by Anita Oh
I hadn’t visited the library yet because I’d been avoiding other students, though it had been one of the things I’d been most excited about from the school brochure. It was just as awesome as I’d hoped. It was a long, domed building on the far side of the school, with stained-glass ceilings and secret little reading nooks, and books so old and rare you needed like a PhD in old and rare books to handle them. It was five floors, with an open square in the middle, so the entire building was flooded with colored light from the stained-glass. There were so many books, more books than I’d ever imagined. There were even those sliding ladders so you could climb right up to the top shelves, which to be honest seemed a bit dangerous in real life. How were you supposed to carry the books back down? How did you stay up there without falling while browsing through the books? It was clearly fraught with peril, so I kept my feet firmly on the ground.
Mr. Porter sat at the information desk in the middle of the ground floor. Even the colored light reflecting over him from the ceiling didn’t disguise how dull-eyed and droopy he’d become, like a wilted flower. He barely looked up from his massive stack of books as I greeted him.
Nobody else was around at all, not in the stacks or the computer labs or the study areas. It was a bit creepy. I wandered the rows, looking for the occult section, but I kept expecting someone to appear at the end of the row, or to be watching me through a gap in the books from the next aisle. I tried to tell myself I was being dumb and paranoid, but with all the weird stuff going on, it was hard to convince myself. It was a world full of werewolves and witchcraft, so I felt kind of justified getting creeped out.
The occult section was not helpful. There were books on astrology and the properties of crystals and other New Age stuff, but nothing I needed. I needed something practical, something like A Beginners Guide to the whole world being a total mess, but there was no category in the Dewey Decimal System for that. I had to think laterally. If I were Melvil Dewey, what would I class werewolves and witches under? I’d just assumed it would be under occultism, but when I looked up the library catalog on my tablet, I realized that, of course, folklore was way more logical. I scrolled through, disregarding all the pop culture and literature results, and wandered out of the 100s and up the stairs.
I hit the jackpot with the folklore section. It was massive, filled with books on werewolves and witches and all sorts of other things that weren’t relevant to my current situation. I kind of felt a little bit betrayed by the Internet as I browsed the wealth of printed information. There was a lot about witchcraft. Witchcraft was a thing in like every culture ever, apparently. There were books on how to tell a witch, how to banish a witch, how witches were associated with the devil, all that kind of thing. A lot of it read like misogynist propaganda, but there were a few handy little facts that seemed the same in most cultures. Witchcraft couldn’t be performed across running water, that kind of thing. The spell has no effect on the caster, apparently it really was common knowledge.
I sat a couple of books to the side, then ran my finger along the rows of books on werewolves. Most of them sounded like BS, and some were in foreign languages, but then I came to one called Lycanthropy: Facts and Fictions. It was a new and glossy book, so I wasn’t expecting it to be useful, but as I flicked through it, I realized it was exactly what I needed. There was good stuff in there, practical information. It said that lycanthropy was a genetic condition, and there were whole chapters on how it affected people, how it was sometimes a dormant gene, the biology of the transformation process – actual science. It made me feel so much better. I put Lycanthropy: Facts and Fictions on the top of my pile and went to the checkout counter.
As I walked back to the stairs, I noticed a lone, huddled figure in the corner of the study section. Fatima. I hadn’t talked to her in a while, so I went to see how she was doing. I sat down at the table opposite her, and she didn’t even look up, she was so intent on taking notes from the textbook in front of her. She looked even more tired than before, her eyes red and swollen, her posture slumped.
“Fatima?” I said, touching her on the arm to get her attention. “Are you okay?”
“I have to study,” she mumbled, scribbling something on a Post-it and sticking it in the textbook. “Have to get ahead while everyone else is slacking off.”
“You’re doing fine,” I told her. “Take a break.”
She shook her head. “Breaks are for losers. I have to come first. My parents said if I get first, they’ll pay for the Green package next year.”
I withdrew my hand in surprise. “That’s important to you?”
“Of course it is,” she said in a monotone, turning to the next chapter in her book. “Status is power. Power is the most important thing. You can’t do anything in this life without power.”
I was fairly sure that every evil villain ever had made a similar speech, but I couldn’t suspect Fatima, she was so clearly messed up by the spell. I watched her work for a minute, then fished around in my bag for a granola bar. I sat it on the middle of her textbook so that she couldn’t ignore it.
“At least eat something,” I told her.
As I scanned my books at the checkout counter, I thought about the nature of the spell. Fatima had barely seemed aware that she’d been speaking to me and I doubted she even wanted me to know those things she’d said. The truth had just flowed out of her. The spell was getting stronger.
The scanner on the checkout counter beeped and printed out a little receipt with the due date on it. I tucked it in the cover of the lycanthropy book, and then stopped dead, my blood running cold. I hadn’t noticed the names of the coauthors before. Names that I hadn’t seen or spoken in years. Dan O’Connor and Ruby Spencer. My father. Sam’s mother.
I stared at the names for a moment, a thousand different emotions rushing through me, variations of anger and pain and sadness. I took a deep breath. It couldn’t be coincidence.
I tried to be rational. It made no difference now. I needed the information in that book; it didn’t matter who had written it.
I wandered out of the library in a daze. Everything was such a mess, nothing turning out like it should. I’d been reunited with my best friend and he was out of my reach. I got into a fancy school and classes were canceled. There was magic and werewolves and apparently my father had known all about it. It couldn’t be coincidence that I’d gotten into Amaris, been offered a scholarship out of the blue, and it just happened to be the school where Sam went, the school full of werewolves, when our parents had apparently been werewolf experts. It felt as if it should all mean something, as if I should do something about it all. But what did it mean? What could I do?
I was so lost in my thoughts that I almost ran slap-bang into someone in front of the library.
Sam.
I hadn’t seen him again since that first night in the forest glade, not as a person anyway. I still found it hard to accept he was alive, even with him standing right in front of me. He’d gotten so tall.
“Lucy, I’ve been looking for you,” he said, taking me by the elbow and guiding me to a bench seat under a hedge. His hands were the same. Overly large, like puppy paws. Square, clean fingernails with little crescent moons. “Sit with me,” he said. His voice was friendly, but there was a hardness to it that said he definitely wasn’t asking.
I slipped the books into my bag as subtly as possible. Tennyson Wilde had said reminders of Sam’s old life made him unstable, and I didn’t want him seeing his mother’s name and suddenly trying to eat my face off or anything.
Sam had never been mad at me, not in my whole life. He’d been frustrated, maybe, and upset, and disappointed, but never mad. I’d seen him mad at other people, like the time Donovan Price down the street had kicked a puppy. Sam smote that jerk down so hard that Donovan Price still crossed the road every time he saw a dog. I did not want to be smitten by Sam.
I hesitated before sitting down.
“Tennyson said to tell you that his people are looking into
Mr. Corbett.”
“Cool,” I said. “Well, if that’s everything…”
I moved to stand, but he kept hold of my arm.
“I asked you to be careful,” he said. His face was pinched and hard. It made him look like a stranger. “I told you it was dangerous. Why were you in the woods last night?”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “You’re the one who tried to rip my throat out and that’s my fault? Wow, nice victim blaming there. Do they actually feed you jerk pills up in that Golden House, or does it come with the lycanthropy?”
“I could’ve killed you!” he said, fingers digging into my arm. “I’m a monster. When I change, it’s you that I look for. When I lose control, it’s you that I hunt.”
My heart pounded. He couldn’t lie.
“I want you to leave here,” he said. He didn’t meet my eye as he spoke. “Leave here and never think of me again.”
The sun filtered through the trees. Birds sang. It felt wrong. There should be storm clouds gathering over our heads.
“Maybe it’s not about you,” I said, pulling away from him and standing up. I was so, so angry at him. After everything he’d put me through, he thought he could just show up, all being a werewolf and bossing me around? No. “Maybe after thinking you were dead for three years, I’m fine for you to stay that way, and I can be at this school without going near you.”
I spun on my heel, ready to storm off, but suddenly he was right there.
The heat from his body seemed to wrap around me and hold me in place. With each breath, his chest brushed against my arm, sending shivers along my skin. He smelled fresh and sweet, like apples and spring rain.
“Say it without the maybe,” he said, staring at me so intensely that I was sure he could see every hidden corner of my soul. “Say it like a truth.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t.
“I never wanted to leave you,” he said, pulling me closer, just slightly. “I wanted to come back. Every day I wanted to come back. But it’s more important that you’re safe. And you’re not safe now.”
I ripped myself away from him. “I can take care of myself. Just like I have for the past three years. You’ve warned me, so if anything happens, you don’t need to feel guilty.”
He shook his head. “You’re not happy here.”
I gave a sarcastic laugh. “That has nothing to do with anything. I thought you’d know me well enough to realize that much. Even if I hate it here, even if I get eaten alive by werewolves, or cursed by witches, or bullied and starved, none of that matters. Everyone else has deserted my family. My father, you and your family, everyone. I can make us strong by going here, and nobody will ever hurt us again. So I don’t care if you’re a werewolf, or if we get hit by a million spells. I am not leaving here.”
I’d lost the will to storm away. I turned to leave, shaking my head.
“Be careful, Lucy,” he called after me. “Be careful of me.”
Chapter 12
With classes canceled and nothing else to do, I hoarded snack foods and studied up on witches and werewolves. The witch stuff was interesting but not really helpful, mostly just superstitions. The lycanthropy book, on the other hand, was a goldmine. A lot of it talked about the science of it, though the theories were super advanced and basically gibberish to me. I looked up some of the terms but I felt so groggy and awful with the spell that it became too much effort. I knew that once I was feeling better and could maybe make a spreadsheet of all the information, it would be useful. And even if I couldn’t really understand much, those parts were far better than the more conversational sections, which sounded as if my father were speaking directly to me.
People couldn’t become werewolves by being bitten – that was what my dad said. Werewolf bites were a fiction. You needed to have the werewolf gene. Sometimes it was a dormant gene, but that was super rare. There were only a few werewolf families left and they monitored themselves vigilantly. The Wildes were obviously one of those families, and the Volkovs, though the book didn’t name names. I wondered about Sam’s family, if they had all been werewolves and that was why his mother had co-written the book, but surely I’d have noticed something was up in all those years I’d practically lived at their house.
When I felt too sick to read, I went through Hannah’s Netflix queue and watched everything I could find relating to werewolves. I knew I couldn't rely on movies or TV for the facts but it made me feel as if I was doing something useful, without me actually needing to do anything. I jotted down a few notes here and there when things seemed to come up a lot – silver and wolfsbane and super-senses, that kind of thing, to check up on later and see what was facts. TV about werewolves was super addictive but I couldn’t let myself get suckered in. I had research to do, so I had to try to filter out the BS from the facts. All of it seemed like BS but I’d completely lost any frame of reference about what was possible.
Eventually, I felt too sick even for that. The nausea got worse and worse. I didn’t know if it was because I was hiding more secrets, bigger secrets, or if the spell was just gaining power. Either way, the endless churning, rolling in my belly really sucked.
“Are you okay?” Hannah asked, her big eyes staring at me from over her covers.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think I even know what okay means anymore.”
She shifted in her bed. “Nothing seems to help anymore,” she said. “Before, my hot water bottle made it a bit better, and painkillers, but nothing helps now. Do you think we should go see the school doctor?”
“I don’t know if the school doctor can cure this,” I said.
She gave me a sad smile. “No, but I bet they have morphine.”
I crawled off the sofa and over to my bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I started to nod off. Sleep was way better than being awake with the sick feeling.
Hannah moved to sit up, then gave up and slumped back down. “You knew him before, didn’t you?” she asked, out of nowhere. “The boy who was with the Wildes. I saw Tennyson talking to him.”
“We grew up together. He lived next door.” I didn’t want to talk about Sam, not when I couldn’t lie.
“What happened? How did he end up with the Wildes?”
Moonlight streamed into the darkened room, making Hannah’s eyes shine softly.
I really did not want to talk about it. Where did I even start? What would I say? I didn’t want any surprises coming out of my mouth. The truth swirled and swirled around in my stomach, threatening to rise.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, trying to climb back out of bed.
As soon as I got to my feet, a wave of pain rippled through me with such force that I fell to the floor. It felt like toothache, the worst toothache ever, but all through my body, settling into my bones.
“Lucy?” Hannah gasped.
I looked up from the floor to see her at the edge of her bed, her face tight with pain.
I curled up into a little ball, rocking back and forth. “Yeah?”
“I don’t feel so good.”
The pain made it hard to think of anything else. I grabbed hold of my bed and pulled myself to my feet. I had to end this. I looked over to see that she couldn’t even sit up. Her face was pale and her hands shook.
“You stay here and rest,” I told her. “I’m going to fix this.”
She made a feeble noise of protest, but then settled back on the bed. By the time I got to the door, she was fast asleep.
Every step I took was a struggle. All through the house, I could hear people’s groans of pain, their cries and whimpers. It had to end.
The campus teachers lived in one of the buildings near the main school, I remembered from studying the school map. I knew I could make it that far. I had to. I had to find Mr. Corbett and make him stop this. I shuffled along as fast as I could in my yellow daisy pajamas and fluffy slippers, stopping every few paces to catch my breath and try to force out the pain through strength of will. There was a reason
why nobody ever said, “as fun as extreme pain” and that reason was that it sucked balls.
The way through the gardens seemed impossibly long. Why did a school even need so many gardens, I thought, trying to distract myself from the pain radiating all through my body. If you wanted to look at a flower, there were plenty of pictures online. Surely, if they wanted such big grounds, the school was rich enough to install a monorail or one of those moving floors they have at the airport.
Pain wasn’t something you could ever get used to, I realized. It wore you down, weakened your defenses. No matter how you tried to distract yourself, it pushed itself back into your awareness. I wondered if I would even make it. I wondered if it mattered either way. Maybe I should just curl up in the flower bushes and sleep until I died. I wouldn’t be in pain that way, nothing at all would hurt me, not ever again.
If it were only me, I’d have done exactly that, but I’d told Hannah I’d fix this. I thought of the way her bright eyes had grown dull, of how Fatima was in some sort of study coma, and Milo hadn’t emerged from his room in forever. I couldn’t leave these rich kids to their own devices, they had zero coping skills. And I was the only one who knew what was really going on. Well, me and the Golden, but they hadn’t exactly been helpful in any way. Plus, my brothers had enough trauma to be going on with, and funerals didn’t come cheap, so I probably shouldn’t curl up and die just yet. Instead, I labored on, through the endless gardens.
The lights were blazing at the teachers’ house as I finally approached. I struggled toward it as quickly as I could. The end was so close, I told myself. I had no idea what to expect when I got there. Hopefully I could just politely ask Mr. Corbett to end it, though considering what a massive dickbag he was, I doubted it would be that easy.