Cruxes and Crime Read online

  Cruxes and Crime

  Sleep Hollow Academy - Book 4

  Zara Zenia

  Illustrated by

  Natasha Snow

  Edited by

  Elizabeth A Lance

  Copyright © 2020 by Zara Zenia

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Natasha Snow Designs

  Edited by Elizabeth A Lance

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the authors’ imagination.

  Contents

  VIP Reader Club

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Preview of Alien Prince Charming

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About Zara Zenia

  Also by Zara Zenia

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  Visit her site: www.zarazenia.com

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  1

  Marina

  The little Italian restaurant was a welcome change to the cafeteria at Sleepy Hollow University, or even the few restaurants that me and my friends—or boyfriends—visited in Sleepy Hollow itself. It was completely authentic, run by an Italian family (one of whom was a culinary mage, much like Maggie). The pizzas at this place didn't help her focus or send her to sleep though. It just tasted absolutely incredible.

  I sipped on my freshly squeezed lemonade and looked over my delicious quattro formaggio at Mom, who was sipping on a small glass of wine and winding spaghetti around her fork.

  From the small frown on her face, I knew what was coming next. It was something that had been unavoidable, but it didn't mean I wanted to talk about it. Tensions had been running high on campus from the moment I'd started studying at Sleepy Hollow University, my dream supernatural college, but with every incident that happened, the papers grabbed hold of it and ran with the story. My mom made sure to read them all, I was sure.

  "It's nice that you were able to come and see me again, Mom," I said, looking at her over the food and taking another sip of lemonade.

  "Well, I wasn’t sure I could what with the quarantine, and all." She arched a brow at me.

  I lifted one shoulder and attempted to be nonchalant, as if one of my boyfriends hadn't almost died in the attack that had just rattled the school. A rogue, suicidal witch had started infecting the school with a magical plague that had made students delirious, and Vlad had been one of the first to succumb to the virus. Just remembering his sick and pasty face when he was normally tanned and strong made me shiver with fear and I tried desperately to hide the reaction my mom mentioning the attack had brought on.

  The sight still hadn't left me, even though it had been weeks now since the plague had ravaged the school.

  "You know that the papers blow everything out of proportion, Mom," I said casually, immediately taking a huge bit of the pizza so that I'd have time to think of a response to whatever she threw back at me.

  "It's true that they did lock down the entire school, though. There was no one allowed in or out, I rang up the college to check. I was going to see if I could bring you home, just until the illness was over, but they said there was no chance of me being able to do that." She'd set down her knife and fork now, so I knew I was going to have to go the full mile in convincing her that it wasn't as big a deal as she thought.

  Even though it absolutely had been.

  And I'd ended up having a central role in what had happened.

  "Mom." I swallowed my mouthful of pizza and took a sip of my own drink. "I know that it sounded scary, but it makes sense that if there was a magical illness then they wouldn't want it to spread to the human population. It didn't really have anything to do with how dangerous it was. It was just about keeping it away from Sleepy Hollow, the humans, and other supernaturals. It would have just been expensive for the government to deal with giving all those people the cure."

  I didn't mention how I'd found the dead body of the witch who had made it all happen in the first place. Or how none of us thought that she had really been the one pulling the strings, and that the real instigator of the disease was probably still out there, and could come back at any time, and maybe this time we wouldn't be able to stop him in time.

  Mom gave me a small smile. "You don't have to put on a brave face for me, honey, I'm not saying that I'm going to pull you out of the school. I know how much you're enjoying yourself there, even if it does seem to be in the headlines every five seconds."

  "You only think it's in the headlines because you have a Google Alert set up for articles about the school," I teased.

  She laughed with me at that. "Well I guess I can't argue with that one. Still, I know that someone died during the quarantine and I do worry about you. Just stay safe."

  "I always do," I lied. I thought about telling her that the death was due to a specific allergy or unusually bad reaction to the virus, but I didn't want to lie to my mom more than I had to.

  "Good." My mom reached over and squeezed my hand. "Besides, the one good thing about you not living with me anymore, besides you having your independence of course, is that I'm getting some extra money from renting out your old bedroom."

  I was surprised, and my immediate reaction was to be offended. Someone in my space? That had been my room my entire life and even though most of my things had come to the dorms at Sleepy Hollow with me, the thought of someone else living in my space was a strange concept. I was sure I'd managed to hide that reaction from my mom, thankfully, and said, "That's great."

  My mom had always struggled for money. My dad had been a gambler, abusing my luck magic to win him more money sometimes, but he'd always ended up losing it again in the end. He'd gotten us into plenty of debt as a family, and then my mom had needed to spend more money to divorce him. We'd been living on a tight budget our entire lives. If my mom was getting some extra cash by renting out my room, then I wasn't going to be upset about that at all. I was happy for her.

  "It's really helping start to pay off the debts your father took out." She shook her head. "Not that I want to talk about that. But yes, it's nice to have someone else around the house again. It's strange how quiet it was when you moved out."

  "I can't really imagine living somewhere completely alone now," I admitted. My roommate, Laurie was great to live with and we shared so much in common, but even if I'd had the room to myself, living in the dorms it was always so full of life and things happening. I couldn't imagine being somewhere on my own, especially not in a town so small as Fort Ann.

  In the back of my mind, I had a vision of me, Vlad, Colin, Daniel and Tom living together in Daniel and Vlad's ridiculously large house just inside of the boundaries of the campus. There was more than enough room for all of us there, and I could just see us milling about the house. We could all curl up on the couch and watch TV together and everything would be as natural as it was when I was with them intimately.

  "My lodger is a nice woman about the same age as me. It's almost like having a roommate." Mom laughed. "She's recently separated from her partner of twenty years and is looking for somewhere to get back on her feet. I'm not charging her much, of course, but I like the company as well."

  "I'm glad you're happy." For the longest time my mom had been struggling and I'd been able to see it even when I was younger. She'd tried to hide it of course, but it was easy to tell that she wasn't happy even if she never showed that she was sad either. Things seemed to be looking up for her recently, and I was glad of it.

  "And I'm glad you're happy, too. I can tell, even if all this quarantine stuff just ended. I assume that has something to do with your boyfriends." She gave me a wink. "Have you decided which one you're going to keep yet?"

  I tried not to groan. I almost considered dragging the conversation back to the quarantine rather than trying to talk to her about Tom, Vlad, Daniel and Colin.

  It wasn't that she was judgmental or looked down on me when I talked about how I was currently dating four men, even though I'd never dated in my life before coming to Sleepy Hollow. It was that she didn't seem to understand how it worked.

  We were in a polyamorous relationship, meaning the five of us all together, at once. Sure I went out with them individually on dates, and sometimes that caused some jealousy, but they were working those out, and it was certainly getting a lot better.

  Especially with Colin. At the beginning I'd been so worried that Colin wasn't going to be able to handle it after his recent break-up with the girl across the room from me in the dorms, Nala. He’d been terribly in love with her, her being his first. But Nala was only attracted to virgins. Once she relieved them of that, she no longer cared for the guy
or girl. The day we’d met, he’d been at her door begging her to take him back. He’d intrigued me from the moment I saw him, and we had a connection that couldn’t be denied. It had taken him a little while to realize that connection, but once he did, he was all mine and no longer pined for Nala. And so we were just good right now. The five of us existed in a happy little poly relationship, and I had no intention of choosing between them at all.

  I wanted things to always be like this. To always have all of them, as long as they wanted me and were happy with the situation.

  I was never going to choose which one to keep. I wasn't sure my mom was ever going to properly understand that, though, so I just laughed with her and said, "I haven't decided yet."

  She shook her head and chuckled. "Young love," she quipped.

  I just chuckled along with her and took another rapid bite of my pizza. I might be happy with how I was right now, but none of us had mentioned the L-word yet, and I definitely wasn't trying to think that hard about my feelings.

  Things were good right now, and I had no intention of complicating them by bringing out the big guns like confessing to anyone that I loved them, even though I did.

  2

  Marina

  I was unreasonably excited to be up in the Catskills. The mountains had provided the backdrop to my university experience so far, shielding the campus from the worst of the weather, but making it relatively rainy and dreary a lot of the time.

  Still, they were imposing and impressive and beautiful, and the moment that Professor Macon had explained that we would be heading up toward the mountains for our first field trip, I was over the moon. I'd spent days and days before the field trip reading as much as I could about whereabouts we were heading and what I would find there. I'd talked the boys' and Laurie's heads off, I knew, but I couldn't contain it. As practical as most of my classes had been, cryptozoology had been largely theoretical until now, and I couldn't wait to change that.

  We weren't up in the mountains of course, this was just a day trip and actually climbing into the beautiful peaks would have taken more than a day, I was sure, but we were in the foothills where the vegetation was still green and lively and there was plenty of wildlife around the place.

  The weather was bracing, but I didn't care. The cold wind battering my flushed red cheeks just made me feel alive as I looked around for pixies. This was a hotbed for the cryptids, and I couldn't wait to see something in the wild. I'd been reading about the Catskills beyond what Professor Macon had told us, and pixies were around this area in abundance. I'd never even seen one before, except in a photograph, and I couldn't wait to discover one out here.

  Laurie was beside me, looking just as excited.

  I was so glad that Laurie's enthusiasm about our cause hadn't dwindled during our first year studying together. One of the first things that had brought us together when we found out we were going to be roommates was that we were both so interested in cryptozoology. Vlad and Colin, who were on the trip as well, were interested, but it was nothing like the pure fascination that Laurie and I shared.

  I'd chosen to sit next to her on the bus out to the Catskills rather than either Vlad or Colin because it meant we could both sit and talk about the cryptids we were going to find that day and the books that we'd both read in preparation for the trip.

  Now, Laurie stood with a small notepad that she'd brought with her, reading handwritten notes. "Okay," she said. "Judging by what I read in most of the books, the best way for us to find a pixie is to look around trees. They prefer to be near trees, ideally a cluster of a couple, but nothing like a wood or a forest, and they'll probably be hiding among the branches."

  "That's what I read too. Well, apart from in Mortenson's Guide to Cryptozoology, but we both know that's outdated for most things by now."

  "Agreed," Laurie said, and gestured into the distance where a small group of trees like she'd just described were. "Let's go and check those ones out."

  I held up my hand, trying to catch Vlad’s and Colin’s attention, who were both on opposite sides of the cluster of the students. They immediately clocked me waving them over though and came at once.

  They chose to stand on either side of me rather than next to each other, but considering they wore comfortable smiles on their faces, I was counting it as a win. Even Colin seemed at ease with Vlad there. His jealousy issues had always outweighed all the other men's.

  "So," Colin said, pushing his long red hair from his face, though the wind just whipped it straight back to where it had been. His silver eyes flashed with annoyance, but I knew that he wouldn't tie his hair back even though it was irritating him. Colin was a Fae art student and he always looked immaculate. His long, straight red hair always managed to look perfect, even when his face was being battered with it. "I take it you've got somewhere you're planning to head now to find some of these pixie things?"

  I gestured into the distance toward the trees. "We're heading over there. They like hiding in the trees. We might be able to find some."

  "Great," Vlad said, the only one in the group who didn't look like he was being affected by the cold. As a dragon shifter, Vlad was just naturally warm.

  It was very hard not to be distracted by the idea of being in his arms at that moment. He was tall and burly with tanned skin and the kind of arms that made me feel intensely safe when they were around me.

  I was more interested in the warmth at that moment, but there had been plenty of times over the past year when having people around me who made me feel safe had been incredibly important.

  Instead of stepping into his embrace and I knew I could have done, I started walking toward the group of trees instead.

  "How was seeing your mom?" Colin asked as they walked.

  "Great! She seems really happy at the moment, I'm so happy for her. She was worried about the whole quarantine thing—"my eyes flicked to Vlad for a second, and my desire to hug him increased even further,"—but I told her there was nothing to worry about."

  "Ah," Vlad said. "So you told her nothing even close to the full story, then?"

  I grinned. "Absolutely not."

  We all shared a laugh, and I was glad that I could talk to them about it, at least superficially like this, without it causing the same strained expressions that it had in the couple of weeks immediately after the virus had been eradicated. For a while we'd all been terrified that whoever had orchestrated the attack—if someone had—would return and they would have to go through it all again. We were worried that maybe the cure hadn't been complete, and the illness would come back and Vlad would go back to being the terrifyingly ill person that he had been, looking on death's door.

  But now we could joke about it. It was just another thing to add to the already too long list of crazy things that had happened since I'd been at Sleepy Hollow University.

  And, most importantly, it was something that we'd all been through together. It had brought us closer together, it was an experience we'd shared, all being as worried about each other as it was possible to be, no matter what jealousy issues they sometimes had with each other.

  I squinted as I looked at the trees ahead of me, trying to decide if I was actually seeing something moving in the branches or if I was just imagining it. "Laurie," I said, gesturing to the tree furthest to the right in the small cluster. "Did you just see something move? I swear I just—"

  I let out of a squeal as I was suddenly thrown off balance. Vlad, with his strong arms, lifted me completely off my feet when I wasn't expecting it at all and moving me away from the path I'd been walking in.