The first thing I notice about Blackthorn Academy is that it smells like a lie.

Not the obvious kind—not the stench of decay or sulfur or whatever Gothic nonsense I'd been half-expecting. No, it's subtler than that. The air carries notes of old wood and leather, expensive candles, and something underneath it all that my hindbrain recognizes as wrong. Like walking into a perfectly decorated house and knowing, without evidence, that the family inside has secrets that would make your skin crawl.

I stand in the circular drive, my single suitcase at my feet, and remind myself that I'm excellent at pretending not to notice things.

"Ms. Voss?"

The woman approaching me has the kind of smile that's practiced in a mirror. Headmistress Eleanor Thorne—no relation to the other Thorne on faculty, which is either a remarkable coincidence or a lie, and I'm betting on the latter. She's impeccably dressed in charcoal wool, her silver hair arranged in a style that probably costs more than my monthly stipend.

"That's me," I say, reaching for my suitcase before she can offer to help. I don't do helpless. Never have, never will.

"Welcome to Blackthorn. We're thrilled to have you." Another smile. Another lie. "Your credentials are exceptional. Dr. Hartley speaks very highly of your work."

Dr. Hartley, who'd been my advisor at Berkeley and who'd apparently been instrumental in getting me this fellowship, had also been suspiciously vague about what, exactly, I'd be researching here. It's an opportunity, she'd said, her eyes holding something that looked like pity. An opportunity you won't get anywhere else.

I should have asked more questions.

But I hadn't, because the alternative was spending another year in a cramped apartment in Oakland, publishing papers that no one read, and pretending that the nightmares about my family had stopped visiting me at three in the morning.

"I'm excited to be here," I lie back, and Headmistress Thorne's smile widens as if she appreciates the performance.

The campus itself is aggressively picturesque. Gothic architecture that probably dates back to the 1800s, all soaring spires and ivy-covered stone. The kind of place that looks like it should be haunted. Manicured lawns that seem to exist in a permanent state of late August. Students drifting between buildings with the kind of languid grace that suggests they have nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there.

That's when I see it.

A girl—seventeen, maybe eighteen—is walking across the lawn with a group of friends, laughing about something. Her eyes are brown. Normal, unremarkable brown. Then she glances toward the sun, and for one frame—one impossible frame—they flash gold. Molten, luminous gold, like someone lit a fire behind her irises.

Then they're brown again.

My breath catches. I'm good at controlling my reactions, but not good enough to stop my entire nervous system from screaming that I just witnessed something that shouldn't exist.

"Are you alright?" Headmistress Thorne is watching me with renewed interest. "You look pale."

"Just tired," I manage. "Long drive."

But I'm not tired. I'm terrified, which is interesting, because I thought I'd already used up my lifetime allotment of terror. Apparently, I was wrong.

---

My room is in Ashford Hall, a converted Victorian mansion that now serves as faculty housing. It's nicer than anywhere I've lived since my family died—since the witch hunters came and turned my childhood into ash and blood and screaming. The hardwood floors are polished to a mirror shine. The bed has an actual duvet. There's a window seat overlooking the gardens, and if I squint, I can almost pretend I'm someone who deserves nice things.

I unpack methodically. Clothes in muted grays and blacks. Books—mostly research texts, some poetry I'll never admit to reading. A photograph, face-down in my suitcase, that I place in a drawer without looking at it. The faces of the dead don't belong on display.

By the time the sun sets, I'm vibrating with the kind of restless energy that usually precedes a panic attack or a breakthrough in research. I've learned to recognize the difference. This feels like both.

I try to sleep.

I fail spectacularly.

By midnight, I'm wandering the halls of Ashford in a pair of sleep shorts and a stolen college sweatshirt, my bare feet silent on the hardwood. The Academy is different at night. The carefully maintained facade drops away, and the building reveals itself as something older, something that's been here longer than the electric lights and the modern plumbing.

I find the archives by accident.

Or not accident—instinct. The kind of instinct that's kept me alive this long. I round a corner and see a door that shouldn't exist, recessed into the wall like it's trying to hide. No sign, no lock, just a brass handle worn smooth by centuries of hands.

I open it.

The stairs descend into darkness, and I'm already moving down them before the rational part of my brain can catch up with the suicidal part. The air grows colder as I go deeper, and that wrongness I smelled when I arrived intensifies into something almost visible—a pressure against my skin that makes my hair stand on end.

The archives are underground. Of course they are.

Shelves stretch in every direction, floor to ceiling, packed with books that smell like decay and power and secrets. The lighting is soft and amber, coming from sconces that shouldn't be electric but clearly are. My fingers trail along the spines as I pass—titles in Latin, in Old English, in languages I don't recognize. On the Transmutation of Blood. A Comprehensive Study of Nocturnal Predation. The Witch Trials: A Classified Analysis.

I stop in front of that last one.

My hands are shaking.

"That's not a pleasure read."

I spin around so fast I nearly lose my balance. The man standing behind me emerges from the shadows like he was always there, like he's part of the darkness itself.

He's tall—taller than me, and I'm not used to that. Pale skin that suggests he doesn't spend much time in sunlight. Hair so dark it's almost black, falling across his forehead in a way that should look boyish but instead looks dangerous. And his eyes—

God, his eyes.

They're silver-gray, the color of old photographs, and they hold the kind of intensity that makes my survival instincts scream at me to run. But I don't run. I've learned that running is just a slower way to die.

"I couldn't sleep," I say, which is true and meaningless.

"Most people can't, their first night here." He steps closer, and I catch his scent—old leather, winter frost, something ancient and smoky like a library fire from a hundred years ago. "They lie in their beds and listen to the Academy breathe, and they realize that everything they thought they knew about the world was a very small lie."

"And you are?"

"Professor Adrian Kross." He extends a hand. "Supernatural Biology."

I stare at his hand like it might bite me. It probably shouldn't, but the air between us has taken on a quality that reminds me of the moment before lightning strikes—charged, dangerous, inevitable.

I take his hand.

The contact is electric. His skin is cold, colder than it should be, and when his fingers close around mine, I feel it like a shock to my nervous system. My pulse spikes. My breath catches. Every survival instinct I possess is screaming that this man is not human and not safe, and my body is responding by wanting to move closer, which is either the most dangerous impulse I've ever had or the most honest.

"Iris Voss," I say, and I'm proud that my voice doesn't shake. "Research fellow."

Something flickers across his face—recognition, maybe. Or hunger.

"Dr. Hartley's student," he says, and it's not a question. "Yes. I was wondering when you'd arrive."

He releases my hand, and I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed. Both, probably. Everything about this moment is both.

"Were you?" I move away from him, deeper into the archives, because proximity to Adrian Kross is making it hard to think. "Is that why you were lurking in the dark? Waiting for the new research fellow to stumble into your secret library?"

"I'm here most nights." He follows me, maintaining a distance that's professional and infuriating. "It's quiet. Peaceful. And the books have a tendency to answer questions if you ask them properly."

"Books don't answer questions."

"You haven't asked the right ones yet."

I pull a volume at random, trying to center myself. The leather is soft, worn smooth by handling. When I open it, the pages are handwritten—careful, precise script in faded ink. Observations about something called hemophagic metamorphosis. Case studies. Photographs.

Photographs of people whose eyes are golden.

"What is this place?" My voice sounds small. I hate sounding small.

"The truth," Adrian says quietly. "Or at least, a version of it. The version that the Academy maintains. The version that your scholarship was designed to help us expand."

I turn to face him, and the book falls from my hands. It hits the floor with a sound like a gunshot.

"What are you talking about?"

"You witnessed a manifestation today. During orientation." He's watching me with those silver eyes, and I wonder if he can see my pulse racing in my throat. "A student's ocular shift. You noticed because you're brilliant and observant and because you've been trained to notice the impossible. Dr. Hartley thought you would be."

"Dr. Hartley is a traitor," I say flatly. "She sent me here under false pretenses."

"She sent you here because you're the only person we know of who's survived a witch hunt and lived to study the supernatural. Because your research into the biological markers of magical bloodlines is the most advanced in the world. And because—" He pauses, and something vulnerable flickers across his face. "Because you understand what it means to be hunted."

The words hit me like a physical blow.

I don't talk about the hunt. I don't talk about coming home from school to find my house burning. I don't talk about my parents' screams or my younger brother's body in the garden or the way my sister Margot had disappeared into the crowd of townspeople like she'd never been part of us at all. I've built my entire life on the principle of not talking about those things.

"You don't know anything about me," I say, and my voice is ice.

"I know that you've built a career studying what you survived. I know that you live alone and prefer it that way. I know that you haven't slept more than four hours a night in five years because the nightmares won't let you." He takes a step closer. "I know that you're terrified right now, and not just because you've discovered that vampires and witches are real. You're terrified because you're starting to think that maybe you're not alone anymore."

"Stop," I say.

"Iris—"

"I said stop." I move past him, heading for the stairs, but he reaches out and catches my wrist. His hand is cold, and the contact sends a jolt through my entire body. "Let me go."

"You'll run," he says. "You'll pack your things and leave, and you'll spend the rest of your life wondering if what you saw was real. If any of this was real."

"Maybe that's better."

"It's not." His grip tightens slightly. "I know what it is to be alone. I know what it is to watch the world change around you and remain unchanged. I know what it is to want to belong somewhere so badly that you'd accept almost any cost." He pauses. "Don't run."

I should run.

Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to yank my wrist free and get the hell away from this man and this Academy and this revelation that everything I thought I'd buried is actually alive and breathing and waiting for me in the dark.

Instead, I turn around.

"What are you?" I ask.

"Dead," he says simply. "Since 1887. But I prefer to think of myself as persistent."

The world tilts.

I should be afraid. I should be running. I should be doing literally anything other than standing in a restricted archive with a vampire who's holding my wrist and looking at me like I'm the first real thing he's felt in over a century.

"This is insane," I whisper.

"Yes."

"I'm leaving."

"You're not."

He's right, which is infuriating. I'm not leaving. I'm standing here, my wrist in his cold grip, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard I'm surprised he can't hear it. The air between us is charged with something that has nothing to do with the supernatural and everything to do with the fact that I'm standing very close to a beautiful, dangerous man who smells like winter and old libraries and who's looking at me like he's been waiting for me for a very long time.

"If you're going to keep me here, you should at least tell me what I'm researching," I say, and I'm proud that my voice is steady.

A smile crosses his face—slow, dangerous, and utterly devastating.

"The cure for immortality," he says. "Or the reason we stopped looking for one. We haven't quite decided yet."

He releases my wrist, and I feel the loss of contact like a physical ache.

"Welcome to Blackthorn Academy, Ms. Voss. I suspect you're going to be very happy here."

I watch him disappear back into the shadows, and I realize with a kind of sick certainty that he's probably right.

Which is the most dangerous thing that's happened to me yet.