Fallen University: Year Three

He smiled at me, his eyes warm, his expression open.

“Now? Now I don’t know if it matters. I care about you. You care about me. We both care about Xero. So there’s a magical element to it—so what? Would you leave him here if you didn’t need him? Would you let him die?”

The thought made me viscerally sick. “No! God, no.”

He looked around at the hellscape we were in, as beautiful as it was terrible.

“Neither would I.” Then he looked back at me with a triumphant gleam in his eye. “So, you see? It’s more than magic. I’m done trying to sort through which part of my feelings are mine and which are the bond. All I know is that my feelings are real. They’re mine.”

A wave of emotion pushed me back into his arms, and I claimed his lips in a greedy kiss.

Yes, it was definitely more than magic. This overwhelming desire, this comfort and calm, that wasn’t magic. It was just Kai. Pure and simple. He and I were equals—he my vampire master, me his succubus mistress—and even then, it was more than magic. We were bonded on a human level somehow, in spite of the supernatural circumstances.

My mind finally quieted as our kiss deepened.

For the first time since Gavriel had taken Xero, I had a blissful moment of peace.

Chapter Three

I began to feel better in the following days. I hadn’t realized how much the guilt had been draining me.

Being apart from Xero was still crippling, but it was an easier burden to bear now that I was wholly convinced that I was here on a rescue mission first and foremost—and not just an attempt to save my own skin.

Still, after hours of walking on our thirty-fifth day in the underworld, I wasn’t quite as observant as I should have been. I was focused inward, following Xero’s pull.

“Guys?” Jayce asked hesitantly. “Does it seem a little… cultivated to you?”

I looked up but kept walking. Then I blinked, trying to bring the abstract landscape around me into some kind of sensical focus. I didn’t see what he was seeing.

“What are you talking about?” Kingston wrinkled his brow. “It’s the same as anywhere else. Rocks, shrubs, trees, bones of things, grass, random plants.”

I nodded in agreement, but Jayce’s frown deepened.

“No. They’re not random,” he said as he knelt beside a bush. “Look, the earth has been—”

He was cut off by a vicious roar. A half-second later, he was flattened to the ground by something that looked like a bear. The black and silver furry beast sprang up off him almost immediately and held a spear to his throat. It looked up and glared at the rest of us.

“One move and he dies,” the thing growled.

I raised my hands in surrender and gave the other two men a pointed look, wordlessly commanding them to stand down. “What’s your name?” I asked the dark-haired creature.

The thing—a werewolf, upon closer examination—laughed. “Tell a succubus my name? Do I look like I was whelped yesterday?”

“Not unless your mother’s twenty feet tall,” Kingston drawled dryly.

The thing blinked again, then laughed a different kind of laugh. A friendlier one, I hoped.

“You all aren’t Gavriel’s, are you?” He lifted the spear from Jayce’s throat and reached down to help him up. Jayce took the offered claw warily and pulled himself to his feet.

“Come on in,” he said, turning his back to us. “You look hungry.”

I exchanged puzzled looks with Kai and Jayce, but Kingston just smiled smugly, apparently proud that his smart mouth had gotten us out of danger and even secured an offer of hospitality.

We followed the werewolf through an obscured opening in a twin pair of shrubs and found ourselves inside a hidden little cabin. It reminded me of Vee’s, though this one didn’t appear to be underground. But it was homey all the same, and well-disguised amidst the shrubbery.

“How did you know?” I asked. “That we aren’t Gavriel’s?”

I assumed he wasn’t either, considering he was hiding out just like Vee had been, and he hadn’t killed us the moment he realized we weren’t minions of the fallen overlord.