BORN WITHOUT FANGS

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Chapter 2 ENROLLMENT

Friday arrived like a slap.

The car that came for me at eight AM was not a car. It was an SUV the color of a bruise, with tinted windows and leather seats and the specific silence of a vehicle that cost more than the group home's entire annual budget. The driver said nothing. I said nothing. We drove north through the city while it woke up around us — the delis pulling up their gates, the delivery trucks double-parking on 3rd, the bodega cats sitting in their windows like small surveillance systems — and I watched it all with the feeling of someone watching something they might not see again.

Petra had cried when I texted her at 6 AM. She'd also, because she was Petra, immediately started researching the Five-Pack Accord on her laptop and sent me three increasingly alarmed messages before I had to tell her to stop because whatever she was finding was clearly not meant to be found.

"Zoe," she'd sent, at 7:58 AM, two minutes before the SUV arrived. "Please be careful. These people are not people."

I had no idea what that meant.

I was about to find out.

Ravenpeak Academy occupies the northwest corner of Northgate like it owns the whole block, which, I would later learn, it essentially does. The building is Victorian Gothic — the kind of architecture that communicates wealth and permanence and we have been here longer than your entire family's recorded history, child. Four stories of dark stone with arched windows and a front gate made of iron that was already open when the SUV pulled up, like they'd known exactly when to expect me.

Which, I was beginning to understand, they had.

I got out with my two bags and stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the building.

The building looked back.

I am not speaking metaphorically. There was a quality to it — to the stone, to the way the morning light hit the windows — that made me feel observed. Like the building had a nervous system.

"Ms. Vance."

A boy my age was standing just inside the gate. He was wearing the school uniform — dark blazer, grey slacks, a tie that had probably never been loosened in its life — and holding a folder with my name on the tab. He had dark skin, sharp cheekbones, and the expression of someone who had been assigned the least interesting task of his day.

"I'm Idris Farouk," he said. "Student council president. I've been asked to show you to enrollment."

His handshake was firm and his smile was perfect and every single instinct I had said: watch this one.

I smiled back. "Lead the way."

Enrollment was a room on the second floor that smelled like old paper and something underneath it — something warm and animal that I couldn't identify and didn't know enough, yet, to name. There were forms. There were more forms. There were photographs taken and an ID card produced with an efficiency that suggested it had been prepared before I arrived.

Idris sat across the table while a bored administrator processed everything, and he watched me in the way that some people watch things they are professionally interested in — with a focus that was almost impersonal.

"Have you been briefed," he said, "on the nature of the school?"

"Rich kids," I said. "Gifted learners. Advanced curriculum."

"Yes." A beat. "All of that is accurate."

"I'm sensing a but."

He tapped the edge of the folder. "You'll find that some of your fellow students are... different from what you're used to."

"I grew up in a group home in the Lower East. I've met every kind of different."

Something flickered in his expression. Not amusement — something more careful than amusement. "Not this kind."

He didn't elaborate. He stood when the administrator finished processing my forms, shook my hand again, and told me my roommate would meet me in the east residence wing.

At the door, he paused.

"One thing," he said, not turning around. "Don't wander after ten. The school has wings that aren't on the map you've been given. Students who explore them uninvited tend to have..." He paused on the word like he was selecting it. "...Complicated experiences."

He left.

I looked at the administrator.

She was already looking somewhere else with the determination of someone who has decided not to know things.

My roommate was sitting cross-legged on her bed painting her nails when I knocked on the open door of room 412, and she looked up with a grin that was so immediate and so full it felt like being handed something warm.

"Zoe! I've been waiting. I'm Neve." She waved the hand that wasn't wet yet. "Don't shake it, it's still drying. Sit down, I'll give you the real orientation."

"As opposed to—"

"As opposed to whatever Idris Farouk told you, which was accurate and useless in equal measure." She screwed the nail polish cap back on and tucked her legs under her. "Okay. Here are the actual facts. One: everyone here is a werewolf except you. Two: they all know you're human and most of them are either curious or offended, depending on their pack. Three: Callum Dray has already declared you a problem, which is bad, because what Callum Dray declares tends to become school policy within forty-eight hours. Four—" She stopped. Looked at me. "You're taking this very calmly."

"I'm processing," I said.

"Werewolves. I said werewolves."

"I heard you."

She stared at me. "You don't look surprised."

I sat down on the other bed and thought about the smell in Mr. Hale's office. About Administrator Vael's eyes that shifted color. About the feel of being looked at like something structural. About my mother's whisper: don't let them smell it on you.

"I'm surprised," I said. "I'm just not showing it."

Neve studied me for a moment with something in her face that was more complex than the warmth she'd led with. Then she smiled again, and it was real, and it was also — I would only understand this much later — the most dangerous smile in the room.

"I think," she said, "you and I are going to be interesting."

I met Callum Dray at dinner.

The dining hall was large and loud and organized with the unspoken efficiency of people who have a hierarchy and know exactly where in it they stand. I found a seat at an empty end of a table near the windows, put my tray down, and was approximately three bites into the best dining hall food I'd ever eaten — which I resented, because I didn't want to like anything about this place yet — when I became aware that the room had gone quieter.

Not silent. Just... recalibrated.

I looked up.

He was standing at the head of the center table with the specific quality of someone who has never in his life had to announce himself because every room he enters announces him. Tall. Dark-haired. A jaw that looked like it had been made by someone who was angry at the concept of softness. Grey eyes that were moving across the room the way a security camera moves — methodical, cataloguing — until they reached me.

They stopped.

I ate another bite of my food and held his gaze and did not look away.

Something moved through the room. A tension I couldn't name. Several people at the tables nearest me shifted slightly, subtly, in the way that prey animals shift when a larger predator changes its focus.

He picked up his tray. He walked across the dining hall. He sat down directly across from me at the otherwise empty end of the table, set his food down like he was planting a flag, and looked at me.

"You're the scholarship student," he said.

"You're Callum Dray." I speared a piece of roasted potato. "Neve mentioned you."

"What did she say?"

"That you've declared me a problem."

He didn't deny it. He also didn't blink. "You don't belong here."

"Tell that to the Five-Pack Accord."

"I'm telling it to you." His voice was even, unhurried, the voice of someone who has never needed to raise it. "Whatever they want from you — and they want something, they always want something — it will cost you more than it's worth. Leave while you still can."

I put my fork down. I looked at him properly, the way I look at people when I need to figure out what they actually mean versus what they're saying.

He was not sneering. He wasn't performing dominance for an audience. He was — and this was the thing I couldn't account for — he was warning me. Like he actually meant it.

"I can't leave," I said. "The letter said—"

"Letters can be ignored."

"This one specifically said it wasn't optional."

Something shifted in his face — the first movement in that controlled stillness, so brief I almost missed it. Something that looked, if I was being generous, like guilt.

He stood, picked up his tray, and walked back across the dining hall without another word.

The room breathed again.

I sat there and thought: he knows something about why I was brought here and he doesn't like it.

That made two of us.

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