Guardian Academy 2: Prisoner Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners) Read online

  A PRISONER

  OF MAGIC

  GUARDIAN ACADEMY 2

  MARIA AMOR

  Copyright ©2018-2020 by Maria Amor

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  About This Book

  Teenager Julia Beval was a four corner guardian.

  That meant she was one of the intermediaries between the supernatural and the everyday world.

  And this meant she was set to be one of the most important people on the planet.

  Now on the eve of the day where she would gain her full magical abilities there was drama.

  Dylan had been kidnapped and Julia knew it was all down to her to find out what had happened to him.

  And when she found out the truth she was stunned....

  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

  Julia paced the floor of the lobby of her parents’ building, arms crossed over her chest, heart beating fast and faster as each second ticked by. Late. That jerk is so late. She looked at the door several yards away and grumbled behind her pressed-together lips. It was one of her rare weeks in Manhattan for the summer, and if the UPS guy didn’t come, it would be ruined.

  “Ms. Beval, maybe you’d rather wait up in your parents’ unit?” Julia turned on her heel to scowl at the man who sat in the lobby most of the day, managing the paperwork for the big, sprawling building, along with mail and messages for the residents. “I promise I’ll call you as soon as the delivery arrives.”

  “That won’t do,” she said, shaking her head. Dylan was upstairs; he had no idea that she was waiting on a package—or that it was for him. If she went upstairs to her parents’ unit to wait, she was certain to give something away. Dylan was deep in his training exercises with her grandmother, but Julia knew that he would notice if she was on edge, pacing.

  “You’re creating a disturbance, Julia,” the front desk man said, giving her a sympathetic look.

  “I can wait in the mailroom,” Julia suggested, taking a deep breath and willing the ready charm that her elemental alignment brought with it to come to the surface. “I don’t want to disturb anyone—I just want to make sure I get my package as soon as it arrives.”

  “If you promise not to interfere with anyone, I think that’s a good compromise,” the lobby manager said, looking relieved.

  Julia had spent the entire end of the semester, and the first weeks of summer, trying to find the perfect present for Dylan’s birthday. After he’d come up with something so good for her birthday, she was determined to top him, determined to get him something every bit as good, if not better. She’d snooped in his room to try and get more clues as to what he really, truly wanted, and had pulled whatever strings she could get her hands on to talk to his former manager, his parents, anyone who might have ideas.

  They were spending the week in Manhattan due to Dylan’s birthday; it was one of the few times during the summer break that Julia had a chance to spend time doing more or less what she wanted—no parties to go to with her grandmother, no one to meet on the council, nothing to do with Guardian politics—and she had only just found what she wanted to get for Dylan the week before, and managed to spend the money she’d saved for weeks from her allowance to make it happen. But if it didn’t arrive on that day—Dylan’s actual birthday—then, she thought, she might as well have not even bothered.

  She went into the mailroom to wait for the UPS man, and tried to force herself to stop pacing. Julia caught sight of herself in a mirror and realized why the front desk man had wanted her out of view of people coming and going through the building; she looked a mess, with her dark hair slipping out of the hasty bun she’d put it in, and her worn jeans and a ratty old tee shirt, a pair of sandals on her feet because she hadn’t wanted to waste the time finding something more substantial to wear when she was only interested in collecting her package.

  Julia took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. The power surges had started to become more and more frequent, to the point where her grandmother’s potion barely made a dent in their appearances. She heard her grandmother’s words in her mind, from the last lecture she’d gotten before departing for Manhattan.

  “A major component in the energy that is flowing through you is volatility. If you want to weather the transition without causing incidents, you’re going to need to learn to control your temper.” Julia took a few more deep breaths, willing the nervous energy crackling through her nerves to die down.

  Equalize the pressure, she told herself firmly. Julia could just barely hear the wind outside of the building; she knew that she wasn’t necessarily on the verge of a spasm, but if she let herself continue to wind up, waiting for the delivery man to come, she could bring one on—on accident.

  There had already been remarks on the news the few weeks she’d been in Manhattan over the last six months about unusually high winds in Manhattan, that didn’t seem to have a normal source. “You can do this, Jules,” Julia told herself out loud, murmuring the words. “You can do this. Get through the day.” If Dylan’s present didn’t arrive, then she had the shipping confirmation to wrap for him; it wasn’t the end of the world.

  Just as she’d finally achieved a measure of calm, Julia heard movement on the corridor leading to the mailroom. She stepped back, looking—and for a moment, remembering the high-stress world of Guardian politics, almost wishing she had Dylan’s backup—and then shook off her own nervous thought. It’s either the mail carrier or the UPS guy or someone like that, she told herself. On the outside, it’s one of the residents here to check their mail. A moment later, she had her answer: brown uniform, a bit of sweat drying on the man’s umber-colored skin, and a quick smile. “Guy in the lobby said someone was waiting for a package—maybe this is yours?”

  “It would be for Julia Beval?” The man looked down at his clipboard and nodded.

  “Yep, this is it,” he said, picking up a slim box from the cart he’d brought with him. “I need you to sign.”

  “Absolutely,” Julia said, nodding with relief as she stepped forward to take the clipboard from the man. She scrawled her signature, her hands shaking slightly as she accepted the box from him, and gave him a hasty smile. “Thank you so much!”

  “Must be important,” the delivery man said. Julia nodded.

  “It’
s a birthday present for one of my closest friends,” Julia explained, not even hesitating over the descriptor; whether or not she’d agreed to the arrangement, the year before, Dylan was—by default—her closest friend. None of her other friends from the School of Sandrine spent almost every day in her company, even during school breaks, and none of them were privy to the depth of her ability, the extent of her power. Dylan had taken up more of a role than he’d had even before their falling out, years before.

  “Today?” Julia nodded.

  “I was a little impatient for it,” she admitted. “There’s going to be a big to-do tonight, and he got me the most amazing gift for my last birthday.”

  “Totally get it,” the delivery man said, jingling the keys to the mailboxes. “Sorry—kind of a tight schedule.”

  “No—no, I have what I need,” Julia said, pressing the box to her body. “Thank you so much.” She hurried out of the mailroom and towards the elevators; with any luck, she could get the box into her room without Dylan seeing her—she didn’t even want him to know that his gift had arrived. She tapped her toe on the old linoleum floor as she waited for the elevator to arrive on the ground floor, and squeezed the package again, carefully.

  It had taken her weeks of working out the details, of keeping it to herself—which wasn’t something that Julia had ever really been good at. When the elevator arrived, she hurried onto it, pressing the “door close” button quickly. She wanted to be alone in the elevator, not having to deal with someone else. Come on, Dylan—be hanging out in your room, so I can get into mine and you don’t see this. She grinned to herself, suppressing a little squeal of delight that the package had actually arrived, that it was in her hands, and in a matter of moments she would be able to look at it before she wrapped it for Dylan.

  The elevator finally arrived at her floor, and Julia darted off of it, down the hall towards her parents’ door. There were only four units on their level, meaning each apartment was larger than the standard Manhattan fare; Julia knew that it had cost their parents an utterly absurd amount of money—money they’d gotten from Ruth, to have a home base that was close to not only the council but their other interests in the city. She’d only just really started thinking about the cost of living, and how high it was in Manhattan; at sixteen—soon to be seventeen—she had never really considered it until her parents had bumped up her weekly allowance, and until she compared her grandmother’s cost of living and her extensive property to what her parents had.

  Julia unlocked the door to the apartment and peered in quickly, making sure that at least Dylan wasn’t in the living room. She heard the muffled sound of music, coming from the direction of his bedroom, and thought that she was—relatively at least—safe to make the dash from the entryway of the apartment to her bedroom. Julia took a deep breath and plunged forward, letting the door slam behind her as she ran towards her bedroom in the same hallway as Dylan’s room.

  It was strange to her, almost a year later, that Dylan’s room was, in fact, his room; he’d stayed in it almost every weekend that they’d been home from Sandrine, every break that they’d both been in Manhattan with rare exceptions when his parents were home and he wanted to spend time with them. Julia wrenched her bedroom door open and was in her room, the door shut behind her, with the precious package in her hands in a matter of moments. “Safe!” she sighed, throwing herself down onto her bed, holding the slim box tightly against her body. She had the present, and she would give it to Dylan, and he would love it; she knew he would.

  Julia slipped off of the bed and left the box behind, moving to her desk to find her exacto knife. She considered the slim, bound box on her bed for a moment with the razor in her hand, all at once eager and hesitant to get into the package. “They have to have padded it well,” she told herself, dismissing her own anxiety. She found the tabs on the box, and sliced through them carefully with the razor. A few more cuts, and she was able to get the box open without having to tear anything, without having to risk jostling or damaging the contents.

  Julia took a deep breath, her heart beating fast in her chest as she lifted the top of the box away. There was a cloth wrapper around the object in the box, and Julia lifted the whole thing out, her heart speeding up even more with anticipation. She’d traded weeks of allowances to get the favor done, and now—hours before Dylan’s birthday party—she was going to have a chance to look at what she’d so eagerly, so earnestly, bought for him.

  She pulled the fabric away and revealed a neatly-bound journal, plain-looking, brown with nothing on the cover to reveal the enormity of its contents. Julia opened the journal and on the inside cover, saw the words scrawled: Thank you! With a scribble that Julia could just barely make out a D and a J in. She closed her eyes for a moment, imagining Dylan’s reaction when he saw it.

  She turned the empty page, and another, and her eyes threatened to well up with relief and excitement and happiness as she saw the first page of writing. A mixture of oddly blocky and fluid capital letters, lyrics filed in surprisingly neat lines across and down the page. Julia gingerly slid her finger along the paper, shaking her head in near-disbelief. It was really there in front of her, in her lap; she had actually managed to pull it off. “Dylan is going to promise me his first born for this,” she murmured to herself triumphantly.

  Julia flipped through a few more pages, confirming that all that she’d been promised was present; it was. She took a deep breath, smiled to herself, and rose from the bed. She had just enough time to wrap the gift and put it away, take a shower, and get ready before Dylan’s parents arrived at the apartment for their night out. Julia opened her closet and found the gift wrap she’d bought from a store a week before, when she’d still been waiting for confirmation that the book was on its way to her.

  She brought the paper to her bed, and started planning out the way she was going to wrap the journal for Dylan. It was almost too good for Julia to stand; she almost wanted to just take the book directly to her friend and protector. But it would be even better to see him unwrap it, to see the look on his face when he realized what it was. Julia got to work, smiling to herself, tingling from head to toe with the anticipation of what was to come.

  *

  “Dylan!” The knock at his door interrupted Dylan’s thoughts; he knew it was almost time for him to get ready to meet with his parents, but he’d gotten into a groove, writing lyrics to a melody he’d idly picked out the day or two before. They’d come to him in a rush, the way they had when he’d been writing the first album and the way they hadn’t—quite—during the writing of the second album.

  “What?” Dylan barely glanced up from the notebook in front of him, scribbling a little notation on the side to remind himself of the alternate chord formation he’d used for the melody. It was a song he definitely didn’t want to forget, even if he never did anything at all with it—even if he never got into a recording studio ever again. There was something about the melody and the lyrics as they’d come to him that made it impossible for him not to write them down.

  “Can I come in?” It finally occurred to Dylan that the voice on the other side of his door belonged to Julia, and he added a final little note to himself—something he hadn’t quite worked out in the song, but something that felt close to working itself out—before setting the pen down and turning to the door.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said, shaking off the fog that inspiration had brought over him. He realized that he’d forgotten about Julia completely—and felt chagrined. What if she’d been having a power surge, and he had been too distracted to notice? What if she’d wandered off somewhere—intent on sneaking off—and someone had tried to snatch her?

  Ever since Julia and he had faced the council months before, Dylan had felt his responsibility to help manage her transition and to protect her from the political intrigues surrounding her eventual debut as a powerful air-aligned Guardian from a politically powerful family even more. They’d already gone to more events that summer than they
had the entirety of winter break the year before—and they’d gone during winter break specifically to attempt to gain some information about the strange events going on at their school.

  The door opened, and Julia came into his room, a wrapped gift in her hands. “I wanted to give this to you before anyone got here,” she said, extending it towards him. For a moment, Dylan didn’t even look at the gift she’d brought with him; he was too busy taking in the sight of Julia herself.

  The yellow glow that he had seen on her in moments when her air-aligned energies surged had—in the last week or so—become almost a permanent feature, and he hoped that at least once she fully came into her abilities she would gain a more “normal” look—though he had to admit that none of the “normal” humans they interacted with seemed to notice the glow. Julia had apparently gotten halfway through getting ready to go out to dinner with his parents, her own parents, and him; she had her hair back in a neat, multi-braided style, but she hadn’t changed out of her jeans and tee shirt yet.

  “Oh—right,” Dylan said, remembering suddenly the gift in Julia’s hands. He had to admit that in spite of confronting her about the kiss she’d planted on him, without warning, in the former dean’s office near the end of the school year, he’d continued to feel a little unsettled by how Julia’s “blossoming”—as the professors at Sandrine insisted on calling it—had tended to make her more and more beautiful.

  He wasn’t attracted to her, exactly; it wasn’t a question of wanting to date her, but instead of being almost in awe of her otherworldly appearance. He knew—from what friends had said, from things he’d heard from family—that he had gone through similar changes in his own transition to his full ability; his eyes had, he’d been told, become almost glowing, his skin almost luminous. But he hadn’t had the same level of power that Julia had coursing through her body at any given time. It made him wonder what Ruth had looked like as she’d come into her abilities as a teenager.