Where Monsters Hide (The Monster Within 1)

“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.