Chapter Four: What Fell From The Sky

The thing that fell out of the sky hit the courtyard fountain and turned it to steam.

I hit the ground on instinct, arms over my head, and felt the heat roll over me in a wave that smelled like scorched stone. When I looked up, the water was gone, just a smoking crater where the fountain used to be, and something was uncurling itself out of the wreckage.

It looked like it had been built out of leftover parts of other monsters. Wings too large for its body, scales the color of old rust, a mouth full of teeth that didn’t line up right, like it had grown them twice and never chosen between the sets.

“Chimera,” Ronan said, already moving, already between me and it without seeming to decide to be. “Young one. Doesn’t happen on campus grounds, not during orientation.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“No.”

The thing shrieked, a sound that hurt to hear, and lunged for the nearest cluster of students still frozen by the dining hall doors.

Ronan moved before I could blink.

He didn’t shift, not all the way, just enough that his claws were where his hands had been, a snarl that didn’t belong on a human face, and he hit the chimera’s side hard enough to send it skidding sideways into the courtyard wall. It shrieked again, worse this time, and swung a tail tipped in bone spikes that caught him across the ribs.

He went down.

I didn’t think. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find, a chunk of broken fountain stone, heavy enough to hurt my hands, and threw it as hard as I could at the thing’s head.

It hit. The chimera’s attention swung to me instead.

“Mia, run—” Ronan started, already trying to get back up, blood soaking through his shirt.

I didn’t run. Not because I didn’t want to. I just froze from fear.

I don’t fully know what happened next. I remember the chimera’s jaws opening wide enough to swallow half my body. I remember deciding, that I wasn’t going to just stand there and watch. I remember my hands coming up, not to block anything, just some old animal instinct to protect my own face.

And the ground beneath the chimera cracked open.

Not from anything Ronan did. Not from anything anyone else did. A fissure split the stone under its feet, sudden and violent, and the thing shrieked in surprise as it lost its footing, wings flailing, giving Ronan just enough time to lunge back in and finish what he’d started.

The chimera didn’t get back up.

The courtyard went silent except for the ragged sound of everyone breathing.

I stood there staring at the crack in the stone, at the scorch marks radiating out from it in a pattern that didn’t look natural, and felt my whole body go cold, and that had nothing to do with the night air.

I hadn’t done that.

I told myself I hadn’t done that. Old stone, unstable ground, the chimera’s own weight, there were a dozen explanations that didn’t involve me, and I reached for every single one of them like a drowning person grabbing driftwood.

“Mia.”

Ronan was staring at me. Not at the crack in the ground but directly at me, blood dripping from a gash along his ribs, eyes narrowed in a way that wasn’t hostile anymore. It looked like he was doing a math he didn’t like the answer to.

“You didn’t do anything,” I said, before he could ask. “I didn’t do anything. It was the stone. It’s old.”

“Mia—”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said again, louder, like saying it enough times would make it true.

Faculty were already pouring into the courtyard, professors I didn’t recognize barking orders, someone with wings the color of storm clouds scooping the chimera’s body up like it weighed nothing. Professor Dorian arrived last, cutting through the chaos straight toward us, eyes doing a fast sweep of Ronan’s injuries before landing on me.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“No. I’m fine.”

Her gaze dropped to the crack in the stone. Lingered there a beat too long.

“Interesting,” she said quietly, mostly to herself.

Then she looked back up at me, and her expression had gone carefully, deliberately blank.

“Get some rest, Ms. Callahan,” she said. “We’ll talk soon.”