Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The lecture hall had been warm in the particular way of rooms where the heating couldn’t be adjusted and nobody had thought to open a window in living memory. Professor Tenebris’s voice still sat somewhere behind my eyes, drilling the distinction between Transmutation and Manifestation into the soft tissue there.

We took the long corridor back toward the dorms. Aria had her notebook pressed flat against her chest and was staring at the ceiling as she walked.

“Okay but why is it different every week. Like, pick a timetable. Commit to it. Some of us have schedules.”

“You don’t have a schedule,” Isabella said.

“I have intentions.” Aria gestured with the notebook. “Which I can’t arrange around a syllabus that changes its mind every Monday. Last week Theory was in the morning, now it’s after lunch, next week it’s probably going to be at midnight or something.”

“It stabilises.” Isabella adjusted the strap of her bag. “The first month is always like this. They’re still calibrating the cohort.”

“That’s such a polite way to say chaos.”

“It is what it is.”

Aria accepted this with a long exhale, then pivoted without breaking stride. “Okay, so—weekend. What are we doing? We can’t exactly pop back to that mortal realm anytime soon.” A pause. “Shame, though. That place you mentioned sounds genuinely interesting.”

“The den.” Isabella’s tone carried something measured underneath it. “I’ve been thinking about that as well, actually. My father is a vampire lord. I’m curious what one of their gathering places looks like.”

“I secured a way back,” I said.

The words were out before I’d finished the thought.

Both of them looked at me.

The calculation was immediate and not in my favour. I’d just handed over the fact of my return visit as though it were obvious, which made it obvious I’d been planning to go without mentioning it, which was now a problem.

“Someone really liked that club.” Aria’s grin spread. “Okay, what mortal did you find? Did you actually meet some mage in there?”

“Not exactly.” I shifted my bag to the other shoulder. “I found someone who could perform the summoning. I taught them the circle.”

“You taught a mortal—” Aria stopped walking entirely for two steps before catching back up. “How long were you in there?”

“Long enough.”

“Okay but who is this person, because that’s not a thing you just—what are they like? Are they cute? Is that why you—”

“Technically he’s not a mortal.”

That landed. Aria’s mouth stayed open.

“He’s a vampire,” I said. “A Vampire Ancestor, specifically.”

Aria closed her mouth. Then opened it again. “Okay. Okay, first of all—you’re in Academy for not even a month and you’re already moving in high circles even in the mortal realms. Second of all—” she pointed at me with the notebook, “—what is a Vampire Ancestor? Sounds important.”

I considered the question.

“I actually don’t know. Forgot to ask.”

Aria stared at me.

Isabella let out a breath through her nose—not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. She looked at the middle distance for a moment, as though composing herself.

“Vampire Ancestors are the origin point of the vampire bloodlines. They’re born, not made. When they die, they reincarnate.” She paused. “They are, for all practical purposes, the vampire equivalent of a Lilim.”

* * *

The corridor outside the lecture hall was quiet except for our footsteps and the distant echo of another class letting out somewhere below. Then, from the cluster of students ahead—a drop in volume, a head turned, the particular shape of a sentence interrupted.

I caught Nightstar before it disappeared.

I looked back. Three girls from the year above, their conversation folding itself into bland nothing the moment my eyes reached them.

“What?” Aria was watching me.

“Nothing.”

She followed my gaze to the girls, then back to me, and said nothing more. Sometimes she read a room faster than she let on.

The dormitory entrance came into view at the far end of the main path, the stone archway familiar now in the way of things you stopped noticing. Isabella’s pace hadn’t changed but she slowed fractionally as we reached the fork where the path split toward the outer buildings.

“I’ll leave you here.” She shifted the notebook—Aria’s notebook, which she’d somehow ended up carrying—and held it out. “The trip created certain administrative problems I’ve been avoiding. They won’t wait much longer.”

Aria took the notebook and tucked it back to her chest. “As long as you’re done before Woesday.”

Isabella’s gaze moved to her. “Why Woesday.”

“Because that’s when your punishment is.”

A pause. The kind Isabella used when she was deciding whether the question was worth the answer.

“What is the punishment.”

I started to speak.

Aria’s hand came up and covered my mouth. Flat palm, no warning, efficient as a door closing.

“Surprise,” she said.

I considered biting her. Decided against it.

Isabella’s attention moved between us—Aria’s expression bright and sealed, me standing there with someone’s hand over my face. Her jaw shifted once.

“If it’s something idiotic,” she said, “I’ll make sure you’re included in it.”

Aria’s free hand went to her collarbone in mock offence. “It’s not idiotic. She completely outdid herself. It’s inspired.” A small pause for emphasis. “I’m almost jealous I didn’t think of it.”

Isabella looked at me. I lifted both hands, palms out. Aria’s grip didn’t move.

The silence stretched the length of one more considered breath.

“Fine.” Isabella turned back toward the fork. Her tail moved in one precise sweep, and then she was gone down the path toward the outer gates, her footsteps fading to nothing before the corner.

Aria pulled her hand back from my mouth.

“You could have just let me tell her,” I said.

“Yeah, but this is funnier.” She fell into step beside me toward the dormitory. “Also, the face she makes when she’s annoyed and trying not to show it? Completely worth it. I’m going to be thinking about that all week.”

* * *

The whispering stopped the moment I turned around.

Three first-years, corridor traffic flowing around them, all wearing the same expression people get when they’ve just remembered they have somewhere else to be. One of them looked at the ceiling. Another found something fascinating in her own hands.

I turned back. Kept walking.

“Okay, you definitely heard that one,” Aria said.

“I heard it.”

She glanced over her shoulder at them, then back to me. “That’s the second time today.”

“Third.” The one outside the alchemy lab I hadn’t mentioned. A single syllable—star—bitten off when I passed the doorway. Could have been coincidence. Twice more and the probability collapsed.

“Okay, we’re doing this.” Aria grabbed my elbow and pivoted us both around mid-stride. “Hey!”

The three of them scattered. Genuinely scattered, the way a flock scatters at a thrown stone, one going left, one right, one doubling back through a door she’d had to push twice to open. Gone in four seconds.

Aria stood with her hands on her hips watching the empty corridor.

“Okay,” she said. “Rude.”

She raised her voice at the closing door: “If you’ve got something to say, say it!”

Nothing came back. Someone passing in the opposite direction gave her a wide berth.

She turned to me, expression resolving into something practical. “We’re going to have to grab one of them.”

“Grab one.”

“For interrogation, obviously. You can’t just let people talk behind your back—there’s a whole thing. You find one when they’re alone, you have a conversation, and they decide pretty quickly to tell you what they know.”

I considered the word conversation and how much weight she was hanging off it. “The Academy has rules about fighting.”

She looked at me the way I’d seen maths professors look at students who’d written two plus two equals five. The full-second pause before they decide whether the error is genuine or tragic.

“Lily. We’re not fighting them. We’re just—” she moved her hand in a small circular gesture, “—applying some pressure. Politely. Until they’re ready to talk.” A short pause. “You only get in trouble if you don’t get anything useful out of it. That’s just, like, the rule. Basic Academy stuff.”

Right. Because outcomes were the metric, not methods. I’d been here long enough to know the logic held, by Hell’s standards. The thought arrived without the small accompanying recoil it would have carried six weeks ago.

“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

I went quiet for a moment. Aria watched me from the side.

There was something clean about the reasoning, if you stripped the context away. Find the leak, locate the source, contain it. The method was just local colour.

The part that sat wrong wasn’t the logic. It was that I’d followed it to a conclusion before the discomfort had time to arrive.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” Aria said.

“Just thinking.”

She nodded, satisfied with this. “I bet you’re already making plans for our interrogation session.” She tapped her chin. “Or thinking about Bellas’s ass. Could be either.”

The laugh came before I could stop it. An actual laugh, short and genuine, the kind that costs something.

“Come on.” I turned us back in the original direction. “Geopolitics.”

She fell into step beside me, already reaching for her notebook. “You know Obsidium’s going to make us do another roleplay scenario.”

“Probably.”

“Last time she made me play the pawn and it was deeply insulting. I’m clearly more of a—”

“Kingmaker?” I offered.

She pointed at me. “Exactly. Thank you. Someone gets it.”

The lecture hall was two corridors ahead, its double doors propped open by the weight of other students funnelling in. The hum of conversation, someone’s bag catching on the door frame, the scrape of chairs on stone. Ordinary sounds. Familiar now in a way that had crept in without announcement.

I filed in behind Aria, took my usual seat, and set my notebook open to a blank page.

At the front of the room, Professor Obsidium stood with her back to us, writing something on the board in precise, unhurried strokes. She didn’t turn when the last students entered. Didn’t wait for the room to quiet. She simply stopped writing, set the chalk down, and let the silence do the work.

The difference between a Queen and a concubine is not the quality of the linen, but who holds the leash.

The sentence stayed on the board while Obsidium let us sit with it. Nobody wrote anything for the first thirty seconds. The students who’d reached for their pens put them down again.

Then she turned, and the lecture began.

* * *

The hall emptied around us in the usual post-lecture surge, students peeling off toward stairwells and side corridors. Obsidium hadn’t dismissed us so much as simply stopped talking, which everyone had learned meant the same thing.

Aria caught Isabella just past the doors, hooking two fingers around her wrist.

“Are you actually walking with us today, or is this another disappearing act?”

Isabella looked down at the fingers, then up. “I have an hour.”

“Two.”

A pause. “Possibly two.”

Aria released her with a small sound of satisfaction and fell into step between us, her notebook tucked under one arm and her free hand already gesturing. “Perfect, because we have a thing.”

“What kind of thing.”

“An appointment.” Aria’s smile was the particular one she used when she already knew how a conversation was going to end. “With one of the first years. We’re going to ask them some questions, and if they’re stubborn about it—” she spread her hands, an open invitation.

Isabella’s expression didn’t change exactly, but something behind her eyes sharpened. “I see.”

“Thought you might be useful. Lilitu, and all that.” Aria waved a hand in Isabella’s general direction, indicating her entire bloodline.

“I am occasionally useful for other things.”

“Sure, but the name does most of the work. Lily’s going to handle the actual—” Aria glanced over at me, “—well. What did they teach you back home? You’ve never really said.”

I kept my eyes on the corridor ahead. “Various things.”

“Right, but specific things. Because I’m thinking, given who your family is—” she caught herself, pivoted smoothly, “—given your background. You’re probably better at this than even Bella.”

Isabella’s chin lifted a fraction.

“I’m really not,” I said.

“You are absolutely—”

“Aria.”

“—the false modesty thing is very cute but we both know—”

“I’m serious. Don’t build it up.”

She stopped walking. Not dramatically, just stopped, which forced Isabella and me to stop too, the corridor traffic parting around us like water.

“Is something wrong?”

The question landed flat and genuine. No performance in it. She was actually asking, the way she did when something didn’t compute—that small furrow between her brows, her head tilted two degrees.

I understood why. From where she stood, we had reasons, the student had been spreading something worth containing, and this was the obvious tool. Hesitating made no sense. Hesitating was the kind of thing that would have required an explanation in this place, the kind of explanation I didn’t have a clean version of.

I thought about Obsidium’s sentence, still bright in my mind from thirty minutes ago. Who holds the leash.

The revulsion I’d expected to feel wasn’t quite there. What was there instead was a faint sourness, rote and familiar, the mental equivalent of bracing for cold water that turns out to be lukewarm. I’d been bracing for it by habit, because I’d always braced for it. Because that was what you did.

Whether that meant the water was warmer now, or whether I’d simply stopped noticing the temperature—that was a question I filed away without answering.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Let’s go. Just don’t expect anything theatrical.”

Aria’s face cleared immediately. She resumed walking, already pulling out her phone to check something, the moment closed behind her like a curtain.

Isabella fell back half a step, level with me. She didn’t say anything. She looked forward, but her eyes cut sideways once, brief and measuring, before she looked away again.

I didn’t acknowledge it.

* * *

The gardens were quieter at this hour, the main paths half-empty, students drifted toward the feast hall or the dormitories. We cut down to the lower terrace through a side path between two trellises of ember vine, the warmth radiating off the coiled stems as we passed.

Aria stopped at the top of the steps.

“She’s here.”

I looked at her. “How do you know what she looks like?”

“Because I’ve been doing useful things while you were in the library.”

“Such as.”

“Talking to people. Asking questions. Being charming.” She paused. “Mostly.”

Isabella’s gaze moved to her.

“Well—mostly charming. Some of it was other things.” Aria was already descending the steps. “Come on, before she moves.”

The alcove sat behind a screen of ashen ivy, a curved stone bench and two low planters that blocked three sides from the main path. The student inside had chosen it for the privacy. She sat with a textbook open on her lap, dark red hair falling forward over her shoulders, and she looked up when our footsteps reached the obsidian flags.

For a half-second she scanned left, then right.

There was nothing to her left but the planter. To her right, the path bent back and Aria was already filling it, leaning against the stone with her arms folded and a pleasant expression on her face.

The girl’s gaze settled on me.

Aria and Isabella both stepped back, creating a deliberate gap. I felt the shape of it, the two of them framing the space and leaving it for me to fill.

I breathed out through my nose.

“Hi,” I said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Lily.”

The girl looked at me the way someone looks at a bill they were expecting but hoped wouldn’t come.

“Why would I tell you my name?”

“Common courtesy, mostly. I introduced myself.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“No,” I agreed. “You don’t. But it would make this shorter.”

She shifted the textbook on her lap. “Make what shorter?”

“I just want to talk.”

“Then talk.” Her chin lifted slightly. “I can listen without giving you my name.”

I found a section of planter low enough to sit on and sat. “There’s been something going around. About me. I’d like to know what, and where it started.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t keep track of gossip.”

“Sure.”

Her eyes flicked to Isabella, then back. “Can I leave?”

“We’re having a conversation.”

“I’m not having anything. You’re talking at me.” She shifted her weight, angling her shoulder away. “Can I leave.”

“In a bit.”

The girl set the textbook aside, with a precision that was meant to look casual. “You know, I’ve heard about you. Hiding behind Lilitu doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

I looked at her.

“Just because she follows you around—” a slight incline of her head toward Isabella, “—doesn’t give you any actual authority here. You’re a first year. Same as me.”

“That’s true.”

“So.”

“So nothing. I’m still asking about the rumour.”

“And I’m still not answering.” She folded her hands in her lap. Something in her posture had shifted, a settling, because Isabella had watched the whole exchange from the same position against the far planter, arms loosely crossed, expression giving nothing. The girl read that stillness as permission. “What are you going to do, torture me? Here?” A short breath that might have been a laugh. “In the gardens? In front of witnesses?”

Aria’s head turned toward the path. Empty.

“Go ahead,” the girl said. “See what happens when you try. If you don’t get anything out of me, you look incompetent. If you do try something, you get disciplinary action. Either way—” she spread one hand, palm up, “—I’m fine.”

I looked at my hands for a moment.

I had tried. There was a correct accounting of this conversation in which I had genuinely, sincerely tried to do this the clean way, and the attempt was formally complete.

“I figured,” the girl said. Her mouth arranged itself into something satisfied. She leaned forward and reached up, two fingers, and patted me twice on the top of the head. “Stop posturing, sweetheart. It doesn’t suit you.”

My hand closed around her wrist before her arm had finished dropping.

Not hard. I didn’t need hard. I just held it, and I looked at her, and something behind my sternum went very quiet and very flat, the specific quiet of a decision that had already been made, and all the warmth I’d maintained for the last several minutes drained out of the conversation like water through a cracked vessel.

She didn’t move. Not a flinch, not a pull. She just stared at my hand around her wrist and went very still.

Behind me I heard Aria murmur something to Isabella. I wasn’t listening.

“Here’s what I want you to understand,” I said. “I came over here prepared to be reasonable. That was a genuine offer. I was going to ask a few questions, you were going to answer them, and we were all going to go on with our afternoon.”

The girl’s jaw set.

“You decided that was weakness.” I kept my voice level. “It wasn’t. I was just being generous.”

“Let go of me.”

“In a moment.”

Her free hand came up fast, nails first, raking for my face.

I caught that wrist too. Stepped into her, turned my hip, and put her against the stone wall of the alcove in one motion—not a shove, something more deliberate than that, her shoulders meeting the rock with a sound that knocked the air out of her. I held both her wrists against the wall above her head and waited for her to stop pulling.

She stopped.

The gardens were quiet around us. The fountain noise from the middle terrace reached the alcove as a soft, continuous murmur, nothing more.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’re going to answer every question I ask. Honestly. If I want you to tell me something, you tell me. If I want you to stay quiet, you stay quiet.” I watched her face. “We’re in a private section of the gardens. We could have quite a long time before anyone wanders through.”

“Go.” Her voice came out thin. “Fuck. Yourself.”

My tail moved before I’d decided anything.

The spade tip hardened and drove into something low on her back, between the wing joints—a pressure point I hadn’t known I knew existed until the moment I used it. She screamed, sharp and sudden, and her whole body lurched against my hands.

I twisted. Her scream climbed.

She had it coming. The thought arrived without apology. She’d looked at every reasonable thing I’d put in front of her and chosen to spit on it. I’d extended my hand and she’d tried to take my eye out. There was a lesson in this that needed to land, properly, deep enough to stay, and I was going to make sure it did.

I pressed my palm over her mouth.

“Shh.” The sound came out almost gentle. I leaned in until I was close enough to see the tears cutting tracks from the corners of her eyes. “Don’t waste your voice. Screaming’s beneath you.”

I rotated the tip, slow, deliberate, and her whole body shuddered and strained and her screams turned to something muffled and wet against my hand.

Then I stopped.

I stood there for a moment, palm still over her mouth, tail still embedded, and something behind my eyes caught up with what I was doing.

The pressure point. The rotation. The shh, don’t waste your voice, as though I’d done this before, as though the mechanics of it were familiar and the only interesting part was the calibration.

I withdrew the tail. Straightened up. Let go of her mouth and her wrists at the same time, and stepped back one pace.

She stayed against the wall. Her legs were still holding her up, barely, and she had one hand pressed flat to the stone at her side.

I smoothed the front of my uniform.

My heartbeat was steady. That was the part that caught me—not racing, not spiked with guilt or adrenaline. Just steady, and somewhere underneath it, something that wasn’t quite satisfied but was adjacent to it, and I filed that away and didn’t look at it directly.

“Are we clear?” I said.

She nodded. Fast, twice, without lifting her eyes from the ground in front of my feet.

“Good.” I smoothed the front of my skirt. “Let’s start over. What’s your name?”

* * *

Her name came out small. “Clara.”

“Was that so hard?”

She blinked. “No?”

“Good.” I let my arms settle across my chest, underneath. “So. Tell me what you were whispering about.”

Clara’s eyes went to Aria and Isabella, then back to me. Her mouth stayed shut.

I didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at her.

“It wasn’t—” She stopped. Started again. “It was something I heard from someone else. I didn’t make it up.”

“I’m not asking who made it up. I’m asking what it was.”

She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “That you’re not actually friends with Isabella. That you’ve been positioning yourself near House Lilitu because you want a placement after graduation. Like, as a contractor or something. Through her.”

I held her gaze for a moment. “Anything else?”

The thread came free. Clara looked at it, then dropped it.

“Two more,” she said.

I waited.

“That Aria’s just—” Clara glanced past my shoulder at Aria. “That you keep her around because she’s useful. You know. Someone to run errands. You don’t actually think of her as a friend.”

Somewhere behind me, Aria had gone very quiet. I didn’t turn around.

“And the third.”

Clara’s jaw shifted. “That your transformation wasn’t complete. That something went wrong, and you’re unstable, and all the time you spend in the library isn’t studying. You’re looking for a way to stabilise yourself before—” She stopped.

“Before I go feral,” I said.

“That’s what I heard.”

I breathed out through my nose. The fountain on the terrace above us continued its steady murmur. A hellfire flower near the path was cycling through violet to deep red and back again, indifferent to all of us.

Three rumours. The first was politically pointed—elegant, even, if you understood how house affiliations worked here. Someone wanted to isolate me from Isabella, or Isabella from me, or both of us from anyone who might otherwise take our alliance seriously. The second was cruder. Driving a wedge between me and Aria, or making other students less inclined to associate with either of us. The third was the most interesting: unstable, incomplete, feral. That one was designed to make people afraid of me. Or to make them pity me. Either worked.

“Who told you?”

“Yrieth.”

The name surfaced with a face attached to it—platinum hair, a step behind Valentina, always watching, always carrying whatever Valentina needed carried. One of the orbit. Whether she’d acted alone or been pointed at me like a finger at a wound, I couldn’t tell from here.

Didn’t change much, either way.

I stepped back and turned. The alcove path was dappled with the bioluminescent flicker of the flowers, Aria and Isabella standing where I’d left them, both watching me with different versions of the same expression.

“You’re free to go,” I said, without looking back.

Clara left. I heard her steps on the obsidian path, quick and even, and then they faded.

I walked over to Aria and Isabella. Aria had her arms folded, which on her was unusual—she normally couldn’t keep her hands still for thirty consecutive seconds. Isabella’s expression was the careful, neutral one she wore when she was deciding whether something required a response.

“Right,” I said. “So, how do we deal with the rumours now?”