invisible

Far from the snow of Silverpine and the golden leaves of the Voss valley, the same moon rose over a fortress on a mountainside. The Alpha Academy. The place where the future rulers of every pack are made, and somewhere inside its walls, a third girl was carrying a secret that could burn the whole mountain down.

Wren's Pov

The trick to surviving the Alpha Academy is to simply be invisible.

When you are invisible, no one will notice you or ask you questions you can't answer.

My name is Wren, and I chose it myself because nobody bothered to give me one that fit. And I have been invisible for three years.

Everyone says I'm the luckiest girl alive. A nobody orphan, adopted by Alpha Marcus, and sent to the most elite school in the kingdom without a drop of Alpha blood in my veins. People say it like I won a prize.

Here's what the prize actually looks like.

I wake before dawn to press my "sister" Delphine's uniform. I carry her books, fetch her coffee, and stand outside her classes like a shadow, and every week I write a report to her father about who she talked to, what she ate, and whether anyone upset her. I'm not a student here. I'm a nanny with a school blazer, and a maid with the title of "adopted sister."

The other students know it, too. They've known it for three years.

They put thorns in my bed, my first month in here. They "accidentally" spill soup on me at least once a week. Last winter, someone locked me in the cold cellar overnight, and when I got out, shaking and blue-lipped, Delphine laughed so hard she cried.

"Oh, come on," she said. "It's funny, tell her it's funny."

And everyone told her it was funny, because Delphine is the daughter of an Alpha, and I am nothing.

So why do I stay? Why not run? You may ask

I stay because of the other thing. The thing I have never told a single living soul.

On the night of my eighteenth birthday, eight months ago, my wolf woke up.

That shouldn't be strange; wolves wake at eighteen, it happens to everyone. But it's supposed to feel like a warm light turning on inside you. A gentle hello. A new friend.

Mine felt like a volcano opening its eye.

Her name is Pyre, and she told me herself. She is also strange. She is too big, too loud, and too bright. When she stirs, my skin gets hot enough to fog a window. When she dreams, I dream of fire that doesn't burn me, a silver light, and two voices calling from very far away, like sisters I've never met. She is also getting stronger every single month.

I looked it up in the library. Wolves don't do that. A wolf wakes with the strength it will have for life. It doesn't grow; nothing grows like this.

So I hide her. I press her down every day like holding a lid on a boiling pot, and I stay small, boring, and invisible because I've seen what this school does to unusual things. It studies them, breaks them open to see how they work.

And it all comes down to the three apex Alphas. That's what everyone calls them. Rhys, Ansel, and Kaelen. Heirs to the three oldest bloodlines in the kingdom, after the royals themselves. They rule this academy, and teachers don't question them. Students orbit them. Even Delphine, who fears nothing because she's never had to, goes quiet when they walk past.

Rhys is the cold one. He watches everything and says almost nothing.

Ansel is the smiling one, which is worse, because venom hides behind his smile.

Kaelen is the violent one. Last year, he put a boy through a stone wall for touching his shoulder.

The whole school worships them and fears them in the same breath.

Me? I've spent three years making sure they've never once looked in my direction.

Until today.

*************

It happens on the training pitch some hours before supper.

I'm waiting at the edge of the field with Delphine's water flask, watching the first-years run combat drills under the big wooden scaffold where the banners hang. It's windy, and the scaffold is old. I remember thinking, someone should fix that, even though it was not my problem.

Then the wind gusts hard, and the top beam cracks with a sound like a bone breaking.

Half a ton of wood and iron tips slowly, over the field, right above a first-year girl who was frozen in place, staring up at her own death.

Everyone screams, and nobody moves. 

And the lid I have been holding down for eight months simply opens.

One heartbeat, I'm at the fence with a water flask, and the next, the flask is on the ground, and I'm across the field, and I don't remember crossing it. 

Pyre's power surges through me, and I catch the falling scaffold with my bare hands. The impact explodes through my arms, and my knees buckle.

Pyre roars inside me, and heat floods every inch of my body.

The scaffold groans as my fingers crush the iron supports without meaning to.

"Easy," Pyre murmurs.

Easy? I don't know how. My hands are shaking. The weight should be crushing me. Instead, it feels impossibly light, like I'm holding up a table instead of half a training scaffold.

I try to lower it, but my strength doesn't listen.

The scaffold slips from my grip and crashes into the empty edge of the field.

The entire training pitch has gone silent. A hundred students, half a dozen teachers, and Delphine, who was twenty feet away, all of them were staring at me.

Careful, Pyre says inside me, and there is no fear in her voice at all. There is something much worse, satisfaction. They see us now- she sneers.

I look down at my hands, and they're glowing. There is a faint silver-white light under the skin, and it is fading slowly.

"Wren?" Delphine's voice is very small and strange, and for the first time in three years, she is looking at me like a stranger. "What... what are you?"

I don't answer. My heart is pounding, and eight months of being unnoticed are destroyed.

I step back, pick up the water flask, and hold it out to her, as if none of it happened. Nobody moves, and then, across the field, I feel it, a pressure, like a storm front rolling in. 

The crowd parts the way, and my stomach drops.

The three apex Alphas are walking toward me.

Rhys is staring at my hands. Ansel is smiling wider than I have ever seen him smile, and Kaelen is looking at me with his head tilted and nostrils flared, like a wolf that has just caught a scent it has been hunting for its whole life.

It's Ansel who speaks first. "So," Ansel says softly, "the invisible girl bites."