by Anita Oh
I vaguely wondered where he was taking me, though it didn't seem like such a big deal. That was probably part of the hypothermia too, I stopped caring about stuff. That was fine. Peaceful, really. So far, when it came to near death encounters, hypothermia was streets ahead. Number one, most recommended.
I snuggled deeper into his pocket. I didn't know what fancy rich person material this coat was made from but boy was it soft and nice.
You're probably not supposed to fall asleep with hypothermia. That seemed like a thing. Or maybe that was concussion. Whatever. Sleep was warm and nice and awake was the opposite. Awake was not my friend.
Shouting woke me up. I was so toasty warm though not pocket warm but blanket warm. I cracked open an eye to look around. Clearly, I had not died. And I hadn't been taken to some torture dungeon or laboratory or anything. It seemed like I was in the common area of the Golden House, especially judging from the shouts.
"She's fine," said Tennyson Wilde. He wasn't shouting. He sounded bored. "It was never a danger."
"She's not fine, she's the size of my finger!" That was Sam. He was shouting. "My pinky finger!"
That made me sit up. He wasn't usually the type to get angry, he was gentle and kind. But ever since the whole werewolf thing, he'd been unpredictable.
They were standing on the other side of the room to me, facing each other. They couldn't have looked more different. Tennyson stood by the fireplace, an elbow propped nonchalantly on the mantle. Sam loomed over him, tense and ready to spring. I was nestled into a blanket on a chair in the corner, though I noticed something had been put up as a barrier so that I couldn't fall off while I slept.
"Are you finally going to stop blaming her for everything then, Tennyson?" Althea asked, sounding amused. "I highly doubt she shrank herself."
"Never underestimate these people," Tennyson said. "You don't think they are capable of doing this to send her in as a spy?"
"She almost died of hypothermia!" Sam said.
"It wasn't hypothermia; she was just a bit cold. Most likely they knew I would sense the magic and investigate before she was in serious danger." He shrugged. "Or perhaps she is expendable to them. Perhaps she does not even know she is being used, like the teacher last time."
"Perhaps she's awake and listening to everything you say," said Nikolai, from where he sat over in the corner, typing on his phone. He looked over at me and winked.
Sam started in surprise and began to move toward me, but Tennyson put out an arm to stop him. They muttered to each other, too quietly for me to hear, and then I was shocked to see Tennyson Wilde break out into a smile. I hadn't thought him capable, he was always so surly and grr and big furrowed eyebrows. It made him look like a completely different person, at least 20% less of a jerk. Sam smiled back and patted Tennyson on the shoulder, then moved away from him to come and crouch in front of my chair.
"Hey," he said quietly. "Is my voice too loud?"
I shook my head. "It's normal. Do I sound all squeaky?" It was surprising he could hear me at all, actually, even with the super hearing.
"You're fine," he said. "It must be part of the magic. Are you warm enough? Do you feel okay?"
I nodded, then sat down cross-legged and stared at him. His face was so huge.
"Am I the only one?" I asked. The thought of everyone who had chased me into the bamboo forest all being shrunk and running around like manic pixies was more than a little funny and would cheer me up to no end.
He nodded. "Nobody else even saw the spell. Tennyson sensed it and was just headed to the spot the last spell happened when he found you. Were you really trying to ride a rat?"
"I was trying not to get eaten," I said loftily. "And not to freeze to death. It is a harsh, harsh world when you are a tiny person, you know. You shouldn't judge."
"That's hardly what's important here," said Tennyson Wilde. He still stood by the mantel and was obviously trying to look uninterested, flipping through a book and not looking at us. "What details do you remember from the spell?"
I told them what had happened, what little there was, but that seemed to bother all four of them.
"Surely you're forgetting something," Tennyson said.
Althea and Nikolai exchanged unreadable looks and Sam's claws were digging into his leg.
"Why's it such a big deal?" I asked. "Maybe whoever it is just couldn't be bothered with all the fancy stuff. Maybe they just wanted to get to some food. You know it was mini pastries today." I sighed. What a regretful life this was, with no mini pastries.
"You're hungry?" Sam asked. He reached over to the table and picked up a plate. "It's not mini pastries but these aren't too bad."
He sat the plate down on my chair beside me and I stood up to get a better look. Giant sandwiches! They were big enough to feed a family of five for a year! Well, the bread would obviously go stale, but you could probably freeze them. I climbed up onto the plate to start nibbling at a ham and cheese one. I wondered if maybe I could get the rest of my family shrunk as well. Our living expenses would be literally nothing if we were all tiny.
"There are rituals that have to be obeyed with this sort of thing," Tennyson was saying. "You can't just wave a magic wand and shrink people. Try to remember!"
Oh, he was talking to me. I looked up at him over a chunk of Jarlsberg cheese the size of my head. It had always been my life's dream to have a whole wheel of Jarlsberg cheese, I used to stare at them all bright and beautiful through the window of the local deli, imagining the luxury of having such an abundance of cheese all to myself. This was even bigger than a wheel of Jarlsberg and I was not going to let Tennyson Wilde ruin it for me.
"Don't get all mad at me," I said. "This is your fault. You're the one who couldn't even look after a stupid little magic ball." I clutched my cheese and turned my back on him.
"She's not wrong," Nikolai muttered, cutting of Tennyson's reply. "That shouldn't have happened. I know it wasn't your fault but how did they get through our security."
"Whoever is behind this is stronger than we thought," said Althea.
"And they're targeting Lucy."
Targeting me into cheese heaven, maybe, I thought. Now that I was out of the cold, getting shrunk seemed like maybe the best thing ever. The bullies couldn't hurt me now; they couldn't even find me. I mean, in the long term things like going to class or walking up a flight of stairs might be difficult, but people lived with disabilities every day in this world, much worse things than just being a bit short. I wasn't going to let it get me down.
Tennyson and Althea decided to do some research and Nikolai had plans, so when I finished my sandwiches, Sam put out his hand for me to climb into and he took me up to his room.
"You're not shoving me in a shoebox with just some holes in the top," I said. "I remember those crickets you caught and their untimely demise."
He placed me carefully on his pillow and then moved across the room to look through his drawers.
His room was so different to the last time I'd been there. Last time, Sam had been having some emotional problems and the room was a wreck. It had been put back together now, and although it was simple, I found it really nice, comfortingly Sam. The stone walls were bare, with a big bed in the middle of the room and a window seat full of cushions opposite the door. There was a desk and a bookcase and some cupboards, and a blue rug on the floor.
"Hopefully the spell won't last very long," he said. "But without knowing anything about who cast it or why, it's impossible to tell. We should probably be prepared for the worst."
"The worst being that I stay tiny?"
"You know you'll get sick of it after a while."
He came back over to the bed with a box of tissues that he'd fashioned into a sort of bed and placed it on the nightstand. Even though I'd seemed to have done nothing but sleep all day, when I saw it, I realized I was still super tired.
"We'll get some proper things for you tomorrow," he said. "Unless you get big again overnight."
I doubted it. Last time, the spell had just gotten worse and worse before I'd put a stop to it. I had no energy to think about it though, no energy to try to figure out who had done this to me and why and how I would stop it.
I was almost asleep when Sam spoke again.
"I'm sorry this happened to you," he said, so quietly I was sure I wasn't supposed to hear. I almost pretended that I didn't. I was sleepy and conversations like that made me uncomfortable. Still, I couldn't have him walking around thinking this was his fault, he already carried too much guilt for things he hadn't been to blame for.
I propped myself up on my elbow and peeked out over the side of my tissue bed.
"Why are you apologizing?" I asked him. "How have you possibly twisted this up in your brain to make yourself responsible?"
He turned to face me, his eyes bright in the darkness and so, so huge. I could probably drown in them for real, though that would be disgusting for me and painful for him.
"You don't think it strange that all this magic stuff started happening to you after I came back into your life? You don't think there's some connection?"
"You aren't the only werewolf at this school," I said. "I'm more inclined to blame Tennyson Wilde. Or, you know, the person actually behind all this. It wasn't a werewolf who put this curse on me."
He shook his head. "But why are you always in the middle of it? It only makes sense that it's because you're linked to me."
My face grew warm at him saying that we were linked. I felt that way too, of course, but I never knew what he was thinking anymore. Sometimes it seemed as if he'd forgotten all about me, that he'd moved on. I felt like I was stuck in the past, standing still and watching as he walked away from me, growing smaller in the distance. But if we were linked, no matter how far away he walked, he could always find his way back.
"I mean, it's not as if you have any other ties to the supernatural community."
He said it as if the very idea was absurd, but his words made an alarm bell chime in my head. I did have other ties. So did he. I'd never told him about the book I'd found in the library. The book on werewolves, which had been co-written by my father and his mother. I should tell him now. It was the perfect moment. But the words sat at the base of my throat, hovering and reluctant to pop out. Any mention of the past, of his family, was like a trigger for Sam. He did seem to be doing better lately though, even Tennyson Wilde had said so. Maybe it would be okay. I took a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed to a spot on the wall.
"So, about that, that's not exactly true…"
Sam didn't move, but I could somehow feel him become tense. How was I supposed to put this?
"So, you know your mom?" Yeah, I didn't sound stupid at all. "And my dad? Well, I mean it might be a massive coincidence, but I'm fairly sure it was them…"
His eyes began to glow. "What are you trying to say, Lucy?"
"Relax, we're not like secret siblings or anything. But there's this book that I found. I'd show you but I left it in my backpack, out in the snow. It's a book on werewolves, facts and sciencey stuff. They wrote it together."
I wasn't sure if Sam fully grasped what I was saying, what it meant in terms of his own past and mine. It meant that on the night Sam had first turned, the night his family had died, the night he had disappeared, his mother had known that was a possibility. That the lives we thought we'd lived at children were lies. Our parents weren't who we thought they were. I didn't know if Sam grasped any of that, because within the blink of an eye, he had transformed.
He wasn't a full wolf. He still retained his human form, just with added wolfy bits, like fur and claws and teeth. And wow, those claws and teeth were scary enough when they weren't bigger than me. He growled, so deep and low that it made my tissue box bed rumble like an earthquake.
"Hey, Sam? Buddy?"
But Human-Sam had left the building. His nose switched as he sniffed in my direction. Oh man, to the wolfy part of Sam's brain, I probably smelled tasty like a bunny. Talk about an extreme reaction to bad news. It wasn't even particularly bad news, just new information, really, but I supposed if you believed you'd murdered your whole family, no news was good news.
"Let's think this through rationally," I said to him. "We were having a conversation, remember? Everything is fine and we're all good and safe, and we're just having a bit of a chit-chat."
He growled. Yeah, logics did not work on the wolf. Logics seemed to annoy the wolf.
He lunged for me, swiping his arm out and knocking my tissue bed. Luckily, I didn't go flying off the nightstand and end up a crumpled heap on the stone floor. I fell out of the tissue box in the other direction, rolling until the bed lamp stopped my momentum. Sam's face was right beside me, so close I could see every detail. I stayed as still as I could, not breathing. I knew his wolfy senses would find me, but maybe I could use that to my advantage. He wasn't thinking like a human. The drawer of the nightstand was open, just a crack, but if I could just get in it, I didn't think he'd be able to get the drawer open to crunch on my bones.
With all my might, I pushed my tissue box bed and it clattered off the night stand and onto the floor. While Sam was distracted by it, I dove for the drawer.
The drawer was dark and I couldn't see out of it enough to know if Sam had seen where I'd gone. I had no clue where he was or if I was safe. I crouched in the darkness, staring up at the thin sliver of light as I listened and waited. There was some thumping and sounds like things being knocked over but maybe Sam was just clumsy as a wolf. Eventually, I relaxed. If he hadn't found me, maybe he'd given up looking, or forgotten, or fallen asleep. I sighed and tried to make myself comfortable. It was a little difficult — I didn't know what Sam kept in the drawer of his nightstand but figured it was probably personal stuff and I didn't want to invade his privacy by going through it. Before I could settle in too much, the drawer was pulled open and cold blue eyes stared down at me. It seemed to have become a recurring pattern.
"What are you doing in there?" Tennyson Wilde asked. "Where is Sam? What have you done?"
I didn't answer him. I thought the answer was fairly obvious and I didn't even have enhanced senses.
"You upset him again?" He huffed. "Why do you have to be an endless source of trouble?"
"Oi!" I got to my feet and waved my fist at him angrily. "Don't victim blame me, you big giant jerk! I'm the one who keeps getting attacked, and cursed, and bullied. Don't make out like I'm the cause of any of this when you're the one who can't keep your little wolf pack under control!"
He rolled his eyes and plucked me up out of the drawer between his fingers. No matter how I struggled, he kept tight hold of me.
"Do you want me to drop you on the floor?" he asked.
I stopped struggling. It was a long way down.
"You obviously can't be trusted so until this situation is resolved, I'm going to keep watch on you."
Before I could say anything in response, he dropped me into his pocket and buttoned it up.
Chapter 8
As much as I hated to admit it, being looked after by Tennyson Wilde was far more comfortable than being looked after by Sam. He squished a cushion inside his sock drawer for me to sleep on, which was both comfortable and safe, and then vanished into the night. I assume he went to find Sam, and while I was worried, I knew that Tennyson Wilde was the best person to sort it out. Mostly, I was happy to be left alone to sleep.
I was not happy, however, to be woken up by a big wolfy face staring down at me the next morning. Its cold, wet nose nudged me. I squealed and ducked under the fluffy sock that I'd been using as a sleeping bag. When I peeked back out, it was to see Nikolai Volkov laughing at me.
"Ah, why am I so hilarious?" he asked, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. "Anyway, I'm first on tiny commoner-sitting duty. Tennyson's drawn up a whole color-coded schedule for us and I made this to carry you around in." He held up a mustard-colored bowler hat with a hideous big sunflower pinned to the front. "See, there's a concealed section in the t
op here behind the flower, and this front part is actually one-way glass so that you can see out, though the fabric covering it will obscure your vision a little. It will make our heads look a little big but it's still rather stylish, don't you think?" He looked at me, squinting his eyes as if he was trying to figure something out. "You really need new clothes but we'll worry about that later."
He sat the hat down on my cushion and flipped the top of it open for me to climb into.
"I don't like that you're talking as though this is a long term situation." The hat room wasn't big enough for me to stand up but I could sit down and stretch out quite comfortably, and it felt very secure. I could even see fairly clearly through the fabric, though everything was in a mustard-colored haze. I was fairly impressed at Nikolai for making it so well at such short notice. He always acted as if he was playing around in C&C club but obviously he took it more seriously than I thought.
"Well, being unprepared never solved anything." He reached out toward me. "Okay, hold tight. And remember, I can hear you if you whisper, but I won't be able to respond."
That made sense, and I didn't know what I'd ever have to chit-chat about with Nikolai Volkov anyway.
He settled the hat on his head and then we were off. Riding in a hat was a new sensation, but not bad. It felt more sturdy than being in Tennyson Wilde's pocket. I didn't jiggle around as much, and I could feel the warmth from Nikolai's head through the hat; he really threw out some heat. Everything seemed much further away than usual and we seemed to be moving at an extremely fast rate, but not in a bad way. It definitely wasn't the worst way to travel.
We headed out of the Golden House and up to the school. Nobody was around, though it didn't feel that early, and I remembered that I'd hardly ever seen any of the Golden at morning classes. They seemed to just do whatever they felt like, on their own schedule, and I wondered if I'd get super behind in all my classes. I supposed that was probably the purpose behind the curse.
