chapter 2

ELVIRA'S POV

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The dorm door swings open even before I knocked. I get tackled by a wall of golden-brown hair.

"Elvi! You made it! I’m happy to see you"

Anika hasn't changed a bit at all since I last saw her — She is still looking amazing in that effortless way I have known her. With her heart-shaped face, hair falling all the way down to her waist, her cupid's-bow lips currently stretched into the widest grin I've seen in a year. She pulls back to look at me. I laughed for the first real time since my parents dropped in this school.

Anika came in with two other girls. One of the girls has thick, dark-rimmed glasses. She has black hair in pigtails, giving off serious secret-genius energy. The other girl has red hair scraped into a messy bun and a spray of freckles. She has a smile that's already contagious from across the room.

"Girls, this is Elvi. We went to high school together." Anika introduces me as she points at me. "This is Lexa and Daphne, my roommates," Anika added.

"Hi girls," I say, giving an awkward little wave. "Nice to meet y’all."

"A new roommate is here, at last!" Daphne says. "We haven't had one since last year — our former roommate had to drop out. I believe she had family issues back home. We thought that room was cursed; that’s why it has stayed empty."

"I am here now to break that curse," I reply to her. Lexa laughs like it's the funniest thing she has heard all week round.

The dorm itself is bigger than I expected it to be. There is an open living area with a squashy L-shaped sofa, a two-ring hob kitchenette along one wall. There is also a television mounted above a stack of board games nobody's touched in years. A set of glass doors leading out to a tiny shared balcony. There were four-bedroom doors branch off it, each with its own ensuite. My bed still has the tags on the mattress just as a new one.

"That one is yours," Anika says, pointing to the last door in the dorm. "We left the room plain so you could make it your own as you desire. There are spare hangers in the wardrobe if you need them."

They pull me onto the sofa and just like that, I'm folded into their group, chatting like we've known each other for years instead of minutes. My shoulders start to unload for the first time since the growling on the lawn when I first stepped into Wolford Academy.

"Don't worry about your classes; the teachers are mostly decent," Anika says. She starts scanning my timetable. "It sucks we don't have similar classes together; we've got Wild-Form and Alchemy together sometimes."

"Sunday nights are the best nights here," Lexa adds in. "You could order your meal on the school app; the delivery turns up around seven."

I d******d the app and scroll through the menu. We Versipellis eat a combined diet; most of the time, human food and fresh meat are both our favorites. Fresh uncooked meat alone makes us werewolves aggressive and feral. The kind of werewolf who ends up living alone in the woods, snarling at hikers, eats mostly fresh, uncooked animal meat. We can go about a week, maybe two, without fresh, uncooked meat before our bodies start to give out. We're taught this from birth, the way humans get taught to brush their teeth.

I order my food from the school app and the girls put a film on for us to watch. The evening was going well; it is the kind of evening where I can almost forget why I'm a year behind everyone else in Wolford.

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My alarm goes off at seven sharp the next morning. I take a quick shower, straighten my hair, and wear my uniform: it was a short, pleated skirt, a blazer stitched through with a rainbow of color instead of one plain shade. A white shirt, a tie that runs through every color like it's daring you to match it, was part of my uniform. I put on my knee socks because it's still warm that early morning.

My hair is pure white; it was white and natural since birth. Werewolves can have any hair or eye color under the sun; nothing limits us to human ranges. My mother's eyes are purple. My eye color is deep red. People mistake them for a dark maroon or brown until the light hits my eyeballs to reveal them. Back at my previous school, someone once told me I looked like a colorful extract from a zombie show. I've never quite forgiven him for that comment; he wasn't wrong about his observation.

I like that my hair is short for now. It is easier to manage and quicker to dry. It makes it possible to worry less about my hair on a morning like this, stacked with things to think about. I really don't know how Anika deals with her hair that’s reaching all the way down to her waist.

The girls were already eating toast when I joined them. I buttered myself two slices and squeezed in.

"You have Wild Form class now; business studies will be later in the day," Daphne says, checking my timetable over my shoulder. "I do hope you know where you're going to have these classes?"

"I have found my classrooms on the map." I chipped in.

"We'll see you at break; meet us on the Pentagon. We will fill you in on all the gossip you've missed."

The bell rings at half past eight that morning. Anika hauls me through the crowded corridor by the hand, into an old-fashioned classroom where a whiteboard looks wildly out of place. A cheerful young teacher was taking the register when we stepped into the class.

"That's Miss Sarah…. She's lovely, don't stress yourself over her," Anika whispers.

Miss Sarah was on the register, calling out names I don't recognize and a couple of names that get answered with a lazy hand instead of a voice. She plays us a news segment — these were updates from both the human world and ours. Werewolves are the dominant species, though we live in an uneasy near-peace beside a much larger human population. Miss Sarah mentions werewolf hunters while she was giving her news segment.

 As I heard the word “hunters,” my stomach tightened at the word the way it always does, like an old scar someone just pressed on.

I kept my face carefully blank while the newsreader talked about a hunting cell broken up somewhere two counties over. Nobody else in the classroom did so much as blink or react to the news update. To us, it's background noise, the werewolf equivalent of a traffic report, what Miss Sarah just read out to us. To me, it reminds me of the worst night of my life playing on a loop somewhere just out of my reach.

Humans can donate fresh meat willingly to our community if they choose to; most of us just hunt for it ourselves.

Mates are the big topic here in our world. We can choose our own — date for months, complete a mating ceremony, seal the bond, the way my parents did. Or the Moon Goddess chooses for you and hands down a prophecy you can't reject, even if you wanted to.

Every Werewolf gets a prophecy, usually at age sixteen. I'm a year late right now.

Just before the class ends, Miss Sarah slips a folded note into my hand.

Miss Elvira Giamatti, report to the Alchemy and Botany Building, Room 68, 11 a.m., for your prophecy flame.

We covered this at my previous, the theory at least. This process involves you holding your wrist above a yellow flame that doesn't hurt. It leaves a pale pink mark, an ancient symbol pressed into your skin like a brand. Within seven to ten days, it changes color, and that color decides everything about your life.

Blue color appears most often, which means an element, like wind or water, bends to you. Green color means one species of animal will always understand you. Red color means a mate has already been chosen for you, and the mate is somewhere in the world waiting for you to find them. You cannot reject the mate waiting somewhere in the world for you to find them. Black flame color means someone dies; probably the bearer of the mark or someone dies by the hand of the mark bearer.

White is the rarest and the strangest of the marks. The bearer of this mark will never marry. The bearer of the white mark is bound to serve the Moon Goddess as a keeper of knowledge and a scholar too.

I really, really do hope my mark isn't black.

Or white.

I don't know which one of the marks scares me the most.