Chapter2 Aurelis Academy? Last I heard, they don't take humans

Wren Hale's POV

I didn't want to go back to school because Bonnie and the others she'd gathered around her wouldn't leave me alone — they shoved me in the hallways, tripped me on the stairs, hid my books and my lunch, called me names loud enough for the whole room to hear.

I came home most days with my clothes dirty and my knees scraped, sometimes with bruises on my arms I couldn't explain. I washed up before Gran could see it and never told her a thing, because she had enough to worry about already.

So I told her the walk into town was too long, and that was the only reason I quit. We both knew I was lying, but she didn't push me on it.

I didn't answer. I kept pouring milk for the other guests. She followed me a couple of steps.

"I've been wanting to see you. But you always stay out here and never come into town. People are saying your family owes a lot of money. That your parents killed themselves because they couldn't pay it back. And now it's your grandmother's turn."

I looked down at the ground and still didn't say anything.

"Honestly," she said, and smiled a little, "back in school, you used to brag that your parents were mages. I knew you were lying even then. Why don't you argue with me now? Mages. Please. You're just a family of deadbeats who won't pay what they owe."

I knew she'd mock me. Mock my family. She'd been doing it since we were kids — my clothes, my lunch, my name called across the assembly hall — and she'd never once needed a reason.

There were plenty of things people could say about me, and I'd spent years learning to stand there and take every one of them. My parents and my grandmother were not in that category. That was too far, and she knew it, and she said their names anyway.

I set the milk jug down on the table, walked over, and hit her in the face. I'd held it in for years, and Gran was gone now, so there was nobody left I had to be careful for.

She didn't dodge the first one, and her nose started bleeding right away. But she was taller than me and a lot stronger. She grabbed my wrist and twisted it, and I slammed into the door frame, my head ringing, and I never got the second punch off.

Someone came in to break it up. I was held from behind, and my knee cracked against the leg of a chair.

By the time things came back into focus, I was sitting on the floor with a split lip, and Bonnie stood three steps away with a handkerchief pressed to her nose, her eyes red, still smiling.

"I hated that look on you in school. Turns out I hate it even more now."

I pushed off the floor and went for her again. Pastor Ellery caught me by the arm before I got two steps — Gran's oldest friend, the man who'd watched me grow up and just now preached her funeral — his grip firmer than I expected from a man his age.

"Not today," he said, low, close to my ear. "Don't turn Ruth's funeral into a brawl. She would be furious." Gran's name went through me like cold water down the back of my neck.

Pastor Ellery was right. I couldn't do this today, not on the one day that was supposed to be Gran's — this afternoon I had to hold it in.

I stood, wiped the blood off my mouth with my sleeve, and set the fallen chairs upright one by one. People gave me a wider berth than they had before. Slowly, the barn settled into something like a funeral again.

That was when the collector came in. He didn't knock. He walked past the folding chairs with mud still on his boots, stopped in the middle of the barn, and read the number off his folder loud enough to reach the back row.

"Hale. One million, two hundred and forty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-five credits. Principal, interest, the whole thing — your creditors sent me to collect, and I'd say take your time, but five p.m. today is five p.m. today. After that, there's a late fee."

Bonnie laughed until she couldn't breathe and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: "A mage's family, and owing over a million? Don't make me die laughing. A liar. You've been lying since we were kids."

I ignored Bonnie. Today was Ruth's funeral, and I didn't want to ruin it. This was the one thing I did not want to ruin. I steadied myself. "Can you come back tomorrow?"

"No."

"It's my grandmother's funeral."

"I know."

"You could give me one more day. That's all."

"I don't decide that. I get paid to collect, and I collect." He tucked the folder under his arm. "A debt doesn't sit still for a day because somebody died. That's not how it works, and you know it."

I looked at him, and my voice came out high and cracked, almost a shout. "One day. Give me one more day, that's all I'm asking. I swear it — you'll get your money, every credit. Just let me bury my grandmother first."

He didn't back down, and he didn't leave.

He only held the folder out in front of me and told me to look at the date on it myself. The barn went quiet. The neighbors watched me.

The only sound in there was Bonnie laughing.

The collector had stopped talking mid-sentence and was staring past me at the doors. Then the guests nearest the entrance shifted out of the way.

The light from the open doors went out, and somebody near the back turned to look. Then I heard it — the slow drag of boots on straw, the brush of heavy cloth.

Just when I opened my mouth to try the collector again, three people appeared in the doorway. Black cloaks, hoods pulled low, no insignia on any of them.

I had no idea when they'd arrived or how long they'd been standing there.

"Who are you? Were you friends of my grandmother?"

"We can pay off your debt today," the one in the middle said.

"What?" People didn't just walk into a stranger's barn and pay off a debt that size. Nobody did that. I didn't even know their names.

"On one condition. Don't worry, it's completely fair. You enroll at Aurelis Academy."

Before I could even process it, Bonnie jumped in. "Who are you? You look like organ traffickers. Aurelis Academy? Isn't that the number one magic academy in the world? Last I heard, they don't take humans."

The one in the middle smiled a little, not the least bit annoyed by her rudeness, and pushed her hood back, then shrugged the black cloak off her shoulders and folded it over her arm.

The whole barn went quiet. Everyone was staring at her face, and I was staring with them — I couldn't help it.

She was an elf — nobody could mistake those ears, long and tapered and set high against her hair, and half the old textbooks I'd grown up with had drawings of them on the cover.

It was her left arm she raised, bare now, turning it so the crest faced the barn. The Aurelis Academy mark. There was no faking that.

The one on the left did the same, and the cloak came off a man built like a door — wide through the shoulders, with hair showing at his collar and across the back of his hands, thick enough that it caught the lamplight. He looked a lot like the werewolves I'd seen in my old textbooks.

The one on the right kept her cloak on and only lowered her hood; she had glasses and a face that could have passed for human anywhere else, and I still knew, the same way I knew with the other two, that not one of the three of them was anything close to human.

The one on the left glanced at Bonnie with no patience left at all. "We've always taken humans. It's just that in the past decade we haven't had a human student worth admitting."

Bonnie frowned. "But she's just an ordinary farm girl. You must have the wrong person."

I didn't want to agree with Bonnie, but I nodded. "Did you get the wrong person?"