The creature had six legs, a crown of antlers, and the sort of expression that suggested it had been disappointed in humanity for several years.
Naturally, it knew my name.
"Kevin Salvador."
I stared at it.
It stared back.
We were standing in a forest beneath a moon that looked far too large to be natural. Its light filtered through the branches in pale silver ribbons, illuminating the creature's dark hide and the strange, branching antlers that rose from its head like a crown grown rather than forged.
Its front legs were too long. Its rear legs bent at the wrong angles. I could not decide whether its face resembled a stag, a wolf, or something that had once observed both animals and concluded that nature had done an inadequate job.
The creature lowered its head.
I took a step backward.
"Look," I said, with the measured patience of a man negotiating with something that had no business existing, "I'm sure you're very important in your own ecosystem, but I would appreciate it if you stopped looking at me like I owe you money."
It did not blink.
"Kevin."
This time, the voice did not come from the creature's mouth.
It came from everywhere.
The trees shuddered. The moon flickered. Something in the distance made a sound like glass cracking beneath the weight of the ocean.
The creature's antlers began to glow.
I woke up.
For several seconds, I lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling of my new bedroom.
Then I reached for my phone.
4:17 a.m.
Wonderful.
I had been in New Orleans for less than a day, and the city had already found a way to make me lose sleep. Technically, the city had done nothing. My subconscious was the culprit, but blaming myself before sunrise seemed unnecessarily cruel.
I turned onto my side and pulled the blanket over my head.
"Not today."
The room remained silent.
Good. At least one thing in my life respected boundaries.
I closed my eyes.
A minute passed.
Then another.
I opened them again.
I had been having the dreams for weeks. Different settings, different voices, but the same creature. Sometimes I stood in places I had never visited. Sometimes I watched people whose faces I could never remember after waking. Occasionally, some of them noticed me.
Those were the worst ones.
Not because they approached me. They rarely did.
They simply looked at me as though I had arrived late to an appointment I had made years ago.
And lately, they had started calling me by name.
I sat up.
There was no point trying to sleep now. My mind had apparently decided that rest was a privilege reserved for people with less interesting problems.
I showered, dressed, and made my way downstairs.
The house was quiet. My father's study door stood open, revealing a desk crowded with papers and two empty coffee cups. My mother's travel case was still beside the staircase. She had arrived home late, left early, and somehow managed to make the house feel like a hotel where I was the only permanent guest.
I loved my parents. I did.
They were simply very talented at being elsewhere.
My father had spent years investigating cases that other people had given up on. He was the sort of man who could notice a misplaced object in a room full of distractions and remember a conversation word for word three months later. These days, people called him when a case became too complicated for the local authorities.
My mother worked in fashion consulting. Her job required her to travel, attend shows, meet designers, and possess opinions about fabrics that I suspected were more detailed than most people's opinions about politics.
Between them, they had enough professional commitments to occupy several lifetimes.
Unfortunately, they had only one son.
And that son had just moved from Atlanta to New Orleans because my parents had decided that a change of scenery would be good for the family.
By family, I assumed they meant themselves.
I opened the refrigerator and found a note.
Breakfast is in the container. We love you. Call if you need anything.
There was a heart at the end.
I looked at it for a moment, then took out the container.
The food was still warm.
I put the note back.
All right. They were not entirely hopeless.
I ate at the kitchen counter while scrolling through my phone. The usual news, messages, and advertisements passed beneath my thumb. A few classmates from Atlanta had asked how the move was going. I had replied that I was alive, which seemed like an adequate summary.
One of them had asked whether I missed anyone.
I had typed not particularly, deleted it, and sent a laughing emoji instead.
People liked to believe that moving was a dramatic event. New city, new life, new opportunities. They expected you to feel as though the world had opened its doors.
Mostly, I felt as though someone had taken my familiar inconveniences and replaced them with unfamiliar ones.
I finished eating, washed the container, and returned upstairs.
That was when I noticed the ring.
It sat in the middle of my desk.
I stopped in the doorway.
I owned precisely three rings.
One was in a box.
One was in Atlanta.
And the third was a cheap silver band I wore occasionally because it complemented my watch.
None of them looked like this.
The ring was made of a dull, dark metal. It had no stone, no obvious markings, and no ornamentation beyond a shallow groove running around its circumference. It was too large for my little finger and too small for my thumb.
I was reasonably certain it had not been there the night before.
I approached the desk.
The ring did not move.
I picked it up with two fingers.
It was cold.
Not the ordinary cold of metal left in an air-conditioned room. This was a deeper cold, one that seemed to originate from the ring and pass through my skin.
I dropped it.
It struck the desk without making a sound.
I stared at it.
Then I did what any sensible person would do when confronted with a mysterious object that had appeared in his bedroom overnight.
I took a picture of it.
If I was going to experience a supernatural event, I at least wanted evidence for the inevitable moment someone suggested I needed more sleep.
I sent the picture to myself, picked up the ring again using the corner of a tissue, and placed it inside a drawer.
Then I shut the drawer.
"There," I said. "Problem delegated."
A pressure formed behind my eyes.
I pressed two fingers to my temple.
The headache had been there when I woke, but it was growing sharper. The room seemed to stretch around the edges, as if the walls were moving farther away while I remained exactly where I was.
I gripped the desk.
Something whispered my name.
Not from the hallway.
Not from the window.
Inside my head.
Kevin.
I straightened.
"Who said that?"
Silence.
My pulse began to quicken. I checked the open doorway, then the window. The curtains were still. The street beyond the glass was quiet.
I was alone.
Kevin.
The voice was male, low and distant. It carried no obvious emotion, but there was something beneath it—an awareness so vast that I felt like a child standing at the foot of a mountain.
"Okay," I said slowly. "Either I need a doctor, or my house has developed a very specific haunting."
The pressure behind my eyes intensified.
The room vanished.
I was standing in darkness.
Not a dark room. Not a place where the lights had gone out. There was no floor beneath my feet, no ceiling above me, no air against my skin. There was only an endless black expanse, and the uncomfortable certainty that I had been brought somewhere rather than fallen asleep.
Ahead of me stood a man.
I could not make out his face. His features blurred whenever I tried to focus on them, as though my mind could not decide what I was looking at. His clothes shifted between forms: a dark coat, a long robe, something that resembled neither.
But I could see his eyes.
For one impossible instant, they were the same pale silver as the moon and creature in my dream.
Then they changed.
Grey. Blue. Silver again.
I knew him.
I had never seen him before in my life, but the knowledge settled inside me with the quiet certainty of a remembered name.
The man looked at me as though he had been searching for a very long time.
"There you are," he said.
The words carried no surprise.
Only relief.
I opened my mouth to ask who he was.
The darkness trembled.
Something moved beyond the man—something enormous, too far away to see and somehow close enough to make the space between us feel fragile.
His expression changed.
"Listen to me carefully."
I tried to move closer. My feet would not respond.
"You must find Viskar Academy."
The name struck me with the force of recognition.
I did not know what Viskar Academy was. I had never heard of it. Yet some part of me reacted as if the name had been waiting at the edge of my memory for years.
"Why?" I asked.
The man looked past me.
For the first time, I saw fear in his eyes.
Not fear for himself.
For me.
"Because you have been noticed."
The darkness rippled again.
"Something that should not be able to reach you yet."
"Yet?" I repeated. "Could you perhaps explain the part where—"
"You have time," he said, almost to himself. "Not much. But enough."
"Enough for what?"
"To reach them."
The man began to fade.
I strained toward him. "Wait! Who are you?"
His gaze returned to mine.
For a moment, I thought he would answer.
Instead, he said a single word.
"Finn."
The name echoed through the darkness.
The man's face blurred beyond recognition.
Then his voice reached me one last time.
"Do not let them convince you that you are alone."
The world shattered.
I woke on my bedroom floor with my cheek pressed against the carpet.
My first thought was that the carpet needed cleaning.
My second was that I had just passed out in my own bedroom, which seemed like a remarkably undignified way to begin a new life.
My third thought was that I should probably call someone.
I sat up too quickly and immediately regretted it. The room tilted. I waited for the dizziness to pass, breathing slowly until the furniture settled back into its proper places.
My phone lay beside the desk.
I crawled over to it, checked the time, and discovered that only a minute had passed.
One minute.
I had apparently experienced an entire conversation in less time it takes someone to microwave a meal.
I checked my messages. Nothing new.
I checked the photograph I had taken of the ring.
The picture was there.
The ring was not.
The desk drawer was open.
I stared at it for a long time.
"No," I said.
I got to my feet, crossed the room, and looked inside.
Empty.
I checked the floor. Under the desk. Beneath the bed. Inside the drawer again, because perhaps the ring had simply decided to become visible on a second inspection.
Nothing.
I sat on the edge of my bed.
There were several reasonable explanations for what had happened. A medical issue. A stress response. A dream that had continued into the first moments of waking. The ring might have been something I had misplaced and forgotten.
I could work with reasonable explanations.
The problem was that none of them accounted for the voice.
You have been noticed.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
"Excellent. Fantastic. I have been in this city for less than twenty-four hours, and I already have an enemy."
The voice returned.
Not as a whisper this time.
As a thought that was not mine.
Viskar Academy.
I went completely still.
The words did not come from the room. They did not enter through my ears. They appeared inside my mind with a clarity that made it impossible to dismiss them as an ordinary thought.
I waited.
Nothing followed.
"Who are you?" I asked aloud.
Silence.
"Are you the man from the vision?"
Nothing.
"Are you dead?"
A pause.
Then, so faintly that I almost missed it:
Not in the way you mean.
I stared at the wall.
"That is a spectacularly unhelpful answer."
The voice did not reply.
I should have been terrified. Perhaps some part of me was. But fear was difficult to sustain when the situation had become so absurd that my mind kept trying to turn it into a joke.
A mysterious voice had appeared in my head. A strange man had warned me that something was watching me. An object had materialized in my room and vanished.
And the only useful instruction I had received was the name of a school.
I opened my laptop.
If I was going to have a supernatural crisis, I wanted to do it with an internet connection.
I searched for Viskar Academy.
The first result appeared after a short delay.
Viskar Academy — Independent Preparatory and Residential School
The website was aggressively ordinary.
A blue-and-silver crest sat above a photograph of a stone building with a lawn, a few trees, and several students who looked as though they had been instructed to stand together and smile for a brochure. The building was attractive enough, but not particularly memorable. The website's layout was functional, its photographs slightly outdated, and its admissions page written in the kind of language that suggested someone had assembled it during a lunch break.
The academy's public rating was moderate.
Not bad enough to suggest that something was wrong. Not good enough to make it a destination for ambitious parents. The reviews were a predictable mixture of praise for the staff, complaints about the dining hall, and vague references to strict rules.
One review read:
The place is fine. Teachers know what they're doing. Not much to say beyond that.
Another complained about the campus being difficult to navigate.
A third gave the school three stars and wrote only:
Strange atmosphere.
I almost laughed.
"Subtle."
The academy's official description mentioned residential programs, specialized instruction, and a commitment to educating students with unusual aptitudes. The language was broad enough to mean almost anything.
There was no mention of magic.
No mention of supernatural creatures.
No mention of the fact that a man named Finn had just appeared inside my head and sent me there.
The admissions page offered a telephone number, an email address, and an application portal. Students seeking specialized placement were advised to contact the academy's security office rather than the admissions office directly.
I clicked through to the contact page. A small note at the bottom instructed prospective students to bring the phrase practices of the first witnesses to the attention of a member of the security office if they were seeking admission through a special referral.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
The words were buried beneath the ordinary admissions information, written in the same bland font as the rest of the page. They could easily have been overlooked.
I leaned back in my chair.
"The first witnesses," I murmured.
The name Finn returned to me.
I had no idea what it meant. I did not know who the first witnesses were, what they had witnessed, or why an obscure school had hidden a phrase about them on its website.
But I knew, with a certainty that made my stomach tighten, that I had found the right place.
I opened the admissions portal.
The application was ordinary enough. Personal details, educational history, emergency contacts. There was a section for special placement, but it required a referral code I did not possess.
I filled in what I could.
Then I stopped.
There was no guarantee the academy would admit me. No guarantee the person who had spoken to me was telling the truth. No guarantee that whatever had noticed me would politely wait while I completed an application.
The website offered no answers.
Only a name, an address, and a phrase.
I could stay home and pretend the last hour had never happened. I could tell my parents, though I could already imagine the conversation: my father asking precise questions, my mother insisting that I rest, and both of them quietly arranging a medical appointment.
Perhaps that was the sensible choice.
But the man in the darkness had not looked like a hallucination.
He had looked like someone who had spent a very long time waiting for me.
And whatever had moved behind had frightened him.
I shut the laptop.
By eight in the morning, I had showered again, changed into clean clothes, and packed a bag. I left a message for my parents explaining that I was going out to look at a school and would call them later.
I did not mention the voice.
I did not mention Finn.
And I certainly did not mention the ring.
I had no intention of making my first day in New Orleans sound like the opening statement of a psychiatric evaluation.
Before leaving, I paused at the bedroom door and glanced back at the desk.
For a moment, I thought I saw the outline of antlers reflected in the dark laptop screen.
I turned.
Nothing stood behind me.
I looked back at the screen.
Only my own reflection stared out at me: light-blue eyes, disheveled hair, and the expression of a man who had slept badly and was about to make a questionable decision.
"Get a grip, Kevin."
I locked the door behind me.
The journey to Viskar Academy was uneventful, which I appreciated. I was beginning to suspect that my life had become a series of events competing to see which could be the most disturbing, and I was grateful for a brief intermission.
The academy stood beyond the busier streets, separated from the surrounding neighborhood by a stretch of trees and a long drive. From the road, it looked much like the photographs: an old stone building, a modest sign, neat grounds, and an entrance that had clearly been designed to discourage casual visitors.
Nothing about it suggested a place that could help me understand the impossible.
I checked the address on my phone.
Correct.
I checked it again.
Still correct.
Then I walked up to the security office.
A man sat behind the reception window, reading something on a tablet. He looked up when I approached.
"Good morning."
"Good morning," I replied. "I'm here about admissions."
"i'm sorry, you are going to want to head to the administrative office. It's the building to your left."
"No. I was told to speak to someone in the security office about a special referral."
His expression did not change, but he set the tablet down.
"What sort of special referral?"
I hesitated. The sensible answer was that I had no idea. The less sensible answer involved a mysterious man, a missing ring, and a voice in my head that had refused to provide a proper explanation.
The man studied me.
I took a breath.
"I came looking for what the first witnesses left behind."
The officer's expression changed.
Not dramatically. He didn't reach for an alarm or summon half the academy. He simply stopped moving, his attention sharpening until I felt as though I had become the only thing in the room worth examining.
Behind him, a door opened.
A woman stepped into view.
"Then you have come to the right door," she said.
The officer turned toward her.
"Headguard Tessa—"
"I heard him."
Her eyes settled on me.
I had no idea what a headguard was, but judging by the way the officer immediately stepped aside, I suspected it wasn't an honorary title.
Tessa studied me for a moment longer.
Then she opened the door wider.
"Come inside, Kevin Salvador. We have a great deal to discuss."