Chapter 2 - Caelum

The moon was heavy tonight, pregnant with tension, not light. I felt it in my bones long before the wards flared.

We’d been circling the southern edge of the Obscura Arcanum campus, the section closest to the city border. Technically off-limits to students after midnight, but patrols like this weren’t just about rules. They were about instinct, tradition… and the things that lurked beyond our gates.

I padded across the moss-soft ground in my wolf form, every muscle coiled and alert. Around me, the others fanned out in formation. Lottie and Tamsyn flanked the tree line, playful despite the hour. Dominic Voss was all bared teeth and quiet growls, as usual, never content unless he was prepared for war. Mykala Davis, ever the drill sergeant, kept a brutal pace.

Shara Baudoin moved beside her, calm and steady. Even in her wolf form, there was something unmistakably grounded about her, controlled, deliberate, like her instincts had been trained to heal before harm. Where the rest of us radiated tension, she moved like a still pulse beneath the chaos.

Professor Fae brought up the rear, his mind always two steps ahead. He’d been quiet all night, which meant he was thinking. Strategizing. The way he did before drills or when something felt… off.

And something did feel off.

The air shifted. Just a whisper, at first. But I caught it. A thread of scent that didn’t belong, foreign magic laced with fire and ash. Older than the forest. Older than the school.

I froze.

Dominic snarled low in response, but I didn’t move.

There, again. Stronger now. It wasn’t coming from inside the wards, but from outside. Something had passed through the veil. Something that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“Did you feel that?” I asked through our mental link, voice rough in their minds.

“I felt it,” Shara confirmed. “The southern ward line just pulsed.”

“Pulsed?” Mykala echoed, not hiding the edge in her tone. “They don’t pulse. They activate. Trip. Burn.”

“Unless they haven’t been touched in a century,” Fae added coolly. “Then they pulse. Like a heartbeat restarting.”

That snapped the group into focus.

“What the hell could trigger a dormant ward?” Tamsyn asked. “Nothing’s breached that sector. ”

Then it hit us all at once.

The ward screamed. Not out loud, but in every fiber of our senses. A magical shockwave rippled through the ground, humming like the low snarl of a giant beast stirring from a long sleep. Every hair on my body stood on end.

“Eyes up,” I growled, already breaking into a sprint.

The trees thinned as we approached the southern boundary, normally dead magic. Unkept. Forgotten. But now?

Now it was… awake.

The old Aurelian gate, untouched for decades, shimmered with low pulses of light, violet and gold threading through the stone like veins. The ground around it vibrated faintly beneath my paws. The air itself felt altered, sharper at the edges, like we’d just stepped into a space that was no longer ours.

None of this should be possible. Nothing had crossed that threshold in a millennium. Nothing had activated it in longer than that. The last time Aurelian magic responded to anything was before I was born, hell, before any of us were born. Before records went digital. Before dragons disappeared from the world.

But tonight, something had crossed through. Something that didn’t trip the wards, it woke them. And I didn’t like that.

“Report,” Mykala barked over the link, voice clipped.

“No visible breach,” Fae answered. “But the magic’s active.”

“Something crossed over,” I said. “I felt it. Not a trip, it was pulled. Like a key in the right lock.”

Shara made a soft sound of agreement. “And whatever it was… It’s still here. Somewhere inside.”

Dominic growled. “We’re not leaving this unchecked.”

Damn right we aren’t.

I narrowed my eyes on the flickering glow of the gate and the long path beyond, still empty but thrumming with magic that didn’t belong.

Something was here. And until I knew what it was, this was no longer just patrol.

We ran as a unit, shadows cutting through the trees, paws barely disturbing the underbrush. The pulse of the wards still echoed through the earth beneath us, steady now, but present, like the heartbeat of something ancient refusing to quiet.

We’d never seen the southern perimeter respond like that. None of us had. And yet the old sigils on the Aurelian gate had lit up like bonfire embers. That wasn’t just a random disturbance.

Something had entered. Something powerful enough to wake the dead.

Dominic was the first to shift back, fur rippling as his body reformed into his usual fully dressed, broad-shouldered human self. “That wasn’t residual magic,” he growled, voice rough. “That was a response. Triggered. Direct.”

Mykala stopped just ahead and shifted next, her transition faster, cleaner. “Agreed. And it wasn’t ours.”

“You’re both assuming it was sentient,” I said, slowing only slightly as I moved to their side. I hadn’t shifted yet, didn’t want to give up the sensory edge until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. “Could’ve been a buried surge. A spell artifact reacting to a full moon cycle or a fault line spike.”

“No fault line burns a damn Aurelian seal back into the ground,” Dominic snapped. “I know what I felt.”

Shara arrived next, still in wolf form, but her voice carried through the link clear as glass. The wards bent around something. Not broken. Not disrupted. Bent.

Fae, silent up to now, emerged from the shadows beside us, brushing debris off his long coat. “Dominic’s right. And you’re all missing the obvious.”

We turned toward him.

“It’s not just a flare,” he said, eyes narrowed as he glanced back toward the ward line. “It’s specific. That gate didn’t light up randomly. It responded to blood.”

Tamsyn snorted as she arrived, already mid-shift. “That’s cute and spooky, Professor Fae, but let’s be real. Even if it was blood-triggered, the Dragons are gone. Wiped out. Ashes.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” I cut in, voice sharp. “You’re all jumping to conclusions. There are no dragons. There haven’t been dragons for over a thousand years. They’re extinct. This school hasn’t seen dragon magic since Seraphine Aurelien died.”

“Then explain that flare,” Dominic challenged.

“I can’t,” I admitted. “Not yet. But I’m not going to toss centuries of verified history out the window because the wards glitched for the first time in our lifetime.”

Fae cocked his head. “And what happens when you’re wrong?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I didn’t like not having an answer. But I knew what it felt like when something threatened our territory. This… this wasn’t that. It didn’t feel like an attack.

It felt like a summoning.

“We’ll find the source,” I said finally, letting the edge settle in my tone. “And until then, we treat it as an anomaly. We don’t panic. We track it.”

Mykala nodded once. “Agreed.”

Tamsyn looked unconvinced but fell into step as we moved.

The light from the gate had started to fade, but the path it had burned into the grass remained, faint, winding, like an invitation carved in moonlight. We didn’t follow it yet. But we would. Because something, or someone, had crossed into our world tonight. And I was going to find out who, even if it meant proving myself wrong.

We broke through the treeline seconds later, paws silent against the grass, eyes on the southern trail where the flare had hit. The glow was gone, but the air still buzzed—static under the skin of the world.

Then I saw him: Calvin Arx, headmaster, all sharp lines and vampire patience. Silver hair, long coat, a glide that made everyone else look clumsy. Of course he wasn’t alone.

Someone smaller kept to his shoulder. Human—no, not quite.

A girl. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Death grip on a bag. Curls frizzed at the edges like she’d been running through wind that didn’t want to let her go. Diner uniform. White sneakers. Apron twisted at her hip. A ladder up one stocking exposing a scrape at the knee. She looked like the city had chewed her and then thought about taking another bite.

Her scent hit a beat later—hot ash and something bright, like sun on stone after rain. Not ours. Not any House I knew. It slid under my tongue and everything inside me went very, very still.

Another stray witch, I told myself. It happens. Some of them don’t even know what they are until the wards nudge them in. Arx would handle it. He’d offer Everley. Paperwork. Orientation. Easy.

Except my wolf didn’t step back. It leaned in.

I didn’t love how close Arx stood to her. I didn’t love the way the night took her scent and tried to hide it from me. I told myself I was assessing threat, because that’s the job. But the truth was simpler and dumber: I could not stop looking at her mouth, the stubborn set of it, like she’d learned the hard way that if you don’t hold your ground, someone else will take it.

I should’ve turned away. I didn’t.

“She doesn’t belong to any of the Houses. Could be Everley-bound. Maybe a hedge witch. Magic clinging to her is unstable.” I concluded.

“I don’t know,” Professor Shara murmured. “There’s something off about it.”

“She smells… hot,” Tamsyn said, nose wrinkling. “Like sun-warmed ash. Not just magic. Something else.”

“Outsider magic,” Professor Dominic grunted. “Shouldn’t be on this side of the wards.”

We were circling slowly now, giving Arx his space but watching, always watching when it happened.

Aurelian House responded.

The ground shook.

A low, thunderous crack splintered through the earth, and in the distance, at the farthest edge of the southern lawn, the sealed black doors of Aurelian House lit up like someone had struck a match across stone. Ancient sigils burst to life in brilliant gold, arcing across the outer walls like veins made of starlight.

The wards roared.

I flinched, skidding to a stop.

We all did because we’d never seen Aurelian House respond to anything. Not in our time. Not in our parents’ time or many generations back. The girl didn’t even seem to notice the flare. But the wards didn’t flare because of us. Or Arx. They flared for her.

My hackles rose, and I growled low.

That wasn’t witch magic. That wasn’t hedge-born instability. That was something else. Something older. Something dangerous.

And suddenly… the way the ground had pulsed, the way the gate had bent, the way every ancient seal in that crumbling House had just lit up like it had been sleeping and heard its name,

It wasn’t a mistake. It was a call. And someone had just answered it.

She stumbled back, eyes blown wide, breath hitching like it hurt. Her bag slipped; she caught it at the last second with white-knuckle fingers. The sound from the House rolled through the air, deep enough to rattle bone. Sigils raced across the wall in gold fire, and her face cracked open—fear, disbelief, a “you have got to be kidding me” layered under both.

She turned in a slow circle, scanning for exits that didn’t exist. For one stupid second, I pictured stepping in, catching her wrist, telling her to breathe, that she wasn’t crazy, that the ground really did just move. I pictured shrugging out of my jacket and putting it around her shoulders because she looked cold in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.

I should’ve been relieved. She clearly didn’t belong here. She wasn’t steering any of this. But my wolf didn’t settle. It growled at the chaos, at the wrongness, at the idea she might vanish back into the dark before we knew what she was—or before someone else decided for her.

She looked small. Mortal. Breakable in all the ways I hate. And yet the earth opened for her. Magic reached first.

Something in my chest twisted hard enough to annoy me. An old, stupid word tried to form—mine—and I shoved it down fast.

Not yet. Not here. Not until I knew what the hell she was.

A warm presence brushed against my flank.

Briar.

Her wolf body leaned into mine, tail swaying just enough to be noticed. Reassurance on the surface. Possession underneath.

“She’s not our problem,” Briar said through the link, voice cool and clipped. “Let the staff handle it. You’ve got nothing to prove here.”

Wrong. I had everything to prove. To my father. To the pack. To myself. Because this girl, whoever the hell she was, was a problem. One, I didn’t trust anyone else to solve it right. But before I could decide anything, Dominic’s voice cut through the link, deep and final.

“Students, return to Hawthorne House. Now.”

Orders. Absolute.

I huffed once and pulled away from Briar, ignoring the slight tension that passed through her body. I turned, paws hitting the ground hard, and led the retreat back toward the tree line. But I didn’t forget the way the girl had looked. I didn’t forget the scent of fire and fear on her skin. And I sure as hell didn’t forget the way the ancient, dead heart of Aurelian House had come roaring back to life, for her.

No matter what anyone said… This was just the beginning.