by G. Bailey
Shadowborn Academy © 2019 G. Bailey & Scarlett Snow
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Formatting by Champagne Book Design
Edits by Fresh Eyes Editing
Title Page
Copyright
About This Book
Map
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Epilogue
Excerpt from Consequence (Holly Oak Academy: Book One)
About G Bailey
About Scarlett Snow
Appendix i—LOCATIONS
Appendix ii—CHARACTERS
Appendix iii—WARDEN RANKS
Appendix iv—THE BOOK OF ZORYA
My fate is in the dark,
And my shadow there is real…
The darkness likes to play in this world.
It also likes to deceive.
In the Enchanted Forest, secrets thrive and one girl desperately needs to find answers before it’s too late.
That girl is Corvina Charles, a powerful Shadowborn—a human who touched dark magic and became something else.
Something dangerous.
At the age of eighteen, Corvina and her best friend are swept away to the Shadowborn Academy, the one place where magic and darkness coincide.
It’s also where pupils go missing, teachers don’t play by any rules, the therapist is hot, and boys with dark magic love to seduce your soul.
With death becoming a game at the academy that not even the Dark or Light Fae seem capable of winning, Corvina’s love life should really be the last thing on her mind…especially when one of the boys just so happens to be her teacher!
Shadowborn Academy is a Dark Reverse Harem Paranormal Fae Romance for 18+. In this world, not even the shadows can be trusted…
“Mirror, show me who will be the most powerful fae of all.” I say the command softly, trailing my fingers over the surface of the mirror, the crystalline glass like water beneath my fingertips. The gold frame is stained with the blood of creatures who tried to protect it from me, and the thought of the pain it took to deliver this mirror to my palace simply warms my darkened heart.
The silver water shimmers ever so slightly before an image appears of a newborn baby, held in the arms of the light fae king. He places the baby on the ground and slowly its small body is draped in a shadow that spreads into the shape of a woman. The darkness fades to show a girl with electric-blue hair and silver eyes that look like midnight itself kissed them.
She is beautiful, enchantingly so, and pride blossoms through my body.
“One born of light and dark.
Royal down to the last drop.
Blue of hair, silver as night.
Your child will be the most powerful in the ever long night.”
I reach out to gently touch the image of my child, the heart of the prophecy and heir to my throne, feeling a longing in my heart for her that I have never before known. As the image fades, so does the magic the mirror once held, but now I know what I must do.
“Invite King Ulric, alone, to my court,” I order, staring at my reflection.
“Yes, Queen of the Dark Fae,” my loyal servant replies behind me before running out of the throne room.
Seduction is always a game I play well.
And this time my daughter will be the prize I win.
A princess of both the light and dark fae courts.
My weapon against the ever long night…
The moonlight bleeding through the trees creates flickering shadows that dance around me. I should be afraid of them like all the other children are, but I’m not. These shadows are safe. They’re not like the ones watching me from the treetops, waiting to snatch me off the ground.
No, these shadows are different.
They’re my friends.
The faeries hiding in them follow me like they always do when I come into the Enchanted Forest. I can’t see them but I can hear them giggling and whispering in my ear. They flick my dark curly hair over my shoulders and play with the ribbons on my light blue dress, then the frills of my white socks with the little bunny rabbits on them. It’s their way of saying hello and it makes me giggle as I skip through the forest, humming to the song Mama always sings to me before I go to sleep.
Mama and Papa warned me not to follow these faeries. They said they’re not like the rest and I’ll be in deep trouble if I ever go out to play after dark. That’s when the faeries come out. They sing to children like me and promise us things beyond our wildest dreams, but nobody ever sees them again once they follow the faeries into the forest. Mama said it’s because they gobble them up for supper. I don’t believe her. I mean, how horrible would that be? I don’t think we taste very nice.
Pitch said the real reason the children don’t come back is magical.
He told me that they grow wings and go to live with the faeries. He said I can do that, too, once I make my wish. I’m so excited. I can hear him singing to me and I start humming along to his favourite song, the one about the raven and the wishing well. I follow his voice, excited to play with him again and eat snacks and tell each other stories. No one else can see or hear Pitch apart from me and the faeries. Although we’re the same age, he doesn’t look like any of the boys from my village. He’s extremely pale with glowing amber eyes and long ebony hair that sways around him like the shadows do in here. I know he’s different and that’s why I like him.
That’s why I’m following him.
Now that it’s my eighth birthday, Pitch is going to let me make a wish in the well he sings about. He says only special humans—the chosen ones—get to make a wish here. Sometimes he says funny things like that and I don’t understand him. All I want is a pair of shiny blue shoes, the same ones as my dolly. Pitch says the faeries are going to give them to me, and then I’ll finally have the same outfit as my little dolly.
The faeries guide me to the edge of a clearing which is bright from the moonlight shining down. I wave goodbye to them, even though I can’t see where they are, then I continue humming and skipping after Pitch.
I can see him now, sitting on top of the well, and my heart soars as I race through t
he clearing. Once I reach the well, he lifts me onto the stone with him. It’s wide enough that the two of us can stand together without falling into the hole.
“It’s time to make your wish,” he says, and my stomach fills with butterflies. “Are you ready to be born again?” I don’t know what he means by that; I just want the lovely shoes. I nod anyway, and Pitch smiles at me. “Then close your eyes.”
When I do this, I hold my breath, too excited to breathe.
My heart feels like it’s going to burst out from my chest. I feel dizzy and sick and excited.
“Do you remember what we talked about?” Pitch asks quietly. “What you do once you make your wish? It’s very important that you don’t forget that part.”
“I won’t forget,” I tell him firmly, peeking through my eyelashes. “Can I say it now? Can I make my wish?”
He giggles and lets go of my hand. “Go on, Corvina. Make your wish and make it count.”
I let out an excited squeal, then I scrunch up my little face and think really hard because I don’t want to mess this up.
—Hello faeries! Please can I have the same shoes as my dolly? You know, the sparkly blue shoes with the pretty bows on the silver buckles? I would like them very much. Thank you.—
With my wish uttered, I open my eyes. Pitch is gone just like he said he would be and I’m alone on the well. I look down into the tunnel of darkness stretching before me. A loose pebble falls away from the edge and drops into the well. It takes forever to splash through the water at the bottom, and I gulp, my palms turning sweaty against my dress.
For my wish to come true, I need to go down there.
Pitch said he’ll be waiting for me and that the faeries will even give me wings so that I don’t hurt myself. I’ll be just like the other children who followed the faeries into the woods and lived happily ever after. Maybe I’ll even be able to see my friends, Bella and Michael and Agnes.
We’ll all be faeries together, like we used to talk about.
I turn around and spread my arms out like wings, smiling at the thought of seeing my friends from school again. Taking a deep breath and holding it in my chest, I close my eyes and fall down into the well, praying that Mama and Papa were wrong about the faeries, and about Pitch, the monster hiding under my bed…
Before I plunge to my death, I wake up with a gasp for air, crutching my thin bedsheets in my hands. Pitch wasn’t waiting for me. There was nothing but pain and misery at the bottom of that stupid well and my innocent ass didn’t know any better back then.
I fell into magical darkness, and as everyone here tells me, that’s when I became a shadowborn.
But that’s not the part that haunts me every night in my dreams. Oh, no. It’s what happened after the pain and misery—after I drowned in all the magical water, my eight-year-old body absorbing it like it was sugar and I was a starving kid. When my heart started beating again and I opened my eyes, I lay floating on my back as the moon drew closer and closer to me. I remember crying and thinking I had been turned into a bug instead of a faery, but it was just the water healing my shattered bones and floating me up to the surface.
The second my feet touched the earth again, my power exploded and I destroyed everything in a five-mile radius, including all the houses and the people inside them.
Including my parents.
And the only living thing was me, covered in ash, lying on the forest floor as the sun rose into a blood-red sky.
Talk about a birthday to remember.
After that, I was picked up by the Shadow Wardens, protectors of the magical world, and thrown in a shadowborn foster home with all the other children that are like me. Only they didn’t kill hundreds of people and not one of them in here see their powers like the curses really are.
“You having those dreams again?” Sage asks, sitting up on her bed next to me and staring at me, the moonlight highlighting her beige skin and curly pink hair that isn’t at all messy even though she just woke up. Sage Millhouse is the only bit of this foster home that I’ve ever cared about and I’m certain it’s the same way for her. We came here on the same day, two scared kids who wanted nothing more than to escape this hellhole and the new powers we have. Sage got her power the way most of the kids here did, by being bitten by a shadowborn in their animal state. One bite is enough to infuse any soul with shadow magic, and all it took for Sage was a bite from a fox in her garden.
The fox was never seen again, and Sage nearly died, only to survive and be taken from her parents to come and live here.
The foster home is full of those stories, and it’s the main reason I don’t talk about my past.
“Always.”
It’s all I need to say for Sage to get off her bed and head out of the room. I follow her, the old wooden floorboards creaking under my bare feet with each step. Sage holds the timber door open and we head outside into the garden. The cool air is refreshing for only a second before it’s nothing but cold nipping at my skin.
“Ready?” I ask her as I stare up, the darkness and shadows comforting me like they always do.
Sage doesn’t reply, though I’m unsurprised as she isn’t one for words. That’s why I like her. I watch her bright purple eyes as she disappears in a cloud of black smoke. The darkness. It’s become a blanket of sorts to people like us. As the blackness fades away, there is nothing more than a hawk sitting on the ground, its lavender eyes staring up at me. I grin as I close my own silver eyes and do the next best thing in the world.
I let the darkness take me, creating me into something more.
Something so much better than I already am.
My body disappears into the darkness but my mind always stays, loving the comfort as I shift into a raven and follow Sage into the skies of Blackpool.
“We should head back,” Sage suggests around a spoonful of ice cream.
I watch the sea lap at the steps beside the shore and the sandbags lined at the top of them. The skies are grey, eerily so, like they can sense what a crap day this is going to be for us. The sea smells of salt and I can almost taste it over the bubblegum lollipop I’ve just finished off. Over the sounds of the waves, the seagulls make themselves known with loud squeaks, and in the distance, some children ride bikes down the front.
“Why? I have nothing to pack and neither do you. The wardens aren’t coming until nightfall,” I remind her. She eyes me carefully and I try to pick up on her emotions. Is she as nervous as me? Unlikely. The Shadowborn Academy is our next home, starting from tonight. We both have known we would attend this year, on the year we turn eighteen, since we aren’t classed as kids anymore. The academy is meant to teach us control and endurance, to accept our new life and fit into their society of normal magics.
What if you don’t want to fit in?
I asked our warden that once, and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.
“They might not come for us at all. Wouldn’t that be nice?” she replies, and I smirk at her, leaning back on the bench. I chuck the stick of my ice lolly in the bin and go back to people watching the streets.
I love people watching, and so does Sage. We have spent days on this bench, making up stories for random strangers we spot. Our stories are unlikely to be right, but it gives us an escape into a normal world—a world where our nightmares cannot reach us. We can almost pretend we’re just two teenagers skipping school instead of what we really are.
“Do you think Keeper Maddox will miss us?” Sage asks, her voice dripping with humour.
The Light Warden runs our foster home and she’s the fourth one since I came here, as all the others quit. No one likes looking after dozens of kids with shadow powers, and all of whom want their parents back. These poor wardens would literally prefer any other assignment in the magics world. It’s depressing, but Keeper Maddox isn’t the worst of the lot.
“I doubt she will even notice us leave. She prefers the younger ones,” I reply.
They’re easier to control.
As for me and Sage?
We’re damaged goods and a waste of air. Or so we’ve been told by previous wardens. Sometimes late at night, when my demons catch up with me, I almost believe them.
“And you have your book? In the name of Selena, do not forget that book, child,” Keeper Maddox warns me later that day, giving my opened trunk an assessing once over. Spotting the old, tattered book beside my trunk, she nods. “Thank the Gods. You mustn’t forget it. Always have your book with you—”
“—from the instant you enter the forest,” I tersely interject, having endured this spiel many times before now. “The book is our bible. We get it, Miss Maddox.”
We’ve had no choice but to.
I’ve read the Book of Zorya a million times already. I don’t know why she’d think we’d leave here without it. It’s practically the map to our new home. A home neither of us wants to be part of.
Well, Sage says she doesn’t, but I have a sneaky suspicion she’s excited to use magic beyond the mediocre level we were taught here. The wardens never wanted us to learn more than needed since we were supposed to be part of the mortal world.
The mortal world.
After ten years, it still feels odd to not be quite human anymore. I had human parents, lived in a human village, before I was…changed. Now I’m just a shadowborn, and I must go to this academy to learn the tricks of the trade. Part of me should at least feel excited, but I’m not. I’m more terrified than anything else. The last time I entered the Enchanted Forest, my whole world was taken from me.
“Very well, then,” Maddox starts, gesturing to my trunk. “Your luggage should arrive at the academy by the time you arrive. Why don’t you go stand outside with the others?”
She leaves without waiting for a reply.
I look out the window above what used to be my rickety bed. Sage is sitting on her tire swing in the back garden, looking down at Little Nessa’s grave. She was a kid who used to stay here before she lost control of her power. Sage and I shared a room with her, and we always managed to calm her down when she had nightmares. But that night we went out for a fly, and when we came back, they were carrying Nessa’s small body out. I remember looking at her and thinking how peaceful she looked, as if she were just sleeping. But that’s the thing with shadowborns. Our magic feeds off the darkness residing within us, and often it takes over.