This is a place made for what I am. Or what I'm supposed to be. What my parents were.
I don't know what that means yet. I just know the smell of it is doing something to me that I don't have words for.
A girl comes quickly out of a side corridor, folders under her arm, and she pulls up when she sees me, eyes moving over me fast.
"New arrival?" she asks.
"Nova Bardot."
Something moves across her face. Not recognition, exactly. More like a filing, a fact being placed somewhere. "Registration is through there." She nods at a door beside the staircase."Headmaster Owen is expecting you. Don't be late." She starts moving again, then stops, half-turning. "Don't be anything they notice, actually. If you can help it."
She's around the corner before I can ask who they are.
The door closes behind me.
I'm standing in the entry of Everpine Academy. The portraits on the walls stare down. The candles burn. The smell of old stone and something living and layered fills every breath and does things to my pulse that I don't have a framework for yet. The man outside is still working at the cobblestones. The girl with the folders is already gone.
I look up at the portraits. Rows and rows of them, all the way up the staircase wall, generations of bloodlines arranged to tell a story about power and permanence. Power that has friends in the right places. Permanence that can make three girls disappear and have it come up empty in an investigation. All those faces looking down, none of them surprised, none of them afraid. Why would they be. This is their place.
Somewhere in this building are people who may have known my parents. Somewhere in this building are people who answer to the same organization that killed them, or people who are both those things at once. The letter didn't say which.
Somewhere up the mountain, whatever howled is still out there in the dark.
I think about the bus driver. Bodies never found. I think about the taxi driver, how quietly he said pretty girls don't last here, not looking at me when he said it, careful not to make it personal. I think about the man with the bucket, the dark water, his jaw going tight when he saw me notice.
I also have eighteen years of fast healing and unusual strength and dreams of running on four legs through forests I've never visited. Whatever this smell is doing to my chest right now, this alive and animal warmth in the air of this building. Idon't know what any of it means yet. I don't know what I am yet. But I am here. The people who killed my parents operate here. The anonymous letter writer sent me here anyway because there was no better option.
I adjust the strap of my bag.
I cross the entrance hall.
I open the registration door.
The heavy oak of the entrance swings shut behind me with a sound like a lock engaging, solid and final, the sound of a door that has closed on many people before me.
I don't look back to check whether it actually locked.
Chapter Three
Headmaster Owen is a small man in a large office.
The registration room turned out to be an antechamber with hard wooden chairs and a woman at a desk who took my scholarship letter without looking at me, stamped it, handed back a room assignment and a schedule on cream paper, and said someone would escort me to the Headmaster shortly. I sat with my bag between my feet and read the schedule three times without retaining any of it, too aware of the building around me, its sounds, the silences between them.
Owen comes through an inner door and he is not what I expected. Medium height, soft around the middle, gray at his temples. His handshake is dry and brief, nothing warm in it.
"Miss Bardot. Welcome to Everpine Academy." He gestures toward his office. "Please."
The office is large, dark wood, books on every wall, a fire burning in a stone hearth. It smells of woodsmoke and underneath that the same layered warmth I've been noticingsince I walked through the front doors. Everything in this building smells alive differently than human spaces do.
Owen settles behind his desk and I sit across from him, bag on my lap.
"Late enrollment is unusual," he says. "Your scholarship came through channels I don't typically work with." He lets that sit between us for a moment. "The recommendation was from a source I respect. Your test scores show you're capable of the curriculum." He pauses. "You're not a registered shifter."
"No."
"Late bloomer. Suppressed shift." He watches me with eyes that are doing more work than his face suggests. "That happens occasionally. You'll be placed in the standard cohort until your wolf emerges. Combat class with the first-years, history with your age group." Another pause, this one carrying more weight. "You're eighteen."
"Yes."
