Fallen University: Year Two

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.