Blood moon academy

THE PULL

Draven's POV

I don't sleep.

This isn't new. I stopped sleeping through the night seven years ago and at this point insomnia is just part of the routine. I train from midnight to two. I review pack correspondence until four. I sit at my desk and stare at nothing and try very hard not to think about my mother's face on another girl's body.

Tonight is different.

Tonight my wolf won't stop pacing.

"You need to stop," I tell her, not out loud because I'm not completely unhinged, but in that interior space where the two parts of me have been negotiating power since I was twelve years old. "She's not ours. She's a threat and we're going to treat her accordingly."

My wolf does not care about any of this.

Marcus is leaning against the wall of my room when I emerge from the shower at five in the morning. He has coffee and the expression of someone who didn't sleep either, for different reasons.

"Tell me I'm wrong," I say.

"About which part?" He hands me a coffee. "The part where she's a Blackthorne? That's confirmed. The part where she looks exactly like—"

"Don't finish that sentence."

"—your mother?" He finishes it anyway. "Draven. That's not something you can just bulldoze through with intimidation campaigns. That's a real problem."

"I'm handling it."

"Handling it like the last girl who made you feel something? Because she transferred out after two weeks and cried every day until she left."

"She was fine."

"She was not fine."

I drink my coffee and don't answer, because Marcus isn't wrong and we both know it. The Blackthorne girl is here. She looks like Selene. She has power that shouldn't exist in someone her age. And last night, when I was in her room, when I got close enough to actually smell her—

My wolf went quiet.

Not afraid-quiet. Not angry-quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when something finally makes sense after years of not making sense, and your instincts stop fighting because they already know the answer.

I am not accepting that answer.

"She's a Blackthorne. The same bloodline that—"

"The same bloodline as your mother. Who you haven't actually found. Who might be connected to this girl, or might not be, and you don't know which because you haven't talked to her like a human being."

"I need her gone."

Marcus looks at me a long moment. "You know what I think? I think you're terrified she's not your mother's echo. I think you're terrified she's something completely different, and that would mean everything you've decided about her is wrong."

I leave for morning training without responding to that.

The first class of the new term is Advanced Supernatural Theory. I don't have to be there. But I find myself standing at the back of the lecture hall when Arwen Blackthorne walks in and discovers that every seat near the front has been claimed by people who will not move for her, that every study group is suddenly closed, that the only empty chair is the one in the far corner, isolated, alone, visible to no one.

She finds the seat without flinching.

I watch her settle in with the focus of someone who has been sitting alone in rooms full of people for a very long time. She doesn't scan the room for allies. She doesn't look at the other students with hurt in her eyes. She just opens her notebook and starts writing, like she expected this, like she already decided it doesn't matter.

My wolf snarls at me.

I tell her to be quiet.

For forty minutes I stand in the back and watch Arwen Blackthorne ignore every social cruelty I arranged. No reaction to the girls who whisper loud enough for her to hear. No visible response when the boy next to her shifts his chair deliberately away. She takes notes. She answers a question correctly that the professor directed at someone else because she clearly wasn't expected to know the answer.

That's when Lydia finds me.

"She's not going to break easily," Lydia says, appearing at my elbow with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on Arwen with a particular kind of anger that has nothing to do with bloodlines. "I've seen girls like her. The ones who've already been hurt so many times they stopped feeling new pain."

"Then we try harder," I say.

Lydia turns to look at me. Lydia Silvermoon, who has been planning our future together since we were fifteen, who has never once questioned whether I would choose her. "You can't stop looking at her."

"I'm monitoring a threat."

"You're staring at her like you haven't stared at anything in seven years." Her voice is perfectly controlled. It has to be, because Lydia never lets anything show that she doesn't want shown. "She's dangerous. Let the headmistress handle her."

"The headmistress doesn't understand what she is."

"And you do?"

I don't answer.

Class ends. Students file out. Arwen is the last to leave, and as she passes through the doorway she glances once toward the back of the room. She can't see me. I'm standing in shadow near the emergency exit, and even supernatural senses shouldn't locate me from this distance.

She looks directly at where I'm standing.

For just a second, her expression isn't afraid or angry or guarded. It's something else. Something I recognize because I've felt it every moment since she walked through those gates.

Like she found something she wasn't looking for and doesn't know what to do with it.

Then she walks away.

Lydia is still watching me. "Tell me you feel nothing," she says. "Tell me and I'll believe you."

I should say it. It would be easy. Four words and Lydia would back off and I could return to the controlled campaign I planned to run against the Blackthorne girl until she left or broke, whichever came first.

My phone buzzes. A message from Marcus, two words only.

New professor.

I look up. Across the emptying lecture hall, a woman I've never seen before is introducing herself to the head of the supernatural history department. Pale. Precise. The kind of stillness that isn't calm but calculated. She carries herself like someone who has been watching from a distance for a very long time and has finally decided to step into range.

She looks up and meets my eyes.

And smiles like she already knows exactly why I'm here.

"Victoria Ashcroft," she says to the department head, just loud enough for my supernatural hearing to catch. "I specialize in bloodline studies." A pause, deliberate and sharp. "Particularly the ones everyone believes are extinct."

My blood goes cold.

This woman came here because of Arwen. The question isn't whether she's a threat. Everything about her signals threat.

The question is whether she came to protect the last Blackthorne—or to finish what someone started eighteen years ago when a bloodstained baby was left on pack territory with nothing but a locket and a secret nobody survived long enough to explain.

I look toward the doorway where Arwen disappeared.

And for the first time since she arrived, I'm not thinking about destroying her.

I'm thinking about what happens if I don't protect her first.