The Truth Spell (Werewolf High Book 1)

by Anita Oh

  The door sat wide open, and a terrible screaming came from inside. I hurried up the steps and into the entrance hall.

  Mr. Corbett lay in the middle of the entrance hall, screaming and clawing at his skin. Mr. Porter knelt beside him, unbuttoning Mr. Porter’s collar and trying to hold his hands still. He looked up at me with frightened eyes.

  “I think he’s having a heart attack,” he yelled over the screaming. “I think he’s dying!”

  I stood in the doorway, struck motionless with shock. Tennyson Wilde had said that the spell had no effect on the caster but it had obviously done a number on Mr. Corbett – it looked as if the truth was trying to climb out his throat and choke him. It wasn’t him. I’d been so sure it was him, sure it was almost over. I’d been wrong.

  “Call the doctor!” said Mr. Porter, his hipster beard quivering.

  “The doctor’s a fly-in,” I told him dumbly. “You need to make an appointment.”

  Mr. Porter held Mr. Corbett’s hands to his chest so that he couldn’t scratch at himself, but his face was starting to turn blue as he struggled to breathe. I didn’t like Mr. Corbett at all, but it was awful to see anyone writhing around in so much pain, the big vein pulsing on his forehead, his eyes bloodshot and bulging.

  “There’s a rapid response team just off-site,” said Mr. Porter, speaking quickly as he grew more and more frantic. “But you need to notify them through the school app and I left my phone in my office. You need to contact them. Now. He’s dying!”

  I shook myself into action. I didn’t have my tablet with me – it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you thought to bring to a potential showdown with an evil warlock, though if they’d made that rapid response information more readily available I might have seen the use for it. Seriously, that wasn’t the kind of information you wanted to waste time looking up in an emergency.

  Mr. Porter’s office was much closer than the Red House, so it would be faster to get his phone than go back for my tablet, and there was more chance of me finding someone to help on the way. I turned back to the night, steeling my body for the burst of activity, even though I felt well past my limit.

  I stopped abruptly as I left the house. At the bottom of the stairs, someone was waiting for me.

  Tennyson Wilde.

  And he looked terrified.

  Chapter 13

  “I need your help,” Tennyson Wilde said, looking up at me from the bottom of the steps, his eyes as cold as ever, even though he was asking for a favor.

  “Well, Mr. Corbett’s on the floor dying, so I’m going to make him the priority.” I hurried down the steps and pushed past him.

  He caught me by the arm. “It’s not me. It’s Sam.”

  I didn't even pause to think.

  “Where is he?” I asked, already moving to follow as Tennyson Wilde turned and walked away.

  “At the house.” His words sounded forced, pained, and I noticed he was unusually pale and wan. Normally he moved like flowing water, but now he walked in stiff, stilted steps.

  “Why come to me?” I fell into stride with him. “You wanted me to stay away. Sam wanted me to stay away. What’s changed?”

  He glanced down at me, face filled with the typical disdain. “You don’t feel it? The pain?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course I do, thanks for bringing it up. Wait, you feel it?” I had no idea how werewolf metabolisms worked, but popular culture led me to believe they’d be invulnerable – no pain, instant healing, all that. There’d been several chapters on it in the book but it was all so technical I’d probably need fourteen different university degrees before I could understand it.

  “We all have secrets, so we all have the pain,” he said. “But what I feel is mostly phantom pain, from Sam.”

  I stared at him so hard I almost walked into a hedge. “You feel his pain?”

  “We all do, the whole pack. We always share pain.”

  “Sucks for you,” I said.

  “It is a necessity. A wolf’s instinct is to hide injury, vulnerability,” he said. “If we can all feel it, we cannot hide from each other, and we can work together to heal.”

  I wondered what else they shared. Underpants? Soda cans, even when they had that gross drooly bit around the lip? It all seemed kind of invasive and horrible to me, but nobody was asking me to live like that, I guessed. No way would I ever drink from Tennyson Wilde’s drool can.

  We rushed through the gardens, through the night, in a way that made me feel distinctly that I was leaving behind one life and entering another, and I wasn’t sure that was something I wanted, but I couldn’t just let Sam suffer.

  “I don’t really get how you expect me to help,” I said, hurrying to keep up with Tennyson Wilde’s long stride. “I’m not exactly an expert in werewolves.”

  He sighed. “Lycanthropes.”

  “Plus, do you remember that time when he chased me through the woods and tried to eat me? That didn’t help anyone.” Seriously, rich people logic.

  “Your safety is not my priority. I suspect that most of his volatile behavior stems from his fear of hurting you. He panics and acts irrationally. But essentially, he wants to be close to you. Your presence is familiar and welcome to him. I believe that in his weakened state, you will be able to soothe him and alleviate some of his pain.”

  “You believe,” I said.

  “We’ve taken measures to ensure he doesn’t hurt you. He is sedated and restrained. But if it comes to a choice between Sam’s wellbeing and yours, you need to know that we will choose Sam.”

  I shrugged, unsurprised.

  We came to the gates, and Tennyson Wilde turned to me. “He should find your presence a comfort, but you need to remain calm and be sure not to distress him. Due to your shared history, he views you as something similar to a pack member, so he will sense your feelings and react accordingly. His form may alarm you, but try to prepare yourself.”

  I nodded, shifting my weight from foot to foot as Tennyson Wilde pressed his finger to the sensor and the gate swung open. The pain still radiated through my body, and feeling anxious about Sam wasn’t helping. None of the reading I’d done had prepared me for this kind of thing, for facing down a real life werewolf. Well, I supposed Tennyson Wilde was a werewolf, but he wasn’t all growly and furry and scary – more like a werejerk than a werewolf, just the same as always. With Sam, I had no idea what to expect.

  We hurried down the path to the front door, where we had to wait for a retina scan to clear us both before we could enter. I hadn’t been inside the Golden House before, but I barely took in my surroundings as we hurried down a hallway. Everything was simple, elegant, a blur of white and gold as we rushed past it. We came to a heavy steel door at the end of the hall.

  “He’s in the room at the top of the tower,” Tennyson Wilde said, pulling the door open.

  “You’re not coming in?”

  He shook his head. “Too many scents will confuse him. We will be right in there, watching on the screens.” He pointed to a room off the hall. “If there is any danger, we’ll intervene.”

  “If it’s in your best interests,” I added.

  He shrugged and pushed the heavy door closed behind me. The clang of it echoed in the stone tower. I sighed as I looked up at the winding staircase, so tall it vanished into shadow. There was no elevator. I grabbed hold of the banister and hauled myself up. Sam needed me, I told myself with each step. I had to help him.

  The staircase seemed to go on forever. If Sam was some angry beast who wanted to eat me alive, I doubted that any help would get up those stairs in time to do anything. Maybe that had been their evil plan all along. Jerks.

  Finally, I got to the top. There was a small landing and another steel door like the one at the bottom, locked with several large bolts. I forced the bolts open and warily opened the door.

  The room was dimly lit and it took me a moment to adjust my eyes. Everything seemed out of place, disarranged, and when I figured out why, I smiled sadly. Sam h
ad always loved small, safe spaces – blanket forts, pillow forts, even the space under the bed. He’d taken everything in the room and arranged it into a massive fort, with the furniture and bedding as the walls and his mattress as the roof. It was just so Sam of him that I couldn’t be frightened of what I’d find inside. No matter what form, it was still Sam in there.

  “Hey,” I said, hovering by the blanket door. “It’s me, can I come in?”

  He whimpered, sounding more like a sick puppy than a ferocious wolf. I pulled the blanket aside and crept through the door. It was even darker inside, but I could make out a lump of blankets in the corner that seemed Sam-shaped.

  “Remember when we had chicken pox in fourth grade?” I crawled further into the cave. “That was the best. We watched Lord of the Rings like ten times.”

  The pile of blankets shifted. “You cried,” it mumbled.

  “You cried!” I moved in closer. Close enough to touch, but not touching. “You cried like a baby, all ‘don’t leave, Mr. Frodo,’ every single time. Just because your name is Sam, you didn’t have to take it so personally.”

  The blankets shifted again until Sam was pressed close, his warmth radiating through to me.

  “It was sad,” he mumbled.

  I smiled, placing my hand where I thought his head probably was. “It was. You nerd.”

  As I sat there with him, the pain, that all-consuming pain, began to fade, just a little.

  I had him back, I realized. I’d been so busy being mad at him, being hurt, that I hadn’t stopped to really think about it. Sam wasn’t dead. He was alive and he was there with me. He was real. I bit my lip, tears of relief suddenly flooding my eyes. I was so stupid. All that other stuff didn’t really matter; all that mattered was that I had him back, that he still existed in this world.

  “I tried to come back,” he whispered, his voice sounding muffled and slightly distorted. He moved so that his head emerged from the blankets, his eyes glowing in the darkness. “Every day, I tried to come back to you.”

  “Shhh,” I said, smoothing the hair from his forehead.

  His skin was flushed and damp with fever. He seemed so much more affected by the spell than even Hannah had been. I wondered if it was because he was a werewolf, though Tennyson Wilde had been more or less the same as usual. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe Sam had even bigger secrets buried in there, struggling to come out. I had no idea what he’d been through. Tennyson Wilde had said Sam had only been with his family for two years. I wondered what had happened in that missing year. I hadn’t been a friend to Sam, I realized, too worried about my own feelings to consider his.

  Sam shook his head, his eyes falling closed. “I need you to understand,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t have to explain.”

  He fell into a restless sleep, and still I kept patting his hair, stroking his face. I didn’t know what else to do for him. His hair seemed thicker, and he had more facial hair than usual, I noticed. As my eyes adjusted more to the darkness, I saw that his teeth were sharp too – wolf teeth – and when he rolled over to be closer to me, I realized that his hands were clawed. He looked caught partway between man and wolf, and I wondered if that was normal. It seemed to cause him pain, and I wondered if it hurt him to transform, and if he was somehow stuck.

  It made my heart hurt to see him in such distress, and my stomach gurgled with the truth that was trying to force its way out, the truth I’d been trying to ignore.

  I couldn’t run from it any longer. I held Sam close, my lips close to his ear as I whispered my darkest truth to him. My biggest secret.

  My heart was his and it always had been.

  Chapter 14

  I tried to stay awake to watch over Sam. I let myself pretend, just for a moment, that things could be that simple. Sam and I could continue as we’d always been. It could be just like he had never left, as if we’d been together the whole time, growing closer and closer until we were inextricably entwined. We’d been like that before, like those science experiments where different fruits are bound together so tightly they grow into one another – a peach on one half and then like a gooseberry on the other.

  The pain had finally receded just a little, and I was so warm and comfortable that I nodded off. I dreamed about a house filled with doors. Different-colored doors, in a passageway that wound around and around. I stopped at a red door and went through, but it just led to another passageway, to more doors.

  When I woke up, the early morning light had begun to filter into the room and I could see that Sam had taken his blankets and curled up in the corner. I really needed to pee and I figured he wouldn’t notice if I left him just for a little while, so I crawled out of the fort.

  The tower room was mostly bare – there was a large window opposite the door with curtains billowing around it, and some broken, discarded furniture that had obviously not fitted into Sam’s overall vision for his fort and been tossed aside. There was no bathroom in the tower room, so I decided to head back downstairs. I searched out a pair of Sam’s sneakers and kicked off my slippers – they were too hazardous on the stairs – and salvaged a worn old sweatshirt from the rubble as well.

  Going downstairs was easier than I expected, the pain in my body having faded a little as I slept. Althea Wilde was waiting for me at the bottom. I was a little wary of her, since our previous dealings hadn’t exactly been friendly, but she didn’t even seem to remember. She looked as perfect as ever, poised and graceful, despite the strange hour. Her hair was pulled back into a loose braid and she wore a long, floaty dress made from some sort of wafty pale blue material. Now that I knew about werewolves, it kind of made sense to me that she looked as if she was made from moonbeams.

  “I saw you heading down on the monitor,” she said, waving gracefully back toward the room at the bottom of the stairs. “How is he?”

  “Sleeping,” I told her. “Is it normal for him to be stuck halfway like…?” I made claws and teeth at her.

  “No,” she said, and nodded for me to follow her along the hallway. “Sam’s different from us. He hasn’t told you about it?”

  I shook my head. “We haven’t really been chatting lately, you know.”

  She shrugged. “Bathroom’s over there,” she said as we got to the main living area.

  I didn’t ask how she knew I needed it, figuring it was probably one of her werewolf powers. Wow, I was so glad I wasn’t a werewolf.

  I hurried over to the bathroom, and when I came out, Althea was sitting at a table in the corner, with two cups of coffee. My opinion of her immediately went up a notch.

  I took a seat, looking around at the inner sanctum of the Golden House. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d imagined – something debauched, with servant girls dressed as bunnies wandering around, and neon lights, and mountains of cocaine or something. It was nothing like that. It was smallish and fairly simple. I mean, everything was in white and gold, so it looked a little like a wedding hall, but an understated and elegant wedding hall. The floors were the same stone as the building, covered in a white and gold Persian rug. A large, gold chandelier hung low in the center of the room, lighting everything with a warm glow, and a fire crackled in a large hearth opposite where we sat. It was a comforting space, welcoming, which seemed strange when I found the people who lived there so cold.

  “Nikolai is watching Sam, and Tennyson is out looking for the spell caster,” Althea said, pushing one of the coffees toward me. “We can take a short break.”

  “I was so sure it was Mr. Corbett,” I said with a sigh, then my eyes went huge and I nearly spilled my coffee as I realized what I’d done. Or, rather, not done. “Omigod, he’s probably dead!”

  Althea shook her head. “He’s fine. Tennyson alerted the medical staff and they flew Mr.Corbett out last night. The spell apparently started wearing off as soon as he’d crossed the water, but he nearly choked to death on his secret.” She flipped her long dark braid back over her shoulder. “App
arently he let it slip to the helicopter pilot, though. I don’t think he’ll be teaching again.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least.” I sighed. “But doesn’t help us with the spell.”

  “You collated some good data,” she said, picking up her coffee with both hands and sipping it daintily. “We’ll work it out.”

  I thought about what she said about Mr. Corbett. “If we all crossed the water, the spell would lift?”

  She shrugged. “Probably only while we were across the water. I assume the spell is tied to the caster, so once we’re under it, as long as we’re in close proximity to them we’d be affected.”

  She seemed to know what she was talking about and that made sense. I wanted to ask her about Sam, about why he was different, but it didn’t seem fair to get his secrets from someone else. The others were born as wolves; from what I could gather. They had always been able to transform, but I was certain that Sam hadn’t. He’d never had secrets from me when we were kids. I would’ve known. I wondered if that had something to do with it.

  “I think it’s good that you’re here,” Althea said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Good for Sam. Good for the pack.”

  “…okay?” I had no idea why she was telling me that.

  “Tennyson is bad with that kind of thing, so he won’t say it, but thank you.”

  I shrugged and gulped down my coffee to hide my embarrassment. It was too hot to drink quickly and it burned my tongue and throat, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of Althea Wilde, so I tried not to show it. She didn’t even notice, just tapped on her watch. It was a smart watch and it looked thick and clunky on her delicate wrist.

  “Nikolai says everything is fine up there,” she said, glancing over at me. “Would you like to help me research? Our families have vast libraries on these matters, and they have loaned us everything that seemed relevant. Although we have many people working on a way to end the spell, I find that it helps me to stay busy. It has impacted Sam so much more severely than the rest of us, I can’t help but worry that if we don’t find a solution soon, he may…” She broke off and bit her lip, as if worried she’d say too much, but I got the point.