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“What was that?” I asked.
“Dru will be teleporting here,” Toland told me. He chewed his upper lip nervously. “He wants a full debriefing, and he has some updates for us as well. They, ah—didn’t sound good.”
Of course they didn’t. Because nothing could ever just be fixed. When things fell apart this dramatically, it was like a domino effect. One thing toppled, and everything else fell with it.
“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him, then?” I suppressed the urge to leap from my chair in front of Toland’s desk and pace the room like an angry tiger.
“Oh, goodness! They can’t talk to the Custodians looking like that,” Shen threw in, shaking her head.
“Hm? Oh, yes, yes, go ahead,” Toland said.
“Go ahead? With what?”
The magic professor didn’t answer in words. Instead, she did that thing with her hands that she had done the first time the school was attacked. Jayce, Kai, Kingston, and I were soon wrapped in her cleansing blue cloud. I looked down at myself as it dissipated. It hadn’t made much of a difference. My skin was cleaner, but the clothes were completely trashed. They really were going to start charging me for tunics one of these days.
“Toland, good to see you.” Dru strode into the office and greeted Toland as if he hadn’t seen him for a week instead of the better part of a year. He shook Toland’s hand and sat down in the last available seat. He glanced over us almost disinterestedly, a cursory flick of his gaze.
“Why are they here?” he asked in a tone of mild curiosity.
Ah, okay. So we were keeping our communications on the down-low.
“They were the ones who made it possible for us to come back to earth,” Toland said. “I felt they could add valuable contributions to this conversation.”
Dru frowned slightly, then shrugged. “If you like. Before we go into your experiences in the underworld, let me tell you what’s been going on up here.”
The headmaster pushed a switch on a little machine that sat on the desk. “Mind if I record this for reference?”
Dru waved a hand. “Not at all. Now. In the last year, fallen attacks have been increasing at an unprecedented rate. Humans are being turned in the open. In broad daylight. So far, the human media has been postulating a new drug on the market, or a violent new viral trend. Copycat humans have been popping up here and there in the fringes, inadvertently making themselves targets for the real thing.”
I shifted in my seat, restless. I wasn’t a complete monster—I did care about what humanity was going through—but I wanted them to get to the point. Were we going back to the underworld or not?
Seconds were ticking down, and every one of those seconds could be the difference between life or death for Xero.
“Without the school, we haven’t had enough trained fallen to combat the new influx. Gavriel’s army is gaining the upper hand, and it isn’t just attacks. The fallen we’ve encountered appear to have been indoctrinated somehow. We believe that Gavriel has begun a propaganda campaign, though we have yet to find where and how the information is being spread.”
“What kind of propaganda?” Toland asked.
“Same as any cult,” Dru said with a shrug. “Telling them that humans will never accept them the way that they are, that their real family is the fallen, and that the home they’ve always wanted exists in the underworld. They preach at us when we apprehend them, spouting off this nonsense to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Like Owen.” I spoke up, desperate to speed this along. “He was one of those guys who couldn’t get a girlfriend and joined a he-man woman-hater’s club online to commiserate with other losers. He was rambling about it before he sent us to the underworld. If Gavriel is looking for people to join his army, angry, discontented assholes are a great place to start.”
Dru contemplated that for a moment, then turned to Toland. “His numbers seem exceptionally large, even for the number of people he’s recruiting from here. Did you encounter any information in the underworld to account for that?”
Toland gestured to me and the guys. “They spent several weeks out in the underworld. They would know better than I.”
Dru frowned disapprovingly—nice cover—and turned to us. “Did you learn anything?”
“Yes.” Kingston nodded. “Gavriel is recruiting otherwise disinterested demons by force. Some of them have gone into hiding to avoid the draft, so to speak. The rumor is that he’s building up for a one-last-strike kind of takeover.”
The brown-haired Custodian rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I was afraid of that. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“All of our students now have real-world battle and survival experience,” Toland said. “And I imagine all of them would be willing to help.”
“The fourth years,” Dru said, nodding. “And third-year graduates, of course.”
“All of the students,” Toland repeated firmly. “If it’s as bad as you say, we need to present a strong front. The professors and students all have plenty to offer. This is an emergency situation, and I believe it calls for flexible protocol.”
Dru tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment, pursing his lips. Then he pulled out his phone and held up a finger. “I’m calling the home office,” he said. “We’ll see.”
