Chapter Text
I was born into a legend I never asked for.
They like to whisper it in the corridors when they think I can’t hear: most powerful vampire of a generation. Power like a storm. Blood-born of some old line that sounds impressive carved into a stone plaque but feels like a chain when laid around your neck.
The plaques are everywhere at Night Side Academy. Our founders carved their promises into the basalt arches: Duty. Discipline. Dominion. The motto glowers down at us from every doorway like the unblinking eye of a god who wants your homework on time and your soul before graduation. Gargoyles squat on the parapets. The towers are ribbed like the bones of a cathedral. The halls smell like ink and leather, steel and cold ash. And underneath all that, always, the constant wind.
My wind.
It drags under doors and shakes panes and rattles threads in tapestries when I’m thinking too hard. I don’t plan it. It leaks out of me like a draft through old stone—irritated when I’m forced to sit, when I’m forced to memorize, when I’m forced.
“Victor,” Instructor Corvin says, chalk ticking against the board, “would you like to demonstrate the proper center of gravity for a silent landing, or would you prefer to keep rearranging my notes with your… enthusiasm?”
The chalk marks smear left, then right, then scatter entirely as the breeze snatches them. Half the class pretends not to look at me. The other half stares with that mix of fear and fascination I’ve learned to recognize as an effective prophylactic against friendship.
I blink at Corvin with my most innocent expression and reel the air back into my lungs. The gust dies. The chalk dust falls.
“Happy?” I ask.
Corvin’s smile has too many teeth. “Ecstatic. Up front, Victor. If you can do this without dramatics, it might inspire the others.”
The mat at the front smells like gum resin and old sweat. I toe the scuffed edge, then let my heel hover over the abyss of nothing and simply step off. The room breathes in with me—floor, walls, classmates—and I exhale. Gravity loosens its fist. I drop like a feather shed by a bird that changed its mind. A brush of boot to mat. Not a sound.
Corvin’s mouth twitches. “Adequate. Again.”
Adequate. Like the letters my parents send: Your assessments are adequate; your control remains adequate-to-strong given your scores. Adequate is the color of stale milk. Adequate is the way a stranger pats you on the shoulder and then checks their watch.
I do it again because it keeps the attention focused on performance and away from the way my mind itches to be anywhere but here. The mat sighs. I smile sugar-sweet and insincere, then step off the edge a third time, land on the balls of my feet without so much as a whisper.
Corvin claps, once. “All right, all right. Save the perfection for your evaluations.” He gestures to the rest of the class. “Pair up. Silent ascents, five sets, hover hold for six breaths at the ceiling if you can manage.”
I don’t pair up. Nobody expects me to and no one volunteers. The last time I tried, a boy named Tarin spent three days in the infirmary with a shoulder that kept reluxating because my wind pushed the joint wrong. He wouldn’t meet my eyes after he was discharged. People talk about power like it’s a throne and forget it’s also a blade pointing at everyone who stands too close.
I run the drills alone, hovers at the rafters, breath steady and useless in my chest. I could stay here all day. All week. My body doesn’t ask for sleep anymore unless I let it. They teach us to manage the nights inside our bones. They tell us we were chosen by darkness so we could choose it back. Most nights I choose it too hard. It’s easy not to close your eyes when the day, and the people in it, feel like a thing that will vanish if you stop looking.
“Victor,” Corvin says at the end, when the class has filed out in clumps, whispers trailing behind them like the ends of bandages. “A word.”
“Can it be a short word?” I ask, shouldering my bag. “Two letters. Or one. I like one.”
“It can be a warning.” He leans his hip against the desk, folds his arms. His hair is the color of iron filings and his eyes are the color of iron, period. “You’re slipping your focus in foundational courses and over-relying on raw talent in advanced applications. That only works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, people get hurt.”
“Tarin’s shoulder,” I say. “I apologized.”
“It’s not about apologizing.” Corvin taps the ledger. “It’s about understanding that your power belongs to more than your moods. You are not a storm.”
“Funny.” I glance at the windows where rain has been flirting all morning with the glass. “I feel like one.”
“Storms pass,” he says softly. “You live with yourself. Both are work.”
There are three answers inside me. One is a joke. One is a spark of anger. One is a truth I don’t know how to say without sounding like I’m asking for something I don’t believe I deserve. I pick the joke and let it come out shaped like a yawn.
“Is this the part where you another one of my fathers?” I ask. “Because my first two are alive and unavailable.”
He stares long enough that I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Then he sighs, something weary and almost—almost—fond. “It’s the part where I tell you that the forest is off-limits after twilight without a sigil and escort.”
“The In Between’s always off-limits,” I say. “That’s the point of it. A border’s not a border if there aren’t fifty signs and a myth or two.”
“Exactly.” His gaze sharpens. “So keep out of it.”
I want to tell him I don’t go there. I want to tell him the wind goes where it likes. Instead I shrug, the shrug that has gotten me through assessments and interviews and one disastrous family dinner. “Sure.”
“Sure,” he repeats, like it tastes of resignation on his tongue. “Go to the quartermaster and adjust your ration. You’re pale.”
“We’re all pale.”
“You’re paler,” he says, and his mouth twitches the way it does when he wants me to know he’s human somewhere under the slate and rules. “And stop sending your evaluation forms back with poetry scribbled in the margins.”
“They’re improved by it,” I say, heading for the door.
“Your handwriting is terrible.”
“Artistic.”
“Illegible.”
“Subjective,” I sing-song, and slip into the corridor before he can threaten me with penmanship remedial.
The halls of Night Side tangle like veins. I know them without thinking: the staircase that drops you a floor when you climb too fast, the broken gargoyle whose head turns to follow you if you hum under your breath, the atrium that smells like rosemary and rust because they once grew gardens there before a fire licked the ceiling black. It’s always twilight inside. The stained glass eats most of the sun and feeds it back to us in bruised colors.
My dorm is a wedge of stone halfway up Keep Three. The tower stairs curl like a rib cage. My door opens into books stacked on books, a trunk that’s been kicked too many times, a desk under a window that refuses to close fully no matter how I coax it. The breeze worries the curtain. On the desk: today’s letter, the envelope thick and white with the family crest like a bite mark on the flap.
I shouldn’t open it. I do anyway. I always do. A compulsion is either a habit with a good story or a wound you keep touching. The seal breaks under my thumbs. There’s no hello. There’s a table of my latest marks, neat as stitches. A note about my “role within the cohort.” A suggestion I request private sessions with the Director of Applied Aeromancy. A list of upcoming galas where I’m expected to appear between training blocks to show the donor class that Night Side still produces a spectacle worth paying for.
At the bottom, in my father’s precise hand: We trust you will maintain standards.
At the very bottom, in another ink, a different bow of letters: Remember to hydrate, darling. My mother. The only person who knows how to slip care past the sentry.
I fold the letter back into itself, then fold it again until the paper is the size of a tooth. I don’t throw it away. I never throw them away. It feels too much like throwing away the little evidence I have that I originate from somewhere besides the wind.
The quartermaster’s office is a closet built into a corridor that used to be a servants’ passage before Night Side realized we were our own servants now. Shelves groan with glass vials and ration cards. The quartermaster herself is older than the school if you believe the rumors; her hair is shell-white and her eyes are the flat gray of old coins.
“Back again,” she says when I slide my card across the counter.
“Don’t say it like I’m a stray,” I tell her.
“You bring a stray’s weather.” Her fingers, thin as willow twigs, count the vials with ceremonial slowness. “You could stand to drink properly. It makes the impulses easier to manage.”
“You sound like Corvin.” I lean my elbows on the scarred counter and drop my voice. “Is it true he used to be Bright Side before he defected?”
She gives me a look that would ruin a lesser vampire’s appetite for gossip. “It’s true he used to have a face that didn’t always look as if someone polished it with regret. Here.”
She slides a wooden box forward: ten vials, dark as garnets. The seal on each glows faintly with a sigil that states source, temperature, consent. Night Side is strict about the rituals around blood. Some rules I believe in.
“You’re pale,” she says, same as Corvin. “Are you sleeping?”
“When I choose.”
“And do you choose?”
I let the silence answer for me. She writes something on my card—a notation I won’t read, so as not to prove that I care—and passes it back. The box is heavier than it looks. I crack one vial and drink it right there under her eye because part of rebellion is letting people think you’re rebellious for their benefit. It tastes like copper and clove, a human who liked their tea dark, who laughed with their whole throat, who signed the consent with a flourish and a little smudge of ink at the top of the curve.
“Better?” she asks.
“Better,” I lie, because the hunger is not just bodily, and because it’s easier than saying: some of us drink and drink and still feel empty, and the emptiness hums like power.
I don’t go to my next class. I tell myself I’ll make it up at midnight with self-study and I won’t, and we all play our roles. Instead I climb. The east tower climbs above even the gargoyles. From its narrow balcony, Night Side sprawls: wings and keeps and quads, iron-limbed shadows of bridges stretched between towers, lamps like watchful eyes along the walkways. Beyond the eastern wall, where the shadow of the school lengthens like a hand, the ground shrugs into the forest.
The In Between looks like someone dropped a green sea and forgot to collect it. In daylight—this thin, bruised version of it that Night Side allows—you can trace the first line of trees. At night, the forest eats sky and horizon and makes them the same black. Between its trunks, there are paths. Between the paths, there are stories. There’s the one about a student who walked until she turned to mist and became the fog that coats the ground every autumn. The one about a boy who tried to bring a match to the heart of the woods and came back with his tongue charred black. The one about the two academies agreeing once a long time ago that the forest could stand between them like a neutral judge—a place that belongs to neither night nor bright.
If you climb higher, and if the clouds are kind, you can see the glint that is Bright Side Academy on the far ridge: stone the color of bread crusts, roofs that catch sunlight and throw it back like laughter. I’ve seen it once. The day I arrived, I didn’t sleep and the sky was clear. I stood on this exact balcony and watched the far buildings turn gold and thought, inexplicably, of warmth I don’t remember ever having.
A bell tolls—one, two, three, the hour marking the end of daylight instruction. Dusk floods in, soft as a cat. Lamps along the walkways wake. Somewhere below, a cohort laughs too loudly on purpose, to prove that we can. The wind skates along the balcony and under my collar. I step onto the rail before I can talk myself out of it.
Flight is like a second confession. The first is that you needed to escape. The second is that you loved it. I push into the drop because the drop pushes back. The wind unfurls from me and around me and through me, buoying my ribs, catching behind my knees, tugging at my boots like impatient hands. Night Side falls away until it’s a geometry problem solved at the bottom of a page. The trees reach up in a thousand dark fingers and I skim them, let leaves slap my palms, let branches whisper things in a language I might have been born to forget.
I could fly for hours. I could fly until the lamps below snuff out one by one, until the moon pulls itself up by its elbows. If I don’t sleep, time becomes elastic. But I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t land, I’ll keep not landing. There’s danger in discovering how easily you can avoid touching the ground.
I circle once, twice, then bank toward the training green and land behind the equipment shed where the security wards are laziest. My boots kiss grass. The wind settles around my ankles like a cat that forgives me everything because I am its entire world.
“Out late again?” a voice says, and for the nearest sliver of a second my heart thinks it’s my father, and then the rest of me says no, too young, too amused.
It’s Elias, two years older than me and built like the academy sculpted him for an admissions pamphlet: clean angles, high cheekbones, a mouth that always looks like it’s been laughing at something you weren’t invited to understand. He’s wearing the uniform like a suggestion—collar turned up, sleeves shoved to elbows, a signet ring that flashes when he gestures toward the guards’ patrol route as if he drew it.
“Curfew’s not for another hour,” I say.
“Curfew’s a myth they invented so we’d feel like we were getting away with something,” he says, stepping into the open. “You coming to House Aeon tonight?”
I roll my eyes. House parties at Night Side are a ritual of defiance. We defy by loudly drinking things we’re allowed to drink and telling stories we’ve memorized and dancing like the floor can be bullied into loving us. I used to go. There’s a thrill in watching other people be reckless, and sometimes there are warm bodies whose mouths taste like cloves and daring. But the last time I went, Elias’s best friend asked me if the rumors were true about my aeromancy, I said yes, and then he asked if I could make his ex’s hat blow into the moat mid-argument, and I did, and somehow I was the one who got reported.
“Pass,” I say.
“Corvin got to you?” Elias grins. “He collects strays.”
“You’re all very confident about who counts as stray.”
“Aren’t we all? We’re a school full of animals pretending to be jokes.” He tips his chin toward the forest like it’s an audience. “You ever go in?”
“No,” I lie.
“Liar,” he says pleasantly. “Come drink with us. It’ll keep you out of trouble.”
“I make my own,” I say, and he laughs, and for a heartbeat it feels like we could be friends if I were a different person and he were a different version of himself. Then someone calls his name—Elias! We found the sugar dust!—and he throws me a salute and is gone.
I don’t drink with them. The vials in my pocket are weight enough. I head for the library because even my rebellion is studious: if I’m going to skip class, I’ll do it somewhere that smells like vellum and sovereign disapproval. The stacks are a warren. If you know how to follow the cool draft, you can find the oldest corners. I know. I always follow wind.
Tonight the drafts pull me to a shelf I’ve never noticed despite a year of sneaking: Speculative Histories: The First Age. Most of the volumes are locked with a simple charm. The kind of simple that requires permission. The kind of permission I never ask for.
I set my palm to a spine. The lock’s sigil tickles. My wind thins to a thread and kisses it, a whisper of pressure in a keyhole. The charm sighs open. I slip a book free and carry it to a table tucked under a lamia window that shows a moon like a slice of an argument.
The speculative histories are full of the usual: myths about a time before division, songs that claim night and light were married and then divorced, arguments about who started counting first and whether counting things is a form of violence. I turn pages because my hands need something to do besides shake. The words are a rhythm. I ride them. There’s a line drawing of a clan crest I don’t recognize, two halves spiraled over one another like the inside of a shell. There’s a mention, brief and breathless, of the melded—a people with heat in their hands and wind in their bones, the way weather has both. It reads like metaphor, the kind you memorize for a test and forget.
But the word knots something low in my gut. Melded. A verb turned into a noun. A body turned into a story.
I put the book back because the back of my neck suddenly feels watched. The library is empty, but empty is a shape that can fit a thousand things. Wind crawls the steps. The lamia window warps the moon until it looks like an eye in the wrong mirror. It’s past curfew. The best way to make trouble not find you is to go make a different trouble somewhere else.
Outside, the quad is stitched with lamplight. The path to Keep Three is as obvious as a confession. I don’t take it. I cut behind the kitchens where the air smells like salt and burnt sugar, and I hop the low wall like the land beyond belongs to me by default. The eastern gate is warded and watched; the southern sluice under the aqueduct is warded and ignored. I slide through the gap, boots scuffing algae, shoulder catching on stone, then I’m outside Night Side in the kept-dark, mouth full of air that doesn’t belong to the school, which is to say it feels like thieving.
The forest waits.
Everyone calls it The In Between like it’s a place that happens to be between two other places, but that’s like calling weather the stuff that occurs when sky gets bored. It has its own rules. It hums. Leaves whisper in accents that don’t belong here. There are flowers that only open their throats to moths. There are places where the ground underneath is water pretending to be patient. I step past the first three trees like I’m stepping past any three trees in any wind. I tell myself I’m not going far. This is a lie I am excellent at believing until I can’t.
There are path markers if you know them: a black knot in a maple means come back the way you came; a ring of mushrooms means count to fifty and then start over; a snag with two branches like a forked tongue means keep secrets. I keep secrets so well I sometimes misplace them from myself. I keep going.
Something is pulling me. Or maybe I am pushing. My wind runs ahead like a hound. Around a bend, the undergrowth thins to reveal a seam in the ground, a dark slit behind a curtain of creepers. If you didn’t know what to listen for, you’d miss it. But I do. The air whispers of cool stone, old damp, something metallic and sugar-faint like a memory of blood or the ghost of paint.
I don’t have a light. I don’t need one. My eyes do fine with the kind of darkness that carries its own map. I shoulder the vines aside. The gap widens into a mouth big enough to swallow me. For someone else, for a storybook boy, this is the part where you turn back. I step into the throat.
The cave should be cold. It is. The cold has teeth and a patience that makes it into a kind of presence. It licks the sweat out of my hair. My breath ghosts. I lift my hand and press wind into my palm until it bunches there, a damp-weave pressure, a pet I can peel off and throw. It clings to the walls and reveals them the way breath reveals glass.
There are carvings.
I tell myself they’re nothing. I tell myself students come out here with knives and boredom and turn rock into diaries. But these aren’t lines you scratch when you’re bored. They’re grooves worn by hands that repeated this shape until the shape became a prayer. Spirals hook into spirals. Lines kiss and separate. Figures—two—face each other. One flame-limned, hair like a corona. One haloed not by light but by the suggestion of night: the negative of stars. Between their hands, a twist of something that could be a braid or a current.
A word, not in any alphabet I know, but in a rhythm I do: meld.
My throat goes tight. Ridiculous. It’s a cave. It’s rock. It’s probably a cautionary tale someone built so a teacher could bring us here and say, see what happens when people invent unity and then ask us to clap for nuance. But the air is paying attention to me in a way air rarely bothers to. It runs fingers behind my ears. It sniffs at my mouth. I put my palm flat to the wall because I am a creature who wants proof, and the stone under my hand is old and indifferent and trembling.
Not the stone. Me. My hand shakes. I swallow and taste copper that isn’t blood.
Behind me, in the forest, something flickers. A lick of light too warm and quick to be a will-o’-wisp. The wind in the cave shifts and points, as if wind were a hand and the cave were a map and I am a piece being moved. I shouldn’t look. I should stay and pretend I saw nothing and go back and pretend I came nowhere and count my breaths and land on my mat in the morning with the look on my face I know how to wear: adequate.
I turn toward the light.
The creepers at the cave mouth are colored suddenly the way leaves are on the far side of a sunset. Fire. Not wildfire—the forest would be screaming—just a small, precise flowering of flame, as if someone opened their hand and found a star sitting in it.
My first thought is not danger. My first thought is not Daywalker.
My first thought is beautiful.
My second thought is idiot, because the forest absorbs beauty and returns it sharpened to points. I snuff the wind in my palm until it’s a soft pressure I can hide. I step backward into the cloak of the cave’s dark and let invisibility wash up the skin of my arms and over my shoulders like someone laying a blanket over a sleeping body. The world dims an increment deeper, the way sound does when snow is falling. I know how to be unseen; it was one of the first things they taught me, because some power deserves secrecy before it deserves applause.
Outside, the flame shifts. A shape with it. A person. I don’t breathe.
And then—because the forest has a humor like a blade—someone on the far path laughs. Not the flame-holder. The laugh is all wrong for this place: too bright, too careless, a flung coin of sound. It ricochets through the trees and spooks the birds. The flame winks out and is replaced by the silvery ghost-light of a lantern being shuttered. Footsteps. Voices. The bright-laugh boy’s voice says something like —told you it was just a rumor and the flame-holder’s voice answers, calm and level, rumors are how rulebreakers explain themselves to themselves.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. The cave and I are the same patient animal. The voices drift. The lantern’s silver thins to thread and then to nothing. The forest takes a long, satisfied breath.
I step out of invisibility like a diver breaking the surface. My skin prickles as if every mote of air wants to notice me, specifically, intimately. My heart does something complicated in my chest. I’m cold. I’m burning.
I look back at the carvings once. The two figures on the wall seem closer than they were, their hands almost touching. It’s a trick of light. It’s wishful thinking. It’s how stories begin to lie to you until you start lying back.
Outside, beyond the first trees, Night Side throws its fretwork of lamps into the low sky and pretends that this is enough to say where we end and the rest of the world begins. The wind brushes my cheek in a gesture that feels embarrassingly like a friend trying to pull me home by the sleeve.
“All right,” I tell it. “All right.”
I leave the cave. I mark the path back with the kind of attention you reserve for someone’s mouth. I slide under the aqueduct and back inside Night Side before the patrol shifts, and I climb the tower stairs two at a time because everything in me that is not wind wants to move.
In my room, I lock the door. I drink another vial. It tastes like cinnamon this time, and it does nothing for the thirst that gnaws behind my ribs. I sit at the desk and pull out a sheet of paper and write: meld, then scratch it out, then write wind, then scratch that out too because it looks like I’m composing a middle-school poem, and I’m ridiculous, and my hands won’t stop shaking.
I don’t choose sleep. I sit with the window cracked and let the night draft over my wrists and imagine a flame cupped in a stranger’s hand, bright enough to warm a cave mouth, precise enough to obey. I imagine a lantern being shuttered by someone with a voice like pulled silk. I imagine a laugh, and the way it didn’t belong here, and the way it did. I imagine the two figures on the wall with their hands almost, almost, almost.
By dawn, the campus bells will pull us into line again, and I will step onto my mat and make silence with my landing and Corvin will say adequate and I’ll say something cheap and clever because it keeps the ache from blooming into a field I can’t cross.
But right now, at the uncounted hour between curfew and courage, I press my thumb into the soft edge of the desk until the wood remembers me. I open the window that last inch it’s always refused me. I let the wind out for a run.
And somewhere, beyond a sea of trees that has learned to swallow names, a flame opens its eyes to the dark and smiles back.