Blood moon academy

BLOOD LETTERS

Arwen's POV

Draven doesn't move.

That's the thing I noticed first. He is completely, unnaturally still in a way that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with a person whose body has stopped receiving instructions from their brain because the brain is somewhere else entirely. His eyes are fixed on the letter in my hands and he is not here in this cafeteria at all. He was somewhere seven years ago.

"Draven," Marcus says from behind him.

No response.

Maya looks at me. I look at the letter. I look at Draven.

"You know this handwriting," I say.

It's not a question. The evidence of it is in every rigid line of his body, in the particular quality of his stillness, in the way his jaw has tightened to the point where I can see the muscle working.

He doesn't answer for long enough that Marcus puts a hand on his shoulder and something in Draven comes back online. He blinks once. His eyes focus. The armour slams back into place with an almost audible sound, but it's too late. I saw what was underneath it and so did Maya and there is no version of the next sixty seconds where he can pretend he didn't react that way.

"Where did you get that?" he says. His voice is very controlled.

"The locket opened," I tell him. "It was inside."

"The locket." He looks at the silver casing still hanging on its chain from my fingers. Something moves across his expression. "You've had that your whole life?"

"Since I was found as a baby. Why? Why do you recognize the writing?"

Draven sits down. Not because he wants to, from the look of it, it was more because his legs have made a unilateral decision about the situation. He pulls out the chair across from me and sits in it and stares at the letter from the new angle, and I watch him breathe deliberately for three seconds in the specific way of someone managing an internal crisis with the efficiency of long practice.

"Read it again," he says. "The translation. All of it."

Maya reads what she has. Every word. Draven listens without interrupting, without expression, his eyes on the letter the whole time. When she finishes, the table is quiet.

"The name at the bottom," Draven says. "Burned away."

"Almost. The first letter is S."

He closes his eyes for exactly two seconds. When he opens them he is looking at the letter again and there is something in his expression that I have no adequate word for—grief, maybe, but grief mixed with something more violent, and underneath both of those something that looks, impossibly, like hope, and underneath even that something much darker.

"It's her handwriting," he says.

The cafeteria keeps existing around us. Trays clatter. Students talk. The normal world continues operating in complete ignorance of the fact that Draven Hunter just said something that has shifted the entire structure of everything.

"Whose handwriting?" I ask, even though something in my blood already knows. Something in the locket's recognition of my thumb, something in the way the letter was written to me, something in the S at the bottom of the page that is not just a letter but the beginning of an answer I've been afraid to find.

"My mother's," Draven says.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I have ever heard.

Maya's hand finds my arm under the table. I don't look at her. I can't look away from Draven, from the catastrophic control with which he is sitting across from me and saying words that dismantle seven years of his certainty in real time.

"Your mother," I say carefully. "Selene."

"Selene Hunter." He says it like he's testing the weight of the name. "Selene, who murdered my father when I was twelve and disappeared. Selene, who I have spent seven years being certain was a monster with no remaining human motivations." He pauses. "Who apparently spent at least some of the time before she disappeared writing blood letters and hiding children in werewolf packs."

"She hid *me*," I say. And then the shape of it arrives fully, like stepping back from a painting that was too close to see: "She's the S. She's who placed me with Margaret. She's…"

"The last act of protection the letter describes," Draven says. "Yes."

"Which means your mother knew my mother."

"Or is your mother." He says it quietly. Without drama. Just the word lying on the table between us like a blade set down carefully so nobody gets cut accidentally. "The handwriting, the seal, the blood letter written to a child she hid—Arwen. I don't know exactly what Selene is to you. But she is something. She is not a stranger."

I look at the letter. The delicate, blood-written lines that I can't read but that feel, now that I know whose hand formed them, like something I should have recognized from the first moment. The way a voice sounds familiar before you understand why.

"Why would she hide me from you?" I ask. "If she knew your family, if she had any connection to your father or your pack, why would she bring me to you and then—"

"She didn't bring you to me. She brought you here six years after she left." He shakes his head. "She didn't know I'd be here. Or she did and she planned it that way. Or this is a coincidence on a scale that doesn't exist." The last option dies in his voice as he says it. "I don't believe in coincidences this large."

Maya has been very quiet. Now she says, carefully: "There's a portion of the letter I haven't translated yet. The middle section… the dialect shifts into something older. I need a reference text." She looks at both of us. "I know where one is. The restricted section, lower shelf, third room. I can get it today."

"Do it," Draven says, before I can speak. His authority is so automatic that Maya nods and is pushing back her chair before she seems to register who gave the instruction. Then she pauses and looks at me.

"Do it," I say. Because it's my letter but he is right.

Maya leaves. Marcus, who has been standing guard at the edge of this conversation with the expression of a man watching a controlled detonation, makes eye contact with Draven and receives some invisible instruction and follows her, leaving Draven and me alone at the table in the middle of a full cafeteria that has no idea.

"You've been tormenting me," I say. "Since the day I arrived. Because I look like her."

"Yes."

"And now you know she hid me. She wrote me a letter. She used the last of something — power, strength, resources, the letter isn't clear — to make sure I was safe." I keep my voice level. "She wasn't running when she left you. Or she was, but not from you."

"I don't know that yet."

"You're starting to believe it."

He looks at me across the table and for once he doesn't reach for the ice or the distance or the careful management of what shows on his face. He just looks at me and he is nineteen years old and his mother wrote a blood letter to a girl who has her face and nothing about his world makes sense anymore.

"The name at the bottom," I say quietly. "S. Could be Selene. Could be someone else. We don't know yet."

"No," he agrees.

"But you recognized the handwriting the moment you saw it."

"I've had seven years to memorize the last things she wrote before she left." He looks down at his hands on the table. "I know her handwriting the way I know my own."

I want to say something about what that costs him. About carrying seven years of certainty built on incomplete information, about what it means to have the foundation of that certainty begin to c***k. I know something about foundations cracking. I've been watching mine give way since my eighteenth birthday.

Instead I pick up the letter and fold it carefully, with the same care the original writer used to put it in a locket eighteen years ago, and I close my fingers around it.

"When Maya gets the reference text," I say, "we translate the rest. Together."

Draven looks at my closed hand around the letter. Then at my face. Something settles in his expression — not peace, not resolution. Something more like the particular relief of a decision made.

"Together," he says.

My phone buzzes. A message from an unknown number, the same one that warned me about Ashcroft in my room. Three words only.

Don't trust the translation.