All Chapters of BLOOD MOON ACADEMY : Chapter 21 - Chapter 29

29 Chapters

BLOOD AND TERRITORY

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

THE PHOTOGRAPH

Arwen's POVKai finds me the morning after his meeting with Draven.I know about the meeting because Marcus told Maya and Maya told me, which is how most information moves through this academy. I don't know what was said inside the room. Draven hasn't spoken to me since the courtyard and the closed-off quality of his silence tells me he received something significant and is not finished deciding what to do with it.Kai knocks on the classroom door where I've been sitting alone since early morning, pretending to study. He comes in without waiting for an answer, which is a habit I'm starting to recognize in the people Selene trusts. They move like people who learned early that waiting for permission costs more than it saves.He sits across from me and puts the photograph on the desk between us.I look at it for a long time before I touch it.Selene's face is older than I imagined it when I heard her name for the first time. There are lines around her eyes and a tiredness in the way she

WHAT COLE KNOWS

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

RUNNING

Arwen's POVI don't run from the greenhouse immediately.I walk. Slowly, deliberately, like someone who has made a considered decision and is moving toward something rather than away from it. I walk until I am through the greenhouse door and across the side grounds and through the academy's main side entrance, and then I am in the corridor and the corridor is empty and I keep walking until the walking becomes something faster.I don't run from the school. There is nowhere to run to. No pack, no Margaret, no home that still looks the way it did before my eighteenth birthday turned everything over. Running away is not an option so it is not the option I take.I run from the feeling.Up the east staircase and then the next one and the one after that. Up past the fourth floor where the senior dormitories are and past the fifth floor that is mostly storage and old classrooms that nobody uses anymore. Up the narrow maintenance stairs at the very top of the building that end at a heavy door

THE VIAL

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

LYDIA'S MOVE

Arwen's POVLydia finds me at breakfast before Maya arrives.That timing is not accidental. I have watched Lydia Silvermoon operate in social spaces long enough to understand that she does not arrive anywhere without knowing who will be there and who won't. She moves through the academy the way someone moves through a chess board, with full awareness of where every other piece is and deliberate choices about which squares she occupies and when.She sits across from me with a cup of tea and a small plate of food and the relaxed posture of someone who has nowhere particular to be, and she smiles at me the way she smiles at everyone, which is warmly and with great control."Good morning," she says."Good morning," I say back, because I was raised with manners even when everything else was uncertain.She takes a small sip of her tea. Sets it down precisely. Looks at me with those clear organized eyes that miss nothing and offer nothing back."I want to have an honest conversation with you

VICTORIA'S SECRET

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

THE OFFER

Arwen's POVI don't sit down. Standing feels necessary right now, like the conversation requires me to be ready to move in any direction without warning.Ashcroft, Mira Vance, doesn't push me to sit. She moves to the desk at the front of the room and leans against it with the careful posture of someone making themselves less threatening on purpose, and she looks at me with that new expression, the one that replaced the careful observer stillness with something closer to honesty."Tell me what you know about The Hunger," she says."Tell me why you're asking," I say."Because the version you know is probably incomplete and the gaps matter for what I need to explain." She pauses. "I'm not testing you. I'm trying to find out where to start."I give her the outline. The entity beneath the academy, the Blackthorne coven's imprisonment of it two centuries ago, the split bloodline, the suppression curse, the fact that it has been responding to my presence since I arrived. I keep it factual an

WHAT DRAVEN KNOWS ABOUT HUNGER

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

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