Chapter 12
She didn't say a word, but I didn't need her to.
Scarlet's confusion was loud. Raw. Like a signal flaring behind her eyes. She looked at each of us like we were strangers—like the world had shifted under her feet and no one else noticed.
I reached out, not physically, but with the part of me that saw beneath skin and speech. A gift, or a curse, depending on who you asked. I scanned her thoughts—not to invade, but to confirm.
There was nothing.
No deception. No buried motive. No memory she was holding back. Just a void. Confusion, spinning wild and honest. That was all.
"She doesn't know," I said quietly. "It's not an act."
Draven leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, face unreadable as usual. Ice-blooded, they called him. Nothing ever cracked his surface.
Dexter was already moving. Quick, silent steps across the marble as he reached Scarlet's side and caught her just before her knees buckled again.
"She needs the librarian," he said.
We all knew what that meant. The librarian wasn't just a keeper of books. She was our private healer. The one who stitched bones and minds alike.
Draven said nothing. His silence was its own language. I knew he was watching Scarlet carefully, but not out of concern. He was measuring her. Calculating.
We moved swiftly. Through hidden halls beneath the school—corridors the others didn't even know existed. Scarlet's fingers were cold in mine as I helped Dexter carry her. Her pulse stuttered under her skin.
"She's burning up," Dexter muttered. "But not from fever."
"She's awakening," I said. "Or breaking."
The librarian's room was dark and hushed. She emerged from the shadows like she'd been waiting. Without a word, she took Scarlet from us, guiding her gently to the stone bed near the fire.
Dexter didn't stay.
Instead, he turned toward the ancient scroll shelf in the back of the room. His hands moved fast, fingers glowing faintly. He was already erasing it—the moment Scarlet growled at the staff, the way she was shoved to the Alpha table, the way her body had shifted, too fast, too primal.
One by one, he wiped it. From memory. From minds. From every whisper that might turn into a story.
He even paused, fingers trembling over the sigil stone, before erasing it from the surveillance records.
Only the four of us would remember.
And even then, barely.
I turned to Draven. He hadn't moved. His icy stare was fixed on Scarlet, but it wasn't curiosity I saw there. It was recognition.
"You've seen it before," I said.
He didn't answer.
As the healer worked silently, Dexter's magic hummed low in the background — rewriting the room's memory, scrubbing clean every witness like ink lifted from old parchment. I stood at the edge of it all, still hearing Scarlet's voice in my head.
Not as she was now — unconscious and trembling — but the way she'd spoken moments before she collapsed.
The words weren't in English.
They weren't in anything I recognized.
But I had heard them before. Once.
In a prophecy buried in the catacombs beneath the old wing of the library. A fragment. A whisper, carved into obsidian, sealed away after the last rebellion.
I closed my eyes and pulled the sound forward.
"Nyriis vel quor'an doraen."
The moment she said it, her eyes had flickered—burning not with heat, but power. Something ancient. Something other.
I whispered it aloud. Testing the weight of it on my tongue.
Dexter paused mid-spell. "What did you just say?"
"She said it before she blacked out," I replied, low. "It wasn't pain. It was… invocation."
The librarian lifted her head slightly from Scarlet's bedside, her eyes sharper than I'd ever seen them.
"You understood it?" she asked.
"No," I answered, then added, "but I recognized the root."
I moved toward the scroll cabinet tucked under the healer's shelf. With a flick of my hand, the lock gave way. The others didn't bother trying to stop me — not even Draven, who was now watching with something very close to interest.
I pulled out the black scroll. The forbidden one. The one none of us were supposed to touch without permission from the High Table.
I didn't care.
Not after what I'd just heard.
I unrolled it gently, ignoring the way the air in the room shifted — colder, thicker. The prophecy's language curled across the old vellum like vines, half-alive. I traced it with my fingers.
There it was.
The same phrase.
"Nyriis vel quor'an doraen."
The flame does not forget its name.
A title.
Or a warning.
"She said this exactly," I muttered. "She didn't even know she said it."
The librarian turned pale. "That language is from the first realm. Before bloodlines. Before packs."
"She shouldn't know it," Dexter said.
"She doesn't," I confirmed. "Not consciously."
And that was the most terrifying part.
Scarlet, the girl they'd tried to break by seating her at the Alpha table, had just spoken the language of the ancients — the kind that hadn't been heard since the Binding Wars.
Draven finally stepped forward. His eyes met mine for a long second. Not cold this time. Calculating.
"You think she's one of them," he said.
I didn't answer.
Because the truth was, I wasn't sure if she was one of them… or something worse.