Chapter 2 Everly
Day two started with a spider on my pillow.
Not near my pillow—on it, inches from my face, close enough that when I opened my eyes it was the first thing I saw. Fat, hairy, and staring at me with what I swear was malicious intent.
I screamed and launched myself backward, hitting the wall hard enough to rattle the window blinds.
"Calm down," Brittany said from her bed, not even looking up from her phone. "That's just Herbert."
"There is a spider on my pillow!"
"I said calm down." She finally glanced over, looking more annoyed than concerned. Then she held out her hand toward the spider and made a small gesture with her fingers.
The spider turned toward her. And then—I swear I'm not imagining this—it walked off my pillow, climbed down the side of my bed, crossed the floor in a perfectly straight line, and disappeared under Brittany's bed frame.
I stared. "Did you just..."
"Blood magic." She went back to her phone. "Everything with blood in it can be influenced, if you know what you're doing. Herbert's my practice subject. He lives under my bed."
"You have a pet spider that you control with blood magic."
"He's not a pet. He's a familiar. There's a difference." She still wasn't looking at me. "He probably just got curious about the new roommate. I'll tell him to stay on my side from now on."
"You'll... tell him."
"Through the blood link, yeah. It's not like he speaks English." Now she did look up, one eyebrow raised. "You going to freak out about this, or are you going to get dressed? You've got class in forty minutes."
I looked at the space under her bed where Herbert had vanished. Then at Brittany, who was already back to scrolling on her phone like nothing unusual had happened.
Blood magic. Right. This was my life now.
"I'm going to get dressed," I said.
"Smart choice."
I pulled on the same purple sundress from yesterday—I really needed to do laundry—and tried to make myself presentable. Brittany watched me struggle with my hair in the tiny mirror on my closet door.
"You're wearing that again?"
"I didn't realize there was a dress code."
"There isn't. Officially." She went back to her phone. "Unofficially, you look like a target."
I looked down at myself. Purple and yellow and pink, bright as a tropical bird in a room full of ravens. "I'm just being myself."
"Yeah. That's the problem."
My first class was Introduction to Magical Theory, held in a dim lecture hall that smelled like old paper and chalk dust. I sat in the front row, dead center—visible, approachable, ready to make a good impression.
That's what I always did. Put yourself where people can see you, and eventually they'll start to see you as someone worth knowing.
No one sat near me.
The seats to my left and right stayed empty even as the room filled up behind me, students flowing around my row like I was surrounded by an invisible fence. I could hear them settling in, whispering, laughing with each other. None of it was directed at me, but that almost made it worse.
Professor Warrick swept in before I could spiral too far into self-pity.
She was a severe woman with grey hair pulled back tight, and she launched into her lecture without so much as a good morning.
Today was history—the Schism of 1926, when the four disciplines formally separated into their own fraternities after generations of infighting.
I took notes frantically, trying to connect all the pieces Brittany had told me last night with the official version.
It wasn't until class ended that I saw them.
Four figures, walking across the quad outside the window. The crowd parted around them the same way it had parted around me—but where students avoided me out of disgust, they avoided these four out of something that looked a lot more like fear.
"Who are they?" I asked the girl packing up next to me.
She glanced out the window, then back at me like I'd asked why the sky was blue. "The presidents." And she was gone before I could ask anything else.
I found Brittany at lunch, sitting alone at the end of a long table with a textbook propped against her water glass. She didn't acknowledge me when I sat down across from her.
"I need you to tell me about the presidents."
"Why?"
"Because I saw them walking across the quad and everyone scattered like they were radioactive, and I feel like that's information I should have."
Brittany sighed, but she put down her textbook. "The fraternity presidents are the most powerful students in each discipline. And because this place is basically a feudal society with better architecture, that makes them the most powerful students on campus. Period."
"Who are they?"
She pointed across the dining hall to where a platinum-haired guy in silver and white was holding court at a table full of similarly dressed students.
Even from here, I could see the sharp cheekbones, the perfect posture, the way everyone around him seemed angled in his direction like he was the sun and they were just planets in his orbit.
"Callum Bolingbroke. Mors. His family has basically run this school since it was founded—twelve generations of Bolingbrokes, all of them cold as corpses and twice as friendly.
He doesn't get his hands dirty, but if he decides you're a problem, your life will get very difficult very fast. People fail classes they never signed up for.
Doors stop opening when they need them to. That kind of thing."
I studied him. Handsome in that untouchable, marble-statue way—beautiful and completely inhuman. "He sounds charming."
"He's not supposed to be charming. He's supposed to be obeyed.
" Brittany's finger moved to a table by the windows, where a broad-shouldered guy in midnight blue was laughing at something one of his friends had said.
He looked like an athlete—the kind of guy who'd be quarterback on any normal campus.
"Atlas Knox. Tempest. He's the enforcer.
When the fraternities want someone punished, Atlas does it personally. "
"Punished how?"
She nodded toward a thin guy at the end of Atlas's table, partially hidden by his friends. A jagged scar ran from his temple to his jaw. "He pissed off Callum last year. Atlas called down lightning on him in the middle of the quad. They say he's lucky to be alive."
My stomach dropped. "That's allowed?"
"It's Nyxhaven. Everything's allowed if you're powerful enough.
" She pointed to a corner table where a guy with auburn hair was shuffling a deck of cards through his fingers, the motion almost hypnotic.
He was dressed in purple and silver, and even from across the room, I could feel something unsettling about him—the way his eyes moved, tracking everything at once, like a predator watching for weakness.
"Felix Ferrix. Tumult. He's the trickiest of the four.
The others are straightforward—Callum is cold, Atlas is violent—but Felix is chaos.
Literally. If he decides to mess with you, you'll have the worst luck of your life and never be able to prove he did anything. "
As if he could feel us watching, Felix looked up. His eyes met mine across the crowded dining hall, and he smiled—warm, friendly, like we were already old friends.
Every instinct I had screamed that there was something wrong with that smile.
"And the fourth?" I asked, forcing myself to look away.
Brittany hesitated before nodding toward a table near the food line, where a dark-haired guy with a gentle face was reading a book, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around him. "Ren Ashford. Sanguis. He's... different from the others. Quieter. People say he's the kindest of the four."
"But you don't buy it."
"I don't buy that anyone becomes a fraternity president by being kind. Sanguis magic is about blood—connection, life force, the things that bind people together. If Ren ever decides to hurt you, he won't do it directly. He'll do it through the people you care about."
I looked at Ren again. He turned a page, sipped his coffee, looked like any other student cramming for an exam. But Brittany was right. You didn't end up in charge of a magical fraternity by being nice.
"So those are the four people I should avoid."
"Those are the four people everyone avoids. The difference is, most people know to do it on instinct." Brittany picked up her textbook again. "You walk around like a baby deer in a room full of wolves. Sooner or later, one of them is going to take a bite."
That afternoon, I went to the campus bookstore for a new notebook and came out with something else entirely.
I hadn't planned to look at the clothing section. But there it was, right by the register: racks of charcoal blazers, grey sweaters, black jeans. The unofficial uniform of Nyxhaven, in every size.
I stood there for a long time, staring at them.
I thought about my purple sundress, my pink shoes, my yellow cardigan. The way people looked at me. The empty seats in every classroom. The whispers that followed me everywhere I went.
I've never not fit in. I've always been myself—bright, friendly, optimistic—and people have always warmed up to me eventually. That's who I am. That's who I've always been.
But this wasn't like anywhere I'd ever been before. And maybe, just this once, being myself wasn't going to be enough.
I bought the charcoal blazer before I could talk myself out of it. Put it on over my yellow sundress, looked at myself in the tiny mirror by the register.
It didn't look like me.
But maybe that was the point.
Brittany actually put down her phone when I walked in that evening, which was how I knew the blazer was significant.
"Holy shit," she said. "You bought one."
"I'm trying to blend in."
"You're wearing it over a yellow sundress with pink tennis shoes. You look like a parrot trying to infiltrate a funeral."
I looked down at myself. She had a point. "Baby steps?"