Chapter 7
Backed against the jagged mouth of the central fissure was a young student.
It was Leo, a fifteen-year-old mixed-blood freshman who worked the scullery shifts in the mess hall. Drenched in the freezing downpour, his thin uniform jacket soaked through, he was trembling violently as he backed away from the snarling heirs, his eyes wild with terror as the widening chasm yawned behind his heels.
“Pick it up, runt,” Julian snarled.
Julian’s jacket was tossed aside on the wellhead. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, his thick forearms already swelling with the coarse, golden fur of a partial shift. In his right hand, he loosely spun a heavy iron crowbar—the kind used to pry up construction slabs.
“I didn't steal it!” Leo pleaded, his voice cracking as he raised his hands defensively. “I was just walking back from the kitchens!”
“My father’s signet ring went missing from the varsity lodge two hours ago,” Julian drawled, his voice carrying the oily arrogance of an apex predator playing with its dinner. “And Headmaster Callow told me he saw an unranked scullery boy loitering near my locker. You think you can paw Highfell gold and walk away with your tail intact?”
*Callow told him.*
The words hit me like a slap. Callow had planted the lie. He had pointed Julian’s vicious, entitled fury directly at a defenseless kid, right here, right now, directly over the fractured earth.
“Julian, stop!” Marcus shouted from the edge of the pit, though there was no pity in the Beta’s voice—only malice. “Don’t waste your time talking to him. Shove him into the hole and let the trucks pave over the whole mess.”
“He’s fifteen!” I hissed, my boots slipping on the wet slate as I lunged toward the archway.
Vaughn caught my shoulder, not to hold me back, but to place himself half a step ahead of me. His amber eyes were already ablaze with the terrifying, primal fury of an awakened mate defending his pack.
“Stay behind my left flank,” Vaughn commanded, his voice dropping into that dark, resonant rumble that shook my teeth. “When I hit Julian, you get the kid. Don’t look back, Waverly. Just get him out of the yard.”
“Vaughn, look at the ground!”
I pointed down.
Beneath Julian’s heavy boots, the shattered flagstones were visibly trembling.
The weight of eight fully grown, agitated shifters posturing and shifting had overloaded the already compromised masonry. The fissures were no longer hairline cracks; they had widened into jagged, gaping black chasms four feet across. Loose limestone chips were cascading into the subterranean void, bouncing off ancient, unseen walls with hollow, subterranean rattles.
The floor was a ticking bomb.
“Julian!” Leo shrieked as the Highfell heir raised the crowbar. “Please—!”
Julian struck.
He didn't swing the bar; he lunged with claws extended, his beast surging forward in an explosion of pureblood violence.
Vaughn moved.
He didn't shout. He didn't issue a challenge. He crossed thirty feet of rain-slick flagstones like a black artillery shell.
Before Julian could reach the boy, Vaughn slammed horizontally into Julian’s ribs.
The impact was deafening. It sounded like two freight trains colliding. Julian let out an explosive gasp of expelled air as Vaughn drove him backward across the courtyard, slamming him violently into the ancient stone wellhead.
The ancient wellhead shattered on impact.
Centuries-old mortar turned to powder. Heavy granite blocks broke apart, rolling across the pavement, but Julian was already snarling, his Alpha blood flaring hot. He caught Vaughn by the throat with one hand, his black claws digging through Vaughn’s collar, while driving his knee viciously into Vaughn’s abdomen.
“You again!” Julian roared, rain plastering his blond hair to his furious face. “You cellar-born mutt! I’ll tear your throat out and feed it to your bitch!”
“Touch her,” Vaughn growled, his voice unhinged, “and I’ll rip your spine out through your chest.”
The other five Highfell wolves surged forward, barking and snarling, shifting into half-forms with elongated muzzles and hooked claws.
“Vaughn!” I screamed.
I didn't have claws like Julian or bulk like Vaughn, but I had the speed of an unburdened tracker. I sprinted through the blinding spray of sleet, skidding across the slippery lime dust to where Leo lay huddled on the crumbling flagstones.
“Get up!” I caught the boy’s arm, hauling him to his feet. “Leo, run! Get to the cloister arcade!”
“I can’t,” the boy cried, his knees knocking, his pupils blown wide with shock. “My leg—it’s caught—!”
I looked down. His boot was wedged firmly between two shifted paving stones, trapped like an animal in a jaw-trap.
Beneath us, the earth groaned.
It wasn't a metaphorical sound. It was the deep, catastrophic bass note of centuries-old structural timber snapping beneath the earth. A vibration tore through the soles of my boots—a sudden, sickening drop of two inches as the stone shelf settled.
“Waverly, out!” Vaughn shouted over the din of battle.
He was fighting off Marcus and two other Betas at once, his massive fists striking like sledgehammers. Blood coated his knuckles, some of it his own, most of it belonging to the Highfell boys he had sent sprawling into the mud. But Julian was rising again, the iron crowbar raised high, his Alpha aura radiating a crushing wave of psychic violence that made the air smell of scorched ozone.
Julian swung the heavy iron bar with the full, monstrous power of his shifted shoulder.
He didn't swing it at Vaughn.
He swung it down into the cracked floor, right at the focal point of the central fissure, screaming in frustrated rage: “*Die, you fucking mutts!*”
The iron crowbar struck the keystone.
For a split second, there was dead silence. The rain seemed to freeze in mid-air.
Then, the world gave way.
The entire center of the Belltower Courtyard—a fifty-foot expanse of ancient limestone, earth, and rotting wooden pilings—sheared off completely.
The sound was like an artillery shell detonating in an enclosed cellar. A massive cloud of choking white lime dust and pulverized stone erupted into the rain. The flagstones didn't just crack; they tilted vertically, sliding into the black throat of the earth like collapsing dominoes.
“*No!*”
Leo shrieked as the stone ledge holding him vanished. The boy plunged downward into the pitch-black void, his fingers clawing uselessly at the collapsing mud.
“I’ve got you!” I lunged forward on my knees, catching his wrist just as his shoulders slipped beneath the rim of the break.
The jerk tore at my shoulder socket, blinding pain shooting down my arm. The weight of the boy, combined with the suction of the collapsing rubble, pulled me forward. The stone beneath my knees cracked, tilting violently toward the abyss.
“Waverly!”
Vaughn’s voice cut through the dust and rain, raw with sheer panic. He broke away from Julian, ignoring a claw slash that ripped across his back, throwing himself across the buckling flagstones to catch me.
His fingers caught the hem of my jacket just as the entire edge gave way.
The ground disappeared beneath us.
We fell.
***
The descent was a violent blur of tumbling debris, blinding white dust, and the bone-jarring impact of landing on a steep slope of compacted shale and broken beams twenty feet below the surface.
