The next evening came colder.
The kind of cold that crept through seams and sleeves, settling in bones, no matter how tightly Xavier pulled his jacket closed. The archery field stretched before him, silent except for the soft rustle of the flags in the wind. He adjusted his bowstring, trying to lose himself in something simple. Mechanical. Predictable.
Breathe. Aim. Release.
The bowstring sang, too long, too strange, and for a split second, he thought it wasn't the bow at all.
A note lingered in the air, faint but unmistakably there. Music. The same melody that had followed him from the infirmary. It wound through the cold like smoke, soft at first, then sharper, each note cutting at the edges of his focus.
It slid under his skin before he could brace for it. The world tilted. Light shifting, breath catching in his throat. The distant line of targets bled at the edges, their red and white rings twisting like wet paint, spiraling inward until they weren't circles anymore.
They changed, transforming into something more familiar. Sigils.
The sound burrowed deeper, behind his eyes, threading through the space between his thoughts. He could feel the melody humming in his teeth, his bones vibrating with it. The grass rippled underfoot as if the ground itself was breathing with the rhythm.
He blinked hard, but the marks didn't fade. They pulsed once, faintly. Alive beneath the paint, echoing to the beat of his own heart.
"Thorpe!"
But the shout came too late.
His fingers loosened. The arrow flew wide, hissing past Marcellus's shoulder and embedding in the wood frame behind him with a sharp thunk.
"What the hell, man?!" Marcellus whipped around, jaw tight, hand still gripping his bow. "You trying to kill someone again?"
"I—" Xavier's throat locked. "I heard something."
Marcellus scoffed, the sound sharp. "Sure. I bet that excuse worked better at your last school. Didn't it?"
Laughter trickled down the line. Whispered voices carried words he didn't have to strain to hear.
"Didn't he, like—lose it once? At Nevermore?"
"Yeah, he got arrested, remember?"
"Guess old habits die hard."
The whispers came in fragments, breathless and venomous, half disbelief and half delight.
He ripped off his arm guard and walked off the range before anyone could say anything else to him. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. The air itself seemed to hum, that same low tone he could never quite silence.
By the time he made it back to the courtyard, Thorn was already there, leaning against the stone ledge, half-hidden by shadow. Her hair shone a deep, dark red under the lantern light.
"You look like hell," she said simply.
"Long day," he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "It's getting louder."
"The song?"
He nodded. "You don't hear it now?"
Thorn stilled, head tilting as she listened. For a heartbeat, there was only the hush of the wind moving through the arches. Then... there it was. A thread of sound, faint but deliberate. The same haunting tune that had chased them for days. It slipped through the wards like breath caught between stones, too soft to name but impossible to ignore. It was testing them, teasing them with something they didn't understand quite yet.
Her jaw tightened. "Where do you think it's coming from?" she asked, her voice lower now, almost reverent. She strained her hearing, but the sound seemed to move when she did, like it didn't want to be found.
Xavier's eyes were distant, unfocused. "It was loudest when I was on the field," he said. "Every time I drew the bow, it came back stronger. Like it was resonating through the string. Like it didn't want to be ignored."
Thorn frowned. "So, not the cemetery then."
He shook his head. "No. It came from the opposite direction."
That made her pause for a moment. Beyond the archery field was only forest. It was ancient, wild, and unkept by the groundskeepers. A place that even Reichenbach's bravest students avoided after dark.
Her breath caught before she could stop it. Just the thought of the tree line, the shadows crowding close, the way the world went quiet inside them, made her stomach twist violently.
Thorn forced the memory back down into the deepest parts of her brain, where it belonged.
"There's nothing out there," she said, her tone clipped, sharper than she intended.
"Then maybe that's where it's hiding," Xavier replied quietly, as if it were the only thing that could possibly make sense.
Thorn's fingers tightened around the edge of the stone ledge. "Or maybe that's where people go when they want to disappear."
The wind shifted, carrying the faint echo again. Low, and insistent, like it was asking for her by name. Like the forest itself had missed her.
"Fuck," she muttered, jaw tight. "Going out there is a terrible idea. The woods are outside the wards. If the song's coming from there, it wants us to follow."
Xavier's gaze didn't waver. "Yeah," he said softly. "I figured."
Something in her chest clenched. Xavier was serious. Of course, he was. They always were. The boys, with conviction and no sense of what lay beyond the tree line. The ones who knew of the danger and ignored it anyway.
She exhaled through her nose, the sound caught between irritation and fear. "You're an idiot," she said finally. "And I'm worse for even considering it."
She pulled out her phone, screen lighting her face in pale blue. "Meet me back here after curfew," she said, glancing up at him. "If we're doing this, we do it when no one's watching."
A ghost of a smirk crossed his lips. "Of course, we wouldn't want to ruin your reputation. Would we?"
"Trust me," she said dryly, slipping the phone back into her pocket. "You already did that the minute you showed up."
Xavier raised a brow. "Oh yeah? How's that my fault?"
Thorn started walking, hands in her jacket pockets. "You're the new murder suspect everyone loves to whisper about," she paused, a slight smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth, "And I'm the half-vampire who makes friends with the shadows. We're basically a PR nightmare."
Her tone was casual, but the corner of her mouth twitched. It was half-teasing, half-truth. But as she brushed past Xavier toward the archway, she couldn't stop herself from glancing once more toward the forest.
It looked too much like the nightmare from a previous life.
The wind rose, humming faintly through the stone, as if mocking her for pretending she wasn't afraid.
Later, under the cover of night, they met again. The halls were empty, the world beyond washed in silver moonlight. Thorn hid in the shadows until she heard the faint echo of footsteps.
"Xavier?" she called softly, her voice barely more than a breath. It cut through the silence. Her voice was cautious yet sure, as if she already knew it was him.
A shape emerged from the corridor's dim light, the glow of a lantern catching in his eyes. "You sound surprised," he said quietly, the softest hint of a smile tugging at the edge of his lips.
Thorn stepped out from the shadows, her hand brushing the blood vial at her throat like a nervous tic. "You definitely took your time. I've been waiting here for like half an hour."
He held up the lantern between them, the flickering light painting their faces in gold. "I had to make sure Malrick was asleep. He's been narrating his dreams lately. Something about a snake rebellion."
Thorn blinked. "That sounds… normal."
"Yeah, for him," Xavier muttered. "Last night he accused his pillow of treason."
Thorn huffed out a short, reluctant laugh through her nose. "Glad to know you're surrounded by stable influences."
"Only the best," he said, adjusting his bag over his shoulder. "Ready to chase down the world's creepiest lullaby?"
"Not really," Thorn said, stepping past him toward the gate. "But I figured if you wandered out there alone, I'd have to explain to the staff why the new kid got eaten by a tree."'
Xavier arched a brow, following after her. "You think the trees here eat people?"
"I think everything here eats people," she shot back dryly.
The joke landed flat in her throat as she looked in the direction of the forest. The memory of bark scraping her palms, the smell of dirt in her mouth, the world narrowing to teeth and cold had a tight grip on her. The lantern's glow had felt too much like the moonlight from that night.
Her pulse quickened; she hated that he could probably hear it.
Thorn swallowed hard and forced her tone lighter. "Come on before I change my mind."
The lantern swayed between them as they slipped through the gate and into the mist-draped forest. The wards shimmered faintly overhead, thin gold threads woven between the trees, humming with protective energy. But the deeper they went, the thinner the air became.
The trees broke open into a clearing dusted with moonlight. They stopped short of entering the clearing itself because the tremors in the ground caused them to pause.
At first, Xavier thought they were staring at statues. Dark shapes standing in a half-circle. Then one moved, leaning forward to pick up its instrument from the black case where it had been stored.
"Fuck," Xavier whispered, his eyes locked on every slight movement. He reached out, wrapping a hand around Thorn's arm and pulling her to the closest tree to hide from the silver-blue spotlight.
There before them were five cloaked figures. Faces hidden behind masks that gleamed silver-blue like the full moon light. Instruments raised; violins carved from bone-white wood, flutes that caught the moonlight, and drums rimmed with glinting filigree.
The music they played wasn't beautiful. It only pretended to be. It only pretended to be human. Every note was slightly off, vibrating in ways that made the ground breathe.
Thorn staggered as the music began, catching herself on the tree in front of her. The bark felt like a curse. Rough, wet, unyielding.
Her stomach turned as the song clawed up her spine. "It's trying to crawl inside again," she gasped, voice raw. Gold veins flickered beneath her skin with each chord.
Xavier's eyes dropped to the ground. The soil wasn't just shaking... it was glowing. Pale threads of silver slithered between the roots like veins. Each pulse synced with the song's rhythm, spreading outward in a slow, deliberate ripple.
The forest itself was reacting to her, but he didn't know why. Xavier swung his bag around, pulling out his sketchbook. He flipped to the most recent drawing, the sigils he'd drawn earlier glowed faintly, their lines alive with pale light that shimmered like moonstone. The resonance from the forest answered them, as if recognizing its own reflection.
"Don't touch the ground," Xavier warned, dropping to one knee.
She was already shaking. Every note felt like a blade slicing through her skin, with hands she trusted turning sharp. A body gone cold before she realized what was happening.
From where he knelt, Xavier could see the change in her face. The usual sharpness was gone, replaced by something raw and terrified. Her eyes weren't angry now; they were wide, distant, unfocused, like she was seeing something far away. Her lips parted soundlessly, trembling with a word that never came. The light from the sigils painted her features in fractured silver, catching the faint shimmer of tears she hadn't realized she'd shed.
"Thorn," Xavier said sharply. "Stay with me."
She clenched her jaw, forcing herself to breathe. "I'm fine," she lied through her teeth.
The melody climbed higher, pressing against his skull. His pencil moved faster.
Suddenly, as if sensing them, one of the masked players turned.
The hollow sockets of its mask were pointed directly toward their hiding place. The bow of its violin hovered midair, the final note trembling into silence.
"We're not alone," the violinist said, its voice wrong, distorted under the mask it wore.
Xavier froze. Every other figure stopped in unison, instruments still raised but utterly still. The silence hit harder than the song had. It was dense, expectant, alive.
Beside him, Thorn's shoulders sagged, the tension breaking all at once.
The burning in her veins dimmed, the gold beneath her skin fading like cooling embers. She exhaled shakily, her breath visible in the cold. Relief and dread tangled in the same breath.
Xavier looked down at his sketchbook again. The lines on his page twisted, converging into a jagged oval. Until he realized it was a mouth.
Open. Screaming.
And then the scream filled the clearing.
When the masked figure stepped towards them, and Xaiver
didn't think; he just moved.
Instinct overrode everything. Xavier grabbed Thorn's arm, dragging her backward before the scream could swallow them both.
They didn't stop running until the cemetery fences came into view.
Thorn shoved the gates open, the metal shrieking in protest. The moonlight made her skin look ghostly pale against the darkness. She leaned against the nearest tombstone, breathing hard, every muscle trembling with leftover terror she refused to name.
Her hands shook as she flexed them, palms blistered from where the resonance had burned through. Xavier's fingers still trembled around his pencil as he followed behind her, watching every move. She seemed calmer now, like the only thing keeping her on edge was the woods themselves, but not what they had seen inside of them.
He dropped beside a headstone and spread his sketches across the ground. The graphite shimmered faintly in the cold air. One by one, the scattered marks began to align. Curves and arcs were knitting together into something that looked like sheet music.
Thorn stared at the sketches, her voice low but steady. "They weren't just performing," she said slowly, eyes blinking slowly with realization, her brows furrowing as she picked a piece of skin off her bottom lip with her teeth.
"They're strengthening it."
Xavier's head lifted. "Strengthening what?"
She met his eyes. "The song. It's not just sound or music that they are playing from a sheet of music. It's resonance. The same frequency that burned Danny's skin. They're using the music to weaken anyone who can hear it."
Xavier glanced down at the sigils scrawled across the page. Now that she said it, he could feel it. An echo humming just beneath the paper, as if the graphite itself was still vibrating with something it couldn't contain.
"How can you tell?" he asked, voice low, wary.
Thorn hesitated before answering, her gaze dropping to the dirt between them. "It's old magic," she said finally. "They don't teach it anymore, at least not officially. But during my first year, Reichenbach still offered a class on resonance theory."
Her voice softened, like she was half-remembering it. "I remember reading through the syllabus. It said we'd learn how sound and frequency interact with living matter. How a single vibration could change the nature of a spell. But the teacher never got that far."
She brushed a bit of ash-colored soil from her knee. "A couple of months in, the classroom was cleared out. The course vanished from the catalog, and the instructor did too."
Xavier frowned. "Vanished?"
"Packed up in the middle of the night," Thorn said flatly. "Rumor was, she tried to replicate an ancient ritual, you know... the kind that binds spells into souls. Turns out you can trap a curse in just about anything if you know how to write it."
Xavier stared at her, incredulously. "And you forgot about that?"
Thorn's tone sharpened in defense. "It was three years ago! And the class only lasted two months. If you haven't noticed, a lot of weird shit happens at this school. Most of the time, you just… move on from it."
She exhaled, forcing her tone back to level, and nodded toward the pages spread between them. "The point is, whoever's behind this knows that language. The runes aren't random; they're layered. Designed to
resonate inside anyone who listens. That's why Danny's body reacted like it did." She met his gaze again. "It's not an infection. It's corruption."
"The notes aren't decoration," she murmured, fingers running over the sigils on the page. "They're coded. The symbols in the measures... they're binding runes. Each one amplifies the next until it mimics silver poisoning."
Xavier's jaw tightened. "So every time that song plays, someone gets sicker, weaker."
Thorn pressed her blistered palms against her knees. "We can't stop here," she said quietly. "We have to figure out a way to stop this." Thorn glanced up, her gaze catching his for a moment.
A humorless breath escaped him, something close to a laugh. "We? Thorn, you're not immune to silver poisoning."
"Like you can do this alone? Face it, Thorpe. We're stuck in this together."
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Their eyes met across the tombstone, Xavier's sketches glowing faintly between them. Thorn exhaled, the sound sharp in the cold. She pushed herself to her feet, brushing dirt from her palms. "Meet me in the library tomorrow morning," she said, her tone clipped, businesslike. "Early. Before anyone else is awake."
Xavier looked up at her, confusion flickering briefly before understanding set in. "You think there's something in the archives," he said.
"I think Reichenbach's been around long enough to have seen worse than this," Thorn replied. "If we're lucky, someone wrote it down, or maybe that teacher didn't pack everything up when she left." She bent to gather the pages of his sketches, careful not to touch the glowing lines. "Bring these. We might be able to match them to something."
He nodded once, still catching his breath. "And if we can't?"
Thorn straightened, sliding the sketches back toward him. "Then we start digging somewhere else." Her voice was flat, steady. Determined. "I'm not letting Danny, or anyone else, die from this."
Xavier folded the papers and tucked them into his bag. The two of them stood in silence a moment longer, the mist lingering around their legs, blurring the edges of the graves.
As Thorn turned to leave, she paused at the gate. "Get some sleep, Thorpe," she said without looking back. "You'll need it."
He didn't answer. Just watched as Thorn disappeared into the fog, her silhouette swallowed by it until she was gone.
Xavier lingered, closing his sketchbook slowly. The pages still pulsing faintly beneath his hands, Alive with something he didn't fully understand.
He exhaled, eyes fixed on the horizon.
The faint hum of the wards lingered like a heartbeat, steady and patient, waiting for the following note.
As he walked back, the Observatory greeted him with silence.
The heavy kind that pressed against the walls and crawled under the skin. Only the occasional creak of pipes and the low thrum of the wards beneath the floor broke through it.
He climbed the stairs two at a time, trying to outrun the stillness.
When he eased open the door to his dorm, the lights were out. Malrick was still asleep, one arm dangling off the side of his bed, soft snores barely audible over the hum of the heating vents.
Xavier moved carefully, toeing off his boots and setting his bag down without a sound.
At his desk, the room felt colder than before. He lit a candle, the flame bending with each sigh of wind that slipped through the cracked window. The pale glow of his phone joined it, casting long shadows across the walls. Flickering shapes that shifted with every pulse of light.
Xavier leaned forward, elbows on the desk, staring at the mess of sketches spread before him. His eyes flicked up, momentarily distracted by the notification that popped up on his screen.
Enid's blog.
He clicked on it instantly, without hesitation. The newest post filled his screen as his eyes scanned every word.
It was homecoming week at Nevermore, and each new photo brought back a sense of nostalgia. He scrolled through photo after photo: Enid with some new guy, their smiles crooked and bright; Yoko posing with a glass of something crimson; Bianca smirking at a group of boys who clearly thought they could mess with the queen bee, Ajax behind her with a genuine smile. There was even one blurry photo of Wednesday with her cello, head bowed, expression unreadable.
A lump formed in his throat. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed all of them until now. How much he missed her. That quiet, calculating steadiness. The way she never flinched when things went dark.
He turned the phone face down, shutting off the light, but the ache persisted.
His hand moved before he could stop it. Pencil to page, graphite whispering in the quiet. He wasn't drawing on purpose; he was just trying to create shapes, shadows, and outlines. The tilt of a shoulder, the fall of hair, the sharp curve of a mouth.
At first, he thought it was Wednesday. That's what the posture told him, the same defiance, the same stillness in chaos.
But when he leaned back, blinking against the candlelight, the details didn't fit. The necklace caught the light like gold. The eyes were too alive, too guarded.
He stared at the page, frowning. The lines didn't fit. They were too sharp, too alive.
It wasn't Wednesday. And the more he looked, the more it unnerved him who it might be instead.
Xavier exhaled sharply, slamming the sketchbook shut. The sound echoed through the room. He sat there for a long moment, jaw clenched, hands still dusted with graphite.
Then, almost bitterly, he muttered under his breath,
"Perfect. I've got a type."
The candle flickered in its glass, its flame bending toward the draft that slipped under the windowpane. Xavier rubbed his thumb across the wax-smeared cover of the sketchbook, trying not to think about why he'd drawn her at all.
Outside, the faint hum of the wards lingered, steady and rhythmic, like the memory of a song.
And somewhere deep down, Xavier knew sleep wouldn't come easily at all tonight.