Where Monsters Hide: An Academy Bully Romance (The Monster Within Book 1) Page 22

  This is a hallway I’ve only visited once; the one that has one room, one very particular room that’s supposed to be guarded at all times, and now is forgotten among the chaos.

  The devil djinn’s phylactery.

  It all clicks. The attempted break-in the other night. The power outage, meaning all alarms and cameras are disabled. The monsters released into the school, drawing away the guards and professors.

  It was all to get to the djinn. The school’s most prized possession. Our responsibility to guard and protect.

  I look around. The professors have disappeared, carrying the boys with them. The hall is littered with monster corpses, but aside from those, I’m all alone. It’s up to me.

  I head down the hallway. The door to the room with the phylactery stands open, and there’s a flickering light coming from inside. I hold my knife at the ready and approach slowly, blowing my candle out. As I get closer, I hear rustling coming from inside, and move even slower, making sure I make no noise.

  I peek around the doorframe and stop, shocked.

  The woman inside has brown hair graying at the roots and a heart-shaped face with features contorted by the dancing flame of the candle she holds. She looks up when I call her name.

  “Professor Waldman?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Professor Eve Waldman stares back at me. She’s got one hand stretched out toward the phylactery and is frozen in place.

  “Avery?” she says. Her voice sounds strangely normal.

  I slowly walk into the room, glancing once over my shoulder and back into the hallway as I do. “What are you doing here?” I ask suspiciously.

  She quickly puts her hand down by her side without answering. She has a few weapons on her; a sword, a knife, a mace. None of them are in her hands.

  “You’re not fighting the monsters,” I say matter-of-factly, my grip on my knife firm. “You’re stealing the djinn.”

  Her face twists into a menacing expression, made all the more frightening by the candlelight. “You’re too smart for your own good, Avery Black.”

  “Why?” I ask her.

  The manticore’s roar echoes down the hallway. Did the others catch up to it?

  Waldman sighs and pulls out one of her knives. I take a step back.

  “If you must know,” she says, “I want to sell it.” She points to the phylactery with her knife. “Collectors will pay a fortune for their own djinn.”

  “They might release it,” I say. “You’d take that chance?”

  She barks out a laugh, so different from the one she uses in class. “Only the person who captured it can awaken it, and only their blood can release it.” She pulls a vial from her pocket and shakes it tauntingly at me.

  I stifle a gasp. Piers’ blood—the son of Mason Dagher, the man who captured the djinn—is in that vial. Blood that I got for her.

  “I want that money,” she growls, still holding up the vial of Piers’ blood. “I need to get out of the monster hunting game. And the money this thing would bring me?” She whistles. “I’d be set up for life.”

  “Why do you want out?” I ask.

  She looks wistfully off into the distance a moment. “I showed you my phylacteries. The one I wanted most … I told you about it.”

  I nod, I remember. “A wendigo,” I say.

  She begins circling around the podium on which the djinn’s phylactery sits. “I hunted one down, about a year or so ago. Went to America. Tracked it for days.” Her path is bringing her closer to me. I feel my heart race. “It would be the jewel of my collection. They’re dangerous, ferocious creatures. Bloodthirsty. Soulless. Only a true hunter could look one in the eye and live to tell the tale.” She pauses, and I take a step back, slipping a hand into my pocket.

  She sees, however, and points her knife at me. “None of that,” she snaps suddenly.

  Caught, I take my hand out of my pocket and hold my hands up in the international signal for surrender. She doesn’t know that I already slipped what I wanted up my sleeve.

  “Well, I found my Wendigo,” she continues, her knife still pointed at me. “I tracked it to its lair. A lair absolutely full of human bodies.” Her eyes have a crazed look in them. “Men, women, children—half-eaten, inside-out, maggots crawling in their wounds. Have you ever stepped into a cave and found a pile of disembodied limbs? Ever seen just a torso with its guts ripped open? A child’s body without a face? And in the center of it all, the Wendigo, eating its fill of human flesh.” She laughs, her eyes wide. “Did you know that a person can become a Wendigo? Oh, yes … even without a monster to possess them. Starving in isolation, driven by hunger, they transform. I could feel it happening to me, standing there in front of it. If I had stayed there, I would have become that monster.”

  For a moment, I can see a flash of monster in her, still. I can see something hungry in her expression. But it’s gone in just a second.

  “What other monsters can humans become?” she whispers hoarsely. “I don’t want to find out. I want to get out. I need to get far away from here.” And then she lunges at me.

  I’m caught off guard, but she’s slow. Her last year of teaching must have dulled her reflexes, because I manage to block her stab with my own knife, deflecting her blade.

  She twists and jabs the handle of her knife into my bruised ribs. Pain explodes through my torso. I lose my grip on my knife and stumble back, coughing. Seizing the opportunity, Waldman leaps at me, but I snatch up one of my mother’s daggers and slash at her before she reaches me. She whirls away, narrowly avoiding the wickedly curved blade, and I nick the edge of her shirt.

  She shrugs her jacket off and throws it over the hand that holds my dagger—using it to rip the weapon from my hand and send it skittering across the floor. Lucky for me, one of her weapons—a katana-like sword—is within reach.

  I snatch it up without missing a beat and lash out at her.

  I’ve hit my stride. I can see she’s slow, unpracticed. My ribs may be bruised and my hand may still be injured, but I know I can beat her. I pursue her, unrelenting, slashing at her with the sword so that all she can do is deflect. She screams in frustration as I hack at her, bearing down on her with everything I’ve got.

  With my injured hand, I grab her by the shirt and yank her toward me. I’m about to jam her own sword up to her throat and give her a final ultimatum—when I find she’s just done the same to me.

  In the moment, my overconfidence kept me from seeing the second she grabbed one of my own mother’s daggers from my belt and raised it to rest against the warm pulse of my jugular.

  “On your knees,” she says, breathless with rage.

  I do as I’m told, but as soon as my palms hit the stone floor, I shake out the object I’ve been hiding in my sleeve. The box of iratxoak lands on the floor and springs open alongside the forgotten sword.

  Waldman, startled, stumbles back a step as the creatures crawl out of the box and spill onto the floor.

  “What to do? What to do?” shriek the little voices.

  I take the opportunity to kick out with my leg. I catch Waldman in the stomach and knock her to the ground.

  I roll over onto my backside and point at her prostrate form.

  “Stop her!” I shout at the imps, and they gleefully leap up and onto her.

  “You bitch!” Waldman yells shrilly as they swarm up her body. She struggles to her feet, but as she does, one of the imps manages to knock the vial of Piers’ blood from her hands and onto the floor. It shatters, spilling the dark liquid.

  The imps swarm up and over her face, attacking and temporarily blinding her. With a desperate cry, Waldman swings out her arms to grab the phylactery. Before I can get to her, she throws it down at the pool of blood congealing at our feet in some desperate attempt to escape.

  “NO!” I dive for it. It can’t touch the blood. The djinn can’t be released. It would mean the death of me and everyone in the school, and that’s just the beginning.

  I stretch my
fingers, reaching for the phylactery until my injured hand closes around it.

  Overbalanced, I fall, skidding through Piers’ blood and the shards of glass.

  The iratxoak continue to claw and bite at Waldman, who continues to scream as they attack her. I roll over, clutching my ribs and breathing a sigh of relief.

  I look down at the object in my hands.

  I might be covered in Piers’ blood, but the phylactery is not. The djinn will not be released into the school along with the rest of the monsters this night.

  Such a small prison for a monster of such cataclysmic proportions. I brush one thumb along the carved surface. As I’m looking, mesmerized, blood drips from a cut on my face and lands on that same thumb.

  For a moment, nothing happens.

  But then the carved eye on the phylactery opens and everything goes dark.

  There’s no sound, no light. I don’t feel the pain in my ribs or the throbbing in my hand—in fact, I feel nothing at all. I’m floating in some sort of void, and in front of me is the phylactery, its eye staring at me. Or what I assume to be me. I can’t feel my limbs, and I can’t look away from the eye to see if they’re still there.

  A deep voice rumbles, seeming to come from inside my head and all around me, all at once. “Ah,” it sighs. “To be awake again.”

  I’m trembling. The voice resonates through my whole body.

  “Avery Black,” it says thoughtfully. “Oh, I see—daughter of Samson and Riley Black.”

  “What’s happening?” My voice floats out of me, thin and frail in the thick void.

  The voice chuckles. “You’ve awakened me. You’re the daughter of the humans who put me in this prison.”

  I try to move my hands, my feet, anything … but I feel nothing. “Mason Dagher captured you.”

  “False,” the voice booms. “It was Samson and Riley Black. Only their blood could awaken me from my imprisoned slumber.”

  My mind is reeling. Mason Dagher lied. No wonder he wasn’t keen to talk about it. This means he was the person who was following them. The person my mother wrote about in her last journal entry.

  “I exacted my revenge upon them, however. I killed them.”

  This is it. The creature that killed my parents.

  I still have a heart—I know because it begins hammering away. The voice laughs at me again.

  “You want to avenge them,” it purrs. “You can, you know. All you need to do … is release me. And you know how to do that, don’t you?”

  The world swims more into focus again. I’m aware of the room around me, the podium near me, the phylactery in my hands. There’s a dagger nearby. I can see it from the corner of my eye.

  “Yes,” whispers the voice. “Release me with your blood, little Avery. In here, I am invincible. I am imprisoned, but I am safe. Don’t you see?”

  My hand begins to drift toward the dagger.

  “Release me. Only then can I be killed. Only then can you avenge those wretched humans you call your parents.”

  I feel my fingers close around the hilt. The voice is whispering to me. The eye is staring into my soul.

  This is it. This is the moment I’ve waited for.

  I lift the dagger. I feel the prick of steel on my wrist.

  And then the phylactery is yanked from my hands.

  I snap back to reality. The pain of my ribs, my hand, the shards of glass stabbing into me, it all returns. Headmaster Novac stands over me with the phylactery in his hands and a stern look on his face. The eye drifts shut again, and he places it back on its podium.

  I turn my head. Professor Waldman is sitting just outside the door, her hair wild, bleeding from tiny bites and scratches. She sobs as another teacher roughly handcuffs her behind her back. The iratxoak are tiredly stumbling around her feet.

  “The container for the imps?” Novac asks me kindly.

  Shaking, I point it out to him on the floor. He scoops it up and places a small lump of cheese inside, then puts it on the ground. The iratxoak rush into the container, which he snaps shut and then tucks inside his breast pocket.

  “I think these should stay with me for now,” he tells me. I nod, unable to speak.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Mason Dagher barrels into the room, chest out, panting. He’s wearing leather armor and carries a lance in one hand. “Who was trying to steal my djinn?”

  “My parents’ djinn,” I say weakly. I sit up and Mason looks at me, astonished. “My parents captured it, not you,” I say, louder.

  “You—you little liar,” Mason hisses, but Headmaster Novac raises his hand.

  “Her touch awakened it, Mason.”

  Mason’s face goes pale. He looks from the headmaster to me, back to the headmaster. “You can’t believe a teenaged girl over—”

  “Over an egotistical narcissist?” Novac asks crisply. He turns away from Piers’ father and offers me a hand. I take it, and he helps me to my feet. “Are you injured?” he asks me gently.

  Mason Dagher keeps opening and shutting his mouth, unable to find the words to explain his sudden disgrace.

  “Only a little,” I reply truthfully.

  Headmaster Novac nods. “You should head to the first-aid station. The infirmary is for the more serious cases.”

  “Is it over?” I ask the headmaster as we pass by the panting Mason Dagher and the slumped Professor Waldman. “Is everyone safe? Are the monsters back in the Menagerie?”

  He smiles at me. “It’s over, and most of the monsters have been contained. A few escaped, many are dead, and …” His smile falls. “No. Not everyone was safe.”

  We’re almost at the front hall.

  “I can make it to the first-aid station myself,” I tell him. “You probably have more important things to deal with,” I add, glancing over my shoulder.

  He laughs a little. “Very well. You’ve done well, Avery.” He gives my shoulder a grandfatherly squeeze before turning and walking back toward the phylactery room.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Everything’s relatively okay. People are safe, Waldman’s been captured, Mason Dagher’s been disgraced—and I finally found the monster that killed my parents.

  I should be triumphant, but all I feel is a deep, deep exhaustion.

  As I round the corner, my newfound happiness crumbles. I see a group of people, Piers and Sawyer among them, huddled around a crumpled figure on the ground. To my surprise, Cleaver stands nearby.

  Erin, I think wildly, and I speed up, running down the hall toward them.

  “What happened?” I gasp as I reach them. Piers, Bennett, and Sawyer glance at me before shuffling out of the way so that I can see.

  It’s not Erin. It’s Owen. He’s covered in gashes, and blood covers his paisley-print shirt. He’s clawing at his own face, but two nurses are trying to wrestle his hands away to treat him.

  “He was attacked by the lycanthrope,” Sawyer says in a low voice.

  Bennett nods.

  “He’ll either die or … become a werewolf.” Piers sounds numb and hollow.

  I bite my lip.

  “I’d rather die!” Owen screams from the ground as the nurses get him onto a stretcher. “Just let me die!”

  “Owen!” I step forward, but a nurse blocks my path, shaking his head.

  “I don’t want to become a monster!” he yells as they take him away towards the infirmary.

  Without thinking, I reach out and grab Piers’ hand, squeezing it. With my other hand, I do the same for Bennett. They both squeeze back.

  “I’m going with him,” Bennett says resolutely. He drops my hand and follows after the nurses.

  “Me too,” Piers agrees as he drops my hand.

  It’s not until they’re gone that I realize who the others are. Erin, Luiza, and Professor Helsing stand by my side. Erin’s holding a crossbow, though I don’t know where she got it. She’s also covered in blood and beaming.

  “I got the lycanthrope,” she tells me, gesturing to the crossbow.
>
  “You were amazing, mi cantante,” Luiza says. She plants a kiss on Erin’s cheek, and they both blush.

  “You were supposed to get to safety!” I exclaim.

  “I couldn’t let everyone else fight while I ran and hid,” Erin says. “I had to do something, too. Cleaver was great. He protected us.”

  “He’s a good dog,” Luiza gushes, kneeling to pet him. Cleaver wags his tail.

  Professor Helsing looks at Erin with a strange expression. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” he tells her softly.

  She smiles, drops the crossbow, and walks up to him, throwing her arms around his neck. “I’m safe, Dad,” she mutters.

  Luiza, Sawyer, and I share a shocked glance.

  “Singer,” Luiza says in amazement. “Of course. Helsing.”

  “I’m proud of you, kid,” Helsing says gruffly, patting Erin’s back. I look on, dumbfounded. I’m not sure they look anything alike. Though … now that I think about it, their eyes are roughly the same shape if you look at them just right.

  Erin steps back with a grin. “Avery, are you okay? You should probably get to the first-aid station.”

  I glance down at myself. “Yeah, probably.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” Erin says brightly.

  “Me too,” Luiza offers.

  Erin gives her dad—Professor Helsing, which I’m still reeling from—one last hug, and we head off to the first-aid station.

  The next morning, with the power restored, I go to the infirmary to visit Owen. I’m not surprised to find Piers and Bennett already there, but I’m a little surprised to see Sawyer. All four of them look miserable.

  “Hi,” I say softly as I come in.

  “Hey,” Sawyer replies first, shooting to his feet.

  Owen glances at me. His beautiful face is marred by long, stitched-up gashes. His arms are covered in bandages. He goes to turn his face away, but I step up to his bed and set my hand on his shoulder.

  “How do you feel?” I ask him.

  “Like shit,” he tells me. “They say I’ll be fine, that I’ll just transform.” His gaze wanders past me. “I’ll be an ugly, hairy beast every full moon. I’ll be covered in scars. I’d rather be dead.”