Page 171 of Wicked Heirs

“Abi,” I rasped. “Our children… they’re in danger.”

It was over then… I couldn’t hold on any longer.

I lost consciousness.

32

~Talon~

“He still hasn’t called. Hasn’t mind-linked. Hasn’t… anything,” Xavier was muttering as he paced up and down our covert spot at the edge of the campus forest.

“He’s the most powerful sorcerer in the world,” Alena reminded him.

“That doesn’t matter when going up against hellfire,” Ore spoke from where he was leaning against a tree a few feet away and stroking the piece of his father’s wing.

“Orpheus,” Alena warned.

We were trying to comfort and calm X, not rile him up even more than he already was after his dad had hung up on him to take on the acolytes seeking to release Constantine, then hadn’t called him back or answered any of X’s attempts to contact him in the hours since.

We’d been up all night with him, waiting on some news.

We’d made an agreement that if we didn’t hear in one more hour, Alena would contact her mom to find out that way.

I felt sick with it, because I remembered three years ago when I’d gotten word that something had happened to my parents. It had taken hours before I’d found out the whole deal,that they’d actually been killed.Exemplarhad been so slow to inform me because they’d been in the heat of theCataclysm.

Was that what was going on now? Was it happening all over again? Was that monster free?

I rubbed my hand over my hair.

All of this, with their fathers, was bringing back everything with my parents.

And I felt for them, so fucking deeply.

Alena was trying so hard to keep morale up and to comfort them at the same time, but it was a losing battle with the weight of it all, the stakes involved.

“I can’t pretend, Alena,” Orpheus spoke, pushing off the tree and finally coming over to us, not distancing himself since we’d headed out here to get X some fresh air and trying to provide him some sort of distraction all at once. The latter hadn’t worked out one little bit. “There’s just reality right now. Something we all need to face.”

“There’s a difference between facing it and ramming it down someone’s throat,” she retorted.

Things were so dire that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to run with theramming it down someone’s throatinnuendo.

“If he was dead, I’d know,” X suddenly stated, pulling us all up short at the blunt brutality of his words. “I’d feel it.”

Before anything more could be said, a whirring siren erupted, tearing through the entire campus like a foghorn on steroids.

“The threat alert,” Ore said.

We all exchanged a dire look.

And then we rushed from the forest and back toward the main building.

We took in the students hightailing it into the buildings, people looking all around, trying to locate the threat the siren was warning of.

All I could see was heavy smoke.

Unnaturally heavy smoke.

We made it into the main building, Ore and me side-by-side at the front and X holding Alena’s hand at the rear as we rushed down the corridors, headed for the main entrance doors.

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