“So was I. I’m Juniper.” I bow my head once back to her. “I might have knocked someone over too in that chaos. Why would they do that to us?”

  She looks over my shoulder at the sea. “My father warned me they did this, and you got lucky the bridge appeared in front of you. Only twenty-five percent of the two hundred first-years survive the first year. This is how it begins. They don’t want weak witches fighting in the war and just becoming another powerful, controlled soldier for the enchantress to use against us.” She blinks. “Oh, I’m going on again. I’ll stop. I’m Winifred Venus, of the Venus clan. What’s your clan?”

  Here we go. I knew I would end up having to tell someone, and I know they will have heard about my clan.

  I pick up my suitcase handle and begin dragging it with her at my side. “Daygan clan.”

  Her eyes widen, and she stops for a second. I don’t stop with her, and she catches up after a brief pause. “I’m so sorry for what happened to them⁠—”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.” I cut her off.

  Her cheeks brighten. “No, of course not.” We are quiet for a long part of the walk. “I’ve made it awkward. I’m not good at making friends. My father says it’s because I talk too much and that annoys people. He always says, ‘Wini won’t stop.’ My brother tells me it’s because I’m shy. I think it’s both, but I know I’ve put my foot in my mouth with you.”

  “You haven’t.” I really look at her. She is tanned, likely from all that Texas heat I’ve heard about—at least, I think that’s where the Venus clan is based. Her eyes are hazel, there is a line of freckles across her cheeks, and she is shorter than me, which is surprising because I’m pretty short myself. “I’m nervous and I’m not used to anyone asking me about my clan. You came back when most wouldn’t have, and I think that’s cool. I’d like a friend going into the academy too.”

  She beams, and I smile back.

  “Did your father warn you of anything happening after the bridge?” I ask, still shaken by what just happened.

  “No, I think we’re okay for now,” she answers.

  It takes us probably another fifteen minutes of fast-walking to catch up with the crowd and follow behind them as we cross the edge of the forest and over the lower parts of the academy. At the end of the path is a huge courtyard with old, weathered metal gates that are pulled open, with hundreds of sharp spikes on top, which line the walls too. The courtyard is all black, along with the black brick floors that are chipped in places, and green plants have crawled up through the gaps. My eyes lock on the towering statues of knights in each corner, each of them holding a lantern in their hands that glows a dark green.

  We all a little leery as we spread out around the courtyard, and I look back, seeing the metal gates lock shut on their own, the road vanishing like it was never there. Bloodstone Academy students are sitting on a row of steps leading up to a big, arched door. My eyes drift down their uniforms. They wear tight, all black clothes that show off every inch of their toned and muscled bodies, with red lines down their arms and the side of their legs. The red emblem on their chests matches the one on my neck. Most of the students have a cloak clipped to their shoulders, and I watch as a few of them walk right past us, not giving anyone a second glance. I guess they aren’t interested in the first-years.

  I don’t blame them. Any one of us could die pretty early on. A familiar man’s laugh makes me turn, looking straight ahead to a man standing on the steps. His uniform is the same, but instead of the red lines and emblem, it’s all silver, which matches his very silver hair. Golden skin, high cheekbones, and a tall, muscular body draw my attention, but it isn’t how attractive he is that has me staring. He’s familiar. I don’t know why. When he turns, his dark silver eyes latching onto mine, I remember, like a key unlocking a door. A memory I’ve never seen before comes flashing into my mind.

  “Stop, stop, Juni. We can’t go too far, you know that!” I laugh, turning around to see Kane Ardian chasing me with a grumpy expression, his silver hair flashing in the sunlight. It isn’t fair that he is only two years older than me, yet somehow he is so much taller. Racing is no fun when you’ve got short legs. He catches up to me in a minute, grabbing my arm and stopping me. I laugh, pushing him away, and he shakes his head. Something changed last year when he turned nine. He just got older—serious.

  “You don’t smile anymore, Kane!” I frown. “Why not? What happens when you turn nine that I don’t know?”

  “You’ll know when you’re older, Juni.” He sighs. “Come on, our parents will be mad if they know you came out this far.”

  “I know, but it’s boring here. We never leave.” I cross my arms. “And you’re my only friend, well you and the other dragons, and now you’re grumpy all the time. I think you don’t like me.”

  He offers me his hand. “You’re my Juni. That will never be true.”

  I stumble on my feet, and Winifred catches my elbow, steadying me. Kane was my childhood friend…before my parents died. I don’t remember what happened, but we grew up together and I adored him. Kane is here…and I remember him. I shrug Winifred’s hold off me, leaving my suitcase, and run to the bottom of the steps. “Kane! It’s me, Juni.”

  He lifts his head, his silver locks moving with him, and he frowns. Slowly, he rises to his feet, and he is so much taller now. Imposing even. But this is Kane, who was kind and sometimes grumpy, but kind. The frown stays perched on his beautiful face, and he takes my breath away. He’s changed a lot since we were kids. “Get fucked, first-year.”

  I wince at his deep voice, at the chuckles from the two girls sitting on the step behind him, both of them watching. I frown right back. “Don’t you remember me?” I close the space between us, and even when I’m on the same step as him, I have to arch my neck to meet his arresting eyes. His frown stays, though. No recognition, no nothing. “It’s Juniper. Come on⁠—”

  “I don’t know anyone named Juniper,” he growls, and the hairs rise on the back of my neck as his eyes brighten, the dark gray turning almost white. “And this is low, even for first-years. Pretending to know me won’t make me bond with you.” He shoves me hard, and my feet leave the ground, right before I smack onto the ground with a cry. Laughter bursts out of everyone except Winifred, who runs over to help me up. I’m grateful to have a friend in this moment, but my embarrassment and confusion outweigh everything. Kane stares down at me. “Thank you for marking yourself as the first person I’m going to kill in the forest tomorrow night, Juniper.”

  Fear sends my heart smacking in my chest, and I can’t hear anything Winifred is saying as she helps me up. My head and shoulder hurt from the fall, but nothing feels like more than a bruise. I’m so confused. “Juniper, seriously, you had to make enemies with the most dangerous unbonded shifter in the first ten minutes in the academy. It might have been better if you fell off the bridge into the sea,” Winifred hisses. “Don’t you know who that is?”

  “Apparently not,” I mutter.

  Wini goes to tell me, but another, louder male voice echoes through the air. “Welcome to Bloodstone Academy, first-years! Please follow me and don’t get lost. The shifters hunt the weak on the first few days here, and a lost soul is a weakness we do not allow to live.”

  Bonus Read

  We all turn to the man standing at the front of the courtyard, just above us, on one single step. Double doors are right behind him, opening to a dark tunnel of a corridor looking nothing but black in his shadow. The archway around the doors is made of stone, each brick with a different shifter symbol, and right at the top is a dragon, shining in gold, a stark contrast to the black stone. My eyes are drawn to something else that’s gold. A shiny pocket watch hangs out of the man’s side pocket, and he picks it up, looking at the time before his brown eyes scan the crowd. No one has moved since his shout, but neither has he.

  He’s a tall man with a long, ominous red cloak and a matching red suit underneath. All the very color of blood, except for the marking like the one on my neck for Bloodstone Academy, which is stitched in black on the cloak. His hair, matching his suit, is short and shaved at the sides. He’s young, not that young, maybe early thirties, and he is just short of being handsome. His features are too pointed, too sharp, and his eyes too small. We are all watching as a fox the size of a horse walks out the door, lying down at his feet. A changeling shifter. Gasps and whispers burst around the space.

  Winifred leans into me. “He’s young to be a professor, don’t you think?”

  “Again, welcome to Bloodstone Academy and congratulations on being fast runners!” My stomach turns at the cheers that echo through the crowd. People died today, just behind us, and they are gone now. They could have been the best of us, and they are just gone. We are already at war; I don’t understand why killing them was needed to prove anything. Couldn’t they be weeded out another way that didn’t involve their deaths?

  He clasps his hands together and I notice the rows of black rings on every finger. “I am your headmaster, Mentor Parker.” Wini and I look at each other. Both of us are surprised. I don’t know why I thought the headmaster would be some old person with long gray hair, but I wasn’t expecting someone who can only be eight to ten years older than me. “This is my bonded, and her name is Sookie. I fought my years in the war with Sookie at my side, and we both chose to return to the same academy we learned at to teach the next generation. I don’t stand before you as a tutor, I stand before you as a fellow soldier in our army. We all work for the Umbral Authority, and we all want the same thing—the end of the war.”

  He looks around, assessing us before continuing, “A few things to note…magic cannot be used within the academy unless you have signed the paperwork, and the moment you do, your magic will be restored instantly. Now, please follow me.”

  He turns, his cloak swinging in the breeze, and Sookie follows after him, her tail brushing the ground as they head through the double doors.

  I go to reach for my suitcase, but it’s vanished. Literally vanished into thin air. I spin around before noticing Wini is doing the same thing. In fact, all of us are looking around for our suitcases and bags, but they are all gone. Wini sighs first, hooking her arm through mine. “They must be magically taken to our room. I can’t wait to get my magic back. It feels like I’m missing a part of me without it.”

  “Same,” I admit, and more than that, I feel scared without my magic and the potions I have in my suitcase. My magic would have made what happened on the bridge nothing. I could have muttered a spell to hover in the air or to breathe underwater and to swim fast. As long as I can talk, I can do magic. I’ve spent my entire life learning and memorizing every spell I could find. I even made some new spells too—even if it isn’t allowed. My heart pounds just a little, because I don’t want to lose my suitcase. It has every bit of my life in it, and I’m not sure what that says about me.

  I tuck my hair behind my ears, wishing I hadn’t decided to cut in the face-framing layers in the bathroom yesterday. Looking good here isn’t going to matter. They proved that with the bridge. A shiver goes down my spine as we walk up the step into the long dark corridor, where there’s too much to look at but all of it is cloaked in shadows. Every wall has dozens of paintings, but they’re hard to see because it’s so dark in here. Other than the knights holding lanterns, which must be a trend for the academy, there is no light and no windows in this long corridor, just hallways and dark corners. I stay close to Wini. Even though we really don’t know each other, it’s better to have someone at my side when I’m in a gothic castle of nightmares.

  Mentor Parker is fast and we end up nearly running to follow him down one corridor and down another one that is mostly the same, but the knights here have gold armor, and the walls are a deep purple. The corridors don’t seem to end, and we pass through too many until it’s a complete maze and I’m definitely lost. I wouldn’t know my way back even if I tried to go back, which I won’t.

  Eventually, when I’m slightly breathless and my legs hurt, Mentor Parker leads us into a room. The room is as big as a football field and as tall as one, too, with rows of windows on each side. The windows have geometric patterns in the glass, making it impossible to see outside, and they are angled at the top with a sharp point. The walls are all black stone, and there are no knights in here, nothing other than a room full of wooden chairs in rows and a stage at the front where Mentor Parker and his bonded are standing.

  “Sit down, please.” Mentor Parker clicks his fingers at the chairs. Wini and I find a seat in the second row, and the moment I sit down, a hovering wooden board appears in front of me. The board has a scroll, an ink jar, and an old-fashioned feather pen on it. Wini has the same thing; so does everyone in the row.

  I feel someone staring, and I turn, seeing a hooded man closing the doors. He is so tall, but his cloak falls down over his eyes, and I can only see his tanned skin and lips. He stands in front of the door like a ghost in all black.

  “In front of you is a magically binding scroll. The minute you sign it with your name, your full name, you will not be able to talk about Bloodstone Academy outside of what we allow. You will not tell our secrets or history, you will not speak a word of it, and you will be magically bound to the academy for three years. Once you are taught here, you will fight in the war for five years after. If you manage to survive and do your duty in the war, there are rewards.”

  Again, people whisper. I didn’t sign up for the academy for any of the rewards. I had a choice when I got my exam results back. I could have chosen to stay in Saturn Town, found a job and got my own place. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I signed my name on the scroll to apply for this academy. Most of my class did. We all want to end the war. I don’t want money or land or promises of anything but peace when the war is won. “Outside of the rewards, you will be marked in our history books as the brave witches who fought in the war. You will be honored forever by your people when we win.”

  The scroll unwinds itself in front of me until it’s laid flat, and there are dozens of sentences running from the top to the bottom of the scroll, except for a small dotted line. It’s all in the old Latin language that I learned even though I was told I didn’t need to learn it because I would never need to use it. Turns out Melody was wrong.

  Mentor Parker doesn’t give me long enough to read more than the first sentence about blood binding us to the years at the academy before he is speaking. “You now get one single chance to leave Bloodstone Academy.” He nods to the hooded man at the door. “If you choose to leave right this second, you’ll be safely returned to your families by one of our third-years. But that’s your only chance. If you choose not to go, you stay here and you do not leave unless it is to go to war or in a body bag for your families.”

  I don’t have a family to go back to. My choice is already written in stone.

  The silence only stretches for a second before people pick up their pens, and I do the same. No one leaves. I glance up to find the headmaster looking right at me, but the second our eyes meet, he turns away. I dip the pen into the ink and move it to the scroll, to the dotted line. It feels like signing my world away for a chance of freedom. Risking my life to change it. But I do it anyway, signing my full name across the bottom. The minute that I do, the scroll rolls itself up and flies away, literally going up and disappearing high into the vaulted ceiling and vanishing from view. The rest of them follow until there is silence, and when Mentor Parker claps his hands, everything vanishes from in front of me like it was never there.

  “Alright, new students, we will begin with a very brief history lesson before you’re shown to your rooms. Tell me, what is the biggest threat to the witch race?” Mentor Parker waits for anyone to answer.

  A boy at the end of our row puts his hand into the air, and Mentor Parker nods. “The enchantress and her Mindless army?”

  “Yes and no. Another answer?” he replies.

  I put my hand up, and he nods my way. “I think the biggest threat to our race is one of us becoming one of the Mindless.”

  “You are correct, Juniper.” I wonder for a second how he knows my name. “The biggest threat is us teaching you to be very formidable weapons, with very dangerous shifters bonded to your souls that would turn into Mindless right alongside you. As we all know, the enchantress can turn witches and mortals into Mindless soldiers, drained of every drop of blood in their body.” A flash of a memory flickers into my mind. A Mindless in front of me, its skin so pale, like moonlight, and its eyes gone. “They become nothing but skin, bones, and explosive magic. The Mindless do not harm children under the age of sixteen, but adults are their food, and they hunt us.”

  He begins to pace on the stage. “I feel I can speak for every soul in this academy when I say that this war has taken someone that we love and turned them into the Mindless—or just killed them. Our race used to be a million strong, hidden throughout the world, but still there. Now there are little more than two hundred thousand of us left alive, and humans? Well, they are much less. Shifters are the biggest surviving race, and why is that?”

  A girl behind me shoots her hand into the air. “Because they cannot leave the forest or be turned into Mindless,” she answers, adding, “unless they bond with a witch.”

  “Correct…but what else can they not do?”

  Silence. No one answers and I don’t know either. He smiles. “Good, you shouldn’t know this. But shifters cannot shift outside of marked witch areas like the Bloodstone Forest. If they leave these areas, they are nothing more than human unless they are bonded to a witch, so a bond is their only chance for freedom.” Hushed whispers burst out, and Wini just looks at me with wide eyes. “The shifters are cursed, and they were cursed by a student who attended this academy in its very first year—the enchantress.”