Chapter 1 #3
The path cuts through a central courtyard—wide and open, bordered by the main academic buildings.
Students are everywhere. Sitting on low stone walls, crossing between buildings with bags and books, gathered in clusters under the oaks.
Uniforms in dark greys and blacks, tailored, expensive-looking.
Most of them move with the easy confidence of people who belong somewhere. Who've always belonged somewhere.
A girl perched on the edge of the fountain leans into the boy beside her, her head dropping against his shoulder while he talks, one hand absently tracing circles on his knee.
He doesn't even pause—just shifts his weight to make room for her like it's muscle memory.
A casual, thoughtless gesture. The kind of touch that costs nothing.
The kind I haven't felt in twelve years, and the wanting hits me so fast and so sharp it catches behind my ribs like a fishhook.
I look away. File it under things I don't get to have. The folder is thick.
But then they start to notice me.
Not all at once. It starts with two girls sitting nearest the path—one glances up, does a double take, and grabs the other's wrist. A whisper.
Then the whisper spreads. I can watch it move through the courtyard like a current, head turning to head, elbow nudging elbow.
Conversations trail off mid-sentence. Someone standing near the fountain takes a full step backward without seeming to realize they've done it.
I keep my eyes forward. My spine straight. I don't hurry. I don't shrink.
I know what they see. The two vampire enforcers flanking me.
The duffel bag. The bandage on the back of my neck.
And whatever they've heard—because they've definitely heard something.
Secrets don't survive institutions. Someone talked.
Someone always talks. And the story that precedes me through this courtyard is the kind that makes people step back.
That's her. The witch. The one who—
Yeah. That one.
What I'm not prepared for is the garden.
The path skirts the edge of a walled garden—herbs and flowering plants and things I don't have names for, growing in neat rows behind a low iron fence.
An apothecary garden, I think. Witch-tended, from the smell of it.
The soil is dark and rich and practically vibrating with a kind of magic that feels different from the wards—older, wilder, rooted in the earth itself.
As I pass, the plants closest to the fence lean.
Not toward me.
Away.
A slow, synchronized tilt—stalks angling back, leaves curling inward, like a crowd slowly flinching from a sound only they can hear. The rosemary nearest the fence shudders and goes still. A cluster of something purple—lavender, maybe—withdraws until the stems are bent almost flat against the soil.
I stop walking. Stare at the garden. The garden stares back, cowering.
Even the plants know what I am.
Damn.
The dampeners are supposed to suppress this. Whatever I'm putting out—whatever frequency or pressure my magic is bleeding through the chemical fog—it shouldn't be strong enough for anything to notice. At least not yet.
But the lavender is still pressed flat and the rosemary is still trembling and across the courtyard, a mockingbird on the stone wall takes off in a burst of panicked wings.
Then another. Then three more. By the time I look back at the garden, everything with roots or wings within ten feet of me has decided I'm not worth the risk.
And this is me dampened. This is me medicated, muffled, running on twelve years of chemical suppression.
Tomorrow the dampeners clear fully. Tomorrow I feel this at full volume.
Corvin clears his throat. I start walking again.
The whispers have gotten louder. Or maybe the courtyard has just gotten quieter—it's hard to tell when both things are happening at once.
A boy in a pressed uniform stares openly, not even pretending to look somewhere else.
Tall, sharp-jawed, the kind of bone structure that says old bloodline.
His lip curls—not quite a sneer but close enough.
I stop walking. Turn my head. Meet his eyes.
He expects me to flinch. I can see it in the way his chin lifts, the lazy entitlement of someone who's never had a person like me look back.
So I don't flinch. I hold his gaze and I let him see exactly how unimpressed I am—a flat, steady stare that says I've been looked at by scarier things than you, and they were the ones who blinked.
He looks away first. A small, jerky motion, like something involuntary.
His jaw tightens and he turns to the girl beside him—sharp fae features, silver-blonde hair—and says something low and clipped.
She doesn't look away from me. Her expression isn't fear.
It's colder. Evaluation. Like she's running numbers on a problem she hasn't decided how to solve yet.
I think about Marion's voice. When someone pushes you, decide if the fight is worth the cost before you swing.
Nobody's pushing me yet. They're just watching. Measuring. Running the same calculation Zeva ran at the facility—how fast can I move if the thing inside her slips its leash?
Faster than you'd like. I don't say it. But I think it loud enough that it warms me and I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.
I pull my duffel strap tighter and keep walking.
The courtyard narrows into a path that curves toward a building larger and older than the rest. Stone facade, tall windows, heavy doors flanked by columns carved with symbols that look like the ones on the clock tower.
The administrative heart of the campus. I can feel the wards thickening as we approach, denser here, more deliberate.
Whoever runs this place works behind those doors.
We climb the front steps. Corvin stops at the top and turns to face me, his expression professionally blank.
"The headmistress is expecting you. Through the main hall, second floor, end of the corridor." He pauses. Seems to consider whether to say more. "Good luck, Miss Dellaby."
Zeva says nothing. Her hand hasn't left the vicinity of her weapon since we got out of the car.
I look at the doors. Heavy, old, carved from dark wood that smells faintly of cedar and whatever enchantments have been soaking into the grain for centuries.
Behind them: the headmistress, my training supervisor, the diplomat assigned to my case, and the beginning of a year-long audition for the right to exist outside a locked room.
Twelve months.
Tomorrow the wean completes. Tomorrow the fog lifts and I meet the full, undiluted version of whatever I am.
The last time that happened, I killed eleven people. Including my entire family. I was thirteen. I couldn't stop it.
I can still hear the sound the hallway made.
I shift my duffel on my shoulder. Set my jaw. Reach for the door.
And then the voice comes.
Not from inside the building. Not from Corvin or Zeva standing behind me on the steps. Not from the wards humming through the stone or the students whispering across the courtyard or the birds that won't come back.
From inside me.
It slides into my mind like a hand through a cracked door—warm, unhurried, settling into the space between my thoughts as though it belongs there. As though it's always been there and I just wasn't listening.
Oh.
A pause. A breath that isn't a breath.
You ARE strong, aren't you?
The words press against the inside of my skull. Intimate and impossible. My hand falls from the door. My knees lock—not from fear, from the sheer wrongness of someone being in there, in the only space I have left, the one place the dampeners and the fail-safe never touched.
My magic surges in response—a hot, blind flare behind my sternum, slamming against the dampeners so hard my breath surges out. The fail-safe hums at the base of my skull, cold and alert, like a guard dog lifting its head.
I can't move. I can't speak. I can't even flinch.
And the worst part—the part that makes my pulse hammer and my throat close and something deep in my chest crack open like a door I didn't know was shut—is that it doesn't feel like an attack.
It feels like being found.