The Wolf, the Demon, and Their Omega

MINA The suppressants scrape down my throat like ground glass and lies. Three pills dry-swallowed in the Uber while Blood Moon Academy rises through morning fog—seven Gothic towers built on bones and bad decisions. My phone buzzes against my thigh. Unknown number, São Paulo area code. I let it ring. Twenty-three feet of apex predator lives coiled in my spine, and I'm about to walk into their most exclusive hunting ground pretending I'm anything but what I am. The driver keeps checking his rearview. His knuckles whiten on the wheel when I catch his eyes. "First day?" "Senior year." My voice carries just enough anxiety to sell the scholarship-kid-out-of-her-depth story. Two years of foster homes taught me that privilege likes its charity cases grateful and breakable. Give them what they expect to see, they never look deeper. The gates yawn open. All I can think about is my mother's last voicemail, the one that plays on loop in my dreams: Mina, baby, they know. Get to your cousins in Brazil. Don't come looking for— Then screaming. Then nothing. That was eleven months ago. I've been swallowing rage like venom ever since, letting it pool patient in my throat. --- Blood Moon's administrative office smells wrong. Like expensive wood polish trying to mask something rotten. The secretary types without looking up, but I catalog the tells—breathing that doesn't sync with her keystrokes, pupils contracting against light sources that don't exist, fingers hovering over my forged transcripts like she's reading secrets through air. "Mina Padilla. Transfer from Columbus." "How... unfortunate." She slides my schedule across marble that radiates unnatural heat. Her nails are filed to perfect points. "Senior transfers rarely adjust well. Especially scholarship students." The last part isn't even subtle. I take the paper without touching her skin. Some creatures read through contact. Others just bite. "I'm adaptable." Her smile reveals too many teeth. "We'll see." My student ID photo stares back from the laminated card—brown eyes that know too much, smile that promises nothing. She almost looks innocent. I practiced that face for hours in truck stop bathrooms, perfecting the mask of a girl who doesn't dream about unhinging her jaw. --- The hallway shifts when I enter. Not obvious—supernatural discretion runs deeper than human gossip. But I feel their assessment crawling over my skin like humidity before a storm. They're sorting me into categories: prey, threat, irrelevant. I find the walk that makes boys stupid and girls suspicious. Confident but not challenging. Worth watching but not worth remembering why. My mother called it anthropological camouflage. Become what they expect to see. Locker 666. Someone thinks they're clever. The lock sticks. I'm working the combination when winter arrives in August. "You're new." Not a question. I don't turn immediately—prey startles, predators calculate. Count three heartbeats before I look. Long enough to show I'm not afraid. Not long enough to challenge. Four of them. The F4, according to bathroom graffiti scrawled in barely legible high school illiteracy. The one who spoke stands like violence in designer clothes. Platinum hair that catches light wrong, silver eyes that reflect nothing while seeing too much. His uniform fits the way expensive things always fit—careless perfection from never questioning your right to exist. Even the way he breathes speaks of apex privilege. Sasha Bolkonsky. My mother had a file on his entire family. "Guilty. Though new is relative. I've been seventeen forever." Dark laughter from his left—smoke given voice. This one's all controlled combustion. Black hair that seems to swallow light, red eyes shifting from crimson to something arterial as he studies me. Beautiful the way disasters are beautiful. The kind of boy who leaves scars. "Kenji finds unnecessary observations amusing." From the honey-brown perfection on Sasha's right. Everything about him screams old money aged in blood banks. His smile belongs in museums—priceless, untouchable, definitely stolen. "Adrian. Welcome to purgatory." "Thought this was paradise. That's what the brochure promised." "Brochures lie." The fourth hasn't looked at me yet. Ink-spill hair, eyes that refuse to pick a color. Something about him makes reality nervous. "Everything here lies." "Even you?" Now he looks. The world tilts five degrees. "Especially me. But beautifully." Lysander Thorne tastes my name without asking for it. That's when I know I'm already in trouble. The bell rings. They don't move. The hallway empties around us like water around stones, other students flowing away with practiced invisibility. Nobody wants to witness what happens when the F4 finds new prey. "AP Biology. Unless tardiness is part of the paradise package?" I step through their formation—coincidence, not strategy. My shoulder brushes Sasha's arm. The contact burns cold, and for one horrifying second, I think my serpent might surface. But the suppressants hold. Barely. Three steps before his voice follows like a blade between ribs. "You smell like questions." Every muscle locks. The suppressants should handle scent. That's what I pay for in pain and bitcoin. But I keep walking, toss words over my shoulder like grenades with the pins still in. "Better than smelling like answers. Those get you killed." Their silence trails me down the hall, heavy with things that crawl and bite. --- AP Biology lives in a room that can't decide between classroom and slaughterhouse. Tables scarred from experiments that definitely violated several Geneva conventions. Specimens floating in jars that pulse with bioluminescence. The teaching assistant's cardigan hides wings—I catch shadows when she writes the formula for population growth over time and makes it look like a warning in cuneiform. Middle table. Not eager front row, not suspicious back row. Optimal observation position with three viable exits and a clear line to the chemical shower. The stool beside me scrapes linoleum like fingernails. "Brave or stupid?" Kenji doesn't wait for an answer. Up close, he smells like burnt offerings and petrichor. "Walking away from us like that." "Neither. Just didn't want to be late." I pull out textbooks I memorized three months ago. My mother's margin notes still visible in pencil—Remember: taxonomy is another form of oppression. He laughs, and the sound does things to my temperature regulation. This close I catalog details—prayer beads that pattern burns on his wrist, skin that runs precisely three degrees above human baseline, the way his red darkens when amused. Like now. "What are you?" The question slides between my ribs. But I've been cut deeper. "Exhausted, mostly. Transfer paperwork's a nightmare." "That's not what I—" "I know what you meant." I meet his eyes and let him see a flash of truth. Just enough to hook. "But weren't you mocking unnecessary observations? Seems hypocritical to start caring about categories now." Students file in, giving our table the kind of berth reserved for radiation zones. Message received: I'm either marked for death or something worse. Neither fits my plans, but invisibility died the moment they cornered me. Ms. Harrison starts her lecture on cellular mutations. Her hands shake slightly when she mentions genetic anomalies. I wonder what she knows, what she pretends not to see. I take notes I don't need while Kenji's presence burns against my awareness. He doesn't write anything. Just watches like I'm an equation written in a language he's still learning. Twenty minutes in, paper slides between us. His handwriting looks like elegantly controlled arson. What are you hunting? I write back without hesitation. Straight A's. His exhale might be frustration. Might be interest. Both taste dangerous. Liar. If you say so. This time his laugh is silent, shoulders shaking as the paper combusts between his fingers. No smoke. No ash. Just gone, like my mother's heartbeat between one phone call and the next. "Lab partners?" Ms. Harrison's announcing semester projects. Something about genetic markers and inherited traits. Ironic. "Sure. Hope you're better at biology than intimidation." "I'm excellent at both." "One out of two isn't terrible." His eyes narrow, but there's heat there that has nothing to do with his pyrogenetic tendencies. "You're not afraid of me." "Should I be?" "Most people are." "I'm not most people." "No." He leans closer, and I smell ozone and anticipation. "You're something else entirely." We don't talk the rest of class. But he stays. Even when Sasha appears in the doorway five minutes before bell, silver eyes finding us instantly. Even when Adrian passes during specimen collection, pausing just long enough for Kenji to shake his head at some unspoken question. The bell rings. Students scatter like startled fish. "Sit with us at lunch." Not quite order, not quite invitation. The kind of statement that reshapes social hierarchies. "Can't. Library research." "What kind of research?" "The kind that requires a library." He stands when I do, and suddenly we're sharing space in a way that makes my serpent nature coil tighter. His heat against my perpetual coolness. Predator recognizing predator recognizing something neither of us can name. "You're going to be a problem." "Count on it." I leave before he can respond. But I feel all four of them tracking me through senses I can't identify. They know I'm not human—that's dangerous. They don't know what I am—that's worse. But they're interested. And interested predators make mistakes. Just ask my mother's killer. --- The library exists in impossible architecture. Three stories where two should be, windows showing forests that cartographers deny. The librarian might be human if humans naturally moved without disturbing dust motes. I find isolation between Medieval Alchemy and Modern Criminal Law. Pretend to research while cataloging seventeen years of disappearances. Transfer students who never made it home for holidays. Scholarship kids whose families received condolence cards but no bodies. My mother's encrypted notes spoke of patterns. Supernatural politics leaving corpses like breadcrumbs. Follow enough bodies, find your killer. She was three days from publishing when they carved her heart out in our kitchen. "You missed lunch." I don't startle. Anacondas feel vibrations through more than skin. I knew Sasha was hunting before he decided to find me. "Devastating loss, I'm sure. How did you survive?" "We managed." He sits without invitation. This close, his beauty hits like calculated violence—sharp angles and winter light, assembled by something that understands human desire without feeling it. His presence makes the air crystallize. "Kenji says you're interesting." "Kenji seems easily entertained." "Adrian thinks you're lying." "I bet he calls everyone a liar. Classic projection." "Lysander wants to know what you taste like." I look up from the folklore text that's too accurate for civilian consumption. "And you?" "I think you're hunting." He leans back, casual in the way only apex predators can be. Every movement deliberate, economical, designed to remind lesser beings of their place in the food chain. "Think you came here looking for something specific. And you're willing to risk everything to find it." All true. Dangerously true. My mother trained me better than this, but grief makes you sloppy. Makes you forget that sometimes the biggest predators hunt in packs. "That's a lot of thinking for someone who just met me." "I don't need time to recognize a fellow predator." The word hangs between us like a blade waiting to drop. He's testing. Probing. But I've been swallowing myself for years. I can swallow this too. "Predator's a strong word for a scholarship student trying to survive senior year." "Survive." He tastes the word, rolls it around like wine. Like blood. "Interesting choice. Most would say complete or finish. You went straight to survival." "Public school conditioning plus years of foster home living." "No." He stands, circles the table with terrible grace. Suddenly he's behind my chair. Not touching, but close enough I feel his cold like weight against my spine. My serpent nature recognizes a threat, wants to coil and strike. I breathe through it, count heartbeats until the urge passes. "That's prey thinking. And whatever else you're hiding, you're not prey." His words brush my neck like fingerprints. I wonder if he can feel my pulse hammering, wonder if he knows it's not fear making my heart race. "There's a party tonight. Lysander's penthouse. You should come." "Should I?" "Unless you plan to spend every night in the library, hunting ghosts in transfer records." I go still. He notices. "Did you think no one would see? You're not the first to look for patterns in our cemetery statistics." He moves back into view, satisfied with whatever my silence revealed. "Just the first to smell like you might actually find them." He's at the entrance now, silhouette cutting darkness from doorway. "Midnight. Don't be late." "I haven't said yes." "You haven't said no." The corners of his lips quirk up in what might be an attempt at a smile. "Wear something memorable. First impressions matter when you're trying to infiltrate." He's gone before I can respond. But his words linger in the air like temperature drop, reminding me I'm not the only one hunting. I return to my research, hands steady through pure will. My phone buzzes again. São Paulo. My cousins wondering why I haven't come home, why I'm still chasing ghosts instead of living with the family my mother wanted to keep me safe. Because somewhere in these records is the creature that killed her. The monster that thought it could murder an Otherkind anthropologist and walk away clean. The thing that doesn't know her daughter inherited more than her research. It's here. At Blood Moon. Hidden among the beautiful boys and deadly girls, the careful violence and cultivated power. And now they're interested in me. Perfect. Let them circle. Let them wonder. Let them think they're in control. I've been patient for eleven months. Swallowed my nature, my grief, my hunger for something that tastes like justice. But patience is just another kind of hunting. And anacondas? We're very, very patient. We wait. We watch. We position ourselves perfectly. Then we swallow our prey whole.