Fallen University: Year Three: A Paranormal Romance

by Callie Rose

  “When did he turn into a dad?” Jayce asked, his lips twisting in amusement.

  “He won’t even let me help.” Hannah frowned, setting down her spoon. “I guess his people know more about all this than I do, but still. I think I could be useful.”

  “Guess you just have to sit around and look pretty with the rest of us,” Xero said with a sympathetic expression. “Trust me, I’d rather be doing something too.”

  “Something other than kicking my ass at pool,” Kai grunted.

  My fire demon mate grinned. “Get good, son.”

  A door slammed somewhere in the house, followed by thundering footsteps. We all stood up, instantly alert. Custodians? Fallen?

  Neither, fortunately.

  Kingston burst into the room a second later, holding a piece of paper and looking like he hadn’t slept in days. His emerald eyes were glassy, his hair was all over the place, and there were two bright red spots on his cheeks.

  “Come on,” he blurted.

  “You found it?”

  He didn’t answer me, just gestured frantically for us to follow him. He led us down into the basement, through a hidden door on one wall, and down a long sterile-looking hallway. There was a half-flight of stairs at the end which led down to another sealed door. He punched in a code, chanted a spell, and waved his hand in front of a sensor. The door slid open.

  Franz, Buford, and Gerard were all standing around a massive electronic map on a table in the center of the room. No, not electronic—magic, I realized as we got closer. The lights on it were tiny floating energy balls, spinning up from points on the map. There were hundreds of them in different colors—green, red, purple, yellow, blue—and five which were a blinding, brilliant gold.

  “It took time to narrow it down,” Kingston said as he led us to the map. “We’ve been using a combination of my magic and my team’s tech. First, we had to get between the created magic and the natural magic, then we had to sift out the portal magic, then we had to narrow that down to portals powerful enough to bring an army through.” He shook his head, running a hand through his already tousled hair. “Do you know how many interdimensional portals are just sitting around on earth? So many. Like, oh my God, don’t go hiking in the Rockies unless you want to end up on a different plane of existence.”

  “So we have to scour the entire Rocky Mountains?” Kai asked incredulously. “How do you expect us to do that in the time we have? Gavriel’s general said they’d be ready for the attack in a week, and that was three days ago.”

  Kingston huffed impatiently. “You aren’t paying attention. Those are the little portals. We’re only interested in the big portals. There are five.”

  “The golden ones,” I said, chewing my lip as I looked at the map. “Okay, so how do we narrow it down from there?”

  “We’re going to have to go to each of them,” Kingston said. “And we’re running out of time. We can’t afford to jet around, it would take days.”

  “Days? Where are these places?” Xero asked.

  “There’s a pentagram in Kazakhstan. Everybody thinks it’s man made, but it’s not. It’s the reflected impression of a demon-carved pentagram in another dimension.”

  Uh, what?

  I decided to pretend that I followed what he’d just said.

  “There’s another pentagram in Cuba,” Kingston went on. “Same deal—an imprint from the other side. Franz, show them.”

  Franz used some sort of stylus on a trackpad to enhance the map until we could clearly see the pentagram carved into the ground, then enhanced it some more. Something tiny and black moved across the map, and I jumped, surprised that a bug would be able to survive in such a sterile environment as this basement room. Then I looked again.

  What I’d thought was a beetle crawling across the map was actually…

  “Hold on. Is that a bird?”

  “Yeah, it’s a scale model,” Kingston said absently.

  “The bird was flying. There’s another one!”

  Kingston blinked at me and frowned as if he was trying to understand what I was talking about.

  “It’s a magical scale model,” Gerard explained gently. “We’re seeing the real world in real time. Those birds you’re seeing actually exist. You could think of this setup as more of a surveillance camera than just a map.”

  “Which is why we need to work quickly,” Franz added. “The Custodians have a map just like this—but older, more sophisticated, and rigged with alarms. They know that somebody, somewhere, is tapping into the same magic.”

  “How long do we have before they find us?” Kai asked tensely.

  “I imagine their alarm system is ringing like mad with all of the fallen activity going on lately,” Gerard said. “But there’s no telling where something like this falls on their priority list.”

  “Are all of the potential portals pentagrams?” Jayce asked, gently bringing us all back to the point at hand.

  “No,” Kingston said. He nodded toward the tall, skinny man again. “Show them, Franz.”

  “Iguazu Falls, Argentina,” Franz said, rotating the map and enhancing it. “Eye of the Sahara, Mauritania. Barringer Crater, Arizona.”

  “I’ve been there,” Jayce said, surprised. “You think it’s a portal?”

  “We know it is,” Buford said with just a hint of impatience. “There was no meteor. It was a blast from another plane.”

  “You keep saying another plane rather than the underworld,” I said. “Is there a reason for that?”

  “Scientific accuracy,” Buford said dismissively. “We are reasonably certain that all of these portals lead to the underworld, but it would be an egregious assumption to say so.”

  Huh. Scientific accuracy on a magical treasure hunt. The conversation I’d had with Jayce in the pool echoed in my head, and I pressed my fingers to my temples.

  My kingdom for a moment of simplicity.

  “So when we go to these places, how are we going to figure out which one we want?” Xero asked.

  Kingston shrugged, but it was more like a violent twitch. Way too much caffeine, not nearly enough sleep. “We’ll have to look for clues. Remember details. Jayce, Piper, try to remember every single syllable you heard that night about where the army would be coming out. Anything could be important. We’re going to have to move fast—anytime someone uses any of these portals, it lights things up like you wouldn’t believe.”

  As if to illustrate his point, a purple point of light swelled in Arizona and zipped across to Utah before exploding in white.

  “There, you see? Someone’s bouncing around. Maybe it’s a first wave or a scout.”

  “Shit,” I said, frowning at the map. “I wonder if they’re bouncing around like that to cover their tracks. To make sure no one portal shows a suspicious amount of activity until it’s too late to stop the army from coming through. I wish we had more information about what’s going on down there. Have you heard anything at all from Michael?”

  Kingston pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, looked at it, and shook his head. “Nothing yet. You know how calls get lost in the between though.”

  “Ugh. Yeah, I remember.”

  Trying to get ahold of Dru last year had been a bitch. Just the memory of it made me feel itchy. The timelines of earth and the underworld didn’t quite match up, which made coordinating efforts across dimensions tricky. Well… more tricky.

  Jayce, apparently on the same wavelength as me, cleared his throat. “Should we call Dru now? We may not know everything yet, but this is more info than we came here with. If he could convince the Custodians to check these five places, I bet they could get it done in an hour. Hell, they might be able to tell just by looking at the map.”

  I shook my head. “No. We need more. We only get one shot to convince him without getting ourselves killed or banished again, and he’s going to need a damn compelling argument to get them to go on a wild goose chase.”

  “I’m hungry,” Kingston said suddenly, looking like
he’d just realized he still had a body that needed basic essentials like sleep and food. “You guys were eating breakfast. Let’s talk in the kitchen.”

  He conferred briefly with his team of analysts, then we all trooped back up to the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you worried about people eavesdropping?” Kai asked quietly as we settled in around the large, comfortable table.

  “Who cares?”

  Kingston shrugged, digging into the leftovers of our breakfast feast with gusto. His parents were out of the house, but I’d seen a few people I didn’t recognize moving around the massive mansion and grounds—all members of the large staff it must take to maintain this place, I assumed. They didn’t talk to us and we didn’t talk to them, and even though we’d just escaped from the underworld, for some reason they were the ones who reminded me of ghosts.

  “Do the rest of the house staff know? You know, about the…” I leaned forward a bit, flapping my hands in an imitation of dragon wings.

  Kingston shook his head, shooting Jayce a grateful look as the hellhound pushed a serving plate with several pancakes on it toward him.

  “No. They don’t know about any of it. No one but my trusted team does, not even my folks. I’m not worried about it though. If we fail, they’re going to find out real quick anyway. If we win, and someone asks about it later I’ll just tell them we were playing an RPG or collaborating on a book or something. But I can’t think on an empty stomach, and I haven’t eaten since—hell, I don’t even know what day it is.”

  That was a good point. The reporter we’d seen interviewing the homeless man could only deny the truth for so long if it sprang out of a massive portal and tried to kill her. Alternatively, if we succeeded in stopping Gavriel, that dragon sighting would eventually become just a funny anecdote she told at parties when someone asked her about her weirdest interview.

  “Do you think the banishment mark shows up in a different color on the map?” Hannah asked as we all returned to our half-eaten breakfasts.

  She rubbed her wrist absently, and I resisted the urge to do the same. The marks that’d been burned into our skin had healed a lot quicker than they would if we’d actually be branded by molten metal, but mine still itched occasionally.

  “It would make sense,” Kingston said. “But I haven’t seen anything.”

  Kai swallowed a bite of food and scowled. “I guess you wouldn’t though. Pretty sure we’re the only banished idiots stupid enough to try getting close to one of the big portals.”

  Kingston grunted and nodded as he bit into a piece of toast.

  “I really think we should call Dru.” Jayce rested his elbows on the table. “We know enough to at least get him on board, and I don’t think he’d go to the other Custodians.”

  “I think Piper’s right,” Hannah said, shaking her head. “We need more.”

  Before I could add anything to the conversation, Kingston’s head suddenly shot up. His eyes widened. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what was wrong when I heard it. A dull thud from the other side of the house.

  Someone had just come in the front door.

  We all jumped up, alert and ready to fight, but I blinked when I heard a man and woman talking animatedly.

  “Oh, Sebastian, you’re missing the whole point of the play!”

  “What I’m missing, Lenora, is the point of flying to Paris to watch a play which will be in Quebec next month.”

  “For the cast, darling, the cast.”

  Kingston stood frozen, turning paler and paler. “Fuck. They’re not supposed to be back until next week,” he hissed.

  “Who are they?” Hannah whispered.

  “My—”

  “Kingston?”

  The man stepped into the kitchen before Kingston could finish his sentence. The explanation was no longer necessary though. Same height, same build, same brilliant green eyes. They could have been twins if it weren’t for the thirty-year age difference.

  “What about Kingston? What are—oh!”

  His mother, or the woman I assumed was his mother anyway, came into the kitchen a half-step behind his father. Kingston shared her hair color and her aristocratic brow, although he definitely took after his father.

  She blinked, coming to a halt. Then her eyes widened and she paled four shades, her mouth dropping open as she stared at her son.

  She looked like she was gearing up to yell at him when her gaze flitted over the rest of us. Her mouth just snapped shut, and her expression instantly changed into a polite, if distant, mask.

  “Kingston. Dear. Good to see you. Would you introduce us to your friends?”

  “To hell with his friends,” Kingston’s father growled. “Where have you been, boy? You think you can just take off for a year with no warning, no note, not even a phone call? Who the devil did you expect to take your place? Stocks in shambles—do you know how much time I spent smoothing things over with your investors? Do you have any idea what I’ve had to do to cover for you? The lies I’ve told?”

  “Sebastian—”

  “Quiet, Lenora, I’m not finished. You’ve cost this company millions, Kingston, not to mention your mother’s health! She’s been worried sick, sick!”

  He continued to rant, and I stood as frozen as Kingston was, entirely unsure what to do. It’d been well over two years since we’d all been recruited to Fallen University, but Kingston had managed to stay in contact with his old life all throughout our first year of training.

  But the year we’d spent in the underworld had been a different story.

  I wasn’t sure what excuse he’d given his parents to explain why he could only communicate with them by phone, but his sudden unexplained radio silence had obviously left them hurt and terrified.

  My heart clenched.

  My life in Seattle had been enough of a mess that I hadn’t been all that sorry to leave it behind, but I knew it had crushed Hannah not to be allowed to have any contact with her family. Maybe ripping the band-aid off in one go was better though.

  Kingston had peeled it off in increments, and I had a fleeting thought that maybe his attempt to stay in contact had only ended up hurting him and his parents worse in the long run.

  Despite his mom’s attempt to put on a composed face, tears were running down her cheeks, and Sebastian’s face was getting redder and redder as he berated his son.

  My stomach churned, the breakfast I’d just eaten settling like a lump of cement. God, this is so fucking uncomfortable.

  “Dad, I’m sorry,” Kingston finally broke in. His green eyes looked glassy, the combination of sleep deprivation and high emotions making him look even more strung out than he had before.

  I was about to step forward and offer him whatever support I could—to take his hand, or stand by his side, or just do something—when the hairs on the back of my neck rose.

  That uncomfortable feeling I was picking up with my heightened empathy wasn’t just from the tension in the kitchen. It was something else.

  At first, it was more of a feeling than a sound, an impression that the ambient silence was growing, that the empty spaces and shadows had come alive and were whispering to each other.

  Jayce must’ve felt it too. His lips drew back slightly, and a low growl rumbled in his throat.

  “Guys…” I murmured. “I think—”

  The sound of shattering glass cut me off, and the ambient rustle suddenly broke into a loud noise that sounded almost like hyenas laughing. Someone screamed in another room.

  “What the hell?”

  Sebastian broke off mid-rant. He puffed up his chest and turned toward the kitchen door as if he was really going to march out there and take the intruders on by himself. But I could smell the sulfur. I knew what kinds of intruders he would face.

  In a flash, all six of us rushed past him, shoving him backward into the kitchen before he could commit suicide by monster.

  “Wha—what the hell are you doing?” he called after us, blustering, but there was no time to exp
lain any of this or apologize for knocking him over.

  Kingston’s team met us in the hallway, and we screeched to a stop.

  “Status report,” Kingston barked.

  “Staff in the basement, fallen in the foyer,” Buford reported quickly, his voice steady although his eyes were wide.

  My mate nodded. “Parents in the kitchen. Get them downstairs. We’ll take care of these guys.”

  The other two men rushed to the kitchen, but Buford hesitated. “You might need backup—”

  “Go!” I shoved Buford toward the kitchen just as fallen began spilling out of the foyer and into the hall where we stood.

  Fuck.

  These weren’t Gavriel’s soldiers. They were his minions—the ones he’d been unleashing on earth in greater numbers for the past year to turn more and more humans.

  And they looked hungry as hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Oh, shit.”

  Jayce’s muttered words perfectly summed up my feelings about our situation as we watched a pack of underworld creatures barrel toward us. There had to be close to a dozen of them, demons and gargoyles and a few monsters I couldn’t identify.

  “Run!” I screamed.

  There was a time to take a stand and fight, and there was a time to book it as fast as you could, and we were definitely in the latter situation right now. Not only were we outnumbered, but if we had this showdown here, there was a very good chance the humans in the house would end up dead—collateral damage in a fight that would probably raze the house.

  I turned on my heel and bolted for the back door, with my men and Hannah hot on my heels.

  Fuck. Is it just a coincidence that these fallen showed up here? Were they just looking for more humans to turn? Or were they looking for us?

  No time to think about it now.

  We careened through the halls of the massive mansion, dodging blasts of fire sent at us from the demons on our tail.

  Xero raised a hand and hurled a fireball behind us, not even bothering to turn around enough to aim properly. He caught the hellhound on the shoulder though, and the thing stumbled as its fur caught fire.