Page 3 of Darkbirch Academy

I glance down at the graveyard that sprawls immediately in front of us once we’ve passed the barrier.

“Drop me here, then take Jax home,” I tell Isander. “I’ll see you at the academy later.”

He sets me down among the gravestones, and I keep an eye on the distance between his handsome face and mine. He wisely tries nothing and takes flight again with my brother. I sigh as I watch Jax’s severely weakened form disappear with Isander into the trees bordering the graveyard. The woods hold our coven’s residential quarters, and my mother is the best person to give Jax the immediate attention he needs. As head apothecary of the coven infirmary, there are few more experienced.

And we urgently need to discuss what I saw in Heathborne… but first I have to do something that cannot wait.

I cast my eyes around the sea of graves, breathing in what has probably been my favorite scent since I was a child: damp earth. Blame it on the countless hours I spent here with my grandmother. It’s basically our community’s vegetable patch.

You see, the common description of us as “darkbloods” is, at best, rudimentary. Just like clearbloods’ conception of death is. The way we see it: Death is a garden and we are its gardeners.

Take this yard, for example. It’s filled with flowers andseeds that keep on giving… if you know where to find them, and how to use them. If you don’t or make a mistake… well, you find out soon enough.

I pick my way toward the headstone where my grandmother lies. Esther Esme Salem. She died before I was born, so my parents gave me her middle name in her honor. And I have come to speak with her almost every day since I learned to talk.

I kneel at her gravestone, draw out the small knife from my belt, and cut my palm. I smear my blood across her name etched into the stone. A small bloodflower, dainty like a deep-crimson hibiscus, blooms in the soil next to me, and I close my eyes.

A skull appears in my mind’s eye, the delicate skull of my grandmother, lying in the soil beneath me. She nods, and her spectral voice, simultaneously distant and intimately close, fills my ears:“Thank you, child.”Hopefully my gift will put her in a good mood for the next time I call her.

Because, naturally, nothing comes for free.

Unless of course you’ve sold your soul to us, like a dumb clearblood. Then you’re basically screwed.

I sheathe my dagger and hurry toward the woods.

3

When I reach our family lodge, its ivy-ridden exterior looms cold and still. No lights, no movement.

“Mom? Jax?” I call, wondering if they might have gone down to the basement. I can’t imagine why they would have, when our ten-foot dining table would have done fine for an at-home treatment.

The lights are also out in the house of my aunt, uncle and three cousins, which stands next door to ours. But that’s to be expected: they were all deployed, along with my younger sister Brynn, as emergency reinforcements to Bloodbane Coven three days ago after a clearblood strike.

The heavy tapestries lining our entryway seem to absorb what little moonlight enters, their embroidered scenes of ancient mage battles fading into the gloom.

My gaze drifts briefly but inevitably to the single photograph perched on the mantel—my father’s face frozen in time, his sharp cheekbones casting shadows across featuresso similar to my own; his gray eyes holding secrets I’ll never know.

He left for Tarnhollow—a fledgling clearblood coven five hundred miles east of Darkbirch— thirteen years ago, when I was ten years old. It should have been a routine reconnaissance mission, but he never returned. Bloodbane and two other neighboring covens helped us send trackers, but the only answers we ever got were rumors which reached us of pyres burning in Tarnhollow’s square.

For years, my mother came to this exact spot every evening and stared at his photograph. She never said it aloud, but we all knew she was waiting. If I’m honest, I waited too. Even after we stopped lighting the spirit-lanterns, and when the bond-ritual scars on my wrist stopped aching, the magic gone cold. Some nights, I still dream of smoke curling against a distant horizon, and wonder if his spirit chose the afterlife over us—or if the clearbloods found ways to ensure hecouldn’treturn to us even in subtle form.

I exhale. Either way, it doesn’t matter anymore.

I tear my eyes away from the picture.Focus.

Jax.

My mother must have taken him straight to the infirmary, which means his condition is worse than I thought. Isander probably escorted them both there.

I glance at my watch. It’s still several hours before sunrise. I stop by my bedroom and briefly glance around at its sparse interior. I’ve barely spent any time here since I moved into the academy’s dorms. I grab my old snakeskin whip, tipped with a silver blade, which stands in a white-porcelain vase behind the door, then hurry back out of the house.

Darkbirch is always wild, but when the sun sets, the creatures we harbor shed the last pretense of civility.

The infirmary path stretches before me, a ribbon of dirt cast in flickering lantern light. Ten minutes. That’s all it should take. But the woods in this area are hungry, and twenty steps in, I already hear the pound of paws and the wet rasp of something breathing too hard, too close.

I turn slowly.

Red eyes float in the dark. Teeth glint like shards of glass.

---