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

by Caroline Peckham

  “Did you just insult my sister?” I snarled.

  Marguerite launched flames at me again and they crashed across the front of my shield in a blinding display of her power. I felt the air magic I was holding tremble with the force of withstanding her attack and I aimed more power into my defences while throwing out my other hand and directing a column of water straight into her chest.

  Marguerite was knocked off of her feet and went crashing back into her bedroom which was flooded by the force of my magic.

  I stalked after her and looked down at her on the floor. “You might want to remember this if you come at me again. Because I get the feeling you just threw the extent of your power at me but I barely even scratched the surface of my magic in retaliation.”

  Marguerite glared up at me from her puddle on the floor but she didn’t respond. I swung her door shut between us and turned to find the rest of the hall’s occupants standing in their doorways watching our exchange. More than a few of them gave me an appraising look and one guy even bowed his head a little before turning back into his room.

  “I hope you meant the part about screwing me senseless.” Darius stood leaning against his doorframe at the end of the hall and I mentally shrugged off the altercation with Marguerite as I stalked towards him.

  I rolled my eyes at him. “In your dreams.”

  “Every night,” he agreed and his tone was serious enough that it brought a blush to my cheeks.

  I fought it off and came to a halt before him. “Are we going then?” I asked, not responding to his last comment.

  “I told you I’d come and get you,” he said mildly. He was dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt and looked ready to walk out of here to me so I didn’t see what the issue was.

  “Did you?” I asked innocently. “Your message was so long and detailed I must have missed that part.”

  Darius twitched a smile at that. “Well as you’re here, we might as well head off.” He ticked his head towards his room and walked inside, clearly expecting me to follow.

  I stayed on my side of the threshold and folded my arms. “I can just wait here for you to grab your purse, dude. I don’t really have any interest in visiting your bedroom again.”

  “We’re leaving from here,” he said, beckoning me impatiently and I reluctantly stepped inside.

  Darius moved close and shut the door behind me, turning the key in the lock for good measure.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, backing away from him as he turned to face me once more.

  “We’ll go via stardust. I spoke with Xavier and he confirmed that Mother and Father are away for a few nights in the city while he concentrates on the war effort with the rest of the Celestial Council so we don’t have to worry about seeing them.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked. “You’re taking me back to your fancy mansion in the middle of nowhere? I just thought we were going somewhere within walking distance-”

  “What’s wrong, Roxy? Are you afraid I’m trying to kidnap you?” Darius teased.

  “I just think you could have been a bit more forthcoming with the information for this venture.”

  “Is this your way of trying to back out of the race so that you don’t have to face losing to me?” he asked.

  “No. But-”

  Darius lifted his hand and threw a pinch of glimmering black stardust into my face before I could finish my sentence.

  The world spun, stars blinked into existence all around me and my stomach plummeted right down past my feet. When everything came into focus again, my boots hit the gravel of the Acruxes’ drive and I sucked in a lungful of crisp night air.

  “What the hell?” I demanded while Darius smirked at me.

  “You said you weren’t backing out.”

  Thunder crashed loudly overhead and I flinched as I realised we were in the middle of a torrential downpour. Darius had cast a shield of heat around us and as the rain hit it, it sizzled out of existence without managing to reach us. My eyes widened slightly at his casual use of such impressive magic. If I tried to replicate that I knew it wouldn’t work. But he’d gotten it into place the moment the stardust had dropped us off before even a drop of rain hit us and didn’t seem to be paying it any attention at all.

  “Are we seriously going to race in this weather?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow in disbelief.

  “Are you afraid? You can always just forfeit the race and admit that I’m the winner. I’ll still want my prize though,” Darius warned me.

  “You never actually told me what you want,” I reminded him.

  “I’ll tell you when I win. Or when you forfeit...”

  “Not going to happen,” I said firmly. Looks like I’m riding in this crazy ass storm then.

  “I need to head inside and see Xavier before we ride, are you hungry? I can just send Jenkins a message to wake him up and have something made for you? I need to let him know I’m taking a couple of the bikes out so that security don’t come hounding after us anyway.” He started tapping out a message on his Atlas and led the way along the drive towards the towering front door which led into the manor.

  “I’m not really hungry.” Why the hell was he offering to feed me? “Who’s Jenkins?” I asked, mainly to make sure there wasn’t any awkward silence.

  “Our butler. I didn’t give him advance notice because I didn’t want to risk Father coming back when he tipped him off. With a bit of luck, he’ll be far too busy to drop everything just to come and see me anyway. He’s still pretty pissed about the whole Pitball fuck up. Luckily the Nymph attack dominated the news that day so the story didn’t cause too much embarrassment and he hasn’t felt the need to visit me about it. But if he knew I was home...” Darius trailed off when I failed to respond.

  I didn’t really know what he wanted me to say. Did I want Daddy Acrux to come back while we were here? Hell no. So I guessed I was glad he hadn’t warned him about our arrival but other than that, I didn’t think it was a good idea to start talking about his family with him. He didn’t exactly seem super close to them but no one liked to hear insults aimed at their parents.

  “Yeah that whole Pitball game was crazy,” I said, agreeing with the only part of his rant that I could really weigh in on without causing an argument. “I was told you were the best academy team in Solaria but then you just lost like that...”

  Darius’s jaw ticked but he managed to respond in an even tone. “Well a few of us were off our game for various reasons,” he muttered. “But that won’t happen again.”

  Oh no! I wonder why? I forced myself not to laugh and responded with my eyes on my boots. “I’ll look forward to watching you win the next match then.”

  “Maybe I should make you wear a shirt with my name printed on it instead of Geraldine’s at the next match as my prize for beating you tonight,” he suggested.

  “That’s what your want for a prize?” I scoffed. “While I’m racing for a shiny bike of my own?”

  “What I’d like for a prize probably isn’t on the table,” he replied with a shrug.

  I looked up at him, meaning to ask what he meant by that but the look he gave me in return made me unsure if I wanted to know.

  Darius gave me a smile that made my gut clench and opened the door into the manor, holding it for me like he had goddamn manners.

  I brushed past him and he followed so close behind that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, sending a shiver down my spine.

  I bit my lip as I looked around at the huge entrance hall and sweeping staircase in front of me. I felt like a pea in a bowl of peanuts. I didn’t fit here. I’d grown up with less than nothing and he had so much money that he was actually too rich for me to have even attempted robbing in my old life.

  Just as I thought I couldn’t feel any more awkward, Jenkins appeared through a hidden door beneath the stairs like a goddamn phantom in a penguin suit.

  “Can I take your coat, Miss Vega?” the butler asked formally, inclining his head to me.

&nb
sp; “Oh, err... sure.” I shrugged out of my leather jacket, handing it over as the butler’s gaze swept over my exposed stomach with a frown so brief I might have imagined it. Either way I was guessing I wasn’t the kind of girl the Acruxes would want their son bringing home. Although, as they were already planning on marrying him off to his cousin I guessed they didn’t really have to worry about that.

  “Where will you be entertaining the lady, Master Acrux?” Jenkins asked, bowing to Darius.

  “We’ll be in my rooms,” he replied, hooking an arm around my waist as he drew me toward the stairs.

  “I’ll have refreshments sent up right away.” Jenkins bowed again and withdrew, taking my jacket with him. I realised too late that my Atlas was in the pocket but he was gone. I guessed I didn’t really need it anyway.

  Darius stayed close to me as he urged me towards the stairs and his magic brushed up against mine like a question hanging between us.

  I pushed it away as heat ran up the back of my neck and shifted out of his grip so he no longer held me in the cage of his arm.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked, shooting him a suspicious look.

  “You let me in this morning,” he reminded me in a low voice. “Why did you trust me so easily then and not now?”

  I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “I didn’t trust you then. I was half asleep and half drunk and for thirty seconds I forgot what a dick you are. You reminded me of the fact quickly enough though.”

  “But you still liked it. You still felt the rush when you let me in,” he pressed and I couldn’t really deny that that was true. Blending my magic with his was bordering on indecent; the rush I got when his power poured into me was heady and addictive. It lit up every inch of my flesh and awoke desires in me which I refused to admit to around him. Which was precisely why I wasn’t going to be doing it again tonight.

  “Seems like you’re the one who liked it,” I teased, following him down a long corridor without giving him the satisfaction of replying beyond that.

  Darius let it drop but the smile playing around his lips said he didn’t buy it.

  Our footsteps filled the space around us as we walked on and on through the huge building and eventually I had to speak rather than let the silence build into anything more uncomfortable.

  “What’s it like growing up somewhere like this?” I asked, eyeing a huge portrait on the wall as we passed it. Daddy Acrux looked younger, fierce, sitting in a chair and glaring out at the viewer.

  “When we were kids we spent a lot of time with nannies and private tutors, we mainly saw our parents for meals. It was pretty much the same as anyone’s childhood I’d imagine; we stayed in our wing of the house and had anything we could ever want.”

  “Having anything you could ever want isn’t pretty much the same as anyone’s childhood,” I muttered.

  “I have no point of reference so I can’t really say but I suppose you’re right. We were happy enough anyway. While we were young.”

  “And then?” I asked because apparently you can’t switch off being a nosey bitch even when the guy you’re prodding at is a grumpy asshole who could flip on you at any moment.

  “As we grew older we had to learn more about our responsibilities and I had to spend more and more time with my father learning what would be expected of me when I take his seat on the Celestial Council. So there was a lot less time for being a kid. What about you? What was the mortal world like to grow up in?” he asked, giving me a look that said he was actually interested.

  “We didn’t have much time for being kids either,” I muttered, not really wanting to go into detail about the shit storm that was our childhood. Being bounced from place to place so often that our heads never stopped spinning. Promises from social workers that this couple or that couple were interested in adopting us and giving us a real home which never worked out. Christmases spent on extra chairs hastily added to the furthest end of the table where we could easily be cropped out of family photos...

  Darius led the way up a curving staircase and I pointedly ignored the looks he kept shooting my way.

  “Did you ever feel like you missed Solaria, without really knowing what you were missing?” he asked.

  “How could we miss something we never even knew existed?”

  “It’s just that I’ve visited the mortal world and the whole time I was there I had this ache in my chest like deep down I knew I was in the wrong place. The lack of magic all around me was stifling and their cities were so big they made it almost impossible to see the stars at night...”

  I pursed my lips as I considered that. Maybe he was right; I’d certainly never felt like I belonged anywhere growing up but I’d put that down to our situation. In fact, the only time in my life when that feeling had gone away had been since Orion brought us back to Solaria.

  “Maybe. I never felt like I had a home before we came to the Academy,” I admitted. And he’d done everything in his power to take that from us since we’d arrived. Everything with him always just circled back to that.

  Darius opened a door for me and I found myself in a huge suite of rooms with curving walls. A king sized bed dominated the space and everything was decorated in tones of dark blue. It was an adult’s room but something about it screamed little boy too. On a high shelf, a wooden train sat above a stack of books.

  Another shelf held rows of Pitball trophies and I wandered towards them slowly.

  My gaze caught on a collection of framed photos on the wall. The same group of four boys in each one. The Heirs were captured at every age; four little babies laying side by side in a crib getting older and older in each shot. My gaze snagged on a picture of them at around six years old, playing at the side of a stream in the blazing sunshine.

  Caleb’s golden curls made him look like a little angel as he laughed, knee deep in the water while Seth was grubby on the bank with smudges of dirt on his face and grass stains on his knees. Max smiled so widely I could practically feel the happiness pouring out of him and Darius looked so serious I had to laugh, his lips pouting as he pointed at something out of shot.

  “You were the grumpy one,” I said, gesturing to the picture and Darius moved close behind me to look over my shoulder.

  He scoffed lightly. “Not always. But Seth had just destroyed a camp we’d been building all morning by shifting into a big fat werewolf pup right in the middle of it. He was so damn clumsy when his Order first emerged that he was constantly breaking everything, either by exploding into a wolf with no notice or by getting so hyped up he just fell over his own feet and caused chaos.”

  I released a laugh. “Tell me about it.” I looked up at him over my shoulder and his dark gaze pinned me in his. “Darcy always...” I frowned, wondering why I’d been going to tell him about our childhood but he only shifted closer to me, refusing to release me from the trap of his gaze.

  “Always what?” he breathed like anything I might say would be the most interesting thing in the world.

  My lips parted and some deep part of me wanted to tell him. A frown pinched my features and I shook my head a little, unsure why I’d even been talking to him about any of this.

  Darius reached out for me, his fingers brushing against mine and making my gut flip over as he hooked a finger around my thumb, grazing it up the centre of my palm.

  A shiver of energy shuddered straight through my body at the tiny point of contact, my heart lurching in surprise as I failed to pull away from him.

  He was too close to me, the scent of cedar and smoke overwhelming me as I looked up at him. I needed to move. I had to step back. I-

  “I thought I heard you in here,” Xavier’s voice interrupted us and I flinched away from Darius like we’d just been caught doing something we shouldn’t, whirling around to look at Xavier as he stepped through a door in the back corner of the room. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise you had company-”

  He started backing up but Darius strode straight towards him, pulling him into a tight embrace as
I lingered awkwardly by the wall.

  Xavier smiled up at his brother as he stepped back and the two of them turned to look at me.

  “You met Roxy at the party for a bit,” Darius reminded him briefly. “She’s come to lose a race against me on my bikes.”

  I scoffed lightly, not bothering to respond to that.

  “Yeah, I remember. You’re not easy to forget,” Xavier added, offering me a shy smile.

  “Neither are you,” I replied. “I still can’t believe Darius is related to someone who’s not entirely obnoxious.”

  Xavier laughed while Darius almost smiled, which was just too damn weird.

  “Did you want a drink?” Darius offered, pointing at a table across the room which I hadn’t noticed held the refreshments Jenkins had promised. That dude worked fast.

  “Sure,” Xavier headed across the room to claim one and I followed so that I didn’t have to lurk.

  “How’s life in the mansion?” I asked him, not really sure what else to say as I claimed a coke.

  Darius exchanged a loaded look with his brother before eventually shrugging.

  “Father has been a bit preoccupied recently so I’ve been alone a lot,” Xavier said.

  “I guess you’re looking forward to coming to Zodiac next year then?” I asked. “To save you from the boredom of life in your rich boy tower.”

  “Errr... yeah,” Xavier said awkwardly, looking at Darius again.

  “It’ll be good to have you there,” Darius said firmly.

  “Sure,” Xavier said but he seemed kinda deflated like he wasn’t really looking forward to it.

  “Don’t you want to come to the Academy?” I asked curiously.

  “Sure I do.” Xavier chugged a whole glass of coke and Darius didn’t look at me as I narrowed my eyes at the two of them, sure I was missing something.

  “So, Father said there’s a theory that you and your sister will emerge as Dragons any day now,” Xavier said, forcing a subject change.