Lost Little Raven

Isadora:

All I wanted was quiet. To be alone.

After everything today—Loralie’s incessant cheer, Professor Malric’s dangerous insinuations, Rhett’s unbearable smoldering heat—I needed silence like a wound needed air. Open. Honest. Raw.

The moon was full, swollen and pale as bone. It followed me as I wandered without direction, letting my boots echo against the worn cobblestones of Ashwyck’s ancient paths. The night was colder here, heavier. Like the campus had taken a breath and hadn’t exhaled.

Past the bell tower with its silent chimes. Past the conservatory where shadows clung to the glass. Past the enchanted hedge maze, whispering secrets only madmen or moths would chase.

And then I found it.

A graveyard.

Because of course the school for the damned came with its own necropolis.

The wrought iron gate groaned like an old man as I pushed it open. It gave, reluctantly, swinging just wide enough for me to slip through. The headstones stood like broken reminders in crooked rows. Statues of weeping angels and cloaked reapers loomed from the fog, weather-worn and streaked with lichen.

A few witches clustered at the far end. Hooded, hushed. They were scooping handfuls of dirt into crystal vials, murmuring to the dead beneath their feet. I moved past them, unnoticed. I didn’t need rituals or spells. I needed stillness.

I found it beneath a weeping willow, its branches trembling in the wind like arthritic fingers. A rusted iron bench waited there, half-swallowed by ivy and time. I sat, pulled out the book I hadn’t had the heart to read earlier, and let the silence settle.

It wasn’t just quiet.

It was sacred.

And for the first time since arriving at Ashwyck, I felt something close to peace. Something that brushed against the ribs of my soul and said, breathe. Just breathe.

But it didn’t last.

Because then I saw it.

A flicker. Just at the edge of my vision. Pale blue and trembling like candlelight behind a veil.

Mist.

No… not mist.

Something trying to take shape.

My heart slowed as I rose. I didn’t feel fear. Not exactly. It was more like a magnetic pull, soft and certain, that tugged at my bones.

"Hello?" I whispered into the quiet.

The air grew colder. Sharper. The glow thickened. Shapes moved inside it, slow and deliberate. A wisp curled toward me like a finger beckoning.

I followed.

And then—contact.

My hand brushed skin.

Cold. So cold it burned.

I gasped, breath catching as my fingers grazed a cheek that was too pale to be living. The light coalesced into form, and I found myself inches away from a man who did not belong in this world.

Silas Grimm.

The name surfaced without warning. As if I’d always known it.

He stood impossibly still, his presence like a dream stitched together with moonlight and regret. His face was sharp and hollowed, cheekbones cut from alabaster, lips too still to be human. His eyes… gods, his eyes. Silver smoke trapped in glass, drifting and endless.

He was hauntingly beautiful. Morbidly delicate. Like he’d been carved from sorrow.

My fingers were still on his cheek.

He didn’t flinch.

He didn’t speak.

Just breathed, "Hi."

The sound was soft. Intimate.

Not eerie. Not wrong.

Comforting.

His presence didn’t alarm me. It soothed me. Like he was absorbing the storm that had churned inside me all day. Like he could siphon my chaos and keep it safe in that cold, quiet chest of his.

I felt the strangest urge—not to run, but to stay. To fold into this unearthly stillness and disappear from the noise of everything else.

"Sit with me?" I asked, voice barely louder than the wind.

He nodded. A soft, slow movement. And then he sat.

We didn’t speak.

He just stayed beside me, unmoving, as I turned pages I couldn’t focus on. His gaze lingered not in a way that felt possessive or intense—but reverent. Like I was something ancient he’d finally remembered.

Time blurred.

The wind hissed through the trees above us. The witches vanished, their rituals complete. The fog thickened, and the cemetery sank into a hush so deep it felt like a held breath.

I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want him to either.

But something always ends peace.

"Little girls shouldn’t be alone at night."

The voice curled around me like smoke from a cursed candle.

"Never know what monsters are lurking."

I turned.

Lucien Bloodsworth.

He emerged from the dark like it was part of him, one hand wrapped around a crimson-stained glass. His coat fluttered behind him like wings, and his boots made no sound against the dead earth.

His eyes gleamed red in the moonlight. Not figuratively—literally. Rubied and reflecting.

I looked beside me.

Silas was gone.

Like he’d never been there at all.

My hand still tingled from his touch.

"I’m not alone," I said, raising my chin.

Lucien smirked, circling the bench like a predator deciding how fast his prey could run.

"No?" he asked, gaze flicking to the empty seat beside me. "You think the dead count as company?"

"He wasn’t a threat."

"No," Lucien said, baring teeth in a smile that didn’t belong to a man. "He’s not. Yet."

He leaned in slightly, the scent of something metallic curling off his breath.

"But monsters don’t always come with claws, Isadora. Sometimes they wear sorrow like a shroud. Sometimes they ask you to run, and sometimes the darker ones just ask you to stay."

"Are you warning me?"

"Would you listen if I was?"

I didn’t answer.

His smile faded. For the first time, I saw something beneath his usual mirth.

Fear.

Or maybe envy.

"You have no idea what you are for certain," he murmured. "But others do. They can feel it. Smell it. It’s not just Malric watching. Not just Rhett circling. Even the dead are drawn to you."

The wind howled then, shaking the branches above us like bones in a storm.

Lucien stepped closer, and his voice dropped.

"Be careful, little raven. You’re not lost. You’re hunted."

He stalked closer.

I was left alone with Lucian, the whispering wind, and the ghost of a touch that hadn’t fully faded from my skin.

Suddenly I felt colder than when Silas was here.