The Truth Spell

Werewolf High #1

Anita Oh

Contents

Copyright

Werewolf High series

Book 1: The Truth Spell

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

ALSO BY ANITA OH

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Werewolf High #1: The Truth Spell

© Anita Oh 2015

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, places or events, is purely coincidental.

This book, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Werewolf High series

Book 1: The Truth Spell

A dastardly spell. Mysterious billionaires. An ordinary girl thrust into an extraordinary world.

Lucy O’Connor is more IT girl than “it girl” but even though she’ll never fit in, the scholarship to elite Amaris High is an opportunity she can’t refuse.

The day Lucy arrives at Amaris, she sees her best friend, Sam Spencer. But Sam had died three years ago, on the night that had changed Lucy’s life forever. The more Lucy looks for answers, the worse things get for her, as she makes an enemy of the richest, most popular boy in school, Tennyson Wilde.

When the entire school is hit by a truth spell, it seems like the perfect chance to find out what Sam and Tennyson are hiding, but the closer Lucy gets, the more she realizes that the truth is stranger than she ever imagined.

A Very Werey Christmas: A Werewolf High Short

When Lucy is kidnapped by a creepy old man in a red suit and transformed into a reindeer, it will take a Christmas miracle to sort things out.

Book 2: The Tiny Curse

A powerful enemy. An estranged love. And only one tiny girl to make things right.

Life isn’t going so well for Lucy at elite boarding school, Amaris High. Classes are a struggle. She has no leads on the evil magic user. Sam’s avoiding her, and the entire student population hates her.

But someone hates her more than the rest. Rumors start spreading that lead to Lucy being bullied worse than ever before. Just when she thinks she couldn’t feel smaller, she’s hit with a spell that shrinks her down to only two inches tall.

Forced to rely on Sam, Tennyson and the other Golden to survive, Lucy is determined to get to the bottom of things once and for all. But the more she learns, she finds that being tiny might not be her biggest problem.

Book 3: The Body Swap

A shocking betrayal. An impossible deadline. Everything is about to change.

Lucy's world is turned upside down when she learns that her enemy is the one person she never suspected.

Although she has Sam and the Golden on her side, she no longer knows who to trust. Then, when she's hit with one final spell, she has no choice but to put her faith in the person the she despises the most.

Stuck in Tennyson Wilde's body, Lucy and Tennyson must work together to break the curse or risk becoming each other for real. But in order to fix things, Lucy will face the greatest betrayal of all.

Book 4: The Soul Bond

A new threat. An unexpected ally. And a spark of unwanted power.

Sophomore year isn’t shaping up to be the cake walk that Lucy had hoped. Everyone still hates her. She can’t forgive Sam for his secrets. Her father is back and she can’t forgive him either. There’s been no sign of Hannah, and Lucy can’t help but resent her new roommate because of it.

And Tennyson Wilde is everywhere. In the dining room. In her dorm. In class. Even inside her head. She thinks it’s just a residual effect of being in his body, the fact that she can hear his thoughts, feel his feelings. But the more it happens, the worse it becomes and it seems to be awakening something inside her.

Lucy never wanted powers. She never wanted to be anything but a normal girl, but the longer she stays at Amaris, the more impossible that seems.

Book 5: The Love Potion

A lurking danger. Untamed powers. And a tangled mess of feelings.

Being a werewolf is hard work. Lucy just wants to frolic in the forest chasing butterflies, but real life won’t give her a break. Classes are a drag, classmates even worse. Her dad is trying to kill Tennyson again and being part of a pack has its own problems.

Sam is complicated, Tennyson is a jerk, and her new alpha has no time for her. When a threat on Tennyson’s life goes wildly wrong, Lucy ends up the victim of a love potion, and that’s when things get really messy.

Book 6: The Time Loop

An unbreakable bond. A magical trap. One bad day that never ends.

Lucy is having a bad day. Things are awkward with Sam. She's failing history. One of her roommates is missing and the other is crazy. Her evil dad is at it again, and this time, he's not playing around.

Lucy has a choice: leave the pack or stay trapped in this day forever. What do you do when the only way to save the people you love is to abandon them? Will Lucy fight to stay in the pack or fight to save them?

For my sisters

Chapter 1

As soon as I stepped onto the grounds of Amaris High, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. The kind of mistake it was hard to come back from.

Maybe it was just the late afternoon light, but everything seemed gilded, magnificent in a way I wasn’t used to. An immaculate lawn stretched out in front of me, divided by a tree-lined path that led up to a building that looked more like some sort of gothic fortress than a school. The lawn was greener than any grass I’d seen in my life, and the sky above was extra blue. I wondered if super rich people had access to colors outside the hexadecimal range. Everything looked too bright, surreal. They’d sent me brochures when they’d offered me the scholarship, of course, but no amount of glossy pictures could capture the atmosphere – an atmosphere that distinctly said, “Not for girls like you.”

There was hardly anyone around, not on the lawn, or the path, or milling around on the school steps. I’d been practically alone on the train as well, to the point where I’d wondered if I had gotten the dates wrong. I’d double-checked the paperwork and made sure I hadn’t messed up with time zones or anything, but I hadn’t.

Well, I was fairly sure I hadn’t. I’d been traveling for so long that I’d lost all sense of time. Amaris was so exclusive that nobody knew the actual location – “for the safety of our students and the peace of mind of their families,” the brochure had said. Which made sense, considering the type of people who sent their kids to a school like this, but also made it a bitch to get to. I’d been zigzagging back and forth all over the place until I wasn’t even sure I was on the same planet anymore. There’d been an option in the brochure to get a direct flight, but they’d obviously made a typo with the price, because for that amount my family could’ve eaten roast dinners every night for a year.

But even the direct flights had only gone as far as a train station “at an undisclosed location,” from which a train then traveled underground to the school, so it didn’t explain why nobody was around. I hovered by the entrance to the train platform, tightening my grip on my battered old suitcase and willing myself not to just turn around and run all the way home, back to my family.

“Um, are you okay?”

A rosy-cheeked girl with dark curly hair popped out from between the trees. Her big blue eyes were filled with concern as she looked earnestly into my face. She was so cute and sweet-looking that I felt like a gangle monster, too tall and plain, all knees and elbows and thick-rimmed glasses, freckles and ginger hair.

“You’re Lucy O’Connor, right?” she asked.

Before I could answer, she grabbed my suitcase, took me by the arm and started leading me up the path to the school.

“I figured you must be,” she said. “My roommate was listed as Lucy O’Connor, so I’ve been waiting for you, and you’re the first person I’ve seen that I didn’t already know, and that was the last train. I almost thought you weren’t coming!”

She grinned at me and I couldn’t help but grin back. I was so relieved to meet someone nice right off the bat. I hadn’t had much time for friends in the past few years, but I was hoping that could change now that I was at boarding school and away from my responsibilities.

“I’m glad you came, though! They organize roomies alphabetically here and I’m right in the middle – Hannah Morgan – which has always put me with either Olivia Montague, who is nice enough but says creepy things in her sleep, or Britt Pendlebury, who is just… wow. She’s just so… wow, I am glad you’re my roomie. High school is going to kick the butt of middle school. This campus is much nicer than the middle school’s, too, and hopefully the teachers will be. Our old biology teacher was such a pervert. I hope we have someone good this year.”

The main school was set on a slight crest, so as we made our way up the path toward it, I could see over the school grounds. There were a few smaller buildings close to the main school, arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way like a quaint tiny village, but most of the grounds seemed covered by gardens, right back to where the forest began. The gardens were divided into two concentric circles, the outer with red flowers, then a larger middle section that was all green. As more of the grounds came into view, I noticed there was also a small square garden of yellow flowers and golden trees set back close to the forest. It seemed an odd arrangement to me, but then I wasn’t exactly a horticulturalist.

Hannah had stopped chatting, and I noticed she was struggling a bit with my bag. I shook my head at myself and tried to take it back off her but she just laughed at me.

“I’m fine,” she said. “But what do you have in here? Bricks?”

We were almost at the school, so it didn’t seem the right time to explain to her that I was actually dirt poor and needed to subsidize my family’s income doing online computer repairs so we didn’t all starve to death.

“Just some work from home,” I told her. “I can go drop it in our room.”

She shook her head. “No time, the welcome ceremony is about to start. I’m surprised the porters didn’t take it with the rest of your luggage, though.”

I could only shrug in reply. That was all my luggage, and I hadn’t seen any porters – they’d probably taken one look at my old bag and figured it wasn’t worth it.

We climbed the steps to the main entrance, the imposing stone building looming over us. I stopped in my tracks as we entered the massive foyer, feeling a little dizzy. Everything was marble and mahogany, polished so shiny that the glare could blind you. A chandelier hung low in the middle, so sparkly it may have been made of diamonds – I’d never seen an actual diamond before, so I couldn’t be sure. Two grand staircases curved around the walls on either side, covered in thick white carpet and edged with banisters of gold. I tried to calculate in my head how many roast dinners the stuff in that foyer could buy for my family, but my brain just kept coming up with an error message. Error $$$: this school is ridiculous – that was what my brain said.

“It’s through here,” said Hannah, nudging me toward a set of mahogany doors between the staircases like it was all perfectly normal.

She led me through the doors and down a set of stone steps into a large paved courtyard. The school bordered three sides of the courtyard, with more stone steps along the back, completing the square. The back steps led down to a marble terrace, the centerpiece of which was a large tiered fountain with cupids shooting arrows that squirted water around it. Beyond that were more gardens. In the middle of the courtyard was a raised garden bed with pretty little seats set around the edges. There had been a quad at my old school, but it had been concreted, with some broken picnic tables and a few struggling plants. It was kind of the same thing.

There was a podium set up at the far side of the garden bed, and the back half of the courtyard was currently filled with rows of seats facing the podium. It was immediately obvious why I hadn’t seen many other students out on the grounds. They were all gathered here. They milled about in small groups, the low buzz of their chatter filling the courtyard. Hannah led me around the side of the courtyard, to some empty seats near the back.

“So, where did you go before?” Hannah asked, stowing my suitcase under our seats and sitting down.

I shrugged. “Just my local school. Nowhere special.”

A look of understanding flickered over her face, and I knew it had clicked for her that I wasn’t a rich kid.

“Well, it’s probably not too different,” she said. “I mean, I assume. I’ve been at Amaris since kindergarten, so I can’t really compare, but high school is high school, right? I mean, I hear the library here is way better than the one we had in middle school, and a lot of the teachers aren’t permanent staff, they’re experts who get flown in specially. I heard one of the math teachers won a Nobel Prize, but these things get talked up, you know.”

I was fairly sure none of the teachers at Greenville High had ever won anything. Maybe the ring toss at the county fair.

In the pause in our conversation, I overheard two girls in front of us chatting. They both had long, shiny hair and very white teeth.

“I cannot believe I missed Fashion Week,” said the blonde one, flicking her hair over her shoulder and almost taking my eye out.

“I know, it’s like you may as well not even exist,” said the brunette. “Still, your new nose is such an improvement, and I’m sure the Alps were lovely.”

I snorted. What had I gotten myself into? Alps and Fashion Week and new noses? Were these people even real? Looking around, everything just seemed so clean – the buildings and gardens, the people, everything. Not that things in normal life were dirty, just that things at Amaris were unnaturally clean, like the way you’d scrub a crime scene so a new family could move into the murder house. It made me a bit uncomfortable.

“And the social structure is fairly simple to understand,” Hannah continued.

I raised my eyebrows. “Social structure?”

My middle school hadn’t had any sort of social structure that I’d been aware of. Maybe antisocial structure. But then, I had kept to myself a lot, so maybe I was just oblivious.

“Like social groups, cliques, divisions? Here we mainly only have two, Red and Green.”

I screwed up my face in thought. That actually sounded kind of familiar.

“I read something about that in the brochure. Study packages?” I’d kind of skimmed over it. It wasn’t relevant to me when I was on a scholarship. I wasn’t exactly in a position to pay for any add-ons.

Hannah nodded. “Right. So the basic package is Red. Basic dorms, basic food, basic services, and so on. That’s what you and I have. The step up from that is the Green package. Better dorms, better food, better services. Everything is better, which makes them think they are better, and so it creates the divide that is the basis of our social structure here.” She shrugged. She didn’t seem that bothered by it, just stating facts.

“Wowsers,” I said. “I thought once you got to the super rich level, there wasn’t anything past that.” I didn’t want to offend Hannah by saying it, but I thought it was maybe the dumbest thing I ever heard. Rather than worrying about how rich they were, they should be rolling around in their wads of cash, and eating Kobe beef and stuff.

Hannah laughed. “It’s practically the only thing people around here think about.”

I thought she was going to say something else, but she was cut off by the screech of feedback from a microphone. Everyone who was standing around chatting hurried to find seats as a hulking bald man took his place at the podium.

“Headmistress Wu is probably at the Asia campus this semester,” said Hannah. “She divides her time up between all the campuses. That’s Assistant Head Noel, he’s really nice.”

“Welcome to another year at Amaris,” he said in a booming voice once everyone had settled. “As always, it is an honor to have such bright and sparkling minds in my care.” He smiled down benevolently at us. “It is a new year, a new chapter in our lives, filled with new possibilities. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously said that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. I would urge each of you, in this new chapter, to strive for the impossible, for only when testing your limits can you find what you are capable of – only when reaching for the impossible can you find the truths that you hold inside your hearts.”

Assistant Head Noel had clearly never tried to feed a family of five on twenty dollars a week, or he wouldn’t talk so fancy about the impossible, I thought. I let my attention wander to the other staff members, who were seated at the base of the garden bed, facing the students. There weren’t that many of them, I assumed because of what Hannah had said about most of them flying in specially for classes. The one on the end looked barely older than some of the students. He had a hipster beard and his suit was worn, but in that purposeful way, like it cost even more for looking crappy. He had the same glasses as me, but I’d bet his weren’t inherited from his grandpa, I bet they were some expensive designer label. Beside him was a woman with blond hair pulled back in a tight bun, then an overweight man with small eyes and sweat stains under his arms.

“That’s Mr. Corbett,” Hannah whispered with a groan, noticing where I was looking. “Remember I was saying about the pervert biology teacher from middle school? Looks like he transferred.”

I wrinkled my nose, but before I could reply, there was a sharp change in the air. I glanced around, wondering what had caused it.

Assistant Head Noel was still talking, but nobody was listening to him – everyone had their heads craned up to the sky. I could hear an engine, I realized. It grew louder and louder. A helicopter. The day was fading fast, and I squinted into the sun as I turned to watch it circle the school, then land in the gardens behind the fountain.

I looked at Hannah in question.

“There’s a third package,” she said. “It’s not in the brochure. It’s not something you can buy.”

The helicopter engine cut out and all the students jostled to get closer to look. Because we were seated near the back, I could already see quite clearly.

The water danced in the fountain, and between beams of refracted light, they appeared.

There were four of them. Even in silhouette they were impressive – the girl with long, straight hair and just the right amount of curves; the boys tall and broad-shouldered. They emitted charisma like a beacon, confident and untouchable. One of the boys turned to another and his eyes flashed in the sunlight.

“What are they?” I whispered, trying to blink the sun out of my eyes.

“They’re Golden,” said Hannah. “Their lives are golden, everything about them is golden.”

The shortest boy moved to the side, into the shade, as he spoke quietly to the girl. He had slicked-back blond hair and cheekbones sharp enough to cut. The girl said something, and he laughed. It sounded mean, somehow, derisive. I shivered.

“That’s Nikolai Volkov,” Hannah said, covering her mouth with her hand as though people were trying to listen to our conversation. “His family basically owns Europe and like half of South America. Some people say they run the Russian mafia. Other people say they run all the mafias… mafii? And apparently he’s heir to like six different thrones. But I don’t know how true any of that is.”

As Hannah spoke, the glare of the light began to fade, just a little.

“And you probably recognize the Wilde twins,” Hannah continued as the girl became visible. “Especially Althea Wilde. Her face has been everywhere lately. She missed half of last semester because she was off modeling and doing special people things, but I mean, it’s not as if any teacher would ever fail her.”

I shook my head. I had definitely never seen that girl before. She was the kind of beautiful that was so striking, you didn’t forget. Her long black hair tumbled over her shoulders, so dark in contrast to her pale skin. There was an opulence about her, somehow, even though she was dressed simply in a yellow sundress and ankle boots – just something that emanated from her that all these other girls lacked, despite their riches. She didn’t look haughty, but rather she seemed as if she’d stepped out of a mist, been fashioned from seafoam and moonlight and stardust.

“They’re Wildes as in W Corp Wilde, so between them they’re going to inherit basically the whole planet. Their father owns the business world and their mother’s family is like the most aristocratic family ever.”

Her brother had the same dark hair and pale skin, same ethereal beauty, but there was an edge to it, a wildness. Rather than moonlight, he seemed formed from a supernova, from the chaos of total destruction, and I could well believe that if you got too close to him, you’d be pulled in; you’d collapse on yourself.

He said something quietly to his sister and began to turn away, toward the school grounds, but as he did, our eyes caught. Although it was only for a moment, it felt like forever, as if time stopped around us. A thousand things seemed to happen in that moment, and nothing at all. I could feel him weighing me up, judging me, and I wanted to prove myself worthy to him, to this strange boy. His eyes were lit with a secret light – not a glow or a reflection, but something that came from deep within, and, in that moment, all I wanted was to understand that light.

Then he turned away, dismissing me.

“And that’s Tennyson Wilde, of course,” said Hannah. “He’s the actual worst person on the planet. He makes Althea Wilde look like a cuddle bunny. He is like, if Hitler had a baby with Voldemort, that baby would be like, ‘Hold up there, buddy, keep me away from this guy. He is too evil for me.’ I am not even kidding. You want to stay away from Tennyson Wilde. He is not someone you want to mess with. I don’t even know if he’s human.”

But I didn’t really hear most of what Hannah was saying, because as Tennyson Wilde turned, I caught a glimpse of the boy standing behind him.

But it couldn’t be.

It looked like him, with his floppy brown hair and puppy dog eyes, and a smile so bright it could melt ice caps. But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be Sam Spencer, because he had died three years ago, on the night that had changed everything.

But then, why was he standing right in front of me?

Chapter 2

My legs gave way and I collapsed into my seat. I couldn’t breathe. Blood rushed in my ears, blocking out all other sounds and making the rest of the world seem far away, as if an invisible wall had sprung up around me. That wall closed in, cutting off the air and squeezing my heart in a crushing grip. I watched everyone drift back to their seats, not really registering anything that was happening. I glanced back at the spot where he’d stood but he wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there. The other Golden students had disappeared into the gardens, but there was no way that Sam Spencer had ever been there.

It couldn’t have been him. It was just the exhaustion from all the travel catching up with me and giving me hallucinations or something. In my mind, I could still see the scene that had greeted me that night, as clearly as if I was looking at it. There had been so much blood.

“Are you okay?” Hannah asked.

Everyone was still listening to Assistant Head Noel talk about truth and possibility or whatever, and whispering about the arrival of the Golden, but none of it seemed real to me the way that picture in my mind was.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

She glanced around to make sure nobody was paying any attention to us, slid my bag out from under the seat and then guided me out of the courtyard and down past the fountain into the gardens, taking a path that led off to the right, toward the forest.

“The other boy,” I said, “the other Golden. You didn’t say anything about him.”

She gave me a strange look, which I took as confirmation that I was actually losing my grip on reality and he really hadn’t been there.

“You’re so pale,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be fine after some food and rest. I hope you haven’t caught some sort of travel sickness.”

I wasn’t sure what sort of travel sickness could cause hallucinations of dead friends, but food definitely sounded good. As Hannah led me past the mini-village of outer buildings and deeper into the gardens, I tried to take my mind off Sam by thinking about all the fancy foods I could eat at rich person school. I didn’t even know anything about fancy foods — fancy for my family was having meat in our weekly stew instead of canned beans.

Still, my thoughts kept going back to Sam. Why would my mind conjure him up now, in this place? I’d worked so hard to move on and it had taken me so long. I was exhausted, and my brain was short circuiting at all the extravagance — maybe it was just looking for something comforting, familiar. That was the most logical explanation, but I had to be sure. It had conjured Sam, after all, not marshmallows or puppy dogs or something else without the traumatic associations of Sam Spencer.

“You definitely didn’t see anyone else?” I asked Hannah. “Only Nikolai Volkov and the Wildes?”

She shrugged, taking me by the elbow to guide me as we left the main path and entered a Zen garden. My feet crunched on pebbles that were raked into formations, and I worried that I’d muck up all the perfect lines, but I made no impression at all. Amongst the pebbles were islands of moss and stone, some with tiny trees. To one side was a large square fountain – maybe a pond – and in the center of the pond was a statue of a very fat man with a walrus moustache in the pose of Buddha, though I was fairly sure he wasn’t Buddha but the founder of the school. The garden was beautiful, but I didn’t feel very Zen walking through it, thinking about my dead best friend.

“I wasn’t really paying that much attention, to be honest.” She gave me an apologetic smile.

I smiled back, but I wished she could’ve given me a definitive answer either way. She’d known everything else about them, but she couldn’t tell me what I really cared about. It wasn’t fair to put that on her, she had no clue about the tornado of thoughts and feelings going on inside of me, but it would’ve been great if she could’ve just said, “no, Lucy, you are seeing things, there were only three people.” Then I could just put it out of my mind and move on.

“Down here is the Red Garden,” she said, leading me out of the Zen garden and along another path. “That’s where our house is, obviously.”

“Our house?” I asked, pleased for the distraction from Sam.

“Not like Gryffindor or whatever,” she said. “It’s just our dorm house, where we live. The Green House is much closer to the school, and bigger, better security and facilities… you get the idea.”

I was definitely starting to.

“The Golden House is usually empty,” she continued. “Because there are only a few Golden families. It’s unheard of for there to be three in one grade. That’s probably why people are so crazy for them.”

“People are crazy for those guys? Normal people?”

Sam definitely wasn’t one of them, then. Not my Sam. My gentle, goofy friend. Nobody would ever go crazy over that guy.

“Yeah, strangely enough, people in this world love incredibly rich, incredibly attractive people. It’s shocking.”

I snorted. “Fair point.”

The Red Garden was beautiful in a different way from the Zen garden. Delicate red flowers bordered the path. Big leafy red trees met over our heads and blocked out the sky, I hadn’t even known there were so many types of red trees. Other clusters of red flowers blossomed across the gardens. The flowers and trees were all mismatched shades of red and seemed to be planted with no formal structure, just springing up naturally. As little as I knew about gardening, I much preferred this style to the carefully cultivated ones closer to the school.

We turned a corner and as the trees cleared, our house came into view. It was a five-story red brick cottage, with some sort of vine growing across it and red geraniums in hanging boxes outside the shutter windows. After seeing the imposing school buildings, I hadn’t expected anything like this, and I was completely charmed. Night had fallen during our short walk, and warm lights glowed from inside the house, as if beckoning us in.

“Do you have your student card?” Hannah asked.

I patted down my pockets, then nodded.

“Security is really tight, even in the Red House. The Green House has retina scan, I think, and I was hoping we would too because it is really annoying if you forget your card.”

She pulled out her card and touched it to the sensor next to the door. The door slid open with a soft whoosh, then slid closed again as soon as she stepped through, as if it knew exactly where she was. I wondered what would’ve happened if I’d tried to sneak through beside her, if like laser beams would have cut me into a thousand pieces or something. I didn’t particularly want to find out. I copied what Hannah had done, scanning my card and entering the house.

Inside had the same sort of homey, cottagey feeling as the outside. The floors were a light, polished wood, the same wood as the exposed rafters on the ceiling and the other trimmings that I could see. The walls were white-painted stone, which I worried would make it cold in winter, but I heard the climate control click on as we moved further into the house.

“This side is the common room,” she said, leading me to a room to the right.

It was a large square room with a long wooden table taking up most of one end, then comfortable-looking white sofas and the biggest TV I’d ever seen at the other.

“Mostly, people study in there and fight over what they want to watch on TV,” Hannah said, leading me back out and toward the room on the other side of the foyer. “This is the house kitchen. It’s better to go to the dining hall up at the school for meals, but if you need study snacks or whatever, there’s usually something in here.”

Although I still felt weird about seeing Sam, I couldn’t help but perk up at the promise of food. The house kitchen had several small tables, and a little kitchenette area. I ambled forward, my eyes on the prize. There was a large beverage fridge, which didn’t interest me; a coffee machine, a microwave, convection oven, sink, all that usual stuff. But there was also a large pantry cupboard and a fridge, both of which were filled with toothsome treats. Well, I assumed they were toothsome. A lot of the stuff I didn’t recognize, but I figured they were just like friends I hadn’t met yet. I didn’t even know where to start.

“I thought you felt sick,” Hannah said, sounding amused.

“Not too sick to eat,” I told her. “I’m not dead.”

Most of my new little friends were in fancy wrappings with foreign writing, so I picked a few things at random and then followed Hannah back out.

“We’re on the top floor,” Hannah told me, leading me toward the back of the foyer and swiping her card again.

Something made a “ping” noise, and part of the wall slid open to reveal an elevator. I sighed in relief that I didn’t have to climb the stairs to the fifth floor, and that the elevator let me enter without swiping as well, because my hands were full of snacks.

We got out on the top floor and I followed Hannah down a corridor to the left with rooms on both sides. Our room was at the very end, with our names embossed on shiny brass plates by the door. I had to swipe again to enter, so Hannah went in first and then held my food for me so I could find my card.

“I hope you don’t mind, I took the right side,” she said, nodding in that direction as she sat my food down on the bench in the corner.

“I don’t mind,” I said, looking around our room in awe.

It was more like an apartment than a room. A fancy apartment. It was designed to match the rest of the house – light wood, white sofa, giant TV – but we also had beds that looked so comfortable they could’ve been made from clouds, and a little study nook each with a big screen desktop computer. When I peeked in our bathroom, I noticed we had one of those rainforest showers and so much toilet paper it would last for a year and we wouldn’t even need to ration it. I couldn’t believe this was the basic package. What did you get with the fancy package? Foot massages? Cabana boys feeding you grapes?

I didn’t want to eat on the white sofa, because I just knew I’d make a mess, so I sat down on the floor beside the coffee table and started digging into some sort of crunchy chocolatey orange thing.

“Omigod,” I said after one mouthful. “What even is this? Can I send this home to my family? It’s like magically amazing.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I needed to message my brothers about this. I still had no cell signal, though.

“You need to connect to the school Wi-Fi,” said Hannah, wandering over to her part of the room and starting to unpack. “There’s no phone signal anywhere on the island so we can’t be traced, so we have to use their Wi-Fi for everything.”

That seemed potentially creepy and invasive, but at least it was free. My phone was too old and cheap to take photos, so I couldn’t send a picture of my food, and I’d been nervous about leaving everyone on their own anyway, so I decided to Skype them. I took my selection of tasty snacks and wandered over to the computer in my study nook. I didn’t know what the time difference would be, but I knew they’d be expecting to hear from me as well, so someone would be around and waiting for me to call through.

Because we had a corner room, it looked out both over the school grounds and the forest. As I waited for the computer to start up, I could see the lights on up at the main school, and the quarter moon rising over the forest. It all looked so tranquil. I could’ve even sworn I heard a wolf howl in the distance.

“Everyone’s heading back after the welcome ceremony,” Hannah said. “I’m going to go catch up with some people, do you want to come?”

I knew I probably should, be sociable and all that, but all I wanted to do was eat and check in with my family, then sleep.

I shook my head. “No, but thanks, and thanks for showing me around and everything.”

She grinned at me. “This is going to be a great year. We’ll have so much fun together!” She gave me a little wave as she left.

As soon as I logged in to Skype, a call came through from my family.

“You were going to call as soon as you got there!” yelled Fletcher, my second oldest brother. “We were worried sick!”

I laughed as I watched my three brothers pushing each other to get the best spot in front of the camera.

“When are you coming home?” asked Hamish, my youngest brother. He was only five and missing his front teeth. “I hate Liam, he’s a bully and wouldn’t sing me any songs when I was in the bath last night.”

Liam was my oldest brother, only two years younger than me. He rolled his eyes at Hamish.

“Well, did you wash your ears?” I asked.

Hamish screwed up his little face. “They didn’t even need washing.”

“Dirty ears, no songs. You know the rules.”

“You suck too,” Hamish said, climbing off the sofa, clearly done with me. “I hate you both.”

“How is it?” asked Fletcher. “Is everything made out of gold and candy?”

“Practically,” I said, holding up my snacks to show them.

Hamish crept back into view as they made me try each different snack and describe it to them in vivid detail, enough for them to almost be able to taste it. As we chatted, my heart ached with homesickness but I began to feel a bit more normal. I wasn’t fooling Liam though. When Fletcher and Hamish got bored and went off to do their stuff, Liam narrowed his eyes at me.

“What’s up with you, anyway?” he asked.

I shrugged. There was no way I was getting into all that. Sam had been my best friend and our families had been close, more than just neighbors. His family had been like our own. Our mom had always been too sick to do much, and when our dad walked out, Sam’s parents had looked after us, kept us together. Losing the Spencers had hit us all hard, and for it to happen so horribly. There was no point bringing it all up again.

“Just tired,” I told him. “How are things there, really?”

It was more than just a handy change in subject; I was really worried about leaving everyone. I hated putting all that responsibility on Liam. When I’d first been offered the spot at Amaris, I’d thrown the letter away. I didn’t need to go off to some fancy school, I needed to stay home and work and look after my family. But Liam had found the letter in the trash and convinced me it was for the best.

“Things here are fine,” he said, glancing off to the side, toward our mother’s room. He hunched in closer to the screen and spoke quietly. “She’s been really unsettled since you left. I told her I’d call the doctor if she’s so distressed.”

I nodded. “She’s probably just testing to see how far she can push you but call the doctor if you need to. If it’s too much, I’ll come home.”

He scowled at me. “You were younger than me when Dad left.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“You just stay at your fancy school and eat your fancy snack foods. It’s one less mouth to feed and you know it’s better for everyone in the long run.” He looked over to the side and nodded at something off-screen. “I have to go, but we can cope just fine without you, you’re not really that great, you know.”

I poked my tongue out at him and hung up. As soon as he was gone, everything felt cold and empty. I curled up on my new bed and gave in to the thoughts that kept crowding my mind.

After Sam had died, I’d seen him everywhere for a while. It had been all I’d thought about, to the point where I was sure I’d go mad. I’d replayed that night over and over in my mind. But then I’d had to stop. I’d had to pull myself together. I couldn’t rely on anyone else, so I’d had to learn how to live without him. I still missed him, but I couldn’t think about him if I wanted to function. It was like a bruise on my heart, and sometimes I couldn’t help but press it to see if it still hurt. But it always did. It always would. That bruise would never heal.

Chapter 3

When I woke from my unintentional nap, my glasses were crooked on my face, the room was filled with moonlight, and I could hear Hannah softly breathing in the other bed.

I’d been dreaming of Sam. I couldn’t really remember the details, only the sense of him, the comfort of knowing he was there. And something about narwhals.

I curled up into a tight little ball. I had to forget that feeling of him, of being safe, protected. Once you lose that sense of being secure in the world, of standing on solid ground, you can never get it back. Not completely. Because once it’s gone you know that it was only ever an illusion, a dream. I wanted to hold onto that safe feeling, to wrap it around me like a blanket, but I had to push it away. It was a weakness and there was no point to it. You could wrap yourself up in dreams all you liked, but at the end of the day things were what they were. Nobody was looking out for me; nobody was protecting me. I had to look after myself.

Still, my dumb brain hadn’t got the message. I could tell it a thousand times that Sam was dead, but obviously it didn’t accept that. No matter what I did, it kept coming back to him.

I’d tried to block the memory of that night for so long, knowing it would only lead to a spiral of dark thoughts about Sam and his family suffering, scared and hurt and dying. Still, even now I could recall it perfectly. I’d replayed it in my head every night for months after it had happened. Years.

A noise had woken me up. I’d thought maybe it was my youngest brother, Hamish. He’d only been two years old then and full of trouble. I got up to see what he was into, but when I looked in on him, he’d been asleep. Everyone was asleep, everything was fine, so I headed back to bed.

Sam’s bedroom window had faced mine. We were such a cliché, childhood best friends with their windows opposite. I never closed my curtains at night because Sam liked to leave messages for me when he woke up. Anyone could text, he said, but this was special, from him to me. But there was no message there that night. There was only blood.

I rushed to the window, not sure what I was seeing. Was Sam playing a joke? If so, it was not funny. Something moved in Sam’s room, but everything was darkness and shadow and I couldn’t make it out.

Then I heard the scream.

It sounded like nothing on this earth. Nothing human. It made my blood run cold.

I stood, unable to move, unable to do anything but look helplessly into the darkness. I felt as if my entire world was fading right before my eyes, and I didn’t know how or why.

Out of the darkness, something flashed. A light, but no type of light I’d ever seen, a light that seemed somehow darker than the shadows. It sucked in the light around it, absorbing it, feeding on it. At the center of the light was a person. A massive person. Too big to be real.

Something smashed within the depths of Sam’s house, and it spurred me to action. I ran. Out of my room, out of my house. To Sam. I was always running to Sam – running to get him out of trouble. Running to save him. Running to be saved.

But this time it was too late.

Sam’s house had always been so warm, so homey and welcoming. But that night it was something else, something frightening. The front door hung off its hinges, huge gouges splintering the wood. I looked around for a weapon and picked up a garden fork from the porch steps, wondering if that’s what had made the marks on the door, the long scratches.

I’ll never forget the way my heart pounded in my throat as I approached that door. It pounded so hard, it seemed to rise up in my throat. I thought I would choke on it. I entered the house, sure that something would jump out and attack me at any moment. But what I found was so much worse.

There was nothing. Nothing but blood. I wandered through the house in shock, but there was only blood. Tracks of blood on the carpet, splatters on the wall, a trail leading out the back door and into the night.

The police didn’t find anything more than I had. The trail was more than cold, they said, it was nonexistent. There was nothing to go on. All the DNA, all the blood was from Sam’s family. There was no motive. Nobody would want to hurt Sam’s family; his father was a grade school teacher and his mother ran the best bakery in town. Everyone liked them. His little sister had been the same age as Hamish.

They didn’t believe me about the person I’d seen. They said it was trauma and I had to talk to a counselor, and after a while I almost believed it. But someone had been there. Someone had taken Sam and his family from me.

Sam was gone. He was dead, no matter what my stupid brain wanted to believe. I could conjure him up all over the place, it didn’t make it less true, it didn’t mean he was really there. But it looked like I’d have to prove it to myself beyond a doubt if I ever wanted to get any peace.

I sighed and rolled out of bed. I’d seen the Golden Garden earlier and it hadn’t seemed that far, I could probably find it in the moonlight. The Golden were probably all asleep and even if they weren’t, the security was no doubt too tight for me to discover anything, but I had to do something to shut my stupid brain up. Hannah hadn’t seen a fourth person, but the sun had been so bright. There might have been someone, someone who just looked a bit like Sam from a certain angle, in the right light. If I met that person, I’d know for sure. There was no point trying to make a fresh start at a new school if I was stuck in the past.

I didn’t want to wake Hannah, so I carried my shoes to the door and slipped out as quietly as I could, making sure I had my student card to get back in. I had no clue what the time was, but the house was silent and the lights were dimmed as I crept down the hall and into the elevator, then out the front door.

The school had a completely different atmosphere at night, less like a quaint village and more like the secluded island that it actually was. The path was edged with tiny lights and the school brochure had gone into great detail about security measures, so it wasn’t as creepy as it could’ve been, but it was still obviously in the wilderness. The air was fresh and crisp, and I wished I’d thought to grab a jacket. At home, summer had lingered, but here it was well past.

Every noise seemed amplified in the quiet, the distant crash of the ocean and the wind in the trees. Again, I heard a wolf howl and I wondered what other animals might be in the forest. Bears? Judging from the coolness of the weather, we seemed quite far north, maybe there were even moose. Moose were cool. I’d like to see a moose. Probably not while wandering around alone in the middle of the night though.

I followed the path around to the right instead of into the Zen garden, toward the school. From what I remembered, the Golden Garden had been at the far edge of the forest, so if I kept to the path right to the end, I’d probably find it. Hopefully.

The path branched off in different directions in a few places but I figured if I went to the right each time it would be easier to find my way back if I got turned around. I wondered what the Golden House was like, would it be some sort of palace, or maybe a weird ultra-modern kind of thing. I hoped that whatever it was, it had a sign at the front that said, “hey, Lucy’s brain, please stop thinking about Sam Spencer”, because that would be super convenient.

Gradually, the lights at the edge of the path became further and further apart until they stopped completely. That didn’t seem right. You’d think there’d be extra lights for extra special people. Still, the path kept going, so I followed it.

“You can’t be here.”

I stopped in my tracks, my heart pounding as I looked up to see who was talking to me from out of the darkness. I’d been so intent on the path that I hadn’t realized I’d ventured just inside the forest, into a woodland glade that was filled with wildflowers. Beyond the glade, the trees grew thickly and the forest was dark. To the left, I could see a high stone wall, continuing on into the trees.

Althea Wilde sat on a white bench under a trellis in the middle of the glade, staring at me disdainfully. She seemed luminescent in the moonlight, glowing and otherworldly. Like a fairy princess. I felt like Godzilla in comparison.

“You have to leave,” she said. Although she gave off this fey, floaty impression, she actually seemed a little agitated. Her whole face was pinched and hard, her lips thin. Her eyes darted around as if she didn’t want to look directly at me, as if poverty was catching via eye contact or something.

“Okay,” I said. “But are you all right? I mean, you’re sitting in the forest in the middle of the night, wearing only your nightgown, is everything okay? You should be careful you don’t catch a cold.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Can you please just go?”

“What’s going on here?” said a sharp voice.

Tennyson Wilde emerged from the forest as if he’d been transported from the netherworld by shadow and moonlight. He moved like a dancer, each motion fluid and calculated, and as he stepped into the glade, his eyes flashed with menace.

“Althea, who is this person?” he asked, looking between the two of us.

“I don’t know,” said Althea, sounding both exasperated and bored. “She forced her way in here and now she won’t leave.”

“I didn’t force my way anywhere!” I said. “This is a public area and I have just as much right to be here as you.”

I had no idea whether or not that was true. There might have been big signs saying “no Lucys allowed” or “super rich people only”. It was dark and I hadn’t been paying that much attention, so it was possible. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that they were rude jerks. And that Tennyson Wilde was a bit creepy. Why was he even in the forest with his sister in the middle of the night? That wasn’t normal. Creepy jerk.

“If he’s making you be here or something, I can help you,” I said to Althea. “I’m not scared of him.”

Althea rolled her eyes. “I’m acting completely of my own free will.”

Sure, she thought that, but so did people in cults just before they committed mass murder and got married to crusty old hippie guys who had fifteen other wives. Tennyson Wilde definitely looked capable of brainwashing the masses. Not so crusty though.

He took a step closer to me, narrowing his eyes. I was hit with that same feeling as the day before, of wanting to prove my worth to him, but I was onto him now. There would be no washing of my brain. He could try as hard as he liked to intimidate me with his piercing blue eyes and his artfully messy hair and his broad shoulders, I was having none of it. I didn’t even care why they were frolicking around the forest in the middle of the night. Rich people were weird, everyone knew that. I’d come out to find answers and that’s exactly what I intended to do.

“Hey, so do you guys know someone called Sam Spencer who died around three years ago? Brown hair? Kind of goofy? Cries if you talk about sad puppies?” I tried to keep my voice casual, as if I was just making conversation and none of this was incredibly weird.

The two of them exchanged a look. It was the kind of look that meant something but I had no way to read it. Most likely they were thinking it was a strange question, but it wasn’t as if they were in any position to judge. Althea shrugged and stood up.

“I’m going to bed,” she said to her brother. “You can deal with this.”

She stepped lightly as she walked over to the stone wall, and I winced as I noticed she wore nothing on her feet. Didn’t she realize she could step on something sharp or be bitten by any number of things? Maybe she was so rich and special that nothing would dare hurt her. She passed through a small golden door in the wall, and I was left alone with Tennyson Wilde.

He didn’t say anything, not for the longest time, just tried to stare me down. I wanted to leave. It was late and I wasn’t interested in playing his reindeer games. But I just didn’t have it in me to back down, either. Once you backed down to a jerk like that, it was all over. So we were stuck there forever, it seemed, trying to glare each other into submission.

“You ask too many questions,” he said, finally.

I bit down on my triumphant grin. I was the winner and he was a total loser. Tennyson Wilde was in for a nasty shock if he thought he could bully me.

“And you don’t answer any of them,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “You know that makes you seem highly suspicious, right?”

“I am under no obligation to you,” he said, turning to leave.

“Who was the other person with you?” I said quickly, desperately, needing to know for sure. “There are four of you, right? Is it him? Is it Sam? You have to tell me.” I knew I sounded irrational, illogical, but I couldn’t even help it.

He paused, his face turned away and in shadow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “I don’t know anyone with that name. Go back to your house and don’t come here again. It is not safe for you to be in the forest.”

He swept away, and a cloud passed over the moon, leaving me in darkness.

As I turned back to the path, I once again heard a wolf howl in the distance.

Chapter 4

“Lucy? Lucy? Didn’t you hear me calling you? Come on, you’re late!”

I jumped up, flailing around for my books, my clothes, my laptop, before even realizing where I was. Hannah stood by my bed, a dark outline against the bright morning sun.

“Everything you need for classes is on here,” Hannah said, placing a brand new tablet by my bed. “You’re going to miss breakfast, but if you hurry you can still get to morning assembly on time. Will you be okay to get there, or do you want me to wait for you?”

“I’ll be fine,” I told her. I actually had no clue what I was doing, but I didn’t want to inconvenience her. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

She waved goodbye and left as I scurried around getting ready. I opened my bag, which was filled mostly with spare computer parts, and found my Amaris uniform at the bottom, then took the fastest shower ever. I was fairly sure my uniform wasn’t authentic, because the authentic ones had cost around the same as a year’s worth of my mother’s medication. I’d bought my uniform from eBay. The skirt was shorter than I was really comfortable with and the vest was super tight. I was fairly sure it was actually a cosplay outfit, but the blazer looked okay, so I buttoned it up, grabbed my stuff, and headed out.

A clock tower chimed as I hurried through the gardens and up to the school. The class schedule on my tablet said that morning assembly was in the main hall, which was off from the fancy foyer we’d passed through the day before. It was easy enough to find, but once I was actually there, facing down the heavy wooden doors, I hesitated. Part of me felt like once I actually went in, I’d be an Amaris student for real, whatever that meant. Also, it was super awkward to burst in late to a hall full of people that you didn’t know. All those eyes turning toward you, thinking thoughts about you that you couldn’t control. But there was nothing for it. I was already late, and I didn’t want to miss out on anything. What if the assembly was full of important information that I needed to know to function at Amaris, but could never access again after this? The thought was enough to make me open those doors.

It wasn’t actually that bad. The doors didn’t make a noise as I pulled them open and I snuck in quietly without anyone noticing. There were no spare seats, but I figured it would be fine to stand at the back near the door. There were a small group of adults standing as well — the fly-in teachers, I assumed, from all the tweed and elbow patches.

I had not been at risk of missing anything important. Assistant Head Noel was reading out a list of sports teams and when tryouts were open for them. Sports teams cost money. Uniforms, equipment, none of that was cheap and extra-curriculars weren’t covered by my scholarship. I tuned him out and looked around the hall.

It was a long room with a stage at the front and stained glass windows all around. The air was heavy and Assistant Head Noel’s deep voice reverberated off the walls. It made me wonder if the hall hadn’t been some sort of chapel once, it had a distinctly church-like feel. The students sat in rows of long bench seats, like pews. In their uniforms, they looked like cardboard cutouts, all made from the same pattern, identical haircuts and pedigrees and futures. I tried to find Hannah but she was lost in the sea of rich kids. I couldn’t see the Wildes either but maybe they got a special dispensation to skip boring stuff.

As Assistant Head Noel moved on from sports tryouts to general school rules, I thought about the night before. That had been strange. I mean, sure I’d also been in the forest in the middle of the night but I’d had a legitimate reason for it, not just to hang out like a weirdo. And the way they’d acted after I mentioned Sam, something was definitely up with them. I ran through the possibilities in my head, amusing myself as I came up with more and more preposterous scenarios, and before I knew it, assembly was over.

“Hey, Lucy!” Hannah waved at me, pushing her way through the crowd. “You made it! Do you have English first? I think it’s in the east wing, do you want to walk together?”

The halls were crowded as everyone was making their way to class, so we fell into the general flow and let it sweep us along.

“What did you do to Tennyson Wilde?” Hannah asked me as we walked down the grand staircase to the main foyer. “He’s ranked you as the number one most annoying thing about freshman year on his blog.”

There was really no good way to explain how you’d been looking for your dead best friend in the forest, so I just shrugged.

“I think we can cut down here,” I said, pointing to a less busy hallway, though I had no idea where it went.

“When did you even meet him?” Hannah asked, following me down the hall. “The Golden have never gone to morning assembly, most of the time they don’t even come to morning classes.”

“I ran into him by accident while I was walking around,” I said. “He seems like a jerk.”

“He is,” she said, then stopped walking. “I think this is the wrong way.”

We made it to class just as the bell rang. Everyone else was still filtering in anyway, not really hurrying, so Hannah and I got the good seats by the window, overlooking the courtyard. The hipster beard teacher I’d seen at the welcome ceremony stood at the front of the room, leaning back on the desk as if waiting for us to come to attention in our own time. The name “Sebastian Porter,” an email address and a room number were scribbled up on the board in barely legible handwriting, along with “9th Grade English.” Mr. Porter looked very stern as he stared down at the class, waiting. His eyes seemed cold.

When everyone had taken their seats, stopped chatting and turned to the front, he crossed his legs at the ankles and held up a book. Heart of Darkness, I saw.

“Can anyone tell me what all the books on this semester’s reading list have in common?” he asked.

“They’re all boring?” the beefy guy sitting next to me muttered.

A few people laughed.

“Mr.… Astor?” Mr. Porter asked, glancing over the class list, which I could see from the angle he held it had not only little photos of each student but what also looked like a short description as well. Again with the creepy and invasive.

Astor nodded.

“If you can give me a valid reason for your opinion that exhibits you’ve actually read the books on the reading list, I’ll give you an automatic A for the whole semester and you can spend every Monday morning tucked up in bed.”

Astor stared at him blankly. Mr. Porter stared back with eyes that sparkled as if he had trouble containing all the mirth he held inside himself and it was straining to burst forth. I took back my initial impression of him as a bit of a douche. This guy was awesome.

“Nothing? You disappoint me, Astor. Anyone else want to have a crack at my original question?”

I hesitated before raising my hand. “They’re all written by men?”

Mr. Porter broke into a grin so big it could swallow the world. “Bingo,” he said, shooting me finger guns. “More specifically, white men. Now, I want you to get those lists up on your overpriced little tablets, and delete them. Or if you have a hard copy, rip them up into little pieces and throw them in the air! We’re going to spend the class discussing books that aren’t on the list and why they should be, until we have a book list we can all agree upon.”

A few people groaned, obviously having read the book list already. And more than a few shot me filthy looks. But I didn’t care. For the first time since I arrived at Amaris, I felt as if I’d done the right thing coming here.

The class passed in a flash and before I knew it, the bell rang. As I stood up to leave, I glanced down to the courtyard. It was empty apart from two boys who sat on one of the seats by the flowerbed. Even from a distance, Tennyson Wilde was distinctive, striking. He watched the other boy intently as the boy said something and bit into an apple. I wasn’t seeing things this time. There was definitely a second boy. A second boy who looked remarkably like Sam Spencer. It was too far away to tell for sure, but the way the boy threw his head back when he laughed was the same. So was the way he held the apple with the very tips of his fingers. And how my heart pounded when the boy turned his head up and looked toward me.

“Lucy, are you coming?”

I forced myself to smile at Hannah and nodded, and when I looked back down to the courtyard, the boy was gone. Tennyson Wilde stood, alone, glaring up at me, his thick black eyebrows furrowed into a scowl.

I’d thought the dirty looks in English were because of the extra reading, but I got more in history class, and a few people muttered behind their hands to their friends while staring at me. Hannah wasn’t in history with me, so I couldn’t ask her, but I was fairly sure I wasn’t just being paranoid. I knew I didn’t have anything stuck on my face, because after history, I ducked into the bathroom to check.

“Think about the free food,” I said to my reflection as I tightened my ponytail and straightened my glasses. “Even if rich people are creepy and weird, it’s worth it for the food.”

I’d been running too late to eat breakfast, so by lunch I was starving. I hardly had to look up where the dining hall was on my map – I just floated toward the smell of food.

The dining hall was as ridiculous as everything else at Amaris. There was no lunch line where a grumpy lady served mediocre food, no cheap long tables with wonky chairs. The hall was a large atrium off the west wing, with glass doors that opened out onto the back terrace. It was filled with sweet-smelling plants and small tables covered with white lace tablecloths. I walked around vaguely, trying to find where to get my food from, and ignored the muttering and snickers that seemed to follow me.

I spotted Hannah sitting in the back corner with a short boy and an Indian girl, and she waved me over to sit with them. The boy furiously whispered something at them as I approached but hushed up once I got within hearing distance.

“You’re being an idiot, Milo,” said the Indian girl, clearly not caring if I could overhear. “Aren’t you the president of the ‘I hate Tennyson Wilde and all he stands for’ club? Have some integrity!”

Milo pouted and looked away as I sat down.

“Ignore him, he’s an idiot,” said the Indian girl. “I’m Fatima, and unlike other people at this table, I don’t throw away my principles at the first sign of trouble.”

The three of them were halfway through bowls of some sort of orange soup, though Fatima didn’t seem to be eating hers so much as using it to prop open her book. I looked around again for somewhere to get food.

“Here,” said Hannah, pressing a small button in front of my place setting. “It’s all automated, but if you don’t like the menu you can change it through your login on the school app.”

She stared at a silver circle in the middle of the table that wasn’t covered by the tablecloth, but nothing happened.

“Weird,” she muttered, pressing the button again.

“It’s not weird,” said Milo. “It’s obvious. What did she think would happen when she made an enemy out of Tennyson Wilde?”

“It’s not because of Tennyson Wilde,” Fatima said, turning a page in her book without looking up.

Hannah pressed the button again. “I mean, how would they even know where she’s sitting to block it?” she said quietly.

I shrugged and got out my tablet. “I’ll try changing the menu and doing it again.” I loaded the app, went to the lunch menu, and selected the table and seat where I was sitting. It flashed up an error message saying the seat didn’t exist.

“Let’s swap seats,” said Hannah.

That didn’t work either.

“It’s him,” said Milo. “They’re not going to let you eat. You won’t be able to access the facilities. The teachers will stop teaching you. They’ll treat you like you’re invisible until it becomes true. You know what happened to the last person who was number one in the Tennyson Wilde ‘worst things’ rankings? Eaten by sharks. Sharks just jumped right out of the sea and ate them up because Tennyson Wilde wanted it that way. Your life is basically over.”

Fatima rolled her eyes and turned another page. “Tennyson Wilde can’t control sharks, Milo.”

From the look on Milo’s face, he definitely did not agree.

“It’s not that bad,” said Hannah, though she did look worried as she pressed the buttons in front of the other seats as well, and still nothing happened.

“What do you mean, they won’t let me eat?” I said. My stomach gurgled in protest. I hadn’t even done anything that bad to Tennyson Wilde, had I? Surely it was just some sort of technical glitch.

Hannah smiled kindly and pushed her bowl of soup toward me. “You can finish my lobster bisque if you like. I’m sure it will all blow over soon.”

I grinned at her and started digging in. I was so intent on eating that I didn’t notice when a hush fell over the dining hall, not until Milo kicked me in the ankle as he tried to duck under the table.

The doors to the terrace had been thrown open and the Golden appeared in a stream of sunlight. The entire student body flooded toward them as if controlled by the Golden’s gravitational pull. Althea said something to the other two and gestured with an elegant wave toward a mezzanine level that overlooked the dining hall and gardens. Nikolai nodded at her, and they crossed the hall to the mezzanine stairs, paying no attention to the crowd as it parted to let them through.

Tennyson Wilde didn’t follow them. He stood in the entranceway, glaring fiercely at me. A few people turned to see what he was staring at, then nodded in understanding and whispered to each other when they saw me. I didn’t care. I had lobster bisque and I was going to eat the whole bowl. And if Fatima didn’t want hers, I would eat that too, and Tennyson Wilde could glare at me all he liked. It didn’t bother me one bit.

Creepy jerk.

Chapter 5

Although I didn’t care about Tennyson Wilde’s opinion, I was in an incredibly small minority.

Lunch had been bad enough, with him scowling at me over his soup, and everyone muttering, and Milo trying to hide behind some sort of exotic plant. But that was nothing. When I got up to go to class, so did everyone else. They converged and by the time I got out of the dining hall, I was completely separated from Hannah and the others. It was as if I was being swept away by a tsunami. There was no way I could fight against it; the force of the crowd was too strong. I tried to push through them but they formed a solid barrier, so I gave up and just went with it.

As far as bullying went, I thought it was kind of weak. It was inconvenient and a bit creepy how they didn’t even look at me as they herded me along but it was no worse than closing time at the Farmers’ Market, when everything was discounted and you had to battle the old ladies for $1 boxes of fruit and veg. And honestly, none of these rich kids were half as scary as Mrs. Gionopoulos if you got between her and a cheap eggplant. Plus, as soon as the bell rang, they started drifting off. No way would Mrs. Gionopoulos quit so easy.

By the time the crowd dispersed enough for me to make my own way, I was in some dusty, forgotten part of the school.

“Jerks,” I muttered to the last few stragglers as I got my class schedule up on my tablet to figure out where I needed to go. Of course, my biology class was at the opposite end of the school.

“You’re late,” said the biology teacher as I slipped into the seat Hannah had saved for me. “Lates are marked as absences in this class,” he said, narrowing his beady little eyes at me. “Three absences are a fail. Organize your time better in future.”

Before I could say anything in my defense – the late bell hadn’t even chimed yet – he put up a slide on the overhead projector about biochemical molecules. The information all seemed far more advanced than what I’d been learning in middle school, and I hurried to start taking notes. A few people laughed at me getting reprimanded, then glanced back at Tennyson Wilde to see if he noticed their reactions. He didn’t. He was too busy scowling.

“Are you okay?” Hannah whispered.

I shrugged and smiled at her, not sure how to answer.

“Don’t mind Mr. Corbett. He’s really horrible to everyone, unless he’s looking down your shirt. Sometimes even then.”

Try as I might to concentrate on molecules, I kept thinking about Tennyson Wilde. He really had no reason to be setting his minions on me. I mean, I’d glared him into submission, but that was only because I was awesome and he was not. And surely that didn’t warrant this kind of treatment. Maybe I’d inadvertently interrupted something in the forest. He’d been committing some sort of nefarious act and Althea had been his lookout. That made sense. Though it didn’t explain why he’d been cutting class to hang out with some Sam lookalike earlier. I was sure I hadn’t imagined that. He’d been weird when I asked about Sam as well. No matter how I looked at it, how I slid the pieces of the puzzle around in my brain, none of it clicked into place. I needed more information.

I screwed up my nose at Tennyson Wilde from across the room, even though he wasn’t looking.

“Something on your mind, Miss O’Connor?” asked Mr. Corbett. “Something more interesting than my class?”

Everyone turned in their seats to stare at me. Well, everyone except Tennyson Wilde. Nikolai Volkov gave me a cheeky salute from his seat next to Althea.

My cheeks burned red and I stared down at my notes. “No, sir.”

“Then, with your permission, we’ll continue.”

It was the worst class ever. I wondered if I could switch out of biology and into something else. Like stabbing myself in the face with a spoon class, that would be way more fun.

“He’s basically Professor Snape,” said Hannah, later on when we were gathered in the common room. “Without the sex appeal and flimsy excuse for being mean.”

We’d skipped dinner at the dining hall, and had taken the prime spot on the sofas while the place was relatively empty. It was safer that way, with the whole school against me. I stretched out on the soft cushions, scrolling through the lists of school activities that I was supposed to pick from. I wasn’t really an activity person, but it was required, so I was looking for the thing that would take the least amount of time and effort, so I could keep up with my computer repair work. I couldn’t really see myself playing croquet or learning the flute.

“Polo, that’s the one with horses, right?”

Hannah nodded. “Can you ride? No? There’s water polo too, that’s horse-free.”

“Where is the club for eating free food and taking naps? That’s the club I want to join.” Actually, there was another club I’d heard about that sounded like a good fit for me, and I kept it in the back of my mind as Hannah and I discussed the possibilities, until Milo and Fatima came in from dinner.

“No way,” said Milo, edging toward the door.

“But you’re the president, aren’t you?” I asked. “You have control over admitting new members.”

“It’s not even an official club. You can’t put ‘hating Tennyson Wilde’ down on your school transcript.” He spoke in a hushed whisper, even though the only other people in the room were some seniors studying at the big table.

“So I’ll do it just for funsies,” I said.

“You want me to die? You want me to end up at the bottom of the ocean, sleeping with the fishes? Because that’s what will happen if word gets out about this club.”

I rolled my eyes. Milo clearly had a thing about the ocean. A totally different type of thing to his thing about Tennyson Wilde. “You’re not going to sleep with the fishes, Milo.”

“Fish don’t sleep,” said Fatima, scrolling through her tablet as she sat down at the end of the sofa. “They just rest.”

“See,” I told him. “You should let me join the club and tell me everything you know about Tennyson Wilde, and then together we can destroy him.”

Hannah gave me a long look, tilting her head to one side as she studied me, but didn’t say anything.

“Tennyson Wilde is indestructible. He’s the destroyer, not the destroyee. He makes people disappear. And not in a fun ‘where did the lighter fluid come from’ kind of way – in a very real and very dead kind of way.” He turned toward Hannah. “You remember Ivy Fairchild from fourth grade?”

Hannah shook her head.

“Exactly,” said Milo.

“Wasn’t that the name of your tamagochi?” asked Fatima.

“It was the name of the tamagochi I inherited from Ivy Fairchild after she disappeared without a trace from fourth grade.”

“You killed her for her tamagochi?” Fatima actually glanced up from her tablet for that.

Milo shook his head. “All Ivy Fairchild did was laugh at Tennyson Wilde’s painting of a dinosaur, and then the next day she vanished. Never to be heard from again.”

“He did suck at art,” said Fatima.

“What about her family?” I asked Milo.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, they were from like Wales or somewhere anyway, and that’s practically the bottom of the ocean. But if you google them, you get zero hits.”

“Is she the only one?”

She wasn’t. I knew she wasn’t.

“I don’t know. I only remember Ivy because of the tamagochi. Maybe he just got better at it after the fourth grade. Maybe nobody made the mistake of laughing at his art after that. The point is, I am not messing with Tennyson Wilde. You’re on your own.”

He wasn’t wrong. The more I looked into Tennyson Wilde, the more it became obvious that people just loved him. And not just people at school, people everywhere. He had fan sites dedicated to his eyelashes, even. But that didn’t help me. I wasn’t interested in rumors about whether he was dating this model or that socialite or whatever. I needed the truth.

Tennyson Wilde’s blog was kind of interesting, though. The whole blog was him ranking things, mostly things he didn’t like. Everything that topped his “worst” rankings seemed to have dropped in popularity shortly after. He seemed to be single-handedly responsible for nobody using Google Plus. Some of it was obviously sponsored – best soft drink, favorite gaming platform, most relaxing holiday destinations but those posts had a markedly different tone to the “worst habits of my family members” and “worst things about the Internet.” The “worst things about freshman year” post was at the very top, with an unflattering photo of me that looked as if it had been taken during morning assembly. I did not read that post, and I definitely didn’t read the 10267 comments on it.

By the end of the week, I still couldn’t get food from the dining hall, people whispered about me, my personal possessions mysteriously vanished, doors wouldn’t open for my student card – it was just like Milo had said, I was becoming invisible. I stuck to my room when I wasn’t in class, catching up on schoolwork and chatting with my family. I’d always been near the top of my class, but rich kid education was nothing to sneeze at. They were way ahead of me in almost everything. If I wanted to keep my scholarship, I had to get decent grades, and if I wanted to get decent grades, I had to study my butt off.

Hannah studied with me. At first, I thought she was being a super supportive friend, but when I thanked her for it, she just shrugged.

“I mean, of course I wouldn’t abandon you to those jackals but it’s not just that,” she said, highlighting something in her history notes. “My father’s business went broke and we couldn’t afford my tuition this semester. I’d have lost my place only my aunt is on the school board and organized a scholarship. Which means I have to keep up my grades, the same as you.” She looked over at me from her study nook and smiled. “I’m telling you because I know you understand, but please don’t tell anyone else. You’ve seen what they’re like.”

I smiled back at her. “Yeah, we’d be screwed if they cut off both our food access.”

Hannah had been sharing all her meals with me, or I’d have starved. Fatima and Milo had begun to avoid me. I’d hoped we could be friends, but I couldn’t blame them. They’d only just met me and I didn’t expect them to put themselves at risk of the same sort of treatment. If Tennyson Wilde would bring this down on me just for crossing his path, who knew what he’d do to those who associated with me. I’d told Hannah to keep her distance as well, but she refused.

I’d managed to avoid another altercation with Tennyson Wilde or any of the others, and I hadn’t caught them up to any more funny business, but that obviously wasn’t helping the situation. I’d caught glimpses of the Sam lookalike, but nothing definitive. He wasn’t in any of my classes, or any classes at all that I could discover, and he didn’t go to meals with everyone else. He was like a ghost. The few times I did see him, I could never get close enough to question him before he vanished.

Tennyson Wilde was obviously hiding something. Something major. Something to do with the boy who looked like Sam. He obviously thought I was onto him and that’s why he hated me so much. If I could just find out what it was he thought I knew, I could use it somehow to make him back off. And at the same time, I could maybe find some closure about Sam, stop being haunted by him and be able to sleep through the night again. I needed to tackle the whole situation head on. I needed answers. I’d just run out of places to look for them.

The weekend could not come fast enough. Friday was the worst. Tennyson Wilde had clearly not been showing enough approval for the bullying techniques of the general school population, so they decided to up their game. Most of it was fairly low grade — spitballs and tripping me in the hallway, rude messages via social networks. Annoying but nothing I couldn’t handle — but it ended with me face down in the fountain after once again leaving the dining hall hungry.

“I’ll go find you a towel,” said Hannah, ducking off into the gardens toward the Red House. “I’ll be back in two seconds.”

I sat in the fountain alone as I waited for her, trying to dry off my glasses while cupids shot water at me from all directions.

“You should leave this school,” said Tennyson Wilde, melting out of the shadows and into a distinctly jerk-shaped blur.

I snorted and shoved my glasses back on my face. “You think you can bully me into leaving? You are such a jerk.” I stood up and climbed out of the fountain, water pouring off me. “You don’t know me, so let me tell you a thing,” I said, and started wringing water out of my hair. “There is nothing you can do to make me leave here. Nothing you can say or do is more important than what I get if I stay. I don’t know what I did to you to make you act like such a massive butthole, what you think I know or saw, but you do not want to throw down with me, because you will not win.”

He stared at me for a long moment, making me fully aware of how I dripped water all over the pristine paving stones, how my uniform didn’t fit properly and my glasses slid down my nose. I was a mess and he was immaculate, and that was clearly obvious to us both. A smirk curled his lips and he turned and walked away.

I watched him go, but with each step he took, my anger built up. What an arrogant jerk, walking away from me like that, as if I wasn’t even worth the effort, as if I would just pack up and go home because he got some kids to throw spitballs in my hair and push me in a fountain. He thought he could just treat me however he liked and I’d have to give in. That was obviously how he’d dealt with every problem he’d ever had in his life.

Standing there, shivering in my wet uniform, I got madder and madder. It wasn’t just Tennyson Wilde, it was everything he stood for, the idea that money was power. I might be poor but I wasn’t weak, and I’d prove that to him. I squelched after him, but my uniform was heavy and chafed my skin, and he was at the Zen garden by the time I caught up to him.

“Hey!” I said. “Stop right there!”

He stopped walking but didn’t turn toward me.

“You owe me an apology,” I told him.

“I owe you nothing,” he said, turning suddenly and walking toward me. “You have brought this all on yourself. I told you not to pry into my business and yet you continue to ask questions and snoop around.”

I snorted and took a step closer to him, standing almost toe to toe. He was taller than I’d thought, and I had to tilt my head up to glare at him. He smelled all clean and pine fresh and it made me hope that I dripped mucky fountain water all over his shiny shoes.

A mist had rolled in from the sea, creeping slowly across the garden floor, but despite that, the night seemed somehow brighter, as if there was a glow from somewhere in the garden.

“You jerk, you think you can just treat people however you want?” I poked him in the shoulder. “Cutting off my food, blocking my student access, setting your flunkies on me, you think that’s how people act in the real world?”

He looked down at where my finger dug into him, then back at my face, his eyes filled with disdain. “This is my world.”

I was momentarily struck dumb by what an arrogant, doucheface jerk he was. He seemed to take that as a sign the conversation was over and started to move away, but I was so not done. Now that I had him there, I was getting some answers.

“Who is that boy, the one who looks like Sam?”

An expression flickered over his face, and I knew he was trying to think up a lie. He definitely knew something. The mist wrapped around us, seeming to shimmer with a blue glow but I barely noticed it, I was so intent on Tennyson Wilde and how close I was to finding some answers.

“I saw you talking to him and I know you know what I’m talking about,” I told him. “Just tell me the truth.”

Everything fell silent as the echo of my words hung strangely in the air. It was as if someone had hit a mute button on the night, sounds I hadn’t even been aware of shut off – wind in the trees, the trickle of water in the pond. I looked around the garden, confused.

Then a sound broke the silence, a strange sound, like the air itself was shattering. I narrowed my eyes at Tennyson Wilde but he looked just as confused as I felt.

“Take heed!” a voice boomed out.

Tennyson Wilde and I both jumped and spun toward the voice. Someone had clearly slipped something funny into the water supply, because the statue of Professor Amaris had stood up from his Buddha pose and was pointing right at us. The entire garden was now lit with the glow coming from him, the blue glow that had seemed to be in the mist. The core of the light was a small orb, around the size of a baseball, that Professor Amaris held in the palm of his left hand.

“Take heed!” he repeated in his booming voice. “Those of you with secrets in your heart and falsehood on your tongue. A light has arrived to shine on your darkness, to clear away your shadows. There will be nowhere for you to hide.”

It seemed that he wasn’t speaking figuratively. The light grew brighter and brighter, until it was blinding. Then there was that same sound, like something delicate shattering. All the light in the garden condensed for a moment into the orb, small and impossibly bright, then exploded outward, like thousands of tiny blue fireflies.

Only, they were definitely not fireflies. Some of them swarmed on us, passing completely through our bodies or vanishing into us, but I couldn’t feel them. They had no physical form. The other lights zipped off in every direction, into the gardens, toward the school and the forest and the houses. I had no idea what it meant.

There was still light around the professor, the outline of the ball of light hovering like a ghost, now just a dull glow. He opened his mouth wide, wider than seemed possible, and swallowed it down, then closed his mouth again and settled back into his Buddha pose.

“Well, that was weird,” I said, then jolted. It felt as if something had forcibly pushed the words out of me. I suspected it was one of those blue lights that had flown into me, though my evidence for thinking so was circumstantial.

Tennyson Wilde stared at me with such coldness, I thought I’d get hypothermia.

“The nonconsensual use of witchcraft is a very serious offense,” he said. “You need to lift this spell immediately. Do not come near me or my house again.”

Chapter 6

I walked back to the house in a daze, barely even noticing that I was still soaked through.

“You’re always complaining that your butt looks big, but I don’t see you swapping out those Doritos for a salad,” I heard a girl say as I passed the door to the house kitchen.

“Didn’t hear your boyfriend complaining when he was grabbing it in the common room last night,” said the other girl.

I hurried for the elevator. The doors slid open to reveal two boys taking swings at each other.

“Take it back!” one said, lunging for the other. “Take back what you said!”

“No! I only watched Enter the Dragon because you invited me over and I was trying to bang your sister,” said the other as he got the first guy into a headlock. “I thought it was the most boring movie ever! I don’t even like Bruce Lee at all, I think Chuck Norris would kick his ass!”

I stepped over them to get into the elevator. Something strange was definitely happening. Tennyson Wilde apparently thought it was witchcraft. He also thought it was my fault. I thought Tennyson Wilde was a bag of dicks.

When I got to my floor, it was to scenes of chaos.

I walked past a boy yelling uncomfortable truths at a closed door.

“Your eyes are too close together and you smell like marinara!”

There was a couple leaning against my door, making out.

“I’ve loved you since the second grade,” the girl told the boy.

“My father’s planning to take over your family’s company and he wants me to get close to you for insider information,” he said.

I pushed past them to get inside and away from all the madness. Hannah wasn’t in, I hoped she wasn’t wandering around the school grounds looking for me.

I peeled off my wet clothes and jumped into the shower. As I let the hot water warm me up, I thought back over what had happened. There had been a talking statue and strange lights, so obviously hallucinations. Possibly connected to my Sam hallucinations, but I didn’t think so. I’d definitely seen Tennyson Wilde talking to someone who looked like Sam, so I was leaning toward the lookalike theory over the hallucination theory with all that. The Sam weirdness seemed to be a whole different weirdness to this new and vividly improved sort.

Tennyson Wilde had definitely seen the statue and lights though, and everyone was acting strangely. There was probably something in the water supply or the food. Maybe the air. The only other explanation I could think of for the shared hallucination and strange behavior was an illness, maybe some type of virus. There was a campus doctor but he was a fly-in, so an appointment time had to be scheduled in advance. I’d do that online after my shower, and look into collecting samples of the food and water.

I shut off the shower, feeling much better now that I had a plan of action which was logical and had nothing to do with witchcraft.

When I left the bathroom, Hannah was back in our room.

“Are you okay?” she asked, looking up at me from the sofa. “Everyone is acting really weird. First weekend of term, I guess, but I was worried.” She held out a bag of peanuts for me. “I got you these.”

I settled in beside her. “People here are always weird.”

There was no way I was telling her about the lights and the talking walrus man. As nice as she was, I got the feeling she already thought I was a bit odd. I caught her looking at me sometimes as if I was a problem she could solve. Talking to her about having hallucinations definitely wouldn’t help with that. Still, when I spoke there was that sensation again, of something moving around inside of me, pushing out the words.

Hannah sighed and scrolled through her Netflix queue on the TV. “What will you do about Tennyson Wilde?”

Whatever was causing the weird sensation, the hallucinations, I figured I needed to know exactly how it affected me. I’d told Tennyson Wilde to tell the truth and now it seemed as if everyone was being truthful, though whether that was just part of my psychosis wasn’t clear. Testing it out on Hannah seemed the safest thing. I tried to lie to her and say I was ready drop the whole thing and move on.

“I’m not just going to forget what he’s done,” I said. The more I tried to resist the words and tell a lie, the stronger the sensation became, like the truth was being pulled out of me. “I can’t just drop it. He’s definitely hiding something and I’m determined to find out what it is.”

“You should be careful,” she said. “Milo may be paranoid but he’s not wrong about the Wilde family. They’re really powerful.”

“Tennyson Wilde is a jerk.” It was true facts. I couldn’t lie.

“Maybe so, but that’s even more reason for you to watch out for him.”

There were drugs that worked like truth serums, sodium amytal and that kind of thing, maybe it was something like that. The Wildes were a powerful family but the school was full of kids from powerful families. If someone wanted to get the secrets of the business and political worlds, they could bug the school, drop some truth serum in the water and put some well-placed questions out there. It could be rival families or journalists… it could be anyone. Anyone with access to the school. To be honest, I wasn’t so fussed about corporate espionage but it made me sick to think someone had taken away my free will. It was terrifying, not being able to control what came out of my mouth, having my bodily autonomy taken from me. I wasn’t about to just let that go. It was probably another student, but I couldn’t rule anyone out. I knew the teachers had to go through like a thousand security checks but the brochure hadn’t said anything about other staff.

“The staff here are very good, aren’t they,” I said to Hannah as she kept scrolling through her queue. “I haven’t even seen them around.”

“Staff?”

“Cleaners and cooks and gardeners, you know?”

She shrugged. “I think everything is sent out, but I know the chefs are flown in each day. Most things are automated, probably.”

I didn’t see how stuff like trimming hedges or changing bed sheets could be automated, and I made a mental note to look into it later. Everyone was a suspect.

If it were a truth serum, or even a virus, there would still be rules. A polygraph test could be fooled if the person taking it believed an untruth or knew how to control their bodily responses. If I knew the rules, I could protect myself from what was happening.

Hannah started playing a Harry Potter movie and I settled in to watch it. I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t true but I wondered if I could make statements that were subjective.

I tried to say, “Prisoner of Azkaban is best.”

“I think that Prisoner of Azkaban is best,” is what came out.

“Deathly Hallows,” Hannah mumbled, clutching a cushion to her chest as Dumbledore appeared on Privet Drive. “Part two.”

Okay, so I could only state things as opinions, not truths. I reached around for my bag, taking out some of my computer repair work to do while I watched the movie. I’d gotten a bit behind on it with everything else going on, and the orders had started piling up but I could get most of them done over the weekend to send out Monday. The school had a fast and efficient postal service, at least. And the work would help my brain sort through everything.

I wondered if I could state things as fact if I didn’t know them. I wasn’t sure, but I tried.

I tried to say that it was all Tennyson Wilde’s fault.

“I bet this is all Tennyson Wilde’s fault.”

Hannah was too engrossed in the movie to even look up, but I thought it was kind of fascinating. Creepy and horrible, but fascinating. I couldn’t state things that I didn’t know for sure, but how did my body know that? Was it because I was aware that it wasn’t a complete truth? Logically, it seemed as if there was some sort of interruption between my brain and my mouth, but within my body, it still felt as if those little blue lights were jumping around, finding the truth and forcing it out of my throat.

I thought it over as we watched Harry Potter and by the end of Chamber of Secrets, I’d caught up on most of my repair work and was getting sleepy. My brothers called me on Skype, but I declined the call. I tried to send a message saying I’d call back later, but I couldn’t type the lie, so I just sent a message saying I was busy. That was only part of the truth, but apparently lies of omission were okay. I didn’t want to risk talking to them and telling them I’d been seeing things, or how much I missed them, or how despite all the rich stuff, Amaris was kind of awful. There were so many truths I didn’t want to spill to them. I went to bed feeling kind of down. I hoped that whatever had happened would just wear off in the night and when I woke up things would be back to normal.

The first thing I did the next morning was try to tell a lie.

“My pajamas are blue,” I said. They were blue, I’d tried to say they were yellow.

Hannah was curled up asleep in bed. I didn’t want to leave the safe bubble of our room, but I couldn’t just sit around and let this thing take its course. I gathered up some water and food samples and took them to the science labs to test for anything weird. There wasn’t a lot I could do with my limited scientific knowledge, and the Internet mostly just said to buy a testing kit or to send my stuff to a lab, so I did what I could with some pH strips, ammonia and a Bunsen burner. Nothing strange appeared. Well, eventually Mr. Corbett appeared and told me to get out, but nothing strange in the food or water. Which didn’t mean anything, except maybe that I needed to study that kind of thing more.

I gathered up my stuff and headed back to the Red House. Mr. Corbett was a jerk. What did it even matter if I used the science labs on a weekend? It wasn’t like I was using them to cook up some meth or whatever. I’d clearly just been doing a simple experiment.

I wandered aimlessly through the gardens, trying to think of other explanations for what had happened. Before I realized it, I was standing in the Zen garden. It looked just as it had the night before, and yet completely different with the morning sun streaming down, no creepy mist or weird lights. It would’ve been peaceful, but for the person standing by the pond.

“Returned to the scene of the crime,” said Tennyson Wilde. “I suspected that you would.”

I rolled my eyes. “You do understand that whatever happened is affecting me as well, so when I tell you I didn’t do it, I’m not lying.”

“Do not take me for a fool, commoner. I’ll not fall for your manipulations.” He locked his hands behind his back and turned to face the statue. “It is common knowledge that the spell has no effect on the caster.”

I snorted, edging closer to the pond. It was so tempting to push him in, but probably not worth the fallout. So tempting, though.

“Well, I’m a commoner and I don’t know it. You know why? Because I don’t believe in magic.”

He gave no indication that he was even listening to me. I stood beside him, looking at the statue. It seemed so innocent. Well, offensive to Buddhists, probably, but not like it was going to spring to life and rain chaos down on our heads with pretty blue lights.

There was a brass plaque at the base of the statue that I hadn’t noticed before, with writing in a foreign language. “Japanese proverb,” I murmured, reading the only part of it that I could.

“Yuri wa kegare wo shiranai,” Tennyson Wilde said. Of course he could read it. He could probably read Sanskrit and hieroglyphics as well. “The lily does not know impurity.”

I looked at the water lilies floating on the surface of the clear water.

“The innocent don’t need to lie,” I said.

Tennyson Wilde looked at me in surprise.

“Who was the boy you were talking to in the courtyard?” I asked him. “The one who looked like Sam?”

He shook his head. “Is that why you cast this spell, to find out about Sam?”

“I didn’t cast the spell. I don’t believe in magic.” I was getting sick of saying it. “You don’t even have any evidence that it’s anything to do with me.”

“I don’t need evidence,” he said. “I don’t like you. I find everything about you suspicious, and my instincts tell me that you’re trouble.”

I rolled my eyes and moved away from him. I really did not need this.

“You’re the one who’s suspicious, buddy. Every bad thing that happens comes back to you. You might think it’s fun to hurt people and falsely accuse them and cut off their access to food, but where I come from, that makes you the bad guy. Me? I am not the bad guy.”

I didn’t really want to flounce off in a dramatic exit, because my mike-dropping statement clearly spoke for itself, so I tried my best to walk away gracefully. I stubbed my toe on a rock and stumbled, but apart from that, I got away clean.

“I’ll be watching you,” he called after me. “I’ll find out the truth.”

Chapter 7

Tennyson Wilde had not been joking about watching me. All weekend, no matter where I went, I saw him lurking in the shadows, furrowing his big broody forehead at me. When I looked out my window I could see him standing under the trees, watching the house. I didn’t know what else to do to prove my innocence, but that was kind of secondary to everything else going on anyway.

Things became quiet. Literally. People stopped speaking unless completely necessary. They didn’t know what was happening, but still a general sort of apathy fell over the school. It was the first weekend of term and the weather was nice, but hardly anyone was out on school grounds. I sent off food and water samples, saw the doctor for blood tests, and waited impatiently for all the results to come back. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when they did but at least I’d have more information. Maybe even something to get creepy Tennyson Wilde off my back.

“Just pick anything,” said Hannah as we waited for the house meeting to start on Monday afternoon. “You can change it next semester if you don’t like it.”

I still hadn’t picked an activity. Everything looked either time-consuming or expensive, or I had no clue what it even was.

“What’s the Key club?” I asked. “Unity club? C&C club?”

“Oh, that might be good for you!” said Hannah. “Cooking and crafts! You like food, right?”

I did. I liked food the most. Crafts, not so much, but I could learn to like them if it meant free food. I clicked on the sign-up button.

“Then next semester you can join diet club,” mumbled Fatima, scrolling through her history notes beside Hannah.

The meeting was in a room behind the stairs on the ground floor of the Red House that I hadn’t been in before. All the freshmen gathered around in comfortable-looking armchairs arranged in a semicircle, facing a larger, even more comfortable-looking chair. Except Milo, who huddled in the corner with his hood pulled down over his face like a Sith lord. I wondered if he’d accidentally told someone about his obvious crush on Tennyson Wilde. He really didn’t need to worry about what we thought, but I couldn’t get close enough to him to tell him that. Plus, you never knew what was going on in people’s lives to make them react a certain way. Of all people, I understood that, so I let him have his space.

Mr. Porter breezed into the room and sat in the comfortable chair, crossing his legs and looking around at us all with sparkling eyes. I hadn’t realized he was our House Master – Amaris promoted minimal supervision of students, to “cultivate independence and self-sufficiency,” so we were left to our own devices most of the time.

“Clubs!” he said. “Activities! Have you all signed up for them?”

We all murmured that we had, then went around the semicircle introducing ourselves to the group and telling him what we’d chosen. Hannah was in piano club, Fatima chose math club, and Milo did sailing. I kind of wished I’d picked a club with someone I knew, but none of those were appealing to me.

We spent the hour chatting about general start-of-term sorts of things, like what was expected of us and what to do if we had problems, but nobody really spoke up about anything, just fell into a stupor listening to Mr. Porter talk. He wrapped it up and dismissed us before the end of the hour, but called for me to stay behind. I gave Hannah and Fatima a longing glance as they left me behind to go to dinner.

“Lively bunch,” said Mr. Porter, motioning for me to take a closer seat. “The future is in good hands with them.”

Wow, so sarcasm still worked. Good to know.

“I was just wondering how you were doing,” he said. “You’re not like the other kids here, are you? Are you coping all right with everything?”

I shrugged and picked at a loose thread on my skirt. “Everything is really different, but I can deal with it.”

I could feel that sensation again, more strongly than ever. It buzzed around inside, wanting to force everything out, to tell him all my problems, but I clamped my lips shut. Mr. Porter didn’t need to know about any of that, about Tennyson Wilde or the hallucinations or the bullying. What could he do about it? Big fat nothing.

“Okay, but you tell me if you have any trouble. We commoners have to stick together.”

I looked up to see him smiling kindly at me. I smiled back, feeling like at least one more person was on my side in all this, even if they couldn’t help.

I hurried out of the house to catch up with Hannah and Fatima, but they weren’t on the path through the Red Garden. I thought if I took a shortcut through one of the other gardens, I might be able to catch up with them – I needed Hannah’s access to get my dinner, so I didn’t want them to get too far ahead of me, and the main path wasn’t the most direct route. I ducked off the path and through the flower bushes, hurrying toward the school.

I left the Red Garden and came into a garden I hadn’t seen before – all box hedges and topiary animals that looked bizarrely real in the fading light. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I started.

There was a wolf. It looked strange, standing beside a hedge T. Rex that was almost too real. My heart thumped. I’d heard howling from the forest, but I hadn’t expected to see a wolf so close to the school, though I was sure I wasn’t in any danger from it. Wolves were rational creatures, with basic needs, patterns of behavior and cultural systems that were inherent to them. You could more or less predict what a wolf would do in a given situation. Not like humans. Who even knew what was going on with humans?

I wasn’t exactly an expert, but I knew enough to know that that a wolf wouldn’t attack a human without a good reason, and I had no intention of giving it one. I stayed completely still and tried to project how nonthreatening I was. The wolf’s posture seemed relaxed; it didn’t have raised hackles or anything, and it didn’t look starved enough to want to eat me.

“Hey, wolf,” I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly. “What’s up with you? Busy with wolf business?”

It was a large wolf, with a brown coat and massive paws. It cocked its head to the side as if taking in what I was saying, its ears perked up.

“I’m heading to dinner,” I told it. “What’s on the menu for you? Bunnies? I bet there’s some tasty stuff in that forest.”

The wolf turned to walk away. I couldn’t really blame it. It was dinnertime, and my conversation probably wasn’t that interesting to wolves. It had only gone a few steps, though, when it looked back, gesturing with its head toward the forest as if it wanted me to follow.

“You want me to follow you into the woods?” I asked it. “That sounds like a cautionary tale that doesn’t end well for the naive girl.”

The wolf jerked its head more emphatically.

I sighed. “Okay, buddy, but please just note that I think this is a bad idea.”

I followed the wolf out of the topiary garden and through a hidden track deep in the Red Garden. I had no idea what I was thinking, following the advice of a wild animal instead of going to dinner. That just was not who I was, but a wolf had never asked me to do anything for it before, and what if it had an injured cub or something that needed help? I couldn’t just turn around and leave it without knowing what it wanted.

The wolf padded along ahead of me. The path was dark, narrow and overgrown, hard to follow with only the light of the half moon, especially when the garden merged in with the forest and I completely left the school grounds. Eventually I lost sight of the wolf, couldn’t even hear it moving through the trees. I sighed. I’d have to try to find my way back to the school, which would not be fun in the dark. Hopefully I’d make it back in time for dinner.

I edged my way forward on the path, looking around for some sort of landmark to use as a guide, and realizing I knew exactly where I was. It was the glade where I’d first met the Wildes. I could just make out the wall to the Golden House through the trees to my left. The wolf was nowhere to be seen in the clearing, but there was a person sitting on the seat.

Sam.

He looked up when I moved into the glade, though he must have heard me come blundering through the forest.

I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes but when I looked again, he was still there. My heart pounded. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t even a lookalike, someone who looked similar in the right light, at the right angle. It was exactly him.

Spots danced in front of my eyes and I was fairly sure I was about to throw up. I was probably having a heart attack. Could heart attacks cause hallucinations? Or whatever was causing the hallucinations and truth telling, maybe that ended in heart failure. Either way, I was probably dying.

“You’re not having a heart attack and you’re not hallucinating,” the hallucination said, as if it read my mind. Which was possible, considering it was a product of my imagination. “Just breathe.” Its voice was exactly like Sam’s.

“Shut up,” I said. “Just stop your talking.”

He looked so real, so solid. Even in the dim light, I could see him in precise detail. The Samness of him. His eyes were the same, green with flecks of gold, shining with an unnatural brilliance in the moonlight.

“It’s me, Lucy,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head and backed away.

“There was a wolf,” I said, trying to focus on what was real. “Where did it go?” I looked around for that little wolfy betrayer who had obviously lured me there under false pretenses and then run off to munch on bunnies. It couldn’t have just eaten me, rather than deserting me with the darkest shadows of my mind?

“I didn’t see a wolf.” He stepped even closer to me, almost close enough to touch. “Lucy…”

I held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t.”

My mind had obviously just given up, given in. It wanted Sam to be there and so he was. It was funny that I couldn’t speak an untruth and yet what I was seeing right in front of me was a lie. So funny. I was laughing a lot. He reached out and touched my arm and I could feel it, the warmth of him, the tangibility.

I couldn’t speak a lie. All I had to do was say it, say that he wasn’t real, say that Sam was dead. But I couldn’t get the words out. They wouldn’t move past the ache in my heart.

“Sam was my best friend,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “I don’t believe he’d do that to me. I don’t believe he’d make me sit through his funeral, not if he were alive.” I looked away from him. I wasn’t crying.

“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” he said softly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but you need to listen to me.” His grip on my arm became almost too tight. “It’s not safe for you here. There are things going on that I can’t protect you from.”

I forced out a laugh. Even for an imaginary and possibly zombified Sam, that was funny. “When have you ever protected me from anything? The way I remember it, you were always the one hiding behind me. ‘Oh, Lucy, that bully Steven Chen stole my Optimus Prime,’ and ‘Oh, Lucy, I lost my math homework and Mrs. Jennings will give me detention.’ So don’t act so tough now just because you’re back from the dead.”

I tried to pull away from him, but he held me fast. I could feel the warmth radiating from his body, could smell his familiar scent. Despite everything, that hadn’t changed, and it reminded me of comforting things, of summer nights looking up at the stars, of watching movies under the covers in winter, of chocolate pudding and stupid jokes. I was close enough to see the scar on the side of his neck that I’d given him that time when we were seven and we’d been playing Gandalf versus Balrog and I’d pushed him too hard into the depths of Moria. A scar in the shape of a heart. More than anything, his voice or his scent or his grip on my arm, that made me believe that he was real. I wasn’t dreaming him up. Sam was there. He was there and real and alive.

Sam Spencer was alive, and he’d deserted me.

“How could you?” I asked him. “How could you let me believe you were dead all this time?”

He shook his head and let me step away from him. “I can’t,” he said. “Don’t ask me.”

“We’re done here,” I told him, wincing when the words came out as truth. “You might not be dead but you aren’t the person I used to know. Go back to your Tennyson Wilde and your secrets. Whatever we were to each other, it’s over.”

He watched me go in silence, not making the slightest move to stop me.

Chapter 8

Nothing made sense anymore. Sam was alive. The results came back clean from the food and water samples I’d sent away. Sam was alive. I was still waiting on my blood tests. Nearly everyone in school had stopped coming to class with some sort of “superflu,” so apparently the results from my tests were delayed because the medical staff were so busy. I knew it wasn’t a flu. Unless it was a flu that caused truth telling, because that was what was making everyone feel so off. It was getting harder and harder to push through the apathy and actually get stuff done. Whatever it was seemed to be building up steam, rather than wearing off, and everyone was suffering from it. Also, Sam was alive. The Golden hadn’t been in class all week and I hadn’t even seen Tennyson Wilde lurking around since I’d talked to Sam, so I couldn’t get any answers there.

That’s why I was super surprised to find Nikolai Volkov at my first C&C club meeting.

The club was held in a disused wing of the main school building. We gathered at one end of a long room, which was divided into two sections – dining and kitchen. The kitchen area was divided into rows of small kitchenettes, filled with state-of-the-art ovens and appliances. I sat in the dining area, at a long table, like from Downton Abbey or something, with fancy candelabras and napkins folded into fan shapes and all that jazz. There were a few other girls right at the other end of the table, who tittered as Nikolai Volkov slipped into the seat beside me.

“You’re in Cooking & Craft club?” I asked in disbelief.

He smirked at me. “I thought I’d find the most needy girls here,” he said, giving the girls at the end of the table a little wave. “Seems I was right. I thought there’d be more of them, though.”

“You’re disgusting,” I told him. “And they’re probably sick in bed with the ‘superflu.’ If you’d been to class all week, you’d know.”

“Being around other people isn’t a good idea for us at the moment,” he said, toying with a shiny fork. I wondered if he was going to stab me with it like in a gangster movie or something, but he didn’t; he set it back in its place and folded his hands.

“So why are you here?”

He shrugged. “Clubs are compulsory. And I was asked to give you something.”

He took an envelope from his inside pocket and placed it on the table, sliding it toward me.

“It’s an invitation,” he said.

Inside the envelope was a small card, the same as my student card only all gold. I flicked it, but it was just made of plastic, not actual gold.

“That will give you access to our house,” he said. “Tennyson asked for you to meet him there tonight, to talk.”

I wanted to ask him why I should. I didn’t owe Tennyson Wilde anything, especially not my time, and I resented being summoned by him.

“To talk about Sam,” Nikolai clarified.

Before I could ask him anything, the celebrity chef who’d been flown in for our club appeared with a plate of itty bitty tiramisus, and everything else vanished from my mind.

I had said I was done with Sam, and I had no intention of meeting up with Tennyson Wilde. I was considering selling the gold card to the highest bidder. It was probably worth more than actual gold, when I thought about it.

I don’t know if I was on a tiramisu high, or just curious, but later that night I found myself standing in front of the gates to the Golden House. He’d wanted to talk, Nikolai said. Maybe it was my chance to get some answers.

I scanned the gold card at the sensor pad on the gate, though I felt in my gut it was a bad idea. Worse than following a wolf into the forest, even, and look how that had turned out.

“Place your index finger on the sensor,” said a computerized voice from the gate.

I did as it said and waited. A green laser light shot out and ran over me. I raised my eyebrows. The Golden were definitely hiding something. Something more than a possibly zombified Sam. Nobody needed that kind of security. Not even the president had that kind of security, or the queen, or Beyonce.

“Lucy O’Connor, Red House,” the voice said. “Access: restricted.”

Something clicked and the imposing gate creaked open.

I stepped inside slowly, carefully, as if the ground would give way at any moment. The Golden Garden was amazing, bright and otherworldly. I had never seen trees like that, with shining golden leaves. Bushes of cheery yellow flowers were arranged in artful groups around the garden walls, and the whole place seemed to have an air of hope, of optimism. It was probably easy to be optimistic if you were a gazillionaire.

The house seemed more like a castle, turreted towers rising from each corner of the building, in a rich sandstone that glowed gold in the afternoon light. I walked toward the house, no longer sure what to expect. I’d thought their house would be tacky, somehow, overdone. I hadn’t expected the simple beauty of it.

Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind. I struggled, but whoever held me was strong. Two men in masks, I realized, as I twisted around, trying to break free. I was so stupid. I was going to sleep with the fishes, just like Milo had said. I should’ve known better.

They put a stinky cloth over my face, smothering me with it, and within seconds, I was knocked out.

When I woke up, there were no fishes, at least. I was tied to a chair. I’d been stripped down to my underwear and a bunch of weird wires had been taped to my body. The room was bare, with stone walls painted white, and I could hear the ocean right outside. Through a high window, I could see that it was night, but I had no clue how long I’d been unconscious. To my left was an old wooden door, and to my right was a small table with a box that all my wires were hooked up to.

Standing beside the table was Tennyson Wilde.

“Wow,” I said. “I knew you were a jerk, but I didn’t realize you were criminally insane.”

“I’m only doing what is necessary,” he said, twiddling a knob on the box.

“Where are your hired goons?” I asked, looking around as much as I could.

“They weren’t hired.”

I snorted. Like that made a difference.

“They weren’t goons, either; they were from the polo team.”

I snorted again. Polo. I knew it was for jerks.

“What is your full name?” he asked me.

“Are you serious? Is that a polygraph machine?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Lucy O’Connor. And I think you’re a jerk.”

“You need to state the question as part of the answer, please.”

“My name is Lucy O’Connor and I think you’re a jerk.”

After that, he made me say my date of birth, home address, all things that were irrefutable facts.

“Is this even legal?” I asked him. “It was bad enough when you were just stalking me from the shadows, but this is probably going a bit too far. You know, I could go to the media with this: Tennyson Wilde is a big creepy jerk who ties girls up in their underwear.”

“My family owns the media,” he said, unbothered as he twiddled his knobs. The big knob twiddler.

“Why do you even need a polygraph? It’s not as if I can lie.”

“As I told you previously, you cannot fool me. I know that the spell has no effect on the caster,” he said. “What energy source did you use to cast the spell on the school?”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t cast any spell. I don’t know any witchcraft.”

He narrowed his eyes at me and then went back to his machine.

“Where did you learn the spell?”

“Is your machine broken?” I asked him. “I didn’t learn the spell anywhere. I don’t know witchcraft. I don’t even believe that’s what’s going on here.”

It went on and on and around in circles. Tennyson Wilde was the most stubborn-headed mule I had met in my whole life. He asked me the same questions in every variation, twiddling his knobs and jotting down little notes. It was lucky I’d joined C&C club instead of a club where you didn’t get food, or I’d have wasted away to nothing, because I was in that little room for at least ten years.

“I don’t know what I can say to convince you,” I said to him, after the millionth question. “When are you going to start on the torture part of this fun adventure?”

He stared at me blankly. “I have no intention of torturing you.”

“As if being kidnapped, tied to a chair and asked the same question a million times wasn’t torturous enough,” I muttered. “In a freezing cold room in my underwear.”

He seemed surprised. “You’re cold?”

“Are you for real? I’m tied to a chair in my underwear. Of course I’m cold. It’s like two degrees in here.”

“Oh.”

Oh, he said. He twiddled his knobs some more and then moved out of my line of sight. Well, that was new, at least.

“I’ll let you leave,” he said, his hands surprisingly warm against my skin as he untied me from the chair. It made me feel exposed in a way I hadn’t earlier, when he’d been standing across the room, barely looking at me. “But don’t think that this is over. I have no intention of letting you be until you’re out of our lives.”

“Whatever, jerkface,” I said, ripping his stupid wires off me and tossing them to the floor. “I don’t even want to be in your life. I just want you to leave me alone.” I grabbed my clothes from where they were hanging over the back of the chair and started pulling them on, anxious to be out of there and away from stupid Tennyson Wilde. “I don’t know why you’d think I care enough about you and your stupid secrets to go to the trouble of learning witchcraft to find them out, but here’s a newsflash for you: I don’t.”

“You care enough about Sam,” he said quietly, facing away from me, neatly winding up the cords of his stupid polygraph machine.

“Even if I did,” I said, being extra careful of my wording as I pulled on my shoes, “even if I did care that much about him, that is not how I roll. I might not like you, I might think you’re the biggest jerk I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go to all this effort to hurt you. I have better things to do with my time. And the fact that you expect the worst from people like that does not tell me good things about you.” I picked up my bag, which he’d placed by the doorway, and stomped my foot down to get my shoe on all the way without undoing my laces. “So suck it, jerk.”

I left the room to find I was at the top of some sort of tower. I made my way down the winding stairs, assuming it was just one of the towers I’d seen at the Golden House, but when I burst through the door to outside, I found I was at the edge of a treacherous cliff, and the tower was actually a lighthouse. The lighthouse shone out over the water below, long, sweeping stripes of golden light. There was only a slight clearing between the cliff where the lighthouse perched and the forest.

“Oh yay,” I muttered, edging along the forest line to look for a path.

I had very limited options, none of them appealing, and I was just weighing up whether getting myself lost in the forest was worse than going back into the lighthouse with Tennyson Wilde when something flashed from within the forest. Eyes, I realized. Some sort of animal was watching me. Before I could creep myself out thinking about the possibilities, the animal came toward me, and I realized it was the wolf that had led me to Sam.

“Oh, hey, wolf. Are you here to lead me to safety?” It wouldn’t even be the weirdest thing that had happened to me since I got to this school. “What do you think of that jerk, Tennyson Wilde? Can you believe him?”

I would definitely take Option Three: Follow the Wolf over Option Two: Ask Tennyson Wilde for Help, any day of the week.

The wolf turned back into the forest, and I hurried to keep it in sight.

“Don’t leave me stranded again, buddy,” I said. “That didn’t end so well for me last time.”

The wolf’s eyes flashed again as it looked back at me, and it huffed as if it thought I was talking nonsense.

“You don’t even know,” I told it. “The forest is where the fun is on this island, let me tell you. The school is no fun at all. The people are mean, and you can’t just frolic about chasing bunnies.”

It would be so much better being a wolf, I thought. Things would be simple. If you wanted to provide for your family, you just hunted some food, made a little den. You didn’t have to earn money and go to a fancy school and carry all this stress around. I could totally hunt bunnies. Maybe I should’ve joined the archery club instead of the eating club.

Before I knew it, I stumbled out of the forest and into the Red Garden. The wolf waited at the tree line as if it wasn’t sure I’d make it safely back to the house without supervision.

“Thanks, wolf buddy,” I told it. “You’re a lifesaver.”

I could’ve sworn it nodded at me as I walked away, but maybe I’d just watched too many movies with anthropomorphic animals as a kid.

I was exhausted when I got back to my room, and kind of pleased that Hannah was already curled up asleep in her bed and I didn’t have to try to explain where I’d been or what had happened. I didn’t even know if I could explain it. Things just kept getting weirder and weirder.

I got ready for bed without turning on the light so I wouldn’t wake her, so it took me a moment to notice the little golden box sitting on the table at the end of my bed.

“This came for you,” said a note in Hannah’s handwriting.

I hesitated before opening it. I’d just been kidnapped, so I wasn’t sure what to expect – maybe my little brother’s finger or an ear or something? But it was way worse than that.

It was mac and cheese. Mac and double cheese with bacon and olives. The best mac and cheese in the world, just like Sam’s mom used to make.

I put the lid back on the box and went to bed, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.

Chapter 9

My blood test results came back and they were fine. I was healthy as an ox. A super healthy ox. That was a good thing but it put me back to square one as far as fixing this thing went. It was getting worse and worse. I felt constantly lethargic, as if I had weights strapped to my body, pulling me down.

Everyone else obviously felt the same. Classes were practically empty and a spirit of gloom filled the halls. Nobody even bothered to bully me anymore. I’d heard a few people complain of nausea too, and when I opened a bag of study snacks, Hannah clapped a hand over her mouth and rushed to the bathroom. I had to come up with some sort of solution before I got too sick to do anything.

I’d been looking for the cause of it, but maybe that wasn’t the way. Tennyson Wilde was delusional, but maybe his method wasn’t so wrong. He thought I was to blame and he focused all his efforts on getting me to stop it. Someone was obviously behind what was happening. Rather than looking for the cause, I should find the causer. I’d find the culprit and get them to fix whatever they’d done.

I started by hacking into Tennyson Wilde’s blog and creating a poll. People loved him, they’d answer anything he asked, no matter how strange or invasive. I asked what they were doing the night I’d seen the talking statue. I asked about their knowledge of truth drugs and airborne viruses. I put in some control questions as well, and some tricksy ones, and made sure they had to include their name, house and class. I changed all the fonts to Helvetica, because for some reason that just seemed very Tennyson Wilde, and made the typeface white on black. I was just about to post when I rethought it and added in a question about witchcraft. It was just as Assistant Head Noel had said at the start of term, once you ruled out the impossible, what was left was the truth. I couldn’t overlook something just because I thought it was poppycock, that would skew the results.

I sent out a school-wide alert about the poll, then waited for the results to come in. They were much faster than my water samples or blood tests. By the time Hannah emerged from the bathroom, most of the school had answered. I collated all the data into a spreadsheet, and after analyzing it, there was one person who was clearly more suspicious than the others.

“I didn’t do it,” I said to the screen, exasperated. “Why would I?”

Hannah barely looked up from the cocoon she’d made in her bed, but after a few minutes her results came in from the poll as well. She tried to act as if she didn’t care at all about the Golden, but even she wasn’t immune.

As the last few answers filtered in, I went over and over them to find something, anything that might help. Most people had a watertight alibi for the night everything went weird. I was operating on the assumption that whatever had happened couldn’t be activated in advance or on a timer or anything like that, but I put a little note to explore that possibility at some point if I needed to. Of the people without alibis, most had no knowledge that would enable them to execute such a dastardly scheme. That actually ruled out most of the student population. What was left was the Golden and two sophomore girls who hadn’t answered the poll, and a senior boy called Tomlinson Myer who knew way too much about strange chemicals. When I looked them up on social media, it was obvious the sophomore girls were innocent. They’d live tweeted about how they snuck out of school for the weekend to go to a Justin Bieber concert.

The poll didn’t account for teaching staff, but I’d double-checked about the fly-ins and all unauthorized staff had to be off school grounds before 6pm each day. There were strict measures in place to make sure they didn’t stick around. Plus, they obviously weren’t affected by whatever had happened, because I’d heard the teacher we had for math say to Astor “good work” but that was an obvious lie because Astor did neither good nor work. I crossed all fly-ins off my list as irrelevant. That only left the campus teachers. The day everything had gone strange, Assistant Head Noel had spent half of morning assembly taking about how he’d be off speaking at academic seminars for the next few weeks, and a quick Google search confirmed that was true.

I had a shortlist. All I had to do was make my way through it and surely I’d come up with some answers. If only investigating Tennyson Wilde and his creepy secrets was so easy.

Wednesday was a good day to investigate the teaching staff. I had Mr. Porter in the morning and Mr. Corbett later on. Mrs. Pritchard taught economics in eleventh and twelfth grade, so I’d have to be creative when it came to her.

Mr. Porter was easy to rule out. Something had definitely dimmed his sparkle – he didn’t even work up a good rant when I asked him his opinion of The Da Vinci Code and Astor said it was the best book ever. The apathy had clearly gotten to him. He was so pale and had such dark circles under his eyes that he looked like a panda bear. I thought about staying after class to question him more, but felt too sorry for him to bother him.

I decided to skip gym class to find Mrs. Pritchard, figuring so many people were off sick that one more missing student would go unnoticed. I looked up where her office was. If she was in class I could maybe just snoop around a bit.

Her door was open a crack, so I poked my head in. There was nothing that seemed particularly evil or witchy, no plaque that said “Mrs. Pritchard: Econ Teacher and Evil Witch,” or like animal bones or virgin blood or anything.

“May I help you?” asked a voice from behind me.

I jumped and spun around, knocking my elbow into the door. Mrs. Pritchard stared at me with her lips pursed.

“Yes, sorry!” I said. It so was hard not to lie sometimes, but I was getting better at it. You could imply things with questions or body language or qualified statements. “Do you have any advice you’d give a young girl thinking about a career in economics?”

I felt a bit bad as Mrs. Pritchard’s eyes lit up and she guided me into her office. She obviously didn’t get too many students interested in her subject – I supposed if you were super rich you had people to take care of that kind of thing for you. As she talked, though, I became more and more into in what she was saying. I loved money almost as much as I loved food. More, maybe, because money could buy food but also other things too. If I got super good at economics, maybe I’d be able to hoard money the same way I had that stash of snacks in my drawer, only in a more figurative way.

“I always wanted to be an economist,” Mrs. Pritchard told me sadly, “only my husband said I was too stupid and pushed me toward teaching. Well, who’s laughing now? Not him, because he’s dead!”

She looked at me with her big sad eyes, as if she wasn’t even aware she’d said anything strange.

“Never let anyone tell you what’s best for you in this life, and never get married,” she said, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger. “You can’t do my class until next year, but if you want to sit in on it sometimes, I won’t mind.”

I promised I would and then left her to it. It definitely wasn’t her; she had both the truth and the tiredness. Two down, one to go.

I should’ve gotten Mr. Corbett out of the way first. He was the worst, the actual worst. Hannah had said that Tennyson Wilde was the actual worst, but Mr. Corbett… No, Hannah was right, Tennyson Wilde was the worst. But Mr. Corbett was a different sort of creepy jerk.

It was even worse with everyone out sick, because he had fewer targets to pick on.

“Quiz,” he grunted as the bell rang.

One of the Green girls put up her hand. Stephanie Von Something or other, I thought, but all those tall blonde girls were hard to tell apart.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, gathering up her things. “I’m feeling unwell. Might I please be excused?”

He put a hand on her shoulder and guided her to the door, making sympathetic noises. He was always nice to the pretty girls, but I’d rather have him be mean than putting his meaty hands on me.

“Sir?” I asked him as he handed out the quizzes to the remaining five of us. “What do the teachers do on a Friday night? Say, the Friday night before last, for example.”

He kicked Astor in the ankle to wake him up.

“We mind our own business, Miss O’Connor. I assume that’s a foreign concept to you. Pipe down now and do your quiz or it will be an automatic fail.”

He looked no more tired than usual and had skillfully evaded my questioning. That put him as top suspect in my book.

I caught up to Tomlinson Myer at dinner. He was a tall, heavyset boy with an abnormally round head. His eyes were red and faraway, and he had a strong patchouli smell. It seemed pretty obvious why he knew so much about funny drugs, he looked as if he’d taken all of them. Still, I had to ask.

“Did you do something to make everyone tell the truth?” I said.

He looked up from his steak dinner. He didn’t seem to register I was there. “I set fire to a mouse once,” he said. “I thought it would be funny but it wasn’t funny.”

“Right,” I said.

Tomlinson Myer pushed out the chair beside him for me to sit down. “My father wants me to take over his corporate empire but I just want to be free.” He looked up at me. “I ordered all this food but I can’t eat it. Will you help me?”

Tomlinson Myer was a bit of a dick but he shared his food with me and told me his life story. I wasn’t sure if he was being so truthful because he had to be or just because he was very, very stoned, but either way, I was convinced he wasn’t the culprit. And that he would never again harm another animal.

He walked out with me, then waved me off and headed into the gardens in the opposite direction, toward the Green House. When I turned to head back to my house, I kind of wished Tomlinson Myer had stuck around for a while, even if he was a dick. One dick was way better than a whole bag of dicks, and that’s what I saw in front of me.

Tennyson Wilde stood by the fountain, waiting for me.

I sighed and approached him cautiously. He seemed different and it took me a moment to pinpoint why. He wore a pale blue shirt that was perfectly tailored to his tall, rigid frame, and that matched his eyes. He held himself with the type of confidence that only money could buy, but there was something off. His hair was still tousled, but less artfully than usual. There were dark circles under his eyes and he was even more pale than usual. He normally stood unnaturally motionless, but now he tapped his foot against the paving stones. He held a black briefcase, and he clenched the handle so tightly that his fingers had turned white.

“This has gone far enough,” he said. “Withdraw at once.”

I wrinkled my nose, wondering what had brought this on all of a sudden.

“This is getting old,” I said. “I’ve got better things to do than explain to you for the millionth time that I had nothing to do with this, so please just leave me alone.”

The dumplings Tomlinson Myer had shared with me churned in my stomach. I knew I shouldn’t have forced myself to finish them, but it was too sad to leave them on the plate. They’d feel unloved. I wondered if I could throw up on Tennyson Wilde’s shiny shoes. Then, at least, my dumplings would have a noble end.

He gave an exasperated sigh and laid the briefcase down on the side of the fountain.

“I knew it would come to this,” he said.

For a moment, I panicked. What did he have in there? Was it some sort of high-tech weapon? He was going to vaporize me or melt my brain or erase me from existence.

But the briefcase wasn’t a weapon. Not in the way I thought.

“Leave this school,” he said, turning the briefcase so I could see the rows and rows of pretty money. “End the spell and leave this school and never see Sam again.”

“And you’ll just hand over all that cash?” I had to be sure that was what he meant.

I stepped closer to the money, barely even realizing what I was doing as I reached out a hand toward it.

“This money would be yours.”

There was a lot of money in that briefcase. Stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. I could feed my family our whole lives with that money, probably my family’s families, and their grandkids. Feed them on some fancy-ass food. I could feed us all forever and pay off the mortgage and my mom’s medical bills and send all my brothers to college, and there would still be some left over for fripperies.

In the movies, when people are offered a briefcase of money, they always have some high moral reason for declining – true love or justice or whatever. That’s because they’re in the movies and the harsh realities of life don’t concern them. In real life, there’s precious few morals that are worth more than financial security, and anyone who doesn’t believe that has never really been poor. Sure, Sam meant a lot to me, but did he mean as much as never losing another night’s sleep worrying over how we’d all eat until the end of the month, or whether Hamish would be bullied because his hand-me-down shorts were too small, or if Liam would drop out of school to earn money even though he was the smartest kid in the world, or if we’d have to choose between keeping the house and paying Mom’s hospital bills?

I would take that money in a second if I could. It didn’t mean I didn’t care about Sam.

“I can’t,” I said, the money blurring in front of my eyes as tears filled them. “I didn’t cast any spell. I didn’t cause this. I don’t know how to end it.”

Tennyson Wilde snapped the briefcase shut.

“I believe you,” he said.

But that was no comfort at all as he carried all that pretty cash away.

Chapter 10

It was a dark time for me. The darkest time of my whole life, maybe. Well, maybe not my whole life, but to have all I’d ever wanted offered to me and then snatched away, it did funny things to my mind. I went back to the house to curl up in bed. It was just too sad, thinking about all that money and how Tennyson Wilde obviously didn’t appreciate it, would just hand it over with no thought or feeling. It should go to a home where it would be loved. That money really should be mine. I would do right by it.

I didn’t get out of bed for days, except for bathroom breaks. It wasn’t just the money but my stomach felt awful as well. It went on too long to just be from too many dumplings. I had no will to eat, no will to do anything. I didn’t know if it was a chemical or a virus or a spell but I couldn’t bring myself to care. What could I do? I’d done all that investigating and it had been for nothing.

Not nothing, whispered a buried, resilient part of my brain. You know some stuff.

I blinked my eyes open. It was daylight. I didn’t know which day, but it seemed like afternoon. I smelled bad. The room smelled bad. I was hungry. Things were looking up.

I knew some stuff. I was sure that it was Mr. Corbett. Maybe, just maybe, if I got him to stop it, I could negotiate with Tennyson Wilde. I might even be able to get visitation rights with Sam thrown in, which was better than what I currently had, which was diddly with a side of squat. I’d go on an epic witch hunt, and then everything would be coming up Lucy.

I planned it all out while I showered. I’d take the information I had to Tennyson Wilde and try to open up negotiations. I didn’t have any concrete proof of anything, not enough for him to hand over the cash, but I could get his thoughts. He probably had some sort of secret police at his disposal to investigate Mr. Corbett and take him down. Or at least the polo team. I wasn’t greedy, if it was just the information, I didn’t need the whole briefcase of money. Though, if he wanted to give it away, I would take very good care of it and love it like my own flesh and blood.

It was later than I thought by the time I got outside, night falling quickly as it seemed to here. I hurried to the Golden House and swiped the card that Nikolai had given me over the sensor.

“Place your index finger on the sensor,” the voice said, but after it scanned me, it said, “Lucy O’Connor, Red House. Access: denied.”

I should’ve expected as much, but it was still a setback. I pressed the intercom button by the gate impatiently. It was growing cold and my belly still felt weird, and I wanted to be back in my bed.

“It’s Lucy, open up,” I said into the intercom.

There was no response. Jerks. All the lights in the closest tower were on, so it wasn’t as if they weren’t there.

“Your hair is stupid, Tennyson Wilde,” I said. “Your eyebrows look like caterpillars and you aren’t very nice.” I really wanted to say his face looked like a butt, but that was a lie. There wasn’t really any fault I could pick with his face. The jerk.

I was just working up to some real zingers when I was cut off by a piercing howl. It made my heart freeze in my chest, the sound of that howl, the raw pain in it. It reminded me of the scream that I’d heard, that night. I thought about my wolf buddy, who had helped me out, and I hoped it wasn’t him. It was such an anguished sound.

The howl rose again, even more harrowing this time. Without thinking, I rushed toward the sound. The wolf was clearly in pain; it obviously needed help. I didn’t know what I could do, but I couldn’t leave it alone to suffer.

I followed the sound into the woods, not taking any path but heading directly for it. The forest was dark and overgrown, trees hanging so low I had to duck as I ran. Even by the light of the full moon, I could barely see my way, the forest was so dense. The howling grew louder as I ran deeper into the forest, so loud it seemed to fill the air. I felt as if I breathed it in and held it inside of me, until it became a part of me. The pain of the wolf became my own pain, like a bone-deep ache.

I stumbled out of the forest, and was not surprised when I found myself in the glade where the wolf had led me to Sam, where I’d first met the Wildes. The place had a special quality that lent itself to strange events. And what I saw in front of me was definitely strange.

Tennyson Wilde knelt in front of the howling wolf, his hands buried deep in the fur of its neck, whispering to it, trying to quiet it. Althea and Nikolai hovered behind him, as if afraid to approach. The wolf continued to howl, inconsolable. No matter what Tennyson Wilde did, the wolf cried and cried.

It was the same brown wolf, my wolf buddy. It seemed different, bigger, more wild, but I could tell it was the same wolf. I knew it, just as I knew in my heart what I was witnessing, despite not wanting to believe it. Perhaps deep down I’d known all along, and that was why I had trusted the wolf. Even as it twisted in Tennyson Wilde’s grasp so that I could see the mark, I knew it. The mark on the side of the wolf’s neck, that it had kept hidden from me before – it was more than a coincidence. The white mark in the brown fur, the shape of a heart. Just the same as the scar on Sam’s neck.

My brain didn’t want to accept it, but as the wolf pulled out of Tennyson Wilde’s hold and toward me, there was no mistaking it. No mistaking those eyes. Green with flecks of gold, shining like the sun. Sam’s eyes.

“Impossible,” I whispered, backing away. “Hallucination. Possibly a dream. A hoax. Something logical.”

The wolf snarled at me.

“You need to leave,” said Althea Wilde, just as she had that first day. I wondered if maybe she hadn’t had a good reason then too, because she was definitely talking sense right now.

My wolf buddy had been friendly the other times I’d met it, but now its hackles were definitely raised. It had stopped howling and it growled low in its throat. A warning.

I backed up to the edge of the clearing, over to the path. Just as I got to the tree line, the wolf slipped out of Tennyson Wilde’s hold and lunged for me.

I turned and ran.

I ran as hard as I could. I didn’t turn back, but I was sure the wolf was at my heels. I could feel its breath against the back of my neck, and every moment I thought it would pounce, and I’d feel its paws on my back and its teeth on my throat. My legs ached and my lungs burned, but I didn’t stop running. I sweated so much that my glasses slipped off, so I stuffed them in my pocket, but still I didn’t stop running. Not even when I got clear of the forest. I just kept running and running, with no thought to where I was going, only to putting as much distance between me and the wolf as I could.

I didn’t stop until I got right up to the school, and then I jumped into the fountain and waded to the middle, then climbed right up to the very top. I sat in the fountain with the creepy cupids and tried to catch my breath. I was fairly sure wolves couldn’t climb, but I wasn’t sure about werewolves. I put my glasses back on and scanned the gardens carefully for any sign of movement, twitching at every little sound. The school was dark, everybody safely back in their houses after dinner. In the distance, I could see the lights of the Red House and I wished I was there. As my panic began to fade, I wished I’d found a spot that was less wet and cold to hide out, but I waited a little longer, just to be safe. Nobody ever got eaten by a werewolf from playing it too safe. I assumed.

The full moon was high over the forest, lighting the grounds, so I saw clearly when the dark figure emerged from the trees. I jolted and my heart began to pound again, but it was only Tennyson Wilde.

“Why are you in the fountain again?” he asked.

“More like why are you not in the fountain?” I said. “Fountains are the places where you don’t get eaten by wolves.”

“I don’t know what evidence you’re basing that on,” he said, staring up at me. He looked almost amused. “But he was never going to eat you. You know that. You should go back to your house now. Do not speak to anyone of what you saw.”

The fountain was just as slippery and dangerous as the last time I’d found myself in it, but I clambered my way out to confront him.

“Nuh-uh, buddy,” I said, wading toward him. I wasn’t as wet as last time though I was covered in slimy stuff and muck, but I didn’t even care. “This is your big secret, right? The thing you’d do anything to hide? Well, I want some answers, or I can’t guarantee I’ll help you keep your secret.”

He folded his arms over his chest and glared at me like I was a bug. “What do you want to know?”

Wow. That was a big question. It threw me for a moment, and I sat down on the edge of the fountain to think about it, dripping and squelching as I moved. I wanted to know everything, but what did I want to know the most?

“Is Sam okay?”

“No.”

It struck me like a punch to the face. I’d been so angry at Sam since I’d found him alive that I hadn’t really thought about how much I cared about him, how much he meant to me.

“And your presence here does not help.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You can’t keep blaming me for everything.”

“My family found Sam two years ago. He was wild, feral. We’ve tried to rehabilitate him and we thought he was ready to come back to school, though he’s still very volatile. He’s triggered by minor things, inconsequential things, but you remind him of his old life, and that makes him more vulnerable.”

It made sense, but I hated Tennyson Wilde for saying it.

“But you’re like him too? All of you?”

He shrugged.

I didn’t want to say the word, to have it as an irrefutable truth, but I needed to know for certain.

“Werewolves?”

He rolled his eyes. “That is a very crude, inaccurate, gender-biased term. We are lycanthropes.”

I shrugged. I was cold, my belly hurt, and I was getting impatient with him. “But you still turn into a wolf on the full moon, right? So it’s all semantics.”

“The moon does not force us to change. The moon is our guide, our power, our energy. We are stronger when the moon is full. It helps us control our powers – we are not controlled by it.” He sighed. “Except for Sam. His case is unique. But it is up to him to decide whether to share that with you.”

“You’re all a bunch of werewolves.” Something else clicked for me as well. “And we’re under a truth spell. None of this is science.” I didn’t want to believe it, struggled to hold on to the last shreds of logic – it was a bad dream, a prank, but I had no choice except to give in to it. It was magic. I gaped at Tennyson Wilde as my entire belief system crumbled beneath my feet.

He loomed over me, falling completely into shadow. “I think you’ve imposed on my goodwill enough for one night. Please return to your house.”

I still hadn’t told him about the information I’d found, but I didn’t really feel like negotiating with him anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted, except to be safe in bed and to forget the whole night had ever happened.

As I got up to walk back to my house, the sound of howling wolves rose up around me. I shivered and hurried home.

Chapter 11

Assistant Head Noel had said that when you rule out the impossible you were left with the truth, but more and more, the impossible was becoming fact. I’d always relied on logic when things were falling apart, on concrete evidence, what was real. Even if everything was a total mess, there were still particular rules that the universe was governed by. It made me feel safe.

Only, it was a lie. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Werewolves. Witchcraft. Everything I’d ever thought about the world was wrong, all my fundamental systems of belief. I wondered what else I had wrong. The sick feeling in my stomach got worse and worse.

It was tempting to just stay in bed. To pull the covers over my head and ignore all of it. That was what everyone else was doing. But I couldn’t. I knew the truth now and I couldn’t hide from it. There was magic. It had gotten inside of me. The blue magic spark chased the truth around and around my belly, churning everything up, and the more I tried to ignore it, the sicker I felt.

I sent Tennyson Wilde a message with my findings from the poll. I didn’t know if he’d get it – he probably had everyone in the school messaging him constantly – but I figured he probably had his own investigations team and data analysts or whatever, so he may as well have as many of the facts as possible. It was in his hands now, I decided.

I hadn’t seriously considered witchcraft as a cause for the truth telling, so my research in that area was seriously lacking, but when I did an Internet search all I found was fan fiction and people trying to sell phony spells. It was the same for werewolves, only with less spells and more porn. Any information I found seemed made up. When I went into my messages, there was a school-wide notice saying classes had been canceled indefinitely due to the superflu, so I headed to the library to research werewolves. Even if there was nothing legit, at least paper books didn’t have flashing sparkle animations in the background like those fake spell sites.

I hadn’t visited the library yet because I’d been avoiding other students, though it had been one of the things I’d been most excited about from the school brochure. It was just as awesome as I’d hoped. It was a long, domed building on the far side of the school, with stained-glass ceilings and secret little reading nooks, and books so old and rare you needed like a PhD in old and rare books to handle them. It was five floors, with an open square in the middle, so the entire building was flooded with colored light from the stained-glass. There were so many books, more books than I’d ever imagined. There were even those sliding ladders so you could climb right up to the top shelves, which to be honest seemed a bit dangerous in real life. How were you supposed to carry the books back down? How did you stay up there without falling while browsing through the books? It was clearly fraught with peril, so I kept my feet firmly on the ground.

Mr. Porter sat at the information desk in the middle of the ground floor. Even the colored light reflecting over him from the ceiling didn’t disguise how dull-eyed and droopy he’d become, like a wilted flower. He barely looked up from his massive stack of books as I greeted him.

Nobody else was around at all, not in the stacks or the computer labs or the study areas. It was a bit creepy. I wandered the rows, looking for the occult section, but I kept expecting someone to appear at the end of the row, or to be watching me through a gap in the books from the next aisle. I tried to tell myself I was being dumb and paranoid, but with all the weird stuff going on, it was hard to convince myself. It was a world full of werewolves and witchcraft, so I felt kind of justified getting creeped out.

The occult section was not helpful. There were books on astrology and the properties of crystals and other New Age stuff, but nothing I needed. I needed something practical, something like A Beginners Guide to the whole world being a total mess, but there was no category in the Dewey Decimal System for that. I had to think laterally. If I were Melvil Dewey, what would I class werewolves and witches under? I’d just assumed it would be under occultism, but when I looked up the library catalog on my tablet, I realized that, of course, folklore was way more logical. I scrolled through, disregarding all the pop culture and literature results, and wandered out of the 100s and up the stairs.

I hit the jackpot with the folklore section. It was massive, filled with books on werewolves and witches and all sorts of other things that weren’t relevant to my current situation. I kind of felt a little bit betrayed by the Internet as I browsed the wealth of printed information. There was a lot about witchcraft. Witchcraft was a thing in like every culture ever, apparently. There were books on how to tell a witch, how to banish a witch, how witches were associated with the devil, all that kind of thing. A lot of it read like misogynist propaganda, but there were a few handy little facts that seemed the same in most cultures. Witchcraft couldn’t be performed across running water, that kind of thing. The spell has no effect on the caster, apparently it really was common knowledge.

I sat a couple of books to the side, then ran my finger along the rows of books on werewolves. Most of them sounded like BS, and some were in foreign languages, but then I came to one called Lycanthropy: Facts and Fictions. It was a new and glossy book, so I wasn’t expecting it to be useful, but as I flicked through it, I realized it was exactly what I needed. There was good stuff in there, practical information. It said that lycanthropy was a genetic condition, and there were whole chapters on how it affected people, how it was sometimes a dormant gene, the biology of the transformation process – actual science. It made me feel so much better. I put Lycanthropy: Facts and Fictions on the top of my pile and went to the checkout counter.

As I walked back to the stairs, I noticed a lone, huddled figure in the corner of the study section. Fatima. I hadn’t talked to her in a while, so I went to see how she was doing. I sat down at the table opposite her, and she didn’t even look up, she was so intent on taking notes from the textbook in front of her. She looked even more tired than before, her eyes red and swollen, her posture slumped.

“Fatima?” I said, touching her on the arm to get her attention. “Are you okay?”

“I have to study,” she mumbled, scribbling something on a Post-it and sticking it in the textbook. “Have to get ahead while everyone else is slacking off.”

“You’re doing fine,” I told her. “Take a break.”

She shook her head. “Breaks are for losers. I have to come first. My parents said if I get first, they’ll pay for the Green package next year.”

I withdrew my hand in surprise. “That’s important to you?”

“Of course it is,” she said in a monotone, turning to the next chapter in her book. “Status is power. Power is the most important thing. You can’t do anything in this life without power.”

I was fairly sure that every evil villain ever had made a similar speech, but I couldn’t suspect Fatima, she was so clearly messed up by the spell. I watched her work for a minute, then fished around in my bag for a granola bar. I sat it on the middle of her textbook so that she couldn’t ignore it.

“At least eat something,” I told her.

As I scanned my books at the checkout counter, I thought about the nature of the spell. Fatima had barely seemed aware that she’d been speaking to me and I doubted she even wanted me to know those things she’d said. The truth had just flowed out of her. The spell was getting stronger.

The scanner on the checkout counter beeped and printed out a little receipt with the due date on it. I tucked it in the cover of the lycanthropy book, and then stopped dead, my blood running cold. I hadn’t noticed the names of the coauthors before. Names that I hadn’t seen or spoken in years. Dan O’Connor and Ruby Spencer. My father. Sam’s mother.

I stared at the names for a moment, a thousand different emotions rushing through me, variations of anger and pain and sadness. I took a deep breath. It couldn’t be coincidence.

I tried to be rational. It made no difference now. I needed the information in that book; it didn’t matter who had written it.

I wandered out of the library in a daze. Everything was such a mess, nothing turning out like it should. I’d been reunited with my best friend and he was out of my reach. I got into a fancy school and classes were canceled. There was magic and werewolves and apparently my father had known all about it. It couldn’t be coincidence that I’d gotten into Amaris, been offered a scholarship out of the blue, and it just happened to be the school where Sam went, the school full of werewolves, when our parents had apparently been werewolf experts. It felt as if it should all mean something, as if I should do something about it all. But what did it mean? What could I do?

I was so lost in my thoughts that I almost ran slap-bang into someone in front of the library.

Sam.

I hadn’t seen him again since that first night in the forest glade, not as a person anyway. I still found it hard to accept he was alive, even with him standing right in front of me. He’d gotten so tall.

“Lucy, I’ve been looking for you,” he said, taking me by the elbow and guiding me to a bench seat under a hedge. His hands were the same. Overly large, like puppy paws. Square, clean fingernails with little crescent moons. “Sit with me,” he said. His voice was friendly, but there was a hardness to it that said he definitely wasn’t asking.

I slipped the books into my bag as subtly as possible. Tennyson Wilde had said reminders of Sam’s old life made him unstable, and I didn’t want him seeing his mother’s name and suddenly trying to eat my face off or anything.

Sam had never been mad at me, not in my whole life. He’d been frustrated, maybe, and upset, and disappointed, but never mad. I’d seen him mad at other people, like the time Donovan Price down the street had kicked a puppy. Sam smote that jerk down so hard that Donovan Price still crossed the road every time he saw a dog. I did not want to be smitten by Sam.

I hesitated before sitting down.

“Tennyson said to tell you that his people are looking into Mr. Corbett.”

“Cool,” I said. “Well, if that’s everything…”

I moved to stand, but he kept hold of my arm.

“I asked you to be careful,” he said. His face was pinched and hard. It made him look like a stranger. “I told you it was dangerous. Why were you in the woods last night?”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “You’re the one who tried to rip my throat out and that’s my fault? Wow, nice victim blaming there. Do they actually feed you jerk pills up in that Golden House, or does it come with the lycanthropy?”

“I could’ve killed you!” he said, fingers digging into my arm. “I’m a monster. When I change, it’s you that I look for. When I lose control, it’s you that I hunt.”

My heart pounded. He couldn’t lie.

“I want you to leave here,” he said. He didn’t meet my eye as he spoke. “Leave here and never think of me again.”

The sun filtered through the trees. Birds sang. It felt wrong. There should be storm clouds gathering over our heads.

“Maybe it’s not about you,” I said, pulling away from him and standing up. I was so, so angry at him. After everything he’d put me through, he thought he could just show up, all being a werewolf and bossing me around? No. “Maybe after thinking you were dead for three years, I’m fine for you to stay that way, and I can be at this school without going near you.”

I spun on my heel, ready to storm off, but suddenly he was right there.

The heat from his body seemed to wrap around me and hold me in place. With each breath, his chest brushed against my arm, sending shivers along my skin. He smelled fresh and sweet, like apples and spring rain.

“Say it without the maybe,” he said, staring at me so intensely that I was sure he could see every hidden corner of my soul. “Say it like a truth.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t.

“I never wanted to leave you,” he said, pulling me closer, just slightly. “I wanted to come back. Every day I wanted to come back. But it’s more important that you’re safe. And you’re not safe now.”

I ripped myself away from him. “I can take care of myself. Just like I have for the past three years. You’ve warned me, so if anything happens, you don’t need to feel guilty.”

He shook his head. “You’re not happy here.”

I gave a sarcastic laugh. “That has nothing to do with anything. I thought you’d know me well enough to realize that much. Even if I hate it here, even if I get eaten alive by werewolves, or cursed by witches, or bullied and starved, none of that matters. Everyone else has deserted my family. My father, you and your family, everyone. I can make us strong by going here, and nobody will ever hurt us again. So I don’t care if you’re a werewolf, or if we get hit by a million spells. I am not leaving here.”

I’d lost the will to storm away. I turned to leave, shaking my head.

“Be careful, Lucy,” he called after me. “Be careful of me.”

Chapter 12

With classes canceled and nothing else to do, I hoarded snack foods and studied up on witches and werewolves. The witch stuff was interesting but not really helpful, mostly just superstitions. The lycanthropy book, on the other hand, was a goldmine. A lot of it talked about the science of it, though the theories were super advanced and basically gibberish to me. I looked up some of the terms but I felt so groggy and awful with the spell that it became too much effort. I knew that once I was feeling better and could maybe make a spreadsheet of all the information, it would be useful. And even if I couldn’t really understand much, those parts were far better than the more conversational sections, which sounded as if my father were speaking directly to me.

People couldn’t become werewolves by being bitten – that was what my dad said. Werewolf bites were a fiction. You needed to have the werewolf gene. Sometimes it was a dormant gene, but that was super rare. There were only a few werewolf families left and they monitored themselves vigilantly. The Wildes were obviously one of those families, and the Volkovs, though the book didn’t name names. I wondered about Sam’s family, if they had all been werewolves and that was why his mother had co-written the book, but surely I’d have noticed something was up in all those years I’d practically lived at their house.

When I felt too sick to read, I went through Hannah’s Netflix queue and watched everything I could find relating to werewolves. I knew I couldn't rely on movies or TV for the facts but it made me feel as if I was doing something useful, without me actually needing to do anything. I jotted down a few notes here and there when things seemed to come up a lot – silver and wolfsbane and super-senses, that kind of thing, to check up on later and see what was facts. TV about werewolves was super addictive but I couldn’t let myself get suckered in. I had research to do, so I had to try to filter out the BS from the facts. All of it seemed like BS but I’d completely lost any frame of reference about what was possible.

Eventually, I felt too sick even for that. The nausea got worse and worse. I didn’t know if it was because I was hiding more secrets, bigger secrets, or if the spell was just gaining power. Either way, the endless churning, rolling in my belly really sucked.

“Are you okay?” Hannah asked, her big eyes staring at me from over her covers.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think I even know what okay means anymore.”

She shifted in her bed. “Nothing seems to help anymore,” she said. “Before, my hot water bottle made it a bit better, and painkillers, but nothing helps now. Do you think we should go see the school doctor?”

“I don’t know if the school doctor can cure this,” I said.

She gave me a sad smile. “No, but I bet they have morphine.”

I crawled off the sofa and over to my bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I started to nod off. Sleep was way better than being awake with the sick feeling.

Hannah moved to sit up, then gave up and slumped back down. “You knew him before, didn’t you?” she asked, out of nowhere. “The boy who was with the Wildes. I saw Tennyson talking to him.”

“We grew up together. He lived next door.” I didn’t want to talk about Sam, not when I couldn’t lie.

“What happened? How did he end up with the Wildes?”

Moonlight streamed into the darkened room, making Hannah’s eyes shine softly.

I really did not want to talk about it. Where did I even start? What would I say? I didn’t want any surprises coming out of my mouth. The truth swirled and swirled around in my stomach, threatening to rise.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, trying to climb back out of bed.

As soon as I got to my feet, a wave of pain rippled through me with such force that I fell to the floor. It felt like toothache, the worst toothache ever, but all through my body, settling into my bones.

“Lucy?” Hannah gasped.

I looked up from the floor to see her at the edge of her bed, her face tight with pain.

I curled up into a little ball, rocking back and forth. “Yeah?”

“I don’t feel so good.”

The pain made it hard to think of anything else. I grabbed hold of my bed and pulled myself to my feet. I had to end this. I looked over to see that she couldn’t even sit up. Her face was pale and her hands shook.

“You stay here and rest,” I told her. “I’m going to fix this.”

She made a feeble noise of protest, but then settled back on the bed. By the time I got to the door, she was fast asleep.

Every step I took was a struggle. All through the house, I could hear people’s groans of pain, their cries and whimpers. It had to end.

The campus teachers lived in one of the buildings near the main school, I remembered from studying the school map. I knew I could make it that far. I had to. I had to find Mr. Corbett and make him stop this. I shuffled along as fast as I could in my yellow daisy pajamas and fluffy slippers, stopping every few paces to catch my breath and try to force out the pain through strength of will. There was a reason why nobody ever said, “as fun as extreme pain” and that reason was that it sucked balls.

The way through the gardens seemed impossibly long. Why did a school even need so many gardens, I thought, trying to distract myself from the pain radiating all through my body. If you wanted to look at a flower, there were plenty of pictures online. Surely, if they wanted such big grounds, the school was rich enough to install a monorail or one of those moving floors they have at the airport.

Pain wasn’t something you could ever get used to, I realized. It wore you down, weakened your defenses. No matter how you tried to distract yourself, it pushed itself back into your awareness. I wondered if I would even make it. I wondered if it mattered either way. Maybe I should just curl up in the flower bushes and sleep until I died. I wouldn’t be in pain that way, nothing at all would hurt me, not ever again.

If it were only me, I’d have done exactly that, but I’d told Hannah I’d fix this. I thought of the way her bright eyes had grown dull, of how Fatima was in some sort of study coma, and Milo hadn’t emerged from his room in forever. I couldn’t leave these rich kids to their own devices, they had zero coping skills. And I was the only one who knew what was really going on. Well, me and the Golden, but they hadn’t exactly been helpful in any way. Plus, my brothers had enough trauma to be going on with, and funerals didn’t come cheap, so I probably shouldn’t curl up and die just yet. Instead, I labored on, through the endless gardens.

The lights were blazing at the teachers’ house as I finally approached. I struggled toward it as quickly as I could. The end was so close, I told myself. I had no idea what to expect when I got there. Hopefully I could just politely ask Mr. Corbett to end it, though considering what a massive dickbag he was, I doubted it would be that easy.

The door sat wide open, and a terrible screaming came from inside. I hurried up the steps and into the entrance hall.

Mr. Corbett lay in the middle of the entrance hall, screaming and clawing at his skin. Mr. Porter knelt beside him, unbuttoning Mr. Porter’s collar and trying to hold his hands still. He looked up at me with frightened eyes.

“I think he’s having a heart attack,” he yelled over the screaming. “I think he’s dying!”

I stood in the doorway, struck motionless with shock. Tennyson Wilde had said that the spell had no effect on the caster but it had obviously done a number on Mr. Corbett – it looked as if the truth was trying to climb out his throat and choke him. It wasn’t him. I’d been so sure it was him, sure it was almost over. I’d been wrong.

“Call the doctor!” said Mr. Porter, his hipster beard quivering.

“The doctor’s a fly-in,” I told him dumbly. “You need to make an appointment.”

Mr. Porter held Mr. Corbett’s hands to his chest so that he couldn’t scratch at himself, but his face was starting to turn blue as he struggled to breathe. I didn’t like Mr. Corbett at all, but it was awful to see anyone writhing around in so much pain, the big vein pulsing on his forehead, his eyes bloodshot and bulging.

“There’s a rapid response team just off-site,” said Mr. Porter, speaking quickly as he grew more and more frantic. “But you need to notify them through the school app and I left my phone in my office. You need to contact them. Now. He’s dying!”

I shook myself into action. I didn’t have my tablet with me – it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you thought to bring to a potential showdown with an evil warlock, though if they’d made that rapid response information more readily available I might have seen the use for it. Seriously, that wasn’t the kind of information you wanted to waste time looking up in an emergency.

Mr. Porter’s office was much closer than the Red House, so it would be faster to get his phone than go back for my tablet, and there was more chance of me finding someone to help on the way. I turned back to the night, steeling my body for the burst of activity, even though I felt well past my limit.

I stopped abruptly as I left the house. At the bottom of the stairs, someone was waiting for me.

Tennyson Wilde.

And he looked terrified.

Chapter 13

“I need your help,” Tennyson Wilde said, looking up at me from the bottom of the steps, his eyes as cold as ever, even though he was asking for a favor.

“Well, Mr. Corbett’s on the floor dying, so I’m going to make him the priority.” I hurried down the steps and pushed past him.

He caught me by the arm. “It’s not me. It’s Sam.”

I didn't even pause to think.

“Where is he?” I asked, already moving to follow as Tennyson Wilde turned and walked away.

“At the house.” His words sounded forced, pained, and I noticed he was unusually pale and wan. Normally he moved like flowing water, but now he walked in stiff, stilted steps.

“Why come to me?” I fell into stride with him. “You wanted me to stay away. Sam wanted me to stay away. What’s changed?”

He glanced down at me, face filled with the typical disdain. “You don’t feel it? The pain?”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course I do, thanks for bringing it up. Wait, you feel it?” I had no idea how werewolf metabolisms worked, but popular culture led me to believe they’d be invulnerable – no pain, instant healing, all that. There’d been several chapters on it in the book but it was all so technical I’d probably need fourteen different university degrees before I could understand it.

“We all have secrets, so we all have the pain,” he said. “But what I feel is mostly phantom pain, from Sam.”

I stared at him so hard I almost walked into a hedge. “You feel his pain?”

“We all do, the whole pack. We always share pain.”

“Sucks for you,” I said.

“It is a necessity. A wolf’s instinct is to hide injury, vulnerability,” he said. “If we can all feel it, we cannot hide from each other, and we can work together to heal.”

I wondered what else they shared. Underpants? Soda cans, even when they had that gross drooly bit around the lip? It all seemed kind of invasive and horrible to me, but nobody was asking me to live like that, I guessed. No way would I ever drink from Tennyson Wilde’s drool can.

We rushed through the gardens, through the night, in a way that made me feel distinctly that I was leaving behind one life and entering another, and I wasn’t sure that was something I wanted, but I couldn’t just let Sam suffer.

“I don’t really get how you expect me to help,” I said, hurrying to keep up with Tennyson Wilde’s long stride. “I’m not exactly an expert in werewolves.”

He sighed. “Lycanthropes.”

“Plus, do you remember that time when he chased me through the woods and tried to eat me? That didn’t help anyone.” Seriously, rich people logic.

“Your safety is not my priority. I suspect that most of his volatile behavior stems from his fear of hurting you. He panics and acts irrationally. But essentially, he wants to be close to you. Your presence is familiar and welcome to him. I believe that in his weakened state, you will be able to soothe him and alleviate some of his pain.”

“You believe,” I said.

“We’ve taken measures to ensure he doesn’t hurt you. He is sedated and restrained. But if it comes to a choice between Sam’s wellbeing and yours, you need to know that we will choose Sam.”

I shrugged, unsurprised.

We came to the gates, and Tennyson Wilde turned to me. “He should find your presence a comfort, but you need to remain calm and be sure not to distress him. Due to your shared history, he views you as something similar to a pack member, so he will sense your feelings and react accordingly. His form may alarm you, but try to prepare yourself.”

I nodded, shifting my weight from foot to foot as Tennyson Wilde pressed his finger to the sensor and the gate swung open. The pain still radiated through my body, and feeling anxious about Sam wasn’t helping. None of the reading I’d done had prepared me for this kind of thing, for facing down a real life werewolf. Well, I supposed Tennyson Wilde was a werewolf, but he wasn’t all growly and furry and scary – more like a werejerk than a werewolf, just the same as always. With Sam, I had no idea what to expect.

We hurried down the path to the front door, where we had to wait for a retina scan to clear us both before we could enter. I hadn’t been inside the Golden House before, but I barely took in my surroundings as we hurried down a hallway. Everything was simple, elegant, a blur of white and gold as we rushed past it. We came to a heavy steel door at the end of the hall.

“He’s in the room at the top of the tower,” Tennyson Wilde said, pulling the door open.

“You’re not coming in?”

He shook his head. “Too many scents will confuse him. We will be right in there, watching on the screens.” He pointed to a room off the hall. “If there is any danger, we’ll intervene.”

“If it’s in your best interests,” I added.

He shrugged and pushed the heavy door closed behind me. The clang of it echoed in the stone tower. I sighed as I looked up at the winding staircase, so tall it vanished into shadow. There was no elevator. I grabbed hold of the banister and hauled myself up. Sam needed me, I told myself with each step. I had to help him.

The staircase seemed to go on forever. If Sam was some angry beast who wanted to eat me alive, I doubted that any help would get up those stairs in time to do anything. Maybe that had been their evil plan all along. Jerks.

Finally, I got to the top. There was a small landing and another steel door like the one at the bottom, locked with several large bolts. I forced the bolts open and warily opened the door.

The room was dimly lit and it took me a moment to adjust my eyes. Everything seemed out of place, disarranged, and when I figured out why, I smiled sadly. Sam had always loved small, safe spaces – blanket forts, pillow forts, even the space under the bed. He’d taken everything in the room and arranged it into a massive fort, with the furniture and bedding as the walls and his mattress as the roof. It was just so Sam of him that I couldn’t be frightened of what I’d find inside. No matter what form, it was still Sam in there.

“Hey,” I said, hovering by the blanket door. “It’s me, can I come in?”

He whimpered, sounding more like a sick puppy than a ferocious wolf. I pulled the blanket aside and crept through the door. It was even darker inside, but I could make out a lump of blankets in the corner that seemed Sam-shaped.

“Remember when we had chicken pox in fourth grade?” I crawled further into the cave. “That was the best. We watched Lord of the Rings like ten times.”

The pile of blankets shifted. “You cried,” it mumbled.

“You cried!” I moved in closer. Close enough to touch, but not touching. “You cried like a baby, all ‘don’t leave, Mr. Frodo,’ every single time. Just because your name is Sam, you didn’t have to take it so personally.”

The blankets shifted again until Sam was pressed close, his warmth radiating through to me.

“It was sad,” he mumbled.

I smiled, placing my hand where I thought his head probably was. “It was. You nerd.”

As I sat there with him, the pain, that all-consuming pain, began to fade, just a little.

I had him back, I realized. I’d been so busy being mad at him, being hurt, that I hadn’t stopped to really think about it. Sam wasn’t dead. He was alive and he was there with me. He was real. I bit my lip, tears of relief suddenly flooding my eyes. I was so stupid. All that other stuff didn’t really matter; all that mattered was that I had him back, that he still existed in this world.

“I tried to come back,” he whispered, his voice sounding muffled and slightly distorted. He moved so that his head emerged from the blankets, his eyes glowing in the darkness. “Every day, I tried to come back to you.”

“Shhh,” I said, smoothing the hair from his forehead.

His skin was flushed and damp with fever. He seemed so much more affected by the spell than even Hannah had been. I wondered if it was because he was a werewolf, though Tennyson Wilde had been more or less the same as usual. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe Sam had even bigger secrets buried in there, struggling to come out. I had no idea what he’d been through. Tennyson Wilde had said Sam had only been with his family for two years. I wondered what had happened in that missing year. I hadn’t been a friend to Sam, I realized, too worried about my own feelings to consider his.

Sam shook his head, his eyes falling closed. “I need you to understand,” he whispered.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t have to explain.”

He fell into a restless sleep, and still I kept patting his hair, stroking his face. I didn’t know what else to do for him. His hair seemed thicker, and he had more facial hair than usual, I noticed. As my eyes adjusted more to the darkness, I saw that his teeth were sharp too – wolf teeth – and when he rolled over to be closer to me, I realized that his hands were clawed. He looked caught partway between man and wolf, and I wondered if that was normal. It seemed to cause him pain, and I wondered if it hurt him to transform, and if he was somehow stuck.

It made my heart hurt to see him in such distress, and my stomach gurgled with the truth that was trying to force its way out, the truth I’d been trying to ignore.

I couldn’t run from it any longer. I held Sam close, my lips close to his ear as I whispered my darkest truth to him. My biggest secret.

My heart was his and it always had been.

Chapter 14

I tried to stay awake to watch over Sam. I let myself pretend, just for a moment, that things could be that simple. Sam and I could continue as we’d always been. It could be just like he had never left, as if we’d been together the whole time, growing closer and closer until we were inextricably entwined. We’d been like that before, like those science experiments where different fruits are bound together so tightly they grow into one another – a peach on one half and then like a gooseberry on the other.

The pain had finally receded just a little, and I was so warm and comfortable that I nodded off. I dreamed about a house filled with doors. Different-colored doors, in a passageway that wound around and around. I stopped at a red door and went through, but it just led to another passageway, to more doors.

When I woke up, the early morning light had begun to filter into the room and I could see that Sam had taken his blankets and curled up in the corner. I really needed to pee and I figured he wouldn’t notice if I left him just for a little while, so I crawled out of the fort.

The tower room was mostly bare – there was a large window opposite the door with curtains billowing around it, and some broken, discarded furniture that had obviously not fitted into Sam’s overall vision for his fort and been tossed aside. There was no bathroom in the tower room, so I decided to head back downstairs. I searched out a pair of Sam’s sneakers and kicked off my slippers – they were too hazardous on the stairs – and salvaged a worn old sweatshirt from the rubble as well.

Going downstairs was easier than I expected, the pain in my body having faded a little as I slept. Althea Wilde was waiting for me at the bottom. I was a little wary of her, since our previous dealings hadn’t exactly been friendly, but she didn’t even seem to remember. She looked as perfect as ever, poised and graceful, despite the strange hour. Her hair was pulled back into a loose braid and she wore a long, floaty dress made from some sort of wafty pale blue material. Now that I knew about werewolves, it kind of made sense to me that she looked as if she was made from moonbeams.

“I saw you heading down on the monitor,” she said, waving gracefully back toward the room at the bottom of the stairs. “How is he?”

“Sleeping,” I told her. “Is it normal for him to be stuck halfway like…?” I made claws and teeth at her.

“No,” she said, and nodded for me to follow her along the hallway. “Sam’s different from us. He hasn’t told you about it?”

I shook my head. “We haven’t really been chatting lately, you know.”

She shrugged. “Bathroom’s over there,” she said as we got to the main living area.

I didn’t ask how she knew I needed it, figuring it was probably one of her werewolf powers. Wow, I was so glad I wasn’t a werewolf.

I hurried over to the bathroom, and when I came out, Althea was sitting at a table in the corner, with two cups of coffee. My opinion of her immediately went up a notch.

I took a seat, looking around at the inner sanctum of the Golden House. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d imagined – something debauched, with servant girls dressed as bunnies wandering around, and neon lights, and mountains of cocaine or something. It was nothing like that. It was smallish and fairly simple. I mean, everything was in white and gold, so it looked a little like a wedding hall, but an understated and elegant wedding hall. The floors were the same stone as the building, covered in a white and gold Persian rug. A large, gold chandelier hung low in the center of the room, lighting everything with a warm glow, and a fire crackled in a large hearth opposite where we sat. It was a comforting space, welcoming, which seemed strange when I found the people who lived there so cold.

“Nikolai is watching Sam, and Tennyson is out looking for the spell caster,” Althea said, pushing one of the coffees toward me. “We can take a short break.”

“I was so sure it was Mr. Corbett,” I said with a sigh, then my eyes went huge and I nearly spilled my coffee as I realized what I’d done. Or, rather, not done. “Omigod, he’s probably dead!”

Althea shook her head. “He’s fine. Tennyson alerted the medical staff and they flew Mr.Corbett out last night. The spell apparently started wearing off as soon as he’d crossed the water, but he nearly choked to death on his secret.” She flipped her long dark braid back over her shoulder. “Apparently he let it slip to the helicopter pilot, though. I don’t think he’ll be teaching again.”

“Well, that’s something, at least.” I sighed. “But doesn’t help us with the spell.”

“You collated some good data,” she said, picking up her coffee with both hands and sipping it daintily. “We’ll work it out.”

I thought about what she said about Mr. Corbett. “If we all crossed the water, the spell would lift?”

She shrugged. “Probably only while we were across the water. I assume the spell is tied to the caster, so once we’re under it, as long as we’re in close proximity to them we’d be affected.”

She seemed to know what she was talking about and that made sense. I wanted to ask her about Sam, about why he was different, but it didn’t seem fair to get his secrets from someone else. The others were born as wolves; from what I could gather. They had always been able to transform, but I was certain that Sam hadn’t. He’d never had secrets from me when we were kids. I would’ve known. I wondered if that had something to do with it.

“I think it’s good that you’re here,” Althea said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Good for Sam. Good for the pack.”

“…okay?” I had no idea why she was telling me that.

“Tennyson is bad with that kind of thing, so he won’t say it, but thank you.”

I shrugged and gulped down my coffee to hide my embarrassment. It was too hot to drink quickly and it burned my tongue and throat, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of Althea Wilde, so I tried not to show it. She didn’t even notice, just tapped on her watch. It was a smart watch and it looked thick and clunky on her delicate wrist.

“Nikolai says everything is fine up there,” she said, glancing over at me. “Would you like to help me research? Our families have vast libraries on these matters, and they have loaned us everything that seemed relevant. Although we have many people working on a way to end the spell, I find that it helps me to stay busy. It has impacted Sam so much more severely than the rest of us, I can’t help but worry that if we don’t find a solution soon, he may…” She broke off and bit her lip, as if worried she’d say too much, but I got the point.

I shrugged. “I just want him to be okay,” I told her. “I don’t know anything about witchcraft or any of this stuff, so just point me in the right direction.”

She smiled at me as she got to her feet. “Sam said you were like that.”

“Like what?”

I followed her out to the hallway, expecting her to head down it, but instead she paused just outside the doorway and turned back toward the room.

“Wait, Sam talked to you about me?”

She smiled enigmatically and gave a little shrug. “We have no secrets in the pack.”

She pressed one of the buttons on the panel by the door, that I’d assumed were light switches. I jumped as a heavy metal door dropped with a clang and sealed the doorway. I could hear a faint clicking-whirring noise from within the room, a bit like bicycle gears. I looked at Althea in question but she was staring at the door expectantly. Finally, there was a soft thud and the door slid open.

The room looked almost exactly the same – same gold and white rug, same fireplace, same chandelier. The only difference was everything else. It was a completely different room. Instead of a living area, there were rows and rows of books. The walls were lined with them, there were stacks of shelves, and when I stepped inside for a closer look, it soon became obvious they were all books relating to witches and werewolves and whatever else was out there. It made my excitement at finding the folklore section in the school library seem a little lame.

“I’ll show you what I’ve been working on,” Althea said, breezing past me to go sit at the large table in the middle of the room.

I stared at her. “What just happened?”

She furrowed her brow at me. “What do you mean? We decided to research, didn’t we?”

So, apparently this was all normal. And if I was going to question anything, there were much better things to ask about than secret rooms that changed at the press of a button, so I decided to just roll with it. I went and took the seat beside Althea.

“Your data was useful in helping us eliminate suspects,” she said, showing me a printout of my research, with a bunch of names highlighted and notes scribbled all over it. “Whoever cast this spell knew what they were doing and they had a great deal of power behind them. It had to be someone with Fey blood in their family.”

“Fey like a fairy?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“Fey like magic,” she said. “My family has been very careful about monitoring who is admitted to this school, if someone with this sort of power has slipped past us…”

I got it. I got wanting to protect the people most important to you, of doing everything you can to make sure they’re safe. I got how scary it was when you weren’t in control of a situation, no matter what you did. And I got how vulnerable these people were, despite all their privilege and superpowers and everything. What made them strong was also their greatest weakness. That must be terrifying.

“That’s why your brother thought it was me,” I said to her.

She nodded and pulled a book closer. “Yes, we had hoped it was you. It would make it all easier. You were the most unknown quantity. We still can’t really find out how or why you were admitted but that investigation has been put on the back burner for the time being. Our priority is currently Sam. Specifically, ending the spell so that he can continue his recovery.” She opened the book and pointed to a particular passage. There was nothing wafty or dreamlike about her now, she was in her element and all business. “Familiarize yourself with the processes of witchcraft, for a start. We had been operating under the assumption of the culprit being Mr. Corbett as well, and Tennyson is currently verifying all the information you’ve gathered is correct. I’ll go back through the surveys and try to find any inaccuracies or discrepancies. If we can find an anomaly, even the smallest lie, that will be somewhere to start.”

I had been over it and over it myself, but I didn’t say that to her. I completely understood the need to feel useful, and maybe she’d find something that I’d overlooked. We quickly fell into a comfortable silence as we worked. I wasn’t sure if it was because we had a common goal but I was surprised at the lack of awkwardness, it almost felt as if I was just studying with Hannah.

Once I started reading, I became enthralled. Witchcraft was fascinating. It worked similar to lycanthropy, in that you had to be born with the witchy gene. It wasn’t like those internet sites had said and you could just buy a spell and some crystals and do a bit of chanting and presto! You needed to have it in your DNA. And there weren’t any incantations or any of that. It was more about the transfer of energy, the control of it. It was almost like science. Except that it wasn’t science and it wasn’t even governed by any known laws of science. It was magic and it was kind of terrifying.

“This is interesting,” I said, placing my finger on the page to mark the spot as I caught Althea’s attention. “It says that the effects of a spell can be lessened if the rules of the spell are complied with.”

Althea tilted her head to the side as she scrutinized me. “So the feelings caused by the compulsion – the pain and nausea, I assume – they are alleviated if we speak the truth?”

I shrugged one shoulder. “Makes sense, I guess.” I’d thought I’d felt better since I slept, either because of the sleep itself or the proximity to Sam, but maybe I’d been wrong. I’d told him my secret, my biggest, worst secret, right before I’d fallen asleep. Maybe that had fixed me.

There was still a low-level churning in my guts, a faint throbbing through my body. I concentrated on that feeling as I spoke. “I’m wearing boys’ underwear.” The feeling didn’t seem to change much, but then, it wasn’t much of a secret. It wasn’t as if I was ashamed of it. Boys’ underwear was cheaper and it had a handy little pocket in it if you ever needed to hide anything in there. Not that I ever had, but it was comforting to know I could if I wanted to.

Althea rolled her eyes. “Nobody cares about your underwear,” she said. “Tell me something scandalous.”

“You’re a werewolf.”

She turned back to her notes. “Lycanthrope. And if you’re not going to take this seriously…”

“You tell me something,” I said. “I don’t even have any secrets.”

She stared at me for a long moment. It was that same stare that her brother always gave me, calculating, weighing me up. Only, unlike her brother, at the end of it she nodded.

“I find people terrifying,” she said, not meeting my eye. “People think I’m a snob but really I just don’t know what to say to them. Whenever I try to make conversation, I just freeze up and it comes out wrong, so most of the time now I don’t even bother.”

“Wow,” I said. I had been expecting something along the lines of “one time I woke up and I’d drooled on the pillow, and it was very shocking to me to discover I am not 100% perfect”, not some deep revelation. I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that. “Thank you for telling me such a personal thing.”

She glanced up and gave me a small smile. “Tennyson is even worse. We weren’t really socialized as children because of the lycanthropy, so I suppose that is why, though Nikolai is fine.” She glanced off into the distance for a moment. “Yes, the pain does seem less.” She nodded. “That’s good, that might be useful. Take a look through these books as well and see if you can find anything else like that.”

She passed me another pile of books and I got to work. I read through chapter after chapter, book after book, not able to get the information inside my head fast enough. My brain whirred with all the information I was taking in. It spun in circles, around and around and around, so dizzying that I lost concentration and had to close my book and sit it aside. The things that it was possible to do in this world, the things that magic could do, they were practically limitless. How were we supposed to stop that kind of power? My thoughts were so noisy that it took me a moment to realize when the alarm sounded, even though it screeched all through the house.

“What is that?” I asked, looking around.

Althea jumped to her feet and rushed to the door. “Sam.”

Chapter 15

I hurried along the hallway behind Althea, confused. Why did Sam need an alarm set on him? What were they so worried about with him? Was he okay? It was impossible to think with that alarm screeching through the air, stirring up the panic inside me.

Althea hit a button at the bottom of the stairs and the alarm thankfully stopped. Everything seemed too silent without it though. Spookily silent. She hit another button and the stairs began to spiral upwards. I rolled my eyes at Tennyson Wilde, the jerk. He could’ve told me about the automatic stairs and saved me the climb earlier, but even that was just a passing thought amid my worry for Sam.

At the top of the stairs, the door had been flung open. Althea went right on in but I approached cautiously. I had no idea what to expect when I got inside that room and the noises I could hear from in there did not help. There was a scuffling, like rats in the walls, and a high-pitched whine.

No scenario that my mind came up with made any sense, no scenario except one. It took every ounce of my concentration not to let those images in, those ones I could always see when I closed my eyes, of Sam’s house that night, of all the blood. I had that same, sick feeling in my stomach, the same clamminess on my skin that I’d had then. It didn’t even make any sense. The Golden House had mega security, it wasn’t as if someone could just sweep in and steal Sam away again, but there was no reasoning with that cold core of fear inside of me. It knew. It knew that my time with Sam was limited, transitory. It knew that at any moment, he’d be taken away again. It knew that whatever I found when I entered that room would be the beginning of the end.

It also knew that I had to go in anyway.

I squared my shoulders and stepped inside.

The room was in ruins. The fort, our sanctuary, was completely destroyed. Pieces of it were everywhere, as if something had exploded inside it. Feathers from the pillows floated in the air, the mattress was ripped to shreds, one of the bed legs was lodged in the wall. It was a scene of total destruction.

My heart pounded as I looked around for Sam, sure that he would be gone. Vanished. Maybe this time forever.

I hadn’t realized I’d been in the library with Althea for so long, I’d been so absorbed in my reading, but the midafternoon sun streamed through the window, warming the room and giving it a false brightness. There was nothing bright about what was happening here, nothing cheerful or warm.

Sam was hunched in the shadows under the window ledge, in the darkest part of the room. He was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth, and the awful whining noise was coming from him. As Mr. Corbett had done, he was scratching at himself, clawing at his face and chest. More than the pain of the spell, more than anything that had happened since I came to this school, the sight of Sam in such misery tore at my heart.

Nikolai and Althea stood facing him, their hands held out, trying to calm him. I remembered that night I’d seen them in the forest, the night I’d discovered Sam was a werewolf, that now seemed so long ago. It had been a similar scene that I’d stumbled on, with everyone trying to calm Sam down. I wondered how much of this was the spell and how much was whatever else was going on with Sam, the reason he was different, the thing nobody would talk to me about. Whatever it was, it couldn’t go on this way.

Nikolai edged closer, reaching out to grab Sam by the wrists and stop him from hurting himself. Sam lurched to his feet, letting out an awful sound that was like nothing I’d ever heard, like something dying of fright. He lunged for Nikolai, and as he stepped into the light, I gasped in shock.

He looked like a monster.

He was hunched over in partial transformation, his spine bent and limbs misshapen. His eyes glowed red. His face was covered in fur and elongated partway into a wolf’s muzzle, but his teeth were cracked and broken with the aborted change, and his mouth frothed with blood and saliva. His eyes were filled with pain, and as he continued to claw at himself, he raised bloody scratches on his skin that began to heal as soon as they formed, only for him to rip them open once again.

He wasn’t human, but he wasn’t a wolf either. He was nothing that existed in nature, I didn’t know what he was. But he was Sam, and that was the only thing that mattered.

I moved toward him, wanting to help him, to take away his pain, but Althea put out an arm to stop me.

“Stay back,” she said, not taking her eyes off him, even as she held me back. “He’s past that now. You can’t help.”

She was wrong. I knew she was wrong. He was Sam, my best friend. We were closer than anyone and I had to help him. That was why Tennyson Wilde had brought me here and it was what I intended to do. There was no way I was going to lose him again. I couldn’t. I’d do everything possible to stop that happening because I knew I couldn’t survive it again.

“Sam?” I said, trying to push past Althea, though she was much stronger than she looked, much stronger than me.

He snarled and swiped his claws at Nikolai, catching him across the cheek.

“Sam, it’s okay,” I said softly, remembering what Tennyson Wilde had said about Sam going into a panic, about him not wanting to hurt anyone. If I could just convince him that he wouldn’t, maybe he’d calm down. I just had to remind him of who he was. He was obviously stuck halfway between human and wolf, I just had to tip him back to the human side. How hard could it be? “Come on, Sam, we’re all your friends here. We can get through this.” The words were true, but I knew that Sam was too far gone to care. It was my tone of voice that was important.

I tried to edge toward him, but he growled, low and dangerous.

“Get the tranq gun,” Nikolai said to Althea. “Don’t worry about the girl, we can deal with her later.”

“It’s okay, Sam,” I said, ignoring Nikolai and holding out my hand toward Sam. I was going to make it okay, I was going to show Sam that he wasn’t dangerous, that he’d never hurt me. We could get through this together and everything could go back to the way it had been. Things would be good again. Nothing would tear us apart ever again, we’d always be together. I wouldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t.

I stepped toward him. “Just let me help you.”

I kept my eyes fixed on him. Althea and Nikolai were doing something behind me but I had no idea what. I had no interest in it. I moved closer and closer to Sam, as slowly as I could, until finally I got almost close enough to touch. He cowered down, glancing around nervously as if looking for an escape. Still, he clawed at himself, gouging at his flesh as if he could rip away the pain.

“If you let me close, I’ll keep you safe,” I told him quietly, as I reached out for him. “I’ll never let anyone take you from me again.”

I don’t know if it was my movement, my voice, or what I said, but he snarled and lunged for me, swiping out and raking his claws down my arm. He recoiled immediately. Nikolai gave a shout and Althea tried to grab him. I made a split-second decision – I could either step back, shy away from the monster and let the others deal with him, or I could hold on. Hold on to the boy I loved and not let him go.

Really, it was no decision at all.

I threw myself forward, at Sam. He snarled and tried to push me away but I wrapped my arms around him and held tight. I didn’t care what happened, if he hurt me, if he ran me through with his claws, as long as I was close to him I could survive anything. Being apart from him had almost killed me the last time, almost drove me mad. Being together is what would fix this. I was sure of it.

His body was warm. Too warm. He was burning up, as if he was fighting off an infection. He didn’t smell like himself either, but instead slightly acrid, sour. He writhed around, howling mournfully as he tried to shake me off. I buried my face in his neck and clung to him.

I couldn’t speak to him in that position, but Tennyson Wilde had said Sam thought of me as pack, that he could sense my emotions, so I put everything I had into conveying them to him.

You’re everything good in this world. I can’t lose you. I love you. Don’t leave me again.

I screwed my eyes shut tight as I pushed the feelings out of me and onto him. I had no idea how that sort of thing worked, but I envisioned it as kind of like an emotional headbutt.

He let out a mighty roar as he pushed me away with all his strength and threw himself backward. Back through the window. The curtains billowed around us and he seemed suspended in midair for a moment. Just for a moment. Our eyes met and they were Sam’s eyes, green and gold.

Then he fell.

He was gone. Sam was gone. He was so strong that his push had sent me halfway across the room, but I jumped to my feet and rushed to the window. By the time I got there, he was nowhere to be seen.

I moved to follow him without thinking, to just jump out after him and follow wherever he’d gone, but Nikolai grabbed me by the arm.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me. “You’re not much help but you’ll be even less so if you’re splattered all over the ground. You need to start thinking before you act. What was that just now? What did you hope to achieve?”

I wrenched my arm away from him. I barely even heard what he was saying. “I need to find him,” I said, backing away from Nikolai. It was happening again. Sam was vanishing right before my eyes. I looked out the window and he disappeared, just like before. “He’s alone. He’s in pain. I can’t just leave him like that. I need to find him.”

“You need to leave him alone,” said a voice from behind us.

I spun around to see Tennyson Wilde standing in the doorway, surveying the wrecked room.

“I brought you here to watch over him. I brought you here to help.” He shook his head as he walked toward me. “You failed.”

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.

“Hey,” I said, waving my hand in front of her face. “Are you in there? Hey, Fatima?”

She made no sign of hearing me at all, just stared straight ahead with lifeless eyes.

The forest thinned out as we came to the lighthouse. The blue light swirled around the lighthouse, those tiny specks that had been like fireflies but now seemed so much more sinister. Just as the specks swarmed the light, the students blocked the lighthouse, making it difficult to see what was going on. I pushed my way toward the front of the crowd.

The ocean roared below and the blue light gave off a hum, but once again, almost as if I was expecting it, there was that shattering noise, and all sounds stopped.

Everyone around me stepped back, arranging themselves in an intricate formation, some lying down, some contorting into strange poses, twisting their bodies into unnatural shapes in a purposeful way. I was sure if I viewed it from a distance, it would make some sort of sense, but standing in the middle of it, it just seemed surreal.

And as everyone moved away, I could see who they had been moving toward. The spell caster. The fisherman who had landed their catch. The one person I’d never really suspected. The one I’d trusted without question.

“Lucy O’Connor, of course it’s you,” said Mr. Porter.

Chapter 18

The specks moved away from the top of the lighthouse and began to swarm around Mr. Porter, glowing brighter the closer they got to him.

“You cast the spell?” I asked. “You’re the bad guy?”

“I’m not a bad guy,” he said, shaking his head. “A person can do something bad for the right reasons.”

I tilted my head to the side, watching him. “That sounds like something a bad guy would say.”

The specks swarmed more frantically around him, and then moved as one, entering his body, filling him with a blue glow.

I really didn’t want Mr. Porter to be a bad guy. I liked Mr. Porter. He’d given me an A on my pop quiz and he made scathing jokes about Hemingway. I didn’t want him to be all hopped up on magic and evil.

“What are the right reasons?” I asked, needing to know why he’d done it, why he’d cast a spell that hurt everyone.

“The truth,” he said, tilting his head toward the sky.

I took a step closer. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if I could exactly take him down with my smooth ninja moves, on account of I had no moves, either smooth or ninja.

My movement made him snap his attention back to me.

“The truth,” he repeated, and for a moment the glow dulled and he sounded almost like himself. “The truth is everything. Every work of art aims to reveal the fundamental truths that we all yearn for. We study them to uncover the truths we’ve not yet discovered for ourselves.”

I snorted. “I study to get an A and keep my scholarship so I can grow up to earn more than eight dollars an hour,” I said. “I don’t care about the truths of old dead people.”

But I wasn’t sure if he even heard me. The glow grew brighter again, until it was hard to see Mr. Porter through it.

“Reveal the truth,” he muttered, in a voice not his own. “Reveal the truth at the heart of the being. The wolves who are howling show their true form. The students who sleep through life lose their awareness. The true form is revealed.”

I glanced around, not sure what to do. Everyone was still bent up in weird shapes, and though I didn’t care so much if Astor slipped a disc in his back from holding the scorpion pose for too long, it wasn’t right that he didn’t have a say in it. Mr. Porter thought they were sleeping, but he was wrong. Fatima wasn’t asleep. She worked harder than anyone to get what she wanted. Hannah wasn’t asleep. She’d been kind enough to stick with me through all the bullying. Milo wasn’t asleep. He barreled ahead at full steam. Mr. Porter had no right to judge them. His truth was not the actual truth. His truth was poppycock.

Even if I took down Mr. Porter with my smooth ninja moves, would that help everyone, or would they be stuck like this forever? There was no guarantee that taking down Mr. Porter would get rid of those little blue buzzies either; they might just swarm on someone else. They might swarm on me and make me do their evil bidding instead. I didn’t really want that.

What I needed was a handy local werewolf pack to jump in and sort things out. That was what Hannah’s Netflix queue had led me to believe would happen. They’d jump in, rip off their shirts and set things right. But from what Mr. Porter said, it sounded as if they had their own problems to deal with, and no matter how long I stood there, no buff werewolves showed up to save the day. I was going to have to sort this out myself.

Just as I was about to jump to action, Mr. Porter turned to me.

“The true form is revealed,” he chanted. “Reveal your true form.”

I couldn’t reason with him while that blue glow was all up in his business, and I didn’t know what other weapons I had in my arsenal. Not that reason had been doing much for me lately.

I had to get rid of the blue glow. I didn’t know if it was sentient or alive or what even it was, but if you wanted something to lose its power, you had to cut off its power source, right? They’d come out of Professor Amaris in the first place, out of that orb thing. I knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything – I’d been born of my mother and she wasn’t exactly a power source for me – but it was a place to start. I had to get back to the Zen garden.

“Reveal the truth,” Mr. Porter repeated.

I moved away from him. I hoped he’d be okay if I left him for a while to foil his evil plan, and didn’t fall over the cliff or anything — he was clearly a little messed up but that didn’t mean I wanted him to die. I’d nearly reached the forest when something reached out and grabbed my ankle. I looked down to see that blonde girl who had skipped out on the quiz, Stephanie Von Thingie. She held on to my ankle, her perfectly manicured nails digging into my leg. I tried to pull out of her grasp but her hold was too strong. It was super creepy, the way she stared ahead blankly, eyes unfocused, but moved on some external command. Her hand glowed faintly blue where she held me.

When I looked up, Mr. Porter was standing in front of me. I hadn’t heard or seen him move. So much for smooth ninja moves.

If I shielded my eyes from the glow, I could see his face, but his features all seemed different, distorted. The skin stretched tightly over his skull and his eyes and mouth seemed strangely magnified. I wasn’t sure that Mr. Porter was still at home in there, or how long since he had been.

“You will not leave,” he said. “The true forms are revealed.”

As he spoke, a howl ripped through the air, startlingly close, and I remembered the way that Althea had been forced to change. I probably needed to do something before that became an issue.

“No offense, sir,” I said to him. “But that is BS.”

The howl was answered by another, and another. I was surrounded.

“They might be wolves, but they’re not beasts,” I said, hoping that it would get through to them, at least. Mr. Porter was obviously too far gone.

“The true forms are revealed,” he said again. It was worse than talking to Tennyson Wilde when he got an idea in his thick head. “They will be exposed. The wolves and the sheep.”

That didn’t sound good. Wolves and sheep weren’t exactly buddies.

“You’re going to make them… eat them?” I asked, pointing between the forest where the wolves howled and the students.

“The wolves will devour the sheep,” he said. “The truth will be revealed.”

Okay, that was more than a little messed up.

“Wow,” I said. “For real? You think the truth is that important? You’d let a bunch of innocent kids get munched on?”

He glowed brighter, and I knew there was nothing I could say to get through to him. I had to get to the Zen garden. It was my only chance. I didn’t know if Mr. Porter was counting me as a wolf or a sheep, but I was fairly sure I came down on the “getting devoured” side, and if I was going to get ripped apart, it might as well be while doing something useful.

Time to break out the smooth ninja moves. I’d just make them up. Who would know? It wasn’t as if I was being assessed by ninjitsu masters or something.

I dropped into a crouch and twisted to the side, using my body weight to break Stephanie’s hold on my leg, and bringing me closer to the tree line. I snatched up a fallen branch and swung around to clock Mr. Porter over the head with it. I felt kind of bad, because he was super smart and I didn’t want to hurt his massive brain, or my chances of getting an A in English, but I definitely didn’t feel bad enough to let myself get eaten.

I’d thought the force of my hit would knock him out cold, but he just staggered and then righted himself.

“Oops,” I said, and then ran.

I got to the forest, but any relief I felt was short-lived. The safety of the forest was an illusion – a dumb illusion, given my history with it, though still better than magic-riddled English teachers and their creepy puppet armies, I supposed.

A wolf jumped out at me as soon as I got under the cover of the trees, landing on my chest and sending me sprawling. I pulled myself up as quickly as I could, my heart racing. Eyes glowed out at me from the darkness. Three sets of eyes, glowing the unnatural blue of the spell.

I was so screwed.

Chapter 19

It had been bad enough when I’d only had one wolf to run away from, but three was impossible. They backed me up against a tree, surrounded me completely. Sam was still only partially transformed, stuck between wolf and human, but there was no human awareness in his eyes, no recognition. It wasn’t the blankness of the puppet army; he looked feral, dangerous. The tawny wolf snarled at me, fur bristling. I assumed it was Nikolai because of the coloring, and that the smaller gray wolf was Althea.

They moved in closer, circling me. I’d seen nature documentaries; I knew how wolves attacked. Any second they’d start lunging at me, working together to bring me down. I looked around for an escape route, but I was completely hemmed in. There wasn’t even any way I could climb into the trees from where they’d herded me. I wondered vaguely where Tennyson Wilde was, if he was about to appear behind me and rip out my throat. I hoped it would be fast. I didn’t really want to lie there for hours watching them chew on my entrails while I bled out.

“Sam,” I said, hoping my voice would trigger something in his brain. “You can beat this, come on. Don’t let some jerk control you. You don’t want to eat people, I know you don’t. You don’t even like bacon.”

Which, let’s be real, was weird in itself.

If my voice triggered something, it was nothing good. He lunged toward me, his teeth bared. I moved away, but that brought me closer to Althea, who nipped at my heels.

“Quit it, you jerks,” I said, skipping away from her.

I tried to think of something I could do to fend them off. Althea had said they were scared of saltwater, but what was I going to do? Make a break for it and jump over the cliff? That did not sound like fun. There had been nothing in the lycanthropy book about what to do in case of attack. It had all just been scientific theory. Thanks, Dad. Thanks for the big fat nothing, to go with the rest of the big fat nothing you left when you walked out.

I tried to remember what I knew from TV and movies, but the buff guys kind of blurred all the details out. Silver, I thought. And wolfsbane. Well, I had nothing silver and wouldn’t know wolfsbane if I was staring right at it, and knowing my luck it was different in reality and actually like caffeine for wolves or something instead of a deterrent.

If I survived this whole thing, I was going to find out everything possible on werewolves, and then I wouldn’t get into these situations.

It seemed like a big if. The wolves tightened their circle around me, and in the distance I could see something moving through the trees. The creepy puppet army, moving toward me, blocking me in, and making themselves easy targets at the same time. Once the wolves were done with me, they could just turn on everyone else right there. It would be a bloodbath.

I tried to make a break for it, to push my way past the wolves, to get back to the school, but they were so big, so strong, they drove me back with minimal effort.

Sam bared his teeth and I could see him tensing, ready to pounce. I clenched my fists. No way would I go down without a fight. Not to Sam Spencer. Not to the boy who’d eaten too much cake at my fifth birthday and thrown up on my new dress, then cried himself to sleep in my bed because he thought he’d ruined my party. Not to the boy who had brought me puddings every day for a week after my mom got sick so that I wouldn’t be sad. I would not let him kill me. He’d never forgive himself.

I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t take my eyes off him if I wanted to survive. I had to see the exact moment he launched himself at me.

But he never reached me.

Suddenly, there was a wall between me and the wolves.

A Tennyson Wilde-shaped wall.

“Stand down,” he snarled, and the wolves cowered.

I could only see his back, but it was a human-shaped back. He stood on two legs and wasn’t furry. And he apparently had free will. Plus, he wasn’t actively trying to kill me, so he was currently my favorite person in the whole forest. Which was a sign of how dire the situation had become.

“Why do you continue to get yourself into these situations?” he said to me over his shoulder.

Which was totally unfair. It had only happened like once before. Maybe twice. I screwed up my face at his back and poked out my tongue. He began to walk forward, forcing the wolves back toward the lighthouse. I stuck as close as possible behind him. The creepy puppet army didn’t move, their eyes unseeing as they stood among the trees.

“I should’ve just stood back and let your wolves eat the whole school?”

“You should’ve not caused any of this trouble to begin with!”

I gasped with outrage. If he wasn’t the only thing standing between me and certain doom, I’d have punched him.

“You are such a jerk,” I said. “This is your fault, not mine. If you weren’t such a dick, people wouldn’t want to cause trouble for you and your kind.”

“If it’s not your fault, why are you the only one not changed?” he asked. “Why aren’t you over there with the rest of them?”

Which was a fair question, and I had no answer for it.

“Clearly because I’m too awesome,” I said. “And you’re not changed either.”

“That has nothing to do with this.” He put out a hand to halt the wolves and they stopped moving, their heads bent in submission. “We need to end the spell.”

I rolled my eyes. “Obviously. I think if I get back to the Zen garden, I can break the connection between the magic and Mr. Porter.”

“How?” he asked. “If it was that easy, don’t you think I would have done it by now? The statue is indestructible. It’s solid gold, and my people have tried to de-spell it. Nothing in the Zen garden can help us.”

I folded my arms over my chest, glaring up at him. “Well, Mr. Porter tried to stop me from going there, so it’s obvious I’m on the right track.” I thought for a moment, but it was hard to come up with anything with all the creepy puppets hovering around, waiting. “Did you try melting the statue down? Tipping it into the pond? If it’s underwater, the magic won’t work, right?”

“We don’t have time for this,” he said. “The spell is strong. I can’t hold the wolves back forever. We need to find another way.”

“You want to take down Mr. Porter?”

I couldn’t see the blue glow through the trees, even though we were close to the lighthouse. I didn’t know what that meant but I was sure it was nothing good.

“The teacher is irrelevant. He is just a tool of the spell caster.”

“Wait, what? Mr. Porter cast the spell, didn’t he?”

Tennyson Wilde huffed. “No. Pay attention. He was affected by the spell – the spell focused on him, used him to carry out its will – but he did not cast it.”

“He’s like… possessed?”

One of the wolves began to growl. Nikolai, I think.

“If that makes it easier for you to understand, but not really.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “The blue light is energy. It is the energy of the spell caster, their essence. Their will. We need to break the connection between the energy and the spell caster.”

It was my turn to huff. “Wasn’t that what I said in the first place?” Well, slightly differently, but only because I didn’t know about that “Mr. Porter being a tool” business. “Look, you do what you can here, and I’ll go try to drown that statue. We don’t have any better ideas, and when I fix everything and save the day, we can reopen negotiations on that briefcase of money.”

He made no reply as I walked away, which I took as agreement.

It seemed to take forever to get out of the forest. It didn’t help that I jumped at every little noise and movement, not forgetting for a second that there was a puppet army on the loose, not to mention feral wolves and a deranged teacher. I lost my way a few times, but I knew that as long as I kept moving forward I’d make it. I’d been lost in the forest enough times to have a general idea now, and eventually I came out near the Red House and hurried along the path to the Zen garden.

As I walked, the adrenaline faded and events of the past few days started to catch up with me. Battling evil was no joke. I dragged my feet and a couple of times caught myself vaguing out. What I needed was a very long nap. A nap and maybe some French toast. With bacon and maple syrup. I would definitely feel better after that. I wished evil would take a dinner break.

A wolf howled in the distance. I didn’t know how long Tennyson Wilde could hold off the wolves for. He was obviously the top wolf, but I didn’t know if that trumped witchcraft. I picked up my pace, just in case the wolves were in the process of eating Tennyson Wilde and planned to come for me next. If they were, it probably wouldn’t take long. He didn’t have a lot of meat on him.

Finally, I reached the Zen garden.

Mr. Porter stood in front of the pond and the statue. This guy, seriously.

“The truth must be revealed,” he said. His voice was completely unnatural. I probably wouldn’t have even understood him if he hadn’t just been banging on with the same thing. He was completely filled by the blue glow, so much so that it was hard to tell if there was any of him left underneath.

“With all due respect, sir,” I said, “you’re being a dick. Now, stand aside and let me drown this walrus man.”

I blinked and suddenly it was as if all the light in the world went out, as if I’d been blinded. I looked around wildly, trying to figure out what had happened, and realized I could see the outline of things, and then a little bit of color. I wasn’t blind. The blue light had gone out. Mr. Porter looked at me with something like terrified confusion. He blinked as if he’d just woken up, and then crumpled into a heap in the grass.

I moved to help him up, but then I realized that there was still a shadow, an outline of his shape where he’d been standing. The blue light hadn’t gone out. It had gone dark. It was still there, just hiding. I wanted to help Mr. Porter, but I did not want to get close to that light. Tennyson Wilde had said that it was energy, the life force of the spell caster or whatever. That didn’t sound like something I wanted to mess with.

But it didn’t seem as if I had any choice.

The light flickered back on. It rushed at me faster than I could move. There was no avoiding it. It pressed against my skin, trying to creep into my pores. Or maybe not my pores, but my spirit or consciousness or essence or whatever – either way, it wanted all up in my business.

And something in me wanted it too. I could feel it reaching out for the blue light, drawing toward it. The blue light would comfort me. It would protect me, take care of me. It would give me the energy to go on. It would give me peace, security, all the things I wanted but had never had. If I just accepted the light, I’d never have to worry about anything ever again. The light was awesome.

I was almost sold, but something broke through the light. Far away, beyond the light. The howl of a wolf.

If I gave in, if I let the light take me, everyone would die. Everyone, including me. Sam and the other wolves would eat everyone and they’d have to live with that forever. I couldn’t let that happen.

The light wasn’t awesome. The light was a lie. The worst lie of all.

My instinct was to push it away, to somehow force it as far from me as I could, but that wasn’t what I needed to do. I didn’t need to get into another struggle. I neither accepted it nor rejected it — I ignored it. Just for a moment. Just long enough to leap into the pond, to the professor.

I launched myself at him, grabbing onto his head, but solid gold wasn’t so easy to move. He didn’t budge even a little. I slipped, losing my hold, and the blue light surrounded me again. I stood in the pond, knee-deep in the freezing water, completely out of ideas. It was exactly the same as when I’d tried to hold onto Sam. I wasn’t able to and I’d lost him. And now I was going to lose everything.

Just as I was about to give up, admit defeat, I saw the strange symbols on the plaque, the Japanese writing. What had Tennyson Wilde said they meant? The lily doesn’t know lies? Something like that.

Most of the water lilies in the pond had died as the weather grew colder, but one hardy lily still floated on the top, strong and glowing blue.

Magic couldn’t be performed across water, I remembered reading that somewhere. But the statue had swallowed down that orb thing and it was in the middle of the pond. But the lily connected it. It floated on the surface of the water held by the roots deep below. It transmitted the magic from the source like a Wi-Fi signal.

Not knowing what it would do, if it would help or make things worse or do anything at all, I plucked that lily.

The blue light gathered and swirled around like a tornado, pulling up the water out of the pond and knocking me off my feet. It grew bigger and bigger until it took up the entire garden, sucking in all the rocks and trees and everything else. The first time I’d entered the Zen garden, I hadn’t made any impression as I’d walked over the pebbles raked into fine lines, but I’d definitely left a mark now.

I hid my eyes in the crook of my arm, unable to bear the brightness of it. I’d obviously made a massive mistake and now the blue light was going to go berserk and take over the world. I clenched my hands into fists, cursing my stupidity, and crushing the lily that I still held onto. The light flashed blindingly one more time and then went out.

I blinked my eyes open, and when I’d adjusted to the darkness, I saw the light hovering in front of me, compressed again into that orb that it had been when it first appeared.

I felt the spell lift like a weight. I hadn’t realized how oppressive it had been, sitting heavily in the air, but now it was as if a fresh breeze was blowing through, clearing away any trace of magic. I felt as if I could breathe again.

I’d done it. I’d totally defeated evil.

I was the actual best.

Chapter 20

Things went back to normal surprisingly fast. The exceptions being that Mr. Corbett had been replaced by a fly-in, and I was now able to order food in the dining hall. Both were big ticks in the plus column for me, in all honesty.

I sat with Fatima, Milo and Hannah, waiting for the house meeting to start. They still seemed a little shaky, but then so did everyone. Hannah in particular still looked pale and wasn’t as lively as she had been before the spell. I hoped she hadn’t been permanently affected by it somehow.

Mr. Porter entered the room and everyone fell quiet. He’d been acting like normal, but he never once met my eye or spoke to me, not in the meeting and not in class earlier that day, so I knew he remembered. I knew he hadn’t been in control of himself, but I couldn’t completely trust him either. That stuff he’d said about wolves and sheep, about the end justifying the means and the truth in art, that had all sounded like him talking, not the magic. Though, it wasn’t reassuring to think that there was someone else out there who had been behind it all either. Mostly, I didn’t want to think about it.

Everyone was acting as if nothing had happened, but I noticed that people who had been sitting together at the first meeting wouldn’t even look at each other now, whereas others were inseparable. The spell had left its scars on us all. People were wary, protective of themselves and those they cared about, and I could understand why.

When we headed out for dinner, Sam was waiting for me by the fountain. Like Hannah, he was pale and shaken too.

“You’ll be okay?” Hannah asked, lingering by my side.

I nodded, and the three of them walked up the steps to the courtyard, Milo looking back curiously.

I sat beside Sam at the edge of the fountain, and for the longest time he didn’t speak. Up close, he looked even worse, shadows under his eyes, and a tremble to his hands.

“Are you okay?” I couldn’t help but ask.

He shrugged and didn’t look at me. “Tennyson said he’s putting the briefcase of money toward restoring the Zen garden.”

I huffed a laugh. The garden had been completely wrecked and was closed off to students.

“Jerk,” I said, then we fell back into awkward silence. Things had never been awkward between the two of us before and it made me sad to think this was how it was going to be from now on. “If you feel weird because you tried to eat me, don’t worry. I know you were under a spell.”

He stared down at his hands, picking at a fingernail. “That’s only part of it.”

While he worked up to whatever it was he wanted to say, I felt around in my bag and pulled out the orb. I hadn’t wanted to just leave it where anyone could find it, but I didn’t want to keep it either.

“Here,” I said. “Give that to Tennyson Wilde or whatever. Maybe he can have it analyzed and find out who cast the spell.”

Sam nodded and took the orb from me. “He thinks whoever cast the spell is dangerous, really dangerous. He thinks they’ll try something else.”

I shrugged. “Seems likely. Lucky for you guys you have an awesome defeater of evil on campus.” I hooked a thumb toward myself. Seriously though, I could’ve been given a few more kudos, if I wasn’t going to get the cash.

Sam turned the orb over in his hands. A few of the specks sparked at his touched, but otherwise it looked harmless, just like a pretty ball of light.

“He thinks it’s suspicious that you weren’t affected the same way everyone else was.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t care what he thinks. But you can tell him what I think about him if you like.”

“I’m pretty sure he knows you think he’s a jerk,” Sam said, a smile playing at his lips. Then it vanished as if it had never been. “But he saved your life. Saved you from me.”

“You weren’t in control of your actions,” I said, putting my hand out to cover his, to hide the orb. “It’s not as if you wanted to hurt me.”

Sam shook his head. “No, but it’s not as if it’s the first time I tried to either. Lucy, I shouldn’t be around you, not until I can be trusted.”

“I trust you,” I told him. “More than anyone.”

“You shouldn’t.” He pulled his hand away from me and put the orb in his coat pocket. “There are things you don’t know. Things you need to know.” He wrapped his arms around himself, huddling away from me. “That night. The night I died. The night I was taken.” He took a deep breath and turned toward the garden, his head away from me. “It was the first night I turned. I knew nothing about it, nothing about lycanthropy. You know that. My family was so normal. I’d never shifted before, and I didn’t know what was happening. It was like a dream. A dream in a red haze. The Wildes say it doesn’t happen like that, but that’s what I remember. I woke up, but the dream had been real. Everyone was dead. My whole family. I killed them, Lucy. My parents, my sisters. I don’t remember doing it, but their blood… their blood was everywhere.”

I remembered.

Sam stared down at his open hands. “It was on my hands. So much blood.” He took a deep breath and held it in for a long moment before exhaling. “There was a man, he came to the house. A stranger. He said he was from a place that helped people like me, helped keep us under control. He said he’d been alerted to my change and I had to go with him, so that I didn’t hurt anyone else. I was so confused. So scared. And I could hear you. I heard your heart beating, heard you coming closer. I was so scared I’d hurt you like I hurt my family.”

I took him by the hand and he gripped onto it, nearly crushing my fingers, but I didn’t care. He hung his head, hunching into himself. There were so many things about his story that didn’t make sense. His family’s bodies had been gone by the time I got there. There had been the shadow man and the scream. None of Sam’s story fit with what I knew to be true. But it wasn’t the right time to question him. I shifted closer to him and squeezed his hand.

“You’ve never hurt me,” I told him. “You wouldn’t. You’ve had so many chances and you never did.”

His fingers ran over my arm, where he’d scratched me. There wasn’t even a mark there now.

“That isn’t true,” he said. “I can’t trust myself with you. I’m not right. You saw the monster that I am, neither one thing nor the other. I need to be fixed, to become complete.”

He pulled away from me and looked into my face. His eyes were so sad, the flecks of gold in them dulled. He was so beautiful, it made my heart ache. I let my eyes fall closed so that I didn’t have to look at him.

Softly, so softly that I wasn’t sure if I imagined it, I felt his lips brush over mine. I didn’t move for the longest moment.

“I heard what you said,” he whispered. “That night. It’s the same for me. You know it is. But we can’t. It’s impossible.”

I kept my eyes closed, not wanting to watch as he left me again.

I stayed by the fountain as the daylight faded. Sam had finally told me the truth, and yet I felt as if I knew even less than before.

But I had to learn. I had to learn everything I could about this strange new world that I’d entered, so that I’d be ready when the next thing hit us. I had to be ready to protect the people that I cared about.

End of Book 1

Click here for Book 2: The Tiny Curse

A powerful enemy. An estranged love. And only one tiny girl to make things right.

Life isn’t going so well for Lucy at elite boarding school, Amaris High. Classes are a struggle. She has no leads on the evil magic user. Sam’s avoiding her, and the entire student population hates her.

But someone hates her more than the rest. Rumors start spreading that lead to Lucy being bullied worse than ever before. Just when she thinks she couldn’t feel smaller, she’s hit with a spell that shrinks her down to only two inches tall.

Forced to rely on Sam, Tennyson and the other Golden to survive, Lucy is determined to get to the bottom of things once and for all. But the more she learns, she finds that being tiny might not be her biggest problem.

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ALSO BY ANITA OH

Werewolf High #1: The Truth Spell

A Very Werey Christmas: A Werewolf High Short

Werewolf High #2: The Tiny Curse

Werewolf High #3: The Body Swap

Werewolf High #4: The Soul Bond

Werewolf High #5: The Love Potion

Werewolf High #6: The Time Loop

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my sisters for everything.

Editing by Eliza Dee from Clio Editing, thank you for your amazing work.

Cover by Deranged Doctor Designs. Thank you so much, I love everything you guys do!

Hannah, Liam and Morgan, thank you for letting me steal your names.

Sandy and Laurie, thank you for all your help, support and advice.

About the Author

Anita lives in Melbourne, where she is a full-time servant to her two dogs. When the dogs give her a break, she writes books. Anita likes books about kick-ass girls and hot boys who fall in love while defeating evil.

Anita's favourite things include: cake, coffee and karaoke. Her special skills are sleeping and marathoning TV shows.

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