Gemini Wild: A Dark Witch Academy Paranormal Romance, page 1

Only I would start my new semester at the dark witch academy with a kidnapping (mine) on dragonback and end the night with a marriage proposal I don’t want from the King of the Dark Fae.
My intense and sinister kidnapper.
Suddenly I’m not only Zara Gemini, the celebrity bad girl and wild rebel queen of the witching world. I’m the misfit new student at the Avalon Academy for Promising Royals of the Faerie Court. And the unwilling future bride of Zephyr, the Dark Fae King. He claims our union is his last chance to break this curse that’s destroying his realm.
Plus I’m already up to my royal neck in dangerous warlocks who’ll kill to rule at my side.
Sounds delish, right?
Not so much. See, the enchanted secret world of Avalon has a dark side, and so does this Hades-Persephone fairytale. Sure, Zephyr’s the sexy-pretty hottie every Fae at court is jonesing to shag. Turns out he’s also broody, tortured, and twisted, with a shattered heart behind his savage surface.
Let’s just call Zephyr… a fixer-upper.
Now I’ve got a curse to break, a warlock to tame, and a kingdom to save.
Plus I’ve still gotta pass my midterms.
Gemini Wild is a spicy paranormal why-choose romance and the sequel to Gemini Kings. This LGBT-friendly adult academy series delivers wolf and dragon shifters, dragon riders, teacher-student forbidden heat, first-time MM, bi awakening, all swords crossed, a confident queen who never has to choose, and flaming fast-burn heat. Gemini Wild will whisk you away from your day-to-day and set your schoolgirl skirt on fire!
Content Notes
The Dark Witch Academy series contains the following:
MF, MM, and group encounters (if you don’t like MM in the harem or only like a little, this is not the series for you!)
teacher-student heat (all adults)
age gap
past suicide (off page)
abduction
grief
violence
dirty language (if swearing offends, this is not the series for you!)
death of a parent
past death of a sibling (off page)
light restraint during intercourse
consensual flogging
internalized homophobia overcome as part of one hero’s journey
talk of pregnancy
animal (dragon) in danger
Chapter One
Zara
I’m being hunted.
That’s a feeling I know way too well. Even though it doesn’t happen on the daily anymore. Not with me squirreled away behind magical wards like a law-abiding freshman here at the Academy.
The average person might think me being hunted like a goddamn fugitive wouldn’t happen at all. You know, since I’m the Gemini queen-in-waiting of the whole witching world, just twiddling my thumbs and waiting for my reluctant predecessor to vacate the throne so I can ascend?
Well, that person would be wrong.
I get hunted. All. The. Time.
And yeah, that shit’s unsettling as fuck.
Same as always.
The biting wind of a drizzly March whistles past, which definitely makes it hard to hear whatever’s hunting me. I’m flying in my dragon form, so a transparent membrane drops over my eyes to protect my peepers from the icy sleet that’s hammering my scales. But I still can’t see much through the heavy veil of clouds and mist hanging over Icarus Island at twilight.
Puffing out a warning rumble for anything in hearing range, I lash my tail and angle my wings to slice through a cold gray swirl of cumulus.
Now I can’t see at all. My six-chambered heart beats harder.
My nostrils flare to search the wind, ears swiveling to catch any out-of-place sound. My dragon shifty senses sort through the damp smells of rain and ozone, laced with the first green hint of an early spring.
An acrid whiff of brimstone eddies past.
Max? I snap my wings tight and spin in a spiral to clear my six, looking for my alpha in my blind spot—which happens to be above and behind me, like it is for any dragon. You following me, big guy? You ready to apologize maybe, you know, for being a total dick?
Because, yeah, we’re fighting.
Again.
But that mating bond that connects me with Max and all my guys?
It’s fucking silent.
Thought I was alone up here. The quiet hum in our psychic bond says so.
But that niggling itch running down the back of my long neck like a plucked guitar string is telling me I was wrong.
Tingling with nerves, I beat my wings in a powerful downstroke that propels me through the clouds.
The wet fog parts and swirls away. There’s the jagged summit of the dormant volcano right under me, heights crusted with snow and ice, looming against a slate sea. Right now the Icarus Academy, and the Roman ruin of a village that shelters us, are hidden behind the mountain. My whole world is gray with rain and twilight.
Somewhere above and to my left, my eye skips over a vivid flash of venom-green. Definitely out of place in these steely skies.
So totally out of place, I’m not even sure I saw it.
My neck snakes around. The protective membrane over my eyes retracts. The blurred edges of my world turn sharp.
Great. Now I’m seeing shit.
Max has me so spun up with his dragon king bullshit—so pissed at his pigheaded dragon stubbornness—that I’m, like, hallucinating. There’s nothing here, showgirl. Nothing to see.
Zero. Zip. Nada.
The fog swirls in a violent eddy, disturbed by a sudden gust of movement.
I’m ghosted by the pungent reek of brimstone.
Max? I bare my teeth in a warning snarl. If you’re not here to apologize—and basically fucking grovel—you need to back the hell off. I swear to fuck, if you’re playing games with me, you’ll regret it.
I fire that challenge through our mating bond like a catapult.
Of course, he’s not the only winged monster that hunts these skies. Vasili’s a shifter too. His serpentine body can wind through the clouds unseen, like the snake he is. V’s the top dog alpha of all the warlocks in my harem.
And I definitely wouldn’t put it past my snake to fuck with me.
The resentment that’s lurking between Max and me? That’s nothing next to the electric charge of sexual tension, spiked with competitive instinct and alpha aggression, that crackles between Max and Vasili.
But V smells like caramel and vetiver. Sweet enough to lick all over. And potent enough to make you drunk.
So it’s not him I’m smelling.
And the telepathic bond that connects me and all my guys stays silent.
I growl deep in my chest. The air smells sharp with the metallic tang of ozone. Lightning tastes like tin on my forked tongue. Thunder rumbles in the clouds. Electrical energy flickers and sparks along my scales.
That feeling of being watched? Stalked? Hunted? It’s getting worse.
And that pisses me right off.
Well, fuck. I’m done hiding.
You want a piece of me? I’m a pretty strong telepath, and I blast out that APB on all psychic channels. Whoever you are? Come and get me.
I angle my neck and plunge beneath the clouds. Fully exposed to whatever’s out here, I part my jaws and scream a challenge with the lightning voice. A jagged bolt of purple lightning erupts from my mouth and forks across the darkening skies.
That’s me—lightning dragon—saying here I fucking am.
Roaring my defiance, I beat my wings hard and soar over the summit. Here’s where we held my succession ritual a few weeks back, right here on Mt. Apollo, when I finally stopped rebelling against my fate and embraced this whole ball-and-chain queen gig.
The whole shebang broadcast live across the witching world by WNN.
Behind a curtain of rain, the summit’s dark and silent as a slasher film. The dilapidated World War II-era bunker looms like a haunted house. But that’s just my nightmares acting up again, given what went down inside with me and Lucius and Max’s bitch of a mom, the last dragon queen. Who’s now—thankfully—dead.
The circle of standing stones where we played nice for the news cams, all wrapped in mist and shadows, gapes up at me like a ring of broken teeth.
It’s not like an Outlander-type circle. Still, I’m running on instinct. I tilt my wings and angle my body to avoid flying over that fucker. It’s a new moon and spring equinox simultaneously in like two days, which I’m learning from my astrology class is a time for powerful and unpredictable magic.
Cheese on toast. If whoever’s fucking with me doesn’t wanna come out and play, they can kiss my scaly ass—
Something massive drops from the clouds like an anvil, right the fuck next to me. It plummets toward me like a freight train, green as venom, wind screaming around a streamlined shape.
Every nerve in my body fires in alarm. Adrenaline spurts through every synapse.
Operating on pure reflex, I swerve.
My sudden veer sweeps me back over the summit. The stone circle yawns underneath me like a hungry mouth. I tilt wildly to avoid flying right over it, then twist in midair to bellow a bolt of lightning over my shoulder to fend off whatever’s coming at me—which is definitely some kinda dragon. Even though we don’t have any of those behind the wards, except for V and Max and me.
Lost in the clouds behind me, lightning sl
ams against… something. Whatever that thing is?
It screams.
That shrill scream is nails on a chalkboard. Loud enough to make my ears ring. My back bristles and my skin crawls.
Goddamn it. What’s back there? I crane my neck around to stare.
I see heat signatures in infrared, it’s a dragon thing, and this apparition’s burning and pulsing a sinister red. I glimpse the churn of beating wings, a flash of poison green, some kinda dark figure perched high on the powerful shoulders between those wings wearing… a towering crown of spikes… what the fuck…?
While I’m distracted, my wingtip sails over the stone circle, close enough to graze the monoliths.
Something—like the circle itself—grabs my wing in steel claws and drags me toward it.
Never mind how batshit crazy that sounds.
Right here, right now, it’s crazy time.
I’m still new to this whole flying thing. Max has been teaching me, but it’s only been a few weeks tops since the first time I shifted. Now I’m thrown way off balance, twisting and tumbling and clawing through the rain-washed gloom, I’ve lost track of that thing that’s maybe a dragon but bigger, more, other, worse. It’s something worse that’s after me—
My whole body tips over the stone circle.
And suddenly, my whole world shifts.
It’s like someone just dragged a curtain aside to show me what’s lurking behind the everyday world of the Icarus Academy. The shadowy summit of Mt. Apollo, it’s gone in an eyeblink. The cold glitter of ice in winter sunlight stabs into my night-blind eyes. A sprinkle of snow whips past my snarling muzzle on a gust of frigid wind. The temperature plunges fifty degrees in a breath.
Again, I react on sheer instinct.
I’m small for a dragon. Max says I’m still a juvenile when I’m shifted.
Which means I’m agile as fuck.
I beat my wings hard to shake free from whatever’s got a hold of me. I backwing and twist away from whatever it is I’m seeing. Sure, I’m awkward and uncoordinated, but my sudden maneuver hurls me away from the stone circle.
In a blink, that whole crazy hallucination of biting cold and the blinding dazzle of sun on blue-white ice—it literally vanishes.
Just winks out of sight.
Bellowing with alarm, heart thumping away like a jackhammer, scared and pissed as fuck, I wing away hard from the summit and that freaking circle with everything that’s in me. Even though it’s hard to fly straight when I’m this off kilter, I roar out a challenge at my hidden attacker and spin end-over-end like a Blue Angel fighter jet to clear my six. I’m pretty desperate to eyeball whatever just drove me into that mindfuck of an ambush.
But the skies are black as pitch. Anything with a heat signature that’s up here with me is hidden in the clouds. The rain’s getting worse, sleet mixed with pebbles of biting hail that plink against my scaly hide.
Sweet Jesus. That stab of sunlight nailed my night vision. I can’t see shit and I can’t smell a thing.
My ears swivel like mad, but all I can hear is the desperate flap of my wings under the wind’s shrill scream. Fear beats in my blood like a second heartbeat.
And I don’t like it.
Okay. Okay. Don’t fall apart here, showgirl. You just gotta pull your shit together.
My little pep talk notwithstanding, I’m already winging hard around the mountain. Making a beeline at top dragon speed for the clutter of half-abandoned Roman ruins, dotted with warm electric light, that’s scattered along the coast.
To be real specific, I’m making straight for Villa Augustus. That’s our domus. Our residential college.
That’s home.
Home’s where my guys are, all five of them, even the one I’m pissed at, even the two that are fighting.
Holy fuck. I gotta get home. Like now.
What in the Sam Hill just happened back there? Whatever went down, only one of my warlocks has a chance in hell of explaining it to me. That’s the guy I need to talk to. He also happens to be the guy who makes me feel the safest. Which, right now, turns out to be something else I really need.
Lucius.
Chapter Two
Lucius
My desk in the domus library is overflowing with student applications for the fall semester.
Truly, the sheer number of them is nothing short of miraculous. The witching world is, after all, slowly dying. This tragic truth has been our grim reality for centuries. During that time, the four races have grown insular and reclusive—none more so than the shifters, of course. In recent years, we’ve barely attracted a handful of junior witches and warlocks from any race into each freshman class.
Yet tonight here I am, steadily leafing through dozens of enthusiastic applications, while veering between astonishment and a heady sense of elation. Needless to say, I attribute this sudden windfall to Zara’s celebrity student status. Since the infamous night of her television debut, the night she finally stopped rebelling and publicly embraced her royal destiny, every clan in the witching world is eager to forge ties with the future Gemini queen.
Merciful God. If we accept even half those who are now seeking admittance, we’ll need to hire more faculty.
Miraculous.
But now is hardly the moment to rest on our laurels. The unwelcome task that currently demands my attention is not the matriculation of my future students, but the crisis of the current student who’s pacing before my hearth, quietly furious but grimly resolved, with tears streaking her freckled face.
Mallory McSnicker, as she has just divulged to my startled ears, is pregnant.
Remarkably, hers is the third pregnancy this month to roil the placid waters of our insular Academy. That statistic is nothing less than extraordinary in a student body that numbers fewer than forty.
Apparently, this plague of unplanned pregnancies is what occurs when half the population indulges in a literal orgy of unprotected sex during an unsanctioned party in the basement of Villa Hadrian.
That orgy, too, was Zara’s doing.
My unsettled silence finally draws Mallory’s gaze. She stops pacing before my hearth like a caged tiger and whirls to face me.
“Look, Master Aries.” Despite the flood of tears, my formerly meek and mild-mannered student is positively gritty with resolve. “I know what you’re thinking, okay? It’s probably the same thing Mistress Agrippina said right out loud when I told her. You’re wondering why I didn’t take care of business and use birth control from the school clinic like a responsible adult, right?”
Dear God.
Truly, I am singularly ill-equipped for such a conversation with a female student. Not to mention this one I barely know.
“To be entirely honest, Ms. McSnicker,” I murmur, “I’m hardly in the habit of pondering the prophylactic choices of my students, I assure you.”
Except for Zara’s, of course. Lately, I’ve found myself spending entirely more time than is prudent pondering Zara’s prophylactic choices.
But Zara is, undeniably, different.
Zara Gemini is far more than my student. She’s one of my precious mates. Never mind that mating her was a shocking indiscretion and a blatant violation of the Academy Codex that nearly got me fired.
I owe my continued employment as headmaster of this residential college to a single bitter truth. These days, the faculty of Icarus Island barely comprise a skeleton staff. I’m the only purebred shifter on the entire faculty, the most gifted at Common Magics, and the only professor qualified to teach History of Witchcraft.
Quite simply, the Dean can’t afford to fire me.
Mallory McSnicker is no telepath, as far as I know. Her mother is Kryll and her father a mystery, but I’d wager my own wolf that the poor dear hasn’t a single Valyrian chromosome in her entire witchy DNA.
Still, she’s an intelligent girl. It’s quite likely she can surmise what I’m thinking.
Unexpectedly, Mallory’s mouth wobbles into an uncertain smile.
