The Tiny Curse (Werewolf High Book 2) (6 page)

"Were you actually trying to catch that rat and ride on it?" He squinted down at me condescendingly. "Animals don't just exist for your exploitation, you know. You can't be surprised that it was angry with you."

I didn't reply to him. Not because I had nothing to say, because my teeth were chattering too much.

"What are you doing there in the snow?" he asked, because he was the most unhelpful person alive. "Did you not realize you would sink and die?"

I glared at him as fiercely as I could while chattering and freezing and mini, though I didn't think the full weight of my disdain was conveyed.

He scooped me up out of the snow and held me in the palm of his hand right in front of his face. It was a horrible sensation, like that moment when a plane takes off only a zillion times worse, because planes stayed in the air with science and I had no such guarantees with Tennyson Wilde. He stared at me so intensely that his massive eyebrows met in the middle. He huffed a breath out his nose so forcefully it knocked me backwards. At least he didn't have bad breath, I supposed, and I was out of the snow.

"You'd better come with me," he said. "If you're always in the middle of the mess, it seems that you'll be needed to clean it up."

And without another word, he tucked me into his coat pocket.

His pocket was warm and protected from the elements, and some sort of luxurious soft fabric. Because he moved so smoothly, I was hardly jostled around at all, and made myself as comfortable as possible. After a while, my teeth stopped chattering. That was bad, right? I remembered reading that was bad, like once your teeth stopped chattering, that was when hypothermia set in and you died. Dying in Tennyson Wilde's pocket would be super embarrassing, but definitely warmer and snugglier than being ravaged by rats in the snow. And, jerk though he was, he did seem like the sort of person who would properly notify my family of my tragic demise, at the very least.

I vaguely wondered where he was taking me, though it didn't seem like such a big deal. That was probably part of the hypothermia too, I stopped caring about stuff. That was fine. Peaceful, really. So far, when it came to near death encounters, hypothermia was streets ahead. Number one, most recommended.

I snuggled deeper into his pocket. I didn't know what fancy rich person material this coat was made from but boy was it soft and nice.

You're probably not supposed to fall asleep with hypothermia. That seemed like a thing. Or maybe that was concussion. Whatever. Sleep was warm and nice and awake was the opposite. Awake was not my friend.

Shouting woke me up. I was so toasty warm though not pocket warm but blanket warm. I cracked open an eye to look around. Clearly, I had not died. And I hadn't been taken to some torture dungeon or laboratory or anything. It seemed like I was in the common area of the Golden House, especially judging from the shouts.

"She's fine," said Tennyson Wilde. He wasn't shouting. He sounded bored. "It was never a danger."

"She's not fine, she's the size of my finger!" That was Sam. He was shouting. "My pinky finger!"

That made me sit up. He wasn't usually the type to get angry, he was gentle and kind. But ever since the whole werewolf thing, he'd been unpredictable.

They were standing on the other side of the room to me, facing each other. They couldn't have looked more different. Tennyson stood by the fireplace, an elbow propped nonchalantly on the mantle. Sam loomed over him, tense and ready to spring. I was nestled into a blanket on a chair in the corner, though I noticed something had been put up as a barrier so that I couldn't fall off while I slept.

"Are you finally going to stop blaming her for everything then, Tennyson?" Althea asked, sounding amused. "I highly doubt she shrank herself."

"Never underestimate these people," Tennyson said. "You don't think they are capable of doing this to send her in as a spy?"

"She almost died of hypothermia!" Sam said.

"It wasn't hypothermia; she was just a bit cold. Most likely they knew I would sense the magic and investigate before she was in serious danger." He shrugged. "Or perhaps she is expendable to them. Perhaps she does not even know she is being used, like the teacher last time."

"Perhaps she's awake and listening to everything you say," said Nikolai, from where he sat over in the corner, typing on his phone. He looked over at me and winked.

Sam started in surprise and began to move toward me, but Tennyson put out an arm to stop him. They muttered to each other, too quietly for me to hear, and then I was shocked to see Tennyson Wilde break out into a smile. I hadn't thought him capable, he was always so surly and grr and big furrowed eyebrows. It made him look like a completely different person, at least 20% less of a jerk. Sam smiled back and patted Tennyson on the shoulder, then moved away from him to come and crouch in front of my chair.

"Hey," he said quietly. "Is my voice too loud?"

I shook my head. "It's normal. Do I sound all squeaky?" It was surprising he could hear me at all, actually, even with the super hearing.

"You're fine," he said. "It must be part of the magic. Are you warm enough? Do you feel okay?"

I nodded, then sat down cross-legged and stared at him. His face was so huge.

"Am I the only one?" I asked. The thought of everyone who had chased me into the bamboo forest all being shrunk and running around like manic pixies was more than a little funny and would cheer me up to no end.

He nodded. "Nobody else even saw the spell. Tennyson sensed it and was just headed to the spot the last spell happened when he found you. Were you really trying to ride a rat?"

"I was trying not to get eaten," I said loftily. "And not to freeze to death. It is a harsh, harsh world when you are a tiny person, you know. You shouldn't judge."

"That's hardly what's important here," said Tennyson Wilde. He still stood by the mantel and was obviously trying to look uninterested, flipping through a book and not looking at us. "What details do you remember from the spell?"

I told them what had happened, what little there was, but that seemed to bother all four of them.

"Surely you're forgetting something," Tennyson said.

Althea and Nikolai exchanged unreadable looks and Sam's claws were digging into his leg.

"Why's it such a big deal?" I asked. "Maybe whoever it is just couldn't be bothered with all the fancy stuff. Maybe they just wanted to get to some food. You know it was mini pastries today."  I sighed. What a regretful life this was, with no mini pastries.

"You're hungry?" Sam asked. He reached over to the table and picked up a plate. "It's not mini pastries but these aren't too bad."

He sat the plate down on my chair beside me and I stood up to get a better look. Giant sandwiches! They were big enough to feed a family of five for a year! Well, the bread would obviously go stale, but you could probably freeze them. I climbed up onto the plate to start nibbling at a ham and cheese one. I wondered if maybe I could get the rest of my family shrunk as well. Our living expenses would be literally nothing if we were all tiny.

"There are rituals that have to be obeyed with this sort of thing," Tennyson was saying. "You can't just wave a magic wand and shrink people. Try to remember!"

Oh, he was talking to me. I looked up at him over a chunk of Jarlsberg cheese the size of my head. It had always been my life's dream to have a whole wheel of Jarlsberg cheese, I used to stare at them all bright and beautiful through the window of the local deli, imagining the luxury of having such an abundance of cheese all to myself. This was even bigger than a wheel of Jarlsberg and I was not going to let Tennyson Wilde ruin it for me.

"Don't get all mad at me," I said. "This is your fault. You're the one who couldn't even look after a stupid little magic ball." I clutched my cheese and turned my back on him.

"She's not wrong," Nikolai muttered, cutting of Tennyson's reply. "That shouldn't have happened. I know it wasn't your fault but how did they get through our security."

"Whoever is behind this is stronger than we thought," said Althea.

"And they're targeting Lucy."

Targeting me into cheese heaven, maybe, I thought. Now that I was out of the cold, getting shrunk seemed like maybe the best thing ever. The bullies couldn't hurt me now; they couldn't even find me. I mean, in the long term things like going to class or walking up a flight of stairs might be difficult, but people lived with disabilities every day in this world, much worse things than just being a bit short. I wasn't going to let it get me down.

Tennyson and Althea decided to do some research and Nikolai had plans, so when I finished my sandwiches, Sam put out his hand for me to climb into and he took me up to his room.

"You're not shoving me in a shoebox with just some holes in the top," I said. "I remember those crickets you caught and their untimely demise."

He placed me carefully on his pillow and then moved across the room to look through his drawers.

His room was so different to the last time I'd been there. Last time, Sam had been having some emotional problems and the room was a wreck. It had been put back together now, and although it was simple, I found it really nice, comfortingly Sam. The stone walls were bare, with a big bed in the middle of the room and a window seat full of cushions opposite the door. There was a desk and a bookcase and some cupboards, and a blue rug on the floor.

"Hopefully the spell won't last very long," he said. "But without knowing anything about who cast it or why, it's impossible to tell. We should probably be prepared for the worst."

"The worst being that I stay tiny?"

"You know you'll get sick of it after a while."

He came back over to the bed with a box of tissues that he'd fashioned into a sort of bed and placed it on the nightstand. Even though I'd seemed to have done nothing but sleep all day, when I saw it, I realized I was still super tired.

"We'll get some proper things for you tomorrow," he said. "Unless you get big again overnight."

I doubted it. Last time, the spell had just gotten worse and worse before I'd put a stop to it. I had no energy to think about it though, no energy to try to figure out who had done this to me and why and how I would stop it.

I was almost asleep when Sam spoke again.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," he said, so quietly I was sure I wasn't supposed to hear. I almost pretended that I didn't. I was sleepy and conversations like that made me uncomfortable. Still, I couldn't have him walking around thinking this was his fault, he already carried too much guilt for things he hadn't been to blame for.

I propped myself up on my elbow and peeked out over the side of my tissue bed.

"Why are you apologizing?" I asked him. "How have you possibly twisted this up in your brain to make yourself responsible?"

He turned to face me, his eyes bright in the darkness and so, so huge. I could probably drown in them for real, though that would be disgusting for me and painful for him.

"You don't think it strange that all this magic stuff started happening to you after I came back into your life? You don't think there's some connection?"

"You aren't the only werewolf at this school," I said. "I'm more inclined to blame Tennyson Wilde. Or, you know, the person actually behind all this. It wasn't a werewolf who put this curse on me."

He shook his head. "But why are you always in the middle of it? It only makes sense that it's because you're linked to me."

My face grew warm at him saying that we were linked. I felt that way too, of course, but I never knew what he was thinking anymore. Sometimes it seemed as if he'd forgotten all about me, that he'd moved on. I felt like I was stuck in the past, standing still and watching as he walked away from me, growing smaller in the distance. But if we were linked, no matter how far away he walked, he could always find his way back.

"I mean, it's not as if you have any other ties to the supernatural community."

He said it as if the very idea was absurd, but his words made an alarm bell chime in my head. I did have other ties. So did he. I'd never told him about the book I'd found in the library. The book on werewolves, which had been co-written by my father and his mother. I should tell him now. It was the perfect moment. But the words sat at the base of my throat, hovering and reluctant to pop out. Any mention of the past, of his family, was like a trigger for Sam. He did seem to be doing better lately though, even Tennyson Wilde had said so. Maybe it would be okay.  I took a deep breath and kept my eyes fixed to a spot on the wall.

"So, about that, that's not exactly true…"

Sam didn't move, but I could somehow feel him become tense. How was I supposed to put this?

"So, you know your mom?" Yeah, I didn't sound stupid at all. "And my dad? Well, I mean it might be a massive coincidence, but I'm fairly sure it was them…"

His eyes began to glow. "What are you trying to say, Lucy?"

"Relax, we're not like secret siblings or anything. But there's this book that I found. I'd show you but I left it in my backpack, out in the snow. It's a book on werewolves, facts and sciencey stuff. They wrote it together."

I wasn't sure if Sam fully grasped what I was saying, what it meant in terms of his own past and mine. It meant that on the night Sam had first turned, the night his family had died, the night he had disappeared, his mother had known that was a possibility. That the lives we thought we'd lived at children were lies. Our parents weren't who we thought they were. I didn't know if Sam grasped any of that, because within the blink of an eye, he had transformed.