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at school,” I said. “Find out what he knows.”
    Meagan caught her breath. “It’s dangerous.”
    “Not stopping them would be worse.”
    Meagan frowned as she reviewed my list with record speed. She and I agreed that the ultimate key had to lie in the alliance of shifters we’d formed. Skuld had been warning me of pending disaster. We had to prevent it from happening.
    I could see that Meagan was drooping, so I told her to get some sleep while she could. She curled up in bed with both cats, one hand on Mozart, and soon I was the only one awake in the room. I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.
    First things first. I composed a message to Liam, Garrett, and Nick, my best guy friends and dragon shifters, too, briefly explaining my dream and asking them to come to Chicago ASAP. This was an emergency. Nick answered right away in the affirmative, I guess because he was awake. That made me feel a bit better. If there was fighting to be done, Nick was the dragon to call.
    Next up, the other shifters. I’d see both Jessica and Derek at school in the morning, just hours away. I had no idea where to find Kohana, much less how to warn him, other than sending him a text message. He had a tendency—like another guy I knew—to ignore text messages.
    That got me to thinking about the alliance.
    And King’s reaction.
    Wasn’t it funny that we didn’t know what the cat shifters even called themselves? Actually, we didn’t know what Derek’s wolf shifters called themselves, either, just that they had a prophecy to follow a dragon when “the stars stood still.” That would be now, during the Great Lunar Standstill. There was quite a lot we didn’t know about one another, so we’d better get started if we were going to solve this riddle.
    By tonight.
    No pressure.
    I pulled out my messenger and sent another message to Garrett. I didn’t think I’d forgotten those names for the other kinds of shifters, but it was possible. Garrett would remember if I had. Or he might be able to find out in his mom’s bookstore. I asked him to score any details about shifters he could find.
    I hesitated a moment, then sent a message to Derek, asking what the wolf shifters called themselves. It suddenly seemed important to define what was similar about us remaining shifters and what was different.
    Were we four kinds the survivors for a reason?
    One that Team Mage knew and we didn’t?
    Because there was exactly zero chance of my falling back asleep and it was only 5:14 in the morning, I made a chart on my messenger of what I knew about the four remaining kinds of shifters. It was pretty thin but looked like this:

    I should have sent a message to Jessica then, but I hesitated. Meagan could do it.
    Things weren’t great between me and Jessica. I still felt that there was a barrier between us. I’d thought it was just the math proficiency that fed her bond with Meagan, but now I realized we hadn’t talked about shifter stuff since discovering our respective powers in November.
    Not at all.
    And it was strange. I mean, having that in common had to be more important than sharing a talent for math. Both of us being wildcards gave us common ground, too. That was certainly more rare than acing math. Meagan had said before that Jessica was an only child, under a lot of pressure from her folks.
    If she was the cat shifter equivalent of the Wyvern, why didn’t we have more of a bond?
    I had tried to open the topic a bunch of times. But she always changed the subject, like she was avoiding myquestions. And I was starting to think that she was avoiding me, too.
    What didn’t she want me to know?
    I wished I could have been less suspicious of her, but given her behavior, I couldn’t. That was partly because she’d been compelled to help the Mages in the past, but mostly it was because of her evasiveness ever since.
    Were the cat shifters still aligned with the Mages?
    Or were they just naturally secretive?
    It was almost time for the alarm