Page 2

Chapter two

A Mortal Reminder

I had been wrong before. There was no truer nuisance than an avalanche.

Soldiers lifted me, one and then two, the second of which was already limping himself. I was fading in and out of consciousness but I felt their hands holding me aloft, felt the sharp and frigid air beating against the cool skin of my face as we reached the helicopter, heard the tremendous roar of natural fury as a wave of white tumbled toward us.

“Just hang on!” one of them was screaming, inches from my face, over the whirring of the helicopter blades and the rumbling of the mountain.

“Hadley,” I croaked, gripping him around the collar, my eyelids already fluttering closed again. “I need… to get back…”

But I was gone. Both mentally and physically as the helicopter lifted from the ground, the last of the soldiers still dangling from its sides, scrambling on.

We left it all behind. The rift, the equipment, the chunks of minotaur. Things we could have salvaged, things we could have studied. But I was already itching to return by the time my eyes opened again in a hospital room back in New York City.

No one was there to greet me. I wasn’t surprised. I just stood, ripping the IV from my arm, and snatched up my briefcase that had made it back to the city long before I had and was in much better shape. I changed back into my clothes in the bathroom before making my way out onto the street. I had opted to forgo the bloody fur coat as I trudged through the streets of NYC but the stains on my trousers couldn’t be helped.

So I ignored the horrified stares of everyday citizens as I made my way south.

“Is it true?” my uncle asked me the moment I stepped onto the Hadley University campus. “A real minotaur? Is it true?”

My gaze slid over him, as annoyed as I could ever be with my beloved uncle.

Xavier Belling was the head of the prestigious astrophysics program at Hadley University. He was to be blamed for my love of all things celestial and unexplained. And I could tell he was champing at the bit to gain some insight into this fascinating new discovery.

“I’m fine, thank you for asking,” I remarked sarcastically. “Perhaps you heard of the avalanche as well? The one I was unconscious for as they flew me out on an emergency chopper?”

He just stared at me expectantly.

“It’s true,” I admitted and he beamed, bouncing on his toes as he followed me through the courtyard like a kid given permission to choose a candy at the confectionery.

“Remarkable,” he breathed in awe. “You must tell me everything.”

“Does this count as our faculty meeting for the month, then?”

I raised a brow. He laughed.

Faculty meetings for the astrophysics department only ever comprised my uncle and myself, since we were the only professors who taught the discipline. Hadley University had become the breeding ground for success in the venture of cosmic exploration. Our alumni had been directors of NASA, corporate pioneers, tech masterminds. And because of our achievement in the subject, the university had determined that it would be very selective about the students it deemed qualified enough to excel in the course of study. Therefore, my schedule was inundated with Intro to Astrophysics classes in which the Dean expected me to flunk over half of my students. So I deserved to be among the first scientists to interact with a minotaur since the dawn of recorded history. I had earned it.

“What did it look like?” He asked, drawing me out of my reverie, and I smiled as he opened the door to our wing of the sciences building and I stepped inside.

“It was enormous. At least fifteen feet tall. It was just like all the old stories describe it to be. Part man, part bull. All muscle and fur and rage.”

“It attacked you?”

“It came with an axe.”

My uncle paused. I turned to face him in the empty hall. High wooden beams arched above us, engraved with the Latin translation of one of my favorite quotes. Non est ad astra mollis e terris via. There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. And the unspoken challenge in the air of these hallowed halls that I had felt all throughout my youth. Prove him wrong.

My uncle’s brows furrowed as he raised a hand to his head, scratching idly at the wild white hair that used to be honey blonde like my own.

“An axe,” he repeated, his voice low, thinking. “What sort of axe?”

“A battle axe from the looks of it. I’m not exactly well-versed in ancient weaponry.”

“It looked old then?”

“Extremely. It had writing around the blade, forged into the metal, something rune-ish.”

“Intriguing. Most intriguing. Do you believe you could replicate it for translation if I should give you a slip of paper?”

“No,” I replied, frowning. “I was a tad busy running for my life.”

“Yes, of course, of course.”

He waved me off and began walking back down the hall toward our offices as we had been before. I followed him, knowing better than to interrupt a brilliant man when he was so lost in thought. We passed through a polished hall adorned with portrait after portrait of various distinguished alumni and former professors, the Venetian tile clicking under our feet as we passed over it.

“They said you… blew it up,” my uncle said with a frown as we reached his classroom and pushed through the door. His tone was not chiding but I could hear the disappointment in it all the same.

“I didn’t have a choice,” I told him. “It was raging, wild. The guns weren’t having any effect on it and it was killing our men.”

My uncle nodded in understanding but his frown remained as we passed through one of the smallest lecture halls on campus and one of the oldest. Rows of pristine wooden chairs lined against thick, polished mahogany desks sat facing a single lectern at which my uncle stood most mornings, waving his hands about like a lunatic as he posited on the speed of light and dared his students not to trust their own eyes. Behind that lectern sat a door and beyond that door was my uncle’s office.

Professor Xavier Belling’s office was always a horrible mess. Books and letters were open and strewn about. Jars of some unidentifiable scrounged up body parts suspended in strange liquids on every shelf. Fossilized bones and a row of neatly polished fangs of various shapes and sizes. One might never know that he was an Astrophysicist at all if it weren’t for the telescope in the corner, pointed out the window, and the spectrometer growing dusty on a top shelf. But I knew that Professor Xavier Belling’s interests were as vast as they were limitless. At first, I’d gotten the chills every time I entered this place. Now, I simply ignored it all and focused on him.

“Something strange happened,” I told him then, lowering my voice out of habit as I broached this particular subject of conversation. “Before I killed it, when it had finally reached me, it stopped.”

My uncle’s eyes met mine. I had captured his interest.

“Stopped?” he inquired, curiously. “What do you mean it stopped?”

“It sniffed me, smelled my scent, and froze. It looked just as confused as I was, like it wasn’t certain anymore if it should make a meal out of me or not.”

“Interesting,” my uncle agreed, tapping his chin.

“Do you think it knew?” I asked, unable to breathe as I did. “That it… sensed me?”

My uncle’s gaze flicked to me again, brushing over the angular features of my face, the high cheekbones, violet eyes, and honey blonde hair.

“I think it’s entirely possible,” he answered after a moment and I loosed a breath, closing my eyes. “I don’t know how much time the Fae spend with their monstrous prisoners but I imagine it may be enough for the creatures to recognize their scent.”

I flushed scarlet. I hated talking about this subject, hating being reminded of that half of me, the part of me that no one could ever know about, that my uncle and the few others we had trusted with my secret had taken great pains to keep hidden.

“Especially if they are arming them with battle axes and shoving them into the mortal plane,” I snapped, nostrils flaring.

I didn’t want to believe it, that the people I shared half of my heritage with could be so evil as to send an ancient beast plunging into the world of the mortal once again. But I couldn’t deny that it was a possibility.

After all, what did I know of my immortal kin other than what the stranger who had delivered me to my uncle when I was just a baby had told him? That there was a plane of existence somewhere above our own and that Fae and other mythical humanoids had brought there all creatures of lore and legend when it had become clear that humanity simply could not handle the existence of magic in our world. So they had separated it from us. As simple as that, my name, and a sympathetic admission that my father, my uncle’s brother, had died and that was why I’d been brought to him.

“Now, now, let’s not be hasty,” my uncle warned, holding his hands up in surrender. “I know you’re inclined to blame the Fae for these unfortunate circumstances but we do not know how that monster escaped, nor how he gained a weapon in the process.”

I opened my mouth to argue but he held up a hand.

“Still,” he continued with a tone designed to placate me, “I will ensure that the Dean is made aware of these… fresh discoveries. If the DAA wishes to look into it—”

I cut him off with a scoff. They had commissioned the Department of Astrological Anomalies just after the first rift had opened over five years ago. They had summoned my uncle then, among the other highly respected scholars the government called upon when it lacked the expertise to investigate a natural phenomena itself, and they had dispatched it with the use of their now patented polarity reversing machine. Since then, the equipment had been used to close two more rifts.

Because they had to be closed.

“How are we going to close it?” I asked then, changing the course of the conversation from the minotaur and reverting to the reason they sent me north in the first place.

My uncle frowned.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he confessed. “If it’s as big as they’re saying it is and now monsters are dropping through it unprovoked, Seren, you know we’ve encountered nothing like that before.”

I flinched at the use of my birth name. He noticed and offered a slight apologetic smile.

I understood what he wasn’t saying, what we never said. These weren’t black holes because they weren’t a natural phenomenon, an inexplicable occurrence of nature itself. They were something else. A portal of some sort, being opened into the only place where monsters such as the minotaur could exist, the place that only my uncle and I knew was real.

“Are you saying there’s no way to close it?” I asked, terror snaking like ice through my veins.

“I will never say there isn’t a way. But there isn’t one I’m currently aware of.”

My shoulders fell. I sighed.

“The Dean and I have been working on some potential solutions,” he told me. “I’ve written to Mr. Kendrick and—”

“Mr. Kendrick,” I scoffed, crossing my arms. “The man who ran from the field like a coward? The man who fled from a discovery that any researcher worth their salt would practically kill to examine?”

“Ren,” my uncle started, correcting himself, calling me by my preferred name, “I know you don’t care for the man. Frankly, I’m not fond of him myself. But the DAA has access to broader knowledge and governmental resources that we might need to face what’s coming.”

What’s coming… I hesitated.

“I will not be around forever, you know,” my uncle said then, his voice soft, almost a whisper. “I can’t always be mending bridges you’re content to burn.”

I uncrossed my arms, letting them slump at my sides. I didn’t want to have this conversation, not now, but I had avoided it enough times already. My uncle had been trying to speak with me about this for months now. I didn’t want to know why. I didn’t want to think too closely about what he might know, about what might be precipitating this dialogue.

“You should make amends with Wyn Kendrick,” he told me. “You don’t want to live the rest of your considerably long life regretting how much you could have achieved if only you’d accepted a little more help.”

I frowned, taking in the white hair, the wrinkled face, the squinting, nearly blind eyes. I could remember my uncle in his youth as though it were yesterday. It had taken little for me to love Professor Xavier Belling. The man had the best stories and the most exciting way of telling them. His passion for his work was a living, breathing thing and he passed it on to me in those years that it was just the two of us living in his moderately appointed faculty apartment, staring up at the stars and calling them by name, musing about what might be out there and never voicing the fact that we might be the only two people in the world who actually knew.

But because of what I was, because I was only half related to Professor Xavier Belling, I had to watch as his honey blonde hair turned white, as his vision left him so greatly that I had to read him his own lecture notes, as his skin sagged and wrinkled. Meanwhile, I remained physically young. I wasn’t. I was nearing sixty now. But I still looked like a woman in her early twenties, or perhaps late teens. A byproduct of being half immortal. No one knew how long I would live. It wouldn’t be forever. I was already aging quicker than a full immortal. But the length of lifespan for a hybrid seemed to vary based on the power of their immortal parent. And since I had never met my mother…

“Whenever Wyn Kendrick deigns to visit again, I promise you, most favorite uncle, that I won’t be completely vicious.”

Xavier frowned and shook his head. He sighed, exasperated, as I turned for the door. I would feel guilty about so severely disappointing my elders at a later date. Right now, I needed to prepare for my classes.