by May Dawson
His Dangerous Ways
Academy of the Supernatural 2
May Dawson
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 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Also by May Dawson
A Note from May
I. Her Wild Angels
Chapter One
About the Author
Prologue
Nix
Year One at the Academy of the Supernatural
I leaned against the cold wall, drawing slow breaths, trying to get my heart to slow again. My heart galloped so fast in my chest that it felt like it would burst, and the let-down of adrenaline through my muscles left me drained.
But I couldn’t let my legs fail me, no matter how much they ached, so I pressed my shoulder blades into the wall and kept standing. I wouldn’t fall. Not in front of them.
“We’re getting you out of here,” Cade said. His voice sounded far away through the thrum of blood through my ears. “I called my dad, and he said—”
“You can’t fight my battles for me.” My voice came out harsher than I meant. Opening my eyes, I took in the worried face of my best friend. Cade leaned against the wall beside me, his posture mirroring mine even though he wasn’t on the verge of physical exhaustion.
“This is stupid,” Cade said quietly. “You’re one of us. This proves nothing…”
“Clear the children,” Calla said quietly to her men.
“Just go, Cade,” I said. He couldn’t help me now. Failing me was tearing him apart. “I want to do this. I want to show them just who I am.”
Cade thought this brutal exercise proved nothing, but Calla and I agreed on one thing.
It was when we were closest to death that we were our truest selves.
The Council doubted me, so they were bringing me closer and closer to death, curious to see if I was a Hunter or a witch, at the end.
Whatever Cade was going to say next was lost as one of Calla’s men gripped his shoulder. “Time to go.”
Cade looked to me over the man’s wide shoulder. At the slightest signal, I knew Cade would burst into motion, trying to bring down half-a-dozen experienced, full-grown Hunters so I could escape.
My best friend was an idiot sometimes.
But still, something about his devotion brought a flicker to life in my chest.
They could take me to the edge of death, and I knew they didn’t care if I went over.
But I’d fight my way back.
“Go,” I told him. “I’ll see you later.”
I took one last sip from the bottle of water that Cade had fought to bring me, demanding that Calla and the Council give me a break from the magic trials.
Then I dropped it on the ground. Ignoring my friend as he pushed back at the door, trying to get back in, though he was blocked by two Hunters, I turned to face Calla.
“Well?” I said. “Is there more?”
My voice came out hard and strong, even though I could feel the dried tear tracks on my face when I spoke, almost as pronounced as the bruises. I’d been back in the memory of the night my parents died. Had I relived it half-a-dozen times now? I couldn’t keep count.
Calla gave me a mocking smile as she gestured toward the room I’d left, the one where I fought with fists and magic against monsters from my imagination. And yet somehow, those monsters had teeth.
Where I fought my monsters alone, even though I was a Hunter.
In the distance, I heard Cade say, “Just let me go with him.”
Then I heard the thwack of a fist into a gut. One of Calla’s men had enough of Cade.
Rage twisted in my gut. I looked over my shoulder as they yanked Cade away, only to see Calla watching me, her eyes self-satisfied.
She wanted me to know they were hurting my friend.
She wanted me to be angry.
Well, I was always angry.
But that didn’t change who I was at my core.
I squared my shoulders to face my nightmares.
Chapter One
Deidra
My boots clattered on the stairs that led down to the basement, and then I sprinted past the weight room and dojo. My heart hammered in my chest as I threw open the door to the Tank.
Nix stood in the center of the room. As magic crackled across his hands, the light reflected across his handsome features. His face was stern with concentration, and he didn’t look up as I flew into the room.
“Deidra,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about how we could—”
“We’ve got to run,” I interrupted.
As if he heard the edge of fear in my voice, his gaze jerked to my face. As his hands fell, the magic at his fingertips sparked brighter, then fizzled out. He was at my side in a few quick long strides. “What happened?”
But he didn’t stop. He touched the small of my back, beckoning me forward. Together, we hurried down the hall to the gym.
“Malcolm said to run,” I said. Just minutes ago, I’d hugged my grandfather for the first time. Men carrying swords had guarded the door as Malcolm whispered into my ear. “The Council is here. He said to find you and to run.”
He cursed. “All right. Let’s go.”
He slipped ahead of me to unlock the glass door that led from the dojo to the lawn, which was covered in a thick layer of fallen leaves; beyond stood the forest that bordered the academy.
“Where’s Cade?” I asked.
He shook his head. “He’s back at Coville house. There’s no time.”
We were leaving now. We were leaving Cade behind. Nix’s urgency made my chest tighten with fear.
What the hell would the Council do that had sparked such fear in Malcolm and Nix?
The two of us stepped out into the chilly air, he strode across the lawn towards the trees. “Everything will be fine, Deidra.”
“Then why are we—”
He turned on his heel, still walking toward the woods. “School’s still in session. The first rule is that we move. Don’t second guess. Don’t go home.”
Home meant someplace different to me than the academy.
“The first rule of running?” I ran to catch up with him, then matched his pace as the two of us passed under the twisted bowers of tree branches into the woods. “I didn’t think Hunters ran.”
It was cooler here in the shadows, and I shivered in my t-shirt.
Or maybe i
t wasn’t the cold that made me shiver.
Nix flashed me a look. “Of course Hunters run. Sometimes you fight; sometimes you run. The goal is to keep alive yourself so you can save everyone else, Deathwish.”
The two of us moved at a brisk pace steadily through the woods. He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket as we walked, ripped out the SIM card, and dropped it at his feet. He stomped it with the hell of his boot, crushing it, before driving it into the mud.
When he set off again, his movements were quick and purposeful, as if he had a destination in mind.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
“I’ve got a cache outside the fence,” he said. He shook his head. “I should’ve told you where to find it. I didn’t think you’d need it. Not with Malcolm to look out for you.”
“But Malcolm doesn’t outrank the Council,” I filled in.
“Correct.”
“And the Council…?”
“Is no friend to witches,” he said shortly. “But they do tolerate us.”
Every part of that sentence prickled on my skin.
They tolerate us. As if Hunters and witches are two different species, and they are so different from us just because Nix and I have a gift they don’t.
They tolerate us. As if Nix and I, at our core, can’t be trusted.
They tolerate us. Witches like Nix and me who grew up in Hunting families, who don’t know any other life. We want to spend our lives saving civilians and slaying monsters, and yet our own people don’t trust us.
The cruelty and stupidity of it curdled in my gut.
“As long as they think we’re ‘safe’,” I said.
They must have decided I didn’t count as safe. I was too powerful. And I was Truby’s daughter. The daughter of the witch who had killed more than a dozen Hunters, who had raised an army of monsters, who had raped my mother…
“You are safe,” he said. “You’ve controlled your magic. You’ve got me to help. We have to get out of here for now, but we’ll be back.”
He sounded so confident. It made me think of how he and Cade had talked about the academy as their home.
I stopped dead, turning to face him. “I don’t think this is about my power. It’s about Truby.”
“He’s not going to last much longer on this earth,” Nix promised me.
I shook my head. “You can’t leave with me. I’ll go on my own.”
“Oh?” Nix’s brows arched over his cool blue eyes. “The fuck I will.”
“If you leave, you might not be able to come back,” I said. “But I could go. You could tell me where the cache is—you just said that you should have told me already—and the Council will never know you’re on my side—”
“Move your ass now or I’ll carry you,” he interrupted, his voice harsh. “We don’t have time to waste with this self-sacrificing bullshit.”
“Why?” I pointed back through the woods, in the general direction of campus, already lost between the trees. “Do you think they’re already looking for me?”
“If they aren’t, then you’re about to get a few days off from the academy for no reason, which is something to celebrate,” he said. He shoved my shoulder, pushing me ahead of him. “If they are, we don’t have time to waste. Either way, move.”
He cared so much about the academy, but I knew he wasn’t going to walk away from me, either.
“I don’t want you to lose everything,” I said, but I moved.
He didn’t acknowledge my words. Instead, he set a punishing pace through the woods, but I matched it.
The minutes trickled by with the only sounds the constant rush of wind rattling the leaves overhead and the faint sounds of our breathing.
Then he said, “I’d be losing something if I let you go off alone. That’s not what we do as Hunters. That’s not what we do at the academy.”
His voice was flat. But I’d noticed Nix’s voice always went bleak like that, almost toneless when he said something tinged with feeling. He’d used the same flat tone when he told me Truby murdered his family.
He sounded so confident about the academy, but I still wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the academy that I trusted.
It was Nix, and Cade, and Tristan.
The two of us reached the spiked wrought-iron fence that stretched around academy grounds. I tilted my head back to stare at the threatening spikes, almost ten feet up.
“Are we going over?” I asked. “Or blasting it down?”
“Neither.” He looked up at the spikes too, studying them as he walked the length of the fence. His fingers trailed over the wrought iron bars. Magic sparked from his fingertips, glowing against the dark metal. “You do have a taste for destruction, don’t you?”
“Can’t help it,” I said. “Destruction just seems to follow me.”
That simple truth should warn him off, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. It never did. Nix had watched me almost detonate, like a magical bomb, and yet in that moment, he’d hugged me close.
“Is Cade going to be worried?” I asked.
“You know he is,” he said. “You know Ambivalent Koko.”
When Nix used Tristan’s teasing nickname for Cade, some of the tension eased in my chest. Nix seemed so confident that everything would work out.
He muttered a word in Latin, and part of the fence shimmered. He pushed on it, and a new gate swung open.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I want you to be able to escape the academy.” He glanced at me as he stepped out into the forest beyond the fence and gestured as if he were welcoming me. “To escape me.”
“You’re not as scary as you think,” I told him.
“Then I’m apparently failing you as an instructor.” He swung the section of fence closed again before stooping to run his hand across the metal. The fence healed closed again. No one could see we’d passed through here. “Yeah, I’ll teach you. When you’re ready.”
The banter between us had lightened my mood, but the reminder that I still hadn’t mastered my powers made dread throb in my chest again.
“When will that be?” I asked, my voice coming out soft. “Will it ever happen?”
“We don’t have time for the self-sacrificing bullshit or the self-pitying bullshit,” he said. “Trust me, I’m familiar with both. Move, Ainsley.”
His confession, no matter how brusque and off-handed, that he pitied himself sometimes shocked me. It was a comforting jolt. I looked up to Nix more than I wanted to admit. He seemed so cool and self-possessed, while I was hot-tempered… a hazard to myself and others.
He didn’t look back at the academy. He headed into the woods with his head held high.
Just like I’d been doing since Liam died, I put one foot in front of the other and kept moving.
Even if I didn’t know where I was going.
Chapter Two
The two of us reached a thicket of brambles, that stood taller than I was, in the middle of bare spruce trees. Through the bare trees, I could glimpse gray in the distance. The road.
Nix’s magic sparked as he began to pull away brambles, tearing them up by the roots and tossing them in a pile. He glanced at me over his shoulder. “You going to help?”
I looked from his questioning face to the thorny tangle of branches in front of us. “I don’t have magic.”
“Nope. Too bad on that. You do have muscles, last time I checked.” He wrenched another armful out of the ground, tossing them away into the woods.
I pulled a face as I carefully grabbed some brambles and pulled them out of the way. Nix was such a gentleman. A thorn drove through my thumb, and I bit back a curse word. Then I popped my finger into my mouth and sucked the blood away as I kept working with my left. He wasn’t complaining about abandoning his life to help me. I couldn’t complain either.
Between the two of us, we made short work of the bramble bushes. I was breathing hard as the two of us peeled away enough brambles to reveal a low-s
lung wooden shed.
He yanked the last few brambles away, then opened the door. Moving quickly, he pulled out two backpacks and tossed one to me. He came out with a long, waterproof bag, and he knelt on the ground to unwrap it before pulling out swords and a pair of handguns.
“You always planned to do this with a buddy, huh?” I asked.
“I figured Cade might come with me.”
“Why did you do all this?”
He slid a clip into the gun, racked it, double checked it before he slid it into the holster. “Malcolm helped me. My future at the academy wasn’t always too clear either.”
“Why?” I stared at him, perplexed, as he went back into the shed. “Why did you stay if you knew you might have to run one day?”
“The academy doesn’t have to be perfect to be good,” he said shortly. He stepped back out wheeling a motorcycle. “And neither do the Hunters.”
That was a pat answer when we might be on the run from our own people.
“How will we know if they’re coming after us?”
“It’ll be hard to miss.” He bent over the handlebars, putting all his formidable muscle into the task of getting the motorcycle across the pitted forest floor to the woods.
“Is there another one of those for me?” I asked, moving to the shed door to check. The shed was empty. “Or were you and Cade going to curl up on one motorcycle?”
“We are pretty close,” he deadpanned.
