Page 7 of The Teras Trials

I bite my tongue. He stares at me, jaw clenched. I wonder if he’ll hit me if I try to say no. I will die as a Hunter. I know I will. I throw up my hands, pretending to be calm. “I’m not even in yet.”

Thaddeus’ fist comes down hard. The wooden table echoes the anger dully, reverberating it; I feel it in my feet, my heart. Both my mother and I jump. Thaddeus points to me, seething.

“Hunter,” he says.

If I became a Hunter, a good one, London couldn’t afford to kick us out. With an Open Call, they are clearly more than desperate—for candidates in every field. But there is no doubt the class that would go out and kill the teras is more in demand. Hunters die all the time. London always needs more of them.

I squirm but I know Thaddeus is right. I need to be in demand.

I swallow and consider my brother. He is always shifting. One moment he is my brother, and a good one at that. A man who clearly loves me, or at the very least respects me. The man who’d taken me to hunt in Watford was that version of Thaddeus.

Then, in other moments, he is this. Vicious. An animal cornered and lashing out. It makes sense—this life does that to you—but the knowledge never stops the sting.

I let it fester for only half a second. Then I close my eyes and stop the feeling at the source, hardening my heart against my brother’s disdain. Right now, in this moment, I am a liability. If the Jones family had had one fewer child, perhaps the University would have looked the other way. But I tip the balance. Now I’ll be the deciding factor on whether my parents can live out their days in London or die in the wilds of teras-infested lands.

I roll my shoulders and flash Thad a toothy grin. “Hunter,” I say with a brightness I don’t feel. “If I make it in at all.”

“You will,” Thaddeus says.

It’s not encouragement. It’s barely support.

It is Thaddeus’ command.

4

LESSON FOUR

The Calling starts that afternoon.

A whining, high-pitched drone; a siren calling out to England. The wind stops, the rain quietens. The whole world seems to pause and listen. The keening is a cry and an invitation all in one, sent out from the very core of London. It reverberates past the city’s wards, the curious, massive stones that give London its impenetrable barrier. The sound travels past that and out into the open, vulnerable heartland. It rings out on the hour, every hour.

That night, I pray.

I also wallow, in a sense.

Thaddeus is on call, so I have the room to myself. I get down on my knees and clasp my hands and whisper a pleading and desperate prayer to a God who rarely thinks of me. I do it with every bit of vigour and faith I can muster. I offer my complete devotion. I offer whatever it takes. And once I’m done, I sit there, locked in place like a statue, and I wait. I wait for the sign that I’ve been heard.

I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I am not filled with relief. I want to be a saint at that moment. I want to be touched by God’s light. But I’m just a boy and I’m unremarkable. I am probably filled with sin. I am not like my brother. I am not like my father. I know I take after my mother. I know all of them think that I’m feminine and soft, and I know my mother is sending another prayer to God this evening, that I will wake up a brute. Whatever it takes to stay in this city.

For some reason, that’s the thing that makes me cry.

I feel like a freak for crying at all. It’s not something the men of London do. It’s certainly not something a Jones man is meant to do. But my father hasn’t been more than a vacant watcher in years, and Thaddeus is gone. I’m alone and I let myself cry. And then, when it starts to hurt, when I start to really feel it, I fumble under the bed for a bottle.

It’s laudanum. I won’t pretend there’s anything good inside that bottle, but it’s numbing and freeing and it’s what I need. The doctors gave it to my father, but he’s beyond it now like he’s beyond this world. He hardly blinks. He hardly breathes. He does not need this golden substance as I do.

I shudder in revulsion as the bitter thing slides down my throat. And then I wait for the magic of it. Laudanum. Laudanum. From the Latin laudare. To praise. When the first bit of swimming delirium hits me, I praise God. I roll the Lord’s name around my tongue as I swim in His ecstasy, His freedom.

I don’t know if I sleep or if I just slip somewhere between waking and unconscious, but I welcome whatever it is. The liminality of oblivion. Wrapped up in the flimsy embrace of a white cotton sheet, I watch the lamplight flicker on my eyelids, and ride the throbbing euphoria until it dissipates.

When it’s out of my system, the sadness hits me. Barely an hour has passed; every awful thing has stayed the same. Whenever the high drifts away, I am left with the remains of something heavy and unsettling. My body feels absent. My skin feels wrapped around the wrong bones. I can feel every tendon working like an old and rusty automaton, everything squeaking and on the verge of breaking. To put it simply, it leaves me feeling wrong.

I like to imagine there’s something to it: if laudanum is holy, if its highs bring me closer to God, what’s left over when it's gone is something of the Devil. Perhaps it's me—the real me. The dregs at the bottom of your tea. When everything else is stripped away, here I am, a pile of shit to be scraped off your boot.

I know self-pity is not a good trait. After a few minutes of wallowing, I haul myself up. There are only a few days until the admission trials. I’m not even sure what they are. But suddenly Thad is in my ear, crowding against me, hand around my throat.

Hunter, he screams, you fucking choose hunter.

I recall the sound of the beast at Watford, the curdling cries of something not of this world. Unbidden, every genus and class of monster in England comes to me, crawling forward to attack. I feel too young for this. Too unprepared. I am grateful for Thad’s absence, then, because I know the way he’d look at me. With shaking hands, I light another cigarette and throw on my coat and my boots. I bring my flintlock gun, my sparker, and the tag that tells the guards who I am. That I belong here. Without it, I won’t be able to get back in.

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