Skye
Abby clutches my arm, trembling, her breath coming in frigid puffs of white mist. The subway station is nearly frantic with bodies stuffed into heavy winter gear, everyone waiting for the evening train from Aurorium to arrive and offload anyone returning to campus after a day spent running errands in the city.
We’ll board that train and head straight to the snug, ice-coated city, and it can’t come soon enough. Even under the fluorescent glow of lights that supposedly radiate like the sun, giving the students who live in the dorms below the surface a minuscule amount of their daily dose of vitamin D, it’s freezing. The grates above our heads spill out hot air, but it’s barely enough against the constant, bone-aching chill.
When the train’s lights finally breach the darkness, the entire gathered crowd sighs in relief, and within minutes, shuffling and squeezing, we’re standing at the back of the train, arm in arm, watching the university platform fade into the shadows.
“Goddess, I’m so glad we don’t live down here anymore,” Abby says, her teeth still chattering slightly despite her heavy, fur-lined parka.
I scan her face for a moment, tilting my head as I take in her little details. “I always forget you’re half witch.”
She huffs a laugh, her dark eyes absorbing the flickering track lights running the length of the train car. “I blame my father wholeheartedly for falling in love with a witch, but you’ve seen my mom. She’s a smoke show. It’s a damn shame I didn’t inherit my dad’s warm, wolfish genetics.”
“You need to shift more. It’ll help, you know, keeping the wolf inside of you more active.”
“What will help me is a stiff drink and a hot club,” she retorts, grimacing as the train jerks to a stop and steam hisses, fogging the windows. Other passengers jostle toward the exits, everyone murmuring excitedly about their plans for the night. Aurorium is the closest any of us can be to the modern world and its entertainment. Concerts, bars, restaurants–Aurorium has it all, two-thirds of its economy driven by bored, overworked students and faculty of Lunaria’s pride and joy–its university.
Aurorium isn’t the capital of Lunaria, however. The Alpha King and his flock live further south, in Northstar, which is a sharp contrast to Aurorium’s ever dark, ever ice-coated exterior. Northstar is mountainous with frost-bitten trees and two real seasons–winter, and “break-up,” when the lake and river ice melt for a few months, which counts as their summer.
While Northstar is lovely, nothing will ever be more beautiful than Aurorium in my opinion.
The aurora the city is named for dances above our heads as we hurry out of the tunnel and up a steep, winding staircase to ground-level, where the city glimmers all around us in a wash of neon light. The buildings are tall here and cloistered together, which keeps the streets shockingly warm–a solid zero degrees compared to the icy tundra beyond, where negative sixty to eighty degree days are commonplace.
Most of the people who call this place home stay in their wolf forms when traveling through the streets, and it’s no wonder. It’s cold. Bitter cold. Even in the summer.
Smaller towns and even villages spread out against the ice. Nomadic packs still live here, moving from place to place, staying in their wolf forms more often than not while hunting reindeer and seals, but they’re much closer to the northern coast. Here, in Aurorium, we’re settled over what was once an ancient ocean that’s been frozen for thousands of years.
I often wonder what would happen if someone like Abby, Toby, or even Alex–Dr. Scarlett–drilled deep enough.
“I am absolutely frozen solid!” Abby shouts before bustling through the front doors of the nightclub I hate but she adores. Noise immediately rattles my senses. It feels like we’re being blasted by a hairdryer that’s been in use for too long. Abby helps me out of my parka and stuffs it in a locker with hers before taking my hand and dragging me through the arctic entrance leading to the club, and when we breach the interior, noise screeches into my head, rattling my powers to the point of pain.
I choke it down like I always do because it’s temporary. Once the bass of the throbbing EDM music registers in my head, my powers quiet, thrumming to the music like the blood being driven by every beat of my heart.
Abby takes the lead, as is usual when she manages to drag me off campus. She orders me a drink, finds us a booth, and gives me a few minutes to get my bearings again. She’s never questioned why I am the way I am, so I haven’t told her the truth–that I’m a freak who can see into the future, a strange, unearthly being of mist who can teleport wherever I want, and that I have visions of… stuff I can’t explain.
I suppose she thinks I’m like her in some way–a hybrid. There are so many of us now, anyway. Witches and shifters can be mates, but it's rarer than a wolf-to-wolf bond, for sure. Or, more likely, she’s used to people like me–people who have a hard time in loud places or crowded, closed rooms and prefer solitude to having a large social circle.
I’m coming back to reality when Toby slides into the booth beside me, bracing his hands on the table and grinning from ear to ear. He’s several beers deep, judging by the slur of his words and the looseness of his posture, but thankfully, instead of starting another fight, Abby blushes and smiles back at him.
“So are you guys mates again or what?” I ask over the rim of a bright, fruity cocktail that tastes like synthetic pineapple and something else I can’t place–but it’s awfully sour. My nose crinkles on impact.
Abby rolls her neck and fixes me with a look I know all too well. “We’ve been mates. Pissing me off is just Toby’s kink.”
“I love it,” he agrees, and I take a deeper gulp of my drink.
“There’s something seriously wrong with both of you.”
He leans back, legs splayed, perfectly comfortable encroaching on my space. “It’s Lunaria. Everyone here is crazy. Fuck, I’ll be getting out soon, I think. Another year or two, when Abby is finally ready to throw in the towel, we’ll be living large in Maatua.”
Abby scoffs at him, leaning forward. “Oh, is that our plan now?”
“You know I talk to your dad every day. He keeps me updated on all the games and royal gossip.” He shrugs like casually chatting with an Alpha, let alone his on-and-off again mate’s father, is a totally normal thing. “He’s got a house lined up for us and everything, and Abby has that job waiting for her at the marina.” He arches a brow in Abby’s direction in a challenge to argue.
“And what will you do without your precious Alex, huh? What will you do without him? He’ll never leave the lab. He’ll die down there in a tomb he builds himself within the ice, I’d bet my life on it. And he’d deserve it.”
“You’re always so hard on him,” Toby protests.
“He’s unnecessarily hard on me!”
I angle my body until I’m facing Toby, blocking out Abby’s heated scowl. “Are you friends with Dr. Scarlett?”
“Yeah, I mean, I consider him a good friend. I doubt he shares the sentiment.”
“Because he’s a fucking dickhead!” Abby shouts over the music.
“What makes you think that?” I ask Toby, leaning in. I don’t know why I care, but Alex… if I can call him that… he’s an enigma. He’s also the driving force behind Abby and Toby’s department. I’ve heard his name spoken for years in a variety of ways. He’s an artist. A savant. A prodigy. He’s also mean and strict, far more than any of the other most hated professors on campus.
People either worship the ground he walks on or loathe him.
And I’m sharing a table with two people on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of their feelings about him.
“Alex has always been cool. I like him, regardless of what Abby says. He’s a damn good scientist, but I get it. He can be really hard on his postdocs.”
“He was never hard on you,” Abby retorts, and Toby smiles softly, heaving a breath.
“I don’t know. He tried. I like fucking with him a bit, trying to get him to laugh—and he does, on occasion. He’s like every other freak of nature who takes tenure and decides to call this hellhole home. That’s all. He’s not a social guy.”
I edge closer to him, dropping my voice while Abby’s distracted by a group of women she knows from campus who stop at our table. “What is he like?”
Toby smiles to himself again, silently chuckling while looking down at his cold-roughened hands. “You know, he recently asked the same thing about you.”
“What–”
“We’re going to dance now!” Abby commands, grabbing Toby’s hand. He obeys in a heartbeat, and I watch them go, swirling my nearly empty drink in a circle. Abby already knows I’m going to dip out without saying goodbye. She knows I can handle maybe an hour of this noise and crowd before I crawl back into my hole of quiet solitude, and when she turns to look over her shoulder at me, winking, I take it as a silent understanding that I won’t see her for the rest of the night because she’s going home with Toby, and I’m free.
The cold bite in the air is a welcome relief from the heat of the club. I stand on the curb, zipping my parka up to my chin and tucking the fur liner of my hood around my ears, watching a group of wolves stroll by. It’s easy to spot the locals. Their fur is far thicker, and they’re smaller but denser wolves than I’m used to seeing in places like Moonrise and Crescent Falls. They’re definitely more acclimated to the elements here, that’s for sure.
I shiver, tucking my gloved hands into my pockets, and duck my head against the breeze, but I catch a shadow leaning against a lamppost on the other side of the street, a man smoking a cigarette, smoke bleeding against the cool puffs of mist rolling off his tongue.
Sharp, nearly-red eyes meet mine and hold, but his face is almost totally cast in shadow.
I used to talk to strangers as a kid. I used to tell random old ladies at the park about how long they had to live. I used to scare away potential playmates with my recounting of my rather dark, grisly visions and dreams.
I’ve learned it’s better to keep my head down and bite my tongue, even if the aura flooding off this man is making my skin crawl, like death is following his every move, his every smoke-tainted breath.
The subway stairs come into view under the glare of hazy neon lights as I trek across the ice. No one drives here unless it's off-road vehicles with chains and stubs embedded in the tires. Instead, wolves drag carts on skis, and people crunch over the ice in spiked boots, so the worn, weather-stripped steps are a welcome contrast to the slick street above when I breach the tunnel and come to a sudden halt.
A small crowd is already gathering to catch the next train back to campus, but it’s not the usual scene of students carrying grocery bags and cases of beer they can’t buy on campus. The benches are empty, and warriors in both human and wolf form are keeping the crowd back from something I can’t see but can taste. Death. I can smell it. My bracelet warms against my skin in warning.
“What’s going on?” I ask a group of young students to my left, likely undergrads. Young. So young. Maybe my brothers’ age. Freshmen.
“They have the whole waiting area taped off. Won’t let anyone through. We were told to wait here for the train,” one of the guys says, tucking his girlfriend closer as she shivers from the cold.
I rise on my toes to try to look over the crowd, but train lights cast a haze over the area as it pulls into the station.
“If you’re getting on, do it now!” one of the warriors shouts, motioning sternly toward the first car.
I follow the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of the scene and…
“Goddess above,” someone murmurs as I’m jostled, my feet refusing to move.
Blood coats the platform. Dark, sizzling blood. Still warm enough to send mist snaking through the air. It’s… everywhere, sprayed across the concrete wall, a bench, and the ground, where a black tarp covers what I know is a body.
“Get on if you’re going to Lunaria U!” a warrior shouts at me, motioning wildly. “Now!”
I side-step onto the train just as the doors shut, and the train jerks into motion. The bloody scene fades until the platform is nothing but a speck of light resembling a star–then darkness.