by Callie Rose
As we reached the gyms, we heard the screaming. Something was very, very wrong upstairs. The whole school had erupted into chaos again.
But… why? Owen was gone. And he’d been the one causing all the disruptions and problems all year.
“We’re sure he’s dead?” Jayce’s voice was strained.
“Yes. He couldn’t have survived that,” Kingston said firmly.
We stopped talking and sprinted faster, all of our energy focused on getting up the last flight of stairs as quickly as possible. When we burst out into the main hall, the full force of the pandemonium hit me square in the face. People were sobbing hysterically, clinging to one another. Others were standing in horrified silence, just staring.
“Shit. Hannah! We have to find Hannah!” I blurted, finally succumbing to my own panic.
Like magic, she was there when we turned the corner. Her face was streaked with tears, her hair was a mess, and she was shaking like a leaf.
“Hannah! What happened?”
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped. “Something’s really, really wrong. We all… we couldn’t have all… I didn’t even finish my exams. How could I have failed? How could we—”
I grabbed her and shook her shoulders, fear clawing at my chest. “Hannah. What are you talking about?”
She blinked at me but didn’t seem capable of speech. Then opened and closed her mouth, then licked her lips and took my hand. I shot an anxious glance back at the guys, who trailed close behind us.
Without a word, Hannah led us through the school, past clusters of students huddled close together. The air stank of terror. Hannah was trembling so hard she almost stumbled, and I wrapped an arm around her waist. She’d always been sensitive, but I had never seen her like this. Whatever was going on here, it was a whole new level of trauma.
She brought us into the main hall, and my first thought was to wonder how long we’d been downstairs. All of the lights were on, and I couldn’t see any daylight at all.
“What time is it?” I asked.
My friend just shook her head. Gripping my hand so hard it hurt, she led me to the windows and pointed. I looked out, expecting moonlight at the very least.
But there wasn’t any.
A red glow lit up a foreign terrain, all sharp edges and blackness. I rubbed my eyes and looked again.
A cave? An endless cave. Stalactites kissed stalagmites, making it feel like I was looking through the teeth of some massive monster. Lava bubbled out of a crack, forming a glowing red stream which snaked across the black ground.
Xero took a sharp breath beside me. I looked up at him and was terrified to see silver tears trickling down his cheeks.
“I don’t think we’re on Mönkh Saridag anymore,” I breathed, my voice catching.
“You think?” Kingston said sharply.
Kai took a shuddering breath. “Xero. Is this—are we—?”
“The underworld.” The fire demon’s voice was stark. “Everything. All of us. The whole school.”
Hannah wailed. I held her close to me as she sobbed.
“We all failed,” she choked through her sobs. “We must’ve failed our exams. We’re all banished!”
I shook my head, a grim realization filling my heart with lead. Whatever Owen had been trying to do in that room deep below the castle, we hadn’t stopped it in time. I’d thought he was trying to attack the school—but all along, he’d been trying to move it.
“No. You didn’t fail,” I promised her. “I did.”
The six of us stood in solemn silence, looking out over the dark, fiery landscape. A single bitter thought filled my head.
Welcome home, Xero.
Fallen University: Year Two
Chapter One
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
…or, you know, a remote mountain range between Russia and Mongolia.
Hannah scrunched close to me as we sat on my bed, staring out of the window at the dark landscape beyond. It was definitely not Mönkh Saridag.
We’d been here all night, keeping a strange, silent vigil. We had talked a little, but not much. Enough for her to know that Owen was responsible for transporting us here. And that he was dead. Nothing else seemed important right now; at least not until we knew whether or not we could ever get back home.
“We aren’t sure this is the underworld though,” Hannah said after a long, bleak silence. There was a hopeful, almost desperate lilt to her voice. “Maybe the school just fell through a collapsed cave or something. We’re probably still on earth, right?”
I didn’t want to point out that a collapse like that would have felt like the worst earthquake ever, or that this transportation had been completely seamless. The tone of her voice suggested she already knew those things but just wasn’t ready to face them yet.
“I guess we’ll find out soon,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and even. “If a sun even rises out there.”
My window had shown me nothing but pitch black throughout most of the night. Now, in what seemed to be the early hours of dawn, an eye-shaped swath of black in the distance was turning gray. Hannah blinked and rubbed her eyes, craning her head forward slightly. I did the same. We’d been up all night; it was entirely possible we were both hallucinating.
But we weren’t. As the light outside got brighter, it also got way more red. Super red. Not like the old sci-fi interpretations of Mars—more like the angry, dull burn of a dying star. Shadows began to take shape in the deep darkness outside, and I could finally interpret what I was looking at. We were in a cave, or something similar. Shit, maybe whatever spell Owen had used to transport us here had gutted a mountain. There were certainly plenty of those to choose from, at least, on earth. I had to imagine the underworld was the same.
The red light streaming through the eye-shaped hole in the distance illuminated the landscape inside the cave. It truly was a cave, but it was so massive it almost didn’t feel like one. It was so wide and tall that I couldn’t even make out all the walls, except for the one with the hole in it. And the terrain around us was… well…
“Oh, God,” Hannah whispered.
“Yeah, I don’t think he can hear you from all the way down here,” I muttered, not taking my gaze off the sight outside.
Massive slags of black slate rose like jagged teeth across the blood-red horizon. Bubbling black bogs spread across the land in front of us.
“I saw an image of an aneurysm once,” I said quietly. “Back in college. A big black splat with snaking arms. It looked like death. It looked just like those.”
She shuddered beside me, reaching out with a trembling hand to point into the distance. “Are those trees?”
They looked more like bones, leafless and gnarled. Great white fingers pierced the ground, reaching up for the sky as if they wanted to claw the blood from the clotted clouds.
“I hope so,” I said. “If they’re not, I don’t want to know what they are.”
She was silent for a long moment, but I could practically hear her thinking, her brain whirring as she tried to figure out how to fix this. I hadn’t known Hannah long, but we’d gotten to know each other very well, very fast because of the intense circumstances of our meeting. Being turned into demons together will do that to people.
Finally, she turned to me, her amber eyes shining. “Do you think Toland knows how we got here?”
I shook my head. “I’m not even sure how we got here. And I never got a chance to tell Toland anything before we were sent to our rooms yesterday.”
The school had been placed on lockdown as soon as the admins and staff had realized where we were. We had all been sent to our rooms and told to remain there until morning, when we’d have an assembly to address this new development.
A knock sounded on the door. Confused, I glanced up at the clock on the wall and was surprised to see that it read 8:50. Dawn had just broken, but I guessed time worked differently here.
“Come in,” I called.
Jayce and Kingston entered the room, which didn’t surprise me one bit. I’d known who it was even before I saw them; I could sense each man like I was a radar attuned to their energy, just as I could sense my other two bonded mates. Kai was lurking down the hall somewhere, close by but also a bit removed as usual. Xero was more difficult to feel. His particular vibe had been obscured for me since the moment we’d come to this place.
I narrowed my eyes as I looked the two men over. Jayce’s blond hair was a mess, and his cobalt eyes were bloodshot and dull. His posture, usually so relaxed, was tense.
“You look like hell,” I said.
“Thanks, you too.” He paused for a moment, then his eyes widened. “I didn’t mean that…”
“I know.” I waved his half-formed apology away with a smile. “Don’t worry about it. We’re all a little fucked up this morning. Well, except for you.” I turned my attention to Kingston, who looked like he had just spent a day at the spa instead of killing a rock monster downstairs.
His dark hair was perfectly combed and his emerald eyes were clear. Where Jayce had clearly been awake all night, Kingston must have slept like a baby.
“What’s up with you?” I frowned, squinting at him. “You look almost cheerful. It’s obscene.”
Kingston shrugged. “Is being trapped in the underworld really that much different from being trapped at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere?”
Hannah squeaked in dismay and gestured at the window. “Look at that! Do you see where we are?”
Kingston looked out the window and nodded, lifting his eyebrows slightly. “Nice view. Lucky. My window faces a rock wall. Seriously though, tell me one thing about this that’s different from what we were doing before.”
Hannah’s honey eyes bulged. She leapt off the bed, golden hair flying behind her. “Well, for one thing, we’re in the goddamned underworld!”
I rose from the bed and put an arm around Hannah’s shoulders. “It’s all right, babes. Remember, he’s a reptile.” I stuck my tongue out at Kingston.
He winked at me, his eyes glinting with a hint of something sinful. “Careful where you point that thing.”
“Oh, shut up. Get out, both of you, so we can get dressed. We’ll meet you outside.”
I squeezed Jayce’s shoulder as he turned to leave. Poor guy seemed stunned. I hoped Kingston’s blasé attitude would rub off on him, at least a little bit. I didn’t want to admit it, but I sort of agreed with the dragon shifter. Sure, the landscape was scary as fuck, and we could be beset by demons at any minute. But Mönkh Saridag was also scary, and the fallen had been getting increasingly bold back on earth. Our sudden transplant did nothing but put us behind enemy lines, and so far, they hadn’t seemed to notice. Maybe we could use that to our advantage.
Once Hannah and I were dressed, we joined the guys. I was still having trouble feeling Xero—it was like he was all around me and nowhere all at once. My stomach twisted a little as it occurred to me that his time in the underworld may have changed him more than he thought it had.
“Has anybody seen Xero or Kai?” I asked the guys as we headed down the hallway.
“Kai’s doing his usual lurking thing by the stairs,” Jayce said. “He’s getting all weird again.”
“Haven’t seen Xero,” Kingston added. “I don’t think he left his room though. He’s right down the hall from me, so I think I would’ve noticed if he had.”
“I’m going to go get him. I’ll meet you guys downstairs.”
“Remember to go straight to the auditorium,” Kingston reminded me. “No breakfast until after, they said.”
Hannah shivered. “Ugh. I couldn’t even eat at a time like this.”
I could have. I was starving. We’d skipped dinner the night before, and I’d burned off breakfast and lunch kicking Owen’s ass. I put the thought of food out of my mind as I split off from the others and headed to the wing of the large building where Xero’s dorm room was located. It took me several minutes to get there, and as I walked down the hallway toward Xero’s room, I reached out with my mind, hoping to feel him at any second.
Slowly, like a ribbon of oil snaking along the surface of a murky pond, his signature met my senses. He was in his room, but I couldn’t get so much as a hint at what he was feeling.
Guess I’ll have to do it the old fashioned way.
I gave three sharp raps at the door. “Xero?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
I opened the door to find him sitting on his bed. I had never taken the time to really look around his room before, but today it all sort of jumped out at me. Postcards decorated nearly every vertical surface. It was like looking through dozens of tiny windows into the other dimension. Or—world, I guess. The one we had left behind.
Xero was in the middle of his large bed, surrounded by a cluster of them. He sat with his legs crossed and his arms limp at his sides, gazing blankly at the bright colors of California.
Careful not to touch any of them, I climbed up on the mattress beside him and touched his shoulder lightly.
“Hey. You good?”
He shook his head, the movement sharp and jerky. “No. I never wanted to come back here.”
I stroked the back of his neck, running my fingertips over his dark skin. “Of course you didn’t. But we’re going to get out of here.”
He looked at me helplessly. “Are we? If we do, will we stay out? I don’t know, Piper. This place has some kind of sick draw. I never wanted to be part of it in the first place. And now I don’t know if I’ll ever not be.” He buried his face in his hands.
“Tell me what scares you the most and I’ll tell you how I’ll fight it.” I’d never been great with people or had much of a nurturing side, but he brought it out in me. Despite his intimidating size and dauntingly gorgeous features, and the fact that he could definitely handle himself in a fight, I still felt the urge to wrap my arms around him and protect him from the world. He just seemed so terribly lost sometimes.
He let his hands drop and stared into nothing. His galactic brown eyes glittered and his full lips trembled ever so slightly. When he was soft like this, it was almost impossible to remember that he was a full-on cloven-hoofed, horned demon underneath.
“I’m afraid of losing my humanity,” he whispered. “You don’t know what kinds of things Gavriel does to people down here, Piper. You don’t know the shit you have to go through just to survive.”
I crawled into his lap, and he wrapped his arms around me loosely. He didn’t meet my eyes until I held his face and gently forced him to look at me.
“Nobody is going to make you do a fucking thing you don’t want to do, Xero. You know why?”
He raised his brows, his lips quirking into a small smile like he was humoring me. “Why?”
“Because we’re all in this together this time. You aren’t here alone, and I’m not going to let you get lost. You understand?”
“Yes,” he said with the ghost of a smile. It disappeared quickly though, and he looked away again. “But it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head and drew me closer. “Losing your humanity—that isn’t something somebody has to do to you, exactly. It’s so easy to let it happen here. Humans aren’t built for this plane of existence. But the fallen… we are. This place has a hold on us, and it’s just natural that we would eventually succumb to the atmosphere. Retaining your humanity in the underworld is like trying to breathe underwater when you have the option for gills. The baseline is survival.”
“Then survive,” I said defiantly. “And if you ever start to forget your humanity, well—I’ll just have to remind you.”
“Oh? How do you—”
I cut him off with a kiss, and he came to life in my arms. It was like a switch was flipped as soon as our lips met. I could feel his aura strengthen, pushing away the underworld atmosphere as he began to remember who he was. He was no weakling. No one
who survived twenty years in the underworld and managed to get away with their humanity intact was weak.
He pulled away with a sigh and gave me one of his slight, gentle smiles. “We’re late for the assembly.”
“Right.”
I kissed him once more and reluctantly slid off of his lap. Honestly, I’d rather stay locked up in Xero’s room all day, with him buried inside me as we worshipped each other’s bodies.
But that wouldn’t get us out of this mess. It wouldn’t help us figure out where exactly we’d been taken, and how to get out of here.
Time to go face the music.
Chapter Two
We walked through the empty halls hand in hand, each of us drawing strength from the other.
Like I did with Kai.
The thought flitted through my brain in a flash, and I grimaced as I pushed it away. I still didn’t know what to do with all of that. But when I saw Kai sitting three rows behind my group, hunched over and glowering at everybody, I couldn’t stop the memory from flooding back. The way it had felt when he’d drunk from me. The feel of his pointed teeth against my wrist, sharp as tattoo needles. A shudder of fear and excitement that had trickled down my spine.
I tried to catch his eye, and I was sure he noticed, but he deliberately ignored me.
“Fine, be that way,” I breathed, frustration making my chest feel hot and tight.
Kai never had been fully on board with any of this—he’d resented the succubus bond from the second we found out what it was. Maybe he was just pissy we’d had an actual bonding moment.
Or, I thought as I looked around at the crowd of students in various stages of shock and hysteria, maybe he’s reacting to the same thing all of them are.
He’d lived on earth out of sight and undetected for years, going to great lengths to avoid both the underworld and Fallen University entirely. He was probably upset that his efforts had been thwarted on both counts.