The Tiny Curse

Werewolf High #2

Anita Oh

Contents

Copyright

Werewolf High series

Book 2: The Tiny Curse

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 #2: The Tiny Curse

© 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 dogs

Except Hamish, you jerk

Stop eating my socks

Chapter 1

Sometimes in this world, it’s the smallest things that cause the biggest problems, and you can’t even figure out why. That’s how things were at Amaris High for sure. Nothing followed any sort of logic that I could figure out.

I stood at a crossroads where the Red Garden met the Green. The path was totally blocked by rival factions of angry rich kids. It was an indirect, out-of-the-way path up to the school from the Red House, but the garden that the usual path cut through had been closed off back in the fall due to a freak accident that was absolutely no fault of my own, and it was taking forever for it to be reopened. The students from the Green House were not happy about sharing a path with lesser beings and had decided to put a stop to it. It had progressed into a class war to rival the French Revolution, and judging by the look on Stephanie Von Thingie’s face, if Britt Pendlebury took one step onto the Green House path, heads would roll.

The crowds grew around the two virtually identical blonde girls. In the freezing February morning, it was impossible to even tell which garden was red and which was green, but every person there knew which side they stood on.

The school bell rang and yet nobody crossed the path. I sighed. I didn’t care about morning assembly, but breakfast was definitely over. I kind of wanted to see what happened, how this would play out, but my level of interest wasn’t high enough to miss out on food. Unless their conflict resolution method was to break-dance fight. That might be worth it.

“We could cut back through the forest,” my friend Hannah whispered to me.

I shook my head. That would take us into the woods behind the Golden House, and that was the place I wanted to avoid more than anything. Or, more to the point, the place that would bring me uncomfortably close to the two people I wanted to avoid more than anything, Sam Spencer and Tennyson Wilde. Even if this rich kid standoff turned into a fight to the death, that would still be more fun than running into either of them. Pair of jerks. My heart twinged at the thought, but I resolutely ignored it.

The tension rose between the two groups. Their glares became fiercer and their shoulders more tense. It wasn’t really much of a spectator thing, to be honest. Mostly, it was cold and boring. I wondered how long this would go on, if I could go back to my warm, snuggly bed without being missed from class. Stephanie shuffled forward and Britt made a move as if she was about to step onto the forbidden path, when muttering broke out and both sides backed right down.

I looked around, wondering what was going on, if there was some sort of signal I’d missed. Sometimes these rich kids reacted to things in unexpected ways, took cues from things that didn’t seem to have any meaning, and even after months of being at Amaris, I wasn’t sure I’d ever fully catch on.

Then I realized why the crowd was parting. It was definitely something I’d never understand. The Golden sauntered down the path as if it were a red carpet, as if they knew and expected that all eyes would be drawn to them.

And they were.

Nikolai Volkov winked at me as I moved off the path out of his way. I wrinkled my nose up at him. He thought he was so cool with his sharp cheekbones and slicked-back blond hair. We were in Cooking & Crafts club together and for some reason he thought that made me one of his staff, and whenever we were in the same proximity he issued a bunch of orders at me. Not today, though. Today, he was on a mission.

Sam Spencer didn’t even look at me as he passed me. That’s how things were with us now. My eyes lingered on his back, his broad shoulders and the curl of his chocolate-brown hair against the nape of his neck, but he gave no sign that he’d ever known me, that we’d been closer than family. I couldn’t breathe. Just looking at him evaporated the air right out of my lungs. He was something else now, something other than my Sam, and I didn’t really know what that was. Since he’d started coming to class around a month ago, people couldn’t get enough of him. They whispered about him and tried to catch his attention — there were already even blogs about him — but he didn’t even seem to notice. Just like he didn’t notice me.

The Wilde twins were last, Althea and Tennyson, pale and otherworldly in the light of the winter morning. Althea caught my eye and gave me a small smile, but Tennyson swept past me in the same way a king would pass by an ant.

It was strange to see them out so early. Normally none of the Golden came to morning classes. I supposed they’d probably noticed the tension with their werewolf senses, but normally they didn’t bother themselves with commoner problems.

“Is there some sort of problem?” Tennyson Wilde said, folding his arms and coming to a stop opposite Stephanie.

Stephanie shook her head, her jaw dropping and her eyes locked on the ground.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “If there’s no problem, then why are you inconveniencing all these people?”

Stephanie opened her mouth, but no words came out. I didn’t get it. I thought she was stupid and had no good reason to block the path other than being an entitled brat, but even so, no way would I let Tennyson Wilde talk down to me in front of the whole school. She should stand her ground. But then, if she had the gumption to do that, she probably wouldn’t have a problem with the not-quite-as-rich kids using the same path as her. It was all part of her screwed-up social hierarchy. At least she was consistent, I supposed.

“Move along,” Tennyson Wilde commanded, looking around at the divided groups on either side of the path. Everyone stared down at the ground, as if afraid to look him in the eye. “The construction on the gardens will be complete before the end of the week. As the new gardens are a donation from my family, please contact our legal staff if you have any further issues, rather than causing a scene.”

He swept off down the path toward the school with no further comment, the other three following without looking back. The Red and Green students glared at each other as they fell in line. Just as everyone began to move up to the school, Tennyson Wilde stopped in his path, spun on his heel and pointed directly at me. The student body held its breath as one entity.

“You!” he said, fixing the entire force of his being on me. “Meet me after class. We have unfinished business.”

As far as I was concerned, I had zero business with Tennyson Wilde, unfinished or otherwise, so I ignored him and his bossypants ways. The rest of the school, however, seemed intrigued. As everyone moved off to what was left of morning assembly, they didn’t even try to disguise that they were talking about me, discussing what Tennyson would want with me.

A pair of girls I’d never spoken to before blocked my way into class. I vaguely knew them by sight from that time I’d surveyed the entire school on illegal magical activity. They were from the Green House. Olivia Hearst and Charlotte Du Pont, I thought. Olivia was tall and skeletally thin with drab brown hair and an air of confidence. Charlotte was a generic sort of pretty, which seemed due to an expert application of makeup.

“What’s your business with Tennyson Wilde?” Olivia asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“None of yours,” I said and pushed past her, but Charlotte put out an arm to stop my way.

“Wrong,” she said. “You’re new, so maybe you don’t understand how things work here. Let me help you out.” She took me by the arm, her fingernails digging into my flesh like talons as she guided me toward my seat. “People like Tennyson Wilde, they’re public domain. Everyone owns a piece of them, everyone is invested in them. At this point, nobody owns a controlling interest, but when that time comes, it won’t be somebody like you. People like you cannot even afford a starting share. People like you shouldn’t even be here. They should be out working in the cornfields and minding their own business.”

“Cornfields?” I asked as she let go of my arm and pushed me into my seat.

“I think you get my point,” she said, staring down at me, her face covered in shadow like a comic book villain.

I opened my mouth to tell her that if her point was that she was a grade-A butthole, then I got it loud and clear, but Hannah poked me in the shoulder from her seat behind me, and I was saved from answering by the bell ringing. Charlotte gave me a haughty look and went to her seat.

“You don’t want to mess with those girls,” Hannah told me later, as we made our way to lunch. “They take themselves very seriously.”

“No kidding,” I said, though mostly I’d already forgotten them. I had better things to think about than bossy rich kids. Like the lunch menu.

“Their aim is to marry Golden and they don’t let anything stand in their way,” Hannah said, looking around for a free table.

“I kind of got that from their whole stock market analogy thing,” I said, pointing over to a spot in the far corner. “Have they discussed their plans with Tennyson Wilde? Because I’m fairly sure his reaction to being thought of as a commodity would be hilarious. We could film it. It would go viral in seconds.”

Hannah gave me a strange look as we sat down. “What did he want with you, anyway? I thought you’d sorted out your problems with him.”

I shrugged and opened up the app on my tablet to flick through the lunch menu. “The workings of his mind are so far beyond my understanding that I couldn’t hope to know what he’d want from me.”

It was only a teeny tiny lie. It wasn’t that I didn’t know. It was that I didn’t want to know. There were only two possible things that Tennyson Wilde would want to talk about with me: magic or werewolves. He was still suspicious of me after everything that had happened back in the fall, even though I’d clearly had nothing to do with it. No matter what I said or did to prove my innocence, he still treated me as if I was some sort of dark mage or something. It wasn’t as if we met up every Sunday for tea and cakes to chat about it, but every so often I caught him glowering at me out of the shadows.

And if he wanted to talk about werewolves, that was a whole other problem. I’d tried to keep as far away from all of that as I could — any time I’d had anything to do with werewolves, they’d tried to use me as a chew toy. I knew Sam was having problems with it. That was why he hadn’t been around, why we were like strangers now when once we’d been closer than anyone. If Tennyson Wilde wanted to talk to me about werewolves, that meant Sam. And things would have to be pretty bad to ask for my help. But Sam had seemed fine that morning. He’d been going to classes regularly all month, and the only problem I’d seen him have with it was his new legions of fans.

“Let me know if you need backup when you go to see him,” Hannah told me, giving me a bracing smile.

“I have no intention of seeing him,” I said. “But thanks.”

The rest of the school was not nearly as easy to convince, though. It was the most attention I’d received since I got to Amaris. The people who weren’t outright hostile were overly friendly, in that creepy fake way that creepy fake people somehow think is convincing. By the end of the day, I was over it and snuck out of class before the bell to get a head start on the morbidly curious crowd.

Instead of taking the path down toward the Green House, I crossed the school lawn as quickly as I could and vanished into the forest. The forest was big and wild and took up most of the island. There was so much of it I hadn’t explored, so I was always careful not to stray too far, but the paths closest to the school were becoming familiar to me. I knew night would fall early and there were monsters out there, so I hurried my way along until I broke out of the trees and onto a cliff top, to where the lighthouse rose up before me.

It felt so good to be away from the school, to be in a secret place where nobody knew to find me, that I sprinted my way up the stairs to the top of the lighthouse and burst into the little room there.

“I expected you an hour ago.”

The table was spread with all sorts of delicious little treats, cakes and pastries and little cheesy wonder things.

“You were in France?” I asked, taking a seat at the table and looking over the display of goodies.

Althea Wilde shrugged and placed a protective cover over the food. “Family business,” she explained. I didn’t ask if she meant actual business or werewolf business or what; I was too busy trying to lift up a corner of the food cover to sneak a pastry. “Sorry I couldn’t meet up last week.”

I shrugged. I found it odd that she wanted to meet up at all, though I liked Althea and I really liked the treats she supplied at our weekly get-togethers. I couldn’t see what she was getting out of it at all, unless maybe she was doing some sort of social experiment, but as long as the tasty food kept coming, I was in.

“Cakes later,” she said, throwing a punch at my head and making me fall out of the chair. “Training first.”

Althea was teaching me to fight, to defend myself. She said that even if I didn’t want to be involved in their world, I was close enough to it to be in danger and I had to know to how to protect myself, so she was bribing me with delicious foods to learn. We trained for an hour and then I collapsed back into my chair. Althea removed the cover and I piled my plate high with treats.

“You know my brother wants to talk to you.”

I nearly choked on my cheesy puff thing. The entire time we’d been hanging out, not once had either of us brought up her brother or Sam. Occasionally we talked about Nikolai, in a general sort of way, but things never got personal.

“You’re his messenger now?” I brushed the pastry crumbs from my fingertips. I really didn’t want to leave in a flurry of righteous indignation, not when there were so many delicious treats to sample, but if she’d just been luring me in all this time to do his dirty work, that put me in a real pickle.

She shook her head. “Nothing like that. I’ll never get between the two of you. I just wondered if you’d caught up with him already.”

I really wanted to try the little guys who looked like deep-fried mini sausages, but I hesitated. I needed to know what I’d be trading for them.

“I didn’t really intend to catch up with him.”

“You haven’t noticed anything strange lately, then?”

I narrowed my eyes at her. What was she up to?

“No stranger than usual,” I said. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Nothing concrete, just… the air tastes different. More metallic.”

I picked up a mini sausage and bit into it. It wasn’t the sausages’ fault if people had hidden agendas; I couldn’t let them suffer for it.

“You think someone’s doing magic?”

“I think Tennyson is worried,” she said. “You should talk to him.” She smiled and passed me a plate of cakes. “How did it go with the history quiz?”

With the subject change, we fell back into our usual routine, but her words kept repeating in the back of my mind. I didn’t want to talk to Tennyson Wilde, but I didn’t want some magic spell sprung on me unawares either. Why couldn’t that guy just send a message like a normal person?

Chapter 2

It wasn’t as if I had much choice about talking to Tennyson Wilde anyway. He was waiting for me when I left the dining hall after dinner the next day, looking like the personification of winter as he lingered in the shadows. His black hair was stark against the crisp white marble of the fountain, and his navy-blue peacoat perfectly matched his eyes. Everything about him looked cold and untouchable.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, breezing past him. “You should be more careful. If your fan club see you here, your stocks might plummet.” I really wanted to tell him about the “Tennyson Wilde is public domain” girls, just to see his face, but it wasn’t worth the bother of having a conversation with him.

“You might have the others fooled, but I see you for what you are,” he said, falling in step with me.

“And what is that?” I tried to outpace him, but his legs were too long and he kept up with me easily.

“Trouble.” He caught me by the arm and pulled me to a stop. “The orb of light — it is acting strangely. With purpose. The energy within it seems to be rebelling, trying to break free.”

I pulled my arm away from him. “And this is my problem why, exactly? I have nothing to do with any of this, which you’ve made more than clear, so I don’t understand why you’d come to me about this. Don’t you have a team of experts standing by to solve your every problem?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You are involved in this.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever, buddy. I told you before, I am done with trying to convince you I’ve done nothing wrong.”

I turned to walk away, but he caught me by the wrist and pulled me close.

“You may not have cast that spell,” he said, his voice a quiet growl in my ear, “but that doesn’t mean you have nothing to do with what is happening here. It’s not a coincidence that this started when you came into our lives.”

He dropped my arm and moved away from me, vanishing before I could even react. When I looked around, a small crowd had gathered, watching the exchange. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how it had looked to them, from their whispers and gestures. A few people had their phones out taking photos and Olivia Hearst and Charlotte Du Pont were watching with looks of horror on their faces. Olivia drew a finger across her throat as if to say I was dead meat. Like Tennyson Wilde was such a sweet prize. Losers.

I had better things to do than to worry about them, anyway. My family called me every week at exactly 7 p.m. and I didn’t want to be late. I’d talk to them every day if I could. It was nice to have the reminder that there were actually real, normal people in the world who weren’t super rich or supernatural. Hannah wasn’t in my room when I got back — she’d gone to study in the library with Fatima and Milo after dinner, which was good, because it always felt a little weird having someone listen in when you were talking to your family, I thought. Like they were seeing you naked or something.

“Hey hey hey,” said the oldest of my brothers, Liam, when I started up my computer and the call came through. He waggled his eyebrows in a way that made him seem extra goofy.

“Hey hey what?” I asked. “Why are you being weird?”

My other two brothers, Fletcher and Hamish, made kissy faces in the background, then the message window pinged with a link.

“It’s all over the Internet,” Liam said, as I clicked on the link. “How come you didn’t tell us you’d landed yourself a hot, rich boyfriend?”

The page loaded to show a series of photos of Tennyson Wilde talking to me earlier, only from the angle of the photos it looked less like a vaguely threatening conversation and more like a loving embrace.

“No,” I said. “No no no no no no, this is not okay.” I scrolled through the page, looking frantically for some sort of “click here to report this post as a dirty awful bunch of lies” link. It had only been like five minutes ago. How had it spread so quickly?

“We googled him and the Internet said he was the richest ninth grader on the planet,” said Fletcher. “Do you think he’d buy me a bike? I don’t mind if he dates you if he buys me a bike.”

My eight-year-old brother would pimp me out for a bicycle? Kids these days, seriously. At least ask for a PS4.

“I am not — nor will I ever be — dating Tennyson Wilde. If you want a bike, you’re going to have to save up and buy one like a normal person.”

Fletcher pouted at me and I felt a momentary twinge of guilt. Not at the fact that I wasn’t dating Tennyson Wilde, because ew ew a world of ew, but there was that one time he had offered me a briefcase of money but I hadn’t been able to fulfil my side of the bargain. I wondered if that offer was still on the table. It was my dream to one day have a briefcase full of money, and maybe if I found out who was controlling that orb of magic, I could negotiate with Tennyson Wilde about it.

“Enough about that jerk,” I said, smoothly changing the conversation, “tell me about the science fair.”

The three of them starting talking at once, yelling over the top of each other to explain how Fletcher had been robbed of first prize due to unfair adjudication, and I hid my smile as I sat back and listened, pleased to have distracted them.

Still, it was worrisome, for reasons other than the obvious. I hadn’t told them that Sam was alive, and now that his popularity was skyrocketing as the newest Golden boy, his face was getting more and more well known. If my brothers were poking around on gossip sites or whatever, it wouldn’t be long before they saw something they couldn’t explain. I should tell them before that happened, but I couldn’t explain it either. Nobody really knew what had happened to Sam, only that he’d suddenly developed werewolf powers and he couldn’t control them. That wasn’t something you could explain over Skype, so I said nothing.

It was late by the time my brothers finished telling me about the woeful betrayal of justice at the Greenville Elementary science fair. Hannah had returned from dinner and started getting ready for bed, and I hadn’t even looked at my homework. Still, I felt so much better after talking to them. Even though they were jerks who would pimp me for a bicycle.

Once I finally signed off from them, Hannah set aside her homework and turned to me. She had her hair up in two pigtails on either side of her head that made her look cute like a bunny. The expression on her face was not bunny-like, though. Unless it was a bunny who was trapped by a fox and about to get eaten.

“Those photos are everywhere,” she said. Her nose twitched.

I shrugged. “It’s not what it looked like.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, shifting forward on the bed. “Olivia and Charlotte, all the girls like them, they’re not going to just let this go. You need to be careful, Lucy. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by careful. It wasn’t as if I ever went out of my way to get into troublesome situations, but I promised her. But as I got ready for bed, I started getting madder and madder about it. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Why should I have to modify my behavior at all, just because other people were jerks? I mean, I’m not a dummy, I know that’s just how the world works, but still, it sucks.

And it wasn’t as if Hannah was wrong. I’d thought things had gotten bad after Tennyson Wilde had said I was annoying on his blog, but apparently it was even worse for him not to hate you. Well, any sort of acknowledgment from him was clearly a bad thing. By the time I got to class the next morning, my arms were bruised from people slamming into me in the halls, someone had stabbed me in the leg with a pen, and I was fairly sure there was a chunk missing from the back of my hair.

I got to history class to find someone sitting in my seat. This big meathead guy, Astor. He was the kind of guy who thought it was witty to be a dumbass. He was on the polo team and all buff and stuff, so a bunch of girls thought he was tops, but he had little piggy eyes and a fat neck and I thought he was the worst sort of person in the world. The type of person who thought he could get away with anything just because he had money.

“You’re in my seat,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and made a big show of looking around the desk, then turned in his seat and looked over the back of it.

“I don’t see your name on it,” he said, giving me a smug smile.

I rolled my eyes. “Could you even read it if it was?”

He dropped the smile. “Look, girlie, I know you think you’re special because you’re banging old T-son or whatever but don’t think that gets you any special treatment with me.”

I snorted and then I choked on my snort. T-son? Was that actually a thing?

“Just sit somewhere else,” he said, his smirk returning. He had cystic acne scars around his pig eyes.

I looked around and every single seat in the room was taken. There weren’t usually that many students in the class, I was fairly sure some of the people weren’t even freshmen. I felt like such an idiot standing there, in the middle of the classroom. Nobody actually looked at me, but I could feel the weight of their attention on me, mocking me.

“Take your seat, Miss O’Connor, class is starting,” our history teacher said, glaring at me from behind his desk.

“There are no seats,” I said, waving my hand around to illustrate my point. Surely he realized that half these people weren’t even in the class.

“Then I suggest you find one.”

A few people snickered and Astor outright grinned at me. I stood for a moment, frozen with indecision. I could walk out, but what then? I’d only be hurting myself, getting behind in class and needing to catch up in my own time. I could punch Astor right in his smug, smirking face, but that would only result in detention, probably. Plus, I doubt I’d even bruise his thick head. He was too solid for me to push off his chair, so when the teacher turned to start the lesson, I swept Astor’s books off his desk and onto the floor. He rolled his eyes and bent down to pick them up, and I grabbed the leg of the chair and tipped it so he overbalanced and went sprawling onto his face. Before he could recover, I slipped into the chair and put my bag on the desk.

Astor got to his feet and turned to face me. His face was twisted into an ugly expression.

“You’ll pay for this, bitch.”

I blinked at him, stunned. I’d expected him to retaliate, but still, the full force of his hostility was a shock.

Without a word, everyone who wasn’t actually in the class stood up and left and Astor took one of their seats. By the time the teacher turned around, there were only half the people left in the room. He didn’t seem surprised, which made me wonder how much of the bullying he was aware of. Wow, you really could not trust anyone in this world.

The day got no better from there. People shunned me in classes, even the teachers. Groups of girls stared at me, always watching, and when I noticed them staring, they’d burst into laughter. When I tried to go to the bathroom, the door wouldn’t open and I was only saved from catastrophe by sneaking into the boys’. People tripped me and pulled my hair but when I turned around to see, they were already gone. I wanted to fight against them but how could I if I couldn’t even see them?

I tried not to let it get to me. I mean, it wasn’t as if I cared what this bunch of jerks thought. Still, it was an awful feeling. By lunchtime, my heart was heavy and my head full of dark thoughts. I picked up a bit when I saw Hannah waiting for me at our usual table. She sat with Milo and Fatima, who both looked up when Hannah waved me over. Milo said something angrily to her, then got up and stormed off. I’d half-expected it. When Tennyson Wilde had first expressed his dislike of me, Milo hadn’t made any secret of not wanting me around. I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed. Milo was funny and interesting, and I thought we’d started to become friends. Apparently, that was done.

I hesitated before sitting down.

“Don’t mind Milo,” said Hannah. “He’s just being stupid.”

“Is he, though?” asked Fatima, not looking up from her biology notes. “Milo isn’t the one getting bullied in the hallways, making a scene in class, picking fights with people.” She glanced up at me and started gathering her things. “You’re not exactly trying to make things better for yourself, are you?” She gave a little shrug and stood up. “No offense, Lucy. I don’t have anything against you personally. I just don’t want to be seen with you while you’re making yourself into a target.”

I felt as if I’d been sucker-punched as I watched her go. Fatima had always said exactly what she thought, so it wasn’t as if she was saying those things to be mean. She genuinely thought I’d brought trouble on myself. It was basically what Tennyson Wilde had said as well.

“I won’t be offended if you don’t want to be seen with me either,” I said to Hannah. It was a lie, I’d be super offended, but I didn’t want her to feel obligated.

She was still eating, so I stood up to leave. I could get something to go.

She shook her head and smiled up at me.

“Don’t be a dummy,” she said. “I don’t care about any of that. Sit down and eat your lunch.”

I blinked down at my plate as I pressed the button and my lunch appeared. It wasn’t that I was crying, I was just so grateful to have someone on my side. I’d never had a friend like Hannah before and I didn’t know what I’d do without her.

Chapter 3

Having Hannah as my friend was the only thing that kept me sane over the next few days. Although I tried to keep my distance from her, she wouldn’t have a bit of it, sticking by my side in the halls and at meals and in class, no matter what people threw at me. Literally threw.

I was heading back from lunch, taking my time getting to class as I wandered down the path, watching that pasty kid Llewellyn from history class as he played with his beagle down on the lawn. It was kind of hypnotic, the way the dog would chase the ball, bring back the ball, chase the ball, bring back the ball. It would be so awesome to be a dog. Life would be simple and people would give you treats just for looking cute. Hannah was stressing over the results from our biology quiz because she hadn’t done as well as she’d have liked, when we were ambushed.

“Hannah, run!” I told her, as a bunch of people jumped out of the bushes, armed with water balloons.

They were all wearing hoodies, so their faces were covered, but it didn’t take a crack detective to figure out who they were. The first one launched their balloon at me and it exploded against my shoulder as I turned away from it. Ew, that was not water in that balloon, it smelled like some sort of swamp muck. Hannah managed to get herself off the path, out of harm’s way, as the others opened fire. I ran. We were close to the tennis courts, so I headed for the locker rooms there, hoping to barricade myself in. I didn’t need to worry. As soon as they ran out of projectiles, they lost interest and didn’t bother to follow me.

They didn’t need to. I was totally covered in mucky muck. Hannah wrinkled her nose at the smell and bolted the locker room doors as I changed into my stinky gym clothes that I’d luckily had in my bag. Man, that sludge was not going to wash out of my uniform. I ran some hot water in the sink and pumped a bunch of soap in to make it nice and sudsy. If I let that stuff set, I’d have no chance.

“Nobody would blame you if you took a few days off,” Hannah said, sitting on the bench behind me while I scrubbed at my ruined blazer. “It might be better if people didn’t see you for a while. It might blow over.”

“And in the meantime, I get behind in classes and they have a few days to cook up even worse torture methods.” I shook my head. “No. I don’t care how bad it gets, I am not giving in.”

In the mirror, I could see Hannah smile. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “How do you get out of bed every day, knowing this is what’s ahead of you? I think you’re really brave.”

I shrugged and stared down at the soap suds in the sink. It wasn’t a matter of being brave. What choice did I have? Even if I’d maybe secretly been looking up the price for flights home late at night when all I wanted was to see my family and sleep in my own bed and have a normal life. I would have to get from the school to the airport, and the island where we were was in an undisclosed location. I was basically stuck there until the end of term. I could hide in my room, but what good would that do? I’d have to come out sometime and it would be even worse when I did. They’d know they’d beaten me and that they could do whatever they liked and I had no defense. It was awful and no fun, but it was the only thing I could do.

My blazer was ruined, though. I’d send it out to a cleaning service but they’d have to be some sort of magical miracle cleaning service to get that smell out. The rest was probably salvageable but it needed a proper wash. I’d have to take at least the rest of the day off. School rules were very clear about what could and could not be worn to class, and stinky gym clothes were a no-go.

“You should go to class,” I told Hannah. “Don’t be late on my account. I’ll fix this up and head back. See you tonight?”

She looked concerned but after some prodding left as the late bell rang. It was kind of nice to be alone for a while. Even though Hannah meant well and had been so great, I could drop my brave face and just wallow in my own misery. Just for five minutes.

I sat down on the bench, my crumpled, sodden blazer in my hands. The sludgy stuff was in my hair as well; I could feel it sticking to my neck. The smell seemed to have sunk into my skin.

It was fine, I told myself. I only had English after lunch and I was well ahead in that anyway. I’d spend the afternoon getting ahead in my other subjects and then I’d take first in everything and win all the academic prizes at the end of the year and they could all suck it. The whole reason I’d accepted the spot at Amaris was so that I could get a jumpstart in life. If I did well, I’d get into a good college. Most of these losers would just go straight on to Amaris University without thinking about it, but that didn’t mean I had to. I could get a scholarship and go to a proper school, somewhere closer to home. That was the point of all of this.

Still, four years was a whole lifetime. It was like fourteen hundred days. Maybe a bit less. I was almost halfway through freshman year. I’d made it that far. But it was a long time. Four years ago, I’d been living a completely different life. I wasn’t even the same person that I’d been then. I couldn’t imagine myself four years in the future.

I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, trying to make everything seem less horrible, trying to cheer myself up. It was longer than five minutes.

“Of course, you’re hiding,” a voice said out of the shadows.

I jumped up and spun around, sludge from my hair splattering all across my face.

Tennyson Wilde. Of course.

“What are you even talking about?” I asked, taking my blazer back over to the sink and wringing the water out so that it was dry enough to stuff back into my bag. “And why are you in the girls’ locker room? You know there are rules about that sort of thing. Probably laws, even?”

“Don’t speak as if you are governed by rules or laws. I know that you do as you please.”

I twisted the thick fabric so hard in my hands that it chafed my skin. “Either say what you came here to say or leave,” I told him. “I’m not in the mood for your waffle.”

Waffles on the other hand, I was definitely in the mood for. I wondered if I could sneak into the dining hall while everyone else was in class. That seemed like the kind of thing that was frowned upon, but still. Waffles.

“The orb.”

I looked up at his reflection in the mirror and shivered. His eyes glowed out of the shadows with an otherworldly shine, intense and terrifying. He was definitely not playing.

“What about it?” I asked. “I know you think I have superpowers, but I can’t actually read minds.”

“It’s gone.”

I dropped my blazer and turned to face him. “What do you mean, gone?”

“This isn’t a game,” he said, his voice no longer human. I had never seen Tennyson Wilde change into a wolf, and I realized now that was a good thing because it would be way too scary.

He stepped out of the shadows, toward me. He moved like molten gold, like he was not governed by the same laws of physics as the rest of the world. I backed away, only stopping when the backs of my thighs hit the cold porcelain of the sink.

“Where is the orb?” he said, his voice still that subhuman growl.

He got right up in my space, standing over me, and that was it. I was so done with people trying to push me around. I didn’t care that he was half-wolf and could eat my face off. Let him try. It was covered in sludge and would taste foul, so the joke would be on him anyway.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My voice came out as a tiny squeak but I had to work with what I had. Then I kicked him in the shins for good measure. “So back off.”

He took a step back and then blinked at me, as if he was shocked at himself for doing as I asked. Or maybe at me for kicking him. Either way.

“Right,” I said. “Now explain to me in a calm and rational manner what happened and we can use logic to figure out what happened and how to fix it, instead of these strong-arm tactics, which quite frankly never work for you anyway.”

He sat quietly for a moment, his brow furrowed.

“The orb is gone,” he said.

“Yes, you said that part.” I didn’t roll my eyes at him, but it was a close thing. “When did you notice it missing?”

“Just now,” he said. “I keep it in a small iron box so that no outside magic can affect it, but when I checked it, the box was empty.”

“How often do you check it?”

“Once a day. Sometimes more.”

I nodded, thinking it through. I’d been doing my reading since all the business with the truth spell, so I knew that magic could not penetrate iron. It couldn’t pass through it and sometimes iron even repelled it. If the box was empty, someone had opened it and taken the orb out, old-school style with no magic.

“You asked the others?”

“Of course.”

“And you hadn’t taken it out to play with it or something and forgotten to put it back?”

He glared at me.

“Or dropped it?”

“I checked it last night before I went to bed and the orb was there, intact. The box was locked and the room was under the heaviest security in our house. I checked the footage and there is nothing strange about it. It is as if the orb just ceased to exist.”

“Well, that would be a good thing, right? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

“Are you stupid? Of course it didn’t actually cease to exist. Nothing in this world ever ceases to exist, it merely changes form. In this case, I believe the energy inside the orb has returned to the original spellcaster, or possibly been redirected to another tool of the spellcaster, as was the case last time.”

That wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The truth spell had not been a barrel of laughs.

“But how? You said nobody went into the room, nobody opened the box.”

“Clearly somebody did. They just evaded our methods of detection.”

I huffed. “And you just automatically blame me?” Just the thought of it made me about a thousand times more angry. “Because I have so much spare time after all the trouble you’ve caused me this week, I can just suddenly pull off some master crime job and steal a ball of magic? Are you ever going to stop and think how stupid it is for you to blame me for every little thing that goes wrong in your dumb jerk life? How about you take some responsibility? And while you’re at it, stop making things worse for me. As if this school wasn’t bad enough, but you make it a hundred times worse. Just leave me alone.” I was so mad that I stepped right up in front of him and flicked him square on the forehead.

A fraction of a second after doing it, I realized it was probably not the smartest move I’d ever made and high-tailed it out of there before Tennyson Wilde got his senses back enough to snap my spine like a twig.

Chapter 4

Things didn’t get any worse, but they didn’t get better either. The bullying kept on, but it wasn’t as if the students of Amaris were particularly creative in their methods. It was the same thing every day: a bit of shunning, a bit of incidental violence, a few spitballs. It got so I could set my watch by it. I’d left my blazer in the locker room and when I went back for it, it was gone, so I looked online for a new one, but the cheap eBay ones I’d found before weren’t available and everything else was so far out of my price range I’d be BFFs with Astor before I could afford one. It was freezing out, but I went to classes without my blazer and did the best I could. It was no big deal.

Worse than all that was what Tennyson Wilde had said. After the anger faded and I thought about what had happened, it really freaked me out. The person who that magic belonged to was not messing around. They were strong and they were angry. Plus, they’d gotten access to the Golden House, and I’d seen the high-level security they had going on there. If they could get into the Golden House undetected, they could go into anywhere in this world. Tennyson Wilde said that the energy in that ball of light was their power. They’d managed to break into the Golden House without their main power, and now they had it back. They could strike at any moment. It was scary stuff.

I had no proof they had a problem with me in particular. It was just coincidence I’d been at ground zero when the spell had struck last time. They’d been after Tennyson Wilde, I was sure of it. Hopefully, if something else happened, it would be Tennyson Wilde-specific. They could steal his voice. Or turn him into a donkey. Or give him boils. Man, maybe I should’ve stolen the orb. I was fairly sure it didn’t work like that, but still. I could’ve thrown it at his head and that would’ve been awesome.

It wasn’t fun, waiting around for the next spell to hit, but it kind of seemed unreal too, as if everything that had happened before, with the truth spell, had been a bad dream. If it hadn’t been for the werewolves constantly reminding me that all that stuff existed, I probably could’ve convinced myself quite happily that it didn’t. It wasn’t real in the same way that the bullying was real, wasn’t such an imminent threat. And it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it, anyway. I tried not to think about it more than I had to. It was Tennyson Wilde’s problem, not mine. Still, the thought kept sneaking into my mind when I dropped my guard, thoughts about what might happen next, what the spell would be, if we’d be able to stop it this time.

Clouds gathered in the sky like a warning of things to come, gray and murky and ominous. It was hard to stay positive when even the weather looked as if it was done with the world. I shivered my way up to the school the next morning, wondering if I’d find a spell cast over everyone. Maybe a spell to stop them from being jerks — that would be dandy.

Hannah had already been gone when I’d woken up, but I thought that was probably for the best. If the bullies weren’t intending to let up, it was no good for her to be seen with me. I was surprised they hadn’t already begun targeting her as a way to get to me.

When I entered the dining hall for breakfast, everyone seemed intrigued by something they were reading on their laptops, tablets and phones, but at my arrival they all looked up. There was silence for a moment and then the muttering broke out. I sighed. What now? Some new blog post? Another top ten ranking by Tennyson Wilde? At least if he publicly disliked me again, the bullying would be for a legitimate reason. Whatever it was, I didn’t care. I didn’t have to read it, and everyone already hated me anyway. What harm could it do?

I spotted Hannah at our usual table. I gave her a little wave and headed over, determined to ignore all the eyes following me. When she saw me, her face went pale. She grabbed her things and fled the room.

What was up with that? I had definitely not done anything to offend her. I cleaned up after myself in our room and I never touched her stuff, and I was fairly sure I didn’t say weird stuff in my sleep. I mean, I never had before, so I doubted I’d have suddenly started. Plus, she knew she could talk to me about that kind of thing.

“Wow,” said Olivia Hearst, stepping in my way and blocking my path. Man, were those girls everywhere? Were they stalking me or what? “I knew you were some weird sort of social reject, but this is a whole new level.”

I scrunched up my face in thought. Nope, no clue what she was talking about. I wanted to ignore her, but if whatever was going on affected Hannah, I should probably sort it out.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “As if you don’t know.”

I rolled my eyes back at her. “As if you don’t know that I don’t know.” Her and her cronies were definitely behind all this, with their creepy Tennyson Wilde loving.

Instead of explaining, though, or rubbing her triumph in my face, she turned back to her gaggle of friends and walked away. Weird.

“This is really bad,” said Fatima, who was sitting at a table nearby. When she spoke to me, the other people at the table looked at her in surprise and edged their chairs away. She glanced up at me. “I don’t know if you did this or if someone is impersonating you, but you should put a stop to it.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Your Facebook page.”

I tilted my head to the side, curious. “I don’t have a Facebook.” My only friend had been dead until recently, so I hadn’t seen the point.

“You do now,” she said, then went back to her books, ending the conversation.

I pulled my tablet out of my bag as I made my way over to an empty table and sat down. It was kind of annoying to search social media without being logged in to it, but finally I got up a list of all the Lucy O’Connors. There were a lot. I found myself a few pages in and clicked on the link.

It was bad.

There was just enough detail for it to seem legit. More than enough. There were posts from months, years ago, well before I came to Amaris. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, backdated the posts, but whoever had done it had been thorough. There were photos too, pictures with my face but not of places I’d ever been or things I’d ever done. Pictures of me with boys, at nightclubs doing drugs, flashing the camera. It was all very incriminating.

The worst part was the statuses, though. They were all observations of my classmates and all super nasty. “I don’t know who Milo thinks he’s fooling with his big gay crush on Tennyson Wilde” and “Hannah thinks she’s so cute but everyone knows she’s poor and stupid,” that kind of thing, about everyone. I didn’t care about random classmates being offended. Some of the comments about them were super on point, but the stuff about Hannah was bad. There was a lot about Hannah, actually, and it was all super harsh. I didn’t blame her for running off because, wow, whoever wrote this stuff did not pull their punches.

As I read through, I started feeling sick. I had no way of proving this wasn’t me. I clicked on the option to report the account, but then I hesitated. If the account was taken down, I’d have no way of finding out who was behind it. Instead, I closed down Facebook and marched back over to Fatima.

“How did you find out about this?” I asked her.

A few of the other people at the table slipped away, as if I had the plague. I ignored them.

“You sent me a friend request,” she said, scrolling through something on her tablet that looked like a very boring academic text.

“When?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember, not long after we met. I hardly go on Facebook, it’s a waste of time. I only went on today because everyone was talking about it.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Her story seemed full of holes and suspicious. There hadn’t been anything about Fatima on there, at least nothing much, not compared to Hannah or Milo, or even some of the random people in our class. That put her as the prime suspect in my book. I didn’t even want to think about the fact that whoever was doing this had started not long after I got to school, it was too creepy.

“You know, I got ninety-nine out of a hundred in our trigonometry quiz last week,” I said. “That puts me half a point ahead of you overall in the class ranking, doesn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I know what you’re implying, but I have better things to do with my time than get involved in petty high school rivalries.”

Still, she didn’t look up from her reading. She was obviously lying. She was smart enough to pull this off, and I knew she wanted to get first in the class more than anything. Saying she didn’t do it only made her more suspicious.

I couldn’t do anything without proof, though.

During morning assembly, I took advantage of Assistant Head Noel’s long and rambling speech to more thoroughly explore the imposter’s Facebook. I set up a profile of my own as a generic Amaris student and sent fake me a friend request. It was accepted immediately. I looked around to see who else was online, but that was literally everyone, so I couldn’t narrow down the suspects. Oh well, at least I’d be up to date on the antics of fake me.

The imposter posted a lot. Assembly didn’t even last that long but during that time there were two updates about the fashion choices of other students — fake me was not wrong about Amanda De Havilland’s scrunchie tbh — and then a photo appeared of me with Tennyson Wilde.

Not just me with Tennyson Wilde. Me with Tennyson Wilde the day before in the locker room, when he had me backed up to the sink. It had been slightly altered to make it look worse than it had been, surely, because it looked bad. Wow, out of context that looked really bad. And the caption took it so far out of context, it was in Mongolia. “life will b golden when u my babby daddy t-son! so long to the trailer park!”

There were just so many things wrong with that, I couldn’t even. For one thing, I would never say “baby daddy,” even if it was spelled correctly. What the hell else would someone be a daddy of?

Also, no. No to all of it. I closed it down and shoved my tablet to the bottom of my bag. Just the thought of it made me feel dirty and wrong. Not the teen pregnancy part of it, because I wasn’t some Judgy McJudgerson, but to the manipulating someone for money in that way. It wasn’t okay. I mean, it was saying that I’d had sex with Tennyson Wilde with the express purpose of getting pregnant and extorting money out of him, wasn’t it? Implying that I was the sort of person who would take away someone’s freedom of choice like that, just for starters.

Also, the “me and Tennyson Wilde” thing kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies a bit. But it was more than that, too, something I couldn’t put into words exactly, just this feeling of being a dirty little grubby speck, a blight on the face of something pristine. Logically, I knew it had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with reality, but logic did not control how I felt.

When I looked up, every single person in the assembly hall was staring at me. Even Assistant Head Noel had stopped speechifying.

“Is everything all right?” he asked to the hall in general.

Nobody answered. Nothing was all right.

I felt myself go bright red as the weight of the whole situation came crushing down on me. I had lost literally all of my friends. My family would see this. Tennyson Wilde would see this. Tennyson Wilde’s rabid fans would see it and hunt me down. Unless I put a stop to it, future colleges and employers could see this. Wow, it really sucked to me be.

Even logically knowing that, knowing what an awful situation I was in, that felt like nothing compared to the coldness in the eyes of everyone staring at me. I felt how a mouse must feel when it is backed into a corner by a cat and it’s waiting for the cat to pounce. I really did not want the entire student body pouncing on me. I knew there was nothing I could do or say to convince them that this wasn’t me, they wanted to believe the worst of me and so they would.

I was sitting near the end of the row, only a few people between me and the aisle. I grabbed my bag and pushed my way out. I didn’t look back as I fled the assembly hall, and as soon as the doors closed behind me, I ran.

I ran until the only thing I could think about was how my legs ached and my lungs burned. I ran until I could no longer see that picture behind my eyes, of me and Tennyson Wilde and what had been implied. I didn’t even know where I was going. Nowhere seemed safe or nice anymore. Everything seemed tainted.

By the time my energy ran out and I slowed down, I looked around to see I was in the clearing behind the Golden House. That was not somewhere I wanted to be. The absolute last person in the universe I wanted to see right then was Tennyson Wilde.

But it wasn’t Tennyson Wilde on the seat in the clearing. It was Sam.

He’d been waiting for me. Or, at least, he hadn’t run away when I’d gotten near and it’s not as if he hadn’t heard me coming with all his super senses. Wow, that was confusing of him. He hadn’t exactly been seeking out my company lately. I wanted to be angry at him, but I couldn’t help the way my heart flip-flopped when he looked up at me. I looked away immediately.

“Hey,” I said, kicking my foot in the dirt and trying to look as if I wasn’t sweating all over the place.

“Hey,” he said. I didn’t look at him, but he sounded as if he was smiling. “You okay?”

I chanced a quick glance at him. “You know?”

The jerk was grinning at me.

“It’s not funny,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s a bit funny. T-son is your baby daddy?” He snorted.

I wanted to be angry that Sam was laughing at my misery, only I knew that he wasn’t, he was laughing at the bullies, and it cheered me up a bit. “I can’t believe anyone really calls him that.”

“I can’t believe anyone would think you’d let him within a mile of you. Have they not seen the two of you have a conversation? Now, if they’d said you’d punched him in the face, that I’d wonder about.”

I held back a laugh, thinking that Tennyson Wilde had obviously not told anyone that I’d flicked him on the forehead. Maybe he’d blocked it from his memory. I hoped so, because I didn’t really want to face the consequences from it.

“Besides,” he said, “anyone who’s ever met you would realize that it’s not really you posting that stuff. You’re not the kind of person to hold back on saying something directly.”

I shrugged and edged my way into the clearing. “You seem to be the only one who thinks that.” I wasn’t sure how close to him I could get. Things felt natural with him, so much so that it was strange. We hadn’t really spent time together since before he had vanished, not really, so much had changed between us that it shouldn’t feel so easy to be around him. I wasn’t sure where the boundaries were with him anymore, because before there hadn’t been any at all.

“I’m not, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t worth your time.”

“That’s a nice concept,” I told him. “You can put it into practice next time everyone you know turns against you and let me know how it goes.”

He flinched. I felt a bit bad, but not very, because really, it wasn’t about him, and if he actually cared, he could’ve shown it a bit sooner.

I sighed and turned away. This conversation was pointless and confusing. My feelings about Sam seemed to change each time I took a breath. I loved him and wanted to be close to him, but I had all this pent-up resentment as well. There were all those issues with our parents and families and everything was just too complicated. I just wanted to rewind back to the time when we’d just been Lucy and Sam, and everything had been good and simple. I’d been there for him and he’d been there for me. We’d been like one mind sharing two bodies. I’d always known what he was thinking and feeling. He was a mystery to me now, a stranger. I didn’t like it and I didn’t really know how to deal with it.

“Lucy, wait,” he said.

I hesitated but didn’t turn back.

“I just wanted you to know…”

I sensed him get up, move toward me, but I still didn’t turn back.

“I’m working really hard to get myself under control, to control my powers, so that we can be… So I can be your friend again. I know I haven’t been there for you, but I’m trying my best.”

I could feel the heat from his body, and I wanted to lean back into it, but I couldn’t. I had to be strong. He wasn’t ready, and I knew that part of me wasn’t either. I nodded to show him I understood and then fled the clearing.

Chapter 5

Seeing Sam had given me a sense of perspective on things. It didn’t matter what all those vultures thought, if they believed I’d lie and manipulate and whore myself. If I let it get to me, I was letting the bullies win. I mean, I couldn’t help my initial reaction or feelings, obviously, but I could control my own thought process and actions moving forward, and I wasn’t going to spend any more of my time on this BS. I messaged my brothers to warn them and then I went to class. I really wanted to talk to Hannah. I was sure after she thought about it, she’d realize I’d never say those things about her, but I could understand her being upset and wanted to straighten the whole mess out.

Mr. Porter barely looked up as I snuck in late to English class. I could probably not even show up to his class and still get top marks, after everything that had happened, but that would do me no good in the long run. Hannah was hunched over her desk in the back corner. She didn’t look at me as I sat down, even when I tried to catch her eye. Mr. Porter was talking about Jane Austen and her “feminist principles,” which I had very strong opinions about, but my friendship with Hannah was more important. I ducked my head, trying to get her to look at me, but she turned away. I twisted around in my seat, but she wouldn’t look at me, not even when I waved my arm out right under her nose.

“Yes, Miss Connor?” said Mr. Porter. “Did you want to share something?”

I looked up, half out of my seat and limbs sprawled everywhere.

“No,” I said. “No, I really don’t want to share anything.”

“That’s not what your Twitter profile says,” somebody muttered.

I had a Twitter as well? Man, who even had time to make multiple fake social media accounts? If they had that amount of spare time, they should do something constructive. Get a hobby or go to Africa and build a well or something and leave me alone, sheesh. These people made me so sick with their judging me even though they had never even worked a day in their lives and just sponged off their parents.

Hannah still wouldn’t look at me, and the class settled down as Mr. Porter went on with the lesson. As I sat there, silently disagreeing with everything Mr. Porter said, I began to get super angry. I’d shared a room with Hannah for months. Surely she should know me well enough to know those posts weren’t by me. I didn’t see the point in shortening “you” to “u,” for one thing. I mean, how much time did you save with that? If you used predictive text, it was exactly the same, probably less because automatically you’d type the “y” and then have to backspace. Man, it drove me crazy when people wrote “u” instead of “you” because they were just trying to look as if they were all nonchalant when they were in fact full of chalance. They were chalant all over the place. Posers. It seemed as if, if she knew me at all, she would know that. It was like representative of my entire personality.

It was like she didn’t even care whether I had actually said those things or not, she just wanted to believe. Maybe she had secretly been hating me this whole time and was just looking for an excuse to end our friendship. The thought made me feel as if a super fat and sweaty man was sitting on my chest, crushing me and making my eyes water.

But when I looked over at her, even though she sat so her hair hung down, hiding her face, I could see that her cheeks were red and she was biting her lip. She didn’t look as if she was filled with a secret joy at getting rid of me, she looked as if the fat man was sitting on her too.

Mr. Porter handed back our midterm papers, and then class ended and I figured that was my chance. Hannah tried to push past me but I caught her by the sleeve.

“Hold up,” I said. “Don’t tell me you actually believe all this BS, Hannah? Come on! You know me better than that!” I tried to catch her eye. “I thought we were friends.”

She ducked her head so that I couldn’t see her face and pulled her arm away, rushing from the room.

“You should just leave her alone,” said Fatima.

I spun around to see her standing behind me, staring at the paper in my hand, my English midterm, trying to see my grade.

“She has to know I didn’t write those things.”

Fatima shrugged, looking up at me though her eyes kept straying back to the paper. “I don’t think she cares. She’s probably realized you’re more trouble than you’re worth.” She gave up all pretense and craned her head to see my grade.

“Just ask if you care so much,” I said, annoyed at her for turning against me when I’d thought we were kind of friends.

Her shoulders stiffened and she gave me a haughty look. “I know you got an A. You’re Mr. Porter’s favorite.”

If I was annoyed at her before, it was nothing compared to the wave of anger that went over me at the implication that I didn’t work for my grades. It rose up in me like a fire and I took a step toward her.

“Come on, Fatima,” said Hannah quietly, standing in the doorway, resolutely not looking at me. “Let’s go to lunch.”

I stared after them, watching them leave together, leave me behind. Even though I was angry at them both, it still felt lonely and awful being left there.

I’d even lost my enthusiasm for lunch. That had never happened to me before. I far preferred to eat my feelings. Feelings were delicious, especially if they came in the form of the little cheesy pastries on the lunch menu. There must be something seriously wrong with me if I was too sad for cheesy pastries. Maybe I was dying. I felt a bit as if I was dying. There was something hard and twisted buried deep in my chest. Like the fat man had grown talons and sunk them deep into my flesh. Maybe I was just sad because I hadn’t eaten. That kind of thing seemed possible, a vicious cycle of non-eating that made you feel sad and not hungry. Maybe pastries would perk me right up. It seemed legit, so I headed to the dining hall despite my reservations.

I didn’t make it to the dining hall.

A group of students — it seemed like everyone in the school — waited for me out in the courtyard. At first I thought they were just milling around. I don’t know why anyone would mill around in the freezing cold, but then I clearly didn’t understand much about the world if whatever was going on at this school passed for normal. They blocked the entrance to the dining hall, and for a moment I stood and waited for them to move out of my way. They didn’t move. Instead, they turned toward me, moving as one and reminding me eerily of that time they were all possessed by some bad juju and wandering through the forest like a bunch of animated corpses. I shivered.

I didn’t need this crap and I could get into the dining hall from the other entrance. I turned to leave but they’d moved to encircle me. Wow, that seemed ominous.

I looked around the circle, pressing in toward me. There was no good way out of this. I could either make a break for it, possibly forcing a physical confrontation, or I could wait for whatever this was to begin. Neither option seemed appealing. I zipped my bag up and slung it onto my back so that it couldn’t fall into the clutches of the evil mob.

The entire world seemed frozen, cold and inactive. I stared at everyone and they stared back at me, unmoving, as if waiting for a signal. I huffed. They were cutting into my lunchtime and I wished they’d get on with it so I could go eat.

Then, finally, somebody stepped forward. I’d expected it to be one of the T-son fan club or maybe Astor or one of the other polo guys, but it wasn’t. It was Fatima.

Even though we hadn’t been on the best terms, I still felt it like a slap in the face. I could understand her sticking up for Hannah or being jealous of my grades, but I’d thought underneath it all we were still more or less friends, that we were cut from the same cloth. But I was definitely not cut from backstabbing bully cloth.

Hannah was nowhere to be seen, but Fatima glanced back at the others as she stepped forward, at Olivia and Charlotte and Stephanie Von Whatsit, and I got it. Well, I didn’t really get it, but I saw what she was doing. She’d mentioned to me once before that she wanted to move up to the Green House, that she wanted the power that came with status and connections. She obviously saw this as her way in.

When she looked at me, her eyes were cold, and I wondered how I’d ever counted her as a friend. There was no friendship in that look, no compassion. She’d be completely ruthless in dealing with me if it meant getting what she wanted.

“You’ve gone too far,” she said, in a loud, clear voice that carried across the courtyard. “It was one thing when you were just annoying and making an idiot out of yourself, but you’ve really upset a lot of people. You don’t belong here. You bring down the entire tone of the school and you need to leave now.”

A few people gave little cheers. I could feel all of their eyes on me, piercing me like ice picks. Bunch of jerks. They didn’t even know me, they didn’t know a single thing about me, but they thought they could dismiss me and treat me however they liked just because I was poor, because I wasn’t one of them. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. But what could I do? There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say that would change how any of them thought. I was completely helpless in this situation. I had no way of fighting back.

It made me so mad that tears sprang to my eyes. I tried to blink them away in case anyone got the wrong idea and thought that I cared what they thought. I didn’t care one bit. I just hated the unfairness of it all. I tried to be a good person. I did my homework and tried to be nice to people, even when I thought they were jerks. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t deserve this.

“You have to be kidding me. Are you actually crying right now?” Fatima rolled her eyes. “That’s not going to get you out of this.”

Charlotte stepped up beside Fatima, shaking her head at me. “Girls like you are the worst. You don’t know your place.”

The circle began to close in, and for the first time I really started to worry. Angry mobs were no joke when you were in the middle of one. They were going to lynch me for real and there was not one thing I could do about it. Man, what was even the point of having werewolf buddies if they never jumped in to rescue you at times like this? Sure, I’d been learning to fight, but I was only one skinny girl. It would take a flamethrower to get these losers to back off.

Although it was only lunchtime, the day was already growing dark. Ominous clouds gathered over our heads, blocking the sun and lending to the apocalyptic atmosphere I felt with everyone closing in on me.

Somebody shoved me from behind and I stumbled forward, closer to the T-son brigade.

“You’re ugly and poor. Why do people like you even exist in this world?” said Olivia.

“You should just die,” said Charlotte.

Somebody grabbed me and that seemed to be the sign they were all waiting for. They converged on me as if they were one entity, only it was so much freakier than that time they were being controlled by magic because this time they were doing it of their own free will, each and every one of them.

Wow, I thought as they all started pulling at me, dragging me off my feet, people really suck a lot. I didn’t know what they were doing, if they had some sort of master plan, but I didn’t think it would end well for me. I mean, if a bunch of super rich kids decide to gang up and kill the poor scholarship kid, would anybody even do anything about it? They’d just bury me in the woods and be like “What? Lucy who? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and their parents would pay some people off and it would be like I never existed. Oh man, that sucked so much. Dumb rich kids and their dumb group murder.

I didn’t have too much time to think about it, though, as they dragged me down the steps to the marble fountain. It was kind of painful and horrific, with people scratching and grabbing and poking at me. My legs scraped along the ground, and every time I tried to stand, somebody kicked my feet out from under me. They pulled my hair and laughed at me. It was basically Lord of the Flies and I was Piggy but I didn’t even have their stupid conch so I didn’t know why they couldn’t leave me alone.

When we got to the fountain, they pulled me to my feet. I thought about making a break for it. If I got to the gardens, I might be able to evade them. But as soon as the thought crossed my mind, somebody grabbed me by the hair and shoved my head into the fountain. Not long enough to drown me or anything, but definitely long enough for me to swallow some of that water and probably get E.coli. I struggled against them and they let me go. I stood up, gasping for air. Water dripped all down my face, in my hair and my eyes. I couldn’t see anything but I sure could see that I needed to get out of there before this went any further.

Despite my best efforts, my bag had been pulled off my back and dumped into the fountain. Literally everything of value I had in this world was in that bag, and even though it was probably ruined, I couldn’t leave it there, but Astor and one of the other polo guys stood between it and me. No way could I overpower them, big meatheads that they were. I had to rely on my special Lucy-specific skills to get out of this. I didn’t know what those skills were, apart from maybe eating. I couldn’t eat my way out of this one, though. The only other thing I was good at was pushing on through the obstacles, and that seemed appropriate to the situation. I let out a mighty roar and launched myself at the polo jerks. They seemed a bit surprised and moved out of my way.

A few of the girls yelled and lunged for me as I leapt into the fountain and grabbed my bag. I felt like I should’ve maybe stopped and made some sassy comment to them like people did on TV, but I had no words for the situation. Plus, they were already moving into action and I had no time to waste. I splashed my way across the fountain and jumped out the other side, vaulting a hedge in my haste to get away from them.

I could hear them closing in on me as I ran down the path, the thunder of their footsteps and their jeering calls. I had been chased through these school grounds by rabid werewolves — more than once — but that wasn’t half as scary as being chased by entitled rich kids. Their thirst for my blood was palpable. If they caught me, I was done for.

My wet bag was heavy and dug into my side as I ran. My whole body hurt from being dragged across the courtyard, but I didn’t even think of slowing down. I had to put some distance between them and me. Those polo guys were fast though, and one of the smaller girls, I think she was a professional tennis player. She was like a whippet, and I could feel her nipping at my heels.

I turned down the path toward the Red House, feeling my heart grow a little lighter as I pulled away from them, just slightly. I might make it. I could lock myself in my room and wait things out. I’d explain everything to Hannah and the world would go back to normal. Maybe I wouldn’t end up in a shallow grave in the woods after all.

I ran smack bang into the fence.

Dammit, I had forgotten all about Tennyson Wilde’s stupid garden rebuilding scheme. Why did he even need a fence around it? Didn’t he realize what a massive inconvenience it was to every single person ever?

They were so close behind me, almost close enough to touch. I kicked at the fence, wishing it was Tennyson Wilde, and — like magic, only less creepy and annoying — a gate swung open right beside me. I flew through it just as Polo Guy #2 reached out to grab me and bolted it fast behind me.

They rattled the fence, banged on it. It was high and sturdy-looking, but I thought it probably wouldn’t take them long to break open that gate. They seemed pretty determined. I didn’t want to stick around until they broke through.

Tennyson Wilde’s mysterious garden was not actually a garden at all, I realized as I looked around. It was a forest. A bamboo forest. The bamboo stood just higher than my head if I was on tiptoes, and was evenly spaced around six feet apart, except for where a stone path ran through. Most of the bamboo was still just a single cane, but I noticed a few shoots had already begun to spring up here and there. There was a strong smell of compost, which I assumed came from fertilizer underneath the bed of straw that lined the forest floor. Why ever would you build something so potentially creepy in a place where creepy stuff kept on happening? Didn’t he know it was the perfect place for evil things to lurk? Well, obviously he knew that, being an evil thing with a fondness for lurking. That was obviously his whole reason for building it. It was also a breeding ground for vermin, probably. And not really a fun place to wander around when you had an angry mob after you. I jumped at every little shadow, every noise. Rationally, I knew that angry mobs weren’t particularly stealthy, and yet I kept waiting for something to reach out through the bamboo stalks and grab me. Seriously, the only thing that would’ve been creepier was maybe a cornfield. On a par, probably.

As I got deeper into the bamboo forest, the sounds from outside faded away. I didn’t know if the mob had given up or if they were lying in wait or still trying to break down the fence, but I thought maybe if I could find a nice little place to sit, once it got late I could sneak back to my room unnoticed. That was basically the best I could hope for, at any rate.

I couldn’t be sure where I was headed. The whole forest looked exactly the same to me, but I seemed to walk on and on without getting anywhere. Nothing changed and I didn’t find a handy little seat or anything. The sky grew even darker and the water in my hair turned to icicles. If it got any colder, I decided, I’d have to risk going back to my room anyway. It was that or hypothermia. You didn’t want to play around with that kind of thing.

That was assuming I could find my way back out. I stopped walking and looked around. The bamboo was almost fully grown. I couldn’t see over it. There was no way of telling which way I’d come from or which way I was headed. I supposed it would be easy enough to head in one particular direction until I came to the fence, and then follow the fence around to the gate. I looked up at the sky to see if I could find the sun to judge the direction from that, but there was nothing but thick gray cloud. No, there was something else, I noticed. Something falling from the sky. Snow. Wow, the universe really did not want me alive.

Hopefully, once everyone else saw the snow, they’d head back up to the school. I figured lunch had probably ended anyway, and usually the bullying ended with the bell, so I was probably safe to head out.

Once the snow started, it really started. I’d never been in a heavy snowstorm and I didn’t really enjoy it now. I picked a direction and plowed ahead. As I walked, though, I noticed something funny about the snow. It seemed to have a light to it, a sort of blue glow.

“Oh no,” I said, stopping in my tracks and looking around. “Come on! Give me a break! I am having a bad enough day as it is!” I wasn’t sure if the spellcaster could hear me or was off somewhere cozy and warm. I shuddered at the thought they were in the forest with me, maybe hiding in the shadows and watching me struggle around. Whenever I pictured them, it was in some sort of creepy dungeon, wearing long black robes and goth makeup and spying on me via crystal ball, but really they could’ve been anyone, anywhere.

The last time it had happened, there had been mist and talking statues and glittery sparkly things, but this time was different. The blue glow flashed in the sky like sheet lightning, once, twice and then was gone. There was no voice, nothing to provide a cryptic explanation of what was going on or how I could maybe stop it.

“Seriously!” I yelled at the sky. “I just wanted to eat some mini pastries!”

It was the weirdest thing ever. The forest seemed to grow up around me at a super fast rate, like it was being filmed with time-lapse photography or something. Up and up it grew, until they stopped looking like bamboo stalks and more like giant wooden pillars. My bag slipped from my shoulder; it was growing as well and had gotten too heavy to lift. When I looked up, even the sky seemed to be getting further away. The whole world was moving, changing. Maybe I was having an attack of vertigo, I thought. I felt as if I might throw up and stumbled to my knees.

When I looked up again, the world had stopped moving. Everything still seemed way too big, though, and I looked around for my bag. Okay, so the giant canvas mountain beside me, I was guessing that was my bag. Obviously, the world hadn’t suddenly become huge all around me, it had only seemed that way. Obviously it had seemed that way because I’d been shrinking.

That would make things tricky.

Snowflakes fell around me, far bigger than the wafty specks they usually were, and despite their size, not even anything like a pretty Christmas decoration. More like a silvery ball of deep-fried breadcrumbs, only cold and wet and not delicious. I rushed for the safety of my bag mountain. I grabbed onto the large plastic hoop that I took to be the zipper and pulled it open.

Oh well, I thought, climbing up onto my bag to avoid the snow, at least those tiny pastries would be more filling now.

Chapter 6

It became fairly immediately apparent that I needed to get myself out of the snowstorm. The snow was coming down in buckets and I was way smaller than buckets. I had no way of knowing how long the storm would last, but if it wasn’t going to be long, I would be better off taking shelter inside my bag than trying to get to the Red House. It seemed an insurmountable distance on such short legs as I had now.

Everything inside my bag was ruined from being dumped in the fountain. I was super careful as I climbed inside the sludgy mess. The bag had fallen on its side when I’d been shrunk, so it was easy to get into at least. There were massive puddles of water at the bottom that didn’t smell so good up close, due to the mix of fountain water and bag debris. Mostly, it was being soaked up by my books, and working its way into my tablet, which was definitely fried. I propped open the zip of my bag just enough to see out and shoved some of the books into place to make a little ledge. I’d put my big woolly scarf in my bag that morning in case I got too cold, and I thanked past me for the thought as I fashioned it into a warm and comforting cushion.

Maybe I could just live in my bag forever, I thought. There were snacks in the pocket, some rice crackers and fruit and that type of thing. Emergency foods. This was definitely an emergency and now that I was tiny, that food could last me weeks. As far as evil spells went, getting shrunk definitely had its advantages. Well, advantage — I couldn’t really think of anything else besides the food thing. I mean, I could easily avoid the bullies now, but at the same time, they could squish me like a bug without even meaning to. And if I wanted to get anywhere, it would take me forever. It was definitely best for me to just live in my bag.

I don’t know if it was because of my relative size, but the snowstorm seemed to get worse. Outside my bag was just a whirl of white and cold. I huddled down into my scarf, pulling the bag closed to block out the wind. I kind of wished I’d put my snacks in the main section of the bag, rather than the pocket, because climbing out there in the cold did not seem like fun. I would probably be blown away, actually. I snuggled into my scarf with a sigh. Being small was kind of boring. Everything in this world was for giants. I decided to have a nap to pass the time.

Napping was not my best idea ever.

I woke up kind of confused, as you’d expect after being shrunk down to the size of a Pokémon. I groaned as I remembered what had happened. Oh, for those golden days when I didn’t know about all this magic stuff. I could’ve convinced myself I was hallucinating and just gone back to sleep. I peeked out of my bag and a pile of snow fell in. The storm had passed but the snow was still coming down, and it had reached halfway up my bag, burying the bottom. I couldn’t stay there, I realized. I was only an itty-bitty person now. If this snow started to melt, I would drown in a sludgy ice pile within seconds. And if I got snowed in, I’d probably freeze to death, or be suffocated, or who even knows what. Being tiny was no joke; you had to think of all these extra dangers.

I pulled my way out of the bag, but as soon as I stepped onto the snow, it became very obvious that I was an idiot. I started sinking down almost immediately. The snow was all soft and fluffy and couldn’t take my weight. I climbed back into my bag and snuggled back into my scarf to rethink the situation. I needed to compress the snow, make it firm enough to walk on. Surely I had something in my bag to help with that.

I shuffled down to my inside pocket and made a little noise of triumph. My pencil case was full of useful things. A pad of Post-its — that would do the job of flattening the snow. And I could use a pencil as a staff to navigate the treacherous terrain. Like Gandalf. Well, more like a Gandalf action figurine, I supposed. The pencil had been sharpened down to half its original size, but was still almost as big as me and kind of a pain to carry. It made me feel badass, though, so I took it with me anyway. I was literally freezing, but my scarf was too big to take with me and all my other clothes had shrunken along with the rest of me, but there was a little fabric tie around the opening of my bag, so I pulled that out and wrapped it around my neck. I was all set to go.

The Post-its weren’t the best thing for flattening the snow. They were heavy and cumbersome and it was hard work whacking them down over and over again, enough to make the snow solid. There had to be a better way. I folded my arms and sat down on my pencil like it was a log while I thought it over. I was working on a limited timeframe; the snow was not slowing down. I couldn’t spend hours compressing the snow enough to walk on. But maybe if I pushed the Post-its in front of me like a snowplow, the snow would flatten out and compact on its own. I gave it a try. I sank down a little, but if I got up some speed, it was definitely workable. I needed two hands to push it, so I shoved the pencil down the back of my blazer like a sword, tied my hair back, and got going.

It wasn’t fun. It was wet and cold and hard work, but I soon got into the kind of rhythm of it. Push and run, stop and sink, start over. The effort of it kept me warm enough to keep going. Over and over, I did it. Push and run, stop and sink, start over. My socks were soaked right through and I was fairly sure I had frostbite in most of my toes, but I knew I had to keep on. I had no other choice. Fairly soon, the safe haven of my bag was out of sight, so I had to keep on or else just curl up into a ball and sink under the snow forever. The chants of everyone telling me to die were so fresh in my ears that it made me want to stubbornly keep on living, if only to annoy them.

As I pushed on through the snow, I went back over what had happened. This spell seemed different from before. The last time I’d been hit by a spell, it had all been very elaborate, with the talking statue and everything. I wondered if he was still in the bamboo forest somewhere. He’d been a pretty sturdy old guy. It was probably significant that the spell had happened in the same place, and it made me wonder if the whole bullying thing hadn’t been orchestrated to herd me there, like a lamb to slaughter. It seemed like a kind of paranoid thing to think, but then, somebody had just used magic to shrink me to the size of a string bean, so it seemed justified. Even the form that the magic took was different. It was still a blue glowy light, sure, but this time it was sort of flat and dull, not sparkly and buzzy. Tennyson Wilde had said that the last time, the magic had sort of been possessing Mr. Porter. The magic belonged to somebody else, was a sort of energy that they’d used to get Mr. Porter to do their evil bidding. And it made sense in a way, because Mr. Porter always had a thousand ideas going on, brilliant, glittering ideas buzzing around, just like the magic had been. It made sense that if somebody else was using the magic now, it would be a bit different. But who was it? And was it the person who owned the magic or another puppet? I had my suspicions but no proof to back anything up. Still, there was one person who had stepped forward to face me down before anyone else, so surely that person was the number one person of interest.

My muscles began to seize up and I wasn’t sure how much farther I could keep going. The world was really big when you were miniature and everything was super far away. I looked behind to be sure I was moving in a straight line. It seemed as though I was, but I couldn’t be sure. The trail I left in the snow looked straight but vanished into a white swirl only a few paces back, so that didn’t really help. It was so cold that it hurt. I began to rethink my plan of leaving the bamboo forest, but staying didn’t seem a much better option. Maybe I could climb the bamboo. I looked up at one of the big, thick stalks and immediately dismissed the idea. No way could I hold on enough to climb anything. I tried to think of something to keep my spirits up, to keep me marching forward, but I was rapidly running out of motivation. Even if I came to the end of the forest, what then? I had very little hope of getting all the way back to the Red House, somehow gaining access and making my way up to my room.

It was so cold and I was so tired. Maybe the best thing to do would be to curl up on top of my Post-its and just have a little rest. Just enough to regain my strength. Five minutes couldn’t hurt, right?

I curled up into a little ball, shivering. I’d read somewhere that when you get hypothermia, one of the symptoms is impaired judgment, and I wondered if maybe napping was not the best idea, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Surely, everything would work out fine. All I needed was a bit of a snooze. Some shut-eye. Forty winks.

My eyes had barely closed when there was a terrible screeching noise. I opened my eyes blearily, but then as soon as I registered what I saw, the adrenaline kicked in and I jumped to my feet, brandishing my pencil out in front of me. Forget rabid werewolves or angry mobs of rich kids — this was definitely the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

I had not been wrong about rodents in the bamboo field, oh em gee.

It was a rat the size of a cement mixer.

It had bright red devil eyes and it salivated when it looked at me. I didn’t dare to move in case it pounced on me. Its whiskers twitched and it shuffled forward. Oh man, why couldn’t I have just died peacefully in the snow? If I was dead, I wouldn’t care if the rat feasted on me. I’d be a tasty Lucycicle, probably. Way more delicious than devouring me alive.

Maybe my brain had frozen out all reasonable thought, or maybe it was just that the idea of being munched on by a rat was so appalling, but suddenly my escape plan seemed super obvious. Rats were fast. Rats could go anywhere. If I could harness the power of this rat, the world was my oyster, no matter how big or terrifying it was.

I would be the Rat Queen and I would rule all!

The rat moved even closer to me and I took my chance. Using my pencil for leverage, I vaulted up onto the back of the rat and held on tight.

The rat screeched again, and I really hoped it wasn’t calling all its rodent buddies to come tear me to bits. I dropped my pencil in favor of clinging to the rat’s fur, which was surprisingly clean and soft. The rat gave another screech and then took off running.

It didn’t seem to be going in any clear direction. I think it was just confused by having a tiny human on its back, and to be honest I couldn’t blame it. I hoped it wasn’t taking me back to its nest, but maybe it would adopt me and I could live there among the baby rats until I got big again. It wasn’t ideal and baby rats kind of freaked me out more than almost anything else on this planet, but I wasn’t really in a position to be picky.

The rat ran around like crazy, trying to fling me off its back. I couldn’t even ride a horse, wasn’t great on a bicycle, even the bus proved a challenge sometimes, so staying on the back of the rat was a tough job. It was not like in the movies. I didn’t somehow get the rat under my control and make friends with it and convince it to take me home. My hands were all stiff and cold and my muscles ached, and it didn’t take very long before the rat flung me off and I landed hard against the ground. The rat advanced on me, its eye flashing red and angry. Okay, so the rat-riding had been a dismal failure, and I’d even lost my brand-new pad of Post-its and my faithful pencil now. This was it for me. I’d done my best, but my best wasn’t good enough and now the jig was up.

“Make it fast, Mr. Rat,” I said, gulping and squeezing my eyes tight shut.

There was a massive thud, and then another and another. Everything shook like the end of the world. I guessed it probably was.

After a moment, when nothing had happened, I cracked an eye open. The rat had scampered off and in front of me was something big, black and shiny. A gigantic shoe. A familiar shoe.

“I knew you would be in the middle of this mess,” he said, bending down to get a better look at me with his giant face.

Tennyson Wilde. Of course.

I would’ve preferred the rat.

Chapter 7

“Were you actually trying to catch that rat and ride on it?” He squinted down at me condescendingly. “Animals don’t just exist for your exploitation, you know. You can’t be surprised that it was angry with you.”

I didn’t reply to him. Not because I had nothing to say, because my teeth were chattering too much.

“What are you doing there in the snow?” he asked, because he was the most unhelpful person alive. “Did you not realize you would sink and die?”

I glared at him as fiercely as I could while chattering and freezing and mini, though I didn’t think the full weight of my disdain was conveyed.

He scooped me up out of the snow and held me in the palm of his hand right in front of his face. It was a horrible sensation, like that moment when a plane takes off only a zillion times worse, because planes stayed in the air with science and I had no such guarantees with Tennyson Wilde. He stared at me so intensely that his massive eyebrows met in the middle. He huffed a breath out his nose so forcefully it knocked me backwards. At least he didn’t have bad breath, I supposed, and I was out of the snow.

“You’d better come with me,” he said. “If you’re always in the middle of the mess, it seems that you’ll be needed to clean it up.”

And without another word, he tucked me into his coat pocket.

His pocket was warm and protected from the elements, and some sort of luxurious soft fabric. Because he moved so smoothly, I was hardly jostled around at all, and made myself as comfortable as possible. After a while, my teeth stopped chattering. That was bad, right? I remembered reading that was bad, like once your teeth stopped chattering, that was when hypothermia set in and you died. Dying in Tennyson Wilde’s pocket would be super embarrassing, but definitely warmer and snugglier than being ravaged by rats in the snow. And, jerk though he was, he did seem like the sort of person who would properly notify my family of my tragic demise, at the very least.

I vaguely wondered where he was taking me, though it didn’t seem like such a big deal. That was probably part of the hypothermia too, I stopped caring about stuff. That was fine. Peaceful, really. So far, when it came to near-death encounters, hypothermia was miles ahead. Number one, most recommended.

I snuggled deeper into his pocket. I didn’t know what fancy rich person material this coat was made from, but boy was it soft and nice.

You’re probably not supposed to fall asleep with hypothermia. That seemed like a thing. Or maybe that was concussion. Whatever. Sleep was warm and nice and awake was the opposite. Awake was not my friend.

Shouting woke me up. I was so toasty warm, though not pocket warm but blanket warm. I cracked open an eye to look around. Clearly, I had not died. And I hadn’t been taken to some torture dungeon or laboratory or anything. It seemed like I was in the common area of the Golden House, especially judging from the shouts.

“She’s fine,” said Tennyson Wilde. He wasn’t shouting. He sounded bored. “It was never a danger.”

“She’s not fine, she’s the size of my finger!” That was Sam. He was shouting. “My pinky finger!”

That made me sit up. He wasn’t usually the type to get angry, he was gentle and kind. But ever since the whole werewolf thing, he’d been unpredictable.

They were standing on the other side of the room to me, facing each other. They couldn’t have looked more different. Tennyson stood by the fireplace, an elbow propped nonchalantly on the mantel. Sam loomed over him, tense and ready to spring. I was nestled into a blanket on a chair in the corner, though I noticed something had been put up as a barrier so that I couldn’t fall off while I slept.

“Are you finally going to stop blaming her for everything, then, Tennyson?” Althea asked, sounding amused. “I highly doubt she shrank herself.”

“Never underestimate these people,” Tennyson said. “You don’t think they are capable of doing this to send her in as a spy?”

“She almost died of hypothermia!” Sam said.

“It wasn’t hypothermia; she was just a bit cold. Most likely they knew I would sense the magic and investigate before she was in serious danger.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps she is expendable to them. Perhaps she does not even know she is being used, like the teacher last time.”

“Perhaps she’s awake and listening to everything you say,” said Nikolai, from where he sat over in the corner, typing on his phone. He looked over at me and winked.

Sam started in surprise and began to move toward me, but Tennyson put out an arm to stop him. They muttered to each other, too quietly for me to hear, and then I was shocked to see Tennyson Wilde break out into a smile. I hadn’t thought him capable. It wasn’t a big smile, but he was always so surly and grr and big furrowed eyebrows. It made him look like a completely different person, at least twenty percent less of a jerk. Sam smiled back and patted Tennyson on the shoulder, then moved away from him to come and crouch in front of my chair.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Is my voice too loud?”

I shook my head. “It’s normal. Do I sound all squeaky?” It was surprising he could hear me at all, actually, even with the super hearing.

“You’re fine,” he said. “It must be part of the magic. Are you warm enough? Do you feel okay?”

I nodded, then sat down cross-legged and stared at him. His face was so huge.

“Am I the only one?” I asked. The thought of everyone who had chased me into the bamboo forest all being shrunk and running around like manic pixies was more than a little funny and would cheer me up to no end.

He nodded. “Nobody else even saw the spell. Tennyson sensed it and was just headed to the spot the last spell happened when he found you. Were you really trying to ride a rat?”

“I was trying not to get eaten,” I said loftily. “And not to freeze to death. It is a harsh, harsh world when you are a tiny person, you know. You shouldn’t judge.”

“That’s hardly what’s important here,” said Tennyson Wilde. He still stood by the mantel and was obviously trying to look uninterested, flipping through a book and not looking at us. “What details do you remember from the spell?”

I told them what had happened, what little there was, but that seemed to bother all four of them.

“Surely you’re forgetting something,” Tennyson said.

Althea and Nikolai exchanged unreadable looks and Sam’s claws were digging into his leg.

“Why’s it such a big deal?” I asked. “Maybe whoever it is just couldn’t be bothered with all the fancy stuff. Maybe they just wanted to get to some food. You know it was mini pastries today.” I sighed. What a regretful life this was, with no mini pastries.

“You’re hungry?” Sam asked. He reached over to the table and picked up a plate. “It’s not mini pastries but these aren’t too bad.”

He set the plate down on my chair beside me and I stood up to get a better look. Giant sandwiches! They were big enough to feed a family of five for a year! Well, the bread would obviously go stale, but you could probably freeze them. I climbed up onto the plate to start nibbling at a ham-and-cheese one. I wondered if maybe I could get the rest of my family shrunk as well. Our living expenses would be literally nothing if we were all tiny.

“There are rituals that have to be obeyed with this sort of thing,” Tennyson was saying. “You can’t just wave a magic wand and shrink people. Try to remember!”

Oh, he was talking to me. I looked up at him over a chunk of Jarlsberg cheese the size of my head. It had always been my life’s dream to have a whole wheel of Jarlsberg cheese, I used to stare at them all bright and beautiful through the window of the local deli, imagining the luxury of having such an abundance of cheese all to myself. This was even bigger than a wheel of Jarlsberg and I was not going to let Tennyson Wilde ruin it for me.

“Don’t get all mad at me,” I said. “This is your fault. You’re the one who couldn’t even look after a stupid little magic ball.” I clutched my cheese and turned my back on him.

“She’s not wrong,” Nikolai muttered, cutting of Tennyson’s reply. “That shouldn’t have happened. I know it wasn’t your fault, but how did they get through our security?”

“Whoever is behind this is stronger than we thought,” said Althea.

“And they’re targeting Lucy.”

Targeting me into cheese heaven, maybe, I thought. Now that I was out of the cold, getting shrunk seemed like maybe the best thing ever. The bullies couldn’t hurt me now; they couldn’t even find me. I mean, in the long term, things like going to class or walking up a flight of stairs might be difficult, but people lived with disabilities every day in this world, much worse things than just being a bit short. I wasn’t going to let it get me down.

Tennyson and Althea decided to do some research, and Nikolai had plans, so when I finished my sandwiches, Sam put out his hand for me to climb into and he took me up to his room.

“You’re not shoving me in a shoebox with just some holes in the top,” I said. “I remember those crickets you caught and their untimely demise.”

He placed me carefully on his pillow and then moved across the room to look through his drawers.

His room was so different from the last time I’d been there. Last time, Sam had been having some emotional problems and the room was a wreck. It had been put back together now, and although it was simple, I found it really nice, comfortingly Sam. The stone walls were bare, with a big bed in the middle of the room and a window seat full of cushions opposite the door. There was a desk, a bookcase and a closet, and a blue rug on the floor.

“Hopefully the spell won’t last very long,” he said. “But without knowing anything about who cast it or why, it’s impossible to tell. We should probably be prepared for the worst.”

“The worst being that I stay tiny?”

“You know you’ll get sick of it after a while.”

He came back over to the bed with a box of tissues that he’d fashioned into a sort of bed and placed it on the nightstand. Even though I’d seemed to have done nothing but sleep all day, when I saw it, I realized I was still super tired.

“We’ll get some proper things for you tomorrow,” he said. “Unless you get big again overnight.”

I doubted it. Last time, the spell had just gotten worse and worse before I’d put a stop to it. I had no energy to think about it, though, no energy to try to figure out who had done this to me and why and how I would stop it.

I was almost asleep when Sam spoke again.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” he said, so quietly I was sure I wasn’t supposed to hear. I almost pretended that I didn’t. I was sleepy and conversations like that made me uncomfortable. Still, I couldn’t have him walking around thinking this was his fault. He already carried too much guilt for things he hadn’t been to blame for.

I propped myself up on my elbow and peeked out over the side of my tissue bed.

“Why are you apologizing?” I asked him. “How have you possibly twisted this up in your brain to make yourself responsible?”

He turned to face me, his eyes bright in the darkness and so, so huge. I could probably drown in them for real, though that would be disgusting for me and painful for him.

“You don’t think it strange that all this magic stuff started happening to you after I came back into your life? You don’t think there’s some connection?”

“You aren’t the only werewolf at this school,” I said. “I’m more inclined to blame Tennyson Wilde. Or, you know, the person actually behind all this. It wasn’t a werewolf who put this curse on me.”

He shook his head. “But why are you always in the middle of it? It only makes sense that it’s because you’re linked to me.”

My face grew warm at him saying that we were linked. I felt that way too, of course, but I never knew what he was thinking anymore. Sometimes it seemed as if he’d forgotten all about me, that he’d moved on. I felt like I was stuck in the past, standing still and watching as he walked away from me, growing smaller in the distance. But if we were linked, no matter how far away he walked, he could always find his way back.

“I mean, it’s not as if you have any other ties to the supernatural community.”

He said it as if the very idea was absurd, but his words made an alarm bell chime in my head. I did have other ties. So did he. I’d never told him about the book I’d found in the library. The book on werewolves, which had been cowritten by my father and his mother. I should tell him now. It was the perfect moment. But the words sat at the base of my throat, hovering and reluctant to pop out. Any mention of the past, of his family, was like a trigger for Sam. He did seem to be doing better lately, though; even Tennyson Wilde had said so. Maybe it would be okay. I took a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed to a spot on the wall.

“So, about that, that’s not exactly true…”

Sam didn’t move, but I could somehow feel him become tense. How was I supposed to put this?

“So, you know your mom?” Yeah, I didn’t sound stupid at all. “And my dad? Well, I mean it might be a massive coincidence, but I’m fairly sure it was them…”

His eyes began to glow. “What are you trying to say, Lucy?”

“Relax, we’re not like secret siblings or anything. But there’s this book that I found. I’d show you but I left it in my backpack, out in the snow. It’s a book on werewolves, facts and sciencey stuff… They wrote it together.”

I wasn’t sure if Sam fully grasped what I was saying, what it meant in terms of his own past and mine. It meant that on the night Sam had first turned, the night his family had died, the night he had disappeared, his mother had known that was a possibility. That the lives we thought we’d lived at children were lies. Our parents weren’t who we thought they were. I didn’t know if Sam grasped any of that, because within the blink of an eye, he had transformed.

He wasn’t a full wolf. He still retained his human form, just with added wolfy bits, like fur and claws and teeth. And wow, those claws and teeth were scary enough when they weren’t bigger than me. He growled, so deep and low that it made my tissue box bed rumble like an earthquake.

“Hey, Sam? Buddy?”

But Human-Sam had left the building. His nose twitched as he sniffed in my direction. Oh man, to the wolfy part of Sam’s brain, I probably smelled tasty like a bunny. Talk about an extreme reaction to bad news. It wasn’t even particularly bad news, just new information, really, but I supposed if you believed you’d murdered your whole family, no news was good news.

“Let’s think this through rationally,” I said to him. “We were having a conversation, remember? Everything is fine and we’re all good and safe, and we’re just having a bit of a chitchat.”

He growled. Yeah, logic did not work on the wolf. Logic seemed to annoy the wolf.

He lunged for me, swiping his arm out and knocking my tissue bed. Luckily, I didn’t go flying off the nightstand and end up a crumpled heap on the stone floor. I fell out of the tissue box in the other direction, rolling until the bedside lamp stopped my momentum. Sam’s face was right beside me, so close I could see every detail. I stayed as still as I could, not breathing. I knew his wolfy senses would find me, but maybe I could use that to my advantage. He wasn’t thinking like a human. The drawer of the nightstand was open, just a crack, but if I could just get in it, I didn’t think he’d be able to get the drawer open to crunch on my bones.

With all my might, I pushed my tissue box bed and it clattered off the nightstand and onto the floor. While Sam was distracted by it, I dove for the drawer.

The drawer was dark and I couldn’t see out of it well enough to know if Sam had seen where I’d gone. I had no clue where he was or if I was safe. I crouched in the darkness, staring up at the thin sliver of light as I listened and waited. There was some thumping and sounds like things being knocked over, but maybe Sam was just clumsy as a wolf. Eventually, I relaxed. If he hadn’t found me, maybe he’d given up looking, or forgotten, or fallen asleep. I sighed and tried to make myself comfortable. It was a little difficult — I didn’t know what Sam kept in the drawer of his nightstand but figured it was probably personal stuff and I didn’t want to invade his privacy by going through it. Before I could settle in too much, the drawer was pulled open and cold blue eyes stared down at me. It seemed to have become a recurring pattern.

“What are you doing in there?” Tennyson Wilde asked. “Where is Sam? What have you done?”

I didn’t answer him. I thought the answer was fairly obvious and I didn’t even have enhanced senses.

“You upset him again?” He huffed. “Why do you have to be an endless source of trouble?”

“Hey!” I got to my feet and waved my fist at him angrily. “Don’t victim-blame me, you big giant jerk! I’m the one who keeps getting attacked, and cursed, and bullied. Don’t make out like I’m the cause of any of this when you’re the one who can’t keep your little wolf pack under control!”

He rolled his eyes and plucked me up out of the drawer between his fingers. No matter how I struggled, he kept tight hold of me.

“Do you want me to drop you on the floor?” he asked.

I stopped struggling. It was a long way down.

“You obviously can’t be trusted, so until this situation is resolved, I’m going to keep close watch over you.”

Before I could say anything in response, he dropped me into his pocket and buttoned it up.

Chapter 8

As much as I hated to admit it, being looked after by Tennyson Wilde was far more comfortable than being looked after by Sam. He squished a cushion inside his sock drawer for me to sleep on, which was both comfortable and safe, and then vanished into the night. I assumed he went to find Sam, and while I was worried, I knew that Tennyson Wilde was the best person to sort it out. Mostly, I was happy to be left alone to sleep.

I was not happy, however, to be woken up by a big wolfy face staring down at me the next morning. Its cold, wet nose nudged me. I squealed and ducked under the fluffy sock that I’d been using as a sleeping bag. When I peeked back out, it was to see Nikolai Volkov laughing at me.

“Ah, why am I so hilarious?” he asked, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. “Anyway, I’m first on tiny-commoner-sitting duty. Tennyson’s drawn up a whole color-coded schedule for us, and I made this to carry you around in.” He held up a mustard-colored top hat with a big hideous sunflower pinned to the front. “See, there’s a concealed section in the top here behind the flower, and this front part is actually one-way glass so that you can see out while remaining perfectly safe, though the fabric covering it will obscure your vision a little. It will make our heads look a little big but it’s still rather stylish, don’t you think?” He looked at me, squinting his eyes as if he was trying to figure something out. “You really need new clothes, but we’ll worry about that later.”

He set the hat down on my cushion and flipped the top of it open for me to climb into.

“I don’t like that you’re talking as though this is a long-term situation.” The hat room wasn’t big enough for me to stand up but I could sit down and stretch out quite comfortably, and it felt very secure. I could even see fairly clearly through the fabric, though everything was in a mustard-colored haze. I was fairly impressed at Nikolai for making it so well at such short notice. He always acted as if he was playing around in C&C club, but obviously he took it more seriously than I thought.

“Well, being unprepared never solved anything.” He reached out toward me. “Okay, hold tight. And remember, I can hear you if you whisper, but I won’t be able to respond.”

That made sense, and I didn’t know what I’d ever have to chitchat about with Nikolai Volkov anyway.

He settled the hat on his head and then we were off. Riding in a hat was a new sensation, but not bad. It felt sturdier than being in Tennyson Wilde’s pocket. I didn’t jiggle around as much, and I could feel the warmth from Nikolai’s head through the hat; he really threw out some heat. Everything seemed much further away than usual and we seemed to be moving at an extremely fast rate, but not in a bad way. It definitely wasn’t the worst way to travel.

We headed out of the Golden House and up to the school. Nobody was around, though it didn’t feel that early, and I remembered that I’d hardly ever seen any of the Golden at morning classes. They seemed to just do whatever they felt like, on their own schedule, and I wondered if I’d get super behind in all my classes. I supposed that was probably the purpose behind the curse.

“Do you know Fatima?” I whispered to Nikolai.

He had said he couldn’t reply, so it was probably a bit mean to ask him questions, but we were walking through the school grounds alone so there was nobody to see him muttering to himself.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Why? Is that one of your commoner friends?”

“I think she’s the one who did this to me.”

“Point her out, then, if you see her.”

He didn’t head toward the classrooms even though it was definitely class time. Instead he turned toward the dining hall. That was fine with me, it was French toast day.

The normal dining hall was fancy enough, but the little balcony area where the Golden ate was something else. Everything seemed literally made of gold, and they had a whole special menu that wasn’t available to the regular students. I didn’t even know what some of the things on there meant.

“Where is she?” asked Sam, before Nikolai could sit down. He looked fine, maybe a bit tired. “Don’t tell me you left her at the house on her own?”

“Of course I didn’t,” Nikolai said, pressing the button for coffee about fifty times in rapid succession.

“And even if he had, it’s not as if I couldn’t survive for a few hours alone in a sock drawer.”

The three of them started, looking at Nikolai in shock.

“Ventriloquism?” Tennyson Wilde asked, furrowing his massive eyebrows and cocking his head to the side.

“You didn’t tell them?” I asked Nikolai.

“I was hoping we could have some fun with it first,” he said.

“She’s in that ugly hat?” asked Althea. “Did you make that? Do you expect the rest of us to wear it? Because you know how I feel about touching anything that’s been in contact with your skin.”

“I don’t have any diseases, Althea,” Nikolai said, sighing in relief when the coffee appeared. “I’m a werewolf.”

“And yet you always make such dubious fashion choices,” she said.

“Have you eaten?” Sam asked, staring at the flower on Nikolai’s hat, where he obviously thought I was hiding. “You can come out. There’s only us here.”

Nikolai lowered the hat so that I could climb out onto the table and Sam set a plate of French toast in front of me. It was like an actual mountain of French toast, the most luxurious French toast in the whole world. There have been many happy moments in my life, but never before had I experienced such a complete and pure feeling of joy as when I faced down that French toast mountain and vowed to make it my own.

At first, I was in such a French toast frenzy that the world around me faded into nothing, but as I began to fill up, bits of the conversation filtered in.

“Look at her eating that thing,” Nikolai said. “Just like a tiny human-shaped rodent.”

“The security people have been over everything again and still can’t explain how the orb was taken,” Tennyson Wilde said. “They are also at a loss to explain this spell.”

“Well, you can’t fire this bunch,” Althea said. “After last time, there won’t be anyone left.”

“They were supposed to be the best in the world,” Tennyson said. “And they obviously were not. Why should I pay them for a service I’m clearly not receiving?”

“You sound like Mother,” she said.

“Did you retrieve the book?” Tennyson said, ignoring Althea and turning his entire body toward Sam.

Sam glanced down at me with a guilty expression on his face. I waved a chunk of bacon at him to let him know I didn’t care that he’d told the others. Things like that, you keep them a secret because they’re confusing or worrisome or whatever, but that only leads to trouble in the end, and I was too small now to keep something that big inside. Better to let it out and have someone else deal with it. Any extra space I had needed to be filled up with French toast.

Sam pulled the book out of my backpack. Both the bag and book had seen better days. The book had gone all stiff and yellow from being soaked and then dried out. Tennyson picked it up, but the pages had dried together and it wouldn’t open. Still, the names on the cover were there for anyone to see.

“I’ll have our people look into it. I doubt it’s a coincidence that her father is involved in all this.”

I stopped eating and stared up at Tennyson Wilde.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know very well what I mean,” he said.

“I want to hear you say it to my face.” I brandished a piece of toast at him. “Go on, explain to me how you think my father was responsible for what happened to Sam. How you think everything that’s happening now is some grand O’Connor family conspiracy. Tell me how you understand everything that’s happened to my family over the past ten years so much better than I do.”

I was all sticky with maple syrup, and a little bit nauseated from overeating and the conversation, but I was too angry to stay there with this jerk. I stormed off the plate and started walking away, but when I got to the edge of the table, I realized I had nowhere to go. I was totally helpless. It was so frustrating that I wanted to scream.

“It’s okay, Lucy,” Sam said, holding out his hand for me to climb onto. “Nobody thinks that.”

Tennyson Wilde cleared his throat.

“But what if he’s right?” I said as Sam held me up to his face. “My dad just vanished. He could be anywhere, doing anything.” I looked away. I didn’t want to say it, didn’t even want to think it, but I needed to acknowledge the possibility. “He could be behind what happened to you.”

Sam shook his head. “You know what I remember about your dad?” he asked softly. “That year when my little sister was an angel in the Christmas pageant and she was so excited, you remember? She loved having wings so much. But then our car wouldn’t start on the way to the school and we were running late, and she was so upset thinking she’d miss it. And your dad told her not to cry, he had magic hands and he’d make everything okay, and popped the hood and got that old car going within minutes, remember?”

“Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” said Nikolai. “Why didn’t he just call a driver?”

I rolled my eyes and Sam laughed.

“If he actually had magic hands…” Tennyson started, but didn’t continue when the rest of us rolled our eyes.

“The point is,” Sam went on, “that your father was a good man. He’d never hurt me or my family. Never. Wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, you have to believe that it’s for the best, that’s he doing the right thing.”

I wanted to believe that, I really did. But would a good man really walk out on his sick wife and four children, leaving them with nothing?

“Either way,” I said, “it would be irresponsible not to investigate him. If he has any connection to what’s happening now, we need to know about it. I don’t think this is him, though.”

I explained to them about Fatima, how she’d been the ringleader in driving me into the bamboo forest. Fatima had more motive than anyone, I told them. As I was telling them, a few other things occurred to me too, like how whoever made the fake social media accounts had some pretty personal knowledge about me, and it wasn’t as if I had a whole bunch of friends at Amaris to choose from.

“We’ll have her looked at as well,” said Tennyson Wilde.

The bell rang, but nobody seemed in a hurry to move.

“The mages should have the analysis of the magical activity over the past day to us by tonight,” Althea said, scrolling through her phone. “They don’t sound hopeful, though. They say if they found nothing last time, it’s unlikely they will this time. But they think that based on how the spell was broken last time and any trace magic left this time, they might be able to extrapolate a countercurse.”

I had like a thousand questions about what she’d just said, but one was definitely the priority.

“They can biggen me?”

She shrugged. “Hopefully.”

“The restoration of your size is hardly the priority here,” said Tennyson Wilde. “We need to find whoever is behind this. You are either in league with them or they are targeting you specifically, and either way that makes you more useful in your current state.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m ignoring you and going back into the hat.”

Chapter 9

At first it was kind of fun, going to class without anyone being able to see me, being invisible. I could concentrate on the lessons and not worry about getting bullied. That only lasted so long, though.

“The air smells so much fresher in here without the stench of that commoner,” said Charlotte Lu Pont on her way out of history class. “Did you see her Facebook from yesterday when we were teaching her a lesson? I’m taking a small vacation. I hope it’s not too small!”

“I hope she never burdens us with her ugly face again,” said Olivia.

“I hope she never burdens the world with her ugly existence.”

The two of them burst into peals of laughter. I felt like being sick, but was a bit heartened when Nikolai stuck out his foot as Charlotte walked through the door of our English classroom and tripped her.

After class, Nikolai met back up with Tennyson to hand over the hat.

“I’m not wearing that,” Tennyson said.

“I made it with my own blood and sweat,” Nikolai said, pouting.

“Then I am definitely not wearing it. Why would I want to wear a hat made from bodily fluids? She can sit in my pocket.”

Nikolai shook his head. “Pockets are not safe.”

“You know my feelings about headwear.”

They stared at each other until Nikolai gave in and took off the hat for me to climb out.

“What are your feelings about headwear?” I asked Tennyson as he tucked me into his pocket.

“It is unnatural and an abomination. Now be quiet, you don’t want the polo team to find you.”

“Polo is unnatural and an abomination,” I told him. “I will have no part in it.”

He ignored me and kept walking. I poked my head out of his pocket to see where we were, but it was a part of the school grounds I wasn’t familiar with. Because it was the sporty part. He obviously wasn’t joking about the polo.

“Hey, Mr. ‘You can’t ride a rat in life-threatening circumstances because it’s exploiting animals’, are you seriously going to play polo? I am not comfortable with this at all. Are there going to be actual horses involved? Are there going to be boys’ changing rooms involved? Because I know you’ve got no issues going into the ladies’, but that doesn’t mean I want to be surrounded by sweaty jockstraps. How about you take me back to the house and I’ll have a nap while you’re off torturing ponies for funsies? I don’t need a babysitter.” And if I did need a babysitter, why not Sam? I was sure he wouldn’t wolf out on me again, and it would be nice to spend some time together.

I tried to kick Tennyson, but the fabric of his coat was too thick for me to have any impact.

“Be quiet,” he whispered. “We’re almost there.”

I huffed and settled down into the pocket. I didn’t really know much about polo, but I’d seen how these people treated humans, so I doubted they had much regard to the feelings of a horse. Plus, all the polo players I’d seen around school were the biggest jerks. This was not going to be a fun afternoon.

Tennyson Wilde stood by some bleachers waiting for all the players to gather. At the far side of the ground were the stables, but there were no horses around.

“Today, we’re going to work on your fitness,” Tennyson Wilde said in a commanding tone, once everyone was gathered.

“Wait, you’re the captain?” I couldn’t believe it. Like, I could believe that he was the head of the jerk squad, that was easy to believe. I just hadn’t taken him for a hypocrite.

“Our fitness is fine,” said Astor, I recognized his voice.

“Your game record says otherwise,” Tennyson said.

“What do you even know?” Astor muttered.

Although I couldn’t risk peeking out of the pocket to see what was going on, I felt a sudden shift in the air. A coldness.

“You will note,” Tennyson said, “that I was asking neither for your permission nor your opinion. Today we are working on fitness. Go and prepare.”

They all filed off into the locker rooms, but Tennyson Wilde stayed behind. I wondered what he was doing but didn’t care enough to ask. He took off his coat and folded it on the bottom row of the bleachers in a way that meant I could sit and peek out without it being obvious. It was pretty cold out of the pocket and I was glad I didn’t have to run around on a field with a bunch of meaty guys waving their sticks at me.

Tennyson Wilde paced across the field, swinging his polo stick in his hand. It wasn’t very interesting to watch him and I wished I had a book or something, but I doubted any books small enough for me to read even existed. Wow, this whole world really was made for able-bodied people. I’d come across it a bit before with my mother being sick, that type of prejudice that isn’t overt but just subtly excludes you from things. Being around all these rich people when you were poor was a little like that as well.

After a moment, I saw someone approach Tennyson. I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Most people seemed too in awe of him to try to engage him in conversation. It was that guy, Llewellyn, from my history class.

“E-e-excuse me,” I heard him say. Poor guy had turned bright red and looked like he was about to pop a vein, but he seemed determined to get out whatever he had to say. “Have you seen my dog? She’s a beagle. Tricolor beagle. Bonkers. That’s her name. She was playing with her ball but then she just ran off and I can’t find her.”

To my surprise, Tennyson Wilde’s face softened. He placed his hand on Llewellyn’s shoulder. “She probably just caught a scent,” he said, almost kindly. “I bet she has quite the nose on her?”

Llewellyn nodded.

“I’m sure she’ll come home when she gets hungry, but I can put a message on my blog about her, if you like. Do you have a picture you can send me?”

Llewellyn seemed reassured as he wandered off, tapping on his phone. I stared at Tennyson Wilde in shock, but already the image of him as a kind, caring guy was fading and he looked harsh again.

The rest of the team came out, in their fancy polo uniforms. They were all grumbling as they walked past me toward where Tennyson stood in the middle of the field.

As they filed past, one of them knocked Tennyson’s coat and it fell to the ground. I landed softly, but the rest of the coat fell on top of me and it was heavy and suffocating, so I struggled my way out of the thick fabric and up to the fresh air. The snow had only fallen lightly on this part of the grounds and had already begun to melt. Only a few clumps here and there remained and luckily I hadn’t fallen into one. Still, the ground was frozen solid, hard and cold, and I climbed back into the warm sanctuary of the coat. I’d just gotten comfortable when I felt a shadow fall over me.

“Such a nice coat…” the person muttered. “Shame to get it all dirty.”

They picked up the coat and brushed it off, flinging me off under the bleachers.

I landed hard, putting my arms out to break my fall as I went skidding along. Through the gaps in the bleachers I could see the person fold up the coat and sit it neatly back on the seat, well out of my reach. I was stuck there, on the freezing cold ground, until polo practice was over. How long did it go for? I wondered. From the way that Tennyson Wilde was yelling at people, it seemed like it would probably be a long time. I shivered and rubbed my arms. Why couldn’t I have been shrunk in the summer, when it was warm? Though, I guess that would’ve been worse, with all sorts of weird bugs and snakes and who knows what else out and about. Probably, no time was a good time to be shrunk out in the wild.

I’d been so cozy inside Nikolai’s ugly hat, and not expecting to be dropped on the ground, that I wasn’t even wearing warm clothes. The grass was wet from the melting snow and there was nowhere for me to go to get out of it. I walked to the edge of the bleachers and looked up, hoping I’d spot some easy way to get back up to the coat. Maybe like a tiny person ladder or something. I was plum out of luck, there was no way I was getting up there without being a whole lot taller.

So, I either had to stay there and freeze, or get some help. Well, there was a third option, go and hide out in the boys’ locker room, but if Tennyson Wilde hadn’t realized I’d fallen out of his coat, I might end up stranded in there, and that was clearly a level of hell that I didn’t want to plummet to.

I took a deep breath and rolled my shoulders. Tennyson Wilde wasn’t so much as participating in the training as yelling from the sidelines, and there were no horses in sight just yet, so if I stayed off the field, it should be safe enough. I’d go find him and he’d put me in his pocket and I’d be warm again. Man, I could so not wait until it was Althea’s turn to look after me.

It was a long walk, but I could do it. The grass was neatly trimmed, even more so than the rest of the school grounds, and only came up to just past my waist, so I could clearly see where I was headed. As if I could miss it, all those big clodhoppers stomping around, with the biggest clodhopper of all barking orders at them. Whoever let him have a whistle was surely from the devil. I kept on the outside of the line around the ground and headed for Tennyson Wilde.

I couldn’t tell what they were doing. How much fitness did you even need for polo? Didn’t the horses do all the work? I guess they had to grip their sticks properly and all that but I didn’t see why that would be so hard for them.

I seemed to walk forever and ever without getting anywhere. What if practice finished and they all came stomping down on me? The ground was so hard that I’d be squished like a bug. I picked up my pace and eventually put a fair distance between myself and the bleachers.

Then a whistle sounded. The whole lot of them, the entire polo team, came thundering toward me. I stood, stunned, watching them. There was nowhere for me to run, nowhere to hide. I couldn’t escape my fate of being trampled to death by a herd of wild polo players.

Panic gripped me and I began to run. I didn’t know where, which direction, anything, just that I had to get away from them. They got closer and closer, so quickly it was unimaginable. I couldn’t outrun them. I looked over my shoulder and they were right there, almost upon me. I was so busy watching them, waiting for a giant foot to finally come down on my head, that I didn’t look where I was going. The whistle sounded again and the polo players stopped running at me and changed direction. I turned around and noticed a mountain right in front of me, but I’d got up too much momentum and didn’t have time to stop. I ran splat, right into that mountain and fell backward onto my butt.

Right away, the smell told me that it was no normal mountain I’d run into. It was a mountain of horse manure. A pony poo pile. And I was covered in it, head to toe.

I groaned as I got to my feet. This was the worst. The actual worst.

The smell was unbearable. Chunks of it were in my hair, it was embedded under my fingernails. I tried wiping myself off on some grass, but the poo was sticky and just smeared around all over my skin. My uniform was ruined for sure. Tennyson Wilde was never going to let me live this down. He was probably also never going to let me in his pocket. Still, I had to keep going. I was more than halfway there and I didn’t want to be left stranded if they finished practice.

I broke into a bit of a jog as I headed for Tennyson Wilde. It kept me warm and I was hoping if I started sweating, maybe the poo would come off. Whenever I’d tried to wear makeup before, it had sweated straight off in minutes, so I hoped poo would be the same.

It wasn’t.

I reached Tennyson Wilde after what felt like running a marathon. Maybe it was, I was too exhausted to try to do the math. He was so busy bossing around the polo guys, making them run sprints, that he didn’t notice me at first, no matter how much I jumped up and down on his shoe. Then he wrinkled his nose, his eyes went huge and he looked down at me.

He gave his whistle one last long blow.

“Hit the showers,” he told them.

Even from there, I could hear the polo guys grumbling, and I bet Tennyson could pick out every word. Still, that was not my problem.

“Why are you here?” he asked when everyone was in the locker room. “Why do you smell like that? You couldn’t stay out of trouble for one hour?”

“Somebody knocked me out of your coat,” I said. “And then I fell in poo. I need a shower and some new clothes. And to get unshrunk. We need to find whoever did this and then drop them in poo and see how they like it.”

“I am not touching you,” he told me. “Stay on my shoe and try not to get any of that stuff on me.”

I grabbed hold of his shoelaces, holding tight as he walked. It wasn’t the worst way to travel, but I made sure to smear as much poo over his shiny shoes as I could. I knew it wasn’t his fault, but still, I figured you could be a bit vindictive when you were covered in poo.

And it was nothing to what I would do to the spellcaster when I finally found them.

Chapter 10

“I can still smell you,” said Nikolai, hiding his nose inside his sweater.

I sat in the middle of the table, freshly washed and dressed in a handkerchief, which was wrapped around me like a toga. I’d bathed in Althea’s sink, with all her fancy toiletries, and I thought I smelled pretty darn good. Like fruits and flowers. Really expensive fruits and flowers. Nikolai was obviously just being dramatic. The four of them stared down at me with unreadable expressions. Well, they might not have been that unreadable; it was hard to look at the whole of someone’s face when you could fit inside their nostril.

“That’s creepy,” I told Nikolai. “And I smell awesome, so shut up.”

“I think that two things about this situation are becoming apparent,” said Althea. “The first is that none of you are capable of keeping a tiny human safe —”

“Hey!” said Nikolai. “Nothing bad happened when she was with me!”

“Your ugly hat says otherwise,” said Althea.

“And you can hardly blame me for someone else’s poor decisions.” Tennyson Wilde humphed and folded his arms across his chest.

“And secondly,” Althea said, ignoring him, “this isn’t a situation that is sustainable in the long term. We need to find a solution, as soon as possible.”

“I agree,” said Sam. “Do you think she’s getting smaller?”

The four of them tipped their heads back and squinted down at me, as if that would help them judge my size.

“Maybe?” said Nikolai. “I’ve never really looked at her much to tell.”

“We need to know,” said Althea. “It will help determine what type of spell it is.”

“You’re researching?” Tennyson asked, sounding surprised. “But we have people to do that.”

“Inept people,” she said. “How do you even know they’re really working for us? Somebody on the inside must have helped steal that orb. I don’t think we can assume the loyalty of anyone outside of this room.”

I was kind of sleepy after my bath, and the four of them seemed to forget I was there and kept on with their conversation. I wondered what would happen if I kept shrinking. Would I vanish completely? Would I just get smaller and smaller until I was tinier than an atom? The world would be completely unrecognizable to me if that happened. It was strange enough now. Well, let’s be real, it was strange enough when I was at full height. But if I was just a speck — a speck on the back of a speck — I wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone, wouldn’t be able to function in the same way, use things the same way. I’d have to relearn everything in my whole life.

When they finished talking, Althea moved to pick me up, but Tennyson Wilde stopped her.

“Did you not look at the schedule?” he asked her. “I didn’t just make it for fun.”

“Is this because Mother wouldn’t let you have a Barbie doll?” she asked, but withdrew her hand.

Tennyson blinked at her. “Mother subscribes to some very arbitrary notions about gender,” he said, sounding more stern and dignified than ever. “And she didn’t just not let me have a Barbie doll. She took my Wedding Stylist Barbie and burned her at the stake. She had a career, you know. And dreams. She deserved better.”

“Maybe we should ask Lucy what she prefers?” Sam said, cutting off what looked to be a lengthy monologue from Tennyson Wilde. “We’re home now. It’s not as if we have to cover her class schedule.”

I really would’ve preferred to go with Althea or Sam, but something in Tennyson Wilde’s voice when he talked about his Barbie really got to me. He was trying to sound so formal and cold, but he wasn’t fooling anyone, and I knew what it was like to lose something important to you and pretend as if you hadn’t. It was about more than just the Barbie.

Wow, I’d never in my life expected to sympathize with Tennyson Wilde. Maybe it was because my brain was now the size of a pea.

Still, I couldn’t say outright that I picked Tennyson Wilde. That would just be too weird for everyone.

“I’m not a doll,” I told them. “And I’m definitely not a wedding stylist. And I don’t need babysitting. I can just stay on that big comfortable cushion over there.”

Sam raised his eyebrows and turned away. It made my heart sink a bit but I couldn’t have chosen him, not when I kept putting my foot in it and messing with his wolfy calm or whatever. I didn’t exactly want to get munched on in my sleep and I had no defenses against him. I wanted to spend time with him, all my time, but I didn’t know how to make that possible.

Althea just shrugged. “Okay, but if you change your mind, just yell out.”

The four of them settled in to do their homework, but I had no way to study. I couldn’t read books or type or use a touchscreen. My future looked grim and full of boredom. Maybe I could rig something up so I could use a laptop at least, but I’d need all my equipment, and that was in my room. I’d need help.

Sam was engrossed in a book. When I looked more closely, I realized it was the book from my bag, the one written by our parents. He was so absorbed in it, his face all crinkled up in concentration, that I didn’t want to disturb him. And he was probably a bit too volatile for this kind of high-stress mission anyway. There was no way I was asking Tennyson Wilde for help, and I didn’t want Althea to get into trouble if she got caught. That only left one person.

“Psst,” I said to Nikolai. “Hey, I have a business proposition for you.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t hear you over the smell.”

It was kind of hard going, but I managed to climb up onto his arm, scale up to his shoulder and flick him on the ear.

“Look,” I said. “I know you’ve got a bit of a thing for my roommate, Hannah.”

I couldn’t see his expression because I was sitting on his shoulder, but his neck grew a bit pink.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered. “Shut up.”

“It’s okay, she’s very cute and nice and probably too good for you. You know she thinks you’re a dickbag, though, right? How about you help me out and I change her mind about you?”

I left out the bit about how she wasn’t speaking to me and probably thought I was the number one dickbag in the world. That was just a temporary thing and therefore not relevant.

“What do you propose?” he asked.

* * *

It wasn’t getting into the Red House that was the problem — Nikolai had my key card out of my bag and the security wasn’t half as tight as for the Golden House. It was that Nikolai Volkov was very recognizable. Especially when wearing a mustard-colored top hat. Nobody said anything, but there were stares and whispers, and as he made his way down the hallway to my door, people were gathered in doorways, peeking out. I heard the snickety-click of more than one photo being taken. When he leaned against my doorjamb, the whispers broke into outright muttering. He knocked on the door with one knuckle and waved nonchalantly to the people gathering in the hall.

“Don’t spook them,” I whispered. “You don’t know how ferocious they can be.”

We waited a moment for Hannah to open the door, but there was no answer.

“You can’t just sneak in with them all watching,” I whispered. “It’s too suspicious.”

He banged on the door with his fist. “Come on, babe,” he called out, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Don’t be like this! Don’t throw away everything we have!”

The crowd seemed to creep forward, closing in on us.

“That is the opposite of helping,” I told him. “Also, make sure they know you’re talking to Hannah and not me. The last thing I need is more rumors.”

“Hannah!” he called. “My baby turtledove!”

I snorted, but luckily Nikolai was banging on the door loudly enough to cover the noise. He seemed to be really getting into it, actually. A bit too much, even.

“You know I can’t live without you!” he wailed, clutching at the door frame. “Don’t leave me like this!”

His dramatics were only egging on the crowd. This was going to be all over the Internet within minutes.

Then it started.

“You are my sunshine,” Nikolai sang. “My only sunshine.”

The crowd immediately began to back off. Wow, with all of the Volkov fortune, Nikolai could not buy a tune. Within seconds, the hallway was clear. I envied them their ability to run away, clutching at their ears.

“Works every time!” Nikolai said, chuckling as he swiped the key card and opened the door. “Whoa, people actually pay money to stay in these rooms? That’s criminal!”

“Don’t be a jerk and help me find my stuff,” I told him, then directed him to my side of the room, telling him which things I needed and which weren’t important. I got him to log in to my desktop computer and send a message to my brothers to say I was sick and couldn’t talk for a few days.

“You know, you could hire someone to be your errand boy,” he said as he typed. “I am actually far too busy and important for this kind of thing.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, loser, and watch your spelling. What’s the point of your fancy education if you can’t tell ‘then’ from ‘than’?”

“My charms are beyond spelling and grammar,” he said, hitting send.

“There are no charms beyond spelling and grammar,” I told him. “Come on, we should go before she gets back.”

Just as I said it, the door began to open.

“Quick, hide!” I hissed.

Nikolai did this elaborate drop and roll under the bed that nearly knocked me unconscious but managed to hide us in time. I didn’t know if anything would happen to him if he was discovered inside our room, but there would definitely be questions asked, and we didn’t have any good answers for them.

Someone walked into the room, slamming the door shut behind them. I could tell just from the footfalls that it wasn’t Hannah; she walked very lightly, and this person was a clomper.

“Yeah, the room’s empty,” the person said. They sounded as if they were on the phone, but that wasn’t possible at Amaris. There was no cell signal. But that wasn’t even the strangest thing. It was a male voice, a deep and unpleasant voice and one I recognized.

Astor.

“There’s no way she made it all the way back here. I told you, there’s no way she got out of the bamboo forest alive. I put the whammy on her good.”

I felt cold all over and a little bit like I was going to vomit.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll look, but it’s pointless… Fine, look I’ll meet you tomorrow night like we arranged and we can talk about it then… Yeah, at seven p.m. at the pool, I won’t forget.”

There was some shuffling, and the sound of Astor moving through the room. Nikolai crept forward so that we could see what Astor was doing. He went over to Hannah’s side of the room and started going through her drawers. He seemed way too interested in her underwear drawer. Actually, that was the only thing he seemed interested in. It had sounded like he was there to look for me, maybe to finish me off for good, but unless I was hiding in the crotch of Hannah’s panties, he wasn’t going to find me. The big creeper.

I had no idea what Nikolai was thinking, or how we would get out of this. I knew that if it came down to it, Astor was no match for Nikolai, but I really wanted to avoid any sort of physical altercation.

“We have to get out of here,” I said, so quietly it was barely a breath. I wasn’t sure Nikolai would hear, I could hardly hear myself, but I had to rely on his super senses.

He gave a little twitch of his head that was probably supposed to signify something, but I had no idea if it was agreement or not. Before I could clarify, he moved. He was faster than the wind and just as unseen, grabbing my stuff and speeding us out of there before Astor even looked up from his panty paradise. Oh man, I hoped he didn’t move onto my panty drawer next. Probably not. I didn’t really give off the pretty-lace-and-silk-underwear kind of impression, and that was obviously what he was into. Plus, he intended to finish me off, so I was probably safe from his panty sniffing.

As soon as we got clear of the building, Nikolai burst into laughter.

“Did you see that guy sniffing those panties? Oh, that was classic! What a pervert!”

I was less amused. Well, only slightly, though, because I’d known Astor was a jerk, but now I knew he was a panty-sniffing jerk.

“Did you miss the part where he was the one behind the spell?” I asked. “And not working alone? We need to tell the others.”

But man, it bugged me that I’d been outsmarted by Astor, of all people. The panty-sniffing jerk.

Chapter 11

I’d thought maybe the others would rub it in, that I’d been cursed by a jerkhead like Astor, but they were surprisingly sympathetic. Even Tennyson Wilde didn’t comment on it.

“He should be easy enough to blackmail or cajole,” he said. “I’ll have my people look into his background and I’ll speak to him tomorrow. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly and efficiently.”

“If we can trace his phone records, then we might find the person behind it all as well,” said Althea. “You can’t go and confront him at the pool. It’s obviously a trap.”

“We should steal his phone,” I said. “He was obviously talking to them through an app because there’s no cell signal here, so if we stole his phone we could access all his contacts.”

“We won’t need to,” said Tennyson Wilde, dismissing me. “It will be easier to confront them at the pool. Even if they know we’re coming, we have the advantage of numbers.” His word seemed final and nobody else argued with him.

As they all drifted off to bed, I got to thinking. I’d been so sure it had been Fatima. Maybe I was wrong about other things too. I’d assumed the bullying and the curse weren’t related, or only arbitrarily so, but things kept cropping up to make that seem unlikely. Sam had left me his tablet, so I opened up Facebook and searched for the fake Lucy account. It was slow and arduous but I finally found what I was looking for. Olivia and Charlotte had said I’d posted on the day I was shrunk. “Taking a small vacation,” it said. I didn’t know the exact time the spell took hold, but the status was posted around dinnertime. The wording could not be a coincidence, surely. The person behind the cyberbullying was at least tied to the magic somehow, if not the one behind everything. I’d underestimated Astor, and I didn’t think he was the one ultimately responsible for everything, but I should be careful about underestimating the real villain.

It was hard to sleep. The cushion on the chair was comfortable enough for lazing about, but I had a zillion thoughts racing through my head. Literally everyone in the school hated me, so anyone could be behind it. It hadn’t just been a random attack; it had been targeted at me specifically. It had been meant to kill me. Wow, somebody wanted me dead. That was maybe the most terrifying thing ever. How was I supposed to sleep? Sleep left you completely defenseless. Sleep was my friend, maybe my best friend after food, but I couldn’t rely on sleep to keep me safe. The person who had attacked me had broken into the Golden House before. Their magic could penetrate any walls. Nowhere was safe.

I crept over to the side of the chair and squeezed down in the crack between the cushion and the arm. I didn’t know if hiding would do any good against magic, but it made me feel better to be in a small space. For a while, after my dad had left, I hadn’t slept. There was nobody in the house to protect our family. What if something happened? I had to keep awake to keep us safe. And then when Sam’s family had been killed, I’d spent the nights under my bed, wrapped up in my blanket with just the top of my head peeking out so I could keep my eyes on the door. I knew it wouldn’t really do anything against an attacker if they broke in, but there was nothing else that I could do. This was the same sort of thing.

I don’t know how long I lay there in the darkness, trying to make myself part of the chair, but it seemed like forever.

And then it happened. The thing I feared the most.

Someone, a shadow, opened the door and crept into the room. No alarms rang, no security detail burst into the room to save me, just the dark form of someone moving toward me. I bit down on the side of my hand to keep from screaming.

“Lucy, it’s me,” Sam whispered. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’d be more okay if you weren’t creeping around giving me a heart attack,” I snapped, but I wasn’t angry really.

“I know you didn’t want to stay in my room, but if you like, I’ll just sit over here while you get some sleep. You can pretend I’m not here, but I’ll watch the door and keep you safe.”

His words were like a sleeping potion. My brain immediately stopped chasing itself around and curled up like a sleepy puppy. My heart felt as if it was growing too big for my chest and I wanted to tell Sam how much it meant to me, for him to know exactly how I felt and what I needed, but I was asleep before the words made it out of my mouth.

I woke up to see him curled in a ball at the foot of my chair, a big furry wolf, fast asleep with his head on a cushion. I wasn’t mad that he’d fallen asleep when he said he’d watch the door. It wasn’t really about watching the door, even I knew that much. It was about feeling like someone had my back, feeling as if I wasn’t alone, that there was someone to share the weight of responsibility.

I had zero energy to go to class. Being tiny really took it out of you, but we had to track down Astor and get this whole mess sorted out. If I didn’t get biggened soon, the school administration would notice, for one thing. I’d lose my scholarship if I had too many absences recorded.

“We’re doing this as a pack,” Tennyson Wilde said as the five of us headed up to the school after dinner. “We don’t know what weapons he has at his disposal, magical or not. We will approach him cautiously, isolate him and try to reason with him. Do not engage in any physical altercation with him unless he attacks first. Do not reveal your powers to him. Be mindful of your surroundings and anything that seems out of place. Remember, our objective is to find the person behind the magic.”

“We know,” Althea said, rolling her eyes.

Sam carried me safely in the front pocket of his bag. Seeing the four of them together like this, striding up to the school like a team of superheroes heading out for a mission, it struck me how different Sam was from the others. They carried themselves with an air of absolute confidence. Whether it was because they’d been born as wolves or born rich or what, there was absolutely no hesitation in anything they did. Sam, on the other hand, he was all stooped posture and second guesses.

He seemed twitchy as he followed the others, and I wondered if he was okay, if this kind of thing would be too much for him, but I figured they wouldn’t bring him along if he couldn’t handle it. Probably it was only me that freaked him out, and evil polo wizards were okay. He’d never been great with confrontation, so he was probably just twitchy about that.

As we approached the aquatic complex, they discussed their plan of approach in hushed voices.

“Sam, you should hang back with Lucy,” Althea said, and the others nodded agreement.

“Nikolai has the sharpest senses, so he should locate the target and then fall back with Althea to form a line of defense. Survey the perimeter for any sign of the magic user. I’ll approach Astor directly and begin negotiations.”

I wasn’t sure if Tennyson Wilde was planning a military operation or a sporting tactic, but I hoped he knew what he was talking about. In my experience, guys like Astor had no idea about their actions having consequences, because they’d never had to deal with any consequences before, and so they thought they could do whatever they liked and get away with it. That made them dangerous and unpredictable.

He was in the main pool area, not swimming, just sitting by the pool, watching the water. He was still fully dressed and looked as if he were waiting for something. When Tennyson entered, Astor looked up and smiled. It seemed obvious that he’d been waiting for us.

“I knew you would come,” he said. “You think you’re so smart. So much smarter than everyone else, so much better.”

I rolled my eyes. Poor little rich kid.

“You think you can make a fool out of me and get away with it? You think that stupid commoner can get away with it? I don’t care who you are, who your family is, nobody makes a fool out of Remington Astor and gets away with it.” He stood up to yell his words at Tennyson, his face red and a vein in his thick neck pulsing.

Tennyson Wilde didn’t react, just stood silently, watching him. To be honest, I knew how infuriating it could be to get into an argument with Tennyson Wilde, but Astor wasn’t doing himself any favors.

“Your little girlfriend has been missing for days and nobody even cares. She could vanish from the world forever and nobody would notice. And what will you do then?”

“We know what you did,” Tennyson Wilde said. “And we know how you did it.”

“Ooooh,” Astor said, waving his arms around. “Look who knows so much. Do you know how to break the spell too? Of course you don’t, that’s why you’re here.”

Even from the back, I could tell from the set of Tennyson Wilde’s shoulders that he was rolling his eyes.

“There’s nobody else here,” called Althea.

Astor laughed. “And nobody else coming.”

“So what’s the point of this?” Tennyson asked. “What do you want from us? Tell me your terms and if they are reasonable, we can negotiate.”

Astor laughed meanly. “Terms? You think I want to make a deal with you? You think there’s anything you could give me more satisfying that being rid of that stupid little bitch? Better than seeing the look on your smug face after I stamp her out? You gotta be kidding me. Something that good doesn’t even exist.”

Tennyson took half a step forward and then stopped himself. “For your own safety, I suggest you reconsider.”

Astor snorted. “You’re threatening me now? What are you going to do, turn into a werewolf and rip my face off?”

As one, I felt the five of us suck in a sharp, shocked breath.

“Go on, do it. I’m recording this entire thing. You want the world to know what you are, that your whole family are filthy animals?” He laughed. “The only thing better than getting rid of your commoner whore would be taking you down with her.”

So many things happened at once that it was impossible to keep track of what was going on. Sam let out a ferocious growl and lunged forward, sending me flying. There was a flurry of movement from the shadows, Nikolai and Althea, but I couldn’t tell what they were doing as I flew through the air. Wow, I was up high. It was going to be a bitch when I hit the ground. The noises from below were awful, growls and tearing, ripping sounds, but I couldn’t turn to see what they were from, whether Sam was okay, whether they were ripping Astor to pieces. I wasn’t so sure if I cared if they were, considering he had every intention of ending me, but I did wonder if the spell could ever be broken if he was dead.

Before I could give it too much thought, though, I landed. Splash, right in the middle of the pool.

Chapter 12

I was a strong swimmer. We lived near a river and my brothers were little troublemakers, so I made sure I was a good enough swimmer to pull someone to safety if they got in trouble. This was something new to me, though. This was like being dropped right in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to cling onto for support. This was really, really scary.

I came to the surface spluttering, with my throat burning from chlorine and something else, a strange and bitter taste. The horrible noises still filled the air, distorted in that strange way that sounds always echoed at an indoor pool. I was too turned around to tell which direction they were coming from; which direction I should start swimming. I couldn’t climb up the ladder. I’d need somebody to fish me out, and I really did not want that person to be Astor.

I floated on my back, trying to get my bearings. As I stared up at the ceiling, I let the thoughts waft through my mind. Astor had said a lot of things, all of them distressing, but one thing in particular caught my attention. He was sure that the rumors about me and Tennyson Wilde were true. Which a) just proved how stupid he was, because who would believe that? and b) strongly hinted that he wasn’t the cyberbully. I was fairly sure that the person posting all that stuff about me wouldn’t post anything if they thought it was true. The truth can be defended, proven; lies can’t. The links between the bullying and the spell were too strong to ignore, which meant that the bully must be the person behind all the magic, behind everything. If I could find them, I could stop the whole thing.

I started swimming. This was great. If it was finding somebody online, that was something I could do. That was something logical, something with practical steps that could be taken to achieve a concrete result. That was exactly my kind of thing. I just needed to get out of this pool and get started on it.

I swam and swam but didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the edge of the pool. It was hard to tell if the sounds were dying down or if they were just muffled from the water in my ears, but I hoped they didn’t vanish completely, because it was too easy to lose my sense of direction when everything was just water. My limbs started feeling weak and I wasn’t sure how long I could keep swimming before my body gave up. I wished I knew what was going on with the others. I didn’t want to call out for help in case Astor found me, but I doubted they’d find me otherwise. I was just a speck of debris in a wide, bottomless ocean. I stopped to tread water for a moment, to rest my aching limbs and try to figure out what was happening.

It was hard to pick the different sounds apart, but it seemed like the werewolf noises had stopped. I couldn’t hear any growling or roaring or any of that. There was some thumping, but everything echoed so badly I couldn’t tell what it was or where it was coming from. Then I heard something that filled me with relief. Somebody calling my name. Somebody definitely not Astor.

“Lucy, where are you?” called Althea.

“Here!” I said, waving my arms around and kicking like mad to stay afloat. “Over here in the water!”

She stepped up to the edge of the pool, appearing like a goddess on a mountaintop. She looked around blankly, obviously not seeing me, so I splashed the water as much as I could to be more noticeable.

Finally, she spotted me, but for some reason she didn’t look pleased.

“Okay, just a second,” she said. “Sam’s chasing after Astor, and Tennyson and Nikolai are trying to calm him down and stop him from hurting anyone. I’ll get you out of there, but Astor’s pumped wolfsbane into the pool so I can’t come in to get you.”

It seemed like forever until she reappeared. I felt so weak, drained of all my energy. I hoped I could stay afloat long enough for her to do whatever it was she was doing.

“Okay,” she said, reappearing with a long pole in her hand. “Grab onto this.”

She leaned over as far as she could, stretching out with the pole for me to grab onto, but still I couldn’t reach it.

“Hang on,” I said, “let me swim in a bit more.”

I swam and swam toward her, but before I could close enough, all my muscles seized up. Oh man, who knew a leg cramp could be so painful? It was like being stabbed by a thousand knives. I couldn’t move, I had no control over my own body. I tried to kick out, to keep swimming, but my body rejected the idea and I began to sink. Stupid body.

As the water closed over my head, I heard Althea yell out. The last thing I was aware of was a mighty splash and a giant wave coming toward me.

When I woke up, I was dry, toasty warm and shocked about not being dead. I was like déjà vu from when Tennyson Wilde had first found me. I was snug on my chair and the others were gathered around the table, talking quietly. It only took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t all of the others, only Tennyson and Nikolai, and I remembered what Althea had said about the wolfsbane.

“She’ll be fine,” said Nikolai quietly. “We’d know if she wasn’t.”

“I don’t know, everything feels confused.” Tennyson Wilde was different than I’d ever seen him, pale and red-eyed.

“We should’ve let Sam kill him.”

“That wouldn’t help Althea,” said Tennyson. “Besides, we shouldn’t—”

The beeping of his phone cut off what he was going to say. He fumbled as he picked it up.

“She’s okay,” he said, expelling a long breath. “Mother says they were able to administer the antidote in time. However, Althea is still quite ill and won’t return to school until she has regained her strength.”

“It was lucky I returned when I did. You should’ve seen her, boiling alive with the commoner clutched in her hand. I should get a medal or something.” Nikolai tried to sound flippant, but the worry in his voice betrayed how much he cared.

I stayed perfectly still on my cushion as I listened. I didn’t want them to know I was awake. Althea had jumped into the pool to save me and almost died. It was all my fault. Well, not all my fault. Let’s be real, it was mostly Astor’s fault. But still, a bit my fault, and I felt horrible. Althea was literally the only person at the whole school who had been consistently nice to me, had always believed in me, and it made me sick that she was hurt on my account. I totally understood Nikolai wanting to get revenge on Astor for it.

They sat in silence, lost in their thoughts, until Nikolai abruptly pushed back from the table. “I’m going to check on Sam. We need to get back to Astor with our response.”

Tennyson hardly seemed to hear him. I wondered what they needed to talk to Astor about. He’d said that he didn’t want anything from the Golden, but he was clearly in a position to demand anything he wanted. He’d said he was recording in the pool, so he most likely had concrete evidence of werewolf activity. I had no doubt the Wildes had enough money and influence to cover up any sort of wolf-related scandal, but it would probably be annoying, and there would always be people who would believe any rumor, even if it was proved false. Plus, their mother sounded kind of strict. I bet she wouldn’t be pleased if the boarding school shenanigans of her kids ended up exposing their entire world.

It made me wonder what Sam’s life had been like since he’d gone to live with the Wildes. Had he been welcomed like part of the family or treated like some sort of scientific anomaly? I felt like the more time I spent around these people, the more questions I had.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” Tennyson Wilde said quietly. “If that’s what you’re doing, you shouldn’t.”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure he was talking to me. He’d always been the first to blame me for anything that went wrong.

“You may be worried that we’ll give in to that person’s arrogant demands to hand you over, but I am not in the habit of submitting to my inferiors. Any mistakes that were made in this case were my own, and I will not let anyone else suffer for them. I will find a way to bring him to justice.”

“Are you feeling okay?” I asked him. “You didn’t hit your head or something?”

He didn’t answer me, just kept staring at his phone.

Sam was back to normal the next day, but the air of gloom still hung over everyone. It was clear that every one of us blamed ourselves for what had happened to Althea. Well, except Nikolai.

“We can’t give in to that guy,” he hissed across the breakfast table. Astor had just sent through a message containing a list of demands and the footage from the pool. It was pretty incriminating. “Let him do his worst. Look at this list — he wants us to wait on him hand and foot!”

“He wants access to our facilities, only because he suspects we’re harboring Lucy and he hopes to find her,” said Tennyson.

“And who knows what else?” said Sam, staring down at his untouched plate of sausages and eggs. “He probably wants to sneak around and find out even more of our secrets.”

“I don’t like it either, but I’m not sure we have any other option.” Tennyson Wilde pushed back from the table and stood, picking me up and taking me away from the delicious saucer of bacon I was nibbling at. “I will consider it, but I don’t think it’s wise.”

For once, I agreed with Tennyson Wilde. Having Astor creeping around the Golden House could only mean disaster. And more panty sniffing, probably. Sometime during biology, though, Tennyson must have changed his mind, because he found Astor at lunch and slapped a key card down on the table in front of him.

“This will give you access to our basic facilities,” Tennyson said through gritted teeth. “If you abuse it, it will be taken away and you will be dealt with.”

“I highly doubt that,” Astor said, smirking up at him. “Is that the only thing you have for me?”

“Yes.” Tennyson Wilde turned and walked away.

“That was a dumbass move,” I told him.

He didn’t disagree.

By the end of the day, it was clear exactly how dumbass it was.

It was thankfully a day without polo practice, so we went straight back to the house after class, only to find Astor sprawled on the sofa, his filthy shoes up on the cushions and playing a game on his phone with the sound at full volume.

“Funny, isn’t it,” Astor said over the music of his game, “how a bunch of stuff around here seems to be fixed up for a tiny person.”

Tennyson ignored him and sat down at the table, pulling a book toward himself and flicking it open. I couldn’t see to read it from his pocket and I didn’t dare climb up onto the table with Astor there. I stayed hunched in Tennyson’s pocket, being as silent as possible.

“Have you noticed it yet?” Astor asked. “How she’s getting smaller. I wanted her to vanish completely, but the boss said this would be better. Funnier, you know?”

“Your boss sounds very astute. Are they hiring? I’ve been looking for a menial position for real-world experience before I take over the company, and being an evil minion is as good as anything.”

I bit down on a laugh. Wow, who knew old T-son could bring the lolz?

“I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not stupid. You think I’ll give my boss up to you? You think I’ll give you information? I’m not an idiot. Now shut up and go get me a drink.”

I felt the growl more than heard it. Tennyson’s growl was deeper than the others, darker, somehow. It made me wonder again what he would look like in his wolf form, how fearsome he’d be. I couldn’t tell what he looked like from inside his pocket, but it was clearly enough to shut up Astor’s stupid mouth, at least for a while.

Tennyson read in silence, the only noise in the room from Astor’s game. I wondered where Sam and Nikolai were, but then I remembered it was Thursday and Nikolai had C&C club. I was a bit disappointed he hadn’t taken me with him. They always had the best snacks.

Sam probably had some sort of activity too; after all, they were compulsory. I wondered what he was doing. Basketball, maybe? He’d always been good at sports. It kind of made me jealous in a way, that he could go and do normal things, normally, with normal people. With me all he could do was turn vicious and hate himself. If I was a stranger, if we just met now, we could be friends. We could be more than friends. It would just be something that happened without all the BS. Though, if we were just to meet now, would we even have anything to talk about?

I sighed. That line of thinking was pointless. Things were what they were.

Eventually, Nikolai and Sam wandered in. Neither of them acknowledged Astor, just sat down at the table.

“Calculus quiz tomorrow?” Sam asked quietly.

Astor snorted. “Don’t pretend like you guys don’t buy your grades just on my account. Just do whatever you’d be doing if I weren’t here. Chase your tails or whatever, sniff your butts.”

“Why are you even here?” asked Nikolai. “You can’t lie around playing on your phone in your own house?”

“Would that annoy you into handing over the girl? I don’t think so.”

If it’d been me, I’d have gone to my room and left him there to his annoying self, but I supposed they didn’t want him snooping around unsupervised.

Eventually, he switched off his phone and got up to go to dinner.

“Same time tomorrow, then?” he said as he left. “Tell your sister hi from me. Hope her pretty face isn’t too messed up from the acid bath I gave her. Even though she’s half-dog, I know I’d let her chew on my bone, if you get what I’m saying.”

The three of them lunged for him at once, but he was out the door.

We needed to break this spell, delete the recording from the pool and get this whole mess finished once and for all.

Chapter 13

If any of us had hoped that Astor would lose enthusiasm for his douchebag campaign, we were in for disappointment. Instead, he seemed to gather momentum with every frustrated sigh, roll of the eyes, clenched fist. It was like he fed off other people’s annoyance. He spent more and more time at the house, and each visit was more invasive than the last.

“We need to delete that footage,” I told the others. “If we can delete the footage, he has no hold over us. He doesn’t even know for sure that I’m here. For all he knows I’ve been living like a queen with the rats. So as long as you play dumb, he’s got nothing.”

Nikolai rolled his eyes. “And how do you propose we do that? We don’t even know how he was filming it.”

“Our security team has a real-time feed of all security footage through the school and intercepts it to protect our privacy, then relays the safe footage back on a thirty-second delay,” Tennyson Wilde said. “If they have the original footage from the pool, we can see if he placed any cameras.”

“That’s a good idea but he probably just filmed it on his phone, so the files will be on there.”

“We’ll find them,” Tennyson Wilde said. Rather than his usual confidence, he sounded distracted. Althea was still away sick.

The days seemed to pass too quickly. I had missed a lot of classes and was starting to fall behind; even the casual teachers were noticing my absence. If I didn’t get biggened soon, I’d lose my scholarship. Well, according to Astor, if I didn’t get biggened soon, I’d get so tiny I vanished forever, but losing my scholarship seemed a more real-world sort of awful.

As the full moon approached, Astor’s evil glee only seemed to grow.

“He’s planning something,” I told the others. “We need to stop him before the full moon. Nothing that makes Astor smile like that can be a good thing.”

Nobody disagreed.

“I thought you guys were supposed to be super-powerful badasses. I thought you could just make people disappear. Why don’t you make Astor disappear, just rub him out? It’s okay, I won’t judge.”

“We’re not in the habit of casually murdering people,” said Tennyson Wilde.

He sounded all offended, but I’d heard the stories.

“Who says it needs to be casual?” I said. “Look, I’d do it myself, but I’m only two inches tall and shrinking, plus you have a whole army of hired goons.”

“We’re not in the habit of asking other people to murder on our behalf either,” Tennyson Wilde told me. “Is this how commoners deal with their problems? If you go around murdering each other all the time, why are there so many of you?”

“He shrank me to the size of a teacup,” I said. “I’m allowed to want him dead. Don’t invalidate my feelings.”

“You are a strange tiny person,” he said, but I could tell he was worried about the full moon too.

Nobody was more obviously freaking out than Sam. Astor obviously had a problem with him. It had been Sam who had attacked him, after all, and Astor never missed an opportunity to annoy Sam. You’d think even someone as stupid as Astor would know better than to pick a fight with a volatile werewolf, but he seemed to be hoping for it. The closer the full moon got, the more Astor tried to irritate Sam. Sam tried his best to ignore it, but it was easy to tell he was losing his control. The night before the full moon, Astor didn’t leave the house at all. Tennyson told the others to go to sleep, but he stayed up to keep an eye on Astor. Even with Tennyson keeping watch, every time he dropped his guard, Astor would sneak away and do something to wake Sam up — set off an alarm, smash some glasses against the wall of Sam’s room — and every time, all Astor did was laugh. Oh man, I wished I was big enough to smack him upside the head. Even if it didn’t knock some sense into him, it would be very satisfying.

The last time he did it, Tennyson had nodded off over a pile of books and Astor pulled the fire alarm, sending sprays of water down all over us. From far away, I could hear the angry roars of Sam and Nikolai as they were woken up, but Tennyson was cold as steel as he stood up from the table. Astor was still laughing as Tennyson grabbed him but stopped when Tennyson slammed him hard up against the wall.

“I have been more than patient with you,” Tennyson said. “And I have been more than generous with our resources and facilities. It is time for you to stop.”

Astor was turning red in the face but that didn’t stop his smug smile. “Give me what I want and I’ll leave you alone,” he wheezed.

“You want the girl?” Tennyson asked, tightening his grip on Astor’s neck. “Do you really think if I knew where she was, I would protect her and risk exposing my entire werewolf pack? Do you imagine for one second that some random commoner means more to me than my family and my heritage?”

“What are you saying?” Astor gasped. I was fairly sure that Tennyson was close to crushing his windpipe.

“I’m saying we don’t have the girl.”

“If I leave you alone, will you help me find her?”

“If we help you find her, will you hand over the footage from the swimming pool?” Tennyson squeezed Astor’s neck so hard it looked like his whole head would just pop off.

“Yes, okay! Fine, just let go of me, you big freak.”

“Swear to it.”

“Yes, I swear. Come on, let go!”

Tennyson nodded and stepped back, dropping his grip on Astor. I made sure I was well hidden under the books. There was no way I was going to let him just hand me over to the enemy, no matter how good the deal was. And to be honest, the deal wasn’t even that good. Especially not for me.

“I will contact you when I know where she is,” Tennyson Wilde said. “I do not want to see or hear from you until then. Get out.”

Astor ran out, clutching at his neck and gasping for breath. What a crybaby. Tennyson Wilde wasn’t even that scary.

“That should keep him out of the way for a few days at least,” Tennyson said, sitting back down at the table. “You can come out; I have no intention of trading in our one bargaining chip so early in the game.”

I poked my head up from behind a book. “You’re going to break your word?”

“I never gave him my word and I do not trust his. I did, however, take the opportunity to slip a small recording device into his pocket.”

I was a little bit impressed with his smooth moves, but no way was I telling him that. I curled up on the table and went to sleep.

Apparently werewolves got a day off school for the full moon. I was fairly sure that wasn’t approved by the school board, but then, I was also sure the Golden could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Going to class was more like a hobby for them than a requirement.

Since Althea had been away, the mood around the Golden House hadn’t exactly been full of chuckles, but the day of the full moon came and it was one hundred percent serious business.

“We’ve created a safe environment for you while we’re out tonight,” Sam told me.

He looked bad, pale and like he hadn’t slept in around ten years. He was twitchy and wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I got the impression he was one false move away from losing control. That was why I felt as if I couldn’t say anything when he showed me the “safe environment.” It wasn’t so much the creepy doll house that bothered me, but the fact that the creepy dolls still lived in it. I just knew that as soon as the lights went out, those dolls would start moving around, and boy would they be mad that a tiny human had encroached on their territory. I had no idea what was supposed to be “safe” about it, though I had to admit that the bed looked comfy and it was nice to have a whole wardrobe full of new, tiny clothes.

I really, really wanted to ask if the creepy doll house belonged to Tennyson, but the mood was way too somber, and without Althea there, I doubted they’d tell me if it was his.

“Okay,” I said, because seriously, what else could I say? I didn’t want to make a fuss and cause any more bother, but Astor knew the house would be vulnerable during the full moon and he suspected they were harboring me. Astor was stupid but surely he could put “tiny person” and “tiny creepy house” together and come to the logical conclusion.

“You don’t like it,” said Tennyson Wilde.

“I like it fine,” I told him. Just because I was spending time in the werewolf house didn’t mean he could start using his werewolf juju on me and sensing my feelings or whatever. That was the last thing I needed.

“It’s not just the house,” Sam explained. “Look.”

He pointed to a little trail around the house and then pressed a button. Water started trickling out from somewhere, forming a little moat around the house.

“Magic can’t cross running water,” Tennyson Wilde explained.

“That’s really awesome,” I said. And it was. But magic wasn’t the only thing you had to worry about when you were teensy. “But you know what can cross running water? Astor.”

“I told you,” Nikolai said from his spot in the chair, not looking up as he scrolled through his phone. “She’s ungrateful and she thinks we’re stupid.”

“I am grateful!” I said. “This is the best house with a magic-resistant moat that anyone ever gave me. But if Astor finds it, he’ll know I was here all along, and what do you think the first thing he’ll do will be? He’ll release the video from the pool. This isn’t just about me, so you can stop acting like I’m the bad guy here.”

“I don’t think you’re the bad guy,” said Nikolai. “I think you’re the incredible shrinking girl.”

“This is all irrelevant,” Tennyson said, raising his voice to silence Nikolai. “We have, naturally, thought of every precaution. If you look on that table to your left, you will find a panic button. If you press that — don’t press it now! An iron cage will drop around you and protect you from any intruder. Magic cannot pass through iron and a magic user cannot touch it. Keep in mind that it is very difficult, expensive and time-consuming to then remove the cage, and as you are currently under a spell, you will not be able to touch the iron or pass through it until the cage is lifted, so do not drop it unless you feel it is absolutely essential that you do so.”

“Right,” I said. I hoped there was a miniature bathroom in the creepy dollhouse, if I was going to be stuck in there for hours. Going to the bathroom wasn’t a fun experience when you were small even if you weren’t locked up inside a cage.

“Maybe one of you should stay here with her,” Sam said to Tennyson and Nikolai. “It might not be so bad this month.”

Tennyson and Nikolai shared a heavy look. I remembered Tennyson telling me that most wolves have more control during the full moon, that the moon is their source of power, but Sam wasn’t like that. Tennyson and Nikolai were fine with the full moon, it was a jolly lark for them, but whatever had happened to Sam made him different, and the full moon was the most difficult time for him. It wouldn’t be fair for me to take away one of the two people who could bring him some comfort just because I was a bit freaked out.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I have a whole house to explore, I won’t even notice you guys are gone.” I gave Sam my most reassuring smile. “You go and have fun. Howl at the moon or whatever you do. Don’t eat anyone’s face off. Unless you run into Astor, then munch away!”

They left me alone to go do their wolfy stuff, but as soon as they were gone, I began to worry. What if Sam did eat somebody’s face off? He’d never forgive himself. I knew that Tennyson and the others had been looking after Sam all this time, but being around me seemed to bring out the more vicious aspects of Sam’s wolf side, and he’d been around me a lot lately. I supposed there was nothing I could do about it. I had to trust in the others to keep Sam safe. I wandered through the house, amazed at the level of detail that had gone into making it. Everything looked so real. Somebody must’ve had nimble fingers to carve the bannisters on the staircase so finely and paint the flowers on those tiny little plates. The books on the bookshelves weren’t real, which was disappointing but to be expected, I supposed. The armchairs in the study sure were comfortable though. I sat down in one for a rest. The house was massive. I’d hardly explored half of it and I was ready for a nap. Being small really burned through the energy. I definitely had motivation proportionate to my size.

I hadn’t intended to nod off completely, but I woke with a start at the sound of a door closing. Not a tiny door, a regular door. I wasn’t sure of the time, but I hadn’t been asleep very long, so I doubted it was the others back from their werewolf shenanigans. I supposed it could be one of Tennyson Wilde’s staff, but they were usually super quiet and Tennyson was careful about his privacy, I doubted any of them would be in the house without him around. That left one person.

Astor.

I jumped up and rushed around, trying to find somewhere to hide. Everything was stuck down, fastened to the walls and immovable. The sound of footsteps got closer and closer. I had to press the panic button but it was back in the entrance way, near the front door. I ran from the study and down the long corridor, trying to remember the way back. Oh man, I was so stupid, I should’ve stayed close by in case this kind of thing happened. I should never have dropped my guard.

I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart as I ran, had no idea how close Astor had gotten to finding me. Finally, I came to the main staircase and thundered down it, my eyes never leaving the panic button. I only had to make it that far. My feet skidded on the floor as I hit the entranceway running. I could hear the rattle of the doorknob outside the room. I was almost there, so close. The door swung open and I reached out, stretched my arm out and hit the button.

I sunk to the ground, exhausted, but for a moment nothing happened. No protective cage fell around me.

In the doorway a figure appeared.

But it wasn’t Astor.

Chapter 14

The figure slinked into the room. They wore a long, dark robe, face covered by a hood like it had read the Evil Villain 101 handbook and dressed accordingly. Astor wouldn’t bother disguising himself, which meant that this could only be one person. The person behind everything. The spellcaster. I ducked behind a tall vase of flowers and watched it through the petals.

The entire building let out a groan, and for a moment I thought it was magic, that the spellcaster was bringing the whole place down around our ears, but finally, the iron cage dropped. The spellcaster jumped back to avoid getting split in two. Lucky for me — if they’d jumped the other way, they’d have been locked in there with me and I’d have been royally screwed.

Still, even locked safely inside the iron cage, it was disconcerting. The room was too dark to see anything clearly, so the spellcaster kept fading in and out of the shadows, a darker spot in the darkness. They paced backwards and forwards around the cage, then reached out to touch the bars. There was a hissing noise and the smell of burning flesh, which was kind of disgusting but also smelled a bit like bacon, which was more disgusting in a different way.

I was torn between whether I should stay hidden or try to talk to the spellcaster. Tennyson Wilde had said I’d be safe in the iron cage, but I had no proof of that, so I was reluctant to reveal myself, but at the same time, this was the best chance we’d had at getting information. If only I didn’t have that deep and abiding fear of ventriloquism and had learned how to throw my voice.

“I am not here for you, Lucy O’Connor,” the spellcaster said. They’d obviously done something to disguise their voice because it came out all distorted and wobbly, so I had no hope of identifying them. “You do not need to fear me.”

I couldn’t let that stand.

“Oh really,” I said, not moving from my spot and hoping that my size and the darkness made me hard to spot. “If that’s the case, why did you shrink me?”

“There is a greater plan at work. You are but one small part of it.”

I snorted. “Size jokes are not funny.”

“We are on the same side,” the spellcaster said. “Your kind and mine are natural allies. We should be working together.”

I didn’t know what they meant about “my kind.” Small people? People from the Red House? Scholarship kids? Who even knows? When someone goes around casting spells to hurt people, it probably isn’t a good idea to look too deeply into their words for sense.

“Yeah, great idea,” I said. “How about you put me back to normal size and we’ll talk about that?”

“Even if I could, the iron bars prevent it.”

“What do you mean, even if you could?”

“The one who cast the spell must lift it. I only provided the source of power for this spell. I did not cast it.”

“So, tell Astor to lift it. He obviously takes his orders from you.”

“I give no orders, only opportunities.”

I sighed. “Look, spare me the cryptic evil villain BS. If you can’t break the spell and you’re not here to attack me, then just go away and leave me alone.” I probably should’ve questioned them more, got as much information on them as I could so we could work out who they were, but I was getting tired and annoyed.

“There is a way to break the spell, Lucy O’Connor,” the spellcaster said, backing out of the room. “But first you have to believe.”

* * *

“What happened? Are you okay? Lucy, answer me!”

I sat up in bed, stretching and yawning. I had no clue what the time was, but that was the best sleep I’d had in ages.

“What’s up?” I said.

I looked up from my cozy little room to find three massive werewolf faces staring down at me from outside the iron cage. Clearly, the full moon was over.

“Did Astor try to attack you?” Sam asked. He looked tired but better than he had in days.

I shook my head. “Not Astor.”

“Don’t tell me, you tripped and pressed the panic button by accident,” said Tennyson Wilde, rolling his eyes at me.

“No, you jerk. It was the spellcaster.”

That made him pipe down. The three of them listened while I explained everything that had happened.

“And that was all they said? Why did you question them about their master plan? Why didn’t you get more clues on their identity?”

I rolled my eyes. “Look, sorry that I failed Interrogation 101, but they kind of caught me off guard. Maybe you could draw up a list of questions for me to ask next time since you’re so awesome at everything ever.”

“How did they get in?” Sam wondered aloud.

“Probably Astor’s card, but we should look into it. And also check any security footage.”

“They seemed like they were looking for something in particular, and they obviously knew you guys weren’t going to be here. You should double-check anything they might have taken as well.”

Nikolai and Tennyson went off to check stuff, but Sam stayed behind with me. I opened up my wardrobe and went through the clothes, trying to pick something to wear out of all the fresh, clean clothes in there.

“It will take a while for the cage to be restored,” he said, sitting down on the floor outside the bars. “Do you need anything?”

“Food,” I told him. “Bacon.” I’d been craving it ever since the night before.

He sent down for some food and then sat there, staring up at me. “I wonder what they meant, though, about your kind.”

I shrugged. “Probably nothing. Just messing with me.”

Sam shook his head. “Strange thing to say, though.”

“Maybe they meant humans.”

“Humans and magic casters have never been allies, though. There’s a long history of fear and mistrust.”

“What are you trying to say, Sam?”

He shrugged again and wouldn’t meet my eye. We both knew exactly what he was trying to say, but no way were we going to talk about it out loud. Ever.

“Our parents…” he started.

“Our parents wrote a book. So what? That doesn’t mean squat, so just drop it.”

He didn’t speak again until the food came. While he arranged it on a tiny plate, I dressed in a stripy dress but didn’t bother with the plastic shoes because they were strange, even for dolls. Once I was dressed, I climbed down out of my house and over to the iron bars, where Sam handed me my food.

“Lucy,” he said softly. “If we knew what you were, maybe we could stop all this from happening.”

“I’m a human girl,” I told him, digging into my food. “Just a super unlucky one.”

Sam didn’t say anything else about it, but I could tell it was on his mind. He didn’t say anything to the others about it either — at least, not in front of me. I was sure Tennyson Wilde had picked up on it, though. Nothing got past him, so maybe they were talking about it when I wasn’t around. Making a list of things I could be, going through their database of magical creatures and checking them off. But I knew it was wrong. I was human. There was literally nothing different or special about me at all. I was the most ordinary person ever.

The day after the full moon, Astor was back, and more obnoxious than before.

“I know she’s here somewhere,” Astor said. “I know you lied, so now you gotta just shut your faces and do what I say. You’re gonna hand her over in the next forty-eight hours or I’m going to post that video all over the Internet. Now, get me some lunch and one of those Swedish massages. And not with some ugly girl either, the hottest girl you got.” He snapped his fingers at Tennyson to hurry him along.

“We have to get that video,” I whispered from Sam’s pocket as everyone left the room as quickly as possible. “I’m small enough to creep up and steal his swipe card out of his pocket without him noticing.”

“They have fingerprint ID and retina scan as well,” said Tennyson.

“I’m okay with him losing a hand and an eye,” I said. “It might be good for him, character building, you know?”

“Any of us could get into the Green House easily,” said Nikolai. “We’d just need to turn on the charm. It’s getting into his room that’s the problem.”

“That’s not the only problem,” I said. “He definitely would have backed the video up to the cloud, so we don’t need to just find the device that has the original video, but anywhere he might’ve saved it to as well.”

Which gave me an idea. I’d never written a virus before, but I knew the theory behind it. I couldn’t do it myself, though— not unless I wanted to spend hours running around a keyboard, jumping on keys.

“This is not going to work,” Tennyson said, looking over Sam’s shoulder as Sam typed out my instructions.

“Well, it’s better than your plan, which was to do nothing and just let Astor blackmail us. And there’s no reason it won’t work. We just need to send this to his phone and watch the beauty unfold.”

We named the file “BOOBS.jpg” and sent it to Astor through the messaging system on the school app. We saw when he received the message but couldn’t tell whether or not he’d opened the file. There was really no way of judging if it had worked or not. That was the one flaw in my amazing plan. That was why we had to steal Astor’s phone to see if all the data had been wiped.

Tennyson Wilde thought he was the king of plans, but his plans always sucked the most. At least my plan hadn’t involved anyone getting up close and personal with Astor’s back pocket. And I didn’t know why it had to be me. Anyone could’ve snuck into the polo club’s locker room and grabbed his phone. Sure, they’d have been way more noticeable in Tennyson’s pocket, but it wasn’t impossible.

I kept my eyes tight shut and blocked my ears as I waited in the coat pocket while the polo players got ready to train. There was some grumbling from a few people about Tennyson’s harsh training and that kind of thing, which seemed mostly incited by Astor. I didn’t much care for the opinions of the polo team, no matter how loudly they gave them, but it did give a good indication of where I’d be able to find Astor’s stuff. It took them forever to change clothes and complain, but finally they filed out onto the ground, leaving me alone with their sweaty jockstraps and other treats. I climbed down out of the pocket and onto the bench, crawling over everyone’s school clothes they’d dumped down, to try to find Astor’s stuff.

Astor hadn’t left his stuff lying around like the others had, but had shoved it willy-nilly into his locker. That made my job a bit more difficult. It crossed my mind that I could bow out, tell them it had been too hard, that I couldn’t get all the way up into Astor’s locker. Nobody would blame me. The locker was up super high. But everyone was counting on me to get this done. If it hadn’t been for me, Astor would never have been able to film Sam turning all wolfy because none of them would’ve been anywhere near Astor. Even though Tennyson and Nikolai were jerks, they had no obligation to me and yet had protected me from the moment Tennyson had found me in the snow, about to be eaten by rats. Now it was my turn to protect them.

Astor’s locker was near the end of the row, right near a bunch of spare polo sticks. That was perfect. I grabbed for one with both hands, with the idea of wrestling it into position high enough to hook around the handle of Astor’s locker and pull it open, but it was too heavy and I lost my grip, and the polo stick clattered to the floor. I tried again with another stick and the same thing happened. They were just too heavy and cumbersome for my itty-bitty hands. I had to try something else.

I grabbed another polo stick and balanced it with the handle against the ground and my arms around the knobby end bit. This really needed to work, because I did not want to end my life squished up on the floor of the boys’ locker room.

I kicked off from the bench, clinging to the polo stick as I flew through the air. Wow, they really should give these jobs to someone a bit less clumsy than me, I thought, as the locker grew closer and closer. I had to time it perfectly.

When I thought I was close enough, I let go of the stick and launched myself at the strips of holes in the locker. What are those holes even for? Ventilation? For what, though? Lockers were a mystery to me. But I caught on and pulled myself in through the hole, landing safely inside Astor’s shoe, which had a nice, springy sole.

It was pretty dark inside the locker, but I looked around as best I could until I found his phone inside his blazer pocket. Unlocking it was no problem — he said his passcode out loud every time he typed it into his phone and he never seemed to bother with fingerprint ID. Hitting the numbers with enough force for it to register was a bit of an issue, but I managed it.

First, I went to his photos app. I braced myself for the horrors I might find there, but lucky for me, it was empty. His mail was empty too, and his messages and call log. I went into the school app, but the only thing in there was the message with the virus. It was great that it had worked so well, but it also sucked that I had access to all his info but couldn’t actually find anything out from it because it had been wiped. I searched through all his apps, my arms aching from the effort of swiping across the screen, but I couldn’t find one for the cloud. Hopefully, he didn’t bother to back anything up, but we couldn’t rely on that. It was possible he had everything automatically back up, though, so I went into his settings. If I could find even the email he used to log in, I could try to access it when I was home.

Before I could get into his settings though, I heard something unmistakable. It sounded like a herd of buffalo only more obnoxious and entitled.

The polo team returning from practice. And I was stuck in Astor’s locker.

Chapter 15

I hadn’t thought my plan through to the extent of how I’d get out of the locker, but there was only really one way. I had to throw my full weight against the locker door and hope for the best. Even if I landed headfirst on the cold concrete floor, that would be way better than getting caught by Astor in his locker.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and rammed into the locker door. I sailed through the air, hoping for the best but expecting any moment to black out from the contact with the floor. I landed on something soft and drew a sharp, relieved breath. That was a mistake. I’d landed in someone’s sweaty socks and the smell was overwhelming. The herd of polo players was almost upon me, so I fought my way out of the socks to try to reach the safety of Tennyson Wilde’s coat pocket.

I ran as fast as I could, using the terrain of discarded shoes and bags to my advantage, ducking behind them and hiding once the polo players were there. Every time I thought I was safe and could take a moment to catch my breath, the landscape would move — someone would pick up a sweatshirt or sit down right next to my head. Then there was the other danger. I did not want to get up close and personal with the most intimate places of sweaty polo players, and I certainly did not want to invade their privacy by being forced to look at those intimate places, but it didn’t seem as if I’d have much choice. They stripped off their clothes and frolicked around naked as they prepared for the showers. Why did they need to frolic so much? Were they actually trying to trample me? Sheesh, what was with all the towel-snapping and name-calling and whatnot? Just get in the shower already.

Finally, I made it back to Tennyson Wilde’s pocket. He had not taken off his clothes, but was sitting primly by his locker. He looked down as I climbed up into his coat and I gave him a thumbs-up to show that the mission was complete, before I ducked down out of sight. I covered my eyes and ears just to be on the safe side. Those naked polo players really liked to flaunt their stuff.

It wasn’t surprising that I had a little nap, getting into Astor’s locker had been a mammoth effort. Plus, there was something super comforting about Tennyson Wilde’s pocket; something about the smell, the luxurious texture of the fabric, that made me feel as if I was protected from anything the outside world could throw at me. Through my nap, I was vaguely aware of being carried back to the house, but I didn’t see any need to be alert for it. Rather, I just let the soft motion of his footsteps rock me back to sleep.

I was woken up by yelling. It took me less than a nanosecond to figure out what was going on.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Astor yelled.

“Buddy,” said Nikolai, “everyone you’ve ever met thinks you’re stupid. That’s hardly the issue here.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t have backup copies of the video? You think I don’t have it scheduled to upload if there’s no response from me? See, that’s exactly the problem with you guys. You think you’re so much better than everyone else, and then it’s a big shock when you find out you’re not, right?”

I didn’t dare to peek out of the pocket to see what was going on, but things sounded heated.

“You know what this tells me?” Astor asked. “It tells me you’re never going to hand over the girl. You’re going to find some way to weasel out of this, just like you weasel your way out of everything. Well, that’s not going to work on me. I’m sick of playing around with you losers. If you don’t hand over the girl by midnight tonight, that video is going live.”

I heard stomping footsteps and then a door slamming, and Tennyson Wilde sunk down into his chair. I climbed out of his pocket and up onto the table.

“We’re not handing her over,” said Sam, sitting opposite.

“Obviously not,” said Tennyson. “She is our only bargaining chip. If we hand her over, we lose any leverage against him.”

“We need to discredit him,” Nikolai said, pulling out his phone. “I’ll make some calls.”

“Even then, does anyone ever care about the integrity of the person who starts a scandal?” I asked. “People will watch the video and make their own conclusions.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam quietly.

I shot him the finger guns. “People probably won’t even believe it,” I told him, trying to sound upbeat. “It doesn’t even look real; you look like you’re wearing some sort of freaky Halloween makeup or something.”

Sam’s face fell and I bit my lip. Yeah, way to win his heart, Lucy, by insulting his face.

“That is true,” said Tennyson. “Humans do tend to rationalize. But even if the video is passed off as a fake, there are those out there who will know the truth of it…” His eyes met Sam’s across the table.

“The people who captured me.”

Tennyson nodded. “And others like them. The opinions of the general public matter little and are easily swayed, but if the wrong people see it and learn where you are, we will all be in great danger.”

“What, like werewolf hunters?” I asked, looking around at their worried faces.

Tennyson shook his head. “Nothing so straightforward. We call them The Others. We do not know what they are, not really. They are human but not entirely. We only know of them because of those like Sam, people lucky enough to survive them and brave enough to oppose them. They do hunt us, that is true, but they also steal from us, distort us, torment us, and only kill us when they have no use left for us. They are scientists and magicians, part demon and part fey, combining the worst of both the natural and supernatural worlds for their evil purpose.”

I sat down with a thud. I didn’t want to think about that kind of thing even existing, let alone being out to get Sam. I remembered that figure I’d seen the night Sam had vanished, the screaming I’d heard, and I completely understood the fear in Tennyson Wilde’s voice.

The three of them discussed different plans, ways they could get into Astor’s room and access the back ups he’d saved, but I felt a million miles away.

Tennyson said they needed me as leverage, but I didn’t think Astor was bluffing about uploading the video. I couldn’t just sit there and let them risk themselves. Not just their lives, but their families, their entire world. They’d protected me while I was tiny and now it was my turn to protect them.

They were so involved in their planning that Nikolai had discarded his phone on the table beside me. They didn’t notice as I opened up the school messaging app and sent Astor a message.

“This is Lucy. Let’s discuss terms.”

Chapter 16

I waited until the others were asleep to sneak out and meet Astor. Getting out of the Golden House was no easy thing. There were sensors everywhere and everything was locked up tight, plus everyone who lived there had super hearing. I had to use every bit of my stealth to get out undetected, but finally I escaped out into the night.

It had been difficult to find a suitable place to meet Astor. It had to be neutral ground — I didn’t want him to have concrete proof that the Golden had been harboring me, but it wasn’t as if I could get very far on my own either. He was going to have the advantage no matter what, but I didn’t need to make it easy for him. We agreed on the entrance to the bamboo forest. I could get there without help if I just followed the path, and it provided ample hiding spots and places to escape should my plan fail.

My plan was going to fail. I had no illusions about the lameness of my plan. It was so lame that Tennyson Wilde could’ve come up with it. The best possible outcome was that I’d get Astor to delete the footage of Sam and agree to never bother the Golden again, and I knew exactly how likely that was, which was not at all. And even if he did agree to that, no way was I coming out of this meeting safely. I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me, what his endgame was, if he even had one, but I knew it was nothing good. Astor was a jerk and that surely meant he was motivated by being a jerk.

Even though the bamboo forest was close, it was still a huge walk for my short legs. I’d gotten used to being carried around in fancy hats and pockets all too quickly and it was a rude shock to be faced with the huge, scary world all by myself again. I’d planned to be early, to set myself up in the prime position for the meeting, to give myself even the slightest advantage, but it took me longer than I anticipated and I’d barely scouted out the area when I heard Astor’s booming footsteps approach. I ducked into the forest and hid behind a bamboo stalk as I waited for Astor to stake his spot. I let him sweat for a while as I went over in my mind what I planned to say to him to get him to agree to what I wanted.

He grumbled under his breath as he waited, shuffling from one foot to the other. When I thought he’d waited long enough, I spoke up, still keeping myself hidden.

“Where have you backed up the video?” I asked him, trying to project my voice so he wouldn’t find me straight away and stomp on my head.

He snorted. “Do you think I’m stupid? As if I’d just tell you everything, and then let your little werewolf buddies can jump out of the trees and attack me.”

Wow, that plan was actually way better than my plan, dammit!

“Once you fulfil your side of the bargain, I’ll tell you where it is and give you my passwords so that you can check it is deleted.”

“I have no guarantee that you don’t have backup copies of it or you won’t just release it once you have what you want.”

Astor was definitely not as good as his word, that was for sure.

He sighed as if I was the one being troublesome. “I don’t know where some cheap-ass commoner like you gets off doubting me, but I guess I should expect it from you.”

He took out his phone and started dialing someone on speaker phone.

“This is Tennyson Wilde.”

“I’m sending you a video,” said Astor. “After you watch it, call me back and tell me what was on it.” He hung up without saying anything else, which I bet made Tennyson Wilde mad.

A few minutes later, Astor’s phone rang.

“It’s a video of you saying any footage of supernatural activity released by you is false,” said Tennyson. “That you have a long-held grudge against us and have tried to discredit us with lies, as well as several other more embarrassing confessions. You do realize this is not good enough.”

Tennyson kept talking but Astor hung up. Did he have no concern for his own well-being at all? Tennyson Wilde was going to end this guy for sure.

“Is that good enough?” Astor said.

It wasn’t, not by a long shot, but it was the best I could hope for from Astor, and better than I’d expected.

“Delete the video,” I told him.

“You seem to be expecting a lot without giving anything back,” Astor said. “How about you show yourself and then I delete the video?”

“How about you break the spell and then I show myself.” It was worth a try.

Astor snorted. “Even if I could break the spell, you think I would?”

Suddenly, my hiding spot didn’t seem to provide much cover. My blood ran cold at his words. He couldn’t break the spell? I’d known he’d capture me, maybe even torture me a bit, but I’d thought at the end of it all he’d get bored of it and make me big again, or I’d convince him somehow, find something to use as blackmail. The thought that I’d never be normal size again wasn’t something I’d ever seriously thought about. It didn’t seem possible to be stuck like this.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Astor said, laughing. “It’s not like it’s forever. You’re getting smaller all the time. Soon you’ll vanish completely.”

Was that true? I wondered. Or would I just keep getting smaller, smaller than even an atom? It would be like existing on a completely different plane, in a different universe. What would I eat? What would I do? It might be okay if I was among friends, if there was someone to help me make provisions should I become too small to be seen, but if Astor caught me I’d be forced to dwindle away to nothing. My family would never know what became of me, or Sam. I’d just vanish. It was terrifying to think about, in some ways even scarier than dying, to just become nothing.

I was paralyzed by my thoughts, completely absorbed in them, so I didn’t notice when Astor moved until the stalk of bamboo I was hiding behind started to shake. I ducked under a leaf, but I knew it wouldn’t hide me for long. Astor was looking for me and it was only a matter of time before he found me.

I had to run.

It was hard to keep my footing on the straw ground covering. It was all slippery from the melted snow, so it felt as if I was running in place as I ducked and weaved through the foliage. Astor was right above me and I knew that as soon as he spotted me I was done for. The best thing I could do was to stay very still and hope he didn’t notice me, but my mind was seized with panic and I couldn’t help but run. I felt like an ant, skittering about on the kitchen sink trying to avoid the inevitable end, waiting for the faucet to turn on and flush me away. I ran deeper into the bamboo forest, hoping to at least confuse him, or bore him into giving up. It was pointless. The air was filled with his booming laugh. He knew exactly where I was; he was just playing with me.

I had to outsmart him. Even at two inches tall, surely my brain was still bigger than Astor’s. It was my one advantage. I had to create a diversion so that he didn’t see where I went to hide. I ducked under a broad leaf to give myself a moment to take in my surroundings and come up with any ideas. I spotted something almost immediately. Rats. They were cowering out of harm’s way and it was kind of a jerk move for me to disturb them, but I was sure they’d be safe. Astor would be looking for anything small and running around on the ground. He’d know in a moment if it wasn’t me, but that moment might be long enough to save me. I grabbed the biggest pebble I had within reach and climbed to a slightly higher vantage point, then threw the pebble with all my might to crash down just behind where the rats sheltered so that they fled in all directions.

As I’d expected, Astor let out a yelp and flailed around, trying to stomp on the scampering rats, but they were too fast for him. I took my chance and ran as fast as I could in the other direction. I ran blindly, only thinking to get away from Astor, to find somewhere to hide. There was nothing. Nowhere was safe. My time was running out. Astor was stupid, but even he would soon realize the rats were only a distraction and come after me again.

The bamboo had grown rapidly since I’d been in there last and there were new shoots all over the place. I leapt up onto the nearest bamboo shoot and began to climb. It was slippery, difficult to find a grip or a foothold, and I’d lost track of where Astor was to know what was safe. I climbed as far as I could, and when I felt as if my muscles were about to give up completely, I found a spot where two wide leaves crisscrossed over an offshoot from the main stalk. The offshoot was wide enough for me to sit comfortably, and the leaves provided ample coverage. I settled in and waited for Astor to give up, not yet daring to hope that I’d get out of this in one piece.

As I waited for it to be safe, I kind of wished I wasn’t alone. Of course, there was no way I could’ve told the others my plan. They’d never have let me go through with it. I missed Hannah. I wondered if she missed me, if she worried about what had become of me, if she’d realized she’d been wrong about me. Before her, I’d never had a proper friend, a girly friend, to talk about boys and TV shows, and it had been a different sort of luxury for me to hang out with Hannah. More precious than all the diamond chandeliers or medieval tapestries, but special because of the rare sweetness of it. Kind of like the Special French Toast, only not edible. If Hannah had been there with me — well, I mean, that would suck for her of course. It wasn’t as if she’d be able to do anything to help, and we’d both be facing tiny doom, but at least we wouldn’t be facing it alone.

The bamboo forest became still again. The rats stopped scurrying; there were no clomping footsteps. Even the wind in the leaves had stopped. It was quiet enough that I could feel every thud of my heart, and I listened as it slowed down, as my body became calm. Maybe everything wasn’t lost after all. I could get back to the Golden House. Tennyson Wilde had that video of Astor as backup against any scandal, so they were free to act against him. Even if Astor didn’t know how to break the spell, surely he knew who he was taking orders from. We could get the information from him somehow, or maybe the Wildes knew someone who could break the spell on me, or even just stop the shrinking. I mean, not that I wanted to be tiny forever, but it was better than nothing. People coped with all sorts of disabilities in this life. Being two inches tall was hardly something to complain about once you got used to it.

I waited and waited but still couldn’t hear anything. Maybe Astor had given up already. I started to feel a bit cheered. Everything had been seeming so bleak, but really if you looked hard enough you could find a way out of any tight spot, right? I waited some more just to be sure, and then a while longer. I started to need to pee, so I knew I’d have to stop waiting soon, but held out as long as I could, just to play it safe.

Finally, I decided I’d waited long enough. I’d been sitting there at least half the night and I was sure Astor didn’t have the patience to stay still and quiet for that long. He’d obviously given up and gone back.

I stood up on the offshoot and stretched out all my limbs, feeling my joints pop from where I’d seized up being in one spot for too long. I wasn’t sure which direction I’d run into the forest, so I pulled back the leaves that were covering me so I could figure out the best way to get back. That’s when I saw it, covering the entire sky. Astor’s big, ugly head grinning down at me like a vengeful god.

It was the face of my doom.

Chapter 17

He snatched me up with a triumphant snort, squeezing so hard I thought my eyes would pop out.

“Careful,” I told him. “I have a very tiny bladder.”

“Shut up,” he said. “I’ve had enough of your talking. If I hear another word out of you I will rip your tongue out.”

He didn’t seem to be kidding, so I didn’t say anything as he stuffed me into his pocket.

This was bad. This was really bad. The worst, even. The actual worst. Astor had made it clear that he didn’t want anything from the Golden, and if he wanted me dead, I would already be dead. That didn’t leave a lot of options, and none of them were good.

Astor’s pocket had a funny smell, strong and sharp like burning rubber. It was a far cry from the soft warmth of Tennyson Wilde’s pocket, that was for sure. I started to feel motion sick with the smell and the jiggling around. The Green House wasn’t terribly far from the bamboo forest, but of the three houses it was the farthest, and by the time we got there and the jiggling stopped, I felt super gross.

If I’d been hoping for some sort of explanation when we got back, an evil villain monologue that provided the solution to all my problems, I was in for disappointment. Astor said nothing, just pulled me from his pocket and shoved me into a box. Then, before I had a chance to even look around, he shut the lid up tight. I was left alone in the darkness. I still really needed to pee.

In some ways, it was better than I expected. I’d seen pictures of lab experiments on animals, horrific stuff, and I’d been thinking along those lines. That’d he’d pin me to a board by my hands and feet and do awful stuff to me until I died. Force me to inhale chemicals and drink poison and then just watch me and laugh as my insides turned out. Being stuck in a box wasn’t painful. It wasn’t scary. It was a different kind of awful than that. I couldn’t tell the passage of time, for one thing. I could judge a bit on account of the need to pee getting more urgent, but it might have been minutes, maybe hours, I had no way to tell. I didn’t know if he’d ever let me out of there or just leave me to starve and die.

I couldn’t hear anything beyond the box, had no way of knowing where the box was placed in the room or if Astor was still there. It was getting hard to think of anything besides wanting to pee. No way was I peeing in that box, being shut in there with the pee smell, so that Astor could find me all urine-ified, and laugh and call me some pee-related nickname for the rest of my high school career. I needed to get out of the box and find somewhere dignified to relieve myself. And then maybe escape. Mostly pee, though, to be honest.

I thought about making a lot of noise. Maybe Astor had a roommate and they could find me and let me out. I quickly ruled that idea out, though. Whoever Astor roomed with would no doubt be a similar shade of buttface in the whole buttface spectrum and I couldn’t rely on them for any sort of help. No reason to give Astor an ally in his torturing of me. I was worried that the box might be perched precariously on the edge of something and any sort of commotion would lead to a plummet to my death, but in the darkness I had no way to tell how deep the box was to climb out of. I tried jumping as high as I could and I couldn’t reach the top, so it wasn’t an option anyway. It seemed to be a fairly sturdy cardboard box — stronger than a shoebox but not as big. There was no way I could come up with some elaborate escape plan when the need to pee had driven everything else from my mind, so with no other options, I ran as fast as I could and threw my full weight at the side of the box, hoping to tip it over or break through it. In the dark, I couldn’t actually tell where the side of the box was, so I ran with my arms out in front of me and just hoped for the best. My first attempt knocked it, but it didn’t tip. I tried again back the other direction and the same thing happened. The run-up wasn’t helping; it was just tiring me out. I tried kicking it in like a door but the cardboard was too thick to hit through, though that seemed to shake the box up as much as running at it. I jumped at the wall with my shoulder, propelling myself at it with all the force I could muster up, and finally, the box tipped over.

I cautiously walked along the wall, which was now the bottom of the box, worried that each step might overbalance the box from whatever it was sitting on, maybe a table or a dresser? It had definitely been on something, because Astor hadn’t had to bend down to the floor to put me in the box. I was still walking blind, but if I was careful about it, I could throw myself backwards if I felt the box starting to fall.

I didn’t fall. When I hit the lid of the box, I pushed at it until it cracked open and I could crawl out. The room was dark but enough moonlight fell through the window that I could make out that I was on a messy desk. There were empty food containers that had been there so long they’d started up their own eco systems, some crumpled tissues, a bunch of empty soda cans… soda cans, that was just the thing I needed. I climbed onto an empty burger box, then hoisted myself up onto one of the cans to relieve myself.

It wasn’t until I finished and climbed back down that I noticed the pair of big, golden eyes staring at me out of the darkness. My heart leapt — first with hope, because I’d obviously been conditioned by werewolves, but then with fear because this wasn’t a werewolf. This was a big floppy-eared hound dog. And sure, hound dogs were cute and sweet but they were also bred to hunt little things like me, and they didn’t mess around about it.

“Hey, cute doggy,” I said to it. “What’s up with you? Me? I’m just here hanging out in this box.” The box I was edging back toward before Snoopy here could get any bright ideas. “Just hanging out like a human who you should definitely not eat.”

The dog’s tongue lolled out the side of its mouth as it stared up at me. It seemed kind of familiar.

“You live here with that jerk, Astor?” I asked it. “Is he as much of a jerk to dogs as he is to humans?”

The dog sniffed up at the air and then circled around a few times before settling in, curled up in a ball with its feet tucked up under its chin. Probably thought I didn’t seem delicious. That was fine by me, but I still needed to figure out a way down from the desk and out of the room. I had no clue where Astor was or when he’d be back. My best guess was that he was contacting his boss, and normally I’d be all set to spy on him about it, but right then I just wanted to be back safe in the Golden House. I could see no way down from the desk that wouldn’t end in broken bones, but what I did see was Astor’s desktop computer, buried under piles of candy wrappers. I used all my force to click the mouse and wake it up. If I could send off a message to Sam, then if my escape attempts failed, at least someone would know where I was. The mouse was heavy and hard to maneuver, but finally I dragged the cursor over to the school app and opened it up. I sighed as I waited for it to load, tapping my fingernails against the plastic of the mouse. It was so slow. Astor would be back before it loaded. Astor would be back and have tortured me to death and then repopulated the planet with mini Astor polo kids before it loaded, that was how slow it was.

I got the messaging system up and noticed that Tennyson Wilde was at the top of the list from when Astor had contacted him earlier with the video, so I clicked on him, because it would probably take another ten hours to find Sam if I did a search. Then I ran over to the keyboard and started to type. “helplu” I got out before I heard the door open. As fast as I could, I ran for the enter button and dove for it, banging my fist down on it to be sure the message sent. It wasn’t exactly the full account of my evening that I’d hoped, but I was sure they’d get the gist.

The light flicked on and I stayed totally still, my face squished down somewhere between the “P” and “[” keys and my arms sprawled out on either side, not wanting to look up and face the inevitable.

“Get out of the way, dumb dog,” Astor grumbled. There was a thumping noise, and I heard the dog yelp.

I wanted to get up and stab Astor in the eye for hurting the dog, but I also didn’t want to make him aware that I’d escaped the box. As few things clattered around and I squeezed my eyes shut tight. It was the most pointless form of denial, but I couldn’t help but hope when I opened them again, everything would be okay somehow.

It was easy to tell when he noticed me, because he stopped clomping around and everything went quiet. Then the world swirled around in a rush of color and movement as Astor picked me up by the leg, dangling me in front of his face.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer him, so he shook me.

“I was going to leave it until tomorrow to teach you a lesson, but if you can’t wait, I guess I’ll start now.”

He took something out of his pocket with his free hand, and there was a flicking sort of sound. After I moment, it became horribly apparent what the sound was. A cigarette lighter. He held me above the flame for a moment, still dangling me by the leg, then lowered me down closer to the heat, laughing. The more I squirmed to get away, the more he laughed. My hair hung down, and there was a sizzling smell as it burned, and the air filled with the stench of it. He moved the flame up, closer to my body. I twisted around, trying to lift myself high enough to get a hold on his hand, to bite his fingers off so that he’d let me go, but he just thought it was funny.

Eventually he got bored. He tossed me onto the bed and I went rolling across it. As soon as he turned away, I tried to flee, using the unmade quilt to climb down. I could see the dog hiding underneath, quivering, and it made me wish I was big again so I could punch Astor really hard in the face. If I somehow managed to escape, I would definitely be back to liberate that dog and serve up some cold justice to Astor.

He was standing at the computer, typing something, so I ran as fast as I could toward the door. It seemed like a bad dream, running and running but never getting any closer to my goal. Astor laughed and plucked me up, holding me by the arms between pinched fingers. He pulled my arms out to the sides, stretching them as far as they’d go until I thought he’d rip them off.

“This is going to be more fun than I thought,” he said, then dangled me in front of the computer. Under where I’d so arduously typed my message to Tennyson Wilde, Astor had sent another message. “Sorry, typo. I meant hello.”

My heart sank and my arm felt as though it was going to tear away from the rest of me. Things were looking grim. That was definitely believable enough for Tennyson Wilde to pass off as nothing unusual, not as a cry for help. I was so mad at myself for not telling anyone where I was going or at least leaving a note or something. If I’d been watching myself in a movie or something I’d be screaming at the screen about what a dumbass I was being. Though, in my defense, I had been expecting to be captured and my main goal was to fix the whole mess with the werewolf video, which I’d accomplished nicely. Good work, me. If it saved the others, then anything Astor did to me was worth it, death or torture or whatever. Though, if I could get out of it, that would be better.

But as Astor placed me up on the highest shelf in the room and then wandered off, humming, I thought maybe getting out of it would be harder than I thought.

Chapter 18

The good thing about being stuck up on the shelf was that I could see the entire room clearly, and gather information with which to hatch a daring escape plan. The bad thing was I was up very, very high, with no apparent way to get down that didn’t involve cracking open my skull.

Astor wandered off toward the bathroom, and without his attention on me, I took some time to see what was at hand that might be useful. There was a dead cactus in a pot at the end of the shelf closest to the window; at the other end was a pile of books that we’d had to read for class, which looked as if they’d never been opened. There was a bowl of moldy cornflakes and some coins, but nothing else except what would’ve equated to a hundred-foot drop over the side. I wasn’t especially afraid of heights, but my head swam when I looked over the side, and I edged back behind the books so that I had a bit of a barrier between myself and the fall.

All in all, there was very little for me to work with. If the windows had been open, at least, I could’ve somehow climbed over to it and out to freedom, but they were firmly closed. Nothing on the shelf could be fashioned into something to use as a rope to climb down. I had no choice but to bide my time and wait for an opportunity, because no way was I going to give up and submit to being Astor’s plaything.

He sure was taking his time in the bathroom, which I didn’t want to think too hard about. If I knew how much time I had before he got back, I could work on a more elaborate plan. I could rip up pages from the books into strips and use them as a rope. Just one strip wouldn’t hold me, but if I somehow braided several strips together, they’d be stronger. As soon as the idea came to me, I knew it was my best chance to escape and I got to it right away. I’d made really good headway when someone started pounding on the door. I hastily tucked my work into the cover of the book and ducked down out of sight. Which was stupid, because whoever was at the door was surely better than Astor. I tentatively peeked out, just to be sure.

The pounding got louder and more urgent, but Astor took his sweet time in coming out of the bathroom. Finally, he emerged, dragging his feet over to the door, even though it sounded as if whoever was on the other side was about to smash it open.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, looking through the peephole. He sighed and opened the door a crack. “What do you want?”

“Where is she?” said Llewellyn, and it suddenly clicked why the dog had seemed familiar. “Bonkers. I know you have her. Just give her back. I’ll do anything you want.”

He sounded so forlorn, so lost, that my heart twisted in my chest.

Astor slammed the door in his face. Bonkers had poked her nose out from under the bed hopefully at the sound of her human’s voice, and I could hear the soft thump of her tail wagging, but when the door closed, her head drooped and she backed under the bed again.

Before Astor could make it back to the bathroom, the pounding on the door started up again. He grumbled under his breath and swung the door open, but it wasn’t Llewellyn this time.

“Where is she?” Tennyson Wilde said, bursting into the room and looking around.

“Here!” I yelled, jumping to my feet and waving around.

Bonkers’s nose emerged again, sniffing cautiously, but Tennyson didn’t even look in my direction. That made no sense. He should definitely have been able to hear me. Astor smirked up at me and I realized that he’d done something, some sort of magic or werewolf-proofing or something so that Tennyson couldn’t notice me. Man, who knew that Astor of all people could be so wily? I had vastly underestimated him. But he’d obviously underestimated me too if he thought he could keep me quiet so easily.

I edged my way over to the dead cactus. It was big and heavy, but I had to distract Tennyson from his argument with Astor. He was getting super worked up, and I knew better than anyone that once he got going, he never let up on something. I whispered an apology to the cactus, then with all my weight, I shoved it off the shelf.

It smashed loudly, sending shards of pottery everywhere. I hoped Bonkers had managed to avoid any debris, but was pretty sure she had honed her danger-avoiding skills enough to keep safe. Tennyson Wilde looked over and I jumped up and down to get his attention. When he spotted me, a funny look passed over his face. I could’ve sworn it was relief.

“Why are you dilly-dallying about, you jerk,” I yelled. “Hurry up and get me out of here!”

He pushed Astor out of the way and took a step forward, toward me, but then stopped abruptly.

“What are you doing? Come on, this is no time for jokes!”

He looked down at his feet with dawning horror. A sparkly line of something ran across the polished floorboards.

“That’s right, bitches,” said Astor. “Silver.” He pushed past Tennyson to step in front of him. “Can’t cross it, can you, you freaky, unnatural beast.”

Tennyson glared at Astor, ignoring me. I knew that, among other things, silver obscured his cognitive function, confused him, but I wasn’t sure if that was why his attention was wandering or if he was just bothered by what Astor had said.

“Don’t listen to him,” I said, pushing the moldy cereal off the shelf. “That thing about silver is just a folktale, it’s all in your head.” I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded legit. “Don’t let Astor beat you, you ninny. Just rip his face off!”

Astor laughed, a grating, ugly laugh. “Oh, but he can’t. Didn’t you know?”

Tennyson’s eyes went huge and all the color drained from his face.

“Oh, was it supposed to be a secret? But it’s not. Not to the people who matter.”

I had no idea what Astor was talking about. I’d never seen Tennyson Wilde change before, that was true, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t. The idea of Tennyson Wilde being unable to do anything he chose to seemed preposterous. But the look on his face said otherwise.

Astor laughed again. “The big bad wolf doesn’t have any teeth.”

“Shut up, Astor,” I said. “Tennyson Wilde doesn’t need to be a wolf to lay the smackdown on you, so put a sock in it. Literally nobody cares what you think anyway.”

He spun around to face me. “But they should!” he yelled. “I should be number one! The king of this school! Captain of the polo team, the one everyone looks to. But they just swoop in and take everything that’s rightfully mine!”

I rolled my eyes.

“And you!” Astor said, swooping down to pick me up. “You’re even worse. No money, no family, nothing. You come out of nowhere and act like you’re so much better than me?”

He squeezed me in his fist so tight I thought my head would explode.

“You’re not better than me!” he roared in my face.

I was fairly sure the fact that I’d never cursed anyone with a potentially fatal curse, or kidnapped anyone, or kicked a dog, were all prime examples of why I was in fact better than Astor, but I couldn’t tell him so while my entire body was being crushed.

Tennyson Wilde roared, his eyes glowing as he tried to break past the line of silver. I’d never seen him look so wolfy before and thought vaguely that it really suited him. The silver thing was obviously a physical barrier, not a mental one, because he looked to be trying very hard to break through it, and I knew that he was headstrong enough that he would if it was just a matter of will.

Astor moved around the room. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, although I was right there in his hand. The whole room was starting to get hazy as I struggled to breathe, fought against the pressure squeezing the life out of me.

“You want your stupid little girlfriend?” he yelled at Tennyson. “Come and get her.”

He dropped me inside a glass box — a mason jar, I realized as he flipped the lid closed. For a moment, my entire body cried out in relief that he’d let me go, but not for long. The jar was sealed tight. Airtight. I couldn’t breathe.

I watched Tennyson Wilde continue to struggle as I fell to my knees, banging on the side of the jar in the hopes of making a crack, just the smallest crack to let some air in. The glass fogged up quickly and I lost sight of the outside world. The last thing I saw was Tennyson Wilde’s face, contorted in anger.

Chapter 19

I woke up back on my shelf, feeling crappy but pleased to not be dead. Someone had removed me from the glass jar — I assumed Astor, because if Tennyson Wilde had been able to reach me, I wouldn’t still be there in Astor’s room. Tennyson was gone and so was Astor, so I set back to work on my braided paper rope. One thing had become clear to me as my life had been draining away in that mason jar, and that was that there were some people in this world who had nothing to redeem them at all, no tiny spark of goodness. Astor was one of those people. He would play with me until he got bored of it and then he would kill me, and it wouldn’t even mean anything to him. He didn’t see me as human, not as the same species as himself. For him to kill me would be the same as me throwing an empty candy wrapper in the trash. I had to get away from him, no matter what.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed while I was unconscious, but it was daylight outside, which meant that Astor was probably in class. I’d have a bit of time before he returned. Folding the long bits of paper together was time-consuming and physically awkward as I’d gotten even smaller, but at the same time kind of soothing. It put me into some kind of meditative state where I could see things objectively. From everything I’d read and been told, magic was really just a way for power to be channeled that had not been explored by science, but that didn’t mean it didn’t follow the same rules of physics that everything else had to. In the olden days, people had thought all sorts of things were magic, but it was only that they didn’t have the scientific knowledge to explain them. More than anything else, people hated not being able to explain stuff, I supposed, so if they didn’t have the answer, they’d just make one up. I didn’t see why this should be any different. Wow, if I could understand the principles of magic in a scientific way and explain them and prove them, I wonder if I’d be heralded as some sort of genius. If you won the Nobel, you got a cash prize, didn’t you? Definitely worth the effort, then.

So, all I really needed to do was find the power that was making me small and divert it to a different outlet. I assumed that the spell was an ongoing thing, that my body was constantly trying to revert to its natural state, so it would be a constant drain on the power source. It was a massive assumption on my part, but I felt it to be true in my bones, that I was constantly trying to grow, and that was why I had less energy than usual. The smaller I got, the more tired I felt.

It also made sense to me that the power source would be close by. If the spell was ongoing, it would have to be close enough to me to not be interrupted. I tied my paper rope to the brackets of the shelf, then tied the other half around my waist. I don’t know why — if I fell, I was basically screwed — but people always seemed to do that when climbing, so I figured I should. I was a bit dubious that the rope would hold as I climbed down over the shelf, gradually letting the rope go, running it through my hands as I lowered myself down. If it did break and I splattered all over the floor, at least I’d be rid of Astor.

I kept on with my train of thought as I climbed. The power source had to be close. Astor wasn’t an animal person and yet he’d stolen someone’s beloved pet. Sure, maybe he’d done it just for kicks, because he loved being mean, but I’d bet that there was more to it. Bonkers was the key, I was sure of it.

Finally, I hit the floor. I crept over to where Bonkers was curled up in the corner under the bed, licking her paws. Poor little thing looked miserable and I couldn’t leave her there, even if she wasn’t involved.

“Hey buddy,” I said. “You wanna get out of here? We could go get a burger and maybe some fries. What do you think?”

She blinked at me. Her eyes were dull and sad. I got close enough to her to pat her on the nose. Her teeth were awfully big, but at least if she munched on me, she would get something nutritious to eat. The poor thing looked as if she had never had a square meal in her life, and I bet she hadn’t since Astor had stolen her.

I’d failed miserably at riding the rat, but maybe this would be different. I felt around in my pockets for a bit of cheese I’d been saving for emergencies and lured her out from under the bed. At first I thought she wouldn’t come, she just stared at me blankly, but then she started to crawl toward me.

“Good dog,” I told her. “You are super smart. Now, let’s skedaddle before that bozo gets back.”

I gave her the cheese and climbed up onto her back, careful not to pull her fur. I rubbed her on the top of the head and then directed her forward, clinging hold of her collar. We got to the door and I held on tight as she jumped up, scratching at the door. The next time she jumped, I reached out as far as I could to press the button to open the door. The door swung open and we ambled out, finally free.

Nobody was around except for one or two people skipping class in the common room, but they didn’t pay us any attention. We opened the front door in the same way, and finally we were free! I gave Bonkers directions to the Golden House, but I don’t think she had been allowed to run around outside while with Astor, so she wasn’t listening to me at all. I nearly lost my balance as she squatted to do her business, then went tearing off toward the forest in search of smells. I remembered Tennyson saying to Llewellyn about the beagle having a super nose and he had not been wrong, it seemed as if there was nothing that dog wouldn’t sniff.

“Sam!” I yelled, banking on the super senses to come in handy at least one time. “Tennyson Wilde! Nikolai! Come and find me, I’m in the forest with a rampaging beagle!”

But even if they didn’t find me, I thought there were much worse things than a life in the forest with a happy puppy. We could live together out there, eating berries and frolicking about. That would be grand. Something under a log really caught Bonkers’s attention. She snuffled around under it, burying her nose in the dirt, and then she began to dig furiously. I hoped it wasn’t something dangerous. I’d had enough danger to last me forever.

Within minutes, though, they came. My rescue party.

Bonkers was startled when three people came crashing through the forest toward us, three people who surely smelled a bit irregular on account of not being human. Bonkers backed away with her tail between its legs, almost knocking me off her back as she tried to hide under a fallen branch. To my surprise, Tennyson Wilde knelt down in front of her, holding out his hand. He murmured something too quietly for me to hear and flashed his eyes and the dog leapt forward, licking Tennyson on the face and wagging her tail like she was the happiest dog on the planet.

Sam lifted me up and held me in his hand, smiling, and I kind of understood how the dog felt.

Chapter 20

“Hey, you guys,” said Nikolai, interrupting our happy reunion. Even Bonkers looked at him with disdain, but then we saw what he was pointing at.

From under the log, where Bonkers had been digging, came a faint blue glow.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “Bonkers, you stole the orb off Astor?”

Bonkers wagged her tail and licked Tennyson Wilde on the face.

Sam put me back on the ground and then dug out the orb and held it up in front of us. The blue energy swirled around inside it. “What do we do with it?” he asked.

“Smash it?” said Nikolai.

“No,” said Tennyson Wilde. “Set it down on the ground.”

Sam placed down the orb next to where I was standing. It was about the same height as me, and up close I could see all the intricacies of it. I felt as though if I looked at it for long enough, it would reveal all the mysteries of the world to me.

Before we could do anything, though, someone else came crashing through the forest.

“I knew that stupid dog had stolen it,” Astor sneered, stomping toward us.

Bonkers growled, her hackles raising. The three werewolves weren’t much better. But I knew that fighting wasn’t going to fix this. Magic was science and science was logical. I had to use my brain, even if it was getting increasingly small.

I opened my mouth and inhaled, sucking the blue glow down into my lungs, drawing it out of the orb and into myself. As I inhaled it, I felt myself grow. I stretched up and up, expanding to the edges of the universe. The rest of the world ceased to exist; there was only that power and the need to consume it. It seemed an eternity.

When the power was gone from the orb, I held my breath, held the power within me. I knew what I had to do. I had to stop Astor. I exhaled, pushing that strange blue power toward Astor. I didn’t know what it would do to him, only that it would stop him from being a threat to us. The power wound around him, covered him like a swarm of bees, and then lifted him. Up, up, it carried him, and then away, until it became no more than a dense blue cloud. I watched as the cloud circled up into the air, high above our heads, above the forest, and then darted away.

I blinked, feeling as though I’d just woken from a nightmare. I stumbled and Sam grabbed me by the elbow. Because he could. Because I was human-sized again.

“Whoa,” I said, reaching down to scratch Bonkers behind the ears. “That dog saved my life!” I really could not go back on the burger promise then.

Being big took some getting used to. I felt super clumsy and my center of gravity was way off. I’d been human-sized all my life but somehow it felt as if it had been easier to adapt to being small. Sam helped me walk back to the Golden House and I took full advantage of the excuse to lean heavily against his side. He was strong and he smelled nice, so I felt perfectly justified. Bonkers frolicked around us and Tennyson Wilde called Llewellyn to give him the good news. Everyone was in celebration mode, but I knew that our problems were far from over.

When we got back to the house, Althea was waiting for us. She was wrapped in a blanket and looked fragile, like an injured bird, but still as beautiful as ever.

“I’m so glad to see you!” she said, trying to stand up when I came in.

I motioned for her to stay sitting, but moved over to hug her.

“You too!” I told her. “I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head but I knew that I’d have to make it up to her somehow.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “But what happened to your hair?”

Cakes were ordered, and bacon and burgers for Bonkers, and everyone swapped stories. For a moment, it was as if we all forgot the threat that was hanging over our heads. The magic user who had the power to attack us at any time. Llewellyn came to collect Bonkers and couldn’t even speak to thank Tennyson Wilde, he was crying so much.

“You know, it was actually me,” I said, though nobody paid me any attention. “I saved Bonkers from the evil clutches of Astor. I probably should get a reward.”

The revelry begun to die down. Llewellyn and Bonkers left. Tennyson got a phone call and moved into the other room to take it. Nikolai and Sam got into some stupid argument about magical theory that seemed more based on World of Warcraft than any of the texts I’d read. Sam met my eyes and smiled across at me. I smiled back. Maybe things weren’t broken between us after all.

Althea tugged on my sleeve to get my attention and I leaned in toward her.

“While I was away, I got our people to do some digging,” she said quietly. “On those fake social media accounts in your name. I remembered you saying you didn’t think it was a coincidence, and I think you’re right.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “All the information led back to one person.”

She handed me the paper and I stared down at it in shock. It couldn’t be right. I was misreading it, or there was some sort of mistake. The name on that paper was the one name in the world that I did not expect to see.

Hannah Morgan.

End of Book 2

Click here for 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.

Click here to join the Werewolf High VIP list for news, freebies and special offers

ALSO BY ANITA OH

Werewolf High #1: The Truth Spell

A Very Werey Christmas: A Werewolf High Short

Werewolf High #2: The Tiny Curse

Werewolf High #3: The Body Swap

Werewolf High #4: The Soul Bond

Werewolf High #5: The Love Potion

Werewolf High #6: The Time Loop

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my sisters for everything.

Editing by Eliza Dee from Clio Editing, thank you for your amazing work.

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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