Bane of Hades (Guardian Academy Book 1) Read online

  Bane of Hades

  Guardian Academy Book 1

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Rae Hendricks

  Copyright

  © 2020 by Raven Heidrich

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Dedication

  To my daughter – as a sign to be strong when the world is against you.

  To my younger self - as a tribute to the wretched harassment you endured.

  To anyone who has ever been knocked down, hated, bullied, vilified, for being who they are and rose above it and survived to triumph as something greater.

  The story of Ember is yours. Find your magic and hold on tight.

  WARNING

  This book is an upper YA/NA urban fantasy with a #whychoose theme. Bullying may trigger some with emotional scars. Sexual situations and minor language mean this book is best for 18+.

  Other Books by Rae Hendricks

  Paranormal Hunter Academy Series

  BLOOD WITCH

  AURORA WITCH

  DEMON WITCH

  Mirrored Prophecy Triunity

  DAVINA’S QUEST

  DAVINA’S ASCENT

  DAVINA’S PREVAIL

  Blackwell Academy Series

  ALMOST DEAD

  ALMOST LOST

  ALMOST BROKEN

  Academy of Dark & Light Series

  LEGENDARY TRIAD

  LEGENDARY DARKNESS

  LEGENDARY WAR

  LEGENDARY GRADUATE

  Guardians of the Sea Series

  OF DRAGONS AND STORMS

  WATER COLORED MEMORIES

  Keep up with all of Rae’s latest releases via her website!

  http://bit.ly/rae-hendricks-author

  Coming Soon by Rae Hendricks

  ACADEMY OF OLYMPIANS SERIES

  SOUL ACADEMY SERIES

  BOUND BY THE COVEN SERIES

  WITCHES OF MOON GATE

  Contents

  Guardian Academy Book 1

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Rae Hendricks

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  " If you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you can find out first-hand what it's like to be me."

  ~ My Chemical Romance

  Chapter Two

  "My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me."

  ~ Green Day

  Chapter Three

  "I’m about to see a million things I’ve thought I’d never seen before. And I, I’m about to do all of the things I dreamed of."

  ~ The Used

  Chapter Four

  " Oh! This is the end of everything that I've known

  No way of knowing if I'll ever be home."

  ~ Falling In Reverse

  Chapter Five

  “We can burn brighter than the sun."

  ~ FUN

  Chapter Six

  "Take my heart, my clothes

  Take everything I own

  Spend my money, spend my time

  Lay me down to rest, lay me down to die

  No one makes it out alive."

  ~ Blackbear

  Chapter Seven

  "As soon as you meet me you’ll wish you never did."

  ~ Halsey

  Chapter Eight

  "Is every last soul just fucking me over?

  With tears on their shoes

  And ice on their shoulders."

  ~ Badflower

  Chapter Nine

  "I will not fall, I will not fade

  I will take your breath away."

  ~ Breaking Benjamin

  Chapter Ten

  "I am the, I am the best

  She claimed and more

  A battle scarred conquistador.”

  ~ 30 Seconds to Mars

  Chapter Eleven

  "Words they don't know to make amends

  All they do is push you to the edge

  But it's not wasted

  It's all done for you."

  ~ Black Veil Brides

  Chapter Twelve

  "If you keep shutting me out it's gonna haunt you

  When you choke on your words."

  ~ New Year’s Day

  Chapter Thirteen

  "Sound of heartbeats, breathing’s drawn

  Tasting your temptation

  My dark embraces revelation."

  ~ Nosferatu

  Chapter Fourteen

  "I'm not sure of what I should do.

  When everything I'm think of is you.

  All of my excuses turn to lies.

  Maybe God will cover up his eyes."

  ~ Nine Inch Nails

  Chapter Fifteen

  "You, what do you own the world?

  How do you own disorder, disorder."

  ~ System of a Down

  Chapter Sixteen

  "This world will never be...what I expected...and if I don't belong...who would've guessed it?”."

  ~ Three Days Grace

  Chapter Seventeen

  "And will you tell all your friends

  You've got your gun to my head?."

  ~ Taking Back Sunday

  Chapter Eighteen

  "Everyone will come, everyone will come to my funeral

  To make sure that I stay dead."

  ~ Marylin Manson

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Shouldn't let you torture me so sweetly

  Now I can't let go of this dream."

  ~ Evanescence

  Chapter Twenty

  "I've been playing somebody and it's helping nobody

  And her lipstick arithmetic didn't stick

  And now I'm sick, throwing fits."

  ~ Yungblud

  Chapter Twenty One

  "Someone send me an angel

  To lend me a halo

  I fell in love with the devil

  Please, save me from this hell

  ~ Avril Lavigne

  Chapter One

  " If you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you can find out first-hand what it's like to be me."

  ~ My Chemical Romance

  I run up the stone steps as fast as my short but athletic legs will take me. As I weave around the other bodies, lounging around and not caring about their measly little lives, I run into the brick lining the concrete railing on the side of the stairs. I feel the tug as my black fishnets get caught, ripping them open on my left leg.

  "Shit," I murmur under my breath, annoyed that, yet another day, I can't even pull off a look that costs so damn much.

  My mother doesn't give me much, but she does help me with this façade. The one that says I could possibly be cool, in someone’s world.

  Expensive clothes, shining hair from the foreign shampoo she buys us, any color treatment I want. But there will always be one thing holding me back from that taste of normalcy.

  I'm a freak.

  I go through the glass doors an
d I scan my student i.d. dangling from my neck, gaining me entry to this place. It’s a place I've been in for far too long.

  Despite my higher than average intelligence, my freakishness has led to a summer making up classes; right up there with the burnouts, too involved in drugs and sex to pay attention to real life.

  Not that there is anything wrong with sex, but it shouldn’t consume everything. And drugs? Well, despite my love for Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, My Chemical Romance, and all things black, with chains, I haven’t done them.

  I’m always too sick.

  See, what makes me a freak, at least the part of it that regular people see, is that I’m always ill.

  My skin just a little too pale, my immune system a little too sensitive; like I’m an alien, who doesn’t belong here and can’t handle it.

  Which brings me to the next part of me being a freak; I see dead people.

  But this is no movie, it’s the real shit. And it sometimes entails other things too, though nothing as uncontrollable as a ghost you can confuse for a real person.

  "Late again, Ember?" Mr. Douglas raises an eyebrow at me. He looks at his watch, something he prefers to the modern modalities of telling time - like a cell phone.

  "I'll have you know that some studies show those with higher intelligence and more success in life are often late, use a lot of cuss words, and have scattered, disorganized spaces," I spout off, a smug grin on my face.

  It makes the man’s chocolate skin glow with amusement when I say smart-ass things like that. He knows there’s no changing me, but that I'm no troublemaker. As a matter of fact, I’m one of his best students.

  Which is why I often get preferential treatment, like not being marked as late. Being allowed to do my work on a computer, at a desk in the front office, instead of being stuck in a classroom where some seventeen and eighteen year olds, still think it fun to throw spit wads at each other, is a plus.

  It’s a typical day with typical assignments, my schoolwork comes down to nothing but a boring and simple string of computer modules, while I catch up from the time the doctors thought I might have lupus, treated it, and just made me nonfunctional.

  And the time I got pneumonia and mono at the same time, depleting my immune system.

  The hospital had kept me almost entirely in a bubble.

  My mother had managed to get a group of really good experimental doctors together in a room, to get me a treatment plan together for me. It was right before the start of what should have been my junior year. But by then, I had missed pretty much an entire grade level.

  It was my lack of poor behavior and my good grades that had Mr. Douglas showing me mercy.

  That, and I’m pretty sure he’s sweet on my mother, though she would never dare to have so much as a fling with a high school principal.

  He is a good man, but she's more interested in his status and his looks. She’s so picky, that she hardly ever stays with anyone long enough for me to remember their names.

  No matter, I don’t need another person in my life to explain my freakishness to.

  The day flies by, my modules doing the same, as I complete double the work I’m meant to.

  Proud of myself, I leave five minutes early, knowing no one will truly care if I wait for the bell.

  Besides, I know better than to get caught up in makeups, perfumes, and scents of detergents on others. Any one of those could set me off and put me down for the count, again.

  The Dallas afternoon is scorching, as it always is this time of year. I can smell a faint fragrance in the air, letting me know a big storm will be coming in tonight, the kind that keeps people up worrying about hail damage to their cars, and tornadoes.

  I take a moment on the steps to breathe in the air, the heat killing most of what I’m allergic to outdoors unless I go traipsing through the woods. I wouldn’t even do that unless I meant to commit suicide. And it’s nice. The closest to normal I get.

  And then comes the feeling I’m being watched. Someone is here, and it isn’t a teacher. I don’t even know if it’s human. It’s like the feeling I get when I see a ghost, something I’ve trained my brain to know, so I don’t go talking to some invisible person. I don’t need people looking at me like I’ve gone mad.

  But there’s no one. Nothing shimmering and ethereal.

  Then I see him. Several yards away from me. The one thing I do have, which hasn’t been messed up, is my eyesight. He looks right at me, and I swear his eyes are swallowed in all deep black. His gaze hard, an evil grin slashing across his angular face. Dressed in all black, he’s a goth god, something from a movie. But he looks older and not at all like someone who would be interested in me, freak or not.

  He walks slowly by, cars passing him on the adjacent road so fast, and my heartbeat picks up. Someone walks past him, and they don’t even notice him, but he doesn’t look like a ghost.

  A pair of wings unfurl from his back, and an explosion happens behind my eyes that makes the world go black. I gasp for air, everything closing in on me.

  And I fall, just hoping that my head doesn’t hit the pavement hard enough for me to become a vegetable. I’m already too close to that for comfort.

  Chapter Two

  "My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me."

  ~ Green Day

  “Well, there’s those pretty amber eyes.”

  In my state, after what happened, no voices should seem as familiar as this does. Yet, how can I forget one of the nurses at the local hospital, who’s seen me through thick and thin?

  “Nurse Imogen?” I manage to croak out as my voice comes back, though my throat feels strange; not out of the ordinary if I had an allergic reaction or panic attack. Or an episode, as some doctors liked to call it.

  Nurses are a comfort. They never change. And they care. Doctors don’t have time to care. Too often, they’re shuffled around, a new doctor forced to read my charts and glean what the last five doctors meant by whatever they wrote down about me. Some think my symptoms are real and others think I should be locked up somewhere in a straitjacket. Something my mother, as shitty as she is, will not let happen.

  And it’s why I still stick around with her. I don’t yell at her or become rebellious just to piss her off. She’s still my mother and behaves as such - in emergencies.

  "Yes, it's me, baby. We were all so worried about you. Do you remember having another episode on the steps at school? You fell on the concrete, even rolled down a few steps."

  I stifle laughter. Having been around the block a few times, I know it will probably hurt too much. But it's funny to think I rolled down concrete steps. "Pretty typical of me," I joke with her, as she knows my sense of humor well. She knows a lot about me, considering she's been here since the beginning.

  She helped keep me going and alive, while I was facing the worst of the side effects of the treatments from the time they thought I had lupus.

  Nurse Imogen lets out a hearty laugh. "You know, sometimes, I think you must be made from rubber, Ember, with all the atrocities you survive. Maybe they need to put you into a medical study and find out why you're so hard to keep down." Her teasing makes me smile. And the banter keeps up as she and another nurse check me out.

  They worry over my vitals, also checking my pupils to make sure I don't have a concussion, ensuring I'm in good enough shape to get a CT. That is just to see, there's been no internal damage that can't be seen from the outside.

  I'm used to all the batteries of tests as I'm being poked and prodded, blood taken, CT and x-rays. It's just a normal day in my world.

  By some miracle, they allow me to eat before all my tests come back. And it's at least two hours, if not longer.

  I try to time it by the number of reruns of Golden Girls on the small TV hanging above me. While the hospital doesn't have all the comforts of home, it's cozy; familiar, instead of the winding hallways of my towering home much too big for just my mother and me.

  When my cell phone rings, I know who it is befor
e I even pick up. Even though I'm no longer a minor, my mother would have been informed about what happened. Either she's just now gotten the message, or just now feels like she's not too busy to check on me. Her only daughter.

  An old sour taste rises in my mouth as I pick up the line.

  I stopped being petty about it and let it go a long time ago. Being intelligent and curious means I get a little bit about psychology and mental health. My mother shows any affection she has through gifts, and she has very little to give. She’s a narcissist, almost incapable of thinking of others in her busy whirlwind head, wondering how she will make herself happy next.

  I’m lucky she kept me and didn’t give me away when my father, whoever he was, hit the road. And I have taught myself, no, trained myself, to be grateful for all the things she does provide me and distance myself emotionally.

  But I guess I’m particularly cranky after this episode.

  “Hello?” I try to sound neutral but am failing.

  "Ember, oh my god, I am so effing sorry for missing all the calls from the hospital and the school! Are you feeling alright?" she asks, her voice dripping with fake concern in her latest way of trying to be cool. Talking as if she’s some shiny preteen straight out of Mean Girls.

  I roll my eyes and scoff, glad she can’t see me. "About like usual; swollen, dry throat, lots of annoying beeping, hungry. They let me eat already, so I must not be too bad off. They're doing a bunch of tests just in case though, since I fell down the steps."

  "At school!" she panics, and I suck in a breath. That's the other thing - when she does get concerned, the woman’s anxiety peaks. She has problems, problems that often require a heavy prescription of the Valium she keeps by her bedside at night, just in case she can’t sleep. It’s the only kind of concern I get, and I guess it makes me feel more loved than anything. But it also often leaves me downplaying my illnesses or playing the adult in the house.