Chapter 11 When Worlds Collide

For a while they all remained silent. None of them could muster up the words to speak. Marcus and Julianna were in shock over what they had seen before he woke up, and Joshua was going over the events that had happened while we was unconscious.

He could not make sense of what had happened, no matter how hard he tried. It was something he probably would never understand, and something that he definitely will never forget.

Finally the silence was broken when Joshua decided to try and fill them in on what had happened. At least, he would try his best to.

"Marcus.... Jules.... there's something I gotta tell you." He began, his voice only just above a whisper. His throat hurt from lack of liquids but he chose to ignore it.

"What's going on?" Julianna asked, knowing that look all too well as it was the same look she would give when she had something serious to say that was on her mind, or just important in general.

It was the same look that he had given her when he informed her that they had received a letter from their incarcerated father a few years back. It was a look she had come to know and hate.

"Nothing is ever as it seems, and so it appears that all these years, we thought that we had normal complicated lives, it turns out none of us in this room are even part of the human world." He began, almost sounding crazy, if it weren't for the fact that they all knew what was beneath the human facade in Moonsong Valley.

He also sounded depressed, which wasn't a Joshua thing. All his life, whenever something sad or serious had come up he always tried to make light of it by cracking jokes and putting on his clown mask. But not this time. No. This time things were much different and the way he was talking was much different. He wasn't the same class clown kind of boy that he used to be.

"What are you talking about bro?" Marcus asked, noticing how depressed Joshua sounded. He began to really worry about his friend. It wasn't like Joshua at all. What if this experience had changed him in bad ways? He thought uneasily.

"This! What happened to me, the bleeding and searing head pain, that was all part of a transition. A transition Jules will also make very soon." He informed them, repeating what he had learned from his time out. It was something that would send them through another roller coaster loop, but it was necessary.

"Transition into what?! What the hell?" Julianna quizzed, her eyes growing wide with realisation and horror. She was scared to no ends after hearing what he had to say.

"Kitsune." Joshua finished, which only led to more stunned and awkward silence. The three of them were having trouble coming to terms with all this new knowledge they were learning.

Marcus was travelling through his memories during that silence. Memories that he had thought were of a normal childhood. Suddenly he remembered all those bed stories that his mother would read to him as a child.

Stories about a young werewolf, and kitsune, two sides of the supernatural world, teaming up together to take on a much bigger evil threat. Were those stories really stories, or were they some kind of prophecy? He questioned, searching his head for all the memories that could have been hints towards the events that have unfolded recently. Though there was one thing that worried him....

If the werewolf and kitsune being friends and teaming up had come true then, would this greater evil threat also come true? He could only hope that that part was untrue.

But if it was.... they would be in for the fight of their lives. Something that Marcus dreaded, he did not believe he was strong enough to take on enemies yet. He was far from it, he believed.

Julianna used the silence to process everything. Between hearing the conversation between her brother and Marcus, to Joshua's ordeal, to what had happened between her and Marcus in the lobby, her head was filled with questions and drama.

What even was a kitsune?

How did Joshua get that information?

What did that moment with Marcus mean?

All these questions that were piling up were just getting way too much for her to handle. She didn't know how much more of this she could take.

Although what frightened her was Joshua saying that she would go through that exact same thing that she had just seen her brother go through. The worst part was not knowing when it would happen. It could happen any time, any place.

With the warning from Joshua, she knew that she had to be prepared for the transition. If she wasn't prepared, it would mess her up the way it had almost messed Joshua up. Now that she knew what to expect, it would be much less shocking when it actually did happen.

Joshua was lost in the silence. It felt so good to finally get that off his chest yet at the same time it felt awful to burden them with something huge like that, especially since he knew that both were already dealing with a lot. He couldn't help but feel a little guilty although he knew that they had to be told.

Then he remembered something else from his time out and it made him question what had happened so far. His grandma had said something about how 'shadows would hear them' just before she took him back to her cottage. The only question that was in his head was,

What were the shadows?

Nothing evil, he could only hope.

The three of them remained in silence. Each lost in their own train of thought, but all wondering the exact same thing...

Was their future at stake?