by Jillian Keep
Magic Academy
Jillian Keep
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Out of a young woman’s ambition comes a love triangle that could destroy more than her heart.
Firia has always wanted to be a witch, but even though she’s a natural in magic, there’s a problem: She’s human.
Considered by the elven elite to be inferior, Firia needs an edge to be accepted into the Magic Academy. Out of sheer desperation, she summons the demon Varuj, a terrifyingly gorgeous spirit who helps her win the entrance competition. But at what price?
As the commanding demon does everything he can to penetrate every aspect of her innocent life, Firia still finds herself drawn to her study partner, Mae’lin. Not only is the sweet elf completely different from the powerful Varuj, but their relationship is forbidden.
How is she supposed to choose between the demon she owes her life to and the innocent elf who makes her a better person?
This thrilling coming of age new adult romance is from fantasy romance author, Jillian Keep.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
MORE BY JILLIAN KEEP
BIOGRAPHY
Chapter 1
Her father worked nights, but that suited her just fine. After all, he took her with him to hang out in the dark corridors of the Arcane Academy. It was a place so few humans had ever gone, and at night she didn’t have to deal with so many of the sour stares of the high elves.
Instead she could simply wander, admiring the history and architecture of the great buildings.
But she always went back to one in particular. The Grand Library. It contained more knowledge than she could ever hope or dream of, and the young woman felt truly alive there. She’d spent her childhood poring over heavy tomes of spells and secrets.
Yet her ambitions were growing with every day.
No longer was she content to simply read the night away, practicing harmless spells that served so little purpose. The moment she had found the dusty, hidden black book she knew it was calling to her. Begging for her to learn its contents.
For months she’d studied it in detail, the yearning to know something of true value, beyond the mundanities of her self-taught tricks, driving her to a near-religious fervor. Finally, the evening had come that she would cast her first ritual from it. No one she knew of had been able to handle such a spell, and it was just what she needed to get into the Academy. To make the elvish sorcerers sit up and take notice of a desperate human.
Her black hair was pulled back in twin pigtails, her bangs swept out of her expressive blue eyes. Her peachy skin felt flush with excitement as she settled in.
She’d blocked the door of the library’s study room, and had everything prepared to see her through to the end of the casting. Yet as the first word of power passed her lips, she wondered if she could ever be prepared for the high she received.
It was something she’d never truly experienced to the same intensity. “Fush-nea klixak hlinta,” she continued, and with each word her body trembled.
This wasn’t the stuff of parlor tricks that she’d toyed with before: simple twists of light and sound to amuse and confound viewers. Each word tapped into some dark plane of existence and the raw magical energies there coursed through her veins and made her skin buzz with electricity.
The closer she got to conclusion, the more reality seemed to warp before her. It was as if the walls changed shape, angles took on impossible dimensions that were not of her world.
Gradually, it was as if a lightning storm were brewing at the heart of the room. Crackles of energy stabbing out from black wisps of nothingness that grew to consume the air there. It was terrifying to watch, and a sense of foreboding followed in its wake, but the high… the high of that power coursing through her with each new word was so sweet. Too sweet to give up.
She wouldn’t. She was so close. She could feel how close she was, and her excitement made her stumble on that final word. “Punummra,” she shouted, praying to be heard over the crackle of power at the heart of the word.
Her skin was flush and her light, white shirt clung to her slender body. The black skirt felt sticky around her thighs and calves, and she shifted to try to get the fabric off her.
The tempest before her writhed and swelled with a fury that belied the earlier display. Black tendrils seemed to lunge out at reality itself in random directions! It wasn’t long, though, before they began to take on some form, and as if from through a gateway to hell itself, she witnessed the ruddy-black visage of a man that was not a man, both step through to her side and tear it open.
He was wrathful. He was monstrous! He was beautiful, even in his fury.
Sleek muscle, he was bare. Not a stitch of clothing, only the wisps of blackness that still clung to his form gracing his body as he clenched his fists and let loose a cry that beat at her ears. Hooves struck the floorboards, and his mighty, obsidian horns nearly scraped the ceiling.
“Kral’kron krizzixt varuj!” he exclaimed in his demonic tongue, almond-shaped eyes that burned like cinders darting about the room before he realized there was nobody to turn his rage on… nobody but her.
His bare chest heaved, his nostrils flared. Tall and mighty, he was broad at the shoulders and dwarfed her in every manner.
She’d never felt so small and insignificant, physically.
Yet at the same time, she felt larger than life, powerful beyond belief, and a smile spread across her lips. Fear still coiled in her stomach and she took a step backwards, away from the hellish thing she’d summoned.
That she had summoned. By herself. Without any aid of elves and their haughty attitudes. He was hers, bound to her alone.
Her body tingled with such perfect disbelief.
The look upon the demon’s face said he believed otherwise. Though some strange amusement tickled his fancy.
From out of his chest his words rumbled forth, dark and ominous, so full of masculine menace. “It was you who summoned me?” he asked, part disbelief in his voice, part amusement. Though she could see the strands of darkness flicker out and fade, they swept away from his body, leaving him mo
re apparent to her. Her eyes able to see his reddish form, the dark hairs of his chest that formed a V-shape on down to a trail across his stony abs, that ended in a tuft above his loins. By the gods! Those monstrous loins of his were enough to snap her in half!
It struck her dumb for a moment and her voice came out as little more than a squeaked “yes.” It was an odd sensation, of feeling utterly powerful and utterly insignificant, all at once. Yet she controlled him, so shouldn’t she feel unstoppable?
The small, young woman forced her eyes away from his massive package and looked instead to his face. “You are here because of me.”
The mighty demon before her snorted with derision and then unfurled his fists. She saw then the long, hooked nails that looked perilously sharp. “Because of you,” he repeated, touching one hand to his chest, letting the dagger-tips of his claws scrape over his own dark flesh, raking across abs as he eyed her with curiosity.
“Why?” he demanded more than asked, brushing back some of his long, black hair with the other hand. The glossy pitch strands flowing about his neck and shoulders, framing his face.
“Because I could!” she replied, trying to sound strong and brave but feeling anything but. She should have felt that same high she’d experienced casting the spell, but instead, fear was beginning to turn her blood cold.
He was too large. Too unwieldy of a weapon. How could she hope to have the mental fortitude to hold him back? Greater mages than her had tried and failed.
Her eyes narrowed at her negative thoughts and she forced herself to stand straight. No. She summoned him and she would control him.
The towering beast before her smirked and a low rumble of a chuckle emitted from his chest as he rubbed his hand up and down across it and his hard belly. “Is that it then? You tore me from my realm, my home, simply because you could?” He stepped closer to her, his hoof hitting the ground noisily and as if time meant nothing to him, he was suddenly several steps closer to her, looming barely two inches from her body.
She couldn’t help but inhale the scent of cinders, sweat, curiously alien aromas and masculinity with him up in her face like that. He pricked beneath her chin with one of his hooked nails, pointing her face up at him slowly. “Nobody summons one of my kind without a reason. Maybe you don’t know it yet,” he mused aloud.
How was it possible that she felt like her pulse was racing and her heart stopped, all at once? His touch, his nail was so sharp and unpleasant, yet his scent was nearly intoxicating in a strange way. “I have to prove myself. You’re my proof.”
Something flickered in those fiery eyes of his. Mischief? Perhaps, she couldn’t tell, for he looked full of wickedness no matter what he did.
He bent down, which was quite a journey. He towered up to nearly seven feet! And was built wider and stronger than any man or elf she’d seen with her own two eyes.
She saw him up close, the pointed patch of hair on his chin. The hard lines of his jaw. The handsome yet frightening features that made him so alluring and scary all at once.
It was so bizarre an experience, especially once he shut his eyes and sniffed at her. Actually sniffed at her! Letting his eyes shut as his nose grazed her hair, tasting her own natural human scent off the air. “You’re young,” he said, continuing his investigation. “Too young for such an accomplishment to be believable.”
That was what she’d always been told. That humans did not have the lifespan to learn magic – true, powerful magic – yet she’d done it, hadn’t she? She’d proved those snooty elves of the Academy wrong, right?
“Without proof it wouldn’t be believable! But you’re here. I summoned you on my own, and there’s nothing they can say to take that away from me.” She couldn’t believe it. Even he was doubting her abilities, and she’d brought him here!
His thick lips spread wide across his face in a wickedly handsome mockery of a smile. The pungent aroma of his masculinity so strong still as he tilted her head one way, then the other. He inspected her delicate female form, and though his manhood twitched and swelled before her, he was slow. Methodical.
Thoughtful.
“You aspire to be a sorceress then,” he said, taking the prick of his finger from beneath her chin and stroking his hot thumb across her cheek, as if he were a lover or a doting parent. “And you summoned me to prove you are better and more worthy of that title than your years attest.” He nodded slowly. “Daring. Or foolish.”
“They don’t let humans in here,” she hissed bitterly. “So I either carry on in my family’s footsteps or I do something daring and foolish. And in the end, I get more powerful than any of them are worthy of.”
“None of them could have summoned and bound me,” he responded with wry amusement on his face, his private joke not shared with her. “Only one other ever succeeded in doing as such, and he was great and powerful by the standards of mortals.” He let his gaze slip down over her full body, and she couldn’t help but notice the frightening creature’s massive girth was stiff and jutted out directly towards her. “You’ve dared big, little conjurer. Dared big and won, perhaps.”
Her body stiffened and she tried to take a step back, but instead she bumped into a bookshelf, keeping her pinned between it and… it. That wasn’t something any text had prepared her for, and even in her fury and power-drunk sensation, that throbbing phallus was distracting her from her victory.
“Don’t they have robes where you’re from?”
He looked down at his own lewdly displayed manhood. “They do. But you summoned me through the void,” he said simply. “I would assume a clever young sorceress like you would know that one doesn’t travel through the void with clothing. Or anything else for that matter.”
He grinned unevenly at her. “Does it bother you, little human?” He took hold of that massive length, gripped it in his hand and began to stroke it—actually stroke it!—right in front of her. He stared down at her petite form, mouth hanging open, fangs on display as he tongued his lower lip.
“You’re disgusting,” she breathed. Fear had been replaced by annoyance and anger at his taunting, and she pushed herself away from him. “You’re mine now, and I command you cover that foul thing up!”
His mouth widened in his amusement, and though he didn’t stop the slow, firm motions of his hand along that thick, bulging cock, he asked, “With what? I have no clothes, sorceress.” He arched his spine back, but kept his fiery eyes glued to her as he pleasured himself so disgustingly. “You must provide me with such things. You’re aware of that, surely.”
He gave another inhale of the air in her direction, tasting her scent with his tongue even, as that monstrously sized appendage swelled in his grasp visibly.
Wasn’t he supposed to be under her thrall? Why did he taunt her so?
“Stop touching yourself and I’ll provide you with something, then!” There had to be something nearby.
He obeyed, but only gradually. “Yes sorceress,” he said in his gravelly voice, amusement rich on it as he finally took his hand from his shaft. “I’ll be waiting here.”
She turned her back on him angrily, clearing the entrance and heading deeper into the building.
It didn’t take her long to find a wardrobe with a spare robe in it, though it was more her size than his. Still, it would be enough to cover up… that. She knew that demons could be disgusting, but she had no idea it would be like that.
When she returned, however, she didn’t see the massive creature. Which was odd, as he towered even above the bookshelves in the room. Was he hiding? It didn’t seem in his nature to do so; he’d been so haughty and cocky.
For a moment, terror took her as she feared he had abandoned her somehow, against the power of the spell.
New fright took hold, however, when the figure of another man—this one significantly shorter than her conjured menace—stepped out from behind the bookshelf, covered in shadows. One of the library mages had caught her!
Why were they even out at night? She stood still,
her hands going behind her back and her head falling demurely to her chest. The young woman seemed every bit a chastised child, and she waited for his punishing words to rain down upon her.
He approached her quietly from the shadows, no scolding following as she expected and was used to from the elven masters. He stood there in the dark side of the room beside her, until his hand came up beneath her chin. It was bare, and dark. Few of the elves had so dark of skin.
With a careful touch there he tilted her head up, and her blue-eyed gaze moved across his ruddy-brown flesh—bare, just like the creature she had conjured, but man-sized, not monster-sized—to meet his face.
Her heart skipped a beat. For unlike the terror created by the thing she had brought forth, he was simply gorgeous. His long silky black hair reflecting a bit of the candle and moonlight, his face smiling as he leaned in and… and kissed her lips. So mysteriously, he held her chin in a moment of confusion and tenderly kissed her.
She was locked, smitten and unable to even flinch, until he broke the touch and gave her a charming look. “Thank you for the robe,” he said, that voice so reminiscent of earlier, though with much of the hellish edge gone.
She barely knew what to make of it and felt her head grow light. She’d never spoken to someone so attractive, and she knew full well why. She felt tongue-tied and scared and embarrassed all at once.
For all her years she’d avoided boys her own age. She got too tongue-tied around them, tripping over her words when she felt they were too attractive to be interested in her. And he definitely was.
At least like this.
How was it possible for him to look like this anyway?
She felt a tremor run through her and she begged herself to speak, to demand answers from him, but nothing would come out.
With smooth, deft movements, he took the robe from her arms and pulled it around behind him. He was in no rush, and she had time to glimpse at his form. He was still taller than her, but no longer inhumanly so. His chest was smooth now, no longer coated with the dark hairs. And though his manhood was on display—and still erect—it was no longer something so horrific. Especially since he covered it up and it vanished from sight, only to linger in memory.