MOONBURN

FIRST SIGHT

AYLA'S POV

Ashwood University did not look like a place with secrets.

It looked like a postcard — old brick buildings draped in ivy just starting to think about turning red, a quad full of move-in chaos, someone's speaker blasting a song three summers out of date, a fountain in the center of campus with a bronze wolf mid-howl at its heart, water arcing silver from its open jaws. Priya had insisted we take a picture in front of it before we'd even found our dorm, both of us sweating under the weight of too many boxes, laughing at nothing in that specific overstimulated way you laugh when a new life is about to start and you haven't decided yet if you're terrified or thrilled.

"Okay, wolf mascot is actually kind of a lot," Priya said, squinting up at the statue. "Like, we get it, Ashwood. You're fierce."

"It's a hockey school. It's basically required."

"Still. Intense energy for a Tuesday."

I laughed, but something about the statue's face, carved mid-snarl, eyes hollowed out in bronze made the base of my neck prickle the same way it had the night of my birthday. I told myself it was nothing. I'd been telling myself that for six weeks, ever since the necklace had gone quiet again and my father's strange warnings had started to feel less like prophecy and more like the ordinary anxiety of a man watching his only daughter leave home.

We found our building — Kessler Hall, fourth floor, a room with two too-small beds and a window that looked out over the east side of campus, where the manicured lawns gave way, almost abruptly, to real woods. Dense, dark, old-looking trees that didn't match the polished brochure aesthetic of everything else.

"Weird," Priya said, following my gaze. "You'd think a school this fancy would clear-cut that and put in, like, a lazy river."

"Maybe it's protected land."

"Maybe it's haunted." She grinned, already unpacking, already halfway into a story about her roommate horror-story research. I stood at the window a moment longer than I meant to, looking at the tree line, and had the strangest, most specific sensation that something in those woods was looking back.

---

The dining hall that first night was its own kind of chaos, trays clattering, upperclassmen performing casual indifference to the freshmen flooding in around them, someone's parents crying near the salad bar. Priya dragged me toward a table of people she'd apparently already befriended in a group chat, and I let myself be dragged, half-listening, half still thinking about the tree line.

That was when I felt it.

Not saw. Felt — a pull, low in my chest, sudden and total, like gravity had briefly reoriented itself around one specific point across the room. I turned before I'd consciously decided to.

He was standing near the far doors with two other guys, tall enough to be visible over most of the crowd, dark hair, broad shoulders in a plain gray t-shirt that somehow looked more deliberate than anything anyone else in the room was wearing. He wasn't doing anything remarkable. He wasn't performing for the room the way half the returning students seemed to be. He was just standing there, half-listening to whoever was talking beside him, scanning the crowd with the kind of unhurried attention that suggested he was used to being looked at and had long since stopped needing to look back.

Then he did look back. Directly at me. Across a room of at least two hundred people, in the space of maybe half a second, his eyes found mine and did not move away.

The necklace went hot against my throat — not painfully, not yet, but insistent, a coal someone had just breathed on.

I don't know how long we stood like that. Long enough that Priya elbowed me and said something I didn't hear. Long enough that his friend — shorter, lighter hair, grinning like he'd just found something very funny — followed his gaze and then looked between the two of us with an expression I couldn't read from that distance but that looked, unmistakably, like surprise.

Then the tall one blinked, and something in his face went carefully, deliberately blank, and he looked away first — not slowly, not casually, but like a man forcing himself to do something his body did not want to do.

"Ayla?" Priya was staring at me. "Hello? Earth to Ayla."

"Sorry. What?"

"I said, do you want to sit here or okay, you're being so weird right now, what's wrong with you?"

"Nothing." I made myself look back down at my tray, heart going harder than it had any right to over eye contact with a stranger across a dining hall. "Just tired. Long day."

Priya, mercifully, let it go, already pivoting back to her group chat friends. But I felt it the entire meal a low hum under my skin, a warmth at my throat that hadn't fully faded, the specific and unshakeable sense of being watched by someone who was very deliberately not looking at me anymore.

---

I saw him again three days later, and this time there was no room to hide behind, no crowd to lose myself in.

I'd taken the long way back from my first Comp Lit seminar, cutting along the path that ran near the edge of the woods because Priya had a lab and I didn't feel like sitting alone in our room yet, and I nearly walked straight into him coming the other direction, gym bag slung over one shoulder, hair damp like he'd just come from practice.

We both stopped. Up close, he was worse — better — I didn't have the right word for it. Up close I could see that his eyes weren't quite brown, weren't quite gold, some color in between that seemed to shift depending on how the light hit them, and that he was looking at me now with an intensity that made every instinct I had want to either run or step closer, and I genuinely couldn't tell which impulse was winning.

"Sorry," I said, stepping back first, because someone had to. "Wasn't watching where I was going."

"Neither was I." His voice was low, controlled, careful in a way that made me think he was working hard to keep it that way. "Ayla, right?"

I went very still. "How do you know my name?"

Something flickered across his face — the same careful blankness from the dining hall, quickly reassembled. "Small campus," he said, which wasn't really an answer, and we both seemed to know it. "I'm Thalric."

"I know." Priya's voice in my head, breathless over hockey highlights. *Every girl on campus has a theory about why he never smiles.* He wasn't smiling now either. He was looking at me like I was a puzzle he'd been assigned and hadn't decided yet whether he wanted to solve.

"You should stay away from the woods after dark," he said abruptly, nodding past me toward the tree line. "Just campus safety thing. Wildlife."

"I wasn't planning on hiking through there at midnight."

"I know. I just…" He stopped himself, jaw tightening, like he'd been about to say something he had no intention of saying. "Never mind. Sorry. It's none of my business."

"You're being kind of weird."

"I've been told." A ghost of something crossed his mouth not quite a smile, but close enough that I felt it land somewhere under my ribs. Then his gaze dropped, just briefly, to the pendant at my throat, and whatever softness had been building in his expression sharpened into something else entirely. Something that looked, for one unguarded second, almost like fear.

"That necklace," he said. "Where did you get it?"

The warmth at my throat flared sharp enough this time that I actually flinched, my hand flying up to press against it before I could stop myself. When I looked up, Thalric's eyes had gone wide, and for just a moment, in the dappled afternoon light under the trees, I could have sworn they weren't brown at all.

They were gold.

"I have to go," he said, too fast, already stepping backward, already looking like a man retreating from something he badly wanted to stay for. "It was nice to meet you, Ayla."

He was gone before I could ask him how, exactly, meeting a stranger for exactly ninety seconds counted as nice, and why my necklace had reacted to a boy I'd never met before in my life like it recognized him.

I stood alone on the path a long time after he'd disappeared into the trees, one hand still pressed to the pendant, cooling now, ordinary now, and thought about my father's voice through a closed door.

Be careful who you trust up there.

I had a terrible, certain feeling that I already knew exactly who he'd meant.