•••

When something happens to magic, it is felt throughout the layers. A disturbance, an imbalance, a complication reverberates inside every magical being.

Magic then is our tapestry, and we, a very microscopic thread of its weave. And once in the magical know we all become tethered to this inescapable truth.

It is for this very reason, Crispen Heavensley now lurches over the Luric's linen-covered dining table, head full of screams. They are more than primal, less than human; they are ancient, colossal, all-consuming, and heart-annihilating.

They emanate from that spark which ignited the universe, and its pain brings tears to Crispen's eyes.

Through blurred vision, he happens upon a glimpse of Gideon Darquish. Covered in darkness, crying and alone, unquenchable fury and suffering echoing from his soul. These are the emotions that have taken root inside him, that live where Gideon's magic had once flourished.

Hatred for the Council, for me, flares up inside of Crispen, and he burns more furiously than the sun, and could, if hefted into the cosmos, incinerate life on every planet in this galaxy.

He balls his hands into fists and calms that rage, filing it away for use on another day. He does not wish to explode in front of Peneloper; it is such a grisly sight to behold.

Instead, he witnesses another image, faded and yellowed around the edges, a sepia snapshot of another layer - the Refinery. More specifically, the Dead Man's Song as it was, as he remembered it to be. Then the picture ripples and the scene shifts to one of the Song as it is now, after Gideon's darkness had eaten away at its purpose.

Crispen desires to avert his gaze, but like with the Eyes of All, he cannot unsee. That, too, is his nature. No matter where he turns, no matter what direction his compass points, or what time he flees to, he will always have to face the consequences of living a life that should not have been.

• Supper's Ready •

Unfamiliarity washed over Crispen, though he knew not why. He was in a familiar setting and almost certainly wearing a familiar form. Though to be sure, he double checked, pinching both cheeks, blinking furiously, even trekking his thumb along the slope of his nose to ensure it hadn't run off somewhere. All parts of him were there, and yet  he didn't much feel like himself.

Around him the Luric pack, Peneloper and Genesis - who nibbled away at his plate of sliced peaches - gazed at him with puzzled expressions. They, too, must have sensed something was off. 

"I," he eyed the table dressing nervously - the lace doilies, the crystal vase of pink carnations, the high-gloss, frilled china, and polished serving dishes - feeling for the first time uncomfortable and uncertain. "I—" Gideon's face surfaced again in his mind, the inky black cresting and falling around his shoes, all trace of the boy Crispen had known, gone, transformed.

How long had Gideon been like that?

He gulped. "You—" he continued, directing his words as Mrs. Luric, as she, very clearly was the alpha of this pack. "You have a nice house, richly furnished, Mrs. Luric," he finally finished.

Mrs. Luric's words sounded like a howl, low, and gruff. The kind offered up on full moons. "No need to lie like that."

Crispen shook his head and started, "I didn't--"

"We all felt it."

It. Gideon's use of magic. Gideon's wrong and powerful use of magic. Of course, they did. The Lurics were werewolves, and though he considered them the magical version of dogs, they were magical none-the-less. The other Lurics all flashed him curt nods and serious, solemn blinks. 

"Sit," she instructed him, and he did so with the obedience he often saw demonstrated by the werewolf collective. She shoveled a wobbling heap of pudding into her mouth before continuing. "He uses," she said, between chews. "Refracted magic."

Peneloper, sandwiched between Chant's twin sisters, Lyabelle and Rosen, looked up from her jiggling, chocolate mass and cocked an eyebrow. "And what is refracted magic?"

Peneloper, magical as she was, had not come into her own and hadn't sensed magic's pain. For the first time since her Grade Three bike contest, she found herself lagging, though without a banana seat in sight, cruel lines of confusion and frustration colored ocher slashing her aura.

Crispen wanted to speak up, assuage her worry, respond to her in kind - though she hadn't asked him to - and tell her that she would learn, she would take to the skies and be able to defend herself against Gideon. That Gideon would—

A flash of Gideon, draped in his all-consuming darkness gave Crispen pause. He'd never really thought too hard on what it would mean to help Peneloper. But now, it'd become all too clear, too real, too undeniable like a beacon on a cloudless, moonless night, one he couldn't blot out, or pretend not to see.

For Peneloper to stay alive, she'd have to win against Gideon. And that would entail Gideon's defeat. Afterward, the Council, the damnable, detestable (other slanderous words here redacted as they are too harsh for delicate readers' minds and ears to hear, let alone are baseless, bias accusations) Council would decide his fate. Reversal or indefinite imprisonment at the Rose and Relinquished. Essentially death, under different guises.

Smatterings of impatience spread across Peneloper's aura like chickenpox. "Something dangerous, Miss Auttsley," he said. "And it's just been used to pervert something's purpose."

She side-eyed Crispen. "And you all felt it?"

Mr. Luric delicately lifted a mound of pudding to his mouth, some getting caught on the wiry hairs of a most robust handlebar mustache. "We sensed it, faintly. Mr. Heavensley, I'm sure, felt it as though it were himself warping magic and forcing it to conform to something it is not."

Crispen's hand tightened around his spoon. It had been like that for him. And when examined under a microscope and with the correct lighting, one might argue it had been him, he and Gideon being different halves of the same whole.

Lyabelle Luric in torn denim and shredded t-shirt, snapped her jaws and said, "Yeah, wonder why that is?" Rosen, in matching ripped everything, smirked and echoed her sister's sentiment.

Peneloper turned toward Crispen, her baffled aura, a splotchy tapestry of green haze, pulsed with the twins' question, though posed more eloquently than theirs.

"Bell. Ro," Chant slapped the table and shook his head, "enough."

The twin girls melted into identical pouts. "But he—" Rosen, who had a third freckle under her left eye where her sister had two, thus ruining the illusion that they were identical and condemning them to lives of hypocrisy, blew out her cheeks. "—he thinks we're dogs."

"He most certainly doesn't," Peneloper intervened. Leaning across the table and forgoing manners, she prodded Crispen in his side.

Against his better judgment, he blushed, because she'd touched him in the only spot where he'd ever been ticklish, the spot she'd discovered on him when they were younger, though she now held no memory of that time. "Do you, Mr. Heavensley?"

Crispen's gaze bounced around the table, flitting from one soured expression to the next. Even the Luric's freckles pouted in unison. "Well...yes. Dogs and werewolves are practically the same when it comes to being in the know." Peneloper gave him a swift kick to the shin. The Luric's faces fell further into frowny disrepair. "But," he continued, hand under the table, massaging at the budding sore spot along his calf, "your kind is bigger than common Reason mutts. And your smell is...more potent. And, your coats when you transform are much nicer and softer than most dogs." Crispen eyed the ceramic plates hung from ribbons on the pale-blue wall behind Mrs. Luric. "And you have good taste in ceramics," he scratched the back of his head, unsure of what, if anything, he was accomplishing, "I happen to like cow-shaped creamers the best."

Mrs. Luric chortled. "Of all the things I've heard about you," she said between snorts, "you still manage to surprise me." Her eyes focused on Crispen. "Boy of crows." Crispen opened his mouth to speak, but she silenced him with a flick of her wrist. "But your platitudes, however false, have worked. Our fangs have retracted."

At this, the rest of the Lurics fell back in their chairs, shoulders dropping millimeters from where they'd been seconds ago wedged neatly in their ear canals.

Crispen found the ordeal exhausting. All occasions with magical beings were. If it wasn't the absurdity and lunacy of the Council driving him down an exit ramp of madness, it was the straightforwardness and no-nonsense approach of the werewolves, so resolved to be like anti-magic that they turned out hard and leaden, with poor manners and conversations of the grunting variety. Both were unbearable. He needed a nap. Or several.

With exhaust turning his muscles and bones into the aerated, spongy textured pudding before him, he struggled with his spoon. After a battle to get his forefinger to clutch the handle tight enough, he finally made to put the cooked custard into his mouth when he noticed Peneloper watching him with interest, more interest, he wagered, than when she and Chant had followed him around town, doing so in the most conspicuous manner he'd ever witnessed- stuffed in trench coats and under fedoras, with dark-tinted sunglasses, while perched on benches or half-hidden behind trees, newspapers tucked beneath their noses, newsprint upside-down. She was, by no means, of the right mindset to pursue that #thief-life lifestyle.

"Miss Auttsley?" Crispen stabbed his spoon into his dessert.

She shook, hair falling in front of her face as if stunned back into reality. She turned to face the Lurics, then Crispen, before finally settling upon the words, "Does no one wish to tell me what's going on?"

The Lurics exchanged a series of quick, fleeting glances which to Crispen's knowledge confirmed a meeting of minds was taking place just beyond his reach, where only muzzled mutts could speak their peace. He frowned.

Peneloper tapped the edge of her plate. "You—" she lanced the air Heavensley's way with her dainty, silver dessert spoon, "have flown into Potter Oaks, caused all manner of upset among the townspeople, and have but a few days ago, revealed to me my nature is one of magic and that something is trying to kill me. My story is missing with no ETA on when it will be back and now I've been gifted a star that shows me the constellations. I—"

Rosen snorted. "You told her she would die?" Lyabelle tossed back her head, red braids flapping like the flags of war. "Aren't you dramatic."

Peneloper whirled and rose from her seat, throwing down her brawny napkin. "You see? This is what I'm talking about. You keep going on about being in the know, but do you really know anything? And if so, care to—" her nose wrinkled, and her mouth moved as though she'd eaten something rotten. Then, through gritted teeth, one eye twitching, the words Crispen least thought he'd hear Peneloper mutter left her lips, "—care to share with the class?"

Before Peneloper finished speaking, her aura flared in angered shades of orange, streaked with slivers of self-loathing at having had sounded so regrettably teacherly. The wound of which lingered, scarring her aura with a stretch of black from one side to the other. It opened like a mouth and smiled.

Painstaking years of diligent refusal to learn anything from her teachers tossed out the window. All her hard work to not work hard, gone. By just being near the learned, khakis-wearing lot, Peneloper had absorbed, without being aware, their mannerisms, their slang. Was she forever to be thus polluted by their ways?

Realization at becoming that which she loathed slithered through her aura, red snakes swallowing what little of her normal temperament remained.

Lyabelle, unable to read the warning signs strobing like neons in Peneloper's aura, folded her arms over her chest and without meaning to, made things exponentially worse, as all younger siblings often did. "Okay, Professor Auttsley," she said. "Take a chill pill."

Peneloper's aura exploded.