Zodiac Academy 3: The Reckoning: An Academy Bully Romance (Supernatural Bullies and Beasts)

by Caroline Peckham

  As I grew up, I grew out of the dreams, steadily learning to rely on myself and my sister for support and love, growing a thick skin in the knowledge that I’d never have that kind of endless protection from a parent. And I’d certainly never looked to claim it from any man.

  So this dream seemed oddly familiar and yet completely alien to me at the same time. Once again I was tucked in a bed, being held and protected against anything and everything the world might have to throw at me.

  But instead of the soft embrace of parents I’d never known, my head lay on the chest of a man whose strong arms were wrapped around me like he never wanted to let me go.

  His heartbeat thumped beneath my ear. My arm and leg were coiled over him while he held me against him, his hand resting on the curve of my thigh. He was warm unlike anyone I’d ever known, his skin almost seeming to hold a fire within it which filled my soul with strength and peace.

  My eyes were closed so I couldn’t see him but I just felt oddly at home. Like this was where I was meant to be.

  My hand lay on the hard muscles of his abs and I slowly started tracing the lines the muscles created with my fingertips, not wanting to shatter the peace of the dream by opening my eyes.

  He inhaled deeply, his chest rising beneath me while the arm holding me pulled me a little closer still.

  I continued my sleepy exploration of his stomach, my fingers tracing the lines lower and lower until they suddenly skimmed against the edge of a rough waistband. I frowned to myself at the sensation of denim against my fingertips. Who would sleep in a pair of jeans? What kind of weird dream man had I conjured up?

  I ran my fingers along the top of the jeans, the rough material tickling at the edges of my memory but my head was too foggy to place it.

  “If you keep doing that I’m going to stop being a gentleman about this situation.”

  My hand fell still and I froze at the sound of that voice. There was no way even dream Tory would be deluded enough to feel safe in his arms.

  My heart pounded a panicked rhythm against my ribcage and I peeled my eyes open, blinking a few times against the darkness I found waiting for me. Pain thundered through my skull and my tongue was thick in my mouth. I cringed against the headache, trying to focus on something around me as I slowly realised that this wasn’t a dream at all.

  I spotted the fire burning low in the grate across the room first. There was a black fire guard standing before it and a plush cream chair beside it. I knew this room. I’d burned it down once. And somehow I’d ended up right in the centre of Darius Acrux’s goddamn golden bed.

  I was too horrified at myself to move, my brain hunting for answers in a foggy sea of alcohol infused memories. I’d been drinking in The Orb with Sofia and Diego while she shielded our presence with a spell to deflect attention so that no one would spot us and play any Hell Week pranks on us. Or notice the fact that we’d stayed out after curfew. I remembered playing a strange Fae version of truth or dare with them while we worked our way through too many shots and Diego came up with ideas to retrieve his hat from Orion. Then...nothing. Certainly nothing that could explain to me how I’d ended up in Darius Acrux’s arms.

  My gaze slid across the wide armchair where I spotted my academy skirt hanging over one arm. I swallowed a thick lump in my throat, turning my attention to what I was wearing...or wasn’t wearing. I plucked at the huge t-shirt which clearly wasn’t mine, pulling the neck wide so that I could look down inside it. A moment of relief found me as I spotted my bra still in place but he hadn’t released his hold on me so I couldn’t be sure my panties were still there too.

  Darius slid his hand from my thigh, running it up my side over the fabric of the t-shirt until he found my hair where he began twisting it through his fingers. This was too damn weird. Why was he touching me like that? What the hell had we done last night to make him think he could? And why the hell was I letting him?

  I still hadn’t moved, my head still lay over his pounding heart, my fingers still rested on the edge of his waistband.

  “Please tell me we didn’t...” I couldn’t actually bear to say it but I had to know because my memory was turning up blanks.

  “I prefer my girls a little less blind drunk and a little more eagerly responsive,” he replied. “Besides, you wouldn’t forget it if I’d fucked you.”

  Heat rose along my spine at that insinuation but I ignored it in favour of focusing on the relief his words provided.

  “Thank heaven for small miracles,” I sighed but for some reason I still hadn’t moved.

  “No need to sound so pleased about it,” Darius muttered but he sounded kind of amused at the same time.

  “So why am I here?” I asked because this still made no damn sense to me and for some unknown reason I seemed to be frozen in place.

  “You got yourself so wasted that you passed out and started using magic in your sleep.”

  I frowned at that. I’d been drunk, yeah, but I could handle my alcohol. Passing out in a public place was pretty full on even for me and I was fairly sure I wouldn’t have drunk that much… would I?

  Darius kept explaining when I didn’t respond. “I had to use my power to bring yours back under control and then I brought you back here so that I could make sure you didn’t set your bedroom alight in the night or anything.”

  At his words, I noticed the feeling of his magic coiling around mine where it had obviously been all night. He hadn’t actually pushed it to merge with mine but it was dancing along the edges of my power as if it was asking to join it. On instinct I let the barrier around my power drop, welcoming his in.

  Darius sucked in a sharp breath as his magic tumbled into mine and a breathy moan escaped my lips before I could stop it as the thrill of his magic caused every muscle in my body to tighten for a moment. The ecstasy of our magic combining was kind of addictive, like I could feel the heat of his power filling every dark space in my body and I had to fight to make sure it didn’t burn me.

  I pushed his magic back out before I could get lost in the feeling of it and we lay in silence for a few long seconds, neither of us commenting on what I’d just done. I was glad he didn’t ask me about it because I really didn’t know why I’d done it. But now every inch of my skin was alive with the memory of his magic filling me.

  His fingers kept moving in my hair and I frowned, wondering why he was doing that. And why the hell I still hadn’t moved. It was like we were under some spell where peace existed between us and we both knew it would be broken if either of us made any sudden movements.

  “Did you undress me?” I asked slowly, heat clawing along my spine at the idea of that.

  Darius released a breath of laughter and I inched back a little, moving so that my head was on the pillow beside his instead of resting on his chest. He rolled towards me, moving onto his side and shifting so that his hand rested on my bare thigh. He didn’t move his hand once it landed there but the heat of his touch was burning through me like magma.

  “You don’t remember putting on a strip show for your friends in The Orb?” he asked, looking into my eyes.

  I frowned a little. I could remember playing some Fae drinking game and forgetting the rules so that I lost a hell of a lot and consumed more than my share of the drinks. I had to admit that I wouldn’t have shied away from a dare like that but it didn’t really explain our current situation.

  “No,” I said eventually.

  “Well you ripped all the buttons off of your shirt right before you passed out. I brought you back here to keep an eye on you - much to the disgust of your little Pegasus friend I might add.”

  “Sofia?” Yeah, I could imagine she wouldn’t have wanted Darius Acrux taking me off to his room after all the shit he’d put me through. He obviously hadn’t listened to her complaints though.

  “She’s pretty loyal to you,” he said. “But as she couldn’t exactly challenge me, she had to accept that I was just going to look after you. You took care of stripping off the rest of your c
lothes after that. Right before you straddled me and stole my shirt.”

  I opened my mouth to protest against the idea of that but it actually sounded vaguely familiar.

  Darius was just watching me like I was somehow fascinating to him and I couldn’t help but stare back into his deep brown eyes. His thumb shifted, painting a line of fire across my thigh and my heart thumped a little harder in response.

  “And then we just... slept?” I confirmed.

  “I wouldn’t have touched you while you were wasted like that,” he said, his gaze travelling over my face and landing on my mouth.

  But I’m not wasted now...

  I reached out slowly and pressed my palm down on his chest so that I could feel his heart pounding to the same fierce tune as my own. I dropped my gaze to the back of my hand so that I didn’t have to see the way he was looking at me anymore.

  His skin was flaming hot beneath my palm, the depth of his fire magic burning within him like an inferno. I wanted to look up again and catch his gaze with mine but if I did then I was fairly sure that I knew what would happen. And this dark temptation before me was so much more monster than man.

  I’d never had an opportunity to really study the tattoos which marked his flesh before and I let myself look at the patterns which wove their way over his shoulders and chest in the dim light. A wing swept across his ribs from some design on his back, the feathers burning like they were made of fire themselves. The red Libra symbol on his forearm began a network of constellations and star signs which formed a sleeve over his bicep, though it stood out starkly as the only image with any colour in it.

  Flames climbed over his left shoulder from the tattoo covering his back which I knew spurted from the mouth of a dragon. I was sure I could have lost myself in the art on his back if I could see it and I itched to ask him about them but it seemed too personal somehow and I held my tongue.

  I shifted my gaze back to my hand above his pounding heart where his skin was bare of any marks. I cast about for something else to ask him as the silence spread and a kind of expectant energy seemed to build between us. I could still feel him watching me, waiting for me to look up and give him the answer to the question which was hanging between us.

  “So what was I dreaming about that made me use magic?” I asked as I tried to piece together the missing lumps from my evening. “Was I trying to grow a fairy forest or create a tornado filled with cupcakes?”

  “No... it was more of a nightmare than a dream,” Darius admitted slowly.

  “Well I only ever have one nightmare so...” I frowned as I stopped myself from going on, wondering why I’d been going to tell him about that. This hangover must have been making my brain fuzzy, or maybe I was still drunk and honestly that seemed like the only reason to explain why I was keeping company with him instead of leaving.

  But if he was right and I’d been having a nightmare then I wouldn’t have been growing trees or playing with wind. There would have been water and ice and panic...

  “You were freezing everything around you,” Darius said quietly. “And then you started coughing up water.”

  “Right.” I pursed my lips as I nodded.

  Suddenly everywhere that had felt hot between us felt cold and that same ice slithered through my veins as I tried to push myself out of his hold. He wrapped his arm around me more tightly, stopping me from rising.

  “Don’t go,” he breathed and there was a strange kind of plea in his voice.

  I pushed harder, my limbs growing cold with the same ice he said I’d been casting last night and he flinched where my hand pressed to his chest before releasing me.

  I managed to sit upright and Darius pushed himself up too, catching my hand as I started to scramble backwards, having every intention of getting the hell out of here.

  “Tell me about it,” he begged. “Don’t just leave.”

  “Tell you about what?” I demanded, meeting his eye again and thankfully finding the spell between us broken.

  “Your nightmare. You said you only ever have one, so you must know what it was about.” His grip tightened on my fingers.

  “It’s not the same as it used to be anymore,” I said coldly, wondering why I was even bothering to have this conversation. But I wanted him to know. I wanted him to see exactly what he’d done to me even if I didn’t really believe he was capable of feeling bad for it. “I used to relive that car crash again and again. I’d be stuck in the car as it sank to the bottom of the river and the cold water raced up over my head... My ex, Zane, just swam away and left me there to die. I used to think he was the worst person I’d ever met. But really he was just a coward. He saved his own ass and didn’t risk it for me. He left me there to die but he didn’t put me there intentionally.”

  Darius scowled darkly, a low growl rumbling in the base of his throat as I told him about Zane like the idea of that asshole pissed him off. Which was about the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard because I was sitting in a bed with someone a thousand times worse than him.

  I snatched my hand out of Darius’s grip as he continued to hold onto me like he thought he was comforting me or something.

  “Now when I have that nightmare, I manage to get myself out of the car and swim for the surface,” I breathed, forcing myself to hold his eye. “But when I get there it’s frozen over and there’s no way for me to get out. I’m stuck, drowning, holding my breath while the last of my energy fades away and I know that I’ll die as soon as I take another breath... And when I wake up screaming, I know full well that there are people a lot worse than Zane in this world.”

  Tears were burning my eyes and I scrambled backwards, getting to my feet and wincing against the banging in my skull as I moved. I began hunting for my clothes in the dark, wondering if I should just abandon them and run back to my room as I was. I’d had a newspaper article published about me claiming I had a sex addiction so I doubted looking like I was on the walk of shame could hurt my reputation much more than that anyway.

  “When Max pulled that fear from you I don’t think he looked at it as closely as he should have,” Darius said slowly from the bed. “If I’d known that-”

  “What?” I snapped, looking up at him angrily. “What is it that you think you can possibly say about that night that might make me see you any differently at all? Why do you even care anyway?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Darius replied on a breath and the way he was looking at me made me pause for a minute. “But for Fae, fear is weakness. Our parents force us to face our fears and overcome them to make us stronger. If we can’t then it’s just proof that we aren’t good enough. We only wanted to show everyone that you weren’t strong enough to face yours... I guess we didn’t really think through all the repercussions for you though.”

  “Good enough for what?” I demanded, ignoring that last part because I didn’t care if he realised he should have thought through the repercussions more, that didn’t help me now. “Everyone has fears. And yeah, maybe facing them is good sometimes but what you and your friends did to us wasn’t out of some sense of trying to make us stronger. It was cruel and calculated and it was fucked up.”

  “I know.”

  Points to him for not trying to excuse it but I didn’t want to see the pain it was causing him. He didn’t have a right to be looking at me like that.

  “Well good for you, you know exactly how much of a dick you are. Next time I’m having a nightmare feel free to leave me to it. I don’t need help from the monster who gave it to me in the first place.” I managed to locate the light switch and flipped it on before wincing heavily as a knife drove right through my skull in response.

  I spotted my satchel by the door and moved to grab it with relief, flipping it open to make sure my key was still in there.

  My fingers brushed against the stolen dagger and I gasped as its presence washed over me, filling me with the desire to wrap my fingers around its hilt and take it into my grasp. I froze for a moment as its power called t
o me, begging me to wield it. I’d brought the stupid thing out with me last night because for some reason I’d thought it might be helpful if we were attacked by Nymphs again. But that thought kind of felt like it had come from the blade instead of me and as I looked at it now I wondered why the hell I’d brought it with me.

  Darius got out of the bed and moved into my personal space, making my heart leap with fear as I quickly released the dagger and flipped my satchel closed again.

  “My powers were Awakened three years before I came to this Academy so that I could spend that time mastering them with various tutors alongside the other Heirs,” he said slowly like he thought he might spook me if he said too much at once. “During that training, my father did a thousand things to me to make me face my fears. He’d make me walk through fire, jump from cliffs, lock me in tight spaces, beat me, drown me, whip me, pretty much anything and everything he could think of so that he could forge me into a man who showed no fear. It’s what we do. It’s who we are.”

  “Well congratulations,” I muttered as I backed up, my hand closing on the door handle. Yep, I was abandoning my clothes because there was no way in hell I was staying here for another second. “Now you’re just like him.”

  Darius’s face fell like I’d just punched him and the door spilled open behind me.

  I turned and darted out into the corridor, jogging away from him and heading straight for the stairs. I didn’t stop until I made it into my room, miraculously avoiding any of my Housemates on the way.

  I locked the door behind me and pressed my back to the smooth wood as I released a long breath. I didn’t know what Darius had been trying to prove by taking me back to his room last night but if he thought I was going to thank him for it then he was insane. The only reason I’d needed his help at all was because of what he’d done to me in that swimming pool. And maybe a little because I needed to learn when enough drink was enough. But I had no intention of altering anything at all about the way I felt about him.