A/N: Something is wrong with Microsoft Word… Kasta played with it and now… I don't know what's up. So… Yeah. Anyways, here comes another chapter of "Lullabies of New York". I finally know where I want to take this sequel. Kevin's POV.

Disclaimer: I own Melody, Carson, and Mandy.

'Me and all my friends
We're all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothin'
And there's no way we ever could
Now I see everything is goin' wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We feel like we don't have the means
To rise above and beat it
So we keep on waiting, waiting
Waiting on the world to change'

~'Waiting on the World to Change', John Mayer

Underground

I pulled the car into the small hidden lot we had secured by building a fence and rigging a small pulley system to pull up the fence so Carson and I could slide our cars right in without a problem. Mandy was the first one out, stretching her limbs from the long ride. Sure, it had taken us two days to make it, but I had been the only one driving and we had stopped twice to sleep and stock up on mountains of food. "Home sweet home," she breathed, arms stretching out towards the bright blue sky that loomed over our heads. "Good to be back, right Kev?"

Instead of saying anything, I just nodded, looking at how beat up the place looked since the last time I had seen it. The gravel was laced with small pellets of hail and the garbage on the side of the alley reeked like dead fish that had been left out for more than a couple of weeks. The whole place just looked run down but not in a ghost town kind of way.

Melody stepped out right before Carson who had been crammed against the dashboard while the girls frantically tried to haul themselves out of the backseat of my ride. Then they too shook out the soreness of their limbs.

It was like walking back in time to a distant memory. An almost haunting one. I had nightmares of this place. I had watched them all die. Just thinking of coming back here after they had all supposedly been consumed by flames… It was like staring into the eyes of my own worst enemy. "This place looks like you threw a party," I said, staring at the empty mouth of the subway's entry. It was pitch black in the abyss below. "I mean, it's just trashed."

"That's what we get for going after you," laughed Carson, coming up behind me and ruffling my hair before moving towards the gaping hole in the ground that led to our home. "You're worth it though, Kev. You were the only one we could think of that could help us." Then he leapt down into the open doorway that had once been the opening into an underground subway; now it was the home of a bunch of street rats.

Mandy was down after him, the sound of her worn sneakers squeaking against the concrete an easy sign of knowing she was down safely. Then Melody was following closely behind her; she smoothed out her dress for a long moment before taking one step over the edge and falling into the darkness, her ivory and ebony hair visible until she dropped into the black hole that led to what we could only call our home.

I looked over my shoulder at the car before turning back, taking a deep breath, and letting myself plunge into the consuming darkness, air whirling around me like a tornado's whipping winds.

"Good to see you still know how to fall with style," remarked Carson as he flipped on lights to shoo the shadows to the corners of the massive underground station. "You always knew how to land."

I was crouched down low to the floor, one hand on the cold concrete and my combat boots pressed firmly to the icy ground. I hadn't fallen, but I wasn't exactly a natural at diving into the pit anymore since we knocked the stairs out to prevent intruders. So far, it had worked pretty damn well.

"Can we safely assume the Knights know nothing about this?" asked Mandy, pushing her way to the bedroom that the girls had once shared that Carson and Mandy had had to share after a while of me and Melody just wanting to be closer for longer. "I mean, it looks trashed, but it's been worse when I've left the boys alone for the weekend."

Carson and I share a love of parties. It's instinctive.

"They didn't get to it," said Melody as she crashed on the couch to check the tv to see if it was still operational or not. The thing was temperamental most of the time. "I had to lie so you guys wouldn't be mad."

"Fair enough," retorted Carson curtly. His face was slightly twisted up in anger, but not enough that anyone would truly notice. Melody was a people person, but she was incapable of reading people the way Mandy and I had been trained to. "But you really should've stayed. Could've saved Kevin all the chick drama."

"Did I make a difference?" Melody asked, blackened orbs narrowed to slits in Carson's general direction. He knew too; I could see the hairs raised on the back of his neck and the anger making the slits on his neck fan up and down a bit in a pathetic attempt to tame the beast. "I got him here, didn't I?"

"Mel, orders are orders," I said, interrupting the conversation before one of them said something they would regret. "When someone tells you to do something, you're supposed to listen." I let my gaze throw daggers in her direction. Her face seemed a bit taken aback by my intrusion into the moment. "They're your superiors. It's law around here."

New York makes hard, cold people. It makes monsters of men. New York is war. Carson was the ringmaster. It was his job to keep on top of us, to keep breathing down our necks all for the prosperity for our cause. We were the only ones capable of taking down an entire organization that was hell-bent on destroying the streets of the city. For good.

Mandy was all up over me. She had randomly just jumped on my back and started giving me a serious noogie with her legs wrapped around my waist and one arm with a death grip around my throat. "That's the good Kevie we love!"

"You're hurting… my head…" I coughed as I found myself unable to take a breath for a few seconds.

She dropped off of my back and her brown tinted eyes stared at me for a long moment as I turned around. "Boy, you missed a ton."

"You oughta go up to the landline and check in with Bryce and the girls," suggested Carson as he began to rummage through the rooms that had once been ticket booths nearly a whole lifetime ago. "It'd be good to hear that we got our leading man back."

"I'll call 'em in a little while." I pulled up the folding chair that we had hauled from a dump on the southern side of the massive city. The dumps were our scavenging grounds. "For now, you guys need to catch me up on the world around here."

Carson just laughed for a long moment as he kicked his feet up on the coffee table. "Who wants to start?" he asked to no one in particular.

No one responded, but Mandy pulled up another chair beside me.

A/N: More details to come next chapter. This is all in my head now. Time to get it out. But seriously, review if you're reading this. I don't want to feel like a moron for writing something that no one's reading.

~Sky