by Anita Oh
I’d thought we’d had some fierce glaring contests before, but they were nothing to the cold fury in his eyes as he stared at me.
I wanted to argue, to tell him that Sam had been sleeping so peacefully when I’d left him, that everything had been good, that I’d done everything I could think of to help, but what Tennyson Wilde said was true. I was supposed to watch over Sam, to take away his pain. I was supposed to protect him, keep him safe. Instead, I’d made things worse.
“You were supposed to know him better than anyone,” Tennyson Wilde said. “You were supposed to help him remember who he was, to ground him. This spell is eating away at the core of who he is and if he is lost to us now, it is because you failed to keep that core strong.” He shook his head. “I should have known better than to trust an outsider, a commoner. You can’t understand us or our world. You can’t understand Sam; you don’t know what he needs. There is no point to your being here. I was wrong to ask for your help, it was a mistake for me to bring you into our home. Leave now and don’t bother us again.”
Everything he said was true. If he’d been mean, I could have argued with him, gotten angry, but he was only stating the facts. My throat burned with shame, and the pain came flooding back into my bones. It was crippling. I wanted to throw myself out the window after Sam.
I couldn’t help Sam. I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t stop the spell. I couldn’t do anything. Sam was lost to me again, but this time it was all my own fault.
The three of them glared at me as I fled the room, and their lives, forever.
Chapter 16
I hung my head as I pressed the button to reverse the stairs and stepped onto them. I’d done everything I could to find out who’d cast the spell. I’d tried to help Sam. I’d even done my best to fit in at the stupid rich person school, but nothing had worked. I’d failed at every single thing I’d tried. I’d failed Sam.
Back in my old life, I’d been someone who got stuff done. My mother got sick, I looked after my siblings. We had no money after my dad walked out, I learned the skills to earn some. There was a problem and I saw the solution and got it done. It wasn’t easy, but I worked hard and did it. But at Amaris, all the rules were different. I didn’t even understand the game. You couldn’t get what you needed just with hard work at Amaris, and I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t belong there.
My arm throbbed where Sam had scratched me, and I dripped blood all down their fancy hallway on my way out. The pain of the spell pounded through my body. But more than anything else, my heart ached. I missed my family. I missed my home. Maybe I should go back there. Just go home. Maybe I should leave Amaris and the whole world of trouble that I’d found there.
As I walked down the front steps of the Golden House, a howl echoed across the school grounds, as full of pain as the time I’d followed it into the forest. It seemed to inflame the pain within me, and I wrapped my arms around myself as I walked through the garden.
How could I leave him? He was part of me.
But I wasn’t what he needed. That night in the forest, Tennyson Wilde had been calming him down. He had been okay until I’d showed up. They were who he needed now, Tennyson Wilde and Althea and Nikolai. I didn’t even know where to begin to help him but everything I’d tried had been wrong. I should leave it to them. Sam had said as much himself, he’d asked me to leave the school, and I hadn’t listened. Because of me, he’d gotten worse. Because of me, the spell was consuming him.
Nobody was around as I wandered through the gardens back to the Red House. Maybe it was the spell, or they were scared off by the howling wolf, but I was pleased I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Hopefully Hannah would be asleep when I got to the room and I could just leave a note for her, I really didn’t feel up to trying to explain.
The girls who had snuck out to the Bieber concert had gone through the subway tunnel, and I was fairly sure I could find how they got in there. I’d just gotten paid for some computer repairs. I’d been saving up to buy a new school uniform for Fletcher but I could use that money to change the date on my return ticket home. It was for the best. Who even knew what my family was up to while I was gone, I hadn’t talked to them properly in weeks. At least at home, I was needed. At least there, I knew how to help.
I patted down my pockets as I walked up the path to the Red House. Dammit, my card. I knew this would happen sooner or later, but it could’ve been at a time when I had nothing better to do than turn back and get second helpings of dinner. I didn’t even know where I’d left it. I searched my pockets again as I looked up at the house. It was probably a bit beyond my abilities to scale the building and duck in the window. I didn’t think the windows even opened.
“Looking for this?”
I spun around to find Althea and Nikolai standing on the path behind me. Nikolai twirled my student card in his fingers.
“That is a terrible picture of you. What is wrong with your face here, have you seen it?” He waved it at me with a grin.
I was not in the mood. “Give it to me,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Not so fast,” he said, slipping it into his back pocket with a smarmy grin. “You see, we…” He waved a hand between himself and Althea like a game show hostess. “Think that you…” He waved his hand toward me. “May have taken what our dearest Tennyson said a little out of context.”
I folded my arms across my chest and shifted my weight onto my back foot. Blood oozed out of the scratch on my arm but I ignored it. “In what context would what he said be a good thing?”
Nikolai shrugged. He made no move to give me back my student card. Whatever. I could leave without my stuff. Well, maybe not my wallet or my passport, but I’d figure something out. I rolled my eyes and started to leave, to walk back toward the school, but Althea stepped in my way.
She took hold of my arm where Sam had scratched me. Immediately, the wounds began to close up.
“I made you coffee and asked you to research with me,” she said, as I watched myself heal in awe. “If you had stayed with him, perhaps none of this would’ve happened. Perhaps it would have and if you’d been with him, you would be much more injured than this. Either way, I’m as much to blame as you. Tennyson means well, but he was wrong to say those things to you. He was just upset, but we could all see that you were helping Sam. We’re all on the same side, and we should be working together to end this spell, not fighting amongst ourselves.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you sure the two of you are twins?”
She shrugged and let go of my arm. “He’s just not good with social things. I’m not making excuses for him but a lot of what he said wasn’t about you. I don’t expect you to forgive him but I’d like it if we could work together. We’re going to find Sam. I don’t think he is beyond salvation, but I’m worried he might hurt himself. I’d like it if you could help us.”
“Plus, you know our secret,” said Nikolai. “Do you really think we’d let you off this island alive?”
After everything I’d heard, I wasn’t sure if he was serious, but then I noticed Althea rolling her eyes.
“I’d like to see you try to stop me,” I told him, looking him up and down. I was fairly sure I could take him, werewolf strength notwithstanding.
He shrugged and started walking toward the forest. “Even if you made it back to your commoner town, you’d die of boredom once you got there. Every night you’d cry into your pillow, ‘woe for a life without Nikolai,’ until you perished of a broken heart.”
“You do get used to him,” said Althea. “Mostly.”
I snorted as I followed them down the path. I really couldn’t get home without my money or passport, after all, and I needed my student card for that. It wasn’t that what they said had lit a tiny spark of hope in my heart, a hope that maybe I wasn’t a total outcast at this school, that maybe I could do something right. Hope that maybe I could save Sam after all.
I glanced around as we left the garden and headed into the forest. “Do you
know where we’re going?”
“We’re going to find Sam,” Nikolai said, walking a bit ahead. “So, wherever that is.”
“You think it’s a good idea for me to come along? I only seem to make things worse.”
Althea looked into the trees for a moment with her head to the side. “If he’s calmed down a bit, you’ll be useful,” she said, sounding distracted. “This way, I think, Nikolai.”
She headed into the forest without waiting for us to follow. I hesitated for a moment. If Sam hadn’t calmed down, he could snap my neck like a twig. Or I could agitate him so much he hurt himself or everyone he came into contact with. I should just leave them to it, steal my card off Nikolai and go back to my room and pack my bags.
But again, the howl filled the air, and before I could make a conscious decision, I’d propelled myself into the forest after Althea. Nikolai was suddenly right beside me, and I noticed that he’d dropped the cool act. His movements were almost frantic in his haste to get to his distressed pack member. He seemed like a totally different person, sharp and focused. Nothing like the debonair chucklehead I’d taken him for.
“So, are you tracking him? Scenting him out?” I asked as we caught up to Althea. I had no idea how that kind of thing worked. I hadn’t gotten that far into the lycanthropy book.
“Partially,” she said, letting Nikolai rush ahead. “But it’s not that clear-cut. We’re not a GPS, we can’t pinpoint him on a map, but we can catch his trail, sense his feelings, his pain.”
I wondered why they didn’t change into wolves to find him. Surely that would be easier, with wolfy senses and everything. It felt rude to ask, though. Maybe changing was painful, or difficult, or you didn’t do it front of outsiders. There were just so many things I didn’t know.
“His emotions are a mess,” Althea said. “It’s hard to make anything out, but I think he’s near the water.”
“Why?”
She shrugged and held some branches out of my way. “We don’t like large bodies of water, especially saltwater. He’s afraid, but it’s a particular type of fear now.”
She said it so easily, but it made my mind boggle. They could sense what Sam was feeling. Tennyson Wilde had mentioned it, but seeing it in practice made me realize that it was something huge. I wanted to ask all about that too, what it was like. Did they feel his actual feelings? Or was it an outside knowledge, like a pop-up ad? How could they tell the difference between Sam’s feelings and, say, Tennyson Wilde’s, or even someone whose feelings wouldn’t be distinctly jerk-flavored. I had so many questions, but I didn’t want to distract them from their Sam-sensing.
Abruptly, Nikolai changed direction, then after a few minutes, Althea changed again.
“We are headed somewhere in particular, right?” I asked.
They both stopped and looked back at me, eyes big and filled with alarm.
“I was following my instincts,” Althea said, exchanging a glance with Nikolai, who nodded. “But I don’t know if they’re right. Everything is so strange and… are we leading ourselves into a trap?”
Before I could answer, the pain hit me full force and I dropped to the ground. It was the same pain as before but turned up to eleven, so severe I couldn’t even scream or moan or cry out. Nothing existed but that pain. I wanted to die, to stop living. I had never even imagined that sort of pain existed. I clawed at myself, wanting to rip it out, but there was nothing tangible, nothing I could remove.
The pain threatened to consume me, to swallow me whole, and my only thought was to let it. If I gave in, maybe the pain would end. That was the only thing in the whole world that I wanted, for the pain to stop.
Not the only thing, whispered that same part of my brain that had rebooted me after I’d shutdown when the briefcase of money had slipped through my fingers. It’s not the only thing you want, that dark corner of my brain said. You want to find Sam. You want him to be safe. Stop messing around and go find him.
Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the pain was gone. I could still feel the echo of it through every part of my body, but the source of it was gone. I didn’t move for a moment, afraid that the slightest thing might make it return.
I looked over to see how Althea and Nikolai were doing. Nikolai was nowhere to be seen, but Althea hunched over on the forest floor, her fingernail transformed into claws and her eyes glowing.
“I can’t hold back,” she said, her voice distorted, inhuman. “Lucy, run!”
Chapter 17
My bones felt heavy and my muscles were cramped, but I scrambled to my feet and into the forest, away from Althea. I had no idea what was going on, why she was changing, where Nikolai had gone, why we were being hit with bolts of pain out of nowhere, any of it.
Obviously, something was going on with the spell. It was amping up, changing, but all I knew for sure was that it really sucked. But it would suck more being mauled by an out-of-control werewolf.
I ran and ran with no idea where I was going, no thought in my head but of putting distance between me and Althea Wilde. She always seemed so cool and controlled in human form, but I didn’t want to rely on that carrying over to her wolf form, not when my personal safety was on the line.
I had no idea where I was headed, but whichever direction, I’d eventually reach either the school or the sea, and either would mean safety from werewolves. All I needed to do was to keep running. I could only hope that I wasn’t running away from crazed werewolf Althea and into crazed werewolf Nikolai. Or Tennyson Wilde, he was out there somewhere too, I assumed. I wanted to find Sam, but that was to help him, not so he could feast on my entrails in a wolfy frenzy. The only way I could help him now was to end the spell, to give him back control of himself and hope that it wasn’t too late, but I couldn’t do that if I was a werewolf chew toy.
My lungs burned as I ran through the forest and my legs faltered. If I lived through all this, I vowed to myself I was going to get in shape. Logically, I knew that I was fleeing for my life but it actually felt as if I was dying, my body hurt so much. Branches whipped back in my face and scratched my skin, my muscles ached, and even though it all sucked really hard, it began to seem a little remote, as if I was experiencing it all from a slight distance. It felt as though someone else was controlling my actions, as though I was a fish on the end of a hook and I hadn’t even realized until I was being reeled in. This was it, I thought, my chance to crack open the spell, to figure out what was going on. I just had to hold onto that feeling, to stay on the hook, and I’d finally get some answers.
Of course, as soon as I thought that, the feeling became much harder to hold onto. It drifted away like the mist, and the more I chased after it, the more it retreated. I threw myself after it, and it vanished completely.
I came fully back to myself just as I broke out of the forest and stumbled on the rocks at the edge of a steep cliff. The rocks crumbled beneath my feet, falling away to where the ocean crashed into the cliff face below. Way, way below. I threw myself backwards, catching hold of a tree branch. I held on to that branch with all my might as I backed up, away from the cliff. My heart pounded so hard I thought it would explode. Why would somebody put a cliff there, anyway, right where anyone could stumble over it? I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself, as I peeked out over the edge, to the sharp rocks that would definitely impale you if you fell over that cliff. The outdoors was so not for me.
The strip of light flashed out over the water from the lighthouse, and as I watched it, I nearly toppled over the cliff again in surprise. Because the light was no longer golden. It was blue. The same blue as I’d seen that night with the talking statue. Magic blue.
I’d known something was going on with the spell, but I didn’t expect to just stumble onto whatever it was haphazardly. Though, I supposed I hadn’t. I hadn’t stumbled anywhere; I’d been lured there. I was exactly where the spell caster intended me to be. I hadn’t been able to stay on the hook, but I’d followed the line right to the end. Which was good. I didn’
t know much about fishing, but I knew that being on the hook did not end well for the fish. I should probably get as far away from the hook as I could, but I just didn’t have it in me. I was just a dumb fish and the lure was too bright and shiny.
I followed the coastline along from the edge of the forest, keeping the lighthouse in sight as best I could. A cloud passed over the moon, so that the only light was the eerie blue glow. I didn’t even have my phone or anything to light the way, so when I heard a noise from the forest, I stopped moving. I held myself completely still until I knew what I was up against.
The cloud moved away from the moon, and light flooded the forest again. I’d expected something creepy, but was not prepared for creepiness of such a high level. It was the entire student body, streaming silently through the trees. Their faces were slack, their eyes blank like dead fish. They had been well and truly hooked, and they were reeled in all the way.
They moved like puppets. A creepy puppet rich kid army. I wondered if the school paid for therapy, because I was going to need it after this.
They paid no attention to me, moving as one toward the lighthouse. I wondered why I wasn’t affected by whatever was going on with them, why I’d managed to get off the hook.
Everyone else seemed to be there, Red and Green alike. Not just freshmen, but all classes. I recognized most of them from my survey. There were no Golden, and I wondered what was going on with them, whether they were off engaged in wolfy hijinks or whatever. I wondered if they’d found Sam and if he was okay. It didn’t seem likely but I had other things to worry about for the moment. I was closing in on the spell caster, I just knew it, so I had to just trust and hope Althea and Nikolai had gotten control of themselves and found Sam.
The creepy puppet army seemed harmless, but then, zombies probably seemed harmless until they started eating your brains. But I had no better ideas, and we seemed to be heading in the same direction, so I fell in with them. I recognized Fatima, and moved to walk beside her. She was fairly strong-willed, so I thought maybe I could get through to her.
