Kai and you disappear. One second you’re there, the next - you’re gone. No flashes of light, no sound, no…nothing. And Kyungsoo is left there gaping, in complete darkness, with his heart nearly palpitating out of his chest in confusion and shock. He turns on the light, waking up Hyojin, and looks around in a panicked frenzy.

“Guys!” he shouts. “Guys!”

It takes literal seconds for the first members of his pack to show up by his side. Xiumin, Min and Sehun are there. Hyojin is frowning at them now, looking around, also frightened, thinking that maybe there’s someone in her room that shouldn’t be there. Sehun grabs Kyungsoo by his shoulder, trying to find his eyes.

“Soo?” he asks, worried. “Where’s Kai and Dal?”

“They disappeared,” Kyungsoo mumbles. Sehun raises his brows at him, Xiumin says ‘What?!’ and more people show up at the door with questions forming on their lips. Kyungsoo finally looks up at Sehun. “They disappeared. Just like that.”

Suho enters the room. With Kai gone and Kris being away, he automatically becomes the next in command, and the second he shows up, everyone gets quiet.

“Was there anyone else?” he asks Kyungsoo. The boy shakes his head.

“I didn’t see anyone. There was no sound, no nothing. They were standing right here,” he says, moving to where you were standing, “and Kai was here.” He stands next to the armchair.

“What’s going on?” Hyojin asks.

“It must’ve been the same person that made that fourth man appear next to Kai before,” Kyungsoo says, “because it looked the same.”

“So a witch?” Sehun wonders.

“Witches shouldn’t be able to do this,” Chanyeol speaks up. “They don’t have enough power.”

“Sunny managed to time travel with her powers,” Chen reminds them.

“It was mostly Dal’s power and Sunny’s spell, which didn’t work correctly, by the way, because she was dumb,” Baekhyun shoots back angrily.

“Kyungsoo, call Siwon. If he doesn’t pick up, go get him here,” Suho commands.

“I’ll go,” Taemin says and takes off before anyone can tell him otherwise. Kyungsoo still runs out after him, though, knowing very well that no one should be alone right now. Suho looks at Hyojin. “If they could take Dal this easily, they can show up anytime and take Mrs. Hyojin, too. We should put her inside a trap.”

“I’ll go look for them,” Sulli says, disappearing down the corridor.

“I don’t understand, I thought they were after Mrs. Hyojin,” Yixing says.

“Their priorities have changed,” Suho muses. “Mrs. Hyojin, come with me,” he adds to the woman. He looks at the pack then, his eyes sharp. “The most important thing now is to keep her safe and to find Dal and Kai. So focus on that.”

*

Werewolf Dude has mostly healed. You find that fascinating enough that you almost swerve off the road twice trying to get a look at it. The guy literally just heals the stab wounds over like they were never there. He’s still unconscious, though. And the second thing that’s a bit on the bad side is that you think there’s someone following you since you left the forest road and entered the highway.

Now, a normal person wouldn’t get paranoid by two cars driving behind you on a highway, because obviously, you can’t drive anywhere but straight on a highway (unless you make a turn, but there’s been literally no turns on your way, which is even weirder), but these guys have been literally sitting on your tail the entire drive. All the other cars just drive past you, especially since you keep on changing your driving speed, and these two haven’t left your side. Well, your behind.

The good thing is that the guy seems to be healing already, and his breathing is normal now. You put your hand to where his biggest wound was before – his shoulder – and find a scar there, and he’s not bleeding anymore.

Now, about the two cars…

They speed up and suddenly, they’re on both sides of your car. You look to your right to see a man driving the white one, and on your left, another man is driving the red one. But the worst thing is, there’s a third, black car right behind you, that you haven’t seen before, and it’s getting dangerously close. They’re all nice, luxurious cars, too, and the drivers seem oddly alike. Adrenaline fills your veins again and you clench your fingers around the wheel.

“Hey, werewolf boy,” you say loudly. “Wake up. Hey, wake up!”

He doesn’t as much as stir in his sleep. You pat him with your right hand quite violently, then slap him on the face, eyes still on the road. He wakes up with a loud growl and almost tears your hand apart, but you’re able to get it out of his face before he can do that. The car jerks to the side and it shakes when it touches the car on your left, and then all hell breaks loose.

The cars on your left and on your right push onto the sides of your car at once, trapping yours inside. The werewolf guy is panicked and you’re screaming; you push at the gas pedal. The cars seem to move in unison and both of them turn left, taking you with them; you feel the steering wheel jerk away from your handle.

“Stop, stop!” the werewolf screams. You take your foot off the gas pedal and hit the breaks, and oh boy, it’s a complete disaster.

The two cars on your sides drive past you, scratching your car on their way; a truly horrible sound erupts outside. Your car jerks and hits the car behind you, making both you and the werewolf let out cut-off shouts; airbags erupt right into your faces and your car starts to beep angrily. You push at the airbag, almost suffocating, when someone wrecks it away from you.

“Turn around, turn around!” werewolf screams. He was the one to take the airbag away. You try to turn on the engine, but your jeep dies down completely. You look at the werewolf in fear and he looks back with similar expression. “Okay, out, out,” he says, pushing you out of the car.

You’re out on the road then, cars speeding past you and honking at you. The black car that you hit when you hit the breaks is standing in the middle of the highway, its driver gone, and the two cars that were on your sides before are nowhere to be seen. You’re gasping out for breath.

The werewolf guy starts waving his hands at random cars passing by, hoping for someone to stop and help, but nobody does. You get a weird feeling of oddity. You look around the highway, at the sky, and then at your jeep. You remember that jeep. It was your father’s, wasn’t it?

“It’s stopping,” werewolf says suddenly. You look to see a car slowing down not so far away from you. But then, just before it stops, it speeds up again, driving past you, and you can swear you hear the driver laugh at you. Werewolf is frazzled, you’re scared.

You go back to your jeep to find a phone, some documents, anything. Meanwhile, the werewolf guy is still waving. You go back to him after searching the entire car and founding nothing except for some money, sweating enormously. You’re as confused as ever and nobody is stopping to help you, everyone is just driving past, not even looking at you.

“This isn’t right,” you say. “Listen, this is not…”

The guy looks at you, his eyes all over your face. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t know,” you reply, your voice on a verge of breaking. “I don’t know.”

Someone finally stops next to you. It’s a taxi driver, and he’s smiling brightly at the two of you. You get in and he drives you to the nearest motel, talking about his daughter the entire ride there. You wonder how the heck you’re gonna pay him for his services if you don’t have anything on you.

*

Siwon has drawn a huge protection circle in the middle of the living room and they’ve placed Mrs. Hyojin inside it. Everyone is on edge; they can’t do anything before Sulli finds you and Kai, and she’s been at it for hours now. Four, to be exact.

“Okay, this is driving me nuts,” Daehyun speaks up from where he’s pacing around the room. He looks at the pack, gathered on the couch, and sends them an incredulous look. “How can you all be so calm?!”

“Panicking never does any good,” Luhan tells him, shaking his head.

“We’ve learnt that the hard way,” Suho adds. “Until Sulli pin-points their location, we should be gathering strength.”

“What if they’re dead already because we didn’t do anything?” Daehyun asks.

“They’re not,” Kris says. “We’d know if they were dead.”

“We’d feel it,” Sehun adds. “It’s the part of how the pack bond works.”

“But how can you just sit around?” Daehyun says, his voice more and more desperate.

“What do you think we should do?” Baekhyun asks gruffly. “Run around searching for them? It’s no use. They’re most likely out of town. If the bad guys haven’t come to us yet, asking for something in exchange for Kai and Dal, it means that they don’t want us to find the two. And that means that they’ve hid them.”

“And Sul is having trouble finding them,” Amber adds, pointing at the ceiling, where Sulli has shut herself inside a room to talk to ghosts. “That means that they’re really great at hiding people.”

Daehyun clenches his fists.

“Chill,” Chen says to him. “We’ll find them.”

*

The motel looks cheap and nasty, and exactly the sort of place that takes cash (they have cash), doesn't mind the blood stains (there are a lot of blood stains), and also doesn't check ID, which you obviously don’t have.

You’re shaking when you sit on the end of the bed, and you can't make yourself stop, because you killed a weird looking animal and drove a bleeding werewolf God knows how many miles. Not to mention the whole I-don’t-know-my-identity thing. You just know that you’re apparently the type of person that can do this, who knows how to do this, is willing to do this. You’re not sure if that's amazing, or terrifying, or some awful third option. Because you’re roughly three hours into his life, and there are already dead bodies, and murder, and werewolves that heal like Wolverine, and cheap motel rooms that smell like people had in them, or died in them, or possibly died while having in them, which you really don’t want to think about.

It's a lot to process. You don’t know if this is normal for you. Is this normal for you? This shouldn't be normal for anyone. What kind of person would this be normal for?

"It was a stupid idea to just grab me," Werewolf says, from where he's cleaning blood off his face in front of the stupid, full length mirror the room has. It had taken a full minute for him to even care that he was covered in blood, suggesting that he ended up covered in blood a lot, and wasn't that a comforting thought. He'd prowled the motel room like the smell of it offended him.

The guy out front must have noticed the blood, but he hadn't said anything about it. You don’t know whether to worry about that or not.

"I could have killed you." The angry werewolf is glaring at his reflection now.

"And yet you didn't, so clearly we know each other, right? That makes sense. If we didn't know each other you would have - what, ravaged me or something?" you watch Werewolf’s jaw work, and you think that's as close to a yes as you’re going to get. "Not that I know much about werewolves. Can I just have a moment to let that sink in. I mean, I know I probably know about you and everything already. But - werewolves, I think I deserve a moment to process that there are apparently werewolves, also witches–“ you stop to think about it. "There were witches at least, because we killed a bunch of them. You noticed that right, the dead bodies. There were dead bodies,” you trail off. You catch your own reflection in the mirror Werewolf’s staring into, and your face looks as shocked as you feel, which is something. There's a dried smear of blood on your cheek, which you haven't noticed before. You rub at it with your sleeve, harder than you mean to, until it's gone.

"You talk a lot," Werewolf says. Though he says it like he's pointing it out, noticing it, rather than judging it, or threatening to make you stop. “Your name is Dal.”

You look up at him in surprise. You squint at him when his words get to you fully.

“Dal,” you deadpan. “Who the hell names themselves Dal?”

Werewolf shrugs. “I like it.”

“Wait,” you mutter, still staring, “how do you know that’s my name?”

“The witch, the one I killed, he threatened you, and he called you Dal.”

“Is that my actual name tho?” you say incredulously. “It sounds like a nickname. No one would call their child Dal, right?” It's definitely better than no name at all. "Ok, Dal it is then. Your turn, because I can't keep calling you ‘Werewolf’ in my head. Since that is your one defining characteristic.”

The guy frowns and fishes in his pocket, tosses some cards aside, before flipping one around and squinting at it.

“Kim Jongin,” he says, brow furrowing as if he doesn't like the sound of it.

You laugh. You don’t even know why. Jongin’s forehead creases further, eyebrows almost meeting. He really doesn't look like a Jongin. He looks like maybe he could have eaten a Jongin at some point.

“Great, I'm a werewolf with an over-dramatic girlfriend named after the Moon,” Jongin glares at himself in the mirror. He looks like he does that a lot.

“A grumpy werewolf with an over–“ you realize what you’re saying somewhat belatedly. “Hey, whoa, wait, why am I your girlfriend?”

Jongin looks at you like you’re an idiot.

“You killed the animal that was attacking me before you even knew my name, and then I let you drag me to a car with four puncture wounds in my chest, let you shove me in the passenger seat and drive my car, without ripping your throat out.”

Okay, that’s actually pretty legit. You know nothing about yourself other than the fact your boyfriend is a) a werewolf and b) almost too hot to be a real person. So even if it's all downhill from here, at least you started on an unexpected and confusing high. How the hell did hyou manage that, anyway? The more you think about it, the less you believe it. Which suggests you either have a ty self-esteem, or good instincts.

“Okay, so I can see how someone would end up with you,” you gesture at the mirror, towards the very obvious proof of Jongin’s muscles and scowl-y face of improbable hotness, "But there's no way you'd hook up with me.” You realize how pathetic that sounds and that hey, you’re great, you like your face, there’s nothing bad with your face!

Jongin stares at you blankly for a second.

“Though you clearly don't mind if we're...together, and oh my God, I'm just going to stop talking now.”

Jongin grasps his jaw and turns his face back to look in the mirror, to try and glare his memories back to the surface. Which probably won't work. Though the guy's giving it a damn good go.

“I think you are,” Jongin says grudgingly.

“What?”

“My–“ he stops and pulls a face. “I think we're together.” He shakes his head, as if whatever he's feeling is hard to explain. “You feel almost familiar. Everything else…the idea of anyone else coming close to me is. It makes me want to break something. You, you're non-threatening.” The frown slips away, as if he'd found the word he was looking for. After a moment of silence, he speaks up again, mostly to his reflection, “I look like a ing criminal.”

“Yeah, a little, even when you're not all fanged-out.”

Jongin pulls a face at you, which you can read perfectly for all that you’re mostly strangers.

“That's what I'm calling it, in my head. You're not going to stop me calling it that.”

Jongin rolls his eyes and tosses his shirt towards the bathroom.

“So, um, what exactly do we know about us?" you ask. "Aside from the elephant in the room that is you being a werewolf. I definitely remember that werewolves aren't supposed to be real. I would definitely remember if we lived in a world where werewolves were supposed to be real.”

Jongin glares at you, as if doubting the truth of his existence is insulting somehow.

“Well, we know you talk too much,”  he starts, like that’s the most obvious thing. Before you’re able to reply, he continues with, "Someone is hunting us. We probably lost our memories via magic, and you own a jeep.”

Silence falls between you two. You slowly realize that you’re not even this freaked-out by the fact that you’ve lost your memory. It was scary at first, but now it just seems like a riddle you need to solve. You stare into nothing for a while and Jongin does just the same. When you glance at him, he’s making a very pathetic emo face.

“Wow, you really are very grumpy,” you tell him. "Do you think that's a werewolf thing, or just a you thing?”

Jongin looks like he kind of wants to hit you with something. So, yes, almost certainly a Jongin thing.

“It's totally a you thing, isn't it? Insanely hot and grumpy is your thing, and apparently my thing as well, who knew? Okay, so we're being possibly hunted by something, maybe witches, I don’t know. Can witches track people? Also, exactly how strong are you? Because back in the forest you literally punched that animal so hard it almost broke a tree with its spine. Are you going to, like, dislocate my shoulder giving me a friendly punch or something? Because if that's an option I'm going to veto the friendly punching right now.”

Jongin glares at you. "I can control myself."

You raise an eyebrow. "How do you even know that?"

"You're still in one piece, aren't you," Jongin points out.

You don’t know Jongin well enough to be able to tell if he's joking.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're very annoying," Jongin says quietly, then tips his head forward in a way that you think is supposed to mean something.

“You're the one who decided to date me,” you inhale the end of the sentence, because Jongin has stalked his way closer, without you even realizing it. All predator eyes and warm breath.

Jongin takes up space in a way he doesn't even seem to notice, radiating heat and intensity that leaves your mouth suddenly very dry, because you think Jongin's going to kiss you - almost definitely going to kiss you, no matter how insane that seems. The thought shouldn't be so startling. If you’re together, if you’re in a relationship then you probably do this all the time. But you can’t remember it, you don't really know each other at all right now. What if you’ve gotten this horribly wrong. What if you’re not together, what if it's all weirdly circumstantial and it's just because you smell completely non-threatening, or Jongin knows you because of some other completely non-y reason. What if you’re related?

“What if it's not true,” you says quickly, heart pounding. “We could be related, we could be siblings.”

“We're not siblings.” Jongin tries to tug your face close, and you can't think of a single reason not to let him. You want Jongin to kiss you, and you honestly have no idea why you’re pretending that you don’t.

Jongin's mouth is warm, all easy shift and pressure. You lift your hands and curl your fingertips in Jongin's shirt, open up a little for him. The kiss goes deep, turns into a wet slide of tongues, and it's really, really good.

He pulls away after a moment and you blink your eyes open. Some kind of electricity runs down your spine and you flinch at the unfamiliarity of it. There’s a thought in the back of your mind that you can’t quite recall, and you frown, looking down at your arms. Your fingers are still clenched around Jongin’s t-shirt, and they look…bare.

Bare?

“What is it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” you reply, shaking your head. “There’s something…”

You look up at him. His eyes are familiar. Warm, safe. You tiptoe to kiss him again, another spark of energy going up your spine, and this time he must feel it too, because he lets out a surprised moan and pulls away. He looks at you in awe.

“There’s just something,” you whisper, taking in his face. You touch his jaw with your right hand, let it move upwards, towards his cheek, and then his eye and eyebrow. Jongin is leaning into your touch easily.

A movement catches your attention. Your eyes shoot towards the mirror behind Jongin, and you hear a weird whisper that makes you somehow pliant. You step away from the werewolf and walk towards the mirror, Jongin following your every move with his own, careful eyes.

“Dal?” he asks, and it seems to echo in your mind. Your mind seems to shake, your heart beats faster, and at the exact same moment, you look into that mirror, and see a fox in the reflection. It’s standing right next to Jongin. You turn your head towards him quickly, surprised, and your breath hitches in your lungs when you see no fox there. You turn towards the mirror once again, and the fox is gone.

“What’s going on?” Jongin asks. You look at him, then around the room, probably looking like Sulli when she–

“Sulli,” you whisper. Jongin frowns at you. Suddenly, it feels like someone just threw a rock at your head; you fall onto your knees when some horrible pain pierces your skull, and you yell, grabbing at your head.

“Dal,” Jongin says hurriedly, crouching down next to you and taking you into his arms. It feels like someone is pushing needles into your head, and tears start to well your eyes; memories are trying to come back, you can feel them at the brink of your consciousness, but something is desperately blocking it. “Dal!”

“Sulli,” you say, then groan when another wave of pain comes. “Who’s Sulli?”

*
 

Sulli opens her eyes with a startle. She’s covered in sweat and her head is filled with screams, voices, and whispers; she sees three weird spirits staring at her from the corner of the room, huddled together, staring at her curiously. She stands up, throws herself at the door, and is out of the room in a second. She runs down the stairs, the whole pack already up and looking at her in anticipation.

“Got them,” she gasps out, grinning.

This is shorter than expected, but you have to