Their Shifter Academy Read online

  Their Shifter Academy

  A Shifter Academy Prequel Novella

  May Dawson

  Contents

  Their Shifter Academy

  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

  A Note from May

  Also by May Dawson

  I. Their Shifter Princess

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  About the Author

  Their Shifter Academy

  During her prospective student visit, Maddie will find herself unexpectedly tested as witches breach the wards of the shifter academy. From her first real fight to her first real kiss, it will be a day she should never forget…

  This is a prequel novella to the Their Shifter Academy series, which begins with UNWANTED, and follows ten years after the Their Shifter Princess series in which Maddie appears as a child.

  To discover the story of Maddie’s older sister, Piper, as she fights to save herself and her sister from the evil coven, read Their Shifter Princess now…

  Chapter One

  We stopped to gas up at the last town. It was tiny: a diner and a gas station with two pumps. I got out of the passenger side of the Rover while my sister was swiping her credit card. Her back was to me, her long blond hair pulled over one narrow shoulder.

  The wind fluttered the leaves in the trees. I could feel someone watching me, but we were still eleven miles from the academy. It wasn’t wolves, not yet.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the little wooden shop and single auto bay behind us. A man leaned against the dusty window, smoking. Well, that seemed intelligent.

  The guy straightened from the window and, after giving me a long look, disappeared into the shack.

  “I don’t remember this place being so creepy,” I said.

  Piper settled the nozzle into the gas tank. “We’re eleven miles from haunted, Maddie. What’d you expect?”

  I hadn’t been to the academy since Piper had helped to start it, many years before. Once war ignited between the packs and the covens, Piper and her men had returned home to Blissford, Virginia. The school was important, but protecting the packs was their top priority.

  Well, they all claimed the pack was their top priority, but sometimes I thought killing witches was their true passion.

  “Where are you girls headed?”

  Piper ducked low enough to hide her exasperated sigh. We couldn’t tell the truth. Oh, just heading out to the hidden academy at the old asylum. He’d probably assume we were ghost-hunting, which would have been fine if this guy didn’t give off such a creep-vibe. My instincts prickled, the hair rising at the back of my neck.

  If this guy followed us, he’d end up dead in the woods.

  I twirled my hair around my finger. Tension tightened my chest. I’d trained an awful lot for a fight, but I’d never been in one, not for real. “Going to visit Grandma.”

  Piper flashed me a look over the car. She hated when I twirled my hair. You don’t get to control me down to my nervous tics, I’d told her once during an argument. I just want people to take you seriously, she’d said.

  We were both petite and blond. People had a funny way of underestimating us. That worked for Piper, the shifter queen who ruled over the three Virginia packs. But I wasn’t Piper.

  “There’s not much down this road,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in an old coffee can. “Sure you aren’t lost?”

  “Sure you aren’t about to go up in flames?” Piper muttered.

  My sister’s the sweetest girl in the world, most of the time, but she doesn’t exactly suffer fools.

  “We’ll be okay,” I promised.

  “Cell phones don’t work out here.” He sauntered toward us. He was older, his brown hair thin at the temples, his face weathered. He was old enough to know how two girls on their own might feel about a man saying there was no way to call for help.

  I was starting to feel less and less concerned about his safety.

  “Oh, we know.” Piper said. She leaned against the car, her posture relaxed as she waited for the tank to fill. When she glanced over at me, her lips quirked into a smile. “We can never get ahold of Grandma.”

  “You two are sisters, huh.” It wasn’t a question. His eyes flickered between the two of us. “You’re both really pretty.”

  Piper lifted the nozzle out and slipped it back into the pump. I hadn’t heard the pump click off. She must want for us to get out of here, even though she looked calm as ever.

  A pick-up truck pulled in then, so fast that it flung grit from the pavement into my face. I squinted as it lurched to a stop. It blocked the exit, parking parallel to the road. The engine cut off, and the only sound was once again the desperate rattle of the leaves in the wind.

  We could still back out onto the road, but it would be difficult. It wasn’t the kind of parking job that makes a woman feel good about the world.

  The pickup doors opened, but Piper was already throwing open her car door. “Well, better get those flowers to Grandma. She’s been so under the weather.”

  “Hang on one second.” The old man was suddenly right by my side. Before I could duck into the passenger side, he snatched my wrist in a painfully tight grip. Ahead of me, the pickup doors swung open. Two guys climbed out of the truck.

  I didn’t bother to take my wrist back from him. He could have it. Instead, I stepped in toward him, slamming my elbow into his face. His head jerked back, but he held onto me as he stumbled. I ducked to slam my left fist into his solar plexus. He huffed out his breath, doubling over.

  The men from the truck came running toward us, shouting like we were the bad guys here.

  Piper threw her elbow on the roof of the car, stepping up onto the running board so they could see her face despite how short she was. Her lips peeled back from her face as she growled at them, a long, dangerous rumble.

  Her canines popped out, long and dangerous, as her face began to transform. Sharp, deadly claws scraped against the paint, creating a shrill noise.

  The guys suddenly changed their minds and reversed course, running for the pickup truck.

  I yanked my elbow away from the guy who had dared to attack us and slipped into the leather seat. I slammed the door between us.

  We left the old creep in the gravel as we pulled out. The pick-up truck kicked up dust as it left us behind, fishtailing across the road as they accelerated down the long country road.

  “Grandma,” Piper said, shaking her head to herself. She seemed amused by the whole experience, but then, she’d been in a whole lot more dangerous situations than I had. “Silly girl, mixing your fairy tales. Don’t you know we’re the big bad wolf?”

  Chapter Two

  When we turned off the road onto a narrow dirt track that led through the tangled green branches of a forest, I pressed my forehead against the glass. I barely remembered this place.

  Piper was already rolling down the window on the driver’s side. She said, to no one in particular, it seemed, “Piper Northsea. I’m bringing my sister for the prospective student tour.”

  She’d started the school, and yet here we were, acting like guests, as if we hadn’t made a home for three years amidst the pines and the ghosts.

  The packs couldn’t keep up their endless infighting if we were going to survive the covens. This school was supposed to be the first step toward a different world.

  All I could see was the dense greenery of spring in the s
outh. The glass was cool against my face as I gazed down the trail ahead of us. Then glittering yellow eyes shone out of the darkness. My heart rocketed in response. Wolves.

  I was only used to being around my own pack. When Piper had missions with the other packs, she almost always left me behind. You never knew when pack diplomacy was going to turn into a pack war.

  That yellow-eyed wolf melted out of the darkness. His dark body seemed to be made of shadows for a second until the sunlight danced over his shiny fur. My focus was on him, and so the second wolf, a big gray-and-white one, startled me. The wolves paced around the car and then disappeared back into the forest.

  Piper put the car into drive and eased off the brake. We pulled down the narrow, rutted trail. Tangled branches wove into an archway overhead, which made the forest feel oppressive.

  My sister had made me go with her to visit regular colleges near home—Virginia Tech and Georgetown and Mary Washington—but I had to be here. There was no escaping the war, no matter how much Piper wanted to protect me from it.

  We passed by walls that split the forest, tall stone walls that shimmered with magical energy, and then drove for another mile through the forest. Then suddenly, we were in an enormous green clearing, and in front of us were a series of stone buildings.

  “I understand why students aren’t allowed cars,” I muttered. Too many vehicles would alert someone to this little hidden city in the middle of the forest. “But I don’t like it.”

  Piper turned off the car, but she didn’t move to get out. She palmed her keys and said, “Are you sure you don’t want to give normal a fair shake? Drive your car to college, date normal boys, take some literature classes instead of training for a war…”

  I did love my car. When I’d turned fifteen, Callum had surprised me with a broken-down 1973 Pontiac GTO that looked like it would sputter and die if I tried to drive it in second gear. Then he and Kai and the rest of the pack had spent that year teaching me how to fix it, turning it into my metallic-cherry-red dream car. That car represented just how loved I was. I wasn’t just Piper’s kid sister; I was all of theirs.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this,” I said, “but whether they’re wolf-shifters or not, there’s no such thing as a normal boy.”

  She grinned as she pulled her oversized sunglasses off and tossed them onto the dash. “Okay, you’re not wrong there.”

  “I’ve done normal for all of high school,” I said. “I’ve tried things your way.”

  “You’re many wonderful things, Maddie, but I wouldn’t say you’re ever normal,” Piper muttered.

  She loved the idea of being normal. She’d had a tough life in high school, when I was just a little girl. Our ‘father’, the man who had kidnapped us when we were kids, had been abusive. She’d been bullied mercilessly. Once she had custody of me, when she was eighteen and I was nine, she’d wanted so badly to give me a better life.

  And she had. I’d joined the swim team, sold Girl Scout cookies, and gone to dances, even though my bodyguards were always lurking within earshot. We’d pretended that was normal, too.

  I hated to break it to her, but even being a normal high school student still sucked.

  “Normal was never achievable,” I said.

  “Possibly true,” she said with a sigh. “Oh well.”

  “I had a beautiful childhood, as weird as it was,” I promised, because I knew how much it mattered to her. Then I released my seatbelt and threw it over my shoulder in my enthusiasm to get out of the car. “And it’s over! Time for the next thing.”

  She sighed. “Which has to be the shifter academy.”

  “There’s a war on,” I reminded her.

  “Exactly. I’d like my little sister safe.”

  As soon as she twisted toward her side, I threw open my door and bounded out. I flashed her a grin over the roof of the car. “Sorry, but I am your sister. Safe is not a priority. If it was ever even an option.”

  We weren’t sisters by blood, but we couldn’t have been more sisters, anyway. Piper had certainly never taken the safe path when there was a more interesting fork in the road.

  “God help me,” she said, but she still threw an arm over my shoulders.

  Together we swaggered toward the big brick asylum, once abandoned and now restored, at the center of campus.

  The bell in the church’s tower began to toll, and I craned my head to look up, startled. I’d forgotten about the bell. That church was eerie, just as haunted as the asylum. I remembered playing hide-and-seek in the dark, the shattered glass windows boarded over, crawling across the hard floor beneath the pews.

  “It’s strange being back here,” she murmured.

  “How does that,” I pointed up at the bell, “help with the whole secret-location thing?”

  “No one can hear it past the warded walls,” she promised me. “And the miles between us and civilization helps too. But it keeps the pulse of the university.”

  “Yeah, good luck sleeping in.” A tall, young guy with tousled light brown hair smiled at me from the top step. He had a leather book bag slung over one shoulder. One very-well-built shoulder. He held out his hand. “The famous Northsea sisters, I take it?”

  “I don’t know about famous,” Piper said, shaking his hand. “But I’m Piper Northsea, and this is my sister Maddie.”

  Sometimes when I heard the name Northsea, it took me a second to remember it was my last name. My sister and her pack had chosen a new name for themselves, and I’d taken it too. I didn’t want to carry my birth mother’s name, after all her sins against our pack, or the name of the witch who had stolen me.

  So I was Maddie Northsea—until, like my sister, I gathered my own pack one day.

  It was getting harder and harder to believe that would ever happen. My sister had found her pack before her eighteenth birthday. I was coming perilously close to my eighteenth birthday and never-been-kissed. I’d never met a boy who seemed worth kissing.

  “I’m Lex,” he said. “Jacob Alexander, technically, but everyone calls me Lex except my mom.”

  The smile he flashed our way was devilishly handsome. His gaze lingered on mine, just for a second, before Piper cleared her throat.

  “Dean McCauley can’t meet you until after the prospective student presentation this afternoon, unfortunately,” Lex said. “He sends his regrets, but he also sent me along to be your tour guide. He thought you’d like to see the changes since your tenure.”

  He directed that last sentence to Piper.

  “Certainly,” Piper murmured, although the rigid straightness of her posture told me that something was bothering her. She still smiled graciously at Lex. “Lead on.”

  Lex stepped back and opened one of the heavy wooden doors into the church. “Well, as you certainly know, this church is original to the site. It was here to serve the asylum, and it was abandoned in the 1940’s. Ahhh… normally, here I say that you decided it would be an ideal site for the school…”

  Piper waved off the thought. “It was actually Nick who found it.” To me, she said, “He has that weird obsession with ghosts, and he found this place on a list of haunted sites.”

  “Which definitely says to me, let’s go there and build a home,” I said. I remembered sleeping in cold rooms in the asylum when I was little. Maybe there were ghosts. But I’d never been scared, since I had my pack to protect me.

  Lex glanced between the two of us, a smile on his lips. He had nicely-shaped lips above a big jaw. Then he turned and stepped through the church’s lobby. We crossed worn wooden floorboards, breathing in the scent of old paper and nostalgia, into what had once been the sanctuary.

  The sanctuary’s two-story ceiling towered above us, and light trickled in through stained glass windows. But the windows were all different from a regular church; the scenes in red and blue and green portrayed images of angels descending and wolves snarling.

  “The original windows were ravaged by time and had to be replaced,” Lex explained.
r />   “Interesting décor choices,” Piper said, eyeballing a window that depicted two werewolves tearing out the throat of a witch.

  “During a recent renovation, Dean McCauley thought it would be interesting to replace the original glass panes with images depicting some famous scenes from the Book of Cain,” Lex said.

  Piper nodded, although she looked less-than-thrilled.

  “The Book of Cain?” I asked.

  Lex glanced at me quickly, his eyes widening, before he continued on as if I hadn’t said anything odd. “The lost book of Cain. The book of the Bible? About how werewolves and witches descended from Cain and his two wives?”

  “We aren’t particularly religious,” Piper said, and rested her hand on my shoulder like she was reminding me of something. “Just like we don’t believe in ghosts.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I still rested my hand on my sister’s. “Speak for yourself. I am open to the possibilities and wonder in the universe.”

  Lex led us back through the big green grassy court to one of the big brick buildings. “We follow a house system here as well as a strict hierarchy,” he explained to me as if it was part of his spiel, although he flashed an apologetic look at my sister, who knew all this.

  “After all, packs love a hierarchy,” I murmured. I did not love a hierarchy. I’d grown up with an overprotective big sister and her eight wolves, who were sweet…and bossy. The last thing I needed was more.

  But I would put up with pack ways to be here. There was no place else in the universe where wolves from all the North American packs came together.

  He nodded. “Freshmen through seniors live in houses together. Freshmen do chores for the upperclassmen. Nothing too terrible, I swear. Laundry, errands.”