Moon Blessed: Heir of Velmora

Chapter 4

Ilyas looked at her like he was deciding something.

Not the way Caius looked at her that was straightforward, the particular attention of someone cataloguing how much damage they could do. This was different. Lighter on the surface. More deliberate underneath.

Then he smiled.

It arrived the way sunlight arrived sudden, generous, and somehow making the temperature in the room feel different. "It's alright, Caius," he said, moving away from her desk without any urgency. "The puppy can have the seat."

He folded himself into the chair beside the one with midnight dark hair and grey eyes, and the grey-eyed one didn't look at him, didn't acknowledge the movement at all, just kept his gaze forward like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened.

Nyra sat very still.

Puppy.

She filed it. Didn't react to it. Kept her breathing even and her face neutral and her hands flat on the desk because the alternative was saying something, and she had already said enough things today that had consequences she hadn't finished dealing with yet.

She looked at them without being obvious about it the particular skill of someone who had spent years needing to read rooms without being caught reading them.

The grey-eyed one she'd had wrong. She'd clocked him as cold and harboring it, the type to carry a slight and let it collect interest. But he'd walked away from the seat without anything in his face, no performance of generosity, no edge underneath it. Just done. Either the seat genuinely didn't matter to him or he operated on a scale where a seat in a history classroom didn't register as worth the storage space.

The auburn-haired one had given her a brief, clean smile when she'd glanced at him. Harmless on its surface. But his eyes had been doing something else entirely moving, cataloguing, the kind of attention that felt almost scientific. She didn't trust harmless smiles attached to eyes like that.

Caius she already knew. Caius she had a working theory on.

And Ilyas she looked away before she could finish the thought about Ilyas.

Mr. Wale taught the rest of the class with the focused efficiency of a man who had no interest in the social architecture operating in his back row, and when he dismissed them Nyra was out of her seat before the last syllable landed.

She had her bag over her shoulder before half the class had registered the class was over, and she moved toward the door with the focused energy of someone who had a destination and intended to reach it before anything could interrupt the journey.

She almost made it.

The hallway outside was still flooding with students from other classrooms, bodies and noise and the particular chaos of a passing period, and she pushed into it and felt the crowd close around her and thought briefly, stupidly that she was clear.

Something hooked around the strap of her bag and yanked.

She stumbled backward and the crowd parted just enough the way crowds parted when they sensed something worth watching and Caius was there, one finger looped lazily through her bag strap, looking down at her with the expression of someone who had been planning this since the moment he sat down beside her.

"Running somewhere, puppy?" he said. Loud enough. Loud enough for the ring of students that had already begun to form to hear it clearly.

Nyra found her footing and turned to face him. "Let go of my bag."

"I just want to talk." He released the strap and held both hands up in a gesture of innocence that his face completely contradicted. "You're new. I'm being welcoming."

Laughter rippled through the watching students not cruel exactly, but not kind either. The laughter of people who understood the hierarchy of what they were watching and had already decided which side they were on.

"You're blocking my way," she said.

"I'm standing in a hallway." He tilted his head. "You're the one who sat in Ilyas's seat on your first day of class. Bold move for someone who doesn't know how things work here yet." He looked at her bag her worn, fraying, single bag that contained everything she'd brought from Thornton. His eyes came back to her face slowly. "Did they not have lockers where you came from? Or just nothing to put in them?"

The laughter sharpened.

Nyra felt it land the way he intended it to land in the soft place below the ribs, where things hit when they're true enough to hurt. She kept her face completely still. She was very good at keeping her face still.

"I'm going to be late," she said.

"For what?" He stepped aside with a sweep of his arm, mocking courtesy. "Go ahead, puppy. The hallway's yours."

She walked past him without another word and didn't look back and kept her face forward and her jaw set and counted her steps until the crowd thinned and the noise fell behind her and she was around the corner and alone.

She stopped.

Let out one slow breath through her nose.

*Three years,* she thought. *Just three years.*

She kept walking.

She found an empty alcove near the east corridor to eat the lunch she'd wrapped in cloth that morning she hadn't wanted to navigate the dining hall hierarchy alone, hadn't wanted to sit somewhere wrong and find out what that cost her.

She was unwrapping it when she became aware of someone in the alcove entrance.

She looked up.

The auburn-haired one stood at the edge of the alcove with his hands in his pockets, burnt copper eyes on her with that same quality she'd clocked in the classroom not hostile, not warm. Analytical. Like she was a variable he was still calculating.

He didn't say anything immediately.

Neither did she.

"You handled that poorly," he said finally. His voice was quiet and even, the kind of voice that didn't need volume because it assumed you were already paying attention.

"Excuse me?"

"Caius." He leaned against the alcove entrance, unhurried. "You held your ground which was right. But you let him see it landed." His eyes moved to her face with a precision that made her want to step back. "You kept your expression but your jaw tightened. He saw it."

Nyra stared at him. "Are you... why are you telling me this?"

He considered the question as if it were genuinely worth considering. "I'm not sure yet," he said.

Then he pushed off the wall and walked away down the corridor, hands still in his pockets, without looking back.

Nyra stood in the alcove for a moment with her unwrapped lunch in her hands and the feeling of having been taken apart by someone who hadn't raised their voice or changed their expression once.

Riven. Gwen had called him the one you least wanted noticing you.

She was beginning to understand why.

She went to the library after lunch because she didn't know what else to do with the restlessness the day had left in her and she needed to know how to survive in the school as a wolfless she wolf.

The general collection had given her nothing useful in a more than an hour of searching. Werewolf physiology, pack theory, the historical documentation of wolf bonds she'd read all of it and found nothing that described what she was. Or wasn't.

The restricted section occupied the far back corner behind an iron gate that was, she had discovered on her third night, not actually locked. The gate had the aesthetic of restriction without the infrastructure. She pushed it open it made a sound but not a loud one and moved into the narrow corridor of shelving beyond.

The books here were older. Some of them looked like they had opinions about being touched.

She found the one she wanted on the third shelf from the bottom dark cover, rusted clasp, no title on the spine. She carried it to the reading table at the back of the section, sat down, and opened it.

The pages were dense and the language archaic enough in places that she had to read sentences twice, but she followed it. She followed it the way she'd learned to follow difficult things slowly, without forcing, letting the meaning arrive in its own time.

She didn't notice the lamp on the other side of the table.

She didn't notice she wasn't alone.

"You're in the wrong section."

The voice came from the shadows at the far end of the shelf. Low. Even. Completely unalarmed the voice of someone who had been sitting there long enough to have assessed her and was only now bothering to announce themselves.