Chapter 2 Selene's POV

"Bloodline?"

"Unknown."

"Step to the mark, Miss Voss."

The silver circle at the centre of the stage was maybe three metres away. I walked to it like it wasn't the longest walk of my life.

Two hundred students watched me cross that distance. I felt every single one of them.

What I had watched for the past forty minutes was Boy, front row, Tier One lanyard. Stepped onto the mark, shook out his hands like he was warming up for something casual, and grew claws that could have opened a car door.

He held them up, smiled and walked off to the kind of applause that said of course, obviously, we expected nothing less.

Girl after him. Eyes went amber, then gold, then something that wasn't a colour that belonged in a human face. She blinked it on and off like a light switch, people cheered.

The third student smiled wide and let his teeth do the rest.

On and on eleven students, eleven demonstrations of something that lived inside them like a second heartbeat easy, natural, as automatic as breathing.

I stood on the mark and tried to find mine but nothing was answered.

Not a flicker, not a tremor in my fingers. Not even the vague, reaching feeling that I was close to something and just needed a moment.

My hands were my hands, my eyes were my eyes. Whatever lived inside the rest of them wasn't in me. Or if it was, it had never once bothered to show up.

"Miss Voss." Professor Crane again, clipped and professional. "Initiate the partial shift."

"I'm working on it."

"You've had sufficient time."

"I know how much time I've had."

That got a reaction not from Crane but from the seats. A low sound, half laugh, half something meaner.

I heard it ripple backward through the rows and felt it settle somewhere between my shoulder blades like a blade that hadn't quite broken skin yet.

‘Just wait,’’ That sound said. ‘We're getting there.’

I breathed in, breathed out, stared at my hands and hated them.

Nothing.

One of the panel instructors, grey-haired, hadn't smiled once leaned sideways toward Crane. He dropped his voice not enough.

"Who cleared a human for intake?"

The word hit the room before Crane could do anything about it.

The low sound in the crowd sharpened into actual laughter. Not everyone. Maybe a third of the room but a third of two hundred people is still enough to make you feel very, very small on a stage with a spotlight on you and nowhere to go.

"She can't even try," Someone said. Not quietly.

"Did they let her in by mistake?"

"Someone check if she's lost, the human school is across town."

I kept my eyes on the panel. I had decided somewhere between waking up to whispers under my floorboards and walking into this room that I would not look at the floor.

That I would not give a single person here the image of me staring at my shoes while they took me apart.

It was harder than I thought it would be.

"That's enough," Crane said to the room, in a tone that suggested she didn't actually care whether it was enough or not.

She stamped her clipboard and didn't look at me when she spoke. "Bottom Tier you may step down."

So I did.

The seating rows ran along both sides of the exit path. I had to walk the full length of them to reach the door, which I understood now was probably intentional. Let them see you leave, let it be a whole thing.

I kept my chin level,  kept my hands loose. I watched the exit door and walked toward it and told myself I was almost there, almost there, nearly done with this particular humiliation, just a few more steps.

The boy in the front row dropped like something had cut his strings.

He was there and then he was on the floor, and the crack of his knees on the stone made the girl beside him scream.

Then his hands started shifting. It was not a demonstration his fingers bent at angles that made me feel sick and claws tore through and snapped back and tore through again, his whole body convulsing with something that was clearly winning the fight against him.

A sound came out of his throat that wasn't human and wasn't quite wolf and was somehow worse than either.

The room came apart.

Students shoved back from the front rows. Chairs shrieked against stone. Three instructors cleared the panel table in seconds.

Someone was shouting for a medic and someone else was shouting something in a language I didn't recognise and the boy on the floor was shaking and staring.

At me.

His eyes had gone fully gold and inside that gold was something raw and animal and terrified, and it was pointed directly at my face.

An instructor grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise. "Back away. Now."

"I'm not doing anything-"

"Move."

I moved.

The crowd had split into clusters, people crowded around the boy, people filming, people talking in fast urgent voices with their hands on each other's arms. The noise was everywhere.

But one person wasn't moving.

He stood at the top of the tiered seating with his arms crossed and his eyes on me, and the stillness of him was so complete that I noticed it the way you notice something that shouldn't be quiet when everything around it is loud.

Kael Ashbourne.

I knew the name because this was Ironveil and some names you learned within the first day whether you tried to or not.

Tier One. Alpha bloodline, old money, the kind of old that people at this school treated like a religion.

He was tall enough to be visible above the people around him and he carried himself like someone who had never once had to wonder where he stood in a room.

I held his gaze for exactly two seconds. Then I turned and walked out.

The feeling started around three in the afternoon. That specific, crawling certainty that the space behind you is not empty.

I tested it twice, stopped suddenly to check my shoe, paused to look at a notice board and both times caught the half-second delay. Footsteps that stopped a beat late. A shadow that dissolved before I could land on it.

By the third time, I was done being subtle about it.

I cut down the narrow lane behind the east building, moved fast until the path curved, then stepped into the gap between two stone walls and waited with my back flat against the cold and my heart going harder than I wanted it to.

The cemetery at the back of campus was the kind of place that made you feel like you'd arrived somewhere you weren't supposed to be.

Iron fence, ivy eating the gate, graves so old the stone had gone dark with moisture and time. I'd noticed it my first night and filed it under not my problem.

Gravel shifted close.

I stepped out. "Stop following me."

Kael Ashbourne stopped walking. He looked at me without any surprise, which meant he'd known exactly where I'd gone, which made it worse somehow.

"You doubled back along the wall," he said.

His voice was even low, the kind that didn't need volume to fill space. "Most people don't think to do that."

"Most people aren't being followed."

He didn't apologize, didn't explain his eyes moved to something behind me deliberately, like a direction and something about the way he did it made me turn before I'd decided to.

The grave was close to the fence, dark stone, the lettering worn but readable.

I walked toward it the way you walk toward something your body understands before your brain catches up.

I read the name then I read it again.

‘Voss.’

My surname was carved into a grave in a cemetery behind a school I'd never heard of three weeks ago, at the end of a scholarship I never applied for.

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