by Callie Rose
But there was one thing I definitely remembered from my Guerrilla Warfare class—if you destroyed a portal while someone was inside it, they would disappear forever.
Fuck.
Before I could react to Gavriel’s incoming attack, Xero’s hand slipped out of mine, his bag tangled around my wrist. I reached for him, but my hand closed on nothing, and the portal was closing around us.
“Xero!”
He wasn’t with us. He wasn’t inside.
The last thing I saw before the portal closed completely was the fire demon launching himself at Gavriel’s face.
“Xero, no!”
The portal snatched my voice away as it whipped us through the space in-between realities to deposit us with an unceremonious thud-thud-thud-splash at the edge of the mineral pool just outside the school’s gates. For a stomach-churning moment, I thought Gavriel and his fiends had followed us through somehow. My head still echoed with demonic shrieks, and I could still smell the pure burn of fireballs in the air. I had landed in the pool itself, facing away from the school.
“We have to go back.” I surged to my feet in the water, holding out my hands for theirs. “We have to get Xero!”
“Piper…”
“What?!”
Jayce pointed behind me. Growling, I whirled around. Whatever it was, it could wait until we rescued Xero—
Or… not.
“She told him,” Kingston said numbly. “That bitch, she fucking told him!”
“Oh, Sonja, no…”
It came out as a mournful breath, because I knew right then that I couldn’t go back to Xero. Not now, not unless I wanted to bring him back to nothing but rubble. The horde that’d attacked us the first time was nothing compared to what I was witnessing now. The monsters stood in ranks, surrounding the school. Hundreds of them or more, maybe thousands, smashing windows and blowing flames, filling the cavern with toxic smoke.
Witch demons were casting counter-spells on the wards while dragons bathed the school in fire. Six one-eyed giants battered at the walls with their massive clubs. Basilisks slithered along the edge of the castle, searching for cracks and open windows to crawl through. The school wouldn’t survive much longer.
“We can slip in the way we left,” I said grimly, my throat almost closing up as my heart tried to beat its way out of my chest, desperate to get to Xero. But he would never forgive me if I left the school to be destroyed like this. “Then straight down to the sub-sub-basement.”
The monsters paid us no attention. We weren’t part of their plan, and we couldn’t have looked very threatening. Filthy from travel, bloody and torn from battles, carrying nothing but simple bags full of salvation.
I hope.
We helped each other back through the window as quickly as possible, cringing as the battering clubs made little flecks of rock rain down on our heads.
Please let the Temple Stones work. Please.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Once inside the castle, we scrambled to our feet and hoisted our bags up on our shoulders. Kai took the extra bag. We hadn’t gone ten feet before Hannah barreled out of a doorway with Professor Shen, Toland, and a couple of fourth-year students on her heels.
“I set alarms,” she said breathlessly. “For portals. I’m sorry, I told them what you were doing but I waited a week just to be sure—”
“You got the stones?” Toland interrupted.
“Yes. All of them. You know the spells?”
“Yes,” Shen answered. “Where do we have to go?”
“I’ll show you. Come on.”
I led them down the stairs, then went to the stairwell to the next floor and ran right into a powerful ward.
“Damn it, it’s down there! Who sealed this?”
“I did,” Toland muttered, flustered. His hair looked grayer than the last time I’d seen him, and his mustache was bushy and disordered. “Trying to avoid—anyway, excuse me.”
I stepped out of his way and chewed my lip until it bled while he wasted precious seconds unlocking the ward. He had to do it again on the level below, then we were finally free to run as fast as we could. I’d walked this path so many times in interrogations, in dreams and nightmares, that I didn’t even have to think about where I was going. The whole crowd shoved into the tiny ward room where Owen had committed his ultimate betrayal.
“Show me,” Shen said.
I opened my bag and pulled the white stones out, smallest to largest. We emptied the remaining bags of the different colored stones and stepped away to let the witches and mages do their thing. Lots of chanting and setting herbs on fire and sprinkling some kind of dust. I wasn’t really paying attention until Hannah took a dagger and slit her palm. She passed it to the left, and every other student in the room did the same thing. Shen went last, then they bound hands, their voices rising together into the air.
It was all going too damn slowly. The school would collapse, and Xero would be dead before they were finished.
“We have to do this in order,” Shen said firmly.
I thought she was talking to me and was about ready to launch into a tirade about how rude it was to read someone’s mind, but when I glared at her, I realized that she’d been talking to the magic students about the stones. They worked efficiently, but it was still too slow. Every second they wasted on this was a second that Xero could be dying.
“You remember what to say when we place the last one?” Shen asked.
The students all muttered their assent. They all put their hands on the final stone—one of the big ones—and recited a chant in some dead language or other. Then they recited it again. Hurry up, damn it.
“Hey.” Jayce put his hand over mine, gently pulling my thumbnail out of my mouth. “You’re going to tear up your fingers.”
I jerked at his touch and the softness of his voice. Neither one had any place in the chaos of my mind—a chaos that seemed to have bled out to infect the entire world. Everything was terrible, my heart was cracking in two, and this chanting clearly wasn’t working. The school was still shaking with every beat of the giants’ club. Someone had done something wrong, made a mistake somewhere along the line.
Maybe it was us. Maybe we didn’t grab the right stones. Maybe they messed up the chants or the herbs or—
“Piper.” Jayce pulled my hand away from my mouth again and held it in his, closing both of his large palms around my smaller one.. He turned me toward him and looked deep into my eyes. “We’re going to get him back.”
“When? Now?” My face was wet with tears, but I couldn’t even feel myself crying. “Because it has to be now, Jayce. Gavriel will shred him! And why aren’t those stupid rocks working?”
Shen turned toward me and blinked. “What do you mean, dear?”
“Why aren’t they transporting us back to earth? What’s wrong?”
As I asked the question, I realized with a start that the pounding had stopped.
How long ago had it stopped?
My eyes went wide and my heart felt like a giant ball of shattered glass in my chest. I had left Xero in the underworld. I was home. He wasn’t. I pressed my hands to my chest to make the shattering stop. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see for the tears.
No. This isn’t possible. It can’t be happening.
I couldn’t have abandoned my Xero in the underworld.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I wiped the tears from my face and stood up straight.
“I have to go back,” I said as loudly and clearly as I could.
Hannah stared at me in horror. Toland pressed his lips together in a thin, disapproving line. Shen laughed. “You’ve gone mad. What on earth would you want to do that for?”
“Did you notice that someone is missing?” My voice was dangerously loud and unsteady. “Where’s Xero, huh? Where’s Xero?”
My voice cracked on his name, and I bit my lip until I could taste blood, willing myself not to fly to pieces in front of all of them.
Shen
gave me a very maternal smile and patted my arm. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”
“We have to coordinate with the Custodians,” Toland said gently. “And we all need debriefings. This is unprecedented, utterly unprecedented.”
“I literally do not give one single shit about your precedent,” I enunciated. “Xero saved all of us. And now he is trapped down there.”
“A very noble man,” Toland said solemnly. “Come now, upstairs. So much to do.”
I was going to explode. Wild-eyed, I looked from Jayce to Kai to Kingston, feeling lost and somehow alone even with them near me. I needed Xero just as much as I needed any of them. I had always felt a little bit responsible for him, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was directly responsible for his current situation. He had thrown himself at Gavriel to protect me. He had saved me.
Now he needed me to save him.
The administrators seemed to have written him off as an unavoidable casualty. Every time I spoke his name out loud, all they gave me were stupid platitudes and empty condolences.
I didn’t want their pity. I wanted them to tell me how to get back to the underworld so I could get my man back. But they just ushered me and my three other bond mates into Toland’s office and had us sit down.
“Now then, first things first.” The headmaster sat behind his desk and picked up his phone. He held it to his ear tentatively, as if he had done that same thing hundreds of times in the last year, just hoping for a dial tone against all logic. When the dial tone came through, he let out a massive sigh. A smile spread across his face.
I hated him in that moment, despised him for being happy about anything when the entire world was crumbling, falling apart into nothing. Didn’t he see that?
Seeming unaware of my glare burning into his skin, he dialed a number and sat up straighter when someone answered on the other end.
“Dru, Toland.” A pause. “Yes, we are back where we belong. If you will—oh, well then, yes, of course.” Another pause, this one longer. “I see. Yes, we’ll see you soon.”
He hung up, his face going a little pale.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Dru will be teleporting here,” Toland told me. He chewed his upper lip nervously. “He wants a full debriefing, and he has some updates for us as well. They, ah—didn’t sound good.”
Of course they didn’t. Because nothing could ever just be fixed. When things fell apart this dramatically, it was like a domino effect. One thing toppled, and everything else fell with it.
“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him, then?” I suppressed the urge to leap from my chair in front of Toland’s desk and pace the room like an angry tiger.
“Oh, goodness! They can’t talk to the Custodians looking like that,” Shen threw in, shaking her head.
“Hm? Oh, yes, yes, go ahead,” Toland said.
“Go ahead? With what?”
The magic professor didn’t answer in words. Instead, she did that thing with her hands that she had done the first time the school was attacked. Jayce, Kai, Kingston, and I were soon wrapped in her cleansing blue cloud. I looked down at myself as it dissipated. It hadn’t made much of a difference. My skin was cleaner, but the clothes were completely trashed. They really were going to start charging me for tunics one of these days.
“Toland, good to see you.” Dru strode into the office and greeted Toland as if he hadn’t seen him for a week instead of the better part of a year. He shook Toland’s hand and sat down in the last available seat. He glanced over us almost disinterestedly, a cursory flick of his gaze.
“Why are they here?” he asked in a tone of mild curiosity.
Ah, okay. So we were keeping our communications on the down-low.
“They were the ones who made it possible for us to come back to earth,” Toland said. “I felt they could add valuable contributions to this conversation.”
Dru frowned slightly, then shrugged. “If you like. Before we go into your experiences in the underworld, let me tell you what’s been going on up here.”
The headmaster pushed a switch on a little machine that sat on the desk. “Mind if I record this for reference?”
Dru waved a hand. “Not at all. Now. In the last year, fallen attacks have been increasing at an unprecedented rate. Humans are being turned in the open. In broad daylight. So far, the human media has been postulating a new drug on the market, or a violent new viral trend. Copycat humans have been popping up here and there in the fringes, inadvertently making themselves targets for the real thing.”
I shifted in my seat, restless. I wasn’t a complete monster—I did care about what humanity was going through—but I wanted them to get to the point. Were we going back to the underworld or not?
Seconds were ticking down, and every one of those seconds could be the difference between life or death for Xero.
“Without the school, we haven’t had enough trained fallen to combat the new influx. Gavriel’s army is gaining the upper hand, and it isn’t just attacks. The fallen we’ve encountered appear to have been indoctrinated somehow. We believe that Gavriel has begun a propaganda campaign, though we have yet to find where and how the information is being spread.”
“What kind of propaganda?” Toland asked.
“Same as any cult,” Dru said with a shrug. “Telling them that humans will never accept them the way that they are, that their real family is the fallen, and that the home they’ve always wanted exists in the underworld. They preach at us when we apprehend them, spouting off this nonsense to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Like Owen.” I spoke up, desperate to speed this along. “He was one of those guys who couldn’t get a girlfriend and joined a he-man woman-hater’s club online to commiserate with other losers. He was rambling about it before he sent us to the underworld. If Gavriel is looking for people to join his army, angry, discontented assholes are a great place to start.”
Dru contemplated that for a moment, then turned to Toland. “His numbers seem exceptionally large, even for the number of people he’s recruiting from here. Did you encounter any information in the underworld to account for that?”
Toland gestured to me and the guys. “They spent several weeks out in the underworld. They would know better than I.”
Dru frowned disapprovingly—nice cover—and turned to us. “Did you learn anything?”
“Yes.” Kingston nodded. “Gavriel is recruiting otherwise disinterested demons by force. Some of them have gone into hiding to avoid the draft, so to speak. The rumor is that he’s building up for a one-last-strike kind of takeover.”
The brown-haired Custodian rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I was afraid of that. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“All of our students now have real-world battle and survival experience,” Toland said. “And I imagine all of them would be willing to help.”
“The fourth years,” Dru said, nodding. “And third-year graduates, of course.”
“All of the students,” Toland repeated firmly. “If it’s as bad as you say, we need to present a strong front. The professors and students all have plenty to offer. This is an emergency situation, and I believe it calls for flexible protocol.”
Dru tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment, pursing his lips. Then he pulled out his phone and held up a finger. “I’m calling the home office,” he said. “We’ll see.”
He held the phone to his ear, then explained the situation to whoever was on the other end of the line. He listened for a time, making little noises of acknowledgment, then pressed his fingers to his temple. Apparently, it was not going well.
“Yes, sir, and I understand that, but I need you to consider what you’re asking. As it stands, Gavriel’s fallen are loyal to him and outnumber us three to one. At the rate they’re spreading, the fourth years alone will not tip the scales in our favor.”
Toland looked hopeful, and I admired his optimism. I thought it was stupid, but I admire
d it all the same.
“Their finals? No, but—yes, of course I understand that, but—firsthand experience must count for something. No, of course I don’t think we should let every new recruit onto the battlefield, but these students have already—no. Yes, sir, I understand what the committee has decided. No, I am not looking to start a mutiny. Of course. That will not be necessary, sir, I assure you—yes. I see. Thank you for your time.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear, his features oddly still and impassive, as if he was trying to hide his emotions. Toland’s face, on the other hand, was turning red.
“They said no.” It wasn’t a question.
Dru nodded. “They said no. The committee is of the opinion that this situation needs to be handled by the book. Though, frankly, I have read the book, and there isn’t a chapter on how to deal with a full-scale invasion. Nevertheless, they have decided that rule of law is the only thing that separates us from Gavriel’s fallen.”
Toland turned a deeper shade and slammed his fist on his desk, surging to his feet. “Then they don’t know what we’re up against! They didn’t see the final attack on the school! The monsters were in ranks, Dru! They were trained! Military discipline! Rule of law!” He punctuated his outburst with another fist against the desk.
The Custodian raked a hand through his hair and blew out a breath. “I agree that rules, while excellent guidelines, should occasionally be broken in times of great need.” He gestured at us, and for a moment I thought he was going to give us up and tell Toland about the phone. “Allowing untried students to wander around the underworld, for example.”
“To be fair, he didn’t really allow that,” Jayce interjected. “We just kind of went.”
Dru nodded. “Interesting.”
He said it slowly and maintained eye contact with my blond mate for several seconds after he had finished speaking. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn he was trying to imply that we should break the rules again.