“The school or the underworld?” I asked.
“Both.”
Yeah. Kinda thought so.
We made it to the hallway that Xero had been looking for, but unfortunately, so did Sonja. She stood between us and the library, breathing hard and tossing a ball of fire back and forth between her hands.
“We weren’t finished,” she drawled, her voice a sickeningly sweet purr. “Put your mistress down, pet. Let her put her money where her mouth is.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I made a frustrated noise in my throat. “Can I please tear her apart?”
“Not even if I let you,” Xero muttered grimly, his voice meant only for me. “She’s got years of training and at least fifty pounds of fury on you. Let it be.”
“Tell her that!”
But he didn’t. Instead he turned and went the other way.
God fucking damn it. This is getting ridiculous.
“She’s following us,” I told him, twisting and lifting my head to look down the corridor.
He broke into a run, and so did the others. I wriggled to get free as we turned a corner, which threw him off-balance. He bumped hard into a wall panel, which opened under the pressure.
“In here!” He recovered his balance quickly and dragged me through the opening.
The others followed us inside, and Kai shut the secret door. Then we froze, listening.
“Where are you?” Sonja’s sing-song tone floated through the heavy door. “Come out here and get what’s coming to you.”
Nobody moved or made a sound as all of us practically held our breath. I was still dangling upside down over Xero’s shoulder, and I could feel the tension in his body as we waited to see if Sonja would discover us. It infuriated me. We had just taken down a massive, powerful stone demon. A walking boulder. Now they were making me hide from a PMS-ing hellspawn? We could rip her to shreds!
And we would, I realized. If all of us fought Sonja together, she wouldn’t stand a chance. Depending on our ability to control our powers—which, for some of us, was rudimentary at best—we could kill her without even meaning to. Which would raise our body count to two, and Sonja wasn’t actually a threat to anybody but me so I couldn’t use the saving the school defense again.
Fine. Xero might be right.
The demon bitch queen kept pacing the hall, sometimes shouting for us, sometimes mocking us, sometimes silent. The point was, she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave.
I slapped Xero lightly on the ass, then pointed over my shoulder and whispered, “Let’s go.”
As silently as possible, we walked down the secret passage we’d discovered. It led to a narrow staircase leading upward that seemed to go on forever. Granted, I was still looking at the world backward from my perch on Xero’s shoulder and couldn’t see the end goal, but even so, the stairs seemed insanely long. By the time we reached the top, I could no longer see the bottom.
“Probably safe to put you down now,” Xero murmured.
He set me gently back on my feet, allowing all the blood to rush back out of my head. He rolled the tension out of his shoulder and let his demon form melt away, the purple of his skin tone replaced by a deep chocolate brown.
“Okay,” I admitted grudgingly. “You were right. We can’t keep racking up bodies.”
“Good call, mistress.” He flashed me an ironic smirk.
“Great, lesson learned. Now where the hell are we?” Kai scowled at the dim hallway in front of us.
“I think we’re right under the attic.” I craned my neck, looking up at the ancient rafters above us.
“Let’s keep going,” Jayce said. “There’s got to be another door up here somewhere.”
He looked downright cheerful to be having an adventure where we didn’t have to fight someone and nobody died. He grinned at us and led the way down the hall. A while later, a door appeared on our left. It was a simple door, but ancient. Jayce opened it gingerly, probably afraid he’d break it if he pushed too hard.
Rather than opening into the dormitories like I had expected, it opened into a tiny room with an equally tiny balcony that overlooked the library. From here, we could see through the library’s decorative interior windows into the main hall, and all the way down the main hall to the front door.