Sparking Magic (Protectors Academy Book 1) Read online

  Sparking Magic

  Protectors Academy #1

  Nika Gray

  Dupin Press

  Prequel

  If you want to read about Cole and Sadie’s first encounter check out Magic Found, the prequel to Sparking Magic. CLICK HERE!

  Contents

  1. Sadie

  2. Sadie

  3. Sadie

  4. Sadie

  5. Sadie

  6. Cole

  7. Sadie

  8. Sadie

  9. Fergus

  10. Sadie

  11. Sadie

  12. Sadie

  13. Declan

  14. Sadie

  15. Sadie

  16. Declan

  17. Sadie

  18. Fergus

  19. Sadie

  20. Cole

  21. Sadie

  About Nika Gray

  Chapter 1

  Sadie

  Branches scraped against my face as I sprinted through the dense trees, slapping branches out of my way. It was so dark and I couldn’t see a damn thing, but if they caught me, I’d be dead.

  Suddenly, I went flying, hands outstretched to catch my fall. A tree root had caught my ankle and I hit the ground hard. I winced, grunted, shook off the pain and scrambled forward.

  They would come after me.

  Something deep in my chest told me they’d always come after me now. Now they knew who I was.

  Red flashed in my eyes as fire ripped through my body. I was back in a lab with men standing over me, their hands outstretched, saying words I didn’t understand that swirled around me as fire ripped through my body, red light overcoming everything else in the room.

  Shaking the memory off, I stumbled forward. The woods around me were pitch black and silent.

  I couldn’t let them get me.

  They’d kill me this time for sure.

  Branches tore at my bare legs as I barreled through the woods in search of a road. My only hope was a road. The crimp in my side was telling me I couldn’t keep running forever. If I found a road, then I could flag down a car, catch a ride to…

  My mind drew a blank.

  Where would I go?

  Where did I come from?

  Shit.

  What was my name?

  My mind was blank. Nothing. I couldn’t remember a damn thing except for the lab and the pain and the red. Always the red.

  My legs pumped harder, fear driving me forever forward. I didn’t know where I’d come from, or where I was going, but I couldn’t stop.

  I checked the sky as I ran.

  The wood was becoming less dense and I could see a half moon peeking through the trees. Less dense could mean civilization somewhere close by or at least a clearing so I wouldn’t keep getting all bloodied and scratched. My feet were cut to hell and bleeding.

  My sprinting became running, then became fast walking.

  Everything hurt.

  My breath came in ragged bursts as I limped through the forest. I clutched my side, trying to push away the searing pain as my feet carried me forward through the brush. Thorns and twigs tore at my skin as I forced myself onward, checking over my shoulder whenever I dared look back. So far, the woods stayed quiet. But inside my head, the red flashed and roiled.

  The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils and screaming reverberated all around me. Blood dripped down my face.

  I swiped at it, but there was nothing wet on my face.

  Terror slammed into my gut and a sob escaped from my lips. I choked the sound off. They wouldn’t get a hint of my location.

  With my eyes straining to see ahead of me, I sprinted forward again,

  A flash of white light flitted through the trees, throwing shadows that stretched as they slid sideways.

  Headlights.

  I ran faster, forgetting the pain in my feet, the cramp in my side. I was getting the hell out of these damn woods and survive this ordeal.

  I burst out of the trees and found a road.

  It curved around a grove of trees and straightened, the dark wood on either side of it. The memory flashed again.

  The smell of burnt skin and hair filled my nostrils and placed me right back in the lab. The now destroyed and smoking lab filled with screams and sobs.

  The restraints on my arms and legs were gone, burned off by the red light. I stared down at my wrists. The red light hadn’t burned me. Swinging my legs to the side, I slid off the bed onto the floor. It was time to run.

  The memory faded as the ground dropped beneath me.

  I fell down the small embankment just as a car curved around the bend.

  I screamed, putting my hands up in defense. The car flew right at me, the screeching of brakes making it buck and fishtail.

  The driver had seen me, but it was too late. The car was going too fast.

  Red energy exploded out of me as my arms dropped to my side. Dizziness washed over me as power rushed through my arms, lifting them in front of me.

  Metal scraped against pavement and the tires screeched again. My body hit the ground.

  More tires screeched as someone picked me up. A man’s face swam in my vision.

  His mouth moved, but I couldn’t make out any words.

  And then everything went black.

  Chapter 2

  Sadie

  The smell of bacon and eggs woke me. Golden light streamed through the bedroom window covered by sheer curtains. Everything was a daze. My head hurt and my body felt as if it had been slammed by a Mack truck. The last thing I remembered was the screeching tires and the red glow. That was all gone now. It was just all golden light in a white room.

  I sat up in the bed and looked around. As my eyes focused, I could tell this was somebody's home and not the lab. It wasn’t a hospital, either. I searched my mind as to how I had gotten here. I only had a faint recollection of a man's face hovering over mine as I had come from the woods.

  The woods. I had been running. Something happened at the lab. Something bad. Had people been screaming? How did I get out? All I knew was I had to get away. My frantic run came flooding back to me. I lifted up my arms to see the scratches from the tree branches. I remembered frantically slashing my way through the woods. Why? The road. I had been looking for a road. I heaved myself up out of the bed, biting back the pain, to see my feet fully bandaged.

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Come in,” I croaked. The door opened to reveal a man in his 50s with a shock of white hair and startling green eyes. There was something whimsical about the way he carried himself. He looked like a professor out of a fantasy novel.

  “I'm so glad you finally woke up,” he said in a kind voice. It had a slight British accent and each sentence lilted at the end.

  “This is breakfast? Eggs and bacon?” I asked.

  “The smell woke you up?” he asked with a smile.

  “It did. Is this your home?”

  “Yes, it is,” he replied. “But why don't you focus on eating right now and then we can talk about where you are and what happened.”

  I nodded and groaned as I shifted my body back into a sitting position on the bed. He put the tray on my lap and opened the silver dome with a flourish. My mouth watered as the smell of the eggs, bacon, and toast wafted up to my nostrils. I grabbed the fork and gratefully started with the eggs.

  “How long have I been sleeping for?” I asked the white-haired man.

  He sat down in the chair across from the bed. “It's been about four days now,” he said.

  Four days? How could I have been wherever I was for four days?

  “I’d like to introduce myself,” he said, breaking through my frantic thoughts
. “My name is Professor Hotchkiss and I am the headmaster of the Protectors Academy, which is where you are right now.”

  “Protectors Academy?” I asked as I hesitantly began again with the delicious breakfast. What a strange name and yet somehow familiar? “What are you protecting?” I asked.

  “Us from you,” he replied.

  I looked at him. Why would anyone need protecting from me? Wait. Maybe they did. I searched my mind, but it still came back blank as to who I was, where I’d been, where I was going.

  “How did you get through?” he continued. “How did you get past the Protectors at the Borderlands?”

  I searched my mind, but I didn’t know what he was saying. This guy was talking some serious nonsense. My heart started pounding and my mouth went dry. Had I just escaped one set of crazies only to fall into the hands of another?

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, hating the pleading tone in my voice.

  I looked him over. The guy seemed harmless enough. His face was kind, but his eyes were sharp with intelligence.

  “I’m trying to protect you,” he said.

  “From the men in the lab?” I blurted out.

  “What men?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I could tell I was on the verge of crying, or screaming, or…red.

  “What’s your name?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” was all I could say.

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember,” I croaked out. “It’s all just blank.” A lump formed in my throat and I tried swallowing it down. I didn’t remember my name. Unease coiled in my stomach and I fully understood how vulnerable I was at this moment.

  “What do you remember?”

  “The lab. The men in the lab,” I tried to keep my voice steady. “An explosion. The woods. There was a car…” My voice tapered off as flashes of my escape through the woods made my heart ricochet in my chest.

  He cocked his head at me, and I watched the struggle on his face until he made a decision.

  “Have you always been a magic user?” he asked.

  What was he saying? I shook my head at him as my mind let go of the lab, the woods, and how I’d gotten here.

  The question brought a flare of nausea into my esophagus. I swallowed it down and took a piece of toast. I’d been so hungry before and now I was having problems chewing the bread.

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” I said flatly.

  “Really? Because you used magic to stop my car the other night.”

  “But…that can’t be. There’s no such thing as magic.” A flash of the red energy flared in my mind and I pushed it away. “Are you sure you aren’t some kind of strange apparition going on right now in my dream? You look kind of like a character from a book…” the memory of it whispered by and was gone before I could grab hold.

  “Curious,” he said. “Very curious.”

  He sat down at the edge of the bed. He reminded me of a crane perching on a distant tree.

  “I apologize in advance for what I’m about to do,” he said.

  I pushed my back into the bed frame behind me in panic. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  “Hush. I’m not going to hurt you.” He pursed his lips. “And I’m sorry that whoever had you hurt you as badly as they did.”

  “What are you going to do?” My voice came out soft and scared. I felt like a toddler next to him and not the twenty-two-year-old woman I was. Wait! I remembered my age!

  “I’m just going to take a little stroll through a corner of your mind to see who you really are,” he said in a soothing, almost hypnotic tone.

  “You can do that?”

  “I can.”

  I bit my lip. I did want to know my name.

  “All right,” I said. I knew he hadn’t asked for my permission, but it felt better for me to pretend he did.

  He touched my temples with both hands and closed his eyes.

  “Just relax,” he said calmly. “Keep your eyes closed.”

  I felt a tingling throughout my head and a feeling of warm water cascading from my scalp through my face, stopping at my neck and the base of my skull.

  I didn't feel him inside my head. It was strange to imagine him looking around and seeing things I might not even be aware of since I had no current memory. Suddenly, the pressure of his fingers on my temples lessened and we both opened our eyes.

  His frown sent a chill up my spine. “What did you see?” I asked.

  “Not much.” He shook his head. “There are large magical blocks in your memory that I can't get through. They were put there a long time ago.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “Are you trying to tell me that I have locked memories older than my abduction and the lab?”

  “Why would you think you were abducted?”

  My heart skipped a beat at his question.

  “I don’t know. But from the fragments that I can remember, there was no way I was there willingly.” I shook my head. Of that, at least, I was absolutely sure.

  “I see,” he nodded. “Well, it appears so,” he said.

  “Could you see any of my memories before the lab?” I asked. “Like what my name is?”

  He stood up and sighed. “I didn’t access that part of your memory.” He shook his head. “In fact, I got knocked out by a powerful spell. Do you have any idea about the kind of magic you can wield?”

  “There are different kinds of magic? Until about a minute ago, I thought magic was only in fantasy stories,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure if you don't have your memory?” he asked and went back over to a small desk with a chair. He pulled the chair out and placed it next to my bed and sat down.

  “I don't know how I know,” I said. “But the whole idea just seems outrageous to me.”

  “Do you remember what happened in the lab?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and saw the flash of red, the smell of burning skin and hair, and the sound of an explosion.

  “There was an explosion. People got hurt, I think because I could smell skin and hair burning. There isn't much else except for the feeling of how terribly frightened I had been.”

  “When I found you, you looked like you’d been running from something. Until we know more, the most important thing we can do is keep you safe. Until you and we understand the magic you wield and you get your memory back. It won’t be safe for you to leave here. We can’t know who is after you until we know you are.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “Bad things happen to powerful magic users out there in the world. You must have used your magic and tipped them off.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “I guess we’ll discover all of that in due time,” he said. “What you need to focus on is getting better.”

  “So, I’m going to be staying here with you?” I asked.

  “I've been trying to decide the best way forward. As headmaster here at the Academy, it’s my job to keep everyone safe, so I’ve enrolled you as a first year.”

  “You’ve enrolled me?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Do I have a choice?” I bristled at all the decisions this man had made for me, even though he may have saved my life.

  “Do you know who is after you?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Will you trust me?”

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked again.

  “Your magic is the strongest I’ve ever seen. As I said, it’s my job to keep everyone safe. I can’t let you back out there without either of us knowing what you can do. It wouldn’t by safe for you, or for my students or staff. I know that you’ll be safe here and as I see it, there’s no other option until you recover your memory.”

  “What if I refuse?” I wasn’t in a position to, just wanted to know.

  “Where would you go? Back to that lab? If you hurt someone or worse, kill someone, I won’t be able to do anything to help you then.”

  Th
e smell of burning hair and flesh came back to me. Maybe I had already hurt someone. He was right. I had nowhere to go. I had nothing with me. I knew no one.

  “I don’t even know my name,” I conceded.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” he said gently. “I do understand. I’ve given this a lot of thought. We’ll say you’re a niece of mine from the West Coast. I’ll make sure your classes are with instructors I trust. My daughter Kelly can help you get acquainted with the school and show you the ropes.”

  “What kind of school…?” I asked.

  “This is the Academy of the Protectors.”

  “And what are you protecting?” I asked.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, you don’t know the history.” He smiled faintly. “A very short history lesson. A war erupted between the faerie folk…”

  “Wait…did you say faerie folk?

  “Yes, faerie. From Fae. The war was between the fae and the rest of the magical community that resides in this realm.”

  “This realm? What realm is this?”

  “The human realm.”

  “Oh. Of course…okay.” I pinched myself on the arm to make sure I was awake. The pinch hurt and I rubbed the spot. Professor Hotchkiss smiled but kept talking.

  “The war ended twenty-two years ago. The Fae, as we call them, have power that can crush us.”

  “Who won?”

  “We did,” Professor Hotchkiss said.

  “If they have power that can crush us, how did we win?”

  “You’ll learn that in your classes.” He stood up again. “The mages managed to close all the portals into the faerie realm which cut the faerie power in this realm. We, the Protectors, patrol the Borderlands around the Veil making sure no Fae sneak back in.”