Blood moon academy

THE WRONG KIND OF HELP

Arwen's POV

I start the list on a napkin at breakfast because paper feels more honest than a phone note for something like this.

“What pack are you from originally?” Cole asked that on day three. I thought he was making conversation.

“Have you ever had any physical reaction to silver? Burns, rashes, sensitivity?” Day five, framed as curiosity about hybrid biology.

“Do you know anything about your biological parents? Even rumours?” Day seven, while we were studying, voice perfectly casual, eyes on his textbook.

I write them all down. Every question Cole Ravencrest has asked me since he sat across from me in the library with coffee and a story about his sister. There are eleven questions. They span two weeks. Individually, each one is the kind of thing a new friend might ask a girl who arrived at a supernatural academy with no history and unusual power. The kind of thing someone might ask out of genuine curiosity and growing affection.

Together, in sequence, on a napkin in my handwriting, they form something else entirely.

A profile. A data collection. The exact questions you would need answered if you were building a file on someone you'd been asked to monitor.

I fold the napkin and put it in my pocket and pick up my coffee cup and drink from it and do not let my face change.

Maya arrives at seven forty-three, which is early for Maya, who treats mornings as a personal insult. She's breathless and slightly wild-eyed and carrying a page that she should not have, given that it is visibly torn from a book with RESTRICTED COLLECTION stamped in red across the top margin.

She sits down across from me and flattens the page on the table between our breakfast trays.

"Don't ask how I got it," she says.

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." She taps the page. "Look at this."

The page is from something called “Remnant Bloodlines of the Founding Supernatural Families”, and it's open to a section on coven identification marks. The illustration in the centre of the page shows a seal—circular, intricate, with a specific pattern of interlocking symbols that form a crescent moon over a stylized flame.

I have seen this seal before.

I have been wearing it against my chest for eighteen years.

My hand moves to the locket before I've decided to reach for it. I pull it out on its chain and hold it next to the page and we both stare at the comparison in silence.

The seal on the page is the Blackthorne family crest. The image embossed into my locket is identical down to the smallest detail.

"It's not a coincidence," Maya says, unnecessarily, because we are both staring directly at the proof of that. "The locket isn't just jewelry, Arwen. It's a coven identifier. Someone put a Blackthorne family seal around your neck when you were a baby and left you on werewolf territory."

"Margaret said the 'A' stood for my name."

"It might. But the crest doesn't stand for a name. It stands for a bloodline." She turns the page over. "There's more. The book has a full genealogy section. I only got one page before the librarian came back, but Arwen—the Blackthorne line didn't just have witch abilities. They were dual heritage. The coven founders were wolf-blooded on the maternal side going back to the third generation. Which means—"

"Which means I'm not a failed wolf," I say slowly. "I'm not a wolf at all."

"Or you're both. Which would explain—"

"Everything." The word comes out flat and enormous. "It would explain everything."

I look down at the locket in my palm. Eighteen years. I've had it for eighteen years and it has never opened. There is no visible clasp, no hinge I can find with my thumbnail, no mechanism I've ever been able to locate. Margaret told me once it was probably decorative, welded shut, that the 'A' was just engraving.

I don't know why I am trying now. Maybe it's the seal on the page beside it, the recognition in my blood of something clicking into alignment. Maybe it's the list of Cole's questions folded in my pocket like evidence. Maybe it's just that I'm so tired of not knowing that my body decides before my mind does.

I press my thumb to the crescent moon in the centre of the crest.

The locket opens.

Not with any mechanical resistance or clicking of a latch. It simply opens, as if it was waiting for the right pressure applied with the right intention. The two halves fall apart on the chain and inside, folded so small it should not be possible, is a piece of paper so thin it's nearly translucent.

I unfold it with hands that are not quite steady.

The letter is handwritten. Small, precise, urgent script cramped into every available centimetre of the paper. The ink is a colour that is not quite brown and not quite red, and after a moment of staring at it I understand with a slow cold certainty what the writer used to write it.

Blood. This letter was written in blood.

The writing is in a dialect I don't recognize, not a language I've encountered, not anything from the supernatural theory textbooks or the academy's standard curriculum. The characters look partially familiar, like a language I should know but have forgotten, the way a melody feels familiar before you can name the song.

Maya leans in. Her expression shifts from eager to careful.

"That's Old Coven dialect," she says quietly. "Pre-modern. My grandmother's texts had a few passages." She studies the page. "I can get partial translation. Not all of it, I'd need a proper reference but some."

She works through it slowly, mouthing words, cross-referencing with her memory. I watch her face for information while she works.

"She wasn't abandoned," Maya says finally, and her voice has gone careful in the specific way of someone delivering news they know matters. "Whoever wrote this is saying the child was placed. Hidden. The word they use is... it's closer to sheltered. Like placing something precious out of a storm." She keeps reading. "Someone with significant power. They used their last... resources, maybe? Last strength? To arrange the placement. To arrange protection."

"Why?" I ask. "Why would someone hide a baby in a werewolf pack?"

"Because nobody would look for a Blackthorne there." Maya's eyes are still moving over the text. "The letter says… I think it says… that what the child carries must not be found by the ones who took everything. And it says she will know when it's time. She will feel it." She looks up. "Arwen. This letter was written for you. To you."

My throat is very tight.

"The signature," I say. "At the bottom."

Maya looks. She goes quiet.

"It's burned," she says. "The bottom portion of the letter has been destroyed. Deliberately. You can see the scorch pattern is too precise to be accidental. But the first letter of the name is still there."

She turns the letter so I can see it.

A single letter. Elegant, clear, unmistakable. S.

"S," I say.

"S," Maya confirms.

My mind runs through every S it has. Surnames, first names, the faces of everyone who has intersected with my life. None of them settle. All of them hover, unresolved, needing something.

The chair behind me scrapes against the cafeteria floor.

I turn.

Draven Hunter is standing three feet away. He arrived silently with his alpha movement, predator quiet and he is looking at the letter in my hands with an expression I have never seen on his face before.

Not anger. Not the cold calculation he uses like armour. Not even the complicated something that flickers in his eyes when he forgets to be guarded around me.

This is recognition. Absolute, devastating, involuntary recognition.

His face has gone the colour of old stone.

He knows this handwriting.

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