It was finally that first glorious weekend on campus. Solene could sit outside, as she was doing now, in the gardens with her friends and she could pretend it was still summer for a few lazy moments. Nearly the entire school had the same idea from what she could see.

She and Willa sat out in the open on a picnic blanket next to a group of girls who were friends of Roxana's. Making friends never came as easily to either of them as it did to Roxana, ever the politician's daughter. Solene supposed she liked them well enough, but she could always feel an invisible wall between herself and the other girls her age.

They didn't know the weight of a curse, the burden of a prophecy, or the secrets that kept Solene too weighed down and weary in the soul to ever join them, with their laughter that arced overhead like the flight of the gulls.

It all felt so useless, to be here.

She remembered when Soleil had first told her what Horus and Miranda Barringer, another of her mother's friends, had foretold when Solene was born.

"You were born alone for a reason," Soleil had told her in a hushed voice, her hand on Solene's wrist. "You're meant to do what all the twins of our family couldn't do. Be the sun and the moon, the destruction and salvation."

Soleil had been quick to return to the game they'd been playing, although Solene couldn't recall what it was anymore. In fact, the shift had been so sudden that Solene often wondered for years after if it was a dream.

But the words stayed with her, haunted her.

There was a truth to it.

Solene was the first to be born to the Danaans with no twin, and no twin coming. The silver of the curse remained in her hair, a reminder of the power that lived within her veins.

The way Soleil had spoken her prophecy, her words were laden with awe, with the reverence of witnessing the beauty and terror of nature. The eclipse, the uncharacteristic hurricane, the beginning and the end. Soleil clearly thought Solene special, to be this way.

Solene didn't think so.

Because she knew the echoes of her family's history, even if the details eluded her. The countries of Verana had unified permanently to fight one of her ancestors, Endymion Danaan. Cyrus Danaan, his twin and her great-great-great-grandfather, had been the one to defeat him.

The way Solene saw it, she'd rather die a hero than live long enough to become the villain.

She needed to be out there, playing hero and to go out in a blaze of glory before she dragged anyone else down with her.

That was why she never dated any of the boys at the Anouir Institute, or wouldn't have even if any of them had caught her eye for more than a passing second. She wouldn't want them to befall the fate of her father, or of her great-uncle Gwydion, or even her great-grandfather. All had loved a Danaan woman, and all had died young under mysterious circumstances.

It wasn't a known part of the family's curse, not like the twins were. But Solene knew enough to recognize a curse when she saw one. And she knew any man who loved a Danaan woman was almost certainly cursed.

Which made Dorian Beltane a problem.

"You should talk to him." Roxana nudged Solene, drawing her out of her thoughts.

"Talk to who?" Solene looked down into her Magical Theory textbook, but felt her face go hot like the summer sun above.

"My dear cousin." Roxana giggled, a hand hovering over her heart. "You keep looking at him—and missing when he looks at you."

"He is not!" Solene looked up, eyes wide in horror.

"He so is." Roxana took the book from Solene. "You know what they say about werewolf boys, don't you?"

Willa looked up from her notes and frowned. "No, what?"

"I know you don't know," Roxana scoffed playfully. "I've never seen you looking at boys."

"I look at boys." There was enough shyness to it to take away from her paper-flat tone as she shrugged.

Roxana crossed her arms over her chest and arched an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Just because I don't tell everyone when I have a crush doesn't mean I don't have them."

"Who?" Roxana leaned in, her golden eyes almost glowing with intensity.

Willa raised her eyebrows. "Well, I'm not going to tell you if you're going to broadcast it everywhere."

"The two of you are hopeless," Roxana declared, shaking her head. "Everyone says that werewolves fall in love at first sight."

"Oh wait, that's true?" Solene couldn't help herself. "I thought that was just a weird stereotype. Like families being headed by alphas and betas and stuff when it's just that they have big families with one family head."

Roxana shook her head. "No, it's actually true. Uncle Icarus talks about it all the time."Her expression grew more serious. "He said it was love at first sight for him and

Aunt Margot. That she just sauntered up to him, said she knew he was going to be hers, and that was that."

"Sounds like something out of a fairytale." The words were more analytical, the way that Willa said them.

Solene had a different train of thought as her eyes drifted to Dorian again, under a tree across the garden lawn. "Is Margot—"

"His mother." Roxana tucked a stray lock behind her ear and glanced away. "She died from complications, after he was born."

"Oh." Solene stared at him as he wrote something down in one of his notebooks. She felt a pang in her heart, a connection. He knew what it was like to lose a parent, although it was so much younger than she was when she lost her father.

"Go talk to him." Roxana nodded in his direction. "I promise, werewolves don't bite. Or at least, he doesn't."

Solene opened her mouth to turn Roxana down, to deny it—when Dorian looked up.

Their eyes met, and Solene realized that she couldn't let this go. Despite every part of her screaming that this was a bad idea, that she couldn't get involved with Dorian, love at first sight or no, she found herself standing up.

"I'll be back in a minute." Her own voice sounded distant as she rose.

"Have fun." Roxana giggled conspiratorially.

But that was distant too.

It was like on the beach again—where all the world disappeared when she saw him, and there was a pull like gravity, like the tides returning to the shore. The invisible string pulled her along to him, and she sank onto her knees beside him under the tree.

"Mind if I join you?" She was faintly aware that it was probably too late for the question.

He didn't seem to mind. "Oh, hey Solene."

Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought his freckled cheeks turned a little pink at that, as he shifted to the side a little to give her space in the shade.

He was still too close—-she was still too close. He was like the radiance of the sun, and her hands began to shake.

He glanced to her and frowned. "Aren't all your things back there?"

"What?"

He pointed with his pen across the lawn, to where she had indeed left her schoolbag by Willa's side. Both Roxana and Willa were staring at them, Roxana with the look of a cat that ate the canary, and Willa with a more detached curiosity, and more unusually, something like longing.

"Oh, yeah." Solene was sure her face was as red as her dress, and she was grateful for the curtain her long hair formed over her face, to obscure it a little from the humiliation of it all.

"You're not here to study, are you?" He tilted his head, his smile was kind.

She couldn't help but meet her eyes and hated how he seemed to see through her all too well. "I don't know why I'm here."

"That's alright, I wasn't getting much done anyway." He closed his books and withdrew a wand from his satchel. Tied around the hilt was a little wolf totem charm. She wondered if it belonged to his mother. She also wondered if it would be rude to ask, and so said nothing.

He suddenly looked down, the tinge of pink revealing the onslaught of self-consciousness. "I have a trick, if you want to see it."

"I do." The words came out too quickly, with an eagerness that belied vulnerability.

He smiled. "Okay, then."

He held his want aloft and closed his eyes. He mouthed something voicelessly, and nodded. He then waved his wand and that was when Solene felt it.

The cold kiss of snow, the taste of vanilla.

She'd only ever seen it during magical displays like this. They were popular during the winter, a reminder of what once was. But snow rarely ever fell since the end of the Long Winter. And even rarer still. Solene had never seen a natural snowfall, although Luna and her father once recalled one to her. But they were small children then.

Solene could not help but stretch her arms out, to see the white flakes drop, to feel the cold. She could not help but smile at it.

She turned to look at Dorian—he was smiling too. But he smiled with that strange sort of awe reserved for miracles of nature, like the sunset and a magnificent storm. Or perhaps, natural-falling snow.

Her heart began to beat fast again. There it was, that feeling on the beach, when she'd first saw him.

She could pick up and run, she could stay away from him and avoid the fluttering in her stomach, the way he made her feel.

But in spite of herself, she stayed.