Chapter eight #2
"Oh, yeah." He says it with total, cheerful conviction. "I was a complete disaster. Full meltdown. There was snot involved. It was not my finest hour."
And somehow, impossibly, the room laughs. Just a little — shaky, half-hysterical, watery — but it's real, and it cracks the terror open just enough to let air in. Even Declan lowers himself slowly back into his chair. Even Freya's shoulders come down a fraction.
Torres didn't take the fear away. He just made it survivable, by proving somebody already had.
Jon lets the laugh settle before he speaks again, and when he does, his voice is quiet.
"He's telling the truth," Jon says. "About all of it. I'm a wolf. I was born into a wolf pack. I've known what I am my entire life."
He gestures toward Torres. "Torres's story is different. He was born human, with no idea any of this existed. He carried a latent shifter gene his entire life, dormant, until it activated. He discovered what he was at Frosthaven."
Jon looks around at us.
"That's why you're here. Every one of you carries that same latent gene. You weren't raised in packs. You didn't grow up knowing wolves existed. Until recently, you had no reason to believe you were anything other than human."
He is silent a moment.
"But you're not."
My brain catches on those two words and refuses to move past them.
Jon's voice softens. "We don't know when—or even if—each of you will shift. That's part of what we're here to help you discover. But your bloodwork wasn't a mistake. The scholarship wasn't random."
His eyes settle on mine.
"You're here because you're one of us."
Nobody breathes.
I turn to Torres, because I have to, because it's the only fixed point in the room. "You knew," I say again — not an accusation, just needing it confirmed, needing something solid.
He nods.
Jon looks at him. "Would you be willing to tell them? Your version? I think they need it from someone who isn't me."
Torres considers it, then nods again, and when he talks he doesn't dress it up.
"I was in juvie," he says, plain. "Seventeen.
Long record before that — foster homes, fights, the whole thing.
Everybody'd already decided what I was." He turns his scarred knuckles over, an old habit.
"They did a blood panel on intake. A few weeks later some people I'd never met showed up and told me I was getting transferred to a special school.
" A short, dry laugh. "I figured it was a scam or a psych ward.
Once I got there, I shifted. I was scared out of my mind, no idea what was happening to my own body.
" He says it without drama, but I feel it anyway, the size of it.
"Feral Academy taught me it wasn't the end of me.
That I wasn't broken, I was just — this.
Then I transferred to Frosthaven, and now I'm here. "
He looks around at us, steady. "So when I say you're still you? I mean it." His eyes flick, briefly, to me. "You five already have more than I did. You've got a week of knowing each other. You've got Jon. You've got somebody who came out the other side sitting right here telling you it's possible."
I realize, looking at him, that he's been exactly where we are right now. Exactly. And he's fine. More than fine — he's the calmest, safest-feeling person in the room. It's the first thing all morning that makes the ground feel like it might hold my weight.
Then the questions come, because they have to.
"When?" I ask. It's the only word big enough. "When does it — how do we know when it's going to—"
"Nobody knows exactly," Jon says. "It varies. Stress can trigger it. The full moon has an influence, though not the one the movies would tell you. For most latents it happens within the first year or two of the marker activating. Sometimes sooner."
"Does it hurt?" Sophia asks, very small.
Jon doesn't lie to her. "You definitely feel it. Your body is doing something it's never done. After that, less each time, until it barely registers. Like any hard thing your body learns."
"Can we stop it?" Declan asks, low. "If we — if someone didn't want this. Could they just… not?"
"No," Jon says, and he says it kindly but he doesn't soften the truth.
"The shift is coming whether you understand it or not.
That's the one thing none of you can choose.
" A pause. "What you can choose is whether it happens with people who know how to help you through it — or alone.
Like most latents used to, before this program existed. "
"Why didn't anyone tell us?" Freya's voice, when it finally comes, is sharper than I've ever heard it. "Before now. Before we — you brought us all the way up a mountain to—"
"Because there is no letter I could have written that you would have believed," Jon says simply.
"You'd have thrown it in the recycling." His eyes land on me, and despite everything, the corner of my mouth almost moves, because I did.
Multiple times. "This is the only way it works.
You have to see it. I'm sorry it's a cruel way to learn. I don’t know a kinder one. "
Renzo, who's climbed back into a chair, tries one last time for the joke, voice thin: "So… dogs love us now? That's a perk, right? Dogs?"
Nobody laughs. Not because it isn't funny. Because we're all somewhere past it.
And in the quiet after, it finally rearranges itself in my head — the whole thing, clicking into a new and terrible shape.
The scholarship. The privacy. The remote castle, hours from anyone.
The armed gate. We're more interested in people who never had the chance to find out what they're capable of.
The way Jon never once oversold the academics.
This was never about getting into a prestigious university.
It's about surviving the thing that's already coming for all of us.
I don't say it out loud. I don't have to. I can see the same understanding landing on every face in the room, one by one, like a light going out.
They give us the afternoon.
The van to the main academy is pushed to tomorrow — "nobody should make a decision like this in the same hour they learned it," Jon says — and one by one people drift off to be alone with it, or not alone.
Declan and Freya end up walking the grounds together, not talking, which is apparently their language.
Sophia attaches herself to Renzo and they go find somewhere to fall apart and put each other back together.
Jon disappears to give us room, but not before catching my eye and saying, quietly, that Pickles is fine, warm, fed, and completely unbothered by any of this, and I'm embarrassingly grateful that in the middle of my entire reality collapsing, someone remembered my lizard.
I end up at one of the tall windows at the end of the corridor, the one that looks out over the whole range, because I don't know what else to do with my body and the mountains are the only thing big enough to look at right now.
Torres finds me there. Of course he does. He doesn't say anything at first, just leans against the stone beside me, close but not crowding, and looks out at the same peaks.
"Does it ever stop feeling impossible?" I ask finally. My voice is quieter than I mean it to be.
He thinks about it. He actually thinks, doesn't just reach for the comforting thing, and I appreciate that more than I can say.
"No," he says.
I let out a breath that's almost a laugh.
He bumps my shoulder gently with his. "It just starts feeling normal."