Chapter 28: _ The Mad Prince

Why would an arrogant, pure-blood Wolf like Ivar stalk a markless commoner, fight a dark entity for her, and kiss her in a drainage pit? Ivar and Zev were always trying to compete with him and Remus, but this made no sense, Raice couldn’t help but conclude.

After all, she was triggering a chain of impossible realities.

When he’d first set his eyes on her, the spirits around him went silent. That had never happened before. Ghosts screamed around monsters. Entities whispered around possessed souls.

The dead always recognized corruption.

But when they looked at Elira... they only watched.

And for the first time in years, Raice had no idea what he was looking at.

"Oh, and because I know how much you dislike that rude little girl," Maeve added proudly, puffing out her chest, "I possessed a passing student and reported the whole fight to the Head Warden using your name! Now Clement thinks you’re his star informant, and the Dragonless girl is going to be dragged right into the security detail’s mess!"

WHAT?!

Raice slammed his palm against the wooden table. "You did what?"

Maeve blinked, her floating form flickering in surprise. "I... I helped you? She was mean to you on the Concourse!"

"She is target number one!" Raice snapped, rising to his feet despite the pain in his ribs. "I needed her isolated so I could figure out what she is! If Clement puts his eyes on her, she’ll be locked in a cell before I can find out why I sensed and felt her the second she stepped into the realm!"

Maeve squeaked and drifted backward toward the ceiling. "Well... oops?"

Raice rubbed his temples as his mind raced through the facts.

~Elira had no dragon mark. At the concourse, he had searched her expression for warmth and found none. Her tongue was even darker. She had no tolerance for everyone around her and hated the realm before even spending twenty hours in it.

She carried no warmth. Only anger. Only bitterness.

But anger has always been easier to see than grief.

And he knew better than anyone how perfect a beacon such bitterness was for dark entity possession... which ultimately meant the Dragonless girl just might not be what she seemed to be.

After all, he did sense her even before ever laying his eyes on her.

~She had just survived an attack by a core-stealing Sylven without using a drop of magic—or revealing whatever power was hidden inside her.

~A wolf prince was suddenly hovering around her like a hawk and even broke his own code of conduct by kissing her.

"This entire school is blind," Raice muttered quietly.

Suddenly, his vision swirled.

A burning agony flared from the deep gash on his forearm. His knees buckled, and he caught himself against the edge of the washbasin, gasping as the air in his lungs turned to ice.

Black venom. The beast’s tusk had been coated in rot-sap.

The candles on his desk flickered violently, their yellow flames turning into spectral violet. The room bled out, the stone walls melting away into the memory he had fought for weeks to bury.

He was back in the crypts beneath the East Tower.

Desperate to prove his horned companion wrong when it claimed his roommate was afflicted, Raice had secretly tracked Julian down into the long-abandoned chambers. He had expected to find a hidden nest of dark spellbooks or contraband artifacts.

Instead, he had found a bloody lair.

Kneeling on a slab of wet stone was Alfred, his roommate, and the only person in the realm he allowed himself to occasionally talk to.

But Alfred’s face was unhinged, his eyes jet-black as he tore into the heart of a low-born Tiger girl he’d lured into the tunnels.

Raice hadn’t hesitated. He had drawn silver steel and cut Alfred down where he stood.

Determined to lay out undeniable proof before the High Rector, Raice had hauled the black-bleeding remains of his roommate out of the crypts and dumped them directly at his mother’s feet in her private sanctuary.

He had expected her to sound the alarm, to mobilize the First Courts, to prepare the Academy for war.

Instead, Maddox had stared at the black gore, looked at her bloodied, exhausted son, and made her choice.

Within an hour, the body was incinerated by her elite guard. Before sunrise, an academy-wide decree was issued: Prince Raice had suffered a "violent mental break" and brutally attacked school wardens in the outer perimeter.

She swept the Borrowed under the rug, using his forced exile to the perimeter to save face and parade the Academy’s unyielding discipline to the Five Factions.

"Raice!" Cedric’s hysterical voice shattered the illusion.

Raice snapped back to the present with a gasp, his hand clutching the washbasin so hard the stone cracked beneath his fingers. Sweat poured down his neck as the venom worked through his veins

"He’s hallucinating again!" Cedric shouted, hovering anxiously around his head. "I told you that beast had rot-sap on its tusks! He’s going to lose his mind before sunrise!"

"I am fine," Raice growled through gritted teeth, plunging his arm into the cold water basin. He pulled a small vial of anti-venom root from his belt and crushed it directly into the open wound, hissing as his skin sizzled and burned away the poison.

He panted, resting his forehead against the stone, forcing his heart rate to slow. His hands were still trembling from the memory.

Maeve drifted down slowly, her usual playful chatter completely gone as she watched him with rare silence.

Raice straightened his spine, wiping the blackish discharge from his arm with a dry cloth. He looked at his reflection in the dark window pane. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin pale, the line between his reality and the dead thinner than it had ever been.

"So, what’s the play, boss?" Maeve asked cautiously. "Are we skipping the Gala like usual?"

"Of course, he’s currently unwell. Going is like proving everyone right about him being a mad Prince." Wight, the horned spirit, deadpan.

Raice looked down at his bloodied hands, then picked up the silver-trimmed formal coat hanging from his wardrobe, delivered to his quarters two nights ago—an unwanted gift from Mother dearest.

A lethal smile spread slowly across his face.

"No, tomorrow night, the predators think they are hunting a crowd. I’m going to go hunt the predator."

He paused, his gaze shifting to the window overlooking the Dragon Academy.

"And I’m going to find out exactly what that Dragonless girl is hiding before she gets us all killed." He rubbed his hands together.

For years, Raice had learned to recognize the signs: An entity nesting inside a soul. A creature pretending to be something it was not.

And even recently, he’d been forced to face a Borrowed wearing another face.

Those things had patterns. They had weaknesses. They had tells.

But Elira had none of them. And that was what disturbed him.

There were three possibilities.

She was a Borrowed.

She was possessed by something he had never encountered before.

Or...

She was something else entirely.

The third possibility made his skin crawl... because Raice understood monsters. He had spent years hunting things that hid behind human faces. He knew how evil moved. He knew how corruption felt.

But something unknown? Something that did not fit any rule he understood?

That was far more dangerous.