Chapter 33
“We can’t go to my dorm,” I whisper as we step through the darkened thicket. I try and fail to catch my breath despite the biting chill. The forest air is damp and sweet, like moss and wood rot and fallen owl feathers. “I bet they have Citadel hunters stationed there in case I came back.”
Moonlight slips through the twisted trees and knotted branches above to illuminate the sweat freckling Deacon’s brow. His hair is windswept from our car chase. “Where, then?” The quiet husk of his voice sends a shiver through me.
“Somewhere I can’t possibly be. Somewhere with professor access only…
” I never gave Fiona’s key card back from the top of the year.
We’d been using it to look for information on my syrabraxa in—“The archives. We just have to get up Mortimer Tower without anyone seeing us. Peter told me they’re patrolling the gateway… and the dorms…and the dining hall…”
But Deacon doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t even look in my direction. We’ve reached the thinning tree line of the thicket. And at the entrance back to Harker’s campus, six Citadel hunters are standing guard.
Sometimes I forget Deacon is a demon. Strange, I know, given his inherently demonic nature and those claws he likes to flash, but it does hit me like a headrest through the windshield every once in a while. Like when he reminds me he can scent my fear.
“You’re not getting scared on me now, are you?”
I don’t respond. I am scared. Worse than when Finn was inches from gouging out my eyes or when I was sailing through the Half City in a stolen taxicab. Fighting the Brood, monsters like Finn, that’s what I was made to do. But I don’t hurt humans. I don’t fight other hunters. “Deacon—”
There’s no time to come up with another plan. One of them has noticed us. “Who’s there?” His flashlight fans over wet grass and spindly branches. When we don’t answer, he calls out to his fellow guards. “Intruders!”
The first silver-tipped arrow sails through the night and lodges behind me in the bark of a tree. A low growl rumbles from Deacon and he’s off like a mutt after squirrels.
The Citadel hunters waste no time, either. Their silver flashes in the night. Swords and knives and arrowheads. Nothing touches Deacon as he charges, tossing those unfortunate enough to be in the front lines into tree trunks and rough earth. They land, screaming. Bent in unnatural angles.
Two hunters reach me, and recognition paints their faces. Viv Abbot, the aeon with the syrabraxa. They whip out weapons that zip and crackle into the night. Tasers.
They know they have to take me alive or they’ll be imbued with the power and the madness.
My daggers rise before I’ve decided how I’m going to fight these men—not monsters, men.
But it’s as if my body already knows what to do.
I never should have doubted my own hunter instincts.
Pain arcs through the wound in my forearm as I slice the tender Achilles tendon of one and deliver a single blow to the temple of another, leaving two immobile, unconscious, living men in my wake.
“Shit.” My wound from Finn hasn’t clotted yet. And it’s deeper than I realized, now that the adrenaline is abating. I’m splattering the forest ground with scarlet red. But I’m not dizzy—I haven’t lost enough blood to be concerned. I shove my sweater down my arm and keep moving.
These men before me are hunters who completed all four years at Harker and were then selected to work for the Citadel and guard the Elders’ land.
By all accounts they should be wiping the floor with me.
But a streak of warm triumph tells me what I should have known all along.
What I used to think was shameful or other, but tonight feels like a gift wrapped in a bloody red bow.
I’m better than all of them. I’ve been doing this longer—learned to fight a decade before any of them even laid a finger on a silver blade—and I had a better teacher: my father, a man the Brood couldn’t catch for years.
And I’m an aeon.
I outmaneuvered twenty Brood just minutes ago.
Even if all these men swinging for me aren’t monsters, I’ve had a lifetime of anticipating evil.
And tonight the syrabraxa guides me too.
It knows what I need, and it provides. A sidestep here, a grounding of my feet there, a dodge before a blow even comes.
And I’m not the only reason I can taste our victory. I may be the best hunter in this forest tonight, but Deacon’s the deviant even I could never beat.
All those jokes about killing him…Jokes.
That’s all they ever were. Watching him now—I hadn’t seen it at the Cineplex.
Hadn’t been looking for it then. Or maybe I’d been actively looking for his weaknesses, my vision clouded with hatred.
And earlier, with Finn, we’d been so outnumbered, I’d been too focused on escaping with my life.
But tonight, my hands wet with hunter blood, I watch as Deacon moves swift as an adder—that white hair flowing in the pitch-black night—slamming into hunters, one in each gnarled alabaster claw.
He pins them against trees, tosses them like deflated balls, and then grins, blood in his perfect teeth. Made for war was right.
When more hunters barrel toward me, I slip and twist, avoiding their grasps.
Deacon knocks them down like it’s a carnival game.
I raise my daggers, and he drives home the target.
He swings, I duck. He crouches, I leap. A ballet of ferocity.
Grace and grit. Care and cruelty. We are as efficient as a factory line.
I’d felt it briefly when we’d stopped that vampire.
When we raced through the city. To my own dumfounded shock, we… work well together.
When all the men are downed, we keep running. No time to assess who’s left. What they’ll tell the Elders. Who’ll come running.
The archives are our best shot. If we can get up there unseen, it’s the last place they’ll look, even once they know we’re on campus.
So we run through the wet grass of Old Campus, submerged in the dead of night.
Up the endless stairs of Mortimer Tower, ducking behind stonework walls when Citadel hunters mosey around the corner, making their rounds.
We bolt past the library and find our way up to the locked double doors of the archives.
Deacon moves to slam them open but I place a hand on his chest to stay him.
I grab my phone out of my jacket pocket, wincing from the wound in my arm.
Fiona’s key card’s been living in my phone case since the start of the year.
I slide it through, and Deacon and I slip inside, shutting the door behind us.
My nostrils twitch at the dust that floats up with our entrance.
Deacon clicks on the iron candelabra, which gilds the cramped room in pools of soft honey.
File cabinets overflowing, wooden shelving bowing beneath the weight of too many leather-bound books.
Stacks and stacks of yellowed paper, old as ammonite.
I’m still panting, eyeing my phone—to call Fiona, to figure out what to do next—when Deacon’s warm hand closes around my bicep.
“Let me see.” His voice is soft. Tender.
I do as instructed, offering up my arm like an acolyte. He pushes the sleeve of my sweater up and I don’t even flinch as it moves past my wound. I’m no wimp, and for some reason I need Deacon to know it.
His face is unreadable as he inspects the gash. Then he scans the room.
It shocks me, how well I know him. “Don’t—”
Too late. He grabs a plastic case with a neatly folded swath of fabric inside, pries it open with his teeth, and winds the invaluable antique around my wound until the bleeding stops.
“That was probably priceless.”
“Probably,” he agrees, before pulling my sweater back down. Something about the gentle way he folds my sleeve and the brutality he carries in every muscle, every action, feels so at odds it makes my knees weak. I shift on my feet until he isn’t touching me anymore.
When he wanders away, I send a group text to our newly named Goonie Squad chat with the update and then call Sophia.
“Why are you calling me?” she croaks. “I’m in the living room.”
“And I’m at Harker.”
That wakes her right up. She clears her throat, and I hear her nudging Penny awake. “Are you okay?”
“Kind of. I had an episode. Finn showed up. We ran to Harker.” That’s what I like to call the short version. She’ll get the details when she checks the news. The line beeps and I see Peter trying me. “One sec, Soph,” I say as I conference him in.
“Campus is covered with guys from the Citadel.” His voice is raspy from sleep. “They’re already looking for you.”
My stomach drops—I thought we’d bought ourselves more time. I push past Deacon to the massive windows overlooking the quad. Sure enough, men and women in navy uniforms are setting up a perimeter inside and beyond Old Campus. At least fifty, and more keep coming.
“Fuck,” Deacon growls, quickly snuffing out the candelabra above and drowning us in darkness.
“Is that Deacon?” Sophia asks, wary.
“Yeah. We’re in the archives.”
“Oh my god,” Penny mutters.
“You’re fucked.”
“Thanks, Soph.”
“Can you make it to my dorm?” Peter asks.
“I think they’ll look for her in your room and Elliot’s,” Sophia says. “They’ll ask other students who Viv was friends with.”
“If they haven’t already,” Penny adds, groggy.
“Then we’ll leave,” I say, moving for the archive doors.
“You can’t go to the gateway,” Peter warns. I slow my feet. “They have like fifteen men stationed there already.”
My heart started to race the minute I saw the uniforms on campus. Now it pounds in my throat. We really are fucked. And I led Finn straight to the Windsor. No way he doesn’t know Harker is here now. Leaving the museum is going to be a feat of its own.
“So we’ll wait them out,” Deacon says, observing the bodies milling below. “By midmorning there’ll be enough students going to and from class that we can blend in with the masses. Slip right past them.”
“And go where?” I ask.
He shrugs. “We have all night to figure that out.” He checks his phone. “Or, the three hours until sunrise.”
“That’s not a bad plan,” Sophia says. “I’ll come to campus. I have a wig you could wear.”
“Of course you do.”
Deacon raises a suggestive brow. “What color?”
“So we’ll stay in here tonight, and you guys come to the archives in the morning when classes start? And help sneak us out?”
“Yeah,” Sophia says. “Exactly.”
“What color is the wig?” Deacon asks, a little louder.
I breathe in tightly. This could work. “Okay.”
“Good luck,” she says. Peter and Penny echo the sentiment before the line goes dead.
It isn’t until I pocket the phone that I realize Deacon and I will be stuck together in here for hours. All night in the intimate, quiet dark of the archives…Nothing to do, nobody to fight. I may actually need that luck more than I thought.