My body weight was pushing my ankle into the mattress too hard, or at the wrong angle, or something, and it was starting to ache. I lifted it up, pointed it a different way, and sat back down again. Didn’t help. I put my hand underneath my ankle as a kind of cushion, and that did help, but then a minute later my hand was starting to hurt instead. I pulled my hand back out and swapped over my legs, so that my left leg went under and my right leg went over. That felt a little weird, but it didn’t hurt any more. Finally I could concentrate!

My nose itched.

I groaned really loud and let myself flop face-first onto the bed. They’d said you couldn’t force an awakening, but I knew what it was meant to feel like. I’d lived Luke’s memories of it, I figured that had to help. But I had to admit, this whole meditation thing just was not working. I’d had a few moments where I thought I could almost feel that fire like Luke did, but then I always got distracted, usually by getting excited that it was working, and I lost it.

Well fine. Maybe this wasn’t going to work, but I’d decided that this was a day where I did a big important thing that I’d been putting off, and I wasn’t going to let myself off the hook just because the thing that I’d been planning didn’t work out. I was plucky and determined again, it was a thing that happened sometimes. So after I’d given myself a minute of mattress-faceplanting, I rolled off the bed and trudged over to the kitchen.

Even with all my pluckiness, I still needed a minute before I could jump into this. It was - well it wasn’t like it was scary, and it wasn’t hard either, but it was weird and uncomfortable and meant going to places that I hadn’t been to for a really long time. It’s like, if you’ve gone for a really long time choosing to not do something, then not doing it becomes part of you, and even if you have good reasons to do it now, it almost feels like betraying that part of yourself.

Or maybe betraying wasn’t totally the right word. It felt like it needed to be a really big deal. Like if someone was going to die and this was the only way to save them somehow, then I could say right, it’s time. It would be the big dramatic moment where a chapter of your life ends and another one begins, and it all starts with this one decision. Just doing it one day without any drama or real reason felt wrong. But that might have just been another way of putting it off.

Well, maybe I could put it off in a not-putting-it-off way. I had to get all the ingredients together first, but I wasn’t actually making anything yet while I did that, so it still counted as procrastinating. That made enough sense in my brain for me to start doing it, anyway. I’d made sure we had all the right ingredients without making it look like I was making sure we had all the right ingredients, which had been pretty easy because it was all normal stuff you used in a lot of things.

A big slab of butter in the fridge, this one was about a quarter used but that left plenty for me. Eggs too, while I was at the fridge, there were only two left in the first carton when I pried it open but there was a second full carton underneath. Then off to the pantry for flour, two blocks of good chocolate (85% cocoa, any less was only good for treats for small children), some sugar and cocoa powder, and just like that I’d gotten started.

I opened the door. “I have presents!”

Gavin and Krystal hadn’t noticed me until then. They looked up, saw the kind of present I was talking about, and both jumped out of their seats.

“Ooooh what is it?”

I opened the box to show them. “Brownies.”

Krystal said, “Yum!”, but Gavin didn’t waste any time at all. He grabbed one and shoved it straight in his mouth. This wasn’t the first time I’d brought baked goods in to study group, and I had kind of a reputation for making them delicious.

Gavin’s eyes went really wide, and the moment he finished chewing he said, “These are the best thing ever.”

“Thanks! It’s my grandma’s secret recipe.”

Krystal grabbed one then, and Gavin took a second one, and I had one too because I wasn’t going to be left out. There was a lot of chewing and general eating noises - the happiest noises of them all. Not that I didn’t enjoy eating food myself, but this was the reason that I liked baking. Food was the universal language, and everybody loved it.

Krystal still had half a mouthful of brownie when she said, “It’s so mmmooooooist.”

Gavin winced. “Aww man, why do you have to say it like that?”

“What’s wrong with being -”

“Noooooo don’t say it!”

“Yeah that word’s kinda icky,” I said.

“Aww, okay. I won’t argue with the Brownie Goddess. How do you get them to be so that-word, anyway? It’s like, almost crunchy on the outside and so soft and gooey on the inside.”

“That’s the ‘secret’ part of the secret recipe!”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Alright, but you are making these again.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry! I’m going to make them lots. It’s my favourite recipe in the whole world.”

“Why haven’t you made them before then?”, Gavin asked.

“Well, ahh… Last time I made them, it didn’t end too well. It made me kinda, you know.” That wasn’t technically a lie.

“Well you’ve got your mojo back now!”

I looked at the two of them. Happy, normal people. Gavin had a big goofy grin, Krystal had chocolate stains around the edge of her mouth that she hadn’t cleaned off yet. I had to smile too.

“Yeah. I have.”

After the excitement of brownies was over, we all settled back down onto the cozy couches, and Krystal and Gavin went back to the game they’d been playing when I got there. Normally we wouldn’t do study group with just three people, but there’d been so many interruptions and stuff lately (mostly my fault) that we’d decided to just go ahead and do it with whoever who could make it.

Everyone else was trying to deal with the whole situation they were in, obviously. They’d taken a few days to try Grace’s idea and see if they could talk to Genevieve and her friend, but one of the big problems with that had been figuring out how to get in touch with them. They’d had a few ideas, but no luck so far. That didn’t really put them in a state of mind to hang out, so they’d made excuses to Krystal and Gavin and gone to work on Plan B.

I wanted to be there with them, helping out somehow, but this was nice too. Krystal and Gavin were playing some kind of shooter game today. They played a lot of games against each other, and Krystal won pretty much every time, but today they’d picked out a game Gavin had played before and Krystal hadn’t.

“How the hell do you reload?”, Krystal was asking.

“Press X.”

She looked up from the game to stare at him with horror. “What? X for reload? Who thought that was a good idea?”

Then the game yelled “HEADSHOT”, and she yelled too.

“Hey! No fair! I was trying to figure out the controls!”

“So you died because you didn’t have enough experience with the game, that’s how it’s meant to work.”

“Morgaaaaan! He’s cheating!”

“Am not! You chose to look away, that’s not my fault!”

“It sounds kind of like cheating to me,” I said.

“Ha! See? The Brownie Queen agrees with me, you dirty cheater-face.”

“Nooo! How could you take her side?”

“Well, she sucks up to me more.”

“I can fix that! I will get down on hands and knees and sing your praises if you agree that I wasn’t cheating!”

Krystal snorted. “That’d never work! Morgan is way too smart to fall for that kind of shameless flattery.”

I smiled. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want him to try, though. Maybe if you sing well enough I’ll change my mind.”

We didn’t get to find out though, because there was a knock at the door. I looked and saw a happy-looking guy standing outside. He had some crazy bed hair, so I figured he’d probably slept in and got lost on the way to his class. Or maybe that was how it was supposed to look, even. It was dark brown edging on black with uneven bands of bleached blonde weaved through it, so the uneven spikes might have been a deliberate part of some anime character aesthetic.

I opened the door for him. “Hey, are you looking for somewhere? This is…” I tried to figure out exactly what to call our study group room, but I really had no idea what it was actually meant for.

“Someone actually! You guys know a chick called Alex?”

“Yeah, she’s a friend.”

“Great. Know where she is right now?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, could you call her and tell her to get her ass over here? It’s pretty important.”

“What is?”, Gavin asked. I didn’t have to, I could put two and two together.

“Hey, man, I’d really like to tell you, but it’s a need-to-know sort of thing, and if you needed to know then you already would. Better if I don’t go blabbing to everybody who asks. Just text her, tell her what’s going on and she’ll come running, pinkie promise.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

This had to be the werewolf guy they’d told me about. I had no idea why he’d shown up here and now, but he didn’t seem to be in a murdering mood, so maybe things would work out after all. All I had to do was make the call, convince Krystal and Gavin that we had to leave before things started happening, and let the adults come and sort everything out.

He didn’t even seem to know that I knew who he was, so I wasn’t in any kind of danger. I just had to stay calm and make a totally normal phone call without giving him any reason to kill me. That’s all! No problems. Just stay totally calm and cool while looking right at this friendly werewolf who’d horribly murdered a defenceless man in his own home and painted the walls with his blood. And probably eaten a lot of the body, but we weren’t sure about that part.

I must have been getting better at this, because my fingers only shook a teensy bit while I sent the message. Dealing with terrifying things that could kill me with one hand wasn’t something I’d ever wanted to get used to, but if this was my life now then it was better than not getting used to it. I slipped my phone back into my pocket, then said to Gavin and Krystal, “We should probably head out. I wanna go get ice cream.”

The werewolf guy sniffed a few times, and his smile got broader. His teeth were very, very white. I tried not to think about that too hard.

Gavin and Krystal didn’t totally get it, but they weren’t too comfortable with this guy showing up either, so they didn’t argue about leaving. We packed up our stuff without any issues other than some sideways glances, said some really awkward goodbyes to the man, and went for the door. Then when I tried to open it, he put his arm out and held it in place.

“What’s up?”, I said, in a way too high-pitched voice.

“Here’s the thing. Really sorry about this, wish there was some other way, but I’m taking a big risk by coming out here. If your friends do just wanna talk then that’s great and I’ll feel like a complete jerk for doing this, but just in case it’s some big trap, I need some sort of insurance to make sure I get out alive.”

A cold shiver went all the way from my head down to my toes. “Insurance.”

“Right! So until I get out of here in one happy piece, you guys can be my… man, ‘hostage’ is such a mean word. You three can be my ‘mandatory guests’. That cool with you?”

I forced an ugly smile. “Yeah. Cool.”