The Love Potion (Werewolf High Book 5)

by Anita Oh

  Except not any more. Now he was cold again.

  “It’s more complicated than we thought,” Althea said quietly to him. “I don’t know if it’s because of the composition of the potion or how it was absorbed, but she’s not reacting to anything in the way I expected. I think perhaps we should…” Althea sighed. “I think we need to tell Mother.”

  “It might be a bit soon for that,” said Tennyson. “You’ll fix this. There’s no reason to get her involved.”

  “Okay, give me a few days,” Althea said. “I’ll find something.”

  I wanted to leave, to just go back to my room and sleep until this was all over, but at the same time, I didn’t want to leave Nikolai, even though he was just sitting there, playing on his phone. Just being near him was enough.

  “This is the worst,” I said. It came out a little squeaky, but at least it was actual words. “I’m going home.”

  I stood up to leave.

  “Wait, Lucy. Just try one more thing.”

  I sighed. “Don’t you get it? I’m in love with Nikolai. I want to hold his hand and hear him laugh and draw his name surrounded by little hearts. It’s sickening. It goes against every single thing I believe in. You might all think it’s a huge joke, but you don’t realize…”

  I broke off, taking a deep breath to calm myself down. I wasn’t sure I had the words to explain how very wrong this felt. “It was bad enough before, when I had trouble controlling the lycanthropy, but now… Now, I can’t even control my own emotional responses.” I rubbed a hand across my face. “It’s like I was roofied, but in the feelings.”

  I sighed again. There was no way I could make them see just how sick this was. Everything I was feeling was a lie, and even though I knew it was a lie, that didn’t make it feel any less true. “I have to go,” I said.

  Sam caught up with me before the gate to the Golden House had even fully closed. He didn’t say anything, just fell into step beside me.

  “I’m sorry that I’m so…” I waved a hand around to encompass everything that was going on. I couldn’t even think about my feelings for Sam; that was just an extra complication that was more than I could deal with.

  Sam shrugged. “It’s not your fault. I just wanted you to know that, whatever else is going on, I’m right here. Whether it’s this thing with Nikolai or stuff with Tennyson or whatever. Before anything else, I’m your friend, and that won’t change.”

  He caught hold of my hand, and even though it felt kind of weird, I let him. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sam to hold my hand, exactly. Only, I didn’t. It felt wrong. The only hand I wanted to hold was Nikolai’s.

  I couldn’t tell Sam that. Even though it was because of the potion, I couldn’t tell him that my feelings for him were totally gone. We’d never actually talked about having feelings in the first place, so there was that, but as things were, rather than seeing Sam as a friend before anything else, it was all I could see him as.

  I walked as quickly as I could without it seeming weird, just so I could stop holding his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, breaking away as soon as the Red House came into sight. “Everything is just so confusing right now.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, but I could sense through the pack bond that he was disappointed. I could only imagine what he was feeling.

  Everything was awful, all the time. I couldn’t study. I couldn’t sleep. I had no interest in food. All I wanted to do was sit around and daydream about Nikolai. I tried to think about homework, and my brain came up with a zillion scenarios where Nikolai suddenly confessed his secret feelings for me. Or I wanted to get some repair work done and got distracted by remembering how he had shown up and saved me in fencing club, and how it had felt to run through the woods with him by my side. It was no wonder I had no appetite. It was nauseating.

  Besides daydreaming about Nikolai, my interests narrowed down to worrying about how Nikolai felt about me and arranging situations where I could be close to him. The logical part of my brain knew that this wasn’t something I actually wanted, but that didn’t stop me wanting it. We weren’t in many classes together, but I had his timetable memorized. It was easy to sneak away and stand outside the door of his classroom, peeking in. Just watching him stare blankly into the distance made me so happy. I tried to get special approval to swap from fencing club back into C&C club and nearly clawed out Assistant Head Noel’s eyes when I was denied.

  I was out of control. The more I told myself to avoid him, the more I found myself watching him. I’d always been so scornful of those Tennyson fangirls, and I was so much worse. At least I could understand why someone would be like that about Tennyson. Even among other good-looking people, Tennyson stood out. There was just something about him that made him shine more brightly than anyone else. Plus, he was at least a good person, despite being a jerk. Nikolai was a jerk right down to the bone, but Tennyson always tried to do the right thing. Tennyson wanted to protect people, Nikolai just wanted to mock them. I was so, so much worse than those other girls. That was what I got for looking down on them for having a crush, I supposed.

  Nikolai had been hanging out with Tennyson a lot. It was the worst. I wanted to avoid Tennyson as much as possible, but I wanted to be close to Nikolai. So, I did the most logical thing and just followed them around at a discrete distance.

  They sat on the bench in the clearing behind the Golden House, chatting. Even with my superhearing, I was too far away to hear what they were talking about. I even had to balance in an uncomfortable position in the tree I’d climbed to see them properly. I’d never really paid that much attention to how they interacted before, but watching them now, I was surprised to see how close they were. They were physically comfortable with each other, their elbows and knees knocking together in an unselfconscious way that reminded me of my brothers. Nikolai was telling some story, waving his arms around to emphasize his point, and Tennyson threw his head back and laughed. It was so strange. He was normally so restrained that it gave me a funny sort of ache in my gut. Was he so very happy now that our bond was broken?

  I sighed. Nikolai was grinning at Tennyson in a way that almost made a person forget about his obnoxious personality. I tried to get my phone out so I could take a picture of it, but it was in my back pocket, and I was perched so precariously on that tree branch that the motion of reaching back made me overbalance. I clung to the branch with my legs, hanging upside down like a sloth for a moment before falling to the ground.

  I landed with a crash and got to my feet as fast as I could. That had definitely been loud enough to alert them to my presence, and I didn’t want to get caught.

  But I wasn’t fast enough. When I turned to leave, the two of them were standing right there.

  “I can explain,” I said, brushing fallen leaves off myself and trying to look nonchalant.

  They both raised their eyebrows.

  “The potion,” I told them.

  “Right,” said Nikolai. “The potion turned you into a creepy stalker.”

  “I wasn’t stalking,” I said, knowing full well I didn’t have a leg to stand on. “You know I was getting physically weak if I wasn’t close to Nikolai, but it didn’t seem fair to burden him about it…”

  That was a total lie, and it was obvious that neither of them was buying it.

  “You don’t have to hide your love,” Nikolai told me. “It’s only a natural thing. I am amazing.” He paused a beat, his eyes going wide. “Wait, I am amazing. Did you do this even before the potion? Have you been stalking me this whole time?”

  I punched him in the shoulder. “Shut up,” I said, but I couldn’t stop smiling. Even being mocked by Nikolai seemed like a good thing.

  “No, seriously,” he said, following me as I turned to leave the woods. “I’m pretty sure this is one of those potions that can’t work unless the feeling already exists.”

  “You’re delusional,” I said. “I think maybe you’re a little bit too obsessed with me, to be honest.�
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  But when I glanced back at Tennyson, I noticed he was watching us with narrowed eyes.

  Chapter 11

  As the full moon got closer, Althea tested more and more antidotes on me, and the effects just got weirder and weirder. I didn’t complain, even when one gave me a unicorn horn for a whole hour. I even tried kissing Nikolai – an awkward peck on the lips that I wished I could scrub from my mind forever, even though the potion-addled part of my brain blushed every time I thought about it, despite his bad breath. I really did not want to have to face the Wilde Alpha. That woman was terrifying.

  “We should wait until after the full moon,” Tennyson said when Althea brought up contacting her again. “Adding more stress to the situation when Lucy already lacks control is only going to exacerbate the situation.”

  On the day of the full moon, I didn’t feel all that different from normal. I went about my Saturday business, assuming I’d spend the night safely shackled in the basement of the Golden House. I talked to my family, sent back some repair work, loaded up on snacks and settled in on the sofa with Katie to watch some Netflix.

  Katie had been awesome about the whole love potion thing. She listened to me bang on about Nikolai for hours: the exact shade of his eyes, every little thing he said and all the possible meanings it might have, my theories on his sordid past. On and on I talked to her, and if I occasionally noticed that she had one of her earphones in her ear, I couldn’t begrudge her that. It probably wasn’t very interesting for anyone else. I owed her big time.

  She didn’t think the potion was the attack my father had planned. She thought it wasn’t aggressive enough, but it felt plenty aggressive to me, and it seemed too coincidental that it would happen just after we’d found out that there would be a poisoning attempt.

  We were trying to choose between Sharknado 3 and a movie where a monkey teaches a Jack Russell how to wrestle when my phone buzzed. I was surprised to see that the message was from Tennyson. He rarely messaged me. He’d never needed to before.

  “I need to talk to you. Meet me at the lighthouse. HIPPOPOTAMUS.”

  “Hippopotamus” was something Tennyson had come up with as a way to prove he was really the one sending the message. He changed the code word at random times, whispering it to me when nobody else was around. I’d have said he was paranoid, except that I was just as paranoid and I thought it was a good idea.

  “Sorry,” I said to Katie. “There’s a pack thing.”

  She shrugged. “That’s okay. It means I can watch Russell Madness without having to try to justify it.”

  I wondered why Tennyson wanted to meet at the lighthouse rather than the Golden House. Maybe he was going to take me to his scary mother. Or maybe Nikolai wanted to avoid me. Maybe he hated me and was sick of all this and had asked Tennyson to do something about it. The thought was like a lead weight in my stomach. Logically, I knew that Nikolai had zero interest in me, just as I had none in him when I wasn’t magically brainwashed, but I still held on to the hope.

  As I walked through the forest to the lighthouse, I imagined various ways that Nikolai might come to realize he had feelings for me. Maybe I should get Althea to give me a makeover. Maybe I should start dressing in more revealing clothes. Nikolai seemed like he’d like that kind of thing. Maybe I should act interested when he started talking all that boring stuff, like whatever game he was playing.

  The part of myself that wasn’t affected by the potion wanted to punch me in the face. But the part that was thought that was a great idea. All I needed to do was change everything about myself ever, and maybe then he’d look at me in a new way.

  By the time I got to the lighthouse, I was in a bad mood. It felt as if I was being split into two people, not just because of the potion but also because the full moon was getting closer. I approached the lighthouse warily. This was where my father used to meet with me. It was a place he was familiar with, so it would be the easiest place for him to lay a trap for me. Or for Tennyson. I kept my back to the wall as I entered, and I sighed in relief when I saw that it was just Tennyson inside.

  “Hey, remember that time you got the polo team to kidnap me and then you brought me here and tortured me for information?”

  “I didn’t torture you,” Tennyson said. His voice sounded a little off, and I glanced around nervously, worried that I’d missed something.

  “It was pretty torturous,” I told him. “You asked me all those boring questions. Anyway, what’s up? Why the secret meeting?”

  He didn’t answer. He turned his back on me and lifted a heavy-looking bag up onto the table.

  “Whatcha got there?” I asked, moving a little closer to him and trying to see what he was doing with the bag. We hadn’t been alone together for so long. I couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken directly to me, not through someone else. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  “Just a few things that I thought might help.”

  “Help with what?”

  I hadn’t realized Tennyson had been working on the potion as well. The thought was somehow pleasing. Maybe he missed our bond as well. Maybe he felt lonely and lost. Maybe he also needed a distraction from that gaping emptiness where the bond used to be. After all, he was a pretty needy guy underneath his cold exterior.

  He moved so fast, it took me a moment to realize what he’d done. One second he was there, right in front of me. Then he was behind me, by the door. I spun around to face him and somehow got tangled in rope. He’d placed it around me and then maneuvered me into a position where all he had to do was pull on the rope and I was restrained.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled, struggling against the rope, which only made it pull tighter.

  “Please understand why I’m doing this,” he said, standing by the door. “It’s for your own safety and the safety of the pack.”

  “You jerk, Tennyson Wilde!” I snarled. “I’ll get you for this!”

  He sighed. “You’re not acting rationally at the moment. Your control was poor enough before this potion, but under its effect, there’s no way of knowing what you’ll do. I had to take some precautions.”

  “You could’ve chained me up in the basement,” I said.

  He shook his head. “In a house full of Nikolai’s scent? Do you really think that would be a good idea?”

  “You’re enjoying this! You’re mad at me, and you’re just doing this to make me suffer!”

  For a moment, he looked unbearably sad. “Lucy…” He sighed, shaking his head. “The ropes are threaded with silver. You won’t be able to break out while you’re bound by them. I’ll come get you in the morning.”

  He was wearing gloves. I should’ve noticed that earlier. Then, maybe I’d have clued in that something was up. He pulled on one end of the rope, and instead of it growing tighter, it started to lift me off the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Put me down! Tennyson!”

  He gritted his teeth and kept pulling, no matter how much I shouted. When I was suspended high up in the lighthouse, he tied the rope off and left without another word.

  The closer it got to dark, the angrier I became. Tennyson had just assumed he had authority over me, that he could treat me any way he pleased and I’d let him. That was not okay.

  The silver stung against my skin. There wasn’t enough of it to burn, just a slight irritation wherever it touched bare flesh. But every sting was like a slap in the face, a reminder of how little regard Tennyson had for me. He didn’t trust me one bit. He thought I was stupid, that I’d go off on some rampage. After everything we’d been through, he should know me better than that. We’d shared our minds, and still he didn’t understand me. That thought burned more than the silver ropes ever could.

  Eventually, the light began to fade. I could feel my human side slipping away and the wild animal taking over. The more this happened, the more obvious it became that lycanthrope side of me was completely affected by the potion and the logic I’
d been able to apply about my actual feelings for Nikolai was forgotten. It made sense that the magic would work better on the magical part of me, but that kind of thought had no significance for me. There was only one thought in my mind. Only one thing seemed important. I had to get to him.

  I could still feel the grass against my feet from when we’d gone running through the forest together. I could feel the softness of his fur and that absolute sense of belonging. In my mind, that day seemed to take on a greater magnitude, as if it had been the start of something legendary. The colors in my memory seemed brighter than anything possible, and I recalled a sweet scent in the air that hadn’t ever existed.

  I had to get to him. Every cell in my body yearned to be close to him. He was mine and I was his and we had to be together.

  Night fell, but the silver in the rope stopped me from transforming. I screamed and howled, but nobody could hear me. No matter how much I struggled, the rope didn’t give. I had to do something to get free.

  I looked around frantically, trying to find something, anything. And then I saw it. Tennyson had been so worried about his clever trap that he hadn’t noticed the obvious. There were windows. If I got up enough momentum, I could swing myself at one of the windows. They weren’t big enough for me to escape through, but if I could break one, I’d be able to use the jagged glass to cut the rope.

  I was too frantic to even be able to gloat about outsmarting Tennyson. In that moment, Tennyson barely existed for me. The only thing I cared about was Nikolai.

  I swung my body back and forth. It took some time to build up enough force, but that was okay. I could be patient. It was just like stalking prey.

  My body swung closer and closer to the wall. If I’d been hanging just a little lower or higher, I wouldn’t have been able to reach the window, but the length of the rope was exactly right, so that once I was swinging enough, I could kick out at the window.