The Dream That Wouldn't Leave

Mina's POV

The cold air hit me as I stepped outside.

I pulled my hoodie tighter and kept walking. The path from the science building to the school gate was long and poorly lit, just two rows of dying streetlamps that flickered more than they shone.

My sneakers were still damp from this mornings incident. Every step made a soft, wet sound against the pavement.

I always counted my steps when I walked alone at night. It helped me stay focused inside my own head.

One. Two. Three.

The envelope was still tucked under my arm. Twelve pages on political theory. I had already started building the argument in my head, the structure first, then language, then I would sand it down until it sounded like Damian.

Confidence. A little arrogant. Heavy on opinion and light on evidence, because that was how Damian Vale moved through the world.

I had ghostwritten eleven essays for the three of them this semester alone.

Eleven.

And not one of those teachers had ever looked at me and thought — wait.

Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.

I turned off the main path and cut through the narrow lane behind the equipment shed. Because it saves seven minutes to get to my house.

Seven minutes meant I could eat before my landlady locked the kitchen.

I was halfway through the lane when I heard footsteps behind me.

Not too close. But deliberate.

I didn't speed up.

Because speeding up tells people they've scared you. Instead I adjusted my grip on my bag strap and kept my eyes forward.

But the footsteps kept pace.

Then a voice — low, almost gentle, which made it worse.

"You walk home alone every night."

I stopped.

It wasn't a question. It was an observation.

Casually.

I turned around slowly.

Damian Vale was leaning against the wall of the equipment shed with his hands in his pockets, still in his school uniform, tie loosened just enough to look intentional.

He was watching me with that soft, unreadable smile.

"I'm not following you," he said.

"Relax."

I stared at him.

"I cut through here too sometimes. He said."

He pushed off the wall and fell into step beside me like I had invited him.

"It's faster."

I started walking again. Faster than before.

"You finished last week's chemistry paper in one night," he said, keeping pace easily. "I checked the sources. Every single one was legitimate. Some of them I'd never even heard of before."

He paused.

"Where did you find the Hartley study?"

I didn't look at him.

"Right."

He almost laughed — a quiet sound, not mean for once.

"Forgot who I was talking to. He said."

We reached the end of the lane. I turned left. He stopped at the corner, hands still in his pockets, watching me go.

"Two days," he called after me as he was about to turn.

I didn't turn around.

"Until your birthday, I mean."

My steps slowed for just half a second. Then I kept walking and didn't look back.

………….

My room was on the third floor of a narrow building that smelled permanently of old wood and someone else's cooking. I paid three hundred a month for a bed, a desk, a lamp, and a window that faced a brick wall.

I locked the door behind me, sat on the edge of the bed, and pressed my palms flat against my knees.

Two days.

I didn't know why it felt like a countdown to something terrible. Birthdays had never meant anything to me before — no cake, no calls, no one who remembered without being reminded. But this year the number sat in my chest like a stone that kept getting heavier.

I opened Damian's envelope. Read the prompt. I opened my notebook.

And started writing.

I always wrote by hand first. Something about the pen moving across paper felt like the only honest conversation I was allowed to have. The words came easily — they always did.

Within an hour I had six pages roughed out, argument clean and tight, exactly the kind of essay that would make a professor nod slowly and give it an A minus to seem balanced.

I put the pen down around midnight.

That was when the dream started — not while I was asleep, but in the space between awake and not, when my eyes were closed and my body was still but my mind hadn't fully let go yet.

Starlight.

A sky I didn't recognize — with too many stars, arranged in patterns I had never seen in any textbook. And below the sky, a forest made entirely of silver trees, their bark pale and luminous, their leaves catching light that had no source.

And a voice.

Not speaking words exactly. More like the idea of words — meaning without sound, the way you understand something in a dream without being told.

You are almost ready.

I snapped awake immediately.

My room was dark. The lamp had gone off — the timer I set to save electricity. My notebook was still open on the desk. The pen had rolled to the floor.

I sat very still and listened to my own breathing.

Then I felt it. The same vibration from this evening, back again, stronger this time. It moved through my chest like a second heartbeat, slow and deep and completely out of sync with my own.

I pressed my hand to my sternum.

My palm was warm.

I crossed to the small mirror above my desk and leaned in close.

My eyes.

The brown was still there — but at the very edges, threaded through like veins of metal in dark stone, something silver was spreading. Slowly. Quietly.

The way dawn spreads before anyone notices the dark is already gone.

I stared at my own reflection for a long time.

Then I went back to bed, pulled the blanket over my head, and made myself a promise.

Two more days. Just hold on two more days.

Mina's POV

The next morning came gray and cold.

I was already awake before my alarm. I had barely slept — every time I drifted off, the silver forest pulled me back in.

The voice. The starlight. The feeling of something enormous standing just behind me, breathing slow and patient, waiting.

I washed my face with cold water, changed into my cleanest hoodie — dark green, two sizes too big — and sat at my desk with Damian's essay in front of me.

Six more pages.

I picked up the pen.

By the time I finished, the sun had come up properly and my landlady was banging pipes somewhere below me.

I read the essay back once, changed three words that sounded too much like me, and slipped it into a fresh envelope.

One day left.

I pushed the thought away and headed to school.

The hallways of Silver Moon Academy were already buzzing when I arrived. Louder than usual.

There was an energy in the air that I recognized — the kind that meant something had happened, or was about to happen, and everyone already knew except me.

I kept my head down and moved through.

"Did you hear?"

"The Awakening Ceremony is tomorrow night…."

"Early this year –"

“Because of the blood moon –"

I stopped at my locker and let the conversations wash over me without catching on anything.

The Awakening Ceremony. Of course. Once in a year, on the night of the blood moon, every pack member who had turned eighteen in the past month gathered in the ceremonial hall to shift for the first time in front of the Alpha and the Elders.

Tomorrow night.

My birthday was tomorrow.

I stood very still with my hand on my locker door.

I had spent years telling myself it wouldn't happen to me. That whatever was broken inside me — whatever made me silent, whatever made grown men go blank when I was seven years old — had probably destroyed the shifting gene along with everything else.

That I would simply not shift. That I would stand in that hall and nothing would happen and I would walk home alone the same way I did everything else.

I had almost believed it.

"Mina."

I turned.

It was Ms. Vern — my homeroom teacher. An average woman.

She was holding a folded slip of paper between two fingers like she didn't want to touch it any longer than necessary.

"Ceremony registration," she said. "You need to submit this by the end of the day." She pushed it toward me.

"I assume you'll be attending. All eligible pack members are required."

I took the slip.

She was already walking away.

Required. The word sat in my stomach like a swallowed coin.

The third period was biology. I sat in the back corner the way I always did — close to the window, far from everyone.

The teacher was talking about cellular regeneration, and I was taking notes automatically, my hand moving while my mind stayed somewhere else entirely.

A folded piece of paper landed on my desk.

I looked at it. Then at the person who threw it.

Ryder Kane was two rows to my left, arms folded on his desk, not looking at me. Deliberately not looking at me, which was its own kind of looking.

I unfolded the paper under the desk.

I heard you're registered for tomorrow. Don't embarrass the pack, Mute.

I folded it back up.

My jaw tightened. That stirring in my chest came again — quicker this time, less like something waking up and more like something standing up. I pressed my foot flat against the floor and breathed through it.

Not yet.

After class, I was the last one out. I had made it exactly four steps into the hallway when a hand closed around my arm and pulled me sideways into the alcove beside the water fountain.

Jace.

He let go immediately — like touching me had been accidental, like he was already annoyed at himself for it.

He stood in the alcove with his arms crossed and looked at me with those gray eyes that never gave anything away.

"You submitted your registration," he said.

I looked at him steadily.

"You shouldn't go tomorrow."

I blinked.

It was the last thing I had expected him to say.

Not clean the lab early.

He was looking at me differently than usual — not with contempt exactly.

Something almost like — concern. He killed it quickly, but I saw it.

"The ceremony is not for people like you," he said, and just like that the coldness was back, smooth and even.

"You'll shift into something weak. The Elders will document it. And It'll be on record permanently."

He paused. "Save yourself the humiliation."

He pushed off the wall and walked away.

I stood in the alcove for a moment.

People like you.

I had heard those words my whole life. Spoken in a hundred different tones — pity, disgust, boredom. I had learned to let them pass through me like wind through an open window.

But standing there, one day before my birthday, with silver threading slowly through my eyes every time I looked in a mirror, with a voice in a silver forest telling me I was almost ready—

Something inside me did not let those words pass through.

Something inside me caught them.

Held them.

And burned.

I unfolded the ceremony registration slip, walked to the administration office, and slid it through the door slot.

Then I went back to class.

Mina's POV

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay on my bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling, counting them the way I counted my steps when I walked home.

One.

Two.

Three.

Anything to keep my mind from circling back to the same thought.

Tomorrow.

The Awakening Ceremony. The blood moon. The hall, full of pack members watching every eighteen-year-old shift for the first time, recording it, judging it, deciding right there in front of everyone whether you were strong or weak or worth anything at all.

I had submitted the registration slip myself. My own hand had pushed it through the office door slot. I still didn't fully understand why.

Maybe because Jace told me not to go.

Or maybe because some, stubborn part of me, that had survived ten years of silence, of being being broken. Wanted to stand in that hall and prove I existed.

Even if what came out of me was nothing. Even if I shifted into the smallest, weakest wolf anyone had ever seen.

At least it would be mine.

I finally got up around five in the morning, made tea I couldn't really afford, and sat at my desk with my hands wrapped around the warm cup.

The mirror was right there. I made myself look at it.

My eyes were brown again. Completely normal. No silver thread at the edges, no strange light. For a moment I almost felt relieved.

Then the vibration came back, low, steady, deep in my chest and I knew the calm was only because whatever was inside me had stopped testing the walls and started waiting instead.

School felt different that day. Heavier. Like everyone was holding their breath without realizing it.

I went through my classes the same as always, silent, invisible, careful. But twice during the day I caught people staring at me a beat too long.

Once in the hallway. Once in the cafeteria line, where I never normally bought food because I couldn't afford it, but today my stomach had twisted into knots tight enough that I needed something, anything, even just bread.

"You're really going tonight?"

I turned. A girl named Priya stood behind me in line, one of the few people who had never laughed when others did.

She wasn't a friend exactly. We had never spoken, obviously. But she always softened a little around me, like she felt sorry without knowing why.

I nodded once.

"My brother shifted last year." She lowered her voice. "He said it's the worst thing he had ever experienced.

Everyone watching.

The Elders writing things down on clipboards like you're livestock."

She made a face. "I'm sorry you have to do it in front of Jace and his friends."

I didn't react to the name, but something in my chest pulled tight anyway.

Priya hesitated, then added quietly, "Whatever happens tonight, it doesn't decide who you are, Mina."

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I did something I almost never did.

I smiled. Small. Just at the corner of my mouth.

But real.

She smiled back, surprised, like she hadn't expected an answer of any kind and got one anyway.

Last period was free study. I used it to finish a small revision on Damian's essay, a few sentences that needed smoothing and I was nearly done when a shadow fell across my desk.

I looked up.

Asher.

I almost never thought of him by his full name. Just Asher. Heir to Ashford Global, the kind of wealth that didn't need to announce itself because everyone already knew.

He didn't bully me the way Ryder did, loud and physical. His cruelty was quieter. Smarter.

He sat down across from me without asking, folding his hands on the desk like we were equals having a meeting.

"Heard you registered," he said.

I didn't respond.

"Brave."

He tilted his head, studying me like he was deciding what use I might be to him. "Or stupid.

Hard to tell with you."

I went back to my essay.

"You know what happens if you shift into nothing." His voice stayed low, almost amused.

"They will record it on permanent record. Omega with no wolf form at all. You'd never be allowed to leave the pack grounds again. Did you know that, and you will become a slave?"

My pen slowed.

"I'm not trying to scare you." He smiled, "Just being honest. Someone should be, with you."

He stood, smoothed his jacket, and looked down at me one last time.

"See you tonight, Mute."

He walked away like he hadn't said anything cruel at all.

I sat there with my pen still against the paper, the ink slowly bleeding into a small dark dot.

Three of them now had spoken to me today. Jace's warning.

Damian's coin and his question about the Hartley study.

Asher's quiet threat disguised as concern.

None of them knew.

None of them had any idea what was sitting coiled beneath my ribs, growing heavier and warmer with every hour that passed, counting down toward the same moment I was.

I closed my notebook, packed my bag, and walked out of the classroom.

Tonight, the hall would be full.

Tonight, every eye in the Silver Moon Pack would be on me.