Zodiac Academy 3: The Reckoning

I CIRCLED THROUGH THE sky above the Academy grounds for about the hundredth time, beating my wings occasionally before just gliding on the currents.

I was angry enough to spit fire. Which I had. Multiple times. So much that even my Dragon throat was beginning to feel raw with it.

My gaze narrowed on the huge mound of earth which contained Terra House. She was in there now with Caleb. I knew it. And the anger it lit in me wasn’t something I could put out easily.

 It was almost dawn. I’d been out here all night and she hadn’t left. At first I’d been meaning to confront her again, force her to bow to me and make her learn her place beneath my feet. But as my rage simmered, I’d realised that that would only be a short fix. She’d just get right back up again, look me in the eye and continue to defy me.

No. If we wanted the Vegas gone then we had to do it differently. And I wanted her gone. I was sick of looking at her in my House and around campus. Sick of watching them with their Royalist club holding court in The Orb. Sick of seeing them learn more and more about their powers each day. Sick of watching her play Caleb like a fucking fool. And most of all I was sick of wanting her and hating her all at once.

My stomach was a knot of constantly warring instincts. I wanted to crush her and hold her at the same time. Every strike I made at her almost seemed to cut me more than her.

When I’d pushed her in that fucking mud, I had to lock my muscles into place to stop myself from diving down after her and lifting her back into my arms. And then I looked into her eyes and saw a moment of hurt there that had nothing to do with physical pain or humiliation but had everything to do with me and what I knew she had felt for me too. I felt like I’d just taken a knife to my own heart and carved a fissure right through it.

Because I knew with every move I made against her I was damaging it more. And I knew that there was nothing I could do to stop myself. I was in full self destruct mode but I refused to go down alone.

It was time we broke the Vegas and got them the hell out of this school. And if I had to break myself to do it then that was just the price I’d have to pay.

I looked down at Terra House as the sun crested the horizon. She still hadn’t fucking left.

I roared my anger into the uncaring clouds and turned toward The Wailing Wood, setting a course for King’s Hollow right at the heart of it.

I banked hard, tucking my wings close and diving out of the sky as I spotted the wooden roof of the huge treehouse we called our sanctuary.

My weight collided with it and the whole structure trembled beneath me, a groan of protest echoing from it. I wasn’t concerned though, this place was born of magic and was more than strong enough to take the weight of a five ton Dragon landing on its roof.

I withdrew into my Fae form with some difficulty. This anger in me had me craving my Dragon form at all times. It was eating me up, consuming me entirely. And I needed it gone.

I stalked across the roof and ripped open the hatch which led inside before dropping down into the wide living area.

I threw a handful of fire into the grate with so much force that it roared to life, flaming half way up the huge chimney before shrinking down to a normal size.

I kicked open the chest in the corner of the room where we kept spare clothes for me and Seth so that we could come here in our Order forms and not have to spend the rest of the night hanging out with our junk on show.

I stuffed my legs into a pair of black sweatpants then crossed to the kitchenette at the back of the room.

I yanked open a drawer and took out the spare Atlas I kept there.

I sent the same message to all three of them at once.

Darius:

King’s Hollow. Now. There’s something we need to discuss.

I drummed my fingers on the counter impatiently as I waited for them to reply. I didn’t care if it was five in the morning, they’d come.

Seth:

On my way. Make coffee.

I scowled at the coffee machine like it had just insulted my mother. He could make his own fucking coffee.

Max:

This had better be good, I’m gonna have to skip out on morning sex for it…

I didn’t reply to that either. I just waited to hear from Caleb. Fucking Caleb who had Vampire hearing and couldn’t be that fucking busy with Roxy that he hadn’t heard my message come in. I glared at the screen, a red tick appearing to let me know he’d read it. 

I waited. And waited.

No reply.

Darius:

This is important, Caleb.

He read that too. Still no reply.

Darius:

Tell me you’re on your way.

Darius:

I’ll come and drag you out of your bed if you don’t come willingly.

Darius:

Answer your fucking messages.

I ground my teeth, smoke pouring between them. I could fly to Terra House and dig him out of it if I had to. I’d carry him here in my claws and remind him that I was king of every beast in the land. Nobody fucking ignored me when I called.

Caleb:

I’m busy.

I almost smashed the fucking Atlas. A roar ripped from my throat and I launched the copper coffee pot across the room with enough force to lodge it into the wooden wall.

A whine caught my attention as a huge, white wolf bounded into the room from the stairwell. Seth shifted in a heartbeat, his eyes wide with concern.

“What’s going on?” he asked, striding towards me with his arms held out like he was gonna hug me.

“Seth, I swear to the stars, if you hug me with your fucking dick out I’m gonna rip it off,” I snarled and he pulled up short with a whimper.

He quickly hooked a pair of sweatpants from the chest in the corner and pulled them on to cover himself.

I turned my attention back to my Atlas, forcing myself to type slowly when I kept hitting the wrong buttons.

Darius:

I know who you’re busy doing. This is about her and you’ll want to hear it. Get your ass here now.

“What’s going on?” Seth asked again warily, moving towards me with his hands twitching. He wanted to hug me. I could see it written all over his face but I was pretty sure he could tell that I’d tear his arms off if he tried.

“Caleb would rather stay in bed with Roxy Vega than come to his brothers when we call him,” I snapped.

Seth sidled closer and looked down at the messages on my Atlas, pushing his long hair back out of his face. Just as he did, Caleb replied.

Caleb:

Give me an hour.

Caleb:

Or two.

Caleb:

😉

Did he just send me a fucking emoji?!

I slammed my fist into the Atlas so hard that the worktop beneath it cracked right down the middle. Bits of broken glass embedded themselves in my fist and blood spurted out of my hand. I actually welcomed the pain. I needed it. I needed something other than rage. I glanced down at it and noticed a jagged piece of glass lodged in my wrist. It must have hit a vein because blood was pissing out of it like a waterfall.

“Fuck, Darius!” Seth caught my arm then flinched back with a whine as my blazing skin burned him.

My shoulders started shaking, my wings demanding to be set loose from my flesh. I was about to lose my shit entirely.

Just as the feeling of the transformation engulfed my chest, a wave of calm washed over me instead and I fell still.

“What the hell have I just walked in on?” Max gasped, his gaze swivelling between the destroyed Atlas, Seth and my bleeding arm.

I bared my teeth at him and his power hit me harder, his brow pinching with concentration as he tried to wrangle the angry beast inside me.

“Cal sent him an emoji,” Seth whimpered. He was pacing, moving close to me and backing up again, his gaze moving to the pool of blood which was getting bigger and bigger beside me.

Max frowned then pointed at my wrist. “Let Seth fix that.”

I didn’t move. Seth approached with a frown, reaching out to take my arm. I didn’t fight him off. The rage in me had dimmed a little under Max’s influence but it was by no means gone.

Seth winced as my skin burned him again but he didn’t pull his hand back, taking the burns as he dragged the sliver of glass out of my wrist then pressed his hand over the wound to heal it. I couldn’t even feel it anymore.

As soon as it was done, he wrapped his hand around mine and healed that too, my skin forcing out the rest of the glass as it knitted over.

Seth threaded his fingers through mine as he finished, whining softly as he shifted into my personal space, taking the burns caused by my touch.

I growled at him, a warning low in the back of my throat but he ignored me, pressing forward.

“Seth, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Max murmured, sweat beading on his brow as he fought with all his might to wrangle my rage under control.

Seth ignored him, wrapping his arms around my waist and nuzzling into my neck as he pressed his bare chest to mine in a tight embrace.

My growl deepened as I warned him to get the hell off of me and I could feel Max fighting as hard as he could to stop me from lashing out.

“Don’t be angry,” Seth tried. “I’m here, Max is here, Cal will be here soon-”

At the mention of Caleb I lost it. I shoved Seth off of me so hard that he crashed into a cupboard, making the door cave in before he fell inside it.

I snarled at him as more smoke coiled between my teeth and Max darted between us, holding up a hand in offering.

I was half inclined to bite his head off but I managed a curt nod instead.

The moment Max’s hand landed on my bicep, the effects of his power multiplied tenfold.

My limbs stopped trembling, the heat withdrew from my skin and I felt the Dragon settle back down beneath my flesh.

I took a deep breath, then another.

Seth scrambled out from the destroyed remains of the cupboard. He didn’t even look pissed at me. In fact it looked like he was still more concerned about me than him. He made quick work of healing the burns I’d given him but I couldn’t quite calm myself enough to offer him an apology.

“I’ll call Cal, tell him it’s important,” Max murmured and the set of his jaw told me he was angry with the Earth Heir too. That was something at least.

He eyed me carefully as he withdrew his hand from my arm and though I felt a good measure of anger returning, I still held it under control.

I moved to the counter and placed my palms flat on it as I waited for him to make the call.

Max placed his Atlas down between the three of us, hitting the speaker button as ringing filled the air.

We waited. And waited.

It rang out.

I gritted my teeth as the others glanced at me warily and Max hit redial.

It rang out twice more before he finally answered.

“Yeah?” he asked, sounding so fucking casual I wanted to rip his throat out for it.

I didn’t trust myself to speak so I let Max do the talking.

“We’re waiting for you at the Hollow. This is serious, Cal, don’t dick us around. We’ll come and get you if you won’t come willingly,” Max said in a low voice.

Seth whined a little in agreement.

Caleb let out a long sigh like we were the ones being unreasonable.

“Fine.”

“That means now, not in a few hours,” I growled, unable to hold back on commenting any longer.

“Yeah, yeah, let me just see if I’ve got any clothes left in one piece and I’ll be there. Make coffee,” he added lazily like he couldn’t tell just how much he was pissing me off.

“I’ll have it ready,” Seth said encouragingly. “Just the way you like it.”

I shot him a death glare.

“Thanks,” Caleb said. Just before he cut the call I heard the soft murmur of Roxy’s voice in the background and my heart twisted angrily in my chest.

He was letting her play him for an idiot and he didn’t even realise it. But it was past time he found out.

Seth headed across the room and proceeded to prise the coffee pot out of the wall as if it was a totally normal thing to have to do.

I crossed the room, heading for the couch then turning away from it at the last moment. I couldn’t sit. This pent-up energy inside me was writhing too much for that. I moved to stand before the fire instead, drawing comfort from the flames as they blazed at my back. I was at home with fire. It lived in my veins. It was a part of me.

Caleb shot into the room a second later, dropping into the armchair to the left of the room and kicking his feet up onto the coffee table like he’d been there the whole fucking time.

I glared down at him and he looked right back at me mildly like he wasn’t the least bit concerned that I might just kill him.

My gaze trailed over his appearance. His blonde curls hadn’t been styled at all and they were all messed up, sticking up in random directions. He wore a pair of sweatpants and a wrinkled t-shirt and just above the collar of it, a love bite showed against his skin.

My gaze narrowed on it. Why hadn’t he just healed it away? Did he even know it was there? When had she given him that? Was it last night when she went to him? Had they even slept at all? Were they literally in the middle of it when we were trying to call him? Had she had her mouth on his neck just a few moments ago?

Smoke filled my mouth and I fought to swallow it, refusing to let him see just how much those thoughts pissed me off.

Seth appeared with two mugs of coffee, offering the first to me but I only scowled in response so he set it down on the coffee table.

Caleb took the second with a word of thanks, covering his mouth as he yawned widely. Seth returned to fetch more coffee for him and Max before dropping down beside him on the couch.

“Little Vega keep you up all night?” Max teased, putting a good deal of effort into acting normal. Like I hadn’t just completely lost my shit and half trashed the place.

“I can hardly keep up with her,” Caleb joked, sipping his coffee as he leaned back in his chair.

“No. It seems like she’s able to run rings all around you without you even having the faintest fucking idea,” I agreed.

Caleb slid his gaze to mine slowly but he didn’t even show a flicker of irritation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, that while you’ve been chasing her all over campus and letting everyone and anyone see how whipped she’s got you, Roxy and her sister have been laughing at you the whole time.”

Caleb set his coffee down on the table, running a thumb over the hickey on his neck like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. “You wanna explain what you’re going on about or just keep on ranting?” he asked. “Because from where I’m sitting, it just sounds like you’re jealous.”

Seth sucked in a sharp breath and leaned back on the couch, pressing himself against Max like he was expecting a fight to break out at any second.

I bit back the response I wanted to give Caleb as my gut lurched uncomfortably. That’s not the fucking point.

“Give me your Atlas, Max,” I said in a low voice, holding out my hand.

Max instantly tossed it to me and I quickly logged out of his profile and into mine, pulling up my emails. Specifically the folder containing all of Roxy’s emails which I’d forwarded to myself when I snatched her Atlas from her last night. When I’d had time to go through them, what I’d found had both surprised me and confirmed what I’d been worried about. I might have been a tiny bit impressed too but I wasn’t going to mention that.

I opened up the order confirmation for a life sized, inflatable Pegasus sex doll with the name Tory Vega printed on the invoice clear as day then tossed it into Caleb’s lap.

Caleb sat up a little straighter as he looked at it. He fell still. Unnaturally still. And Max shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he read the new emotions flooding out of him.

“Is this true?” Caleb growled, his jaw ticking.

Seth leaned forward to take the Atlas so that he and Max could look too.

“Of course it is,” I snapped. “She ordered glitter and horn shaped vibrators too. Even a fucking riding crop with your name stamped on it in rainbow colours. The two of them must have started that whole rumour about you.”

“But how did they get an inflatable sex toy into your room?” Max asked. “Didn’t you say whoever did it got it in there while you were in the shower? They don’t have enough control over their magic to break through a locked door and reseal it that quickly, not to mention quietly enough to-”

“She got into my room last night,” Caleb breathed. “She sent me a message to get me to leave and within two minutes she sent me a selfie of her sitting on my bed. She said I’d left the window open, but I knew I hadn’t…”

“Shit,” Max breathed.

“And instead of questioning her on how she got into your room like that you just fucked her?” I asked scathingly.

“It wasn’t exactly the most pressing thing on my mind. I was more interested in the fact that she was in my bed, not on figuring out how she got there,” Caleb quipped.

“Seriously?” I snapped like he was an idiot.

Three sets of eyes turned on me like I was the one asking a ridiculous question and I rolled my eyes. Yeah, okay if Roxy Vega showed up in my bed mysteriously and wanted to get in my pants then I probably wouldn’t have started asking many questions either. Dammit.

“Fine. But this proves she did that and Gwendalina was obviously in on it too. We thought they just got over what we did to them after that party but they clearly didn’t. They’ve been fighting back against us in ways we didn’t see coming and being pretty fucking clever about it too.”

“Well we know they did that to Cal but what else is there to say they’ve done more than that?” Seth asked.

Caleb had fallen very quiet, his gaze narrowed on a distant point as he seemed to be lost in thought.

“They were responsible for the fire in my room,” I said in a low voice.

“But I thought Milton-” Seth began but I cut him off.

“No. It was them. Roxy admitted it to me and Orion.”

“Then why isn’t she dead already?” Seth asked angrily.

Fire simmered in my veins at that suggestion and for a fleeting moment I wanted to throw myself between him and Roxy to keep her safe from him. I shook the thought off irritably, dismissing it as quickly as it had come.

“We can’t just kill them,” I snapped. Even though I knew he hadn’t really meant it. There was a lot of leeway for us to do what was necessary with the twins, but death and maiming were obviously out of bounds if we wanted to keep our claim. “Besides. She stole something from me while she was there that I can’t have anyone finding out about. She promised to stay quiet so long as I do too, so I can’t out her for it.”

The other Heirs looked at me curiously but didn’t question me. They knew I kept secrets from them. They also knew I did it to protect them from the knowledge not because I didn’t trust them with it. Hell, they’d probably figured out half the shit I was up to long ago but it was like an unspoken rule that none of us ever mentioned it.

“Darcy was in that detention with us when we cleaned Griffin shit off the roof of Jupiter Hall,” Max said in a low voice. “She knew how badly I reacted to that stuff. And I had my cousin ask around Starlight Academy about it. There’s not so much as a rumour of one of them having sabotaged my kit. I wanted to get revenge on the asshole who’d done it…but maybe it was never one of them.”

“How would the Vegas have gotten access to the kits though?” Seth asked. “Only members of the team can-”

“Members like Geraldine Grus?” I asked in a low growl.

“I’m gonna fucking kill them!” Max bellowed, leaping to his feet as his eyes lit with certainty.

Seth got up and caught hold of his arm with a bark of anger. “You can’t hurt Darcy,” he said, looking like he was in pain. “She’s my Omega – fuck. I can’t do anything to her unless she challenges me as her Alpha.”

Max tore out of his grip, running for the door anyway and Seth took chase.

“Wait!” I called before everyone lost their heads. “There’s no point in us just going at them head on like we have before anyway, all it ever does is make them rise up stronger and more defiant.”

“He’s right,” Caleb said quietly from his chair. “They won’t be beaten like that.”

Max fell still, anger coiling through the room like a tangible force as his Siren gifts spread it through the air.

“You need to break that bond with her, Seth,” Max snarled at him.

“I will,” Seth growled. “They haven’t even struck a blow against me yet, but they’ll be coming for me next. I haven’t had anything happen to me lately except…” He scratched the back of his head curiously, like some dark thought had just occurred to him. “Except for me catching fleas…”

“They aren’t the goddamn pied pipers for Werewolf fleas,” Caleb grunted. “There’s no way they could give you fleas. At least… not without summoning them with an Aquarius Moonstone…”

“That’s Sophomore year magic,” Max said. “How would they even know about it?”

“There’s a whole library full of spells just sitting there if they wanted to find one,” I said, not believing for one moment that anything was beyond those girls.

Seth stared at me for a long moment as horror filled his gaze before tipping his head back and howling at the ceiling. The sound was full of rage and bloodlust, a thirst for vengeance that needed to be sated.

“My whole pack have abandoned me because of those fleas and that fucking girl! We can’t let this stand. I’ll make her challenge me tonight!”

Seth turned and started charging for the door but I stepped into his way, grabbing his arm to halt him.

He looked up at me with a frown and a dark smile pulled at my lips.

“No,” I agreed. “We can’t let this stand. But we can do so much better than last time.”

“What are you suggesting?” Max asked, drawing closer to me as he fed on the dark thread of my emotions.

“I think we let the Vegas try and get through The Reckoning. If they don’t, problem solved, they’re gone anyway. But if they do, we make sure they wish they never had.”

Seth’s eyes glimmered with darkness as he took that in and he stopped straining against my hold on him.

 “We’ll take them down?” he breathed, his ache for vengeance dancing on the air between us.

“Oh we’ll do more than that,” I assured him. “The Vegas won’t know what hit them.”

“I’m dying for a little revenge at least.” Max cracked his neck. “We’re owed some pay-back.”

“Hell Week,” Caleb spoke for the first time in a while, his eyes a cold abyss. “We can terrorise them under the guise of Hell Week for now. Then if they make it through The Reckoning, we’ll go after them for real.”

A dark smile pulled at my lips as I looked around at my brothers. We’d let the Vegas think they had one up on us for now, because by the time we came for them again, they wouldn’t even know what hit them.