Fortune Academy: Year Three - J.R. Thorn Page 0,77

nerve. He wasn’t ready to face the hard questions. He launched his wings, sending wind to whip around my face as he vanished into the mist. My stomach dropped a moment later when I felt him leave Purgatory with a violent boom.

All my smugness and conviction buckled when the last remaining connection to my Virtues vanished. Had I been wrong? Had I made a terrible mistake?

Something snapped in that moment as I embraced true hopelessness and suffering.

Fuel… to complete my transformation into my true form.

Agony worse than when I’d died raked through my body as two blades sliced across my shoulders and down my spine.

The world went dark as I screamed… and I fell.

“That was one hell of a show—excuse my pun,” a chipper, female voice said, shoving fresh clothes at me.

I opened my eyes as pain raked its way through my body, making my vision waver. When the worst of it cleared, I was met with long, gothic spires that shot into a dark sky and a warped, red moon shining down, making the fields around the iron gates look as if they were bathed in blood.

“Where am I?” I asked, immediately regretting speaking as my skull throbbed. I grabbed my head and groaned. “Holy shit. Did I get hit by a truck or something?”

“No, silly! You Fell! Like seriously, you Fell with a capital ‘F,’ how cool is that?” I opened my eyes to find Yuri staring down at me with her trusty cherry lollipop. She bopped me on the nose with it. “Did you hit your head when you Fell? Because now that you’ve got wings, that’s pretty ironic. You could have fall-glided, or something, at least.”

I went still, holding the clothes she’d given me to my chest before I noticed fluffy, black feathers moving back and forth in my peripheral vision. I turned and then screeched when I saw a wing.

And then another.

It flared up, yanking my spin painfully with it.

Yuri jumped back and laughed. “Whoa! Okay, well, you need to work on controlling them, it seems. You’re kind of like a baby chicken. What do they call those things?”

“Chicks,” I informed her as I experimented with my wings again, this time managing to fold them to my back so that the weight wasn’t so painfully distributed.

“That’s so stupid. ‘Chick’ is just ‘chicken’ without the last two letters. That’s so lazy. They should be called something cuter, like chicklings.”

What the actual fuck was this vampire going on about?

“Can you tell me where I am?” I asked as I looped the halter top around my neck and pulled on the skirt. At least the outfit was suitable for someone with wings.

“You’re at Monster Academy, silly,” she said, bopping me on the nose again with her sticky lollipop. She whirled around and waved at the massive iron gates that surrounded long, dark fields and a campus that looked like it belonged in a horror movie featuring demonic elites.

“Well, now it’s being renamed with the Dean taking over and all, and that whole thing with Fortune Academy merging with Hell so we get a moon, even though we’re underground. It’s all sorts of weird. She’s calling it Fortune Academy Underworld, kind of catchy, I’ll admit.” She offered me a hand. “You’ve been gone for a long time. I read in Realm Studies that Purgatory can do that sometimes. Messes with the time-space continuum or something. Anyway, it’s been a few months. You missed graduation, not that there was much of one. Everyone thought you were dead, including your mates. They put up a good fight, but your mom convinced them they could get revenge if they helped her train a proper army to fight Luc. Plus, Hell’s influence doesn’t help. They’re pretty angry all the time. That’s a thing around here. Of course we didn’t know that you’d holed up in Purgatory while you unlocked your final powers, you crafty thing you. The Dean is going to flip her shit.”

Ugh, I was never going to get rid of this woman, was I?

“They thought I was dead?” I asked. “Are they okay?”

She shook her head. “Oh, definitely not. Your mom is in charge, but she made the Dean her second while she keeps Lucifer out of her territory.”

“Why would my mother work with that woman?” I asked, disgusted. The Dean had freaking killed me.

“Oh, it’s not the Dean’s fault. Lucifer corrupted her and he took the power of Calamity when you opened up the portal to Hell. Something to do