Page 1 of Cleansed By Water (The Nature Hunters Academy 3)

Prologue

“Dammit, dammit, dammit.” Gabby growled as she paced. It was late, ridiculously late. She had no business being out of her dorm room after hours, but she couldn’t sleep. Her mind simply wouldn’t shut off no matter how much she cursed at herself.

Why did she have to meet Tara? And why did the girl actually have to be cool? Friends. They were not something Gabby had a use for. She didn’t do close relationships. She’d learned long ago that people couldn’t be trusted, no matter who they were. Her parents had taught her that.

“Don’t go there, Gabby,” she snapped. The last thing she needed was to remind herself about the people who’d brought her into the world but hadn’t bothered to care about her. Love was not an emotion she was familiar with, and that extended to friendships. Her heart could only handle so much pain.

“DAMMIT!” She yelled and threw out her hand. A ball of fire erupted out of it, illuminating the night and striking one of the targets standing innocently in the middle of the training field.

Gabby had never felt that she fit in anywhere. She had always beenthat girl. The one who stood off to the side, unsure of her place in the world. She kept to herself because she was embarrassed by her body. Not just because she was so thin,or at least she had been when she was younger, which was a result of the lack of food kept in her house. It wasn’t that her parents refused to buy food. It just wasn’t a priority when scarce resources would be much better spent on important things like drugs or alcohol. As long as Gabby could remember, the majority of her nourishment had come in the form of the occasional stolen candy bar or bag of chips from the convenience store a block down the road. Not exactly three square meals a day. But that was secondary to the real issues Gabby tried to hide. What embarrassed her more were the bruises. She hid them well enough. But she knew someone would notice if she allowed them to get close enough.

“Thanks, Mom and Dad,” she said bitterly and flung a few more fireballs, one after the other. She was sweating, and her clothes stuck to her skin. Gabby hoped she would wear herself out to the point of exhaustion and that she’d be able to sleep without her demons attacking her in her dreams. Just once, she needed a good night's sleep.

It troubled Gabby that the girl, Tara, was threatening to cross that clearly defined line of arm’s-length acquaintance into a full-blown friend, which would put her in a place she didn’t belong, a place where she would inevitably cause Gabby more pain. But Tara wasn’treallythe thing keeping Gabby up tonight. The real cause of Gabby’s worries washim. The water elementalist who was too handsome for his own good. The second she’d heard his voice, the air had fled Gabby’s lungs. Then she’d looked at him, their eyes had met, and she’d felt something inside of her reaching out for him. It clawed at her insides, desperate to get close to him. Apparently, according to the professors, it was possible that different types of elementalists could be soul bonded. The thought that she and Liam just might be such a pair was buzzing at the back of her mind like a pesky fly she was refusing to acknowledge.

Gabby wasn’t surprised to find out that it was the darkness in one person that would draw the light in the other to them. Professor Fernis had said there were some students who came to the academies missing a part of their soul because of the trauma of their past. Gabby’s life had certainly been traumatic …andpainful. Also lonely and full of anger. How could her soul possibly have remained intact after that? For all she knew, she wasn’t missing merely a part of her soul. Shecouldbe without the whole damn thing. Gabby knew there was darkness in her. It was always there, deep down, waiting, biding its time. She didn’t know what it was waiting for, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.

When her magical energy was spent, and she no longer had the strength to raise her arms, Gabby sat down on the ground, fell back, and looked up at the sky. She sucked in huge breaths of air, enjoying the quiet of the night. She loved it when everyone else was fast asleep, and she wasn’t surrounded by the constant hum of chatter from other people—people who had all their crap together. The night was the only time she had any semblance of peace. But tonight, it wasn’t enough.

She rubbed her hand across her chest, trying to ease the ache that had begun growing inside the minute she’d first heard Liam’s voice.

“Dammit.” Gabby growled for the hundredth time. Apparently, her vocabulary had dumbed itself down to that one word. She’d been saying it either in her mind or out loud ever since she’d met the water elementalist. How in the world was she supposed to focus on her training at Terra Academy with him around? And how was she going to keep herself from getting too close to Tara when she so desperately wanted a friend? Just admitting that to herself was beyond something she thought she’d ever do.

Somehow, in the three years she’d been at Crimson Academy, she’d managed to keep her distance from her fellow students. It was probably why she was batshit crazy—that and the fact she still carried the rage her parents had beaten into her. She’d learned a long time ago there was a certain look she could keep in her eyes that caused other people to keep their distance from her. A hardness, an edge that was easy for Gabby to maintain because her emotions had spent so much time being ground against the whetstone of her parents’ indifference. When she realized the power of that look, she’d decided to go big or go home. She owned it as much as every great psychopath throughout history had owned their crazy. And Gabby didn’t apologize for the way she was. Why should she? She’d been a kid—a helpless child when her parents had starved her, beaten her, and verbally abused her. At first, she’d so desperately wanted their love that she would do anything to try to earn it.

Gabby had cried, begged, and promised to forgive them and love them if they would just love her back. Once upon a time, she’d been a small girl with hope in her eyes. But that hope had been ripped out of her until nothing but a giant hole remained. Something had to fill that hole. That something was the crazy.

Now, her mind was a chaotic wildfire. The only time it didn’t race was when she was using her magic or training. Apparently, violence was her jam. It quieted her mind. Go figure.

As her mind filled with the memories of a childhood she’d been desperately trying to forget for nearly seven years, tears ran down her cheeks.

Gabby rarely let herself cry. Her parents didn’t deserve her tears, but the lost little girl inside of her did. So, in the quiet of the night, with everyone else peacefully sleeping in their beds, Gabby let herself mourn the things she’d lost or never had. Her innocence had been stripped away before she was five years old. The world that she should have been protected from had been welcomed into her home, and she’d been thrown right into the middle of the storm.

Her body shook as sorrow attempted to suffocate her. She tried to suck in air, but her lungs were so tight she couldn’t get anything inside.

Gabby rolled onto her side and drew her legs up, wrapping her arms around them and burying her head into the tops of her knees. She didn’t try to silence the sounds. She couldn’t have even if she wanted to. The pain was too much. She didn’t know what was going on between her and Liam. But meeting him had opened the dungeon she’d shoved all of her past into, the dark place where her pain could at least be contained. Now, the locks on the dungeon door had been broken and the emotions were fleeing like prisoners escaping the gallows. Her brief encounter with Liam had caused the magic inside of her, and something deeper, to cry out with such need that she’d had to turn to the rage to keep herself together.

But she couldn’t hold it together any longer. In order to be able to face Tara and Liam again, she was going to have to put all of it back in the dungeon and relock that shit—even tighter this time. There was no other choice. She might even have to request being removed from the training program, though it would put a hole in her pride to do so.

Gabby had no idea how long she let herself fall apart. Eventually, out in the open of the training field, exhaustion allowed her to escape her agony, and the oblivion of sleep overtook her.

Chapter 1

Liam's gut hadn’t stopped churning since the moment he’d watched Gabby leave through a portal to head back to Crimson Academy. It was irrational, but he had wanted to grab her by her sexy pigtails and pull her back to him. There was a part of him that knew she belonged by his side. The thought of her out of his sight, let alone thousands of miles away at her own academy, made him crazy. It didn’t matter that she was really just a portal away. It still felt too far.

He’d not slept longer than two hours the entire night. He wasn’t sure when he’d see Gabby again. With the new information they had received from the royal elementals concerning the witches and demons plotting against them, and the earth plunging into a freaking ice age, he wasn’t sure if the inter-academy training would continue. And if it did, would they still meet at Terra Academy? Would he still see her during the training sessions?

Liam was pretty sure if the answer to those questions was no, then he was going to be raising some serious hell over it. The moment he’d laid eyes on Gabby, he’d known there was something different about her. He’d never reacted to a girl the way he was reacting to her. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, hot as hell, feisty, and crazy. It was something more. When he was around her, he felt complete, whole, and settled.

The craziest part was that he hadn’t even realized something was missing, at least not consciously. He’d always been restless, but he’d just tossed that up to having a touch of ADHD. It was his personality type to stay on the move, constantly doing something. Did he like stirring up a bit of mischief? Absolutely. Life was too short to be boring. But until he’d met Gabby, he hadn’t realized that none of that stuff really satisfied him. He just yearned for more as soon as the high wore off.Now, his restlessness came from an entirely different sort. A girl—one single girl—was causing his distress, and that’s where things took a turn for ‘what-the-hell-ville.’

He dressed quickly for the day, knowing he and the others would meet for breakfast.How the hell he was going to keep from teasing Ra and Elias, he had no clue. The fact thatthey’dgotten some lovin’ had him seriously jealous. He prayed to Mother Gaia that Gabby would be there. Liam was desperate to see her again, even if she wouldn’t look at him or only gave him scathing remarks. He didn’t care. He’d take any crumb she graced him with. He’d wear her down eventually. It might take some time, but he could learn to be patient. Especially if she was what he suspected—his soul bonded. How in the seven levels of hell had he managed to get a soul bonded? He certainly didn’t deserve one, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sporting his school-issued training uniform, he descended the stairs to Hydro Academy’s training rooms. There, a portal that had been set by the professors for those students training at Terra Academy awaited him.He went through and headed for the dining hall of Terra Academy, the school for earth elementalists. He figured if he wasn’t supposed to be there, an oh-so-helpful professor would let him know.

Liam didn’t see his crew, so he took a seat at a table and waited. He forced himself to sit still.He tried talking himself out of teasing Tara and pissing off Elias. It was a tossup who would win: the devil on his left shoulder or the angel on his right.

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