Entrance Exam

by Ivy Hearne

  Hunters’ Academy

  1: Entrance Exam

  Ivy Hearne

  Hunters’ Academy 1: Entrance Exam

  Copyright © 2018 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

  Hunters' Academy 1: Entrance Exam

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Hunters’ Academy 2: Winter Break

  Hunters’ Academy 3: Crash Course

  Hunters’ Academy 4: Independent Study

  About the Author

  About Hunters’ Academy 1: Entrance Exams

  SURVIVE OR DIE.

  It's not much of a school motto—not as inspiring as, say, "Let us give light to the world," or "Knowledge is liberty," or even just "Light and Truth." Those are all real school mottos. So is this one. It belongs to the Hunters' Academy. And now, so do I.

  Since she was twelve years old, Kacela Deluca has suffered debilitating migraines. On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, she learns her headaches are the result of untapped psychic abilities. She's given a choice: continue to suffer or leave behind everything she knows and join the Hunters’ Academy. The only catch? If she doesn’t pass the entrance exam, she’ll die.

  A teen with blocked psychic powers, a panther shifter who can't—or won't—shift, a secret academy, and the power to defend the entire world...if only Kacie can unleash her potential before it's too late.

  Fans of Vampire Academy, Mortal Instruments, Harry Potter, and Dragon School will love Hunters’ Academy!

  Entrance Exam is episode one of Hunters’ Academy - expect a new episode every month beginning Fall 2018!

  Chapter 1

  The headache started like it always did: without any pain at all. Something else always went wrong first. Sometimes it was my speech. They call that aphasia. It’s like I can think what I want to say, but the words come out of my mouth wrong. Or sometimes, they don’t come out at all.

  That day, though, the day I first found out about Hunters’ Academy, the blinding lights were the first symptom. My first sign that I was about to go blind with a migraine was a silver light streaking across my vision like the flashing from a spinning disco ball.

  I was in math class. It was the first time I’d made it to math class in over a week, and I was so far behind, I didn’t know how I’d ever get caught up. It wasn’t like geometry was my best subject, either. Fear of failing only made the headaches worse. All the doctors told me to avoid stress, but I was in high school, so that was impossible.

  If I’m lucky, I’ll have enough time to get to the nurse’s office before I go blind, I thought. I wasn’t counting on it, though. I never counted on it.

  When I pushed my chair away from my desk, it toppled over behind me. But I was already headed toward the door, hands held out to keep from smashing into any of my classmates. Or the walls.

  I heard snickers behind me. You’d think after almost four years of this, my classmates would have been used to it.

  Of course, I wasn’t used to it, either. Even after forty-eight months of pure torture.

  The migraine intensified as I reeled down the hall, trying to peer around the line that split my vision—the one that existed only in my head. I placed my hand on the cinderblock wall and used it to navigate down the seemingly endless hallway. I managed to make it all the way to the nurse’s door and I breathed a sigh of relief. But my relief didn’t last long.

  It was locked.

  I was supposed to head to the principal’s office if this happened, if Nurse Smith was gone. But that day, I didn’t have time. The rest of my vision grayed out and was replaced by strobing silver lights sliding and flashing back and forth in front of me. The principal’s office was down the hall and around a corner. I would never find it among all the lights. So instead, I let go of the doorknob, turned around to put my back against Nurse Smith’s door, and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor, my knees drawn to my chest, and my head cradled on my arms on top of my knees.

  I was still sitting there five minutes later when the pain hit. I’d spent that entire time dreading what I knew was coming. My neck and shoulders were so tense I couldn’t even turn my head properly. The headache smashed into me with a wave of nausea so strong, it was all I could do to keep from vomiting all over the hall.

  I hadn’t always managed to keep from throwing up. Yet another reason my classmates loved me so very much. No one really wanted to hang around with the girl who went blind at unpredictable intervals and could start crying and vomiting at any minute.

  You’re such a mess.

  I was surprised when a kind female voice said, “Here. Let me help you.” I felt her—whoever she was—sit down next to me, and the cool touch of a slim hand rested on my wrist. “Do you mind if I look at your face?” she asked.

  Do we have a new nurse or something? I was too sick to ask, so I simply raised my face from my arms, keeping my eyes closed. It was slightly better without the fluorescence of the school lights overhead shining directly my eyes.

  I felt her shift beside me, and her other hand touched my forehead. If I could have spoken, I would have told her it wouldn’t do any good—nothing helped those headaches except the heavy-duty injections the nurse kept in a locked box in her office for me. And even those didn’t always work.

  But then the woman brushed her fingertips across my forehead and whispered a few words I didn’t understand. I assumed it was me, though—sometimes my ability to understand what other people were saying disappeared when I was in the midst of a migraine. The pain was so intense it blocked out everything else, making me a prisoner in my own body.

  But in the weight of her touch, a new, almost purple haze flowed across my vision. Inside my eyelids, the strobe lights of the migraine receded in the wake of this cool, violet touch. After a few seconds, I opened my eyes, and I could almost see.

  Usually after migraine, everything was too bright, too sharp, like I could cut myself on the edges of reality by walking through it.

  I had none of that. Instead, everything seemed surrounded by a soft, pinkish-purplish glow the same color as the fog that chased away my blindness. I turned my head to look at the woman kneeling next to me. She was an adult, but small, smaller than almost any other grown-up I knew. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed them, then opened them again to examine her more closely.

  She was fair-skinned, with a pointed chin and dark, curly hair to her shoulders.

  “Can you see now?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” That purplish haze was still floating around everything, but I could see, and I could talk. And the nausea was gone. “What did you do to me?”

  “Are you Kacela DeLuca?” she asked.

  “Kacie,” I corrected her absently. “But yeah, that’s me.”

  “You can call me Mina.” She waved her hand in front of my eyes. Purple smoke trailed behind them. “Can you see that?”

  Does she mean the smoke or her fingers? Fingers, surely. “Yeah. Ar
e you the new nurse? Or a substitute?”

  She laughed, and the sound was like tinkling bells. “Oh, no. I’m actually here to see you.”

  “Me?” There was nothing special about me. Except maybe my inability to make it through an entire week without humiliating myself in class. Ask anyone in my classes and they’d tell you I was the furthest thing possible from special in a good way.

  “Yes. I’m a recruiter for a school.”

  I tried to process that, but I felt like I had a migraine hangover. I couldn’t make sense of the idea that a recruiter for a school would be here for me. My grades were crap because I could barely ever study enough without getting sick. The same went for sports—I’d been kicked off the track team in junior high because I couldn’t be counted on to make the meets. I had to take specials—music, art, and the like—but I wasn’t any good at those, either. My specialty was lying in dark rooms and occasionally listening to television shows with my eyes closed.

  “Like, for a college or something?” I finally managed to ask.

  Again came that laugh like bells. “A little. It’s more like a private school. But it covers high school and some college.”

  The only private school I knew of nearby was ultra-religious and super strict, and therefore terrifying. “What private school?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Hunters’ Academy. It’s a...boarding school some distance away.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “What did you do to make my headache go away?” I hadn’t felt the prick of a needle, and I hadn’t taken anything, as far as I could remember. I wanted to know what kind of medical magic she commanded.

  She narrowed her wide-spaced, almost purple eyes as she examined my face. With one fingertip, she reached out and touched the center of my forehead. When she lifted her finger away, it was like relief spread from that single point.

  She nodded in satisfaction. “That should get rid of the last of it, at least for a while.”

  I jerked back. “How did you do that?” I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself that she had gotten rid of the worst of my migraine with just a touch. But there was no denying this.

  “We can make sure it doesn’t come back. But only if you come with me to the Academy.”

  Go with her to the Academy? I didn’t know who she was, I’d never heard of the Academy, and I was pretty certain my parents would never allow me to go to boarding school. My mother stayed anxious about my health, and my father would say we couldn’t afford what boarding school must cost.

  I was already shaking my head when she spoke again.

  “We should have found you years ago. Please say you will at least tour the school.”

  “My parents—” I began.

  “I can have you there and back by the end of the school day,” she interrupted. “They’ll be none the wiser.”

  I squeezed my eyes closed. Was I misunderstanding something? I thought she had said the school was far away. The idea was intriguing, if not very rational.

  Is this some trick to get me to go with her? I felt stupid worrying about it in the middle of school. I peered at her sparkly blue blouse. She wore one of the stickers required for campus visitors, so she must’ve checked in at the office. It was bad enough getting hit by vomit-inducing headaches on a regular basis. I might never live down the shame if I started screaming Stranger Danger! in the middle of the hall outside the nurse’s office.

  Still, leaving campus with a stranger seemed like an especially bad idea. I didn’t want to end up a face on a milk carton, or worse, a body in a ditch. I shook my head and opened my mouth to tell her no, when she interrupted me again.

  “If you won’t leave your school with me, at least go into the nurse’s office.” I tried to consider how that could be used against me. I doubted Nurse Smith had anything that could disable me locked away in the safe where she kept everyone’s medications. And this Mina person was tiny. Even when I felt bad, I could probably overpower her. And whatever she’d done to my forehead had made feel much, much better.

  In fact, I felt better than I had in years. I needed to find out what she’d had on her fingers that acted so quickly and well.

  “Nurse Smith’s door is locked,” I informed her.

  She stood up from where she was crouching beside me and turned the knob. It clicked open easily. “It’s open now.”

  I frowned, but scrambled to my feet, too.

  Next to Mina, I felt like a giant colt. I was all arms and legs and likely to trip over my own feet at any moment, whereas she was tiny and even standing still, she seemed to almost buzz with vitality. She moved around to the other side of me, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a fluttering...something. When I turned to look directly at her, it was gone.

  I hoped my migraine wasn’t coming back. But if it was, I needed to get to the real medicine, the kind Nurse Smith had in her office. And that would be the best place to wait for the nurse’s return, anyway. There was a cot in there.

  “Go ahead,” Mina encouraged me. “Open it.”

  I cast a suspicious glance in her direction and pushed the door wide.

  In front of me, stretching into the distance, much farther than Nurse Smith’s office actually extended, was a brand-new hallway.

  Its ceiling was higher than the one in my high school, and the floors were a shiny gray marble, not old, stained, cracked tile. Dark oak doors lined the walls.

  I fell back a step. “What is that?”

  “That,” Mina said, “is Hunters’ Academy. Part of it, anyway. The headmaster is waiting to speak to you, and then I can show you the rest of the grounds.” She stepped through the doorway into what should have been Nurse Smith’s office and was, instead, someplace entirely different.

  Am I hallucinating? Have I finally lost my mind entirely?

  Mina turned around to face me, slowly walking backward down the hallway. “Are you coming? If you do, we can help you get rid of those headaches forever.”

  It was stupid to step through that doorway.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  I knew it. Either I was hallucinating, or I’d been drugged and whatever she had given me to make my headache go away had made me delirious.

  But I was drawn, seduced almost, by the idea of a life without migraines. It was the one piece of magic I’d wished for constantly since they’d begun.

  In the end, that was enough to make me step through the doorway from one world into another.

  Chapter 2

  “Where are we?” I asked. “And how did we get here?”

  A bounce in her step, Mina led me down the hallway. “We’re in one of the upper dorms.” She gestured at several the doors as we passed them. “These are where our upper-level students live—the ones that you would consider college students, probably.”

  I noticed she didn’t answer my second question—how we got here. My head was spinning, and it wasn’t with a migraine. For once.

  I couldn’t let it go, though. “If we could walk into the upper-level students’ dorm, then why couldn’t we just appear outside the headmaster’s office, if that’s where we’re going?”

  Mina’s tinkling laugh echoed in the hallway. “We walked through the closest door. We can’t just appear anywhere on campus. That’s insane.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but then closed it. Everything about this is insane.

  I trailed along slowly behind her, examining the doors I passed on my way. In some ways, they looked like I imagined dorm-room doors everywhere looked. Some had dry erase boards attached to them, others had posters. And a lot of them had school flags and other decorative school-spirit items.

  From those, I could figure out a few things.

  The school’s colors were black, white, and maroon. There was a kind of crest, too, with a symbol inside. It had to crossed swords with a circle over it. Inside the circle was the outline of an animal’s head—maybe a wolf? Around the edges it said Hunters’ Academy. And along the bottom, it had a Latin phrase.
>
  Supereste aut Morimini.

  “Hey, Mina.” I stopped her. “What does that mean?”

  “Technically, it means something along the lines of ‘Survive or Die.’”

  I blinked. “Survive or Die?”

  Mina shrugged. “It’s our school motto.”

  “What kind of school motto is that?”

  “I suspect the founder who came up with it had a minimal grasp of Latin, at best.”

  Or of school slogans, I thought.

  “Be sure to get headmaster Finnegan to tell you about our school colors. It’s one of his favorite parts of the pitch.” Mina turned and headed back down the hall. Again, I caught a glimpse of something fluttering out of the corner of my eye. It didn’t come with any of the usual migraine nausea, so I let it go.

  We stepped outside the dorm onto a campus that was completely different from the one I’d left.

  At home, my public high school in Kansas sat on a flat plain, with nothing around it. There, it had been raining that morning when I had left for school, the temperature easily in the low 60s. Here, the sun was shining, but it was much cooler. I wrapped my thin jacket around me. But there wasn’t any wind. It was crisp, clear, and beautiful—and made more so by the mountains rising all around us.

  I turned in a circle, amazed at the sight of the craggy peaks crested in white snow encircling the school.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “I told you, we’re—”

  “I know, I know. The Hunters’ Academy. But where is it?”

  “It’s in Colorado. No place any more mystical than that.”

  “Seriously, how did we get here so quickly?”

  “I took a shortcut. It’s not one we’re allowed to use very often.”

  “So, it’s magic?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “Not really.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  We paused in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “I promise,” Mina said, “Headmaster Finnegan will explain everything. His office is in the administration building.” She pointed toward a building with a high clock tower. I noticed the time difference between Colorado and Kansas. It was only 1:00 here, but according to my watch, it was 2:00 in Kansas.