
The boy gives my arm a tug, and meets my eyes, earnest and urgent. “You just need to follow the steps, Alvin. Keep your weight centered on the middle of your foot, and the wood won’t creak. I promise!”
Uh-huh.
So, yeah, it looks like I’ve got two choices.
I do what this guy is telling me to—even though I have no idea how he knows me, how he’s creating this glamour, who he is, or even what he is—and hope he isn’t leading me to a dismal end.
Or I can stand stupidly in this room, trying to come up with a better plan, all the while freaking the hell out, until whoever just let themselves in makes their way up here.
I start my little dance forward on those glowing shoe prints. Cha cha cha!
The steps are widely spaced apart. Apparently there aren’t many places under the carpet that won’t scream in protest, so I’m practically doing splits trying to follow Collin’s directions.
Meanwhile, even though his legs aren’t any longer than mine, he’s skipping on ahead of me, smoothly landing on each step like Fred freaking Astaire.
“Alvin, you need to hurry. They aren’t going to stay downstairs for long. Oh! Shite! I can’t believe I almost forgot! Once you get to the doorway, you’ll trigger the defenses. You’re going to need to—”
He’s not doing anything to keep his voice down, and since I’m moving as fast as I can (at his urging!), I’m already halfway through the doorway, leg fully outstretched toward the next spot, before he even mentions it.
But when I glare at him, I find his gaze locked on the doorway’s upper beam.
That’s when I see a set of blocky runes above me flaring to life with serious crisp-apple-flavored magic that somehow I missed.
This spell doesn’t just feel protective, it feels ferocious, and it activates with a roar of power just over my head.
The good news is that nothing actually bad seems to happen as I jolt ahead. The taste goes from tart to sweet and its magic flutters away, like cherry blossoms in the wind.
The bad news is that I’m so freaked out by the sudden magic, I pitch forward awkwardly, and my knee crashes against the floor with a hard thud.
“Ow!” I exclaim, because I’m an idiot.
Creeeeeeak! the floorboards exclaim, because of course they do.
I freeze. The boy freezes. Maybe whoever’s down there missed it. Maybe they were far enough away that they didn’t—
Multiple footsteps from below start running for the stairs. It’s not a whoever. It’s a bunch of whoevers. And they are coming for me. Right now.
The dance steps on the carpet disappear, and the boy points at what looks like a small handle, painted the same color as the wallpaper, sticking out of the wall of the hallway about ten feet away.
I probably would still have missed it, except there’s also now a big glowing blue arrow blinking above it.
“This way!” he cries.
Well, crap! What else am I going to do?! I bolt for where the arrow is pointing, rip the handle back, and I’m shocked to find it pulls out a tall rectangular slice of the wall that reveals a completely separate set of rough-looking wooden stairs leading up and down.
“These are what the servants used to use,” he says. “Quick! Lock the door behind you!”
On the other side of the door, there’s a small exterior bolt lock.
Like the rest of the house, it looks over a hundred years old.
But it also has a small serpent’s head on the lock case, and when I slam the section of wall back and twist the thumbturn knob, its eyes glow.
Tart magic immediately spreads over the whole door, like a rolling wave.
I barely get my hand off the lock when something thunderously strong rams itself against the other side of the door with a guttural snarl.
This side of the wall is completely unfinished, and the bare bricks between the beams that surround the entry cough out sprays of century-old dirt from the impact.
The door still holds, but only because of the magic that just activated.
Collin tugs quickly on my hand with both of his. “You need to move, Alvin! Right now!”
“Yeah, okay!” I sputter, my heart pounding.
The wood in the stairwell looks thin and rotten—apparently protecting servants from occupational safety hazards wasn't really a thing in San Francisco back in the day. The blond dude easily trots down each of the sketchy-looking wooden steps, while I lurch from side to side on the narrow boards after him, trying to suss out the thicker parts of the wood while hauling ass. He’s still Fred Astaire, and I’m clumsy as a freaking dancing bear.
At this point, my fate is completely in this strange boy’s hands.
I have no idea what we’re up against. I have no plan, no way to protect myself, and no idea how to get out from here.
We get to the landing at the bottom of the servants’ stairwell. It leads to some kind of narrow passageway sandwiched within the structure of the house. The boy starts sprinting down it. “This way!”
“Where are we going?! What’s after us?!” I call after him. Not that knowing that information is really going to help me at all right now, but it’d be nice to know something!
I’m immediately sorry I asked, because just down the hall, three hulking, man-shaped figures burst through the side of the wall in an explosion of plaster to block our way. Collin immediately stops, and I crash into his back, which does a pretty good job of stopping me in my tracks as well.
The three freakishly large dudes are less than fifty feet away.
They’re in black suits, black button-down shirts, open collar, no tie.
And they’re wearing sunglasses (at night!).
They see me and their jaws, packed with fangs, open far too wide while they let out blood-chilling snarls in perfect unison.
Oh, fuck me. They’re vampires.
I straight-up scream.
I’ve never actually met a vampire in person, but here are the deets: They’re crazy-strong, really fast, can soak up a ton of damage before even starting to slow down, have claws (!), travel in packs, and yes, if they get to you, they will eat you.
(Or drink you, if you want to be pedantic.) Unlike what you see in the movies, they aren’t cute and sparkle-y, or suave and sexy.
They are feral beasts and have legit bloodlust, so there’s no reasoning with them if they consider you prey.
The undead creatures charge at us, claws out, hissing like pissed-off cats.
In TV shows, vampires have full-on super-speed, turning into mere blurs when they move.
And okay, vampires are fast, but if they were that fast, there wouldn’t be any humans left in this world—just little drops of blood flecked all over the place, left over from the turbo-undead apocalypse.
But even twice as fast as a normal human is still hella quick, especially when it’s coming for a chubster like me who would be lucky to hit twelve miles an hour in a hot sprint.
I turn back for the servants’ stairs. (Maybe I can make it through the locked hallway door above and then down the other stairwell before they get me?
Or try my luck on the third floor instead?) (Yeah, I don’t like my chances, either!) Then I see it.
A rotten, short plank of wood hanging loose between a couple beams inside the scaffolding of the wall.
I yank it out as hard as I can and pray it’ll have an edge sharp enough to sub for a wooden stake.
(Which I’m pretty sure is one of the things that actually does work against vamps.) (And yeah, I don’t like my chances with this plan, either!)
But Collin grabs my arm and points behind the vampires, who have stopped about halfway to us. “Alvin, look!”
I follow his finger to see a very big man with a very big shotgun now stepping through the hole in the wall the vamps made.
He’s got a full-on Kevlar duster. Knee-high ass-kicking boots.
Thick black Kevlar pants. High-tech night-vision goggles.
And his massive biceps, chest, and thighs stretch out all that shiny cowhide like freaking sausage casings.
I swear it’s like he enters the hallway in slo-mo.
You can practically hear the Terminator music swell around us.
Only one kind of dude would walk toward vampires with that kind of swagger.
He’s a Monster Hunter.
Monster Hunters are another part of the paranormal world I’ve only heard about, and you’d think his surprisingly timely arrival would be a good thing. I do have a pressing monster problem at the moment, after all.
But let’s not forget—I’m a monster, too.
He sees the vampires. He sees me. And he barks out, “Hey!”
Before the vampires can even get out another one of their terrifying snarls, he blasts one full in the chest. And shockingly, the vamp immediately crumples, which means that whatever buckshot he’s carrying, it ain’t the kind you can get at Walmart.
I know at this close range, the spread of any pellets shouldn’t extend wider than a few inches, but it’s so goddamn loud, I still crouch my ass down into as tiny a ball as I can against the corner of the hallway wall.
And just for good measure, I also wrap my arms around up and over my ears.
It would be just my luck to die from a ricochet of anti-paranormal ammunition.
Collin, though, just stands there, smiling at the Hunter as he blasts a hole in the head of another vampire that was stupid enough to run at him. This time, some of the shot travels on through, creating an explosion of brick shrapnel just a few feet from the kid’s side. He doesn’t even flinch.
“Dude!” I hiss at Collin, eyes wide, pointing rapidly to the ground next to me.
“Ah!” he says. “Sorry, lad! Of course!”
He plops himself down next to me, but instead of cowering and covering his head like a sensible person, he throws an arm around my shoulders and hugs me close. Then he starts stroking my hair with his fingers! Gah!
“It’s going to be okay, Alvin. It’s going to be okay. Trust me, this fella’s class!”
No. It is not going to be okay, because once this dude gets through the vampires, I’ll have officially moved on from the frying pan portion of this misadventure directly into the fire.
You see, Ms. Stryker might hunt monsters, but she’s not actually a Monster Hunter (capital M, capital H).
From the little that Mom told me, these dudes are members of ancient clans that have dedicated their lives to exterminating supernatural threats.
They are the primary reason the population of supernatural beings in the world is so small.
For a Monster Hunter, there’s no such thing as choosing “to live a normal human life.” The only good paranormal is a dead paranormal.
Unlike for the fae, she didn’t have to give me any specific advice to steer clear of them, because they were the bogeymen of almost every single one of her bedtime stories to me.
(Yes, my mother told me horror stories to “help” me get to sleep.
It took me forever to realize it was to get me to stop asking her to tuck me in at night.)
Monster Hunters aren’t paranormals, but somehow, they’ve found a way to massively boost their human capabilities.
They’re strong and fast, and they heal quick, too.
They’re supposedly masters of all forms of weaponry (which are almost always enhanced to be lethal to magical creatures like yours truly).
And if that’s not bad enough, word on the street is that they can smell paranormal blood.
This is an absolute nightmare.
I need to get out of here. Right now.