I snapped up. “That’s got to be the bell for lessons, right?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Okay, let’s go.” I lifted my shirt—immediately all business. “I got a good look around while Belphe was using me as a pillow. None of the demons who took Dora were in there, but it’s not the only mess hall, is it?”
“No.” Sabrina slithered up and wrapped around me. “There are many eating areas scattered about this dwelling. For a host of reasons, it’s not a good idea for the species to be in the same room together when they’re hungry.”
“That’s okay.” I quickly gathered my stuff and headed out. “They can hide in different mess halls, but they can’t hide in the classrooms. I’m finding those bastards—today.”
My determination carried me all the way downstairs and into the main hall. Then, I halted.
“Wait,” I cried. “Where are the classrooms? Where am I supposed to go?”
“How should I know?” she snapped. “Your dementia is not my responsibility.”
“I am not elderly!”
IT TOOK A LOT OF ARGUING, cajoling, and back and forth, but I finally got Sabrina to sniff out where she sensed the highest collection of demons. Hera forbid I give that jerk a compliment, but he really saved my butt sending Sabrina to be my guide. If it were left to me to wander the halls alone without a clue, I would’ve been thrown out of Abaddon on my first day.
I slinked my way through the dark and haunted hallways, following the sounds of shouting and stomping.
Each corridor I passed through was darker, smaller, and more windowless than the last. It was strange. Stranger still, the way it was constructed. Nothing but walls dipped in red and black, thick heavy doors allowing not a sound in or out, and no light—barring the half-hearted flickering of skeletal hands sticking out of the walls with candles on their palms.
It was as if the whole layout of this place was made to keep you confused and feeling like you were trapped in a darkened maze.
If that’s the purpose, they’re succeeding.I propped the notebook against my chest—tracing and sketching as I went.But not for long. I’m going to have every inch of this place mapped out. The quickest way to Dora, and then the quickest way to get us both out.
I rounded the final corner and the noise hit me over the head like a ton of bricks, but this time, it wasn’t just the jeering of the demons.
All the doors in this hallway were open, and students streamed in and out of them—shouting out which lessons were being held in there, and demanding to know where the one they were looking for was.
All the other beings who disappeared when I fell in with the demons had all returned.
Tall, statuesque, impossibly beautiful people with large, feathered wings ranging from all white to pure ebony. Their earscame to sharp points, and their skin glittered—truly glittered as if the sun defied hell’s unwillingness to let it shine, and chose to let its light live in the very essence of the fae.
The only thing that passed for a uniform in this place were the badges, which allowed me to see the styles and customs the different species adopted.
The fae dressed like kings and princes on their way to a gala in the palace ballroom. Long embroidered robes, train sleeves, and, resting on the long, silken locks of a few of them, laurel crowns.
The werewolves were easy to spot right away. They were the only ones moving through the hall as a group—or I guess I should say, a pack.
About a dozen scarred, bare-chested guys with rippling muscles, ripped jeans, and scruffy jaws moved through the hall as one snarling unit. Hatred like I’d never seen burned in their golden eyes as they passed the last group of creatures I had yet to understand.
Pale, white-eyed people clung to the wall in a straight-backed single file that stood my neck hairs on end. Unlike everyone else, the vampires were dressed in clothes from all eras, from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, and all the centuries before and after. There was nothing to indicate who was in the same coven—if that was even the right word. Even so, you knew who they were.
The vampires were still—so very still—like the suits of armor lurking in every other corridor, but unlike them, their eyes tracked everyone that passed by them... and they didn’t like it.
“What the fuck are you looking at, leech!”
A feathery demon with a waddle and tailfeathers got in the face of one of the vampires, which set the whole row off. Loud, hair-raising, unsettling hisses erupted from all of their throats. Lethal fangs glinted in the candlelight, and that was all that wasglinting. Before my eyes, their orbs darkened to pitch black—brought on by hunger or anger, I didn’t know. But I did know it almost sent me running in the opposite direction.
“Creepy-ass freaks!” The chicken demon threw a punch at his head.
His fist blew through the plaster, getting stuck in the wall. In a blink, the vampire was suddenly five inches to the right, nowhere in reach of that punch.
“Wha— How did he—?”
“Vampiresss are fast, girl,” Sabrina said. “Faster than werewolves, fae, or demons. And impossibly strong. The lords of hell did not want to recognize the vampires at first. They tried to lump them in with the Others, but after countless exsanguinated assassinations that no one could stop and no saw coming, they were forced to acknowledge that cursed does not equal weak.”
