“It’s not?”
“No,” I shook my head. “It’s entirely about how shifters can use potions for good.”
“My friend ran a background check on him.”
“An ordinary background check wouldn’t show anything about his magic use,” I shook my head. “They ran one on me when I got my job at the café.”
“They ran a background check before you could make coffee?”
I shrugged. “They were paranoid. Now I know why.”
Vampires.
They were hunting people, so of course, they thought they were being hunted, too. Why wouldn’t they be totally paranoid?
“Wendy is a magical tech expert. She ran a magical background check on him, and to be honest, everything came up clean.”
“But you think there’s something we don’t know about him?”
She nodded.
“I think there’s more to Casper Elkridge than meets the eye.”
“We’ve got time,” I said. “Why don’t we just ask him?”
Erin laughed. “This is what I love about you, Max. You’re so willing to just be totally blunt.”
Sometimes.
Not that it’s done me much good.
“Well, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I mean, who knows? Maybe he has a clue as to who has been turning students into shifters all semester. Maybe he knows why they’re doing it.”
“Right,” Erin agreed. “It could be mischief, but it could be something more.”
Maybe someone was testing out potions on shifters. Maybe they were trying to work out which spells they could use to transform people. Maybe they were doing something else entirely.
There was only one way to find out.
Besides, Erin was an expert witch. Surely, she could find a way of persuading Casper Elkridge to talk without letting on that we thought he was secretly working with the vampires. Maybe she could just ask him something sweet or unusual and start a conversation. We could see where it went from there.
“First things first, though,” Erin said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of…
“Is that pixie dust?”
“Yep,” she said. I didn’t even get a chance to ask her where it had come from or what she wanted to do with it. Erin didn’t wait for me to ask questions. Instead, she threw it up in the air and let it fall everywhere.
Instantly, I started sneezing. The dust was a soft purple color and it basically covered everything in my room: my bed, my roommate’s bed, my cat, and…a shape.
No, a body.
No, a roommate.
What on Earth?
There was a strange shape on the floor of the bedroom over in a corner. I hadn’t even noticed it before. Had it always been there? Had it just appeared? I knew pixie dust could reveal things that were hidden, but was it actually possible to hide a person in a room like this?
Who was it?
“Got you,” my aunt said. She stood with her hands on her hips and watched as the shape came more into focus. It was definitely the body of a girl.
And it had been entirely invisible until the pixie dust revealed it.
Slowly, second-by-second, the body became clearer. It shifted from being almost ghostlike to being a true, solid form.
“I’d like to present your roommate to you,” Aunt Erin said. “I had a suspicion that there was something wonky going on. Look at that. She was just invisible this entire time.” Erin shook her head. “Like they wouldn’t have given you a roommate.” She seemed to think that was the strangest idea ever.
I heard what she was saying, and I was shocked that my roommate had not only been invisible, but that she had been so very silent. She’d been quiet. She’d been living here without making a single sound, and I’d never even noticed that she was here at the same time as me.
But more than that, I was shocked at who my roommate actually was.
When the girl stood up, she brushed the dust off her clothes, turned around, and looked at me. She was dressed in a bright pink dress and her hair was perfectly groomed and styled. Despite being invisible, she hadn’t lost her fashion sense.
Patricia looked different than she had last year. She seemed a little bit taller, and her hair was a little bit shorter, and she looked a little bit more callous. Apparently, life as an invisible girl hadn’t been all fun and games.
“About time,” she said, looking over at me. “I wondered when you’d finally realize I was here.” Patricia seemed angry and frustrated. If I wasn’t mistaken, she also looked a little…hurt.
“What happened to you?” I asked, still taken aback. I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that I’d had someone living with me this entire time.
“Jeremiah happened to me,” she said. “He cast an invisibility spell on me by mistake on the first day of school. It was just after orientation. Instead of owning up to it, he ditched me and didn’t tell anyone what had happened.”
No wonder Patricia seemed angry.
I’d be pissed, too.
“How did that happen?” Erin asked. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see Patricia, but my mind was blown.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “How could Jeremiah have cast an invisibility spell on you? How would he have even learned to do that?” It seemed far beyond the magical skills taught at Hybrid Academy. Then again, I often forgot that some students came from very magical backgrounds and had extreme knowledge of different magical powers.
“I don’t know how he learned it,” Patricia said. “But I upset him, and he said he’d rather not have to see me ever again. Then he cast the spell on me. I mean, he could have just broken up with me,” she shook her head. “The two of us were dating.”
“Were?” Erin asked.
“You think I still want to be his girlfriend after all of this?” She asked, motioning around the room. “I’ve spent the entire semester as the invisible girl. I couldn’t even speak to anyone. No matter what I did, I was silent. I tried so hard to be loud and to be heard so that someone could help me.” She shook her head. “Pixie dust. I never would have thought that could be the cure.”
Everything suddenly clicks into place.
“That’s why I didn’t know you were here,” I said. “You didn’t have a voice.”
“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “But you certainly did. Did you know that you talk in your sleep?” She shuddered, and I blushed.
“Uh, sorry about that.”
I didn’t want to think about all of the other things Patricia undoubtedly knew about me now. She definitely knew that I was on the hunt for my grandma. She knew I sucked at magic. She’d probably even seen me practice shifting into my wolf form a few times even though that sort of magical activity was frowned upon in the dorms.
“But you could still do magic,” Erin said. “Even though you couldn’t shift.”
“Yeah,” Patricia said. “Not that it helped much. I couldn’t use my wand, so I was limited to spells I had memorized, which wasn’t very many. Besides, doing spells without a wand is like trying to knit a sweater without any knitting needles.”
“The hamsters,” I said. “That was you.”
“The colors were a nice touch,” my aunt said drily.
“Thanks,” Patricia said. “I did my best. You girls really think anyone else could have pulled that spell off?” She shook her head. “It’s my own original recipe.”
“I thought your friends knew the spell,” I said. “They performed it with you last year when you turned me into a rodent.”
“Nope,” she shook her head. “They think they know. I told them one of the words needed to make the spell happen. The rest of the magic I whisper under my breath. Somehow, they never caught on.”
“Why didn’t you ask for help?” I asked, ignoring the fact that turning people into hamsters for attention was kind of weird. “Why didn’t you use a pen or a paper to write something?”
“I couldn’t hold anything long enough to,” she said sadly.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “And it took me like, over an hour and a half to move that hairbrush. You really think I had enough energy or strength to write something?” She shook her head. “I’m stronger now than I was, but the most I’ve been able to write was a single letter.”
“That must have been scary,” I said, suddenly filled with compassion for her. It must have been hard, difficult. I found life at Hybrid Academy to be challenging enough without throwing invisibility into the mix.
“It was boring,” she said. “I spent a lot of time eavesdropping.” She raised an eyebrow at me pointedly and took a quick glance at my cat. I knew what that meant. She knew about Henry. She knew that Boo was really a shapeshifter. The real question was whether she was going to do anything about it. I didn’t want my aunt to know about Boo. Not just yet. I knew that Henry didn’t want anyone to know, either.
“So, what have you been doing?” I asked, obviously changing the subject. “You couldn’t hold things very well, so you couldn’t move your textbooks to go to class. What did you do?”
“I still went to class,” she said. “And I wandered around a lot. There are a lot of places you can go when you’re invisible. People speak freely when they think there’s no chance of being overheard.”
Erin and I both instantly start paying rapt attention.
“And?” Erin asked.
“And what?” Patricia said, blinking innocently. “That’s all. I just…eavesdropped a little.”
“Look,” I said. “Let’s cut to the chase. You obviously know more about me than I would ever tell another human soul. You know things about me that even my aunt doesn’t know about me. You know things that I had planned on taking to my grave.”
“And your point is?”
“I owe you,” I said. “For your silence. I understand what the score is, but you’ve obviously heard everything that Erin and I have said. Can you weigh in on Casper Elkridge?”
“Oh yeah,” Patricia said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “He’s definitely super evil.”
“What?” Erin said. “Really?”
“Yep,” she nodded. Then she looked directly at me. “And he’s onto you, Max. You need to be careful.”
Chapter 12
“What do you mean, he’s onto me?” I felt sick at the idea that Casper was going to somehow come after me.
“I knew his background check had to have been faked,” Erin said. “Nobody teaches a class like that unless they’re up to no good.”
“It’s true,” Patricia said. Then she turned to me. “And you should have caught on sooner.”
“But his classes were so educational,” I pointed out.
“Because he wanted you to keep coming back,” Patricia said. “Didn’t you think it was weird that he was always watching you?”
A little.
But I had been so caught up in, well, everything.
“He had his eye on you all of the time,” Patricia said. “I used to follow you to class sometimes and sit in.”
“And you saw him?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “I definitely saw him.”
I thought of the times he’d been watching me, but had called on other students. I’d actually thought that he hadn’t liked me very much as a student. Maybe I had everything all wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been looking at me because I was bad at magic. Maybe he’d been looking at me because he wanted to figure out if I was Maddison’s granddaughter.
“What can you tell us?” Erin said. “We don’t need conjecture.”
“Ah,” Patricia said. “The witch has been watching some courtroom dramas, has she?”
“What? Demons don’t like legal dramas?”
“Everyone likes them,” Patricia broke into a smile, and it was probably the first time I’d ever seen her share a real, genuine smile. So maybe she wasn’t as bad as I thought, after all. I mean, it had been a year since the great hamster incident. Maybe we’d both grown and changed since then. “They’re one of the best ways to learn about how much people love to lie.”
“Everyone lies,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s true, but it’s being able to figure out what they’re lying about and what they’re telling the truth about that’s important.”
“So, Casper?”
“He’s working for Alexander,” she said.
Erin groaned and rubbed her temples. Suddenly, she looked much older than she was. More than that, Erin looked tired.
“Tell me he doesn’t realize who Max is.”
“Sorry,” Patricia shrugged. “But he does.”
“How?” I asked. “He knows about my grandmother?”
“All of the vampires know about your grandmother and her book,” she says. “And your grandmother has figured out what your parents are working on. If they get Grandma and the book together, they’re going to try to force her to create potions that will accomplish what they want. I don’t think she has all the answers. She doesn’t have all of the ingredients needed for the potion, but they’re going to try to gather them and then make your grandma help them get what they’ve really been after all of this time.”
“And what do they want?” Erin asked.
“A world of shifters,” Patricia said. “A world of animals.”
“We already have shifters in the world,” Erin said. “There must be a twist.”
“There is,” Patricia said. “It’s something that most people who study this potion don’t understand.” Patricia bites her lip and looks around nervously for a minute. I’m guessing that being invisible for half of a year wasn’t very fun. She probably doesn’t want to do or say anything that’s going to upset me, but the problem is that I’m already upset.
Not only are the vampires coming for me, but they think they can replicate the potion?
And there’s something we don’t know about it?
My stomach hurts thinking about what she’s going to tell us next. I don’t want to believe Patricia. I don’t want to trust anything that she’s saying, but I know that it’s true. It’s all true. She has no reason to lie to me, anyway. Not anymore.
“Once you take the potion, you turn into an animal,” she said. “But then,” she paused. “Then, after you take it, you can’t shift back.”
“What?” Erin paled.
“Never,” Patricia said. “The potion is a one-way trip. Then you’re stuck.”
“But…but there must be an antidote.”
Every evil potion needed an antidote.
Right?
“Actually,” she said. “That’s one of the things Casper has been working on. Didn’t you think it was strange that all of a sudden, students stopped turning into hamsters?”
“Yes.”
“That’s because I stopped trying to use that call for help once I realized what the teacher was doing.”
“What was he doing?” Erin sat on the edge of my bed, hands gripping her robes. She was more nervous, more anxious, than I’d ever seen her before.
“Here’s how it went down,” Patricia said. “I turned some students into hamsters. I figured someone would realize it was me, look for me, and somehow manage to find me. That didn’t happen. Instead, the students I turned into hamsters were turned back into humans, but two weird things happened. What were they?” She looked at me.
“It took them a long time to get turned back to human.”
“Yep. No way should it have taken a few days to turn them back.”
“And they lost their memory.”
“Yeah, exactly. That wasn’t me.”
“What are you saying?”
“When I turned Karen, I followed her,” Patricia said. “I wanted to see what they were going to do to her. I thought that the headmistress or the nurse would turn her back into a girl, but that’s not what happened at all. Instead, Casper brought in some of this weird orange potion he’d concocted. Everyone left him alone while he administered it. Sure enough, Karen turned back into h
er normal self, but she forgot everything about her time in hamster form.”
“So, he found a way for people who use the potion to turn back to their human selves.”
“Yeah, but the only stipulation this time is that anyone who takes the antidote loses all memory of their time in wolf or hamster or dog form,” Patricia shook her head. “You get the idea. Basically, their time as a shifter just sort of vanishes.”
“So why even make the antidote?” I asked.
“It’s always a good idea to have one,” Erin said. “What if a vampire accidentally took the potion? They’d want a way to turn back one of their own.”
“So, if they’re working on antidotes, it means they’re close to perfecting the potion. That still doesn’t explain what took the students days to return to civilization instead of hours. When Alicia had cast a counter-spell, they’d come back almost instantly.”
“She never cast a counter spell,” Patricia said. “Any charm she may have used on you was fake. My hamster spell lasts four hours.”
“What?”
“Yep. Four hours. I designed it to self-destruct after that time period. You know, in case something ever happened to me, which it did. So, they can take a student away and practice waving their wands around all they want, but four hours is the max amount of time that spell lasts.” Patricia shrugged. “Maybe the nurses and the headmistress thought they were curing those students, but they weren’t. It was an auto-destruct.”
“So, Casper?”
“He wants to test this antidote but doesn’t have test subjects. Of course, he’d use the people I turned.”
Erin stood and walked to the door. She walked back and forth across the room a few times. She wrung her hands a few times.
“So…a few days?” She finally spoke. “What was he doing to them during that time?”
“Running tests,” Patricia said. This was the most I’d ever heard Patricia speak. Apparently, not being able to speak at all for months made her a chatterbox. I wondered, briefly, how she managed to eat and stay hydrated if holding objects was hard for her during all of that time. Had she showered? I shook my head. There would be a time and a place for asking those questions, but it wasn’t right now.
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