Free Neophyte / Adept by T.D. McMichael

fight. I want in, that’s all.”)
    Ballard explained to me about shape changing (“It’s like
this tingling in your nether bits,” he said) and how it’s really painful. “It
sounds like you’re doing it wrong,” I told him.
    “That’s the thing. I have so much to learn. I want to learn,” he said. “I want to know . Finally I understand what it’s
like being you !”
    He laughed and finished his spaghetti. It was like watching
the bloodied muzzle of a carnivore tear its way through a carcass.
    A bunch more questions popped into my head, now that we were
being honest with each other.
    I reasoned that any knowledge was good knowledge, and that
it would improve my magical education, would it not, knowing as much as I could
about he and his family? I did not tell him that I had dreamed I was a wolf. There was no need to freak
him out too badly.
    I noticed that he had seemed to take on a bit of the
werewolf in his everyday life. His table manners were not of the best.
    “Even when I’m on two legs, I’m still a werewolf,” he said,
“if you follow me?” He grinned. I could tell what he meant. It sounded like a
license to kill.
    “Don’t get carried away too much by it, Ballard,” I told
him. He told me not to worry about it.
    “What about when a werewolf bites someone, is that person
placed under the Curse ?” I asked him.
I wanted to know if he was dangerous, and if I should worry about him.
    “Curse?” That seemed to astonish him greatly. “No, no. It’s
like we’re super powerful. You’re either born with the gift or you aren’t.
There is no curse.”
    “And the whole full moon thing?” I asked.
    “I love the full moon,” he said.
    “You know what I mean, Ballard.”
    “I can only tell you this. We’re sitting under a full moon
now. The remnants of last night’s full moon, and if I didn’t kill anybody
then.... Werewolves get better with age, more powerful, and we also learn
self-control. But this is more to do with controlling the gift, not wielding
it.”
    “Actually, you seem rather composed. If we’re going off
stories, I mean.”
    “The werewolf roaming the countryside myth? Hogwash,” said
Ballard. “We’ve been used to explain away criminal behavior in human beings.”
    I listened as Ballard explained about murderers and other
sickos stalking the night.
    “...Cannibals, mutilation, is he or isn’t he on a lunar cycle? It sickens me. But then I
remember that is what we want them to think––people. That we don’t
exist. That we are not real .... It’s
like the best inheritance ever!”
    I watched him dip his fork into the cheesecake, with the
dripping wet red cherries, and took a bite of my own. We were in our own
unusual world.
    “I prefer the cave paintings,” he said. “At least there, man
and animal were one.”
    How many of them were there? And was that how long it had
been going on? Had human beings been metamorphosing into animals since
pre-history?
    “It’s all there...” said Ballard. “At Lascaux, the
pyramids––Pleistocene aurochs and cats , alligators and the like. And that’s another thing. I Gatti is
comprised entirely of cyanthropes... Dogs ...
How we came to be called the Cats is
beyond me...”
    “You’re saying people transform into all of these things?” I
said.
    “No. I’m saying that I have a tail. It’s just hidden right
now,” said Ballard. “The gene, or whatever it is, isn’t recessive at all. It’s
dominant. Every member of I Gatti is affected. We all change.”
    As I listened to him speak, I recalled that of the 8 Virtues
which affected my kind––Insight, Discretion, Virtuosity,
Severeness, Humor, Goodwill, and Grace––one of them was also
Malleability, which was the ability to change in its purest form.
    Had I just discovered my own Virtue? Were the dreams telling
me that I was Malleable? That I was going to be a shape changer?
    He talked about what he called the transmigration of the
soul, next. “A wolf can be