As you walk on, your mind slips back to your confrontation with the young man out on the road. You suppose you should have expected it: the first school opened specifically for the undead was never going to meet with universal approval. There had even been protests about it, although not too close to the school buildings themselves.
You can see the logic in it. When your natural predator—no matter how unnatural they are—suggests that they'd like to spend a bit more time together, suspicion and wariness can be considered survival traits rather than social faux pas.
Of course, other people had supported the undead population's right to an education and further integration into Britannian society. The people of Britannia had fallen on both sides of the issue, mostly because both sides made decent points.
It has been tough for some parts of humanity to accept, but the undead do seem to be serious about changing their ways, although in fact they already changed most of them over the last century. Officially, the last case of a human corpse being found with a pair of holes in the throat took place in 1931, and werewolves have never shown more interest in eating humans than regular wolves do.
The old argument, of course, is that werewolves and vampires are intelligent enough to know that killing other sentient beings is wrong, but people always get annoyed if you point out that they've stopped doing it.
Pragmatism probably played a part, helped along by the invention of the modern flamethrower. Still, if you're going to accuse the undead of acting purely out of self-interest, then it hardly seems fair to say that they can't fit in with humanity.
It's a tricky situation.
You find yourself at the center of this great political debate, arriving here because your aunt happens to be Madame Cavalcade, headmistress of Cavalcade Academy. Not that your attendance is politically motivated. Your parents' work taking them abroad for six months, coupled with an inexplicable reluctance to leave you at home unsupervised for half a year, is the cause of your current relocation.
So here you are. Armed with nothing other than a perfect academic record in…