It was a little disconcerting to live with someone you never saw. At least, that’s how I felt about it. Perhaps it shouldn’t have bothered me nearly as much as it did, but I could never help but wonder what she was getting herself up to.
One particularly ordinary Wednesday, I got up early to go to my Writing Magical Spells class. Professor Roe wasn’t particularly keen on students being late, so I always made sure that I was earlier than necessary. I might not have been the world’s best student, but I wasn’t going to take my chances by not showing up when I was supposed to, either.
Henry wasn’t around when I got up. Neither was my roommate, but that wasn’t really a surprise. Henry only came into my room in his cat form. The last time I’d seen him was a few days ago, but I wasn’t sure whether he’d gone to see his parents or whether he was researching. Henry was a curious kind of person and he was always trying to solve things he didn’t understand.
That day, I was brushing my hair when I heard something crash. I jumped and reached for my wand. Holding it out in front of me, I walked back into the center of the bedroom, but there was nothing.
No one.
“Hello?” I called out, because why not? What better way to discover if someone was hiding in my room than to let them know I wasn’t sure whether they were there or not?
I looked around. My side of the room was neat and tidy. My bed was made, and my books were neatly stacked on my dresser. The opposite side of the room was much the same. Maybe my roommate had a boyfriend or girlfriend whom she stayed with on school nights. I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that one of her glass figurines had fallen to the floor and broken into a bunch of different pieces.
Damn.
I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t see her. I didn’t see Henry.
So how had the figurine fallen?
I checked the window, but it was securely closed and locked. Even our bedroom door was locked. It could be opened only by uttering a special magic spell, which I was guessing most people didn’t know. At least, I hoped they didn’t.
“Well,” I said entirely to myself. “I guess I’d better clean this up.”
I didn’t want to.
I was scared that my roommate would choose to take that moment to show up. I thought maybe she would waltz in and demand that I stop breaking her things. Would she suspect I had been the one who broke the figurine? I hoped not. From the looks of things, it had been a tiny demon, once upon a time, and it had been entirely made of glass.
I couldn’t glue it. That much was obvious. Maybe I could do something else, though. Maybe I could do a spell to put it back together. I didn’t know one, but I gathered up the pieces, shoved them in a little leather pouch, and put that inside my backpack. I was going to be late to class if I didn’t hurry, and I had no desire to upset Professor Roe.
*
As it turned out, I was still on time for class. This was good for me, but it was also bad because despite being on time, I had managed to leave my homework sitting on top of my pillow. This meant that showing up on time was pointless since I was unprepared and unable to answer questions about the assignment. I was embarrassed, but Professor Roe didn’t have time and didn’t care about embarrassment or excuses.
Instead, she separated the class into two groups: one that had completed the writing assignment and had it with them, and one that had not.
I was in the group that had not.
She gave directions to the “good” group and then came over to my group.
“Since you have found it entirely too difficult to complete the task I gave you,” she said. “You’ll spend the rest of the class period copying yesterday’s assignment by hand.”
“No wands?” Asked a boy.
“No wands,” she said. “If I so much as see a wand, you’ll be spending the afternoon explaining yourself to Headmistress Gregory, and mark my words, after what happened this morning, she’s not in any sort of mood to be trifled with.”
My ears perked up.
“What happened this morning?” I asked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. Maybe it wasn’t the right time or the right place, but hey, I was curious. Besides, nothing had happened in weeks. No one had discovered who was behind the hamster invasion. No one knew anything other than that it had happened. Even the students who had been transformed couldn’t identify the person who had done it to them. None of them could remember seeing anyone or anything strange.
A few students seemed surprised that I didn’t know. Angela Andrews raised an eyebrow.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Uh, no?”
Professor Roe sighed. She seemed frustrated that her class was being derailed and I felt a little bad about that, but I was also curious. What could possibly have gone wrong this morning that put Headmistress Gregory in a bad mood?
“Karen Wyatt was turned into a frog,” another student said helpfully.
“It’s true,” Angela said. “And not just an ordinary frog, either. She was turned into a purple frog.”
“Wow,” I whistled. “Who did that?”
“Nobody has been caught yet,” Professor Roe said. “But if anyone obtains any information about the culprit, please remember to tell either myself or Headmistress Gregory as soon as possible.”
So, the person who has been turning people into shapeshifters struck again.
How weird.
I sighed, shaking my head, and tried to focus on the exercise Professor Roe had given us. The other students in my group were writing quickly, eager to finish the exercise, but I let my thoughts wander a little bit. This situation reminded me of the one my parents were in. They had found a potion that could turn people into animals. What was happening at Hybrid Academy? Someone was turning students into different animals, but how?
Were they creating their own spells?
Were there potions involved?
Was someone trying to get back at the shapeshifters?
As far as I could tell, the person who was casting these spells was only targeting students who could shapeshift, but he or she wasn’t turning the students into their normal animals. Instead, they were being turned into arbitrary animals: into things they couldn’t quite escape from. After all, it had taken Headmistress Gregory days to turn each of the hamster students back into regular students.
I wondered how long it would take for her to turn Karen back into a girl.
Last year, a student had issued a similar spell. It was during a gaming tournament. Two boys were competing against one another and one had chosen to turn his opponent into an animal: one he was scared of. Was this related to that?
Could Jeremiah be behind this?
I didn’t think so. It would be much too obvious. Besides, he had done something malicious to one person during a competition. He hadn’t been a bully the rest of the year.
Or had he, but I just hadn’t noticed?
The reality was that last year, I’d been caught up with my own issues. I’d been busy trying to deal with my grandmother’s disappearance. I’d been learning how to use magic. Hell, I’d been discovering the fact that I was, in fact, actually a shifter. Then I’d learned to shift. I probably hadn’t paid attention as closely as I should have, at least when it came to my classmates.
Now I kind of wished that I had.
Eventually, the bell rang for class to end and the students started gathering their stuff to leave. I looked down and realized I hadn’t finished the assignment. I looked up toward Professor Roe. She just raised an eyebrow pointedly, as if to see whether I actually thought I was going to be getting out of her class without finishing it.
Apparently not.
Apparently, I was going to be sitting at the desk and finishing my work on time.
As commanded.
I sighed and pulled a new pencil out of my bag. Then I started to write, but once more, I found my mind drifting. Who could focus on writing at a time like this? There were so many questions spinning around in my head that it
was difficult to keep them all straight.
Why was someone turning students into animals at Hybrid Academy?
Most of us could already shift into something. Maybe it wasn’t something small, like a mouse or a hamster or a rat, but we could shift. So why waste the time and energy into making others turn into creatures?
Unless these weren’t just random attacks.
Unless these were planned and coordinated.
There was a chance that these attacks had been carefully orchestrated for a specific reason. Maybe the attacker felt wronged by the people he’d turned into animals? Maybe he felt threatened by them? Maybe he felt like they weren’t very good students.
I wasn’t sure.
What I did know was that Professor was giving me increasingly nastier looks, so I picked up my pencil once more. This time, I started to write.
When I finally finished, I hurried out of the classroom. I was anxious to get away, so I didn’t even look back. I didn’t want to see the teacher I’d disappointed. I didn’t want to see the reminder that I’d messed up.
Sometimes it seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I always had something holding me back. Hurrying down the hallway, I tried not to mope about my problems or issues. Who cared if life at Hybrid Academy wasn’t always perfect? Who cared if sometimes things got a little out of hand? I was an adult, I reminded myself. I had come here to learn how to do magic. Well, I’d come here because Erin forced me, but that was beside the point. I knew now that she had just been trying to keep me safe.
I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I wasn’t even paying attention as to where I was walking. I went around a corner and bumped into a hard, solid mass.
“Careful there, little wolf.” I looked up to see none other than Jeremiah.
“It’s you,” I said.
“And it’s you,” he agreed, looking at me with a little smirk. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be mean or flirty. It didn’t matter.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I go to school here,” he said. “What about you?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
One of my biggest problems is that I’m blunt. I probably shouldn’t be as straightforward as I am. It seems to bother people, even magical people, so I should probably tamp down the way I interact with people, but I just can’t seem to do that.
“Shouldn’t you be in class or something?” I was growing more and more agitated being this close to him. I thought he might be responsible, or at least involved, in the bullying that was happening with the students. He knew how to change people into other creatures, after all. He was a great student. He was a third-year, which meant that next year, he’d be leaving Hybrid Academy to go on to pursue other endeavors.
Like wizardry.
Like creating chaos.
Jeremiah looked at me, considering me, for a long moment. Then he snapped his fingers.
“You think I did it,” he said.
“What? No,” I lied.
“Yes, you do. You think I’m responsible for messing with the students,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“Liar,” he said, but he didn’t sound mean or angry when he spoke. Instead, his voice was soft, almost sympathetic.
“I didn’t accuse you of anything.”
“You didn’t have to,” he shrugged. “I’m not dumb, Maxine. I’m not ignorant. I know what people around here are saying about me.”
“What are they saying?”
“That it was my girlfriend,” he said.
“Your girlfriend?”
“Patricia.”
“You and Patricia are together?”
“Of course,” he said. “We make a great couple. Well, we did. We aren’t together anymore. I haven’t, uh, seen her in a long time.”
“So, if you aren’t responsible for creating problems around the school,” I asked. “Then who is?”
“Beats me,” Jeremiah shrugged casually. “But if you find out who it was, do me a favor and let me know, okay?” He balled his hand into a fist and slapped it with his other hand. “I’d like to give them a piece of my mind.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” I said. “I’ll definitely do that.”
He left, walking away, and I stared at him for a long time. I leaned against the wall, wondering if he had been telling the truth or not. It probably wasn’t a good idea to trust a guy like Jeremiah, but he had seemed pretty genuine when he’d said he wasn’t responsible for what happened.
But if he wasn’t to blame, then who was?
I shook my head. Sometimes it seemed like the more I learned about magic, the less I understood any of it.
“Boy trouble?” A familiar voice said. I spun around to see Henry leaning against the wall. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his crooked smile made my heart happy.
“I’ve never had boy trouble before in my life,” I said.
“What about kitty-cat trouble?” He moved his hands like they were little paws and made a tiger-ish growling sound. “Roar,” he said.
I laughed happily, but shook my head.
“Definitely not,” I said. “No kitty trouble, either.”
“Then what’s going on?”
“I was talking to Jeremiah about the happenings around school,” I shrugged. “I was trying to see if he knew anything about what had happened.” I hadn’t really planned on talking to him. In fact, we’d sort of just bumped into each other. Crazy how that worked.
“And did you find any answers?” Henry asked. He started walking, and I kept up with him. We moved down the hall toward one of the side exits. The cool thing about Hybrid Academy was that there were doors basically everywhere. It was easy to slip in and out of the school.
Maybe that made it dangerous, too.
I had been assured that there were wards in place to guard the school. Magical wards could do a lot of things. They could keep unwanted creatures from locating the school. They could keep us hidden away. They could protect us.
They could do just about anything.
The wards were designed to ensure that the students of Hybrid Academy could safely study magic without fear of outsiders finding us. We were supposed to be able to learn and practice and make mistakes without being under someone’s watchful eye.
But maybe they weren’t as effective as we all liked to believe.
“Not really,” I told Henry. We went outside and started walking toward the dorms. It was chilly out.
“What did he say?”
“The usual, I suppose. He told me to blame Patricia for everything that’s been happening.”
“Is she even a student this year? I haven’t seen her.”
“Me neither,” I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure she’s taking a gap year or something like that. Besides, what reason would she have for wanting to hurt the students? It has to be someone else. Maybe Clementine?”
“They were good friends last year, but I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you considered the possibility that Jeremiah could be lying? I mean, he did turn Raymond into a piglet last year.”
“Yeah, Raymond still hasn’t really gotten over that disaster.”
“So, I mean, there’s a chance that he’s just trying to throw you off the trail.”
I thought about Henry’s words for a minute, and then I nodded. Yeah. He might be right. Perhaps I shouldn’t cross Jeremiah off my suspect list just yet. There was always a chance that he’d been messing with me. Maybe he had some beef with people who could shift. I mean, he was a demon himself. He obviously was in competition with the shifter students. We were all studying magic, but within the realm of magic, we all had our own specialties and abilities.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely,” Henry said.
“Okay,” he looked around. We were all alone, though. There was no one outside of the girl’s dormitory. “Let’s go shift and run
around.”
“What?”
“When was the last time you shifted, Max? Think about it.”
“I just shifted the other day.”
“What day?”
I thought about it for a minute. It had been right after a big test and I’d wanted to run around and burn off some steam. It had been less than a week before.
“Tuesday,” I said.
“Max, that was like a month ago.”
“What? No.” It couldn’t have been that long. Could it have?
I knew perfectly well that there was a danger that came from not shifting enough. In order to be able to shift, you had to practice. Oh, shifters could go a long time without shifting, but eventually, the need could overwhelm you. Then you might shift at a terribly inopportune time. Since I’d learned to change into my wolf form so late in life, being able to shift was even more important to someone like me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We headed down the little winding path that went through the forest near the school. No one was around, which wasn’t unusual given the colder weather. Students would rather be inside sipping hot cocoa than wandering around changing into their animal forms. Once we were far enough away from the school, I looked around, cocked my head, and snapped my fingers. Then I shifted instantly into my wolf form. My clothing tore, but my robes just fluttered quietly to the ground.
“Max, I wasn’t going to look,” he said. Most shifters weren’t shy about shifting into their animal forms in front of other people, but I still hadn’t really gotten used to the idea. My clothing was replaceable. My dignity wasn’t. I gave Henry a look that said try to keep up.
Then I took off running.
I ran and ran and ran. I bounded over hills and under fallen logs. I went around curves and leapt over little creeks. At one point, I actually jumped over some frogs. Then I just kept running. The wind blew hard against my face as I moved as quickly as I possible could.
In this form, in my wolf form, I felt like I could breathe.
I could be myself.
For just a little while, I didn’t have to worry about anything else in the world. I didn’t have to worry about finding Grandma. I didn’t have to worry about seeking answers. I didn’t have to worry about the fact that my aunt was more stressed than she’d ever been in her life.
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