Where Monsters Hide: An Academy Bully Romance (The Monster Within Book 1) Read online

  “Yeah,” I reply, feeling butterflies in my stomach. I hope he hasn’t found out about the iratxoak and the vial of Piers’ blood they delivered to Professor Waldman. That would be a little hard to explain away. I’ve just done my best to forget it and hope it doesn’t creep back to bite me in the ass one day.

  He rips his ruined shirt in half and wraps one of the al’s fingers in it. “Be careful around her. It’s weird she seems to have known them so well. Never heard Riley or Samson mention her.” He hands me the bundle. “Show that to your boys.”

  Hands shaking, I take the bundle. “Thanks, sir,” I say quietly. I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry. He gets to his feet and winces.

  “Lemme get changed. I’ll drive you back up to the school.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I decide not to remind Helsing that he’s had a couple beers. It’s late, it’s freezing, and I really don’t want to walk all the way back to school. He drives just fine, though, and I sit in the passenger’s seat with the finger wrapped in cloth sitting in my lap.

  “Are you gonna tell anyone?” I ask him after we pass through the village and start the long, winding journey back up to the school.

  “Nah.” He slows down to allow a horse and cart to cross the road in front of him. “Don’t see the point. You did just fine out there.”

  “Thanks.” I turn to look out the window. There’s something I want to ask him, but I haven’t quite gotten up the courage. He’s already given me so much to think about tonight.

  The rest of the ride is quiet. The radio faintly plays some song in Romanian, and Helsing hums along. Just around the corner from the main gate, he pulls over to a thick patch of brush.

  “Better let you out here,” he says. “Too easy for you to be seen if I drive you all the way up.”

  “Yeah.” I reach into the backseat to grab my spear, and then notice that I still have Helsing’s knife. “Oh, uh—” I offer it to him, but he waves his hand dismissively.

  “Keep it. If you’re gonna go around fighting monsters without permission, you’ll need a proper weapon.”

  “Thanks,” I say again. I reach for the door handle, and then hesitate. It’s now or never. I might not get another chance like this again. “Professor Helsing … can I ask you something?”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “How, exactly, did my parents die?”

  He looks at me. The lights from the dashboard only illuminate half his face, casting the other half in shadow. The scar on his forehead is especially lurid now.

  “I wish I knew, kid,” he says softly. “All I know is something went wrong on that hunt … and they didn’t come back.”

  I nod. “Okay. All right. Thanks, I guess.” I open the door and am halfway out when he speaks up again.

  “Avery.”

  I glance back at him. “Yeah?”

  “Maybe ask Mason Dagher next time he’s at the school.”

  “What would be know about it?” I’m ready to climb back into the car and demand answers, but Helsing is already reaching to shut the door behind me.

  “He just … always seems to be places he shouldn’t. I heard rumors he was the last person to see them … alive or dead. Where there are secrets, you usually find a Dagher.”

  He nods and leans back in his seat. I get out and close the door, tapping on it once to let him know it’s shut, before heading up to the school.

  It’s quite a trek, and I have to dodge professors patrolling the grounds, but I make it to my window. The rope is still dangling out of it. I grab it and climb up, bracing my feet against the wall to make it easier. I scale it more quickly than I would have done at the beginning of the year, even after everything tonight.

  When I poke my head into the window, I’m surprised to see not only Erin, but also Sawyer, and a third guest that I definitely didn’t expect.

  “Hey,” I pipe up from the window, hooking an arm around the sill.

  “Avery!” chorus Erin and Sawyer. Their guest, Luiza de la Cruz, just grins as my friends spring to their feet and rush toward me.

  “I was so worried,” Erin breathes, grabbing my arm to help me through the window.

  “How did you not get caught?” Sawyer asks, also reaching to help.

  Luiza just points to where my rope is secured on Erin’s bedpost. “Your knot wasn’t tied tightly enough,” she tells me. “I redid it for you.”

  “Thanks,” I say flatly, still half outside. Erin and Sawyer pull me the rest of the way in.

  “No problem.”

  “Are you hurt?” Erin asks as I stand up. Sawyer doesn’t wait for an answer. He starts patting me, touching my shoulders and face for any sign of injury. I blush, but I don’t push him away.

  “I’m fine,” I tell them. I pull the cloth bundle out of my hoodie pocket. “I have this, though.”

  Luiza finally stands as I unwrap it, revealing the al’s clawed finger. She raises her eyebrows.

  “So you really saw the creature.”

  “I killed it, actually,” I reply, re-wrapping.

  Erin frowns. “But it was … Professor Helsing who called in the kill.”

  “Yeah. He caught me. But it’s fine, he says he won’t turn me in.”

  Sawyer stops his worried tapping and instead pulls me into an embrace. “I was so worried,” he whispers in my ear. Next to me, Erin nods.

  “The professor called it in and all the upperclassmen came back, but you were nowhere to be found.”

  “The Dagher boy told me where you’d gone,” Luiza said, putting a hand on her hip. She’s wearing pajamas now. “So I came to your room to see if our Singer was okay. She was distraught, of course,” she adds, scowling at me.

  “Why do you care so much?” I ask, my voice slightly muffled by Sawyer’s arm. I’m not particularly shaken by tonight’s events. If anything—I’m invigorated.

  This embrace is for Sawyer. He doesn’t seem ready to let me go, and truth be told … I’m not quite ready to step back from him, either. There’s no danger of anything overly romantic happening right now. Not, at least, in front of Erin and Luiza.

  An awkward silence descends. Sawyer finally lets me go, but grabs my hand firmly. His lips are pursed into a line. The hand encasing mine is trembling.

  “Come on, this is what we’re here for, isn’t it?” I tell him, quietly. “I’m fine, really.”

  He nods.

  “I should get going,” Luiza says. “Classes tomorrow. Goodbye, little Singer.”

  Erin nods, still standing by the window. She doesn’t look away from it until she hears Luiza shut the door behind her.

  “You should leave, too, Sawyer,” she says stiffly. Up until now, I thought she was just her usual nervous self. Now, I realize, she’s not nervous … she’s angry.

  Sawyer nods again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I tell him, begging him with my eyes not to leave me alone with Erin and her wrath. He doesn’t get the message, however. He turns to me and hugs me again, this time brushing his lips gently against my forehead, and then he leaves.

  I brace myself. It’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for.

  “That was incredibly stupid of you,” Erin snaps at me. “I was so worried! Beyond worried! If Luiza hadn’t come—”

  Ah yes. My shoulders relax. I should’ve known.

  “She came by to comfort you, huh?” I ask, pulling off my hoodie and throwing it on the floor. I set the al’s finger on top of my dresser.

  “Well, I was beside myself!”

  “Interesting that she’d be the one to calm you down.” I smirk at her as I pull my pajamas out of my dresser. “Didn’t you say that she … gets under your skin?”

  Erin’s face flushes.

  “Funny that there are no boys around here you like,” I add.

  “Avery Black, you are the biggest bitch I’ve ever met.”

  I laugh as I start to change. “And don’t you forget it.”

  Despite my lack of sleep, I have a ski
p in my step the next morning. When I exit my dorm, Sawyer is waiting; and he’s got Piers, Owen, and Bennett in tow.

  “I told Mr. Quiet over here that you had something to show his boys,” Sawyer says, gesturing to them.

  I grin. “One moment.”

  I prop open the door to the dorm and go to my dresser and pluck the cloth bundle off it. Erin waits just outside, arms folded and glaring daggers at them. They all lean in as I start unwrapping the cloth.

  Their reactions are priceless.

  Bennett, as usual, gives no visible expression, but Owen reels back, mouth agape. “I can’t fucking believe it!” he cries. “That’s a whole finger! How did you get a whole finger?” He then stares at me, awe etched onto his face. “Black, you’re a badass.”

  I smirk and blush just a little at the compliment. He’s got lovely gray eyes, and they’re scanning me now, new appreciation in them.

  Piers is quiet. He reaches out and plucks the finger out of its wrapping, turning it over.

  “It’s real, man,” Owen says, tearing his eyes away from me. “Look—als have copper claws. Like, real, actual copper, like the metal. And those are copper.”

  Piers nods and puts the finger gingerly back into my hands. “A deal’s a deal, Black. We’ll leave you alone until after Christmas break.”

  I grin even wider as the three of them turn and walk away. Owen glances at me over his shoulder, still wearing his amazed expression.

  For the first time all year, PW goes amazingly well. We’re using real weapons from the armory against training dummies, and without anyone to trip me or push me or accost me in any way, I perform the best out of the class. Hands down. Creature handling goes great, too. Survival class is my only roadblock.

  I’d be lying if I said the boys were entirely to fault for all my mishaps there. I’m good at big picture stuff—but survival, it’s all about the details.

  “Big project,” Helsing announces, as soon as we’re all seated. He writes it on the board, showing no sign of his most recent injury. “You’ll pair up. Pick a country. Identify a monster indigenous to it. Plan an expedition to the country to kill a monster in one of the towns. And you won’t be picking your own partners,” he adds, before we can even think of pairing ourselves up. The class groans, but he just grabs a hat that’s been sitting upside-down on his desk and pushes it to the front.

  “All your names are in this hat. Half of you will come up and draw a name. You get your own name, you put it back and draw another.” He scans the class, then points to a row. “You all first.”

  One by one, people approach the hat, draw a name, read it aloud, and then go sit with their new partners. Sawyer gets paired with Bennett. Erin gets paired with someone neither of us have spoken to that much.

  Piers pulls a name out of the hat and then stands for a minute, frowning.

  “Read the name, boy,” Helsing snaps.

  He glances up. His eyes meet mine. “Avery Black.”

  Owen and Bennett both look up, looking first at me, then Piers, who awkwardly sets the name down on Professor Helsing’s desk before grabbing his books to sit beside me.

  I don’t pay attention as everyone else picks their partners. I’m staring at Piers, who refuses to look at me.

  If I didn’t know that Helsing couldn’t give a rat’s ass who my partner is, I’d think he did this on purpose.

  Once everyone has been paired up, Helsing clears his throat and starts writing things on the board. “All right. You’ll pick your country from this list. You’ll be presenting these, by the way,” he adds, scowling at the class as they groan again. “And you’ll have to work with each other outside of class to do these. I’ll give you today to work on it, but we can’t spend every class doing this. And once you’ve figured out the native language of the country you pick, you’ll have to learn a few phrases in it. Can it!” he snaps as the class groans again.

  He whips around to face us. “These are skills you’ll have to learn! Once you get out of here and start actually hunting monsters, you’ll be up shit creek without a paddle if you can’t do this.”

  It’s quite simple really. Pick a monster, pick a town.

  “You learn some native phrases. You figure out how you’ll get there, how you’ll kill it, how you’ll hide the evidence, and how you’ll get back.”

  For this assignment, he lets us assume we’re licensed monster hunters on an official hunt. At least we have that. It means we won’t have to figure out a way to smuggle our weapons, or find a place to buy them once we’re there, since hunters on official business could carry weapons into the very halls of The Vatican if they wanted to.

  Class ends, and Piers and I stand up simultaneously. He turns to me for the first time since class started.

  “So, uh … I guess we should plan to meet up.”

  Now that he’s not supposed to be bullying me, it’s like he doesn’t know what to do with me.

  “Are you mad that you can’t terrorize me during this project?” I ask with a smirk.

  He looks away. “Couldn’t have done that anyway,” he mutters. “It’s my grade as much as yours.”

  I nod. “Smart. Wanna meet in the library in an hour?”

  He looks around. Owen’s talking to his new partner—they’re obviously planning when they’re going to meet up. Bennett is staring impassively at Sawyer, who’s trying desperately to get Bennett to respond to a question he’s asking.

  “Yeah,” he says. “An hour is fine.”

  He goes to walk away, but I grab his arm. “Piers.”

  He looks at me.

  “Look, we can work together. This won’t be weird, all right? Like you said, this is my grade as much as yours. I want to do well on this project.”

  He mumbles and glances off toward Owen and Bennett, who seem to be detaching from their partners and heading out. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. See you in an hour.”

  I let him walk away and gather my things to meet up with Sawyer and Erin outside the classroom.

  “Funny you got stuck with Piers,” Sawyer says, grinning. He reaches out and touches my elbow. I blush. “Y’know—now that you’ve brought back that finger and he can’t do shit to you.”

  “Speaking of … you didn’t tell us the whole story,” Erin says shyly. She hugs her books to her chest. “What happened with you and Professor Helsing?”

  “Not here,” I say quickly. “Let’s head back to our dorm. There is something I wanna talk to you guys about.”

  We head off. I want to tell them what Helsing said about my parents’ cabin. A cabin I didn’t know about. A cabin I want to go to. And what he said about Professor Waldman.

  And how he wants me to talk to Mason Dagher, that he might be the key to learning how my parents died.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Erin is perched on her bed while Sawyer paces by the dresser.

  “He said you should talk to Mason Dagher?” Sawyer asks finally, turning.

  I nod.

  “He does come down to the school often, but I think it’s just for meetings,” Erin pipes up. “He’s on the board of trustees though, so he doesn’t interact much with the students.”

  “Yeah. And it’s not like he tells any of us when he’s coming and going.”

  Sawyer snaps his fingers and points them at me. “You’re working with Piers, right? Maybe he knows. Mr. Dagher is his dad, after all.”

  I push my face into my hands to hide. What an idiot I am. I should have thought of that.

  “Then there’s this supposed cabin,” Sawyer says, resuming his pacing. It’s such a small room that he’s really only taking a few steps before he has to change directions. “Have you asked your aunt about it?”

  “Not yet. I’m worried it would upset her if I told her what I’m doing.” I rub my hands on my knees. What I don’t tell him is that she doesn’t know any of it yet. I haven’t been able to ask her about the cabin Helsing mentioned since she doesn’t even know about Helsing to begin with. “Maybe I’ll wait u
ntil I’m actually there, or maybe I’ll just try to find it on my own. She has some of my parents’ stuff in her attic.”

  “You could look through it when you’re home for Christmas break,” Erin says thoughtfully. She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her chin on them. “You’d have time to find the cabin, then, too.”

  To be honest, I hadn’t considered going home for break. I’d originally planned to stay here at the school, or if they won’t have me, in the local village. I made the tentative decision not to tell my Aunt about the school … but it looks like I’m going to have to face her after all.

  “I just wish my aunt wasn’t so against all this,” I say, leaning my head back so it rests against the wall and I’m staring up at the ceiling. “Even if she knows about the cabin, it’s not like she’s going to help me find it. This sort of thing she usually leaves me to handle alone.”

  “Well then, don’t do it alone,” Sawyer says to me, pausing. “I can come with you.”

  I glance at him. “Aren’t you going home to your family?”

  He shrugs and jams his hands in his pockets. “I’m not really cool with my parents, anyway.”

  A silence follows this announcement. I realize suddenly that I’ve never asked Sawyer about his family.

  “Oh,” I say quietly.

  He nods. “They don’t know I’m at Saint M, and they don’t know I want to be a monster hunter.” He turns his head away, face impassive. I guess we have that in common.

  Most of the students here have families with long histories of hunting. One day I’d like to know what Sawyer’s backstory is … but I’m the last person who’s going to try to pry it out of him.

  Hoping to change the subject, I look over at Erin, who’s gazing at Sawyer with visible concern. “What about you, Erin?”

  She starts and looks at me. “Oh. I’m going to my mom’s. She has a lot of stuff planned for us, so … I can’t … um …”

  I smile at her. “Yeah, of course. You’re the only normal one of us.”