I purse my lips. “Aren’t we, like, not allowed out before breakfast?”
Shade shrugs. “What’s the worst that they’re gonna do to you if they catch you? Send you back here?”
“You have a point,” I reply.
“Then it’s settled,” Shade says, sitting back in his chair. “Tomorrow morning at six, on the quad. I’ll show you a thing or two about turning into a wolf.”
“Come on,” Hunter says finally. “Can you not ask the new girl out right in front of me?”
Before I have time to process the implications of his anger, Shade is already replying gamely. “Hey, I never said it was a date. You can come too, if you want. I’ve heard you’re not doing so well, yourself.”
Hunter snorts. “Not happening.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Shade tells him. “So, Millie,” he says, “how did you end up winning the shifter lottery, anyway?”
“No idea,” I reply. “I never knew my parents.”
“Damn, really? Join the club.”
My eyes widen at the same time as Landon’s. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” Shade replies. “I was adopted.”
“Holy shit,” mutters Landon. “I spend my whole life angsting about my past and then I meet two others like me in less than a day? It’s a small world, I guess.”
Silas, who’s been silent for some time now, speaks up. “It’s even smaller than that,” he says slowly, turning around in his chair to look at the rest of us. “I’m an orphan, too.” There’s a pause, and he adds, “That sounds pretty pathetic when I say it out loud.”
“I’ll be damned,” says Landon, looking between the three of us with newfound respect.
“Well, looks like we’re a regular Breakfast Club in here, aren’t we?” says Shade. “Next thing you know we’ll be dancing on the desks and confessing our darkest secrets to each other.”
Silas snorts, but there’s humor behind it. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
“To be honest,” Landon says, “until I met you, Millie, I thought hybrids didn’t exist.”
“Oh, they existed, all right,” replies Shade. “They say they were experiments done by witches, but then the humans took them out.”
Silas clears his throat but says nothing.
I open my mouth for a moment and then close it, debating, before asking, “So what happened, Silas? To your parents, I mean.” There’s a pause, and I realize how insensitive the question must have sounded. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I add hastily, already feeling my cheeks going red. What the hell came over me?
“It’s all right,” Silas replies. He takes a breath, meeting my eyes, and replies, “They were killed.”
The room goes completely silent, except for the snores coming from the teacher’s desk. The others are staring at Silas, eyes wide. Even Hunter seems to be both intrigued and scared.
“How?” Shade asks, the only one bold enough to break the silence. “I mean, who by?”
“Jeez, Shade,” snaps Landon.
Shade puts his hands up. “Sorry, sorry.”
Silas shifts in his seat, not seeming particularly bothered. “Humans,” he replies, swallowing before he continues. I’m surprised at how composed he is, considering what he’s discussing, but maybe that’s just how it is when enough time has passed after a tragedy. “My mom and dad were both pretty pro-shifter,” Silas says. “They were always suspicious of them--raised me in a shifter-only community, away from civilization. They were always telling me not to trust them, calling them violent and xenophobic. I kind of brushed it off. I mean, I was a kid back then, and I didn’t even know if I was going to end up with shifter powers, you know?”
The others nod.
“Anyway,” Silas continues, “my parents paranoia eventually started to get the better of them, I think. They started coming up with all these crazy conspiracy theories about how the humans who know about shifters don’t actually want to coexist with us. The humans apparently wanted to enslave us, or use us, experiment on us… It was a different story every day. It got to the point where they tried to stop interacting with humans at all. It went about as well as you’d expect.” He takes a breath, fidgeting. “At one point, I remember coming home every day to see a new group of shifters in our living room, discussing conspiracy theories and talking about how they were going to ‘escape enslavement’, or something like that.” He shakes his head.
“I can’t imagine that ended well,” says Landon.
“No,” Silas replies. “It didn’t. By the time I was ten, they had basically turned our lives upside-down. Then, one day, they pulled me out of school, packed up our stuff, and got in the car. They wouldn’t tell me why, or where we were going. It didn’t matter anyway--we hadn’t made it that far when we were stopped by a couple of humans. Apparently, the word had gotten out that my folks had been stirring the pot, and the governments needed to do damage control. So they took me out of the car, hauled my parents away, and that was the last time I ever saw them.”
There’s a long moment of silence as we process all this. Finally Landon turns to look at him. “You okay, Silas?”
He nods. “Yeah, I’m fine. It was a long time ago, and my parents were… unwell. That much was obvious.” He shakes himself, sitting up in his chair. “But enough about that. Let’s talk about something more fun, yeah?”
“Well,” Shade remarks, “I don’t think any of us are going to top that.”
Silas snorts and the others laugh, the tension in the room breaking up. I stay quiet, Silas’ story still bouncing around in my head like a pinball. The idea of having parents and then losing them… I didn’t think anything could be worse than not knowing one’s parents at all, but I’m realizing now that I’m wrong. Absently, I reach down into my boot, touching the necklace given to me by the only real family I’ve ever had. I do know what that’s like, I think, the memories of
