Chapter4
992 Words
He is outside my last class.
I know something is wrong before I see him, the way you know a room has someone in it before you see them — a shift in the air, a change in the quality of silence that means the silence has an audience. I push open the door of AP English and there he is, directly across the hallway from it, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and the stillness of someone who has been waiting for exactly the right amount of time.
He is not a face I know.
He should be — I’ve been in this school for three weeks, I’ve memorized every student, I know faces the way I know exit routes, because you never know which one you’ll need. But this boy is not in my school. He is somewhere between seventeen and ancient, with dark olive skin and black hair that falls across his forehead and dark eyes that do not blink at the rate most eyes blink. He is leaning against the wall like he owns the wall. He is wearing black. He watches me come out of the classroom with the patience of someone who has been watching things for a very long time.
“Seraphina Voss.”
I stop walking and turn to him.
“Nobody calls me that.”
“I know. Former Ashvale pack, publicly rejected at Verification three weeks ago, now residing at 14 Carver Street in the Westfield district. Currently unaffiliated.” A pause. “Currently unusual.”
The hallway is emptying around us — students flowing past, lockers slamming, the end-of-day dispersal. He doesn’t look at any of it. He looks at me.
“How do you know where I live.”
“I know a lot of things.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
I look at him and I run my threat assessment and the results are: he is dangerous and he is not going to explain himself until he decides to. These are the facts I have and I work with what I have.
“What do you want.”
“Right now? For you to get home safely.”
I wait for more.
He doesn’t offer more.
“And in general?”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he says: “To be determined.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be honest.”
I look at him for another three seconds. I catalogue: no weapon smell, no aggression signal, no deceptive tell in his posture. Something else — something I don’t have language for, something in the quality of his attention that is different from the way Jasper paid attention and different from the way the other students look at me, when they look at me. This is the attention of someone who has already decided something and is waiting for events to catch up.
“What pack.”
“Vael.”
I go still.
I know the Vael name. Every Ashvale wolf knows the Vael name — it is the first thing you learn in pack history, the blood feud that’s been running for forty years, the political scar that both packs have learned to live around. A Vael wolf, watching me, three weeks after my rejection. In front of my school. This is either a threat or something more complicated than a threat and I need more information before I can tell which.
“Why would a Vael wolf care where I live.”
“Because you’re Aurum Primalis.”
The words land quietly. The hallway noise continues around us. I have never heard those words directed at me and I don’t know precisely what they mean and my face does not show any of this because my face has been trained not to show things.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Not today.”
“Then we’re done here.”
I walk away. I count to seven before I check behind me. He is not following. He is still in the hallway, arms still crossed, watching me go with that same patient, decided attention.
I face forward.
I think: Vael. I think: blood feud, forty years, illegal under Silver Council treaty.
I think: he knew my name before I said it and he knew my address and he said Aurum Primalis like it was a thing I should already know about myself.
I think: he said he wanted me to get home safely and he looked like he meant it.
I think: he is either the most dangerous thing I’ve encountered since the Verification or something adjacent to dangerous that I don’t have a word for yet.
I walk home. I check my route twice. Nothing follows me.
That night I look up Aurum Primalis in every pack database I still have access to.
Every result is redacted.
I sit at my desk and look at the series of blacked-out entries and I think: someone really doesn’t want me to find this. I think: which means I really need to.
I look at the photograph of my father on the corner of the desk. His smile. The easy confidence of someone who didn’t know what was coming.
I say, to the photograph: “What did you know?”
He doesn’t answer. He never does.
I close my laptop, get up, go to the east window and I look at the city below — the streetlights coming on, the quiet block, the ordinary Tuesday night dark.
My eyes catch my reflection in the glass.
They’re glowing.
I blink and it’s gone. Just my normal amber, my normal face, my normal everything.
I stand very still at the window for a long time.
To be determined, he said.
Yeah. I think that covers it.
- Writer
