The Tiny Curse (Werewolf High Book 2) (3 page)

Having Hannah as my friend was the only thing that kept me sane over the next few days. Although I tried to keep my distance from her, she wouldn’t have a bar of it, sticking by my side in the halls and at meals and in class, no matter what people threw at me. Literally threw.

I was heading back from lunch, taking my time getting to class as I wandered down the path, watching that pasty kid Llewellyn from history class as he played with his beagle down on the lawn. It was kind of hypnotic, the way the dog would chase the ball, bring back the ball, chase the ball, bring back the ball. It would be so awesome to be a dog. Life would be simple and people would give you treats just for looking cute. Hannah was stressing over the results from our biology quiz because she hadn't done as well as she'd liked, when we were ambushed.

"Hannah, run!" I told her, as a bunch of people jumped out of the bushes, armed with water balloons.

They were all wearing hoodies, so their faces were covered but it didn't take a crack detective to figure out who they were. The first one launched their balloon at me and it exploded against my shoulder as I turned away from it. Ew, that was not water in that balloon, it smelled like some sort of swamp muck. Hannah managed to get herself off the path, out of harms way, as the others opened fire. I ran. We were close to the tennis courts, so I headed for the locker rooms there, hoping to barricade myself in. I didn't need to worry, as soon as they ran out of projectiles, they lost interest and didn't bother to follow me.

They didn't need to. I was totally covered in mucky muck. Hannah wrinkled her nose at the smell and bolted the locker room doors as I changed into my stinky gym clothes that I’d luckily had in my bag. Man, that sludge was not going to wash out of my uniform. I ran some hot water in the sink and pumped a bunch of soap in to make it nice and sudsy. If I let that stuff set, I'd have no chance.

“Nobody would blame you if you took a few days off,” Hannah said, sitting on the bench behind me while I scrubbed at my ruined blazer. “It might be better if people didn’t see you for a while, it might blow over.”

“And in the mean time, I get behind in classes and they have a few days to cook up even worse torture methods.” I shook my head. “No. I don’t care how bad it gets, I am not giving in.”

In the mirror, I could see Hannah smile. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “How do you get out of bed every day, knowing this is what’s ahead of you? I think you’re really brave.”

I shrugged and stared down at the soap suds in the sink. It wasn’t a matter of being brave. What choice did I have? Even if I’d maybe secretly been looking up the price for flights home late at night when all I wanted was to see my family and sleep in my own bed and have a normal life, I had to get to the airport from the school and the island where we were was at an undisclosed location. I was basically stuck there until the end of term. I could hide in my room, but what good would that do? I’d have to come out sometime and it would be even worse when I did. They’d know they’d beaten me and that they could do whatever they liked and I had no defense. It was awful and no fun, but it was the only thing I could do.

My blazer was ruined though. I’d send it out to a cleaning service but they’d have to be some sort of magical miracle cleaning service to get that smell out. The rest was probably salvageable but it needed a proper wash. I’d have to take at least the rest of the day off, school rules were very clear about what could and could not be worn to class, and stinky gym clothes were a no go.

“You should go to class,” I told Hannah. “Don’t be late on my account.  I’ll fix this up and head back.  See you tonight?”

She looked concerned but after some prodding left as the late bell rang. It was kind of nice to be alone for a while. Even though Hannah meant well and had been so great, I could drop my brave face and just wallow in my own misery. Just for five minutes.

I sat down on the bench, my crumpled, sodden blazer in my hands. The sludgy stuff was in my hair as well; I could feel it sticking to my neck. The smell seemed to have sunk into my skin.

It was fine, I told myself. I only had English after lunch and I was well ahead in that anyway. I’d spend the afternoon getting ahead in my other subjects and then I’d take first in everything and win all the academic prizes at the end of the year and they could all suck it. The whole reason I’d accepted the spot at Amaris was so that I could get a jumpstart in life. If I did well, I’d get into a good college. Most of these losers would just go straight onto Amaris University without thinking about it, but that didn’t mean I had to. I could get a scholarship and go to a proper school, somewhere closer to home. That was the point of all of this.

Still, four years was a whole lifetime. It was like 1400 days. Maybe a bit less, I was almost halfway through freshman year. I’d made it that far. But it was a long time. Four years ago, I’d been living a completely different life. I wasn’t even the same person that I’d been the
n
.

I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, trying to make everything seem less horrible, trying to cheer myself up. It was longer than five minutes.

“Of course, you’re hiding,” a voice said out of the shadows.

I jumped up and span around, sludge from my hair splattering all across my face.

Tennyson Wilde. Of course.

“What are you even talking about?” I asked, taking my blazer back over to the sink and wringing the water out so that it was dry enough to stuff back into my bag. “And why are you in the girls’ locker room? You know there are rules about that sort of thing. Probably laws, even?”

“Don’t speak as if you are governed by rules or laws. I know that you do as you please.”

I twisted the thick fabric so hard in my hands that it chafed my skin. “Either say what you came here to say or leave,” I told him. “I’m not in the mood for your waffle.”

Waffles
on the other hand, I was definitely in the mood for. I wonder if I could sneak into the dining hall while everyone else was in class. That seemed like the kind of thing that was frowned upon, but still.  Waffles.

“The orb.”

I looked up at his reflection in the mirror and shivered. His eyes glowed out of the shadows with an otherworldly shine, intense and terrifying. He was definitely not playing.

“What about it?” I asked. “I know you think I have superpowers but I can’t actually read minds.”

“It’s gone.”

I dropped my blazer and turned to face him. “What do you mean, gone?”

“This isn’t a game,” he said, his voice no longer human. I had never seen Tennyson Wilde change into a wolf, and I realized now that was a good thing because it would be way too scary.

He moved out of the shadows, toward me. He moved like molten gold, like he was not governed by the same laws of physics that the rest of the world were. I backed away, only stopping when the backs of my thighs hit the cold porcelain of the sink.

“Where is the orb?” he said, his voice still that subhuman growl.

He got right up in my space, standing over me, and that was it. I was so done with people trying to push me around. I didn’t care that he was half-wolf and could eat my face off. Let him try, it was covered in sludge and would taste foul, so the joke would be on him anyway.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My voice came out as a tiny squeak but I had to work with what I had. Then I kicked him in the shins for good measure. “So back off.”

He took a step back and then blinked at me, as if he was shocked at himself for doing as I asked. Or maybe at me for kicking him. Either way.

“Right,” I said. “Now explain to me in a calm and rational manner what happened and we can use logic to figure out what happened and how to fix it, instead of these strong arm tactics, which quite frankly never work for you anyway.”

He sat quietly for a moment, his brow furrowed.

“The orb is gone,” he said.

“Yes, you said that part.” I didn’t roll my eyes at him, but it was a close thing. “When did you notice it missing?”

“Just now,” he said. “I keep it in a small iron box so that no outside magic can affect it but when I checked it, the box was empty.”

“How often do you check it?”

“Once a day. Sometimes more.”

I nodded, thinking it through. I’d been doing my reading since all the business with the truth spell, so I knew that magic could not penetrate iron, it couldn’t pass through it and sometimes iron even repelled it. If the box was empty, someone had opened it and taken the orb out, old school style with no magic.

“You asked the others?”

“Of course.”

“And you hadn’t taken it out to play with it or something and forgotten to put it back.”

He glared at me.

“Or dropped it?”

“I checked it last night before I went to bed and the orb was there, intact. The box was locked and the room was under the most heavy security in our house. I checked the footage and there is nothing strange about it. It is as if the orb just ceased to exist.”

“Well, that would be a good thing, right? Then we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

“Are you stupid? Of course it didn’t actually cease to exist. Nothing in this world ever ceases to exist, it merely changes form. In this case, I believe the energy inside the orb has returned to the original spellcaster, or possibly been redirected to another tool of the spellcaster, as was the case last time.”

That wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The truth spell had not been a barrel of laughs.

“But how? You said nobody went into the room, nobody opened the box.”

“Clearly somebody did, they just evaded our methods of detection.”

I huffed. “And you just automatically blame me?” Just the thought of it made me about a thousand times more angry. “Because I have so much spare time after all the trouble you’ve caused me this week, I can just suddenly pull of some master crime job and steal a ball of magic? Are you ever going to stop and think how stupid it is for you to blame me for every little thing that goes wrong in your dumb jerk life? How about you take some responsibility? And while you’re at it, stop making things worse for me. As if this school wasn’t bad enough but you make it a hundred times worse. Just leave me alone.” I was so mad that I stepped right up in front of him and flicked him square on the forehead.

A fraction of a second after doing it, I realized it was probably not the smartest move I’d ever made and high-tailed it out of there before Tennyson Wilde got his senses back enough to snap my spine like a twig.

Things didn’t get any worse but they didn’t get better either. The bullying kept on, but it wasn’t as if the students of Amaris were particularly creative in their methods. It was the same thing every day, a bit of shunning, a bit of incidental violence, a few spitballs. It got so I could set my watch by it. I'd left my blazer in the locker room and when I went back for it, it was gone, so I looked online for a new one but the cheap eBay ones I’d found weren’t available and everything else was so far out of my price range I’d be BFF with Astor before I could afford one. It was freezing out but I went to classes without my blazer and did the best I could. It was no big deal.

Worse than all that was what Tennyson Wilde had said. After the anger faded and I thought about what had happened, it really freaked me out. The person who that magic belonged to was not messing around. They were strong and they were angry. Plus, they’d gotten access to the Golden House and I’d seen the high level security they had going on there. If they could get into the Golden House undetected, they could go into anywhere in this world. Tennyson Wilde said that the energy in that ball of light was their power. They’d managed to break into the Golden House without their main power, and now they had it back. They could strike at any moment. It was scary stuff.

I had no proof they had a problem with me in particular. It was just coincidence I’d been at ground zero when the spell struck last time. They’d been after Tennyson Wilde, I was sure of it. Hopefully, if something else happened, it would be Tennyson Wilde-specific. They could steal his voice. Or turn him into a donkey. Or give him boils. Man, maybe I should’ve stolen the orb. I was fairly sure it didn’t work like that but still. I could’ve thrown it at his head and that would’ve been awesome.

It wasn’t fun, waiting around for the next spell to hit, but it kind of seemed unreal too, as if everything that had happened before, with the truth spell, had been a bad dream. If it hadn’t been for the werewolves constantly reminding me that all that stuff existed, I probably could’ve convinced myself quite happily that it didn’t. It wasn’t real in the same way that the bullying was real, wasn’t such an imminent threat. And it wasn’t as if I could do anything about it, anyway. I tried not to think about it more than I had to. It was Tennyson Wilde’s problem, not mine. Still, the thought kept sneaking into my mind when I dropped my guard, thoughts about what might happen next, what the spell would be, if we’d be able to stop it this time.

Clouds gathered in the sky like a warning of things to come, gray and murky and ominous. It was hard to stay positive when even the weather looked as if it was done with the world. I shivered my way up to the school the next morning, wondering if I’d find a spell cast over everyone. Maybe a spell to stop them being jerks, that would be dandy.

Hannah had already been gone when I’d woken up, but I thought that was probably for the best. If the bullies weren’t intending to let up, it was no good for her to be seen with me. I was surprised they hadn’t already begun targeting her as a way to get to me.

When I entered the dining hall for breakfast, everyone seemed intrigued by something they were reading on their laptops, their tablets and phones, but at my arrival they all looked up. There was silence for a moment and then the muttering broke out. I sighed. What now? Some new blog post? Another top ten ranking by Tennyson Wilde? At least if he publicly disliked me again, the bullying would be for a legitimate reason. Whatever it was, I didn’t care. I didn’t have to read it, and everyone already hated me anyway. What harm could it do?

I spotted Hannah at our usual table. I gave her a little wave and headed over, determined to ignore all the eyes following me. When she saw me, her face went pale. She grabbed her things and fled the room.

What was up with that? I had definitely not done anything to offend her. I cleaned up after myself in our room and I never touched her stuff, and I was fairly sure I didn’t say weird stuff in my sleep. I mean, I never had before so I doubted I’d have suddenly started. Plus, she knew she could talk to me about that kind of thing.

“Wow,” said Olivia Hearst, stepping in my way and blocking my path. Man, were those girls everywhere? Were they stalking me or what? “I knew you were some weird sort of social reject but this is a whole new level.”

I scrunched up my face in thought. Nope, no clue what she was talking about. I wanted to ignore her, but if whatever was going on affected Hannah, I should probably sort it out.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “As if you don’t know.”

I rolled my eyes back at her. “As if you don’t know that I don’t know.” Her and her cronies were definitely behind all this, with their creepy Tennyson Wilde loving.

Instead of explaining though, or rubbing her triumph in my face, she turned back to her gaggle of friends and walked away. Weird.

“This is really bad,” said Fatima, who was sitting at a table nearby. When she spoke to me, the other people at the table looked at her in surprise and edged their chairs away. She glanced up at me. “I don’t know if you did this or if someone is impersonating you, but you should put a stop to it.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Your Facebook page.”

I tilted my head to the side, curious. “I don’t have a Facebook.” My only friend had been dead until recently, so I hadn’t seen the point.

“You do now,” she said, then went back to her books, ending the conversation.

I pulled my tablet out of my bag as I made my way over to an empty table and sat down. It was kind of annoying to search social media without being logged in to it but finally I got up a list of all the Lucy O’Connors. There were a lot. I found myself a few pages in and clicked on the link.

It was bad.

There was just enough detail for it to seem legit. More than enough. There were posts from months, years ago, well before I came to Amaris. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, backdated the posts, but whoever had done it had been thorough. There were photos too, pictures with my face but not of places I’d ever been or things I’d ever done. Pictures of me with boys, at nightclubs doing drugs, flashing the camera. It was all very incriminating.

The worst part was the statuses though. They were all observations of my classmates and all super nasty. “I don’t know who Milo thinks he’s fooling with his big gay crush on Tennyson Wilde” and “Hannah thinks she’s so cute but everyone knows she’s poor and stupid”, that kind of thing, about everyone. I didn't care about random classmates being offended, some of the comments about them were super on point, but the stuff about Hannah was bad. There was a lot about Hannah, actually, and it was all super harsh. I didn’t blame her for running off because wow, whoever wrote this stuff did not pull their punches.

As I read through, I started feeling sick. I had no way of proving this wasn’t me. I clicked on the option to report the account but then I hesitated. If the account was taken down, I’d have no way of finding out who was behind it. Instead, I closed down Facebook and marched back over to Fatima.

“How did you find out about this?” I asked her.

A few of the other people at the table slipped away, as if I had the plague. I ignored them.

“You sent me a friend request,” she said, scrolling through something on her tablet that looked like a very boring academic text.

“When?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember. I hardly go on Facebook, it’s a waste of time. I only went on today because everyone was talking about it.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Her story seemed full of holes and suspicious. There hadn’t been anything about Fatima on there, at least nothing much, not compared to Hannah or Milo, or even some of the random people in our class. That put her as the prime suspect in my book.

“You know, I got 99/100 in our trigonometry quiz last week,” I said. “That puts me half a point ahead of you overall in the class ranking, doesn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I know what you’re implying but I have better things to do with my time than get involved in petty high school rivalries.”

Still, she didn’t look up from her reading. She was obviously lying. She was smart enough to pull this off and I knew she wanted to get first in the class more than anything. Saying she didn’t do it only made her more suspicious.

I couldn’t do anything without proof, though.

During morning assembly, I took advantage of Assistant Head Noel's long and rambling speech to more thoroughly explore the imposter’s Facebook. I set up a profile of my own as a generic Amaris student and sent fake me a friend request. It was accepted immediately. I looked around to see who else was online but that was literally everyone so I couldn’t narrow down the suspects. Oh well, at least I’d be up to date on the antics of fake me.

The imposter posted a lot. Assembly didn’t even last that long but during that time there were two updates about the fashion choices of other students – fake me was not wrong about Amanda De Havilland’s scrunchie tbh – and then a photo appeared of me with Tennyson Wilde.

Not just me with Tennyson Wilde. Me with Tennyson Wilde the day before in the locker room, when he had me backed up to the sink. It had been slightly altered to make it look worse than it had been, surely, because it looked bad. Wow, out of context that looked really bad. And the caption took it so far out of context, it was in Mongolia. “life will b golden when u my babby daddy t-son! so long to the trailer park!”.

There were just so many things wrong with that, I couldn’t even. For one thing, I would never say “baby daddy”, even if it was spelled correctly. What the hell else would someone be a daddy of?

Also no. No to all of it. I closed it down and shoved my tablet to the bottom of my bag. Just the thought of it made me feel dirty and wrong. Not the teen pregnancy part of it, because I wasn’t some judgy Mcjudgerson, but to the manipulating someone for money in that way, it wasn’t okay. I mean, it was saying that I’d had sex with Tennyson Wilde with the express purpose of getting pregnant and extorting money out of him, wasn’t it. Implying that I was the sort of person who would take away someone’s freedom of choice like that, just for starters.

Also the me and Tennyson Wilde thing kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies a bit too. But it was more than that too, something I couldn't put into words exactly, just this feeling of being a dirty little grubby speck, a blight on the face of something pristine. Logically, I knew it had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with reality, but logic did not control how I felt.

When I looked up, every single person in the assembly hall was staring at me. Even Assistant Head Noel had stopped speechifying.

“Is everything all right?” he asked to the hall in general.

Nobody answered. Nothing was all right.

I felt myself go bright red as the weight of the whole situation came crushing down on me. I had lost literally all of my friends. My family would see this.
Tennyson Wilde
would see this. Tennyson Wilde’s rabid fans would see it and hunt me down. Unless I put a stop to it, future colleges and employers could see this. Wow, it really sucked to me be.

Even logically knowing that, knowing what an awful situation I was in, that felt like nothing compared to the coldness in the eyes of everyone staring at me. I felt how a mouse must feel when it is backed into a corner by a cat and it’s waiting for the cat to pounce. I really did not want the entire student body pouncing on me. I knew there was nothing I could do or say to convince them that this wasn’t me, they wanted to believe the worst of me and so they would.

I was sitting near the end of the row, only a few people between me and the aisle.  I grabbed my bag and pushed my way out. I didn’t look back as I fled the assembly hall, and as soon as the doors closed behind me, I ran.

I ran until the only thing I could think about was how my legs ached and my lungs burned. I ran until I could no longer see that picture behind my eyes, of me and Tennyson Wilde and what had been implied. I didn’t even know where I was going, nowhere seemed safe or nice anymore. Everything seemed tainted.

By the time my energy ran out and I stopped running, I looked around to see I was in the clearing behind the Golden House. That was not somewhere I wanted to be. The absolute last person in the universe I wanted to see right then was Tennyson Wilde.

But it wasn’t Tennyson Wilde on the seat in the clearing.  It was Sam.

He’d been waiting for me. Or, at least, he hadn’t run away when I’d gotten near and it’s not as if he didn’t hear me coming with all his super senses. Wow, that was confusing of him. He hadn’t exactly been seeking out my company lately. I wanted to be angry at him but I couldn't help the way my heart flip-flopped when he looked up at me. I looked away immediately.

“Hey,” I said, kicking my foot in the dirt and trying to look as if I wasn’t sweating all over the place.

“Hey,” he said. I didn’t look at him but he sounded as if he was smiling. “You okay?”

I chanced a quick glance at him. “You know?”

The jerk was grinning at me.

“It’s not funny,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s a bit funny. T-son is your baby daddy?” He snorted.

I wanted to be angry that Sam was laughing at my misery, only I knew that he wasn’t, he was laughing at the bullies and it cheered me up a bit. “I can’t believe anyone really calls him that.”