by Anita Oh
I didn't know what to do. Should I call for help? Should I hide the body? Run away? Running seemed like the best option, but I couldn't move. Apparently, I was frozen in shock.
I don't know how long I sat there, staring at the body, trying to see if he was breathing but shaking so much that I couldn't tell. There were bloody gouges across his back, and his hair was matted with so much blood that I couldn't even tell his hair color.
After I'd sat there for an eternity, the door burst open and Sam entered, followed closely by the others. The sight of them snapped me out of my daze.
"Oh my god, you killed someone!" said Nikolai, stumbling into the room.
Althea made an annoyed noise at him. "He isn't dead, you idiot. Can't you hear his heartbeat?"
I couldn't hear anything over the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I felt confused and disoriented and thought maybe I'd throw up.
"He's pretty messed up, though," she continued. She gave me a look I couldn't read. "But we need to know how much he remembers of what happened. How much do you remember?" she asked me.
The more I thought about it, the more elusive my memories became. I shrugged.
"You fully transformed," said Sam. "Do you remember?"
I shook my head. Tennyson seemed stunned, and I was surprised that he hadn't known, hadn't sensed it somehow. It made sense that the link between us was weakened or confused during the full moon, but I thought he'd been running with us through the night. Maybe he'd overestimated how much he could do as a human.
"You got separated from us early in the night, and we couldn't find you after that," Althea explained. "We could sense you strongly. Your emotions were all over the place, but because you were fully transformed, we had trouble tracking your exact position."
I barely heard her words, I was so intent on Tennyson's reaction. Even without the link between us becoming strong again, he was wearing my face. I knew the exact feelings that prompted my muscles to move in that way, the absolute devastation that locked my jaw and narrowed my eyes. But the link seemed stronger now than ever before and I could feel it as well, like an ache in a previously unknown part of my heart. He was crushed.
But before I could think about it deeply, what it meant for him to feel that way, why I could feel it so strongly now, the body on the floor started to move.
He sat up and stared around at us, blinking in confusion. I recognized him immediately: Hannah's friend Milo. I knew that he didn't like me, but his feelings toward Tennyson seemed more complex, and I wondered what had made me attack him, of all people. I'd felt betrayed by him in the past, when the bullying was the worst and he'd turned on me, but I doubted I'd had enough rationality last night to make such a judgment call.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember something, anything. Things were so fragmented that it was difficult to pull apart separate thoughts. Running, sniffing, hunting. I remembered hunting; I definitely remembered hunting. A frightened little bunny. I had chased it through the forest, but it was fast and had escaped me. Then I'd caught another scent. A more interesting scent, more challenging. I'd stalked it through the night, along the pathways of the school. It hadn't suspected me, that fresh, pink little bunny. I'd crept up on it, and it wasn't until I pounced that it even knew I was there.
It had screamed, and I had seen myself reflected in the fear in its eyes. A massive black wolf with glowing eyes and dripping fangs. Its screams had pleased me. I had let it go only because I knew it would run. I craved the thrill of the chase.
I came back to the present with a gasp, my eyes huge as I stared down at Milo, the frightened bunny that I'd terrorized.
He dabbed at the blood on his shoulder and then looked up at me. He seemed confused for a moment, but then he put it together. He'd always been quick to come up with crazy theories and this was no different — except for the fact that this time, he was right.
"Tennyson Wilde?" he whispered. "You did this to me?" He tried to move and winced. The wolf had hit him hard when it pounced. "What are you?" he said, his voice turning to steel, not taking his eyes off me. He scrambled to his feet and pointed an accusing finger at me. "You're a monster!" Then he clapped a hand over his mouth, as if speaking it aloud would make me attack him again. He backed his way toward the door, still not taking his eyes off me, and then he ran.
Bile rose in my throat as I watched him leave. I still wanted to chase him, still wanted to hunt.
Chapter 12
Milo didn't spill the beans, which was a worry in itself. In the past, he hadn't worried too much about whom he shared his theories with. I didn't want to go near him; I was too ashamed of what I'd done, and I feared that I wouldn't be able to keep the monster inside myself, that it would overpower me and attack him again.
"You're Tennyson Wilde," Nikolai whispered to me over lunch. "You can't have him going to the media and saying you made untoward advances to him."
"You're a werewolf," said Althea. "You can't have him going to anyone and saying anything."
I understood where they were coming from, but I didn't know what they expected me to do about it. Plus, I was finally hungry for the first time since I'd become Tennyson Wilde, and I couldn't get enough of the pulled pork salad on the lunch menu.
"At least you didn't seriously hurt him," said Sam. "And he has no proof of anything. Leave it to me. I'll convince him there were hallucinogens in the water supply or something."
I nodded. I knew Sam could take care of it. People seemed to instinctively trust him. Still, his promise didn't make me feel better, and I could tell Tennyson wasn't happy about it, either.
It seemed his brooding was contagious. Over the next few days, I found myself increasingly sitting in a corner, looking out rainy windows. Whether or not Milo said anything to anyone, the fact that I'd attacked him bothered me. I might've killed him, and I couldn't even remember doing it. I wanted to talk to him, to apologize, but I didn't trust myself around him.
I was just not cut out to be a werewolf. I didn't have the self-control. I was a horrible coward who preyed on those weaker than myself, no different from someone like Olivia Hearst, who bullied people who were lower down on the social scale. Except that Olivia Hearst's teeth and claws were metaphorical.
"You can't keep beating yourself up about it," Sam told me one day, sneaking up behind me as I sat in the garden behind the Golden House. "You weren't in control. You didn't intend to hurt him. You're a good person, and this doesn't change that."
I smiled at him. Here I was feeling sorry for myself when Sam had been through so much worse than this. Of course he understood how I felt.
"Let me guess," I told him. "That's word for word what the others told you when you attacked me."
He nudged me in the side. "Not very comforting, is it?"
I could sense how he felt, how it was a comfort to be close to me, how it was easier for him to be around me if I was a lycanthrope as well, and he didn't have to fear that he would hurt me. But it was just the ease of being near an old friend. There were no romantic feelings there, or if there were, they were hidden. It was more a feeling of belonging, of family. Of pack. I tried not to probe at it too much. Perhaps his lack of romantic feelings was because I looked like Tennyson Wilde, or maybe they were secondary to other feelings. Maybe I just wasn't that good at sensing stuff yet. I'd been more focused on learning how to shut my senses off than exploring the nuances of them. That didn't mean he didn't see me that way.
Now that I'd opened myself up, it wasn't just Sam that I could sense, but the others as well. The more I thought about it, the more strongly I felt them. Before the full moon, I'd only been able to sense vague emotions, but now their presence was crystal clear. I could feel where they were, what they were doing. Maybe it was because the bond between us had strengthened over the full moon and my transformation, but I knew that Althea was in the library, studying. Nikolai was taking a nap. But Tennyson Wilde…When I tried to sense him, his presence hit me like a freight train in the face.
I was vaguely aware of myself falling to the ground, but that seemed to be happening far away, to someone else. Then I wasn't there at all; I was back in my own body. Only not really — I was Tennyson Wilde in my body. I was in the girls' bathroom near our English classroom, getting backed into a corner by two girls who had always seemed to admire me in the past. Wait — no, that was wrong. They were the girls from C&C Club. They'd always admired Tennyson Wilde. They had always been jerks to me.
They crowded into my space, saying nasty things, and I didn't understand why. People never spoke to me like that. I had done nothing to deserve this hurtful behavior, and yet they were acting as if I was at fault. My confusion seemed to fuel their anger, and they became more violent toward me. There had been times in the past where I'd felt fear, but this was different. These girls were weak and stupid, but they outnumbered me, and I was in a weak and stupid body. There was nothing I could do against them.
I came back to myself with a violent thud. Sam was holding on to me, looking concerned, and to my surprise, Nikolai and Althea were there as well. I wondered how long I'd been out of it for them to get here so fast.
"Tennyson is in trouble," I told them.
"Where is he?" asked Althea.
I told her, and without a word, she and Nikolai left to help him.
"I should go help," I said, trying to stand up.
Sam shook his head, helping me back to the seat. "You're not going anywhere after that," he told me. "You need to rest."
He looked super worried, so I decided not to argue. Plus, I wasn't sure if my legs would work anyway. That had been intense. It had felt as if I actually was Tennyson Wilde, but Tennyson Wilde in my body. Like being split in half, but also like two people blending together. There were so many thoughts and feelings swimming around inside of me that I couldn't even begin to separate them. The most distressing thing of all was that I still had all the awareness of being in Tennyson Wilde's mind — his memories, his feelings, everything. Not just from that particular moment, either. I wasn't sure how far back it went, how comprehensive it was, and I didn't want to probe into it too deeply. It was invasive and weird. I didn't know if he had that same awareness about me, but I hoped not.
Sam and I sat quietly amongst the spring flowers, his side pressed up against mine. Although my stomach was churning from what had happened, it was nice to just be there with him, to feel as if he was taking care of me.
Before long, the others showed up. Tennyson seemed flustered, and when our eyes met, I knew that he had experienced the same strange, mind-blending sensation that I had.
"What are we going to do?" he asked me.
I wanted to ask him what had happened with the bullies, but it seemed too personal, too much as if the whole thing would become real if I spoke it aloud.
"We need to end this spell," I told him. "I don't care how. We just can't keep this up."
"You don't care how?" Sam asked quietly. He narrowed his eyes at me, and I wondered if he was judging me. That wasn't it, though. I felt no judgment from him, only concern.
"I don't care how," I said firmly.
Tennyson nodded in agreement. "If we have to end her to end the spell, I am down with that."
The four of us looked at him in surprise, and I felt a little sick at how much he sounded like me. More and more, the line between Tennyson and Lucy was getting blurred, and I feared that unless the spell ended soon, we'd never be wholly separate again.
Chapter 13
The way I saw it, we had two options. Option A was to confront Hannah and somehow convince her to end the spell. Considering how every time we'd tried that, we'd just made things worse, I wasn't really behind that idea. Option B wasn't much better, but more and more it felt like it was the only thing we could do. Option B would take some work to convince the others of, though, and I needed at least one of them to help me out.
We were having lunch. Tennyson Wilde wasn't sitting with us. He'd said that that only made the bullying worse. He sat alone in the corner below us.
"I think fixing the problem with her father would make her rethink things." I sat back and waited for all the usual objections. I knew it was a big ask. We'd exhausted every single option except for Option B, and I couldn't find my own father, so how would I ever find Hannah's?
"We don't even know his name, let alone anything else," said Nikolai. "There's no trace of him anywhere, if he ever even existed."
I snorted. "Well, I assume he existed in some form, or Hannah is a bit of a miracle."
"Mother would know," said Althea, sounding pensive. "I bet she even knows where he is now."
Everyone fell silent at the mere suggestion, but it was exactly what I needed. Option B was to tell Tennyson and Althea's mother, to spill the beans, to come clean and hope for the best. Everyone seemed terrified of her, but no matter how scary or strict she was, surely the best possible solution for everyone was to get Hannah's father back. Surely if we did that, Hannah would reverse the spell and things could go back to normal. Well, not completely normal, I hoped, because so far normal at Amaris hadn't been kind to me.
The only problem was, I didn't actually know how to contact Tennyson's mother. I didn't want to ask any of the others outright because I knew they wouldn't approve, but I had to talk to her somehow. The best thing was to make the others think it was their own idea. I'd planted the seeds, and now I just needed to water them so they'd sprout into big getting-things-sorted trees.
"I know what you're trying to do," Tennyson said, jumping out at me as I made my way to class.
I startled and spun around. "You know, lurking in the corners has a totally different effect when you're in my body."
"Don't evade the point. You're trying to contact my mother. You're dropping hints all over the place. It's not exactly subtle."
"Do you have a better idea?"
He paused for a moment and stared at me. "Why do you want to break the spell?" he asked.
I glared at him in disbelief. "Are you for real?"
"Completely. I've lived life in that body for fifteen years, and never have people treated me with such disrespect as they do when I'm like this. Nobody listens to my opinion. People treat me as if I'm worth nothing. It's unpleasant. I don't understand why you would wish to return to that."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Don't you?"
We'd had the same experience with the mind-melding or whatever it was, so I was sure he knew enough to understand why I wanted to be Lucy again.
"In your current form, you could provide for your family a thousand times better. Even if you worked for a lifetime in this body, you would never be able to give them the opportunities that you could offer them as Tennyson Wilde."
I shrugged. "But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't be part of their family." It sounded selfish, but there was more to it than that, feelings too big for me to describe to him. Then he nodded, and I knew that he understood them anyway.
"Very well. We shall contact my mother. It will not be pleasant, and she will be suspicious of the slightest anomalies in your behavior. She has trained me since birth to become the head of this family, and everything I have ever said or done has been because of her influence. I will tell you everything you must do and say. She will know without a doubt that something is wrong if you deviate from the script."
She sounded more like an army drill sergeant than a mother, but it still seemed like the best option.
"And you cannot tell the others. They will not agree to it."
I nodded again.
"You can give her no hint that there is any witchcraft involved. No matter what happens, we want to avoid a face-to-face meeting with her, which she will request if she suspects anything unusual."
It took him days to come up with an adequate script, during which time I felt the lines between us blurring more and more. After he had it perfected, I then had to practice it with him, which we had to do without the knowledge of the other three. They didn't say anything about us sneak
ing off together all the time. Perhaps they thought it was something to do with the connection between us that had formed from the spell.
Finally, the day came when Tennyson Wilde thought we were ready to speak to his mother. He sent a message requesting an audience with her, and an hour or so later came the reply that she could schedule us in for three minutes after dinner that night. Tennyson seemed surprised to have gotten an appointment with her so quickly.
Their family was so weird. I definitely didn't want to be part of that family. I wanted my own family back.
It was a bit bothersome getting the other three out of the way in time, but Tennyson told them that we wanted to meditate, to try to find our own "oneness" together, whatever that meant. It seemed to work, and at 7:42 p.m. the call came through on Tennyson's laptop.
My heart pounded nervously. Would she be able to hear that with her werewolf senses, even through the computer? Maybe Tennyson was always nervous talking to her, though, if she was so awful.
"Speak quickly," she said when the call was picked up.
Tennyson had told me that I was not to glance around, not to fidget. I had to be direct, but not give the game away.
"A student in my class attempted to blackmail me," I told her.
She raised one sharp eyebrow. "Deal with them," she said, and moved to end the call.
"I have," I said quickly. "But I wish to provide them with information to prevent any ill feeling."
She rolled her eyes. "You have still not managed to rid yourself of these soft feelings, I see. Very well. What do you wish to know?"
"Her name is Hannah Morgan," I told her. "Her father vanished after leaving one of our companies. She wishes to know his whereabouts."
