Fangless And Wolfless: The Academy's Outcasts

POV: Elian

I pressed a pinch of gray powder to my gums. It burned like swallowed coals. I bit my lip until I tasted copper and counted to ten behind closed eyes.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

The burning stopped. I opened my eyes and smiled at the mirror, and two long, white fangs gleamed back at me, fierce, aristocratic, entirely fake. Underneath the synthetic draught, my gum line was smooth as a child’s.

I was Elian Vance, heir to one of the oldest vampire houses on record, and I was, in the most literal sense, a fraud with excellent tailoring.

“Don’t smile too wide,” I told my reflection. “You’ll crack the paint before you even get downstairs.”

My reflection didn’t answer, which was probably for the best, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what it thought of me tonight.

There was a knock at the door and I nearly dropped the jar.

“Master Elian?” Bramwell, an old house servant who’d known me since I was too small to bite anything at all. “The carriages are leaving for the gala. Your uncle asked that you not be late this year.”

“Tell my uncle I am never late. Fashionably delayed, perhaps.”

“He said that exact phrase would earn you a week’s confinement, sir.”

“Then tell him I’m already on the stairs.”

I wasn’t; I gave myself one more look, straightening my jacket and raising my collar high enough to hide the pulse jumping in my throat, while my fangs caught the candlelight just right. Only then did I go downstairs to be looked at.

Tonight was the welcome gala at Nocturne Academy, where power was currency and you were only as good as your bite or your howl. The corridor down to the ballroom was long and black-stoned, lit by floating blue candles that hissed like they had opinions about who passed beneath them. I could hear the party before I could see it, glasses, laughter, the particular sound money makes when it’s enjoying itself.

A footman at the door, young, nervous, clearly new, looked at my invitation twice before letting me through, as if my name might have changed between the front gate and here.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“No, sir.” The footman hesitated, then added, “Just that you’re the Headmaster’s nephew.”

“Unfortunately,” I muttered.

“I only meant, sir.” He lowered his gaze. “They said you’d be arriving early.”

“They were wrong. I’m never early either.” I took my invitation back before he could study it a third time. “Do try to relax,” I added with a faint smirk. “You look like you’ve swallowed a hymnal.”

He didn’t laugh, which told me he was smarter than most of the students I was about to spend the evening avoiding.

I pushed the doors open and stepped into it.

The ballroom was a wash of candlelight and old money. Purebloods swirled wine the color of the thing they fed on; young wolves laughed too loud in tight circles, flexing for an audience that mostly wasn’t watching. I kept to the edges, the way I always did, and told myself it was strategy and not cowardice.

“Well, well, look who crawled out of his room,”

Kaelen Voss leaned against a pillar, tossing a gold coin, smelling of pine and raw meat in a way that suggested he’d showered in both. Storm-gray eyes, the kind that were made to make you feel hunted.

“Good evening, Kaelen.” I kept my voice level, even as my pulse betrayed me.

“You smell nervous.” He pushed off the pillar, unhurried, the way predators are never in a hurry. “Worried your little trick won’t hold tonight?”

“I don’t have tricks.” I met his gaze evenly. “I have technique.”

“Call it whatever helps you sleep.” He flipped the coin again, caught it without looking. “Watched an imp get thrown out the side gate an hour ago. Cried the whole way, apparently. Shame if a Vance ended up in the mud right next to him.”

“I’m exactly where I belong.” I let the candlelight catch my fangs on cue. “The mud’s not on my schedule tonight.”

“Everyone’s schedule has a little mud in it eventually.” He tilted his head, studying me the way wolves study things they’re deciding whether to eat. “You’re sweating.”

“It’s warm in here,” I replied.

“It’s always warm in here. You’ve never sweated before.”

“Perhaps I’m finally developing a personality,” I said.

That, at least, got a short, surprised laugh out of him, which was almost worse than the insults, because it meant he was still watching, still working out whether I was worth the trouble.

“You know,” he said, “for a Vance, you talk a lot for someone with nothing to say.”

“It’s a gift and it runs in the family, along with the cheekbones,” I shot back.

He studied me a moment too long. Wolves could smell a lie the way the rest of us could smell rain coming.

“You’ve got until midnight,” he said, almost pleasant about it, which was worse than if he’d shouted. “That’s usually when the good illusions start slipping. I’ll be watching.”

“How flattering, I didn’t realize I had an audience.”

“Everyone in this room is somebody’s audience, Vance. That’s the whole point of a gala.” He nodded toward the crowd, toward the wine and the jewels and the careful arrangement of people who all wanted to be seen wanting something. “You just usually get to pick who’s watching and tonight, I picked you.”

“Lucky me,” I said dryly.

“Isn’t it?” He grinned, all teeth, real ones. “Try not to disappoint me before the toasts.”

“I’ll do my absolute best to ruin your evening some other way.”

“That’s the spirit.” He was still smiling when he opened his mouth to say something else, something I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to enjoy, when the brass bells tolled, and the whole room turned to stone.

Conversation died mid-sentence all around us. Someone near the front hissed for silence like it was a spell that needed casting and Kaelen straightened without seeming to decide to.

Headmaster Alistair Vance did not walk onto the stage, he arrived the way weather arrives. Midnight cloak, spiderwebbed in silver thread, skin like the inside of a glacier and when he moved, the room’s temperature dropped, and even Kaelen straightened his spine another inch, as if an inch might save him.

“Welcome, students, to another year.” His voice didn’t need volume; it found you regardless, the way cold finds the gaps in a coat. “Some of you carry pure blood tonight. Sharp fangs. A wolf that howls the way a wolf should.”

His eyes swept the front rows like a blade deciding where to fall.

“This academy has no patience for the weak, the broken and the fake.” A pause, long enough that I could hear my own heartbeat over the silence. “Any student hiding a lesser bloodline behind these walls will be found, and they will be removed.”

I told myself he wasn’t talking about me specifically. I told myself that twice.

Beside me, someone whispered, “Is he always like this?” and someone else whispered back, “Only when he’s breathing,” and under normal circumstances I might have laughed but these were not normal circumstances then, I took a slow breath to steady myself and that was my mistake. The motion jarred something loose in the illusion, and the draught reacted to the heavy pulse of magic rolling off the stage as pain lanced through the roof of my mouth, sudden and bright.

Not now. Please, not now.

The fangs dissolved in real time, flaking away into pale dust that drifted down like something out of a snow globe designed specifically to humiliate me, leaving smooth, flat, humiliating flesh behind. I clapped a hand over my mouth half a second too late.

Alistair stopped mid-sentence. The hall went silent enough to hear the candles hiss.

His head turned, slow as a compass needle, past the front rows, past Kaelen, into the shadows at the back where I had been so carefully, uselessly hiding.

And found me.

For one endless second, nobody in that ballroom moved. I could feel Kaelen beside me, not laughing now, not saying anything at all, just watching, the way you watch a building you suspect is about to fall down.

He didn’t look surprised.

That was the part that scared me.

Somewhere near the front, a girl in emerald silk had gone pale and was gripping her date’s sleeve. Someone else laughed once, sharply, and thought better of it but Kaelen didn’t move at all.

Alistair let the silence sit a moment longer than it needed to, then simply resumed his speech, as though four hundred people hadn’t just watched his nephew’s fangs dissolve into powder in front of the entire school.

“As I was saying,” he continued, and the room exhaled all at once, grateful for permission to breathe again.

I did not feel grateful, I felt like a man standing on a trapdoor, waiting to find out which floorboard was the one that mattered.

Point of view : Maya

The iron grate scraped against the stone, too loud. I froze with my hand on the bars and quickly did the math: one exit behind me, one ahead, a stray dripping pipe between them making a sound worth mistaking for footsteps.

“Someone there?” A voice, up the corridor, unconvinced.

I didn’t move and I didn’t breathe as boots stomped past, splashing through a puddle, faded.

Two floors up, under the chandeliers, the rest of the school was busy being beautiful. Down here, in the drafty maintenance tunnels, was mine. Dirt, rust, quiet. Rule one, the only rule that mattered: never be seen.

If a wolf caught my scent or a vampire found me somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, I’d be gone by morning. Or worse.

“Hey. Down there.” A voice called from somewhere in the dark.

I went still against the wet wall, breath held. A pair of yellow eyes blinked back at me from the dark. A shadow-cat sat there, its tail flicking against a rusty pipe.