Last time:

Minseok his head out from the room. “Tao-ya? Does hyung need to give you a backrub tonight?”

Tao treated him to a pathetic look. “Please?”

“Just remind me,” the older man said, nodding.

A scream from K’s apartment split the air. It hung in the air, crystal-clear and glass-edged sharp, before the silence shattered and all of the men lurched toward the door.

CHAPTER TWO:

This was not how Kris had wanted to explain what was going on to the other EXO members, nor was it how he had wanted them to learn about the supernatural. But, as his aunt had often said, if wishes were fishes, people could walk on the sea.

At least he wasn’t the only one drowning. The nurse, Yunmi-ssi, looked well out of her depth, and the horrified faces the other members were wearing would have been funny in just about any other circumstances. Furthermore, their manager-noona­ and several of the manager-hyungs had all hauled in to K’s apartment upon hearing the screams, so now he had that to deal with.

Oh, and one very amused Kim Kibum, whose lithe body was propped elegantly against a doorframe, like he was a statue put there to give the room some class. His carefully-shaped eyebrows were raised, and amusement had curled the corners of his lips. He was enjoying this.

Kris took a deep breath, trying to focus and calm himself. He would do no one any good if he was losing it, himself. And much as he wanted to punch Key in the face—so tempting right now, so unspeakably tempting—he was not fool enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if the mouth in question was painted in scarlet lipgloss, and the horse more resembled a supernatural creature than anything s had seen before.

“Key,” he said, voice firm and calm.

“Yes, Kris?”

“Kindly get noona a glass of water? I think she’s about to faint. If we move this to the living room, I can explain to more people at once.”

Key nodded, pushing himself off of the wall and reaching out to take the hyperventilating woman in hand. “A good plan,” he agreed, the oiliness of his earlier amusement seeping away until he sounded more like Key-hyung, the man they all knew and had worked with many a time. Still, while the others followed him, several of them regarded him carefully, a new wariness in their eyes.

With the herd moving, Kris turned his attention back to Suho, who was now thankfully unconscious, though still pale and sweating with pain. His arms—his forelegs—seemed to have settled, small mercies.

Yixing’s eyes darted between Suho and Kris. “Gege?”

“Hmm?”

“Is…is it usually like that?” he asked, pointing to the bruising along Suho’s still-human skin, warped over clearly-wolf bone.

Kris blinked at him, reading the fear in his voice and face. “What? No, no. I’ve never seen this happen before. Maybe because your teeth didn’t break the skin? Or because you were human at the time? I don’t really know, XingXing, I’m sorry.”

Yixing nodded, flinching as another crunching, grating snap announced that Suho’s legs had started to shift, too. “But that’s…that’s not going to be me, right?”

“No,” Kris said, shaking his head. “You’ve shifted already, and this didn’t happen, did it?”

Yixing shook his head.

“Then I doubt it will happen to you,” Kris said, feeling twice his age and suddenly exhausted. “And once Suho-ge gets all the way through to his wolf the first time, I think he’ll be okay. I hope.”

“For what it’s worth,” the nurse said, coming back into the small bedroom after having made sure that the manager-noona didn’t actually faint, “I think you’re probably right. I, uh, I don’t know much about wolves, or weres in general, really, but, um. Well. That’s how it works for shape-shifting species like ravens.”

Kris’s eyes narrowed as his brain slowly percolated through the clues. “Key-hyung?”

The young woman winced, but nodded. “Not that you heard it from me.”

“Of course not,” Kris said. He stood up carefully, trying his best not to jostle Suho. His efforts, unfortunately, seemed to be in vain; the older man, still unconscious, whined quietly as the mattress shifted.

“Don’t worry about him,” Yunmi said, seeing the way Kris had leant back in. She waved a needle at him. “Goddess of injections, here.”

“Really?” Yixing asked, cocking his head to the side.

Yunmi laughed. “Not in the sense that you’re a wolf, no,” she admitted, “but I am pretty handy with a painkiller, which is what he’s going to get. I’ll keep an eye on him. You two have some explaining to do, I think.”

Kris inhaled as deeply as he could and then let all the air out in a rush. Looking to Yixing, he grimaced. “Ready?”

“If I have to be.”

“Then here we go.”

---

“I texted Jinki,” Key muttered out of the corner of his mouth, rising to join Kris and Yixing as they entered the room.

“Jinki—?”

“Oh, so Yunmi did manage to keep that little fact to herself. Ah, well, cat’s among the pigeons now,” Key said, a look of false regret flickering briefly across his face. “Or, I suppose, incubus among the humans…”

Kris choked on air. “He’s a—”

Key smirked. “How do you think no one noticed me, hm? I’m guessing your education did cover incubi.”

“It did,” Kris said, tone dark. “Yixing, go grab a seat on the floor. We’re going to coordinate our plan of attack. I’ll be right there.”

Yixing nodded, already sliding down to the floor, scooching closer to Luhan and Minseok.

“Plan of attack?” Key asked quietly.

“Well I’m not actually supernatural,” Kris bit out, “so I might need a demonstration. Something like that should be right up your alley, trickster.”

“It is, at that,” Key said. “Jinki can keep a lid on tempers when he gets here; he’s pretty good at that. But the rest of it? All your show, alpha.”

“I’m not…”

“You are,” the slim man cut in. “You are the one who knows what’s going on, you’re that one’s leader, you’ll be leading Suho when he shifts. Human or no, you’re the head of this pack, for now.” His eyes traced Kris’s face, taking in the dark circles under his eyes, his hollow, pale cheeks, his bitten and chapped lips. “Lead them, Kris.” His part said, he patted Kris’s shoulder and slunk down to sit on the floor, next to the chair he’d left open.

Ceding authority to Kris, the young man realized, even as he wrapped numb fingers around the seat’s carved wooden back. He forced a tight smile and sat down, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “So,” he began, looking out at the group.

The managers were standing in the far corner, but for the lone woman; she was seated on a beanbag chair, her knees clutched tight to her chest. To her left was Kai, seated cross-legged on the floor. Kyungsoo was next to him, standing, with Chen standing next to him. Chen’s hand rested on the arm of the couch, just behind Sehun’s elbow. Luhan was crushed against the maknae, Minseok and Yixing practically sitting on his feet. Baekhyun sat behind Yixing, leaning into Chanyeol. Chanyeol stood behind the couch, almost fading into the corner, but for the hand he had on top of Tao’s head. That was easy enough for him to achieve, as Tao was seated on the floor, between the couch and the floor, leaning into the cushy arm of the couch.

Kris coughed. “So,” he said again. “Um, explanations.”

“Would be nice, yes,” Minseok said, nodding sharply. He wore a sharp, pointed look, and his voice was cutting.

“To be to the point,” Kris said, trying not to let Minseok’s anger get to him, “werewolves are real. So are vampires and fairies and all kinds of things you heard about as a child.”

It was so quiet in the crowded room that they could hear Yunmi murmuring to the still-whimpering Suho through the wall. That didn’t help the intense, uncomfortable atmosphere. A quick look around made it very clear that no one from Exo (barring Yixing, for obvious reasons) believed Kris. The managers’ faces, though…there was horror there.

“Werewolves,” Chen said, finally breaking the quiet.

Kris nodded. “And while we were in the United States, XingXing got bit. At some point, he infected Suho. The change…” He sighed. “It can hurt, if it doesn’t go just right.”

“And we’re just supposed to—”

“He’s telling the truth, Hyun-ah,” Key said, tossing his head. He sat up a little straighter. “Isn’t he, noona?”

The woman looked up, startled. She swallowed, and then nodded, her face pale. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve…I’ve just never met a werewolf, before.” She swallowed again, her eyes darting to Yixing.

Seeing her look, Minseok wrapped an arm around Yixing’s shoulders, and Luhan caged him in with his leg, keeping him close.

“But you have met a trickster,” Key said, winking at her. He turned his attention to the wider group, distracting them as Lee Jinki edged in through the door. “Because she’s worked with me for years. And I’m not human. Not at all.”

“Nor am I,” Jinki said, closing the door behind him with a tight snap. “As I suspect Yixing-ah might have noticed? At least a little?” Grinning, he let the glamour he wore shimmer and fade.

Yixing’s jaw dropped as the geometric patterns on his face were revealed, along with quicksilver eyes. “You…”

“I’m an incubus,” Jinki said, letting them all get a good look at his face. Waving a hand, he raised the glamour once more, though slowly, so they could see the changes. The black lines thinned and paled, until only unmarked skin showed, while his eyes stilled and darkened. “I need human energy to feed,” he continued, voice quiet, though it seemed loud in the otherwise silent room. “It’s safer to skim off a crowd. During a concert. When there’s a lot of…interest.”

“I do something similar,” Key croaked, now sitting on Kris’s knee. Twisting his neck, he preened a glossy black wingfeather with his beak. “As a trickster, I thrive on excitement and chaos. Do you know how much of that there is in this business?” He laughed.

“And XingXing?” Luhan asked.

“Basically human,” Kris said, taking the opportunity to draw attention back to himself. Bouncing his knee, he sent Key flapping over to Onew’s shoulder. “Far more than those two, anyway. Werewolves, barring great tragedies, tend to spend the majority of their lives as humans. Some people are born as wolves—they’re more like the sunbaes. Bitten weres are…they’re human. Just with a little bit more.”

Tao shifted, but said nothing. Above him, Chanyeol frowned. “Is the full moon thing true?”

Kris nodded, then paused, and grimaced. He see-sawed a hand in midair. “Somewhat? Yes, the full moon does affect werewolves. Yes, it brings the wolf forward more—makes them more prone to emotional outbursts, eases the transitions. In children, it almost always forces a transition between forms. In adults? Not once you’ve got the hang of it. And weres can change between their forms outside of the full moon.”

“Does he go full wolf or what?”

“I became a wolf,” Yixing murmured, looking down at his lap. “Completely. Except that I was still me. Mostly.”

“Yixing got bit by a Tibetan Wolf werewolf,” Kris said, trying to explain. “So he can become entirely a wolf, entirely a human, and something halfway in between. He’s going to need practice, though. Especially when it comes to maintaining his human form. In times of stress, everyone reverts to something that protects them. For weres, that’s often a less human shape than normal.”

“What do werewolves even eat?” Chen asked.

Kris snorted, feeling the tension in the room easing rapidly. He wasn’t sure how much of it was due to Jinki exerting an incubus’s particular emotional cloud, how much was due to Jinki and Key’s little display making him, the human, seem far more comforting, and how much of it was due to the members just getting with the program. They were good kids, and tended to roll with things fairly well. Hopefully this would be one of those things.

“Werewolves eat what everyone else eats,” Kris said. “Though I did know one girl in Canada who was vegetarian. The others tried to get her to hunt rabbits with them, but even under the moon, she refused.”

Sehun fidgeted. “Are you one?” he asked.

“A vegetarian?”

“A w-werewolf.”

Kris shook his head. “No. I am not a werewolf, a mage, or anything else supernatural. But my aunt… Well, when I lived in Canada, I lived with a pack of werewolves. The pack was a mix of humans and born wolves and bitten wolves and a few other supernaturals.”

“You never said anything,” one of the manager-hyungs interjected.

“Wasn’t my place to say anything,” Kris said. “Not about my pack—that’s not my secret to tell. And I wasn’t going to ask where someone didn’t want to tell.”

“Good manners,” Key cawed. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, fluffing and settling his feathers. “We live on secrets, our type.”

“We live because of secrets,” Jinki said. He looked around the group, focusing intently on the gathered members, less so on the managers. “You’ve just learned one of the biggest secrets in the world. Trust me when I say that you keeping that secret is a life or death situation. There are people—human people—in this world who want us dead. There are non-humans who want other non-humans dead. And there’s a lot of scientific value to a dead supernatural being. Imagine how much there is for one that’s still alive.”

Kris shivered, thinking of the people he had met and lived with in Canada, the children who still called him “uncle Kevin,” the girl he had kissed beneath the stairs in high school. But even as their smiling, laughing, human-skinned, wolf-furred, golden-eyed, blue-eyed, red-eyed faces streamed through his mind, he found himself putting Yixing and Suho and Tao in their places. Anger boiled hot and hard in his belly, snakes eating him from the inside out, at the thought of someone getting their hands on any of his people. He could feel his fingernails biting into his palms, his hands clenching into tight fists.

Yixing, on the floor, edged forward until he was pressed against Kris’s leg. “Duizhang,” he said, putting his hand on Kris’s socked foot.

“I won’t let them touch you,” Kris said, loosening one hand just enough that he could grip Yixing’s shoulder. “No one’s going to get you, XingXing.”

“I know,” Yixing said, leaning into his touch. “So just breathe.”

And suddenly Kris understood what Key had meant when he had said that Kris was the alpha.

---

“If Yixing bites him again, it may make the rest of the transition easier,” Stiles said, his voice crackling over the speaker of Kris’s phone. “You said he’s not dripping black goo?”

“Nope,” Kris said. “No black goo, no black veins. He’s responsive—well, except that he’s drugged right now—and the change has definitely started.”

“Then the change is going to take,” Stiles said. “I’ve been reading up on what I can find about Tibetan weres since we met. You should get the first set of .pdfs in, like, twenty minutes? I’m almost done pulling them together. I’m going to keep sending you more information as I get it, though. Unless you’ve found someone there?”

Kris shook his head. “No such luck,” he said. “Thanks for the information, though.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Stiles told him. “This is what I do. Well, not this, exactly. I don’t spend all day on the phone. Most days. Some days when Lydia—not the point. I’m here to help. As much as I can. When I can.”

“Thanks, Stiles.”

“Ha, yeah. Night, Yifan. At least I think it’s night. For you. Agh, I’m just going to hang up, okay? Okay.”

Kris snorted and slid his phone back into his pocket. Wherever his aunt had found this kid, he was a character, and no mistake. Still, he was nice, and far more helpful than Kris would have been in his shoes. He looked for Yixing as he re-entered the small room Sehun usually shared with Suho.

Yixing was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of Sehun’s bed, glancing nervously between the nurse and Chen. Seeing Kris’s raised eyebrow, he shrugged, as if to say that he didn’t know why their other member had joined them, either. “The expert say anything?” he asked.

“He thinks if you bite him again, as a wolf, it should help the end of the change go more smoothly,” Kris said. He nodded to Chen. “You sure you want to stay?”

Chen nodded. “You guys are family,” he said. “You can’t scare me away.”

Kris smiled. “You’re a good man, Kim Jongdae,” he said, gripping Chen’s shoulder tightly. “Thank you.”

“Duizhang,” Chen said, nodding to him.

---

Yixing slid into his wolf skin, feeling fur burst from his skin in itchy little clumps, hearing more than feeling the grate of bones twisting and shifting and warping and changing until he was on all fours, jaw pulling forwards, sharp teeth bursting from his gums. He sniffed, wrinkling his nose at the stench of pain and fear that nearly smothered the smell of Suho, Sehun, and a hundred sleepless nights, and sneezed.

Hopping up onto the bed, he took Suho’s sweaty arm in his mouth and bit.

The world exploded into fur.