Connie Senior says she’s obsessed with werewolves and now we are too! Thank you, Connie, for this spellbinding piece— our first ever from a werewolf’s point of view —just in time for Halloween!
Werewolf Meets World
by Connie Senior
Magic got Bela into trouble. Yeah, he’d made mistakes. Looking back at his first couple of months in high school, he was lucky someone hadn’t been badly hurt—him or the targets of his magical revenge.
He made a mess of his first day in an American school. And it got worse from there, like starting an avalanche by kicking a rock down the top of a mountain. When a huge boy standing in front of his locker eyed him and said, “Someone should keep this little doggy on a leash,” he jumped to the wrong conclusion. In spite of knowing better—how could an American kid know he was a werewolf?—Bela lost his temper and punched him.
Maybe because of his name or his accent or because he was from Romania, they yelled things at him like “Hey, Dracula!” or, showing a lame lack of originality, “Bite me!” What would they do if they knew he was a werewolf? Bela didn’t want to find out after the way people treated him back in Romania. Being called a vampire was funny in a sick sort of way. Ridiculous, too. Bela had met vampires, and they weren’t anything like the American kids’ cartoonish ideas or the laughable Bela Lugosi in that Dracula movie. But it wasn’t funny when they drew crosses and coffins on the outside of his locker or when someone slimed everything inside with a smelly, oozy layer of garlic.
Bela promised he wouldn’t get into any more brawls, but he didn’t promise not to use his other talents. There were strands of magic floating through the air all the time, invisible wisps shed from all living things. If you had the Gift, you could snag the magic: twisting, weaving, bending and shaping it with your mind into a flame or a gust of wind or a solid, invisible wall. Most people couldn’t do magic. Werewolves had an advantage, because they already had magic in blood and bone.
What tools did he have at his disposal? He could summon Fire to make floating blobs of light or little lightning bolts or even actual flames, but using Fire as a weapon wasn’t practical in crowded school halls. There were other options. Bela had made the invisible magical shields called wards before. He knew how to create simple ones on his own. His scarred and dented locker at school was the obvious place for protection because kids kept finding ways to jimmy it open and fill it with things worse than garlic, like mud and horse shit. After painful experiments, he found a way to plant the seed of an invisible hot mess of energy that would be let loose if someone tried to pop open the lock.
And it worked. It worked too well. One of his archenemies, the brawny captain of the football team, tried to force open the locker and was blown backward, breaking an arm as he slammed into the other side of the hall.
Author’s note: This is an excerpt from chapter 5 of Connie Senior’s fantasy novel, Blue Moon, which will be published November 10, 2026.
Connie Senior is an engineer by training, but obsessed with werewolves. She blends magic and science in her fantasy series set in New England: werewolves struggle to find family while battling their ancient enemies, vampires. Blue Moon, the third in her series, is out November 2026. She lives in Northampton.