His Dangerous Ways: An Academy of Demon Hunters and Angels Reverse Harem Romance (Academy of the Supernatural Book 2)

by May Dawson

  Corson’s heels hung off the edge of the roof, a maniac smile plastered across his face. Emily’s face was a mask of terror, since she stood beside him, her hand in his.

  “Deidra,” Truby said. “I think it’s time to tell you that the demons think you can fly.”

  “Excuse me?” I demanded.

  But the dozen demons rushed toward us then. Truby’s hands moved quickly, blasting magic at them. A dozen small beasts suddenly poured out of his pockets and raced across the cement floor, clawing up the demons clothes and causing far more panic than I would have expected.

  As I fought, my magic whipped around me, building like it was going to poison me. But I had to keep it under control. I was a Hunter—not a liability. I had to get to my sister.

  “Deidra—” Nix called. I didn’t know what he saw in my eyes, but he came toward me as if he was going to tell me to stop, he was going to try to calm me again.

  He still thought my magic was dangerous to everyone.

  “Deidra.” Corson called, imitating Nix’s voice. My gaze snapped to his.

  He still stood on the edge, gripping my sister.

  Then as I watched, he pushed her toward the ledge.

  Faster than thought, I ran to rescue her. She tottered at the very edge, her eyes wide with terror. She grabbed at his arm, trying to leverage herself so she wouldn’t fall. She fought Corson desperately for her life.

  Nix grabbed for me, but I gave him the slip. I ran as fast as I could for the ledge.

  Just as she teetered and fell, I caught her clothes. Her momentum yanked me toward the ledge, and I fought to hold onto her even as she pulled me off the edge of the roof. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  The two of us tumbled off the ledge, my hand still wrapped around her shirt.

  I heard Corson laugh in sheer delight, clapping his hands together.

  Chapter Forty

  I screamed as we fell, then agony laced through my shoulders, just before something shadowed us. Suddenly we were floating.

  We hung above the city street below. How?

  I looked over my shoulder to find wings unfurled above us. My heart stuttered as I tried to make sense of them. My wings.

  Emily’s shirt was still clutched between my fingers, and she screamed as she dangled beneath me. My fingers were weakening steadily.

  What the hell was going on? The demons thought I could fly…and I could?

  “Get us down,” Emily begged. Her eyes met mine.

  I didn’t know how to do that. Uncertainly, I tried to tense my shoulders, imagining myself if I were to flap my wings.

  We plunged three feet and Emily screamed, but then we stopped.

  “Sorry,” I hissed. “This is new to me.”

  Slowly, the two of us inched our way down, dropping a few feet at a time. My fingers cramped around her shirt, but it held until we were close to the ground. I managed to let go, and she slammed into the ground.

  Emily groaned, like it had knocked the wind out of her, then scrambled to her feet.

  “What the hell?” I screamed at Truby as everyone else joined us.

  “It is true,” he said, his eyes wide. “You’re a Nephilim.”

  I knew that word from my classes. Half-angel. Half-human.

  The idea was full crazy.

  I wanted to deny it, but the wings that unfurled to either side of my body seemed to suggest it was true.

  “So I’m not your daughter,” I said to Truby, then looked to Emily, who was backing away, her eyes wide with terror. “But I really am your sister.”

  I still wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just another trick.

  Then the battle was back around us before I could blink.

  Two demons moved to capture me. My body moved automatically through the motions I’d practiced for years, my muscles faster than conscious thought, even with the wings that tugged at my back, throwing off my balance.

  It was only when the second demon tripped me that I sprawled across the ground. My wings slapped the ground first.

  The world went slow motion.

  I was already throwing my hands back, ignoring the sudden pain that spiked through my knee—I’d fallen wrong, but it didn’t matter, get up or die—and arching my back, gathering my legs to pop myself up to my feet. I was in my feet in a second.

  The demon cleaved the broad sword straight for me. I danced back—

  --but my feet didn’t move.

  I looked up into the face of a grinning demon. A spell. I was stuck.

  The two-handed broadsword the demon swung arched closer and closer, the silver blade bright in my vision. It would take my head off.

  Truby was suddenly in front of me, muttering the words of a spell.

  Something cool splattered across me as I suddenly was in motion again. Truby’s counter spell had worked, and I was already in motion, jumping backward. The second demon was close to me and I twirled, jumping into the air and driving the sword deep into his throat.

  The demon stumbled back. His eyes went black as he fell to his back. I turned back to find the second demon.

  He held the bloody broad-sword in two hands, and he hadn’t stopped grinning.

  Truby’s body was on the ground.

  His head was a few yards away.

  Truby was dead.

  He died protecting me. He’d had all those precious memories of my mother locked away in his brain. But most of all, Truby might be dark and dangerous, but he had tried to be family to me.

  No one had the right to take him from me.

  My magic whipped around me, sizzling hot and dangerous, then lashed out at the demon who still held the ax. He fell to the ground.

  I could feel the guys trying to fight their way through to me, slaying demons and fighting hand-to-hand.

  Then Nix’s hard arms were around me. “Deidra, the fight is almost over,” he murmured, his voice low and soothing. “The demons are dead. It’s time to calm down. Okay? Calm down.”

  The magic in my chest was so tight now that I almost couldn’t bear it. I was going to lose control.

  I looked across the scene spread around us—the desolation of abandoned cars and damaged buildings, the boar tearing away at a dead demon, the last couple of living demons fighting furiously with Hunters.

  There was no sign of Corson. But he was the one who did this, who brought me to this moment, who was ultimately responsible for killing Truby. He’d found this all so funny.

  Truby had died for me, even though he knew I wasn’t his daughter at all.

  I screamed in frustration, channeling all my rage toward those demons, toward the last of Truby’s beasts who didn’t belong in our world.

  And they all went up in flames.

  “Holy shit,” Nix said.

  I looked into his face, expecting to see fear there, but instead he grabbed me and pressed his lips to mine. He cupped my face so intimately, kissing me like he loved me there on that battlefield, kissing me like nothing could break that love.

  And suddenly, the wings were gone, no longer hanging over me.

  I fell against his chest, as if I was exhausted by everything I’d done, as the demons crumpled to the ground.

  Nix caught me. Of course he caught me.

  He always did.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “Before we go, I need to talk to my sister,” I said.

  Emily watched me from where she sat on the hood of one of the Hunters’ cars. “Before you go,” she said, her jaw hard, “you need to stop calling me your sister.”

  She just didn’t understand. It was confusing to me too.

  “We’re technically half-sisters,” I explained. “Because my biological father was an angel, apparently.”

  A few minutes earlier, Ellis had introduced me to Jacob Kerr, the man the compass had led me to, who was apparently also my half-sibling. He was a Nephilim too.

  “I guess we share a father,” Jacob had said, frowning at the thought. “Azrael.”

  “I want to
know why you can’t fly,” his friend Ryker had demanded. “We got the defective Nephilim, apparently.”

  “And I got the defective family of Hunters,” Jacob had shot back. He was the tall, curly haired guy from the theater, and he had a British accent, full of sarcasm and grit. But his gaze had been compassionate when it met mine. “I know you have a lot to take in. But I’ll be here to answer questions… or anything else you need.”

  “Thank you,” I’d said.

  That conversation had gone a lot better than this one, so far.

  “I follow,” she said, her voice crisp. “Let me make this simple for you.”

  She got to her feet, letting the Hunters’ borrowed jacket slip from her shoulders. She’d been shaking at first from the trauma of first being Corson’s captive, then the fall.

  But she seemed like she’d gotten her strength back now.

  She touched her chest with one hand. “Witch.”

  She reached out and tapped her fingers on my shoulder. “Hunter.”

  Gesturing between us, she added, “Enemies.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “No, it really is,” she said. “You killed Truby. By coming into our lives. He was my friend, my teacher.” Her eyes welled with tears. “I don’t want anything to do with the Hunters. And I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “But we are sisters—”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “I’m worried someone will come after you,” I said. “The demons will still want to use me for whatever they wanted before. They might take you to try to make me—”

  “Leave me alone.” Her eyes were narrow with anger…or maybe grief. “If you just leave me alone, if you didn’t care about being sisters, they would have no reason to come after me.”

  The hatefulness of her words washed over me.

  “Right,” I said. “Well, the angel side of my family is cooler anyway.”

  There was nothing about my flippant words that matched how gutted I felt inside.

  “Make sure someone takes her home,” I told Cade.

  “Okay,” he said. He watched me with a gentleness and a wariness in his gaze at once, like I was a feral cat he wanted to rescue. “And what are we doing?”

  “We’re going back to the academy,” I said. “I’ve got a gift to bring back to Calla, after all.”

  And with that, I went searching for the rubble for Truby’s head.

  The Hunters’ Council had messed with the wrong half-angel.

  I was all-in to protect my sister, whether she wanted me or not, and my fellow Hunters.

  But I wasn’t going to be leashed.

  To discover just what havoc Deidra will wreak—and what her men will do to protect her—download Their Dangerous Ways, the final installment in Deidra’s story.

  Also by May Dawson

  The True and the Crown series:

  One Kind of Wicked

  Two Kinds of Damned

  Three Kinds of Lost

  Four Kinds of Cursed

  Five Kinds of Love

  Their Shifter Princess:

  Their Shifter Princess

  Their Shifter Princess 2: Pack War

  Their Shifter Princess 3: Coven’s Revenge

  Their Shifter Academy:

  Their Shifter Academy: A Prequel Novella

  Their Shifter Academy 1: Unwanted

  Their Shifter Academy 2: Unclaimed

  Their Shifter Academy 3: Undone

  The Wild Angels & Hunters Series:

  Wild Angels

  Fierce Angels

  Dirty Angels

  Chosen Angels

  Ashley Landon, Bad Medium

  Dead Girls Club

  Hi! May Dawson here.

  If you enjoyed His Dangerous Ways, please leave me a review if you can! It makes a huge difference in connecting readers with indie books, so authors like me can keep on writing!

  You can review His Dangerous Ways here.

  If you have’t met Ellis, Jacob, Ryker, Levi and Nim before, you might enjoy diving into the world of Ellis and Her Wild Angels. You can find this complete four book reverse harem series on Amazon or in audio, or turn the next page for a sample.

  Lastly, if you’d like to join my newsletter—and receive a free book, Ugly Magic—you can do that here.

  Thanks for reading!

  Best,

  May

  Part I

  Her Wild Angels

  Chapter One

  The first thing you need to know is that my mother used to love me. When I was little, she would bend in three-inch-heels and pick Ash and me up together, one on each hip. She was always so dignified and serious with the rest of the world, beauty wrapped around an iron spine.

  My twin sister and I were the only ones who knew her other side, when she sashayed around the kitchen with us, singing into wooden spoons, or when she tossed us onto the couch and tickled us. She deserved two daughters who also grew into lovely women.

  Instead, she ended up with one dead daughter, and the one who may have killed her.

  Things had changed terribly the night that my sister died.

  They changed again months later, the night I woke from my nightmares into a world on fire.

  One minute I was in a lush, green garden. It should have been beautiful, but I was chasing Ash. My sister ran away from me, the long blue satin gown she wore the night she died streaming behind her. Her long dark hair, the same color as mine, flickered behind her as she turned a corner in the garden’s maze, then disappeared behind a stone wall.

  When I turned the corner, orange tiger lilies seemed to fill the space where she had been. The bright orange blossoms waved in the wind, and then I heard the low, constant rush of flames, and the blossoms crackled into a wall of fire.

  I screamed for Ash. My voice sounded desperate as it rang in my own ears. The garden fell away, leaving me alone in my bedroom. Flames licked the curtains and the ceiling, casting an orange glow throughout the dark of my room. My face felt hot, my throat dry, and when I tried to draw a breath, it didn’t quite fill my aching lungs. I gasped in another frantic breath.

  I scrambled across the foot of my bed. I yanked the comforter off my bed to try to smother the flames.

  The door flew open, and my mother stormed in with a fire extinguisher in her hands. She aimed it at the flaming curtains. White foam covered the flames, dousing them, and flecks of it flew back to splatter across my face.

  When the last sparks died away, the room was dark again.

  My mother threw the fire extinguisher on my desk. When it rolled across the white-painted oak, it pushed my snow globe ahead of it. White flakes of snow whirled as the globe rolled towards the edge, the heavy red canister pushing it closer to its doom.

  I rushed to grab the snow globe before it could shatter on the carpet, but Mom reached out and grabbed my wrist. She was still breathing hard, but her voice was low and controlled when she said, “You’ll tell them that you were smoking.”

  The snow globe fell, but landed, upright and unbroken, on the carpet.

  “I wasn’t, I promise. I wasn’t smoking. I didn’t do anything—”

  The fire extinguisher landed heavily on the glass bubble of the globe, shattering it. The fluid in the globe seeped out to darken the carpet.

  “You were smoking,” she repeated. “I had to call 9-1-1. The fire could be in the walls.”

  In the distance, I could hear the roar of fire engines; the station was only a few miles away, and we only had a minute or two before they were here.

  “Mom.” I had to at least make her understand about something. “I promise—”

  “I don’t want any of your promises,” she cut me off. “Tomorrow, I’m sending you away.”

  “You’re sending me away?” It was such a ridiculous threat that I smiled in disbelief.

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a place for people like you.”

  “People like me? I think it’s called college, Mom.
Hang in until fall, and we’ll get away from each other. Hell, I’ll move out. I’m almost eighteen—”

  “You’re almost eighteen,” she said. “And that’s why I have a few more days to choose where you’ll spend your summer. I’ve been debating if I should send you there or not, but you could have killed us both tonight. I’m not going to let you hurt anyone else, Ellis.”

  My mother’s ashy-blond hair fell in stringy strands over her shoulder around a wan face. It was the middle of the night, and that must be why she looked other-worldly tonight, with her eyes as black as sin in the dim light.

  As black as my sin.

  I shouldn’t hate her for blaming me for Ash. Because I did too. But I desperately wanted her to wrap her arms around me and tell me it would be okay. I wanted her to tell me she still loved me.

  She just stared back at me.

  The spell between us was broken by the thumping on the front door. Firemen. She startled, running her hands through her limp hair, as she turned. “I don’t want them breaking down the door.”

  She swept towards the door, imperious even in sleep pants and a t-shirt. She turned and glanced at me over her shoulder, one last look, and then she hurried down the hallway.

  She looked at me like I was the fire in the walls, a hidden danger that could burst into full flame at any moment.

  The firemen didn’t believe me when I said I hadn’t been smoking. My mother had planted the idea in their heads, and it was the only thing that made sense. By the time they left, dawn was breaking, and I was so exhausted that I almost believed the story I’d started the fire with cigarettes myself. There was only one little problem: I had never smoked in my life.

  I didn’t want to be in that house anymore. As soon as the fire truck pulled away down the street, I sat down heavily on the porch swing. It squeaked back and forth as the red lights faded down the street. The house across the street from me, an enormous gray stone McMansion, was empty; it was being foreclosed on. So I knew no one was watching me through the curtains, curious about the drama at our house tonight.