Chapter 98 — Leave Me Alone

Chapter 98: Chapter 98 — Leave Me Alone

~ Raven ~

The package the Headmaster had given her sat unopened in Raven’s pocket, small and flat against her hip. She kept her hand away from it the entire walk back.

For the first few steps outside the infirmary, the corridor felt almost normal.

Then someone near the east stair noticed her.

The conversation there died first.

Raven kept walking.

Someone farther down said something to the person beside them, but the words reached Raven strangely, blurred around the edges like an argument heard through a wall. She caught part of a sentence and lost the meaning before she could make sense of it. When another whisper started, she simply stopped trying.

By the time she reached the arcade, heads were already turning ahead of her.

Students moved out of her way before she got close.

It happened gradually at first. One person noticed her, then the people beside them followed their gaze, and a path began opening through the crowd where there hadn’t been one moments earlier.

Raven walked straight down the middle of it.

A girl sitting on the low wall stared at her with her mouth slightly open. Two Ashbourne boys watched her pass without saying a word.

Raven couldn’t tell what any of the faces meant anymore.

Some students looked uncomfortable. Others looked frightened. A few wore the sharp, hungry expression of people who had just been handed the best piece of gossip they’d heard all year.

After a while they all began to look the same.

Raven had been stared at before. Valerius had been watching her since her first week, and eventually she had learned how to keep walking through it without caring.

This was different.

Before, she had usually known what people saw when they looked at her. The Blackthorn maid. The wolfless girl who had somehow earned a place at Valerius. Something easy to mock, dismiss or whisper about.

Now she had no idea which version of her they were staring at.

Maybe it was the girl who had entered the Hunt as Nascent and come out Awakened. Maybe it was the girl the attackers had apparently come for, or the one who had forced them to their knees with a single word.

And because apparently that wasn’t enough, there was also what she’d said about Cassian.

Mate.

The worst part was that none of those things actually explained anything. They were only pieces of what had happened, already turning into gossip around her while she still didn’t understand them herself.

The Headmaster’s questions returned almost immediately.

What kind of wolf was she?

Raven didn’t know.

Why had those people wanted her?

She didn’t know that either.

Who had altered the Ward?

Apparently no one knew.

And the only prisoner who might have given them an answer had somehow killed himself inside a warded cell while the academy wardens were supposed to be watching him.

Then, beneath everything else, there was the one thing Raven still hadn’t told the Headmaster.

The white place she had seen before.

The faceless man who had somehow entered her mind and stood inside memories that should have belonged to Raven alone.

And the mistake he’d made the second time.

He hadn’t needed to come far.

He was already inside Valerius.

Raven’s pace slowed.

Brielle had talked her down afterward. A nightmare brought on by stress, she’d said. Dreamwalkers belonged in old stories and children’s warnings; no one had produced a documented one in living memory.

At the time, that had sounded reasonable.

After what happened, Raven wasn’t nearly as interested in what people considered impossible.

Maybe impossible simply meant nobody had figured out how it happened yet.

Raven rounded the corner into the long gallery.

There were perhaps thirty students inside.

The noise dropped by half.

She kept walking.

At this point, her entire plan consisted of reaching Hale Wing, getting inside her room and shutting the door. Her wounds might have disappeared in the clearing, but whatever had happened to her hadn’t left her rested.

She still felt emptied out, her muscles weak and heavy, and every few dozen steps her knees reminded her that healing and recovery were apparently not the same thing.

The unopened package from Melissa kept brushing against Raven’s hip as she walked.

She was almost through the gallery when a movement near one of the pillars caught her attention.

A boy stood half-hidden behind two taller students, second-year judging by his collar. His Linkslate hung low beside his thigh.

He wasn’t looking at Raven.

In fact, he was making a very deliberate show of looking at his boots.

But every time his head shifted slightly in her direction, his thumb moved across the slate.

Raven stopped.

"I can see you."

The boy froze.

Colour climbed his neck and spread across his face in seconds. He lowered the slate against his leg without arguing or even trying to pretend she’d misunderstood what he was doing.

He just stood there getting steadily redder while his friends found the walls suddenly fascinating.

Fine.

Raven turned away and kept walking.

Four steps.

That should have been the end of it. She could have kept going.

She should have kept going.

Instead, something in her finally snapped.

Raven stopped and turned back.

"You know what?" she said. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

The boy looked up.

"No, seriously."

Her voice was still rough and scraped against her throat as it came out.

"What is wrong with you?"

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came.

Raven stared at him.

"I almost died."

The words travelled farther than she’d intended.

Conversation stopped completely now.

More heads turned farther down the gallery, but Raven registered them only distantly.

"You watched all of it." Her voice rose despite herself. "All of you did. You sat outside that Ward and watched what happened to us, and now I can’t even walk back to my own room without somebody putting me on their fucking slate?"

The boy lowered his head.

Raven’s hands had begun to shake.

She curled them into fists.

"I don’t know why they came for me."

Her voice shook.

"I don’t know what happened to me in that forest. I don’t know what’s inside me, I don’t know what I did, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next."

The words started coming faster.

Once they started, Raven couldn’t seem to get ahead of them.

"So stop looking at me like I’ve got the answers!"

Nobody spoke or moved.

"Stop following me. Stop whispering every time I walk past. Stop taking everything that happens to me and passing it around like it belongs to you."

Her throat burned, but she kept going.

Because suddenly it wasn’t only the boy.

It wasn’t even only the Hunt.

It was the Headmaster asking what she was.

It was thirty students watching her cross a corridor.

It was weeks of Valerius turning everything she did into entertainment.

It was eighteen years of House Blackthorn deciding who she was before she was old enough to argue.

All of it came out through the same crack.

"I just want to be left alone!"

Her voice cracked.

Raven barely noticed.

"SO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!"

The words struck the gallery and seemed to hang there.

Silence followed.

The boy lowered his head completely.

Beside him, one of the taller students slid his Linkslate into his coat without being asked. Farther down the gallery, another disappeared into a pocket, then another.

Raven turned around.

And walked.

She made it around the corner before her hands started shaking badly enough that she shoved them into her pockets so nobody could see.

There was no satisfaction in it.

That was the worst part.

She didn’t feel better.

She felt scraped hollow.

If anything, she felt more exposed than before, because now the academy hadn’t only watched her nearly die.

They had watched her lose her shit too.

Raven couldn’t remember most of the final corridor.

She only knew she eventually reached Hale Wing, found her door and opened it.

"—not walking around looking like a cripple."

Raven stopped.

Brielle sat on the edge of her bed with one sleeve pushed up. She had the end of a thick bandage clenched between her teeth and was using her good hand to work it loose. Half the wrapping already lay coiled in her lap.

"The Velkarin said two days," Thalia said, standing directly in front of her with both hands hovering as though she was trying very hard not to physically restrain her. "Two. Days. Brielle, that was hours ago."

"The bones are set. They’ve knitted. I can feel them." Brielle pulled another turn loose with her teeth. "There’s a throb. That’s it. Just a throb."

"You cannot feel bones knitting."

"I know my own hand."

"Clearly not, because you’re trying to unwrap it hours after somebody crushed it."

From her desk, Tessa spoke without looking up.

"Wait for a healer to clear it."

Brielle glared at her.

"One healer," Tessa continued in the flat voice of someone who had already made the same argument several times. "Ten minutes. Then if they say you can take it off, I’ll personally help you burn the bandage."

"I don’t need permission to take off my own—"

Thalia glanced toward the doorway.

She stopped.

Tessa looked up.

Brielle froze with the loose end of the wrapping still between her fingers.

All three of them stared.

Raven stood there with absolutely no idea what expression belonged on her face.

Thalia moved first.

She crossed the room and wrapped both arms around Raven before Raven had time to decide what to do with herself.

That was it.

No questions about the clearing. No questions about how Raven had entered the Hunt Nascent and come out Awakened, why corrupted wolves had dropped when she told them to, or what exactly she’d said to Cassian Blade before losing consciousness.

Even Tessa stayed quiet, which might have been the strangest part. Tessa had a question for everything.

Raven remained stiff inside Thalia’s arms, her own hands hanging awkwardly at her sides.

Get hold of yourself.

She stared over Thalia’s shoulder.

Two minutes. She’ll let go. Then you can sit down.

Her gaze found Brielle.

More specifically, it found her hand.

Half of the wrapping had come away.

The fingers beneath the wrapping were swollen and dark with bruising, held stiffly together while the skin around them remained discoloured beneath whatever salves the Velkarin had used.

The bones had been set, apparently, but the hand still looked nothing like the one Raven remembered.

The clearing came back without warning.

One second she was standing in the room.

The next, Brielle’s hand was pressed flat into the leaves beneath an operative’s boot.

Seren beside her.

Both of them looking at Raven.

Raven opening her mouth and getting nothing out.

Trying again.

Too slow.

Then the sound of both hands breaking almost together.

"Brielle."

Her voice gave out halfway through the name.

Thalia’s arms tightened around her.

She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t pull back to look at Raven’s face or tell her to calm down.

She simply held on harder.

And somehow, that was what broke whatever Raven had been holding together.

Because for the first time since the Hunt, someone was touching her without hurting her, restraining her, examining her, checking whether she was still functioning or waiting for something from her.

Thalia was just holding her.

A sob rose in Raven’s throat.

She swallowed it.

The next one broke through anyway.

After that, her breathing came apart.

Thalia tightened her arms around her just as Raven’s knees gave way, lowering them both to the floor without letting go.

Tessa moved immediately. She crossed the room, locked the door and stayed there with her back against it, quietly making sure no one came in.

Brielle remained on the edge of the bed, the loose bandage hanging from her damaged hand, her face unreadable.

Raven grabbed the back of Thalia’s uniform and buried her face against her shoulder.

Then whatever she’d been holding inside finally gave way.

She cried until it hurt.

Hard, ugly sobs tore through her one after another, shaking her badly enough that breathing became something she had to fight for. Every time she thought she had it under control, another memory came with it.

Brielle’s hand breaking.

Seren screaming.

Garrick barely standing and still telling her to run.

The black wolves.

The masked men who had known exactly who she was when Raven still didn’t.

And beneath all of it, the same question everyone kept asking her in one form or another.

What are you?

Raven didn’t know.

She had spent eighteen years knowing almost nothing about herself, and now suddenly everyone seemed to expect her to have answers.

She had none.

Nobody in the room asked her for them.

So Raven clung to Thalia and cried.