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Half City Chapters 18–26 Summary
This Kate Golden Half City chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Half City Chapter 18
In Monster Identification, Peter notes that Kitty still hasn’t returned the textbooks that dropouts must hand in within 48 hours, deepening his suspicion that something’s wrong.
Reid interrupts class to take his Field Training students to hunt a deviant in Astera. Viv forces her way into the group despite his repeated refusals, and he finally agrees on the condition that she only observe.
The deviant turns out to be a vampire hiding at Shiloh Asylum, a decaying psychiatric facility on a small island off the coast. While Reid distracts the front desk, Viv’s aeon instincts pull her away from the group and into a restricted section.
Viv tracks the vampire, who’s posing as an orderly, to an abandoned floor. After losing her stake in a fall, she ends up locked in a corridor alone with the vampire and nothing to fight him with. She improvises by snapping a mop in half and driving the splintered handle through the vampire’s chest, but not before he injects her with a large dose of Valium.
As the sedative pulls her under, Viv notices a woman locked in a barred cell at the end of the corridor. The elderly woman, who may be a patient, cryptically tells Viv that the High Thane is coming for the last of them. Before Viv can question the woman, Reid arrives, finds Viv disoriented, and gets her out of the building.
Half City Chapter 19
Reid guides Viv, still heavily sedated, onto the subway back to Harker. Loosened up by the drug, Viv tells him the Brood killed her father, that she was there when it happened, and that her mother has never forgiven her for not saving him. Reid admits he joined the Brood to please his parents, then tells Viv with unexpected warmth that it was inexcusable for her mother to blame a child for her father’s death. Before Viv drifts off, she snaps a photo of him on her half-frame. Reid catches her before she falls.
Once Viv sobers up, she and Reid walk back to Harker in silence. Viv goes straight to her dorm, cringing at how much she’d given away.
Furious, Sophia is waiting when Viv returns. She confronts Viv for disappearing in the asylum, pointing out that she and Reid had no way of knowing whether Viv was alive or dead. Viv apologizes and admits she left Sophia behind out of habit.
Sophia then tells Viv she’s figured out that Viv is an aeon, having noticed that Viv’s tracking went far beyond normal hunter instincts. Viv panics. No one has known her secret since her father died. Sophia promises to keep the secret and tells Viv she’ll always have her back. Viv admits how lonely it’s been carrying the secret alone and confesses she’s always been afraid of hurting someone. Sophia reassures her, and the two share a quiet moment of real closeness.
Half City Chapter 20
Over breakfast, Peter shares updates on Kitty. Kitty’s phone has been disconnected, and she hasn’t responded to anything. The registrar confirmed that Kitty formally withdrew several days after her roommates received the goodbye letter. The group agrees to search Kitty’s room the following morning.
In Combat Training, Reid runs the class’s first practical test. Each student must identify the right weapon for a given deviant and land a hit on Reid with it. Most pass, though Matt grabs the wrong weapon for a troll and ends up on the ground for it. Reid gives Viv a hydra, which would normally call for mermaid tears, but Matt already wasted them. Viv chooses a crossbow loaded with mirror dust and puts a bolt clean through Reid’s shoulder. He looks impressed before she even fires.
Sophia draws a hellhound last, but someone has already taken the weapon she needs. She sprints to the top of the coliseum stands, dips her oil-coated sword into a burning torch, and comes back down swinging a flaming blade at Reid. He puts out the fire by pinning the sword between them and rolling with Sophia through the stands until the flames die, making sure Sophia passes without getting hurt. The class cheers.
Viv watches Reid pack up and reluctantly admits he’s a genuinely good teacher who’s been outfighting the entire class at a fraction of his actual strength. Beneath his cold exterior, she senses something pained and lonely.
Half City Chapter 21
Viv and Sophia watch a lacrosse game while their friend Elliot plays. Bat and Blood is winning, and the girls make plans to celebrate afterward.
Between bursts of cheering, Viv and Sophia share more than expected. Viv reveals that her father was a hunter who attended the same school and died when she was ten. Sophia opens up about her own unconventional upbringing, though she keeps most of it close to the chest.
Then the game falls apart. A scream rips through the crowd, and the bleachers collapse into chaos. Instead of running, Viv and Sophia push upward to see what’s happening. From higher up, Viv sees the lacrosse field has turned into a war zone, with reanimated corpses streaming in from the school cemetery just yards away.
Viv and Sophia quickly determine it isn’t the work of deviants. Someone cast a spell. The goal shifts to finding whoever’s responsible and stopping it. The bleachers are too chaotic to navigate, so Viv jumps over the edge, and the two run for the cemetery, where hundreds of reanimated dead crawl out of the tombs.
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Half City Chapter 22
Viv and Sophia take cover at the cemetery entrance and watch zombies drag themselves out of open graves toward the lacrosse field. They try to force the iron gates shut, but the gates have already been ripped from their hinges.
Dean Driscoll arrives and unleashes powerful magic to fight off the dead. He senses the object of origin inside an open crypt, tells the girls to close the gates, and heads down to destroy it.
Since the gates are beyond fixing, Viv and Sophia climb the oak tree at the entrance and scream until the herd swarms the trunk. The combined weight topples the tree, and they jump free just before it crashes across the entrance, trapping the remaining zombies inside. Viv and Sophia fight through what’s left on their side until the campus lights cut out.
When the lights come back on, every zombie is down. Dean Driscoll emerges from the crypt, wounded and covered in ash, holding the crushed skull that anchored the spell. He tells Viv and Sophia they saved lives. Professor Lisette arrives and, over the dean’s objections, coldly orders the girls to the field to help rebury the dead.
There Viv and Sophia find Elliot, battered but alive. When he pulls them into a hug, Viv feels a burning pain and breaks away to find her daggers scalding hot and glowing, scorching the grass. It’s never happened before.
Half City Chapter 23
Two Harker students were killed during the zombie attack, and the school is still shaken. Most classes are canceled for the week while the administration works out how an outsider managed to cast a spell that bypassed the school’s defenses. Viv also hears from James. He asks her to dinner, and she agrees.
In Combat Training, Reid arrives looking badly beaten from the attack. Too demoralized to train, the students watch as he brings in Professor Crowley, who wheels in a caged werewolf. Reid calls on Peter to fight the creature despite Peter’s limited experience with werewolves.
Peter goes down to the arena floor and holds his ground when the wolf is released, but he struggles badly. He makes rookie mistakes, and the wolf starts mauling him. Even Reid’s guidance from the sidelines does nothing. Crowley grows uneasy but defers to Reid and doesn’t step in.
When the wolf knocks Peter’s sword away and closes in for the kill, Viv leaps from the stands onto the arena floor and pulls the wolf off Peter.
Half City Chapter 24
Viv pulls the werewolf off Peter, who scrambles back to his sword. Instead of going for the kill, Viv notices the wolf smells clean and well-fed and realizes the twelve-hour moon window is nearly up. She stops fighting and leads the wolf on a chase around the arena to burn down the clock. She cuts her hand to throw the wolf off her scent, then pushes to the top of the coliseum. Just as the wolf closes in, the sun breaks through, and the werewolf shifts back into a man.
The students cheer, but the man attacks Viv from behind in a rage. Reid sprints up and kills him with a silver sword.
After everyone clears out, Reid confronts Viv for jumping in uninvited and for not finishing the werewolf when she had the chance. They argue, with Reid accusing Viv of reckless grandstanding and Viv insisting she only kills when a life is truly on the line.
Viv grudgingly thanks Reid for saving her, and when she grabs his forearm, his eyes flash red. Her touch triggers his hunger. Viv notices the reaction and uses Reid’s distraction to lift his key card from his belt loop before stepping away, leaving him none the wiser.
Half City Chapter 25
Walking back from the arena, the group wonders why Crowley kept the werewolf alive. Peter mentions a syrabraxa, a dark magic spell that, in rare cases, strips an aeon of all aeon abilities entirely. The idea takes hold of Viv, who imagines life without aeon genetics.
Then Viv asks Peter about her daggers glowing after the zombie attack. Peter leads the group to the armory, where they discover the third dagger missing from a glass display case. Peter explains that Viv’s two blades belong to a legendary three-piece set that ancient magic binds together, and Peter guesses that when the third dagger was destroyed or damaged, the other two reacted.
Viv decides Elliot and Peter need to know the truth about her. She can’t get the words out, so Sophia tells them for her. Both boys take it in stride and promise to keep Viv’s secret.
Afterward, Viv asks the armorer about the missing dagger. The logs show that Kitty checked it out on the night of the zombie spell, which is impossible since Kitty had already vanished from school by then. The armorer doesn’t remember opening the case, which means someone with a faculty key was involved. Viv returns to her friends, shaken, telling them she’s only made things murkier.
Half City Chapter 26
Viv uses Reid’s stolen key card to get the group into the archives and tells them about the armory log showing Kitty’s name on the missing dagger. The group theorizes that the wraith infiltration and the zombie attack were deliberate distractions to cover Kitty’s disappearance and the dagger theft. The group agrees they can’t bring their theory to the faculty, since a staff member may already be involved.
Using an enchanted compendium, the group finds a 1948 article explaining that dark rituals can use the Aeon’s Dagger after someone smelts it.
That leads Peter to search for syrabraxa ingredients. Inside a classified grimoire, the group finds a recipe that calls for the liquified third dagger, a rare flower called the celestial bloom, the eye of the casting witch, and aeon’s blood. Sophia cross-references the article and discovers that the celestial bloom, known as an asphodel, grows in a restricted garden hidden somewhere on campus. The group concludes that someone at Harker is gathering the ingredients needed to create a syrabraxa.
Aeon’s blood on that list puts Viv in direct danger. The group decides that Peter will investigate the location of the asphodel garden while the others continue to brainstorm. After everyone leaves, Viv stays behind and uses the time to search for her father’s real name.