Chapter Text
There is a cat sleeping on the ground, curled up on its side at the foot of a chair. This is cute and all, but it would be better if the cat was not inside the small drivers’ room of the Jaguar TCS Racing team.
“What the fuck,” Sam says out loud. This would not happen if Mitch learned to close the door behind him. “Get out of here!”
The cat lifts its head to yawn, then looks at Sam without blinking. It’s all grey, looks a lot fluffier than the stray cats Sam has seen all over the streets of Mexico, but Sam doesn’t think he should try to grab it. He kind of needs his hands to race, so.
“Pshhh,” he tries, tapping his foot down a few times. “Psssh!”
The cat doesn’t seem startled in the slightest.
“What’s going on?” Mitch asks, peering his head in.
“There’s a cat in our room,” Sam explains, gesticulating towards the cat in question, who gets up at this moment and meows at Mitch.
Mitch squints at it. “It’s fine, it’s just Robin,” he says nonchalantly.
Sam blinks at him. “What?”
Mitch’s eyes suddenly go wide, a panicked look on his face. “Um. Nothing!”
So, Robin can turn into a cat. This is news to Sam, but apparently not to Mitch; nor to André, that Mitch calls in a fit of panic citing ‘an emergency’.
André shows up five minutes later, already in his fireproofs for FP1.
“This is kind of not the time,” he tells them, putting his hands on his waist. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry,” Mitch says. “I know I shouldn’t have told Sam but Robin showed up here for some reason and I didn’t think–”
“I think you rather should have told me, yes!” Sam exclaims. “The fact that my ex-teammate is a cat is kind of a big deal, don’t you think?”
Despite the shouting match, the cat –Robin, apparently– doesn’t seem afraid. He meows again, more insistently, rubbing up against André’s leg.
“Ugh, Jev is gonna hate that,” André mutters, picking Robin up delicately. “Mitch, it’s fine. Stoffel said he was going to find out this year, remember? The issue now is why is Robin here instead of getting ready?”
Robin rubs his head against the underside of André’s chin.
“No, I don’t think that’s quite the issue,” Sam persists. “The issue is that none of you are finding this weird!”
André shushes him, which, okay, rude. He lifts Robin above his head, so he can peer into his eyes, and squints.
“I think we need to find di Grassi,” he says.
“Not again,” Lucas says as soon as they enter the Mahindra garage. “I’m busy.”
“What do you mean, not again?” Sam exclaims.
Lucas takes one long, bored look at him. He raises an eyebrow.
“Sorry!” Mitch immediately pipes up. “It’s my fault. I told him Robin is a cat.”
“And he believed you?” Lucas says. Ah, so maybe it is a prank after all.
“We’ll deal with that later,” André interrupts. “I think Robin is stuck.” He hands the cat to di Grassi.
“I figured, considering there are only fifteen minutes before free practice and he’s still like that,” Lucas sighs. Sam expected him to laugh and immediately put the cat down, ribbing him about how gullible he is. Instead, di Grassi looks into Robin’s eyes in much the same way André had done, serious.
“Mitch, go find Nico, maybe he’ll know what’s going on with Robin. André, call Scot. Depending on what we find, we might need to cancel this session.”
Usually, people don’t let themselves be bossed around by di Grassi. Sam kind of likes the guy, has learned to appreciate his passion for their sport, but he sometimes acts like he’s a bit better than all of them: in turn, it makes it funny to ignore him a bit, now and then. Right now, though, Mitch nods sharply before setting off, and André grabs Lucas’ phone from a table and steps outside. None of the engineers still working on the Mahindras seem surprised. This feels less and less like a joke, and Sam had never seen a cat who let itself be manhandled in this way.
“This is mad,” Sam mutters to himself.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you an amnesia potion if you can’t handle it,” Lucas says off-handedly, no trace of teasing in his tone as he steps into his drivers’ room. He’s holding Robin at arm’s length, as if trying to touch him as little as possible. Sam follows him, feels his head spin a little as Lucas dumps Robin onto a table and grabs a brown business suitcase, the kind that would fit in well in a 70s espionage movie.
“Don’t move,” he tells Robin seriously.
Sam must be in a dream; Lucas’ case is full of plants stored in little glass bottles, nestled amongst small liquid containers and a variety of metal trinkets, as well as a pocket mirror hanging from the top.
These must be drugs; Sam must be on drugs right now.
Lucas takes a bottle filled with a yellow powder, sniffs it once before taking a pinch and spreading it around Robin, who meows again. Sam is very much a dog person, but it sounds distressed even to his own ears.
“Shh,” Lucas says, putting a gold necklace around his own neck before holding some sort of crystal ball in front of him.
He starts murmuring something, and Sam’s no expert but it doesn’t sound English or Portuguese at all. Wisps of grey smoke start swirling into the ball, slowly turning a brown-ish colour before fading away into nothingness.
“Shit,” Lucas says emphatically.
Mitch texts them to say that he hasn’t found Nico, and to meet him in one of the rooms usually used for briefings. He adds ‘BIG PROBLEMS’ at the end, like Sam hadn’t already figured that out.
“Yeah, Scot’s cancelling at least the session, if not the weekend,” André is saying to Lucas as they march towards the end of the pitlane. “Apparently it’s not just Robin.”
“Great,” Lucas mumbles. He hasn’t taken the golden necklace off, and he’s idly playing with it in a very uncharacteristic display of nervousness.
Robin, now in Sam’s arms, meows and licks his hand.
“Gross,” Sam says. “Also, what is going on again?”
Lucas shoots a look at André, who shrugs.
“It’s some supernatural stuff,” André finally says. “Sorry, we’ll explain later.”
“If your small human mind can comprehend it,” Lucas adds haughtily, and Sam had almost forgotten he was still kind of an asshole.
There’s barking coming from inside the meeting room, for some reason. Lucas enters without knocking.
Mitch and Jev are standing next to each other, while the two largest dogs Sam has ever seen pace around the room. One perks up when he enters, immediately making a beeline for him. It doesn’t seem aggressive, but Sam is still relieved when André intercepts it with a hand on the muzzle and gets it to step back. The dog moves obediently under André’s touch.
“I just found them like this,” Jev is saying. “I have no idea where Seb is.”
“And Jake?” André asks. “Haven’t seen him in the garage for a while either, now that you mention it.”
Jev turns towards them, scrunches his nose when André pats his shoulder, before his gaze falls on Robin and he bares his teeth at him. Robin hisses back, but doesn’t otherwise move.
Once again, the dog comes closer, this time facing Jev and growling.
“António, stop that,” di Grassi says, and Sam has to do a double take because what now??
“I don’t know where Dennis is either,” Jev finally replies, looking back at André.
“Any idea what’s happening?” Mitch asks, left foot tapping the floor in rapid succession. He keeps staring at the dogs. “Why haven't we all shifted, then?”
“Someone’s cursed them,” Lucas says without preambles. “I couldn’t identify who did it, or what their intentions were.”
“Spirits?” André asks. He crosses his arms in front of his chest, a frown between his brows. “I didn’t feel anything.”
“No, it was probably through an object. Something that all of them came in contact with, but neither Mitch nor Jev yet.”
Sam is starting to let himself seriously consider that this might actually be real, because he knows none of his friends are good enough actors to be pulling a prank for this long without cracking up. Or maybe he’s going crazy and making this all up in his head. In his arms, Robin-cat wriggles until he sets him down, at which point he moves to sit between the paws of– well, António, apparently. He seems so tiny, next to it.
“I wish Alex was here,” Mitch mutters. “He’d know how to find it.”
André perks up. “What about Fenestraz?”
Fenestraz, too? What is Sam then, the only normal guy of the group?
The second dog, the one that is not António, but is probably someone else on the grid if Sam were to hazard a guess, barks enthusiastically.
“He’s too young,” Lucas contests immediately. “The person who cursed them has managed to bypass the paddock’s protections. They must be powerful.”
“This is our only choice,” Jev says. “Or do you want to call someone from the FIA?”
Lucas grimaces.
“I’ll text him,” Mitch says, phone in hand. “Are we going to need candles?”
Lucas rolls his eyes. “Obviously.”
Sam immediately feels a strong affiliation with Sacha as soon as he enters. The young man’s eyes widen as he takes in the room, right hand nervously flexing around the shoulder strap of a messenger bag; they must make a weird picture, half of them in race suits and the other half turned into animals. And Sam, for some reason.
“Um,” Sacha says. “Wow. I’d actually never seen werewolves before.”
Sam feels faint, but he doesn’t even want to ask. Instead, he locates the closest chair and tries to collapse into it as discreetly as possible. André pats his shoulder in a manner that should be comforting, but instead feels a bit patronising.
“We need you to perform a revelation spell,” Lucas says.
Sacha nods. “Mitch told me. But, you know, I’ve never done it on a living thing before, and depending on the caster’s strength, I…”
“We need you to try anyway, alright?” Jev says, though not unkindly.
“What do you need?” Mitch asks.
For the next minute, they all push the tables and chairs back from the centre of the room, while Sacha looks up something on his phone. He takes a cray from his bag and starts to draw circular patterns on the floor.
“Dude, are you googling what runes to use?” Mitch asks incredulously.
“Of course not,” Sacha scoffs. “I have some books in pdf.”
Mitch jabs his elbow into Lucas’ ribs. “You should do the same, instead of always carrying a suitcase of dusty old books.”
Lucas grumbles, swatting Mitch away. “What are you doing? This isn’t very… conventional.”
“These are the runes used in a revelation spell, aren’t they?” Sacha replies.
“I’ve never seen them used in that order before.” Lucas crosses his arms.
“Jesus, Lucas,” André says. “Just let him do his thing.”
Lucas huffs but doesn’t add anything else, while Sacha lights up candles at regular intervals around the main circle he’s drawn.
“Norman, step back please,” he tells the second dog, who goes to sit down at Jev’s feet. “I need Robin to get in the middle, right here. Don’t move while I perform the spell.”
António-the-dog licks the top of Robin-the-cat’s head while he goes, and Robin glares at him before sitting down in the centre of the circle.
“Okay,” Sacha says, sitting criss-crossed on the ground in front of the circle. “Nobody interrupts me.”
He holds one hand out in front of him, putting the other down on the edge of the circle. Sam feels all the hair on his arms stand on end as the room seems to fill with static. He sits back down on his chair.
Under Robin’s paws, the circle begins to glow faintly, a deep purple colour. Robin shifts nervously, his tail flicking. Both António and Norman crouch closer to the ground, pressed against Jev’s legs. Mitch seems to be similarly half-hiding behind André, while Lucas’s eyes are tracking something just above Robin’s head.
Sam can’t see anything special. In fact, he’s starting to not see anything at all, vision zeroing in on the purple light that is now glowing more strongly. He cannot tell if Sacha’s eyes are glowing as well, or if it’s just the reflection. There is a buzzing in his ears, starting to drone out all other sounds.
Suddenly, it all stops. For a minute, Sam is almost convinced he has passed out; it feels like blinking awake from a bad dream, taking in the room again under a new light. The glow has disappeared, as has the buzzing, his ears almost ringing with the absence of it. All the candles have been snuffed out, filling the room with dark smoke; Sacha is crumpled on the ground, a worried Norman nosing at his arm.
“I’m okay,” Sacha says faintly. “Can you see it?”
Sam blinks, trying to clear his senses. He cannot discern anything unusual, but Lucas nods.
“Yes,” he tells Sacha. “Good job. André, let’s go.”
“Wait,” Sam says. “I’m coming with you.”
The room slightly sways around him as he gets up and he almost falls back, but António presses against the back of his legs, catching him.
“I’m not sure you–” Jev starts, but Sam shakes his head. He doesn’t think he can stay in this room, right now. Somehow, even the possibility of finding a cursed item seems more appealing.
“Hurry,” Lucas says. “I’d rather finish this before sundown.”
Sam doesn’t know what, exactly, Lucas is following, but he seems to know where to go, walking at a brisk pace that leaves André and Sam almost jogging to catch up. António is bouncing alongside them, tongue lolling out.
Sam catches a few other animals from the corner of his eyes, but he sort of purposefully doesn’t look at them too closely. Has all of this been going on right under his nose? For how long?
He’s starting to come to terms with the possibility that, for all of his life, he has cohabited with these… strange creatures, has interacted with people with supernatural abilities. Every one of his friends, basically. And now it’s all revealing itself to him, and it feels like hitting the wall at full throttle, and he doesn’t know if he would rather still live in ignorance.
They’ve lied to him, Sam realises somewhere between the end of the pitlane and the start of the private area reserved for Formula E personnel. Jev, Mitch, Robin, and almost everyone else, apparently. Sam doesn’t know why, and it stings.
“In here,” Lucas says, taking a sharp turn into the cafeteria, jostling Sam out of his thoughts.
At this time of day, the room is empty, the noon rush long finished. It feels eerie, the deserted rows of tables and chairs lined up against the glare of the neon lights, the hollow metallic trays.
A shiver runs down Sam’s spine involuntarily. Once again, António presses against his legs, whining softly, and Sam pets his fur almost unconsciously. Like this, António’s head comes up to his stomach, and Sam thinks of what Sacha had said. Are werewolves real?
“The miso soup?” André asks incredulously, reading the small sign of the tray Lucas has stopped in front of.
“No,” Lucas says. “The ladle. António, did you use this?”
António nods, which is a weird thing to see a dog-wolf do.
“I guess it could make sense,” André comments, brows furrowed. “Mitch doesn’t like soup, and I served Jev, he didn’t touch it.”
“Really clever,” Lucas murmurs, bending down to take a closer look. “Such an intricate spell, targeting only shifters, and with a delay long enough so that we wouldn’t identify the object by proximity alone.”
He looks at the spoon like one would look at a diamond, or a championship trophy.
“Any idea who did it?” Sam asks.
“I can’t tell. Maybe Sacha would know more, but unless he knows the spell caster, I doubt he would recognise the magic signature.”
André taps his foot. “Can you break the spell?”
“I should be able to,” Lucas says. “Let’s go back to the others.”
He throws André a pointed look, and André sighs and grabs the ladle. He looks ridiculous, in his Andretti fireproofs, holding a spoon at an arm’s length like he fears it suddenly turning into a snake. Although, it wouldn’t exactly be the most surprising thing Sam has seen in the last two hours or so.
They march back to the meeting room, dusk slowly settling around the paddock. Sam hears some animal sounds around him but doesn’t turn his head to look.
When they enter, Sacha is cross-legged on the ground, drinking a blue Gatorade while softly petting Norman, while Mitch is sitting on a chair with Robin curled up on his lap. Jev is standing near an open window, keeping an eye outside.
“That’s the most ridiculous object to curse,” he scoffs when he sees what André is holding.
“And yet,” Lucas counters. “Most people used it.”
“How the hell did it not set off any alarms?” Mitch asks incredulously. “I can feel this thing from over here.”
“It was very powerfully hidden,” Lucas explains. “Sacha’s spell is the only reason why you can feel it now.”
“We’ll need to ask Scot who organised the security details this weekend,” André adds. “We can’t let that happen again. We were lucky it wasn’t a worse curse, or that it didn’t activate while we were driving.”
He sounds irritated, a bit worried; Jev wordlessly leans against him.
“Alright,” Lucas says, opening his weird drug suitcase again and picking an assortment of plants. “This should only take a minute. Sacha, can I have one match, please?”
Sacha hands him one. “Do you need me to…?”
Lucas shakes his head as he strikes the match, lighting up a few herbs around the ladle. Sam would be worried about the fire hazard, except that the fire is green.
“There are more benefits with using fixed spells, especially in Latin,” Lucas tells Sacha, in that tone of voice he uses to lecture people about climate change. “Improvising is good, but it’s foolish not to use what researchers have already perfected.”
Sacha makes a face, but doesn’t get any time to respond before Lucas blurts out a string of words, balancing what looks like a silver necklace with a square pendant above the fire. A few times, his hand dips entirely into the flames, but it doesn’t appear to hurt him.
Sam hears a pop, not unlike those he feels on airplanes when the pressure shifts. A gush of smoke erupts from the fire, which gradually turns to orange. Then, with one last word, Lucas closes his hand around the pendant and the fire goes out.
“Done,” he says, satisfaction peeking through his tone.
“Ughh,” someone groans from behind Sam, and he turns to discover that all the animals have turned back into their human forms.
António is sitting on the ground next to him, looking around a bit dazedly, while Norman stretches his back with a pop.
“Move, you’re so heavy,” Mitch huffs, and he pushes a definitely-human-again Robin off his lap.
“You grabbed me!” Robin protests, flopping to the ground.
“I didn’t know you were going to be so big,” Sacha is saying to Norman, eyes wide. “Could I see your wolf form again, one day?”
“Are you all okay?” André asks. “No nausea, or headache?”
“No, it felt like a normal shift,” António says. “Except I was stuck.”
Norman nods, and Robin adds, “I didn’t like it at all.”
“I have a headache,” Sacha offers, which prompts Lucas to give him a small seed that he starts to munch on.
They all look so... normal. There's no trace of the shift in them, now, no sign of panic after what has just happened. They even have clothes on, which for some reason Sam didn’t think would be the case. Is this really a common occurrence for them?
“Sam,” Jev says. “Are you alright?”
Sam blinks. Is he? He deflects with a joke. “I’m not sure. I think I need to have, like, at least two panic attacks about all of this before I can decide.”
After feeling confused, and then freaked out for most of the afternoon, Sam feels a bit numb, now that it’s all over. Like there is a barricade, between him and his thoughts, preventing him from feeling them fully. Is this what shock feels like? Sam ought to be angry, betrayed, and he is, but he cannot seem to be able to muster the energy to, right now.
Sacha mouths something that looks like he didn’t know? to Mitch, who shakes his head with a guilty expression.
“Yeah, I’ve been there,” Norman says sympathetically, clapping Sam’s arm. “You’ll be alright. Is the race still on tomorrow?”
“Looks like it,” André says, checking Mitch’s phone.
There’s a collective groan.
“Cheer up guys,” Mitch says. “We could be dead, or worse!”
That gets him a slap on the knee by Robin. Mitch yelps.
Sam wants to eat a warm meal, and shower, and sleep until the last possible minute; after everything that has happened today, he is desperate for some kind of normalcy. He decides the panic attacks and the angry yelling can probably wait until the race is done.