Enchanted Academy Box Set

by L. C. Mortimer

  “Everyone can have five,” she finally agreed. “And that will leave enough of the good ones for class tomorrow. But,” she held up a finger. “You have to eat the bad ones. That means you need to choose the cookies that are crumbling or that look a little defective.”

  Defective cookies?

  Was there really such a thing?

  “Whatever,” Wolf said, reaching for the cookies. Beauty and I exchanged knowing looked and followed suit. I wasn’t about to miss out on some witchfully delicious cookies. Not when it was spooky season at Enchanted Academy. The high school was known for being elegant and classy, but around Halloween-time, everything got a little spooky and crazy.

  “These are amazing,” I said through a mouthful of cookies. If my foster parents could see me now, they’d freak out. Eating with your mouth full was a quick way to get on the no-fly list in foster kid world. Nobody wanted a kid who didn’t have manners or who stuck out like a sore thumb. Here, though, I got to relax a little bit, and if I wanted to talk with my mouth full of delicious, savory cookies, well, nobody was going to stop me.

  “I know,” Stacy said proudly, watching us eat her creations. She looked very smug and very self-assured. Sometimes I wondered how my roommates all managed to be so confident all of the time. I constantly felt like a not-so-hot mess.

  “How did you get them to taste both gingery and sweet?” Beauty asked. She flipped her cookie over a few times, as though doing so was going to let her in on Stacy’s secrets. The rest of us knew better than that. Stacy was the type of person who was very private, even to a fault. She’d take her secrets to the grave with her if she could. We all knew it.

  As expected, Stacy avoided Beauty’s question. Instead, she just shrugged and reached for her own cookie. She bit into it, satisfied, and then she started counting the cookies again.

  “If you’re so worried,” Wolf said, glaring at her. “Then just bake more.”

  “I can’t,” she said, looking up. “I’m out of...well, I’m out of something.”

  “Of what?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she snapped. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she stood up and grabbed the box. “Sorry. I’m feeling a little tense, I guess. I’m just going to go in my room now.” She took the box of cookies, went into the bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

  “Wait,” Wolf said. “We didn’t get five.”

  We heard the lock turn on the door in response. Wolf narrowed her eyes and glared at it. She’d been doing a lot of glaring lately in Stacy’s general direction. Things weren’t so good in roommate paradise these days.

  “Locked out of my own room,” she said. “Cool.”

  She threw her body back on the pillows that covered our living room floor and let me know that this was definitely, totally, absolutely not cool. None of it was. Stacy had been obsessing about her cooking class for awhile now, but I knew that Wolf had the same problem. They were in different classes. Stacy was in Baking With Spells and Wolf was taking a class called Cooking in Cauldrons. Her teacher was driving her crazy.

  Well, that might be a nice way of putting it.

  He was a total jerk to her.

  Constantly.

  “So,” I said, looking over at Beauty. She had been much calmer about her schoolwork ever since she’d returned to living in the suite with us. She’d vanished for awhile, caught in a world of magic and temptation. She’d been trapped in a case with a rose thanks to an ill-timed wish that hadn’t turned out exactly the way she’d thought that it would.

  “So,” she said.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “What homework do you have tonight?”

  “Well, I’m not taking any cooking classes,” she pointed out. “So not nearly as much as everyone else.”

  “Good,” Wolf said from her place on the floor. “Cooking classes are the worst.”

  “Why’d you sign up for yours, anyway?” I asked her. “You hate it. You don’t like the teacher. All you ever really do is homework for that one class.” The rest of her workload seemed easy in comparison, almost. Her cooking class had spiraled out of control, though. It was a nightmare that she hated, but Wolf couldn’t seem to find a way out of it.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. I made myself comfortable beside her. I didn’t like seeing my friend feeling so stressed or anxious. It wasn’t really fair that she had so much to deal with. We all had a lot of magical spells to learn and potions to create as students at Enchanted Academy, but somehow, things seemed worse than usual for Wolf. I hadn’t been a student long enough to know whether this sort of thing was normal, but it didn’t feel normal.

  It felt wrong.

  She sighed and looked over at me. For a second, I didn’t think Wolf was going to answer me. She could be closed-off sometimes, just like Stacy could, but Wolf was a bit more tender than our other roommate. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to tell me why she signed up for the class.

  “My mom,” she said.

  “Your mom made you take the class?” Belle asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “We’ve got all night,” Belle motioned to the empty space around the room. “In case you didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “So you can tell us. We aren’t going to judge you.”

  If there was one thing I’d learned since coming to live at Enchanted Academy, it was that other witches, and students of magic in general, could be quite fantastic. Oh, we all had our own little worlds we could get swept away in, but Wolf and Belle both seemed really trustworthy. I had the feeling that if I ever told them the truth about my own family, that they’d understand.

  At the very least, I didn’t think they’d treat me differently.

  That had to count for something.

  Back when I went to Millbrook High School, I never had friends like this. The people I knew were cutthroat. They’d do anything if it meant getting ahead of each other. I guess that was one of the reasons I was happy to transfer. Winning a scholarship to Enchanted Academy meant more to me than anyone would possibly understand. It meant that, for the first time, I could be in a place where I felt safe.

  Despite all of the adventures I’d already had and the dangerous spells I’d encountered – Belle did get trapped inside a glass box, after all – I really did feel like I was going to be okay. I felt like everything around me was going to be fine.

  I was safe.

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Wolf said. Her tone changed a little. She sounded...hesitant. She knew we weren’t going to judge her. She knew that we weren’t going to tease her or give her trouble. She knew that no matter what happened, we’d be by her side, so why was she afraid to talk with us about her class? About her mom? Surely her family wasn’t nearly as messed up as she thought it was.

  Then again, maybe it was worse.

  “Then what is it?” I asked. I looked at Wolf anxiously. She was a good person: a kind person. She wasn’t someone who deserved to have bad things happen to them. What could be wrong with her family that made her feel like she couldn’t drop a class she hated?

  It seemed to me that if she disliked her course so much, she should have the option of walking away from it. I knew that the administrators at Enchanted Academy were actually fairly calm and understanding. They were pretty much always willing to work with students who were struggling. I thought that if Wolf talked to them, they would totally be up for helping her find a solution.

  Wolf didn’t seem to want that, though.

  “I’m an only child,” Wolf said. That wasn’t really unusual. As far as I knew, Belle was an only kid, too. I definitely was. I mean, I’d grown up in foster care, so it wasn’t like I had been alone, but I’d never had anyone who was, you know, on my team. All of the people I met were having a terrible time with life. Everyone I encountered was struggling in the same way I was.

  �
�So?” I asked the question I was certain Belle was also thinking.

  “So, there’s a lot of...” She hesitated, searching for the right word. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what she was going to say. There was a lot of pressure? A lot of stress? A lot of anxiety? Being an only child probably had its perks, but I had a feeling that it also had its downsides and those could be truly incredible.

  “Chores?” Belle offered up helpfully.

  “What? No!” Wolf shook her head. She smiled, just a little. “That wouldn’t be so bad. If that was the only downside to being an only child, then I’d be set.”

  “Hey,” I frowned. “Watch what you say about chores.”

  I wasn’t exactly a big fan of them.

  Who was?

  “There are just a lot of...expectations,” she finally said. She breathed out heavily and frowned. She was obviously lost in thought. I recognized the look on her face. If we let her, she’d get trapped in the past, and I wasn’t ready to let that happen to my friend. Whatever she was thinking about, it was over now.

  Done.

  And she was safe here with us.

  “What does your mom expect from you?” I asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Everything,” she said. Wolf looked like she wasn’t quite believing that she was spilling her guts, but I mean, that was fine. That was one of the perks of having female roommates who were also into magic. They understood. At least, I hoped we did.

  I was the least magical of the bunch.

  As in, I couldn’t do magic at all.

  I hoped that it didn’t matter to Wolf at a time like this. I didn’t think it did, but you could never really be totally sure. I’d come to Enchanted Academy on a scholarship and that was going to have to be good enough because it was all that I had. There was a part of me that wished desperately that I’d be able to learn to do some sort of magic. Anything would be acceptable at this point. It had been more than a month since I’d arrived, and I was still struggling with the most magic of tasks.

  My peers could do things like levitate objects.

  They could move books or tools or objects just with the right words or the right flick of their wands.

  Me?

  I was just glad I had stopped getting lost on my way to classes.

  “She expects that I’ll be a perfect witch,” Wolf said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is your mom a witch?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Wolf sighed.

  “What?” Belle asked. She shook her hair and her soft curls bounced, falling over her shoulders. She made being beautiful seem easy and simple.

  She made it seem like something she didn’t even have to think about.

  “She’s the head of a coven,” Wolf said.

  “Woah, seriously?” I asked. Even I knew that leading a coven was a big deal. A witch’s coven was like a special club or group of women or men or both. The people in a coven could get together and do magic or solve problems or work up enchantments and spells together, and because they spent so much time working as a group, they really began to understand one another in beautiful and magical ways.

  And their spells became stronger and greater over time. It was one of those things that non-magical people didn’t really understand.

  I hadn’t, at least not until I’d come to Enchanted Academy. Now I knew more about witches, warlocks, goblins, and ghouls than any teenage girl ought to know, and I was only a sophomore in high school. I still had plenty to learn.

  “Yeah,” Wolf said.

  “Oh, I get it,” Belle pointed out the obvious. “She wants you to take over as coven leader.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And you don’t want to?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? It’s a cool gig,” Belle said. She shrugged, as though it wasn’t anything more than that: a gig, or a job, or an activity. “You get paid well and you get to do spells with your friends. What’s not to love?”

  “It’s just not what I want to be doing,” she said. She twisted her hands and blushed a little. So that was the problem. Her mom had tried to plan out her life for her, but that wasn’t what Wolf wanted. She wanted more than that. She wanted something different.

  Hell, maybe she needed something different.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked, but I had a feeling that I already knew. There was something about Wolf that not many people realized: not even people who lived with her, like Stacy and Belle. The three of them had lived together last year, too, but they’d all been caught up in their own lives and their own issues.

  Me?

  I was new.

  Everything about this world was fresh and strange and beautiful to me, which was great in some ways because it meant I really understood what was happening, at least in some ways.

  And I knew that Wolf had a secret dream of being a writer.

  That was what she wanted to be more than anything else.

  She wanted to create.

  She wanted to write.

  Yeah, I be that would go over well with her coven-leader mother. There was no chance that someone who led a group of witches and crafted spells, created hexes, and practiced different kinds f magic was going to be okay with a child who wanted to go into art. That sort of thing just didn’t happen.

  The reality was that I didn’t even know if she’d admitted it to herself. There was a chance that Wolf hadn’t really accepted the fact that she wanted to create stories for people to read. Maybe she had. She was constantly writing in notebooks, though, and drawing. She was always reading stories and taking notes about the things she liked and didn’t like in different books.

  Wolf looked at me for a minute, and I thought she might tell me honestly, but she just shook her head. She pressed her lips together and sighed, and I realized there would be no emotional heart-to-heart today. That was fine. We didn’t really need one.

  “Who knows?” She shrugged. “I have plenty of time to decide, but I do know that I don’t want to lead my mom’s dumb coven.”

  “Harsh words,” Belle pointed out.

  “Yeah, well,” Wolf shrugged. “Who cares?”

  The energy in the room was getting anxious and angry and antsy and even though I totally adored my roommates, I also thought that maybe, just maybe, it was time for a change of pace. Maybe changing the subject would lighten the mood. There was encouraging Wolf to open up and then there was just forcing her to think about people who didn’t like her. I wanted our relationship to be centered on sharing and openness: not on thinking about her parents who didn’t like her.

  “Um, anyone want to play a game?”

  They looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “You know, like charades?”

  “What?” Wolf asked, wrinkling her nose. “What’s that?”

  “Charades?” Belle echoed, looking equally confused.

  Okay, so apparently, charades wasn’t a staple in the world of magical beings. Got it. Noted for future reference. I wondered if they played bored games, or like, Simon Says. Everyone liked that game, right? It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest it, but I thought better of it. I didn’t need to further alienate myself from my beloved roommates. Not today.

  “What do witches do when they’re bored?” I asked.

  Belle and Wolf exchanged knowing glances and then started laughing. I sat there for a second, realizing there was some sort of inside joke that I wasn’t privy to. The realization kind of stung a little.

  “Hey!” I said. “Let me in on this.” I frowned playfully, putting my hands on my hips. This just made my friends laugh even more, which was good. I was glad the mood was slowly calming down. The tension was easing, draining away. Finally, they stopped laughing long enough to give me a real answer.

  “We cause mischief, of course,” Wolf said. She raised an eyebrow and looked at me. “What do you think, new kid? Want to go cause some trouble?” She and Belle looked at me as though they thought I’d back down. They thought I was going
to be scared or afraid, but I wasn’t. I could do this. Hell, I could do anything because I believed in myself.

  I’d learned a lot about inner-strength since coming to Enchanted Academy.

  I wasn’t scared.

  Far from it.

  “Yup,” I said. “Ready when you are.”

  Chapter 2

  As it turned out, Jessica was braver than Wolf had given her credit for, which was fine. She was a normal, ordinary human with a magnificently boring back story, but apparently, she had bravery in spades.

  Good for her.

  Wolf didn’t personally understand how the human girl had come to be at Enchanted Academy. She’d won a prize of some sorts – a scholarship – but Wolf had been under the impression that students had to have a magical background in order to be accepted to the academy. Wasn’t that kind of the point? If you didn’t have to be a magical student, it didn’t make much sense to have a magical academy, now did it?

  It wasn’t really up to Wolf, though, and besides, she liked Jessica just fine. It was just that Jessica wasn’t used to being around magic and she had a lot to learn. Wolf and Belle had secretly agreed to help her as much as possible to make sure she succeeded at the school. They would do whatever it took to make sure that Jessica was comfortable and that she was able to keep up with her classes.

  Some of the students could be vicious and mean. Wolf was nervous that one of those students was going to cause trouble for Jessica. What if they drove her away from the school? What if they turned her off to the idea of magic altogether?

  Beast was one of the biggest troublemakers in the school. Wolf hadn’t missed the way he’d been looking at Jessica, and she knew that Belle hadn’t missed it, either. Jessica was new, and young, and she still had a lot to learn about the way things worked at this school. Wolf wouldn’t tell her what to do, but Beast? He was bad news. Jessica should stay away from him. Wolf made a mental note to tell her just that.