I finally felt good enough to go back to class again, just in time for everybody else to be all messed up instead. That was just the kind of life I was living now. Physically they were okay, but I hadn’t seen Alex in days, and Luke, well. He was trying his best to seem like he was fine, but only when he was actually talking to someone. We had a couple classes together, and normally he was really talkative during Intro to Philosophy. He was really good at it, but he still asked questions all the time, and every time the professor asked the class a question and nobody else said anything, he always ended up answering.

But today, nothing. He was just as quiet as everyone else for the whole class, except for the one time that he caught me looking at him funny. Then he was suddenly Luke again, but only for a couple of minutes. So I decided to ambush him after class ended. I had a kind of motivational speech sitting in my head; I’d heard what went down and I totally got why he was feeling this way, and I knew he had to be blaming himself for things he shouldn’t be blaming himself for.

And maybe trying to make him feel better was a way of making me feel better about it too. I’d felt kinda uneasy about the whole plan while they were making it. Maybe if I’d said something, things could have gone better, but I’d clammed up. The others weren’t treating me differently, but I was the little kid sitting at the grown-ups’ table, and everyone knew it. It wasn’t my place to tell them how to do their jobs, and anyway, they knew better than me so if I did tell them I was probably wrong. Or maybe that was just what I told myself because it was easier to say nothing.

Class wrapped up, and I packed my things away and hurried out to the door as fast as I could so that Luke didn’t get away without me, though he packed up pretty quickly too so he wasn’t far behind me, which already meant things weren’t going how I’d planned them. Then things went even more off plan when before I could turn around and grab him, I spotted Grace, Alex and Charity all waiting outside the door already. They’d ambushed my ambush.

“Did something happen?”, I asked them.

“Nothing new,” Grace said. “But we need to come up with a plan. Do you have time?”

“I have two hours free, is that enough?”

“It should be. Luke?”

I looked around and saw he was behind me. “Yeah.”

“Good. Then, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Grace started to walk off, Alex and Charity both going with her. Luke and I shared a look, then followed.

Once I’d caught up with them, I asked, “So, um, what exactly are we planning?”

“That’d be the first thing we have to plan,” Alex said.

“Oh.”

“Oh indeed,” Grace said. “It seems we’ve made enemies of at least two individuals with considerable supernatural power. They know where we live, and have reasons to attack us - revenge or eliminating a potential threat being the most obvious. Without knowing more about them, we have no idea whether or not they will attack us, which means we have to prepare for the worst, one way or another.”

“Should be talking about this here?”, I whispered. We were still inside, taking up most of a hallway as we walked, and there were other students all around.

“They won’t pay any attention unless they’re forced to,” Charity said.

“Are you sure?”

“Poor naive Morgan. You’ve seen me reading at least once a week for months now. Can you remember what a single one of those books was about?”

“Umm. Vampire-werewolf porn?”

Charity cleared her throat. “Twice-Bitten is erotic literature, thank you very much, and it is a work of art. Can you think of anything besides that?”

I tried, but I couldn’t.

“Exactly. I’ve been raiding Luke’s family library for months, and you never noticed a thing. Your eyes see a treatise on the nature and history of magic, and your brain simply ignores it and registers only ‘a book’. And these poor chumps won’t pay attention to anything we say that might compromise their filtered view of the world. It’s all so terribly convenient.”

Something clicked in my mind, a little later than it should have. “So wait, hang on. That book. Were you only reading it out to us because of Grace and Alex?”

Charity started sniggering, and Grace sighed. “She thinks she’s very amusing.”

“You gotta admit, it was pretty hot though,” Alex said. “Especially that part where the werewolf chick -”

“Stop encouraging her, please. We do have important matters to discuss.”

Luke had stayed silent at the back of the group until now. I’d almost forgotten he was there until he stopped in his tracks and said, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

“Yep, you’re a fuckup just like the rest of us.”

“Charity.” Grace loomed over her, and she actually backed away. Then she turned to Luke.

“You went out of your way to try to help people and save lives. That was the right thing to do, and you should be proud of yourself. And you didn’t rush in blind and alone. Your only mistake was not recognising how dangerous that woman was, and you had no reason to suspect she could stand against the three of you. Whoever - or whatever - she is, we’ve never encountered someone like her before. And in the end, everybody survived.”

“She let them survive,” Luke said, still looking glum. That part had been in the news. There’d obviously been even more big reports when Mr White’s house was attacked after his death, most of it was confused conspiracy theories and stuff, but they’d said that even though all the officers on the scene had been shot and badly hurt, every one of them miraculously survived. Which, actually, was where a lot of the conspiracy theories were coming from.

“And now we know one more thing about her. She tried her hardest to kill Alex, and her friend murdered the mayor, but she chose to spare the bystanders. If you hadn’t done what you did, we would know nothing at all, and nobody would be in any position to stop whatever she’s doing. Feeling good is normal, sometimes even healthy, but you have to use it to drive yourself forwards. Stop apologising and help us to fix this.”

Luke didn’t respond, but his head jerked in a nodding kind of way. I saw his eyes had gone a little red and teary. That was exactly the kind of speech I’d wanted to give him, except done way better than I could have.

We’d pretty much reached Luke’s room by now, so the conversation didn’t pick back up until after he’d unlocked the door and everyone was inside. It seemed like this was the official Important Group Discussion space, since Grace and Alex lived too far away and Charity’s room was a lot smaller (plus, Charity lived in it). There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so I ended up sitting on the edge of Luke’s bed, which poked around the corner just enough for me to be part of the conversation still, and Luke stayed standing.

It was Alex who started up the conversation again. “So the question is, do we go murder this woman.”

I tried to swallow nervously, but it got stuck in my throat.

“Tactless phrasing, but yes,” Grace said. “As I see it, we have two options. We can either try to contact this Genevieve and make sure that she and her associate - or associates - agree not to seek vengeance, or we can make sure they don’t get the chance. I don’t condone violence unless it’s absolutely necessary, but she’s already shown the lengths that she’s willing to go to.”

“We can’t just make friends and let them go after everything they did, can we?”, Luke said.

“No, but if we talk to them, we might at least learn more about them and buy ourselves some time. And don’t forget, for all we know, Mr White may have begun this whole conflict. It seems unlikely, and the grisly nature of his murder would imply that Genevieve and her friend are the villains here, but we have nothing to lose and a great deal to gain by talking, even if it does have to end in violence.”

Charity slowly raised a hand.

“What is it?”, Grace asked her.

“If I’m allowed to speak right now, there is a third option: set up defences, hide, and wait ‘til this all blows over. That way we don’t have to chase after danger or put our trust in the fundamentally good nature of people.”

“Why would it blow over?”, I asked.

Alex answered. “The general awakened community in Fall’s Bay are traditionalists, which means they’ll let you do whatever you want to whoever you want, as long as it doesn’t bother any of them. Murder the mayor? Go ahead, as long as he’s not someone’s drinking buddy. Sleepers are just props, you can do whatever you want to them.”

“That’s horrible!”

“Welcome to people.”

Luke made a weird noise and waved his hand side to side. “It’s tradition because it stopped too much open conflict between the awakened, since that’s really bad news for everybody, sleepers included. I mean, not that you’re wrong, it’s horrible and unacceptable and I just want to say that my family doesn’t approve of it, but places that have tried more active policing have gone really badly in the past, so most of the people who tried not being horrible ended up dead instead.”

That was a lot to deal with, so I decided not to deal with it. “But um, if nobody else is going to stop them, how will things blow over?”

“Three reasons,” Alex said, counting them out on her fingers. “First, they tried to kill us, which is a big no-no. The whole fucked up arrangement doesn’t protect you if you attack other awakened folks, that’s the point of it. Second, they aren’t locals. You can shit on your own floor as much as you like, but wander into someone else’s house and do it, and you’re going to get in trouble.”

“How do you know?”

Charity said, “We asked Luke’s aunt. Keeps tabs on everybody, very tight-knit community. Nobody matching Genevieve’s description lives there, and they have no werewolves at all, the poor things. Which means that her friend is either freshly awakened or also not from around there.”

I could feel everyone getting impatient with me. I’d already asked way too many questions and derailed the whole talk, and it was a really important talk too. I made a promise to myself that this was the last one, and asked, “What would being just awakened have to do with it? I thought you said being a werewolf was something you were born with.” That was one of the first things I’d asked Grace and Alex.

“All werewolves are descendents of a single culture, yes,” Grace said. “Our ancient ancestors joined with primal spirits of the pack, and that connection is passed down through blood, but it cannot manifest itself without magic. That wouldn’t matter at all, except that the Veil doesn’t only prevent people from knowing about magic, it causes them to subconsciously reject it with mind, body and soul. Cut off from magic in this way, young werewolves cannot transform, feel the moon’s power, or express any kind of superhuman physical abilities. They are, in essence, not werewolves.”

“And then they break through the Veil.”

“And in an instant, power surges through them for the first time and they reclaim their lost heritage. Almost all forms of supernatural inheritance work in the same way. It’s rare, but people can change in all kinds of ways once they see through the Veil, depending on their ancestry. People used to change their bodies in all manner of ways, and some of them could be inherited. Enormous size, pointy ears, blue hair…”

“Wait, what?”

Luke ran his fingers through his hair. “Yeah. It’s one of the ones that doesn’t need magic to work, so it spread further and changed over time, but blue hair never naturally evolved. All came from magic, way in the past.”

I was too stunned to keep talking. After a few seconds of silence, Alex raised her third finger.

“And point number three, werewolves are horrible abominations that deserve to die, so they only get protected by tradition if it’s convenient.”

Grace sighed very loudly. I wasn’t sure who it was directed at.

“Hence, we hide and wait for someone else to slay the beast for us,” Charity said.

“I of course agree that we should establish some defences if we choose not to attack,” Grace said, “but I don’t like the idea of hiding. Like it or not, we are a part of this conflict now, and we should be helping to end it, not running away from our lives to hide in an abandoned shack somewhere.”

“So what, you want to send her a nice email, ask her out for dinner and a movie and sort it all out like a bunch of mature adults?”

“Precisely. Except for the dinner and the movie, in case it needs to be said. And if she refuses to back down, then we consider our options.”

I ended up tuning out the rest of the conversation, as it turned into arguing back and forth over which ideas were good and which ones were dumb and suicidal. It’s not like I was really a part of it anyway, nobody needed my input. The thing they’d all agreed on by the time I left was that trying to go out and attack Genevieve was a really bad idea.

I wasn’t one of them, even if they let me into their secret meetings. There were a whole lot of really good reasons for that, but there were also a whole lot of excuses. And if I wanted it to change, there was only one person who could make that happen. It didn’t matter if it was scary or not, I was done with sitting around and watching while other people were risking their lives. I was going to awaken, and I was going to do it today.