Chapter 4
Faye
"You." His voice came out level, then didn't. There was a half-beat gap right in the middle of the word — barely there, gone before I could be sure I'd heard it — and then he cleared his throat once, short and deliberate. Like the sound could reset the moment. "You — what's your name?"
The stammer sat between us in the fog. He knew I heard it. His jaw flexed.
"Faye," I said. "Faye Allen."
He didn't react to the name, but something shifted in the set of his shoulders — microscopic, controlled — the way a chess player adjusts his grip when the board stops matching his projection.
He reached up and straightened his jacket collar with two fingers, slow, and the motion brought his lapel badge into the light: a silver shield, flat and clean against the dark fabric.
"Evander Corvinus." His voice was even now, the crack sealed over. "Given that you're new to St. Helis, someone needs to walk you through basic survival etiquette." He started toward me — unhurried, like he was crossing a ballroom floor. His nostrils moved. Just slightly. His breathing slowed in a way that felt worked at, not natural.
"First rule: bleeding on campus grounds is a genuinely poor habit to—"
Adrian came off the ground like a switch had been thrown.
His eyes had gone full red, pupils pinched to points, and when he screamed, "Get away from her — I found her first!" his voice had that raw, scraped-out quality of something that had stopped being a person. He lunged at Evander.
Evander sidestepped. One clean, almost bored pivot, and Adrian's momentum carried him straight past. "A half-turned convert," Evander said, tone flat. "Can't hold basic control, and still thinks it's appropriate to bare his teeth at me."
He raised one hand and pushed — not a punch, just a light, open-palmed push that shouldn't have done anything — and Adrian left the ground.
The crack when he hit the stone wall sent something cold down my spine.
Adrian was still trying to get upright when Evander was already there, one foot pressed to his chest. He let the shield badge catch the light directly in front of Adrian's face. "Memorize this," he said. "Next time you see it, you kneel."
Adrian's mouth was dark at the corner. The red in his eyes was fading — not from calm, but from something worse. Pure humiliation, burning through the rage and leaving just the ugly residue of it.
That's my cue.
I didn't wait. While Evander was busy with his dominance demonstration, I mapped the gaps — around the left side of the path, past the hedges, straight shot to the residential hall — and I ran.
What in the actual hell is wrong with this school. The thought looped with every stride. Beautiful people, zero functional brain cells. One's out here treating girls like a free buffet, and the other just used a person as a wrecking ball.
I hit the dorm entrance at full speed, shoved through the door, and collapsed against the back of it. My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I pressed both palms flat against the door behind me and just stood there, breathing, until the sound of my own pulse stopped being the loudest thing in the room.
6:00 PM.
I knew because I checked my watch — the light outside hadn't changed at all since I'd arrived, the fog sitting at the same flat grey it had been at noon. I'd been on the ground for maybe six hours total and already felt like I'd lived a full week inside them. No food since the airport, no sleep since the flight, and whatever the hell that was on the back path didn't exactly count as a restful welcome.
When I pushed open my room door, there was already someone inside. Short pale blonde hair, gray eyes carrying definite tiredness, skin a shade paler than it probably usually was. She was crouched beside the storage unit, pulling clothes from a half-open suitcase with the energy of someone who'd started the task three times and abandoned it twice.
She looked up. "Oh — hey. You must be my roommate. Emily Carter. Got here this afternoon."
"Faye Allen." I dropped my bag by the bed. "Just transferred."
She smiled, small, not quite full wattage. "This place is... something, right? Bigger than I expected."
Normal, I thought, watching her wrestle a sweater free from under a stack of textbooks. Completely, genuinely normal. After the last few hours, I could have cried from relief.
I gave it about fifteen minutes before the relief wore off.
"Okay, real talk," I said, dropping onto my bed. "The driver who picked me up from the airport said this fog appeared out of nowhere ten years ago. Government investigated for eight months, got nothing. Zero explanation." I unzipped my bag and kept going. "And the local theory is that something moved into the city, hated sunlight, and pulled the fog in like a set of curtains."
Emily made a sound that was technically a response.
"Right, sounds insane. But then he told me St. Helis has a student disappearance problem. Every year. No bodies, no explanations—" I glanced over. "Emily. Are you listening?"
She surfaced from her phone with the expression of someone coming up from deep water. "Hm? Sorry, what?"
"Students. Disappearing. From this school."
"Oh." Then her face lit up, and she turned the screen toward me. "Okay but Faye, have you seen the student directory? I found this ranking thread on the campus forum and I have serious questions about the genetics situation at this university."
I stared at her.
"I feel like my whole romantic life has been building to this moment," she continued, cradling the phone against her chest with complete sincerity. "I'm going to have the most cinematic college experience. I can feel it."
"Emily, I'm serious about the disappearances—"
"Dangerous?" She waved a hand without looking up. "Oh, totally. I don't know how anyone's supposed to focus on coursework with that kind of visual distraction situation going on. Genuine threat to my GPA."
I closed my mouth. She'd built a whole gorgeous fiction in her head — the campus romance, the meet-cute, the kind of story people make movies about — and every word I said about fog and missing students was just static bouncing off the surface of it.
"Time difference is still wrecking me," I said finally, pulling the blanket back. "I'm crashing."
"Totally, yeah." Emily was already back on her phone, a small smile at the corner of her mouth that meant she was already somewhere else entirely.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
She has no idea, I thought. If only she knew that every hot guy in this school is either a creep or a violent maniac.
Adrian — that's what the other guy called him, the one who apparently settles disagreements by throwing people into walls. Does whatever the hell he was doing with that girl in the classroom, then shows up on a dark path like that's a completely normal follow-up. And Emily wants to date her way through the entire campus directory.
Honestly? I should introduce them. Let the universe sort it out.
