Ashwood academy has a bit of a gruesome history. Only five years ago a student set her dorm ablaze and died, and in the eighties another had drowned herself in the river. There's a permanent chill down near the boilers, a place where the temperature should be higher, not lower. There are mysterious stains that won't go away, no matter how many times the flooring is replaced or walls are repainted, stains that have been there since at least the eighteen hundreds, possibly earlier. And Ax McNialláin, a boy who can see the many ghosts haunting the school and nearby town, is going to get to the bottom of this, no matter what it takes.
(there are characters implied to have killed themselves in the first three chapters, it's mainly passive, they don't actively harm themselves, but two of them imply a jump, please don't read those if they're triggering to you, and the deaths will be referenced in later chapters too. all the chapters are short, only a paragraph long)
With a new name and new life, Nathan must learn to fit in at an Academy of the Feral Investigation Bureau, or risk being sent back to prison.
*****
Escaping prison was only the beginning for inmate C41. Now on the run and going by Nathan, he's enrolled in an American Academy for training agents and joins the Feral Investigation Bureau, charged with hunting down criminals and sending them to the same place he just escaped. But after learning how blurred the distinction is between feral and non-feral, Nathan is forced to flee with his sister and his boyfriend, only to discover their safe house hides a secret that might cost Nathan his freedom.
Content and/or Trigger Warning: sex and violence. [Note: failed suicide attempt]
[[word count: 70,000-80,000 words]]