Page 224 of Castings & Curses

CHAPTER1

“I’m telling you,Rio, he’s driving me bonkers,” I grumbled.

It had been days since I had a little unfortunate accident during my Earthquake Anatomy final.

Fine.

It was all my fault.

I kinda sorta maybe created a mini earthquake in the Tellus Coven Amphitheatre.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Emma Jacobs, a super obnoxious classmate of mine, pretended to be in dire need of help to get some boy’s attention. In my haste to get to her, I dropped a huge piece of granite on my foot, fracturing the dang thing and forcing me to see one of our student healers.

“Arlo Glenn is a menace,” I grumbled.

I scrolled through my tablet, deleting the seven—I counted them again, and, yep, there were 1,2,3,4,5,6,7—alerts I’d gotten today alone about missing my follow-up visit.

What did the man want from my life?

It wasn’t like I had nothing else to do.

“He’s just doing his job,” Rio offered.

“Yeah, right. He’s practically stalking me!”

With summer classes having already started, I had little time for anything but work. Lucky me, to have been selected to attend Westwood Academy, one of the premier schools for advanced witchcraft specializing in elemental studies. Plus, it was one of those magical schools with year long offerings insofar as courses and seminars.

Not everyone did that, and honestly, I hated school, so I was in kind of a rush to finish. My fellow 563W roomies and I decided to tough it out, staying over the summer. We were hoping to find some answers to a slew of increasingly disturbing facts we’d discovered by accident over the past few months.

To put it simply, we were anything but the average group of witches. Unlike our peers, ours was the only dorm room housing witches from various elemental covens. It was tremulous at first, but I knew we were destined to be besties the first time I set eyes on the lot of us on the bus to the portal in Cape Mystic.

“Awwww, someone has a crush!”

My blue-haired bestie was a water witch and a lousy singer, but that did not stop her from teasing me in a sing-song voice. Ever since she got mated to her big, scary, hulking boyfriend, she’d been determined to pair everyone up.

“A crush? Ha! He wishes,” I grunted.

I pretended to be repulsed, even though I felt my cheeks grow warm. My derisive grunt wasn’t nearly as impressive as Rio’s mate’s growl, but oh well. That was to be expected. The man was a kraken shifter and a sentinel—one of the deadly warriors contracted to protect Westwood.

Was it so obvious I had a major crush on Arlo Glenn?

The wizard was almost finished with school and would soon be an official licensed healer. He’d already finished human med school, and was a licensed Medical Doctor in the normal world, but magical doctors were required to take extra classes and Westwood had one of the best programs in the country, making it not only highly sought after, but super competitive as well.

So, what did that mean for me?

Easy peasy.

I was completely out of my league when it came to the blond-haired hottie.

And worse, I knew it.

I looked down at my curvy figure in the simple peasant dress I wore with my gardening apron tied over it—yep, I forgot to hang it up in Greenhouse Twelve,again. I heaved a big sigh. I was a hopeless mess, and unlikely to change. Definitely not the right fit for a rising healer. A wizard like Arlo Glenn would need a certain kind of female on his arm. Someone with something more than I had to offer.

What a depressing thought.

“Jade, you are positively green, girl. What is wrong with you?” Rio asked, feeling my forehead with a cool hand.

“What? Oh, nothing,” I mumbled and placed the kettle on the burner.

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