“Go ahead.” I shrugged. “But it won’t do any good,” I added quietly, before going upstairs to my room.
There were new security cameras in the servant staircase, blinking at me. I watched them carefully, feeling a kind of nervousness I couldn’t rationally explain. I might have passed it off as leftover anxiety from the school bathroom fire, but who needed that many cameras inside a house?
Clearly I wasn’t the only one with secrets.
Chapter Four
Ethan
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I told Colt as he made a pass through the obstacle course, dripping sweat. I didn’t have much time to convince him to back out.
“You don’t have to do this,” I added as he swung from one rope to another, like Tarzan with a military crew cut. “Just because our parents drank the Kool-Aid doesn’t mean we have to.”
He snorted a laugh down at me, eyes gleaming with a manic kind of intensity. “Are you high? Of course I do. I owe my parents.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You don’t get it. My mom cried for two days straight after I came out. When I get my ring, she’ll realize everything’s the same. I’m still me.”
“She’ll get over it even without the ring. Your dad doesn’t care if you’re gay, and he’ll calm her down,” I insisted quietly. “Colt, you’re not ready.”
“And you really need to work on those motivational speeches,” he shot back. “If I do this, my mom can focus on the champion thing instead of the gay thing.”
I didn’t know how else to make him understand. The Cabal had raised us with stories of glory and visions of medieval knights and ancient champions testing their mettle against monsters. I could recite all of Hercules’s trials before I could recite the alphabet. But there was one thing worse than the reality of being chased through the woods, of being hunted. And that was being the hunter, of emerging from the forest covered in blood and with a life on your conscience. Monster or not, those creatures hadn’t chosen to be part of the Blackwood bestiary.
But our parents didn’t get it. They were drunk on the romance of it, on adventures they wished they’d had at our age. In college they’d fancied themselves hunters and cryptozoologists. They wanted an excuse to travel to exotic places and kill things. They got tired of hunting lions and tigers, of exotic game in exotic places, and took it one step further by joining the Cabal. It was one step too far. And we had no choice but to keep up. Even after my mom died, and Sloane’s parents, Tobias’s parents. Summer. All because of the Cabal and the bestiary. It was like the old saying: if you got off the tiger, you got eaten.
My dad might play at being the king of the castle, but the Cabal had real power. They could go anywhere, through barbed fences and magical wards. They oversaw the zoos around the world. Without them, we wouldn’t have the resources to run the bestiary or to keep it hidden. So they were in charge, even here. But there was a price to pay for that kind of protection: absolute obedience. And it didn’t matter that we were the children of the Cabal and the whole hunting lodge wasn’t even our choice in the first place; we were family.
And family’s a bitch.
“Are you sure you’re not worried that you won’t be the only guy with a silver ring? The only champion?” Colt snarled. I could already tell he was pumped full of adrenaline and testosterone, even though the actual Trials wouldn’t start until the weekend. He’d burn out if he didn’t get a grip on that mad hunger. I remembered the taste of it, like copper and sugar.
I’d loved it once.
“Don’t be a jackass,” I said mildly. “I’m trying to save your life. I don’t give a crap about the other stuff.”
“See, I think you’re lying.” Colt paused on a wooden balance plank between two platforms and wiped his face with a towel he plucked off a branch. It was damp. He must have run the course once already. “I think you’re scared to share a little glory.” His face was red as he leaped down to the ground. “You want to stay the big man.” He shoved me. “But no one’s keeping me down.”
I’d known it was a lost cause, but I still had to try. I clenched my jaw and resisted the urge to shove him back. Barely. We’d end up looking like kids in the sandbox when the rest of the Cabal arrived. “Back off, man.”
He sneered and took a swing at my head. I reacted on instinct, dodging and swinging back. His nose cracked under my knuckles, and he swore, stumbling. He spat blood in the dirt before tackling me. We landed in a cloud of dust and cursing. His fist collided with my sternum and broke my breath, but then I wedged my elbow between us and jammed it under his ribs. He was bigger than me and built like a linebacker.
But I was faster.
It was hard to remember why we were fighting, even harder not to feel the intense buzz of adrenaline, that sweet burning moment in a fight where nothing else mattered. It was the same moment when Dad’s stories about heroes and champions always took root, like a particularly poisonous weed. You could salt the earth, but that weed would still grow. I knew exactly how Colt felt.
I just didn’t want him to know what I felt.
We were still hauling off punches and kidney jabs when Ada, Colt’s mother, interrupted us. “Boys.” She clicked her tongue. “That’s enough.”
Colt’s father, Jed, was even bigger than Colt, and he reached down and hauled us apart, grinning. “Save it for the Trials.” He slapped Colt on the shoulder. Colt barely budged. It was a point of pride with him now that he could withstand his father’s friendly slaps. Bulls would have tipped over. “Now, come on. You’ll be late.”
Colt used a towel to wipe the dirt and sweat off his skin, trading his worn T-shirt for the cream-colored hand-woven linen tunics Dad had had made for all of us. They had the Cabal crest embroidered on a sleeve. Ever tried getting mud and blood out of linen? I preferred to fight in jeans.
We went back to the castle, picking our way silently through the garden, past the mermaid fountain and through a hidden door behind a bank of thorny rosebushes. We made a procession up the main stairs and Colt’s cocky snarls faded under the weight of the ritual before it even began. The others were already waiting for us. Inside the trophy room, the heavy wooden door hidden behind an ivory screen was open.
This was the real trophy room, the one Dad wanted to show off to the world but couldn’t. The walls and ceiling were painted with protective symbols. The lights were discreetly hidden behind lantern glass, all aimed at the collection of animal heads nailed to the walls. They varied in size and species, but they were all fantastical, impossible.
Dead.
There was a stately griffin’s lionlike head, with the eagle wings nailed to the wall on either side. There was a hobgoblin whose moss-green eyes still followed you, even though it had died before I was even born. There were two Stymphalian marsh birds suspended from one of the beams, a bottle of basilisk blood, a whirled bone dagger purported to be made of unicorn horn, and the far too humanlike body of a mermaid floating in an aquarium filled with special embalming fluid, her hair like dusty turquoise. Her sister Nix was in the lake on the other side of the garden wall, singing songs no one could understand anymore. I’d brought her a flute once. I never told anyone.
Dad waited under his favorite trophy, the glossy head of a small albino dragon. He sighed at the state of my tunic. His was, of course, spotless and freshly ironed, and he wore a gold medallion of St. George slaying the dragon. “Honestly, have a sense of occasion, Ethan,” he said.
I went to stand behind him, gritting my back teeth. Justin was across from me, also looking annoyed, but for a different reason. He was about to be the last guy who hadn’t been tried. Just like there was no convincing Colt to drop it, there was no convincing Justin, either. Hell, there was no convincing any of them except Justine. She refused to have her Trials because if she went through with it, her little sister would follow. She was determined to put it off as long as possible, even though she was personally ready. And if Justine wouldn’t have her Trials, then n
either would Justin. Ariel stood between them now, wide-eyed and silent. The light flashed off her braces when she smiled at me.
Sloane’s absence was notable. She’d survived the Trials, though barely, and not without consequences. My scars were nothing compared to hers. And Tobias wouldn’t talk about his night. All we knew was that he’d come out of the forest alive but without a trophy. No one was sure if that meant he’d officially passed his Trials or not.
Colt took his position in the center, his parents beaming at him. He was barefoot, standing in a mixture of ground monster bones and rose petals. “Kneel now to receive the weapons that carry with them all the might of the Cabal,” Dad said.
Colt’s father was the first to step forward. He handed him a new dagger with a scabbard etched in gold. I still had the dagger Dad gave me, with the turquoise crown in the hilt, but I mostly used knives I got from the hunting store in town. Dad gave Colt a new spear. Justine gave him leather arm bracers, Justin a chain-mail patch for his tunic, and Ariel a blue ribbon, like girls used to give knights in the Middle Ages. To his credit, he didn’t make a joke, just accepted it gravely.
Dad handed me a horn cup. “Since my son, Ethan, was the only one to make it properly through his Trials, he will pass you the cup.”
“That’s not true,” I muttered, thinking of Summer, frostbitten and bleeding, of Sloane crawling through the long grass, of Tobias refusing to tell his story.
Dad gave me a look, the one that made me think of the first time he’d locked me in this room overnight, when I was seven years old. It was all family pride with him. “It’ll make you strong,” he continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “It will give you the speed of a dragon, the fierceness of a manticore, the strength of a minotaur. And you can bring us back something truly unique to mark your Trials.”
I couldn’t look at the leathery wings pinned to the wall from the Harpy I’d dragged out of the lake while I cried like a little kid.
I handed Colt the cup, and he drank it without gagging, which was a heroic feat in itself, since it tasted like bloody swamp water and paprika. His mother stood in front of him, holding a ceremonial sword. Legend had it that the pommel contained hair from St. George and ashes from the fire that had burned Joan of Arc, but not her heart. Colt’s mother knighted him with the sword, as if he was a medieval warrior. She didn’t tap him lightly on the shoulder with it, but used the flat of the blade to slap him. It bit into his cheek, drawing blood and his first ceremonial scar.
All that was left was the blessing from the children of the Cabal, but that would wait until right before his Trial. We’d done it with Summer, even though it hadn’t helped her in the end. And they’d done it for me. So I’d stand up for Colt, even though I felt like knocking him down so he couldn’t go through with it. Instead, I passed him the cup because in the end, it wasn’t my choice. And I knew my duty, if nothing else. Didn’t mean I had to like it.
Colt drank, then grinned at me, blood smeared on his teeth.
After the ritual, I left, needing the soft danger of the forest on the other side, the sinister beauty of the lake. I might as well patrol while I was out here. I’d always preferred tracking to fighting. Sloane called it haunting. Same difference in my mind, as long as they both ended with a certain creature at the end of my spear. I wasn’t giving up. Even after three and a half years. Because unlike the others, this was one monster that had to be put down.
Sloane insisted I was becoming hard and jaded. Even she didn’t know my secret, didn’t realize how well I was starting to wear my hunter persona. I hardly knew anymore, either—that was clear to me when Kia had startled a genuine laugh out of me in the car. The sound was so foreign I’d actually thought about reaching for a weapon.
She might be a problem.
She was smart enough to figure out something was going on at the estate. She was keeping secrets. And she was hot enough to be a distraction. She’d made me forget, for one brief moment, that I wasn’t a guy driving a cute girl home, that though I might not be able to change a flat tire, I could gut an angry Scylla and set traps for three different species of goblin.
I wondered if Summer would recognize me now.
Of the two of us, she’d always been the natural warrior, even when we were fourteen. She’d been so shy and polite, no one suspected that she was brilliant with a sword, gun, and aikido. Her father taught her, drilled her mercilessly each and every day to make her strong. But still not strong enough.
I checked the inner wards, trying to forget Colt, Summer, my dad, everything. Forgetting Kia proved more difficult than I’d thought. I hadn’t been lying when I’d told her she wasn’t like other girls. I’d never met anyone like her. Sloane was both practical and ridiculously romantic. Justine was loyal but ruthless. The girls at school were more interested in my abs and Dad’s bank account than anything else. They wouldn’t last a day in my world. But I played my part. I flirted and smirked and generally acted too lazy and spoiled to care about anything important. It was a good cover, and it was surprising how many people, teachers included, were impressed by that.
But not Kia.
She didn’t seem particularly impressed by anything. And that made her hotter.
The steady flap of huge wings had me turning to the west, throwing knife in hand. Stymphalian marsh bird. The untrained eye could be fooled at a glance, thinking it was an eagle or a heron, but the marsh bird was bigger, smellier, and definitely meaner.
Spotting Kia was just as easy.
She was trudging through the grass, heavy compost bucket in her hand, red hair like fire. Abby was really strict about composting, and though she was far away, Kia sighed visibly as she turned over the bucket. I knew from experience that it was heavier than it looked.
Kia didn’t see the Stymphalian marsh bird flying toward her. She didn’t even know to look up.
But it saw her.
The bird, already drawn by the magical wards, turned, sensing a fresh meal on the ground below. I waited patiently, grimly, for it to fly past me. It was so focused on Kia, it didn’t sense me. I threw my dagger and it hit the back of its neck, pinning it to a tree. Blood and feathers went everywhere. The bird gave a mournful, piercing death cry, which had the hair on my neck standing up. But I couldn’t afford to feel pity. One moment of hesitation and someone might die. Kia might die.
Kia glanced up, frowning at the sky. When there was nothing for her to see, she hurried back through the gate and toward the castle. I reclaimed my knife and wiped it clean on a leaf. Then I continued into the forest, wondering what the hell Abby had been thinking, inviting Kia to live here.
I searched for other marsh birds, since they tended to travel in pairs, but there was nothing but the wind and the smell of smoke.
And the standing stone.
It wore a dress of moss now, the tiny gray and green spots filling the engraved letters spelling out Summer Kirihara. I hadn’t been here in a while. At first I came every day, then once a week, once a month, and now I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been here. Probably in July with the other Cabal kids to pay our respects. In the early spring the whole field was carpeted with lily of the valley and purple periwinkle flowers.
It was nearly four years now. I couldn’t remember the exact sound of her shy laugh, or the wicked gleam in her eye when she knocked my crossbow bolt out of the air with her own.
But I still remembered the feeling of her blood on my hands. We’d found it smeared on the grass and the birch trees. We’d never found her body, just her torn clothes and some of her hair in a summer grove somehow thick with frost.
Not enough to mourn.
Just enough to know she was lost.
Chapter Five
Kia
I woke up early, as usual, at least an hour before my alarm clock. The light was different here. It didn’t fall in bright harsh squares across my bedroom floor. Instead, it sneaked in like smoke, slowly and softly. The sky went pink, then orange, burning through the horizon as i
f it were paper. At home I would have heard delivery trucks and the creaking of the apartment building’s old water pipes. I called Dad, just to be obnoxious. He’d sent me away to live with a woman I barely knew. He didn’t deserve to sleep in.
“It’s barely six thirty in the morning,” he grumbled into the phone. “Are you dead?”
“No.” I couldn’t help but smile. I knew he was sprawled on the couch, rubbing his unshaven face. “You fell asleep on the couch again.” He mumbled something incoherent through a yawn. “Love you, too, Dad.”
“Are you all right, kiddo?” I could hear him sitting up, trying to sound awake. “How’s the house?”
“Big.”
“Just give it a chance.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
He snorted. “Your tone, daughter of mine, is hardly inscrutable.”
“Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “Go back to sleep, Dad.”
“Love you, Kia. Get out of your own way.” He’d been telling me that for months now. It was his parental catchall phrase, which loosely translated meant: don’t be a smartass and don’t antagonize people. Also, don’t set them on fire.
And he didn’t even know the full extent of it. He thought he had a budding arsonist for a daughter and that I’d just been playing with matches.
Sighing, I hung up and headed to the kitchen, grateful for the servant staircase for once. I didn’t have to get dressed, I could pop down in my T-shirt and skull pajama bottoms with a sweater for warmth.
Sara was already at the long counter, her hair in a braid wound around her head like a crown. “Coffee’s on.” She nodded to a coffeemaker on the end of one counter. “I like it plain, none of that fancy espresso and foamed milk.”
She poured muffin batter into pans lined with gold-edged paper cups. I was glad she hadn’t suggested I drink hot chocolate instead; adults usually accused me of being over-caffeinated. “Even the muffin papers have gold on them?” I asked.