The Fae Asked If I Was Human, Now the Alpha Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Roommate

Posy shares her room and her cardigan, Mira's warm hands melt a prank at her first class, and Ilyan offers to explain the marks for one true thing.

"Not yet what?" I said. "I'm brushing my teeth."

Bram looked at the mirror, where the gold was still burning across my collarbone.

Then he turned his back and faced the hallway.

"Tell me what it does," he said. "Don't turn around for me. I won't look."

"Nothing. It lights up. It doesn't hurt."

"It lit when I opened the door."

"It lit before you opened the door," I said. "I saw it start."

He was quiet for a second.

"Then I was wrong about what set it off," he said, and shut the door from the outside.

The gold faded as his footsteps moved down the hall.

I stood at the sink with toothpaste in my mouth and my heart going hard.

The marks had lit before he touched the door, and I could not say what they had been reacting to.

In the morning Posy walked me to my first class and talked the whole way.

"Elemental theory," she said. "It's mostly fae and wolves. Don't sit by the window, the shadow-walkers use it as a door and they never close it."

"Where do humans sit?" I asked.

"Humans don't sit," said Posy. "Last year's human scholarship kid sat on the floor. They put you wherever there's a chair."

The class was held in a round room with a glass ceiling and a long table of students already seated.

The only open chair was across from a heavy-shouldered wolf boy with a wide grin.

On the table in front of him stood a tall frozen glass of water, solid ice from rim to base.

"Welcome, crest-girl," he said. "Professor says the first test is who can melt this. Wolves can't, fae are too proud, so I figured it's a human job."

Three other wolves laughed.

It was a prank.

I looked at the ice.

I had been teased in nine different schools.

I knew the shape of a prank and the shape of a trap, and this was both.

If I refused, I was a coward.

If I tried and failed, I was a joke.

"Fine," I said, and set both hands around the glass.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the ice sweated, cracked, and went to water against my palms.

It was warm water.

Then it was steaming.

The water boiled in the glass with a rolling hiss, and the wolf boy shoved his chair back so hard it hit the wall.

"That's not possible," he said.

I took my hands away, and the water went still and cold.

The room was quiet.

"Your pin is broken," said the professor, a thin fae man who had come up behind me. "I suspect a heat charm leaked from it. Sit, Miss Quennell."

He believed it.

I could see him wanting to believe it.

After class Posy dragged me out by the sleeve.

"You boiled a glass of water," she whispered.

"With a heat charm," I whispered back. "It leaked."

"Sure," said Posy, and squeezed my arm. "I can't be photographed, you know. Cameras just show a smudge. Everyone here has one weird thing, and I won't ask about yours."

That was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in six months.

A tall auburn-haired girl in a wolf-pack ribbon caught up with us on the stairs.

"Mira, right? I'm Sabrina. I saw what you did to that wolf's ice." She was smiling and looked genuinely worried. "That's a lot of attention on day two. Let me show you the library, where nobody bothers anyone."

"I'd love that," I said, and meant it.

She walked me to a long hall of dark wood and green lamps and showed me the reading rooms, the quiet carrels and the stack nobody was allowed into without a warden.

"Bram will take you in there," she said lightly. "He holds the key."

She said his name easily.

Her bag slipped on her shoulder, and a spare grey tie with a pack ribbon sewn on the end fell out.

She stuffed it back in without a word.

"Sorry. Pack habit."

At the end of the hall she squeezed my hand.

"Anything you need, ask me. I mean it."

She walked off, and I felt warm and grateful and a little ashamed of how nervous she had made me at first.

I found a carrel and spread out my notes.

A chair scraped on the other side of the divider.

"You boiled water with your bare hands," said a voice, "and a crest doesn't do that."

Ilyan sat down across from me, folding himself into the chair.

"I can tell you what the marks are," he said. "For the price of one true thing about yourself."

"Why do you want it?"

"Because it's the only thing in this whole school nobody else has."

"And if I don't pay?"

"Then Bram finds out on his own," said Ilyan. "And he's not the one who should find out."

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