Feral Marked (Feral Academy at Frosthaven #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

The paperwork says transfer. The cuffs say something else.

They say I killed someone. The problem is I don't remember it.

The van smells like sweat and vinyl and the particular brand of industrial cleaner they use in county facilities — the kind that doesn't actually clean anything, just covers one bad smell with a worse one.

I know that smell. I've been breathing it for years, in seven different placements. I could bottle it and sell it as Eau de You Fucked Up. It's the smell of fluorescent lights and metal detectors and being told to sit down by people whose names I'll forget by tomorrow.

My wrists ache.

The cuffs are standard transport — steel, not zip ties. Whoever requisitioned this transfer used the adult form, not the juvenile one.

I'm eighteen, but I've been in the system since I was fourteen, and nobody has ever cuffed me with hardware this heavy.

These are the kind they use for people who've hurt someone.

Which.

Fair.

I shift in the seat, the metal biting into my wrists.

The two officers up front haven't spoken to me since we left the airport.

One of them — stocky, blond, neck like a fire hydrant — keeps checking the rearview mirror like he's waiting for me to do something.

The other one drives with both hands on the wheel and his jaw clamped shut.

They're not corrections officers.

I've spent enough time around COs to recognize the posture. The fake boredom. The way they hold their shoulders like the job is beneath them.

These two look scared. But not of the road or the weather.

Of me.

The weather's worth being scared of, honestly.

We've been driving for hours — a flight I slept through, then a smaller plane that rattled so hard I bit the inside of my cheek, then this van.

The landscape outside the mesh-covered window has been getting emptier for the last ninety minutes.

Trees. Mountains. Snow. No cell towers. No gas stations.

No other cars. Alaska. That's all the transfer paperwork said.

Juvenile rehabilitation program. Remote therapeutic facility. Frosthaven Review Panel Authorization.

I don't know what a Frosthaven Review Panel is.

I don't care. The phrasing sounds federal.

Or military. Something with enough pull to requisition a transport van and a flight to Alaska for one eighteen-year-old with a juvie record.

That's not county-level paperwork. Someone above the normal chain signed off on this.

Every facility has a name that sounds like it was focus-grouped by people who've never been inside one. Sunrise Academy. New Horizons. Fresh Start. All of them smell the same. All of them have the same locks.

"How much longer?" I ask, because the silence is starting to feel heavier than the cuffs.

Fire Hydrant glances at the rearview again. Doesn't answer.

"I'm not being difficult. I have to pee."

"Twenty minutes," the driver says, without looking back. His voice is flat. Clipped.

I lean my head against the window and watch the trees blur.

There's a scratch on the glass — someone dragged a key or something hard enough to leave a mark.

I trace it with my eyes without moving my hands.

I used to do that in every new placement.

Map the damage. Figure out who was here before me and how angry they were.

You can tell a lot about a place by what the last person left behind.

My file is on the seat next to Fire Hydrant — a manila folder thick enough to prop open a door, with colored tabs I can't read from this angle. But I can see the red tag on the front. I've seen red tags before. They mean high risk or violent history or do not house with general population.

Mine probably says all three.

The folder's been opened at least twice since we left the airport. Fire Hydrant keeps going back to one page — I can't see what's on it.

I know what's in that file. I've heard it read aloud in courtrooms and intake offices and emergency placement reviews. Alexandra Jones, eighteen, ward of the state. Extensive juvenile record. Multiple placement failures. History of aggression, property destruction, and one incident classified as—

They always pause before they say it. Like the word itself is dangerous.

Homicide.

Unresolved. That's the part they don't like.

Not that someone died — people die all the time and nobody calls an emergency review panel.

It's that they can't explain how. The body was found in a group home basement with bite marks that didn't match any human dental pattern and blood splatter that a forensic analyst described, in a report I was not supposed to see, as "inconsistent with known attack methodology. "

I was fourteen. I was covered in blood. I don't remember what happened.

That's the truth, and nobody has ever believed it, and after a while I stopped trying to make them.

The van turns off the main road onto something that isn't quite a road — two ruts in the snow with gravel underneath, winding through trees so dense the light drops by half.

The driver slows down. Fire Hydrant sits up straighter.

His hand moves to his belt, casual, like he's adjusting his pants, but I see the snap on his holster pop open.

I'm handcuffed in the back of a transport van in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, and this man just unsnapped his holster.

Something cold moves through my chest. Not fear — I know what fear feels like, and this isn't it. Fear is fast. This is slow. Heavy.

The trees break.

The facility sits in a clearing like it was dropped there and the forest grew up around it to hide it.

Not what I expected. I expected concrete and razor wire — the standard juvie aesthetic, all right angles and concrete architecture.

This is different. The buildings are spread out, made of some dark wood, hard to tell from here.

There are three main structures that I can see, plus smaller ones set farther back toward the tree line.

A yard. No, two yards — one open, one enclosed with fencing that's taller than it needs to be for a therapeutic facility.

The fencing is the first thing that's wrong.

It's layered. Chain link on the outside, then a gap of maybe ten feet, then a second fence — this one solid, metal, with no handholds.

The inner fence has something along the top that isn't razor wire.

It's thicker. Darker. It hums. I can hear it from inside the van, a low vibration that I feel in my back teeth before my ears pick it up.

Electrified. They electrified the inner fence.

No juvenile facility in the country uses electrified fencing. I know this because I've escaped from two of them and researched the security specs of eleven others during a period of my life I refer to privately as my ambitious phase.

The van rolls to a stop at an outer gate. The driver punches a code into a panel I can't see, and the gate slides open — smooth, fast, mechanical. No guard booth. No sign-in. Just the code and the gate and then we're inside the first fence and rolling toward the second.

"You can uncuff me now," I say. "Unless this is a place where I need to stay cuffed."

Neither of them answers.

Right.

The second gate is different. It doesn't open automatically. Someone's standing on the other side, waiting, and the van idles while that someone walks to a panel and does something I can't see — not a code, something else. Something that takes longer. The gate opens slower. Heavier.

And then we're through, and the gate closes behind us, and the sound it makes isn't a click. It's a thud. Deep, final, sealed. The sound of something that wasn't designed to open again quickly.

The driver pulls up to the nearest building and kills the engine.

For a second, nobody moves. Then Fire Hydrant turns around in his seat and looks at me — really looks at me, for the first time since the airport — and what I see in his face isn't hostility.

It's relief. Thank God this is someone else's problem now.

"Sit tight," he says. "They're coming around for you."

I sit tight. I watch through the mesh of the reinforced glass.

The door of the building opens and a man walks out.

He's tall — taller than the guy who opened the gate, taller than most people I've met.

Blond hair cut short. Face that could be handsome if it ever learned how to relax.

He moves like he was built for a specific purpose and has never once questioned what that purpose is.

There's an efficiency to him that makes my skin prickle.

Not the lazy authority of a prison guard. Something sharper. Something trained.

He's not wearing a corrections uniform. Dark jacket, dark pants, boots that are meant for terrain, not tile. No badge. No visible weapon. No radio. He walks to the van like he's done this a hundred times and has never once been surprised by what was inside.

The side door slides open. Cold air hits me so hard my lungs clench. Alaska cold. A reminder that this place exists specifically because it's far away from everything else.

"Alexandra Jones." Not a question. He's reading from a tablet, not a clipboard, and his eyes move over it the way you'd scan a threat assessment, not a student file.

"It's Alex," I say.

He looks up from the tablet. Pale eyes. Steady. He holds my gaze for a beat longer than is normal, and something behind his expression shifts. Not surprise. More like confirmation. Like I match something he was told to expect.

"I'm Sven," he says. "I'm your house advisor. Step out."

I look around. The yard between the buildings is cleared, flat, hard-packed dirt under a thin layer of snow.

No one's out here. But the buildings have windows, and some of those windows have faces in them — distant, blurred, watching. I count six before I stop counting. None of them move.

Sven is watching me watch them. I can feel it without looking.

Fire Hydrant is out of the van now, handing Sven the manila folder. His hand shakes when he extends it. Small tremor. Barely visible. But I see it because I've been watching hands my whole life — whose are steady, whose aren't, whose are about to swing.

"All yours," he says, and the way he says it — fast, half-turned toward the van already — tells me everything. He wants to leave. He wants to get back in that van and drive away from this place and never come back.

Sven takes the folder. Opens it to the first page. I see it, upside down, for just a second before he angles it away.

Death on record — unresolved.

Something stamped at the bottom in text too small to read, next to a logo I don't recognize — not the state seal, not the Department of Corrections. Something else. An organization I've never heard of.

"Your transfer paperwork lists this as a juvenile rehabilitation program," Sven says, still reading.

"That is technically accurate. You are here under the authority of the Frosthaven Review Panel, which oversees all placements at this facility.

You will be housed in Red House, which is my unit.

You will follow my instructions. You will not touch anyone without permission.

You will not leave your designated areas without escort. "

Red house, what the hell is that. And ‘you will not touch anyone without permission’. In juvie, the rule is don't fight. Don't assault. Don't threaten. Nobody says don't touch.

"Do you have questions?" he asks.

I have about forty. I start with the most honest one.

"Where am I?"

"Feral Academy. A satellite program of Frosthaven Academy, located approximately five miles from the main campus."

Satellite. The word they use for the place you put people who can't be at the real school. Five miles of forest between us and whatever Frosthaven Academy actually is. Close enough to be connected. Far enough to be a deterrent.

"And what is Frosthaven Academy?"

He closes the folder. "That's above your placement level."

Above my placement level. That's not corrections language. That's the kind of thing people say when there are tiers and I'm not on the right one.

"Cool. What's a feral academy?"

"A facility for individuals whose behavior and biology require structured intervention in a controlled environment."

Every word of that sentence was designed to say nothing. I've heard sentences like that my whole life. They mean: you're here because we put you here, and the reason is in a file you're not allowed to read.

The van is pulling away. I watch it go. Swallowed by the tree line in seconds. No taillights. No evidence it was ever here.

From somewhere behind the nearest building — the one with the tall fence, the enclosed yard — a sound drifts across the cold air.

Low, rising, rough. Not human. Not mechanical.

An animal sound. But not like any animal I've heard.

It's too cadenced, too deliberate. Like something between a growl and a howl, and it cuts off abruptly.

Sven doesn't react. Doesn't flinch, doesn't look, doesn't acknowledge it at all. Like it's background noise. Like it's normal.

My arms break out in goosebumps and it has nothing to do with the cold. Something low in my gut pulls tight.

I should be scared. I should be cataloging exits and calculating odds and doing the math I've always done — how fast can I run, who's between me and the fence, what's the weakest point. That's what I do. That's what I've always done.

Instead I'm standing in the cold, listening to something that isn't human.

Sven removes my cuffs and turns me around.

Sven is watching me and his nostrils flare — a tiny movement, fast.

"Come with me," he says. Something in his voice has changed.

I follow him toward the building. The faces in the windows are still there. More of them now.

I feel warmth in my wrist. I press my hands into my jacket pockets and try to ignore it. Probably bruised from the cuffs.

I look back at the fences — the two layers. I look at the buildings with their too-small windows. I look at Sven's rigid posture.

This isn't a school and it doesn’t look like a detention center either.

Where in the hell am I?