Marrow looked at the chaos.
He looked at the glitter raining down. He looked at the dancing Fae. He looked at the vampire surfing on a shield. He looked at his terrifying Enforcers playing "hot lava" on the furniture.
He looked... defeated.
He didn't look like a scary void monster anymore. He didn't look like an ancient evil. He looked like a tired middle-aged man covered in craft supplies who had lost control of a children's birthday party.
"It's over, Dean!" I shouted, standing on my own desk. "You can't grade us if we don't take the test!"
Marrow looked at me. His eye twitched.
"Get out," he whispered.
"What?" I asked, signaling for Jax to turn down the music.
"GET OUT!" Marrow roared.
It wasn't a spell. It was just a scream. A raw, human scream of frustration.
"Get out of my hall! Get out of my sight! All of you! You're unreachable! You're un-teachable! You're... you'reanimals!"
He stormed off the stage. He tried to maintain his dignity, but he slipped on a patch of glitter and had to flail to keep his balance.
He fled through the back door, trailing pink sparkles.
The hall went silent for a beat. The music stopped. The "lava" faded back into stone.
Then, the cheering started.
It wasn't a roar of victory in battle. It wasn't the sound of warriors surviving a siege.
It was the roar of the last day of school. It was the sound of freedom.
Students high-fived. Werewolves hugged vampires. People made snow angels in the glitter.
We hadn't just beaten him. We had broken him. We had taken his fear and turned it into a joke.
"You know," Rhett said, hopping down from his desk and wiping pink glitter off his forehead. He looked at me, his eyes bright with laughter. "I think I failed that test."
I looked at the chaos. At the joy. At the undeniable proof that we were a Pack, united not by fear, but by fun.
"I think," I said, pulling him down for a kiss, getting glitter all over his face. "We all got A-pluses."
25
The Quad was packed.
It wasn't a battlefield. It was a stage.
The snow from yesterday had melted into a slushy gray mess, but no one seemed to care. Students were everywhere. They were perched on the stone walls, hanging from the ancient oak trees like oversized fruit, and sitting cross-legged on the roof of the library.
Everyone—literally everyone—was holding a phone.
The air buzzed with the collective hum of a thousand livestreams. The mesh network Ivy had set up was working overtime, broadcasting this moment to every pack, coven, and enclave in the state.
Dean Marrow stood on the steps of the Administration Building.
He looked... rough.
