Chapter 2 Someone will die before the next full moon. Weep for them.

Theron's pov

"Step aside, Serena."

My voice was quiet and that was how everyone knew I meant it.

The shadowborn princess didn't move. Instead she stood at the gates of Crestville with her arms crossed and her blue eyes gleaming like she had already won everything worth winning.

"You don't give orders here outcast," Serena said. "This is my territory. My gates. And that..." she flicked her gaze to the silver-haired girl beside me and her lip curled "...is a dead elf walking."

I felt Iris stiffen but she didn't speak. Smart girl.

"Three hundred years ago," I said and I took a step forward, "your grandmother knelt before my father. She begged for his shadows to protect her bloodline during the Shadow War. He agreed. In exchange she swore a blood debt. Shadowmere would answer Ashveil's call once and without question."

Serena's smirk faltered and I watched the color drain from her face.

"I am the last Ashveil." Another step. "And I am calling that debt. Now."

The air between us grew cold and my shadows unfurled from my skin. Not the thin wisps I usually showed them. The full ancient darkness that had slept in my blood since before Crestville was built. It coiled around Serena's ankles and it climbed her throne of bone and it whispered her true name in a language older than the moon. Serena was terrified. I could smell it on her and it smelled like rust and sour milk.

Her guards drew their blades but I didn't look at them.

"I could tear this gate from its hinges," I said softly. "I could scatter your ancestors' ashes across the Weeping Forest and leave them for the wraiths. I could leave you standing here alone and cold while every shadow in this academy remembers that you were the one who broke the pact. That your bloodline means nothing because you have no honor left to spend."

Serena's throat bobbed and her crown of thorns seemed heavier on her brow.

"You wouldn't," she whispered.

"Try me."

The silence stretched until I thought it might snap. Then Serena laughed. It was a brittle and hollow sound like ice breaking underfoot.

"Fine." She stepped aside and swept her arm toward the open courtyard. "Welcome to Crestville Academy princess."

Iris walked past her without a word. Her chin was high and her silver hair caught the light like spun moonlight and she moved like someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible but had decided that lesson was wrong.

Then she stopped and she turned back to Serena and her voice was silk over steel. "I'm no princess. But I've survived eleven years of a queen who wanted me dead. I've survived poison in my wine and knives in my bed and guards who looked at me like I was already a corpse." She smiled and it was small and sharp. "You'll have to try harder than a bad joke and a locked gate."

Serena's eye twitched and the sound that came out of me was not quite a laugh. It was rougher than that. It came from somewhere deep. Somewhere that had been silent for three hundred years. Iris glanced at me and one eyebrow went up.

"You made a sound," she said. "I thought shadow faes didn't make sounds like that."

"We don't." I offered her my arm and my hand trembled. "But I'm beginning to remember how."

She took it and when she looked at me I felt seen in a way I had not felt since my mother died.

I had been looking for a moonpetal.

A stupid errand. The herbology master had assigned it. Find a flower that blooms only under a weeping star. I had laughed out loud in class. Weeping stars appeared once a century if they appeared at all. The flower might as well be a myth.

But I went anyway. Because the forest was the only place where the shadows were quiet.

I was kneeling by a stream when I smelled it.

Starlight. Warm and sweet and so achingly familiar that my heart stopped and my shadows went still.

I followed it through the trees and past the wraiths and into a clearing where night-blooming flowers glowed like fallen constellations.

Four men surrounded a girl with silver hair. She knelt among the Starbells with her hands raised and her violet eyes blazing with magic that made the very air hum. The leader had his hand fisted in her hair. She was bleeding from her scalp and the blood ran down her face in thin red rivers.

But she was not crying.

She was glowing.

The light came from inside her and it pushed against the darkness like the sun pushing against the horizon at dawn.

I stepped into the clearing and the shadows stepped with me.

"Let her go."

The men turned. They saw me and they saw my shadows and they should have run. Instead the leader tightened his grip on her hair and she made a small sound and something in me broke.

The fight lasted twelve seconds. I counted. When it was over the men were scattered across the clearing and none of them were moving and I stood over their bodies with blood on my hands and the girl was still kneeling in the flowers and still glowing and still looking at me.

"Get up," I said and my voice was too harsh.

She got up. Slowly.

"Iris," she said and her voice was steady. "My name is Iris."

"Theron." I pulled off my coat and handed it to her. "You're bleeding."

"It's not the first time."

"That doesn't make it right."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she took the coat and put it on and it swallowed her whole.

Now she walked beside me through the courtyard and her fingers were light on my arm.

"Wolves," I said and I nodded toward a pack wrestling in the mud. "They run the training grounds. Loud and smelly and loyal to a fault."

She studied them with her head tilted. "They look like they want to eat me."

"They want to eat everyone. It's not personal." I pointed toward Crimson Tower. "Vampires. Cold and elegant. They'll compliment your neck before they try to bite it. Drystan is their heir. Avoid him."

We passed the gardens where fae nobles played chess with living vines. Their eyes followed us.

"Fae. Never trust them. They'll give you exactly what you ask for and then show you the receipt."

"And shadowborn?"

I hesitated. "Complicated. Serena is their face. But not all of them share her enthusiasm."

We climbed the winding stairs of the main dormitory building. The stone was cold beneath our feet.

"Elves?" she asked quietly.

"Extinct. At Crestville anyway." I pushed open a door on the fourth floor. The room was small and plain and it smelled like dust and old stone. A bed with a thin mattress. A desk with a single candle. A window that faced the training grounds. "Until today. This is the general dormitory. It's not much but it's safe."

She stepped inside and turned in a slow circle. Her hand touched the blanket and the desk and the windowsill. Memorizing the space.

"It's mine," she said and she sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. "Thank you Theron."

The way she said my name made my shadows shiver.

I should have left. Instead I leaned against the doorframe. "What happened to your family?"

Her hand went to her throat and I saw the scars there for the first time. Thin white lines that crossed each other.

"My mother was the queen's sister. She fell in love with an elf. The queen killed my father first and then my mother. Then she kept me alive because killing a child would have made her look weak."

"How old were you?"

"Seven."

"The queen raised me," Iris continued and her voice was flat. "She wanted to watch me break. But I never gave her the satisfaction. I learned to smile when I wanted to scream. I learned to thank her for the poison she put in my wine."

"And now?"

"And now I am here." She looked at her hands. "And I do not know what to do with that."

I wanted to cross the room and take her face in my hands. I did none of it.

Instead I said "The dining hall opens at sunset. Sit with me if you want company."

"Would you sit with me?"

"Yes," I said. "I would sit with you."

She smiled then. Small and fragile.

I left before I could say something that would ruin everything.

Well, the council chamber was a circle of thrones carved from the bones of old kings.

I took my seat. A dark stone chair in the shadow fae section. Empty except for me.

Across the circle the other heirs had already gathered.

Kaelen Bloodmoor sprawled in the wolf throne with his golden eyes half-lidded. Drystan Vane sat in the vampire seat with a glass of blood-wine dangling from his pale fingers. Serena occupied her crypt-throne and she was still fuming.

Lord Caldor stood at the center. His face was unreadable.

"The assembly bloodbath," he said. "Three dead. Two wolves. One fae. No witnesses. No suspects."

Kaelen leaned forward. "My wolves don't kill without reason. Someone framed them."

"Your wolves don't need a reason," Drystan drawled. "They're animals."

The wolf heir was on his feet in an instant with his claws extending. "Say that again bloodsucker."

"I said..."

"Enough."

Caldor's voice cracked like a whip. The torches dimmed and the temperature dropped. "You will sit. You will listen. Or I will turn your bones to glass."

Kaelen sat and Drystan's smirk faltered.

"We have no evidence," Caldor continued. "But we have a pattern. Three attacks in three moons. Each time the victim's blood was drained and replaced with silver ash."

My heart stopped. "The Stillness."

Every head turned to me.

"The plague killing the elves," Serena said slowly. "You think it's here?"

"I think someone wants us to think it's here." I stood and my voice was hard. "Fear divides us. Division makes us weak. And weakness invites invasion."

Kaelen growled. "So what do you suggest shadow boy?"

"I suggest we stop blaming each other and start looking for the real enemy."

Before I could answer a raven flew through the open window. It landed on Caldor's shoulder and a black scroll was tied to its leg. The headmaster unrolled it and his face went pale.

"What is it?" Kaelen demanded.

Caldor read aloud. "The Weeping Star has arrived. The first seal is broken. Prepare your heirs and your armies and your prayers. The bloodbath was only the beginning."

He turned the scroll around and at the bottom written in dried blood that flaked onto the floor were the words:

"Someone will die before the next full moon. Weep for them."

The chamber fell silent and Serena looked at me with an expression that said I told you so.

Iris.

I left the council chamber without another word and I did not stop walking until I reached the fourth floor. I stood outside her door with my shadows curling around my feet and my heart beating too fast and my hands shaking.

The door was closed.

The light was off.

And I stood there in the darkness and I listened to her breathe on the other side of the wood and I did not knock.

Someone would die before the next full moon.

I would make sure it was not her.