I sigh bitterly and tell him about the whole ogre ordeal.
He whistles. “Sucks to get the trick monster. We had to defeat a kappa. It’s this Japanese monster that has a little bowl of water on its head—but I’m an idiot. I tried to fight it, and I should’ve remembered that you have to bow to the damn thing. No one else in my team knew what it was, and I totally blanked.” He sighs. “Didn’t get very good scores. I did okay on the written test, but it was hard … and I went to a high school for this.”
I stop. “I wondered about that,” I say. “Has everyone else been studying this stuff forever?”
He stops too. “Some of us, but not all,” he says. “I actually went to school with Piers, Owen, and Bennett … believe it or not.”
“And?”
“And they’ve always been exactly the same,” he says. “But that Erin … I haven’t seen her before. I wonder what her connection is here.” He glances over his shoulder. “Maybe one of her parents is a monster hunter.”
“Well, you know all about that shit, right?” I ask, a little bitterly. “Don’t you know?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know everything. And Singer … I’ve never heard of any famous hunters with that name.”
He stops at a door and fumbles through his pockets, eventually extracting a key. “But who knows. Maybe she’s braver than we think.”
“Maybe.” I don’t want to talk about Erin anymore. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that she’s not going anywhere, but it’s nice not to keep an eye on her all the time. I’m afraid if she’s left alone she’ll just shatter into a million, tiny, terrified pieces. “Now that kappa,” I say. “I’d like to hear more about that.”
He laughs as he finally gets his door open. “Just watch out for any weird looking monsters with little bowls of water in their heads, and you’ll be fine.”
His dorm looks much the same as mine, but with different posters on the wall. I can tell which side is Bennett’s by the abundance of bodybuilding posters over the bed and at least a half a ton of protein powder stacked along the wall in little boxes.
Sawyer’s half of the room, however, is a kind of shrine.
All sorts of newspapers are pasted to the wall, biographies of hunters are pulled from magazines and tacked up, and replica weapons hang from every hook and sit on every shelf. I really hope this part of the world isn’t known for its earthquakes, or else this is a veritable death trap.
“Oh, hey, Avery.” He points to one of the weapon replicas on his desk as he throws down his things. “This is your dad’s axe!”
“What?” I freeze, my eyes dropping to the wicked-looking weapon cradled in his outstretched hands. It’s small, barely larger than a dagger, but the blade is curved and seriously sharp. Even from here, I can tell the replica would slice through my skin easy. These weapons are made to cut through hide, scale, armor—things much tougher than the human flesh that wields them.
“I mean, one of them. Axes were his specialty weapon, after all. This is just his most famous one,” Sawyer says, setting it back on its stand. He comes back into the hallway, beaming, and locks the door behind him before we head down
towards dinner. “I also have a replica of one of your mom’s daggers around here somewhere.”
“She used knives?”
“Sorry,” Sawyer says, smacking himself on the head. “Sometimes I forget you don’t already know these things.”
“It must be nice to forget,” I mutter, but not loud enough for him to hear me. Or, if he does, he doesn’t let on. He’s already gone glassy-eyed and started up on more of his favorite subject; my dead parents.
“Nah, she was more of an all-rounder. Daggers, spears, crossbows—you name it, she could kill with it. Your parents were amazing.”
Sawyer keeps going on, but I tone most of it out.
There’s something uncomfortable about Sawyer speaking so casually about my parents, but at the same time, I’m itching to hear more. This is the sort of stuff that Aunt Trish didn’t know because she simply didn’t want to; little details about what they actually did. I feel that slightly guilty stab in the pit of my stomach. If she hasn’t figured out where I am by now, she’ll be seriously freaking out.
It’s better this way, I remind myself.
Sawyer might be a welcome distraction, but that’s just it. He’s a distraction and nothing more. If I plan on becoming a hunter fit to fight the monster that killed my parents, it’s going to have to stay that way.
Chapter Seven
The week goes on. I try to avoid Piers, Owen, and Bennett, but they aren’t making it easy. I thought that having such small classes would create a kind of camaraderie, but the opposite is true. There’s heavy competition hanging in the air, and the fact that our real-time scores are displayed on a big screen in the foyer at all times. It’s a constant reminder of how close we all are—me, Piers, Owen, and Bennett—to being the last name at the bottom of that list at the end of the year.
We have a big gap to fill to catch up, even to Sawyer, but where I focus on being the best—the boys focus on me. More accurately, they focus on crushing me.
To make matters worse, I have an assigned seat right between Owen and Bennett in survival class with Professor Helsing. I know they’re going to cause trouble for me, and sure enough they do everything they can to make me look completely incompetent.