by Anita Oh
The glass shattered easily. I quickly hooked a foot through the window, ignoring how the glass cut into me. Cutting the rope was more difficult. The weight of my body was pulling me back into the lighthouse, and I had to use my legs to cut at the rope enough for it to unravel. The glass tore at my skin and clothes, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting myself free.
I’d almost given up hope when I finally felt the rope give way. I didn’t even try to keep hold of the windowsill, just let myself fall. I landed in a crouch, already transformed into a wolf, then took off for the door.
The forest smelled intoxicating at night, but nothing could distract me from my goal. I knew exactly where he was, exactly what he was doing. I was locked onto my target, and nothing could get in my way.
He was in the forest behind the house. There were others with him, but they were unimportant. He was a magnet, drawing me in. I drew closer and closer to him, and the closer I got, the closer I needed to be. The feeling was all-consuming. It could devour me, and I wouldn’t even care.
Finally, I broke through the bushes, and he was there.
I stared at him for a moment. He was still in human form, and he turned around in surprise. Even this short distance between us was too much. I needed to touch him, to be as close to him as possible. I leapt toward him, but something got in my way. I bared my teeth at them and lashed out with my claws, forcing my way forward, toward Nikolai. He began to transform, and I let out a howl of delight. We would run together again, through the forest and through the night. We’d be together.
I launched myself at him again but I didn’t reach him. There was a dull pain at the back of my head, and everything went black.
Chapter 12
When I came to, it was morning and I was in my own bed, naked under the covers and covered in dirt. I wondered how long I could lie there and pretend to sleep before it became suspicious. Maybe nobody would even come looking for me. They were probably so disgusted that they never wanted to see me again. I’d attacked Nikolai. It was different, somehow, from after I’d first been affected by the potion. This had been pre-meditated, intentional. It had been a specific set of actions aimed at a specific purpose. I hadn’t cared who got hurt, not even myself, not even Nikolai. They shouldn’t call it a love potion, because none of this had anything to do with love. It was obsession, and it was dangerous.
I tried to bury my head under my pillow without moving any more than necessary. What sort of a person was I, to be capable of something like that? I couldn’t blame the lycanthropy. I couldn’t even blame the potion, not really. They’d been my actions, and I had to take responsibility for them.
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to stop existing. Maybe whatever it was in my father that had turned rotten had been passed on to me. Maybe this was just the first step in my downward spiral to evil.
My thoughts became darker and darker until I heard someone bang into the room.
I lay completely still. Maybe if I held my breath, they’d be convinced I was dead and just leave. Or bury me in a shallow grave. Either way.
“Get up,” said Katie. “You can’t hide in here all day, no matter what it was you did last night.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “I’m dead.”
“You will be,” she said, “if you don’t get these damn Golden off my back. They’ve been hounding me since I left this morning for my run.”
I peeked out from under my pillow. “You run?”
“We’ve been roomies all semester and you didn’t know that? That’s a pretty high level of self-involvement right there.” She grinned at me. She didn’t look as if she was dressed for running. “Okay, it was a snack run. You know today is cherry danish day. But that just makes it more annoying. Not to mention that they woke me up in the middle of the night bringing you in here. You seriously need better friends.”
I retreated back under my pillow. “It’s not their fault. I’m evil and horrible. They probably just wanted to make sure I hadn’t hurt anyone.”
Katie snorted. “If they cared about that, why would they put you in a room with a defenseless human? They’re the ones who are evil and horrible, not you.”
“You don’t know what I did,” I mumbled.
I felt the bed dip with her weight as she sat down beside me.
“Well, now you have to tell me,” she said. “Did you get drunk and flash them? Did you steal their favorite chew toy? From what I’ve heard about werewolf packs, it would have to be something pretty bad for them not to forgive you. And to be honest, they seemed more worried than angry when they were badgering me all through breakfast.”
I shifted over to give her more room and pulled my head out from under the pillow.
“If I tell you, you have to promise not to hate me.”
“No promises. Like, what if you ate a puppy or something?”
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“Eating puppies isn’t funny,” she said. “That’s like, the worst thing I can imagine anyone doing, ever.”
I shook my head and launched into the story, starting from when I’d left her in our room the day before. She didn’t say anything the whole way through, didn’t even react. It made the story easier to tell, though some parts were a bit blurry. By the end, I couldn’t even look at her. I didn’t want to see the look in her eyes change.
“So, Tennyson Wilde restrained you against your will, and you broke free and then proceeded to not actually hurt anyone, and now you feel too bad to get out of bed?”
“Well, of course it doesn’t sound bad if you say it like that,” I said. I didn’t have the words to explain what had been in my heart when I attacked, how I’d have done anything, anything.
“It doesn’t make you a bad person,” Katie said. “You weren’t in control.”
“That sounds like something a frat guy would say to justify date rape,” I told her.
She shook her head. “It’s different, and you know it. Look, if you’re determined to feel bad about this, nothing I can say will stop you, but aside from your loser friends bugging me, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
Something in her voice made me prop myself up on my elbows to look at her. “What?”
“Okay, so I know you’re a scholarship kid, so you have to keep your nose clean and all that, but what would you think about sneaking out of school today to meet up with some of my friends? I’ve kind of got the impression that they know more than they’re telling me. I don’t know if they’re holding out on me or if they’re just worried about their messages being intercepted, but either way, I think we’d get more out of them face to face.”
I didn’t even need to think about it for a second. “I’m in,” I said.
I’d snuck out of school before, but I felt like it didn’t count if it was with the Golden. It wasn’t as if they’d ever get in trouble in the unlikely event that they were caught. This was the real thing, though. Katie’s mother wasn’t BFF with the headmistress, and my family didn’t donate millions of dollars to the school. Plus, neither of us had access to a helicopter.
I had no idea how to even go about sneaking out of school. It wasn’t as if we could steal a boat from the yacht club. Well, we could, but neither of us knew how to sail. But I had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t the first time Katie had snuck out. She knew what she was doing.
She led me to the entrance to the underground platform for the school train, where she snicked open the lock with a pair of bolt cutters she’d pulled from her bag.
“We’ll just follow the train tracks,” she said easily.
I assumed we had a very long walk in front of us, but after we got to the platform and jumped down under the tracks, she ducked underneath the end of the platform and rolled out a vintage scooter.
“Okay, let’s blow this popsicle stand,” she said, throwing me a helmet.
I didn’t bother to question her. I was half-sure she was actually an international spy or something and no
t a high school student at all.
I held on tight around her waist as she rode the scooter down the train line. I knew that the train only ran at the start and end of term, but I had a sudden fear that for some reason, today it would be coming toward us.
We made it to the end of the platform, emerging in the bright early afternoon light at the other end.
“It’s a couple of hours from here,” Katie said, then took a sharp turn and drove us off the platform and onto the actual road.
The location of the school was supposed to be a massive secret, but it didn’t surprise me that Katie knew exactly where we were. I tried to get some idea from the landscape, but we really could’ve been anywhere. The coast was on one side of us and there were mountains off in the distance on the other, and a lot of trees, but it wasn’t as if I knew enough to identify regionally specific flora or anything. Katie would probably tell me if I asked, but I didn’t want to take her concentration away from driving. We weren’t on a highway, so there wasn’t too much other traffic, thankfully, or we probably would’ve died. Katie seemed to think the road rules were for other people.
I wished I’d thought ahead enough to wear a coat and maybe also gloves and a warm hat. The day was clear enough but cold, and the wind whipping past us soon froze all my extremities. I wondered how that kind of thing worked with lycanthropy. If I got frostbite but my superhealing kicked in, would I just keep freezing and healing and freezing and healing? That didn’t sound like fun, though, so I didn’t particularly want to test it.
We seemed to travel forever and ever, and just as I thought that my arms were too numb to hold on any longer, the road wound around to show me that we were approaching a town.
“This is it,” said Katie.
The town was tiny, with only one main street. She parked the scooter across three spaces in front of a diner.
I felt too frozen to move, but I awkwardly climbed off the scooter and shook out my arms and legs once I was standing upright. Katie laughed, stretching her long leg over the seat easily. She was dressed way more appropriately than I was, in long boots and jeans, a warm jacket and gloves. She shook her hair out from the helmet, and it fell perfectly.
Why was I always surrounded by beautiful people? It wasn’t really fair.
“We try to meet here once a month,” Katie explained as we headed into the diner. “They’ll be curious about you, but try not to say too much.”
I didn’t know what “too much” could be, so I figured the safest thing would be to say as little as possible.
There were two girls and a boy sitting in a booth in the corner, and Katie headed toward them.
“Hey,” she said, sliding in next to the boy.
I shuffled in beside her, nodding hello.
“This is Emily, Sara and Dave,” Katie told me.
“Those aren’t our real names,” said Dave.
Katie introduced me. “This is Sophie.”
I wonder if Katie was her real name, but it made no difference to me either way, I realized.
“We have a situation,” Katie told them.
“Wait,” said Emily. “Are you the one who broke into one of the labs and set it on fire and then, like, exploded five guys with your brain?”
“Um,” I said.
“That’s her,” said Katie. “Only she didn’t actually kill anyone. She just immobilized them with her superpowers.”
I didn’t really remember either of those things happening, but my memory of that time was a bit foggy, so I just nodded.
“Cool,” said Sara.
“Yeah,” said Dave. “Those guys are dicks.”
“Some of those guys are our parents, Dave. How would you feel if you came home one day to find your dad exploded all over the place?”
“She didn’t explode anyone,” Katie repeated.
The waitress came over to take our order. I realized I hadn’t brought any money with me, but Katie waved me off and ordered us a burger and shake each.
“What’s your situation?” asked Sara, once the waitress had gone.
I glanced at Katie, and she started talking on my behalf. She left out most of the details but got across the general point that I’d been the victim of a “non-consensual amorous compulsion” potion and we were interested in finding out the origin of it.
“To be honest, it doesn’t sound like the company to me,” said Sara. “They’re not very subtle.”
I nodded. That had been true in my experience of them too.
“They’re more of a snatch-and-grab kind of operation,” said Dave. “If they wanted to target you or the person you’re enamored with, they’re more likely to just shoot you with a tranq gun.”
“They tried that with her, though, and she exploded them,” said Emily. “Maybe they thought they’d try something new.”
I nodded. That did make sense. “I don’t think they were targeting me, though,” I said, then I bit my tongue. I didn’t want to give them any information about Tennyson or the pack.
“I’ve been decrypting some of my mother’s classified documents,” said Sara. “I’ve found some interesting things about trial therapies, but I haven’t come across anything like this. I mean, this is basically psychological torture with no guaranteed benefit to the aggressor, isn’t it?”
The waitress arrived with our order, and I listened to them discuss my problem while I ate. The more I heard, the more I became unsure whether or not my father’s organization was behind the love potion. They drifted from the topic of me and my problems to other stories they’d heard about the company — a friend’s mother did this, they’d heard about a guy who did that. It all fitted in with my idea of my father and what his company did, and Sara had been right: none of it was subtle. I was nearly finished with my food when I heard something that made me choke on my shake.
“Oh, hey, you were asking about that girl that vanished from your school,” Emily said to Katie. “I heard my dad talking about her last week. He said they have a lock on her location, and they’re monitoring the situation. I couldn’t get any information on where, but I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.”
By the time I finished choking, the conversation had moved on. I didn’t want to give anything away, but I knew they meant Hannah.
She was alive.
I had to get over this love potion thing so I could find her.
Chapter 13
The whole way back to school, my heart felt lighter, knowing that Hannah Morgan was alive. If she was alive, I could save her. If I could save her, I wasn’t evil. She might be evil, though — I mean, she was borderline even before she got taken by those creepy things, but that was something I could deal with once we got her back. My head was so full of hope and ideas that I was barely even terrified of Katie’s driving along those back roads in the dark.
By the time we got back to school, it was past midnight, and I was past exhausted. We trudged down the path to the Red House, dragging our feet and too tired to talk. All I wanted was my bed. Anything else could wait until tomorrow.
Something grabbed me as soon as I walked through the door to our room. I shrieked and struck out without thinking, but my attacker was too strong. I looked up at him and immediately relaxed. It was Tennyson. I struck out again.
“What are you doing here?” Katie asked as she closed the door behind her and leaned back against it.
Tennyson didn’t let me go. I looked around the room. All four of them were there. Sam and Althea were sitting on the sofa, where they’d obviously been watching something on TV. Nikolai was lounging on my bed. I gulped. That was more than my potion-addled brain could handle. If Tennyson hadn’t been gripping my arms so tightly, I’d probably have pounced on Nikolai then and there.
“Where. Have. You. Been?” asked Tennyson.
“What are you, my mother?” I asked, trying to pull away from him. “Let me go.”
He gave me a little shake, and I noticed he was even more pale than usual. There were dark shadows unde
r his eyes, which I’d never noticed before. It made my heart jump in fear.
“What’s happened?” I asked him. “Is everyone okay?”
“Are you completely stupid?” he said in a quiet voice that was somehow much worse than if he had yelled. “We’ve been looking for you all day. Nobody has been able to sense you through the pack bond. We had no idea what happened to you after last night.” He let go of me and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I knew we should’ve chained you up in the basement after you got loose, but everyone else said we needed to show that we trust you. Which we obviously can’t. Now, tell me: where have you been?”
I shared a glance with Katie, and she shrugged. I knew she trusted them about as much as they trusted her, and it had taken a huge leap of faith for her to take me with her. I didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize the only lead I had on Hannah.
“I went out,” I told him. “And now I’m back. Everything is fine.”
He shook his head. “That’s not good enough.”
I was way too tired to deal with Tennyson when he was in a mood like this. He thought he could bulldoze people until they agreed with him, and I didn’t have the energy for it.
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” I said, heading for the bed.
It was nice to be in the same room as Nikolai. Nikolai was hot. And uncomplicated. And didn’t yell at me. I loved him.
“No,” said Tennyson, stepping in front of me and blocking my way to Nikolai. “We cannot talk about this tomorrow. We’re talking about this now. You’re part of a pack, and you need to start acting like it. How could you be so irresponsible? You know this girl is an enemy of ours, and yet you went off with her to who knows where without telling anyone. Not to mention the fact that your body and mind are both unstable at the moment. What if you’d had a reaction to being so far from Nikolai? What if you weren’t able to handle being out of the range of the pack bond so soon after having such a volatile full moon? Did any of these things even pass through your head?”
