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  Tales & Dreams

  Lost Time Academy: Book Two

  G. Bailey

  Contents

  Join Bailey’s Pack

  Description

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Stay in Touch

  About the Author

  More by G. Bailey…

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  www.gbaileyauthor.com

  Tales & Dreams © 2019 G. Bailey

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

  Edits by Polished Perfection.

  Created with Vellum

  All the fairy tales are real, and now I can’t escape them...even when they break my heart.

  Madilynn Dormiens didn’t know how dark the world really is, that is until the dark tales took it over. Death, pain and torment are the new motto of Lost Time Academy.

  There is no place for love in this academy.

  If the dark tales controlling the Lost Time Academy weren’t difficult enough, The Tale brothers are out of control, and Quinton Frostan is causing trouble now that he is back in Madi’s life.

  The sort of trouble that will get them all killed.

  Except Quinton is determined to make a big change, one that could bring someone they all want back…but the price of that change is too high. Too dangerous.

  Love just might get them killed after all.

  Even the Darkest Fairy Tales can fall in love…

  18+ RH

  Prologue

  I bang my fists against his chest as thick tears stream down my cheeks. Once. Twice. Three times. I lose count of how many times I hit him before I fall to my knees, great sobs leaving my lips.

  “You let him die! You just stood there as he was killed!” I scream at Quin. I can’t get rid of the image of Sin on the cold grass, his body cold and empty of his soul. I see Quin kneel in front of me before he places a freezing cold finger under my chin and lifts my head to meet his blue eyes. There is so much guilt there, but I don’t care. I just can’t.

  “It was Sin or you. If I stopped my uncle, you would both be dead. I hate myself more than you ever could for not being able to do anything,” he gently tells me. I stay silent as he gets up and walks to the door. “I’m sorry.” His words aren’t enough, not for this, and they never could be. Sin didn’t deserve to be the victim of that choice. I would have happily died to save him.

  “Madi…” I jump, falling to the floor as I hear a familiar voice whisper my name. I sit up, frantically searching for who I think it was. I turn around as a raven flies across the field, swooping low and landing on the ground in front of me. I watch the raven as it steps closer and very quickly pecks my finger. I feel so numb from the shock of hearing that voice that I don’t even cry out from the sudden pain. The raven flies away, and my finger drips blood onto the cold ground, but I feel empty and broken. The ravens are meant to protect me, that’s what my Nan said…so why would it hurt me then?

  How can Sin really be gone? That’s the question that haunts me. I can’t believe it, I won’t.

  “Sin?” I whisper. That was his voice, I’m sure of it. I’m not going crazy, I know I’m not. After a few seconds of nothing but silence and the chilling wind, I know I must have been wrong. Even that breaks my heart more to realise it. I hold my finger to stop the bleeding as I stand up, and just as I take a step to walk away, I hear it once more. This time, I’m sure it’s him. I’d know Sin’s voice anywhere.

  “Madi…”

  Chapter 1

  I lie so very still, letting the ravens brush against my arms as they fall from the sky to lie next to me, their bodies and feathers keeping me warm. They keep falling all around me, almost like they want to comfort me, but I feel nothing but empty as I stare at the night sky above me. There are no stars, just a darkness that seems never-ending. I feel as cold as the grass under me and the air blowing around us. When the last raven falls, something inside me changes. I don’t know what exactly it is, but I can’t lie here anymore. I pull myself to my feet, even as my body screams at me not to. Emptiness is a nasty feeling; it takes you whole and leaves nothing left for you to cling to.

  And I feel empty. I feel lost. I feel desperate…and only one person’s name is on my lips. Oisin Tale.

  The ravens are quiet as they lie on the ground, but I see they aren’t dead as I look around at them. Their chests move up and down in rhythm with each other. I frown as I turn around, looking at the shape they are lying in.

  It looks like an S.

  S for Sin...but the ravens can mourn all they want. I want revenge first and no more dreams. My dreams and powers were useless to really do anything when I needed them. When Sin needed me. The moment I think it, the ravens all sit up and swarm around me, blocking out any light as I fall back into them, letting the darkness take me.

  I groggily wake up, blinking at the daylight shining into my eyes as my hand goes straight to my head, feeling the hard lump there and a little dry blood. I quickly become aware I’m in my bed, looking up at the wooden boards above me where Tavvy’s bed is. I run my hands over my dress, feeling the mud and how it is a little wet from the ice in places. As I lift my hands, I see the blood covering them, and a sob leaves my lips as I think of Sin’s last moments. The room is eerily quiet as I wipe my tears away with the back of my hands and slide off the bed. I search around the room, seeing that Tavvy isn’t here and neither is my book. Someone has taken Lane, but nothing else seems to be missing.

  I freeze as I hear the sound of a door being unlocked, and I call my power to my hands. I don’t care if it is Quin coming through that door. I’m not playing the victim, and I’m so furious with him. How could he just stand there while Sin died?

  “Alright! Alright! No need to push me, you giant asshole!” I hear Tavvy protest as the door is opened and she practically falls into the room. I don’t get to see who pushed her before the door is slammed shut and quickly locked. I wipe the dust away on my dress and fall in front of Tavvy, instantly reaching for the cut on her forehead that looks bad. Her dress is as ruined as mine, and her hair is partly loose whereas the rest is still held up by slides. When I meet her eyes, we both pause for second. The world just got incredibly scary, far more than it has ever been for us. If we thought Lost Time Academy was bad before, I’m certain it’s going to be a whole new ball game now.

  “Looks worse than it is. What happened to you?” Tavvy asks, her eyes widening at the
blood on my hands and the state of my dress. I look down at the blood-stained dress and how the red looks so wrong against the blue. It shouldn’t be there, because tonight should not have happened. The whole thing feels like a bad fairy tale that I read, only I can’t close the book. I have to live it out and the raw pain that goes with it. I use all the strength I have to lift my head and take her hand tightly in mine. She only has to meet my teary eyes for a second to know something is really wrong. “Tell me, Madi. What happened?”

  “Sin is dead.” The words feel wrong as they leave my lips, and Tavvy pulls me tightly into her arms as I cry. He is really gone. Just gone, and there is no magical way to bring him back to me.

  “Bastards. We will kill them all for this. I promise you the dark tales will not win this war. I can’t promise you anything other than the fact we are going to fight to survive this,” she firmly tells me, tears streaming down her dirt- and blood-covered cheeks, leaving clear streaks.

  “Quin is one of them,” I whisper, and it doesn’t sound right to even say it out loud. Quinton, the boy I grew up with. The boy who loved the Tale brothers like the siblings he never had. And he betrayed them all the moment he decided to let Sin die and not help him.

  “Your ex-boyfriend? The human?” she asks, confused. I know how she feels. I hardly even believe it yet. I keep seeing Quin standing there, looking so different. So cold and empty, just like the powers he has. They must have done a complete personality transplant when he got those powers, because the Quin I knew, the Quin I loved, wouldn’t have stood there. He wouldn’t have knocked me out because someone told him to, either. Quinton used to be a good person…and now it seems none of that boy is left.

  “Isn’t human. He is a dark tale,” I whisper, wiping more tears away. “He stood there as Sin was killed. Sin was like a brother to him, and he didn’t care.”

  “Fuck,” she mutters in as much shock as I am. “The dark tales have full control of the academy. They are locking everyone in their rooms for now. I saw a girl called Venny, one of Ella’s close friends, tried to attack a dark tale. They killed her like it was nothing and burned her body away. That’s the new rules now; they kill and do not care. Our instinct is to attack them, and my skin is itching to do just that.”

  I find it odd that’s how she feels about them, because other than how angry and upset I am with Quinton, I didn’t feel a natural instinct to kill him. I’m considering it now though. He doesn’t deserve to live when he let Sin go. It seems like a million memories flash through my head of Oisin and Quinton, and how they were best friends. I remember them riding their bikes down to my house, and they were always laughing together by the time I got outside. I even saw them hug once, when Quinton had a hard time at home with his mother, and he was really upset. Sin was always there for Quinton, actually more than the others. He always had his back…and Quinton let him get stabbed in the back like he was nothing to him.

  “I didn’t want to kill Quin,” I tell her, looking down at my blood-stained hands. Dirt and blood nearly cover all of the pale skin. I look to my academy symbol, where dots of blood have dripped through the mark. It makes it look more sinister than usual.

  “Really?” she asks me, and I have a funny feeling she has said it more than once before I’ve noticed. “Not one stabby thought?”

  “Not until he let Sin be killed, no,” I reply, realising that we are still sitting on the floor and need to stand up. If we keep sitting here, we might as well raise a flag that says the dark tales have beaten us and won. Sin wouldn’t want me to give up, but it’s hard to even think of him without crying. I get up first and hold a hand out for Tavvy to get up too. “I don’t want to talk about Quin anymore. He doesn’t deserve a moment of my pain. I need to see the Tale brothers, and that is what I’m going to focus on. They have to know what happened to Sin. All of it, down to the last difficult detail,” I say, because it’s the right thing to do. I know they will go after Quin and the man that killed Sin, but first of all, we need to mourn. We need to say goodbye, no matter how wrong it is, because Sin was seventeen. He was my age, and it’s no age to die at all.

  I don’t feel like a seventeen-year-old, and I really haven’t for a long time. The world took what was left of my childhood innocence and crushed it like a bug when I was taken here and left to face the real world without my parents there to hold my hand. Hell, I really miss them, and I wish my mum was here to hug me, to explain how to grieve Sin. How to cope with Quinton being back. How to stop my heart from feeling like it’s been torn into a million pieces.

  “I don’t think we can do anything until they let us out. We play by their rules for now, and then we make a plan,” Tavvy says, placing her hands on her hips and nodding her head, like this is the best plan there is. It’s better than sitting on the floor, crying and feeling beaten, I guess.

  “What are the dark tales’ rules?” I ask her. “We have been told they are evil, and everything they have done so far suggests just that.”

  “Nothing good, that’s for sure,” she replies, and she places her hand on her head, wincing. “This stings. Do we have any first aid stuff?”

  “Yeah, my mum packed me a small kit actually,” I reply, and I just realise I have my phone as I think of where the kit is. “I have my phone!”

  “That’s good. We need to tell the tales community what has happened, Madi,” Tavvy says. “Maybe they can send help or tell us what to do.”

  “Do you know your parents’ number? I’m going to call mine first and let them know,” I answer, because I don’t want to call the tales community first. If they could take back the academy, they would be here. I know it, and so does Tavvy. We are on our own here, and the adults who are meant to protect us won’t be doing that.

  “I have it written down somewhere. You call them while I look for it,” she says as I squat down and pull my phone out from a box under my bed, next to the first aid kit, which I hand to Tavvy. She starts cleaning her head and sticking a plaster over the cut for now as I turn my phone on. I frown at the ten percent battery I have left. It won’t last too long, so I need to make every second count. I quickly call my parents, and my heart feels like it’s beating fast every moment I wait for them to answer. Please, please let them be alive.

  “Madi? Please say you are okay?” My mum’s frantic voice pleads down the phone, and I let out a sigh of pure, perfect relief. They are alive, and mum sounds alright. They know Lost Time Academy has been taken, but that is worrying. If they know, then there is a good chance no one is coming to rescue us because they can’t. I thought that anyway, but hearing evidence of it is a totally other thing altogether.

  “I’m okay. Well, not okay, but alive at least,” I tell her, and she cries down the phone as I hear it being taken off her.

  “What have those bastards done to you?” my dad growls, and I hear him quietly tell mum that they need to get to the academy somehow and rescue me. Mum tells him it isn’t possible, even with the one key they have. Other parents have apparently been trying to get in, and the keys don’t work anymore. “Madi, I will find a way—”

  “Oisin is dead. We are locked in our room with no clue what is going on and...Quinton is a dark tale,” I blurt out all the worst things first, hoping that somehow it’s going to make things easier in this conversation. The more I say those words, the more they feel real, and I feel closer to the edge of breaking down. Sin is dead. Quinton is evil. The Lost Time Academy is lost.

  “What?” my dad’s voice is shocked, whereas my mum is crying her eyes out in the background as my hand shakes, and I nearly drop the phone. The harsh beep of the low battery snaps me out of it. I can breakdown later; this might be the last time I can talk to my parents for a long time. I need to make it last. I need to remember their voices. Dad is shocked into silence, I think, as I hear the phone being passed somewhere, and then there is a very welcome voice I didn’t expect.

  “Now my sweet Madi, the dead never leave us, remember that. Have the ravens been aroun
d yet?” my grandmother says, her voice sweet and familiar. It reminds me of all the fairy tales she used to read to me as a child. It reminds me of the cookies she would always bake for when I was staying over. My grandmother somehow makes me feel comforted, even when comfort was not something I was expecting.

  “The ravens are always in my dreams. I saw the future in my dreams, I just didn’t know it,” I admit to her. “I’m meant to have sleep powers only. How the hell did I see the moment before Sin died in my sleep? Why do the ravens haunt me like I’m a long lost friend of theirs, yet I can’t use them to actually help me?”

  “The ravens protect our family, and everything will come out in the end. You trust in them, sweetie. They guide both the living and the dead,” she tells me. “They are guides, but you have the blood of the ravens, Madilynn. Sleep maybe your strongest descendant line, but it is not your only one.”

  “Grandma, I don’t think the ravens can help me or Sin anymore. He is gone, and I l-loved him,” my voice cracks, and I try to hide the pain I’m feeling from her, but it doesn’t work. There is always that one person you can’t hide the truth from, no matter how much you try. It doesn’t work because their voice alone cracks something deep down inside of you.