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This was it. The clock was ticking, and we were at war.
“Just pray they don’t hang up on me.”
Kingston sat on a pile of blankets we’d smuggled into our secret room above the library. He held the phone in his hand with his thumb poised over the call button.
“Just do it,” I urged him. “And if they hang up, call back and let me talk to them.”
My persuasion wouldn’t work over the phone and across dimensions, but I could chew somebody out from that distance just fine.
Kingston shrugged and pushed the button. None of us were very hopeful that we would reach Dru—we’d called dozens of times and we seemed to keep missing him, even though we’d been leaving messages asking him to be there at a specific time.
“It’s one of two things,” I said as Kingston listened to the phone ring. “Either he’s deliberately avoiding us, or time really does work differently here. I’m not just talking about the days being longer or shorter or whatever. It might not be possible to sync with earth time.”
Or the stupid dive bar he loves so much has the most unreliable bartenders in existence.
Kingston frowned at me thoughtfully, then held up a finger as someone answered on the other end of the line.
“Hi, this is Kingst—yeah, it’s me again. Calling for—what? He is?! Yes! Please.”
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe we were actually about to make contact with the human plane of existence. With home.
Fucking finally.
“Put it on speaker,” Jayce hissed.
Kingston pulled the phone away from his ear and tapped a button. The normal, earthly sounds of a busy bar trickled out of the phone, and I was suddenly desperately homesick.
“Hello?” a male voice asked, louder and clearer than the sounds in the background.
“Dru! It’s Kingston. From Fallen University.”
“And Piper, and the rest of our crew,” I added.
There was a long pause on the other end. Then, Dru’s shaky voice came again. “You’re… alive?”
“As far as I can tell,” Kingston said wryly.
“Where are you?”
“The underworld.” I leaned closer to the phone, raising my voice a little. “That Owen kid sent us here somehow. We need your help to figure out how to get back.”
“How are you making this call?”
Kingston sighed. “I have an enchanted phone.”
Another long pause. “That is a very serious violation of the rules, Kingston.”
“I’m aware.”
“I’ll have to report it to the other Custodians and—”
“Wait. Hold on,” Kingston snapped. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I’m going to be banished to the underworld for having a phone? Because, newsflash, I’m already here. So is our entire goddamn school. Yeah, I have some contraband, but damn it, man, focus!”
A short pause. I could hear Dru suck in several unsteady breaths and blow them out before he spoke again.
“Right. Sorry. Okay, so you say you’re in the underworld. The—the whole school, you said?”
“Every brick of it.” Kingston shook his head bitterly. “And everyone in it.”
