Kyra Gregory
Fantasy (New adult)
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3rd Person Narrative, multiple POVs.
Coming off the most difficult term of her life, all Zara Burman wanted was to finish her education at her very ordinary school, and move out of her parents’ less than ordinary house. Her father, a witch and politician, has other plans for her.
The controversial opening of the Alliance Academy hopes to bring about one thing—a true, lasting peace amongst the magical community—and Zara is expected to attend, to support the cause, and further her father’s political career. Tired of his agenda, but with little choice in the matter, Zara strikes a deal; get through the year at the academy, finish her education there, and her father would fund her independence for a year.
But surviving the school term like she’d hope, making her father happy enough to let her off the hook, takes on a whole new meaning when a student is murdered on campus. Receiving no answers, Zara is expected to turn the other cheek and go on like nothing has happened—and she can do anything but that.
With the clock ticking before someone else gets killed, and the academy’s intentions are brought to ruin, Zara brings together an unlikely group of classmates, made up of werewolves, witches, and a vampire, to find the killer living amongst them. A killer, she reckons, is out to destroy the peace, and throw them back into war.
Time away from the academy should have been peaceful—and permanent, given the murder that had occurred on campus.
Going their separate ways for the holiday season has Zara, Isak, Lucian, Miles, Nico, and Emery, increasingly aware of what they have all come to mean to each other. Friendships forged out of loneliness and an understanding of one another they had never had before has brought them together in a way they had never expected.
As eager as they are to reunite for their second term at the academy, there’s no denying their return is against their better judgement. But what choice do any of them really have? Some are forced to attend, some favour it to the alternative, some want answers, some are simply too stubborn to be scared off, and, others, refuse to let the people most important to them go at it alone.
Ambitious in their hope that the horrors of the first term are behind them, that hope is quickly dashed when new dangers emerge, with some creeping closer to home than they had first imagined possible. With threats around every corner and no one to trust, it has never become more obvious to them that all they have is each other.
The final term at the academy has arrived. All they need to do is survive it and then they’re free.
Except, that isn’t quite true anymore. It might have been once but not anymore.
The deaths that revolved around the academy might not have started personal, but that is certainly how it ended. Murderers who never meant to kill, victims that were close to the heart—and justice hasn’t been served for any of them.
With Zara’s own father a suspect and trust in short supply, Zara, Miles, Isak, Lucian, Nico, and Emery can only rely on each other—and Lucian’s new position on the council. Threats, manipulation, bartering with what little they already have, there is nothing Lucian won’t do to pluck at threads of leads and information unavailable to them before, and to discern friends from treacherous foes.
As graduation looms, time is running out to make the academy safer for those that come after them, with it becoming increasingly impossible to get the answers, and the justice, they are all desperate for.
A twelve-chapter short story set during Zara, Isak, Lucian, Miles, Emery, and Nico's first Christmas together.