by LM Wilson
Split Shift
Abaddon Academy Book 1
LM Wilson
Copyright © 2020 LM Wilson
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by: LM Wilson
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
To all those who have felt cursed and found the strength to keep going.
This is book 1 of a Reverse Harem Series - The female main character will end up with more than one love interest and live out a happily ever after with multiple partners. It is intended for mature audiences.
You have been warned
LM Wilson
Split Shift
LM Wilson
Abaddon Academy Book 1
Unknown
The circle must be complete to repair the rift.
Together they must be or there will be no full shift.
By their side to heed the call.
Without the guardians she will fall.
A wolf, a dragon, and a bear.
Fire, water, earth, and air.
Complete the cycle of the spirit chain.
Or trapped within she will remain.
Trouble comes thrice more.
Death stalks behind the door.
If she falls then all will pay.
Three years to the day.
The words were spoken with such venom and malice that if the girl were to have heard them and remembered she’d probably be a psychotic mess. No one knew when the words were spoken, that the girl in question would be a Queen of many races.
A young woman who would one day save the world. She was forever imprinted on our hearts, caught up among our myths and legends.
But the day she was born, no one knew who she was. For the child was born in a time and age that defied the age of myths and legends.
She was born in the 22nd century among technology and a time when the world knew not of the pangs of hunger or of the deeds of true wars.
She was born in a time when the world needed her most.
Though she knew not what she was.
She knew not what she would become.
For she was to become a hero, the likes of which would never be needed among mortal realms nor seen in any land thereafter.
This is her story.
Though I’d like to say that it is accurate and told with perfect truth, reality is often times skewed by our own emotions.
♡
Prologue: Raine
I’ve spent my entire life in the shifter community, but I never thought I’d wish to have been born mortal instead. Everything up to this point in my life had been easy compared to meeting Joey Kale. If only I had known who I was letting into my life. Into my heart the day I met her.
I’m no one special, at least that’s what I think. My mother and father used to tell me differently though.
My mother was a teacher at the local elementary school and my father, like his father before him, was the principal of Abaddon Academy. It’s a family tradition that has been handed down to the eldest of each generation for over five hundred years.
I’m not the eldest though, that honour goes to my brother River, who has been trained to take over running the academy when our father finally retires.
River’s nearly fourteen years older than me, but we’re still great friends despite our age difference.
I have two best friends, Angel Leones and Chase Macedon. We’re all shifters, I’m a panther shifter with an affinity for the fire elemental. Angel is a dragon shifter with air elemental powers and Chase is a bear shifter with a gift for earth and healing. We all have other abilities but these are the best out of them all.
We all grew up as neighbours when we were in elementary school and soon became fast friends despite our age differences. I’m the eldest, then Chase and the baby of our group is Angel. We all have a year between us, but we were all born in December and due to our birthdays being only a few days from each other, we have celebrated together every year since I was five.
It’s rare for different breeds of shifters to grow up so close but our parents have always been friends and have always done their best to teach us that no matter what animal form we shift into, we are all equals.
When my fifth birthday came along our parents discovered what they thought was a gift, but in truth it was a curse. My friends and I had been marked. Destined to become the Guardians of the Lost Princess. Our lives were forfeit if we ever met her. The mark that adorned our flesh like a brand was supposed to be an honour. It was supposed to show the world that we were important.
But how important can you be when the very thing you were made to protect doesn’t exist anymore?
We spent many years thinking we were king shits. We all thought our lives were the best.
Of course, life doesn’t stay good for long in our world.
On Angel’s fifth birthday, tragedy struck all our lives when Angel’s father was killed in the clan wars. His mother died a few years later, Angel believes that she died of a broken heart. One good thing came from his loss, he moved in with me and my family. Although he had lost his parents, he had gained two brothers in me and River.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck us again the year I turned ten, when my own parents vanished without a trace. Angel, River, Chase, and I had been out at the cinemas and when we got home the entire house had been torn apart. The only things left that belonged to my parents were the Abaddon Academy and a will stating that Angel and I were to be left in the care of River and that River was to take over at the Academy.
We said our goodbyes to Chase and went off to live on the academy grounds with River. Almost six years later, we were once again reunited with Chase, his parents and elder sister Veronica were tragically killed in a car accident and with no legal guardian he was assigned to the Abaddon Academy until he turns eighteen.
While the good thing is that we were finally reunited with Chase, the bad thing is that we now had to face a whole new set of problems; Our families were once considered to be the royalty of the shifter community, with the passing of all of our parents, we became the heirs to three of the most prestigious bloodlines.
That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on three teenagers.
Our famous parents gave us all big heads, add to that my own brother River being the principal for the Academy and we basically ruled the school. Every guy wanted to be our friends, every girl wanted to be our future wives and every teacher wanted to suck up to us in order to get a better social standing in the community.
Basically, we were spoiled children and we got away with almost everything.
The same year that Chase joined us at Abaddon academy, the police located my parent’s bodies. Rumours began to surface that I was responsible, which only became worse after the police showed up in the middle of class and arrested me.
I was innocent, obviously. It didn’t stop the assholes from treating me like a killer though.
While Chase and Angel began to gain more attention for their academic and elemental prowess, I fell behind as the outsider, the suspected murderer. My grades fell (I even had to repeat the grade, which put me in the same grade as Chase and Angel.) My social status fell and I became known as the bad boy that girls wanted to fuck but didn’t want to be seen with afte
rwards. The guy that guys wanted to brag about knowing but didn’t want to hang out with.
The more time that passed, the further Angel, Chase and I drifted away from each other. Chase became the popular jock, dated the most popular girls in school and started hanging out with all the cool kids. Angel became the prankster, always getting into trouble. Hell, he even went so far as to hook up with practically every girl he could get his hands on. Despite his mischievous ways, he began showing an aptitude for schoolwork, that placed him firmly into the Brainiac category.
My life had pretty much hit rock bottom, but then the strangest thing happened; On the first day of classes in the second semester of my sophomore year, I met a girl who changed everything. She brought my friends back into my life, she gave me a reason to get up every morning and despite how much she annoyed the hell out of me, I began to fall for her.
But I wasn’t the only one to fall for the girl who was destined to turn our entire world upside down.
My best friends fell for her too….
♡
Chapter: Joey
“Happy eighteenth Joey.” My laughter blends with mum’s as she struggles through the birthday song in the most annoying imitation of Monroe.
“Happy birthday Miss Joey Kale. Thanks for all the things you’ve done….” She bursts into unstoppable gales of laughter and my milk dribbles out of my mouth and nose, spraying the bench and my empty plate.
Slipping over my own mess shouldn’t make me laugh as hard as I do, but let’s face it, I’ve never been the most graceful of people.
Despite how much I protest our silly traditions, I really do love singing the birthday song in different ways every year and trying to outdo each other in the ridiculousness factor.
Mum and I are closer than mother/daughter, we’ve always been more like best friends than anything. She held my hand while I cried over the first boy that I ever had a crush on, who rejected me mind you. Not that he turned out to be a winner anyway, that boy is the biggest bully at my school.
When my dad died, mum was there for me, putting her own grief on hold to make sure I was okay. She took me to buy my first bra and she was even there while I needed someone to listen when I raved about all the horrible things the school bullies did to everyone else. I may not have ever caught their attention but that never stopped me from feeling bad about never standing up to the bullies.
Mum is the kind of person you turn to when things go wrong and for me, that means so much more than I could ever say.
I smile as my mum places the cake she’s holding down on the table just as I finish cleaning the last remnants of my milk spill. It’s decorated like a black wolf which only makes me laugh harder at the irony of eating something that looks like what I’ll hopefully become at midnight tonight. My laughter blows out a few of the candles, so I finish them off and begin cutting the cake.
Mum’s family come from one of the most prestigious bloodlines in the Wolven community. Wolven is the name given to every member of my clan. No, they don’t call wolf shifters “Packs” anymore. Our ancestors decided that calling ourselves “Pack animals” was demeaning to our human halves. We’ve been called Clan ever since. We still have Alphas, Betas and Omegas, also Loners or Lone-Wolves but they are so rare that no one really knows if any exist. After all it’s in our animal natures to want to be close to others of our kind.
“Are you ready for tonight?” Mum’s question pulls me from my musings.
I swallow the mouthful of cake and take a sip of my milk before answering her, “I think so. Do you think I’ll be a black wolf like you or a gold dragon like Dad was?” Mum takes her time considering her answer, while she’s thinking I get lost in my own thoughts.
Shifters aren’t all wolves, while its rare for different shifter clans to mix, it’s not frowned upon or looked down on. When it happens, the child is able to be one or the other, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. There was even one girl, over a hundred years ago who was born to a Wolf shifter and a Panther shifter who was able to shift into both creatures. Of course, there’s always a bad side, occasionally the child born doesn’t develop any shifter abilities at all. Usually if that happens the child is sent to live among the humans, their memories wiped. They live long happy lives, never knowing that they were born to a world that is far bigger and more magical than they ever knew. There are some families who raise their non-gifted children, but it’s rare.
“You’ll be whatever you are meant to be, don’t worry, fate always chooses the animal we need. Even if we don’t always agree with the one that she chooses.” Mum’s answer makes me more nervous than I already was. On one hand, I really want to be a dragon, so I can continue my Dad’s tradition, he was a beautiful golden western dragon, the kind with four legs and huge bat-like wings. On the flip side, I think it would be really awesome to be a black wolf like Mum, because her powers are less destructive than my Dad’s were. She has earth powers that allow her to heal, which is why she works for the shifter hospital.
While shifters heal faster and live longer than humans, they still get hurt and sometimes those injuries require medical treatment. Imagine if a shifter walked into a human hospital with his arm hanging by only a bit of tendon, then said shifter had his arm put back into place and the bone and muscles began to fuse back together over the space of hours, it would cause a panic to the poor humans who saw it; hence why we have our own hospitals. We do get the occasional human accidently sent to them, but usually they get their memory erased and go on to live their lives never knowing what they saw.
My Dad though, he had these really cool fire powers and was recruited by the military, unfortunately he died when I was four, blown up by a grenade thrown into his vehicle while deployed. Some injuries can’t be survived, no matter how much we wish they could be. Unfortunately, shifters are often recruited to fight the human’s wars. Don’t get me wrong, the shifters who fight do so of their own free will and I for one agree with shifters assisting the humans. After all we are stronger, faster and can survive more than humans can. Not all shifters agree though. There are those who believe we shouldn’t get involved in the human’s affairs. Leaving them to fend for themselves and wipe each other out. My Dad taught me that all life is precious though.
My sad thoughts must be written all over my face because Mum wraps me up in a hug that squeezes the air from my lungs. “I miss him too honey, he’d be so proud of the wonderful young woman you are.” She pulls back and wipes a lone tear from my cheek. “Go get some rest, I’ll wake you at eleven.”
“I love you mum.” I drop a quick kiss on her cheek and head off to bed.
♡
Chapter: Joey
The stars shine brightly outside my window as I toss and turn for the next three hours. I’ve tried everything from a glass of warm milk to opening my window and letting the cool night air in. I’ve never had trouble sleeping but I can’t help feeling like something bad is about to happen and although I do manage to doze off, it’s not a deep restful sleep.
The circle must be complete to repair the rift.
Together they must be or there will be no full shift.
By their side to heed the call.
Without the guardians she will fall.
A wolf, a dragon, and a bear.
Fire, water, earth and air.
Complete the cycle of the spirit chain.
Or trapped within she will remain.
Trouble comes thrice more.
Death stalks behind the door.
If she falls then all will pay.
Three years to the day.
I wake up with the words repeating inside my head. I have no idea why I was having such a wacked out dream, but I’m up a full thirty minutes before Mum is due to come and wake me.
My toes sink into the extra soft teal carpet beneath my feet as I make my way over to the bathroom. The contrast between the carpet and cold tiles brings a short squeal to my lips.
Almost four minutes later, I swipe my han
d across the fogged-up mirror. I kept my shower short, so I didn’t end up using all the hot water, even though it’s just Mum and me living in our small house.
My fingers dig hard into the marble countertop, as my eyes swim with tears at the image in front of me. Instead of my usual pimple covered adolescent face, I see a young woman with clear skin and very long black hair. I’m talking all the way down to my ass, long. When I went to bed my hair was barely down to my ears and the colour was so light that you’d almost call it white.
“What’s going on? Why are you scream….” Mum’s voice trails off as she gets a good look at me. I snap my mouth shut, only now realising that I had indeed been screaming over the changes that have come over me. “Oh Joey, you are beautiful.” Mum’s honey brown eyes shine with unshed tears as she grasps my hands.
“Mum, what…?” I’m not even sure how to ask the question, nor can I take my eyes off the reflection before me. “My eyes.” I gasp, they used to be a dark grey-blue but now they shine like the sapphire that adorns Mum’s neck. A gift my Dad gave to her on their first anniversary. She’s always joked that one day I’ll be the owner of said necklace but I couldn’t imagine seeing my mother without it.
“It’s okay Joey, this happened to me too when I was nearing my first shift.”
I start to ask why she didn’t warn me but then I remember her telling me about it a few months ago. “I had no idea I’d change this much.” I send a mock glare at Mum, then glance back at my reflection. I barely look like Mum now, she’s blonde with brown eyes and taller than me by half a foot.
I’m ashamed to say that I never really paid much attention to how either of us looked until this very moment. Comparing the old me to the new me makes me feel like I’m not Mum’s child anymore.