THE VAMPIRE AND WEREWOLF PRINCESS: AETHON ACADEMY

Iris' pov~

The girls bathroom on the second floor of Westbrook High smells like cheap body spray which is honestly a perfect summary of this entire school. I am leaning over the sink, scrolling through my phone with one hand and splashing water on my face with the other, fully committed to spending the rest of AP Chemistry in here.

Mr. Dalton can fail me if he wants. I am not sitting through another forty minutes of him mispronouncing my name on purpose.

I am about to text my best friend Yara when I smell something.

It is not the body spray or the sad little lavender air freshener hanging off the towel dispenser. I lift my head and look around the bathroom. There's no one else here though.

My phone slips out of my hand and I grab the edge of the sink because my knees are starting to feel weak. I know something is wrong. I spin around trying to get to the door and my legs are not cooperating at all.

The sweet smell is everywhere now, almost suffocating me.

I am not going down without a fight. That has never been who I am. I grab the edge of a stall door and use it to pull myself toward the exit, jaw clenched, vision blurring at the edges. I make it two steps. Then the bathroom floor comes up to meet me and everything goes dark.

I wake up in a chair. To start with, my neck hurts. Secondly, there is nothing about my surroundings that makes any sense at all.

The room is enormous. There is a fireplace large enough to stand in, bookshelves covering an entire wall, and a wide dark desk sitting in the center. The whole place feels old.

And guess what? Sitting behind that desk, is a man with horns. I wish I meant it figuratively.

Two dark horns curving up from his head mehn! I'm in deep shit this time fr. I really really hope I'm dreaming.

He is wearing a suit and has reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He looks completely unbothered by the fact that I am staring at him like my brain is about to explode.

I grip the arms of the chair. My heart is going absolutely insane inside my chest and I am not going to pretend otherwise, at least not to myself. I am terrified.

My silver eye is wide open and trying to look for anything in him that could point towards why I'm here... In front of a creature that is not supposed to exist.

"Good," he says, "You are awake."

"Where am I?" It comes out flat because my voice is apparently the only part of me still functioning normally. "And who are you? What did you do to me?"

"Three questions." He folds his hands on the desk. "I will answer all of them. My name is Principal Adaeze. You are at Aethon Academy and you were sedated for your own comfort during transport."

"My comfort," I repeat.

"You are welcome."

I stare at him. "That was not a thank you."

He almost smiles. Almost. "Aethon Academy is a school for supernaturally gifted individuals. It exists separately from the world you grew up in. You have been enrolled as a student and this is now your home."

"Enrolled," I say. "I did not enroll anywhere. I was in a bathroom."

"Yes. We are aware of how you arrived."

"You kidnapped me."

"We retrieved you."

I swear these people are high or something. "I need you to tell me why. Right now. Why me specifically, out of every person on the planet, did you decide to retrieve."

He opens a folder on his desk and looks at it briefly before looking back at me. "When you were ten years old you wandered into the woods near your grandmother's house on the night of a full moon. Do you remember that night?"

My stomach drops. I keep my face still. "Barely."

"You were bitten by a werewolf." He says it plainly, like it is simply a fact that exists and always has. "The bite did not complete a full turn because of factors we will discuss in time. But it left something behind in your blood. Something that has been growing quietly for seven years." He pauses. "Your right eye changed that night. I imagine people have had many explanations for it over the years."

I do not answer that.

"It is not a medical anomaly," he continues. "It is a result of the bite and it is the beginning of something significant. It is also one of the primary reasons you are here." He closes the folder.

"Aethon has been watching you since that night, Iris. You have no other place that can properly account for what you are and what you are becoming. This academy is your home now."

My mind goes completely blank for a minute, unable to process shit. I stand up.

I do not think about it. I see the door behind him to the left. I see another one further along the wall to my right. I pick the closer one and I move.

I am fast. I have always been fast and right now I am faster than I have ever been, fueled by adrenaline and genuine outrage. I hit the door and it opens and I am in a corridor that stretches in both directions, stone floors, torches on the walls, nobody in sight. I go left because left feels right and I run.

The corridor curves. I follow it. It curves again. I push through a door and find myself in another hallway that looks exactly like the one I just left, same torches, same stone, same impossible sameness. I try three more doors. Two of them do not open at all despite having handles. One of them opens into a room full of suits of armor that turn their heads to look at me and I close that one immediately.

There are students in some of the hallways. They watch me jog past with expressions ranging from mildly curious to deeply unbothered. Not one of them looks alarmed or tries to help. A girl with pointed ears and silver hair actually steps politely to the side to let me pass and then goes back to her conversation. I am running for my life and she moved like I was a mild inconvenience in a grocery store aisle.

I find what looks like an exit, a large set of double doors with light coming through the cracks, and I hit them at full speed. They swing open. I run through them and stop.

I am back in the principal's office.

I stand there, breathing hard, staring at Principal Adaeze who is still sitting exactly where I left him, hands folded, expression unchanged. He looks at me. I look at him. The fire crackles. Somewhere a clock ticks.

"The academy," he says quietly, "does not let people leave before they are ready."

I want to say something sharp and devastating. I want to have the perfect response for this moment. Instead I press my lips together and look around the room again, at the stone walls and the ancient ceiling and the door I just came through that should not have led here, and I feel the reality of my situation settle into my bones like cold water.

I am not getting out today.

I look at him, and I make sure he sees both of my eyes when I do and I let him understand clearly that this is not over.

"Fine," I say. My voice is steady. "Then tell me everything."

He opens the folder again and somewhere deep in the walls of this impossible place, I hear something that sounds almost like a howl.

I'm definitely dying here.