Ch. 1, Start DRACON HALL Here
A cursed academy. A dangerous forest. Students disappearing. Draco/Hermione Vibes. Read Dracon Hall free on Substack. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Prologue
The forest sings as I drown.
Cold black water drags at my skirts, tangles in my hair, pulls me deeper beneath the surface of the lake. I fight anyway, lungs burning, fingers clawing for air that feels impossibly far away. Above me, moonlight ripples over the water, taunting and foreign.
Too late. Always too late.
The forest’s voice is everywhere. In the ripple of the reeds. In the choking water aching to devour and fill me. In the ancient trees leaning over the lake, watching but not helping.
Let go, she whispers.
Give in, she commands.
But I keep fighting. I can’t just fail my sister. And I won’t fail him: the boy who could have saved us. Saved me...
The boy I should have know better to trust.
The boy who is the reason I’m about to die.
My body sinks further. It’s as if some ancient, angry force is pulling me down, as if something alive and hungry lurks beneath the dark. Panic consumes me. I kick and fight and struggle, but the movements are desperate, useless.
The lake tastes of salt and sorrow and doom.
I’ve been running for so long. Fighting for so long.
Maybe I should give in. Maybe the path I choose, the path of violence and blood and claws wasn’t the right now.
I failed.
Above me, the moon becomes a pale blur. My body jerks and grows heavy, drifting downward through silver weeds and black water as I stare up at the moon, so far, far above me...
And somehow it reminds me of his silver hair. Of the one who started all this.
The one who ended me.
Part One: A Study of Glass and Blood
I used to think books held the answers to life. In the pages of a book lay everything I needed. Problems found in the white spaces between black letters.
Now, brandishing a book above my head, I wished it was a real weapon.
“Come on Mallory,” Carter crooned, his tall form blocking my only way forward. “You don’t have to keep up the good girl act for me.” Even in the blinding fluorescent light of a disgusting bathroom, the mirrors reflected a scene that felt more fiction than reality. A fifteen year old girl, with pale skin, dark curly hair and big eyes walking backwards from the boy approaching her. When had my life become such a desperate, sad parody of the books I once read?
I lowered the book, and tried to smile at Carter. “Come on Carter, can we do this in the morning? I just want to go back to bed.” I went to step around him, but he blocked my path, grinning down at me in that way men liked to do. With the confidence that no one would stop them. A cold sort of rage flushed in my chest. I’d been using the book to prop open the window behind me—the only one in this horrible house that could be opened enough for me to crawl out. I’d thought crawling out of a second story window would be my dangerous activity for the night. But noooooo. Now I have to deal with this too.
Life with no parents was so fun.
“Ahh, come on,” Carter said, in a low voice that made the hair on my skin stand on end. “I’ve seen you watching me. I know you want it.” He reached down to squeeze his crouch. Ugh, gross. The only reason I’d been watching him was to make sure he stayed the hell away. “It’s been, what, six months now you’ve been here? And you got kicked out of your last house. Surely by now you know no one is coming for you and your sad little sis. I think it’s time maybe you get on your knees and thankouff—”
His words cut off as the book caught him full in the face. I didn’t wait, swinging my leg and trying to kick him in the balls. He moved first, catching my head and then grabbing my hair and slamming me against the mirror. I heard it shatter, glass falling around me as I saw black for a moment.
Then his hand came around my throat, choking me as his voice came hot on my face. “You little bitch,” he snarled, keeping his voice low. “You think you’re so much better than the rest of us, don’t you? Well, you’re here now. You’re as alone and unforgotten as everyone else”
“Please, just don’t hurt me,” I whimpered. “Please, I’ll do anything.”
He grinned, his hands tightening on my throat. “That’s what I want to hear,” he whispered, leaning into my ear. “See, I knew we could work something out.”
And that’s how it goes, right?
The sweet young maiden, who grew up reading books, waits for a handsome Prince to save her. Sure, the details differ a bit—the monster isn’t usually some rapey teenager holding a girl pinned against a mirror in a halfway house for teenagers who no one wanted.
But you know what always happens in those stupid stories I used to love? Someone comes to save her. Someone kills the monster, and she lives happily after.
But what happens if that young maiden didn’t need someone to slay the monster?
What if she was the one they should fear?
Carter pulled back, working at his pants, and I reached down, searching the sink beside me. The tickle of glass moving sounded under the fluorescent, but I kept searching till I found it, a long, wickedly sharp piece of broken glass. I’d taken to wearing leather gloves at night, to keep my fingerprints from places I didn’t want others to know about. Now came in handy as I lifted the long glass shard.
And then buried it into his hand.
Carted screamed, and something about that sound sang to my blood. I shoved him backwards, and with his pants tangled around his legs he fell hard. Then I lifted another piece of glass, holding it against his throat, as I crouched over him.
“Shut up,” I snarled, pressing the glass to his throat, and his moans turned into pathetic whimpers as he stared up at me, tears in his eyes. “This is how this is going to go. I’m going to leave you a stack of cash, and you’re going to take it and say you hurt your hand on accident. You’re never going to touch another girl without her permission again. Understand?”
He barely moved, tears spilling from his eyes, and I pressed harder till he blubbered, “I understand, I understand!” Pathetic. I shoved him back to the floor and he curled around his hand like some kind of wounded animal. I knew what my little sister Lainey would have said—that he’d a horrible life. That he never had anyone to take care of him, never had anyone to protect him or love him.
Well, tough shit.
My life wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either. Something in me had died when my parents did, and something dark and twisted had risen in its place. But I had Lainey to protect now. And I refused to let her see this ugly side of humanity. She needed to believe in those stories about the Prince and true love and happily ever after.
I would make it true for her, even if I had to find the Prince and threaten him into compliance. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was off the table when it came to Lainey.
I stepped over Carter and his quiet sobs as he pulled the glass shard free, before making my way to the doorway and checking the hallway. Either nobody had heard the commotion, or, far more likely, nobody cared. This house was for kids who nobody wanted.
At the doorway I turned back, opened my backpack and took out one of the small, precious wads of cash. I desperately needed every dollar, and I’d some unspeakable things to get this money, but I also couldn’t have the cops coming after us.. I tossed the money at Carter and he whimpered at the sound it made when it hit the floor. “Remember what I said, Carter,” I warned. “Tell anyone what happened here and I’ll come back and finish the job.”
Then I left the bathroom, making my way down the long twisty hallways of the group home. Most of the walls had holes or writing on them, and the carpet was dirty; their center was worn to a deeper shade of brown than the outer.
It had been almost a year since my parents died, and sometimes I wondered how exactly things had changed so quickly. How could my life be full of life and laughter one moment, and then the next be so cold and empty? How could the people who’d raised us be reduced to two long wood boxes covered in flowers?
Which was why we needed to leave. Tonight. Someday it would be Lainey in that bathroom, and I wouldn’t be there to protect her.
The door to the female bunkroom eased open, and I slipped in, walking tiptoe to stop the ancient floor from creaking. Snores filled the room, a few quiet voices whispering or crying in their sleep. So much pain and sorrow and despair in this room. So much desperate, misplaced hope of parents that might one day return, or get out of jail, or finally get sober or clean.
In some horrible, twisted way, I was glad my parents were dead. It made me realize that absolutely no one was coming to save us.
Lainey was still sleeping on the top bunk—I’d insisted because I was terrified someone might hurt her while I slept. I stepped up on my bunk, reaching out, shaking her awake. “Lainey,” I whispered. “We have to go. Wake up.”
Her wide blue eyes stared at me with such blank emptiness a punch of cold fear hit me. She’d been like this for a year now, and yet still, something twisted in me everytime she looked at me with those blank eyes. I wouldn’t have risked so much, so fast if it weren’t for her. No one seemed to know why she hadn’t spoken a word for the last year. The best I could find in the books I’d found at the library is that she was depressed and in shock and needed a safe place to heal and rest. In other words, somewhere far, far away from here.
“Come on,” I said, trying to make my voice excited and not desperate. “It’s finally happening. Remember our plan? We’re going! It’s time!”
We were finally getting out of here.
Continue on to Chapter Two here.
Hi friends, this is H.J. Nelson, YA author of stories full of wicked magic, tangled loves and fierce heroines. Thanks so much for checking out Draco Hall, a dark academia romance mystery with Draco/Hermione vibes. I will be uploading the entire novel right here, for free, so don’t forget to subscribe! Book description included below.
Hogwarts meet Maxton Hall-but Hermione isn’t the good girl... and Draco is the only one who notices.
Fifteen-year-old Mallory Foxglove was not always made of sharp edges and quiet hunger. Once, she was soft and kind. But the night her parents died tore something open inside her.
Now, with her thirteen-year-old sister in tow and nowhere left to run, Mallory arrives at Trestlewood Academy, an elite boarding school set in the heart of an ancient forest.
From the moment she steps onto its grounds, she knows something dark and haunted lives here. And that she needs to stay away from the cold, arrogant Cillian Dreadmoor. He plays the perfect student... that is until Melody finds him in the woods, soaked in blood, a body at his feet.
Soon Melody and Cillian are swept into a mystery someone has spent centuries burying. A mystery that will force them to descend into the deepest shadows of the forest... and of each other.
DRACON HALL is an ongoing serialized romantasy featuring a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance with Hermoine/Draco vibes, set in a Maxton Hall-like elite boarding school filled with secrets. New chapters weekly. Free to read on Substack.
