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How Not To Become Lunch: 37 - Don’t Be Surprised
“Jack!”
The boy turned, and a moment later let out a little sigh of relief. He waved back to Ozzy, walking down the hall with Zach. Their friendly company and the inherent safety were welcome to say the least.
“Hey, guys,” he greeted with a smile, “how was class?”
“Fine-”
“Hard-”
The two overlapping answers almost made Jack chuckle.
“Sorry,” said Zach, awkwardly apologizing for cutting his friend off.
“It’s fine,” Ozzy replied. “But yeah, it was pretty tough- for me at least. The teacher gave us an etymology quiz. I mean, isn’t it enough to just know how to use a word in a spell? Do we really need to know where the meaning came from too?”
“It is important to make sure you fully understand a word, especially before you try to use it in a complex spell,” Zach answered.
“Geeze, you sound just like Mr. Erlin,” Ozzy laughed.
“Sorry,” Zach apologized again.
“It’s fine,” Ozzy encouraged. “Besides, you’re both probably right.” He rolled his eyes in begrudging acceptance. “But when my head starts spinning it’s enough to make me wish I was back in Ms. Caster’s class.”
“Not today you don’t,” Jack countered.
“Oh no, did she pull another one of her ‘trials’?”
“Yup, and she called me up to her desk at the start to waste my time.”
“Seriously?” Ozzy looked gravely concerned. “Man, she really wants you, huh?”
“Yeah… But, you know, it’s thanks to Zach that I managed to get away. That lesson yesterday was a literal lifesaver.”
“Glad I could help,” Zach replied with a slightly bashful smile.
*guuurgle*
All three boys looked over as a dragon-teen with a particularly large, squirming belly, walked past. There was a short moment of tense silence.
“…Guess we should probably get to lunch too,” Ozzy said. They started walking with mutters of agreement, suddenly feeling a bit exposed standing still in the increasingly busy hallway.
“You think they’ll have anything good today, Jack?” Ozzy asked as they passed through an intersection.
Jack opened his mouth to speak, but a not-too-distant shout caught his attention:
“Macalister!!”
“Huh?” Jack muttered, head snapping to look down the hall. Not a moment later he began to silently scold himself, annoyed that he’d let the name call him like that. It wasn’t until another moment later that he realized he was looking almost straight at Fiona. Fiona and meal; the werewolf had a human- an adult- flailing nearly halfway down her gullet.
The image struck him. Just seeing Fiona, grown up after all these years, had been one thing. Seeing her swallowing people her own size had been something else- and he’d just started getting accustomed to that. But seeing her in the process of scarfing down someone even larger than either of them was almost surreal. He watched her throat and jaws stretch and stretch to accommodate her prey, and found himself questioning if she could really get the man down, but the memory of her enormous belly after she’d caught that ‘volunteer prey’ reminded him that she very much could.
“Mom, look out!”
Jack looked to the student who had cried out: a boy standing near Fiona, his hand clutched by an older woman, a woman whom Jack noticed had just pulled out a wand with her other hand and was aiming it intently in the werewolf’s direction. Jack took an almost involuntary step forward, afraid of what the mother might do, but then he noticed, along with everyone else: Arthur.
The other werewolf had crept up just behind her. She whirled around in a panic, and he plucked the wand from her hand as easily as a flower from the dirt. Jack let his breath out in relief, even as the unrest continued to grow inside him.
“Reuben, run!!” the mother yelled. Jack watched her thrust her son away just as the predator’s jaws came down to claim her. He saw Arthur bring her to her knees, and then from down the hall heard the distant, meaty sound as the werewolf swallowed:
*GULP*
Jack felt a certain… coldness, come over him. Watching the way the werewolf hunted, the way he ate, deftly calculated and deliberate, without showing the slightest hint of remorse and instead displaying a clear, focused zeal, eagerly devouring the human now in his jaws.
And then he looked back to Fiona. He watched her gulping down her own meal, dragging the man down her throat just as eagerly. …Somehow he just didn’t feel the same as with Arthur, he couldn’t help but see the friend he knew underneath, the warmth he knew, and yet… watching them both together, he couldn’t help but see how similar they seemed. What actually set them apart he couldn’t quite say, and that thought alone brought a new chill to the scene.
“She really is a real predator, isn’t she?”
Jack was startled to notice both Ozzy and Zach silently standing and watching alongside him. The words Ozzy had muttered and the expression on his face said it all. Not that he’d ever been completely comfortable around her, but with all that time she’d spent harmlessly hanging around them at lunch, it was easy to forget just what she was really capable of.
A growing round of gulps drew Jack’s gaze back. Staring, he watched the husband and wife disappearing each down into the belly of their respective predator. But he found his eyes falling mainly on Fiona. It still seemed so surreal, watching her powerful gullet suck down a man so overpoweringly, seeing her belly grow and grow as she drew the human over the line from father to food.
Even more strange than the sight was the feeling. As Jack watched the man’s legs begin to disappear down into his friend’s maw, this odd, irreconcilable conflict took hold. On one hand, he felt himself hoping that she would pull it off. He was proud of her skill, happy for her pleasure, relieved at her safe success. On the other hand, seeing her next to Arthur as the other werewolf’s belly swelled in turn, seeing that look they were sharing, Jack almost wished he could ask her to stop.
But he didn’t ask, and she didn’t stop. Legs, knees, feet and toes disappeared into the muzzle of the huntress, down her throat, and finally came to rest in her stomach, packed away behind fur and muscle and fat, now ready to be transformed into more of the same.
Jack’s chest rose and fell as he remembered to breathe, though it was an uneasy breath as he watched the little shifting lumps in Fiona’s shirt that were her meal’s first attempts to settle. A moment later Fiona stumbled, nearly losing her balance; and Jack nearly took a step again, remembering almost without meaning to how unstable she’d been with that big belly of hers that first time she’d swallowed an adult.
But Arthur was there. He walked over and placed a steadying hand on her shoulder. And a moment later the rest of her friends from her predator class were there too, congratulating them, praising them.
“Come on,” Ozzy said quietly, gleaning just enough from Jack’s expression to know that whatever he had stirring in his head wasn’t something to dwell on.
Jack nodded and faked a poor little smile, following Ozzy as he started to walk. After a few silent steps, Zach spoke up.
“…So… is Macalister your nickname or something?” he asked, trying his best to start a pleasant conversation. Unfortunately, this was one socially awkward blunder that Jack really wished his new friend hadn’t made, but he answered, nevertheless.
“No, Macalister was my dad’s name…”