Page 38 of Fortune Academy: Year Three
Yuri’s eyes went wide. “What? No. I amsonot talking to that asshole again. He—”
“Yuri,” Olivia warned. “You owe me, remember…? Oh, wait.” She chuckled at the insensitive joke. “I do love my puns today.”
Yuri frowned. “Just because you helped me forget about my Maker and the soul-crushing grief that comes with that can of blood-worms doesn’t mean I want to lie to a demon I’m already double-crossing.”
“Tell him it’s a challenge from me,” I said, straightening. “If he can lay off of the Academy for six months, then I’ll face him in Hell—alone. No mates. No one else. Just me and him. But I need time to prepare… and to say goodbye.”
No fucking way I was going to say goodbye to my guys, but it’s something an arrogant asshole like Lucifer would believe.
Yuri rubbed one of her tiny fangs. “Huh. He might go for that. He does love a good challenge.” She jumped to her feet. “All right. But you two better get all my friends out of there in one piece by the time this is over.” She tapped me on the nose, making me flinch. “That doesnotinclude the psycho-demon named Cole. I’ve got enough of those on my plate as it is.”
“Got it,” I murmured. She didn’t have to worry about Cole, because by the time I was done with him, he’d be on our side.
Hopefully.
Olivia showed Yuri back to the mirror which she spritzed with the black ooze again, sending the vampire on her way back to Hell.
“Six months,” Olivia repeated as she blew out a breath. She propped her hands on her hips and stared me down with golden eyes that suited her. “That runs into graduation. What are you planning?”
“The less you know, the better,” I said as I rubbed the back of my neck.
My mind raced through my plan. Graduation was the only time the founders made a visit to the Academy, which just might give me the distraction I needed to take out Calamity and Lucifer all in one fell swoop.
“I hope your plan works better than the last one,” she said with a smirk. “You know, the one where I was captured and you were trapped in Hell.”
“It has to work,” I said, the stone in my gut already sinking.
Because if I failed this time, we were all screwed.
Chapter 15
Olivia had picked up a few new tricks since I’d been gone. There weren’t any classes on how to be a Light Mage, so she was learning it on the fly. She’d taught herself how to mess with other people’s memories, which was how she’d gotten in good with the Dean in the first place and wiped my slate clean—for now, anyway.
She’d also touched on the gift of foresight that few mages ever gathered enough power to be able to do. Hendrik had endured a few visions for the sake of his clan, but I knew that came with a buttload of Blood Duty sacrifices and some illegal fights in the Monster Arena.
Olivia, though, had more than enough power at her disposal since she’d regained her soul, she could feed on herself again. She claimed that she had more than enough power to go around before she endangered herself, but I made her promise not to have any more visions or use significant magic that would put further strain on her. If she lost her soul again after she’d just gotten it back, I’d kill her myself.
The vision wasn’t as helpful as I would have hoped. Olivia saw multiple futures, some where we all burned up in Hellfire and others where I died at a demon’s hands—not comforting.
But there was one vision where we got out of this alive. She backtracked from there, finding us together teaching classes, which meant I needed to mentor with her—gross.
The final vision she came across that spurred everything into action contained a vampire, a young woman who wasn’t wearing a uniform, and blood.
It all made my head hurt and I decided the best way to deal with it all was to get some much-deserved rest, so I curled up under the sheets of my bed in the freshman dorms that had started to feel like home.
It felt nice to sleep in my own bed, despite not having my Virtues with me. Only because I felt them in my head anyway, ever-present and in tune with my current mood.
While I drifted off to sleep, I indulged by walking through the mate-circle bonds, envisioning it as a long road with a rope that I played through my fingers. I veered down a path that filled me up with my wolf’s emotions. He lived in the present and didn’t worry about the future, and that was something about him that I loved. His animalistic side had a tendency of taking over wanting to play, to bite, and to mate until the moon set and the sun came up.
Logan was thinking of me, too, and he was tempted to patter in through his secret entrance by the window as his wolf, but he had his own pack to deal with. Even though they couldn’t remember him, their instincts recognized him as their Alpha. He wouldn’t admit it to me, but he’d missed them and I was glad he had a chance to just be a wolf again among his own kind, even if it was temporary. I didn’t know what our lives would look like when this was all over and my brain wouldn’t let me think ahead that far. Survive the end of the world first—then we’d deal with the rest.
I’d learned my survival mindset from my Hunter. Thinking of him took me down a new path, one where a shadow fell over my feet and screams of his victims echoed in the distance, but I wasn’t afraid. This was my Hunter’s mind, one just as dark as my own.
Dante was used to playing it solo, but getting back to his Hunter’s lair underneath the Monster Arena was going to prove difficult. I felt him in the dark rummaging through Kaito’s office over in the Counselor building for an answer to our predicament, any weakness of the Dean’s that could be exploited, but I doubted he’d find anything—and so did he. He just needed to keep busy, keep moving, and that was a sentiment I understood.
I brushed his mind with encouragement, to remind him he wasn’t alone, while I drifted off into a deeper sleep and continued to explore my connection to my mates. Sunlight hit my face as I went down a new path. I licked my lips, tasting the sweet addiction that sprinkled the air when I thought of my demigod.
Orion had returned to the Demis and was welcomed back, especially by Ally. I should have felt a spike of jealousy, but the way Orion hugged her was the way a brother hugged a sister. He was proud of her, of all of them, for learning how to shine without his starlight to guide them. They were all growing up and Orion was glad that they would be okay when it would be time to leave.
