“Are you the Moon Pack?” the woman asks. Just a second ago, she was talking about her daughter, her voice shaky and panicked; now she looks determined. Angry. Her fists are clenched around her blanket and her eyes are piercing; you feel like she can see inside your soul. Everyone is standing outside the bedroom, looking at the woman through open door, curious and wary.

“Yes,” Kai says.

“You saved my life,” she states, but there’s disbelief laced in it. Neither you nor Kai reply, and the woman is looking at you, then at Kai, then back at you. “Can you save my daughter’s?”

“Please, start from the beginning,” you plead. “What’s your name?”

“Lee Hyojin,” the woman says.

“You’re human,” you say in-a-matter-of-factly.

“Yes.”

“But you know us. You know our pack. You know about werewolves.”

“Yes.”

“Please calm down,” Kai butts in. “Your pulse–“

The woman looks at him with sudden fear. She swallows hard. “Yes, I know about werewolves. I know all of it. I know about magic and I know that you’re a mage, because my daughter is, too.”

“Why are you here?” you ask. You motion for Kai to sit down somewhere because he’s glowering down at the woman from where he’s standing; he obliges and sits on the chair by the desk. You’re occupying the pouf next to his bed. “How did you find us?”

“They took my girl,” the woman says, tears welling her eyes. Her voice breaks. You feel your heart break, as well, and you reach out to that woman out of habit; she lets you place your hand on her own as she stares into your eyes. “A pack of werewolves and a–a girl. I don’t know who she was, but she could do magical things. But she wasn’t a mage like Sori.”

“Sori is your daughter?” you ask. Hyojin nods, swallowing a gasp.

“They broke into our house and took her. Then they tried to kill me, but I escaped. I didn’t know what to do or where to go; I called the police, but I know that they won’t be able to find her. But I’ve heard about you, about a pack that helps anyone that needs it, about a powerful mage.” Her eyes are sincere now, pleading. “I was on my way here when they attacked me again. These men just came out of nowhere, cornered me in a motel I was staying in for the night. And you know the rest of the story.”

“These men are regular people,” Kai speaks up. “They’re not werewolves.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Hyojin cries, her fingers closing around your hand. Tears are dripping down her cheeks now. “I just know that they attacked me, and I had to run away.”

“That girl,” you say, “the one that came with werewolves. What could she do?”

It takes a few minutes for Hyojin to calm down enough to talk again. Her palms are clammy around your own and her tears have soaked through Kai’s blanket. “She could move things a little. She also did something to Sori. She took a piece of her hair, I think, and then Sori went all pliant and followed her every order, even though I could see the terror in her eyes. She was like a marionette. Like a doll.”

“Voodoo?” Kai whispers. You glance at him in wonder.

“A witch,” you say. “How old is your daughter?” you ask Hyojin.

“She’s only eight.”

You feel the bottom of your stomach drop at that. Kai holds in his breath.

“Eight,” you say to yourself. “When…when did her powers–?”

“Only two months ago,” Hyojin replies. “Her powers showed up two months ago.”

“She can’t be out there,” you whisper, your voice low, and panic hazes your senses for a short moment. “She’s a walking nuclear bomb.”

“What?” Kai asks, frowning.

“When magic wakes inside a mage, it can do horrible things,” you say, shaking your head. “It’s a lot of magic for a very tiny, very unprepared body. She doesn’t have anyone to walk her through things. She’s could turn into a rogue mage, if she doesn’t learn how to use her powers in time. If they keep her magic bottled up inside her–wait.”

You look at the girl’s mother. “That’s why they took her. Because her magic is so strong right now.”

Hyojin nods, then dissolves into a pile of a crying mess. You look up at Kai, as if asking him what to do.

“You need to tell us everything,” you say, taking Hyojin’s hand again. She looks you in the eye. “How many of them are there?”

“Five of them came to my house, and that girl. I don’t know if there’s more.”

“Do you know where we could find them?”

“No,” she whispers. “No, no. I don’t–I’m not–“

“Calm down,” Kai says, looking tense. “Please ma’am, calm down.” He sends you a pointed look. You lean towards the woman, whispering the simplest calming spell that you know, and some of your tattoos glow when you do. Hyojin looks down at them and her eyes slowly go from desperate and teary to blank and neutral. She lies back down, staring at the ceiling with an expression of regret and surrender.

“Will you help me?” she asks. “Please, help me. You’re my only hope. I’ve heard that you help people like me, like Sori. I’ll do anything. You must be strong if none of you has died before, right?”

You send Kai a pointed look. Kai does a double-take at you and Hyojin frowns, opening .

“Wait. Are you a zombie?” she asks, looking at Kai with disbelief. “You’re not that pale.”

Someone laughs outside the room. You glance at your pack to see Chen laughing like an idiot with Amber and Tao and the rest snickering.

“Being a zombie involves a rotting, walking corpse,” you explain, shooting daggers at the Dumb Squad.

“If I’m dead inside, does that mean I’m half a zombie?” Baekhyun asks, erupting another wave of laughter around your pack.

“Do you have a photo of your daughter?” Kai asks, completely ignoring the entire convo.

“I don’t have anything on me,” she admits. There’s a thud on the corridor and you close your eyes, reminding yourself to be patient, when someone says ‘ow!’ and another someone screams ‘feel that burn!’.

“We need her photo. Or something of hers, so that we can find her,” Kai continues meanwhile.

The woman blinks at you a few times. Then her eyes light up. “I sent her photos to her father. Emailed them, of course. You can find them there.”

*

“She’s alive,” Sulli says, entering the bedroom. Hyojin is eating, you, Kai and Chen are inside the room with her, and the rest of the pack is scattered around the loft. They show up once Sulli is done asking the ghosts about Sori, though, and hang out by the door again. “But I can’t pin-point her location correctly. Just the general area of it.”

“And?” Chen asks, sending Hyojin a distressed glance. The woman has put her food onto the bedside table and is looking at Sulli intently. “What do we do?”

“We go take her back,” Kai replies, standing up. “It’s gonna be a big battle, and we need to prepare ourselves.”

“When do you want to do it?” Yixing asks from the corridor.

“Tomorrow. Call Sehun, Chanyeol and Suho; they might be able to come home for this one.”

“But there’s so many of them,” Hyojin gasps out then, looking at Kai with something akin to amazement. Amber snorts from the corridor.

“Have you seen us?” she asks, then giggles again. Some of you crack a smile.

“So it’s settled,” Kai says. “Tomorrow.”

You all nod. If some evil witch has taken a mage hostage, then you can’t stay put – you’re personally gonna kick her .

*

You wake up late at night, when you feel your triangle tattoo warm up at someone approaching. You blink away the sleep and sit up, finding a hand slung over your middle and your left shoulder, and you grunt in annoyance. You look to your left to see Chen draped over your back (he literally sat up when you did because he was holding onto you so tightly) and then down to see that it’s Luhan’s arm hugging your middle. You take Luhan’s arm off of your stomach as gently as you can and then throw Chen’s arm off, making him drop back onto the floor with a grunt; he hits Kyungsoo in the face with his knuckles and the boy lets out a yell. Chanyeol wakes up with a startle on the other side of the room upon hearing it, and starts looking around like a scared deer. You hear someone snickering at the dinner table and you start shaking from laughter yourself.

“Wha?” Chanyeol mumbles. He only got here like an hour ago, together with Suho.

“Go to sleep, it’s just me,” you whisper back to him.

“My nose,” Kyungsoo cries. Someone awws at him, but you can’t tell who it is because there’s a lot of bodies huddled together on the floor. You stand up and somehow manage to get out of that pile without stepping on anyone – it’s a true feat that you’ve perfected through the years. Xiumin, Min, Daehyun and Krystal are sitting around the table, just started playing Monopoly, and they’re all grinning at you, probably still happy after seeing Chanyeol’s dumb, surprised face.

“Don’t kill each other,” you remind them, pointing at the game.

“We’re cool,” Daehyun reassures.

“If you try to move someone’s pawn without them noticing again, I’m gonna kick you, darling,” Min says sweetly to him. You raise your brows and walk past her as stealthily as you can, noting Xiumin’s blissed-out expression, and head towards the door.

You open it right before Sehun can knock.

“Nice,” he preens, pulling you into an easy hug. You smile into it. You let him in and lock the door behind.

“You’re quick,” you say. “Are you sure you can bail school tomorrow?”

“Today, you mean?” Sehun asks, tapping his finger on the wristwatch he’s wearing. It’s two am. “Yeah. I’m sure.” He smiles and takes off his boots. “I brought some stuff from Siwon on my way here.”

“From Siwon?” you frown. Sehun takes off his backpack and hands it to you, then puts his hands inside the pockets of his jeans. “How did he know I’d need stuff? And that you’re in town?”

“Beats me,” he shrugs. “Kai, maybe?”

“Ah, right,” you nod, ping the backpack. “I always forget you’re all so thoughtful. And I’m not being sarcastic right now.”

“Thanks for pointing that out, I wouldn’t have known,” Sehun says with a grin.

“Sehun!” Xiumin calls, appearing in the corridor with the rest of the people who are still up at this hour. Sehun goes to hug and greet them all and you go through the stuff Siwon has given you. Some ashes that you’ve ran out of, a few daggers, all from different materials, and a book on witches that you haven’t seen before, and that’s weird because you know about every single book that Siwon owns. You frown down at these things. You’ve given him a list of ashes you needed a few days ago, but the book is truly a surprise, daggers, too. He either kept them away from you (he does that with objects sometimes) or only just got them from somewhere.

You shrug. He goes shopping sometimes. He even tends to disappear for a few days because he goes to meet with someone, and he often comes back with various gifts for you.

You turn towards the rest, seeing that Sulli, Amber and Jessica have woken up, and just in time to see Sehun scooping Sulli up into a tight hug. You walk towards them and clap Sehun on the back a few times as he greets Amber.  

“I’ll go check on Kai,” you inform them, and put Sehun’s backpack onto the floor. You go upstairs. Kai is looking at you the second you enter the room; he’s sitting on the armchair, keeping a close eye on Hyojin, who’s soundly asleep. “Hey.”

“Hi,” he says sleepily.

“Want me to switch you?”

“Naw. I’m good.”

“Xiumin is up. I could ask him to come and keep an eye on Hyojin. You should get some sleep too.”

“And I will,” Kai mutters. You close the door behind yourself. The room is dark, but the moonlight is coming in through the window, and your eyes are slowly getting used to the greyness. You walk towards Kai and sit on his lap; his hands wrap around your waist and he looks up at you with wonder in his eyes. You smile down at him.

“Hi,” you greet. He smiles a tiny bit, pursues his lips and places his head in the crook of your neck, breathing you in. You decide to his hair, and you sit in that position for the next few minutes, both content in each other’s embrace. “You should sleep.”

Kai hums and you can feel the vibrations on your neck and chest.

“Seriously,” you say, a bit louder this time. “Go sleep. I’ll switch you.”

“Mm. I wanted to sleep with you, though.”

You grin, your hand leaving his head and attacking his stomach instead. Kai jerks up, closes his mouth not to wake Hyojin up with sudden giggles, and pushes you off of his lap to stop you from tickling you. You barely manage to keep your balance. You’re stifling your laughter with your hand clasped over your mouth when someone opens the bedroom door and sticks their head inside. It’s Kyungsoo, and he’s only just woken up.

“Want me to–what are you guys doing?”

“Nothing,” you and Kai whisper in unison. Kai stands up from his armchair. “Is it your turn?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo replies.

You take a step towards the door, Kai following you shortly, when someone appears right in front of you, out of nowhere.

You see a mess of red hair, glowing, green eyes, and before you can as much as realize that there’s a person standing in front of you, bright light blinds you and swallows you up. You scream, trying to hold onto something, but there’s nothing to hold onto, and you’re falling.

*

You wake up staring at the sky, with absolutely no idea who you are. It’s enough for your heart rate to pick up and for adrenaline to fill your veins; you can see the flash and dart of sunlight between the leaves overhead, and you can feel the rough, damp press of hard dirt under your back, so you know you’re outside. It's more than just a garden, there's the sense of space, of area, the wet smell of trees and cold air.

Weirdly, the first thing you do is move your wrists, ankles, limbs and neck to check for any injuries. You head doesn't hurt, so you don’t think you’ve suffered any sort of traumatic head injury. Which seems strange because you’re pretty sure that's how people get amnesia, isn't it? After a traumatic head injury. You can't hit your head hard enough to forget who you are and not feel it, that's just stupid. The inside of your brain is really just a fog of half-processed thoughts. It's not empty - you know things, you remember things, but nothing about yourself.

You’re in a forest, you may or may not have a traumatic head injury, but you don't seem to be hurt in any other way. That feels like something of an accomplishment. You're clearly smart enough to make deductions based on evidence.

But you know absolutely nothing about yourself. There's just nothing there.

What you know right now is that someone is fighting an animal roughly ten feet away from you. Not the sort of thing you want to be lying there and staring at the sky for. You roll, as quickly as your stiff, protesting body can manage, because you really don’t want to be on the ground, confused and defenseless, if there's some sort of vicious dog on the loose.

The first thing you see is a dead man, sprawled in the grass next to you. He’s smeared with dirt, leaves clinging to him. His throat is a mess of blood and tissue, jaw half torn away, and there's the white flash of bone there that makes your stomach jolt. The smell of it on the wind is unexpectedly sharp, and you’re scrambling sideways, trying to get away from the body. From the strange, dead man within touching distance.

You’d almost forgotten the fight. But you jerk your head up when a wet, animal snarl is accompanied by the crash of bodies hitting the ground. A crunch of small stones and dirt skitters past you.

There's a stranger with glowing, red eyes, and he's trying to wrestle some sort of animal away from you.

There's an animal fighting a werewolf right in front of you and thinking that doesn't help at all, because that makes no sense.

The guy with glowing eyes punches the black, furry animal (that stands on its hinge legs, holy ) into a tree, it literally drives all the way into it, blood spattering around. Even then, it doesn’t seem like the animal is dying. Not any time soon, at least. It mostly just looks really, really pissed off.

And you’re just frozen there on your knees in the dirt, watching it happen. Because you don’t  know what to do. But the fact that your first instinct is to scramble upright, heft a spiky branch off the forest floor, and bring it down with all your strength on the side of the weird animal’s head, tells you something about yourself. The way you grip the wood tight, watch the animal collapse sideways, head a mess of blood and dirt, it tells you things you don’t understand.

You jump a few feet in the air when you hear a sudden, dull thud, and when you look left, you see the werewolf lying on the ground, unconscious and bleeding. Then you find yourself pulling the fanged monstrosity - werewolf, holy , werewolf, werewolves are real – up, and hauling him in the direction of a white jeep that’s just standing there, parked on the side, and hoping like hell it's either his, Mr. Werewolf's, or that one of you knows how to hotwire a car.

The werewolf is heavy, all bones and muscle. He's still snarling wetly, bright red eyes and blood-slick fangs far too close to your face to be anything comforting. Your grip keeps slipping on the bloody leather of the guy's jacket, it's running down your wrists in thin streams.

You hope that werewolves are more durable than people because you think you just killed a beast for this one and it'd be nice to know his name, if nothing else. Or know your own name, no pressure. One thing at a time.

You stumble past another dead beast on the way, chest being eaten out by some sort of crawling blue flame. Then another by the tree line, face down in the dirt. What exactly are you a part of? What the hell have you woken into?

"Is that your car?" the weight on your shoulder breathes pain, and doesn't answer. You do your best to tug at the jacket, twist your fingers in the leather to get his attention. "Hey, is that your car?"

The guy looks at you, confusion and wariness struggling out through the pain. As if he has no idea what's going on either. No idea who he is. That seems to be a thing that's going around. There is definitely a mutual sense of bewilderment here. You honestly don't know whether to find that comforting or not. Or whether to be afraid, because people don't lose their memories in groups. That doesn't happen. Was it magic? Were your memories taken by magic?

"Do you know who you are?" you ask, confirming that it's true, or trying to get an explanation.

There's a headshake, rough and jerky, which works in place of words. The bleeding werewolf's heavier suddenly, coughing blood, and you stumble, tightening the hold around him, much to the snarling displeasure of said werewolf. At least you don’t get bitten. It's always a good day when you don't get bitten by a werewolf.

This whole thing is genuinely terrifying. There’s a mess of weird, very human-like animals decomposing fifty feet away, at least one of which is because of you, and you know without doubt that you need to get out of here, memories or not. This is not a good place to stay. Eventually there'll be police all over this place, eventually there's always police, and right now you don’t know how to explain werewolves. Or magic.

You dig through your pockets. Apparently you have keys, and apparently the car really does belong to you.

You get the hell out of that forest.

dum dum dum

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