My eyes narrowed at the self-professed demon standing in front of me, and I tried not to overreact at what he was saying. It had been two weeks since we’d arrived on Omega campus and saved Kit from her dark side. Two weeks of dealing with two hundred and sixty-eight fresh-as-fuck supernaturals while keeping the whole damn campus from being burned down.
“Repeat what you just said,” I ordered Finn in a deathly quiet voice, feeling my fangs sharpen in response to my emotions. “Just exactly what you said. Once more. I think I misheard you.”
Finn rolled his eyes at me and sighed. “You heard me perfectly fine, Mage. I said that if you want to stack the deck in your favor, then you’re really going to need help from Bridget’s third dianoch, Lachlan.”
“The other part,” I growled from behind gritted teeth.
“Oh, about him being my twin? I thought you knew that already.” The sarcastic smirk on his face said he knew perfectly well what a bombshell this information was.
I sucked in a few breaths in an attempt to calm down before replying, “Why, Finn? Why the fuck would we have known that?”
He arched an eyebrow at me, like the smartass he was. “Because Lucy knew. I assumed she had told Kit. Anyway, what does it even matter? He’s the missing link you’re going to need to nail that psychotic bitch to a board.”
Running my hands over my face, I started pacing to give my angry energy an outlet. Why the shit was he telling me of all people? So that I would have to tell everyone else? Fuck that! I’d just drag him upstairs by the scruff of his neck to tell Kitty Kat himself.
“So, I take it you know where to find him then?” I asked, and Finn nodded. “Great. Where is he?”
“Can’t tell you that,” the infuriating demon replied, shaking his head.
“And why not?” This fucker was seriously testing my patience now, and I was not above physical violence when angered.
“Not my place to say. Besides, he’s in hiding for a reason, dipshit. Do you really think it would be super smart for me to go running around telling everyone where to find him? What if Bridget has spies here and she finds out and gets to him first? Use your brain, Mage.” Finn tapped the side of his head as if to demonstrate where a brain was located. Asshole. “Lachlan is one of five princes of Hell. What do you think Bridget would be capable of if she could access his power?”
“Fuck,” I breathed out, grasping the seriousness of the situation. “So, her killing Lucy…”
“Was more of a fuck you to me than Kit, yeah. Why do you think I’m here helping you all instead of comforting Elena? When she found out…” He grimaced. “Let’s just say I need to do my damnedest to see Bridget ended or there won’t be much hope of reconciling with that feisty thing.”
“Fuck,” I groaned, scrubbing at my face. “You have to tell Kit about this. She blames herself for Lucy’s death.”
Finn shrugged again, totally uncaring about my girl’s guilt. “Not important right now. We need Lachlan, which means you and your surly brother need to work on a spell to break the dianoch bond. Currently Lachy is under a magic-induced coma, which prevents Bridget from accessing his magic. We cannot risk bringing him out until that bond is broken.”
“Why us? Why now? How long has he been in this coma shit? And how the hell are we supposed to break their bond unless you tell us where he is?” I had way more questions than just that, but those were the first ones off my tongue.
“I don’t have time to hold your hand and talk you through this shit, Caleb,” Finn drawled, pushing off the wall he’d been leaning on. “Your Ban Dia has me teaching a class to a bunch of demonlings and assorted other weirdos, and I’m already late. Just figure it out, yeah? You and Austin are the only ones with the power. So, figure it out.”
He started to walk away from me, then, while I shook my head and gaped in shock. Was he seriously just dumping all of that at my doorstep and then walking away?
Finn didn’t make it far, though.
A loud boom thundered through the campus, and the ground shook under our feet, causing Finn to cast a worried look over his shoulder at me.
“What the fuck was that?” I shouted at him, hurrying in the general direction the noise had seemed to come from—the training center.
Finn ran with me, keeping up as he replied. “I think I know. I have a couple of jötunn in my class of random weirdos. They were scrapping over a girl yesterday.”
“Jo-what?” I demanded, not slowing down.
“Jötunn. Frost giants. This sort of sounds like they’ve come to blows.” We didn’t need to speculate any further as we rounded a corner and saw the culprits for ourselves.
Two blue-skinned, ten-foot tall creatures tussled on the grass outside what used to be a solid brick wall but now revealed a trashed classroom and twenty-odd yelling recruits. As they rolled, one aimed a punch for the other’s head and missed—hitting the ground and causing another mini-earthquake like we had just experienced.
“Holy fucking…” I gaped at the jötunn. They couldn’t fight for shit, but damn, they packed some serious strength.
“Don’t just stand there!” Finn snapped at me. “Help me separate them before they turn this whole fucking building to dust.”
I was sorely tempted to just let it play out for a bit. What better way for two teenage boys to work through their anger than by pounding each other’s skulls into the ground, right?
Then again, these were fucking frost giants, and Finn probably wasn’t being all that dramatic when he’d said they could turn the whole building to dust. They’d already demolished an entire brick-sided classroom, after all.
“All right, that’s enough!” I snapped, projecting my scary “leader” voice that I’d been working on for official mage gatherings and such. “Break it up, now!” As I bellowed this command, I threw a droplet of blood, which landed on the grass beside them with an explosion like I’d just thrown a grenade.
“I said help me reduce the damage, not make it worse, you idiot!” Finn growled, stomping over to one of the dazed frost giants and placing him in a binding spell while I took care of the other one.
Shrugging, I used the toe of my shoe to nudge some displaced grass and dirt back where it had come from. “This place could have used a little landscaping anyway.”
Finn rolled his eyes at me so hard I could practically hear it, but I was in no mood to be fucking around with out-of-control teenagers fighting over a girl. The demon had just dropped a major info-bomb on my head, and we really needed to get back to that subject.
“What in the hell is going on here, then?” Finn demanded of his captive, shaking the kid’s huge blue shoulder. I sighed and ran a hand over my face, realizing we actually had to discipline these morons before we could get back to discussing missing princes of Hell.
Before the stubborn, blue dickheads could come up with a plausible lie for why they’d been fighting, like “we both tripped and fell through the classroom wall” or some bullshit like that, a young girl came running over to us and skidded to a panting stop in front of Finn.
“I’m so sorry; this is all my fault,” she gasped, looking upset. “These two idiots got it into their frozen skulls that I was dating them both and therefore cheating on them both.” She looked pissed as hell, and her forearms rippled with fur as she glared at the two giants.
“And are you?” I asked her, genuinely curious and not at all judgmental. I had seriously come a long way since my days of monogamy—not that I’d ever really been that hellbent on it to begin with.
“No!” she raged, fur coating more of her arms in her anger. Definitely a shifter of some sort. “I wasn’t dating either of them! We each went on one damn date before all of this happened, then I shifted and found my mate, Trevor.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate a shy-looking boy in glasses. “I had zero interest in these two even before I found Trev, and even less now! This whole thing is out-of-control stupid.”
I raised my eyebrows at her ire and gave the frost giants a pointed look. “Well, I think you both got your answer on whether she’s ‘cheating’ on you.”
“Thank you, Bella,” Finn told the girl. “You and Trevor can return to your class. We will handle this from here.”
The girl—Bella—gave Finn a concerned frown, but did as she was instructed, grabbing her mate’s hand as she passed and dragging him away from the fight scene.
“One guess who the alpha of that relationship is,” Finn muttered under his breath, and I fought not to laugh.
Turning back to the two dipshit blue dudes, I turned on a good teacherly scowl. “Have you two learned something from this?” They nodded sullenly. “What have you learned? We need to hear it out loud.”
The boys glanced at each other, and the one sporting a swollen eye sighed before responding. “We learned that we should probably communicate with one another before resorting to violence?” He posed it as a question, so I nodded, like I knew fucking anything about disciplining teenagers.
“And that by letting our anger get the best of us, we caused a lot of damage?” the other boy added, and I eyed the demolished classroom as I nodded again.
“Very good,” I agreed, wanting to be done with the whole thing so I could go and find Austin. “Now, shift back down to human size and report to Instructor Morgan for punishment assignments.” Yeah, I was that lazy. But also, River came up with way better—more appropriate—punishments than I ever could. “Finn, I believe we were in the middle of a chat?”
“Sorry, snake-boy. I need to deal with this mess. Go chat with your brother and hit up Yoshi for more info. He and Jackson had started some research before hitting a dead end.”
“What?” I exclaimed, barely restraining myself from punching him in his smug-ass face. “Why the hell are you only telling me this now? Why not months ago?”
Finn gave an apathetic shrug. “I didn’t trust you then. I do now.”
