“No, they said the plane wasn’t leaving for another hour,” I countered, even though I really wanted the girls to be right. “It hasn’t been that long yet, has it?”

  “Dylan, you know I can’t keep track of anything with your dick in my mouth,” my pixie dream girl said, and her lips puckered into a teasing pout. “Least of all the time.”

  “What was I thinking?” I asked with a wolfish grin, and I stroked her bright pink cheek as her pout turned into a sweet smile.

  Then another, louder knock shook the door, and I sighed as I finally unwound my arms from the girls’ bodies and headed over to answer it.

  When I threw the door open, I found two tall, dark, Men in Black with sunglasses on. One of the Academy guards furrowed his brow and tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, and the other seemed to somehow look even sterner at the sight of me emerging from the wrong room.

  “Oh, uh… Mr. Cooper.” One of the guards cleared his throat. “Message from Headmaster Burkhard: you’ve all got an urgent mission. Be at hangar bay three in five minutes.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, the pair of guards turned on their heels with a military-like clicking sound and marched back down the hallway.

  Steffi slid up beside me as I stood in the open doorway and watched the Men in Black retreat back toward the elevators.

  “I really wish that had been Elisabeth,” the fairy-girl sighed.

  “Yeah, watching her guzzle Dylan’s cum would have been way less stressful than another mission,” Nala agreed.

  “You ladies are gonna kill me,” I groaned, and I firmly gripped their arms to shuttle them back toward the common room. “Come on, we’re saving the world before we think any more about anyone swallowing my cum.”

  Chapter Five

  With Nala and Steffi at my sides, we made our way back into the common room, where the scene was much as I’d left it. Nick lounged on the couch with a controller in his hand, headphones in his ears, and a plate of half-eaten pie in front of him.

  When we approached, he glanced up and grinned.

  “You all look heat-stroked,” the nymph snorted as he paused his game and removed the large headphones from his ears.

  “Just got a message from a couple of guards,” I told him. “Burkhard’s called us for an urgent mission. Five minutes and counting.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right,” he grumbled and eyed his cozy setup on the couch.

  I unwound my arms from my female teammates and rubbed my forehead. I couldn’t help but agree with Nick on this one, since I’d hoped to maybe grab a quick nap before we had to head to our afternoon classes. Instead, we’d be going who-knew-where and fighting who-knew-what.

  Although I was usually glad to have missions during class time, our course material had actually started to get pretty interesting lately, so I was a little disappointed to be missing classes this afternoon. Whatever we were going to face was going to have to be mind-boggling if it meant I wouldn’t get to spend an hour of my day ogling Dr. Crawford.

  “You heard the captain, nymph-boy,” Steffi teased our blond teammate. “Urgent mission. That means you need to get up off the couch and put away the pie. You should be all charged up by now.”

  Nick let out a melodramatic groan and stood up.

  “Fine, I’m up, fairy-girl,” Nick narrowed his eyes at the pink-haired beauty. “And for your information, I am more than charged up. I’m ready to bounce off the damn walls and break some monster skulls.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I chuckled. “Let’s head to the hangar.”

  “And who knows?” Steffi said with a toss of her curly locks. “Maybe we’ll get to fight something really cool today!”

  The pink-haired girl squeezed my hand and smiled over at me as she spoke. Even under the buzzing fluorescent lights of our dorm room, her golden eyes sparkled and sent warm tingles up my spine. Her positive demeanor was infectious, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

  As we all headed toward the door, I caught Nick giving one last wistful glance over his shoulder at the plate of half-eaten pie sitting on the couch. Then I clapped him on the shoulder, and he sent me a fidgety smile that proved he really was buzzing with calories right now.

  “Maybe they’re sending us to capture Mothman,” Nala offered as she pounded her fist into her open palm. “Or the Jersey Devil.”

  “Or maybe a Chupacabra,” Nick added with a vocal inflection that almost gave the smallest hint of the Spanish accent he was going for.

  “Hey, as long as it’s not one of these new displaced beasties, I’m game,” I snorted.

  The four of us filed out of the common room, shut the door behind us, and proceeded down the hallway toward the elevator. As my teammates continued offering suggestions of awesome monsters, I realized just how much we had all grown over the past month.

  When I’d arrived at AIMM several weeks ago, the team hadn’t even gone on their first official mission yet, and they weren’t monster experts by a long shot. Now, we were being sent on multiple missions a day, and my teammates knew almost as much as I did about some of the more obscure creatures of folklore that the Academy’s existence revolved around. I loved sharing what I knew about mythology, and my team loved listening to my stories, and I believed this complementary relationship was why we were the strongest team at AIMM these days.

  Then Ky and Goldie wriggled under the skin of my shoulders, and a sudden warmth on my chest reminded me Beyblade didn’t want to be left out, either.

  “Okay, okay,” I half-chuckled in a whisper. “You guys, too. We couldn’t be what we are today without all of you.”

  I dropped back behind my teammates a bit so I could give each of my tattoos a few reassuring rubs, and I instantly sensed their pride. Ky was almost freezing my whole upper arm over it, but Goldie seemed to be nuzzling into my touch more than the others, and Beyblade let his fire ease up enough that I didn’t have to start sweating.

  The three of them were such a huge part of me now that sometimes I wondered how I had ever lived without them, but the way they were coming into their own made me just as proud of them as I was of my other teammates.

  Our team entered the elevator and headed down to the hangars located on the ground floor of the facility. We hadn’t seen many people in the hallway, so I figured it was around lunch time, and my assumption was proven correct when the elevator doors opened.

  A throng of students and staff filled the hallway in front of us, and I lifted myself onto my tiptoes to peer over the horde of heads. It turned out the line of bodies led all the way down to the cafeteria doors at the far end of the hall.

  “This crowd looks rough,” Steffi said beside me. “I’m going to fly to the hangar and tell Silva you’re all on your way.”

  The elevator suddenly filled with light as the fairy-girl’s golden dragonfly wings burst from her back, and they began to flutter and lift her off the ground.

  “I’ll meet you all down there!” Steffi cried as she flew from the elevator and over the sea of people.

  As she zoomed away, bits of fairy dust fell from her wings and landed on the heads of the students and staff below her, and a few people looked up and gasped in awe at the gorgeous sight.

  A smile spread across my face as I watched my beautiful, powerful lover fly off down the hallway, but then I swiftly snapped back to the issue at hand. I knew that if the rest of us wanted to make it to the hangar in time, we’d need to part the proverbial Red Sea, and fast.

  “Bianxifa!” I shouted.

  In a flash of orange light, a red Chinese fire dragon appeared in front of me. Even though Beyblade was close to the ground, I knew he would be the best option for diverting the mass of people, since Ky and Goldie would have taken up almost the entire width of the hall.

  The hungry students standing closest to the elevator let out a few gasps and cries of surprise as the monster materialized in front of them, but Beyblade did his job. As the long, whiskered dragon scurried through the throng, people yelped and leapt out of the way, and several cadets pressed themselves up against the wall to avoid the fiery beast.

  Then my team and I rushed through the cloven crowd, and I periodically offered a quick “sorry,” “coming through,” or “urgent mission,” to the alarmed faces as I passed.

  Being a dragon conjurer had its perks.

  Eventually, we made it to the end of the hall and turned left at the cafeteria doors. The following hallways were populated with a few teams and handfuls of individual students all rushing toward the promise of lunch, but we were able to weave around the clusters of people without needing to use Beyblade’s crowd control.

  “Thanks, buddy! Fanhui!” I shouted and called the dragon back under my skin, where he appeared on my chest with a burst of warmth.

  When we reached the large metal doors that led into the hangar bay, I punched the white button to alert the staff inside to our presence. The huge doors opened with a low creak, and we rushed forward to the bay where we knew Silva and Steffi were waiting for us.

  “Wait!” Nala stopped in her tracks. “What about Elisabeth?”

  Oh, shit. I couldn’t believe I’d almost forgotten about our newest team member.

  “Right. You two,” I pointed at my teammates and then motioned down the hangar. “Head to bay three and make sure Silva and Steffi don’t leave without me. I’ll go grab Elisabeth.”

  Nick and Nala nodded and ran off toward the plane, and I scanned the busy hangar for the trio of French students. The hustle and bustle of incoming and outgoing planes was made even busier by the number of cages and cadets being transported up and down the length of the nearly mile-long hangar.

  A mop of red hair suddenly caught my eye from within a small gathering of cadets outside one of the nearby planes, but when I peered through the crowd at the group, I realized the hair belonged to Johnny.

  I groaned.

  If Johnny was nearby, so was his best friend and the Academy’s most self-important asshole: Bruce Olsen.

  I watched Johnny and the group of cadets around him as they unloaded their cargo from the recently landed plane, and I kept my eyes peeled for the muscular bully so I could avoid him if necessary. When his hulking frame came down the walkway of the aircraft, however, I noticed he wasn’t so… hulking.

  Bruce limped from the plane with his broad shoulders slumped, and his uniform was burnt away in a few places to reveal the reddened and blood-covered skin underneath. Even from this distance, I could tell that his breathing was labored, and his expression was pained. He looked worse than he had even after I’d beaten him in a fight on one of my first days at the Academy, and I realized the headstrong blowhard was having a hell of a time keeping up with this week.

  The notion made it almost hard to pull my gaze away from Bruce’s bloodied figure, but I continued searching for my newest teammate as I sensed the clock was ticking on my flight out of here.

  After scanning for a few more moments, I was able to catch another jolt of red hair through the crowd. This time, the hair was long and braided, and I knew I had found the correct target.

  I ran through the throng of cadets and AIMM staff until I reached the three French students. It looked like Michel and Leon were just about to board their plane, and I grabbed Elisabeth by the arm just as she finished placing kisses on the cheeks of the two Frenchmen.

  “Sorry, but we’re gonna have to cut the goodbyes short.” I shouted to the trio so they could hear my voice above the din of the hangar. “We have to go save the world.”

  “Again?” Elisabeth gasped as she looked at me with wide eyes, but there wasn’t any disappointment in her tone. She lit up at the prospect of fighting this next battle with me, and when I began tugging her through the crowd, she eagerly trotted along after me.

  “Bon voyage, mon amie!” she called back to her old teammates with a cheery wave.

  We snaked our way through the rush of bodies, and when we ran past Bruce’s team, I braced myself for a jeer, but it never came. I looked back over my shoulder at the group after we’d passed by, and I saw the muscular bully looking in my direction with an exhausted expression.

  I shrugged, but I didn’t have time to question Bruce’s odd behavior as Elisabeth and I continued toward our destination. A moment later, we made it to our landing bay and sprinted up the plane’s open ramp. When we reached the interior, the redhead and I flopped into the two open seats between Steffi and Nala to catch our breaths.

  “Cuttin’ it a little close, aren’t we?” Silva’s voice crackled through the plane’s loudspeaker.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I wheezed in response.

  “We have a brief for the mission,” Steffi said from beside me. “We figured we’d watch it once we were in the air, since the hangar is so hectic.”

  At that moment, I felt the plane jolt to life beneath me, and I pulled my seatbelt onto my lap and snapped the ends together.

  “Off we go!” Captain Silva cried as he maneuvered the plane to its take off position. “This’ll be a quick flight, so don’t get too comfortable.”

  After a brief taxi down the hangar and the usual nauseating lift off, we were in the air.

  Steffi unclasped her seatbelt and sat cross-legged in the aisle of the small plane. She pulled out a manilla folder and an audio recording device and then motioned for the rest of us to gather around so we could hear the mission brief. Once we were all sitting in a huddle near the aisle, the pink-haired girl handed me the folder and pressed play on the device, which crackled to life with the familiar husky voice of Dr. Hastings.

  “Hello, cadets,” the recording began. “AIMM has received reports of a horde of ground imps causing trouble on a remote stretch of highway in Nevada. They’ve already caused significant damage to the infrastructure of the roads, so you’re being dispatched to put an end to the monsters’ mischief and prevent any more damage from being done.”

  “Ground imps are a common nuisance, so we ask that you simply…” Dr. Hastings cleared her throat. “Eliminate the nuisance.”

  Nala and I shared a glance across the circle, and the dark beauty bared her gap-toothed grin while she pounded her fist into the palm of her other hand. I smirked and nodded in response.

  “As always, be discreet,” continued the recording. “However, this stretch of highway is one of the least-traveled roads in the country, so if you have to decide between discretion and your ability to eliminate the imps, choose elimination. Good luck, cadets.”

  The playback ended with a soft click, and I opened the folder to sift through the images and descriptions that AIMM had provided to us.

  “Ground imps?” Nick mused through a mouthful of granola bar. “Awesome.”

  “They’re so ugly!” Elisabeth grimaced as I handed her one of the pictures from the folder.

  I agreed with the French girl’s assessment.

  The little monsters weren’t devilish like their fiery cousins, but actually looked more like miniature trolls. Their backs were covered in rocky calluses, and they had long, spoon-like claws and cone-shaped heads, both of which helped them to dig and burrow with speed and precision.

  “So, what’s our play?” Steffi asked.

  “Well, we know there’s a whole horde of them,” I began while I rubbed my chin. “So, we’ll need to be prepared for numbers.”

  “I could just bury them,” Nala suggested. “I mean, I know they’re ground imps, but if Beyblade hardens the dirt as I cover them with it, maybe they wouldn’t be able to dig through it?”

  “We need to make sure we protect the roads, though,” Nick added.

  “We could just do what we did with the vampires,” Elisabeth offered. “Circle around them, get them into a group, and then, bam!”

  The redhead slammed her fist into her palm like she’d seen Nala do a thousand times, and I caught the dark beauty flashing a grin of approval at our new teammate.

  “I like that idea,” I said, “but just like we needed to prevent the vampires from flying away, we’ll need to prevent the imps from digging away.”

  “If only we could get them off the ground,” Steffi mused. “Then we could avoid their digging entirely.”

  The lightbulb in my brain went off.

  “Steffi, you’re a genius,” I praised as the fairy-girl gazed at me in bewilderment.

  If we could get the imps off the ground, they would be helpless. It’d be like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “Okay, so you know about skeet shooting?” I asked the group.

  “I’ve gone skeet shooting a time or two, yes.” Nick’s eyes glinted at the notion, and I could tell he and I were on the same wavelength.

  As I glanced around at the others, though, I was met with blank stares.

  “Well, there’s this sport called skeet shooting,” I explained to the rest of my teammates. “Someone launches these little disc-shaped targets called skeets, or clay pigeons, into the air. The goal is for you to use a shotgun to shoot as many of them as possible. So, what if we thought of this fight as skeet shooting? Some of us will be launchers, others will be shotguns, and the imps--”

  “Will be clay pigeons!” Nick shouted as he pumped his fist in the air.

  “I call shotgun!” Steffi smirked and tossed her hair over her shoulder.

  “Me, too!” the blond nymph agreed.

  “I’ll definitely be a launcher,” Nala added. “Tossing asshole imps is basically my specialty.”

  “Since when?” I snickered.

  “Since today,” the dark beauty laughed.

  “Well, then Beyblade can help you by burrowing down and rooting them out,” I suggested before turning to Nick and Steffi. “Goldie and Ky can help you guys shoot them down.”

  “What about me?” Elisabeth’s soft voice broke through the excitement.

  I reached out to the redhead, and when she placed her hand in my outstretched palm, I gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “What part would you like to play?” I asked. “Name it.”

  “I don’t know…” the French girl murmured with a nervous smile.

  “What kinds of animals can you turn into?” Steffi asked.

 

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