by Anita Oh
I shrugged. “I just want him to be okay,” I told her. “I don’t know anything about witchcraft or any of this stuff, so just point me in the right direction.”
She smiled at me as she got to her feet. “Sam said you were like that.”
“Like what?”
I followed her out to the hallway, expecting her to head down it, but instead she paused just outside the doorway and turned back toward the room.
“Wait, Sam talked to you about me?”
She smiled enigmatically and gave a little shrug. “We have no secrets in the pack.”
She pressed one of the buttons on the panel by the door, that I’d assumed were light switches. I jumped as a heavy metal door dropped with a clang and sealed the doorway. I could hear a faint clicking-whirring noise from within the room, a bit like bicycle gears. I looked at Althea in question but she was staring at the door expectantly. Finally, there was a soft thud and the door slid open.
The room looked almost exactly the same – same gold and white rug, same fireplace, same chandelier. The only difference was everything else. It was a completely different room. Instead of a living area, there were rows and rows of books. The walls were lined with them, there were stacks of shelves, and when I stepped inside for a closer look, it soon became obvious they were all books relating to witches and werewolves and whatever else was out there. It made my excitement at finding the folklore section in the school library seem a little lame.
“I’ll show you what I’ve been working on,” Althea said, breezing past me to go sit at the large table in the middle of the room.
I stared at her. “What just happened?”
She furrowed her brow at me. “What do you mean? We decided to research, didn’t we?”
So, apparently this was all normal. And if I was going to question anything, there were much better things to ask about than secret rooms that changed at the press of a button, so I decided to just roll with it. I went and took the seat beside Althea.
“Your data was useful in helping us eliminate suspects,” she said, showing me a printout of my research, with a bunch of names highlighted and notes scribbled all over it. “Whoever cast this spell knew what they were doing and they had a great deal of power behind them. It had to be someone with Fey blood in their family.”
“Fey like a fairy?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Fey like magic,” she said. “My family has been very careful about monitoring who is admitted to this school, if someone with this sort of power has slipped past us…”
I got it. I got wanting to protect the people most important to you, of doing everything you can to make sure they’re safe. I got how scary it was when you weren’t in control of a situation, no matter what you did. And I got how vulnerable these people were, despite all their privilege and superpowers and everything. What made them strong was also their greatest weakness. That must be terrifying.
“That’s why your brother thought it was me,” I said to her.
She nodded and pulled a book closer. “Yes, we had hoped it was you. It would make it all easier. You were the most unknown quantity. We still can’t really find out how or why you were admitted but that investigation has been put on the back burner for the time being. Our priority is currently Sam. Specifically, ending the spell so that he can continue his recovery.” She opened the book and pointed to a particular passage. There was nothing wafty or dreamlike about her now, she was in her element and all business. “Familiarize yourself with the processes of witchcraft, for a start. We had been operating under the assumption of the culprit being Mr. Corbett as well, and Tennyson is currently verifying all the information you’ve gathered is correct. I’ll go back through the surveys and try to find any inaccuracies or discrepancies. If we can find an anomaly, even the smallest lie, that will be somewhere to start.”
I had been over it and over it myself, but I didn’t say that to her. I completely understood the need to feel useful, and maybe she’d find something that I’d overlooked. We quickly fell into a comfortable silence as we worked. I wasn’t sure if it was because we had a common goal but I was surprised at the lack of awkwardness, it almost felt as if I was just studying with Hannah.
Once I started reading, I became enthralled. Witchcraft was fascinating. It worked similar to lycanthropy, in that you had to be born with the witchy gene. It wasn’t like those internet sites had said and you could just buy a spell and some crystals and do a bit of chanting and presto! You needed to have it in your DNA. And there weren’t any incantations or any of that. It was more about the transfer of energy, the control of it. It was almost like science. Except that it wasn’t science and it wasn’t even governed by any known laws of science. It was magic and it was kind of terrifying.
“This is interesting,” I said, placing my finger on the page to mark the spot as I caught Althea’s attention. “It says that the effects of a spell can be lessened if the rules of the spell are complied with.”
Althea tilted her head to the side as she scrutinized me. “So the feelings caused by the compulsion – the pain and nausea, I assume – they are alleviated if we speak the truth?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Makes sense, I guess.” I’d thought I’d felt better since I slept, either because of the sleep itself or the proximity to Sam, but maybe I’d been wrong. I’d told him my secret, my biggest, worst secret, right before I’d fallen asleep. Maybe that had fixed me.
There was still a low-level churning in my guts, a faint throbbing through my body. I concentrated on that feeling as I spoke. “I’m wearing boys’ underwear.” The feeling didn’t seem to change much, but then, it wasn’t much of a secret. It wasn’t as if I was ashamed of it. Boys’ underwear was cheaper and it had a handy little pocket in it if you ever needed to hide anything in there. Not that I ever had, but it was comforting to know I could if I wanted to.
Althea rolled her eyes. “Nobody cares about your underwear,” she said. “Tell me something scandalous.”
“You’re a werewolf.”
She turned back to her notes. “Lycanthrope. And if you’re not going to take this seriously…”
“You tell me something,” I said. “I don’t even have any secrets.”
She stared at me for a long moment. It was that same stare that her brother always gave me, calculating, weighing me up. Only, unlike her brother, at the end of it she nodded.
“I find people terrifying,” she said, not meeting my eye. “People think I’m a snob but really I just don’t know what to say to them. Whenever I try to make conversation, I just freeze up and it comes out wrong, so most of the time now I don’t even bother.”
“Wow,” I said. I had been expecting something along the lines of “one time I woke up and I’d drooled on the pillow, and it was very shocking to me to discover I am not 100% perfect”, not some deep revelation. I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that. “Thank you for telling me such a personal thing.”
She glanced up and gave me a small smile. “Tennyson is even worse. We weren’t really socialized as children because of the lycanthropy, so I suppose that is why, though Nikolai is fine.” She glanced off into the distance for a moment. “Yes, the pain does seem less.” She nodded. “That’s good, that might be useful. Take a look through these books as well and see if you can find anything else like that.”
She passed me another pile of books and I got to work. I read through chapter after chapter, book after book, not able to get the information inside my head fast enough. My brain whirred with all the information I was taking in. It spun in circles, around and around and around, so dizzying that I lost concentration and had to close my book and sit it aside. The things that it was possible to do in this world, the things that magic could do, they were practically limitless. How were we supposed to stop that kind of power? My thoughts were so noisy that it took me a moment to realize when the alarm sounded, even though it screeched all through the house.
“What is that?” I asked, looki
ng around.
Althea jumped to her feet and rushed to the door. “Sam.”
Chapter 15
I hurried along the hallway behind Althea, confused. Why did Sam need an alarm set on him? What were they so worried about with him? Was he okay? It was impossible to think with that alarm screeching through the air, stirring up the panic inside me.
Althea hit a button at the bottom of the stairs and the alarm thankfully stopped. Everything seemed too silent without it though. Spookily silent. She hit another button and the stairs began to spiral upwards. I rolled my eyes at Tennyson Wilde, the jerk. He could’ve told me about the automatic stairs and saved me the climb earlier, but even that was just a passing thought amid my worry for Sam.
At the top of the stairs, the door had been flung open. Althea went right on in but I approached cautiously. I had no idea what to expect when I got inside that room and the noises I could hear from in there did not help. There was a scuffling, like rats in the walls, and a high-pitched whine.
No scenario that my mind came up with made any sense, no scenario except one. It took every ounce of my concentration not to let those images in, those ones I could always see when I closed my eyes, of Sam’s house that night, of all the blood. I had that same, sick feeling in my stomach, the same clamminess on my skin that I’d had then. It didn’t even make any sense. The Golden House had mega security, it wasn’t as if someone could just sweep in and steal Sam away again, but there was no reasoning with that cold core of fear inside of me. It knew. It knew that my time with Sam was limited, transitory. It knew that at any moment, he’d be taken away again. It knew that whatever I found when I entered that room would be the beginning of the end.
It also knew that I had to go in anyway.
I squared my shoulders and stepped inside.
The room was in ruins. The fort, our sanctuary, was completely destroyed. Pieces of it were everywhere, as if something had exploded inside it. Feathers from the pillows floated in the air, the mattress was ripped to shreds, one of the bed legs was lodged in the wall. It was a scene of total destruction.
My heart pounded as I looked around for Sam, sure that he would be gone. Vanished. Maybe this time forever.
I hadn’t realized I’d been in the library with Althea for so long, I’d been so absorbed in my reading, but the midafternoon sun streamed through the window, warming the room and giving it a false brightness. There was nothing bright about what was happening here, nothing cheerful or warm.
Sam was hunched in the shadows under the window ledge, in the darkest part of the room. He was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth, and the awful whining noise was coming from him. As Mr. Corbett had done, he was scratching at himself, clawing at his face and chest. More than the pain of the spell, more than anything that had happened since I came to this school, the sight of Sam in such misery tore at my heart.
Nikolai and Althea stood facing him, their hands held out, trying to calm him. I remembered that night I’d seen them in the forest, the night I’d discovered Sam was a werewolf, that now seemed so long ago. It had been a similar scene that I’d stumbled on, with everyone trying to calm Sam down. I wondered how much of this was the spell and how much was whatever else was going on with Sam, the reason he was different, the thing nobody would talk to me about. Whatever it was, it couldn’t go on this way.
Nikolai edged closer, reaching out to grab Sam by the wrists and stop him from hurting himself. Sam lurched to his feet, letting out an awful sound that was like nothing I’d ever heard, like something dying of fright. He lunged for Nikolai, and as he stepped into the light, I gasped in shock.
He looked like a monster.
He was hunched over in partial transformation, his spine bent and limbs misshapen. His eyes glowed red. His face was covered in fur and elongated partway into a wolf’s muzzle, but his teeth were cracked and broken with the aborted change, and his mouth frothed with blood and saliva. His eyes were filled with pain, and as he continued to claw at himself, he raised bloody scratches on his skin that began to heal as soon as they formed, only for him to rip them open once again.
He wasn’t human, but he wasn’t a wolf either. He was nothing that existed in nature, I didn’t know what he was. But he was Sam, and that was the only thing that mattered.
I moved toward him, wanting to help him, to take away his pain, but Althea put out an arm to stop me.
“Stay back,” she said, not taking her eyes off him, even as she held me back. “He’s past that now. You can’t help.”
She was wrong. I knew she was wrong. He was Sam, my best friend. We were closer than anyone and I had to help him. That was why Tennyson Wilde had brought me here and it was what I intended to do. There was no way I was going to lose him again. I couldn’t. I’d do everything possible to stop that happening because I knew I couldn’t survive it again.
“Sam?” I said, trying to push past Althea, though she was much stronger than she looked, much stronger than me.
He snarled and swiped his claws at Nikolai, catching him across the cheek.
“Sam, it’s okay,” I said softly, remembering what Tennyson Wilde had said about Sam going into a panic, about him not wanting to hurt anyone. If I could just convince him that he wouldn’t, maybe he’d calm down. I just had to remind him of who he was. He was obviously stuck halfway between human and wolf, I just had to tip him back to the human side. How hard could it be? “Come on, Sam, we’re all your friends here. We can get through this.” The words were true, but I knew that Sam was too far gone to care. It was my tone of voice that was important.
I tried to edge toward him, but he growled, low and dangerous.
“Get the tranq gun,” Nikolai said to Althea. “Don’t worry about the girl, we can deal with her later.”
“It’s okay, Sam,” I said, ignoring Nikolai and holding out my hand toward Sam. I was going to make it okay, I was going to show Sam that he wasn’t dangerous, that he’d never hurt me. We could get through this together and everything could go back to the way it had been. Things would be good again. Nothing would tear us apart ever again, we’d always be together. I wouldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t.
I stepped toward him. “Just let me help you.”
I kept my eyes fixed on him. Althea and Nikolai were doing something behind me but I had no idea what. I had no interest in it. I moved closer and closer to Sam, as slowly as I could, until finally I got almost close enough to touch. He cowered down, glancing around nervously as if looking for an escape. Still, he clawed at himself, gouging at his flesh as if he could rip away the pain.
“If you let me close, I’ll keep you safe,” I told him quietly, as I reached out for him. “I’ll never let anyone take you from me again.”
I don’t know if it was my movement, my voice, or what I said, but he snarled and lunged for me, swiping out and raking his claws down my arm. He recoiled immediately. Nikolai gave a shout and Althea tried to grab him. I made a split-second decision – I could either step back, shy away from the monster and let the others deal with him, or I could hold on. Hold on to the boy I loved and not let him go.
Really, it was no decision at all.
I threw myself forward, at Sam. He snarled and tried to push me away but I wrapped my arms around him and held tight. I didn’t care what happened, if he hurt me, if he ran me through with his claws, as long as I was close to him I could survive anything. Being apart from him had almost killed me the last time, almost drove me mad. Being together is what would fix this. I was sure of it.
His body was warm. Too warm. He was burning up, as if he was fighting off an infection. He didn’t smell like himself either, but instead slightly acrid, sour. He writhed around, howling mournfully as he tried to shake me off. I buried my face in his neck and clung to him.
I couldn’t speak to him in that position, but Tennyson Wilde had said Sam thought of me as pack, that he could sense my emotions, so I put everything I had into conveying them to him.
You’re
everything good in this world. I can’t lose you. I love you. Don’t leave me again.
I screwed my eyes shut tight as I pushed the feelings out of me and onto him. I had no idea how that sort of thing worked, but I envisioned it as kind of like an emotional headbutt.
He let out a mighty roar as he pushed me away with all his strength and threw himself backward. Back through the window. The curtains billowed around us and he seemed suspended in midair for a moment. Just for a moment. Our eyes met and they were Sam’s eyes, green and gold.
Then he fell.
He was gone. Sam was gone. He was so strong that his push had sent me halfway across the room, but I jumped to my feet and rushed to the window. By the time I got there, he was nowhere to be seen.
I moved to follow him without thinking, to just jump out after him and follow wherever he’d gone, but Nikolai grabbed me by the arm.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked me. “You’re not much help but you’ll be even less so if you’re splattered all over the ground. You need to start thinking before you act. What was that just now? What did you hope to achieve?”
I wrenched my arm away from him. I barely even heard what he was saying. “I need to find him,” I said, backing away from Nikolai. It was happening again. Sam was vanishing right before my eyes. I looked out the window and he disappeared, just like before. “He’s alone. He’s in pain. I can’t just leave him like that. I need to find him.”
“You need to leave him alone,” said a voice from behind us.
I spun around to see Tennyson Wilde standing in the doorway, surveying the wrecked room.
“I brought you here to watch over him. I brought you here to help.” He shook his head as he walked toward me. “You failed.”