Wolf just shrugged.
“I pay attention in class,” she said. “It’s easy to kind of figure out the types of things each teacher would say.”
It was easy to know what one teacher in particular would say.
A shiver shot through her as she thought about Codsworth and how much he despised her. It was for no good reason, too. He just didn’t like her. As far as Wolf knew, he had no idea she was a shifter. He didn’t know she was a coven kid. He didn’t know anything about her.
Something about Natasha just rubbed him the wrong way, and Codsworth took every possible opportunity to make her uncomfortable. He loved making her feel bad. He liked seeing her fail.
It was a terrible feeling to know that you were going to walk into a class and no matter what you did, it would be wrong. It was a horrible feeling. She hated it.
Jessica blinked, looking around. She seemed a little confused. Wolf turned her attention to the human.
“How are you feeling?” She asked.
“Looks like you can see better,” Belle added.
“Hey,” Jessica said. “This is pretty cool.” She held her hands in front of her and took a few steps. She walked around in a circle. Then she turned back to her buddies.
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, I can! Everything! Wow!” She jumped up and down like a little kid: happy and giddy and ecstatic to be able to see things that the rest of the world could not, and a feeling of satisfaction suddenly settled over Natasha. This was what friendship was supposed to be like. This was what life at Enchanted Academy was supposed to be like.
Magical.
It was supposed to be magical.
Chapter 3
I blinked, and everything seemed very vivid. Suddenly, the forest was no longer dark or scary. It was almost light. Even though I knew that it was nighttime out and I knew that we’d probably be in trouble for wandering around outside alone, I couldn’t help but love the fact that the spell had enhanced my ability to see.
It was fantastic.
“Come on,” Wolf said, looking back at me. “No more dilly-dallying.”
“What?”
“Just come on.”
She turned, hurrying ahead in the woods. I had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do or see, but I couldn’t wait to find out. Hanging out with Wolf and Belle was like being on an adventure all of the time. They were so interesting and so totally put-together. I so often felt like an outsider at the academy. It was nice to be around girls who actually knew what was going on. They did a great job showing me that no matter what I was dealing with, everything was going to be okay.
Sometimes I just had to remember to keep trying.
We scurried through the woods that surrounded the school. Normally, I’d be scared out of my mind to be wandering around in a place like this, but I wasn’t. Somehow, being able to see made everything much less scary and a lot more wonderful. I’d never gotten an experience like this back in Millbrook.
Nope.
Not ever.
This was way different and a lot more fun.
We hurried through the woods that surrounded the different outbuildings at Enchanted Academy. Every so often, I thought I heard a rabbit or a deer or a small animal scurrying around, but it always turned out to be nothing. Besides, if Wolf was actually, as she had said, a wolf, then I figured anything that tried to hurt us should probably just watch their backs.
She wasn’t going to let anything happen to us.
At least, I hoped she wouldn’t.
“Ah, here we are,” Wolf finally said. I looked up to see what she had spotted.
Then I kept looking up.
“What in the world?” I asked.
“It’s a tower,” Belle said helpfully.
“I can see that.”
I craned my neck to look all of the way up. It was definitely something you might see in a horror novel or a scary movie. It was very, very tall, and very, very narrow.
“What is that tower doing out here anyway?” I asked, looking around. “I don’t see any other buildings close by.”
“We found it last year,” Belle said. “We think maybe it used to be part of the school.”
“When? A hundred years ago?” I looked at the vines growing on the sides of the tower. I mean, our dormitory building had vines growing on it, too, but nothing like this. These vines were thick and messy. They were interlocked and deep. I probably couldn’t even pull them apart to see what color the tower stones were.
“Definitely a long time,” Wolf said. “Come on.”
She motioned for me to follow her, so I did. Belle came, too, bringing up the rear. I probably should have been afraid that we were going to get kidnapped or attacked by wild beasts out here, but I was way too excited for that.
Besides, anything we encountered couldn’t possibly be worse than what I’d come from. Things couldn’t be more terrible here than they’d been back in Millbrook. Everything I did now was weighed in comparison with my past, and that was how I decided if a risk was worth taking or not.
The bottom portion of the tower was obscured by the vines, but also with bushes and random branches that had fallen over the years. They surrounded the outside of the tower. There was no way to see where a door might have been once, long ago. I mean, there had to be one, though.
Right?
“How did people get inside?” I finally asked.
“Come on,” Wolf said. She climbed up on one of the fallen branches and gestured for me to follow.
“I’m not climbing on that.”
“Don’t be scared,” Belle said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“What are you going to do?” Belle and I were roughly the same size. I seriously had no idea how she thought she could save me if I fell off of the tower.
“Why, catch you if you fall, of course,” she pushed her hair back over her shoulder, which was quickly becoming her signature move, but I didn’t find it cute. I found it annoying.
“Better watch it,” I said. “Or I’ll buy you a hair tie.”
She looked confused, but shrugged and motioned for me to follow Wolf. It was probably just peer pressure, but I did. Carefully, almost gingerly, I climbed up on the branches. I was careful not to slip, which was harder than it should have been. I made my way up the branches and when I reached Wolf, I saw that she had found a ledge on the tower.
“Come on.”
She reached for my hand and pulled, helping me up on the ledge, too. I climbed up beside her and pressed my hands against the vines. They were cold. They were seriously icy. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but that wasn’t it.
“They’re freezing,” I said. The rest of the forest was at most, lukewarm.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s enchanted.”
“What?”
“The tower is enchanted,” Belle yelled up at us, as though I hadn’t heard Wolf the first time.
“Yeah,” I said, looking down. “I got that bit.”
“Enchanted,” she mouthed again, and I shook my head. I was getting used to the way things worked at Enchanted Academy. Slowly, but surely, I was learning exactly what it took to fit in here, and mostly, that consisted of accepting the fact that just about everything I encountered was under some sort of a spell.
Whether those were big spells or small spells would vary, but the important thing was that everything was somehow, in one way or another, affected by magic.
“What is this place?” I asked, holding onto the vines.
“We found it last year,” she said. “Don’t know what used to be here, but, well, look.”
Wolf began to shuffle to the left. She stayed on the ledge, faced the tower, and moved carefully. The ledge we were standing on was probably a foot wide. I didn’t think I was going to fall, but any sudden movement would definitely result in me tumbling to the ground. I wasn’t high up enough that I’d die or even be seriously hurt, but da
mn, that fall was going to hurt.
A lot.
“I’m not sure about this,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. “Just look. Then we’ll go back to the dorms, okay?”
She moved, and I followed her carefully. We made our way around the tower to the opposite side. There were no branches on that side: no way at all to climb up to the tower, which is why we’d climbed up where we did. And now I could see that the tower wasn’t entirely without open access.
“There’s a window.”
“Not just any window.”
“It’s enchanted!” Belle called from down below.
“Again, with the yelling,” I rolled my eyes. “I can see that it’s enchanted.”
And it was.
I wasn’t sure what was happening, exactly, but the tower window looked like it was filled with water. That was impossible because there was no glass. If there was water in the tower, it would have spilled out, right?
“It’s part of the enchantment,” Wolf said.
I looked at the tower. How was it filled with water? I craned my head back and tried to look up, but I was too close to the walls.
“You said you came out here to cause mischief,” I asked. “Tell me, what exactly is it that ya’ll like to do out here?”
I closed my eyes for just a second before she answered.
Please don’t say climb in the water window.
Please don’t say climb in the water window.
Please.
“This,” she said. She jerked her hand, pulling away a bit of the vine. I could see that the tower was made of stone. Once she pulled back part of the vine, the stone’s colorful walls were revealed.
“Is this a purple tower?”
“Purple, blue, green,” Wolf shrugged. “You name it.”
“It’s enchanted!” Belle called again.
“Okay,” I growled at Wolf. “Is she broken or something?”
“She’s just excited.”
“What’s so exciting about a purple tower filled with magical water that doesn’t pour out?”
Even as I said it, I realized how ungrateful I sounded. They were showing me something truly spectacular, something truly fantastic, and I was totally wasting it.
Would I ever have seen anything like this at my old school?
That would be a big, fat, “nope.”
“This,” she said. Wolf reached for the wall and pulled out a tiny pebble. Then she pulled her hand back and thrust it forward again, chucking the pebble into the water window. I could see it enter the water, but then...nothing.
It just floated there.
“It didn’t sink.”
Belle sucked in a breath and for a second I could have sworn she was going to talk about the enchantment again, but she didn’t. She looked up at me and when I glanced down at her, she was just shrugging.
“Pretty cool, right?” She said back.
“Pretty cool,” I agreed, but that was putting it lightly. I grabbed a pebble of my own and threw it into the water. It went inside and, like my friend’s stone, it simply floated instead of sinking.
“This place must have a story,” Wolf said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, surely there’s a reason it’s here, locked away in the darkness of the forest.”
“Maybe everyone just forgot about it.”
“A place like this?” She shook her head. “People forget a lot of things, Jessica, but nobody forgets something like this. Nobody.”
Chapter 4
Cooking In Cauldrons was perhaps the world’s most horrible class, thought Wolf.
She didn’t particularly like being enrolled in a class she was horrible at. She’d been struggling for weeks to perform even the most basic of tasks, and it wasn’t because she hadn’t tried. She wasn’t holding back. She wasn’t being lazy. She just found the tasks to be incredibly difficult and unbearably hard. For some reason, even the simplest of activities felt nearly impossible, and she hated that.
It was made about a million times worse by the fact that Red was in her class.
He sat by her sometimes. Sometimes they were even partners. She couldn’t tell whether it was worse to have him close or to have him far. It was obvious that she was attracted to him. She had been for a very long time. It had taken her all of last year just to work the nerve up to talk to him, but then, that had probably been a mistake.
Now she was on his radar, but they still weren’t dating.
They weren’t a couple.
They weren’t anything.
They were just...close to each other.
Their lives constantly rotated around one another, but rarely intersected, except for here. In this class, in this place, she would be close to Red, but Natasha didn’t much like the environment in which she found herself. She didn’t like the way the teacher made her feel. She didn’t like his square-looking face or the fact that everything he said was spoken in a way that seemed overwhelmingly negative. Red might be close, but when Natasha was in the class, she felt scared.
Tense.
Worried.
She hated every second of it.
“Potions are one of the most important elements of magic,” the teacher said. “Without them, all of your magical abilities are somewhat useless. Failing to use potions when necessary is not different than failing to use your wand. It makes you look ill-informed.”
He walked back and forth in front of the class, looking from one student to the next. Somehow, Codsworth managed not to look at Wolf, which was just as well. It was better not to be on his radar today.
Not when she was already feeling anxious and shy.
Each student in the class had a little cauldron in front of them today. Cauldrons were definitely the key to mastering magic: at least magic you could create. If you wanted to make potions or spells or enchantments, you’d need to get comfortable using a cauldron, and that was the entire point of the class.
Natasha tried to pay attention to what Codsworth was saying. Although most of the information he was giving her she already knew, she still found it tedious and overwhelming. It was probably because no matter what answer she gave when asked a question, he always found fault with her.
She didn’t want to be in his class.
She wanted to take a class where the teachers believed in her.
She wanted to be in a class where everyone thought she could do it.
But that kind of class didn’t seem to exist for Wolf.
Not at Enchanted Academy.
It was the end of the week. The cauldron projects were due on Monday. That was good, Wolf knew. She would have all weekend to perfect the recipe she’d been working on for this project. She felt like she was pretty close to having it done, but Professor Codsworth was notoriously finnicky, especially when it came to teaching people he didn’t particularly care for.
Her idea for a potion that could enhance your ability to hear things was very straightforward. It relied heavily on a simple listening spell that could be accomplished by combining several important elements she’d learned about in the class. There were a couple of herbs that were difficult to acquire, but because so many of the teachers at the school did want their students to succeed, Wolf found that a couple of them had been willing to work with her to help her find the elements she needed.
Codsworth had been no help at all.
He didn’t like Wolf. He viewed her as a problem student, and once you were labeled as an ungrateful or bad student in his class, there was no coming back from that.
As far as Wolf knew, she’d never actually done anything to offend the teacher. She’d spent hours racking her brain, trying to come up with a reason he might dislike her so very much, but it had been a futile exercise.
Still, he somehow seemed to feel like she was constantly wronging him, and she couldn’t really understand why. Was his life so hard that he had to pick on the one shifter student in the class? Who knew? Maybe it was. Maybe he really did feel
like she was a terrible student and worthy of being made fun of or teased.
She didn’t know.
“Hey,” Red hissed at Wolf. She looked at him and tried not to bite her bottom lip. She seriously needed to stop swooning over this boy. He was just a boy, after all. Just a boy. He was a boy who had finally noticed her, though, at least as a classmate. He definitely didn’t think of her as girlfriend material, but so what? She had her dreams, and she’d meet him there.
“What?” She whispered, raising her eyebrows.
Red jerked his head toward the front of the class and motioned for her to pay attention. Okay, so maybe she’d been zoning out a little bit. Just a little. It was just that Codsworth was ridiculously hard to listen to. He droned on and on, and he was mean, and he always found ways to insult absolutely everyone.
But Red was right.
She met his eyes and nodded. Then she mouthed a quick thank you to let him know she wasn’t irritated that he’d called her out.
Wolf needed to pass this class, which meant she needed to pay attention to everything he was saying. Besides, maybe he would reveal some important information that could help her. Codsworth liked to talk at length about many different random topics. If she paid attention, maybe Wolf would get some new ideas she could incorporate into her project.
At the very least, maybe incorporating some of his key points into her project could help her get a slightly better grade.
And any grade at all was better than failing.
“The secret to creating an ingestible potion,” Codsworth said. “Is ensuring that you use only high-quality ingredients.”
This was something she already knew. Wolf had listened to Codsworth rant endlessly about the quality of certain things and which things were “good” and “bad” and “usable” and “inedible.” He was really passionate about this topic. It was just too bad that he always singled her out.
“And how can you ensure that your ingredients are as good as you want them to be?” He looked around the room.
Not me, Wolf thought to herself.
She really wasn’t up for answering questions today. She kind of just wanted to sit and enjoy herself during class. She would listen and take notes like a good girl, but that was about as far as this could go for her. She didn’t want anything else. She didn’t need anything else.
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