Marked By The Dark Professors;, Claimed By The Cursed Princes

The first time my brother coughed blood, he smiled and told me it was nothing. The second time, he collapsed into my arms, and by the third, the doctor had stopped pretending there was still hope for him.

"There isn't a cure," he said quietly, sliding the medical file across his desk. "Not in the ordinary world."

I stared at him, waiting for the rest of the explanation because surely he couldn't expect me to accept a statement like that without telling me what it meant. "What does that mean?"

"It means..." His eyes flicked toward the closed office door before returning to me. "There are places that study things medicine cannot explain."

I laughed, not because I found anything funny about what he was saying, but because sometimes people laughed when they were desperate enough to hear something impossible and didn't know how else to respond. "You're telling me magic?"

"I'm telling you," he replied, his voice firm despite the hesitation that had come before it, "that your brother is dying."

Silence swallowed the room. Ethan sat beside me, pale and painfully thin, pretending not to notice that our savings, our hope, and now our future had all disappeared inside one sentence. He reached for my hand, his fingers cool against mine, and I tightened my grip as though holding on to him could somehow keep the doctor from being right.

"I'm tired, Sable." His voice was barely above a whisper.

My chest tightened. "No."

"I'm tired of hospitals."

"No."

"I'm tired of pretending I don't know."

"You are not dying." The words came out sharper than I intended, but I couldn't bear to hear him speak as though he had already accepted what I was still fighting to prevent.

He smiled, and that gentle, heartbreaking smile only made me angrier because it was the same one he used whenever he wanted me to stop worrying about him. "You always lie badly."

I stood so quickly that my chair scraped against the floor. "There has to be something."

"There is."

Both Ethan and I turned toward the doctor. He hesitated before opening a locked drawer and removing a thick black envelope sealed with dark blue wax. There was no hospital logo or return address, only a silver crest pressed into the wax: six swords, one crown, and one eye. I stared at the unfamiliar symbol, trying to understand why a doctor who had just told us that medicine could do nothing for my brother was now reaching for something that looked as though it belonged in a story about forbidden magic.

"The academy?" I whispered.

His expression changed immediately. "You've heard of it?"

"Only stories."

Everyone had heard something about Blackthorn Academy. Children whispered about it like it was a haunted castle, a school where students disappeared, professors never aged, and nobody graduated as the same person they had been when they entered. Most people dismissed those stories as folklore, the sort of nonsense adults invented to frighten children into behaving, but the doctor wasn't smiling or treating the name as a joke.

"They're accepting applications," he said.

I frowned. "I thought nobody knew where it was."

"They don't."

"Then how do I apply?"

"You don't." He pushed the envelope toward me. "They invite you."

I looked down, and the sight of my name already written across the front made my stomach drop.

Sable Vale.

"I never applied."

"I know."

"Who sent this?"

"I don't know." His voice had become strangely careful, as though he were choosing each word before allowing himself to speak it. "It arrived this morning."

"This morning?" I repeated, looking from the envelope to him. "Before my appointment?"

He nodded, and my fingers trembled as I broke the wax seal. Inside was a single black letter, its contents brief enough to make the lack of explanation feel deliberate rather than accidental.

Sable Vale. Blackthorn Academy summons you.

Arrival: Tomorrow.

Failure to attend forfeits the invitation forever.

There was no explanation, no signature, and no indication of how the academy had learned my name or why it had chosen to contact me. Only one final sentence had been written across the bottom of the letter, and the moment I read it, the room seemed to grow colder.

Bring the boy.

Ethan looked at me, his expression changing as he understood what the words meant. "They know about me."

I looked back at the letter, my fingers tightening around its edges as I read the instruction again. No, it wasn't simply that they knew about Ethan. They knew too much, and I had no idea how they had learned anything about us.

We left before sunset. Our apartment took less than twenty minutes to empty because there wasn't much worth packing anyway: some clothes, my notebooks, Ethan's medication, and the framed photograph of our parents. I wrapped the photograph carefully and held it for a moment longer than necessary, staring at the faces I had spent years trying to remember clearly.

A fire had taken our parents when I was seven, or at least, that was what everyone had always told me. I remembered pieces of it, but whenever I tried to put those memories together, they became strangely blurry, like pages smudged by rain. I could never tell whether the gaps were the ordinary result of being a child when something terrible happened or whether there was something about that night I had never been meant to remember.

"Sable?" Ethan stood in the doorway, watching me with the patient expression he had worn far too often lately. "You ready?"

No, I wasn't ready to leave the only home we had left for a place that might not even exist in the way the stories described it, but I nodded anyway and tucked the photograph into my bag. "If this academy can save you, I'll crawl there if I have to."

He laughed softly, and for a moment, he sounded more like the brother I remembered before the hospitals and the coughing fits had taken over our lives. "I know you would."

The invitation included no map or address, only a set of instructions that gave us a destination without explaining how we were supposed to reach it.

Wait where the old railway ends.

Midnight.

Come alone.

The abandoned station looked exactly like the kind of place people disappeared from, with broken benches, rusted tracks, no lights, and no trains. Fog rolled across the empty platform as we waited for midnight, and the longer we stood there, the more ridiculous our decision began to feel. We had left everything familiar behind because a mysterious letter had promised us a chance, and now we were standing in a deserted railway station with no guarantee that anything would happen.

Then every clock around the station stopped.

Twelve. Exactly twelve.

The fog thickened until the far end of the platform disappeared, and the abandoned rails began glowing beneath our feet. A train emerged from the darkness without making a sound. It wasn't arriving so much as appearing, its windows black and its metal body older than history itself, as though it had been waiting somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary time.

The doors opened, revealing an empty carriage. There was no conductor, no passenger, and no welcoming announcement, only the silence of a place that seemed to have been expecting us.

Ethan swallowed as he looked inside. "This feels like a bad idea."

"It feels like our only one."

I grabbed his hand, refusing to give myself time to reconsider, and together we stepped aboard. The doors closed behind us, and the train moved instantly, without acceleration or sound. One moment the station still existed beyond the windows; the next, it was gone, leaving no trace of the platform or the world we had just abandoned.

I leaned toward the window, trying to find something outside that would tell me where we were going, but there was nothing to see. Not darkness, which would have meant there was at least something beyond the glass, but nothing at all, as though the train was no longer travelling through the world I knew.

A woman in a gray uniform appeared without warning. I hadn't heard footsteps or seen a door open, and neither Ethan nor I had noticed anyone approaching. She simply existed inside the carriage, standing a short distance away as though she had been there all along.

"Miss Vale."

I turned toward her, still holding Ethan's hand. "Yes?"

"The academy has one rule."

I studied her face, searching for some sign that she was joking or trying to frighten us, but her expression remained unreadable. "What rule?"

She looked directly into my eyes. "Trust no professor."

Before I could ask what that meant, a violent jolt threw Ethan and me forward. The lights flickered overhead, and for one split second, every window reflected six men standing inside the carriage behind us, their attention fixed entirely on me.

I spun around so quickly that my shoulder struck the seat, but the carriage was empty. There were no men, no movement, and no sign that anyone had been standing behind us at all. When I turned back to question the woman, she had disappeared too, leaving only her voice echoing softly through the train.

"They've finally found you."

I barely had time to wonder who she meant before burning pain exploded beneath my collarbone. I screamed and clutched at my chest as blood soaked through my shirt, spreading across the fabric while something dark began to emerge against my skin. The pain sharpened with every passing second, and when I finally looked down, I saw a black mark blooming beneath my collarbone, spreading as though it had been waiting there all along for the moment it could reveal itself.