I looked at Mum.
“Who is that?”
“Go upstairs now, please, Bayla!” she snapped and started pacing again. I had definitely inherited that from her.
“Go upstairs!” she snapped at me, and I winced, because my mother had never yelled at me before.
Suddenly, an elegantly dark-dressed woman with straightened brown hair came striding into our kitchen.
I knew her.
Amara Blair. Mum’s childhood friend.
What was the mayor doing here now?
Determined, she looked at my mother, whose jaw dropped.
“She’s not going anywhere, Diana, until we have had an urgent word.”
By the time Amara had entered the house, more fuses had blown in me. I had lost consciousness and crashed to the floor.
Completely shaken up and with a head full of questions, I now sat at the kitchen table. In front of me, an undamaged glass of water. This time without a pill, because I had already had to swallow this crap thing when I had woken up on the couch and Mum had just shoved it into my mouth while the mayor had been distracted.
Right now, Mum was pacing up and down in the kitchen.
Her friend sat in front of me and looked at me with a gentle smile.
If she was trying to comfort me, she definitely wasn’t succeeding. I knew something was up, and I wanted to know now. But my head hurt, and I felt like a cat that had been run over while parking. I wonder if that’s how the squirrel had felt then, when I’d run over it with Mum’s car.
“How are you, Bayla?” the mayoress now asked, as if we were just sitting together in the café, trying to talk about Mum’s student life.
She continued to smile gently, radiating a certain authority with her entire appearance, one that could not be feared, but also not questioned.
“You can trust me, I don’t bite.”
Was she just making fun of me? Had Mum told her everything?
“Just give her some time, please, just a few days. She just passed out a minute ago.”
I looked over at my mother, who was leaning against the sink, looking at Amara with an exasperated look. And there she was again. The caring mother who always worried way too much about me.
“We can’t wait any longer. You’ve kept her in the dark long enough,” Amara replied to her without turning around.
Kept in the dark? Did she mean me?
“Everything was fine.” Mum came to the table and sat down diagonally next to Amara, looking into her blue eyes as if they had known each other forever.
“Diana, imagine if Gloria had found out before I did.”
“Who told you?”
Mum pressed her lips together.
Amara just ignored her and looked back up at me encouragingly.
What on earth was this all about? And was I supposed to tell Amara that there was a wolf out there somewhere chasing all of us, that as mayor, she had to do something about it?
“Bayla. Your mother told me what you saw.” She looked briefly at her hands – adorned with silver rings – which she had clasped on the table.
I only now realized what she had just said.
“What?”
“You were watching a Senseque transform,” she continued, looking me in the eye again. There was an incredible matter-of-factness in her voice.
“I can’t quite keep up...”
I also felt drained, exhausted, and as if I had slept too long.
I admired this woman’s patience as she began to try to explain something to me.
“The university you are attending is located in an area where people live who are cursed and who can turn into wolf-like creatures.”
What? Was she serious? If that was supposed to be a joke, it was absolutely not funny.
I fell silent and stared at her, stunned.
She was a grown woman, the age of my mother. That she believed me was one thing, but that she now mutated into Sister Grimm was another.
