Getting through class had become a bigger chore than usual. I was completely zoned out through the lecture on the use of roads in the Roman Empire, and equally bored as we balanced equations in Algebra. Every ounce of my soul wanted to be where it belonged – alongside Casper, my fated mate.

His baby blue eyes were like two gorgeous crystals that held my gaze like he owned me – which he did. He was a tough boy. I’d seen the way he’d looked at Josh Peterson when he shoved him in the hallway. It had taken everything I had not to shift and tear Josh to pieces right then and there. But that would have been a major mistake.

We spent more time at the gazebo, talking in whispers, but when the groundskeeper came by, we had to escape back to our rooms. I’d barely had any time with him, and he was all I had been able to think about since then.

“Meet me in the main hall at lunch,” I’d told him. “I want to eat with you.”

“I want that too,” he’d told me with a smile. We’d gone our separate ways, and I’d snuck back through the maintenance door and back to my room, and stayed up for hours just smiling, thinking about how blessed I was to have met my mate.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of him.

The dreams had been odd, hard to decipher. The first was us together, shifted, running through a sunny field, but we were being chased by shadowed figures with large nets like a fisherman might carry. Perhaps it was something related to my fear of being caught outside with him, or the thought that somehow the world might come between us both.

And the second was me waking up at another school, a gothic, worn-down place made from dark sad stone, filled with shadows and flickering candlelight. I knew no one, and the teachers were cruel and vile, snapping at students and slapping those who got out of line. I knew Casper was somewhere, but I couldn’t find him. It was awful. I’d woken up in a sweat and had been dying to see him all day.

But I hadn’t seen him at breakfast, which wasn’t unusual as we were second breakfast and he was third, but I at least had thought I might run into him in the halls – or maybe he would have been waiting for me after mine let out and before his began. But he hadn’t been anywhere. I hadn’t even picked up his scent.

What is going on? I thought as I stared up at the clock, just aching for it to be 10:30 so I could get out and search for him. My next class started at 10:40, but I didn’t care if I was late. This was abnormal behavior and I had to know what was going on.

The rest of the lecture droned on in the back of my mind like a dull roar, and when the bell rang, I was already packed up and out the door.

The halls were filled with students, storming this way and that way like separate herds of cattle, and it felt like every direction I moved in I was fighting against the current. I lifted my nose high above the fray, searching for the sweet scent of blueberries – that was his smell. Casper, the blue-eyed, blueberry-smelling omega that had captured my heart.

But his scent wasn’t anywhere to be found. The air was dry, bland, filled with the scents of alphas, betas and omegas I had no interest in. Maybe for some reason he was still back at his dorm. Perhaps he was sick.

I pushed through the crowd to the end of the hall and found the stairwell leading up to his dorm. Taking the stairs two at a time, I reached the third floor in seconds and found his room. I pushed the door open and startled his roommate Terry, who was half asleep over an open notebook.

“Gah!” he gasped, almost toppling over in his chair as he spun around to face me. “Red! You scared the bejesus out of me!”

“Where is Casper!” I asked him, doing my best to keep my voice down. Terry just shrugged.

“Class? I dunno.”

“Shit,” I cursed, peering out into the hall.

“Why? What is it?”

“I haven’t seen him all day,” I replied without looking at him.

“I’m sure he’s around,” he said lazily, stretching and yawning. Terry was an odd boy, always on the verge of sleep. “You’ll probably see him at lunch.”

“Yeah…” I replied slowly. The bell rang, signaling class was about to start. “Goodbye, Terry.”

“See ya, Red.”

But I didn’t see Casper at lunch. I didn’t see him in the halls leading up to lunch, in the dining hall, the kitchen, or anywhere else at school. I didn’t even bother eating. I used the entire forty-five-minute lunch break to scour the entire school grounds for him.

I went back up to his dorm to see if he’d returned, and found Terry asleep with a half a turkey sandwich on his chest. I checked the parking lots, the gardens and even went to the gazebo again. But Casper was nowhere to be found, and I was starting to panic.

What made things worse, was the lack of his scent. His room smelled like him, of course, and there were occasional faint traces in the hallway and the stairwell, but that was it. If he’d been up and moving around the school all day, I would have picked up his scent everywhere. But it was as though he’d just…vanished.

The entire day went by, and Casper was nowhere to be found. I reported his absence to Mrs. Kish, the principal, and the school started whatever nonsense they did when a student went missing. It happened often. Kids ran away, realized they had nowhere to go and that the outside world was a lot harder than their lives at school, and returned in a few days.

“I’m sure that’s what’s happened,” Mrs. Kish assured me. “Your little friend will be back in no time. You’ll see.”

I wanted to slap that fake smile off her face.

There’s no way Casper would just leave me like that, I wanted to tell her. Not now.

But there was no point. I searched the school again, and snuck out once more after lights out, hoping to see him come running back in from the main road or the trees out back, but I was again disappointed.

So I waited. I waited all night for him. I waited the next day, and the next and the next and the next. I waited all week. Then weeks turned into months, and Casper never returned. Slowly, the pain in my heart began to fade as I realized the truth: He had left me. My fated mate left me.