by Anita Oh
As much as I wanted to pull the covers back up over my head and ignore the whole situation, I knew she was right.
“I wish I could trust you,” I told her. “I wish I could ask for your help with this.”
She shrugged. “You’ve made your choice. Don’t expect me to cry about it.”
I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out the best way to tell the others, then the next morning I messaged them all to meet me at the greenhouse. No point wasting all those tiny cakes, and I knew that Sam wouldn’t mind if something major was happening.
Nikolai didn’t take the news well.
“Wait, so I’ve done all this work for the dance, and it’s for nothing? Tomorrow, nobody will remember the dance because tomorrow will be today again!” He paced the floor, his face turning an unpleasant shade of purple. “I may as well just let stupid Laura Montgomery have her stupid cherry blossoms!”
“Well, that’s a half-empty way of looking at it,” I said. “Shouldn’t you think that people get to enjoy your hard work over and over, instead of only once?”
“The dance is hardly the issue here,” said Tennyson. “We need to figure out exactly how this magic works if we want to find a way to stop it. Tell us everything you remember about the first day this happened.”
I told them about the assembly and my classes. I told them about the call from my brothers and every detail I could remember about the conversation with my dad. I told them about the dance and Sam losing control, and then the storm, and how the clock had spun backwards. I told them about how I’d spoken to my father again and how every time I tried to leave, the day reset again.
“So, I went with the strappy shoes?” Althea said when I was finished. “I’d been thinking the ankle boots.”
“Again, the dance is hardly the issue,” said Tennyson.
I smiled at Althea. Normally, she was the first one to put forward helpful suggestions, but she’d been so focused on the dance. It kind of made me happy in a way that she’d put so much thought into it on my behalf. I knew that at least part of it was that she still felt guilty about the love potion and wanted to make it up to me, but I hoped that she genuinely thought of me as a friend as well.
“The magic is obviously connected to me somehow,” I said. “The day resets to the moment I woke up for both me and Katie, so he’s obviously linked it to me somehow.”
Althea nodded, and I could see by the way her shoulders tensed and the lines of her face pulled sharp that she was slipping into business mode. “That makes sense, but I’m not sure if it helps us. He’s probably used blood, and because he’s your father, he could substitute his own for yours for something like this. That’s probably why Katie can remember too, because of her parents’ blood.”
I’d kind of hoped there would be some amulet or something that he’d slipped into my pocket which could just be smashed and the spell would be broken, but of course nothing was ever that easy.
“If the headmistress was still here, we could ask for her help, but she wasn’t at the assembly,” I said, thinking of all those books in her office on weird subjects. She had books on literally everything; surely, one of them would have something on time manipulation in it. The Wilde pack library had a bunch of great stuff too, and a lot of it was kept in the Golden House, but most of that was archaic magic. This seemed like something new, something my father had made up in his creepy laboratory.
“I’ll go find out if she’s on campus,” said Sam, getting to his feet and touching me on the shoulder. “Her secretary likes me, so even if the headmistress isn’t around, I might be able to convince her to let me look through the books.”
“Good idea,” said Althea. “I suppose we can’t contact anyone outside of the time loop?”
I shook my head.
“So, there’s no point trying to get outside help. I’ll go through the books we have here, and maybe you and Tennyson should go to the clock tower and see if you can find anything out of place. That seems to be where it all began. And Nikolai…”
“Nope,” said Nikolai. “Today isn’t even real. Nothing I do will make any difference. I’m going back to bed.”
Althea sighed. “And, Nikolai, you have an existential crisis. Great, very helpful.”
Nikolai just grunted. I could see his point, but as the person who would remember, I couldn’t just go back to bed. I had to try to find a way out.
Chapter 8
For some reason, it wasn’t awkward to be alone with Tennyson as we walked over to the clock tower. Maybe because it was like Nikolai said: it wasn’t a real day. Nothing we did mattered. We could make as many mistakes, say stupid things or do things we’d never dream of in a million years, and tomorrow it would all be erased. If anything too awful happened, I could just take a swim out to sea and wake up in my bed and start the day fresh. So, I just relaxed and enjoyed my walk. Tennyson wasn’t like the banjo or dying my hair, but it was nice to have a safety net.
“You’re enjoying this,” Tennyson said as we walked through a rose garden.
It was rare for him to speak aloud when it was just the two of us, but kind of nice in a way. There was a sort of smoky quality to his voice that made it pleasant to listen to. Not that I’d ever tell him that – his head was big enough.
“Well, it’s far from the worst curse I’ve ever been under,” I said.
He sighed. “Yes, you are rather hapless.”
“Hey!” I said, elbowing him in the ribs. “I am not! I’m full of hap! I’m... happy!”.
I laughed at my hilarious joke, but Tennyson just shook his head.
“Are you though?” he said so quietly that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear.
Normally, I wouldn’t have responded, or maybe I would’ve lied, but today had no consequences. And he looked so earnest that it was impossible not to be honest in response.
“I’m not unhappy,” I said. “When I first came here, I was. I was so miserable all the time. The only thing that made it bearable was Hannah.” I sighed. There were so many things that I wasn’t happy about, but even on a day with no tomorrow, some of them were too dangerous to talk about, especially with Tennyson. I couldn’t exactly start opening up to him about how uncomfortable I felt about my relationship with Sam. For a start, he’d run for the hills.
“You feel guilty that you can’t save her, but there’s nothing more you can do. You have no way of finding them, and even if you did, you couldn’t defeat them.”
“So, I’m weak and ignorant? Thanks. You’re awesome at cheering people up.”
He turned his face away, so I knocked my shoulder into his arm to show him I was only kidding and let him know through our bond that I actually did feel better. It always seemed as if I hadn’t done enough for Hannah. I’d just gone on with my life when I should’ve been out there searching for her, but really, I didn’t even know where to start.
“Plus, there’s the fact that I seem to attract every sort of bad magic around and my father is some sort of evil Doctor Frankenstein and I’m evolving into an unidentified monster. Apart from that, though. Things are peachy.”
“Peachy?” Tennyson said.
I nodded. “Very peach-like.”
“I don’t hold with stone fruit,” he said. “It gives me stomach cramps.”
The path left the rose garden and turned into a more open space with raised flower beds and bench seats. From there, we could see the clock tower.
“It looks normal,” said Tennyson. “But I haven’t spent a lot of time on this side of the grounds.”
There were a few people around, excused from class to prepare for the dance. They were all chattering excitedly, carrying boxes or chairs or other equipment. Their day hadn’t changed from the first time they’d lived it, and it probably wouldn’t until the loop was broken. They seemed unreal to me as well, like actors going through the motions in the background of a movie. You could fast forward or rewind and they’d still be there, saying the same lines with the same expressio
ns on their faces.
“Can you see if the hands are moving?” I asked. I squinted, but I couldn’t tell from there.
“Where were you when the lightning struck?”
I looked around, trying to judge. It had been difficult to tell in the dark whether we’d been heading back toward the school or the forest. I looked between the pavilion and the clock tower, trying to get a feel for where it was. For the first time since I became a werewolf, I realized just how much I’d come to rely on my special senses — you couldn’t scent out something if it hadn’t happened yet. I could tell that Tennyson was having the same issues.
“I think it was over here,” I said eventually. “There were couples making out around that arbor and some kids over there smoking pot, and we headed past them and over this way.” I retraced my steps as best I could. “I think we were around here when the storm started.” I pointed to an area just ahead of us. “There wasn’t much in the way of shelter, so I think it was around here.”
We both looked around, scouring the ground. What we hoped to find, I had no idea.
“Then the storm started, so we ran for the clock tower.”
“Wouldn’t the pavilion have been closer?” asked Tennyson.
I shrugged. I’d thought so too, but saying so felt disloyal to Sam, somehow. As if I’d be choosing Tennyson over him.
We made our way toward the clock tower. Although it was a bright spring day, the face of the clock tower was in shadow, and I still couldn’t tell if the hands were moving.
“Do you know the story of the clock tower?” Tennyson asked me.
I shook my head. “I know that it apparently stopped when some guy died.”
“I’m not sure if it’s true. It’s very dramatic,” he said, glancing at me from the corner of his eye and giving me one of his rare smiles, tiny and fleeting. “You know that the school was founded by two of the strongest families, one of sorcery and the other of lycanthropy? It was one of the periods in history when we weren’t fighting with magic users. We had quite a strong alliance. They built the school as a sanctuary for people like us to be educated, as both our kinds were relentlessly persecuted at that time. When we’re younger, it’s harder to control our powers, so we can give ourselves away unknowingly. Obviously, there can be humans in every family, so they came up with the house system, White for humans and Golden for the rest of us.”
That was more or less what the headmistress had told me as well. “Because segregation always works so well.”
His smile reappeared, a little wider, and I wondered what I’d need to do to make it into a grin. Or even a laugh. His laugh would be something magical.
“So, twenty years or so after the school was built, there was this girl in White House, from the sorcery family. Rosalind. You might’ve seen her portrait in the hallway outside the headmistress’s office. They say it’s not a good likeness because her beauty was too magnificent to be captured, but I have no way to verify that. She fell in love with one of the Golden, Constantine, who was in line to be alpha of the Wilde pack. They allegedly had quite an epic romance until she fell ill with some fever or other. It was long ago, before things like sanitation and modern medicine, and she could not be saved even with the combined talents of sorcery and lycanthropy. When she died, Constantine was so moved by grief that he climbed to the top of the clock tower, where they used to meet, and ended his life. There are countless stories about how he did it – silver blade through the heart, poison – but people seem to like the one where he throws himself from the top of the tower and is impaled on a sharp branch of a rowan tree. Why they would have grown rowan trees here when everything about them is toxic to both lycanthropes and magic users, I do not know.”
I stared up at the tower, now right before us, and tried to imagine this couple meeting there, dressed in medieval clothes but otherwise not too different from us. He’d been Tennyson’s ancestor, so I imagined they looked alike. He’d have been brave and dashing and haughty, and the poor human girl probably never stood a chance against him. Once he’d swept her away, she’d never have been able to see anything else. He’d have taken up her entire vision, filled her heart completely.
“They say the clock hasn’t functioned since, but they left the tower as a monument to the two of them and their love.” Tennyson’s voice was soft as he looked up at the tower, and when he turned to me, my heart skipped a beat. My brain was still back there with the doomed lovers, and for a moment I was confused about who we really were. “But of course, he probably broke something in the clock while he was up there rampaging in grief and then nobody ever bothered to fix it. People just like to assign meaning to things that don’t have any. Have you found anything odd?”
I shook my head, pulled out of my daydream by Tennyson’s brash reality.
“The clock hands definitely aren’t moving,” he said. “I think we should go up.”
After that weird moment where I’d gotten us confused with the dead couple, I kind of didn’t want to go wandering into their special place with Tennyson, but there was no reason I could give him to refuse.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked as he pushed open the little wooden door at the base of the tower. The hinges of the door were almost rusted closed, and they squealed when he pushed. The tower was dark and full of cobwebs, not to mention probably the ghost of an angry werewolf.
“I’ll test the stairs,” he said. “They may have rotted.”
I waited outside for a moment until he called that it was fine. It really didn’t feel fine. It felt creepy and probably not useful, but I followed him anyway.
“Stay close behind me,” he said quietly as we made our way up. “The stairs seem fine but I’ll keep testing them as we go.”
Even though the entire situation was super creepy, for some reason his words made me feel safe. I grabbed hold of the back of his sweater as we climbed up so he wouldn’t get too far ahead. It was the school uniform black V-neck sweater, but his felt way softer than mine, probably some sort of ethically-sourced cashmere. It felt warm from being close to his skin.
As we got closer to the top, light filtered in, and I could see where I was walking. I let go of Tennyson, thinking it would be weird to hold on to him when I didn’t need to for safety. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting when we came to the little room at the top of the tower — something super gory, maybe, or else a shrine to the dead lovers. What we found was way too ordinary. In the hundreds of years since the clock had stopped, people had obviously clued in that it was a discreet place to hang out if you wanted some privacy. There were empty beer bottles, cigarette butts and chip wrappers all over the floor. Someone had been ambitious enough to drag an old sofa up those stairs, even, and I did not want to know what some of the things were that had stained the cushions.
“I don’t know how long I can stand this smell,” Tennyson said, holding a hand over his nose and mouth. “Do you see anything odd?”
I didn’t want to look too closely at anything, but I made my way closer to the back of the clock face. If there was anything related to the time loop in there, I figured it would be near the clock face, maybe even attached to it somehow. I trailed my hands over the cogs, all the workings of it, but nothing seemed out of place.
“I mean, technically, the lightning hasn’t struck it yet, so there could be something that hasn’t appeared yet. Maybe I should come back tonight, during the storm?”
“The spell is ongoing, so anything related to it would be outside of the loop. Like you and Katie. If there’s nothing here now, it won’t change later.”
I didn’t know how much of his explanation was based on facts and how much on his wanting to leave the smell, but it seemed legit. I turned away from the clock, back toward Tennyson, and my reply was caught in my throat. Maybe it was being there, in that place, with my mind all messed up over the time loop and the old stories, but the way the light filtered through the clock and fell across his face seemed to make him glow. He looked otherwo
rldly, as if he wasn’t really there and I was only glimpsing him through a veil. He was beautiful, but it terrified me. He looked insubstantial, as if he might vanish completely the next time I blinked. He looked like a ghost.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’re just wasting time.”
Chapter 9
Althea and Sam were deep into the research when we got back to the Golden House. The headmistress wasn’t on campus, but Sam had scored everything relevant from her secretary, and Althea had made some good finds in the library there. Tennyson joined them, and the three of them made notes, which I then had to memorize, as I was the only one who would remember the next day. I wasn’t sure if it was lucky or not that there wasn’t all that much written on time manipulation, so I didn’t have a lot I needed to do. I set about memorizing book titles so I’d know which ones we’d already read.
“It’s so weird that we won’t remember any of this,” said Althea. “I mean, I could do anything right now, and the only person who would know would be Lucy.”
I nodded. “We should call for more cakes.”
“When I was five years old, I snuck into Mother’s rooms and played dress-ups with her things, but I knocked over a perfume and spilled it on her favorite Chanel dress, and when she discovered it, I told her it was Tennyson.”
Tennyson’s eyes went huge. “I cannot believe you are finally admitting to that now, when you know I won’t remember. That is cowardly, Althea. It’s unworthy.”
She shrugged. “You should get your secrets off your chest, too,” she said. “It’s very cathartic.”
“I have no secrets,” he said, staring down at his book, but I noticed those two pink patches appear on his cheeks again.
“You’re totally lying!” I said, pointing a finger at him. “There’s no way you can’t tell us now!”
