Page 44 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

1. How old are you REALLY? 2. Do you eat people? 3. Can you turn me into a lycan? (NOT a request, just curious.) 4. Is your whole family like this? 5. Why do your eyes do the gold thing? 6. What’s the deal with the “mate” thing I keep reading about online? (The internet is UNHINGED about this.) 7. Are you going to keep lurking outside my window? 8. Why?

Eight questions. Some practical. Some suspicious. Some that make my heart race and my hands shake slightly.

She’s researching. She’s asking. She wants to understand.

She hasn’t run yet.

I pull a pen from my pocket, I always carry a pen, have done since the invention of the ballpoint, and start to write.

***

LYCAN FAQ: ANSWERS

(Note: Alphabetized by question number because my brain physically cannot organize information any other way. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. You’ll learn to love it.)

Q1. How old are you REALLY?

Old enough to know better. Young enough to still make terrible decisions, see: showing up at a stranger’s hospital bed, alphabetizing her bookstore, shifting in her stockroom while completely naked.

Town says thirty-four. Town is polite.

I stopped counting after the first century because the numbers started to feel meaningless. What does it matter if you’ve seen one hundred years or two hundred or three? After a certain point, you’ve witnessed enough births and deaths and empires rising and falling that the specifics blur together. You remember feelings more than dates. Moments more than years.

You asked for honesty, so here’s the most honest thing I can tell you: I’ve been alive for a very long time, and most of it felt like waiting. Like standing in an empty room, listening for a sound that might never come.

Then I found you bleeding in a car, calling me pretty like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I’m not waiting anymore.

(Footnote: The Spanish flu was terrible. The Inquisition was worse. The invention of the leaf blower was a close third.)

Q2. Do you eat people?

No.

Absolutely, categorically, without exception: no.

We’re predators, not monsters. There’s a difference, and it matters. Lycans hunt, it’s in our nature, unavoidable, but we hunt animals, not people. Any lycan who ever tried to harm a human for food would answer to me personally, and the results would be extremely unpleasant for them.

I’ve been king for over two hundred years. In that time, I’ve dealt with exactly three cases of a lycan threatening a human. None of those lycans are threats anymore.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that means.

(Footnote: I’m vegetarian about 60 percent of the time these days. Not for ethical reasons, more for variety. Three hundred years of the same diet gets boring.)

Q3. Can you turn me into a lycan? (NOT a request, just curious.)

Not through a bite, despite what popular media suggests. The condition is genetic, passed through bloodlines. Werewolf rules don’t apply to us, we’re a different species entirely, with different biology and different limitations.

There is a ritual that can turn a human, but it’s ancient, dangerous, and rarely performed. The survival rate is… low. Most humans don’t make it through the transformation.

I’m choosing to believe you when you say this isn’t a request. But if it ever becomes one, if you ever wanted this, the answer would still be no. Not because I wouldn’t want you as one of us. But because I refuse to risk losing you to a process that could kill you.

Some things aren’t worth the gamble.

(Footnote: The last human who successfully completed the transformation did it well over a century ago. She lived a long lycan life and became one of the most formidable alphas in North America. But she’s the exception, not the rule.)

Q4. Is your whole family like this?