Fall Festival Read online

  Hunters’ Academy, Year 2

  Book 2: Fall Festival

  Ivy Hearne

  Hunters’ Academy, Year 2, Book 2: Fall Festival

  Copyright © 2019 by Ivy Hearne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Belgate Press

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author or authors.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Fall Festival

  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

  Epilogue

  More Hunters’ Academy Books by Ivy Hearne

  About the Author

  About Fall Festival

  Having a campus full of supernatural monster hunters dress up for Halloween might not be the best idea ever.

  But Kacie Deluca’s not in charge of things at the Hunters’ Academy, so she’s stuck worrying about the consequences of a wild campus-wide party on the most haunted night of the year.

  The semester has gone well so far.

  If you don’t count the usual student-deaths-by-exam or the odd doppelgänger here or there.

  Still, Kacie can’t help but feel something is simply off.

  Then, just as the party gets going, she remembers what’s missing—or rather, who is missing.

  And all hell breaks loose.

  Entrance Exam is episode two of Hunters’ Academy, Year 2!

  Chapter 1

  “What about this one?” I scrolled down the website to stop on a picture of a fuzzy gorilla suit.

  “Are you kidding me?” Izzy scoffed as she leaned over my shoulder. “Halloween is supposed to be all about finding sexy costumes.”

  “You’re the one who’s got a permanent life-mate already.” I glanced around at her dorm room, where she had several pictures of Bash pinned up.

  “So? Doesn’t mean I don’t want to look good.”

  “Fine. We can look good. But we also need to be armed while we’re out on campus that night. You know, just in case. It would be better if we could incorporate our weapons into our costumes.”

  The bad thing about going to school where everyone was training to be a monster killer—and where a whole bunch of us had monstrous tendencies, anyway—was that when things got a little too quiet, we got a little nervous.

  By the end of October in my second year at the Hunters’ Academy, we had gone an entire six weeks without any attacks or violence. No rabid werewolves or killer demons or doppelgangers or strange on-campus murderers. There weren’t even any violent, maneating plants growing around the buildings. As far as I knew, anyway. But once I thought of it, I kept my distance from the foliage, just to be sure.

  Since the campus was so amazingly quiet, the Student Council decided that what we needed to do was have a campus-wide Halloween party. Monster hunters with real weapons dressing up and running around acting like the monsters they hunted? Yeah, nothing could go wrong there.

  But I wasn’t in charge, so I decided to go with it.

  And when I say go with it, I mean find the very best costume I could possibly come up with to try to terrify my scary classmates. And not be killed in the meantime.

  Izzy pointed at another image, a little farther down. “What about an angel?”

  “Angels don’t carry good weapons.” I kept scrolling. Then I stopped on a red devil’s costume, complete with a horned headband. “That’s it. Devils can carry any kind of weapon they want.”

  “It’s perfect for you!” Izzy laughed aloud and clapped her hands. “Okay. Now let’s find my costume.”

  We spent the next hour searching for something she thought was both sexy enough and amusing enough and that I believed would allow her to carry a weapon that might help her in case of trouble.

  “I don’t need a weapon,” Izzy insisted the third time I brought it up. “I can just shift and use my teeth and claws.”

  “What if you don’t have a chance to shift?”

  She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. I’ll carry a weapon.”

  We scrolled through another page of costumes until suddenly she exclaimed, “That’s it! That’s my perfect costume!”

  Somehow, I didn’t see how a coywolf-shifter dressing up as a vampire—Hollywood’s idea of a vampire, anyway, not a real one—was in any way “perfect.” The skirt was too short, the neckline too plunging, and if she’d been human, she would have frozen her butt off. But Izzy loved the costume, and I wasn’t about to tell her I thought it was ridiculous.

  Then again, I knew of at least one vampire who was going as a werewolf—again, a Hollywood one—so I assumed that at the worst, everyone would be equally offended.

  But even my concerns about how various groups on campus might react to the costumes we were all choosing didn’t explain the growing anxiety I felt about the upcoming party. It gnawed at my stomach. It followed me to my classes and back to my dorm room, where I did my best to avoid my new roommate, Layla.

  She was a shifter. A giant, predatory bird shifter, like a hawk or something—and part of the Academy pack. I was part of the pack, too, now that I’d been brought in. I was bonded to her through the pack bond and through the bond I’d created using my gorgon magic.

  So I might have been joined with her during the attempt to save Souji at the beginning of the school year, and we might technically even be packmates at this point, given that I was an honorary member, but that didn’t mean I had to like her. It was a good thing, too, because I didn’t want to like her.

  We lived in the same room and we were cordial to each other. But I think we both spent as little time in there together as was humanly—or almost-humanly—possible.

  But I still thought she was more than a little snobby.

  I was pretty sure she didn’t like me any more than I liked her.

  However, she wasn’t the source of my anxiety.

  As far as I could tell, everything on campus was perfectly normal.

  As normal as it got at the Hunters’ Academy, anyway. I mean, we still had Entrance Exams popping up in the hallways and classes.

  One first-year student even died during his exam, so the first-years had hit the part of the year where they were more subdued than usual.

  But that wasn’t what was bothering me, either.

  Something else was simply off.

  Every instinct I had was screaming at me to watch my back, to protect the Academy.

  If only I could figure out how.

  Chapter 2

  The night of the Halloween party, we all met on the quad, where we were given instructions on what kind of fun we were allowed to have.

  I held a scavenger hunt paper in my hand and went over what we were supposed to be finding.

  “Pumpkins, another student’s mask, an item from a classroom, a teacher’s favorite book...” I glanced down the rest of the list.

  Great.

  Most the time we were out hunting demons and monsters and creatures of the night.

  Now we were out pretending to be creatures of the night while hunting pumpkins and teachers’ books.

  This was so lame I could hardly stand it.

  I
turned to Souji. “Do we really want to do this?”

  “Hush,” he said. “You were the one who talked me into dressing up for this. If I have to play, so do you.”

  But he’d lost me after the first word.

  Hush...

  There was something about that word. Something important. Something I was forgetting.

  Whatever it was, it made my stomach clench and my head hurt to think about it.

  But I had spent years dealing with headaches that showed up whenever something magical presented itself to me. I recognized a magically induced headache when I felt one.

  Whatever this was, it was trying to keep me from thinking about the word hush.

  But why wasn’t I supposed to concentrate on the word? I knew the best thing to do was come at it sideways. With this one, though, I didn’t know what direction was sideways and what was head-on.

  “... don’t you think?” Souji finished asking.

  I blinked out of my dreamlike state. “I’m sorry. I missed that.”

  Souji huffed. “Okay. Aren’t you paying any attention to me? Wait. Are you staring at Caleb?”

  Souji, a panther shifter, was my hunting partner. We’d been assigned to each other by the school. That we’d ended up liking each other—even kissing a couple of times—would actually be a problem if the school admins ever caught wind of it.

  Caleb, on the other hand, was a British hound shifter who’d moved in next door to me over the summer. He’d ended up at the Hunters’ Academy because I’d figured out he needed help learning to control his shifting.

  I’d chosen Caleb myself. And the academy administration wouldn’t have any trouble at all with me dating him.

  Then there was Reo, also a panther shifter. He was also off-limits—not only because he was Souji’s older brother, but because he was the Hunter-in-Residence on campus. A full-fledged Hunter and part of the academy staff.

  That didn’t stop the heat that simmered between us every time we were around each other.

  Souji and Reo ignored the issue because they valued their brotherhood. Reo managed to avoid hating Caleb by remembering that he was an adult and Caleb was a student. But the only reason Souji didn’t challenge Caleb to some kind of deathmatch fight was that they were both members of the academy pack, and as the leader of that pack, Reo would punish them both for turning on each other.

  I dealt with the whole thing by pretending none of it existed.

  “Caleb?” I asked innocently.

  “Yeah. He’s over there in a devil costume that matches yours. Did you two plan this?”

  I scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Now that he mentioned it, though, Caleb did look pretty good in that devil costume.

  Then again, he was over there talking to Layla.

  Ugh.

  Because they had started at the academy together during the same year, she and Caleb had gotten to be pretty good friends. The last time I had tried to talk to him about her, he simply shook his head and said, in that beautiful British accent of his, “I have no idea why you two simply cannot get along.”

  “Me either,” I said, then changed the subject. I didn’t think it would be wise to be cranky enough to get Caleb completely on her side.

  But I had asked Caleb what he was doing tonight, and he had not mentioned Layla.

  I guess if he wanted to go out with her, that was fine.

  And by fine, I meant not at all okay.

  “Let’s go see if we can find this stuff,” I said, waving the orange paper I held.

  Thirty minutes later, Souji and I stood outside a row of faculty offices.

  “Do you suppose it has to be a book that actually belongs to the professor, or can it just be a copy of a book that we know is professor’s favorite?” he asked.

  “I think you’re overthinking it. If we can get into any professor’s office and get a book, I think it will count.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I snorted. “Because I suspect that any book that goes missing automatically becomes the professor’s favorite book.”

  “Right.” Souji moved down the row of offices, trying each door, one at a time. They were all locked until he came to the fourth one. That doorknob turned easily. Souji chortled. “We are so going to win this one.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I said as the door swung wide. The office was completely empty except for a desk and a set of empty bookshelves.

  Chapter 3

  For an instant, it was like my senses shivered into some other realm. There, a rug covered most of the floor. A lamp cast a soft light through the room. It smelled familiar, almost. A candle sometimes flickered on the desk, too close to the computer, I thought.

  And there was a woman with something in her skin or hair that reminded me of silver.

  She’s someone important.

  I blinked and the vision was gone.

  “Come on, Kacie. Gotta keep moving if we want to find something to count as a professor’s favorite book.”

  “Hold up.” I touched Souji’s arm, and the electricity the always flared between us sparked up.

  “Yeah?” Souji casually pulled his arm away as if turning to check another doorknob, but he rubbed his skin where I had touched him. He felt it too.

  I decided not common on it, though. “Why isn’t anyone else here?”

  “Who cares?” Souji was only half paying attention to me, I could tell. “If it means we get the prize money, does it matter whether anyone else is here or not? Why does it matter where they were when we won?”

  “It’s just weird,” I insisted. “There ought to be more students in here since we’re searching for things belonging to professors. Unless the other hunters are over at faculty housing.”

  I finally had his attention. He frowned. “Do you think maybe we misunderstood what the scavenger hunt is looking for?”

  “No. But something feels very wrong.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  One thing I loved about my hunting partner was that he actually paid attention to the things I said, to the way I felt about situations. It was part of why we worked so well together.

  “Your cat senses tingling about anything?”

  “Not even a little bit. Then again, I haven’t really been checking.” His voice turned solemn. “Let’s get out of here, see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “What about the scavenger hunt?”

  “Screw the scavenger hunt. It’s not important.”

  Okay. That was easy enough for Souji to say. The $200 prize didn’t mean that much to him—I had begun to figure out that he was from the premier cat-shifter clan in Japan.

  I, on the other hand, was a scholarship kid—one without any known supernatural heritage. My family didn’t even know I was at the Hunters’ Academy. They thought I was off in Switzerland at some hoity-toity boarding school.

  I hadn’t ever even asked anyone about my powers—where they came from, how I could possibly be a gorgon if no one else in my family was.

  I usually didn’t even think about it. It made me too anxious.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers.

  “Hm. Maybe I can make the prize money back anyway.” Souji flashed that grin of his at me. “If you’re right and there’s something weird going on, I’ll give you two hundred dollars. If you’re wrong, then you have to do my math homework for the next month.”

  “The next week,” I countered.

  “Two weeks,” Souji said. “One week for every hundred dollars I lost by following your gut what was wrong.”

  “Deal.” I stuck out my hand and we shook on it.

  Both grinning, we headed toward the exit. Before we could even get to the double glass doors, though, they burst open. One of the first-year students rushed past us, breathing heavily. “They’re after me,” he managed to gasp as he passed us.

  “Oh, shit. I’m gonna have to pay you a hundred dollars, aren’t I?” So
chi muttered.

  “Two hundred,” I corrected him.

  I my ax out of its harness on my back. “I knew I was going to need weapons for this.”

  Souji didn’t answer—he was too busy stripping down to shift.

  I carefully didn’t look at him.

  Luckily, he was fast at it. And by the time the doors popped open again to admit the first-year’s pursuers, Souji was in full panther form, crouched down and waiting to leap.

  In the meantime, I had started trying to send out psychic messages to anyone I could reach. I wasn’t getting any response at all.

  “Think there’s a psychic block,” I announced as three students ducked inside the building, snarling.

  I recognized them all by sight, though I didn’t really know any of them.

  “Where did he go?” the tallest boy asked.

  “The first-year kid?” I asked. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A girl, tall and blonde, stepped forward. “It’s no use hiding him from us. We’re going to find him.”

  “And then what?” I asked brightly. “You’re going to give him a tour of the campus? Make sure he’s made lots of new friends? What?”

  The second guy didn’t move forward at all, but he growled, and his eyes turned a bright glowing blue.

  Great. A frickin’ vampire.

  “I’m going to make sure he knows his place,” the vampire declared.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded. I did not want to hurt another Hunters’ Academy student. But I couldn’t let them hurt the poor kid, either.

  I glanced down at Souji, who gave me a nod.

  Fine. Grasping my pendant, I concentrated on allowing its powers to connect with mine.

  I still wasn’t sure how it worked, but somehow, as a gorgon, I was the only one who could use the pendant.

  It was my strongest power, though I apparently had some others that I could sometimes tap into.

  The pendant began to glow, and I opened my eyes. Everything the hallway seems sharper, brighter.

  I took a step forward, and for an instant, the taller boy’s eyes seem to clear somehow, as if they’d been cloudy before, though I hadn’t realized it until just now.