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

by Maria Amor

  “Dylan will in no way interfere with you finding a mate, if that’s what you’re interested in doing,” Ruth said. “You’ll meet people at the events, and you’ll transition the way that you should—with someone to support and bolster you as it happens.” Ruth looked at her firmly. “I doubt you want to commit to anyone while you’re sixteen or seventeen, but if you meet someone you just can’t help but be in love with, there won’t be any interference.”

  “Right, because having a guy hovering a few feet away from me is so conducive to romance.”

  “If you decide to go on a date with someone, you can have your privacy,” Dylan said drily. “I’ll wait in the car. Or wherever.” Julia rolled her eyes and had another bite of pancake.

  “In any case, that’s the deal, right?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “More or less,” Ruth agreed. “You and he will be in school together, he’ll accompany you as an escort to events, and he’ll stay in your parents’ home.” Julia couldn’t help but smile slightly to herself at the knowledge that her parents were probably twisting their brains to justify going against something they’d forbidden ever since she’d hit puberty: a boy staying overnight in the apartment.

  “We can head back after breakfast, right?” Julia glanced from Dylan to Ruth. Her grandmother nodded.

  “Your parents have already had your things sent to my daughter’s home,” Ruth said. “If I’m not wrong, they’ll leave you to settle into their guest room as best you can, and of course there’s no rule saying that you won’t be able to change things around within reason.”

  He’s a guest and an employee at the same time, Julia thought.

  “The drive home will be interesting,” Julia observed with a slight edge in her voice.

  “Plenty of time for the two of you to catch up and get your social calendars together,” Ruth suggested. “I should think you’ll enjoy yourselves.” Julia glanced dubiously at Dylan. She didn’t think the car ride up to Manhattan would be all that enjoyable for either of them. What did they have to talk about? It would just be a long, silent ride with a bunch of tension between both of them.

  “I’m happy to have an actual social calendar again,” Dylan said mildly. Julia resisted the urge to say something bitter, knowing that it would just make things tenser between the three of them at the table, and that it would only give away her long-term plan to shake off Dylan’s protection as quickly as she could. Remember: he’s not your friend and hasn’t been your friend for years, now. Don’t go falling into the trap of letting him in just because he’s there.

  They finished the meal in boring small talk, and Julia went back to her room long enough to strip the linens off of the bed for the household staff, and to get changed out of the pajamas provided by her grandmother the night before and pack up her clothes from the previous day. She twisted and tucked her hair into a loose, messy bun and left the room, feeling even more irritable than she had the day before, coming to her grandmother’s home.

  Dylan stood in the entryway to the big, old house, with a backpack slung over his shoulder, his back slightly hunched. “The car is outside,” Ruth said, emerging from the kitchen where Julia was sure she’d been discussing some matter of great importance with the staff there.

  Maybe she’s hosting important members of the council for lunch...or speaking with some selkies over tea this afternoon. “I’ll expect to see you both back here in a few weeks for more training, more development for Dylan.” She turned her green-eyed gaze to Julia. “I also expect that when you come see me in a few weeks, you’ll have attire for two or three events I plan to take you to.” Julia nodded.

  “I can do that,” she said, thinking—with a small trickle of anticipation—about being able to go to Saks or Nordstrom’s, spending the afternoon there.

  “Good to hear,” Ruth said. She hugged Julia quickly and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “You do know that I love you—in spite of everything—right?” Julia half-smiled at her grandmother and shrugged.

  “We’re not for normal things, are we?” The older Guardian smiled.

  “Not so much, no,” she said. “But I hope you can have as normal a life as possible, even with everything going on. Enjoy your summer.” Julia glanced at Dylan.

  “I’ll try my best,” she said. She wasn’t sure whether or not she meant it.

  Ruth turned away from her and clasped Dylan’s hands in hers. Julia watched, fascinated, as the two exchanged energies, transmitting some form of information alien to her—water-aligned things, stuff that she would never know or understand. She stood back, almost able to see the flow of energy between the two of them, cool blue and green, colors that didn’t exist in the normal human visual spectrum.

  When she got her full abilities in a little over a year, she would be able to see the energies more clearly—but even as an air-aligned Guardian, without the full power of her abilities, she could detect colors that didn’t exist in normal human languages.

  Dylan released her grandmother’s hands and stepped back, inclining his head towards her slightly. “We’ll be back in a few weeks,” he said, speaking for them both, and Julia’s curiosity shifted into annoyance once more. But instead of saying anything, she turned to the door and opened it.

  Outside, just as promised, the car waited; it was the same one that had come to pick Julia and her mother up outside of the apartment in Manhattan, and she was fairly certain that it was the same driver as well. Julia carried her bag to the open trunk, walking underneath one, and then another, rose arch without even admiring the beauty of the flowers themselves. She nodded to the driver and threw her bag into the trunk, turning in time to see Dylan following her. Oh goodie, three hours or more alone with Dylan, what a great start to my summer.

  She waited for the driver to open up the door to the back seat and then climbed in without a word, trying to think of how she would spend the next few hours waiting to get to her home. Dylan put his backpack in the trunk and climbed in next to her, shifting to the opposite seat and settling there. “This is going to be an awkward time, isn’t it?” Dylan met her gaze steadily, and Julia was reminded—as she almost always was—of how unspeakably bright, how impossible-to-ignore his eyes were.

  “We could just agree not to talk the whole way back.”

  Dylan grinned and Julia felt her cheeks warming up without knowing why.

  “An air-aligned Guardian not talking for three hours? You’d die,” he said. Julia crossed her arms over her chest and rolled her eyes.

  “I’m perfectly capable of keeping my mouth shut for long periods of time,” she told him tartly.

  “Apparently,” he said, his voice perfectly level. The driver closed the door behind them, and Julia heard and felt the movement in the car a moment later when he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Ruth stood at the door, watching them leave, and in spite of herself, Julia gave her a brief, almost perfunctory wave as the car pulled off down the drive, headed for the long and winding part that led up to the road. They would be hours getting into the city and then Julia thought, almost another hour again getting to the apartment in the middle of Manhattan. She had to do something with herself; it wouldn’t do, although she wouldn’t admit it to Dylan, to just sit there silently the whole time.

  “We need to figure out how this is going to work,” Julia said finally, as the car neared the gate separating the property from the road.

  “I agree,” Dylan said.

  “We’re not friends,” Julia told him abruptly, and the heat in her cheeks intensified. “I just want that understood. As of right now, we’re not friends.”

  “I didn’t think we were,” Dylan said mildly. “I figured I was the least bad of several bad options.”

  “Just as long as we’re clear on that,” Julia said. She took a slow breath. “How is this going to go?”

  “I’ll accompany you places,” Dylan said with a shrug. “Partly to make sure there’s no one trying to abduct you.” Julia raised an eye
brow at the thought of Dylan, slim to the point of being skinny, defending her from would-be abductors. “When you go to events and things, I’ll be your escort to them. You’ll need one.”

  “What is my grandmother expecting to happen to me?” Julia frowned.

  “She’s prepared for the worst, basically,” Dylan replied. “She thinks that there will probably be more than a few people who want to claim you for their family, and that you should have a buffer for that. She also thinks that there are people who will want to take you out altogether—not unheard of for us—and wants to put a layer in between you and them.”

  “I honestly can’t imagine someone wanting to assassinate me,” Julia told him matter-of-factly. “Or you defending me against an assassin.”

  “I have skills that would and will come in handy,” Dylan said. “But the goal is to just make it so you’re never out there alone. That all by itself should deter people from trying something.” Julia pressed her lips together, thinking about how her summer would go with Dylan dogging her steps wherever she went. If she met with Keegan, or Adele, or any of her friends in the city, the so-called “private school set,” she would have Dylan with her. How could she explain his presence? What was she going to do?

  She was determined that everyone know that Dylan wasn’t really her friend, not anymore; but she was also determined not to let anyone know that her grandmother—out of an excess of caution—had assigned her a bodyguard. “I’m going to be stuck in the apartment half the summer, aren’t I?”

  “You don’t have to be,” Dylan countered. “You just have to take me with you when you go somewhere.” He smiled, and in spite of herself, Julia felt like smiling too. There was something so contagious about the expression on his face. She resisted the urge.

  “And how are we going to explain you? I’m not going to tell all my friends that I have a bodyguard now,” she said.

  “We’re going to explain that your grandmother wants you to have an escort wherever you go—that you’re highly in demand and you need someone with you to keep the guys off.” Julia snorted. “Yeah, well—it sounds like something your grandmother would do, doesn’t it?”

  “This is going to suck and you know it,” Julia told him.

  “It’s only going to suck as much as we let it,” Dylan countered. “Don’t explain anything you don’t want to explain; surely by now your friends—Keegan included—are used to you doing what you want to do without telling them why.” Julia once more resisted the urge to smile at the apt point.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  “What do you want to talk about now?” Dylan folded his hands in his lap. “I think we’ve got another two and a half hours at least before we get back to the city.”

  “I just want to pretend like this isn’t happening,” Julia admitted. “Like I’m going back to be sixteen years old and have fun and enjoy my teenage years.”

  “You can do all those things still,” Dylan told her. “Or is just having me around going to make it impossible to enjoy everything?” That was something that Julia didn’t quite have an answer to; she looked out through the window and tried to catch sight of as many birds—her allies and friends—as possible as they made their way back towards Manhattan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dylan walked a few paces behind Julia as she made her way to the entry of the big hall where the event they’d both been invited to was being held. He’d pulled a brush through his hair and confined it to a relatively neat ponytail at the base of his skull, and put on a suit for the big event; but Julia had gone all-out as it benefitted her position: she’d spent two hours at a salon having her darkening hair teased and pulled and twisted and tucked into some kind of style that made her look at the same time like an adult and a supernatural creature in her own right. The dress she wore was in air-aligned colors: sky blue, soft yellow, emphasizing not only her alignment but also her figure, in spite of falling almost to her feet.

  “Julia Beval,” the attendant at the entrance announce. “With escort, Dylan Kelby.” He saw several gazes move in his direction as he followed behind Julia, wondering how many of them knew; how many guessed the real reason he was escorting her to this exclusive function.

  It had been almost a month—just shy of it—when they met with Ruth again, and Dylan knew that things were not exactly getting warmer between him and Julia; he didn’t really expect them to. He went with her to the stores to get the dress she decided to wear to the event, and he’d gone with her to the salon.

  He went with her to meet her friends at the cafe she liked, or to go visit Central Park with Keegan while the other girl was in town. Keegan knew something of why Dylan was there all the time; but even then, Julia had hedged, just saying that her grandmother insisted on her being accompanied by a person that she could trust—and that the person had to be around her age for it to look right.

  Her parents had given him the guest bedroom next door to Julia’s room, and he had spent nights in there, music turned low in case there was a suspicious noise from his neighbor’s direction but otherwise doing what he would have normally done at home: reading, playing guitar, playing his handheld, and watching movies on his laptop. Julia apparently spent far more time during her summers out of the house before he’d come along, but Dylan couldn’t do anything about her willingness to wander about the city with him in tow; he could only hope that she would loosen up eventually and get over it.

  He’d noticed, too, that as Julia entered the last year before assuming her full abilities as a Guardian, she was physically and mentally changing more and more. She was still—in many ways—the girl he’d kept up with, the girl he’d been friends with until he’d abandoned the friendship for what he’d thought would be less complicated pastures.

  But he could see the ways that she had changed in two years, the ways that she’d developed; it wasn’t just that her hair had darkened, or that her frame had changed to look more like the other air-aligned creatures, but a kind of pulse of energy around her had intensified.

  As he followed Julia into the room, Dylan could feel the curiosity directed at him—and at her. His water alignment wouldn’t allow him to discern individual thoughts, but he could feel the general pulses of emotion coming from different areas of the room: disbelief, envy, hostility, interest, intrigue. He offered Julia his arm, almost expecting her to rebuff him, expecting her to put more distance between the two of them. But somehow the powerful group of people in the room seemed to intimidate her more than her own grandmother—one of the most powerful humans on the planet—and she accepted the courtesy.

  Dylan almost cringed at the high, volatile energy that began to flow through him from Julia, but instead did what Ruth had taught him to: carefully, gently pushed back with his own calmer, cooler energy, directing it through his arm and into Julia to stabilize her, at least slightly. It was a sneaky trick, and when she came into her own abilities fully he wouldn’t be able to do it without her noticing, but it helped in the moment; she calmed, some of the color retreating from her cheeks, some tension fading from her face and shoulders.

  Within a few moments, they were in the midst of the group of assembled Guardians, most of them members of the council or family members. They were people that Julia had never met, but Dylan had more than enough experience with them himself to know that despite her pleasant demeanor, and the way that she was capable of charming just about anyone when she was determined, it was going to be a rough night for his fellow Guardian.

  “Dylan, I thought you decided to leave our world behind,” someone said from behind him.

  “I tried it out on my own and decided that it’s just as cutthroat in the recording industry,” Dylan replied, turning to see that one of the councillors—a Guardian aligned with the element of fire, named Raymond—was the source of the comment.

  “It’s good to have you back among us,” Raymond said. “And of course, it’s good of you to help usher another Guardian into her majority.”

  “
Dylan and I are making up for lost time while he was away,” Julia said brightly, and Dylan resisted the urge to grin. She knew that she couldn’t tell the people at the event that she was being escorted by a bodyguard; but she also knew that it would be the best way to needle him.

  “I’d heard that you two had a falling out,” Raymond said, and Dylan had to wonder: how had he heard it, and who had he heard it from?

  “Odd that you’d be so invested in school gossip,” Julia said, as if she’d read his mind.

  “My granddaughter, of course, attends Sandrine,” Raymond told her. “Though I think she tends to keep with other fire-aligned Guardians much more than mingling with others.” There was an implicit reproach in that, but Dylan didn’t bother to rise to it.

  “Ah, that’s right,” Julia said, smiling the slow, charming, slightly bitter-edged smile that Dylan had seen when she was about to verbally cut someone. “Your daughter is Felicia, right?”

  “You know her? Wonderful,” Raymond said.

  “I do,” Julia said. “Sadly, her reputation at the school is that of someone who’s always seeking the latest gossip about other people because she never does anything interesting herself. Maybe she was discouraged from doing things when she was younger?” Julia tilted her head to the side just slightly, a questioning look on her face, and Dylan resisted the urge to laugh with an effort.

  “I try to avoid interfering with my son’s parenting,” Raymond said, looking—for a moment—a bit at a loss for the mature conversation coming from Julia. “But of course, I would hope that the more daring parts of her nature as a fire-aligned Guardian would be encouraged by her parents. Within reason.”

  “I will have to get to know her better, since she apparently keeps such a close watch on my social life,” Julia told the older fire Guardian. “I appreciate your lead-in for that.”

  Dylan turned away slightly, and Julia followed in his steps. While he could feel her triumph at setting down a self-important councillor, he could also feel her irritation at the probing comments. “This is going to be all night, isn’t it?” He nodded slightly to her whispered question. “Great.”