Course Schedules

by Ivy Hearne

  Hunters’ Academy, Year 2

  Book 1: Course Schedules

  Ivy Hearne

  Hunters’ Academy Year 2, Book 1: Course Schedules

  Copyright © 2019 by Ivy Hearne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Belgate Press

  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 or authors.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Course Schedules

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

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  About the Author

  About Course Schedules

  The first day of school shouldn’t be so hard the second time around.

  At least, that’s what Kacie Deluca thought. But it’s a new year at the Hunters’ Academy, and everything is different.

  There’s a whole new entering class—and new students means random Entrance Exams popping up in the hallways, disrupting the usual schedule.

  Her hunting partner, panther shifter Souji, has decided to wear his human form most of the time. That means a whole new class of girls to ogle him. Worse, his brother Reo is on campus—and off-limits to Kacie—full-time now.

  Kacie has a brand-new roommate. Someone who apparently knows more about Kacie than she ever planned to tell anyone. And Kacie doesn’t know if she’s a friend or foe.

  But worst of all, Kacie knows that the darkness she sensed last year hasn’t been banished, no matter what the faculty says.

  If she can’t figure out how to fight off the darkness permanently, it won’t matter how different this year might be—it’ll be over before it even begins.

  Chapter 1

  Stepping through the portal from the perfectly silent nurse’s office of my former high school—still currently closed for the summer—and into the busy noise of the beginning of a new year at the Hunters’ Academy was like walking headfirst into a hurricane of sound.

  The sound-storm hit me from all sides at once, people screaming and yelling, and it took me several long seconds to determine that this was not the normal moving-back-into-the-dorm level of noise.

  In fact, I wasn’t entirely certain until a desk chair from one of the dorm rooms went flying over my head as someone behind me yelled, “Entrance Exam incoming!”

  Entrance exam? What the hell? Those weren’t supposed to start until the first week of classes. Why was a student facing one already?

  As I stepped away from the portal to allow Caleb to follow me through before it closed, some kind of animal went rushing by. It wasn’t a wolf, though it kind of looked like one.

  It also wasn’t anyone I knew.

  Almost instantly, an actual werewolf in its half-human, half-animal shape loped by, too.

  That one I recognized, at least by sight, though I couldn’t have told you his name.

  Werewolves. Entrance Exams. Were-other-things.

  Why did I come back?

  I almost turned around and went back through the portal, back home to my sweet, clueless parents in Kansas, with whom I’d spent most of the summer. Back to the beautiful silence of the vast Midwestern plains.

  Instead, though, I moved aside and let Caleb step up to stand next to me after he came through the portal.

  I’d promised to be his student mentor as he began his first semester at the Academy.

  This was not starting out all that well.

  At the end of the hall, a small magical explosion sent colorful sparkles flickering through the air.

  “What was that?” Caleb asked, hefting his backpack up onto his back and rolling his suitcase behind him. Even now that I’d had weeks to get used to it, that British accent of his still nearly made me swoon every time I heard it. Not to mention his high cheekbones, blue (blueblueBLUE) eyes, and that blond hair of his, bleached almost white by his time in the summer sun.

  Which honestly kind of confused me. When he shifted, the enormous hound he turned into was dark black with red eyes.

  Caleb was the only shifter I’d ever met whose human form didn’t really match his animal shape at all. My hunting partner Souji and his brother Reo both had dark hair and golden-brown eyes. And their shifter animals were black jaguars.

  Whatever had streaked by me had been a blur of grays, vaguely canine-shaped.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I suggested. Caleb nodded and grabbed his luggage.

  The portal from my old high school exited into one of the floors of the upper-classmen’s dorm, so I led us down the stairs. But the closer we got to the first-floor exit, the more chaos erupted around us. Strange bolts of magical power zipped through the air, some splashing against the walls harmlessly, others leaving scorch marks behind.

  “What is going on?” I muttered to myself as I ducked a particularly virulent green zap of magic. I glanced back to make sure Caleb was still with me. He gave me a thumbs up, but he looked less calm than he had when we’d started out from his house that morning.

  Caleb had moved into the house next door to my parents in Kansas while I was visiting them over the summer. We’d gone on precisely one date, where he’d tried to kiss me, turned into a ravening beast, and gotten his ass kicked—or at least held still—by the power I channeled through my gorgon’s pendant.

  Luckily for him, I called Dr. Novak, the Headmaster of Hunters’ Academy, and he believed Caleb could learn to control his shifter beast.

  So here we were. My summer not-quite-fling following me into the rest of my world.

  That wasn’t how summer flings were supposed to go, was it?

  Anyway, it was what I was stuck with.

  At the stairwell door, I peeked my head through the door. Caleb moved up behind me, his shifter body heat pressing up against my back, almost as tangible as an actual touch. I had to remind myself not to step away from him. Instead, I crouched down a little to let him see over me, like some old comedy with people’s heads popping out at different levels around a corner.

  Outside the stairwell, in the middle of the hall between us and the building’s front exit, a girl with frizzy reddish-brown hair stood with her back toward us, weaving some kind of magic spell with her hands.

  She was completely naked.

  Caleb twitched when he realized he was staring at her bare bottom.

  “Interesting school you have here,” he murmured into my hair.

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes but otherwise ignored him.

  Seriously. What is going on here?

  She was naked, so I assumed she was the shifter who’d raced past me upstairs—they were a lot less self-conscious about nudity than the rest of us in general since they spent a lot of their shifting from skin to fur and not always having clothes around when they shifted back.

  But as far as I know, shifters didn’t do magic.

  So what did that leave?

  A magic user who preferred to run around without clothes? Or a shifter who, against all odds, did magic?

  What was she fighting, anyway? I eased out of t
he stairwell as silently as I could, holding it open for Caleb. At the last minute, I used his suitcase to prop the door open—I didn’t know for sure that we would end up locked out, but I was not about to risk it. There was a fire exit in the stairwell. It would set off an alarm, but I didn’t really care.

  As tried to figure out what exactly was going on, the naked girl spun around to stare at us. Her eyes grew huge, and she raised up her hands as if preparing to fire on us with her magic.

  Chapter 2

  I grabbed Caleb and pulled him toward the ground with me just as someone else—a naked guy this time—shouted, “Watch out!”

  Then he leaped toward us, shifting in midair into a giant, shaggy, dark wolf.

  Under any other circumstances, his shift would’ve been gorgeous to see. It was smooth and easy and beautiful.

  As it was, though, I barely had time to notice that before I realized that we were all under attack.

  Not from either of the shifters, but from whatever it was that they were fighting.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen. If this was really an entrance exam, it was supposed to focus entirely on the student being examined. Which meant either the test had gone awry, or it wasn’t an entrance exam at all.

  Either way, if it was coming after me, it was fair game.

  I scuttled off to the side of the hallway to give myself a little room, then stood and turned to face the monster of the test.

  That’s when I realized that what I was seeing was a magic user, floating near the ceiling and blasting magical bolts back toward the naked-shifter-magic girl.

  But it wasn’t just any magician.

  It was the one I had faced at the end of the previous school year. He was bald and tattooed and terrifying, and if it hadn’t been for one of his own students turning against him, I would have died in battle last year.

  I knew that our entrance exams were supposed to somehow embody our greatest fears about joining the realm of the hunters when we finally graduated. I didn’t know how the exams were created, but they could be deadly. Souji’s first hunting partner had died during her entrance exam.

  Now, for some reason, this naked chick was facing off against my biggest fear.

  But it had zeroed in on me, too. I didn’t have time to think about it now, though.

  In my shock, I only barely managed to get my pendant working before the magician released his magic against me.

  My heart pounded against my chest, and a bitter metallic taste flooded my mouth, the adrenaline of battle allowing me to move more quickly.

  The bright green tentacles from the power my pendant gave me shot out and wrapped around me, serving as a shield. The wizard’s magical attack bounced off it and fizzled out when it hit the wall across from me.

  The wolf had finished its transformation and clamped its jaws around the magician’s ankle, tugging him toward the floor.

  While the wizard tried to fight him off, I glanced around to see where everyone else was.

  The naked girl was chanting, and I could almost taste the power building up around her.

  Caleb had taken the last few seconds to shift, too, and now he stalked toward me in his black hound form, his eyes glowing bright red.

  “Go for his throat,” I instructed Caleb. The giant hound dipped his head in acknowledgment and crouched down, preparing to leap as the Wolf continued dragging the floating wizard toward the floor.

  “I’ll wrap up his hands,” I said to the naked chick. “You paralyze his magic.”

  She nodded and continued chanting. The static in the air around her caused her hair to float.

  The wizard, who’d certainly heard every word I said, started spinning up his own magic. But we all attacked at once.

  My plan worked. As soon as my green power-tentacles flashed out and wrapped the wizard’s arms and hands tight, Caleb leaped for his throat. I added my strength to the wolf’s, all of us pulling him down until he hit the floor with a thump. The naked girl’s power flew toward the wizard just as Caleb ripped out his throat.

  Arterial blood sprayed out of his neck, coating the walls and the two shifters closest to him.

  Then the naked chick’s spell hit him, and his entire body exploded.

  Chunks of flesh and bone pattered down around us as if the sound storm I had walked into upstairs had ended in a flesh rain.

  I wiped blood out of my eyes and shook it off the tips of my fingers as I waited for the gooey bits to disappear or something.

  They didn’t.

  The cooling blood congealed into puddles. I brushed a few slimy pieces off my shirt, shaking them away from my hands. They plopped down onto the floor.

  “Well,” I said, turning to Caleb. “Welcome to the Hunters’ Academy.”

  “THANKS FOR THE ASSIST back there,” the wolf shifter said as we moved toward the door. He stopped inside the vestibule that led outside and opened the door to a utility closet off to one side. I guessed it had always been there, though I hadn’t ever paid any attention to it. It was full of sweatpants and T-shirts, sorted by size.

  He tossed a set to the girl.

  “You’re new, right?” he asked Caleb. “We have these closets all over campus—most of the buildings have them. Usually in the front entrance. That way you can grab clothes if you need them, no matter where you are.”

  “Good to know,” Caleb said. I could see him filing the information away for later use.

  I gave the girl barely long enough to get dressed before the questions poured out of me. “What was that back there? Can you do magic? I mean, obviously, you can do magic. Are you a shifter who can do magic? That’s not supposed to be possible, is it? That’s what I’m learned last year, anyway.”

  She cracked up, her sweet laugh a welcome interruption to my inability to quit talking.

  “Hi,” she said, holding out her hand and shaking mine. “I’m Izzy Kirk, and I am a coywolf.” She had a thick, syrupy Southern accent. “And apparently I’m kind of a hybrid in other ways, too.”

  “Kacie DeLuca,” I replied absently, then added, “a hybrid?” It was the wrong question. What I really wanted to know was what a coywolf was.

  Wasn’t “coy” some sort of flirting or something?

  “Yeah, a hybrid. My mom is from an Appalachian mountain wizard clan and my dad’s a coywolf shifter.”

  “Coywolves are the combination of wolves, coyotes, and hounds,” the boy with her explained.

  “And this is Bash—Sebastian, but no one calls him that—my mate,” Izzy added.

  Wait. What? Her mate?

  I had heard some shifters talk about mating bonds, but everyone here discussed them like they were old-fashioned and, even if they were real, nothing that happened until shifters were much older. If at all.

  “Anyway,” Izzy continued, “thanks for the help with my entrance exam. I knew it was gonna be a tough one, but not so tough that it would take four of us to help me pass it.”

  The rest of us glanced at each other nervously.

  “What?” the coywolf shifter demanded. “What are you not telling me?”

  Bash shook his head. “Not sure. There’s something weird about that test, Iz. It’s not supposed to affect anyone else around you. We shouldn’t have been able to help you at all, much less take it down.”

  Izzy went pale. “Do you think maybe it wasn’t an entrance exam at all? Was it an attack on the school?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “That wizard really did attack the school last year. But the real guy’s dead. I’m certain of it.”

  “So that one wasn’t real?” Izzy asked, frowning at the blood drying on her skin.

  “I don’t know. Whatever it was,” I said, “I think we ought to report it to Dr. Novak, just in case.”

  Everyone else murmured their agreement, and we left the building to head toward lower-classmen’s dorm. “But not until I get a shower and change out of these disgusting clothes.”

  As we walked away from the bloody scene of
our battle, a dark cloud seemed to settle over me, tugging at me, trying to pull me back into a place I’d sworn I would never go again.

  A cold shiver went down my spine.

  The darkness.

  It was back, and for some reason, it was quietly testing our limits to figure out how strong we were. To find out how it could take us down the time came.

  I was sure of it.

  I just wasn’t sure I could get anyone else to believe me.

  Chapter 3

  An hour later, while I was in the shower, I heard my roommate come into our room. I finished up, dried off, stepped out of the stall, and wrapped my hair in a towel. Slipping on my bathrobe, I stepped into our room from the bathroom, already talking.

  “Hey, Erin. I was thinking maybe this semester we could...” My voice trailed off.

  The girl standing in front of me wasn’t Erin.

  She looked like a model, or at least what I thought the perfect student would look like. I could just imagine her picture on the recruitment material for the kind of fancy academy my parents thought I was going to in Switzerland.

  She was tall and thin, but curvy. Her chestnut hair had deep red highlights and fell in waves past her shoulders. She wore jeans and a light sweater, but something about her clothes just screamed money.

  Unlike my tatty blue bathrobe, which had definitely seen better days.

  I felt at a distinct disadvantage with my hair wrapped up in a towel. Part of me wanted to explain my mid-afternoon shower. But what would I say?

  Sorry. I wouldn’t have bothered to wash my hair if it hadn’t been for the bloody chunks I needed to rinse out.

  There really wasn’t any way to say that. Not without sounding exactly like the crazy girl I wanted to avoid being this semester.

  We stared at each other for a long, silent moment.

  Finally, I asked, “Who are you and why are you in my room?”

  She gestured toward a pile of luggage beside Erin’s bed and said, “Actually, it’s my room, too.”