Georgia
The trees watched me arrive.
That’s the only way I can describe it once I’m actually driving under them, my GPS having long since given up trying to reroute me back to a real highway. I keep thinking about the letter, how vague it was, how it never actually explained what Rosethorne was, only that I’d been chosen. Mollie’s voice echoes in my head from three days ago, dismissive and clipped: *"It’s a scam, Georgia. Predators target girls like you."* Girls like me. Girls with talent and no say in how it gets used. I try to hold onto that anger, use it as ballast, because the alternative is admitting I have no idea what I’m driving into.
The road narrows the deeper I go, and the forest closes in on both sides, branches meeting overhead in a canopy so thick and so old that the morning light barely makes it through in anything but broken pieces. These aren’t ordinary trees. They’re the kind that were already ancient when the rest of the country was still arguing about what to call itself.
I grip the wheel a little tighter and keep driving, my pulse finally slowing for the first time since I left the house. Three days of lying to Mollie, three days of planning this escape, and I’m finally here.
When the trees finally break, the town of Rosethorn appears all at once, like it’s been waiting behind a curtain. It’s colonial-perfect. Too perfect. White clapboard houses with black shutters, a church steeple exactly where a postcard would put one, brick sidewalks swept clean of a single fallen leaf despite being surrounded by forest on every side. It doesn’t look like a town that’s survived two hundred years of weather and neglect and progress. It looks preserved, as if something is holding entropy at bay, one polished storefront at a time.
The school gates rise up at the edge of town, stone pillars taller than my car, flanked on either side by the same crest from the wax seal. Two wolves. A pine tree between them. Carved into the stone arch above the gate, in letters worn smooth by weather but still perfectly legible, is a single line.
*Strength in Shadow.*
I sit there for a second with my foot on the brake, staring up at it, before I finally pull through.
Inside the gates, the campus opens up like something out of a dream I didn’t know I was having. Cobblestone paths wind between buildings built from dark stone, ivy climbing the walls in patterns too deliberate to be accidental. Students move between buildings in small clusters, and even from a distance there’s something fluid about the way they walk, unhurried and certain, like the ground belongs to them.
At the far end of campus, past the main hall, I catch sight of a building with twin spires rising off either side of its roofline, curved and pointed like something reaching upward. It takes me a second to place why it looks familiar before I realize what it has to be. The rink. Even from here it looks less like an ice arena and more like a mouth, twin spires arcing up like fangs against the sky.
Behind everything, past the last row of buildings, the forest begins again, waiting.
I park, grab my bag, and start toward the building marked Admissions in gold lettering above the door. My eyes are still on the twin spires of the rink when my foot catches on an uneven cobblestone and the ground tilts hard beneath me.
I don’t fall.
A hand closes around my arm, not my waist, my arm, gripping just above the elbow with a precision that feels almost surgical, like whoever caught me measured the exact amount of force needed before they ever touched me. And it’s hot. Burning hot, like I’ve grabbed onto a stove instead of a person.
I look up.
The boy holding my arm is tall, dark haired, and utterly still, the way a held breath is still. His eyes are fixed on my face, but not in the way people usually look at each other. He’s assessing me, nostrils flaring slightly, pupils blown wide despite the daylight all around us. For one long second, something passes between us that I can’t name, something that raises every hair on my arms and settles low in my stomach at the same time.
Then his whole body goes rigid. Not from surprise. From something closer to recognition, the way a predator locks onto a scent it knows it will follow for the rest of its life.
I yank my arm free.
"I’m fine," I snap, the words coming out faster and sharper than I intend.
His jaw works like he’s fighting something down. "You shouldn’t be here," he grinds out, his voice rough, almost cracked, nothing like the smooth greeting I’d expect from someone who looks like he belongs on this campus the way the stone buildings do. Then he turns and walks away fast, hands visibly shaking at his sides.
I stand there for a second, arm still tingling where he touched me, and watch him go.
Puck
I make it exactly forty feet before Liam finds me.
I’m not walking anymore so much as standing frozen on the path behind the admissions building, both hands braced against the stone wall like it’s the only thing keeping me upright. Beneath my palms, the stone has gone warm, a faint mist rising off the surface where my skin meets it, like frost burning away under a flame it was never built to survive. My heart is doing something it’s never done before, pounding in a rhythm I don’t recognize, and underneath my skin I can feel my control fraying at the edges like a rope pulled too tight.
"You okay?" Liam asks, jogging up, his question dying the moment he sees my face. "Puck. You look like you saw a ghost."
"No," I mutter, flat and distant.
"No you’re not okay, or no you didn’t see a ghost?" he presses, alarm sharpening his voice.
I don’t answer right away. I can still smell her. Even from here, even through the stone wall between us, some part of my brain is tracking her like she’s the only scent in the entire world.
"Oh no." Liam’s voice drops low, urgent. "Oh no, no, no. Puck. Tell me you didn’t just."
"I did," I admit, hollow.
"She’s HUMAN," he hisses, disbelief cracking through the words.
"I know what she is," I growl, the words coming out lower than I mean them to, rougher, less like me and more like something underneath me finally surfacing. I can feel my eyes doing it before I see the gold reflected in the window glass beside us, my pupils blown, my control slipping in a way it hasn’t since I was twelve years old and still learning how to hold my shape.
Liam grabs my arm, the same way I grabbed hers, except his grip is meant to anchor, not to catch. "Not here. Not on campus. Not like this," he orders, low and urgent. "We need to talk to your father. Now."
I don’t argue. I let him pull me down the path, away from the admissions building, away from her, my whole body straining the entire time to turn back around.
Georgia
Through the admissions office window, I watch him walk away. Even from behind, there’s something fluid and controlled about the way he moves, like every step is deliberate, like his body could do a hundred different things at any given second and has simply chosen this one. The other boy jogs to keep pace beside him.
The hair on my arms lifts again, but it isn’t fear this time. It’s something closer to recognition, like some part of me already knows exactly what I just walked into, even if the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.
Somewhere deep in Rosethorn Forest, a wolf howls. Long, low, unmistakable. A second answers it a moment later, then a third, the sound rolling through the trees and settling somewhere in my chest.
The admissions officer glances up from her paperwork, smiling like nothing at all is happening, then returns to her work as if the forest hadn’t just spoken.
It didn’t sound like coyotes.
It sounded like a welcome. Or a warning.