The Moon-White Tiger

Zahara Reed has spent the last five years racing deliveries through Reedhollow beside Miki, her moon-white tiger, to keep her family's failing ranch and tavern alive.
Now, at twenty, Zahara has one chance to build a different future.
WesternWoods Zodiac Academy trains the territory's finest Racers, Hunters, Duelers, healers, historians, Gearsmiths, and Wardens. Admission could lead Zahara to professional races, lucrative demonic-beast hunts, and enough prize money to save everything her parents have struggled to protect.
Failure will send her home with an empty purse and no second chance.
Getting through the gates is only the beginning.
The entrance trial throws Zahara into the path of a disgraced Warden heir, an elusive lion-bonded traveler, a quiet Fae whose panda takes an immediate liking to Miki, and several ambitious Tamers who do not believe an impoverished rancher belongs among them. When the academy places them in the same racing and hunting crew, Zahara is unexpectedly chosen to lead people who can barely tolerate one another.
Then the academy's oldest Ki stone begins behaving strangely.
For generations, the stone has resisted every scholar, Warden, and Tamer who attempted to study it. Its reputation has inspired stories of curses, vanished expeditions, and beasts driven into uncontrollable Discordance. WesternWoods insists those stories are exaggerated, even as sealed ruins begin opening beneath the racing grounds and unfamiliar Tamers appear along the academy's borders.
Zahara wants only to survive her first year, win enough money to help her family, and understand why Miki has begun reacting to powers no one else can sense.
Instead, she finds herself caught between altered histories, inherited expectations, forbidden rivalries, and an underground conflict that may have begun long before the academy was built.
Some secrets were buried to protect the world.
Others were buried to ensure the wrong people continued ruling it.