Blood moon academy

WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

*Arwen's POV*

The door to my room is unlocked.

I know I locked it. I remember the specific click of the mechanism, the way the handle resisted slightly before catching. I locked it because Elena showed me the trick of it on my first night — push up while you turn, otherwise it doesn't catch properly. I pushed up. I turned. It caught.

It's unlocked now.

Draven puts his arm out before I can reach for the handle. Not touching me. Just a barrier, solid and certain, that says *wait* without needing words. He tilts his head and I watch him listen to something I can't hear yet.

"Elena's inside," he says quietly. "No one else."

"You can hear her?"

"Heartbeat." He drops his arm. "It's elevated. She's frightened."

He opens the door.

Elena is sitting on her bed with her knees pulled to her chest and her face doing something complicated. She looks up when we enter and the relief that crosses her expression is immediate and genuine and laced with something else underneath. Something that looks like guilt.

"You're okay," she breathes.

"What happened?" I ask.

"She was in here." Elena's voice is steady but her hands aren't. They're pressed flat against her knees like she's trying to keep them still through force of will. "Ashcroft. I came back from the library and the door was open and she was standing at your desk, and when she saw me she just smiled and said she was doing a routine check of student accommodations." Elena's jaw tightens. "There's no such thing as a routine accommodation check."

"What was she doing at the desk?"

"I don't know. She was just standing there. But Arwen—" Elena hesitates. Looks at Draven. Something passes between them that I can't read, and it's fast enough that I almost miss it. "Your locket. Is it still in your bag?"

My hand goes to my jacket pocket instinctively, where I've been carrying it since I left home. The familiar weight is there. I pull it out and hold it up, the tarnished silver 'A' catching the lamplight.

The temperature in the room drops two degrees.

Draven is staring at the locket.

"Where did you get that," he says. It isn't a question. His voice has gone to that particular flat quiet that I'm learning means something has shaken him down to the foundation and he's building the walls back up in real time.

"I've had it my whole life. Margaret said it was found with me as a baby."

"That crest." He takes one step forward, then stops himself. "The engraving on the back. Turn it over."

I turn it over. On the back, so worn I've never paid it much attention, is a small engraving I always assumed was decorative. A crescent moon over a five-pointed star, with a single line through the centre.

"That's not a decorative pattern," Draven says. "That's a seal. A Blackthorne Coven seal, specifically the one used by the inner circle." He looks up from the locket to my face. "The woman who wore that locket last was not an ordinary member of that bloodline."

"Who was she?"

"Someone important enough that people have been looking for proof of her legacy for eighteen years." His jaw tightens. "Someone important enough that Ashcroft came to this academy the moment you arrived."

The silence in the room is the kind that has weight.

I close my fingers around the locket. "She didn't take it."

"She didn't need to." Draven moves to my desk. He doesn't touch anything, just examines the surface and the space around it with the focused attention of someone who knows what they're looking for. Then he crouches and looks at the underside of the desk drawer and his expression goes very still. "She left something instead."

He pulls a small object from beneath the drawer. It's barely bigger than a thumbnail, dark, organic-looking, like compressed ash pressed into a disc. He holds it up between two fingers and doesn't let it touch his palm.

"Tracking seal," he says. "Witch-made. Old design." He looks at Elena. "Did she touch anything else?"

"I don't know. I came in and she left."

Draven carries the disc to the window, opens it, and drops it into the courtyard below without ceremony. Then he turns back to the room and something in his posture changes. Not softer. More contained, like he's made a decision and now the decision is running the show.

"You can't stay in this room tonight," he says.

"I'm not sleeping in your room," I say immediately.

Something flickers across his face. Not offence. Almost amusement, except it doesn't quite make it all the way. "I have a guest suite in the Alpha quarters. Warded. Ashcroft's seals won't penetrate it."

"And I'm supposed to trust that?"

"You're supposed to assess your options and make a rational choice." He meets my eyes. "Option one, you stay here in a room Ashcroft has already accessed and knows the layout of, with no wards and no protection. Option two, you come to a warded space and dislike being near me, which you've managed perfectly well for two days already."

I hate that it's logical.

Maya's voice comes from the doorway. "For what it's worth," she says, and I didn't hear her arrive, "the Alpha suite wards are legitimate. They're etched into the stonework. Older than the current building." She looks at Draven with the flat assessment she apparently gives everyone. "I'm coming too."

"You're not—"

"I'm her friend." Maya walks into the room and picks up Arwen's bag from the floor and hands it to her, like the conversation is over. "That means where she goes during an active threat, I go. Unless your wards only work for people you personally approve of, in which case they're not very good wards."

Draven looks at Maya for a long moment.

"Fine," he says.

Elena stands up from the bed. "I want to come."

Something about the way she says it makes me look at her carefully. Her heartbeat, even I can almost feel it — too fast, too unsteady for someone just frightened about an intruder. She's been strange since I showed her the anonymous text. Strange in that almost-imperceptible way that keeps almost resolving into something I can name and then doesn't.

"Elena." I say it gently. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just don't want to be alone here."

I believe the last part. It's the first part I'm not sure about.

"She comes," I say to Draven.

He doesn't argue.

We move through the corridor in a strange formation — Draven ahead, Marcus appearing from nowhere to fall in beside him, Maya next to me, Elena just behind. The academy at night is a different building than the academy in daylight. The stone breathes differently. The lights in the hallway are lower, and the shadows they leave are the kind that could contain anything.

We're halfway to the Alpha quarters when Elena stops walking.

"I remember something," she says. Her voice is strange. Layered, almost. Like two people speaking slightly out of sync. "About the night before Arwen arrived."

Nobody moves.

"I had a dream." Her eyes are unfocused. Looking at something the rest of us can't see. "Someone was speaking to me. I couldn't see their face but they told me to watch her. They told me to report what I saw." She blinks. Hard. Comes back to herself. "I didn't know I was doing it. I swear I didn't know."

The corridor is very quiet.

Draven turns around slowly. He looks at Elena, then at me, then back at Elena with the focused attention of someone recalculating everything they thought they knew about the board.

"Who were you reporting to?" he asks.

Elena opens her mouth.

The lights go out.

Every single one. Simultaneously. Not a flicker or a surge. Just — gone. Darkness, complete and absolute, and in the darkness something moves that has no heartbeat, no scent, no signature that any supernatural sense can track.

And Elena screams.