Guardian Academy 1: Seeds Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners)

by Maria Amor

  “Honestly it wasn’t high up on my list of things I wanted to do either,” Dylan told her. “But I’m in a jam and this is one way I can start repairing my image.” Julia raised an eyebrow at that and her lips twitched; in that moment, Dylan wondered if she knew how much she resembled her grandmother.

  “I thought you’d left us all behind,” Julia said tartly. “If you don’t want to have any part in the politics, why would you come back?”

  “I don’t have much of a choice,” Dylan said. “I’m in hot water with the council, and on top of that I just...I don’t want to do it anymore in the music industry.” Julia rolled her eyes.

  “Of course,” she said blandly. “Must be nice to have the chance to have it both ways.” The water in the pond started to swirl and ripple with slightly more violence as Dylan began to give up control of his abilities, of the energy flowing through him.

  “Julia,” he said firmly, “I get that I’m not your favorite person, but the other option is for you to not go back to school in the fall, for you to basically be under house arrest in your parents’ apartment all summer and under constant freaking supervision until you find a mate. Do you want that?” He gestured absently. “Because let me tell you: it’s a damn drag. I’ve been on lockdown for weeks, first at my parents’ place and now here.”

  “Ruth has you on lockdown?” Surprise flitted across her face for a moment, but was gone a heartbeat later.

  “Technically I’m a guest here,” Dylan said, smiling wryly. “But I think we both know that if I tried to leave without Ruth’s consent it would be a stupid thing to do.”

  “She does tend to feel that way,” Julia conceded. “So, what’s the deal?” Dylan looked at his former friend for a long moment, trying to feel her out, opening up the intuitive aspects of his water-aligned ability to her; he wasn’t quite the psychic that some of the water-aligned Guardians were, but he could feel people out fairly well. In Julia’s mind, he felt the pulse of irritation, curiosity, resentment, fear, affection—all swirling around, there and gone in brief flickers.

  “The deal is that if I protect you, help you through the transition, then I get a little freedom,” Dylan explained. “Ruth worked it out. You probably know by now she’s got a lot of influence.” Julia’s lips twisted into a quick smile.

  “Apparently, even more influence than I thought,” Julia said drily.

  “She’s pulled some strings, and if I help her out, I can go to school. I can regain some of my reputation in the world.”

  “I thought you were done being all involved in ‘the world’,” Julia said.

  “In the fame world? Absolutely,” Dylan told her. “I’m tired of it out there. I want to finish school, and…” he shrugged. “I want to see how I feel when I’m fully an adult in the world out there, not just among our kind.”

  Julia looked at him for a long moment, and Dylan could feel the steady pulse of her thoughts, though he couldn’t read the individual items flickering through her mind, just the feelings. She was uncertain, she was still a little angry. She was determined.

  “What if I don’t go along with it?” Julia uncrossed and crossed her arms over her chest, looking at him and then looking away.

  “Then we’re both screwed,” Dylan replied. “I stay on house arrest and get private tutoring at home until the council forgets that I’m an embarrassment to our kind, and you’re stuck in your parents’ apartment: no school, no clubs, no shopping, no nothing.” Dylan let the words sink in. “Maybe our parents would let us socialize occasionally, but only under supervision.” He grinned at Julia wryly.

  “She can’t do that,” Julia protested.

  “Like your parents are going to go their own way?”

  “My mom did it once,” Julia insisted. “She can do it again.”

  “She dragged you down here with just your grandmother’s say-so, and didn’t stay behind because Ruth told her not to,” Dylan pointed out. “She’s past her ‘go against my mom’s demands’ phase in life.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not,” Julia muttered.

  “You’re sixteen,” Dylan said. “Same as me. You’ll have your full powers in a year, and then you’ll turn eighteen after that, and you can tell whoever you want to go to hell if you want to.”

  “I don’t want you as my bodyguard,” Julia said, though Dylan could feel the irresolute pulse of her feelings.

  “It’s me or it’s nobody,” Dylan said. “Think about it—and I mean actually think about it, not that freaky thing you do where you examine every edge of something in point-five seconds.” He turned to leave. “Because whether we like it or not, we’re stuck together.”

  He walked away from her, knowing it was useless to push her any further. Like any air-aligned Guardian, Julia always became stubborn when she felt like she was tied down, or bound to someone else’s will. If Ruth hadn’t decided to make a power play, Dylan thought, she would have maneuvered Julia into thinking that the idea of a bodyguard was her own. She would have worked on Julia’s ego and made her think that it was her own thought that Dylan be the one to protect her.

  In spite of the way things had ended between the two of them, Dylan had never fully stopped thinking about Julia. He had regretted the way that things had ended between them, their friendship, the entire time since the fight had happened. “Jules, I have to get out of this mess. You don’t understand. You can’t understand.” Dylan cringed, closing his eyes, and exhaled slowly.

  “I can’t believe you’re abandoning me.” Dylan could remember the start of the fight in a way, but it didn’t seem like a fight that started on the question of whether or not Julia would help him pack for the trip to LA had ended with accusations that he was abandoning her on her part—and cold indifference on his part.

  He’d come into his full abilities, and finally knew the full extent of what it meant to be a Guardian: the politics, the pettiness, the power-plays. He’d wanted to be a million miles away from anything to do with it. He’d known that Julia was deeply afraid of her transition—not just because of the power she’d shown long before she even knew what transition was, but because she’d known that she’d be pressured to participate in the politics her family navigated.

  He’d known that and out of his own frustration and fear and discontent, he’d abandoned her. But I didn’t have to—it didn’t have to be that way. If Julia had been willing to support him, if he’d been willing to apologize to her, then maybe they wouldn’t be in the position they were in. Maybe he could have gotten permission for her to come out to California to spend time with him during the summer.

  Instead, he’d been too much of a coward and too stubborn to ask for forgiveness, and Julia had refused to buckle as well. And now, two years later, he had to protect her almost against her will.

  As he walked back around to the front of the house, Dylan remembered something from his conversation with Ruth, two days before. “You know, the way that the two of you stopped being friends never sat the right way with me,” she’d said. “It was never your destiny—either of you—to leave each other’s lives so young.”

  He could remember what Julia had been like when she’d first appeared at the School of Sandrine: ten years old, her reddish-brown hair with coppery glints in it barely contained in a bun that fell out halfway through her first day.

  Sandrine prided itself on being a school that had kept the convention of recess up through the middle school grades, saying that especially for young Guardians and other paranormal creatures, they needed time to express excess energies. She had been a skinny little girl, inches shorter than he was but with enough guts and confidence that no one ever seemed to notice how tiny she was.

  Dylan was only months older than she was, and at the time that they’d met he’d been known as a slightly awkward, quiet-but-friendly child. Julia had approached him while he sat under a tree her first day and asked him what he was doing, why he wasn’t playing with anyone; that had been the spark that had started their friendship.r />
  The wild-haired little girl and the quiet blond boy they’d been then had raised eyebrows, but Julia was the one to encourage him to learn guitar, to listen to the ridiculous songs he’d come up with at eleven and twelve. She’d been the one to sneak into the dean’s office and play a recording of his music over the PA system in place of the usual pre-announcement Brahms tape. She’d even worked the controls on his home recording system to help him put together the recording he’d submitted for the song contest he’d won.

  She’d supported him until he’d tried—though not purposely—to move beyond her. He hadn’t given any thought to his promise that he’d stay by her side through her transition; he’d been consumed with the need to get away from everything to do with Guardian politics. And when he’d realized that he’d done just that, his own pride had prevented him from admitting it, from apologizing. Right up until Ruth had spoken to his parents, Dylan had been convinced that he would likely never even see Julia again, much less speak to her.

  Dylan stepped into the house, wiping his feet on the rug, and exhaled. Ruth came through from the kitchen, looking mildly curious. “You spoke with her?”

  “I did,” Dylan replied. “She’s still not on board.” Ruth sighed.

  “For a girl who’s so smart, my granddaughter makes stupid choices sometimes,” Ruth told him. “You didn’t hear that from me.”

  “I know,” Dylan said. “She’s thinking about it, which is the important thing.”

  “Keep talking like that, I’ll start thinking you’re a grown man,” Ruth said. She pressed her lips together. “I felt your energy out there.”

  “A little showing off,” Dylan said, half-smiling. “She wasn’t impressed.”

  “No wonder,” Ruth said, looking almost amused.

  “I think—if you want advice, which I wouldn’t presume to give you—that you need to let her make the decision on her own,” Dylan said. “She knows now that she’s not going to have anything if she doesn’t cooperate.”

  “Her parents would just sneak her back into the apartment,” Ruth said, sighing again. “But making her choose to get her own self back to the city or take the car would probably work.”

  “And just...let her think about it, really think about it,” Dylan suggested. “Don’t push her on it tonight at dinner or anything.”

  “She’ll bring it up on her own,” Ruth countered.

  “Let her,” Dylan suggested. The woman smiled.

  “And then when she does insist that I don’t want to discuss it—you have some politics in you after all.”

  “I hate it, but the music industry is just as bad as the council,” Dylan admitted. “I thought I was getting away from politics, I just got into pettier politics.”

  “There’s nothing more likely to brew pettiness than putting a small group of people in control of something,” Ruth told him. “You would not believe how much pettier the Rulers’ council is.” Dylan cringed.

  “I can only imagine,” he said, picturing the four strongest Guardians, one for each element, trying to decide something.

  “Hope that it’s never your place to live it,” Ruth told him. “Do you think I’ll have to force things with my obstinate granddaughter?”

  Dylan considered it.

  “I hope she’ll come around,” he said. Not just because it was what was best for Julia—but because he knew things weren’t resolved between them, and probably wouldn’t be any other way.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning, Julia had—almost against her will—made up her mind. After spending the rest of the day avoiding both Dylan and her grandmother, Julia sat down to dinner with both of them, and discovered that neither had any interest in discussing the ultimatum. Instead, she’d listened to stories that Dylan told about the recording studio, and about being on the road, and heard about the different changes that her grandmother had made or was making to the landscaping scheme around the big, old house.

  A few times, one or the other of her dinner-mates had ventured a question towards her about school, or about her summer plans, but Julia hadn’t felt up to speaking much—unusual enough for her air-inflected personality.

  She emerged from her usual bedroom at her grandmother’s house after staying up half the night, thinking about the situation. Julia knew that she didn’t really have much choice in the matter; she could—theoretically, at least—make her way back to Manhattan from her grandmother’s home, but it would take her hours: first to get to a local train station, then to ride the train into the city, and she’d be broke at the end of it. There wouldn’t be anything left over to even get a cheap hotel room with—maybe a few bucks for a street hot dog or a pretzel and a drink, but that would be all.

  In the back of her mind, Julia had decided that if she made the effort to appear to go along with the plan, and she sold her giving-in well enough, she would be able to find an opening to get out of it further along the line. After a summer of Dylan going everywhere with her and nothing happening to her, she would point out that Dylan could hardly be with her in the dorms—the school would forbid it—and maybe he’d be able to go home to his own parents by the first weekend of the school year. Or maybe she’d be able to shake him off during the week; it shouldn’t be that hard, after all.

  The table was loaded down with breakfast foods: eggs, toast, a carafe of coffee, pancakes, different kinds of jelly, sausage and bacon, a pitcher of orange juice, maple syrup, and things that Julia didn’t even see enough to pay attention to. She pulled out a chair, looking at her grandmother, and sat down. Dylan hadn’t emerged from the room he’d taken yet, and Julia felt briefly torn as to whether she wanted him to come out and join herself and her grandmother at the table as quickly as possible, or whether she wanted him to stay away.

  “I’ve made my decision,” Julia said, reaching for the coffee pot to cover the awkwardness she felt.

  “That’s convenient, since I expected to hear what you’d chosen over breakfast,” Ruth said. Julia fought the temptation to roll her eyes.

  “I obviously don’t have much choice in this situation,” Julia countered instead. “Considering that my options are basically going along with what you want, or be broke and homeless.”

  “You could stay here,” Ruth told her. “For as long as you wanted.”

  “Okay,” Julia said, giving into the eye-rolling impulse. “My options are: go along with your plan, stay here until I decide to go along with your plan, or be homeless and broke. Not really choices, either way.”

  Ruth half-smiled. “It’s such misfortune, being a child,” she said blandly.

  “In any case, obviously, I’ve got to choose to go along with it,” Julia said tartly. “How is this going to play out? It’s not like Dylan will be able to guard me every minute—especially at school.”

  “I’ve made the best arrangements that I can,” Ruth said. “Your parents will host him in Manhattan through the summer. You’ll be in adjoining dormitories at the school.” That was news to Julia—normally the creatures and Guardians aligned with a particular element stayed in the same dorm halls; she had more than once charmed her way into the water-aligned hall to spend time with Dylan before he’d left the school, and he’d sneakily managed to get into the air-aligned dorm to spend time with her on rare occasions when she couldn’t sleep.

  “You must really have the power to be able to go against school policy,” she said lightly.

  “I made it a condition not only of your return to the school in the fall, but also of my continued financial support of Sandrine,” Ruth told her matter-of-factly. “And I spoke to a few members of my own alignment to do the same—at least about their financial support.”

  “One day, I’ll find a string you can’t pull,” Julia told her grandmother, not quite daring to scowl at the older woman.

  “You, my dear, are the string I can’t pull,” Ruth replied. “I have to do my best to manipulate circumstances around you instead.”

  Just then, Dylan came
into the dining room. “I take it Julia’s decided to do the right thing?”

  “Not the right thing necessarily,” Julia replied hotly. “But I’ve decided to do what my grandmother has worked so hard to make sure that I have to do.” Dylan’s lips twitched in the start of a smile and he sat down at the table setting that was clearly intended for him.

  “I assume we’ll be heading back to Manhattan today?” He glanced at Ruth.

  “I’d like you both to visit me a few times this summer,” Ruth said. “On your side, Dylan, because I have more things to show you; on Julia’s part, you need to understand your new place in the world. Also, I need to begin introducing you to people.”

  “Why not throw me a debutante ball, at that rate?” Julia helped herself to eggs, a couple of well-buttered pancakes, and bacon. She sipped her coffee and began to eat while Dylan and Ruth both served themselves from the dishes and plates on the table.

  “That’s no longer the thing,” Ruth replied. “But you will need to shop for appropriate attire for some formal occasions.” That was one bright spot: at least she’d have some family-approved shopping time.

  “I’ll need to get my hair done, and get new makeup, too,” Julia suggested.

  “I’m sure your parents will provide you with an appropriate budget,” Ruth told her. “You’ll be attending a few special events where I intend for you to make a good impression on people before the school year begins, and you’ll have events throughout the year as well—they’ve been pre-approved.”

  “Did you also schedule all my classes for me?” Julia plastered the most pleasant smile on her face that she could manage.

  “I’ve made it clear that I want the two of you to share as many classes as you can, within reason,” Ruth replied.

  “So basically, I’m supposed to be finding a mate, transitioning into my new abilities, and forming political alliances with him never more than a dozen steps away from me?” Julia brought a slice of bacon to her mouth and bit off about half of it. “I can’t imagine how that would go wrong.”