“We’re examining all dark Nephilim students this week. Nothing to be concerned about.”
Nothing to be concerned about.
My shadows, currently wearing Bael’s vampire signature like a too-heavy coat, press tight against my body and try very hard to be nothing.
Constantine is here.
Standing by the door in his faculty coat with a clipboard that I know he’s not actually reading because his eyes haven’t moved from the same page since I walked in.
His role is liaison — overseeing the assessment, making sure the academy rules are followed, providing faculty witness to the proceedings.
His actual role is the only thing keeping me from running out the door: the steady, amber presence of his fire on the other side of my awareness, banked and controlled and radiating the quiet messageI’m here, I’m watching, I won’t let this destroy you.
There are twelve dark Nephilim students being assessed today. I’m number seven.
The first six went through without incident — I know because I was sitting in the waiting corridor outside with my shadows locked down and my hands clenched in my lap, listening to each student enter and exit and trying to read the expressions on their faces when they came out.
Most looked bored. One looked annoyed.
None looked terrified.
None of them are hiding what I’m hiding.
The girl who went before me — Seline, a quiet fourth-year whose shadow abilities are as standard as shadows get — came out yawning.
Actually yawning.
“It’s just lights and sitting,” she told me on her way past. “The crystals feel kind of warm. That’s it.”
Kind of warm.
For her, that’s all it is. For me, those crystals are going to probe the difference between what my shadows look like and what they are, and the gap between those two things is the gap between walking out of this room and never walking anywhere again.
“Student seven. Ashley Dawn.”
I stand.
My knees don’t buckle. My shadows don’t flare.
I walk into the examination room the way six students before me walked into it — routine, unremarkable, a little bored — and the performance is so practiced by now that the muscles of my face form the appropriate expression without my conscious input.
This is what months of hiding has made me: a woman whose mask fits better than her face.
“Please sit,” Dr. Voss says.
I sit.
The chair is metal — cold through my school uniform trousers, the chill of something that’s been sitting in an unheated room all morning.
The crystal ring activates when I settle into position — all three stones brightening simultaneously, their faceted surfaces throwing light in patterns that sweep across my body like searchlights looking for something worth finding.
My shadows react.
Not visibly — I’ve had months of practice controlling the visible responses.
But beneath the surface, beneath Bael’s vampire layer, the living darkness that is the core of what I am flinches from the crystal light the way a hand flinches from a hot stove.
Instinct. Self-preservation. The shadows know what these crystals are looking for and the knowing makes them want to hide deeper, compress further, become smaller and quieter and less alive.
