Share

FIRE AND BONES

Author: Tolu writes
last update publish date: 2026-03-30 02:00:34

Arwen's POV

Nobody told me the most dangerous thing at Blood Moon Academy would be standing in my doorway.

He fills the entire frame. Not just because he's tall, though he is, the kind of tall that makes rooms feel smaller. It's the energy radiating off him. Pure, suffocating alpha power that presses against my skin like a physical weight and demands that I fold. Submit. Disappear.

I don't fold.

I don't know why I don't fold. Every instinct I was raised with is screaming at me to bare my throat and make myself small, because this is an Alpha, the real kind, the kind that makes wolves forget their own names. The silver light flickering around my hands clearly didn't get the memo.

"You have no idea what kind of fire you've walked into." His voice is quiet, which somehow makes it worse. Loud anger you can brace for. This kind of quiet means he's already decided something. "But you're about to find out."

"I just got here," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I haven't done anything to you."

"You exist." He takes one step into the room and the temperature drops like something natural left the building. "That's enough."

The guy behind him is broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, with an expression somewhere between fascinated and horrified. He's watching me like I'm about to do something either spectacular or catastrophic. He's probably right about one of those.

Draven Hunter. I got the name from the intake paperwork I glanced at in the headmistress's office. Alpha heir of the Hunter Pack. Top of every ranking this academy posts. Feared by students, respected by faculty, and apparently personally offended by my face.

I still don't know why he's looking at me like I murdered someone he loved.

"I'm Arwen," I say. Maybe if we start over. Maybe if I just—

"I know who you are." Something flickers in his eyes. Something raw and old and devastated before the ice slams back down over it. "Blackthorne."

He says my name like it's a verdict.

The silver light around my hands pulses. Not on purpose. My body keeps doing things I'm not authorizing, like it has its own opinion about how this conversation should go. A crack appears in the window behind me. I didn't touch anything.

Draven's eyes go to the window. Then to my hands. Something shifts in his expression. Not fear. I don't think Draven Hunter has ever been afraid of anything. But recognition. Like he just confirmed a suspicion he was hoping was wrong.

"Get that under control," he says, very softly. "Or I will."

"You don't get to walk into my room and make demands—"

"This is my academy." He steps forward again and now he's close enough that I can see the jagged scar beneath his right rib through the gap in his shirt. An ugly, vicious thing that someone put there deliberately. "Every hallway, every classroom, every corner of this building operates under my authority. You're in my space, Blackthorne. Act like it."

I hold his gaze. I don't know where that comes from either, because the smart thing, the survival thing, would be to look away. But something in me refuses to give him that. Something in me that has been quiet and small and invisible for eighteen years decides right now, in this moment, that it is done shrinking for people who haven't earned the right to make it small.

The silver light flares. Just once. Just enough.

Draven's jaw tightens. His eyes drop to my hands and I watch something complicated move through his expression — something that isn't just anger. Something almost like warning. Not a threat this time. An actual warning, like he knows what's coming and he's not entirely sure it ends the way he planned.

Good. Neither am I.

The door behind him swings open.

A girl I've never seen before tumbles in with an armful of towels and the expression of someone who just realized they interrupted something dangerous. She's small, dark-haired, warm brown eyes that immediately take in the entire situation in about half a second.

"Oh," she says. "Wow. Okay. Hi." She looks at Draven. "Hi, Draven. Very menacing as always." She looks at me. "I'm Elena. Your roommate. I was getting towels because the ones in here are terrible." She stops. Recalibrates. "Should I come back?"

Draven looks at Elena. Then at me. Then at the cracked window.

"Control your power," he says. Just to me. Like Elena isn't there. "Before it gets out and hurts someone you don't mean to hurt." He turns to leave, then stops with his hand on the doorframe. "First warning, Blackthorne. I don't give second ones."

He's gone before I can answer. His companion gives me one last look and follows.

Elena sets the towels down on the bed.

"So," she says carefully. "You met Draven."

"Is he always like that?"

"Worse, usually." She sits cross-legged on her bed and looks at me with genuine concern. "Whatever you did to make him look at you like that, don't do it again."

"I didn't do anything. He just saw me."

Elena goes very quiet for a moment. "Yeah," she says. "That's what I was afraid of."

I want to ask her what she means. I want to ask a lot of things. But before I can, my phone buzzes. An anonymous message with my class schedule for tomorrow, except someone has already crossed out three of my assigned study partners and replaced their names with a single word.

Alone.

Draven Hunter moved faster than I thought possible. Before I've even unpacked my bag, before I've slept a single night in this school, he's already started. Every class I'll be taking. Every person I might sit next to. Every possible source of support in a school full of strangers.

Already poisoned.

"Arwen?" Elena is watching me. "What's wrong?"

I flip the phone over so she can't see the screen.

"Nothing," I say.

But something shifts in Elena's face. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to notice. She looks at my phone with an expression I can't quite read. Not concern. Not curiosity. Something older that doesn't belong on a girl who was just smiling about towels.

Then she smiles again, warm and genuine and perfect.

And I tell myself I imagined it.

I fall asleep that night listening to Blood Moon Academy settle around me like a building that knows I'm here. My last thought before sleep takes me is that I should be afraid. That I walked into something tonight that I don't have the language for yet. That the boy with my mother's eyes and that ancient, devastating rage is going to make my life here a war.

But underneath the fear is something else. Something stubborn and silver and quietly furious.

He wants a war.

He picked the wrong girl.

The plants on my windowsill grow three inches while I sleep. In the morning, every single one of my assigned study partners has transferred out of my classes.

The war has already begun.

Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App

Latest chapter

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    WHAT DRAVEN KNOWS ABOUT HUNGER

    Draven's POVArwen sits down on the chair by my desk and looks at me with the expression she uses when she is preparing to receive something difficult. Chin level, eyes steady, hands still in her lap. She has gotten very good at receiving difficult things since she arrived at this academy. She has had considerable practice.I sit on the edge of the desk and think about where to start."My grandfather encountered The Hunger once," I say. "He was twenty-two. He was tracking a rogue supernatural threat in the northern territories and the trail led him to a location he didn't have on any of his maps. A valley that felt wrong in a way he couldn't identify at first." I pause. "He described it in his journal as the feeling of standing next to something enormous that was pretending to be nothing. Like a held breath the size of a landscape."Arwen says nothing. She is listening in the way she listens when she knows there is more and interrupting would cost her part of it."He survived the enco

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE OFFER

    Arwen's POVI don't sit down. Standing feels necessary right now, like the conversation requires me to be ready to move in any direction without warning.Ashcroft, Mira Vance, doesn't push me to sit. She moves to the desk at the front of the room and leans against it with the careful posture of someone making themselves less threatening on purpose, and she looks at me with that new expression, the one that replaced the careful observer stillness with something closer to honesty."Tell me what you know about The Hunger," she says."Tell me why you're asking," I say."Because the version you know is probably incomplete and the gaps matter for what I need to explain." She pauses. "I'm not testing you. I'm trying to find out where to start."I give her the outline. The entity beneath the academy, the Blackthorne coven's imprisonment of it two centuries ago, the split bloodline, the suppression curse, the fact that it has been responding to my presence since I arrived. I keep it factual an

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    VICTORIA'S SECRET

    Arwen's POVI find Maya in the library before first class and put the folded paper on the table between us without saying anything.Maya reads the name. Reads it again. Then looks up at me with the expression she gets when something she suspected has just been confirmed and she wishes it hadn't been."Vance," she says quietly."You know it.""I know the name from the restricted archives. I didn't connect it to Ashcroft because I wasn't looking for a connection." She folds the paper and slides it back to me and immediately opens her notebook. "Give me until lunch. I need to pull everything I have on the Vance family specifically.""How much is there?""Enough that I should have found it sooner." She is already writing a list of sources, her pen moving fast. "Go to class. Keep your face normal around Ashcroft. Don't let her know you have the name."I go to class. I sit three rows from the front in Supernatural Theory and I watch Victoria Ashcroft, who is not Victoria Ashcroft, move thro

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    LYDIA'S MOVE

    Arwen's POVLydia finds me at breakfast before Maya arrives.That timing is not accidental. I have watched Lydia Silvermoon operate in social spaces long enough to understand that she does not arrive anywhere without knowing who will be there and who won't. She moves through the academy the way someone moves through a chess board, with full awareness of where every other piece is and deliberate choices about which squares she occupies and when.She sits across from me with a cup of tea and a small plate of food and the relaxed posture of someone who has nowhere particular to be, and she smiles at me the way she smiles at everyone, which is warmly and with great control."Good morning," she says."Good morning," I say back, because I was raised with manners even when everything else was uncertain.She takes a small sip of her tea. Sets it down precisely. Looks at me with those clear organized eyes that miss nothing and offer nothing back."I want to have an honest conversation with you

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE VIAL

    Draven's POVI know what it is before she finishes taking it out of her pocket.The glow is specific. Not all supernatural objects glow and the ones that do glow in ways that are distinct enough to identify if you have spent any time around them. This one pulses with a silver light that moves in a slow rhythm, patient and deep, like something breathing rather than burning. I have seen that glow once before, in a photograph in my mother's research files, beside three handwritten pages of notes that I read so many times at sixteen that I still know the specific order of the sentences.Selene spent four years looking for a complete Blackthorne bloodline amplifier. I know this because the research file was detailed and dated and covered every dead end alongside every small piece of progress. She tracked down components across six different supernatural territories. She contacted people she had no other reason to contact. She spent resources the pack didn't know she was spending.She found

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    RUNNING

    Arwen's POVI don't run from the greenhouse immediately.I walk. Slowly, deliberately, like someone who has made a considered decision and is moving toward something rather than away from it. I walk until I am through the greenhouse door and across the side grounds and through the academy's main side entrance, and then I am in the corridor and the corridor is empty and I keep walking until the walking becomes something faster.I don't run from the school. There is nowhere to run to. No pack, no Margaret, no home that still looks the way it did before my eighteenth birthday turned everything over. Running away is not an option so it is not the option I take.I run from the feeling.Up the east staircase and then the next one and the one after that. Up past the fourth floor where the senior dormitories are and past the fifth floor that is mostly storage and old classrooms that nobody uses anymore. Up the narrow maintenance stairs at the very top of the building that end at a heavy door

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE GHOST

    DRAVEN'S POVThe courtyard smells like rain and old stone, the way it always does this time of year. I'm supposed to be helping Headmistress Thorne with new student logistics, which is basically code for standing around looking intimidating while lesser alphas pretend they're not terrified of me. I

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE LETTER

    Arwen’s povThe drive home takes exactly seventeen minutes. I know because I watch the clock on the dashboard the entire way, and it's the only thing keeping me from completely falling apart. Margaret doesn't turn on the radio. She doesn't try to talk to me. She just drives with both hands on the w

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE GATHERING

    Arwens povThe pack house smells like wet dog and expensive cologne, which is basically what happens when you mix supernatural creatures trying to look civilized with a bunch of visiting alphas who've driven for hours to inspect potential mates. I can feel the testosterone in the air before I even

  • BLOOD MOON ACADEMY    THE THING I'M NOT

    Arwen’s povI stopped shifting three years ago but nobody knows that part.The first thing I notice every morning is the sound. Even now, it's still dark outside, that weird time between night and actual morning, and the howls that start right on schedule. I lie in bed listening to the pack transfo

More Chapters
Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status