Seventeen

Dahlia's POV

Something was happening to me. I just couldn't figure out what.

It wasn't my first time sneaking out at night. The air at Northmont was always tense during the day, and I'd found that stepping outside after dark was the only way to breathe properly. But tonight the moon looked brighter than it used to. Brighter, and closer, as if it were watching me. I couldn't explain it any better than that, which is a strange thing to admit about the moon.

I crept back into my dorm room, hugging the wall to avoid the floorboard that always creaked. I couldn't take another round of laughter from my little audience. They were probably in their beds right now, rehearsing tomorrow's material. I sat on the edge of my mattress and tried to talk myself out of it. I hadn't heard a voice. The moon wasn't watching me. It was an assumption, nothing more. Think about something else, I told myself. But what?

The time, a voice in my head said, and I almost laughed. Focus on the time. You'll be seventeen in a few hours.

Fine. That I could do. Anything was better than sitting alone with my thoughts. I'd never wanted a roommate as badly as I did that night, someone to talk to, or at least someone breathing on the other side of the room. Not that anyone would have chosen to share with me.

I stared at the small clock on the wall and counted the ticks until midnight, when I'd officially be a year older.

“Seventeen. Still fat. Still invisible. Happy birthday, Dahlia Reed,” I muttered. My eyes were heavy by then, and before I knew it, I'd drifted off.

Light. So much of it that I squeezed my eyes shut, then forced them open a crack. I wasn't in my room. I was still trying to work out where I was, and how I'd gotten there, when a woman appeared in front of me.

She had blue eyes and a sharp jaw, and silver hair that glowed the same way her silver gown did. It hurt to look at her. My pulse hammered in my ears, and I'm sure the panic was all over my face, but I made myself speak. I needed to know where I was.

I straightened. “Who are you, and where am I?”

“Welcome, Moon Blessed. Your journey starts today!”

“Wait. Moon what?” I nearly laughed, but she was already gone. Has she just called me Moon Blessed? She had to have the wrong person. I wasn't even a wolf. Then it hit me, and I almost felt sorry for her. It was my figure. I was round, so the comparison wasn't a huge leap.

“But guess what?” I shouted at the empty space where she'd stood. “I might be round, but I'm definitely not related to the moon.” Saying it out loud helped, even if nobody was there to hear it.

I needed to leave. I took a few steps forward, and suddenly I was standing in a forest I'd never seen. Did turning seventeen come with a travel package? The trees climbed into the sky, their branches hooked like claws, and I was so frightened that I wished the glowing woman had stayed.

Then the voices started again, the same ones from earlier but clearer. The air turned cold. I turned around slowly, expecting to find someone behind me. There was no one.

One voice rose above the rest. “You are the Moon Blessed. You are the last one. You can lead, or you can be destroyed.”

I gasped. The light swallowed everything, and I was back in my room, soaked in sweat, sitting bolt upright. My heart was pounding so loudly my roommate would have heard it, if I'd had one.

It felt real. For a second. Then I got a grip. It was a dream, obviously, because there was no way I could be the last of a bloodline I knew nothing about.

Dreams aren't real, I reminded myself. After Grandma died and I moved in with my father and his wife, I'd had one like it. A clearing so wide I couldn't see the end of it, and a woman calling me a name I couldn't remember now, only that it had something to do with the moon. I told my father about it, and he said what parents say: dreams aren't real, just imagination playing while we sleep.

But I'd never imagined anything like this. What I'd always carried around were questions nobody answered. What kind of person was my mother? I'd been told she died when I was a baby, but no one would tell me how. Not even my father. I grew up asking, and the answers never came. Some nights I made up my own just to have something. If my head was going to invent something while I slept, wasn't that what it should have invented? Answers?

I checked the time and discovered it was still too early to get dressed, so I flopped back on the bed and tried to think of a lie that would get me out of biology.

Ms. Hale. I'd disliked her from the first day, and I couldn't say why, which felt unfair, since she'd never actually done anything to me. Maybe it was the way she looked at me, a beat too long. But I couldn't come up with a decent excuse, and I didn't want to fail her class.

What kind of mother enrolls her human child in a school for wolves? I'd been wanting to ask my stepmom for a long time. From the outside, Northmont High looked like any other school, but she must have known what it was when she registered me. There was no way she hadn't.

She'd always been so caring that I never thought to doubt her. I never doubted her love, not until she made sure I got into this academy, even though they only took one human per year. She'd done everything she could to make me that one human. That made it harder to understand, not easier.

A headache cut off the thought, or took my thoughts from me altogether. It came fast, a white-hot stab behind my eyes. I grabbed my head and rolled around on the bed like a patient in a bad television drama. I begged it to stop. I bargained with the universe. I promised never to skip dinner again and swore off sugar for good. All lies, and the pain knew it. It kept its grip as if my head belonged to it.

And just when I thought my skull would split open, words appeared in front of me.

[SYSTEM ONLINE. USER IDENTIFIED: MOON-BLESSED. STATUS: AWAKENING LOCKED POWERS…]

That was when I knew my life had gone from tragic to absurd. What on earth was that?