Page 102 of Angel Lost

We’re locked in.

Dean Emrick strides for his back office and Dean Davina and I hurry behind him. I stop dead in the doorway. Hell, his security has had a massive upgrade. High-tech touch-screen monitors span an entire wall, each one displaying a different live feed from cameras positioned throughout the campus. They cover all angles: main buildings, pathways, entrances, parking lots, and secluded areas. The wall casts a bluish glow, illuminating the room.

“There.” Davina stabs a screen with a fingernail.

I squint, then use my fingers to zoom in. A human, a young woman. What the actual hell? She exudes an air of polished refinement, an unmistakable upper-class elegance that even I can recognize. She’s wearing a fitted tweed jacket and a matching skirt that flatters her round figure. Her red hair is busy escaping a messy plait, and despite her poise, she seems frantic. Her lips move, like she’s shouting something.

I twiddle a button. No audio. Damn.

Around her, the familiar cobbled paths of the academy stretch between towering turreted buildings, their ancient stone facades dark against the low, overcast sky. She stands near the archway to the training grounds, her polished shoes out of place on the worn, uneven ground.

“The alarms. A human…It’s a rip,” hisses Emrick beside me. “It has to be.”

“If the rip is big enough for a human, it won’t be long before the hellions find it,” Davina mutters.

Wait. The hellions don’tcausethe rifts? They’re just taking advantage of them. Well, shit. Every day’s a school day. So what causes—

Dean Emrick elbows me aside and starts pressing buttons, flicking between screens. Students mill around outside, clearly confused.

“Why aren’t they in lockdown, Soren?” Davina snaps. “Why are they going outside?”

A blush creeps up the back of Dean Emrick’s neck. “We were going to run the simulation this weekend. We’ve not told them what the alarm means yet.”

He flips helplessly from one screen to the next.

Suddenly, the screen I’m watching blacks out. I reach over, flick to another, catching a scurrying motion. The camera won’t pan enough to follow so I move to the next screen. A small furball with giant eyes peers straight back at us from the monitor.

“Aw, cute.”

“That?” Davina says. “Cute? Not cute—evil!”

As we watch, the cute-eyed creature pulls its lips back to reveal three rows of extremely sharp teeth. I flinch. The picture vanishes inside the creature’s mouth, and we lose the feed. Holy shit. Okay, so that was a hellion. Not one I’ve met before.

In the corner of another screen, four large humanoids appear, almost twice the size of a normal demon. Whatarethey? A flap of familiar white wings draws my attention. Zephyr! I lunge for the monitor, zooming in. He’s outside the observatory, a glazed look on his face. The camera screen cracks, a large dark shard splitting the monitor. My view of him vanishes.

Shit. He’s not okay. In a vision or tripping or something. I glance at the bickering deans, then back to the rapidly failing monitors.

I tug on Dean Emrick’s gown. “There is help, right? Help is coming?”

“I hit the panic button. The Council will come,” Davina says.

“Eventually,” mutters Dean Emrick.

Fuck. If the rip on Maverik territory is anything to go by…I glance between the two professors. Are they genuinely just going to sit here? Hell no. Zephyr is out there. My allegiance is out there.

I won’t sit in the dean’s private panic room. I slam the button at the side of the shutter. The mechanism groans, and the professors startle.

“Lorelei, stop!” Davina snaps, but I duck out her reach, hand firmly over the control.

Painstakingly slowly, the shutter creaks open. Emrick swears under his breath. By the time it’s waist height, I duck under it and bolt for the observatory.

My feet hit the cobbles outside and I careen around the corner, nearly flattening a bunch of hada as they take turns poking kitchen knives into one of the small, very not-cute hellions. The hada. Of course.

I stumble to a stop. “I need your help!”

The hada pause.

“Can you get all the hada to the kitchens, inside the ley line loop, and get ready for students to arrive?”

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