“Or what?” Stacy said in a sickly sweet sing-song voice. “Is my widdle woommate gonna cwy?”
“Why are you speaking like that?” Red asked. He was staring at his grandmother, but jerked his eyes away to ask Wolf, “Why is she speaking like that?”
“She’s trying to embarrass me,” Wolf said.
“It’s not going to work,” Red said, turning to Stacy. “Wolf is much too tough for that.”
“Too tough?” Stacy picked up a bottle of herb juice from a nearby table and threw it at the ground. “Too tough? You want to know what’s too tough?”
“Not really,” Wolf mumbled. This was ridiculous. “Seriously, why don’t you just let Grandma go, and we can pretend this didn’t happen?”
“We both know this has gone too far for that, Wolf.”
It was true.
No matter what happened next, one of them – or both of them – wouldn’t be walking away. They definitely wouldn’t be walking away unscathed. The truth was that Wolf was beginning to realize the world wasn’t quite as black-and-white as she’d always thought it was.
Stacy had always been, in her mind, an ideal roommate. She’d been a girl Wolf could hang out with and have fun with. They could share stories and have adventures. Now she knew that had all been a trick. Stacy had betrayed her, but more than that, Stacy had betrayed the school.
Whoever won in the upcoming fight was going to have scars that would last a lifetime, but there would be a fight, and there would be a clear winner and a clear loser. There was no way they would both just walk away.
There was no chance at all.
“Just let her go,” Wolf said. She took a step forward.
So did Stacy.
“How did you find me, anyway?” She asked. “You’ve never come up here before.”
So Stacy had been coming to the tower, had she? This wasn’t just a one-off for her. Wolf had glanced quickly around the room, but the upper part of the tower seemed to be kind of creepy, to be honest. There were bottles of potions and multiple cauldrons. There were tables and books and a bunch of other random stuff.
And it was dusty.
Everything Wolf could see at all was coated in this nasty layer of dust.
“You left your cookies at Grandma’s house.”
“Oh, did you sniff that out with your big ol’ nose?”
“All the better to smell you with.”
“Oh, that huge nose goes well with those big ol’ eyes.”
“All the better to see you with.”
“And your teeth?” Stacy asked, glaring at Natasha’s bared canines.
Wolf opened her mouth to scream something nasty, something terrible, at Stacy, but before she could, a small stone hit Stacy right in the head. She didn’t faint or fall over, but she looked disoriented, and Natasha instantly threw her body at Stacy, knocking her to the ground. She pinned her and looked over her shoulder, where Red was looking at her.
“You threw a rock at her.”
“Uh, yeah. Guess I did.”
“Where did you get the rock?”
“They were on the side of the building,” he said. “I’m surprised you didn’t see the little stones as we were climbing up. They were everywhere.”
So Red had grabbed a little stone rock as they were climbing up, and he’d used it to distract Stacy long enough for Wolf to nab her. Maybe things weren’t going to get too violent, after all.
“J-J-Jack? Is that you?” A little voice said.
Wolf and Red turned to where Granny was opening her eyes. The sleeping potion was wearing off. Red rushed to her side.
“It’s me, Grandma. I’m here. Are you okay? Did she hurt you?”
“Jack?” Natasha found herself asking. “Is that your real name?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he called over his shoulder, but he turned back to Granny. “What happened?” He asked. “Tell me what happened.”
“She needed help with her recipe,” Granny said.
“And you helped her?” Wolf asked.
“As much as I could,” she said. “That’s what I do, you know. For fifty years, I’ve worked here and lived here and done my part to make sure everyone has a fair shot at learning how to bake as well as they possibly can. I bring comfort to the students with my cookies and cocoa, but I also help them to learn.”
“So why did she capture you?” Wolf asked. She was speaking to Grandma, but staring at Stacy, who was lying on the floor.
“That girl,” Grandma said. “That girl has a dark heart, Jack. You be careful around her.”
“What happened?”
“She came to me and wanted my help. I helped her. I offered her ideas for making her magical baking better than ever, but it wasn’t enough. She feels like she has to be the best.”
“It’s normal to want to succeed, Grandma,” Red said.
“This was beyond normal, Jack. She thinks that if she’s going to win, then everyone else has to lose, and she doesn’t care what it costs.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that she’s been baking, Jack, and if anyone eats her cookies, they’re going to lose their magic forever. She submitted them to the baking competition before she came and captured me. She’s mad I wouldn’t help her add poison to them. She’s mad about that, Jack, and she captured me.”
“Lose their magic?” Wolf and Red looked at each other.
“All of it,” Grandma said, nodding sadly. “If they can shift, they won’t be able to anymore. If they can levitate objects, they’ll forget how. If they can cook in cauldrons, they’ll forget every recipe they’ve ever known. That’s what she put in her cookies today.”
“I ate some of her cookies this week,” Wolf said.
“It’s only the cookies she submitted for the competition that are affected,” Grandma said solemnly. “If you hurry, you can make it.”
Chapter 12
“Lose their magic?” I whispered to Beast. We were standing on the ledge outside of the window on the tower.
“We can’t let that happen,” he said. Then he leaned inside and said. “We’re going now! Take care of Grandma!”
Beast turned me and hesitated for a minute.
“Do you trust me?” He asked.
“What?”
“Do you trust me?” He repeated his question urgently, anxiously, and his eyes were so pleading. What had this poor boy been through that he felt like nobody cared?
“Of course,” I said, and he nodded.
Then he took my hand and squeezed it. I stared at our interlocked fingers and wondered what the heck was going on. What was he doing? Why was he doing this? Beast was...well, Beast was himself. He wasn’t the kind of guy who took a girlfriend. He wasn’t romantic or nice or sweet.
He was just...him.
Why was he holding my hand?
“Don’t scream,” he said.
Then he pulled me close to his chest, and he pushed away from the tower, so we were falling off the side of the building. I opened my mouth, but no scream came out, and I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking to ever trust him. This was it, I realized. This was how I was going to die.
But then something happened.
Something changed.
He changed.
In an instant, he wasn’t a boy anymore, but a monster: a big one. He was huge and scaly and he had wings. Somehow, I found myself hanging by the shirt from one of his talons just before we would have hit the ground and died.
But I didn’t die.
He had caught me.
He flew up, up, up over the tops of the trees, and he flew over toward the castle.
So, this was his big secret, was it?
He was a monster, after all. Only, he wasn’t the kind of monster I thought he was. Beast wasn’t really a boy at all. He was a dragon. I arched my neck back to look up at him. I tried to see him better, more clearly, but it was difficult. How had I not known he was a dragon? How had nobody known? Oh, we all knew about the headmistress.
Helena Hex was a legend, but she was supposed to be the last of her kind.
Now I was discovering that someone I knew, someone I cared about, was more than what they seemed.
Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
He flew us to the school, and we landed outside of the main building. He changed back into his human form and I found myself whirling around and standing with my back to him.
“What’s wrong?” He asked.
“You’re naked.”
“That’s what bothers you about all of this?”
“Pretty much.”
“You don’t care that I’m secretly a shapeshifting dragon?”
“Not really.”
“But you care that I’m naked?”
“Yep. So, if you could, uh, put something on,” I waved my hand around in his general direction. “That would be great.”
“Hold on.”
He murmured something I couldn’t hear, and snapped his fingers. An instant later, I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s safe to turn around,” he said.
Did I detect a hint of laughter in this voice? Oh, that was so not cool!
“How did you get clothes so fast?” I asked.
“Magic.”
“Sure.”
“It’s true,” he said. “But there’s no time to dilly-dally. We have to get to the auditorium.”
“Is that where the baking competition is?”
“Yes, and there isn’t much time,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We ran inside the building and raced down hallway after hallway. Enchanted Academy had more twists and turns than any school reasonably should. In fact, it was quite crazy to me just how many hallways this place actually had. Some of them didn’t even seem to have any use at all. They were just empty hallways that seemed to be there solely for the purpose of taking up space.
When we reached the auditorium, we rushed inside to see the baking competition in full swing. A glance at the clock on the wall showed that it was nearly 7:00, which was when the judging was supposed to begin.
“We have to hurry,” he said.
“Where’s her table?” I asked.
There were at least fifty tables set up in the auditorium and each one was filled with cookies, snacks, and other treats. There were students, teachers, and judges walking around, but no one was supposed to start eating until right at seven.
That gave us a few minutes to locate her table and dispose of the treats: but only a few.
“Split up,” he said. “It’ll be faster.”
“Right.”
We both raced in a different direction. I passed tables with parfaits and a couple with large, magical-looking cakes. One table had cupcakes with toppings that changed colors when you blinked. Another table had fruit that turned to candy when you sliced it.
“Where is it? Where is it?” I hurried, pushing past people and trying to get to the right table. Nobody was supposed to be eating yet, but you never really knew what people were going to do, and it was never really easy to predict this sort of thing.
“I found it!” Beast yelled over the sound of the crowd. His voice seemed to echo everywhere at once. I raced in his direction, trying to push my way past the crowd. It wasn’t working. Finally, I dropped down and crawled under the tables until I finally emerged at hers.
“Did you get them?” I asked.
“They’re all here.” He motioned to the cookies.
If you just looked at them, they appeared to be ordinary cookies, but we all knew that wasn’t the case.
“Can you burn them?” I asked.
“I don’t have a lighter.”
“Can’t you use your dragon breath?”
“What?”
“Can’t dragons breathe fire?”
Beast looked at me like I was literally insane, but he finally shook his head.
“It’s time for the judging to begin,” an announcement said. “Please take your seats. The judging will begin momentarily.”
We were out of time.
“Plan B.”
“What is?”
“Grab them!” He grabbed a plate of cookies and I took another, and we started hurriedly walking toward one of the distant exit doors that seemed to be unoccupied or guarded.
“Hey! You!” A teacher noticed us and started coming over. I walked faster, but didn’t run. I couldn’t. If I tried to, the cookies would slide off of the display plate and go everywhere. Then it would be just as though I hadn’t even come to save the day.
“Keep going,” Beast said. “We’re almost there.”
“Just a few more steps,” I muttered, but I wasn’t sure if we were actually going to make it or not. We needed to get the cookies out of the space and find a way to destroy them before anyone so much as looked at them.
We had almost made it to the door when I felt a hand clasp around my arm and someone’s sharp nails dug in.
“Ouch!” I cried out. I almost dropped the plate, but I managed to keep it upright. I turned to see Professor Codsworth staring at me with his dark, beady eyes. He was the guy who hated Wolf. I’d heard her complain about him many times, and now I could see why she felt so uncomfortable around him. He was a strange guy, to be sure. He was a bit short and a little stout and his eyes just screamed mean.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He hissed.
“These cookies are poisonous,” I said.
“Put them back.”
“Nobody can eat these,” I insisted. “My roommate poisoned them, Mr. Codsworth.”
“That’s Professor Codsworth,” he said. “And they aren’t yours to judge.”
“She’s telling the truth,” Beast said, coming back. By now, the rest of the group had fallen silent. The audience was almost totally quiet as they watched what was happening between us. After all, high school students loved drama. It was almost nice to see that that little thing hadn’t changed. Maybe life at Enchanted High wasn’t going to be all that different from life at Millbrook High, after all.
“This doesn’t concern you,” Codsworth said to Beast. “And put those cookies down.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Beast said. He turned to the crowd and spoke loudly, carefully projecting his voice. “Stacy poisoned her cookies,” he told everyone. “If you take even a bite, you risk losing your magic forever.”
A gasp shot through the crowd.
“Lies,” Codsworth said.
Another teacher nearby nodded in agreement.
“No! She’s telling the truth!”
That was Wolf.
I turned to see her running in the exit door.
“Please, Professor Codsworth,” she said. “He’s telling the truth. They both are.”
Wolf was dressed in only robes, and I wondered if she’d shifted and run here. It was probably the only thing she’d been able to find. She couldn’t magic up clothing the way that Beast could, at least not as far as I knew. Then again, it seemed like there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my roommates, but that I was learning the hard way.
“Miss Wolf,” he sneered. “I’m surprised to see you showing your face. Aren’t you supposed to be completing your homework for my class?”
“Please,” she said. “You have to listen.”
“I have to do nothing of the sort.”
“Please,” she said. Tears were streaming down her face. “I don’t know why you don’t like me, sir, and I’ll do whatever I can to change your impression of me, but you cannot serve those cookies. My roommate is currently in the forest tower with Jack Red. She captured his grandmother and put her under a sleeping spell.”
Now the other teachers were interested, and they started gathering around.
“Which tower?”
“Rapunzel’s tower?”
“I always knew that old place was going to be a problem.”
“Should’ve knocked it down years ago.”
Codsworth grabbed a cookie off the plate and held it to his lips.
“There’s nothing wrong with the cookies!” He said.
“No!” Wolf cried, and she jumped toward him, but it was too late. He took a bite of the cookie and smiled at her.
“See?” He said. “Nothing.”
But we all stared at him. Everyone. The entire crowd was staring, holding their breaths. This was the moment when the rest of our high school careers were going to be decided.
Was he going to be fine?
Or was Grandma being truthful when she said Stacy’s cookies were poisoned?
We didn’t have to wait long to find out because suddenly, Codsworth started to turn a strange color. It was a mix between blue and green, and he grabbed at his throat.
“Water,” he said.
“Get the man some water!” Someone called out.
A student rushed over with a drink and Codsworth started drinking, but I had the sinking suspicion that it was too late. If what Grandma said was true, then it was much too late to save Codsworth. His powers were gone.
One of the teachers looked at Wolf.
“What happens if you eat the cookies?”
“You lose your magical powers forever.”
The teacher looked at Codsworth.
“You idiot,” she said. “You should have listened.”
“It’s not...it’s not real,” he said.
“Then cast a spell,” the teacher said. “Cast a spell right now and show us that your magical abilities are fine.”
“Yes,” Miss May said, coming up. “Codsworth, cast a spell.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just do it,” she said. “I’m already sending word to Helena to come back early from her trip.”
Codsworth sighed and rolled his eyes.
“All right,” he said. “A spell.”
“Here,” one of the male teachers said. He held out a pencil and set it on the ground. “Levitate it.”
“Yes,” Miss May said. “Good idea.”
“That’s an easy spell,” Wolf nodded.
“I didn’t ask you,” Codsworth grumbled, but he shook his head and held out a hand. He pointed at the pencil and mumbled a spell. Everyone watched carefully, but nothing happened. Codsworth looked surprised.
He tried again.
And again.
On the third try, there was a loud gasp.
Enchanted Academy Box Set Page 19
