Chapter 4

Iris' pov~

Caelum leaves before I even finish getting dressed and honestly good for him because I was planning to ask him so many questions over breakfast and now he has successfully avoided that.

Ren is still in the room when I come out of the bathroom, sitting at his desk with a book open.

He looks up when I emerge. "Your first class is in the East Wing, third corridor, room twelve."

I stare at him. "How do you know my schedule?"

"You left your timetable on the desk," he says and goes back to his book.

I look at the desk. There is indeed a timetable sitting there, delivered at some point this morning by someone who slipped it under the door without knocking.

I pick it up, look at it, look at Ren, and decide to let it go for now because I have bigger problems.

I thank him and he nods without looking up and I head out into the corridor as if I know exactly where the East Wing is.

I absolutely do not know where the East Wing is.

It takes me fifteen minutes and two wrong turns and one very unhelpful fae student who points me in a direction that turns out to be toward the dining hall to find room twelve.

I arrive late enough that the door is already closed and I have to open it in front of everyone which is, truly, a perfect start to my first day.

Every head turns. I stand in the doorway and look back at all of them with the serene expression.

There are students from what looks like every bloodline the academy houses packed into rows of desks.

The teacher is a tall woman with silver streaked hair who gestures at an empty desk without breaking her sentence and I take it gratefully and sit down. There are a few openly hostile looks from a cluster of wolf students near the front who have clearly already decided I do not belong here. I make a mental note of all of their faces. I am going to need it.

Then the teacher announces that today is an ability assessment and my stomach drops straight to the floor.

She explains it like it is routine, which apparently it is.

"Nothing to worry guys. It's just going to be a regular tracking exercise where students can demonstrate their current ability level so the academy can monitor development."

She starts calling names from a list and one by one students go to the front of the room.

A wolf student rolls up his sleeve and shifts his forearm, bones moving under skin, fur pushing through, claws extending and retracting in about four seconds.

He sits back down like he just cracked his knuckles. I'm legit horrified to say the least.

A vampire girl near the window moves from her desk to the front of the room and back so fast that I almost miss it. A fae boy manipulates the light from the windows, bending it into shapes, making the room go gold and then blue and then back to normal like he is adjusting the ambience at a restaurant.

One of the mages in the back pulls something from the air, shapes it into a geometric structure that holds for ten seconds and then dissolves.

The class watches all of this with a bored contenance as if they have since it so many times.

"Iris Vael."

I breathe in and stand up. I walk to the front of the room and I do it with my chin level.

Nothing happens.

I stand there for what feels like a very long time. I am just a girl with mismatched eyes standing at the front of a room. Then someone laughs. One or two others join in, soft enough to be deniable.

The teacher says "thank you" and I walk back to my seat. I stare at the front of the room for the rest of class with my jaw tight and a very specific list forming in my mind. It is a list of everyone in this room who is going to deeply regret this moment when I figure out what I am capable of. I am already looking forward to it.

I am still carrying that energy when class ends and I end up in one of the academy's open courtyards afterward, sitting on a stone ledge and looking at my timetable and trying to decide if the rest of my day can possibly be worse than that.

The courtyard is busy, students moving through it between buildings, and I am doing a reasonable job of minding my own business when I become aware of a shift in the atmosphere near the main archway.

It is the kind of shift that happens when someone walks into a space and the space notices. I look up.

There are four of them, vampire students by the look of it, moving through the courtyard with confidence. The one at the center is the reason everyone is noticing.

He is lean with sharp features and something about the way he moves that makes the air around him feel different, older somehow.

He is looking at me and I get the impression he has been looking at me since before I looked up.

He stops a few feet away from where I am sitting with a very irritated expression. Damn, they must really hate humans.

"You are the human," he says. It is not a question.

I look up at him. My silver eye does its work and what it finds is complicated and interesting enough that I decide to think about it later.

"And you are?" I say.

"Dorian," he says, like that should mean something to me.

"Cool name," I say. "Did it come with the attitude or did you develop that separately?"

The faint irritation changes and he looks like a puzzle. The students with him are very quiet. I get the sense that people do not usually talk to Dorian like this. I find that very satisfying.

He opens his mouth to say something and I genuinely want to hear it but I am already going to be late for my next building and I have had enough of today to last me a week. So, I slide off the ledge, tuck my timetable under my arm, and walk past him without waiting for the response.

I hear one of his companions make a sound behind me. I keep walking.

I am rounding the corner toward the training wing when I nearly walk directly into someone coming from the other direction and I pull up short and so do they.

We end up in that awkward dance of two people trying to step around each other in the same direction twice. I step left, he steps left, I step right, he steps right, and I am about to say excuse me and be done with it when I actually look at him.

He is tall, lighter featured than the others I have met today, and he has the specific quality that I have started to associate with fae, that slightly too-composed, too-balanced look.

"Watch where you are going," he says, and his voice is even but there is an edge underneath it that I do not think was there a moment ago.

Something about his tone after the day I have had, makes me angry immediately. "You walked into me," I say.

"I did not."

"You absolutely did."

"I suggest you move," he says, and takes a step toward his original direction.

I step into his path. "I suggest you learn how a corridor works," I say, "because last I checked it goes both ways."

He looks at me. Then his hand comes up and he moves me out of his way, not roughly but firmly and my body responds before my brain gives it permission.

I grab his wrist and pull. It is a move I learned from three years of self defense classes and a lifetime of being underestimated. It works better than it should on someone who should technically be stronger than me because he was not expecting it.

He stumbles. I do not let go. We end up squared off in the corridor with an audience materializing from absolutely nowhere.

He looks at my hand on his wrist. He looks at my face and goes very still.

The crowd around us is growing and I have not let go and neither of us has said anything and the corridor feels very small suddenly.

I have just made my situation at Aethon a great deal more complicated.