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connections all around me, as I let my feet lead me down a path that I knew by heart.
    Gradually, the buzzing connection started to lift the depression that had settled on my mind, and I felt a lightness flare in my chest. I didn’t have to open my eyes again to see the change in the forest, because I had seen it so many times before. Everything would be magnified, the grass would stand taller, the colours would begin to saturate, the starved plants would feed from my peaceful state, and everything else would prosper. I had forced plants to bloom out of season before, but when I discovered that it actually shortened their life span, I stopped. I couldn’t heal the forest, couldn’t help the plants that were already dead, but they fed off my connection, and it seemed to bring them as much peace as it brought me.
    “Well now, when they told me that Caroline’s daughter would be starting up at the Academy, I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this.”
    My eyes flew open, my whole body freezing over at the soft-as-silk voice, which had sounded frighteningly close. The man was standing right before me, blocking the path ahead, if he hadn’t spoken at that moment, I would have run straight into him. Taking a hasty step backward as my brain struggled to catch-up, I let my eyes take him in, with a growing sense of realisation and horror. He was beautiful, uncommonly so, in varying shades of gold. His hair was misleadingly dark, though it was indeed still a shade of gold, and his eyes were just as misleadingly light, almost masking the intensity of his gaze. His skin was a similar shade to my own, dark golden-brown, though his was admittedly more beautiful, and it only took a moment to concede that there was no fae shimmer to it. Structurally, he was—quite simply—perfect. Broad shoulders spread beneath two thick straps of leather, which crossed once over the muscles of his bare chest, to meet up behind his back. And his lean waist tapered to renegade pants, in camouflage colours, with boots of a similar make. He wasn’t a renegade though, of that much I was certain. Despite the fact that renegades almost never travelled without a pack, they also all harboured tattoos on their necks, indicating their clan, and occasionally their status. This man’s neck was bare. He wasn’t a vampire either, because I felt no repulsion in his presence, which was supposedly the one easy way to tell a vampire. They might be vicious, fast, and super-humanly strong, but there was something in our systems that immediately repelled them, so it wasn’t necessarily easy to be fooled by a vampire.
    I didn’t bother asking how he knew my mother, or how he knew that I would be starting up at the Academy, as it seemed everybody knew as much.
    “Who are you?” I asked instead, taking another quick step back.
    He put a hand over his heart in mock outrage, though I had a strange feeling that the theatrics were only meant to distract me from the fact that he had taken a step closer, to bridge the space that I was trying to put between us.
    “You don’t even recognise your own kind, how sad.” He made a bow, and caught a hold of my hand, raising it to his mouth in clear defiance of my now paralysing horror.
    “The name is Nareon Soulstoy,” he said in that silky voice, his eyes glimmering wickedly as his kiss brushed across the back of my hand.
    The horror slowly melted away the moment his lips touched me, and I felt another feeling spreading through me, a billowing cloud of awareness. It permeated my very bloodstream and tingled right to the tips of my fingers, a feeling that was as unnatural as it was unfamiliar. Despite how very convincing it was, my mind seemed to be working perfectly fine, and while my nerve endings suddenly stung with awareness, I was fully aware that I was, for the first time in my life, experiencing the power of the synfees.
    “Please don’t kill me,” I whispered, barely even realising the words had left my mouth as