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  The Hidden Court

  The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 1

  Vivienne Savage

  writing as

  Dominique Kristine

  Illustrated by

  Merely Art

  Edited by

  Hot Tree Editing

  By Vivienne Savage writing as

  Dominique Kristine

  All material contained herein is Copyrighted © Payne & Taylor Publishing 2018. All rights reserved.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your preferred e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Contents

  1. Vampires Don’t Sparkle

  2. A New World to Explore

  3. Magic School is Intense

  4. Not Here for Hookups

  5. Insomnia is a Bitch, Like My Mentor

  6. Running With Ravens

  7. Magic School Has No Dull Moments

  8. I Have Nothing to Hide

  9. Scavenger Hunts are Grand

  10. Haunted House or Heart Attack?

  11. The Final Exam

  12. The Heartflame

  13. My Parents Need Work on Their Poker Faces

  14. No Secrets on Campus

  15. Secret Admirers are Better Than Traitors

  16. Understanding a Misunderstanding

  17. Mission Unimpossible

  18. His Baby Hates Me

  19. Not a Real Date

  20. When Midterms Pack a Punch

  21. A Blood Moon

  22. The Queen of the Castle

  23. Wow is an Understatement

  Book 2: The Scary Godmother

  Other Books by Vivienne

  About the Author

  1

  Vampires Don’t Sparkle

  A gray, overcast sky stretched above me, an endless blanket of dark clouds heralding the approaching storm. Ten minutes away from home, I hurried without an umbrella down the sidewalk while leaving my first job for the last time.

  In less than seven days, I’d be entering one of the world’s only magical universities to spend the next four years of my life learning to become a topnotch faerie godmother.

  Lucky me.

  As I reached the street corner, the first speckles of rain kissed my cheeks, and cool, storm-scented wind whipped an abandoned newspaper down the vacant road. While it was hell on my hair, the pleasant mist made an improvement over the usual oppressive humidity.

  “Hey, Skylar, wait up!” Mindi called from behind me.

  My best friend of eleven years trotted into view when I twisted around. Her freckled face flushed red from her jog to catch up, so I paused and let her regain her spent breath.

  “You still want to hit up the movies tonight?” she asked.

  “In this weather? Like there’s anywhere else to go. Dad said I could borrow his car, so I’ll pick you up around five.”

  “Sounds go—ood!” Her sneaker sole skidded over the wet sidewalk, her toe struck the jagged edge of a loose concrete chunk, and Mindi pitched forward. Before she could tumble into the street and catch the cement with her face, I grabbed her by the shoulders.

  A jolt shot through my fingers, zipping down each nerve like a magical telegraph to my brain.

  Precognition wasn’t my specialty—it was actually my weakest fae talent—but when I touched my friend, a vision of the future flashed through me. I saw the doctor she had the potential to become, the lives she would save, and an overwhelming branch of positive outcomes like ripples across a vast ocean.

  It vanished, a mere soap bubble of possibility, and before my eyes, Mindi’s fate tore itself from its predetermined track into the hungry jaws of a vampire. I jerked my hand back.

  “You okay?” she asked, like I was the one who almost kissed sidewalk.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Far from it. My bestie was doomed to die in a grimy alley behind the town’s only pizzeria.

  Hot tears stung my eyes, but they couldn’t wash away the knowledge of what awaited the girl who used to share her lunches with me at school, shriek over horror movies with me during sleepovers, and enviously brush my hair any time she had the chance. For years, she’d thought Mom let me color it, ignorant to the truth that the teal, violet, wine, and gold streaks in my black hair were my natural colors. I hadn’t told her until I was a teenager that I was a faerie, because humans usually treated us differently once they found out.

  Through it all, Mindi had accepted me.

  It wasn’t fair.

  In eighteen years, I’d only had the occasional vision, usually manifested as nightmares or a keen sense of intuition—common for faeries, but far from impressive when the most powerful of my ancestors could see every human probability strand in a great, arcing tapestry of fortune.

  But I was only a half-fae, the spawn of two other half-breeds rejected by their capricious magical ancestors. I had no extraordinary gifts of foresight or clairvoyance—until now. The vision was the clearest to ever flit across my sight, but not yet etched in stone if I did something about it.

  I couldn’t tell her. According to some of my parents’ old textbooks, rule numero uno of dealing with prophetic visions prohibited telling the subject, and the consequences were murky at best. I could make things a thousand times worse.

  “I still can’t believe you’re going to Illinois for college,” she said, oblivious to my internal struggles. “And in a week. Summer isn’t even over. Why does magic school have to be so far away?”

  “Cause that’s where the fae own a whole crap-ton of land. They have acres dedicated for the university. God, I’m not going that far. You act like I’m leaving for Hogwarts.” Unable to shake the vision, I forced out a laugh. It barely trembled past my lips.

  “You may as well be going to the UK—or any other fictional setting for that matter. I won’t be able to hang with you. So, since you’re leaving and Jerome is headed off on a last-minute vacation, I’m thinking of taking over his shift at Hot Slices. They’re posting the job opening tomorrow, but his boss is giving me first dibs to come fill out an application. I’m gonna head over now.”

  “You shouldn’t,” I blurted. “It’s a crap place to work. Remember how Jake rage quit a month ago?” Her ex-boyfriend hadn’t lasted three months at Hot Slices.

  “He ate more pizza than he sold. Do you really think he was right to storm out because he lost his privileges to eat on the job?”

  I blew a wisp of dark hair from my face then groaned as the skies unleashed a misty bounty of rain, soaking my t-shirt. My ironed waves were ruined in seconds and reduced to a mass of springy curls. “Well, no,” I admitted.

  “It’s a decent job.”

  “What about Samantha? She burned her wrist real bad because those idiots never clean the floor, and she slipped on grease while pulling a pizza out.”

  “Yeah, she’s going to have a scar from that.” The resolve in Mindi’s voice wavered. “I’ll just be careful, I guess.”

  I hooked an arm around her shoulders and wove a mild Persuasion glamour. Stronger faeries didn’t require physical contact, but I did. “Girl, you can do so much better than serving pizza to hungover drunks and rowdy football players. What about all that ta
lk about volunteering at the vet?”

  “Volunteering won’t get me closer to saving up for a car. As great as it would be to gain some experience, I need to earn funds now.”

  “True, but a recommendation letter from Dr. Taylor will look great on your Johns Hopkins application next year.”

  The glamour backfired royally. Instead of taking my advice, she shrugged off my arm. Her easygoing smile faded, and a scowl popped onto her face. “Why does it matter to you where I’ll work when you’ll be gone a thousand miles away? You have a free ride. A scholarship because you’re different.”

  I stiffened. She’d never brought it up before. Never uttered anything but warm acceptance. “Min—”

  “I have to go. Let’s forget the movie tonight. I can’t afford it anyway.”

  “I was gonna pay.”

  As Mindi rushed away through the rain, her voice carried back to me on the howling wind. “Don’t bother.”

  Crap. I’d really messed up. If I couldn’t sway her away, then I could at least get someone else who could.

  After sidestepping beneath the green awning of a thrift shop, I fished my phone from my purse and dialed the emergency hotline all paranormal beings knew by heart. For dilemmas of the mortal variety, Americans called 9-1-1, but people seeking paranormal solutions dialed 7-7-7 to solve life-or-death situations. In ten minutes or less, some wizard would appear to blow Mindi’s vamp into blood-scented dust.

  A recorded message warned that I’d contacted them during a period of high call volume but was welcome to try my call again later or remain on hold. When I phoned my mother, it went straight to voice mail as it often did when she was on the job.

  Trying the house didn’t work either. Although Dad was probably home in bed, he worked nights with his godchildren and usually ignored the phone when trying to rest.

  I tilted my head back toward the sky and closed my eyes. “Now what?”

  What the hell would my parents do in a situation like this?

  I could call the police, but they’d turn it into a bloodbath. As part of the Pact of 1977, mortals technically couldn’t intervene with paranormal affairs unless directly confronted by a threat—which meant some human law enforcement instigated a fight straight off.

  And who could blame them? We were terrifying.

  Under normal circumstances, local police officers couldn’t investigate supernatural disturbances, and our special agents, the sentinels, couldn’t put their noses into human law enforcement without an agreement.

  And then there were situations that brought the two factions together, when it behooved both sides to involve each other in a case. But that was rare and hadn’t happened in years, not since a warlock took a human cult under mind control and sent them into banks with explosives while he reaped the rewards.

  As the first rolling rumble of thunder boomed overhead, inspiration struck me. If I couldn’t persuade my friend to avoid the pizzeria, maybe I could talk her hunter out of his dinner plans and convince him it wasn’t worth having a death on his soul.

  Most vampires weren’t the jerks modern horror movies made them out to be. They didn’t cut a bloody, serial-killer swath through unsuspecting, isolated towns in Alaska or stalk high school girls a century their junior.

  They didn’t sparkle, and they had reflections. That nonsense about crossing holy ground? Absolute BS. Don’t wave a crucifix at a vampire unless you want him to shove it up your butt. Of course, most of those rules flew out the window once they succumbed to their thirst.

  Whenever supernatural creatures underwent the Change, they became a malevolent being called a darkling. In the case of a vampire, they transformed into nosferatu—foul, undead blood drinkers that smelled like rot and sickness.

  I was positive this guy wasn’t a nossie yet, but he was probably inching his way down the alignment spectrum toward the irreversible path of evil that would forever stain his soul with corruption. That’s where the myths came from.

  I shuddered, the hairs raising on my arms and skin alight with static.

  A quick glance up and down the sidewalk guaranteed I was alone, so I pulled the shadows around myself like a shroud and weaved the rain into an Inconspicuous glamour. The mist made an ideal disguise for a Prismatic Cloak and hid me from mortals.

  I took every shortcut I knew through town as rain splattered around my ankles and the wind howled through trees bending beneath the onslaught. With luck on my side I’d arrive in time to chastise the vamp and be ready to salvage our girls’ night out before Mindi was through with her interview.

  And if I couldn’t talk him out of it, I could handle him. His impression felt young and hungry, not experienced and capable. A couple sparks of a Sunlight glamour would chase him into hiding.

  The subtle drizzle evolved into a downpour as I reached the narrow alley behind the pizzeria. A light by the back door flickered and buzzed, staying off more than it was on.

  I frowned. The atmosphere couldn’t appear more ominous, like the Hollywood set of a slasher flick.

  “Hello?” I called.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dim environment, a dark shape shifted in the shadows between the dumpsters. Empty pizza boxes and other garbage spilled out from the overflowing bins.

  “Hey, look, I know you’re there, and I only want to talk. This isn’t the best place for hunting, so you should probably head out of town. The local sentinels are strict, dude.”

  His hunger permeated the air like a tangible force. While vamps weren’t expressly forbidden from hunting for a sip, underage snacks and murder were off the table. The King and Queen of Hearts, rulers of the Sanguine Court governing all vampires across the world, had created a rigid set of rules to protect their people, and it was up to all of us to enforce it whenever we saw an infraction.

  “Hey, I called the emergency hotline,” I bluffed. “They know you’re here, but you didn’t hurt anyone yet. It’s not too late for you to go.”

  While dropping into a territorial posture, the vampire hissed and revealed his yellowing fangs, resembling a ravenous dog guarding his food dish. I skidded backward across the wet pavement and began to reassess my stance on negotiating. This guy didn’t want to talk. He was starved to the point of frenzy, little more than a beast in human skin.

  So I backed away, nice and slow, and pulled my phone from my pocket.

  “Faerie.” His low, smooth voice rumbled through the air. With the grace typical of all his kind, he abandoned his hiding spot and stalked toward me. “Fae is delicious. Sweetest most powerful blood.”

  “Crap, crap, crap.” I jammed my thumb down on the redial button, fumbled, and watched the four-hundred-dollar device tumble into a puddle. If I didn’t die, Dad would murder me for wrecking the phone I’d promised to cherish till the end of freakin’ time. “Crap!”

  Telling myself I could handle a vampire wasn’t the same as actually facing the dude. All that bravado and confidence melted in the rainy breeze. As he closed in, I twisted and ran for the mouth of the alley, feet pounding the pavement and water sloshing over the tops of my ankle boots.

  Before I could get far, the noise of flapping wings filled the alley, and a few dozen little bodies slapped against me. Biting. Scratching. Tasting. My attacker must have transformed. I shrieked and slapped the bats tangling in my hair, the initial explosion of terror making me forget one essential fact: I had magic. I wasn’t helpless, and I refused to let someone find my bloodless body facedown in a rain puddle.

  Light bloomed from my fingertips, and the tiny sparks multiplied in size until it seemed I held a cluster of miniature suns in my hands. The light released in a burst and illuminated the entire back alley for one moment of brilliance. Each individual member of the bat colony shrieked as my attacker was thrust from the swarm and back into the body of a man. A hungry, salivating man hurling himself at me in defiance.

  I threw punches. I kicked. I squirmed and struggled until he slammed into me and I crashed to the ground. Rain soaked through my jea
ns, and I tasted blood in my mouth. It couldn’t end this way. Not in a dirty alley, alone, with the smell of greasy pizza and garbage in the air.

  Now that diplomacy had failed, a single, risky alternative loomed before me. I could try to shadowstride and flee into the spiritual realm, but that was a risky strategy.

  As I gathered my power and propped my weight on both palms, I prepared to leap to my feet and run for my life. The vampire rose above me, and to his rear, I saw a stately figure standing tall, shrouded by the weight of a black rain slicker.

  “This just won’t do,” the figure stated. He made his matter-of-fact commentary in a heavy baritone, each word ringing with power. Waves of energy fell over us with the vibration of a double bass drum as he raised his staff. The crystalline tip of it flared with sustained light. My attacker shrank away and shrieked as the alley became as bright as a sunny, summer afternoon.

  From the opposite end of the alley, a black shape streaked past my shoulder. It bounded over my huddled body and straight into the vampire. Teeth gnashed, and I wasn’t sure which of them growled, but in the end, an enormous wolf stood above his prey with a set of powerful jaws closed over the vampire’s neck. With the Daylight spell flooding the alley, he couldn’t escape in bat form.

  “That will be enough, Sebastian.”

  Fur vanished, giving way to skin and clothes. The shifter put his boot where his jaws had been seconds before. He was a tall man, easily six and a half feet with the build of a rugby player, and a crooked nose, like it had been broken multiple times but never set the right way to heal. He eyed me with shrewd blue eyes and grinned, half-canine teeth flashing in the light.