by Callie Rose
“Do you know how many times I’ve thought about your lips wrapped around me? How many times I’ve fucked my own hand in the shower, imagining it was your sweet mouth? Your pussy? Your ass?”
His nostrils flared as he spoke, and he began to push up harder into my mouth. I relaxed my jaw and let him have some control, and he used the grip on my hair to guide my movements, pushing deeper into my throat with each thrust—never hurting me, but straining the boundaries of what I could take.
“I’ve imagined fucking you in every position I can think of, in every room of this damn castle.” His voice dropped lower, rasping with strain as I felt him thicken against my tongue. “I’ve imagined taking you in this room. Against the wall. In the shower. On this very fucking bench.”
His words were like a shot of desire injected straight into my veins. It wasn’t just the dirty promise in them that lit me on fire, it was the truth in them.
He wanted me. He might not want to want me, but at least I wasn’t alone in being drawn toward him by a pull too strong to resist. At least he felt the same things I felt.
And if I had my way, we’d check off every single one of his dirtiest fantasies in real life.
My clit throbbed harder, and I focused back in on his cock, creating suction with my lips and sucking as I pumped up and down his length.
“Fuck… Fuck… Fuck!”
His last word was punctuated with a thrust of his hips, and then he exploded, bathing the back of my throat with his cum. The sound of him, the feel and taste of him, pushed me over the edge too. I came on his heels, my clit throbbing and my core clenching despite never having been touched. My world exploded into white sparks as I continued to suck and lap at him, the movements jerky and desperate as I fought to maintain control.
He gasped in shuddering breaths as I licked every inch of his dick clean, and when I finally pulled back, he released his grip on my hair.
We gazed at each other across the few feet that separated our faces. His dick was still hard. It had hardly softened at all, despite the intensity of his orgasm, and my body was already starting to contemplate all the amazing things he could do with that thing if he wasn’t done yet.
“That was…” His chest rose and fell a few times as he tried to catch his breath. Then he shook his head, seeming to give up on trying to find words to describe it. “Thank you.”
“Pretty sure I should be the one thanking you,” I shot back, rising slowly to my feet. “I feel like I could bench press a truck right now.”
My body was so full of energy, I could’ve sworn my skin was glowing slightly.
“So, are you all powered up?” Kingston asked, hooking his hands into the waistband of my pants and tugging me toward him. His gaze flicked down to my core, and I knew he could probably smell me. Smell how turned on I was. What sucking his cock had done to me. “What happens if you… overcharge?”
His green eyes had that teasing glint in them, and something warm sparked in my heart even as desire ran through me like a river.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I murmured, letting him pull me even closer. “It’s never enough.”
His arms banded around my lower back as he pulled me onto his lap again, a low growl rising in his throat before he kissed me. His cock was still free, so when I straddled his hips again, the only thing separating us was the thin fabric of my leggings. But they would be easy enough to get rid of.
I rocked against him. Despite the fact that he’d just come in my mouth, he was hard as steel beneath me, clearly ready for me.
And I hadn’t been kidding. It was never enough.
Our bodies began to move in sync as we kissed long and deep and hard. I wondered if he could taste himself on my tongue, and the thought sent a jolt of lust through me. I grabbed for the hem of his shirt, ready to say “fuck the consequences” and just hope our luck held out and no one found us in here—
The lights flickered.
Kingston and I both froze, breaking our kiss to blink at each other in surprise. Panic fluttered in my chest. “What now?”
Then the room was plunged into darkness.
Chapter Seventeen
Screams of panic echoed in the hallway outside. Kingston grabbed my hand and half-ran, half-stumbled toward the commotion. Spots of magical lights floated here and there, but not enough to get a sense of what was going on.
Since the Combat gym was in the basement, there wasn’t even any natural light to alleviate the crushing darkness. I heard a crashing noise to my left and saw an energy ball blast off to the right. There was nothing but chaos all around us.
“What is going on?” I shouted. My voice was swallowed up by the frantic screams of everyone around me, or so I thought. Seconds after I shouted, I sensed Kai beside me.
“Lights went out,” he said shortly. “We don’t know why. People are so on edge from the last attack, they’re freaking out about nothing. Owen’s fighting with the wall. Just students so far, no teachers.”
“Do you see Jayce or Xero or Hannah?” I was rapidly gaining a new appreciation for vampires.
“This way.” He took my other hand and it sent a shockwave of pleasure up my arm to my brain. I didn’t fight it or revel in it, just let it be. His touches happened so infrequently that they usually got me a little bit high, but I was too freaked out to enjoy it.
“Jayce!” I called as soon as I sensed him.
“Piper! Can you get them to calm the hell down and stop blowing things up for no reason?” Jayce groped for me in the dark, then threw his arms around my neck and kissed my forehead.
“They can’t hear me,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”
I wasn’t sure how true that was, but the sheer panic radiating off all of the dark bodies around me was rattling my brain. I couldn’t focus enough to draw persuasion up to the surface to use, and Hannah was still lost somewhere in this crowd.
“This way,” Kai said shortly.
Jayce moved around behind me and kept his hands on my shoulders as we pressed forward.
“Hey! Let go!” Hannah blurted when we finally reached her in the crowd.
“It’s okay! It’s okay! It’s us.” I groped for her face in the darkness and almost poked her in the eye. “Kai can see in the dark. Grab on and come with us, we have to find Xero.”
My heart was beginning to pound frantically. Xero had been the focus of so much hate and fear over the last few months, I was terrified that someone was going to use this as an excuse to hurt him. Or worse.
Kai led us in a zig-zag through the crowd, shouting instructions like left and right and get down! That last one was to dodge a stray energy ball that some moron had fired blindly. It must have been dark energy because I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it as it singed my hair.
“Where the fuck is he, Kai?” I felt like we had walked through the whole labyrinth, and someone was still shaking the walls. I got the terrifying image of the whole castle crashing down on our heads and forced it out of my mind.
“I don’t know, I can’t see him,” Kai growled between his teeth. “You’re sure he was down here?”
My heart nearly stopped. He hadn’t been in the locker room at all earlier. I hadn’t picked up his warm, fiery scent. The note Hannah had passed me earlier about some students jumping him—what if they’d done it? What if he was lying broken and hurt somewhere?
Kai had come to a complete stop. We huddled together in the dark, scrunching closer every time someone ran blindly into us.
“Come on!” The vampire dragged us sharply back the way we’d come, then took a few sharp turns. He finally stopped, then let go of my hand and pushed my shoulders until I was standing flat-backed against a cool, solid wall. The others joined me moments later as Kai lined us all up.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting Xero,” he said shortly. “Don’t move.”
We all held hands. Kingston, me, Jayce, and Hannah. The chaos had only increased around us. The floor shook
in rhythmic bursts. The ceiling lit up with electricity sporadically. I cursed the teachers for how slow they were to respond to literally any emergency. Where the hell was Beedle? He, at the very least, should have been down here before this even started.
“Nobody move!” Toland’s voice boomed through the darkness, amplified somehow. It dwarfed the earth-shaking crashes, which stopped almost immediately. “There is no need to panic.”
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t missing his person. I chewed my lip, slowly going insane. Where the hell was Xero? I was just about to break away from the wall and wade into the dark after Kai when I smelled the pure aroma of fire. Xero.
“Got him.” Kai shoved him toward the wall next to Kingston.
“Where were you?” I demanded.
“Staff locker room,” he said under his breath. “Talking to Beedle. Rumor was I was gonna get jumped after class today. Was explaining to him why I was going to stay a while after, and we got to talking.”
The lights flickered back on overhead, illuminating what was left of the basement. Owen, in his panic, had smashed a massive hole in the wall that separated the gyms from the labyrinthine corridors. He looked around, blinking sheepishly as his stone demon form melted away, leaving only his usual geeky self in its place.
“Everyone form a line in the center hallway,” Toland intoned.
People were still in various stages of panic and weren’t listening. Kingston and I exchanged an annoyed look. Our group moved as a unit toward the center hall, pushing our way through people who were still freaking out.
Then Toland bellowed, bringing the room to silence. “Everyone! Form a single line in the center hall! Now!”
“We’re going to be questioned again,” a girl piped up somewhere to my left. Her voice sounded strained to the point of breaking.
“We already know what caused this,” Toland said loudly over the chattering mess of students. He sounded frustrated by the lack of order, but not furious like he had after the sprites were set loose. “Circuits were damaged during the sprite attack. Some of that damage went unnoticed and caused a short. Repairs are well underway, as you could probably deduce from the fact that the lights are on. Form! A single! Line!”
“If they could just listen for like half a second, we could all get out of here,” Jayce said. I’d never heard him sound so grumpy, and I looked back at him in surprise.
“Look at what they did,” he explained. His voice shook as he gestured around at the disaster. “For no reason! Can you imagine what this crowd would do during rolling blackouts?” He rubbed a hand over his face and groaned.
It took way too long, but eventually Toland got everybody under control. He and his assistants separated us into two groups; one bound for the infirmary, the other dismissed for the rest of the period. That suited me just fine. I was sorely bothered, and I needed to talk it through to pinpoint exactly what it was.
I knew part of it. I definitely didn’t believe that the school would just let damage go unnoticed. Even if they had missed something somehow, I didn’t think a short would go that long without making itself known. Something wasn’t adding up, and I wanted to see if anybody else thought this was weird.
When we were finally released from the basement, all I wanted to do was go up. Anywhere up. I was feeling incredibly claustrophobic after all of that and needed air. Hannah had been sent to the infirmary with a burned hand, but the guys stuck close to me. All of them.
“Hannah’s tower?” Jayce suggested.
I shook my head. “Roof. I need space.”
Nobody argued, which made me wonder if I had inadvertently used persuasion on them, but I shook the thought away. I would have felt it—I was getting better at controlling my powers, and it wasn’t really the kind of thing you could do accidentally.
The stairs seemed to go on for miles, past the dormitory floor, past a floor filled with little attic spaces, until it led to a door which opened up onto the roof. There wasn’t as much snow as I’d anticipated, which was nice. Short ledges ran around the inside of the protective wall, and I led the group to sit down on one of them.
“All right, raise your hands if you think the sprites caused a short that didn’t show up for months,” Kingston said as soon as we were all situated.
Nobody moved a muscle.
Kingston nodded. “That’s what I thought. More sabotage?”
“They didn’t even seem sure the sprites were sabotage,” I pointed out. “Maybe this place is just so old it’s starting to crumble.”
“They were sure,” Xero said quietly. “Trust me.”
My heart squeezed with something between pity and fury. That fierce protectiveness rose up in my chest again, but I had no idea how to express it. I clenched my fist and glared over the parapet.
“I think it was Sonja,” I said.
Jayce’s eyes widened in surprise. “Really? I don’t know, that seems like a stretch. She’s been telling everybody she suspects you. She couldn’t suspect you if she’s the one who did the thing.”
Kingston and I shared a look.
“Right, okay, but here’s the thing. If she is the one who did it, wouldn’t she want to fling suspicion away from her as fast and as firmly as possible? She would want to point everybody’s attention away from her so they didn’t suspect her.” I spoke as gently as possible, silently blessing Jayce for being so pure.
Rueful realization dawned on his face. I hated to wreck Jayce’s world view, but we couldn’t afford to be naïve.
“She could be framing you,” Kingston said, nodding. “It would make sense, since she already has a grudge against you.”
“She’s tried to sabotage my reputation, my confidence, and even my enrollment. You know she pushed the Custodians to send us to the underworld before they even had a chance to offer us the alternative? She’s been gunning for me since the moment she laid eyes on me.”
“Okay,” Jayce said slowly. “But that’s all conjecture, right? I mean, I trust you, Piper, but if you don’t have any evidence, aren’t you just doing the same thing she is?”
I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “It’s not all conjecture. Her minions cornered me in Combat the day the sprites were released, but one of them was missing. That’s pretty coincidental timing.”
“And Sonja was fighting with you today,” Kingston added. “Maybe she was setting herself up for an alibi while her friends sabotaged the lights?”
“Makes sense to me,” I said.
Jayce frowned. “I don’t know. It’s not a lot to go on.”
“She does hate us,” Kai said slowly. “But does she hate us enough to ruin the whole school to get rid of us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Some of the things she’s said make me think that she isn’t completely thrilled about how the Custodians are running things. She might just be setting things in motion for something bigger. She’s graduating this year, isn’t she? She’d be in line for a job with the Custodians. This could give her something to point at and say ‘see, this isn’t working, this is why we need to do things my way.’”
Even as I spoke, I hoped I was wrong, but it made so much sense I couldn’t just ignore it.
“And her way would be to send people straight to the underworld if they pissed her off,” Jayce said with a wince.
I nodded. We sat in silence for a while.
“Regardless,” Xero said quietly. “We should all be very, very careful from now on.”
His big brown eyes looked so sad it just about broke my heart.
Chapter Eighteen
Hannah was back in class the following period, which was a relief. Her hand was bandaged and she looked a little loopy, but at least she wasn’t in pain. She sketched a brief smile at me as I slid into the desk beside her, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. It wasn’t just her; everybody in the room was subdued. Whispers floated around between desks and the rustle of notes being passed filled the air.
Even the professor was distracted
. Jewel, the Human Relations professor, was a tiny woman with messy hair and big glasses. She sat on top of her desk at the front of the room, staring at a spot on the floor. I’d been a few minutes late to class, but it didn’t look like I had missed anything.
“Um… roll call,” she said distractedly. She held up the roll call sheet to read it, then put it down again. Instead, she just looked around at the faces in the room. Her eyes filled with tears. “Well, you’re all here. That’s good. No injuries? Oh, a couple of you. I’m so sorry, dears.”
She sniffled a bit and shuffled a stack of papers on her desk. She picked up the syllabus and put it down again, then picked up the primer. She put that away too and sighed.
“Okay. Why even bother? Nobody’s going to remember anything we learn today anyway.” She stuck her fingers under her glasses to rub her watery eyes. “But you’re stuck with me, so we’re going to talk. Let me tell you something, class. Up until the sprite attack, I would have sworn that this school was the safest place in the world for fallen. Now—between the sprite attack and the chaos downstairs, I just—I just don’t know anymore.”
“But it’s still this or the underworld, right?” The man’s voice sounded rough and forced, like he was afraid and trying very hard not to show it.
“I’m afraid so, dear. The Custodians won’t allow fallen to run loose all over the planet, that’s the whole point of their organization. Gods, but I wish there was something we could do.”
People began talking amongst themselves, and she didn’t stop them. She struck up a conversation with the question asker and the person sitting beside him. I took the opportunity to talk to Hannah.
“I think Sonja is trying to frame me and my guys,” I said quietly. “I think she did this, and I think she released the sprites. Or her minions did anyway.”
Hannah frowned the same way that Jayce had. “Piper, I know you’ve had issues with her, but—”