Monstrous Mate: The Cursed Bloodline

The first thing they teach you at Alliance is how to breathe wrong. The gates opened and the wind came down off the Monts d'Or like it had teeth. It wasn't Paris wind. Paris wind has perfume in it. This one smelled like wet concrete and rust and someone's old ashtray left out in the rain. My lungs took it in and coughed. I stood there with my suitcase that had one broken wheel and my grandmother's coat that was too big for me, and I watched the campus. It wasn't a castle. The brochures lie. Brochures always do. They show you stone arches and ivy. Alliance Elite Academy is a brutalist block sunk into the hill, built inside a sanatorium that closed in '73. Long corridors of poured concrete, small windows that don't open, lights that buzz too loud. They painted over the word INFIRMERIE but you can still see the ghost of the letters if it rains. A girl in front of me cried. Her parents were hugging her. They smelled human. She smelled human. Fear sweat, cheap shampoo, hope. I did not cry. Mémé told me never to cry where they can smell it. "Name," said the man at the desk. He didn't look up. He had a stamp. "Elise Moreau. Second year transfer. Scholarship. Archives." Now he looked up. His eyes were yellow for half a second. Then brown again. Wolf. "Moreau," he repeated. He typed. He frowned. "There is no Moreau in second year." "There is now." He stared at my file. My file was thin. Intentionally thin. Mémé paid a woman in Marseille to thin it. No mother listed. No father listed. Grandmother: legal guardian. Address: 9 Rue des Pêcheurs. Blood type: O. Which was a lie. He stamped me. The sound was loud. "Block C. Room 7. Curfew at 22:00. No perfume. No menstrual products in the shared bins. Use the black bags. Orientation is mandatory. If you bleed, report to Madame Chevalier." If you bleed, report. I took my key. It was cold. My room was not a room. It was a cell with two beds. One bed had already been claimed. A girl with white hair sat cross-legged on it, sharpening a nail file against the concrete wall. She was not human. I knew before I smelled her. Her stillness was wrong. "You're the archive girl," she said without looking. "You're the roommate." "I am Anaïs. Owl. I work nights too. Don't touch my food. Don't bring boys here. I will scream, but not because I am scared." "Noted." She finally looked at me. Her eyes were huge, lidless for a second too long. She inhaled. "You don't smell like a scholarship girl." "How does a scholarship girl smell?" "Like soap that tries too hard." She smiled, showing small teeth. "You smell like nothing. That's worse." I put my suitcase down. The radiator was leaking brown water. The window showed the woods. The woods were too close. At Alliance, the forest is not scenery. It's a wall. I had come here for two reasons. The official reason was money. Scholarship students at Alliance get their tuition wiped and a stipend. The real reason was on a piece of paper folded in my coat pocket. A photo. My mother at 21, standing in front of this exact building when it still said HÔPITAL on the side. She is smiling. Behind her, a man with his arm around her waist has been scratched out with a knife. On the back, in her handwriting: They file everything. Even the things they bury. - S. S for Sophie Moreau. Missing since 2006. Declared dead in 2012. No body. Mémé told me, "Humans who go to Alliance never come back human." She said it while frying sardines and not looking at me. Mémé says the truest things when she is not looking at you. I unpacked. Three sweaters. Two pairs of jeans. One dress I never wear. My grandmother's rosary made of black beads and a little bottle of Florida Water that she told me to pour in corners. At 18:30 I went to find the library. Alliance doesn't teach. That is the first secret you learn when you actually get inside. There are classes listed — Economics of Packs, History of Flight, Blood Law — but no one goes. What they do is contain. They keep two hundred rich shifter kids who cannot control their second form away from the public until their hormones settle and their families buy them a company. The games they post on i********:? The tournaments in the snow? Those are punishments. I learned that in week one last year, watching a boy from Lille who couldn't pay his fees get put in the center of the courtyard while the dragons threw snowballs full of rocks at him until his bear came out and broke his own jaw. I found the library stairs going down, not up. Of course. The air changed. Bleach. Old paper. Wet stone again. The basement was colder than outside. Fluorescent lights clicked. Rows of steel shelves, no books. Files. Thousands of files in grey boxes, tied with string. And a desk. And a man sitting at the desk who was not supposed to be there. He was not sitting like a student sits. He was sitting like he owned the chair, the desk, the building, the air that was trying to be cold. Black sweater. Dark hair that needed a cut. A scar through his left eyebrow that made him look like he was always questioning you. He had a file open. My file. Gabriel Laurent. I knew his face from the alumni magazine Mémé kept to line her drawers. Laurent Banque Privée. The family that funds half the concrete in this place. The unofficial alpha. Final year. Dragon shifter. The one everyone whispers about because he never shifts. He looked up. His eyes were grey. Not yellow. Not animal. Worse. Human grey that had decided to be cruel. He didn't seem surprised to see me. "You're late," he said. His voice was low. He spoke French the way rich French men do, like every word costs money. "Archivists are supposed to be on time. It's in the contract." "I was not told there was a contract." "There is always a contract." He closed my file. Slowly. "Elise Moreau. Twenty-two. Marseille. Grandmother a seamstress. Mother deceased. O negative. Which is interesting, because O negative doesn't smell like that." My spine did something I hated. It straightened. Every muscle in my back locked. "And how do I smell?" I asked. He stood. He was taller than I thought. He walked around the desk. He didn't walk close enough to touch. He walked close enough that I could smell him. He smelled like clean skin, expensive soap that doesn't try too hard, and something burnt underneath. Like a match blown out too late. He leaned down. Not to my neck. To my hair. Like he was bored. Then he said it. "You smell like a grave." For a second, there was no sound except the lights buzzing. I should have flinched. Scholarship girls flinch. I didn't. I had spent twenty-two years learning how to not flinch when men try to make me feel small with poetry. Mémé taught me: when they give you a line, give them a worse one. "Funny," I said, dry. "You smell like an ashtray that thinks it's a church." His mouth twitched. Not a smile. A warning. "You're supposed to file," he said, stepping back. "Not talk." "You're supposed to have a dragon. Where is he?" That landed. I saw it land. The grey in his eyes went flat and dead. The polite mask slipped half an inch and underneath there was something that had been starving for a long time. The lights flickered. Not the fluorescents. Something in the air. "Careful," he said, very softly. "You have been here five hours and you already want to be punished." "I have been here five hours and you are already in my office. Who should be punished?" He looked at me for a long time. I let him. I have learned that men who are used to girls looking away get confused when you look directly at them. It makes them think you know something. He picked up my file and dropped it in the trash can. It didn't hit the bottom. It hovered, then fell. "You will organize the west wing. Alphabetically. By bloodline. Do not open the red boxes. Do not go into Room 9. If Madame Chevalier asks what you were doing down here with me, you tell her I was lost." "I thought you owned the building." "I do." He was already walking to the stairs. "That's why I can get lost in it." He left. The door at the top of the stairs closed with a concrete thud that vibrated through my teeth. I breathed. My hands were shaking. I shoved them in my coat pockets so the cameras, if there were cameras, wouldn't see. On the desk, his coffee was still warm. He had left a ring on a file labeled MOREAU, S — 2004-2006 — RESTRICTED. The red kind of restricted. The kind you are not supposed to open. My mother's file. It was not supposed to be here. It was supposed to be deep. Buried. The archivist before me must have pulled it. Or Gabriel had. My heart made a stupid, loud noise against my ribs. I reached for it. From the top of the stairs, his voice came down, like he knew exactly what I was doing without looking. "Elise. If you open it, I will have to keep you." The door didn't open. He hadn't moved. He was still on the other side of it. I pulled my hand back. The file stayed there, breathing. Down here, the winter never ended.