Chapter 26
HOW DO YOU PREPARE TO BE AMAZED?
LEVI
I clenched the black sack in my hand. “Why do we need to put this on?”
We were standing amid a group of young humans in an underground service corridor at the center of the campus. Twelve of the group appeared to be newcomers like us. Tammy was there too, flanked by three others who appeared to be Tammy’s underlings. Kyle wasn’t there, which surprised me.
I studied each participant, trying to remember as much as I could about them for later.
They all looked na?ve, and their faces were soft with lingering youth.
Parker was easily ten years older than the others gathered here, which meant I was ancient compared to them.
But I was ancient compared to Parker too.
I tried not to glance toward the slightly darker shadow clinging to the corner by the stairs where Nelson was hiding in his shifted form.
Without his presence, I’d be a lot more panicked about now.
I fought the urge to poke at the earpiece in my right ear, to confirm it wasn’t falling out.
With it wedged uncomfortably in my ear, I didn’t think it was going anywhere, despite my panicked need to check it.
“Do as they ask,” Teague whispered through the device.
Finley’s nervous laughter dragged over my nerves. “Yeah, Tam,” he said. “What’s this all about? You already took our phones and now this? Hazing is against university policies.”
Tammy rolled her eyes. “If you don’t want to wear the hood, don’t. It just means you can’t come to the meeting. We don’t want everyone to know where we’re going. It’s private. Our sponsors like to keep it that way.”
“We have sponsors?” Fin asked.
This kid was killing me. How could he be so na?ve?
How did he think they could afford all that equipment?
Their YouTube views and audience size weren’t that high.
Of course, I hadn’t known that until Edith talked about it in one of our many debriefs since Finley had asked us to go to the meeting.
But Finley was a young human. They knew about shit like that, didn’t they?
Tammy didn’t bother answering Fin. “Put the damn thing on. Not everyone gets invited. You don’t want to waste this chance. It’ll change your life.”
Fin bit his lip as he flashed a look at Parker. “You’re still coming?”
Parker nodded without checking with me. It was like he knew I would have said no .
“Okay.” Fin pulled the sack over his head with shaking hands.
Parker and some of the other young people did the same. Fuck. We were really doing this.
“I’ve heard about these tunnels,” Finley was saying to Parker.
His voice wasn’t muffled by the bag, so that was good.
“Decades ago, students used them to get from building to building in the winter. But now access is restricted to most of them. I’ve heard there’s a whole group of students who sneak in to search the tunnels for forgotten rooms and shit. ”
Finley kept talking, but I tuned him out.
I figured he was rambling to calm his nerves, not because he had anything important to say.
I understood the impulse. I swallowed hard and tugged the hood over my face.
The fabric reeked of perfume, probably to hide any smells along our route from us.
But you’d only do that if you thought there were shifters in the group.
Dread slithered over me as my heart raced in my chest. This had to be one of the most foolish things I’d ever done in my life. At least if they were taking this much trouble to hide their route from us, they must be planning to keep us alive.
I hoped.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like we were cattle being led off to the slaughterhouse.
“Good,” Tammy said.
I sucked in a deep breath. As I released it, I centered myself.
I tugged gently on my minotaur’s magic. We thrived in mazes.
We had an unerring sense of direction and always knew where we were in the world.
That knowledge was always there, whether I was shifted or not, but I figured a bit of extra focus wouldn’t hurt.
I suspected it’d be important in the minutes to come.
Tammy might think that the scented hood would protect anyone from knowing where she was taking us, but she was wrong. Once I was at this meeting space, I’d be able to find it again. Anytime I wanted.
So maybe it was good that Parker and I had come today. No one else would have been able to do that.
“Okay. We’ll just be a minute longer as we get everyone sorted, and then we’ll get a move on,” Tammy said.
A hand slipped in mine before anyone else approached us. I knew it was Parker’s as soon as our skin touched. I couldn’t explain it, it just was.
“Levi? I’ve got you in one hand and Fin in the other,” Parker whispered.
He’d been practicing how quietly he could speak and still have me hear him.
We’d figured out my hearing was a hell of a lot better than his.
I’d always been told supes had better senses, but now I knew for sure.
I squeezed his hand to let him know I’d heard him.
People were shuffling around us. The faint scrape of their shoes on the concrete suggested a few more people had joined us, but I couldn’t be sure.
“I saw the live feed of everyone coming in. There are a bunch of new faces. Who are these people?” someone whispered harshly.
I didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t one that belonged to any of the people we’d met before our faces were covered. Given how quietly they’d spoken, I couldn’t tell whether they were male or female, but my intuition told me it was an older man. Which meant it was someone new.
And why had he been watching us come in? That sounded ominous.
Someone stood in front of me for a moment before stepping in front of Parker, and then Fin.
They didn’t touch us, and I couldn’t make out what they were doing.
Somewhere to my right, someone protested being told to move, saying they wanted to stay with their boyfriend.
Soothing words were said. Things quieted again.
I waited for someone to grab my other hand, but no one did.
“Okay,” Tammy said. “Let’s go.”
Then we were moving.
“ They checked each of you with an amulet of some kind,” Nelson said through the earpiece, which had been enhanced with magic.
He’d promised the gadget would work anywhere, and the deeper we went into the bowels of the university campus, the more I prayed he was right.
“The amulet uses magic. When it reacted to someone, that person was separated from the others. Not sure what it was testing. It didn’t react to Levi.
I’m following the guy who brought it. Shout if something comes up. ”
Shit. We were on our own.
Since I was at the back of the line, I could hear when part of the group went in a different direction.
That happened twice. I didn’t know what it meant, but our original group of twelve initiates was now a group of eight.
One person was leading us down the hallway, while someone else had approached us from behind and was whispering heatedly with Tammy.
“This is a bad idea,” an unfamiliar male voice said. Their whispering was probably soft enough that the humans couldn’t pick up the words, but I wasn’t human. “He’s pissed there are unfamiliar faces in the group.”
“It’s fine,” Tammy argued. She was speaking just as softly. “These ones are exactly who we need. We need new recruits. There were too many reports of preternatural activities going on this past summer. We couldn’t keep up with them all. We need to build our numbers.”
“Slow and steady,” the stranger agreed, “but not like this.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Tammy promised. “And don’t blame this all on me; Kyle vetted them with me. He agreed.”
“No, he didn’t. You’re lying. Kyle doesn’t like recruiting. And he doesn’t like events like tonight, either. Everybody knows that.”
“Well, he didn’t stop me.”
“Kyle said you’d talked to Professor Boyle about these people before you invited them here. But the professor says you didn’t consult him. We all know Boyle would have said no to the older ones. He’s always going on about how they are harder to control.”
“No, they won’t be.” Tammy’s voice dropped even quieter.
“It’s those older ones who have chips on their shoulders.
It’s easier to convert people to a cause when the motivation is right.
And we can motivate these two. I know it.
Their businesses aren’t successful. It’ll be easy to convince them it’s because of the monsters.
People love someone to blame for the shit in their lives. ”
What the fuck? Okay, my motel might not be a five-star resort that was fully booked each night, but I did okay.
I could pay my employees, and I didn’t need to earn much to meet my own needs.
I had been alive for a long time. Anyone who got to my age and couldn’t look after their own needs had a problem.
My savings account had enough figures that I could take it easy for a while.
But even if it wasn’t so comfortable, not everyone needed to make millions to find their lives fulfilling. But to slam Parker’s business too? No way. He was successful.
“The professor didn’t think your evidence was compelling enough to suggest there were monsters in that town.”
“Okay, fine. But these two don’t know that.”
“How are you going to convince these two their businesses are failing because of monsters when we can’t show them the evidence?”
“Have you not been paying attention to the world? Of course the monsters are at fault. The monsters are always the reason humans can’t succeed. We are fighting against beings who are too cowardly to show themselves. They hide amongst us and undermine everything humans stand for.”
“But what if the businesses are failing because they aren’t viable?”
“It doesn’t matter. Like I said, people like to blame others. Who better to blame than monsters? It isn’t really a lie. The monsters are coming for us and our businesses. Even if they haven’t taken them yet, they will.”
I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t argue with them.
No matter how much I wanted to, that would be the wrong thing to do.
But, really, were humans so easily swayed by hatred?
Did they really shit on strangers for simply existing and being who they were?
If that was true, something was seriously wrong with the human world.
The man must have given up trying to convince Tammy she was wrong, because they quit talking.
We walked for another twenty minutes. I memorized each step, forming a map in my head as we shuffled through a warren of service corridors.
Interestingly, we crossed through the spot where we started two times.
They were taking us in circles, hoping to confuse us. Thankfully, that wouldn’t work on me.
“Okay,” Tammy said. “Take off your hoods and be prepared to be amazed.”
She sounded like a ringmaster at a circus. And why did I suspect the last thing I was going to feel was amazed?