Mason: Big enough to scare the shit out of everyone in the gymnasium.
I read the message twice.
A wolf.
Not a mascot costume. Not a student called Wolf by people who were too committed to the bit.
A literal wolf. What the hell?
My stomach turned over.
Hilary: Did anyone record it?
Mason: I don’t know.
Karen: Of course they recorded it. Teenagers record themselves opening beverages.
Patty: That is unfortunately true.
Hudson: Dana’s contact has spoken to the principal. They’ve already started telling students it was a prank involving a trained animal and a costume.
Byron: That explanation contains many contradictions.
Hudson: It doesn’t have to survive academic review. It needs to create enough uncertainty that videos don’t become evidence.
Julie: What about Eli?
Hudson: His parents have him. He’s frightened and embarrassed, but otherwise he’s physically fine.
Grandma Ruth: TELL THEM TO BRING HIM HERE THIS WEEKEND. I’LL MAKE PIE.
Karen: Pie doesn’t solve the risk of exposure.
Grandma Ruth: IT HELPS FRIGHTENED CHILDREN.
Hilary: Mom is right.
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.
Entire online communities existed for adults who pretended to be medieval villagers, space soldiers, vampires, or cartoon ponies. Perhaps the Blackwells had devoted themselves to a private mythology so thoroughly that they had started confusing it with reality.
My phone buzzed again. Julie had sent a photo of Caldwell sitting on the kitchen counter, quietly drawing.
Seeing him so calm in the middle of their madness gave me a sudden, ridiculous thought. If I was going to test whether this was real, I needed concrete proof. Not vague text messages. Not a photograph of an oversized dog with a purple tail. Something direct enough to either settle the question or confirm that I’d accidentally joined a multigenerational delusion.
I hesitated.
If they were role-playing, they would come up with excuses.
If they weren’t –
I refused to finish that thought.
Sloane: It’s been a while since I’ve been around other shifters.
Several people reacted with hearts. Guilt coiled in my stomach, but I continued.
Sloane: I’ve forgotten how fast everyone is. Who can shift quickest now?
Byron: Me.
Trevor: No, you take forever.
Byron: False. I’m quicker than you, for sure.
Trevor: challenge accepted
I swallowed hard.
Sloane: Videos or it doesn’t count.
Surely, they would make a joke. They would claim recording transformations was forbidden, physically impossible, private, dangerous, or poor etiquette.
Fifty-three seconds later, Trevor sent a video. I almost dropped the phone.
The thumbnail showed his bedroom. Band posters covered the walls, several hanging crookedly above shelves filled with clay mushrooms, resin key chains, embroidered patches, and painted figurines. Trevor stood in the center, wearing black athletic shorts and no shirt, grinning at the camera.
I pressed play.
“This is a terrible idea,” someone said from outside the frame.
Trevor glanced at the doorway. “It’s for science.”
Then his body changed.
There was no dramatic explosion or flash of light, no convenient cut in the video. His shoulders folded forward. His limbs shortened and rearranged. Dark fur spread across skin that stopped being human before my mind could identify the exact point when it happened.
Within seconds, a black-and-brown wolf stood where Trevor had been. The animal sneezed. Then it nosed the camera hard enough to knock the phone sideways.
The video ended with a view of the carpet and someone yelling, “You broke it, didn’t you?”
I stood motionless in my kitchen, my fingers trembling.
The transformation had been too fluid for a costume. Too detailed for it to be a filter. The wolf occupied the same space, moved against the same objects, and cast the correct shadow across the carpet.
It had to be fake somehow.
AI could make disturbingly good videos now. People generated celebrities dancing in grocery stores, babies discussing tax policy, historical leaders reviewing skin-care products, and cats giving legal advice. Trevor could have entered a prompt and sent the result.
Although, he’d done it in less than a minute.
Maybe he already had the video. This could be a common family challenge. They probably had transformation videos prepared for exactly this situation, though that raised questions I didn’t have the emotional capacity to examine.
Another video arrived.
Julie: Did I win?
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