Contents
Prologue
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 14
Epilogue
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Deleted Scenes
Academy
Author
Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse
Hybrid Academy
Year One
L.C. Mortimer
Story copyright by L.C. Mortimer
Cover design by Melody Simmons//www.ebookindiecovers.com
*
“And I'll never be alone.” -The Dresden Dolls, Coin Operated Boy.
“I dare you to move like today never happened.” -Switchfoot, Dare You To Move.
For Mémère:
To lost shoes in muddy fields,
To bread baskets at dinner theaters,
To old records played much too loud,
And to you.
I love you.
Fans of Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Supernatural – get ready to dive into a world where magic is powerful, clever witches rule the world, and vampires lurk in the darkness.
It was an otherwise normal Tuesday when I found out that I’m not alone in the universe.
At 2:05, my grandmother vanished, taken by vampires I didn’t know existed.
At 3:30, my aunt showed up to explain how the world really operates.
By 5:00, I was on my way to Hybrid Academy: a school for people like me.
At 7:30, I was walking into my dorm for the first time and discovered that Hybrid Academy isn’t so unlike high school. There are the popular witches, the dreamy warlocks, the shy magicians, and yes, even the shifters.
Hi.
I’m Max.
And this is my story.
Prologue
My life is divided into two parts: before and after.
The time in the middle, the time that overlaps, is a wave of loss and pain I struggle to think about. Good memories are interspersed with tears and blackness. These are the things I want to forget. These are the things I want to wish away. It wasn’t always like this, the pain. Now things are different.
I broke.
Cracked.
Changed.
The world around me crashed and burned, taking me with it. The world almost destroyed everything I care about. It attacked me, wrapping around me like a blanket of pain and terror I never thought I’d be free from.
But I won’t stay broken.
I have something to live for now.
I have a mission.
A quest.
I have the Academy.
Chapter 1
"This isn't what I ordered." The tall man in the suit looked at the coffee and sneered. He thrust the cup back at me. A little bit sloshed over the side of the cup and onto the counter. "And you'd better clean that up."
Biting back irritation, I managed a smile.
"Of course. Anything else I can do for you?” I asked politely. Inside, I felt anything but polite. This guy was being a total jerk, as always. I knew for a fact that his coffee had been made perfectly. He just didn’t like me because I couldn’t do magic.
He wanted Maggie to make his drink.
“A free bagel couldn’t hurt,” the man said, jerking his head toward the display of blueberry bagels.
“I’ll have to get my manager’s permission,” I said. “Please wait just a moment.”
I scurried to the back of the café and knocked on the door to the office.
“Come in.”
I yanked the door open and peered inside. Tony was sitting at his desk with his ankles crossed over the top. He looked bored out of his mind.
“What do you want, Maxine?” He asked.
“It’s Max,” I said. “Not Maxine. And there’s a customer who wants a free bagel.”
“We don’t give out bagels for free,” Tony said with a yawn. He was obviously bored. He was always bored at the café.
“I know, but he said that his drink was wrong and he wants to be compensated with free food.”
Tony glared at me and got up with a huff. He acted like it was my fault that he was the manager of the café or that he had to leave the safety of his office to come do his actual job. Whatever. I’d been dealing with Tony ever since I started working at the café. He was neither a good boss nor a team player, so I tried to stay as far away from him as possible. Besides, something about Tony made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why.
“Is there a problem, Lionel?” Tony asked the tall man.
“Yeah, your em-ploy-ee,” he dragged the word out sarcastically. “Messed up my drink. I asked her nicely if she could fix it.”
“Not a problem,” Tony said. He jerked his head toward one of my coworkers. “Maggie, make Lionel a new drink.”
Maggie shot me a nasty look but nodded and started the drink. The café wasn’t busy and the drink wasn’t complicated, so I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. Actually, I had the distinct feeling that Lionel’s original drink had been just fine, but that he wanted a bagel out of the deal.
Correction: he wanted a free bagel.
Tony and Lionel sat and chatted while Maggie made the drink. I cleaned up the spill on the counter before starting to check our inventory. I wasn’t a magic user, so I couldn’t just summon cups whenever we ran out of something we needed. Instead, I’d have to trot back to the stockroom, find what we needed, and carry it back. It was kind of a drag for everyone, which was just another reason nobody liked me.
By the time I left work that day, I was tired, exhausted, and spent.
And I knew my grandmother was going to be beyond pissed that I was late.
*
I ran up the steps to the little log cabin where I lived with my Grandmother. My heart was pounding, racing, and I silently begged it to stop. Slow down. It needed to chill out, to be honest. Overreacting never turned out well for anyone, least of all me.
I smelled sweaty and I was tired: both signs that I left work much later than I should have. I didn’t want her to give me a hard time about it. Mémère had enough to worry about. She didn’t need to be concerned that my boss still wasn’t letting me leave on time or that my customers were constantly giving me a hard time.
That’s the price I paid to work at a café in Brooksville.
Nobody liked me because I was poor, and an orphan, and I couldn’t do magic.
All of those elements combined to make me one of the most disliked people in town. Despite trying to have a charming personality and showing kindness to the people around me, I somehow still managed to catch the eye of every magic-user within shouting distance, and not in a good way.
I glanced down at my work clothes. My once-white blouse was now splattered with coffee, no thanks to Maggie and Justine for their “assistance” at work. My jeans had fared just as poorly. They had a few new stains, a new tear, and smelled slightly questionable. I sighed. Mémère was definitely going to notice something was wrong.
I hated to make her worry.
I hated to make her sad.
She worked so hard to raise me, to take care of me, that the idea of letting her down again filled me with stress and anxiety. I wished for the millionth time that I could use magic. I wished that I had a wand, that I knew spells, or that I had, you know, powers. I wished that I could whisper a few carefully practiced words and somehow whip up an appearance she could be proud of.
But I couldn’t.
In my case, practice hadn’t made perfect.
I stared at the front door of our home for a long minute. My breathing finally began to stabilize and I began to feel like everything was going to be okay. Maybe it would. Maybe everything would be fine. One bad day at work wouldn’t kill me.
A hundred bad days at work wouldn’t kill me.
Besides, I owed Mémère everything. Without her, I wouldn’t exist. I would have died when my parents did. I would have been killed or lost or starved. No one else in this place was about to take in a little orphan kid who couldn’t do spells. Nobody. Yet my grandmother was ready.
My grandmother was brave.
I reached for the door and pressed my hand against it, but I didn’t turn the knob. Not yet. I needed a few more minutes to be alone with my thoughts, to focus on the fact that today had been the worst day yet. Today seemed different somehow. Part of me thought that after awhile, things at work would get easier. I thought that they’d improve and that I would finally begin to connect with people who understood me.
I was so wrong.
I’m not understood now, just like I wasn’t understood before.
A tear slid down my cheek and I brushed it away. I look around wildly, like someone could see me, even though I was completely alone.
“I know you’re out there,” I heard her voice through the door. “Come on in, love. I won’t bite.”
I gulped.
Yeah, my grandmother definitely knew something was up. She didn’t want me working in town, anyway, but I had convinced her that I needed to. The reality was that I knew she didn’t have a lot of money and I felt bad for not contributing to our family. The café didn’t bring in a lot of money, but I was finished with school and wasn’t really doing anything else with my time.
There weren’t a lot of job prospects in Brookville, but the café was something. It enabled me to make some money, spend time socializing, and get to know people who lived near me. It meant I could be around other people, for once. It meant I could explore the world, if only just a little.
The front door opened before I could turn the knob, and there stood my grandmother: tall, lean, and silvery.
Fierce.
My grandma was fierce.
Everything about her screamed strong. She was taller than me, which was sometimes hard for me to grasp since at 5’7”, I wasn’t a tiny girl. Although she was getting older, she still had strong muscles that were clearly defined. Whether it was from being a witch or from years of exercise and hard work, I wasn’t sure. I just knew that my grandma wasn’t the type of person anyone messed with.
Not if they knew what was good for them.
“You’re late,” she said simply, but she glared when she did. Her eyes narrowed a little: not too much. She didn’t quite look mad. It was more like, a cautious sort of look, as though she was waiting for me to say something first. I knew exactly what she wanted from me. She wanted me to admit that working in the shop was a bad choice and that I was ready to stay home with her.
After all, even if I couldn’t use magic, I could still learn about it, and my grandmother loved it when I studied.
“Not by much,” I responded, but I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to say. My grandmother didn’t yell at me or raise her voice. She never had. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. Besides, disappointment was so much worse than yelling, anyway. If I wanted to trick Gram, I should have acted stupid. I should have pretended like I didn’t know just how late it was. Then I could have pretended that I was lollygagging or chatting with someone and just completely lost track of the time.
My answer let her know that I knew I was late, and that there was a reason for it.
“What happened?” She said gently. Her eyes softened when she looked at me. Mr. Boo, my familiar, came out of the cabin and rubbed against my legs. I reached down and picked up the fat, black-and-white cat and held him in my arms for a minute. Somehow, Boo always managed to calm my racing heart when I felt stressed. I might not do magic, but Grams had given him to me just the same.
“Every witch should have a familiar,” she had told me that day. Boo had been a full-grown cat already. No one knew exactly how old he was or where he’d come from, but Gram had chosen him and he turned out to be just as special as she thought he would.
“It’s nothing, Mémère,” I told her. “I just got caught up at work.”
“Did you get busy at work, Maxine, or did someone make you stay late out of spite?” She didn’t ask it in an accusing way, but I knew what she was thinking. Mémère didn’t like me working for my boss. She didn’t understand why I wanted to work or why I thought it was important that I have a job of some sort.
Any sort.
In her mind, my time would be better spent helping out on the property, working in the yard, or memorizing spells from the big, heavy book she kept on the kitchen table. The pages were worn with years of use, but Grams told me every day how important those spells were.
Not that I’d ever use them.
The little cabin we lived in was surrounded by a wide yard and then trees for as far as the eye could see. Our driveway itself was almost a mile long. That’s how hidden away we were. Unless someone was looking for us specifically, they’d never find us. We didn’t even get mail at the house. Everything went to a post office box in town that one of us would check on a weekly basis.
Mémère and I were isolated, and she worried about me.
“You know Tony likes to have me stay late sometimes,” I finally said. It wasn’t a lie, but it was sort of a half-truth. I didn’t know if Tony actually liked having me stay or if he just liked having me miserable. Did I get paid for staying late? Yeah. Of course. This wasn’t some sort of illegal café. That said, it was still a nightmare working late after I’d already been on my feet for an eight-hour shift.
My grandmother sighed and shook her head.
“This man is no good for you,” she said.
“He’s not my man,” I pointed out. I didn’t date. Mémère knew that. A lot of things kept me from relationships and one of the biggest reasons was that I didn’t want to date a magic user. It wasn’t my thing. I couldn’t use magic. I had never been able to get even the simplest spell to work. My grandmother did her best to train me in the ways of her people, but somehow, I’d just never managed to pick things up.
If it bothered her, she was kind enough not to tell me.
Still, I didn’t want to date someone who could use magic. Part of it was a safety thing. Self-preservation was important and I didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who might do a love spell on me. I just hated the idea of not knowing what was going on.
I hated the idea that someone might take advantage of me.
“He’s still cruel,” Mémère said. She shook her head. She was disappointed. In me? In the situation? I wasn’t sure, but I nodded in agreement and moved past her and into the house. I dropped my bag on the living room sofa and walked into the attached kitchen. The book with Mémère’s spells, as always, was spread out in the center of the table. Gram had been working on spells this afternoon. Herbs and pots and potions and bottles were on every flat surface in the room.
“What were y
ou working on?” I asked her, but she only shook her head gently. Grams never liked to talk about the spells she was doing. I didn’t really understand why it had to be a secret. She wanted me to trust her, but there were so many things she wouldn’t reveal to me.
“Are you hungry?” Mémère asked, and I knew there was to be no discussion on what she was trying to do with her spell book. It didn’t make sense to me. Sometimes it seemed like she had just as many secrets as Mom and Dad.
“I ate at work,” I lied. She looked at me carefully. Was she trying to see if I was lying? I totally was, but this time, there was no way for her to tell. Not unless she used some sort of truth serum on me. I wouldn’t put it past her, but this wasn’t something I was ready to talk about today. Not with Grams.
“If you change your mind…” Her voice trailed off and I nodded.
“Don’t worry. I’m 19, Grams. I’m old enough to make myself something to eat.”
I kissed her softly on the cheek and turned to the little staircase that led upstairs. Our home was very cozy, but it was also very small. The second floor of the cabin had only two little bedrooms and a tiny bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a shower. I went up the stairs and sat at the very top for a minute. I listened to see if I could figure out what Gram was up to.
I heard her bustling around in the kitchen for awhile, touching things and whispering, but she was so quiet that I couldn’t make out the words. When Boo came up the narrow staircase and rubbed against my legs, I reached for him and pet him softly. Instantly, he started to purr.
“At least I have you,” I whispered, and I pulled him into my lap. I held Boo for a long time. Then I stood up and carried him into my bedroom and shut the door behind me. I locked the door. It didn’t matter. If Gram needed to come in, she could cast a spell and be in my space in like, two seconds.
But the lock made me feel like I was tucking myself away from everything: my boss, my job, my lack of friends. I used it because it gave me a little bit of security I wouldn’t otherwise have. I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling.
Hybrid Academy Box Set Page 1
