Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp, and your wits even sharper. Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn’t even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother’s approval. She also happens to be a demon hunter. Ever since her father''s murder, she''s been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider . . . until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, she''ll learn to hone her craft, work with other hunters, and never be alone again. But Viv has a deadly secret. One that not even her new friends at Harker can know about, not if the school might hold the answers to untangling the mystery surrounding Viv''s father’s death. When strange occurrences begin to plague the students, Viv will have to figure out who she can trust, fast, all while trying to ace her classes, avoid falling for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?

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Kate Golden

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Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp, and your wits even sharper.**

Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn’t even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother’s approval.

She also happens to be a demon hunter.

Ever since her father's murder, she's been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider . . . until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, she'll learn to hone her craft, work with other hunters, and never be alone again.

But Viv has a deadly secret. One that not even her new friends at Harker can know about, not if the school might hold the answers to untangling the mystery surrounding Viv's father’s death. When strange occurrences begin to plague the students, Viv will have to figure out who she can trust, all while trying to ace her classes, avoid falling for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?

Leseprobe
ChApter 1

Once, I crushed a beetle with my bare foot.

Nora was faster than me back then. I was all limbs and joints, with little coordination between them. We'd been playing gymnasts on the sidewalk-cartwheels resulting in skinned knees and tumbles leading to bits of asphalt embedded in our palms-when the sun-drenched day bled into a dusk that turned our neighborhood downright menacing. Or at least, that's how it looked to six-year-old me. I peered up from one of my more impressive somersaults and realized Nora was already at the stairs of our apartment building.

I ran after my big sister as if the shadows yawning off the power lines were long fingers that could seize me where I stood. I didn't even see the bug.

When the shell crunched beneath my heel-innards spreading across my foot like jam on toast-I expected revulsion. Guilt. Horror.

But none came.

I bent down to inspect the gore, my fear of creatures that slunk out with the fading daylight forgotten. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the insect's shattered exoskeleton. The still-twitching limbs. My blood thrummed with morbid allure. A predator discovering prey and, with it, a sick, insistent desire.

A desire I've fought against every single day since.

Staring down at the once-blue, now-gray gum stuck to the heel of my loafer, I try to shake the memory. I don't have time to dissect my psyche this evening. I'm late.

"Thank you so much for calling-"

I nearly jam the phone into my ear canal. "Yes? Hello?"

"Your call is very important to us. Someone from the district attorney's office will be-"

The noise I release is less human woman, more exasperated hyena. A balding man in a crumpled shirt recoils from me, and I deserve it. The Astera subway at rush hour is terrible by anyone's standards. The Astera subway at rush hour in the summer is a stinking, sweat-drenched hellscape from which few emerge with their sanity. A hellscape made worse only by all the lunatics who call this city home, and tonight, to Crumpled-Shirt Man, I am said lunatic.

But there's no time to mutter apologies. I secure the phone against my shoulder and shove past him down the stairs into the bowels of the multifloored subway. A sardine in a sweaty, sticky, tin can of conference calls, nursing scrubs, and unsupervised teenagers. My bags, water bottle, wallet, and railway card are about as secure in my hurried grasp as a handful of eels. When I maneuver through a turnstile, a dog's yapping echoes from deeper within the subway, rising above the din.

Someone behind me, equally rushed, knocks my precious phone from the crook of my shoulder and I spy the endless depths of a grate beneath my feet. A mere second before disaster, I catch the phone between my chin and collarbone. Phew. I listen to the irritating melody over the line to confirm that my spot in the queue hasn't been compromised.

What kind of mother is more likely to answer her work line than her cell? I'm all for boundaries, but if I hear one more automated woman tell me how valuable my time is, I'm going to implode. While I wait for my train, the Muzak blares in my ear and that dog yowls again.

Every time a train thunders past, the entire tunnel flickers. One fluorescent light high above is missing a bulb. My stomach growls, and I wonder if every suit on the crowded platform can hear it over the rumble of the subway cars. I search through my leather tote-a designer bag my from my mother, which I hate yet carry daily out of some misplaced guilt-and find the soft pretzel I grabbed on my way to work this morning.

This morning.

Shit. I haven't eaten today.

My mother once told me that forgetting to eat when stressed is a superpower. I'm about to cram as much of the stale, salty dough into my mouth as I can in an act of fierce rebellion against such an archaic, patriarchal notion when I finally catch sight of the dog that's been barking for the last ten minutes.

Against the tiled wall to my left, below graffiti depicting white antlers on Caspar Harlock's ad for his burgeoning news network, sits a yowling, dark-haired mutt, not too unlike my own. He's barking mostly at his owner, a kid with matted hair, leathery skin from too much sun, and clothes that I can smell from here.

The boy's sign reads: Hungry, Anything Helps.

Astera-the Half City, the country's epicenter of culture, business, and politics, located on the glittering edge of the eastern seaboard. We must have the largest population of billionaires in the world-our graffitied Caspar Harlock over there and my best friend Penny Pine's parents, to name a few-and yet a seriously shameful percentage of the city is living on the street. And who can you blame for a cycle that never breaks? Those in government? Say, perhaps, our tough-as-nails district attorney?

Whose office I am still on hold with?

Even though she birthed me?

It's moments like these in which I almost understand my mother's obsession with marrying me off to James Pine like some tragic Dickensian wretch. It's the same part of her that g…