The Fae Asked If I Was Human, Now the Alpha Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Crest Burns Off
Mira arrives at Eclipse Academy as its one human student, until golden marks burn across her neck in the entrance hall and a fae asks if she is sure she is human; Bram walks in and says nobody leaves.
The doors of Eclipse Academy opened before I touched them.
I stood on the top marble step with my duffel bag in one hand and the other still lifted for the handle.
Behind me the shuttle was already pulling away down the drive.
A silver-haired man in a dark suit waited inside and gave me a small bow.
"Miss Quennell. Welcome. The orientation hall is straight ahead."
"Thank you," I said, and tried to stand up straighter than I felt.
Then I walked in and forgot what I was going to say next.
The entrance hall went up five floors.
Chandeliers hung in the air with nothing holding them, and the glass ceiling was painted with an eclipse and a ring of stars.
The fountain in the middle ran with silver water.
Two tiny winged girls shot past my head arguing over a cupcake.
A boy with antlers of pale light crossed the floor carrying a stack of books.
A girl stepped into a patch of shadow beside a pillar and came out of another one forty feet away, fixing her bag strap.
Nobody looked twice.
Everybody looked at me.
I knew why.
Pinned to my blazer collar was a small bronze crest with a hand-stamped sun on it.
The matron at the group home had handed it to me in a brown envelope on my last morning.
"The school has rules," she had said. "Keep it pinned and don't take it off for anything."
"Who sent it?" I had asked.
"It's part of your scholarship, Mira. Don't be difficult."
I had three months of savings, no apartment and no job offers, so I had pinned it on and stopped asking.
It was October and I was wearing only the blazer.
I had never owned a winter coat, because I had never once been cold.
The matron always called that good circulation.
Now the crest was warm against my collar, and getting warmer.
I touched it.
It was hot enough to sting.
The silver water in the fountain stopped falling and leaned toward me.
All the way across the hall, every voice dropped.
"Excuse me," I said to the steward. "Is something wrong with the pin?"
He didn't answer.
He was staring at my neck.
Something hot slid up under my collar and across my skin.
I put my hand to my throat and my fingers came away glowing gold.
Lines of light were burning across my neck and collarbone in long curved shapes I couldn't read.
They didn't hurt.
That was the strangest part.
They felt like standing in front of an open fire after a lifetime of being told fire was something to fear.
The crest cracked in half and dropped off my blazer.
It rang once on the marble.
The golden lines held for as long as it takes to say a whole sentence.
Then they sank into my skin and vanished.
My neck was just a neck again.
The whole hall was silent.
A boy leaned over the second-floor balcony rail with his chin on his folded arms.
He had silver-gold hair, pale green eyes and a uniform he wore unbuttoned at the collar.
He came down the staircase without hurrying and stopped an arm's length from me.
"You're the human," he said.
"I'm the scholarship student," I said. "Yes."
"I'm Ilyan. I'm fae." He tilted his head. "We can't lie. So when I ask you something, it's a real question."
My hands had started to shake.
I put them behind my back where he couldn't see.
"Are you sure," he said, "that you're human?"
I looked at the cracked crest on the floor.
I thought about the matron's brown envelope, and the three months of savings, and the bus ticket I would never be able to afford out of here.
I could have said no.
I could have said I didn't know what he was talking about and asked to go home.
I didn't have a home to ask for.
"I'm the one who got a perfect score on the entrance exam," I said. "I'm staying."
Ilyan's mouth curved at one corner, pleased and not kind.
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the one you're getting."
Behind him the huge doors boomed shut.
The steward stepped back against the wall.
A tall boy in a warden's silver pin came down the main staircase two steps at a time, with the whole hall parting for him.
He had dark hair, grey eyes and a face with nothing on it at all.
His eyes went to my neck and stayed there.
"Nobody leaves this hall," he said, "until I've seen her skin."
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