4: The Scent Test

The bloodline testing room was in the academy's lowest level, past the old archives and down a staircase that smelled of stone and something faintly metallic, like old ceremony.

Seraphina had been summoned by a note slipped under her door at breakfast. No signature. Blackwood Academy crest on the paper. Report to Archive Sub-Level B at two o'clock.

She had gone, because not going felt worse.

The room was lit by a row of old lanterns, electric but designed to look older, and it smelled like dried herbs and the particular dustiness of things that had not been opened in a long time. A round table sat in the center. On it: a shallow silver basin, two glass vials, and a document she could not read from the doorway.

Professor Wren was there. Beside him stood Archivist Dene — straight-backed and composed now, with all the color returned to her face and a careful, controlled expression that told Seraphina she had worked very hard to put it there. Whatever had rattled her at the board that morning, she had buried it somewhere deep.

Caden was there too, standing against the far wall with his arms crossed, and she hated that she'd already learned to expect him in rooms she wasn't prepared for.

"Miss Voss." Professor Wren gestured to the chair nearest the basin. "Please sit."

She sat.

"This is a standard bloodline assessment," the professor said, with the tone of someone who said things were standard when they were anything but. "We do conduct these periodically for unaffiliated students. Nothing to be concerned about."

Archivist Dene said nothing and watched Seraphina with eyes that were doing several things at once.

"What does it involve?" Seraphina asked.

"A few drops of blood in the basin. The solution will respond according to your bloodline markers. It takes about three minutes."

She looked at the silver basin. At the vials. At Caden, who had not moved and was not going to tell her anything useful with his expression.

She held out her hand.

Professor Wren made a small cut on her index finger, and she let three drops fall into the basin.

The silence lasted exactly four seconds.

Then the liquid went black.

Not dark. Not cloudy. Black, like ink, like night, like the bottom of something very deep. It spread outward in a perfect ring and then began to shift, threading into shapes that moved too fast to follow before slowing into something she could see: a wolf she didn't recognize, two-headed, which was not a shape she had ever encountered in any bloodline chart or textbook.

Professor Wren made a sound she had never heard from him before.

Archivist Dene stepped forward and leaned over the basin. When she straightened, her expression was the carefully constructed neutral of someone suppressing something large. She looked at Caden. Something passed between them — fast, wordless, the communication of people who had already discussed this privately.

"What does that mean?" Seraphina asked.

The archivist and the professor exchanged a look she was not supposed to see.

"It means," Archivist Dene said carefully, "that your bloodline is not what was recorded."

"I'm an Omega."

"Your maternal line is Omega, yes." She paused. "Your paternal line is something else entirely. Something we need to research further before we can tell you more."

Seraphina looked at her. "That isn't an answer."

"No," Archivist Dene said. "It isn't. I'm sorry." And she sounded, genuinely, like she meant it. "What I can tell you is that this bloodline was believed extinct. Whatever your father's family was — whoever they were — they carry a line that hasn't appeared in these records in forty years."

The room was very quiet.

Seraphina heard her own breathing. The shape in the basin moved slowly, the two-headed wolf turning in the dark liquid like it was looking for something.

"What's the name?" she asked. "The bloodline. What is it called?"

Another look between the archivist and Professor Wren.

"We need to verify before we say anything formal," the professor said carefully. "We don't want to give you information that turns out to be incorrect."

She looked at Caden.

He met her eyes.

He said nothing.

But his jaw was set in the way of someone holding something back deliberately, and she filed that away with everything else she was collecting about him, all the things he knew that he hadn't said.

"I need an hour," she said, standing.

"Miss Voss—"

"I need an hour," she repeated, and she picked up her jacket and walked to the door without looking at any of them again.

In the cold corridor above the archive, she pressed her back against the stone wall and stood very still.

Her father's bloodline was extinct.

Believed extinct.

Something that hadn't appeared in forty years had just shown up in her blood in a basement testing room, in front of an archivist who had gone white at her name that morning, in front of a boy who was keeping secrets with his silence.

She did not know the name yet.

But she was beginning to understand that the name was the answer to every question she hadn't known to ask.

Her wolf was wide awake.

It had been waiting for this room her entire life.