The Body Swap

Werewolf High #3

Anita Oh

Contents

Copyright

Werewolf High series

Book 3: The Body Swap

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 #3: The Body Swap

© Anita Oh 2016

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

No matter how well you think you know someone in this world, you never can tell what's going on inside their head.

I'd thought Hannah Morgan was just an ordinary girl. Average. I'd thought she was like me: the kind of girl who'd rather watch Netflix than do her homework, would rather eat a cheeseburger than fit into some haute couture fashion. I'd thought she was my friend.

Clearly, I knew nothing.

We were sitting on our beds, studying. She looked up at me over the top of her biology textbooks and smiled when she caught my eye.

I know what you are, I thought, and then hastily looked back down at my homework. Could she read my mind? I had no idea what she could or couldn't do.

It had been two weeks since I'd broken the last curse she'd brought down on me. Two weeks since I'd moved back in to our room. I'd hardly slept. How was I supposed to sleep in the same room as someone who'd made repeated attempts on my life? I mean, the fake social media accounts in my name were bad enough, but the evil curses had definitely taken it a step too far.

She got up from her desk and walked across the room.

I narrowed my eyes. What was she doing? Sure, it looked like a harmless bathroom break, but how did I know she wasn't going to conjure up some other evil curse to throw at me? As soon as the door had closed behind her, I quickly looked around to be sure all my protections were in place. Tennyson Wilde had said they were a load of poppycock, that you couldn't find real magic by Googling, but that was easy to say when you didn't have to share a room with it.

I had protective charms hidden under my mattress, sigils carved into my bedposts, crystals and totems and anything else that even hinted that it might ward off bad juju. I whispered protective chants under my breath every morning and night, and had gathered up everything I could find that was made of iron and hidden it under my bed. If I could've figured out a way to be subtle about it, I'd have installed a little moat with running water around my bed as well so that magic couldn't pass over it while I was unaware.

Hannah came out of the bathroom and headed into the little kitchenette area of our room. "You want some grapes?" She looked so normal, so everyday Hannah, with her pajamas still on mid-afternoon and her hair up in cute pigtails. She didn't look at all villainous.

I shook my head. "No. Thanks." Everyone knew you didn't accept food from witches, or they'd bespell you and make you their bitch for all eternity.

She raised her eyebrows at me. "Are you okay? You've hardly been eating at all lately."

I shrugged, trying to act natural. I had been eating, just not near her. "Probably just stressed," I told her. "I'm so behind in everything from when I was off sick."

We hadn't talked about my absence, hadn't talked about the reason we hadn't been talking even before that. We'd just smiled sheepishly at each other and pretended that nothing had happened. I didn't want her to know that I knew. Not before I had concrete proof. I'd spent the last two weeks trying to find out what I could, but it was hard without arousing suspicion. I wasn't the world's most natural spy. It was a Sunday afternoon, two weeks after I'd returned to full-size after being shrunk, and I was having a study session with the person to blame for my shrinking. Life sure was a ball of laughs.

She smiled kindly at me as she set a bowl of grapes on my nightstand. "You'll catch back up in no time, but you should make sure you eat. It's not like you to lose your appetite."

I looked askance at the grapes. They looked delicious and not evil, but maybe enchanted grapes always looked like that. Still, I wouldn't know unless I tried one.

I plucked one out and bit into it. It was juicy and sweet. I waited a moment, but nothing strange happened, so I ate another.

Hannah settled back in with her homework. She didn't keep glancing over with evil glee or anything to check that her grape curse was taking effect, so they were probably okay.

The thing that sucked the most was that I really liked Hannah. She was a great roommate; tidy but not fussy, fun but not obnoxiously so. We got along really well, and I didn't want her to be evil. I kept thinking maybe there had been some mistake. We'd tracked the cyberbullying down to Hannah, but maybe someone had used her stuff without her knowledge or hacked into her IP or something. Surely that made more sense. But no matter what I wanted to believe, I knew I had to play it safe. Even if Hannah wasn't the villain, it was better to suspect her and be wrong than to be willfully ignorant and dead.

"I might head to the library," I told her, setting the grapes aside. "Do some work for extra credit."

It wasn't likely she'd want to tag along, but I held my breath until she answered, just in case.

"Okay," she said, not looking up from her book. "See you at dinner."

The weather had started to warm up while I was tiny, and lots of people were taking advantage of the spring afternoon, milling around on the grass in the sun. I hurried along the path with my head down. The bullying hadn't been as bad since I came back to classes, but I didn't want to do anything to encourage it to start back up again, not when I had stuff to do. It was better to just slip by unnoticed.

The gardens were pretty, though, with all the flowers coming into bloom, and the divide between the different houses had become obvious again. The flowers of the Red House were bright and vibrant, lining the path I was walking along and ending abruptly as I got into Green territory. I definitely did not want to go that way, so I veered onto a path off to the side, toward the high stone walls of the Golden House. I looked back over my shoulder as I scanned my pass at the gate, making sure nobody saw me enter. If I wanted the bullying to stop, nobody could know about my association with the Golden at all.

The Golden House loomed over me as I approached, more like some Gothic castle than the friendly cottage of the Red House. The entire garden seemed to fall under its shadow. I crept up to the front door, scanned my card again and buzzed. No answer. I knew that someone was definitely in, though; they were expecting me. I sighed and headed back down the path that wound its way around the house. Maybe they were in the gardens.

I went into the gardens to my left. I hadn't really explored around there, but they were beautiful, of course. The Golden were the most elite among the super-rich kids at Amaris; everything they had was the best, the most special, most beautiful. I hadn't gotten far before I heard voices and the sound of laughter. I hurried toward them and came out at a terraced area at the back of the house.

Although I had spent a lot of time with the Golden recently, I was always struck dumb when I first caught sight of them.

The terrace was painted all white, with thick bunches of lilac hanging down from wooden rafters. Little golden fairy lights hovered in the air. Althea Wilde looked ethereal as she laughed and ran through the lights, the long white skirt of her dress flaring behind her as she was chased by a large brown wolf. Nikolai Volkov was making sarcastic comments as he looked on wryly and tapped away at his phone. In the shadows in the far corner, Tennyson Wilde lurked like a creeper, the golden glow of the lights making him seem otherworldly. Although the day was warm, he wore a dark, heavy jacket with the collar pulled up to his ears.

As I stepped into their space, the four of them stopped as one and turned toward me.

The mood changed immediately. They didn't intend to make me feel unwelcome or like an outsider, but the relaxed atmosphere vanished at once. The brown wolf rushed toward me, jumping at me with such force I was knocked to the ground. Before I had time to process what he'd done or feel more than that first flicker of fear, the wolf licked my face and then bounded away.

"Nice one, Sam," I said, wiping the slobber away with my sleeve, and I couldn't help but laugh. He always seemed so much more at ease in his wolf form.

He dashed off into the bushes and emerged a moment later as the tall boy I'd known my whole life. His brown hair flopped down into his face and his eyes sparkled as he looked at me, laughing.

"You always seem to time your reports around meals," Tennyson Wilde said, pursing his lips in disapproval, like someone's maiden aunt.

I shrugged. It was true, and I wasn't ashamed. "You guys always have the nicest food."

I was pretty terrible at espionage, and I felt weird about invading someone else's privacy even if they were an evildoer, but I'd been through the files on Hannah's computer and found diddly.

"Here's everything from her hard drive," I said, throwing a USB stick at Tennyson Wilde's head. "Unless she's using some sort of futuristic encryption that doesn't exist on this planet yet, I think it's mostly just pirated episodes of Game of Thrones. I doubt she'd keep anything on her school computer, anyway. Shouldn't she have some kind of dusty old book of spells?"

"Most magical knowledge has been passed down through oral storytelling," Althea said. "I guess when you're persecuted for existing, you probably don't want to put any evidence down on paper."

"I think a lot of stuff was burned or destroyed by witch hunters, too," said Nikolai. "I have cousins with magic, on my mother's side."

I raised my eyebrows. That was new information. I'd thought lycanthrope families were always lycanthropes. I didn't know you could mix and match like that.

"If there's nothing else, you can leave," said Tennyson, narrowing his eyes at me.

"There's no reason to be rude," I told him.

I didn't have anything else, but I would like to have some of those mini cucumber sandwiches they'd had laid out for them on a fancy tiered platter. I'd expected to find more information on Hannah, but my search so far had been fairly fruitless. I didn't know what else I could do, though. I didn't have any sort of super powers; I wasn't even naturally snoopy.

"You can stay as long as you like," Althea said. "He's just grumpy because he spent the afternoon speaking with our mother."

Sam sat beside me and cast me meaningful looks while I chatted with the others and ate mini sandwiches. My belly fluttered each time I caught his eye, but it wasn't from nerves.

It was strange that the people I felt the most comfortable with at this school were the ones who were the most different from me. I'd thought I'd fit in with Hannah, and her friends Milo and Fatima, but for various reasons each of them had rejected my friendship. Maybe it was just me. Maybe I was inherently unlikeable. I mean, I wasn't exactly friends with the glamorous, shining creatures around me, either; they were just the closest thing to it that I had. Well, except Tennyson Wilde, because that would be like making friends with an icicle. A jerk icicle who dressed like someone's grandpa.

The day faded around us, making everything glow, and for once I felt as if I was in the exact place I was supposed to be.

Chapter 2

Spying on Hannah wasn't fun, like hanging out with Hannah used to be, so I started spending all my time in the library. I did need to study — finals were hanging over my head, and my grades had slipped while I was mini — but mostly it was just procrastination from spying. If I was studying, that was a valuable use of my time and nobody could say I was slacking off.

"You're slacking off," said Tennyson Wilde, sitting down opposite me at my table in the library. His hair was getting longer, I noticed. It had started to curl a little around the nape of his neck, where it brushed against the collar of his school blazer. Not that I cared about him or his hair.

"Go away," I told him. "I'm studying, and I don't want to be seen with you. Whenever you acknowledge me in public, bad things happen to me, and I have better things to do than deal with it."

As usual, he ignored me and kept just sitting there being a nuisance.

"We think we have a way to find proof that she's the one, but we need your help," he said. "You need to stop slacking off and get your head in the game." He actually took my books and pushed them to the other side of the table so I couldn't pretend to study and ignore him. "Althea has procured an ancient device that can detect magical residue in any particular location. Obviously we need your assistance to gain access to the most likely places."

"I doubt she did any spells in our room," I told him, reaching for my books.

He rolled his eyes like I was the one being bothersome. "I thought you were going to educate yourself." He picked up my textbook and shook it at me so all the pages fluttered. "What good will An Introduction to Biochemistry do the next time you're cursed?"

"That's all well and good for you to say," I said. A few people looked over, so I hunched down, then went on in a whisper. "I need to maintain my GPA. I can't just swan through this life having everything handed to me."

He stood up from the table abruptly. Several people were staring now, and I sank down even more in my seat and pulled my books in front of me so they couldn't see my face.

"You think that's what I do?" he asked sharply, his eyebrows crinkling into wavy lines. "Just trade on my family name?"

I tried to shrug in response, but it was hard when I was slumped so far down in my seat.

He plunked a small brass object and an old book down in front of me. "Well, obviously that type of person would be of no assistance to you, and you would be better off figuring out how to use this device yourself."

Then he turned and stiffly marched away.

I stared after him for a moment, wondering what his problem was. I hadn't meant to offend him. When I did mean to offend him, he just ignored me, so I doubted he cared a fig about my opinion. Obviously, something else was going on that had nothing to do with me, and I was better off ignoring him. Still, I was curious about the magical thingie.

I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. There seemed to be a faint vibration coming from it, and it was a strange shape, unlike anything I'd ever seen — sort of like one of those G-shaped clamps my dad had used when he was doing woodwork stuff, before he'd abandoned us and possibly turned to the dark side. Only different, because it was sparkly and magical. I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it, so I opened up the book to see if maybe it was some sort of handy user manual.

Maybe it was, but it was written in some sort of Old English. I rolled my eyes and pushed my homework away. It was going to take all my attention to decipher this. Damn Tennyson Wilde and his delicate feelings.

* * *

From what I could gather from Ye Olde Instruction Manual, I had to clamp the device somewhere where the essence of the magic doer would gather. I figured under Hannah's bed was the best spot. I had no idea about essences or any of that, but she was less likely to see it there than other places.

I doubled back to our room after breakfast the next day, telling her I'd forgotten my history book. Any excuse to miss morning assembly was a good one, anyway.

I tried to act all tough about it in front of the others, but I really hoped that whatever this magic clamp thing did would prove that Hannah wasn't guilty. Even though it would set us right back to square one in terms of finding the bad guy, at least I'd have my friend back.

I clamped the magic thingie at the base of her bed, near the head, and stood back to survey my work. Nothing happened immediately, and I wasn't sure I'd done it correctly. I flipped open the book to the part about getting it to work, but it might as well have been written in Mandarin for all the sense it made to me.

"Beginnan halig miht," I read, the words making zero sense to me. But before I could look it up in my old English to normal English translation app, a crackling sound like pop rocks distracted me.

I looked up and gasped. Blue smoke had started to billow out from under the bed as if I'd switched on a smoke machine under there. It had a funny smell to it and soon filled the room so I could barely see. I felt as if it should be choking me and I covered my mouth, but after a moment I realized I wasn't breathing it in at all. I didn't need an app to translate what this meant in magic. It was clearly saying, "Evil witchy stuff is afoot right here."

I tried to rationalize it. Maybe the clamp always did that when it was activated; it didn't necessarily mean that Hannah was guilty. But then the smoke cleared and sparkly magical words hovered in the air. They said Hannah Morgan.

My heart sank as I stared at the words. They were fairly hard to misinterpret.

I messaged Althea on the tablet she'd loaned me after my old one had died, and snapped a photo of the sparkly letters as well, just in case they didn't actually mean what they seemed to.

I had no heart to go to class, which was good, because before I could even get over the shock, there was a thumping at my door and the four Golden piled in.

They stared at the name hovering in the air. The sparkles had started to fade, but what they spelled out was still clear.

"Is it wrong that this only makes me like her more?" Nikolai asked.

"Yes," said Tennyson.

"We need a plan," said Althea. "A good plan," she added before any of us could reply.

The problem was, none of us were very good at plans. On TV shows I'd watched, people always came up with plans to defeat evil so easily, but really, that was the hardest part. Anyone could throw themselves into the path of danger; it was finding the right path that was the problem. I was just a normal fifteen-year-old girl. The wiliest plans I could come up with were how to get seconds of dinner and evade homework.

"We should confront her," said Sam. "If we're just honest with her, maybe she'll tell us why she's doing this."

"That is the worst plan ever," said Nikolai, but he couldn't come up with anything better, so he just lounged on the sofa, staring up at the sparkly words.

"If we confront her, we need some sort of assurance," said Tennyson, poking around the room as if a plan would pop out from behind the bookcase. "Some way of restricting her powers so she can't attack us."

I had started gathering up my things and packing them into my suitcase. No way was I staying there with her now, not when I knew she was guilty and there were sparkly letters in the air to tell her that I knew.

"What about something like that cage thing we used on the full moon when I was tiny? Only we use it on her, not ourselves," I said, looking up from my sock drawer.

"You don't think trapping her in a cage might be a bad idea?" asked Sam. "We don't want to make her angry."

"She cursed me into being two inches tall and made the whole school into zombies who kept vomiting up their darkest secrets. I think she's already angry." Plus, I didn't see why I should care about her feelings. She obviously didn't care about mine.

"We might not have to use a whole cage," said Althea. She had taken her phone out of her pocket and was looking something up.

The rest of us watched her blankly, but before she could explain, the door swung open and Hannah walked in.

"Or we could just do this," said Nikolai, then he shut the door behind her and stood to block it.

I rolled my eyes. Nikolai's plans were always the worst.

Hannah looked around suspiciously and started when she noticed the sparkly letters of her name.

"So, the jig is up, then," she said with a sigh. "I wondered why you hadn't shown up for class."

There was an awkward moment where nobody really knew what to say.

"So…" I said, standing awkwardly with a pair of socks in each hand. "You're a witch?"

Hannah shrugged.

"We will, of course, need to deal with you," said Tennyson Wilde, because in any given circumstance, he could be counted on to make things worse.

"And what do you intend to do?" Hannah asked. "You haven't exactly been impressive at defending yourself against me so far." When she had turned to look at him, her whole face had changed. She seemed like a completely different person, not cute at all.

"How about you just agree not to curse us again, and we'll forget it all ever happened?" I asked hopefully.

Hannah laughed. An honest witchy cackle. I was fairly sure she was laughing like that on purpose, because she normally laughed like a normal person, not some sort of evil mastermind.

"I won't stop," she said. "Not until I have my revenge."

The magical letters swirled around, which seemed like a bad sign.

"Revenge?" I asked, edging toward the door.

Hopefully, I could get her talking enough to distract her and then make my escape. I'd have to leave my suitcase behind, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I signaled my plan to the others through waggly eyebrows and assumed their enhanced senses could work it out from there. Althea, Sam and Nikolai were close to the door, but Tennyson Wilde and I would need to get past Hannah to get out.

"What did I ever do to you?" I asked.

"At first, nothing, but I had to teach you a lesson when you started nosing around, ruining everything."

"Teach me a lesson?" I spluttered. "By killing me?"

Hannah rolled her eyes. She had definitely lost all her cuteness. "Your life was never in danger. I only shrank you for a bit of fun, some payback for the setback you caused with the Mr. Porter business, and it got you out of the way. I couldn't have you messing up my master plan."

"You have a master plan?" That did not sound good. "Why? Surely with all that TV we watched together, the one lesson to take away is that revenge plans never turn out well."

Nikolai slipped out the door, then Althea, but Sam didn't look like he wanted to leave. He stood with his arms folded over his chest, waiting. He wasn't going to leave without me. I shook my head at him, but he ignored me.

"I've learned from the failure of others," Hannah said. "I will have my revenge."

Before I could ask her about the finer details of her master plan, she flicked her hand, and the sparkly magic letters dissolved into tiny little darts and flew toward Sam. He ducked behind the door to shield himself, then, with a gesture, Hannah slammed the door shut, locking the others out.

"Finally," Hannah said, turning to Tennyson Wilde. "I am going to make you suffer."

The room seemed to fill with that blue smoke again, only this time it was hard to breathe and I began to choke. I lost sight of Hannah and Tennyson Wilde as the smoke thickened. I clapped a hand over my mouth, trying not to breathe it in, and headed toward the door, but before I made it more than two steps, I passed out.

Chapter 3

When I came to, the smoke had cleared and Hannah was gone. Everything seemed strange, off somehow, but it took me a moment to figure out why.

It was several things, really. Firstly, I was staring right into my own face. And, boy, did I look freaked. Secondly, everything seemed brighter, more vivid. I could hear people talking out in the hallway as clearly as if they were standing right beside me. My body felt fuller somehow, kind of like if I'd eaten a whole roast turkey, only without the wanting to throw up, and kind of not like that at all. More like there was less room inside my skin or something. I felt angrier, wilder, and somehow trapped.

"This cannot be happening," my mouth said. The mouth in the face I was looking at but which was definitely not me. I hadn't spoken.

"I did not say that," I said, but the voice that said it was not my own. I knew that voice, and it was definitely not mine. I started to suspect what had happened and I did not want it. I sat up and put my hands over my face, feeling my skin, my nose, my mouth and ears.

"Please refrain from touching my person," the imposter-me said.

Although it was my voice, my body that was speaking, the phrasing was familiar, and it confirmed my worst suspicions. I jumped up and rushed to the bathroom, letting out an involuntary yelp when I saw my reflection in the mirror.

Of all the curses in all the world, this had to be the worst. I stepped closer to the mirror, eyes wide with horror as Tennyson Wilde's reflection stared back at me.

"And please stop making such undignified noises while in my body," Tennyson Wilde said. He was standing in the doorway. Looking like me.

"No, no, nononononono," I said.

None of the other curses had freaked me out like this. Being small had been workable. Telling the truth… well, I hadn't really believed that was happening. But this? This was the worst.

"Pull yourself together."

Did I really look like that? I was sure I didn't usually purse my lips like that when I spoke, but other things about the not-me seemed odd as well. I supposed that I'd never looked at myself objectively before, but, boy, was there a lot to object about. My face was weird-looking, like a patchwork of parts rather than a cohesive whole, and the proportions of my body were all wrong. Still, it was my body and I wanted to be back in it.

"Clearly, the witch knew this was the way to inflict the most suffering on me," Tennyson Wilde said. And, wow, who knew I could sound like such a pompous jerk? "We need to discover why she has a vendetta against me and work toward undoing this mess."

"No joke," I said, flinging my arm out to emphasize my point. Only it didn't flail around like it normally would; it moved gracefully in an arc through the air. My hand was large, with long, square-ended fingers.

The other three burst into the room.

"Are you okay?" asked Sam, grabbing Tennyson Wilde by the shoulders and spinning him around to stare into his face. My face. He pulled Tennyson into a rough hug, and Tennyson's eyes nearly popped out of his head. Or my head. It was all very confusing.

"She just vanished," said Nikolai. "We left in pursuit of her, but she turned into smoke right before our eyes." Normally when Nikolai spoke to me, his voice had an underlying tone of sarcasm, but now it was respectful. "That's really high-level magic."

"Wait," said Althea, looking between the two of us. "Something isn't right."

"That's for sure," I said. "It's so not right that I can't even."

Their eyes boggled as they looked at me.

"You need to stop doing that," said Tennyson Wilde. That haughty expression looked so strange on my face.

"Well, I'm not going to start acting like a jerk just because I look like one," I told him.

"You're kidding," said Nikolai, his eyes alight with evil glee.

"What?" said Sam, narrowing his eyes and peering into Tennyson Wilde's eyes. "I don't understand. Lucy?"

"No," said Tennyson Wilde. "And please unhand me."

Sam let go of Tennyson as if his hands were burning and backed away. "Sorry!" he said.

"So, she knocked you out, and you woke up like this?" Althea asked, pulling out her phone. "In the wrong body?"

I nodded. It seemed like she knew what was going on, which made me hope that she knew how to fix it.

"We cannot tell Mother," said Tennyson Wilde. "If that is what you're doing, then stop."

Althea shook her head. "Of course not. I'm looking up classic body swap scenarios to see how they're typically resolved."

Tennyson shook his head. "We need to end this once and for all," he said. "The witch must be stopped."

I didn't disagree, but I didn't have any bright ideas on how to end a body swap and stop an out-of-control teenage witch, either.

I grabbed my suitcase, and we headed over to the Golden House to figure things out. I took Tennyson's room, so that things wouldn't look weird if anyone came around, and he had to share with Althea. Neither of them seemed too happy about it, and I felt kind of bad to have a whole luxurious room to myself, but it was obviously the best way to do things without arousing suspicion. He seemed super paranoid that his mother would find out what had happened.

"We need ground rules," I told him.

He had called an "emergency summit" about the situation, which seemed overly dramatic to me, as it was just the five of us there anyway, sitting around the main table in the living area like normal, exactly as we would've been anyway.

"We definitely need ground rules," he said.

"You bet we need ground rules, buddy," I said.

The other three kept looking at us and laughing, but I didn't think it was so funny. If I'd learned anything in my time at Amaris, it was that magic was not for jokes. It might start out all like, "Hahaha, Lucy is in Tennyson's body," but it always ended in strife.

"No looking at me naked," I said. "If you need to shower, do it with your eyes closed. Same for going to the bathroom and getting dressed."

Sam choked.

"Believe me, I have no desire to become any more familiar with this body than I already am." Tennyson sniffed. "You are not to attempt to transform into a wolf, use any other non-human abilities, do anything to alert anyone to the existence of lycanthropy, or anything that would arouse suspicion that I am not who I appear to be."

"Same to you, buddy."

"It is very restrictive being in this form," he said. "All my senses are dulled, and I am slow and witless."

I raised my eyebrows. "If I punch myself, will it hurt you?"

"There are three main problems, as far as I can tell," said Althea, typing away at her laptop. "Obviously, the first and most immediate is how to get you back into your own bodies. Secondary to that is keeping this a secret — from everyone, not just the general public. We all need to agree on this point specifically." She gave a sharp look to Nikolai. "Delete everything of this that you've recorded."

Nikolai held up his hands. "Okay, okay. But we're missing some prime blackmail material here. Can't I just keep it for personal amusement, if I promise not to share it with anyone?"

"No," said Althea. "You know what my mother will do if she finds out about this."

The four of them shuddered, but I had no clue why. From what I'd heard, she was a harsh woman, but surely she wouldn't do anything to harm her son.

"What would she do?" I asked.

Nobody answered.

"And lastly," Althea said, "we need to deal with Hannah Morgan."

We all agreed on that.

"But how?" I asked. "She's outsmarted us at every turn. We've got no way of defending ourselves against her and no idea how to stop her."

"And it's not as if we can ask for outside assistance on this," said Tennyson Wilde. "In all this time, our research has come up with nothing."

I picked up a mini pastry to bite into, but Tennyson Wilde yelled at me to stop.

"Do not pollute my body with unhealthy fats!" he said. "No carbs, no sugar, no dairy!"

I put up my hand to stop him. "No talking," I said, and popped the pastry into my mouth.

It tasted wrong. So wrong. Like rotten sawdust. I looked around wildly for a napkin and spat that pastry into it.

"What is this devilry?" I asked it, feeling much like my best friend had betrayed me. Well, she had, but the pastry too.

"Your taste buds are different," Althea said. "In fact, your entire metabolism, physical make-up, everything. If you have any allergies, health conditions, anything like that, you need to let Tennyson know what to do for them."

"I'm allergic to this whole situation," I told her.

"We need a plan," Tennyson said. "A well-laid-out plan. The sooner this is resolved, the less risk that anything will be exposed."

"Like your butt," Nikolai mumbled.

Sam coughed to cover up a laugh, and Althea put a hand over her face. Tennyson looked confused, and I realized that he hadn't heard Nikolai's comment.

"The most logical thing to do," Tennyson said, sounding annoyed, "is to attempt to reason with her. Obviously, her vendetta is against me. If we discover why and take measures to appease her, perhaps she will agree to reverse the curse and stop targeting us."

I snorted. "You don't think if she was that reasonable, she wouldn't have cursed us all in the first place?"

"Maybe she felt she had no other option," said Nikolai. "We shouldn't be too hard on her."

"You just think she's cute," said Althea shortly. "If we do approach her to reason with her, we need to take precautions. I don't want to end up in Nikolai's body. If that happens, I want everyone to agree right now that you will render me unconscious until the situation is fixed."

"We'll do some research," said Tennyson. "Lure her to a place that is safe for us and trap her there."

Nobody had any better plans, so we hit the books to find a way to trap a witch.

Chapter 4

Luckily, it was the weekend, so I didn't need to go to class or do anything that warranted acting un-Lucylike. We holed up in the living area of the Golden House and worked our way through every suggestion ever on how to break a spell.

"Most of this is absolute poppycock," said Tennyson as he sifted through the search results on how to break a curse.

"I don't know what you expected," I told him, brushing a pile of nail clippings up off the table and handing them to Althea for whatever it was she was doing.

She sprinkled them into a round, fat bottle with a bunch of herbs, hair, and who knew what else. She poured some red wine in, then corked the bottle and shook it up.

Tennyson read out a few suggestions, which I added to our spreadsheet. None of them seemed particularly likely to work, but probably more likely than the whole situation happening in the first place, so I didn't want to judge.

"What are you doing with that?" Tennyson asked Althea, as she muttered over her bottle.

She glared at him for a moment, shook the bottle in a particular pattern, muttered some more and then set it on the table.

"It's a witch bottle," she explained. "If I bury it in the right place, you should wake up tomorrow with the spell broken. Or, at the very least, it should weaken Hannah's power."

She picked the bottle up and carried it carefully to the eastern corner of the room, then started the whole shaking and muttering process again.

"Did you add 'purifying baths'?" Tennyson asked me, his attention back at the task at hand.

I nodded. "You said there were different types, though."

I hoped to avoid taking any sort of bath while not in my own body, or experience any nakedness at all, but if it was for the greater good, I couldn't really argue.

"Not that way, you dummy," Nikolai called. "In here!"

We looked up to see him directing a couple of the polo guys into the main room. They were carrying something large and heavy, though what it was I couldn't tell, as it was concealed by a white sheet.

"Speak of this to nobody," Nikolai told the polo guys as they set the thing down in the middle of the room. "And bring us down some of whatever is for dinner."

He waited until they'd completely left before revealing what was under the sheet.

"A double-sided mirror!" he said. "My cousins let me borrow it, though I didn't tell them what for, and they gave me a few suggestions on what you need to chant while looking into it. They said it should break any curse."

"Really?" I asked him. "Even a curse like being super tiny? It's great how you suddenly have all these extra resources when it's him being cursed, not just me."

Nikolai shrugged. "I don't know what you're complaining about, when I made you a wonderful hat to hide in. They said you need to do it during the hour that Mars rules the sky, whenever that is."

I glanced at Tennyson, and he began typing.

"It's Friday, so the hour of Mars is one hour after the sun sets." He began typing again. "Which is five minutes from now."

I was a bit surprised. It felt so much later. It had been a long day.

Tennyson and I sat on the floor on opposite sides of the mirror. Althea left to go bury her witch bottle, but Nikolai took a seat, his feet up on the table, watching us like it was top entertainment. I wasn't sure where Sam was — he had made himself pretty scarce. I could understand why he'd be weirded out by the whole thing, but so was I, and I could've used his support.

"Okay," said Nikolai. "Start chanting in three… two… one…"

The chant was fairly simple, though I had no idea what it meant. I hoped it wasn't some sort of prank and I'd end up in an even worse pickle. Not that I could imagine what that could possibly be.

"Ablinnan se awiergan, aflieman wea," we chanted over and over. It sounded like gibberish.

It was cold sitting on the floor, and after a while my muscles started to seize up. I didn't know if we had to chant for the entire hour, but it felt like it had been even longer than that, sitting there, looking in the mirror and chanting. I'd never looked at Tennyson Wilde for very long before. I'd never had any need to, and he was the sort of guy who would poke out any unworthy eyes who dare gaze upon him. Now, though, I had my chance to stare my fill.

He was a good-looking guy. For a jerk, I mean. When you just glanced at him, all you saw was the pale skin and massive eyebrows, but he had super long eyelashes and really full lips that curled slightly at the edges, like a hidden smile, as if to spite his personality. He had a square jaw and pointed chin, which had a small mole to the left. It was the sort of face that you could keep on looking at, even for a whole hour of chanting.

Still, I wanted my old face back.

"Time," called Nikolai. "I assume that didn't work."

I rolled onto my side. My legs were too stiff for me to stand.

"Get up," Tennyson told me. "What if someone were to walk in and see me lying there like that?"

I wrinkled up my face at him.

"Honestly," he said, then grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me to my feet. "You need to school your face into an impassive expression at all times."

I let all my facial muscles go slack and pretended to be a dead fish as I stared at him.

"Much better," he told me.

I rolled my eyes and went back to the table.

"What next?" I asked.

Someone sitting in a chair by the fire cleared their throat, and I looked over to see Sam. I didn't know how long he'd been there; I'd been too busy chanting to notice him come in.

"I made something," he said, then came over to sit with us. He seemed nervous, but I wasn't sure why until he showed us what he'd made. "I know they're not very good, but I thought they might help."

Poppets were on my spreadsheet. Protective dolls made in the form of the person who was cursed, with the idea of transferring the curse out of the person and into the doll. Only, Sam's handiwork had given neither me nor Tennyson a very flattering form. The Lucy poppet was made from what I was sure had once been a fuzzy green sock, with some orange wool glued to the head. It looked kind of like a troll, but at least he'd drawn a big smiley face on the front. The Tennyson poppet, on the other hand, was all eyebrows and frown, though at least he was made from plain white cotton.

I picked up the Lucy poppet and turned it over in my hands. "Hello, Tennyson Poppet! I'm Lucy Poppet!" I said in a high voice, introducing Lucy Poppet to her new friend. "Let's do some magic and break this curse!"

I nudged Tennyson Poppet toward Tennyson Person, so that he'd get into the spirit of things, but of course he was no fun.

"Thank you, Sam. That was very thoughtful," he said, setting Tennyson Poppet aside and giving Sam a small smile. "I'll research the correct ritual to undergo with them."

"I also made these," Sam said, handing us a pair of hex bags. "I think you just need to burn them."

We went over to the fire and threw the bags in.

"Ablinnan se awiergan, aflieman wea," I said, because I figured it couldn't hurt.

The bags sparked a little as they burned and gave off a nice herby smell, but apart from that nothing happened.

The only other thing on our list was the purifying baths. Neither Tennyson nor I said anything; we just kept researching. Sam seemed a little bit down, so I tucked my Lucy Poppet into the top of my shirt with her head poking out so she could help us work. After a while, Althea came back in from burying her witch bottle. She sat down by Nikolai and the two of them looked stuff up together.

Nothing else we found seemed helpful, and I definitely did not want to take a purifying bath with Tennyson. Even if he was wearing my body, so technically I wouldn't be seeing him naked, everything about it still seemed creepy and weird.

"I have a few other suggestions," Althea said.

Nikolai sniggered, and she elbowed him hard in the side.

"So, we were looking through common body swap scenarios in fiction…" she said.

Tennyson huffed.

"Oh, did you not want my help?" she asked him. "Would you rather stay like this until Mother finds out?"

He folded his arms across his chest but made no further comment.

"I've ruled out anything from science fiction, like laboratory mishaps or failed experiments, but there are still a lot of common elements."

"Because people are unimaginative," Tennyson muttered.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"Sorry," he said. "Continue."

"Nearly always, the solution is related to the cause, as you'd expect, but often when magic is involved, the people who are cursed must do something or overcome an obstacle before the curse is broken."

I shrugged. "That makes sense for a movie or whatever, but I doubt Hannah would make it so easy."

"I agree," said Althea. "But, still, I don't think we should outright disregard anything that may be relevant."

It was a valid point, but from the way Nikolai was smirking, I was fairly sure I wouldn't like some of the suggestions.

"There's a lot of cases of magical statues being involved," Althea continued. "I think, considering how most of Hannah's magic has had some proximity to the statue of Professor Amaris, those cases should be considered."

I nodded in agreement.

"I am not urinating into any fountain," said Tennyson Wilde. "Nor is anyone wearing my body."

I thought it was a random statement until I looked over at his screen to see he had the Wikipedia page for body swap scenarios up.

"I second that," I said. "No public urination at all, actually."

"There's a lot of cases involving wishing," Althea said, sounding distracted as she read.

"I wish this curse would end," I said at the same time as Tennyson.

I raised my eyebrows at him, surprised we'd say exactly the same thing. He seemed equally surprised, though I supposed it was the obvious thing to do. At any rate, we were still in the wrong bodies, so it hadn't worked.

"Maybe the planets are out of alignment," said Nikolai.

I expected him to be sarcastic, but he didn't make any follow-up comments and seemed busy reading over Althea's shoulder, so maybe that was an actual thing. We'd had to do the chanting at the right time, and there was the whole moon-werewolf thing, so planetary alignment wasn't so very far-fetched. Maybe.

Althea stopped reading and exchanged a glance with Nikolai. He put a hand over his mouth to cover his laugh.

"Okay, so there's two things left that come up a lot," Althea said. She seemed very reluctant to say whatever she was about to say.

"Face transplant?" Tennyson said.

"What? No! And that's a terrible movie."

"They have to kiss," said Sam. He didn't look at either of us. "That's what it is, right? They kiss, and the power of love switches them back into their own bodies."

I snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. There is no power of love here."

"It's a classic fairytale scenario," said Tennyson. "The kiss, I mean. Not the love."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Do you just want to kiss yourself? I mean, I know you fancy yourself a bit, but those are still my lips you're wearing, so you should be careful where you put them."

"The only other option is to be hit by lightning," said Nikolai, sounding positively gleeful.

"I'm down for that," I said, jumping to my feet. "Let's go! Bring on the lightning!"

"The weather forecast for the next week is clear," said Althea.

"So? Aren't you guys super rich? Can't we find where the next storm is due and go there? Or make some fake lightning? You could just electrocute me. I don't mind!"

"It will be over in just a moment," said Althea. "And then we can rule it out. If that doesn't work, we'll think about electrocuting you. I promise."

She was missing the point entirely, and I suspected they all wanted me to kiss Tennyson Wilde for their own perverse enjoyment.

"I don't know why you're complaining so much," Tennyson told me. "Obviously, this is much more of a hardship for me than it is for you."

I had never wanted to punch my own face before. It was an interesting sensation.

"None of you are allowed to look." I narrowed my eyes at Nikolai. "Or take pictures or any recording whatsoever."

"They should leave the room entirely," Tennyson said.

Nikolai grumbled about it, but Althea pushed him out of the room. Sam gave me a sad, betrayed look, but honestly, he'd brought it up in the first place. And it wasn't as if he was fighting to kiss me anyway, so he could just put a sock in it.

"Right," said Tennyson Wilde. Then he stood up and looked at me expectantly.

I sighed and stood up to face him. "I think this will be easier if we close our eyes and don't think about the fact that we're kissing our own faces. Or that we're kissing each other. In fact, let's just pretend it isn't happening."

He nodded. "That sounds like the best idea."

But try as I might, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

He put his hand on my shoulder, and I leaned in. Even though it was my face and I could do with it what I wanted, it was still Tennyson Wilde. He smelled like coffee and pine needles. I'd expected him to feel cold, but he was warm, and when our lips finally touched, he was soft and gentle.

For a moment, I forgot it was my face I was kissing, forgot why he was doing it, and just let him kiss me.

We both remembered at the same time and jumped backwards. My lips tingled, and I could still feel the warmth of where his hand had rested on my shoulder. I didn't look at him.

"Well, that didn't work," I said. "You guys can stop spying on us now."

Althea and Nikolai crept back into the room, though Sam wasn't with them. Nikolai shot me finger guns, and I quickly sat down and pulled the laptop over in front of me.

"Well," said Althea. "Before we electrocute you, I have one other idea."

But the look on her face said none of us would like it.

Chapter 5

It was not a good plan. That was the only thing the five of us agreed on.

"I hate this place," I told them as we snuck into the bamboo forest. "Bad things happen here."

The plan had taken us almost two days to put together, but it was our best shot at breaking this curse before the weekend ended and we had to go back to class. We couldn't get off the island to find a lightning storm, apparently — Althea and Tennyson's mother had restricted their use of the family jet, though nobody would tell me why — and it was harder to simulate a lightning strike than I'd expected. We'd even tried the purifying bath, though separately and fully clothed. That left us with one option, which was a long shot at best.

"It'll be fine," Sam said, touching me on the arm.

"That's all well and good for you to say," I told him. "Come back and talk to me after you get miniaturized." But I smiled at him so that he'd know I wasn't mad. It was hard; everything I said with Tennyson's voice sounded snappish and angry, and I didn't want to hurt Sam's feelings.

He'd been strange with me since the horrific kissing incident, and I could kind of understand it. I mean, if the person that I apparently liked was in the body of my best friend/adopted brother/whatever, then I'd probably need some time to process too. I certainly did. My feelings for Sam were strange, confused. Part of them seemed to be residual feelings of Tennyson's, like the pack connection or something, but they were so tangled up with my own feelings that it was impossible to straighten them out. There was a strong sense of caring about him, of platonic love, but not so much of that belly-hopping excitement.

Things were creepy in the bamboo forest, shadowy and indistinct. At least it was easier to navigate now that I had werewolf senses, which were better than GPS. We eventually came to a clearing where the statue of Professor Amaris sat. He looked no different from when I'd first seen him, with his big moustache making him look like a walrus.

"What's with this guy, anyway?" I said. "What makes him so special? Does he have some sort of magical properties?"

"That's right, Lucy. Full marks." Hannah stepped out from behind the statue. "The statue is made from a special sort of metal that is the perfect conduit for magic. I'd have thought with all your research, you'd have learned at least that much. How are you the top of the class?"

I shrugged. "I'm also running a business while trying to maintain my grades." Neither of which I was doing particularly well at recently. "Plus, I keep getting hit with these pesky curses. That kind of makes it hard to learn about the black arts."

Our plan had been to lure Hannah out and trap her, then convince her to break the spell. It was rudimentary at best, but we'd apparently done the luring part okay at least. Now for the trapping.

Althea had snuck out during the night and buried a ring of iron around the clearing. She'd left a gap for Hannah to pass through where the path ran, and now we just had to close it. But as soon as Althea dropped the iron pole into place, Hannah clicked her fingers and let out a sharp laugh.

I felt the effect immediately. All my senses were dulled, and I felt as if a great weight had fallen on me and was pushing me to the ground.

"What are you doing?" I gasped, bending over with my hands on my knees so I wouldn't collapse completely.

Hannah rolled her eyes. "Alchemy is the most basic form of magic. Even iron can be transformed if you know what you're doing. Iron into silver, the perfect defense against werewolves," she said, sounding far away, even though I could see her right there in front of me. "You're so disappointing, Lucy. I thought you would be my Hermione, but you're not even…" She broke off as if she couldn't think of anything bad enough to call me. "Wormtail!" she said finally. "At the first sign of trouble, you turn your back on me and go off with these… Death Eaters!"

"Um," said Nikolai. He was still standing, though he looked as if he was struggling to remain upright. "You do realize you're the bad guy here, right? You're not Harry Potter, no matter how much magic you do."

Hannah narrowed her eyes at him. "Do you think this is a joke?" she asked. "My family has lost everything, and you don't even care."

Blue smoke gathered around her. We needed to calm her down before she released any more bad juju on us, but I couldn't even begin to think of what to say. I tried to think of something Dumbledorey, that would definitely work on her, but it seemed so long ago, back in the fall when we'd watched the movies together, that I couldn't remember anything specific.

"We don't think it's a joke," said Sam. "Why don't we talk about what happened and see if we can sort it out?"

The reasonableness of Sam's tone only seemed to annoy her, and the smoke clouded even more thickly around her.

Hannah rolled her eyes. "What are you going to do? You can't even werewolf properly."

"If we don't know what's happened, how can we help to fix it?" asked Althea.

"He's gone," Hannah said hysterically. The blue smoke crackled. "He was the head of one of your stupid family's companies, and you just tossed him aside and now he's gone."

The five of us looked at each other in alarm.

"Your father?" I guessed.

"He's dead?" asked Tennyson Wilde. He was obviously unaffected by the silver, but the rest of us were struggling. "I hardly see how I am to blame for any of this. I can put you in touch with our Human Resources department. Perhaps you are eligible for some sort of compensation. This is hardly the way to deal with such matters."

"He's not dead," said Hannah. "He's gone. Vanished. Because of you and your stupid family."

"Did you know anything about this?" Tennyson asked Althea.

She shrugged. "We don't even have a vote on the board in the business yet," she told Hannah. "I understand that you're angry, but you're directing it toward the wrong people."

"It's nothing to do with the business. Do you people understand nothing?"

Clearly, we did not.

"It's them. The Enforcers. They took him because of the precious Wilde family." She turned to me. "Your father. How do you think you got into this school so easily? My aunt is on the board of directors, and we knew that you'd be useful. Now you have to prove that you are. You have one hundred days. Get him back in that time and I'll reverse the spell. Fail and you will stay that way forever, gradually losing more and more of yourself as you become the person you appear to be." She turned and walked away, out of the circle of silver.

Tennyson Wilde and I looked at each other in horror. Become him for real? I did not want that at all.

Chapter 6

I didn't think I'd ever get used to being in Tennyson Wilde's body. The strangest thing was the way people looked at me. I'd been so used to being an outcast at Amaris, and even back home I'd never been all that popular. It kind of gave me the creeps a bit.

"It's like I'm royalty," I said as the crowd parted to give me a clear path down the corridor to class.

"You are," said Althea. "On our father's side. He's the eighteenth Duke of Elkington."

I wrinkled up my nose. "So, should I be calling you by some fancy title?" The thought of it boggled my mind. I knew they were famous and in the gossip magazines and all that, but royalty was like a whole other level.

She laughed and waved me off. "Please don't," she said, but then she looked at me askance. "You still don't seem like him. You need to keep your face more passive," she said. "Don't speak to anyone apart from us, even if they speak to you. Especially then."

I nodded. All I had to do was be a d-bag. It couldn't be that hard, considering so many people seemed to pull it off with little effort in this world.

It wasn't that easy, though. I had to physically restrain myself from giving my opinion in English class. We were studying Lord of the Flies, and there were some awesome parallels I could've made, but it would've completely given the game away. In the hallway, Olivia Hearst told me she liked what I'd done with my hair, and I couldn't reply with a scathing comment. Being an aloof jerk was way harder than it looked. Nearly every single person greeted me as I walked past them, not even with stuff like, "Hey, fat pig, you should die," but with smiles and sometimes even unsolicited gifts. It was crazy.

At the end of history class, the teacher called for me to stay behind. I wasn't too bothered; it wasn't as if I had to accept the consequences for anything Tennyson had done prior to my being in his body. The teacher was a fly-in who had like three degrees in Civil War history even though she couldn't have been older than 30. But she did not want to talk about Abraham Lincoln.

"So…" she said, fiddling with the top button of her blouse. "You did really well in the pop quiz last week." She popped her lips on the last "p" in pop and finished with a little pout.

"Um," I said, edging toward the door.

"I was just wondering." She crossed her legs and leaned forward a little so that I could've seen right down her top had I been looking. "If you'd be interested in a little extra credit project."

Wow, so things like that really happened in real life. If you were Tennyson Wilde. Sure, she was pretty, but I was a fifteen-year-old boy! That was definitely not ethical.

"Um," I said again. "I'm fine."

I escaped out the door before she could say anything else that might give me nightmares.

I kept my eye out, but I didn't see Hannah Morgan anywhere. That probably didn't mean anything, since I was sticking to Tennyson Wilde's timetable, which he normally didn't, so I couldn't be sure of his classes in relation to hers.

When it got to lunchtime, I looked around for her, but she was nowhere in the dining hall either. As I climbed up the stairs to the balcony where the Golden ate, people whispered and cast glances at me, and when I reached the top, I realized it was because Tennyson Wilde was already there, and they thought it was me. They were waiting with bated breath for my reaction.

I wasn't sure what to do. What would he do? Make some nasty remark and send me away, I supposed, but I couldn't send him away when he was the one who actually belonged there, so I just shrugged and sat down.

"Did you even go to class?" I asked him as I took my seat. "If you expect me to keep up my end of the deal, you need to go to classes and get decent marks."

He shrugged. "I went to class, but people were acting unusually. They made unsolicited comments to me regarding my appearance and lineage. It was unpleasant."

I snorted. "Well, I hope you didn't reply. I've just got the bullying down to a reasonable level. Don't do anything to start them up again."

He stared at me. "If people act inappropriately, I have no choice but to retaliate with the full strength of my ability."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, let me know how that goes for you. And remember that we might be stuck like this forever, so you're going to have to deal with the consequences of your actions."

I wondered if that would be such a bad thing, though, being stuck like this. Sure, there were some weird things — going to the bathroom was very uncomfortable, and I couldn't really get the hang of all the creepy social stuff, but people definitely looked at you differently when you were an incredibly rich white male. They treated you with a respect that you didn't even need to earn. Everything was easier. Would it really be so bad if I had to live the rest of my life as Tennyson Wilde? Was there anything in my life that would be so bad to lose? Really, it was he who was getting the short end of the stick. I'd be rich and good-looking and have super powers. And what would he get in return?

My family. He'd get my goofy brothers. Everything else, I could stand to lose, but I couldn't give up my family. Althea was great and everything, but I didn't need her as a sister. I needed those dumb chuckleheads.

"Hey, why so sad?" Sam said, sitting down. He looked as though he'd just woken up.

"If we can't reverse this," I said to him quietly, "if I get stuck as Tennyson Wilde forever, you need to promise me something."

He shrugged. "Anything."

"Make sure he takes proper care of my brothers. If I'm him, I might not remember them, and even if he becomes me, he'll probably still be a jerk and not think of them. You need to make sure they're taken care of."

Sam nodded. "Of course I will. But you don't need to worry. It will get reversed, and even if it doesn't, Tennyson is a good person."

I raised my eyebrows in disbelief.

"Once you get to know him, you'll see it's true."

I had no intention of getting to know him, but I guessed if I was stuck in his body, I wouldn't get much choice.

Chapter 7

Having super powers was no joke. Sure, I felt healthier than I had in my whole life, I could hear and see and taste things I'd never before imagined, and do things much more quickly and efficiently, but I wasn't used to such a sensory overload. By the end of each day I was exhausted. I could sense things about the others, but I didn't know enough to control it, so I couldn't shut it off. I really didn't need to know private things about Nikolai. The further away we were from the full moon, the harder things were to control, and I found myself getting more and more angry and frustrated.

Sam came to find me one night when I was hiding out in Tennyson's room after getting frustrated with my bio homework and shredding it with my claws. Apparently it was time for a werewolf intervention.

"I can understand if you don't think I'm qualified to give advice on this," he said, sitting on the end of the bed and jiggling up and down nervously.

I shrugged. "You've been a werewolf for five years. I've been one for five days. Any advice at this point is appreciated."

He settled back on the bed, cross-legged. "I find it helps to focus on the physical sensations of what's happening. If you can think about it objectively, you don't get so caught up in the moment."

I nodded. "That probably works for just about anything."

"Yeah." He turned a bit pink and looked up at me through his floppy hair. "I was having real trouble when I first got to the Wilde's. I was practically feral. Tennyson's mother gave me this hypnosis thing for fear of flying. It sounds weird, but a lot of the ideas behind it are the same. If you can focus on how your body reacts to the fear, you get that distance from it, I guess."

"Okay, I'll try it."

I scooted back to sit opposite Sam and closed my eyes, then tried to focus on the physical sensations of being a werewolf. Only, I kind of felt okay. Nothing was frustrating me or worrying me so much now; all I really felt was a little full from dinner. I still wasn't used to having such a small appetite, even if I was being forced to eat stuff like kale salad and chia pudding.

I sighed and opened my eyes. "I guess it only works when I need it."

Sam was staring at me intently, but when I met his eyes, he looked away. "There'll be things that work sometimes but not others," he said. He looked shifty, like there was something he wanted to say but really didn't actually want to say at all. "The thing is, Tennyson has a bit of a problem in that area." He twiddled his thumbs and looked at the ceiling, and I supposed he probably wasn't supposed to talk about this sort of thing. "It's basically the opposite of my problem, but also the same. We both have trouble maintaining the balance between wolf and human within us. With myself, I can't hold the wolf back. It dominates my consciousness, and it's a constant struggle to keep it contained. With Tennyson, it's as if his wolf is blocked somehow. In the entire time I've known him, I've never seen him transform. I don't know why, if it's a decision he's made, or if it's psychological, or if some sort of barrier has been placed on him."

"So, if it's psychological, it won't apply to me?" I asked. I thought about it for a moment. "That could be really bad, right? Like, if he's been holding the wolf part back and it suddenly gets unleashed, with me in here who has no werewolfing experience at all. I'm going to, like, eat off the faces of everyone in this school."

Sam shrugged. "It depends on what you believe. If the wolf part of a lycanthrope is purely physical, like having blue eyes or whatever, then it's just a matter of you learning how to control it."

I nodded. "That's what it said in the book," I said, referring to the book our parents had written together. "That makes sense."

"But many lycanthropes believe it's more complex than that. That the wolf is either a separate being within us or a disconnected part of our psyche."

Before, I would've dismissed that theory as hogwash, but it really did feel as if there was a wolf inside me, clawing to get out. And there were clearly things going on here that were beyond science. Both theories warranted serious consideration.

Sam nudged me with his foot. "But the fact that you've been able to control it so far makes me think that it'll be fine."

I shrugged. "I don't know. He seems pretty repressed about everything else. Why not this?"

"He's also very determined," said Sam. "If it were a psychological issue, he would've done everything possible to fix it."

"It's not psychological," came a voice from the doorway. My voice. Man, there was no getting used to that.

"Can you maybe try not to lurk in the shadows like a creepy stalker while you're in my body?" I asked him.

"There was a curse," he said as he entered the room, then stood awkwardly by the end of the bed where Sam was sitting. "Shortly before Sam came to live with us. I was never informed of the exact details, but there were some issues between my parents and my governess, and my governess lost her position. She placed some sort of curse on me to prevent my wolf side from emerging. I still have most of the physiological benefits of lycanthropy, such as enhanced senses and healing, but I cannot transform. My family tried everything possible to have the curse lifted, but my governess was very thorough, and it became apparent that she was the one who needed to lift the curse, but we've found no trace of her."

We were all silent for a moment as the information sank in.

"Wow," I said after a moment. "That really sucks."

Tennyson nodded. "Yes, it does." He eyed me warily for a moment. "We've kept this information as secret as possible. Only my parents, Althea and Nikolai know. Even the staff we had researching the curse were not given the full details. My mother fears that if this secret were exposed, it would undermine my authority when I take over from her as alpha of our pack."

I nodded along as if I understood, but all of that pack hierarchy stuff seemed so medieval and strange that I'd never paid it much attention. I supposed if I was going to end up being Tennyson Wilde, I'd need to learn about it, though.

"But the bottom line is that I won't suddenly go on a crazy werewolf killing spree?"

"If you do, it will not be my fault," Tennyson Wilde said. "But the actual bottom line is that if anyone finds out about this, my family will destroy you."

I shot him an evil grin. "Not if I'm in your body."

But I had no intention of telling anyone. Who would I tell? And, anyway, Tennyson Wilde's best interests were now my own.

Chapter 8

Knowing about Tennyson's repressed werewolf curse actually made it easier to act like him, though I had no idea why. Maybe because I understood him a little better, or maybe it helped me get into character. Either way, I let myself settle into being him, and the days just flew by. School was kind of a breeze when you were Tennyson Wilde. The only class I had any trouble with was English, surprisingly. I knew Mr. Porter didn't like Tennyson on account of the time he'd tried to make him go mad and kill everyone, but it was different when you experienced it firsthand.

"Mr. Wilde," Mr. Porter said one morning in class, the one time I'd forgotten to do the reading. "Do you feel it necessary to waste my time, and the time of every other student in this class? Perhaps it would be better for everyone if you returned to your usual routine of truancy."

I seemed to always be irritated when I was in Tennyson's body. It was his natural state, and it took very little to push that over into actual anger.

Plus, I could sense the others getting mad about how Mr. Porter had spoken to me. Well, maybe not that specifically, as they were off having a leisurely brunch, but they were annoyed on my behalf at any rate, which fed into my own feelings and made me madder. It was a cycle of crankiness. There was probably some sort of evolutionary reason for it, but of all the super senses, that one was the most annoying. I felt my claws lengthening and my teeth becoming sharper, so I took a deep breath and tried to do the thing Sam had taught me, focusing on the physical sensations.

Teeth and claws, and a churning in my stomach. A weight on my chest not much different from when we'd been trapped in the silver circle. When I tried to focus on each sensation, it seemed to just melt away, and after a moment I felt like I was in control again. I tried to push my feelings toward the others, to let them know I was okay, and that seemed to work too. Within seconds, the feeling of tension was gone.

This whole "feelings" thing was definitely the worst part of being a werewolf. I hated how the others could sense my feelings as well.

After class, I tried to find Hannah. She had math when Tennyson had English, but I thought I might see her in the hall. I kept an eye out for her any time I was outside the walls of the Golden House, and the others disapproved. Disapproval was bad enough when you could just see it on people's faces, but when you could actually feel it, it was, like, twenty times worse. It wasn't even any of their business. I could talk to Hannah if I wanted; it wasn't like they got a vote on it.

I thought maybe if I got her alone and talked to her, things might go better than the five of us bombarding her. I couldn't believe our entire friendship had been a lie.

I caught sight of her in the main hall and tried to catch up to her, but being Tennyson Wilde made that kind of thing hard. You couldn't sneak up on someone when everyone parted to let you through, plus I had an entourage of hangers-on who followed me around like a line of ducklings. It wasn't very subtle. Before I got anywhere near her, she had vanished into the crowd.

I sighed. I'd always thought it would be nice to have minions, but they did make it hard to sneak up on someone.

As Tennyson Wilde, it would be weird if I went to every single class, so I skipped history and went straight to the dining hall. The others were waiting for me. They'd finished their brunch and were now having pre-lunch coffee. Althea poured me a cup, black with no sugar, like Tennyson preferred, but before I could start drinking it, my phone went crazy with messages.

Tennyson and I had both kept our own phones. It made things easier — we could answer our own messages and just reject voice or video calls. Not that my phone was capable of video calls, but theoretically.

I flipped my phone open and saw that I had three messages, all from my brothers.

TAKE THE MONEY, said my youngest brother, Hamish.

DON'T GIVE UP ON LOVE!!! Fletcher had sent.

No, but seriously where are you, said Liam. We're hearing all this crazy stuff and haven't talked to you in ages.

I sighed. "You have to speak to my family," I told Tennyson Wilde.

He looked up at me. "Why?"

I turned to Sam. "See, this is why I need you to take care of my family if this thing sticks. He's got no…" I waved my hand around to encompass the entire lack of human feeling that radiated from Tennyson Wilde. "They're worried because they haven't heard from me," I explained. "Just talk to them for five minutes and say you overate and have a stomach ache and need to go lie down. Then they'll believe any weird behavior."

"You do eat a lot," said Tennyson. "I am constantly hungry in this body, and your brain seems wired to only think of food. It's most inconvenient."

He waited while I sent a message to Liam to say I'd call that night at the usual time.

The call did not go well.

Liam hadn't been kidding when he'd said they'd been hearing crazy stuff. I hadn't paid it much mind, but because Tennyson was in my body, it had looked like I was sticking super close to the Golden, and Tennyson in particular. There were a lot of pictures, and they were all over the internet. My brothers had already been way too obsessed with the idea of me having some creepy Cinderella-esque relationship with Tennyson Wilde, and the pictures had sent them into overdrive.

"We thought you were kidnapped!" Hamish yelled at Tennyson Wilde as soon as the call connected.

Tennyson blinked at the screen. I couldn't see what they were doing. I didn't want to risk them seeing me while I looked like Tennyson. Their heads were already full of cotton wool without adding any fuel to it.

"If his mother offers you money to break up, don't take it!" said Fletcher.

"It's okay if you want to take it," Hamish said. "It's okay to give up on love. And you can buy me a bike."

"Don't give up on love," said Fletcher.

Those boys watched way too many rom-coms.

"You could take the money but not really break up," Hamish said. "Just be really careful about your secret affair. I just want you to be happy! And a bike!"

Tennyson blinked again.

"Lucy, are you okay?" asked Liam. "You don't seem like yourself."

Wow, that was a creepily on-point remark, I thought. I made the danger signal to Tennyson from behind the laptop.

"I feel sick. I have to go," Tennyson said, then ended the call.

"Great going," I told him. "How about next you go see my teachers and say things to offend them so I fail the year… Oh, wait, you've already done that."

"Maybe he needs Lucy lessons!" said Sam. He seemed way too amused.

Tennyson sniffed haughtily, and I rolled my eyes.

"See, that right there. Don't sniff like you're a princess. Snort like an indignant bulldog," I told him.

But no matter how many handy pointers I gave him, he just wasn't a natural.

Chapter 9

Although I hadn't been able to get near Hannah, Nikolai had apparently been keeping close watch on her. I literally stumbled into him in the gardens the next morning, watching her walk to class.

"You did this even before we knew she was evil, didn't you?" I said.

"Shut up," he said. "I'm conducting an important reconnaissance mission."

"No, you're not. You're being an old-fashioned creeper. I thought that was just a Tennyson Wilde thing, but are all of you like that?"

I knew they'd had Hannah looked into before the whole body swap thing, and they'd done a bit of poking around about Hannah's father as well, though there wasn't a lot they could do without arousing the suspicion of Tennyson's mother. Still, we hadn't even found out Hannah's father's name. Everything about Hannah and her family was a massive mystery, which was weird, considering they'd all gone to school together all their lives.

"You think I'd like a girl who tried to hurt my pack?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I think it makes you like her more, TBH."

He turned away from me, back to his lookout spot, then made an annoyed huffing noise. "Now I've lost her," he said, putting away his binoculars. "That's a whole morning's work down the tube."

"Stalking girls is work for you?" I asked him. "What exactly is your job title?"

He gave me an annoyed look, then sighed and sat down on the bench. "I just really liked her," he said. "Ever since we were small. I know not all the other girls around here are shallow and horrible, but I never really get a chance to talk to any of them because they seem to freak out and run away when I come near. Hannah's different. She never seemed to care who I was, who my family was. She just ignored me."

"I didn't freak out and run away," I said, slightly indignant.

"You're not a girl," he said, wrinkling up his nose. "Quite literally at the moment. Sometimes I'm not even sure you're from this planet. But, anyway, this isn't about you. It's about me and my feelings."

I snorted.

"The point is, I don't just like her because she's evil. I like her despite it. I'm very conflicted about it, so I've been watching her in case she's being controlled as well, or there's some other reason for all of this that makes it okay for me to keep on liking her."

I nodded. "That's fair," I said. "I'll help, if you like. She's my friend, so if there's any way she's innocent, I'd like to keep on being her friend."

We spent a lot of time together over the next few days, watching Hannah. Maybe she knew we were watching her, but she didn't do anything particularly interesting or out of the ordinary. She went to class, she ate, she studied. Maybe she did all her nefarious business in the dead of night, when we were sleeping. It was impossible to tell. What we needed was more information.

"We should break into the office and read her school files," I said to Nikolai one afternoon in C&C club. Nobody had said anything about Tennyson Wilde attending a club he hadn't signed up for, because he was Tennyson Wilde and he could do as he pleased, so I figured I could stay up to date in that, at least. People definitely had something to say about Lucy O'Connor being absent, though, but they just muttered it under their breaths, so I figured it was okay to ignore it.

We were knitting. Nikolai was surprisingly good at it, his needles clacking away. I kept getting my yarn tangled and dropping stitches, but even though it was frustrating and unproductive, it provided a great cover to discuss things away from the others.

"Leave it to me," Nikolai said. He finished his row on the fluffy hat he was making, and set it carefully on his knitting basket. "I'll be back in a jiffy!"

I was making a striped scarf, only when I looked at it, it was definitely getting thinner as I went along, except for in a few places where it wasn’t. I supposed it would still keep my neck warm, though, so I pushed on. A few of the C&C girls eyed Nikolai's empty seat with anticipation, and I hoped he'd return before any of them got up the courage to sit in it. Their knitting was no better than mine, so it wasn't as if I could even get them to help me out.

Nikolai was back super fast, anyway. He sat down with a pleased grin and pulled a USB stick out of his pocket to show me.

"All her files, from her first term at Amaris to now."

I raised my eyebrows. "You broke into the office in broad daylight?"

He chuckled and picked up his knitting. "No. I'm Nikolai Volkov. I smiled at the office girl, and she gave me whatever I wanted."

Annoying as it was that he could just flout security like that, it was still very convenient. I couldn't wait to go through the files and finally get some answers. I loaded the files onto Nikolai's laptop while he tried to fix my scarf, tutting at me when he held it up and saw the strange shape.

"I'm making an artistic statement," I told him, waiting for the files to load.

"Is that statement, 'I'm terrible at knitting'? Because, if so, you're doing a wonderful job."

As soon as I opened the first file, I knew I was set for disappointment. Any information that might have been the slightest bit helpful had been removed. Parents' names, place of birth, anything that would help us trace her — it was just not there. There was only a record of her grades, which were average. There were no behavioral issues, nothing interesting at all.

"Maybe it's a fake name," said Nikolai. "Though, if so, she's had it since she was five years old, which is suspicious in itself."

He gave my scarf up as a lost cause and put it back in my basket. Then he hid the basket behind my chair, as if it was too much of an abomination to even look at.

"She said her aunt is on the school board," I said, thinking aloud. "Maybe we can find her that way."

"I'll ask around," Nikolai said, but he sounded dubious. "If they've gone so far as to delete school records, they're obviously covering their tracks."

I knew he was right, but I didn't have any other ideas.

On the way to dinner after C&C club, we ran into Tennyson in the hall. He looked unkempt, and I could tell that he wasn't happy.

"Hey," said Nikolai. "We're heading to the dining hall. Where are you going?"

Tennyson was going the opposite direction. He shrugged, but before he could speak, the girls from C&C club flocked around us, pushing him off to the side.

"Hi," said one of the girls. "You don't need to worry about her. I'm sure she can find the dining hall without any help." She gave us a big, fake smile.

Another one of them took me by the arm and turned me away from Tennyson. "If you need some company, we'll help you out."

"I was watching you work in C&C club," another one said, trying to lead us away. "Your scarf is so beautiful. You have a real talent."

I wasn't sure what to do. I couldn't exactly shake them off and make a big deal out of talking to Tennyson. The real Tennyson Wilde would never do that; he'd just leave me standing there all alone and sad. And he was sad. I could feel it. Each step away from him that we took, his sadness grew. It was different from the feelings of the pack members. That was remote, more like an awareness than a physical sensation. But this — I could feel it as if it were my own emotions. It felt almost like a psychic link. I was sure that if I concentrated really hard, I could even read his thoughts.

I glanced back at him and when our eyes met, I could sense his surprise. He was clearly having the same experience.

I turned the corner. Once he was out of sight, and the sensation abruptly ended. Okay, so that was something.

I pulled away from the C&C girls and rushed back to the Golden House. He was waiting for me just inside the gate.

"That's not normal, right?" I asked him. "We aren't pack-related or wolf-in-laws or anything, so why am I feeling your feels? I don't want to feel them. I don't even want to feel my own."

I started to panic. Or maybe he started to panic. It was impossible to tell. Was this what Hannah had meant by our becoming each other? It was as if we were melting into the same person, and I didn't know if we'd ever be able to separate completely again.

"This is not okay," I told him. "We need to sort this out."

What if I was having private emotions that I wanted to keep private? Or private thoughts? I didn't want to become some weird sort of Lucy-Tennyson hybrid.

"Calm down," Tennyson said as I turned back to the gate to go find Hannah. "We can't do anything if we're both overcome with emotion."

But I didn't care. I didn't want to melt, to become someone I didn't even recognize.

"Stay there," I told him. "If we're not together, it won't be as bad."

But this time, it kept happening even when he was out of sight. It only lasted about thirty seconds, but back in the hallway, it had stopped instantly, as soon as he was out of sight. That meant it was only going to get worse.

I still had my access card to the Red House, so I swiped my way in and hurried up to my room. People seemed shocked to see Tennyson Wilde there, but I ignored them.

Hannah was sitting cross-legged on the bed, studying. She looked up when I burst in and smiled faintly.

"Reverse it," I said. "Reverse it now."

"No," she said.

"You're supposed to be my friend. How could you do this?"

She shrugged, one-shouldered. "You were supposed to be my friend, and yet you obviously prefer the company of those barbarians. I thought you were nice, Lucy. I thought you were different. But you're just a nasty social climber like all the others."

"Wow," I said. "Harsh."

"I don't know what you want from me," said Hannah. "I've told you what I want and what will happen if I don't get it. Shouldn't you be working on that instead of standing there talking rubbish?"

It was like trying to talk to a brick wall.

"You could at least tell me where to start. I don't even know your father's name," I told her. "I don't understand why you're doing this."

"Don't you?" She gave me a look that was the most uncute thing I'd ever seen her do. "Well, maybe you should think about it, Lucy. You act like you're so smart, like you know so much more than everyone else, so I'm sure you can figure it out on your own."

I opened my mouth to say something else, though I didn't know what possible response I could have to that, but she held up a hand to stop me. Blue smoke started to curl out from her palm toward me, and it pushed me backwards. I backed out of the room without meaning to, as if I were on an escalator facing the wrong way, and once I was through the door, it slammed in my face. I was left staring at the plaque with our two names engraved in it.

Chapter 10

Things only got worse. The more time I spent with Tennyson, especially when we were in the same room, the stronger the bond became, and the longer it lasted when we were apart. Nikolai couldn't find out anything about Hannah's aunt, and eventually we had to admit defeat. The full moon got closer and closer, and I could feel the wolf writhing around inside me, scratching underneath my skin.

"It was like that just before my first full moon as well," said Sam. "It's normal."

"It's usually fine once you transform," said Althea, "but in your case, we'll just need to see what happens." She smiled weakly. "I'm sure it will all be fine."

It didn't feel as if it would be fine. It felt as if that wolf had decided that if it couldn't get out, it would eat me up from the inside out.

"That's not unusual," said Tennyson Wilde. "Every month it feels like that. You just need to overcome your weakness and control it."

"Right," I said, raising my eyebrows at him in a way that seemed to convince people that I really was Tennyson Wilde.

Fairly soon, he had his own monthly problem.

"I'm dying," he announced. "I am in a great deal of pain, and I think I'm bleeding internally. Also, I would like to commit violence on all those around me. And I'm having an aneurysm."

Althea rolled her eyes. "I'll deal with this," she told me.

I was very grateful. Although it was my body, it was still Tennyson in there, and I didn't want to have such a personal conversation with him. I didn't really want him getting so well acquainted with my body, either, but I supposed that couldn't be helped. It was best to just not think about it and let Althea handle it.

"Just overcome your weakness and deal with it," I told him as Althea led him out of the room.

Being in a male body wasn't exactly a picnic, either. It did all sorts of random stuff without my permission, but mostly it was stuff I could pretend to ignore. Period pains weren't really something you could brush off, and it was nice that I got to miss out on it for this month.

The morning of the full moon, though, I started to think I'd rather deal with a year's worth of period pains all at once than being a werewolf. I'd thought before that I understood why Sam was having trouble coping, but I hadn't understood jack squat. Even though I'd spent all my time at Amaris around lycanthropes, I knew nothing. It wasn't painful, exactly, but it definitely wasn't comfortable. I felt as if I was imprisoned by my own skin. I wanted to break out and run free, but it just wasn't possible.

"Stop doing that," Tennyson told me. "You're only making it worse."

"I don't even know what I'm doing."

I stepped in front of the mirror so I could see. I watched as the sensation came over me again and I pushed at it, trying to break free. My eyes glowed. My teeth grew sharp and my nails turned into claws. Various other things happened, but then it got to a point that was like a brick wall, and no matter how much I threw myself against it, I couldn't break through and completely transform.

"You must really hate witches so much," I said vaguely, checking out my pointy ears.

"Not really," said Tennyson. "My governess was kind to me, and I understand the reasoning behind what she did."

Which was all well and good when he was tucked up all cozy in my body. I didn't know how he could forgive someone who had betrayed him so badly, whom he'd trusted and who had cared for him. It made me look at him in a slightly different way, to know that he wasn't completely made of icicles.

"How do you deal with this?" I asked him. "Doesn't it drive you nuts?"

"I can still run with the pack," he said. "It helps a little to get out and act like a wolf. It's enough to get me through."

But the tone of his voice made me think that it wasn't enough at all, that it was slowly killing him.

As the day dragged on, I really thought I would hurt someone. The others all seemed so calm, it just made me more irritable. We took the day off from classes, and everyone seemed to think that hanging out and supporting me would be helpful, but I just wanted to be alone. I understood why I couldn't be, why they wanted to keep an eye on me, but that didn't make it any more annoying. At least with all the distraction, my bond with Tennyson didn't seem as strong.

Tennyson had told me once that the full moon gave lycanthropes more control, that they drew their power from the moon, but it felt as though I was filled to the brim with that power and it was overflowing. I had no control; there was nothing I could do that would relieve me of the painful sensations that only grew as night approached.

I thought Tennyson would stay behind in the house while we went out into the forest, so I was surprised when he made his way out to the forest with us.

"Is this completely safe?" I asked him. "You realize you're a vulnerable human now, right? Your body won't just heal if some werewolves decide to munch on you."

"None of you would harm me," he said, not looking at me as he fell into step beside me. "If you had more command of your skills, you would realize that this body now carries the scent of pack."

"That's so weird," I said. "That even though your body is completely human, your scent is still wolfy."

He shook his head. "No, that's not what I mean," he said. "It's because of your link with Sam, perhaps, but more and more, our instincts count you as one of us."

That gave me a lot to think about, but before I could make any sense of it, we were caught in a beam of moonlight and my body seemed held in suspension by it for a moment. I hung in a place between space and time, then I was struck down by a wracking pain unlike anything I had ever felt.

"Don't fight it," said Tennyson Wilde, speaking with my voice close by my ear.

His words brought me back to myself, and I realized I was writhing on the forest floor. I could feel that I was half-transformed; my teeth and claws were sharp, and so were my senses. But it wasn't enough for the wolf inside me. The wolf needed to run, to hunt, to join with the night.

"Go," Tennyson Wilde said, his presence a strange comfort. "Let your wolf run free with your pack."

So I did. I let go and joined with the night.

Chapter 11

I woke with a banging headache and hardly any memory of the night before. There were flashes — running with the others, moonlight and joy and a sense of belonging, but it was all fragments.

I sat up and rubbed the back of my neck. Even with my eyes still closed, the morning light felt too bright. I wished I could bury my head under my pillow and sleep until I felt better, but the thought of it made me realize that I wasn't in bed. I didn't have a pillow. Cautiously, I creaked my eyes open.

It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at, and when I did, I scrambled backwards in shock until I hit the wall. There was blood everywhere. On the floor, on the walls. I crouched in the corner of a room I hadn't seen before, what seemed like one of the outer buildings used to store garden equipment and whatnot. I was naked, which I tried to ignore. The only other thing that caught my attention was the body in the middle of the room. I couldn't tell who it was, although the clothing told me it was a guy. He was sprawled face down and covered in blood. I couldn't tell if he was breathing.

I didn't know what to do. Should I call for help? Should I hide the body? Run away? Running seemed like the best option, but I couldn't move. Apparently, I was frozen in shock.

I don't know how long I sat there, staring at the body, trying to see if he was breathing but shaking so much that I couldn't tell. There were bloody gouges across his back, and his hair was matted with so much blood that I couldn't even tell his hair color.

After I'd sat there for an eternity, the door burst open and Sam entered, followed closely by the others. The sight of them snapped me out of my daze.

"Oh my god, you killed someone!" said Nikolai, stumbling into the room.

Althea made an annoyed noise at him. "He isn't dead, you idiot. Can't you hear his heartbeat?"

I couldn't hear anything over the sound of blood rushing in my ears. I felt confused and disoriented and thought maybe I'd throw up.

"He's pretty messed up, though," she continued. She gave me a look I couldn't read. "But we need to know how much he remembers of what happened. How much do you remember?" she asked me.

The more I thought about it, the more elusive my memories became. I shrugged.

"You fully transformed," said Sam. "Do you remember?"

I shook my head. Tennyson seemed stunned, and I was surprised that he hadn't known, hadn't sensed it somehow. It made sense that the link between us was weakened or confused during the full moon, but I thought he'd been running with us through the night. Maybe he'd overestimated how much he could do as a human.

"You got separated from us early in the night, and we couldn't find you after that," Althea explained. "We could sense you strongly. Your emotions were all over the place, but because you were fully transformed, we had trouble tracking your exact position."

I barely heard her words, I was so intent on Tennyson's reaction. Even without the link between us becoming strong again, he was wearing my face. I knew the exact feelings that prompted my muscles to move in that way, the absolute devastation that locked my jaw and narrowed my eyes. But the link seemed stronger now than ever before and I could feel it as well, like an ache in a previously unknown part of my heart. He was crushed.

But before I could think about it deeply, what it meant for him to feel that way, why I could feel it so strongly now, the body on the floor started to move.

He sat up and stared around at us, blinking in confusion. I recognized him immediately: Hannah's friend Milo. I knew that he didn't like me, but his feelings toward Tennyson seemed more complex, and I wondered what had made me attack him, of all people. I'd felt betrayed by him in the past, when the bullying was the worst and he'd turned on me, but I doubted I'd had enough rationality last night to make such a judgment call.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember something, anything. Things were so fragmented that it was difficult to pull apart separate thoughts. Running, sniffing, hunting. I remembered hunting; I definitely remembered hunting. A frightened little bunny. I had chased it through the forest, but it was fast and had escaped me. Then I'd caught another scent. A more interesting scent, more challenging. I'd stalked it through the night, along the pathways of the school. It hadn't suspected me, that fresh, pink little bunny. I'd crept up on it, and it wasn't until I pounced that it even knew I was there.

It had screamed, and I had seen myself reflected in the fear in its eyes. A massive black wolf with glowing eyes and dripping fangs. Its screams had pleased me. I had let it go only because I knew it would run. I craved the thrill of the chase.

I came back to the present with a gasp, my eyes huge as I stared down at Milo, the frightened bunny that I'd terrorized.

He dabbed at the blood on his shoulder and then looked up at me. He seemed confused for a moment, but then he put it together. He'd always been quick to come up with crazy theories and this was no different — except for the fact that this time, he was right.

"Tennyson Wilde?" he whispered. "You did this to me?" He tried to move and winced. The wolf had hit him hard when it pounced. "What are you?" he said, his voice turning to steel, not taking his eyes off me. He scrambled to his feet and pointed an accusing finger at me. "You're a monster!" Then he clapped a hand over his mouth, as if speaking it aloud would make me attack him again. He backed his way toward the door, still not taking his eyes off me, and then he ran.

Bile rose in my throat as I watched him leave. I still wanted to chase him, still wanted to hunt.

Chapter 12

Milo didn't spill the beans, which was a worry in itself. In the past, he hadn't worried too much about whom he shared his theories with. I didn't want to go near him; I was too ashamed of what I'd done, and I feared that I wouldn't be able to keep the monster inside myself, that it would overpower me and attack him again.

"You're Tennyson Wilde," Nikolai whispered to me over lunch. "You can't have him going to the media and saying you made untoward advances to him."

"You're a werewolf," said Althea. "You can't have him going to anyone and saying anything."

I understood where they were coming from, but I didn't know what they expected me to do about it. Plus, I was finally hungry for the first time since I'd become Tennyson Wilde, and I couldn't get enough of the pulled pork salad on the lunch menu.

"At least you didn't seriously hurt him," said Sam. "And he has no proof of anything. Leave it to me. I'll convince him there were hallucinogens in the water supply or something."

I nodded. I knew Sam could take care of it. People seemed to instinctively trust him. Still, his promise didn't make me feel better, and I could tell Tennyson wasn't happy about it, either.

It seemed his brooding was contagious. Over the next few days, I found myself increasingly sitting in a corner, looking out rainy windows. Whether or not Milo said anything to anyone, the fact that I'd attacked him bothered me. I might've killed him, and I couldn't even remember doing it. I wanted to talk to him, to apologize, but I didn't trust myself around him.

I was just not cut out to be a werewolf. I didn't have the self-control. I was a horrible coward who preyed on those weaker than myself, no different from someone like Olivia Hearst, who bullied people who were lower down on the social scale. Except that Olivia Hearst's teeth and claws were metaphorical.

"You can't keep beating yourself up about it," Sam told me one day, sneaking up behind me as I sat in the garden behind the Golden House. "You weren't in control. You didn't intend to hurt him. You're a good person, and this doesn't change that."

I smiled at him. Here I was feeling sorry for myself when Sam had been through so much worse than this. Of course he understood how I felt.

"Let me guess," I told him. "That's word for word what the others told you when you attacked me."

He nudged me in the side. "Not very comforting, is it?"

I could sense how he felt, how it was a comfort to be close to me, how it was easier for him to be around me if I was a lycanthrope as well, and he didn't have to fear that he would hurt me. But it was just the ease of being near an old friend. There were no romantic feelings there, or if there were, they were hidden. It was more a feeling of belonging, of family. Of pack. I tried not to probe at it too much. Perhaps his lack of romantic feelings was because I looked like Tennyson Wilde, or maybe they were secondary to other feelings. Maybe I just wasn't that good at sensing stuff yet. I'd been more focused on learning how to shut my senses off than exploring the nuances of them. That didn't mean he didn't see me that way.

Now that I'd opened myself up, it wasn't just Sam that I could sense, but the others as well. The more I thought about it, the more strongly I felt them. Before the full moon, I'd only been able to sense vague emotions, but now their presence was crystal clear. I could feel where they were, what they were doing. Maybe it was because the bond between us had strengthened over the full moon and my transformation, but I knew that Althea was in the library, studying. Nikolai was taking a nap. But Tennyson Wilde…When I tried to sense him, his presence hit me like a freight train in the face.

I was vaguely aware of myself falling to the ground, but that seemed to be happening far away, to someone else. Then I wasn't there at all; I was back in my own body. Only not really — I was Tennyson Wilde in my body. I was in the girls' bathroom near our English classroom, getting backed into a corner by two girls who had always seemed to admire me in the past. Wait — no, that was wrong. They were the girls from C&C Club. They'd always admired Tennyson Wilde. They had always been jerks to me.

They crowded into my space, saying nasty things, and I didn't understand why. People never spoke to me like that. I had done nothing to deserve this hurtful behavior, and yet they were acting as if I was at fault. My confusion seemed to fuel their anger, and they became more violent toward me. There had been times in the past where I'd felt fear, but this was different. These girls were weak and stupid, but they outnumbered me, and I was in a weak and stupid body. There was nothing I could do against them.

I came back to myself with a violent thud. Sam was holding on to me, looking concerned, and to my surprise, Nikolai and Althea were there as well. I wondered how long I'd been out of it for them to get here so fast.

"Tennyson is in trouble," I told them.

"Where is he?" asked Althea.

I told her, and without a word, she and Nikolai left to help him.

"I should go help," I said, trying to stand up.

Sam shook his head, helping me back to the seat. "You're not going anywhere after that," he told me. "You need to rest."

He looked super worried, so I decided not to argue. Plus, I wasn't sure if my legs would work anyway. That had been intense. It had felt as if I actually was Tennyson Wilde, but Tennyson Wilde in my body. Like being split in half, but also like two people blending together. There were so many thoughts and feelings swimming around inside of me that I couldn't even begin to separate them. The most distressing thing of all was that I still had all the awareness of being in Tennyson Wilde's mind — his memories, his feelings, everything. Not just from that particular moment, either. I wasn't sure how far back it went, how comprehensive it was, and I didn't want to probe into it too deeply. It was invasive and weird. I didn't know if he had that same awareness about me, but I hoped not.

Sam and I sat quietly amongst the spring flowers, his side pressed up against mine. Although my stomach was churning from what had happened, it was nice to just be there with him, to feel as if he was taking care of me.

Before long, the others showed up. Tennyson seemed flustered, and when our eyes met, I knew that he had experienced the same strange, mind-blending sensation that I had.

"What are we going to do?" he asked me.

I wanted to ask him what had happened with the bullies, but it seemed too personal, too much as if the whole thing would become real if I spoke it aloud.

"We need to end this spell," I told him. "I don't care how. We just can't keep this up."

"You don't care how?" Sam asked quietly. He narrowed his eyes at me, and I wondered if he was judging me. That wasn't it, though. I felt no judgment from him, only concern.

"I don't care how," I said firmly.

Tennyson nodded in agreement. "If we have to end her to end the spell, I am down with that."

The four of us looked at him in surprise, and I felt a little sick at how much he sounded like me. More and more, the line between Tennyson and Lucy was getting blurred, and I feared that unless the spell ended soon, we'd never be wholly separate again.

Chapter 13

The way I saw it, we had two options. Option A was to confront Hannah and somehow convince her to end the spell. Considering how every time we'd tried that, we'd just made things worse, I wasn't really behind that idea. Option B wasn't much better, but more and more it felt like it was the only thing we could do. Option B would take some work to convince the others of, though, and I needed at least one of them to help me out.

We were having lunch. Tennyson Wilde wasn't sitting with us. He'd said that that only made the bullying worse. He sat alone in the corner below us.

"I think fixing the problem with her father would make her rethink things." I sat back and waited for all the usual objections. I knew it was a big ask. We'd exhausted every single option except for Option B, and I couldn't find my own father, so how would I ever find Hannah's?

"We don't even know his name, let alone anything else," said Nikolai. "There's no trace of him anywhere, if he ever even existed."

I snorted. "Well, I assume he existed in some form, or Hannah is a bit of a miracle."

"Mother would know," said Althea, sounding pensive. "I bet she even knows where he is now."

Everyone fell silent at the mere suggestion, but it was exactly what I needed. Option B was to tell Tennyson and Althea's mother, to spill the beans, to come clean and hope for the best. Everyone seemed terrified of her, but no matter how scary or strict she was, surely the best possible solution for everyone was to get Hannah's father back. Surely if we did that, Hannah would reverse the spell and things could go back to normal. Well, not completely normal, I hoped, because so far normal at Amaris hadn't been kind to me.

The only problem was, I didn't actually know how to contact Tennyson's mother. I didn't want to ask any of the others outright because I knew they wouldn't approve, but I had to talk to her somehow. The best thing was to make the others think it was their own idea. I'd planted the seeds, and now I just needed to water them so they'd sprout into big getting-things-sorted trees.

"I know what you're trying to do," Tennyson said, jumping out at me as I made my way to class.

I startled and spun around. "You know, lurking in the corners has a totally different effect when you're in my body."

"Don't evade the point. You're trying to contact my mother. You're dropping hints all over the place. It's not exactly subtle."

"Do you have a better idea?"

He paused for a moment and stared at me. "Why do you want to break the spell?" he asked.

I glared at him in disbelief. "Are you for real?"

"Completely. I've lived life in that body for fifteen years, and never have people treated me with such disrespect as they do when I'm like this. Nobody listens to my opinion. People treat me as if I'm worth nothing. It's unpleasant. I don't understand why you would wish to return to that."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Don't you?"

We'd had the same experience with the mind-melding or whatever it was, so I was sure he knew enough to understand why I wanted to be Lucy again.

"In your current form, you could provide for your family a thousand times better. Even if you worked for a lifetime in this body, you would never be able to give them the opportunities that you could offer them as Tennyson Wilde."

I shrugged. "But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't be part of their family." It sounded selfish, but there was more to it than that, feelings too big for me to describe to him. Then he nodded, and I knew that he understood them anyway.

"Very well. We shall contact my mother. It will not be pleasant, and she will be suspicious of the slightest anomalies in your behavior. She has trained me since birth to become the head of this family, and everything I have ever said or done has been because of her influence. I will tell you everything you must do and say. She will know without a doubt that something is wrong if you deviate from the script."

She sounded more like an army drill sergeant than a mother, but it still seemed like the best option.

"And you cannot tell the others. They will not agree to it."

I nodded again.

"You can give her no hint that there is any witchcraft involved. No matter what happens, we want to avoid a face-to-face meeting with her, which she will request if she suspects anything unusual."

It took him days to come up with an adequate script, during which time I felt the lines between us blurring more and more. After he had it perfected, I then had to practice it with him, which we had to do without the knowledge of the other three. They didn't say anything about us sneaking off together all the time. Perhaps they thought it was something to do with the connection between us that had formed from the spell.

Finally, the day came when Tennyson Wilde thought we were ready to speak to his mother. He sent a message requesting an audience with her, and an hour or so later came the reply that she could schedule us in for three minutes after dinner that night. Tennyson seemed surprised to have gotten an appointment with her so quickly.

Their family was so weird. I definitely didn't want to be part of that family. I wanted my own family back.

It was a bit bothersome getting the other three out of the way in time, but Tennyson told them that we wanted to meditate, to try to find our own "oneness" together, whatever that meant. It seemed to work, and at 7:42 p.m. the call came through on Tennyson's laptop.

My heart pounded nervously. Would she be able to hear that with her werewolf senses, even through the computer? Maybe Tennyson was always nervous talking to her, though, if she was so awful.

"Speak quickly," she said when the call was picked up.

Tennyson had told me that I was not to glance around, not to fidget. I had to be direct, but not give the game away.

"A student in my class attempted to blackmail me," I told her.

She raised one sharp eyebrow. "Deal with them," she said, and moved to end the call.

"I have," I said quickly. "But I wish to provide them with information to prevent any ill feeling."

She rolled her eyes. "You have still not managed to rid yourself of these soft feelings, I see. Very well. What do you wish to know?"

"Her name is Hannah Morgan," I told her. "Her father vanished after leaving one of our companies. She wishes to know his whereabouts."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "There is something strange about you. I've been receiving unwelcome reports concerning your behavior recently, and I can see now that they aren't completely false. Are you ill?"

"No, Mother."

She continued to scrutinize me, then seemed to come to a decision. "I'm busy for the next six hours, but clearly something is not right. I shall make the trip to see you once my work is finished tonight. Expect me in the morning."

Without waiting for my reply, she ended the call.

Tennyson and I stared at other in shock. This was the worst possible outcome.

Chapter 14

"Don't panic," Tennyson said, pacing the room and pulling at his hair. I was reasonably sure he was talking to himself.

"What will she do?" I asked.

He looked at me with huge eyes. I could feel how terrified he was.

"What won't she do?" he said. "If she suspects that you're not me…" He shook his head, as if the thought was too horrible to speak aloud.

Being left to my own imagination wasn't a good thing.

"But she's your mother. The mother of this body," I said. "Surely she wouldn't do anything to hurt it."

"I need to eat," Tennyson said with a sigh. "Why do you need to eat so much?"

Without another word, he left the room.

I didn't know what he was complaining about. His body hardly needed to eat at all; eating wasn't enjoyable, and he filled up super easy. What was the point in being alive if you didn't enjoy food? Still, I didn't want to wallow around by myself for the whole night, imagining the weird werewolf tortures I'd be suffering the next day, so I followed him down the stairs to get dinner.

The dining hall was deserted. Dinner for students finished at 8 p.m., but the Golden could eat at any time they wanted. Tennyson didn't speak to me as we ate, but at the rate he was shoveling food into his mouth, he wouldn't have been able to even if he had been the chatty sort.

I nibbled on some paleo toast and tried to make sense of what had happened. I had stuck to the script. I hadn't fidgeted or done anything un-Tennyson-like. It had been an award-winning performance, I thought, but apparently still not good enough.

"She said she'd heard things," I said, thinking aloud. "Do you think she knows about the attack on the full moon? About the transformation?"

He shrugged and kept eating.

We were both so freaked out, I shouldn't have been surprised that the other three found us. They didn't sit at the table with us, but hung back, watching.

"Sit down," I told them. "There's no point keeping anything from you now."

Tennyson glared at me over a massive bowl of pasta but didn't stop eating to say anything.

"Your mother is coming to visit," I told Althea.

The three of them drew in a shocked breath.

"What?" said Sam.

"Why?" said Nikolai.

"When?" said Althea.

"In the morning," I told them. "We called her for info on Hannah's dad, but she knew something was weird about me."

"Of course she knew," said Althea, glaring at Tennyson. "How could you do something so stupid? Do you not want to be alpha? You were on thin ice with her as it was. You'd better not mess this up. You know I'm next in line, and I don't want it. And there's no way we're letting Cousin Henry become alpha."

I'd always thought of Althea as easygoing and friendly, but she'd turned to steel talking to Tennyson about this. It made me think she'd make an awesome alpha, but no way was I going to tell her that.

"Well, it's too late now," said Sam. "We're just going to have to be honest with her."

The others nodded.

"There'll be no fooling her if she's in the same room as you," Nikolai said, looking me over. "You're just not Tennyson. Anyone could tell that."

But I was feeling more and more like Tennyson all the time.

None of us slept that night. We sat up together, going over and over how we could break the truth to Tennyson's mother in a way that wouldn't end up with both Tennyson and me in dire trouble. None of the others mentioned what they thought would actually happen; they just cast worried glances at each other in a way that was more terrifying than if they'd told me outright.

Maybe there were werewolf police. Werewolf prison. Man, I was not cut out for the big house, especially not when I was all Tennyson Wilde and pretty.

Finally morning came, and with it came the sound of a helicopter getting closer and closer. I knew the school was in a secret location, but I wondered if that was different for the Golden. Most things were.

"You need to go greet her," said Tennyson. "I'll remain concealed until the appropriate time."

If I were him, I'd have figured the appropriate time was never and cut my losses. The island was big; you could hide out in that forest for years and nobody would find you. It seemed like a better option than what was in front of us.

I didn't want to go out into the frosty spring morning at all, let alone to meet a woman who would bring about my doom, but I didn't have much choice, so I let Althea forcibly drag me out to the clearing where the helicopter was circling to land.

The sense of doom only got stronger as the helicopter touched down, and with a shock I realized that I could remember other moments such as these, waiting for this woman with a sense of apprehension. How much longer would it be until I was completely lost to myself? It was almost funny that I was in trouble for not being Tennyson Wilde when I didn't feel as if I was Lucy anymore either.

Tennyson's mother approached us disdainfully and barely glanced at us as she swept past. She was tall and thin, with the same dark hair and pale skin as her children. Only she was so cold. I'd thought Tennyson Wilde was a cold guy, but he had nothing on his mother. She made him seem like a snuggle bear.

"We will talk inside," she said, heading toward the house.

We gathered in the living area nervously as she sat at the head of the table. She glanced around as if the room was contemptibly shabby, even though it was probably the fanciest room I'd ever been in.

"Explain," she said, her cold eyes seeming to draw out all my secret fears.

"Please understand, Mother —"

She raised a hand to cut me off. "You are not my son, so you will address me in an appropriate manner. You may call me Duchess."

I stared at her in disbelief, but she was clearly not joking.

"Who are you, and where is my son?"

I opened my mouth, but before I could try to explain, Tennyson Wilde stepped forward out of the corner of the room.

"I'm here, Mother."

She looked between the two of us for a moment and then nodded. At her nod, Tennyson approached the table and sat down.

"And is this the commoner you requested information about?"

Tennyson shook his head. "No. Hannah Morgan is the one who cast this spell on us."

"And you requested the information to try to coax her into reversing it?" The duchess shook her head. "Will you never cease with this irrationality? If you hope to become a leader, you must act decisively." She narrowed her eyes at me. "So, who is this, then?"

It really bothered me how she kept talking about me rather than to me.

"My name is Lucy O'Connor," I told her.

My answer did not please her. I didn't know whether that was because she hadn't been addressing me, or I hadn't used her title, or maybe she just didn't like my name. It didn't seem to take much to get her to make that sour-lemon face.

She pursed her lips as she watched me. I felt as if she were extracting all the darkest secrets of my soul.

"I see," she said, and abruptly got to her feet.

I wasn't sure what she could see, but it didn't seem like anything good.

"Am I correct in assuming this spell took place before the full moon?" she asked Tennyson, pacing the length of the table.

"Yes, Mother."

"It was Lucy O'Connor who completed the full transformation? Of course it was." She sighed and turned to face us.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised that it was the transformation she cared about, not the fact that I'd almost eaten Milo.

"If you cannot resolve this matter on your own before the end of term, I shall have to rethink your position within the pack," she told Tennyson. "The Morgan girl will also need to be dealt with. Consider this your final chance."

She swept out of the room without another word, leaving the rest of us sitting there stunned.

"We need to fix this," said Althea.

But there were only two weeks left until the end of term, and our last chance had just walked out the door.

Chapter 15

Each day that passed brought us one day closer to the deadline, and each day I felt a little bit less like myself. It was like dying in increments. Another full moon passed, which I spent locked inside the Golden House so that I couldn’t hurt anyone. The end of term got closer but a solution to our problems did not. I could hardly concentrate on studying for my exams, but I figured I was sitting them as Tennyson Wilde, so no matter how badly I did, I'd still pass. Tennyson Wilde seemed to be devoting his full attention to studying, which I appreciated, though it did seem as if he was doing it because he felt doomed to being stuck in my body forever. Well, maybe a bit to distract himself, too.

Although Tennyson and I had given up hope, Althea threw herself into finding a cure to the spell with renewed passion. She really did not want to be alpha. After meeting her mother, I could well understand that. Althea tried every single thing possible to break the curse. Any scrap of information, no matter how small, she tried, all the things we'd passed over as being too unlikely, too bogus. She collected hair and nails, and various bodily fluids, until Tennyson told her to stop so he could concentrate on studying. Then she practiced the counter-curses on Nikolai, though he was sure none of them would work without Althea being a witch herself.

At least he was trying to help. Unlike Sam. Sam had been making himself scarce. I could feel that he was really confused about what was happening, his feelings for me and Tennyson getting all mixed up, but that wasn't what was keeping him away. I knew that shifty-eyed look he kept wearing, and it meant that he was up to something.

I let myself be distracted by exam week, but the end of term hung over my head like a black cloud. I hardly slept. I hardly ate. I was tormented by bad dreams when I did finally sleep.

"You look like death," Nikolai told me on the Friday just before our final exam.

"What do you expect? There's only one week left until my life is over."

"Don't be so melodramatic. Every other time, it's all worked out okay. Surely you'll come up with some last-minute trick to fix everything."

But I wasn't myself, and Tennyson Wilde wasn't really me, either, so I didn't know who was going to come up with a plan.

After I finished my history exam, I found Sam waiting for me by the fountain. It was strange, seeing him there and not feeling the usual jump in my belly. Tennyson's feelings for him had completely taken over from my own, and I knew that when Sam looked at me, he was starting to see me more as Tennyson than Lucy as well.

"I think I have a way to fix everything," he said. "But you're going to hate me for it."

I couldn't imagine ever really hating Sam, no matter what he did, no matter who I was.

"Do it," I told him.

He gave me a half-smile. "It's already done. Take Tennyson to the bamboo forest tonight, right at dusk, to the statue of Professor Amaris."

I looked at him questioningly. "Haven't we done this already?"

He smiled, and I tried to will myself to feel something, but it was no good.

"You'll understand when you get there."

I could feel that he was too nervous to explain, that he really thought I'd hate him for whatever it was.

"It'll be fine," I told him. "No matter what happens, it'll be fine."

I tried to believe that, because I knew he'd sense it if I felt otherwise.

The afternoon seemed long and pointless. Exams were over. I didn't want to start doing anything that I'd have to leave unfinished if whatever Sam had planned was successful. Not that I really thought I would; it was just an excuse to be lethargic. I was too nervous to sleep or eat, too edgy to talk to anyone. I sat in the garden and watched the spring breeze ripple through the flowers.

Eventually Tennyson came and sat silently beside me. I was pleased for his company, and that more than anything made me aware of how wrong this whole situation was. Tennyson was the one person I couldn't stand above all others, and he was the only comfort to me now. As the shadows began to lengthen across the garden, we stood up as one and began to walk toward the bamboo garden.

As we walked, the strangest sensation came over us. My consciousness kept flickering between the two of us. Not just between our bodies, but from Tennyson to Lucy, with all our thoughts, memories, likes and dislikes, everything that made us who we were. It was nauseating. Hannah had said that we had one hundred days, which would end at the end of term, which meant we had another week, another full moon to get through, but it felt like the two of us were merging more and more every minute. Maybe she felt as if the end of exams was close enough, because I didn't see how this could go on much longer.

We stumbled our way through the bamboo forest, never sure from one footstep to the next which body we would be inhabiting. Finally, we made it to the statue.

We looked at each other, not sure what to do next.

"If this doesn't work, I'll take care of your brothers," he told me.

I nodded. "I'll become alpha and protect Althea from your mother. I'll keep the pack safe."

"Don't let me get fat," he said.

I rolled my eyes. "Try not to be a jerk to everyone."

He reached out for my hand, and I took it.

At the same time, we both sensed another presence in the forest and turned toward it. It was Hannah. She looked at us expectantly.

"You said we had one hundred days," I told her.

She shrugged. "From the beginning of the spell, not from when I said it," she said. "So, that makes it… today?" She looked all wide-eyed and innocent, but I knew now that it was just an act. "I assume you aren't returning my father to me."

"We tried," said Tennyson.

She waved her hand vaguely in the air. "And I tried to reverse the spell. Oh, oops, it didn't work." She narrowed her eyes at him. "If I don't have my father, you don't have yourselves. Another week wouldn't change anything, anyway. The spell may as well be completed now."

My heart clenched, and I started to panic. I didn't want to be Tennyson Wilde. I wanted to be Lucy. I wanted my own life, my own identity. We stared at each other, and I saw the same fear reflected in his eyes. I knew that part of my panic was his own and part of his was mine.

Hannah raised her hand, the swirling ball of blue light cupped within it. That light had brought me nothing but trouble, and I wanted to put it out for good, but I didn't know how.

"It's for the best," she told me. "You had nothing. You were nobody. Now there's nothing in this world you can't have. Really, I'm doing you a favor. You should be thanking me."

She pulled back her arm and pitched the light toward us like a baseball.

I clutched Tennyson's hand, screwing my eyes shut so I couldn't see the moment that the light hit us. I thought I would feel something. Maybe not pain, but something at least to signify the end of being Lucy.

But there was nothing.

After a moment, I cracked my eyes open.

There was someone standing in front of us, shielding us. He was holding the ball of blue light in his hand, and I knew that we were safe.

I recognized that back. It had shielded me from things my whole life, until it hadn't anymore. It was the last person in the world I had expected to see there.

It was my father.

Chapter 16

"Lucy, are you all right?" my father asked.

I felt more Lucy than I had in ages, so I figured he was speaking to me.

"What are you doing here?" It was literally the only thing I could think. Why was he here? Why now? Maybe also a little bit of, "Where have you been?"

Hannah was cowering behind the statue of Professor Amaris, looking shocked at this unexpected turn of events. And to be fair, it was pretty shocking.

"I can't reverse the spell completely, but I can pull it back a bit," he said, which wasn't an answer to my question. "Are you still yourself?"

I was still in Tennyson's body, so Hannah must not have been able to complete the spell, or I'd have felt completely one or the other.

"I'm myself enough to be super mad at you," I told him. Then something awful occurred to me. "Sam contacted you? He knew where you were? All this time?"

"That's not the issue at the moment," he said. "We need this girl to reverse the spell. I can slow it, but if it's not undone, it will continue to progress. I need you to focus and tell me how far the spell has advanced."

It seemed to me like it was totally the issue, and he was trying to weasel out of answering.

"Lucy!" my dad yelled.

"What?" I yelled back.

"She's getting away," said Tennyson. "Look, there she goes. Good job, both of you." He rolled his eyes. He was definitely feeling more himself.

He wasn't wrong though. Hannah had vanished into the bamboo forest, leaving the three of us standing there awkwardly. My dad turned toward me and Tennyson, did something with the blue light to make it dim and then tucked it into his jacket pocket, out of sight.

"Where will she go?" he asked.

"Are you kidding me?" I asked in return. "You show up out of nowhere for the first time in years, and that's all you have to say for yourself?"

I was furious at him. I wished that he hadn't shown up, even if that would have meant Hannah finishing the spell. I wanted to scream in his face. How dare he, after everything, after deserting us? It felt as if the feelings inside me were too big to contain, as if they'd just come bursting out.

Tennyson squeezed my hand, and I felt some of those feelings being leached away. He was taking them for me, sharing them.

"Lucy," my father said. "There's time for all that later. We have a job to do."

I shook my head at him and turned away. Nothing I said to him would make any difference. It was too late for that now. I walked away, leaving him there with Tennyson. Tennyson could answer any questions he had.

But after a moment, I realized that Tennyson was leaving with me. I supposed it kind of made sense; he shared my feelings, my memories, so he probably felt the same incontrollable rage when looking at my father, and he didn't want to be stuck alone with him in a bamboo forest.

Sam was waiting for us when we got to the house. Even without being able to sense his feelings, I could tell from his face the exact moment he realized his plan hadn't worked. I didn't want to speak to him either, but he caught me by the wrist.

"Don't," I told him, but he didn't let go.

"You have to let him help," Sam said. "He's here. What's the harm?"

I pulled my arm away from him. "All this time? You knew where he was all this time?"

"It's complicated, Lucy. He was trying to protect you."

"Get away from me," I spat as I turned away.

I saw him exchange a look with Tennyson. Tennyson shook his head, and Sam backed off.

Tennyson followed me up to his room and sat in silence as I paced around, getting madder and madder the more I thought about what had happened. Nothing, nothing my father said or did could justify how he'd abandoned us, leaving me to take care of the whole family after my mother got sick. And nothing could excuse Sam for knowing where he was and not telling me.

Over and over, every single person I trusted had betrayed me. Again, I felt as if my brain was going to explode. After a while, I tired myself out and flopped down on the bed.

"Do you want me to talk to him?" Tennyson asked. "I know you're angry, but it seems that he's the only one who can help us. I can speak with him so you don't have to."

I could see the logic in what he'd said, but I didn't want my father's help at all.

"You know it's the only way," he said. "I don't know who he is or what his abilities are, but he can help us out of this."

There was no way I was going to agree to that, but he could feel all my feelings, so he took my silence as agreement and left me there in the room alone. I felt stupid and weak, but I was grateful that Tennyson was there to deal with things for me.

Shortly after he left, Althea crept into the room.

"You don't need to talk about it, if you don't want to," she said, sitting in the comfy chair by the window. "But if you do, I'll listen."

I wasn't going to, but then the whole story just flooded out of me.

"He just wasn't there one day," I said, staring at the wall so I could pretend I was talking to myself. "I woke up and started getting ready for school, and he wasn't there. I thought maybe he'd come back, that maybe when I got home from school, he'd be there. Even after weeks, after months, I kept hoping." I'd been such a stupid kid. "My mother was sick. She'd been sick a few months, and we ran out of money so we couldn't afford the hospital bills. Dad had been taking care of her, feeding her and nursing her. She rarely got out of bed. She was too weak, and her mind wasn't right. She wasn't herself. I always just supposed he got sick of it."

That first winter had been so cold, I could almost feel it on my skin, smell the damp in the air. "My brothers weren't very old," I went on. "Hamish and Fletcher didn't really understand what was happening, but Liam did, and he tried to help as much as he could. We had no money coming in to buy food, so I got some work around the neighborhood. It wasn't much, not enough. That was when I started doing the computer repairs, and I started making enough to survive. Sam's parents helped us…"

I hadn't thought about it for years. I'd tried not to think of Sam's family, how they'd accepted my father’s leaving without a word. "She knew. She must've known," I whispered. "Sam's mother. She looked after us, cooked for us, but of course she knew."

I was so stupid. They'd all known. Sam and his family, my father. Tennyson's mother, too, probably. That was why she hadn't liked my name, because she'd heard it before. I was so stupid. I didn't know anything about my own family. I probably didn't even know anything about myself.

"You did an amazing job," Althea told me. "You got through that, and you'll get through this, too."

I appreciated that she didn't tell me I should forgive my father or let him help. She just smiled at me and didn't say anything else.

Before long, I fell asleep. It was the first proper sleep I'd had in weeks.

Chapter 17

When I woke up, I felt more like myself than I had since I'd actually been myself. I wasn't sure if it was because of whatever my father had done, or just from talking to Althea, but my head was clear and I felt an unemotional detachment from the whole situation. I knew that Tennyson had been right: we needed my father's help, and now that I was refreshed, I wanted some answers as well.

When I got downstairs, I found my father in the living area with the others. He was sitting at the head of the table, just as the duchess had been only days before. He was chatting quietly with Sam, and although I'd resolved to be calm and rational about it, I felt that unquenchable anger flare back up again.

I stood in the doorway until they looked up and noticed me. Sam flinched at the expression on my face, which gave me a mean little satisfaction.

"Where were you?" I asked my father, my tone cold. I hadn't intended to ask him. I'd wanted to be cold toward him, professional, but it was too much for me to hold in. "What was so important that you had to abandon us?"

"I know it's hard to understand, Lulu —"

I raised a hand to stop him. "Don't speak to me as if I were a child. I haven't been a child since the night you walked out." I narrowed my eyes at him. "What did you expect would happen? That I'd welcome you with open arms? As far as I'm concerned, you are not my father. You are the merely the means to get us out of a difficult situation. Once that's done, I want nothing further to do with you, but I think right now I deserve some sort of explanation."

I folded my arms across my chest and waited for his response.

He nodded. "How about we talk about it afterwards, once you're wearing your own face?"

I could tell he didn't want to have to explain himself in front of everyone, but I didn't care. "What, so you can fix this and then just vanish again? No, I think I want some answers now."

"Give him a break, Lucy. He's trying to help," said Sam.

I raised my eyebrows. "Don't speak to me. I don't want you to speak to me ever again."

Saying the words felt like a dagger of ice in my heart, but I couldn't just forgive him, not when he had betrayed me as well.

"Sam said that you've read my book?" my father asked. "Then you must have an idea of the type of work I was doing before I left home. It became apparent to me that both our family and the Spencers were in danger. Sam's mother elected to stay behind and protect you, while I was recruited…"

"By who?"

"It's an independent peace-keeping agency," he said. "We work mainly against the Others…" He looked around the table. "Do you know…"

Everyone nodded. I didn't know much, but I wanted more answers, so I motioned for him to go on.

"Why were we in danger?" I asked. "I can understand Sam's family. They have the gene, but we don't."

My father grimaced. "Your mother was bitten by a lycanthrope. That was the cause of her illness. That, among other things, made us a target."

"But the bite is a myth," said Althea.

"Yes, but it's more complicated than that, unfortunately. She was bitten, and she didn't possess the lycanthrope gene. Lycanthropy isn't transferrable by bite. However, it still functions in much the same way as an infection. It didn't transform her, but it did make her gravely ill. And it was like a beacon to those who were looking for our kind."

I held my breath. What was he trying to say? "What do you mean, our kind?" I asked him. "What am I?"

Sam had talked about it before, had hinted that he thought I wasn't 100% human, and Tennyson had said as much all along, but I'd thought they were just talking rubbish.

"Above all things, you are my daughter," my father said.

He was just stretching now, I knew. It was like those times when I'd asked him for ice cream and he didn't want to say no and look like the bad guy, but still he had no intention of cracking open the Ben & Jerry's. I rolled my eyes at him. It hadn't been cute then, and it definitely wasn't cute now.

"And what does that mean, exactly? To be your daughter?" I suspected what he was getting at, but I wanted to hear him say it. "I have the gene too. Like Sam. I have the lycanthropy gene."

My father shook his head. "No. Well, yes and no."

I motioned for him to keep talking.

"It could be the lycanthropy gene, if it's activated to be such. We call it the zero chromosome, the empty gene." He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Can't we talk about this later?"

I narrowed my eyes at him in answer.

"The empty gene lies dormant in almost everyone who possesses it, for their whole lives. They're completely human and don't even realize there's anything different about them. They'd need to get their entire genome sequenced to even know there was an anomaly. But if something happens to trigger that gene, then it takes on the characteristics of whatever triggered it. Like Sam — if he came into contact with werewolf DNA, he then would become a werewolf. Or like myself, triggered by a powerful warlock."

He stood up to signal that the conversation was over, and I was reminded of Tennyson's mother doing the same thing. They seemed so different on the surface: my dad with his dirty jeans and old t-shirt compared to the immaculate duchess, but when you came down to it, they weren't much different. They were both jerks.

"But none of that explains why you thought it was fine to leave a twelve-year-old girl to look after three small children and a sick woman."

My father shook his head. "You're willfully misunderstanding me, and that's enough for now. We need to find Hannah Morgan and deal with her."

"We've done a preliminary search," Nikolai said, speaking up now that the uncomfortable part of the conversation was over. "But she's not in any of the usual places. Nobody has left the island, so we know she's here somewhere."

"Lucy, you know her best. What do you think?" said Sam.

They all turned toward me. I wasn't really in the mood to be helpful, but I didn't have an alternative.

I sighed. "She's probably frightened, so she'll go somewhere comforting."

I couldn't imagine her doing anything but hiding out in our room, eating chocolate and watching Harry Potter, but I assumed they'd checked the room thoroughly. Unless…

I turned to Tennyson. "You remember when I was tiny and stuck in Astor's room? You couldn't see me at all through the silver barrier, could you?"

Tennyson shook his head.

"Is there anything like that for humans? To make someone undetectable?" I asked my father.

He thought about it for a moment and then slowly nodded. "If they're powerful enough, there are certain protections."

I indicated myself and the absolute Tennyson Wilde-ness of me. "I think she's powerful enough. I'll go find her."

"I'll come with you," my father and Sam said at the same time.

"No," I told them. "Not either of you."

"I'll go," said Althea. "And Tennyson. It won't look so strange if he's there."

I couldn't imagine that Hannah would actually be in our room, even with magic to make her seem like she wasn't. I entered the room on high alert and knew immediately that she was there, even if I couldn't see her. I looked around carefully, feeling nostalgic for the days when I could hang out in my own room. Hannah and I had shared some good times there, back before I knew she was evil.

If it hadn't been my own room, I'd never have noticed anything out of place, but everything seemed just slightly off-kilter.

"There," I said, pointing at a line on the floor that was only visible if you really stared at it.

"There's silver as well," said Althea. "I can feel it."

"I can pass silver," said Tennyson. "But I can't see what you're pointing at."

I hadn't tried to do it on purpose before. It was such an awful sensation, and I didn't even know it would work now that my father was holding the spell back, but I needed Tennyson to know what I knew. I pushed with my mind, pushed toward that line that blurred between us, until I felt the disconcerting sensation of becoming another person. I could only keep it up for a moment, and then I slid back into myself again.

Tennyson looked at me, horror-struck. "Don't do that without warning me."

I rolled my eyes. "Come on. She knows we're here."

He pushed forward, over the silver barrier. The entire world seemed to waver around him as he walked forward, and then suddenly we could see Hannah, sitting there, looking surprised. I needed to really concentrate to see her. If I let my attention lapse for even a moment, she vanished again. Wow, that kind of thing could be really useful for non-nefarious purposes, I thought. Why did she have to use her powers for evil and not for sneaking extra food portions?

"Leave me alone," she said, but Tennyson pulled her to her feet and dragged her over to us so that we could see her properly.

I snorted. "You're kidding, right? You keep messing with us, and you want us to leave you alone?"

"I can't reverse it now, anyway," she said. "That scary guy took my power." She pouted cutely, but that wouldn't work on me anymore.

"Put a sock in it and come with us," I told her, then took her by the other arm and helped Tennyson pull her out the door.

Now that her power had been taken from her, she wasn't half as scary. She was just a normal girl. She cried out for help as we dragged her down the hall, but people just turned away and shut their doors. Which, to be honest, was pretty horrific. I mean, we might've been taking her for any reason. We might have terrible plans for her. We could've been taking her to sell her into sex slavery, and not one person in that whole house stood up to us. I would definitely be writing a letter to the headmaster about that, once I'd been restored to my rightful body. Or maybe before, considering how people actually listened to Tennyson Wilde.

Once we'd left the house, the fight went out of her, and she let us lead her to the Golden House. I'm not sure what she thought we were going to do to her there, but it wasn't until we got to the front door and my father appeared that she began to struggle again.

"Not him," she said, trying to pull out of our grip. "Not the Enforcer. He'll kill me. I know what they're like."

"He won't kill you," I told her.

But from the look on his face, I could see why Hannah was afraid.

"He won't kill you," I said again. "I promise."

I hoped it was a promise that I could keep.

Chapter 18

My father had been busy while we were away. The living room was gone, and in its place was what looked like a medieval torture dungeon. There were pentagrams and big pointy iron things and other stuff that I didn't even want to imagine the purpose of.

He sat Hannah down in a massive chair in the middle of the room and strapped her in by the arms. Hannah was pale, and I thought maybe she'd pass out.

"What are you going to do to her?" I asked my father.

"I'm going to gather information and persuade her to end the spell," he said.

I wasn't sure I'd like his persuasion tactics.

"It would be better for you to leave," he said.

"Sorry. Leaving's what you're good at, not me," I said, then sat down in the corner. No matter what Hannah had done to me, I wasn't going to leave her alone in a torture chamber.

He started by questioning her. It seemed harmless enough, but she flinched at the sound of his voice. The five of us sat silently, watching, and I could feel that the others were nervous as well. All of us had something at stake here. Even though I was still angry with Sam, I was pleased to have them all here. I hadn't thought about it before, but this had really begun to feel like a pack to me. They'd talked about it before, but I hadn't understood, hadn't realized what a strong bond it was, what a feeling of rightness there was just from the five of us being together. If my father's tactics worked, it would be the thing that I missed the most, this belonging with the others.

After a while, when Hannah had refused to answer his questions, my father upped his game. He wound something around her wrists. At first I couldn't see what, but then I realized it was thin iron chains. Hannah gritted her teeth. I wasn't sure if the chains were painful for her, but she definitely didn't like them.

"Can I talk to you for a second?" I said to my father, nodding toward the door.

"I'm working, Lucy." He didn't take his eyes off Hannah for even a second.

"Well, take a break," I told him.

He followed me out of the room, obviously unhappy about it.

"I'm not comfortable with this," I told him.

"Which is why I suggested you not be here. Perhaps you and your friends should occupy yourselves with something else and leave me to do my job."

I sighed. "Is this what you do for a job? Torture young girls? This is the noble calling that you abandoned your family for?"

"I don't expect you to understand, but I do expect you to let me do what I'm here to do. I'm trying to help you, Lucy."

"I didn't ask for your help, and I don't want it." As far as I could tell, he'd only been questioning her. He hadn't even asked her to reverse the spell yet. "You're only here for your own selfish reasons. If you cared at all about me, you'd have acted like a father at some point in the past five years."

He shook his head and turned to go back in.

"You're not going to get her this way," I told him as he walked away. "I know her. This isn't going to work."

I followed him back into the room. Although he was my father, I didn't know him. That man I remembered was a lie. He had never really been that person, and I had no idea what he was capable of. He was a liar, a torturer. No way was I going to leave Hannah alone with him.

But apparently he had no intention of torturing her. He stopped in the middle of the room, in front of where Hannah was sitting, but when he spoke, it wasn't to her.

"What would you do with her?" he asked me. "How would you make her reverse the spell on you?"

I shrugged. "I'd find her father. That's the only reason she's doing any of this. She misses him."

He gave me a shrewd look, but I glared back at him. I was talking about Hannah, not me.

"You think it's that simple? That she has no darker motive?"

I shook my head. Even though Hannah had done bad things, she wasn't evil. Well, some of the fake Facebook updates she'd made were borderline, but nobody had died. She hadn't really hurt anyone, and she could've.

My father sighed. "I can force you to reverse the spell," he said to Hannah. "It will be painful for you and will damage your magic forever. This is your final chance to do the right thing on your own."

Hannah flinched away from his voice but didn't reply.

"Give us a minute, will you?" I told him.

He joined the others, who were still sitting in the corner. Nikolai was napping, or at least pretending. Althea and Tennyson were talking quietly. Sam watched me sadly.

"Hey," I said to Hannah, then started unwinding the iron chains from her arms. They gave off a faint sizzle, but her skin was unmarked underneath them. "Look, if anyone can find your dad, it's my dad."

She raised her eyebrows. "Are you seriously playing good cop/bad cop with me?" Her voice sounded faint and weak, but there was steel behind it. "You know what he is, don't you? He would never help me do anything, and I wouldn't want him to. And what are you? I knew there was something about you, Lucy O'Connor, something odd, but I never expected this." Her face twisted into a smirk. "Oh, well. It probably doesn't matter now, not if you're going to be Tennyson Wilde anyway."

I shook my head. "Don't do this," I told her. "You're only going to hurt yourself. Not me, not Tennyson. We were friends, don't you remember? We had fun together."

"It was just part of the plan," she said, but it sounded like a lie, and in that moment I knew I could win her over.

"It's just like when Ron wore the horcrux for too long," I told her. "Maybe he had valid reasons for feeling how he did, but he'd never have deserted Harry and Hermione if he'd been in his right mind, right?"

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Are you saying I'm Ron Weasley?" she said. "Because you're the one who's poor and redheaded."

I smiled at her, because if she was calling me Ron Weasley, then things were looking up. "It's our choices that show whether we're evil and should be left to the devices of my jerkface torture-happy dad," I said, finally remembering something Dumbledorey to say to her.

"That's not how it goes," she said, but I could tell by the look on her face that she was about to reverse the spell.

"Dad?" I called, not taking my eyes off Hannah as I motioned for him to bring over the ball of blue power.

He got to his feet, and Hannah lifted a hand. The ball crackled and spun in the air, gaining in speed and size as it moved toward Hannah.

But before it could reach her, the entire room was filled with a bright white light, and I could hear a noise — the same noise that had haunted my dreams for years. The sound of screaming, exactly as I had heard it coming from Sam's house the night he had vanished.

I wanted to move, to run — whether away from it, or toward it, to fight, to protect my people, I couldn't tell. But it didn't matter. I couldn't move. I had no form, no weight. Nothing existed inside that white light except for the screaming.

It seemed to last both an eternity and only an instant.

Then it was gone.

I was sprawled on the floor, and I immediately realized I wasn't in the same place as when the light had appeared. I was in the corner with the others. And I was back in my own body. It felt both right and strange.

I got to my feet and looked around, wanting to see Tennyson's face, just to be sure. He was staring at me with the same look of wonder, standing in the exact spot where I had been standing just a moment before. In front of Hannah's chair.

But the chair was now empty.

Hannah had been taken.

Chapter 19

"Where is she?" I yelled, rushing forward.

My father grabbed me by the arm and spun me to face him. "Lucy?" he said, staring deep into my eyes.

I didn't say anything, but he must have recognized something in my face that was full of Lucyness, because he pulled me into a strong bear hug, which I was fairly sure he wouldn't have done if he had thought I was still Tennyson Wilde. I was still angry at him; I'd probably never really forgive him, but he was my father, and something deep inside of me identified him as a symbol of refuge and safety. I was so terrified about what had just happened — residual fear left over from what had happened to Sam's family, and actual fear from someone breaking into our secure space, from them taking Hannah away — that I welcomed the relief of that safety, as false as it was. Just for a second, I let myself be fooled by the comfort of that hug. Then I pushed him away.

"Where is she?" I repeated, looking up into his face. "What happened?"

"It was the Others," said Sam.

His voice sounded remote, far away, as if he were speaking from all those years ago, when he had been taken. His face was ashen, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much he remembered from when the Others had him.

"We have to get her back," I said.

I had no idea what they would do with her, but from the look on Sam's face and everything I'd heard, it would be nothing good. I had no idea where to even start looking, but I knew we couldn't abandon her. We needed to move, to go now, before we lost all traces of her, all the evidence. I looked around, but there was no sign that the Others had even been there. Everything was as it had been, except for Hannah.

"No, we don't," said Tennyson. "She was a criminal. Time and time again she cursed us, tried to hurt us and get us to hurt others. Why should we risk innocent lives for her?"

"She was about to reverse the spell!" I yelled at him. "She was sorry! She just wanted her father back!"

I could understand that. I'd wanted my own father back, too, until I got him and I realized he was a jerk. Even after everything Hannah had done, we had to find her. If she was going to be punished, it should at least be fair.

"He's right, Lucy," said my father. "There's nothing we can do for her now. Once the Others decide to get involved, it's all over."

I couldn't accept that. "What about Sam? He escaped from them. There must be a way." I looked to Sam for support, but he still seemed miles away. "Tell them, Sam. Tell them we have to save her."

Sam looked at me vaguely, shaking his head. He would be no help to me at all. I looked to Althea, to Nikolai, but they both just seemed shocked.

"Let it go, Lucy," said my father. "She's as good as dead."

He was wrong. They were all wrong. They had to be. Sure, Hannah had made some bad judgment calls, but that didn't mean she deserved to be left to die. Everyone made mistakes; that didn't mean they should be abandoned. I pushed away from my father, from them all, and ran out. Out of the room, out of the house, away from them all. I heard someone calling after me, but I ignored them.

I stumbled as I ran, not yet adjusted to being back in my own body, to the frail humanity of it. I wasn't sure where I was running to until I got to the Red House. Of course. That was where I belonged, not at the Golden House. I was just a girl, a human girl with no money or super powers or anything remarkable. I couldn't rely on being Tennyson Wilde to get me through anything anymore.

I ran all the way to my room. I was sure Hannah would be there, waiting for me, laughing at how she had tricked us all. It wasn't impossible. She had gotten her power back, after all, so surely it would be nothing to pull a stunt like that. I didn't mind; I'd forgive her for it, for that and everything else, just so long as she would be sitting there waiting for me. We could put on our pajamas and watch some TV and eat snacks and talk about what a funny, silly time we'd all had.

But the room was dark and empty.

Hannah was gone, and she wasn't coming back.

I crossed the room and lay down on her bed, curling up in a little ball.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't find the Others on my own, and nobody would help me. I didn't know what they were, let alone where to start looking for them.

Milo had told me months ago, back when I'd first gotten to Amaris, that Tennyson Wilde could make people disappear. I hadn't believed him. I hadn't thought that anyone could really disappear, that they could vanish without a trace and nobody would question it. But I knew this wasn't Tennyson's fault. It wasn't really anyone's fault, probably. Maybe it wasn't even Hannah's fault. There was nothing to say that the Others had taken her because of what she'd done. Sam hadn't done anything wrong, and they'd taken him. It seemed like they just took anyone with powers who wasn't protected.

I shivered. I didn't have powers. I was human; my father had said as much. Even with this weird gene, as long as it wasn't triggered, I was just a normal girl. The Others didn't need me for anything. If only Hannah had been so lucky.

I don't know how long I lay there, pretending the whole world didn't exist and that everything was fine. Eventually, the door creaked open and someone came in. I thought it would be my dad, or maybe Sam, and I hoped it was because I could yell at them, blame them for everything that had happened, make myself feel better by making them feel bad. They deserved it.

But it wasn't either of them. It was Tennyson Wilde.

Neither of us spoke for the longest time. Maybe it was because I'd shared his body and his mind, but I couldn't summon up the same outrage at his very existence that I used to. I couldn't yell at him or blame him. He didn't deserve that from me. It felt strange for his presence to be a comfort, but it was nice for someone to be there, not expecting anything from me. When he didn't speak, he wasn't such a bad guy, I supposed.

He lay down on the bed opposite me, on my bed, though it didn't feel like mine so much anymore. He held out his hand to me, and I reached across until our fingertips touched. He couldn't share my feelings like he had when we were cursed. He couldn't take away my pain, but it didn't feel all that different.

"Your father has gone," he told me eventually. "He wanted to speak with you, but I told him to give you some time."

I nodded, surprised but pleased that he'd known exactly what I wanted.

"I suppose it's the wrong time tell you that I was right about you not being human."

He was trying to cheer me up by antagonizing me, and that more than his actual words made me smile.

"But you were wrong about me being to blame for any of it."

He shrugged and shuffled a little closer, so that he could link our fingers. "I can't be blamed for being unaware that someone existed with such terrible luck." He smiled at me. He looked like a completely different person when he smiled. "Things will be different for you now."

I nodded. "For us both."

We stared at each other in silence until we both fell asleep.

Chapter 20

The last week of school was strange. I was back in my old room, back in my own body, but it felt lonely not sharing either of those things with someone else.

I sat in English class, barely listening as Mr. Porter read aloud to us. It was something long and rhymey, and his reading voice was soothing, so I just let it wash over me.

Hardly anyone else had bothered to come to class. It was the last week, and exams were done. I knew that most of the Green House had already packed up and gone home, though I didn't know if that was part of their school package or if they just didn't care. I didn't mind either way. It was nice to have such empty classrooms and halls, nobody tripping me or throwing spitballs at me.

There was a vague feeling niggling at the edge of my consciousness. I didn't want to poke at it because I suspected what it was, but like a sore tooth, I couldn't leave it alone. It was Tennyson Wilde. I could sense him, just faintly. If I concentrated, I could pick up his emotions. Annoyance, mostly, and a little bit of relief. I knew that he'd spoken to his mother and that she was pleased with how the situation had been resolved, so he was probably relieved about that. I didn't know that from sensing it; Althea had told me. She seemed worried about me and kept popping up unexpectedly to check on me. I suspected that part of her just missed having another girl around, and I couldn't blame her, living with those jerks.

I'd hoped to avoid Sam until I left, but he was waiting for me after class.

"Don't run away again," he said, falling into stride with me as I walked across the courtyard. "I just want to talk."

I snorted. "Oh, now you want to talk? Seems like the time for that passed by months ago."

"Lucy, please." He made a movement as if to catch me by the arm, but thought better of it.

I couldn't resist him when he turned those big eyes on me, and he knew it. Even though I was still filled with righteous fury, my belly still gave the most pathetic flip-flop. I'd thought that feeling had evaporated with all the body-jumping, but traces of it were still there, though whether it was the dying embers or a lingering smolder, I couldn't tell. He was Sam, and no matter how angry I got with him, I'd always care about him, whether I was in love with him or not.

We sat down by the fountain, and for the longest time neither of us spoke. I hoped he'd move it along before dinnertime, at least.

"It was your father who saved me," he said eventually, his voice so quiet I had to strain to hear him. "He was there that night."

He'd been staring at his feet. Then his gaze flickered up to me, but I didn't say anything. It was my father's jerk move if he'd been at the house next door and hadn't bothered to pop in.

"He tried to stop the Others from taking me, but there was nothing he could do. They're so strong. He's the one who took me to the duchess, to live with the Wildes. He knew I'd be safe there. He's still looking for the rest of my family. He believes they're alive. That's how I knew how to contact him. He checks in with me to update me on his search. He made me promise not to tell you. He said you wouldn't believe me anyway, but then when you found out about us, I really wanted to. He said if you knew, you'd be in danger, that because of the zero gene, the Others would want you if they knew. And I couldn't let that happen." His voice broke a little, and I took him by the hand. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't lose you too."

I didn't know what to say to him. I had a thousand questions, but it wasn't the right time.

"I don't expect you to forgive me," he said. "I know I should've told you as much as I could."

I didn't tell him it was okay, or that I forgave him, because I didn't know if it was true. I understood his reasoning, but I couldn't trust him. The one thing I'd learned over the entire school year was that the more you trusted someone, the more it hurt when they betrayed you. And everyone, eventually, would betray you. I'd learned that from Mr. Porter, from Hannah, from Sam and my father.

I had to be more careful in the future, to protect myself and not give anyone the chance to betray me again. I'd been such a stupid little girl when I'd arrived at Amaris, my head clouded up with dreams of what my life would be like, of what a golden future I'd have there, but it hadn't been like that at all. The future was dark and full of monsters, and I had to learn how to fight against them.

I left Sam sitting there by the fountain. The sun was setting behind him, reflecting off the water of the fountain so that he was almost lost in the red and gold glow of it.

I turned away from him and headed back toward the path.

End of Book 3

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.

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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 Carol Davis, thank you for your amazing work.

Covers 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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