บททั้งหมดของ BLOOD MOON ACADEMY : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 29

Draven's POVMarcus tells me the last name in the corridor outside the courtyard door, two words spoken quietly while Arwen crosses the stone toward the boy with the travel bag, and the name lands in my chest like something physical.Ashford.I know that name. It lives in the Hunter Pack archives in a file I read when I was sixteen and going through every document my mother ever touched, looking for anything that explained what she was and what she did and why she chose it. Daniel Ashford. Mentioned twice in her private correspondence. Referenced in a financial record I couldn't fully decode at the time. I assumed the worst because assuming the worst had become the framework I used for everything connected to Selene Hunter.I was wrong.The picture I built of my mother's disappearance was specific and detailed and felt true because I needed it to feel true. She killed my father and ran to someone. She chose that someone over her son, over her pack, over everything she had promised to

Arwen's POVCole does not pretend.That is the thing about him that makes everything so complicated. He could pretend. He is good enough with words and warm enough in the way he uses them that he could construct a story about just arriving, about coincidence, about not wanting to disturb me. He could make it believable. He has made other things believable.He doesn't. He just stands at the far end of the greenhouse with his arms at his sides and says twenty minutes like someone who decided honesty was the floor he was going to stay above no matter what.I look at him for a long moment. The flowers that opened for my grief are still open around me. The vine on the east wall has stopped growing but the new inches are visible in the dark. The herb plants closest to me are still turned in my direction."Sit down," I say.He comes and sits beside me on the floor between the raised beds. Not too close. He leaves enough space that I can breathe without feeling managed. That consideration cos

Draven's POVI know what it is before she finishes taking it out of her pocket.The glow is specific. Not all supernatural objects glow and the ones that do glow in ways that are distinct enough to identify if you have spent any time around them. This one pulses with a silver light that moves in a slow rhythm, patient and deep, like something breathing rather than burning. I have seen that glow once before, in a photograph in my mother's research files, beside three handwritten pages of notes that I read so many times at sixteen that I still know the specific order of the sentences.Selene spent four years looking for a complete Blackthorne bloodline amplifier. I know this because the research file was detailed and dated and covered every dead end alongside every small piece of progress. She tracked down components across six different supernatural territories. She contacted people she had no other reason to contact. She spent resources the pack didn't know she was spending.She found

Arwen's POVI find Maya in the library before first class and put the folded paper on the table between us without saying anything.Maya reads the name. Reads it again. Then looks up at me with the expression she gets when something she suspected has just been confirmed and she wishes it hadn't been."Vance," she says quietly."You know it.""I know the name from the restricted archives. I didn't connect it to Ashcroft because I wasn't looking for a connection." She folds the paper and slides it back to me and immediately opens her notebook. "Give me until lunch. I need to pull everything I have on the Vance family specifically.""How much is there?""Enough that I should have found it sooner." She is already writing a list of sources, her pen moving fast. "Go to class. Keep your face normal around Ashcroft. Don't let her know you have the name."I go to class. I sit three rows from the front in Supernatural Theory and I watch Victoria Ashcroft, who is not Victoria Ashcroft, move thro

Draven's POVArwen sits down on the chair by my desk and looks at me with the expression she uses when she is preparing to receive something difficult. Chin level, eyes steady, hands still in her lap. She has gotten very good at receiving difficult things since she arrived at this academy. She has had considerable practice.I sit on the edge of the desk and think about where to start."My grandfather encountered The Hunger once," I say. "He was twenty-two. He was tracking a rogue supernatural threat in the northern territories and the trail led him to a location he didn't have on any of his maps. A valley that felt wrong in a way he couldn't identify at first." I pause. "He described it in his journal as the feeling of standing next to something enormous that was pretending to be nothing. Like a held breath the size of a landscape."Arwen says nothing. She is listening in the way she listens when she knows there is more and interrupting would cost her part of it."He survived the enco