Chapter Text
Camila was in her kitchen reading through a veterinary textbook she hadn't touched in many years. It was a book about a certain animal she deeply loved, but also one she had no practical experience taking care of. In a small Connecticut town like Gravesfield veterinarians like her spend their careers treating household pets, and very rarely if ever do they get the chance to provide medical care for wolves.
So her spending the last two hours taking care of a teenage wolf was a dream come true, except that in her dreams she never treated one in her house, nor was he actually her adopted son who got stuck in that form thanks to a malfunction in some sort of magical ritual.
Yes. Magic is real… Not in the human realm (barring some exceptions) but definitely in the demon realm, a whole separate dimension that forever changed the lives of Camila and her only biological daughter Luz.
Two of the biggest changes came in the form of Camila adopting two non-human kids that originated from the demon realm, or more specifically an archipelago in it called The Boiling Isles. Her two amazing kids she loved with whole her heart and did her best to be the family they always deserved. Luz was not just fully on board with the family expansion, she claimed Hunter as their own much earlier than Camila did.
But having kids that spend most or even some of their time in a different dimension where magic exists can sometimes make a parent's life quite challenging. For example, one morning your son leaves the house for what was supposed to be a week-long camping trip with one of his demon realm guardians, a biped demon named Eberwolf, and a few hours later he comes back to her all wolf-shaped!
It was a very particular kind of camping trip, one that biped demons like Eberwolf don't often offer witches to come with. When they do like in the case of Hunter, it is customary for the witches to partake in a magic ritual that can give a witch attributes humans normally associate with beasts.
It is a perfectly safe ritual for any witch or demon who decides to experience it… but Hunter is neither; He is a Grimwalker, a being created by a type of magic long forgotten on the isles, that had a much more complex biological mixture. On the surface, her son appeared as a completely normal witch, albeit one who couldn't cast spells due to a lack of a functioning bile sac, the special organ that is attached to a witch's heart, and from which 'magic comes from'. In truth, Hunter had no bile sac for he was 'cloned' from a human, and his heart was made from a magical relic called a galderstone.
Galderstones have the unique property of greatly boosting magic, and that fact is likely behind the transformation ritual going wrong: Instead of just temporarily gaining the hearing and smelling sense of a wolf, Huner's favorite animal, and the ability to growl and howl like one, Hunter found himself fully transformed into one.
He was still himself, recognizing Eberwolf and all other familiar figures he encountered, but he was also distressed and clearly needed to be changed back as soon as possible. The safest de-transformation method for the ritual was simply letting the magic holding it run out. But likely due to his galderstone heart, the tests they ran showed It can take up to a week.
And then someone had the idea to covertly run those tests while he was in the human realm, to see if the relative lack of magic would decrease the duration, and they came back with a 14-hour duration.
This was the explanation given to Camila by Darius Daemon when he and Eberwolf brought her son back to the human realm. Darius was also one of Hunter's many legal guardians in The Boiling Isles, but anyone who knew the two realized that by this point he was one of Hunter's two full-blown parents, even if they have yet to make it official.
The explanation obviously came with a profound (and as always extremely polite) apology, an oath to never let something happen to her son again, and a promise to be available 24 hours on the scroll (a smartphone 'equivalent' means of demon realm communication Camila had access to) in case she needed any kind of help.
So here Camila was, consumed by thoughts on how to best help her son remain as comfortable as possible while they waited it out. She didn't notice the front door opening or her daughter Luz entering in and immediately rushing down the stairs to the basement to grab the board game she and her sister Vee decided to play with their friends that afternoon.
Camila however very much did hear Luz's somewhat frightened but mostly excited shouts about a WOLF BEING IN THEIR HOUSE.