Die wolflose Erbin der Blackthorn Academy

ELARA

The letter arrived without warning.

He arrived on a Tuesday, wedged between a gas bill and a pizza flyer, as if he didn't know he was about to change everything. As if he hadn't been deliberately designed that way.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and read it twice. Then a third time. Then I put it on the counter, went into the bathroom, and stared at myself in the mirror until my reflection felt like a stranger.

Blackthorn Academy. Full scholarship. Immediate enrollment.

My father had already signed the acceptance form. He hadn't asked me. He never asks me.

Ever since I was six years old, I knew there was something wrong with me.

Not wrong in the human sense—not mentally, not emotionally, not the kind of wrong a therapist can fix with a prescription and a weekly fifty-minute slot. Wrong in the way that matters in our world. The kind that's whispered about at pack gatherings and pitied by aunts who think no one's listening.

I don't have a wolf.

I am seventeen years old, daughter of Alpha King Theron Voss of the Ironblood pack, and I have never felt the pull of the moon. Never transformed. Never heard the second heartbeat that every wolf pup describes—that warm, animalistic hum at the back of their head that tells them they are never truly alone.

I have nothing.

Only silence.

My father sent me to Blackthorn to hide me.

He packaged it beautifully – opportunity, growth, new beginning. He said it with the practiced warmth of a man who had rehearsed the words in front of the mirror, which I knew because I had heard him say exactly that through the door of the study the night before.

What he meant was: You are a burden, and I need you far away from people who could use you against me.

I did not object.

There was nothing left to argue with. He had already signed the form.

Blackthorn Academy sits on the edge of a mountain, as if it had grown there – all dark stone, iron turrets, and windows so high that the building looks as if it's watching you arrive. The forest stretches right up to the gate. No buffer. No manicured lawn. Just trees, so dense that the afternoon light dies somewhere in their midst, and then the school, and then nothing.

The car that picked me up had no driver.

Or rather: The driver didn't speak. Didn't look at me. He barely blinked twice during the entire four-hour drive, which I counted because I had nothing else to do and because something about the way he sat—too still, too upright—made sleep seem like a bad idea.

I watched through the window as the world grew wilder. Saw highways become streets, paths. Saw the last human town disappear behind a hill.

And then the goal.

Iron. Tall enough to make a statement. Engraved with a symbol I recognized from my father's study—the ancient crest of the Celestial Pact, the agreement signed three centuries ago between wolves, lycans, vampires, and the ancient magical bloodlines.

The gate opened without anyone touching it.

My room was in the east tower.

Fourth floor, end of the hall, door that jammed unless you lifted the handle at exactly the right angle. The girl who brought me upstairs—a vampire, third year, bored expression, didn't give a name—pointed at the window and said the view was nice, and then left before I could ask a single question.

The view wasn't nice.

The view was of the forest, and the forest was dark, and something at its edge was watching the window.

I resigned.

Whatever it was, it didn't move. It simply stayed at the treeline, a form too still to be an animal and too dark to be a human. I counted to ten. When I looked again, it was gone.

I unpacked anyway. What else could I do?

On the first morning, I found the timetable under my door.

Breakfast at seven. Orientation at eight. Meeting at nine.

I was four minutes late for breakfast because the door was stuck, which I should have anticipated but didn't, and the cafeteria was already full when I walked in. Maybe two hundred students. The noise stopped the moment the door swung shut behind me.

Not everything. Not in a dramatic way, not the whole-room-becomes-still movie moment.

Just a wave. A table near the door fell silent, then the tables around it noticed, and the awareness spread in waves until about a third of the room had registered me and decided what to do with it.

I continued walking.

Tray. Toast. Tea. I didn't look up. I didn't make eye contact. I found an empty seat at the end of a table by the window, sat down, ate, and watched the trees through the glass, and I was fine.

I was perfectly fine.

"You are sitting in my seat."

The voice came from my left. Deep. Flat. The kind of voice that has never had to raise its volume to be heard.

I looked up.

He was tall—not tall next to normal people, but the kind of tall that feels wrong, like a body that had forgotten to stop. Dark hair. Dark eyes. The jaw of someone sculpted by someone who found subtlety boring. And the way he looked at me was the way you look at something that's turned up somewhere it doesn't belong.

As if I were a mistake.

He wasn't alone. Three others stood slightly behind him – not exactly bodyguards, but close by. The entire table had fallen silent.

I looked down at the seat below me. Then at the huge, empty cafeteria around us, where half the tables were still unoccupied.

“There are forty other free places,” I said.

Something changed in his expression. Not anger. Worse than anger – the slight, almost bored irritation of someone unaccustomed to receiving answers.

“New girl,” said one of the others behind him—a girl, her voice like honey over glass. “This is Caelan Ashveil. In two years he’ll be the Lycan king. You should probably get up.”

I looked at him. He looked at me.

I took my tray and sat down at the table directly opposite.

Still within his line of sight. Technically a different location.

The girl made a noise. Caelan Ashveil said nothing. He sat down where he had been standing—not in the seat I had vacated, but to the left of it, which meant that I had actually misread it and he had led me to believe I had won a round I hadn't even played.

He ate without looking at me again.

I concentrated intensely on my toast, trying to figure out why I had felt something on the back of my head for just a second when our eyes met.

A sound.

Deep. Warm. Like a frequency I—