The Body Swap (Werewolf High Book 3)

by Anita Oh

  "Lucy," my father said. "There's time for all that later. We have a job to do."

  I shook my head at him and turned away. Nothing I said to him would make any difference. It was too late for that now. I walked away, leaving him there with Tennyson. Tennyson could answer any questions he had.

  But after a moment, I realized that Tennyson was leaving with me. I supposed it kind of made sense; he shared my feelings, my memories, so he probably felt the same incontrollable rage when looking at my father, and he didn't want to be stuck alone with him in a bamboo forest.

  Sam was waiting for us when we got to the house. Even without being able to sense his feelings, I could tell from his face the exact moment he realized his plan hadn't worked. I didn't want to speak to him either, but he caught me by the wrist.

  "Don't," I told him, but he didn't let go.

  "You have to let him help," Sam said. "He's here. What's the harm?"

  I pulled my arm away from him. "All this time? You knew where he was all this time?"

  "It's complicated, Lucy. He was trying to protect you."

  "Get away from me," I spat as I turned away.

  I saw him exchange a look with Tennyson. Tennyson shook his head, and Sam backed off.

  Tennyson followed me up to his room and sat in silence as I paced around, getting madder and madder the more I thought about what had happened. Nothing, nothing my father said or did could justify how he'd abandoned us, leaving me to take care of the whole family after my mother got sick. And nothing could excuse Sam for knowing where he was and not telling me.

  Over and over, every single person I trusted had betrayed me. Again, I felt as if my brain was going to explode. After a while, I tired myself out and flopped down on the bed.

  "Do you want me to talk to him?" Tennyson asked. "I know you're angry, but it seems that he's the only one who can help us. I can speak with him so you don't have to."

  I could see the logic in what he'd said, but I didn't want my father's help at all.

  "You know it's the only way," he said. "I don't know who he is or what his abilities are, but he can help us out of this."

  There was no way I was going to agree to that, but he could feel all my feelings, so he took my silence as agreement and left me there in the room alone. I felt stupid and weak, but I was grateful that Tennyson was there to deal with things for me.

  Shortly after he left, Althea crept into the room.

  "You don't need to talk about it, if you don't want to," she said, sitting in the comfy chair by the window. "But if you do, I'll listen."

  I wasn't going to, but then the whole story just flooded out of me.

  "He just wasn't there one day," I said, staring at the wall so I could pretend I was talking to myself. "I woke up and started getting ready for school, and he wasn't there. I thought maybe he'd come back, that maybe when I got home from school, he'd be there. Even after weeks, after months, I kept hoping." I'd been such a stupid kid. "My mother was sick. She'd been sick a few months, and we ran out of money so we couldn't afford the hospital bills. Dad had been taking care of her, feeding her and nursing her. She rarely got out of bed. She was too weak, and her mind wasn't right. She wasn't herself. I always just supposed he got sick of it."

  That first winter had been so cold, I could almost feel it on my skin, smell the damp in the air. "My brothers weren't very old," I went on. "Hamish and Fletcher didn't really understand what was happening, but Liam did, and he tried to help as much as he could. We had no money coming in to buy food, so I got some work around the neighborhood. It wasn't much, not enough. That was when I started doing the computer repairs, and I started making enough to survive. Sam's parents helped us…"

  I hadn't thought about it for years. I'd tried not to think of Sam's family, how they'd accepted my father’s leaving without a word. "She knew. She must've known," I whispered. "Sam's mother. She looked after us, cooked for us, but of course she knew."

  I was so stupid. They'd all known. Sam and his family, my father. Tennyson's mother, too, probably. That was why she hadn't liked my name, because she'd heard it before. I was so stupid. I didn't know anything about my own family. I probably didn't even know anything about myself.

  "You did an amazing job," Althea told me. "You got through that, and you'll get through this, too."

  I appreciated that she didn't tell me I should forgive my father or let him help. She just smiled at me and didn't say anything else.

  Before long, I fell asleep. It was the first proper sleep I'd had in weeks.

  Chapter 17

  When I woke up, I felt more like myself than I had since I'd actually been myself. I wasn't sure if it was because of whatever my father had done, or just from talking to Althea, but my head was clear and I felt an unemotional detachment from the whole situation. I knew that Tennyson had been right: we needed my father's help, and now that I was refreshed, I wanted some answers as well.

  When I got downstairs, I found my father in the living area with the others. He was sitting at the head of the table, just as the duchess had been only days before. He was chatting quietly with Sam, and although I'd resolved to be calm and rational about it, I felt that unquenchable anger flare back up again.

  I stood in the doorway until they looked up and noticed me. Sam flinched at the expression on my face, which gave me a mean little satisfaction.

  "Where were you?" I asked my father, my tone cold. I hadn't intended to ask him. I'd wanted to be cold toward him, professional, but it was too much for me to hold in. "What was so important that you had to abandon us?"

  "I know it's hard to understand, Lulu —"

  I raised a hand to stop him. "Don't speak to me as if I were a child. I haven't been a child since the night you walked out." I narrowed my eyes at him. "What did you expect would happen? That I'd welcome you with open arms? As far as I'm concerned, you are not my father. You are the merely the means to get us out of a difficult situation. Once that's done, I want nothing further to do with you, but I think right now I deserve some sort of explanation."

  I folded my arms across my chest and waited for his response.

  He nodded. "How about we talk about it afterwards, once you're wearing your own face?"

  I could tell he didn't want to have to explain himself in front of everyone, but I didn't care. "What, so you can fix this and then just vanish again? No, I think I want some answers now."

  "Give him a break, Lucy. He's trying to help," said Sam.

  I raised my eyebrows. "Don't speak to me. I don't want you to speak to me ever again."

  Saying the words felt like a dagger of ice in my heart, but I couldn't just forgive him, not when he had betrayed me as well.

  "Sam said that you've read my book?" my father asked. "Then you must have an idea of the type of work I was doing before I left home. It became apparent to me that both our family and the Spencers were in danger. Sam's mother elected to stay behind and protect you, while I was recruited…"

  "By who?"

  "It's an independent peace-keeping agency," he said. "We work mainly against the Others…" He looked around the table. "Do you know…"

  Everyone nodded. I didn't know much, but I wanted more answers, so I motioned for him to go on.

  "Why were we in danger?" I asked. "I can understand Sam's family. They have the gene, but we don't."

  My father grimaced. "Your mother was bitten by a lycanthrope. That was the cause of her illness. That, among other things, made us a target."

  "But the bite is a myth," said Althea.

  "Yes, but it's more complicated than that, unfortunately. She was bitten, and she didn't possess the lycanthrope gene. Lycanthropy isn't transferrable by bite. However, it still functions in much the same way as an infection. It didn't transform her, but it did make her gravely ill. And it was like a beacon to those who were looking for our kind."

  I held my breath. What was he trying to say? "What do you mean, our kind?" I asked him. "What am I?"

  Sam
had talked about it before, had hinted that he thought I wasn't 100% human, and Tennyson had said as much all along, but I'd thought they were just talking rubbish.

  "Above all things, you are my daughter," my father said.

  He was just stretching now, I knew. It was like those times when I'd asked him for ice cream and he didn't want to say no and look like the bad guy, but still he had no intention of cracking open the Ben & Jerry's. I rolled my eyes at him. It hadn't been cute then, and it definitely wasn't cute now.

  "And what does that mean, exactly? To be your daughter?" I suspected what he was getting at, but I wanted to hear him say it. "I have the gene too. Like Sam. I have the lycanthropy gene."

  My father shook his head. "No. Well, yes and no."

  I motioned for him to keep talking.

  "It could be the lycanthropy gene, if it's activated to be such. We call it the zero chromosome, the empty gene." He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Can't we talk about this later?"

  I narrowed my eyes at him in answer.

  "The empty gene lies dormant in almost everyone who possesses it, for their whole lives. They're completely human and don't even realize there's anything different about them. They'd need to get their entire genome sequenced to even know there was an anomaly. But if something happens to trigger that gene, then it takes on the characteristics of whatever triggered it. Like Sam — if he came into contact with werewolf DNA, he then would become a werewolf. Or like myself, triggered by a powerful warlock."

  He stood up to signal that the conversation was over, and I was reminded of Tennyson's mother doing the same thing. They seemed so different on the surface: my dad with his dirty jeans and old t-shirt compared to the immaculate duchess, but when you came down to it, they weren't much different. They were both jerks.

  "But none of that explains why you thought it was fine to leave a twelve-year-old girl to look after three small children and a sick woman."

  My father shook his head. "You're willfully misunderstanding me, and that's enough for now. We need to find Hannah Morgan and deal with her."

  "We've done a preliminary search," Nikolai said, speaking up now that the uncomfortable part of the conversation was over. "But she's not in any of the usual places. Nobody has left the island, so we know she's here somewhere."

  "Lucy, you know her best. What do you think?" said Sam.

  They all turned toward me. I wasn't really in the mood to be helpful, but I didn't have an alternative.

  I sighed. "She's probably frightened, so she'll go somewhere comforting."

  I couldn't imagine her doing anything but hiding out in our room, eating chocolate and watching Harry Potter, but I assumed they'd checked the room thoroughly. Unless…

  I turned to Tennyson. "You remember when I was tiny and stuck in Astor's room? You couldn't see me at all through the silver barrier, could you?"

  Tennyson shook his head.

  "Is there anything like that for humans? To make someone undetectable?" I asked my father.

  He thought about it for a moment and then slowly nodded. "If they're powerful enough, there are certain protections."

  I indicated myself and the absolute Tennyson Wilde-ness of me. "I think she's powerful enough. I'll go find her."

  "I'll come with you," my father and Sam said at the same time.

  "No," I told them. "Not either of you."

  "I'll go," said Althea. "And Tennyson. It won't look so strange if he's there."

  I couldn't imagine that Hannah would actually be in our room, even with magic to make her seem like she wasn't. I entered the room on high alert and knew immediately that she was there, even if I couldn't see her. I looked around carefully, feeling nostalgic for the days when I could hang out in my own room. Hannah and I had shared some good times there, back before I knew she was evil.

  If it hadn't been my own room, I'd never have noticed anything out of place, but everything seemed just slightly off-kilter.

  "There," I said, pointing at a line on the floor that was only visible if you really stared at it.

  "There's silver as well," said Althea. "I can feel it."

  "I can pass silver," said Tennyson. "But I can't see what you're pointing at."

  I hadn't tried to do it on purpose before. It was such an awful sensation, and I didn't even know it would work now that my father was holding the spell back, but I needed Tennyson to know what I knew. I pushed with my mind, pushed toward that line that blurred between us, until I felt the disconcerting sensation of becoming another person. I could only keep it up for a moment, and then I slid back into myself again.

  Tennyson looked at me, horror-struck. "Don't do that without warning me."

  I rolled my eyes. "Come on. She knows we're here."

  He pushed forward, over the silver barrier. The entire world seemed to waver around him as he walked forward, and then suddenly we could see Hannah, sitting there, looking surprised. I needed to really concentrate to see her. If I let my attention lapse for even a moment, she vanished again. Wow, that kind of thing could be really useful for non-nefarious purposes, I thought. Why did she have to use her powers for evil and not for sneaking extra food portions?

  "Leave me alone," she said, but Tennyson pulled her to her feet and dragged her over to us so that we could see her properly.

  I snorted. "You're kidding, right? You keep messing with us, and you want us to leave you alone?"

  "I can't reverse it now, anyway," she said. "That scary guy took my power." She pouted cutely, but that wouldn't work on me anymore.

  "Put a sock in it and come with us," I told her, then took her by the other arm and helped Tennyson pull her out the door.

  Now that her power had been taken from her, she wasn't half as scary. She was just a normal girl. She cried out for help as we dragged her down the hall, but people just turned away and shut their doors. Which, to be honest, was pretty horrific. I mean, we might've been taking her for any reason. We might have terrible plans for her. We could've been taking her to sell her into sex slavery, and not one person in that whole house stood up to us. I would definitely be writing a letter to the headmaster about that, once I'd been restored to my rightful body. Or maybe before, considering how people actually listened to Tennyson Wilde.

  Once we'd left the house, the fight went out of her, and she let us lead her to the Golden House. I'm not sure what she thought we were going to do to her there, but it wasn't until we got to the front door and my father appeared that she began to struggle again.

  "Not him," she said, trying to pull out of our grip. "Not the Enforcer. He'll kill me. I know what they're like."

  "He won't kill you," I told her.

  But from the look on his face, I could see why Hannah was afraid.

  "He won't kill you," I said again. "I promise."

  I hoped it was a promise that I could keep.

  Chapter 18

  My father had been busy while we were away. The living room was gone, and in its place was what looked like a medieval torture dungeon. There were pentagrams and big pointy iron things and other stuff that I didn't even want to imagine the purpose of.

  He sat Hannah down in a massive chair in the middle of the room and strapped her in by the arms. Hannah was pale, and I thought maybe she'd pass out.

  "What are you going to do to her?" I asked my father.

  "I'm going to gather information and persuade her to end the spell," he said.

  I wasn't sure I'd like his persuasion tactics.

  "It would be better for you to leave," he said.

  "Sorry. Leaving's what you're good at, not me," I said, then sat down in the corner. No matter what Hannah had done to me, I wasn't going to leave her alone in a torture chamber.

  He started by questioning her. It seemed harmless enough, but she flinched at the sound of his voice. The five of us sat silently, watching, and I could feel that the others were nervous as well. All of us had something at stake here. Even though I was still angry with Sam, I wa
s pleased to have them all here. I hadn't thought about it before, but this had really begun to feel like a pack to me. They'd talked about it before, but I hadn't understood, hadn't realized what a strong bond it was, what a feeling of rightness there was just from the five of us being together. If my father's tactics worked, it would be the thing that I missed the most, this belonging with the others.

  After a while, when Hannah had refused to answer his questions, my father upped his game. He wound something around her wrists. At first I couldn't see what, but then I realized it was thin iron chains. Hannah gritted her teeth. I wasn't sure if the chains were painful for her, but she definitely didn't like them.

  "Can I talk to you for a second?" I said to my father, nodding toward the door.

  "I'm working, Lucy." He didn't take his eyes off Hannah for even a second.

  "Well, take a break," I told him.

  He followed me out of the room, obviously unhappy about it.

  "I'm not comfortable with this," I told him.

  "Which is why I suggested you not be here. Perhaps you and your friends should occupy yourselves with something else and leave me to do my job."

  I sighed. "Is this what you do for a job? Torture young girls? This is the noble calling that you abandoned your family for?"

  "I don't expect you to understand, but I do expect you to let me do what I'm here to do. I'm trying to help you, Lucy."

  "I didn't ask for your help, and I don't want it." As far as I could tell, he'd only been questioning her. He hadn't even asked her to reverse the spell yet. "You're only here for your own selfish reasons. If you cared at all about me, you'd have acted like a father at some point in the past five years."

  He shook his head and turned to go back in.

  "You're not going to get her this way," I told him as he walked away. "I know her. This isn't going to work."

  I followed him back into the room. Although he was my father, I didn't know him. That man I remembered was a lie. He had never really been that person, and I had no idea what he was capable of. He was a liar, a torturer. No way was I going to leave Hannah alone with him.