Guardian Academy 1: Seeds Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners) Read online

  SEEDS

  OF MAGIC

  GUARDIAN ACADEMY BOOK 1

  MARIA AMOR

  Copyright ©2018-2020 by Maria Amor

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  “Potter fans, young and old, will love this!”

  Being the granddaughter of one of the most influential Guardians on the planet has its drawbacks.

  Not only is Julia Beval a target because of her grandmother, but the she is rapidly developing into the most powerful air-aligned Guardian of her generation, making her vulnerable until her powers are fully developed.

  Her grandmother’s solution?

  A bodyguard . . . in the form of one Dylan Kelby. It seems like the perfect arrangement. Julia is protected during her transformation, and Dylan restores his image after turning his back on the Council to pursue a career in music.

  Except Dylan is the last person Julia wants to be stuck with 24/7.

  Julia and Dylan haven’t spoken since he abandoned their friendship, and her, two years ago.

  But when something strange starts happening at the Guardian Academy—something that threatens not only the students, but all of the Guardians—it’s up to her and Dylan to stop it.

  Before it’s too late…

  This is a magical adventure story series that fans of Harry Potter and Twilight will LOVE. Download now and enjoy getting lost in a whole new world!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the letter came, marked with her grandmother’s special seal, one week after the end of the term exams, Julia knew that it didn’t contain anything she wanted to be a part of; but she also knew that her parents would never let her avoid it. The only solution, then, was to hold off on finding out what the older woman wanted for as long as possible—and then to bargain for as much advantage as she could get.

  “Aren’t you going to open that?” Julia looked up from the letter in her hand to see Keegan watching her, dubiously eyeing the envelope with its blue-green seal.

  “Eventually,” Julia said, shoving it into her backpack.

  “It could be something important,” Keegan pointed out. Julia shrugged.

  “It usually is,” she agreed. “And I usually don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Julia,” Keegan said, more firmly. Julia looked at the other girl; Keegan had started to show the real signs of her “true nature as a Guardian” as the profs called it: she’d started to take on some of the physical traits that would tell anyone in the know that she was aligned with the element of fire. Almost overnight—or so it seemed—she’d grown at least five inches, and her hair had taken an even redder hue than she’d had before. Her deep blue eyes had darkened a little that Julia could see—or maybe it was makeup? But it was obvious to Julia at least, that her friend was starting to accelerate in the process of gaining her full abilities.

  “What, Keeg?” Julia adjusted her backpack straps on her shoulders and knocked the soles of her shoes against the stair she’d been seated on.

  “You know who your grandmother is,” Keegan said. “We all do. You can’t just ignore it when she’s obviously summoning you.”

  “She’s my grandmother,” Julia replied tartly. “If she wants to talk to me so badly, she can come to me.” Her heart beat a little faster at the thought of it; if Ruth came to see her, it would mean trouble of the kind that an apology and a few weekends trapped at home wouldn’t get her out of.

  “Just because she’s your grandmother doesn’t mean you can blow her off,” Keegan countered.

  “I’m not going to,” Julia told her friend. “I’m just putting it off a little. I don’t want to go to her stupid house out in the middle of nowhere for her to give me some lecture on my ‘blossoming’.”

  “You can tell it’s happening,” Keegan said dispassionately, looking her up and down.

  “Not really, I’m still a year out.”

  “No—you can tell,” Keegan insisted. “And she probably wants to see you to name you her heir.”

  “I’m not the same element as her,” Julia said. “She wouldn’t name me her heir.”

  “But you’re obviously powerful,” Keegan told her, with only a little envy in her voice. “The profs are giving you extra busy work because you could do the stuff they assigned us two years ago.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Julia said. “Just means that unlike some of you, I have to practice on weekends or my parents won’t let me leave the house to do what I actually want to do.”

  “They make you practice because if they didn’t, they’d have to start calling Manhattan ‘the windy city’ instead of Chicago,” Keegan countered with a little grin.

  “Ugh—shut up,” Julia said. “We have to go to class soon and I don’t even want to think about this whole stupid mess.”

  Keegan shrugged.

  “I’m just saying, if Ruth wants to see you, she’s going to make it happen. There aren’t many people who could actually stop her,” she pointed out. “And your parents sure as hell won’t.”

  “I know,” Julia said. She sighed. “I’m going to try and hold out and see if I can at least get something from it.”

  “See? That right there: that’s why people know you’re going to be a powerful Guardian once you blossom,” Keegan said, making a face at the expression the way they always did. It was—Julia thought—one of the stupidest ways of referring to the situation that anyone could think of: the idea that when Guardians of the Four Corners came into their full abilities, they “blossomed” into them. At least you’re not a guy—it’d be really annoying to hear people talking about your blossoming then.

  “What is?” Julia turned back in the direction of the main entrance to the school, and Keegan fell in next to her, both of them walking as slowly as their natures would allow.

  “That—thing you do, where you feel like it’s going to be fine to challenge one of the most powerful Guardians on the planet,” Keegan replied. “The bravado. Very in keeping with your elemental temperament.” Julia rolled her eyes.

  “I would be just as ‘brave’ if I was a water-aligned Guardian,” Julia countered. “Probably even more daring.”

  “Maybe if you were earth-aligned,” Keegan temporized. “But if you were with water, you’d be in awe of her, and fire…” Keegan shuddered. “I’ve heard the stories about what she can do to Guardians aligned with fire.”


  “She’s water—so of course,” Julia protested.

  “But only an air-aligned chick would see the letter and go ‘I bet I can get something out of this if I just put it off and make my parents beg.’ Manipulative and canny.”

  “Stop quoting the Book at me,” Julia told her friend. “We get that crap all day and half the nights at school functions, and I think I’ve even recited passages in my sleep. I don’t need you parroting it like a good little star student at me.”

  “It’s not my fault you fit in your corner like a box,” Keegan said.

  They fell into silence as they approached the main entrance of the School of Sandrine. In another two days, they would both be back home; Julia to Manhattan and her parents’ apartment a few blocks away from Central Park, and Keegan further south, just outside of D.C., for summer vacation. The school itself didn’t look all that impressive to outsiders: just an old, old, old building, nestled amongst the middle-of-nowhere farms and fields of upstate New York.

  According to local legend, it was originally built by an extravagant Dutch merchant, and converted to a school just before the Revolutionary war; the entry standards were such that almost no one local attended. Julia’s parents had enrolled her at the age of ten, when the early signs of her alignment with the element of air had progressed to more obvious spectacles.

  It was one thing to explain away a young child’s precocity and ability to learn languages in an instant—quite another to explain away gusts of wind and the tendency of butterflies, birds, and anything that flew to linger close to her, or even talk to her.

  The School of Sandrine had a different look for its intended pupils and parents, however, building and renovation by earth-aligned guardians meant that the stones that made up the building were in fact raw gems, gleaming dully in the morning and afternoon light. The interior walls of the school were capped in gilt, and glinted with the crystals and metals embedded in the walls, meant to contain and direct elemental energies.

  When she’d first seen the school, as a nervous, confused ten-year-old, Julia had thought that it was truly beautiful; but after years of spending every school week there, she had long since learned to ignore the glittering, gleaming nature of it. The smell of old magic and herbs was harder to disregard, but Julia had grown accustomed enough to both to just accept it as something like the smell of “home.” She spent as much time on school grounds as she had in her parents’ apartment over the years; as much time in the dormitory as she had in her own bed.

  “Ladies,” Professor Kieran nodded to them as they came through the door. “You have fifteen minutes to be in your classrooms.” Julia smoothed her skirt over her legs and glanced at Keegan. Professor Kieran was one of their mutually favorite teachers, but that didn’t make him immune to the annoyance they both felt at having to go to class when their grades for the school term had already been decided.

  We’re not even really going to be doing anything anyway—just watching those stupid videos about ‘how to control spasms’. Any given year, a little less than half of any of the grade levels’ Guardians came into the full possession of their abilities; some of them during the school year and some of them during holidays.

  According to the teachers, the instructive videos—shown every year, with varying levels of information—were supposed to prepare them for when their blossoming arrived. But after the first few years of watching them during the school year, and the tingles of fear and fascination that went along with the information, Julia had been largely unimpressed.

  She parted with Keegan at the end of the hallway, listing to the right in the direction of her first class of the day: Geometry. “The School of Sandrine has as its mission the full education of those children who will be walking the worlds, preparing them not only for the supernatural realms they inhabit but the earthly realm as well.”

  There had been a few different options when it came time for Julia to begin attending a school that would prepare her for a life as a Guardian of the Four Corners; her parents had chosen Sandrine because they hadn’t wanted her “normal” education interrupted in favor of too much focus on the inherent magic and elemental energies in her system. The only other school in the country that would have provided her with the same level of education was in Washington state, and they’d balked at the idea of their daughter being on the opposite side of the continent from them.

  Julia stepped into her class with only seconds to spare before the bell rang to announce the beginning of the school day, and took her seat. A moment later, Professor Langley came in from his office, striding towards the front of the room. “Only two more days, right class?” Julia smiled in spite of her irritation. Langley was—she thought—a rare example of a teacher she liked for a class she was inclined to hate. The professor was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, with sandy brown hair and warm brown eyes; he liked to wear jeans and a sport coat to class, with a long-sleeved shirt underneath—just barely within the dress code for the professors at the school.

  She hadn’t managed to do better than a B in the course, but Julia had long since given up trying to be the best in every subject; particularly when, for example, an earth-aligned Guardian did math as easily as she breathed, or one of the changeling-type human-fae students was better at history than she could be, able to recite dates and events from memory that she could never keep straight.

  She’d focused on keeping a 3.5 GPA—enough to be able to go on to college, and if she occasionally got the extra A unexpectedly, enough to bump her up in the class standings—without working so hard that she had no social life. Heading into her freshman year at Sandrine, there had been a grand discussion amongst the Guardian students as to what they intended to do with themselves once they graduated. Almost unbidden, Julia’s thoughts turned to Dylan Kelby, and she frowned to herself, in spite of the joke that Professor Langley told.

  Dylan had left the school at the age of fourteen, shortly after coming into his full abilities as a Guardian aligned with the element of water. Half of the students at Sandrine worshipped him; he’d left behind the politics of the Guardian world after a song writing contest he’d entered as a joke chose his song, and given him a contract to record an album.

  The other half of the students—Julia included—felt more than a little resentful that one of their own had abandoned their world, and didn’t seem to be suffering for it. The night before he’d left to fly out to Los Angeles to record, Julia had gotten into a fight with him. “You promised we’d see this through together. You swore you’d be here.”

  Dylan had known—as Keegan did not—that Julia was actually afraid of the process of coming into her own abilities. She’d confided it in him while she’d watched him achieve his full power as a Guardian, hoping that he would be able to tell her that it wouldn’t be that bad. He’d had a particularly difficult transition, but he’d managed to get through it with aplomb—at least, it had seemed that way to everyone who’d known him.

  She hadn’t heard from him since the fight, and Julia reminded herself that she didn’t want to anymore. After all: he could have called her at any time in the past two years to apologize, couldn’t he? And he hadn’t. Instead he’d achieved a little fame and come close to outing the world they belonged to for the humans to know about, with a string of “incidents” at his concerts that most of the “normal” world just thought were bizarre coincidences, while everyone with knowledge of the supernatural and paranormal knew exactly what they were.

  A flash flood at a festival gig, a sudden stop to pyrotechnics on a neighboring stage at another big concert—things like that made normal humans wonder, and made the supernatural community worry. Particularly the elder Guardians, already solidly working in their roles as intermediaries between the human realm and the other worlds that occasionally crossed over into it.

  Julia pushed Dylan out of her mind and tried to focus on what the professor was saying; she wasn’t likely to ever see the self-important jerk again, she reminde
d herself for perhaps the hundredth time.

  “Since we’ve already got grades in for the semester, I thought that today we’d do a little fun Geometry,” Langley said from the front of the classroom. The ripple of disbelief through the classroom—fun geometry—was almost palpable, and Julia felt her lips twitch with the beginning of a smile as Langley reacted to it with a chuckle. “I promise you, one day many of you will find that some equations can be like old friends—reliable solutions that keep you anchored in the real world.”

  He took a breath and turned back to the board. “You don’t have to write this down, but pay attention—we are still in class, after all.” Julia sat back in her chair, and watched as Langley began scribbling an equation on the board, waiting to find out what the fun element would be.

  In spite of her bravado, she knew that within the next two days, she would have to find some way to respond to her grandmother’s summons; and the letter she’d received—but not opened—that morning, weighed on Julia in the back of her mind. She would call her parents that afternoon to confirm her return to the city, but she wasn’t about to mention that Ruth had contacted her, especially not by one of the special couriers she used for “official” business. She could only hope that Ruth had decided to keep her summons between the two of them—though if it was important enough, Julia knew it wasn’t likely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dylan Kelby looked out through the window as the car approached the entrance of the property, taking in the trees that obscured it from the road. He’d been to this home before, but he knew that a summons from Ruth Arlen didn’t just come about for no reason. She wants something from me, that much is obvious.