Blessing and Curse

Silas:

The Academy is never truly quiet. Not really.

Even now, with the wards down and the storm clawing at the towers, there are voices. Low, hissing things in the cracks between stone. Shadows that gossip like spiteful courtiers, eager to tell me what they see. They laugh about the banshees wailing through the quad, whisper about the creatures picking their teeth with the bones of first-years, hum hymns of doom that were old when the founders still breathed.

But tonight, they are louder. Too loud.

I find Isadora in the bottom of the scriptorium, standing near the window as though the storm might answer her instead of me. The candles have guttered to weak spines of flame, and the lightning outside paints her in white flashes—fragile one second, terrible the next. The kind of girl who could be mistaken for a saint in the chapel and a demoness in the crypt.

She doesn’t notice me slip in. She rarely does. The shadows carry me like a lover.

“Little dove,” I murmur, and she startles, spinning. Her eyes—too wide, too bright—fix on mine. I see the tremor in her hands. The way her lips part, trying to form a reply but catching on something in her throat.

I step closer. The shadows reach for her without my bidding, curling like smoke around her wrists. Protective. Possessive. Hungry.

“You’re shaking,” I say.

“I’m fine,” she whispers. But her voice cracks. She isn’t fine. She hasn’t been fine since the night Lucian pulled her dripping from prophecy’s jaws and Rhett shackled her to his wolf-bond. Since Kai discovered what she really was. Since the wards shattered.

No, she’s not fine.

“Liar.”

I close the distance until the storm’s chill from the window is swallowed by the chill of me. She doesn’t move. Her chin tilts upward, stubborn thing, daring me to name what she is, to pin the prophecy to her chest like a dagger.

The shadows scream around us. Not in warning, not in rage. In yearning. They want her. They want me to take her, to drown her in black and make her mine before fate can make her anyone else’s.

But I don’t.

Instead, I brush a strand of hair from her cheek, my fingers lingering too long against her skin. It burns. Not with heat—never with heat for me—but with the ache of wanting something I should not.

“Talk to me,” I murmur. My voice is softer now, though no less sharp. “Before the shadows tear it from you themselves.”

Her lips tremble. “They keep… whispering.”

“What do they say?”

“That I’ll ruin everything.” Her laugh is hollow, a ghost of sound. “That I’m the devourer. That I’m death itself, dressed up like a girl.”

I let the silence linger. She needs it. The storm fills the space with thunder, rattling the glass behind her.

Finally, I lean closer, until my breath ghosts her ear. “Death is not always destruction, dove. Sometimes, death is release. Sometimes, it’s mercy.”

Her body stiffens. I can feel her heart hammering, the pulse in her throat begging for teeth, for shadow, for something unholy.

“You don’t believe that,” she whispers.

“No.” I smile against her cheek, the shadows curling around us like a shroud. “I don’t. But I’d make you believe it if it kept you alive. I know you are strong, so incredibly strong, and fierce, and caring. But if we lost you, it would be as good as us all being dead.”

Her breath stutters, and for a heartbeat, I see it—the way she leans toward me, caught in the undertow of everything wrong about this moment. My hand slides down, catching her chin, tilting her face up. The candlelight flickers across her lips. Close. Too close.

The shadows chant in a tongue older than stone. Take her. Claim her. Bind her.

I nearly do. Gods, I nearly do.

But I stop. My mouth hovers a breath from hers, the silence between us louder than thunder.

“Careful, little dove,” I whisper. “If you beg shadows for comfort, they’ll never let you go.”

Her eyes flicker closed, just for an instant, and the ache that rips through me is vicious. When she opens them again, I step back. Only slightly. Just enough to remind us both that I could leave. That I won’t.

She sways, as though I’ve stolen her balance along with the kiss I didn’t take. “Why are you here?” she asks, voice thin.

“To remind you you’re not alone.” My smile is sharp, humorless. “Even if the others abandon you, the shadows won’t. And neither will I.”

Her throat works. “You make it sound like a curse.”

“It is.” I brush my fingers against her hand, letting the cold of me slip beneath her skin like ink. “But sometimes curses are safer than blessings.”

The storm howls outside. The shadows hum in approval, though it tastes like hunger. She stares at me as if she can’t decide whether I’m salvation or damnation. The truth, of course, is both.

And before I let myself say more, I melt back into the dark. Leaving her at the window, candlelight trembling, storm screaming.

Her lips still parted as though waiting for a kiss that never came.