Page 49

Karen: About pie?

Hilary: About Eli needing support instead of a tribunal.

My thumb stopped moving. Tribunal. Exposure. First shift. Pack. Council. Scent blockers. Running trails. Full moon picnic. Wolf form. The phrases I’d spent the previous weeks filing under family quirks and inside jokes began rearranging themselves into something I didn’t want to understand.

I got up from the couch and carried my phone to the kitchen, then realized I had no idea why I had gone there. Abruptly, my apartment felt too small.

“There’s no way,” I said to nobody.

My phone vibrated again.

Hudson: The immediate situation is mitigated. Students have been told it was a prank that got out of control. Anyone with footage is being encouraged to treat it as staged and not worth posting online.

Mason: Are they buying that?

Hudson: Enough of them are confused. That’s the goal.

Karen: Humans will believe anything if it arrives with the right letterhead.

Patty: For once, Aunt Karen’s cynicism is supportive.

Karen: It’s realism.

I lowered the phone.

Werewolves weren’t real. There weren’t people turning into wolves at school dances. There were no secret packs living in ordinary neighborhoods, holding pack reunions and fighting over who would bring the pasta salad. There were definitely no wolf grandfathers communicating supernatural secrets through thumbs-up emojis.

That would be ridiculous.

Maybe it was a cult.

That seemed like a better explanation. Not great. But better than werewolves.

I reopened the chat and scrolled back through weeks of messages. Trevor had asked how fast a wolf could hit a mailbox. Aunt Karen had demanded to know why he’d been in wolf form near the road.

Hudson had mentioned shifting on the ridge trail.

Somebody had asked whether a new medication interfered with scent blockers.

I had read all of it and laughed at some of it. Never once had I paused long enough to accept the obvious explanation because the obvious explanation involved monsters that existed in old movies and paperback covers.

I searched the group chat for the word wolf.

Wolf form. Wolf instincts. Wolf-safe fencing. Wolf injuries. Someone’s wolf refusing to cross a footbridge. Julie dyeing the end of her wolf’s tail lavender.

I stopped.

Julie had sent a picture afterward. At the time, I had assumed she had a large white dog as a pet. I opened the photograph again.

The animal stood in a backyard with lavender-tinted fur at the end of its tail and an expression of patient resignation. Its size had been difficult to judge without context. Now I noticed the patio chair behind it.

The animal’s shoulders came nearly to the top of the seat back.

My skin went cold.

“No fucking way.”

A cult could own large dogs, worship them even. Build a detailed mythology around them. People believed stranger things.