Chapter 5
Faye
I woke up at 2:30 a.m. with the voice already in my head.
Not gradually. Not the slow drift up from sleep where you're still half-somewhere-else. One second I was out, and the next I was staring at the ceiling with my pulse hammering and the words already mid-sentence, like they'd been going the whole time I was unconscious.
Find me. In the fog city. At St. Helis.
Find me. In the fog city. At St. Helis.
Find me. In the fog city. At St. Helis.
Clearer than it had ever been. Not the muffled, underwater version from the past year — this was right there, right behind my eyes, like whoever was speaking had their mouth pressed directly against the inside of my skull.
I pressed the back of my hand against my sternum and waited for my heartbeat to slow down. It didn't, really.
This is why you're here, I reminded myself. This is exactly why.
I'd been eighteen for less than a week when the dreams started — three days after my grandmother's funeral, to be exact. At first just images — fog so thick it had weight, the curved glass of a massive dome, trees with branches that bent the wrong way. No sound. No context. Just the feeling of being pulled somewhere I hadn't agreed to go.
Then the voice came in.
I spent three months convincing myself it was grief. Stress. My grandmother had been a private woman — silver-haired, sharp-eyed, the kind of person who answered questions with other questions and watched you like she was calculating something you weren't supposed to know about. She never talked about family. Never explained why she'd taken me in at five years old after my parents died, or why she'd sometimes looked at me with that expression I could never quite name.
After she was gone, I started looking. Library first, then the basement, then the attic. Two full days before I found it — a flat wooden case wedged behind a broken wardrobe, no label, no lock.
The star chart was inside.
Old metal, dark with age, one edge broken away. Constellation markings across the surface, most worn past legibility. But the center was clear — a glass dome ringed with carved vines, the exact symbol I'd been seeing every night for three months.
When my fingers touched it, it lit up. A faint pulse of warmth, brief and certain.
The inscription on the back read: When the blood awakens, the path of fate begins.
After that, the dreams sharpened. The voice got louder, more insistent, until it finally gave me a name — St. Helis. Six months of applications and waiting and telling myself I wasn't losing my mind. A full year after my grandmother died, I was nineteen and standing on a campus I'd crossed an ocean to reach.
The voice still hadn't stopped.
I pulled the chart from the nightstand drawer. Emily was dead asleep across the room, one arm over her face, the corner of her mouth curved up — dreaming about somebody, no question.
The center symbol caught the dim light. That same glass dome. The same thing the department head had told me to stay away from, in a voice with teeth behind it.
Fuck her, I will not listen.
I slipped out without making a sound.
3:00 a.m., and the campus was a different place entirely.
Fog thicker than it had any right to be, sitting low against the ground, swallowing the path lights from the knees down. I kept to the edge of the walkway, no phone light, moving toward the coordinates I'd mapped during the afternoon tour.
The chart was warm in my pocket. My wrist throbbed once — faint, rhythmic, like a second heartbeat syncing up with something I couldn't see.
Just hold on, I thought. I'm almost there.
The fence around the restricted zone was a joke. Rusted iron, sections leaning at bad angles, three gaps without even trying. Beyond it, trees started immediately — dense, lightless, branches at angles that didn't match the wind. Dozens of bats hung motionless from the upper limbs. Not sleeping. Waiting.
Fresh boot prints near the widest gap — large, deep tread, edges still sharp. The white building sat at the tree line: three stories, every window boarded, walls thick with ivy. Second-floor boards on the left window showed fresh pry marks, wood pale where the nails had pulled free.
The air smelled wrong. Blood underneath something sweet and floral that had no business being out here. It settled at the back of my throat and stayed.
The chart pulsed hard. I pulled it out — the center symbol glowing steady now, lit from within.
We're close.
I followed the outer wall, one hand on the ivy, moving slow. The sounds reached me before I cleared the corner — something wet and rhythmic, underneath breathing that was too controlled, too mechanical to be natural.
I looked through the gap in the ivy.
Through the gap, maybe ten feet away, a woman was bound to a tree with her feet barely touching the ground. White fabric, torn at the collar — a blouse that had once been pristine, now disheveled and stained with dark patches I didn't want to identify.
The exposed skin of her throat caught the faint light, pale and somehow luminescent in the darkness.
I moved closer, keeping the ivy between us.
The familiar sharp features, now slack and unfocused. The same woman who'd dismissed me with such disdain just hours ago.
The department head.
Someone was standing in front of her. A girl, her back to me — champagne-gold hair loose down her shoulders, posture calm and methodical. She was holding something, moving with ritualistic precision.
Then she shifted, and her profile came into view.
Savienne.
The same girl who'd helped me find my way around campus. Who'd smiled so warmly, so genuinely helpful. Standing here at three in the morning in a restricted zone, conducting some kind of twisted ceremony.
Savienne held a wide-bristled brush in one hand and a small jar in the other. The sweet smell intensified — honey, thick and cloying, mixed with something metallic that made my stomach turn.
But it was the department head's eyes that made my blood freeze.
Completely vacant. No awareness, no fear, no consciousness behind them at all. Just empty glass reflecting the ambient light, pupils dilated and unresponsive. Her head lolled slightly to one side, mouth parted, breathing shallow and automatic.
Savienne dipped the brush into the jar and began painting honey across the woman's throat in deliberate, ritualistic strokes. The department head didn't flinch, didn't react — just stood there like a mannequin being prepared for display.
"There we go," Savienne murmured softly, her voice carrying an almost maternal gentleness. "Just like that."
The department head's eyes rolled back slightly, showing more white than iris. A soft, contented sigh escaped her lips, as if she was experiencing something pleasant rather than terrifying.
My hands were shaking. This wasn't just assault — this was something far worse. Complete mental domination, turning a human being into a hollow shell.
Savienne stepped back to admire her work. Honey dripped slowly down the department head's neck, catching the light like amber. The woman's pulse was visible beneath the golden coating, beating steadily in the hollow of her throat.
"Perfect," Savienne whispered, setting down the brush and jar.
She moved closer to her victim, tilting her head like a predator calculating the perfect angle of attack. In the dim light, I caught a glimpse of something sharp gleaming between her lips.
Fangs.
Savienne leaned in, her mouth hovering just above the honey-coated throat. The department head's vacant eyes stared at nothing, her expression blissfully empty as Savienne's fangs pierced the pale skin of her neck.
