Chapter 1
Ionly seem to be able to like this place when I’m leaving. It’s 2AM on a chilly end-of-summer night and I’m standing in the middle of the deserted small-town square. I have my suitcase in hand and my ticket at the ready, my eyes sweeping over the red-brick storefronts and the inconspicuous station building ahead of me. It’s always a relief and it’s always exciting — to leave the all-human town and go back to the Academy, but tonight…
There’s something in the scents of the cold ground and stone all around me, something in the moon shining from behind the tree canopies high above, something telling me this is something else.
I smile and I shake my head. I’m romanticizing things again.
Just as I move to keep walking for the station pub, I hear rushed footfalls behind my back. I turn around and I spot Steve marching towards me.
It makes my eyebrows shoot up. I open my mouth to ask what he’s doing, but he’s already shoving the screen of his phone in my face.
“‘Won’t be able to make it tonight after all. Thanks for everything,’” he recites in an incredulous tone. “Really, Anna?”
From the way he says it, you’d think it was the love of my life I’d left with nothing but those words. But instead of getting sucked into the drama, I choose to make light of it. Smiling, I say playfully, “I thought I told you I was leaving today. You know how it goes with packing.”
He takes a step back, frowning. “You could’ve at least come to say goodbye.”
What for? So I could look into the eyes of the guy I’ve been sleeping with for the past three months and only feel more alone? “Well, goodbye?” I say with a smile.
“Come on, Anna,” he urges as he takes a step closer. “Don’t we have a good thing going?”
“We did, yeah,” I reply, still smiling.
“So? Don’t you want to see where it takes us?”
I have to fight not to let out a sigh. “I think I told you exactly where it’ll be taking us when we started it.”
He laughs. “You know, you independent women, you all say that these days.”
I still want to part on good terms, but I press my lips tight, saying in a colder voice, “Some of us mean it.”
He throws his arms up, letting out a pent-up breath.
Then he shakes his head and looks into my eyes. “When’s your… that thing leaving?”
Typical Steve. Just like most people in this town, he doesn’t even want to mention anything having to do with the Originals. “In half an hour,” I tell him.
“I’ll wait with you,” he says with determination in his voice, already looking around for a spot.
“No need,” I rush to say, “I’ll be having a cup of coffee on my own, it’s a tradition of sorts.”
“In there?” he demands as he motions at the red-brick facade behind my back. “Alone? The place is probably crawling with them.”
I have to fight not to roll my eyes at how hell-bent he seems to be on playing the knight in shining armor, despite the fact I see no fucking damsel in distress anywhere around here.
“I’m off to spend another year working alongside them,” I tell him, in a noticeably colder voice, “so I think I’m good.”
I move to walk away, but I guess my life choices have once again touched a nerve, because he blocks my way to say, “It’s not natural, Anna.”
This time, I actually do roll my eyes at him, but he doesn’t stop. “And I’d understand if it were a last-resort kind of thing. But it’s not the only place you could get a job as a goddamn librarian.”
I take a deep breath and then a step closer to him. “This is Grimm Academy we’re talking about, Steve. So sure, maybe it’s not the only place.” I grin. “But it’s the very best one. Goodbye,” I say in a final tone of voice, smiling and waving as I turn around, “and have a good life.”
“You’re seriously leaving?” I hear him raise his voice. “You know, you’re twenty nine, Anna, you’re not getting any younger.”
Yeah, and I have fat on my stomach, and a huge ass, and one day, I’ll turn to dust. So what?
I just keep walking towards the pub. I guess I’ve made it clear enough that we’re done here, because he doesn’t follow.
My frustration with him dissipates almost as soon as he’s out of my sight. He’s not the first guy who’s pretended to be nice right up until I said no to him. It’s sad, but that’s just how men are.
He’s definitely not the first person who’s felt the call to restore me to the right path. But I never told him why I was working at an Academy for Originals. He probably thinks it’s for the money — humans tend to think all Originals are rich beyond belief. I wonder how he’d feel if I told him the truth — that I don’t find it endlessly terrifying or even unsettling to be around vampires, shifters and faes. That I can’t seem to live in a world with magic without trying to get as close to it as possible.
I huff a laugh through my nose. He’d probably tell me I need therapy, I think as I approach the wooden pub door, the glossy black paint peeling off in strips down its length.
Taking a lungful of the crisp night air, I open the door, step into the cozy, dimly lit little space and look around.
As usual this time of night, it’s still noisy, but there’s only the fae bartender behind the beer-stained wooden bar to my left and a group of people giving off shifter vibes sitting around low tables to my right, framed retro posters adorning the soot-stained walls.
Perfect, I think with a smile. I’ll have my coffee and in no time, I’ll be back at the Academy.
But just as I close the door behind me and move to grab the table in the far right corner — the one closest to the three doors on the wall opposite me, my phone pings.
An email from Professor Naehorn.
My eyebrows shoot up. I know it’s two o’clock in the afternoon there, but it’s strange for her to be sending anything before the first faculty meeting of the year.
Then I skim over the text. Jaeger has resigned. Unexpectedly, but for real.
Almost instantly, my heart sinks.
***
My mind is buzzing, and it’s on autopilot that I order a black coffee and start making my way to the table. No one pays me any attention — not the bartender watching something on the screen above her, not the rowdy group of tattooed shifters with beers in front of them, not even the attractive young couple I only spot once I walk past the shifters. They’re both on their phones, the girl’s legs thrown lazily over the guy’s.
Vampires? I’m almost positive that he is, but you can never know for sure.
My mind rushes back to the email. I walk past the couple, put my coffee and my tote down on the table in front of me and my suitcase on the floor. I sit down, making sure I’m facing the middle of the three doors on the back wall.
It’s then that it starts becoming real.
She just left?
Trying to sip my coffee despite it still being piping hot, I try to remember if she’s given me any hints.
Is she ill? Fuck.
No, she’s one tough vampire, and they don’t get sick so easily. She’s probably just gotten fed up with the Academy.
But to leave without telling me?
Something nudges me to look over my shoulder, in the direction of the girl from the young couple. For a second, I think she’s looking at me, then I realize she’s just inconspicuously staring at her guy with adoration in her eyes.
Human, no doubt about it, I think as I tear my eyes away. The way she’s trying to carry herself… She just looks too much like one of those humans who can’t seem to make peace with one very simple thing — the fact that you can’t be turned into a vampire, you can only be born as one.
Still, there’s something else there…
Something that makes me want to go over and ask whether she truly understands — how many Originals there are who couldn’t care less about whether we humans live or die in misery.
None of your business, I tell myself. Don’t get yourself in trouble.
My coffee now just the right temperature, I finally take that proper first sip. Jaeger was one of the few at the Academy who never seemed to care that I was human. Who never tried to make my life miserable or disrespected me simply for not being one of them. Besides helping me get the position of Librarian in the first place, she was the closest I had to an actual friend there, and more than once, she’s willingly taken on the role of mentor with me.
And now she’s gone.
What snaps me out of my ruminations is the soft ping that comes from the middle of the three doors in front of me.
My eyes dart to the sign above, the green light now turned on.
I hear the scraping of chairs against the floor when the vampire and his girl get up.
I take another sip of my coffee, but as soon as I do, I grab my tote and my suitcase and I walk up to the door.
Just as I open it and step onto the vast, noisy, crowded space that is the Pull Platform, sensing the vampire and his girl following suit, it finally hits me — what the resignation means among other things.
That the Archivist role is now open.
I hold my breath, the possibility of me applying for the job and getting it exploding in my mind.
***
It snaps me out of it, when that vampire pushes past me.
“Bloody move, will you?” he snaps without even looking at me.
The girl moves to follow him, throwing a look over her shoulder. In a split second, our eyes meet, I make the mistake of truly looking. She stops midstep, staring into my eyes.
My gaze drops to her lips, to the bite marks on them.
Then our eyes lock again and I see the pain and shame in hers. There’s a moment of silence before she whispers, “I sometimes feel so alone, I want to die...”
She breaks off and keeps standing there, breathless in anticipation.
“Nothing to be ashamed about,” I whisper, feeling breathless myself. “It”s hard.” And I move to hold my hand out.
“Sofia,” the vampire’s impatient, scolding voice booms from somewhere behind her, and I see her pulling herself together, confusion and shame twisting her features.
I open my mouth to call after her.
The very next moment, I see her disappear into the crowd.
I keep standing there, my mind lingering on her eyes, and her eyes filling me with sadness. Then my mind rushes to her ‘boyfriend’ and I feel anger swell inside me.
No, not going there, I snap at myself.
I force myself to shake it off and start looking for the right Chamber. The world is a shit place, if you really look, there’s pain in the eyes of almost everyone you ever see. Some people are just better at hiding it.
So yeah, serves me right for letting my guard down like that.
I look around the Pull Platform, the crowded, echoing hall all in onyx stone stretching endlessly to my left and right, people coming out of the rows of doors behind me and disappearing through the rows of doors in front of me. I identify the longest queue, the one mostly made up of students, and I join it, taking a look at the sign above the door we’re all waiting for, just to check if it really is the Grimm Academy one.
It is.
As soon as I settle into the waiting and slowly moving in line, my mind rushes back to the open position. They’ll need to fill it, as soon as possible. The selection processes at Grimm Academy are far from standardized. They always give you a task to earn the position with, but what they choose varies wildly depending on who you are and how much you still need to prove yourself.
How amazing would it be, to have access to everything — all the censored materials, all the forbidden works, even the Lexarcanum?
Talk about magic.
Squeezing my suitcase handle tighter, I watch the last of the students before me enter the Pull Chamber and close the door. In my mind, I’m trying to figure out whether I have a chance by listing all my qualifications.
This will be my fourth year working at the Academy, I’m already a librarian and I’ve been an exemplary employee. When the Academy needed more space for the Eastern Runology section, it was me who reorganized the entire system to house it. When that student got cursed by that book, it was me who saved him from certain death.
I wait for the green light meaning that the student before me has been successfully transported and I enter the Pull Chamber myself, which from the inside looks much like a bathroom stall without the toilet.
I thought working as a librarian at the world-famous Grimm Academy would be the highest I could go.
What if I was wrong?
The magic sucks me in and spits me out — nauseous and wobbly as always — into the Chamber on castle grounds, on the grass near the central Dame Gothel statue. This particular Chamber is just a tall, round cast-iron fence. I open the door and step outside, pausing in the hopes that my knees will stop shaking.
They don’t, but the Pull Chamber starts glowing again so I get moving, not wanting the next traveler to bump into me.
I’d normally say fuck it and head straight for the Grimm Tower, but now I get drawn to the Dame Gothel statue. It’s one of my favorite places on Academy grounds, probably because it was the first I’d ever seen with my own two eyes. There’s the large cobblestone ring with grass shooting from between the stones, and at its center, one of the biggest statues I’ve ever seen. Rising from the weathered stone pedestal, there’s one of my fondest depictions of Dame Gothel — standing with her feet firmly on the ground, as if preparing for some important moment in history, her long robe and wild hair billowing in the wind.
I come to sit on one of the lichen-covered benches surrounding the statue. I take a deep breath and let my eyes sweep over the castle grounds. Behind me, to the south, there’s the somber Grimm Tower and the only stretch of the wall that can be seen without venturing too far away from the garden.
To the west, north and east there are the student towers. There’s the elegant, smooth Lilith Tower with barren Graf Hill watching its back, the rough-looking Lycan Tower with the Lycan Forest looming from behind, and the leaning, vine-covered Ydril Tower shooting up from the shore of the Sobbing Lake.
The effects of the thrill of thinking about going for the job are still there, but now, watching the newly arrived students buzz around the gardens…
Vampire. Shifter. Fae. They were all born to go to places like the Academy, to fit in, to find their purpose there. Am I kidding myself even thinking about this?
Let’s say everything goes as planned and I actually get the position of Archivist, the Chief of Grimm Academy Library Restricted Sections. It’s one that comes not just with perks, but with great responsibility to very delicate, valuable possessions. To all my not-so-welcoming colleagues, it would mean a better opportunity to get rid of me once and for all, if they only wished to.
Fuck, that’s not good.
If I go for this job, I’m risking losing everything I’ve worked for since I finally managed to put the past behind me.
My eyes get drawn to a spot just outside the cobblestone ring, to the north, where the beaten patch of grass marks the place of the ‘secret’ entrance into the underground castle itself. At least it used to be secret, before it got turned into an Academy and before the towers got erected.
No wonder they called it The Castle that Isn’t…
It makes me remember those times I’d manage to sneak out to go to the local library and read Grimm’s fairy tales.
I’m a shifter, I’d recite to myself, and I can turn into an animal so small, there’s no place I can’t hide.
I’m a fae and I have sight so powerful, there’s nothing that can escape me.
I’m a vampire and I can run so fast, there’s no place I can’t go.
I’d spend hours daydreaming about getting a chance to meet some of the characters from my favorite fairy tales — Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Vasilisa the Wise.
It makes me let out a soft scoff, remembering how naive that child was. It was only years later that I realized things aren’t as straightforward as that. Sure, fairy tales are based in real life. Sometimes, the characters you come across while reading them are actual historical people, like in the case of Dame Gothel. More often than not, the tales were just desperate attempts by us humans to explain what was hiding in plain sight, like predatory wolf shifters being merged into a single figure of the Big Bad Wolf.
Then again, what was truly naive of me was daydreaming about the Pied Piper using her Flute to whisk my sorry human ass to an Academy for Originals.
But for some reason, even now, this place is the only place I want to be.
So no, I won’t be letting someone else take on the role. If I did that, I’d be missing out on what could turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.