Chapter one
Alex
RJ’s howl is still in my chest when the van stops.
Feral Academy pulls at me — four bonds west, tight. One stays here. Warm. Steady.
The driver opens the back.
Cold air. Grey sky.
Frosthaven.
I've heard the name the way you hear things at Feral Academy — carefully, in pieces, spoken like I wouldn't track the subtext. Above placement level. I'd built a picture from context and implication and the way a room went quieter when it came up, the particular drop in register, like the word itself required handling.
The picture wasn't right.
It's bigger than I expected. Dark wood and stone, buildings that look like they were constructed to outlast something — the weather, the isolation, anything that tried them. Old trees along the perimeter, massive, the kind that were here before anyone walking these paths was born. A quad with actual benches. Paths that curve like someone thought about how it would feel to walk them.
I stand in the cold and take it in.
Warm light in the windows. Paths cleared between buildings, easy even in the cold.
Voices carry when the door opens, then cut off as it seals again. Someone's music from a window above the quad, low enough that a human ear wouldn't catch it.
I catch it.
Students moving in clusters across the stone paths.
Regular clothes. That's what hits me first — jeans, heavy jackets, a girl in a yellow coat laughing at something the boy beside her said. No uniform. No red or grey. I've been in both long enough that the yellow coat does something to my chest I don't look at directly.
I step out of the van.
The girl in the yellow coat stops laughing.
She's not afraid. There's no recognition in it, nothing shifting under the surface. She just stops, coffee cup halfway to her mouth, and looks at me the way people look at something that doesn't fit the picture they had of their morning. Her friend follows her gaze. Then the boy beside her. Then two more, further across the quad, one of them stopping mid-sentence.
I stand in the cold and let them look and give them nothing.
They can't name it. They just know something came off that van that doesn't fit and their bodies clocked it before their brains did.
I'm scanning the way I always scan — exits, sightlines, who's watching and who's pretending not to.
Near the path a couple walks close, shoulders touching, the girl laughing at something and grabbing the guy's hand without looking at him. Like it's automatic. Like hands find each other without thinking about it.
I look away.
Across the quad three guys and a girl are doing something with her hat — one of them gets it, holds it over his head, and she goes after him and he wraps an arm around her and pulls her in instead of giving it back, laughing into her hair. A second guy snatches the hat and runs. She twists free and gives chase, all of them loud and careless and taking up space like the quad belongs to them.
It does. That's the thing. They're just here. Nobody is monitoring the situation. Nobody is noting the interaction for a file somewhere.
I watch them for a second longer than I mean to.
The bond finds him before I do — warm, pulling forward, the only one not straining west.
Dark jacket. Hands loose. Moving toward me like he already knows this place.
Like it’s already his.
