Chapter 1 - Iris

I was wound tighter than an exploder at the end of the semester. 

Not because of finals. Those were over, submitted, graded, and filed away with everything else. I coped by compartmentalizing. Winter break was supposed to mean silence. Quiet. Certainty. Normal weather patterns where flakes melted into yards instead of faces. 

But Kaia Greaves had been stalking me for days. 

Not literally stalking. Well, partially. She popped up wherever I went to read. Perched in doorways that she plainly didn’t need to use to get anywhere. Stared at me like she was still deciding if she wanted to punch me or make out with me. She intruded on my concentration. She pulled on my magic in stupid, nonsensical ways. I hated that part most of all. 

The Obscura courtyard should have been deserted. Most people were already gone, or halfway through the frantic process of departure. Laughter bubbled around me as friends hugged goodbye and half-dragged suitcases toward the front gates. Snow gathered along the edges of the fountain, delicate icicles curling saw-teeth along the stone bars. Frost made the air brittle and cold. Pristine. 

I was debugging a ward. 

Honestly, it was stupidly small. A feedback loop along the outer runes that had started flickering strangely after last month’s incident under the school. Ten minutes at most. Fifteen if I took the time to redo the anchor points. I was midway through debugging when I sensed her before I heard her. 

Warmth flicked against my neck. 

“You’re late,” Kaia said. 

“I’ll be done soon.” I ignored her, kept my eyes on the sigils etched around my feet. 

“You said that yesterday.” 

“I got distracted yesterday.” 

She exhaled a noise that was somewhere between a snort and a sigh. Heat pressed against the back of my neck, her body close behind me. Close enough that wisps of my magic flared, my pressure simmering behind my eyelids like an impatient horizon cracked with stormclouds. I flexed my hands, fingers knotting slightly to rein my power back into carefully delineated runes running along the flagstone. 

“This isn’t urgent.” Kaia frowned. “People are leaving. Break’s tomorrow.” 

“I know,” I said calmly. “Hence why I should finish now.” 

She pushed herself in front of me. My body didn’t move, but every fiber of me wanted to shove away. The air grew warmer, the heat gentle but definite like sunlight bouncing off heated rock in defiance of snow. 

“You always do this.” Kaia leaned her forehead against my shoulder. “Obscure yourself in nonsense. Obscure rules.” 

I swiveled around to face her, hands coming up to cover the sigils at my feet. “That isn’t hiding.” 

Kaia’s eyes were too wide, too kaleidoscopic storm grey and twisting. Magic writhed against her skin like a living thing, thrashing just barely under her skin. It protested violently. 

It made my stomach lurch in a way that I refused to consider. 

“I don’t think so,” she said. “You won’t even speak about what happened.” 

“It doesn’t matter.” Irritation edged my words, harsher than I meant them to be. 

She laughed, but it wasn’t humor. It was bitterness. “Yeah, sure. You’re just fine.” 

“You’re overreacting,” I said, stepping past her so she was in my space instead of me in hers. 

She shook her head. Heat blossomed between us then, insistent and unwanted like sweat along my back. Magic crackled against my skin, demanding release. “You’re running again.” 

“I am setting boundaries,” I said. 

Kaia laughed again, brighter, genuine humor edging her voice despite the frown plastered on her face. She leaned back, taking a step away from me, and the warmth fled like I’d evaporated it with my words. Air rushed into the void it left, stealing my warmth and making everything colder than before. 

“Suit yourself.” Kaia turned and started walking away. “Go enjoy your break while you can.” 

Her boots crunched through snow, dusting the ground stones, her shoulders rigid and coiled with barely restrained violence. I didn’t move. Heart hammering in my chest, palms clammy against my skin as I forced every stray volt of magic back into conformity. 

Winter break was supposed to make things better. 

As I stood there in the middle of the courtyard, with the ward thrumming quietly under my palms and Kaia’s lingering too heavily in the atmosphere around us, I got the distinct feeling it would make them unbearable. 

Kaia’s arrival always bent the air around her. 

I told myself that was stupid. She wasn’t touching me. She wasn’t spellweaving. She wasn’t actively doing anything that should cause a disturbance, yet every time she stepped into the room, the atmosphere shifted. Barely enough to notice. Just enough pressure to make my ears pop softly, to cause my lungs to heave a little, to pull my magic to attention like someone had called it forward. 

I hated that. 

I hated that my damn weather magic heard her before my brain waves could catch up. That ice responded to her warmth without asking. That air whispered toward her as if it knew she was speaking. I had years of training in discipline, had forced my gift to listen to me and only me. Around Kaia, though, it acted like it didn’t know who the boss was. 

Hell. I could still feel her pressure lingering when she’d departed. 

Warmth stuck to my limbs from her presence like leaning against a fire too long and trying to step away after it’s already melted through your clothes. My heartbeat refused to calm, magic tingling under my ribs, impetuous and needy. 

I left the ward simmering in resentment. 

Every movement was mechanical, stripped of flourish, as I performed the final checks in efficient silence. Undoing her disturbance with practiced flicks of my wrists. Convincing myself that this flare was a coincidence. Leftover emotion from finals. Echoes of the fight underground bleeding into our world. Anything but because she existed too close to me. 

It irked me how easy she made that untruth sound. 

Kaia had called me out. Claimed I’d been hiding. Running. But the irritating part was how easy she made it sound like she knew me. Like she could look at me and see beyond all my rigidity, see the weakness underneath. 

I wasn’t scared of instinct. 

I was scared of what came after; instinct kicked in. 

Because when she invaded my space. Stepped far enough inside me that the air felt electric between our bodies…I felt an ancient, illogical pull rise inside me. Not fear. Not desire in any conventional sense. Acknowledgment. My body recognized her. Knew her. Had reacted as if she were something it knew how to push against. 

That couldn’t be allowed. 

I couldn’t have my magic responding to anyone before me. Not when I still had work to do, digging through my own secrets. I needed my mind clear, my responses tactical. Instinct was wild. Instinct was why people got massacred. Bloodlines were destroyed and futures rewritten without their say-so. 

“You think you’re scared because you can’t categorize it.” 

Her voice drilled through my brain minutes after she’d left. Irritating and spot on. I’d reacted because she hit too damn close to home. Because the notion that my flesh betrayed what my mind would stubbornly refuse twisted my stomach. 

I didn’t like reactions I couldn’t analyze. 

I didn’t like connections I hadn’t agreed to. 

I didn’t like how Kaia Patton could sound just skeptical enough to make my magic prick up and listen like a good dog who’d lost the will to hold its tongue. 

That wasn’t instinct. 

That was a weakness. 

Packing up took me longer than I’d care to admit, so that I could keep repeating those actions. Lining my bags up, smoothing the wrinkles from my shirt, triple-checking that I hadn’t missed a spell node after she shattered my concentration. Stood outside in the freezing courtyard long after most people had gone to sleep, waiting until I felt my magic powers simmer into nothing under my skin. 

Winter made sense. 

Cold never forgot a lesson. Storms could be calculated, quantified, and braced for. 

Humans like Kaia Greaves were not natural disasters. 

They were anomalies. 

And as I marched towards the exit, leaving Primus know where to wait for me, I tried telling myself that again. Maybe distance would help. Leaving would let the weird edge between us dull. 

What I wouldn’t give for my instincts to agree. 

That’s where I should have left it. 

It would have been the smart thing to do. Walk away. Let the cold settle my nerves. Tell myself the tightness in my chest was just adrenaline hangover. Three steps out onto the path, and Kaia called out to me again, gritty and sharp across the courtyard. 

“You’re lying to yourself.” 

I spun before my boots even hit the ground. Alone about that pissed me off. How she could draw something out of me so easily, like she’d sliced a line into my ribs and jerked. 

“What am I lying to myself about?” I asked curtly. 

She stepped closer again, slower now, measured. Watching me like she was trying to peel away layers of my face. “Not magic,” she said. “You know your magic, Kai. You know exactly what you’re capable of when you’re over there.” She glanced toward the ward, then back at me. “Connection.” 

It felt wrong on her tongue. Too personal. Too intimate. 

“I don’t—“ 

“There is nothing,” I cut over myself immediately and flat. “You are reading significance into nothing.” 

Her jaw clenched. “You honestly believe that?” 

“I do.” 

She shook her head once, sharp and disbelieving. “Don’t you feel it when I get too close? How the air shifts? How your magic crackles like it’s been startled. And you still pretend like this isn’t anything.” 

“I feel disturbance,” I sniped. “You think chaos is truth, Kaia. Just because you react doesn’t make something genuine.” 

Her eyes sparkled. “Guess bottling everything up doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” 

“Not everything has to be ripped open to be true,” I spat back. “Some things are real because they’re stable. Because they can exist without tearing themselves apart and analyzing every detail like a science experiment.” 

She laughed, short and ugly. “Maybe that’s your problem, then. Thinking if you refuse to define it, you can’t be hurt.” 

“And maybe you’re just so comfortable throwing yourself at everything that you think feelings automatically have meaning,” I shot back. “Being reckless is not being truthful.” 

We were breathing on each other’s necks now. Warm from her, magic burning at my fingertips, restless against my command. Frost spread across the stones again, crystalline and threatening as it reacted to her mood. 

We both ignored it. 

We both ignored the way the world seemed to close in around us, the way the air pooled between our chests and seemed to lean in to hear. I tried to ignore it, scrubbing my mind back to cold, hard logic. She ignored it, provoking me, goading my defenses just enough that my body betrayed me despite myself. 

“You’re afraid,” she repeated, quieter this time. 

My hands tightened into fists at my sides. I felt it like a punch to the gut. “No,” I said through clenched teeth. Came out wrong. Too shaky. Too quick. 

She blinked. Once. Like she saw the crack, and that hurt more than her anger ever could. “You’re running,” she whispered. “Running from me. From us.” 

“I refuse to define us because there is nothing!” 

But that wasn’t what I felt buzzing under my skin, thrumming in my ears. When I said it, the air swirled around us like leaves after a storm, restless and electric, whether I believed in it or not. 

Something happened behind the fountain. 

I sensed it before I saw it. The feeling of eyes on you, of tension rippling through the atmosphere around you two. I didn’t look. I wouldn’t ruin the second by acknowledging it. Kaia sensed it too, tensing before growling quietly to herself before taking a step back. 

“Fine.” She rolled her eyes. “Keep lying to yourself.” 

She spun away, striding away with harsh stomps of her boots on the rocks. I stood there trembling, hands balled by my side. Livid that I even considered following her. It was nothing. Tension. Proximity. Winter break would take care of that. 

Wrong.