“But it was a precious item,” I said.
“It was quite the treasure,” the headmistress agreed. “But I do believe we all agree that your friend’s life is more important, no?”
Belle blushed.
“I’m really sorry,” she said.
“Have a seat,” Helena said, and she gestured to the floor of her office. I looked down to see that there were cushions everywhere.
Seriously?
What was with these people and cushions? It had been weeks now, and all I wanted to do was sit in a nice, comfortable recliner. Hell, even an armchair would be better than the constant floor-sitting, but I didn’t want to be that person who whined all the time, so I sat down beside the others.
The headmistress looked at us carefully, and she leaned back against her desk. She was comfortable with herself, I realized, and she was comfortable with her position in the school. She exuded confidence at every turn. I wondered how old she was. Not very old. Maybe 40. Maybe 50. She looked young, though, and she looked like she’d kind of seen it all.
She hadn’t so much as flinched when we’d burst into her office with a huge, unbearable problem. It hadn’t bothered her. She hadn’t really seemed to react negatively at all. She’d just acted.
And she’d helped us.
And she’d saved our friend.
“What you did was reckless,” she said calmly. “And dangerous. You put your own life at risk.”
“I’m sorry about the rose,” Belle whispered.
“I don’t care about the rose,” Helena said. “It’s an enchanted flower from an old story, child. Who cares? What I care about, more than anything else, is you. I care about my students. I care about the fact that you not only went into a forbidden place, but that you made a terrible choice.”
Belle bit her lip and looked away.
Snow White opened her mouth to say something, but Helena gave her a nasty look. The glare was so icy that it chilled me to the bones. So Helena could be scary. Good to know. I tucked that piece of information away for a later date.
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” Helena asked.
Snow nodded.
“For how long?”
“From the first day.”
“And you didn’t come forward until now.”
Snow White looked like she wanted to defend herself, to argue, but she was smart enough to stay silent for the moment. I didn’t say a word. I just sat there because I realized that everyone involved had made mistakes.
“Start from the beginning,” Helena said to Belle. “And don’t leave anything out. You’ll each have a chance to share your story,” she added. “And no one is leaving here until it’s been completely solved.”
There was a knock at the door and Helena smiled brightly.
“Ah, that’ll be your friends arriving,” she said. “I assume they were causing a distraction so you could get to my office?”
“Um, yes?”
“Very well,” Helena said. She snapped her fingers and the door to the office flew open. There stood Hook and Tinkerbell. They both looked tired and worn out and their hair was ruffled. Tinkerbell looked fairly unscathed, but Hook had the beginnings of a black eye, and I wondered how long she’d make Tinkerbell pay for that. The teacher delivering the girls shoved them into the office and left without a word. Helena just smiled.
Tinkerbell and Hook came into the office and didn’t say anything. They looked around, taking it all in. They saw Belle, and their eyes widened, but they also saw the mess that had been created in the process of trying to save her.
“Welcome, girls,” Helena said. “Now, why don’t you have a seat?”
Chapter 15
Three weeks.
That was how long our entire group was going to be spending cleaning up the forbidden floors. Three weeks. After we cleaned Helena’s office and restored it to its former state of beauty and chaos, we were banished to the upper floors of the girls’ dormitory. The worst part was that we couldn’t tell anyone what we were doing, so everyone just thought we had detention, which was probably fair.
Our job was to organize, catalog, and clean up the enchanted objects up there without doing anything stupid, which was decidedly both more difficult and more dull than I could have possibly imagined.
By the last week, we were all tired and worn out.
“Don’t you think it’s a little strange that she gave us this job?” Hook asked. “Out of everything she could have given us to do, she sent us back to work with enchanted objects?”
“They aren’t all enchanted,” I said, picking up a little red apple. I dusted it and put it back where it had been.
“Most of them are,” Snow White said.
“No talking,” said a voice, and we looked over to see Miss Thomas. She was one of our teachers and it was her job to sit and make sure we didn’t do anything reckless or stupid. I wasn’t sure what she had done to make Miss Hex mad, but she was being punished right along with the rest of us.
“Sorry,” I said.
She just glared in response.
We got back to cleaning and organizing and after three hours, we got to go home to our rooms to settle down for the night. It had become the best part of my day: getting to relax in the silence. After weeks of chaos and craziness, it felt good to simply rest.
Once Belle returned, I kind of thought things would settle into a new normal, but they didn’t. Instead, everything kind of reverted back to how it had been. Hook went back to lurking around the school. Tinkerbell was her usual, bubbly self. Snow White returned to being mean and snapping at anyone who looked twice at her.
And then there was Belle.
The first thing she did was to take down the posters and pictures of roses.
“I won’t be needing those anymore,” she confided in me one night. We were lying in our hammocks, swinging gently, trying to fall asleep.
Something had been bothering me, though, and I figured it was a good time to ask her.
“What made you do it?” I asked.
“What? Make a wish?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think the fairytale made it pretty clear it was going to cast a curse of some sort, and from what Miss Hex said, it had never been broken before.” That was why her blood had shattered the rose. Miss Hex was the last ice dragon. She was literally the only person living who could break the curse that had been cast on Belle. She was the only person who could do anything about it at all.
And that was the very first time in the history of the rose that anyone had broken the enchantment without the wisher dying. Even the man from the original fable had only been freed upon his death. Belle was lucky like that, I supposed. The power of the spell breaking had been too much for the enchanted flower, and the rose had broken entirely.
“I guess I hoped for the best,” she said.
“I think there’s more to it than that.”
Belle was quiet for a long time, but she finally spoke.
“You know how everyone calls me by my nickname?”
Beauty.
“Yeah.”
“You know how I got that?”
“By being super pretty?”
“By being super pretty,” she agreed. “But do you know what I really wanted?”
“People to think you were smart?”
“Yeah, a little, but mostly, I wanted to blend in. I didn’t want to be noticed. I wanted people to walk by me and just think I was another normal girl in the world. I didn’t want to deal with the pressure of being forced to perform in some way. I didn’t want to have to act like I had all of the answers because I didn’t.”
“Sounds like things weren’t as perfect as they seemed.”
“Not at all.”
“So you just wanted some time to just be yourself, right?”
“Exactly.”
I wondered what it had been like, sitting alone in the glass box. I wondered if it had been scary or terrifying, but Belle didn’t seem scarred.
Like, a
t all.
In fact, she almost seemed sad to be back.
But that would be crazy, right?
We were quiet, lying in our hammocks, but I knew she was still awake. I knew she was thinking, and I knew she was reflecting on what was going to happen next.
I didn’t know.
None of us did.
Our journeys at Enchanted Academy were twisting and turning and intersecting, but there was no way to predict what adventure was going to come next, and maybe that was okay. Maybe that was all right. Part of me felt like I should be scared or upset about that. Part of me thought that maybe I should be nervous or worried that I didn’t know what to expect, but the rest of me?
Well, the rest of me couldn’t wait to see what came next.
I had new friends. I had Hook, who was maybe a friend, or maybe an enemy. I couldn’t tell. I had Beast, who, despite being super handsome, had a mean streak. I had teachers who looked after me. I had teachers who couldn’t stand me.
And I had Tinkerbell.
And Stacy.
And Wolf.
And I had Beauty.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I whispered.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad everything turned out okay.”
“I’m glad you’re safe.”
“Me too,” she said, and this time, I knew that she meant it.
The future was totally open and anything could happen, but one thing was for sure: we were all in it together, and everything was going to be just fine.
We were going to get our happily-ever-afters: one way or another.
Epilogue
Wolf stared at the cauldron in front of her. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. It should have been easy. Neat. Nice. The world was too messy for her taste, and that was the problem. She was supposed to be big and bad and wild, but things were just...well, they were hard.
“Rough morning?” A familiar voice said, and she turned to see him. The boy with the yellow hair and the bright red hooded jacket smiled at her. It made her insides turn all gooey and mushy, and she hated herself for it.
“You could say that,” she said.
“Sorry to hear it,” Red said. He made himself comfortable on the stool beside her, and she couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited that he’d chosen her, out of all of the girls at the school, to sit by. Red could have any girl he wanted.
Any girl at all.
“Yeah, well,” she said awkwardly. “Mondays, am I right?”
Inwardly, she cringed.
Mondays?
Am I right?
Who talked like that?
Definitely not someone brave and strong and worthy of carrying the Wolf family name. Definitely not someone like her. Natasha Wolf was a lot of things, but awkward wasn’t something she was striving for.
“I feel you,” he said, and he looked down at his own cauldron. Red started grabbing ingredients and throwing things in as the professor started talking about their project for the day.
“Miss Wolf?” He said suddenly.
“Mr. Codsworth?” Natasha looked up at the grumpy little man. He’d been cruel and conniving since she met him as a freshman. He was the type of man who was mean for no reason at all except that it made him feel bigger and stronger than he actually was.
Now he was staring at her cruelly, glaring at her. Obviously, he had said something that she hadn’t heard because she’d been too busy thinking about Red.
“What do you think about that?”
“Uh,” she blushed, because he wasn’t going to let her get away with it, was he? He wasn’t going to let her escape from his glare. Nope. Mr. Codsworth was going to make Natasha admit out loud that she hadn’t been paying attention, and oh, she hated him for that.
Well, perhaps hate was a bit of a strong word.
“Could you repeat the question, please?” She asked quietly. Her face was bright red. She could tell. The entire classroom was staring at her and Natasha wanted to sink down into the ground and just die. She wanted to disappear, to vanish from plain sight, because not only was she making a huge fool of herself, but she was doing it in front of Red.
“Why, of course,” Mr. Codsworth said. “Were you having trouble paying attention?”
“No, sir. I just didn’t hear the question.”
“Well, it seems to me, Miss Wolf, that you’ve been having a lot of problems paying attention in class.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Why don’t you see me during your lunch period?” Mr. Codsworth said. “Today, and every day for the rest of the week.”
She slumped down in her seat and stared at the cauldron in front of her. She mumbled that she understood, and Mr. Codsworth turned his attention to someone else, but it was too late. If Red didn’t know who she was before, well, he definitely knew who she was now.
A troublemaker.
Shit.
The Wolf
Enchanted Academy
L.C. Mortimer
Story copyright by L.C. Mortimer
Once upon a time...
To taking chances.
Boarding schools aren't for the faint of heart.
Neither are fairy tales.
A lot can go wrong in a fairy tale.
You can have your prince stolen, your eyes poked out, or your parents murdered.
High School is kind of the same way.
Anything can happen, and usually the things that do won't lead to a happy ending.
Hi.
I'm Jessica.
I'm the only non-magical student at Enchanted Academy, and I'm kind-of crazy about the school bully. I shouldn't be, but I am. That's high school, right? My school has a lot going for it, but there's also a lot going wrong. For example, my roommate's life is totally going up in flames. See, Wolf loves this guy, Red. She's totally fallen for him. She's like completely, absolutely, over-the-top crazy about him. This story is all about Wolf and whether she finally gets the nerve to make a move on Red. After all, high school is all about taking chances and chasing your dreams, right?
There's just one problem.
He doesn't know she exists.
Prologue
(From the closing of THE BEAUTY)
Wolf stared at the cauldron in front of her. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. It should have been easy. Neat. Nice. The world was too messy for her taste, and that was the problem. She was supposed to be big and bad and wild, but things were just...well, they were hard.
“Rough morning?” A familiar voice said, and she turned to see him. The boy with the yellow hair and the bright red hooded jacket smiled at her. It made her insides turn all gooey and mushy, and she hated herself for it.
“You could say that,” she said.
“Sorry to hear it,” Red said. He made himself comfortable on the stool beside her, and she couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited that he’d chosen her, out of all of the girls at the school, to sit by. Red could have any girl he wanted.
Any girl at all.
“Yeah, well,” she said awkwardly. “Mondays, am I right?”
Inwardly, she cringed.
Mondays?
Am I right?
Who talked like that?
Definitely not someone brave and strong and worthy of carrying the Wolf family name. Definitely not someone like her. Natasha Wolf was a lot of things, but awkward wasn’t something she was striving for.
“I feel you,” he said, and he looked down at his own cauldron. Red started grabbing ingredients and throwing things in as the professor started talking about their project for the day.
“Miss Wolf?” He said suddenly.
“Mr. Codsworth?” Natasha looked up at the grumpy little man. He’d been cruel and conniving since she met him as a freshman. He was the type of man who was mean for no reason at all except that it made him feel bigger and stronger than he actually was.
Now he was staring at her cruelly, glaring at her. Obviously, he had said something that she hadn’t heard because
she’d been too busy thinking about Red.
“What do you think about that?”
“Uh,” she blushed, because he wasn’t going to let her get away with it, was he? He wasn’t going to let her escape from his glare. Nope. Mr. Codsworth was going to make Natasha admit out loud that she hadn’t been paying attention, and oh, she hated him for that.
Well, perhaps hate was a bit of a strong word.
“Could you repeat the question, please?” She asked quietly. Her face was bright red. She could tell. The entire classroom was staring at her and Natasha wanted to sink down into the ground and just die. She wanted to disappear, to vanish from plain sight, because not only was she making a huge fool of herself, but she was doing it in front of Red.
“Why, of course,” Mr. Codsworth said. “Were you having trouble paying attention?”
“No, sir. I just didn’t hear the question.”
“Well, it seems to me, Miss Wolf, that you’ve been having a lot of problems paying attention in class.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Why don’t you see me during your lunch period?” Mr. Codsworth said. “Today, and every day for the rest of the week.”
She slumped down in her seat and stared at the cauldron in front of her. She mumbled that she understood, and Mr. Codsworth turned his attention to someone else, but it was too late. If Red didn’t know who she was before, well, he definitely knew who she was now.
A troublemaker.
Shit.
Chapter 1
“Five.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Okay, three.”
“Five,” Wolf said. I watched as she gestured toward the box of gingerbread cookies on the floor. “There are more than enough for everyone to have five and there will still be some left over to show your teacher.”
Stacy, our roommate, pushed back her long hair and frowned at the cookies. She had spent the afternoon baking instead of attending class, and we all knew she was a little obsessive about the cookies she’d created. She was a little bit of a perfectionist and, according to her, these were the best cookies she’d ever crafted.
Enchanted Academy Box Set Page 11
