The Love Potion (Werewolf High Book 5)

by Anita Oh

  I reached up to touch his arm. Nothing happened — no powerful surge of emotion and understanding like when Tennyson had held my hand. But it wasn’t bad, either.

  “Was it really like this for you?” I asked him.

  I bit my lip, waiting for his answer. Maybe, just maybe, if Sam kissed me, it would break this spell that Nikolai had over me. Maybe everything would be normal and right.

  I stood on my tiptoes, reaching up for him, but he took me by the shoulders and pushed me away.

  “It’s okay, Lucy,” he said gently. “You don’t need to force yourself. We’ll have time later on to figure things out. It’s better if we wait.”

  His words made sense, but that didn’t stop the sting of rejection. I tried not to show the hurt on my face, even though I knew he could probably sense it. It gave me the illusion of keeping my pride.

  “Let’s just hang out as friends for now,” he said, then led me over to a swing seat set in amongst some ferns. “It’s peaceful here. We should just enjoy it.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t deny that part of me was relieved.

  It got to the point where we’d run out of things to try as antidotes and began looking for other avenues. Days went by and Alpha Wilde didn’t get back to us, even though Tennyson and Althea had both left more messages for her. I returned the books to the headmistress and tried to subtly question her about what she’d use to reverse the effects of a love potion, but all her answers were things we’d already tried. Nikolai got in touch with his sketchy contacts. We all did everything we could think of, but nothing panned out. Katie even messaged her parents for information, so when she called me out of class one afternoon, I thought we’d hit the jackpot. One look at her face told me otherwise. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me in close.

  “Thursday night,” she whispered in my ear, her eyes darting around frantically, even though we were in the hall outside the English classroom. “The night of the new moon. They’re going to come for him, and they’re coming in force. If you want to save him, you have to get him out of here.”

  She dropped my arm and rushed away, leaving me standing there in shock. I needed to warn him. I needed to move, to hurry, but I couldn’t force myself into motion. It was really happening. This was all my fault. I’d made Tennyson into a target, and he was going to get hurt.

  Eventually the bell rang, startling me back to the real world. I found Tennyson in the dining hall, and it gave me the worst sense of deja vu. He was sitting up on the Golden balcony, chatting with the others, but when I rushed in to look for him, he turned around, meeting my eyes from across the room. I hurried over to them and collapsed into the chair beside Tennyson, and I didn’t wait to catch my breath before I let everything Katie had said spill out.

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “Thursday,” said Althea. “That’s only two days from now.”

  I nodded.

  “She didn’t say how they’d get into the school or what they plan to do?”

  “No, but she seemed really freaked out. I know you guys don’t trust her, but I don’t think she’s lying about this.”

  I couldn’t stop staring at Tennyson. What if something happened to him? I couldn’t even imagine it, couldn’t imagine him not being there. It was bad enough without our bond, but without him at all? My stomach churned.

  “They know that the new moon is when we’re weakest,” said Tennyson. “It’s the perfect time for them to attack us.”

  “You should get out of here,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “If it’s me they want, so it won’t matter where I am. And if I’m not here, other people will get hurt in my place. I’ll stay here but we’ll be prepared.”

  He reached over and took my hand, and just like before, our bond flared back into existence. It filled me with warmth, with reassurance. He was there. He would always be there.

  We will fight, and we will win, he said.

  Or, I replied, we’ll lure them into clever traps while we remain at a safe distance and we’ll win.

  That is acceptable.

  He smiled at me, and I held his hand even tighter.

  “Oi,” said Nikolai. “Hands off my girl.”

  I started in surprise. I’d barely noticed he was there.

  We will win, Tennyson repeated.

  I chose to believe him.

  Chapter 16

  Without knowing what type of attack we were facing, it was hard to prepare. Nikolai and Sam were pretty excited about laying booby traps. Sam looked up all sorts of ideas. Nikolai mainly seemed excited about saying booby a lot, but he helped Sam set things up. Tennyson went off on his own, muttering stuff about artillery and security, and Althea and I tried to outthink them.

  “They were obviously planning to use the potion as some sort of weapon to throw Tennyson off guard,” I said. “I think we need to figure out exactly how it could impair someone when we’re fighting them.”

  Althea nodded. “Why don’t you look into that, and I’ll collate all the data we have on them and look for any patterns in how they attack.”

  I’d also planned to ask Katie for anything else she might know, but she was obviously avoiding me. I didn’t know where she was sleeping, but it wasn’t our room. The others thought this was suspicious, but Katie was obviously really scared of what would happen if they found out she’d told me about the attack, and I didn’t blame her. I knew what those people were capable of. Concepts like family didn’t mean much to them, and Katie obviously knew as much as, if not more than, I did. I’d be scared too.

  Still, even if she was scared, I wished I’d got more information out of her when I had the chance. Without any more to go on, I had to think about what type of attack would benefit the most from having Tennyson distracted by the potion. There were too many gaps in our knowledge for me to be sure of anything, but the obvious reason for making someone obsessed with another person was in order to use that person as bait. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because the potion hadn’t contained anyone’s DNA, so, as far as I understood, there was no pre-arranged target for him to have fallen in love with. With that type of potion, the target could be the first person to touch whoever drank the potion, or in advanced cases, someone who said a particular phrase, or any number of things. It was impossible to tell with the information we had. I had to assume that was intentional, and that the point was that Tennyson was in love with someone, not the person themselves.

  We had a meeting that night to talk about our progress, and I told everyone my thoughts.

  “So, the way I see it, it’s one of three things,” I said. “One: they’ve got some way of knowing who Tennyson fell in love with when he drank the potion, either magically or through a spy. If it’s this, then they probably know that it didn’t go as planned and Tennyson didn’t take the potion. Two: they didn’t care who it affected, because the whole thing was just a distraction. In which case, we don’t know if it was a distraction for when the potion was taken, in which case their plan worked and we clearly missed whatever it was. Or they plan to use it as a distraction when they attack. Or the third option, which is that they had nothing to do with the potion and it’s unrelated.”

  “So, you’re basically saying that you’ve got no idea why they might have used the potion against us,” said Althea.

  I raised my eyebrows. I could understand that she was stressed and worried about Tennyson getting attacked, but she wasn’t usually so snappish.

  “Well, while you were busy doing nothing helpful, I went through everything we know about their infiltration methods. They prefer a guerrilla style of combat. They’ll try to incapacitate us from a distance and engage as little as possible. We don’t know what they plan to do to Tennyson, if their mission is to kill or capture him. They may approach differently, depending on whether or not they want him alive. Our goal needs to be to make sure they don’t get close enough to do either.”

  “Agreed,” said Sam. “We’ve done all we can t
o secure the perimeter.”

  He pulled out a map, and he and Nikolai started pointing out where they’d laid their booby traps and what they’d done.

  “Hang on,” I said. “I thought there was all this special security on you guys. Where are the ninjas? The wall of lasers? You guys have basically been re-enacting Home Alone. Where are your black ops specialists?”

  The four of them gaped at me.

  “We’re werewolves, Lucy,” said Nikolai. “That’s all the security we usually need.”

  I groaned. “You’re kidding, right? What about when you need protection from people who know about werewolves? Like right now? Surely, the adults in your pack don’t leave you defenseless against that kind of thing.”

  Tennyson shrugged. “We’re all highly trained in combat.”

  I rubbed my temples. “So, what you’re saying is, the forest isn’t full of ninjas who’ll jump out if you’re suddenly in real danger?”

  “Well, if they were any good, we wouldn’t know, would we?” Tennyson said.

  I was fairly sure that was his way of trying to reassure me. It didn’t help.

  I stood up. “I’m going to the headmistress. It’s her job to protect the students, and she’s friends with your mother. If there’s a threat, she should know about it.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Tennyson.

  I shook my head. “No freaking way. You’re not leaving this house until this is over. I’m not having you wandering around in the open where anyone can pluck you up off the ground. One of you guys can come with me so I don’t fall into any tar pits or step on a trap or something.”

  Sam got up to come with me, and I was half-relieved that it wasn’t Nikolai. Too much was going on for me to worry about how to act if I was alone with him.

  The headmistress was just leaving her office when we got there, but she stopped when she saw us and let us go into her office to explain what was happening.

  “And you’re convinced that this is a real, genuine threat?” she asked, pacing around the bookshelves. “You trust your informant?”

  I’d left Katie’s name out of it. I wasn’t sure how much the headmistress or Alpha Wilde knew about her, and I didn’t want to blow her cover.

  “Not completely,” I said. “But I believe the threat to Tennyson is real.”

  She nodded. “I’ll inform Alpha Wilde at once,” she said. “And set the security countermeasures in place.” She gave me a tight smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep him safe. Go back to your house now and stay inside until you get word that the threat has been neutralized.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  “I know it’s difficult in these situations to sit by and do nothing,” she said, pulling a book off a shelf, seemingly at random, and then handing it to me. “I think you’ll find something in here to reassure you.”

  It was a heavy, leather-bound book titled, Spells for Protection and Healing.

  “I’m not magic,” I told her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  It was a harmless question, but it didn’t feel like one. I’d never actually tried magic. Not unless you counted running around the yard with my brothers, waving a stick and yelling, “Expecto patronum!” Which had not worked.

  “The key to this kind of thing is to do it with your heart, not your head,” the headmistress said. “At any rate, it will keep you occupied.”

  I nodded and thanked her, and we got up to leave.

  As we walked back to the house, I cast Sam a sidelong glance. He hadn’t spoken in the headmistress’s office, and I wondered what he thought of her.

  “Do you think we can trust her?” I asked him.

  “It’s probably safer not to,” he said. “But I didn’t sense anything off about her.”

  I agreed. Plus, she’d given me a book, which was nice of her. Unless it was an evil book. It didn’t feel evil, though. Just heavy.

  Things looked fairly normal when we got back to the house, only instead of doing homework, Nikolai and Tennyson were sitting at the table, sharpening long knives. Althea was looking at a screen, monitoring the outdoor security monitors. She seemed normal again, though still a bit worried, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she blamed me for putting Tennyson in danger. It was my fault.

  “Put down your broadsword, Sephiroth. Come over here and let me magic you.”

  Tennyson looked up at me. “I know you think you make sense, but you rarely do.” But he set his knife neatly on the cloth he had laid out for his weapons.

  “Just come here,” I said, taking him by the sleeve and pulling him up.

  We sat opposite each other on the rug by the fire as I flicked through the book.

  “I told you that you were a witch,” he said, the firelight flickering in his eyes and making them seem like they were twinkling.

  “You’re the witch,” I said. “I haven’t actually done any witchcraft yet, so leave the name-calling until after I’ve saved your life.”

  I stopped on a page titled, “Protection Against a Specific Threat.” The instructions were short and seemed relatively simple.

  “Don’t try anything on me without reading the instructions thoroughly,” Tennyson said. “I know what you’re like, with your rushing into things before you have all the information. I don’t want you to transform me into a bowl of porridge or something.”

  I snorted. “Okay, shuffle a bit closer and hold your hands out like this.”

  I held my hands out toward him at chest height with the palms up. He copied my action, and I placed my palms against his. The bond surged back to life between us, and for a moment, I pretended to be reading the spell book so I could enjoy the feeling of him. He was so warm, and I wondered if that was why I had been so cold recently.

  “Now, close your eyes,” I said.

  There weren’t many opportunities for me to study his face like this, so I took the chance. There was a shadow of stubble on his jaw that made him look older than sixteen. He had a small mole on the left side of his chin, and I wanted to reach out and touch it. I could see every little groove in his lips, every shadow cast on his cheek by his eyelashes. I wanted to capture all of it in my mind forever, just in case something happened to him. But there was no way I’d let it. I’d protect him, no matter what.

  He cracked one eye open. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “It’s part of the spell,” I said, quickly looking back down at the book. “Sheesh, don’t be so impatient. Do you want to be turned into porridge?”

  He closed his eyes, and I read back over the spell. It seemed simple enough, but I wasn’t sure I could do it. I wasn’t magical. I was supposed to gather our energy in the place where our hands touched, but what did that even mean? I didn’t have a lot of energy. Quite frankly, I could use a nap. And I had no clue how to get the energy I did have to move from the rest of my body into my hands.

  I closed my eyes and focused on the place where our palms were touching. Tennyson’s hands were soft. Ridiculously soft. His hands were so big that they engulfed mine, the heel of my hand settling into the hollow of his palm as if our hands had been sculpted to fit that way. I tried to send all of my energy to that point, to focus it all there, but rather than moving energy around, it felt more like I was imagining how that might happen.

  I sighed and opened my eyes.

  “Well, it’s obviously going to take more than one try,” Tennyson said. “You can’t assume you’ve failed just because you can’t do it the first time.”

  His fingers curled slightly into mine, just slightly, linking our hands together. I wasn’t sure if the spell allowed that, but it felt right. As if I was binding him there so nobody could snatch him away.

  “Okay, I’ll try again,” I said.

  This time, I focused on our bond. That was kind of like energy, right? Everything was energy, wasn’t it? That was just science, not witchcraft. The heat generated from our hands touching was energy. That made sense. It was logical. So, I focused on
that and then on surrounding Tennyson with that energy so it enveloped his whole body like a shield.

  “Hey, you guys? Sorry to interrupt.”

  I was jolted back to reality. Maybe I’d dozed off for a second, but it really felt as if I’d left my body for a moment and was reaching out to Tennyson. Weird dream.

  I looked up to Sam, who was staring down at us with a weird expression on his face. For a moment, Tennyson’s hands tightened on mine, then he let go.

  “What’s wrong?” Tennyson asked.

  “Some of the alarms have been triggered,” Sam said. “One or two of them might be a coincidence, but five of them just went off at once.”

  Chapter 17

  “But they’re not supposed to attack until tomorrow night!” I said, jumping to my feet.

  Tennyson was standing beside me, and I wanted to grab him, to do something that would guarantee that he wouldn’t just vanish from before my eyes the same way our bond had vanished from my mind.

  We weren’t ready. We had to set more booby traps. We’d told the headmistress it was the new moon. Nobody was coming to help us, not until Thursday. We were all alone in a big creepy house with only a few knives and tar pits to protect us.

  “Everybody stay calm,” said Tennyson. “This is the safest place for us. So long as we stay here, we’ll all be fine.”

  “Are you serious?” I said, punching him in the arm. “You did not just say that. How about you go check out the basement by yourself, and on the way out, tell us you’ll be right back? Idiot.”

  I knew I was freaking out, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “This place is a fortress, Lucy,” Tennyson said, giving me a bracing smile that wasn’t one bit convincing.

  “Your face is a fortress,” I told him. “Shut it up. Where are those knives you had before?”

  Even though I had claws and fangs, I’d still feel safer if I had a weapon in my hand. I probably wouldn’t be able to use it, if it came down to it, but I’d feel better anyway.

  “Nothing has changed,” said Althea. “We stick to our original plan. Nikolai, bolt the doors. Sam, check the windows.”