Chapter 45: A Verbal Warning

Inside the faculty office, Daphne Whitlock sat at her desk with a crease between her brows.

The rumor she had overheard in the hallway kept circling back.

A white-haired student.

On the surface, it sounded ridiculous. St. Alder Academy was not the kind of place where someone that noticeable could pass through unseen. If a boy with white hair had really been walking around in uniform, half the school would have known by now. Someone would have taken a picture. Someone would have sent it to a group chat. Someone would have turned it into lunch gossip before the next bell.

During the off-campus cooking activity, though, Daphne had seen a flash of white in the woods.

At the time, she had blamed the heat, the sunlight through the leaves, and her own mind catching on the white-haired child she had not been able to stop thinking about. A teacher could not go chasing every pale flicker between trees. She had told herself she was being unreasonable.

Now another student had seen something too.

That made it harder to dismiss.

Daphne leaned back and looked toward the window. Most of the teachers in the office were using the lull after lunch to rest, grade slowly, or pretend to read while their eyes stayed closed. Outside, a few students were messing around near the walkway, too loud in that easy way people got when they had never needed to hide anything serious.

A normal student could not change hair color.

For rare-bloods, that was possible.

Some bloodlines were better at it than others. Some treated it as camouflage. Some treated it as a basic social skill, the same way humans learned to lower their voices indoors or smile when they did not mean it. The human world preferred rare-bloods quiet, familiar, and easy to overlook. A person who could adjust what others saw had a much easier time surviving inside it.

Daphne lifted a strand of her own hair between two fingers.

The black deepened by a shade under the office light, gaining a denser sheen before fading back when she let it fall.

Her family had always said there was a thin trace of giant-blooded blood in their line.

Not enough to make her life dramatic. Not enough to make her visibly different. Modern life had softened most of the old disadvantages until they barely mattered, leaving behind only a few useful leftovers.

Strength, for one.

More than enough strength to sit alone in a male student’s apartment at night without worrying that the boy across from her might try something stupid.

A high school boy was still a high school boy. If Cyrus Calder had made trouble during the home visit, Daphne was confident she could have put him on the floor before he understood what had happened.

That confidence did nothing to settle the white-haired child in her mind.

Cyrus’s file was plain in the ways a file could be plain. Missing parents. Memory problems. Low grades. Part-time work. Sparse apartment. Few connections. A boy trying to keep his head down.

The white-haired child was not plain at all.

Daphne’s thoughts kept arranging three images side by side: Cyrus with his lowered bangs and guarded voice, the pale child she had once held in his apartment, and the rumored white-haired student in St. Alder’s uniform.

If those pieces belonged together, the question became much more troublesome.

What was Cyrus to that child?

Across campus, Cyrus Calder was about to return to class when two male students stepped into his path.

At first, he thought they were blocking the hallway by accident. Students did that all the time. They stopped in doorways, drifted sideways while talking, and occupied space with the confidence of people who assumed everyone else would adjust around them.

Cyrus shifted to pass.

The two boys moved with him.

He stopped.

One of them looked familiar. Same class, probably. Cyrus had seen him near the front half of the room, though never for any reason important enough to remember at once. After a beat, the name came to him.

Miles Sutton.

The other boy was also familiar in the vague way classmates became familiar when a person had spent enough time sleeping in the same room as them.

Miles smiled first. "Cyrus Calder, right?"

Cyrus kept his voice flat. "Do you need something?"

Miles gave the other boy a quick look.

The unnamed classmate took that as permission. He stepped close with a loud, friendly laugh and hooked an arm over Cyrus’s shoulder before Cyrus could move away.

Cyrus went still.

The contact was not painful, but it was unwelcome. Pressure, weight, skin, the forced shape of friendliness. He disliked all of it.

"Man, we’ve heard a lot about you," the boy said, grinning wide enough to make the grin useless. "Come with us for a minute, okay?"

His tone sounded like a question. His arm did not.

Cyrus could have broken free without much effort. A turn of the shoulder, a pull at the wrist, and the boy would lose his grip. The problem was not the strength. The problem was the hallway.

A few passing students had already noticed the three of them together. If Cyrus threw the boy off too easily, people would remember. If anyone called a teacher over, questions would follow. Questions were rarely worth the satisfaction of a quick answer.

So Cyrus let himself be guided.

One boy walked ahead. The other kept close beside him, still pretending the whole thing was friendly. From the outside, it probably looked like three classmates going somewhere together. That was likely why they had chosen this method. They wanted pressure that could be denied if anyone asked.

They took him into the restroom.

No one else was inside.

The boy who had laughed in the hall dropped the act as soon as the door swung shut. He shoved Cyrus back against the wall with one hand, not hard enough to leave a mark, but hard enough to show off.

"So," the boy said, his expression twisting into something he must have thought looked threatening, "I hear you’ve been getting pretty close to Audra Sloane. That true?"

Cyrus stared at him.

He had been prepared for a few possibilities.

Someone might have connected him to the white-haired rumor. Someone might have seen him in the woods during the cooking trip. Someone might have noticed that his hair, body temperature, and school disguise did not line up as neatly as they should.

Instead, this was about Audra.

"All she’s doing is tutoring me," Cyrus said.

"I don’t care what you call it."

The boy shoved him again. Cyrus let his shoulder hit the tile and measured the force out of habit. Average strength. Bad balance. More anger than training. If this were not a school restroom in the middle of the day, the whole thing could have ended before Miles Sutton finished blinking.

The boy leaned closer. "Audra isn’t someone a guy like you gets to hang around. Stay in your corner, keep being invisible, and you’ll save yourself trouble. You understand?"

Cyrus said nothing.

Silence worked well on people like this. They usually came prepared with their own answer. If they wanted fear, they found fear. If they wanted guilt, they found guilt. A quiet face gave them room to flatter themselves.

The boy misread him exactly as expected.

He gave a satisfied little laugh and stepped back. "Good. Glad we understand each other."

Miles watched from the side, his expression dismissive now that the warning had been delivered. He glanced at Cyrus once, as if checking whether the message had landed.

Cyrus kept his shoulders slightly lowered and his bangs in place.

Miles seemed pleased by that.

The two boys left the restroom without another word.

Cyrus stayed by the wall for a moment, then looked toward the closed door.

That was all?

He had expected more from being dragged away by two classmates. At the very least, a two-against-one fight would have given him useful information. He still did not know exactly how much advantage his body gave him against ordinary human boys his age. A real scuffle would have answered that.

Instead, the human world had given him a speech.

A restroom, a shove, and a warning about staying away from a popular girl. Considering how seriously they had acted, the whole thing was almost polite.

Maybe this was what people meant by a peaceful society.

Cyrus rubbed the spot where his shoulder had touched the wall. It did not hurt.

Receiving a verbal warning felt childish.

Then he thought about the times he had warned that woman in the past, and his mood turned strange. She might have felt the same way. A warning without enough force behind it was not a threat. It was only proof that the person giving it had run out of better options.

That was annoying to realize.

The cause was still obvious.

A woman had brought trouble to him again.

Audra Sloane sat there with her tutoring schedule, composed face, and schoolwide attention, and somehow the inconvenience had landed on him. He still needed the Most Improved Student Award. Unless Audra stopped tutoring him first, he had no reason to refuse free help.

If he actually got the prize money, he could consider forgiving her for the trouble.

Only consider it.

The bell rang while Cyrus was still washing his hands.

By the time he returned to the classroom, the next period was about to start. He noticed Miles Sutton’s stare at once.

Miles sat in his seat, watching him with the heavy seriousness of someone who believed he had done something meaningful. Cyrus passed by without reacting and headed for the back corner.

On the way, he checked the room more carefully and spotted the other boy a few rows away.

So they really were both in his class.

That explained why their faces had seemed familiar. It also made Cyrus feel a little better about not remembering them. He still had not memorized everyone in the room. His first stretch at St. Alder had been divided between sleep, failed math, hunger, and avoiding attention.

Memorizing classmates had never been near the top of the list.

Owen Keats leaned toward him once Cyrus sat down. His voice stayed low. "Why are you only getting back now?"

"I took a longer route."

Owen accepted the answer because Owen was decent, and decent people made life easier by not digging into every suspicious pause.

Cyrus took out his notebook.

He had no intention of telling Owen what had happened. Owen would worry. Owen might get angry. Owen might even try to help.

Sincere people could create trouble for the same reason dangerous people did. They acted like consequences were better than leaving something alone.

Audra might be worth telling, though.

If she learned that her tutoring had brought him trouble, maybe she would stop. Maybe she would become more careful. Maybe she would understand that pulling an invisible person into her orbit came with a cost.

Cyrus looked toward the front of the room.

Audra had just turned back around.

For the brief instant before she faced forward completely, he caught the fall of her hair over her shoulder and the composed line of her profile. Once she settled again, she looked as calm as ever.

Half the class noticed anyway.

Audra did not need to do anything. Attention collected around her on its own, and anyone standing too close to that attention would get dragged into it.

Cyrus lowered his eyes to his notebook.

There were already plenty of reasons to avoid beautiful women. Today had handed him another one.

The afternoon classes passed with less suffering than usual. Cyrus could follow most of the lesson, which counted as progress by his standards. The teacher’s voice did not blur as badly. The numbers on the board stayed connected to the explanation instead of turning into punishment. He still missed pieces, but missing pieces was better than losing the entire thing.

When the final bell rang, Friday noise filled the classroom. Chairs scraped back. Bags zipped. People started talking before the teacher finished reminding them about homework.

Cyrus waited before standing.

There was no need to leave at the same time as Miles or the other boy. Avoiding a pointless second confrontation was not fear. It was efficient.

Once the doorway cleared, he packed his books and headed upstairs as usual.

The fourth-floor classroom waited at the end of the hall.