The Tiny Curse (Werewolf High Book 2)
Read The Tiny Curse (Werewolf High Book 2) Online
Authors: Anita Oh
© Anita Oh 2016
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, places or events, is purely coincidental.
This book, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
Sometimes in this world, it’s the smallest things that cause the biggest problems, and you can’t even figure out why. That’s how things were at Amaris High for sure, nothing followed any sort of logic that I could figure out.
I stood at a crossroads where the Red Garden met the Green. The path was totally blocked by rival factions of angry rich kids. It was an indirect, out-of-the-way path up to the school from the Red House, but the garden that the usual path cut through had been closed off back in the fall due to a freak accident that was absolutely no fault of my own, and it was taking forever for it to be reopened. The students from the Green House were not happy about sharing a path with lesser beings and had decided to put a stop to it. It had progressed into a class war to rival the French Revolution, and judging by the look on Stephanie Von Thingie’s face, if Britt Pendlebury took one step onto the Green House path, heads would roll.
The crowds grew around the two virtually identical blonde girls. In the freezing February morning, it was impossible to even tell which garden was red and which was green, but every person there knew which side they stood on.
The school bell rang and yet nobody crossed the path. I sighed. I didn’t care about morning assembly but breakfast was definitely over. I kind of wanted to see what happened, how this would play out, but my level of interest wasn’t high enough to miss out on food. Unless their conflict resolution method was to break-dance fight, that might be worth it.
“We could cut back through the forest,” my friend Hannah whispered to me.
I shook my head. That would take us into the woods behind the Golden House, and that was the place I wanted to avoid more than anything. Or, more to the point, bring me uncomfortably close to the two
people
I wanted to avoid more than anything, Sam Spencer and Tennyson Wilde. Even if this rich kid standoff turned into a fight to the death, that would still be more fun than running into either of them. Pair of jerks. My heart twinged at the thought but I resolutely ignored it.
The tension rose between the two groups. Their glares became fiercer and shoulders more tense. It wasn’t really much of a spectator thing, to be honest. Mostly, it was cold and boring. I wondered how long this would go on, if I could go back to my warm, snuggly bed without being missed from class. Stephanie shuffled forward and Britt made a move as if she was about to step forward, onto the forbidden path, when muttering broke out and both sides backed right down.
I looked around, wondering what was going on, if there was some sort of signal I’d missed. Sometimes these rich kids reacted to things in unexpected ways, took cues from things that didn’t seem to have any meaning, and even after months of being at Amaris, I wasn’t sure I’d ever fully catch on.
Then I realized why the crowd was parting. It was definitely something I’d never understand. The Golden sauntered down the path as if it were a red carpet, as if they knew and expected all eyes to be drawn to them.
And they were.
Nikolai Volkov winked at me as I moved off the path out of his way. I wrinkled my nose up at him, he thought he was so cool with his sharp cheekbones and slicked back blonde hair. We were in Cooking & Crafts club together and for some reason he thought that made me one of his staff, and whenever we were in the same proximity he issued a bunch of orders at me. Not today, though. Today, he was on a mission.
Sam Spencer didn’t even look at me as he passed me. That’s how things were with us now. My eyes lingered on his back, his broad shoulders and the curl of his chocolate brown hair against the nape of his neck, but he gave no sign that he’d ever known me, that we’d been closer than family. I couldn't breathe. Just looking at him evaporated the air right out of my lungs. He was something else now, something other than
my
Sam, and I didn't really know what that was. Since he'd started coming to class around a month ago, people couldn't get enough of him. They whispered about him and tried to catch his attention — there were already even blogs about him — but he didn't even seem to notice. Just like he didn't notice me.
The Wilde twins were last, Althea and Tennyson, pale and otherworldly in the light of the winter morning. Althea caught my eye and gave me a small smile but Tennyson swept past me in the same way a king would pass by an ant.
It was strange to see them out so early, normally none of the Golden came to morning classes. I supposed they’d probably sensed the tension with their werewolf senses but normally they didn’t bother themselves with commoner problems.
“Is there some sort of problem?” Tennyson Wilde said, folding his arms and coming to a stop opposite Stephanie.
Stephanie shook her head, her jaw dropping and eyes locked on the ground.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “If there is no problem then why are you inconveniencing all these people?”
Stephanie opened her mouth but no words came out. I didn’t get it. I thought she was stupid and had no good reason to block the path other than being an entitled brat, but even so, no way would I let Tennyson Wilde talk down to me in front of the whole school. She should stand her ground. But then, if she had the gumption to do that, she probably wouldn’t have a problem with the not-quite-as-rich kids using the same path as her, it was all part of her screwed up social hierarchy. At least she was consistent, I supposed.
“Move along,” Tennyson Wilde commanded, looking around at the divided groups on either side of the path. Everyone stared down at the ground, as if afraid to look him in the eye. “The construction on the gardens will be complete before the end of the week. As the new gardens are a donation from my family, please contact our legal staff if you have any further issues, rather than causing a scene.”
He swept off down the path toward the school with no further comment, the other three following without looking back. The Red and Green students glared at each other as they fell into line. Just as everyone began to move up to the school, Tennyson Wilde stopped in his path, spun on his heel and pointed directly at me. The student body held their breath as one entity.
“You!” he said, fixing the entire force of his being on me. “Meet me after class. We have unfinished business.”
As far as I was concerned, I had zero business with Tennyson Wilde, unfinished or otherwise, so I ignored him and his bossypants ways. The rest of the school, however, seemed intrigued. As everyone moved off to what was left of morning assembly, they didn't even try to disguise that they were talking about me, discussing what Tennyson would want with me.
A pair of girls I’d never spoken to before blocked my way into class. I vaguely knew them by sight from that time I'd surveyed the entire school on illegal magical activity, they were from the Green House. Olivia Hearst and Charlotte Du Pont, I thought. Olivia was tall and skeletally thin with drab brown hair and an air of confidence. Charlotte was a generic sort of pretty, which seemed due to an expert application of make-up.
“What’s your business with Tennyson Wilde?” Olivia asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“None of yours,” I said and pushed past her but Charlotte put out an arm to stop my way.
“Wrong,” she said. “You’re new so maybe you don’t understand how things work here, so let me help you out.” She took me by the arm, her fingernails digging into my flesh like talons as she guided me toward my seat. “People like Tennyson Wilde, they’re public domain. Everyone owns a piece of them, everyone is invested in them. At this point, nobody owns a controlling interest but when that time comes, it won’t be somebody like you. People like
you
cannot even afford a starting share. People like you shouldn’t even be here, they should be out working in the cornfields and minding their own business.”
“Cornfields?” I asked as she let go of my arm and pushed me into my seat.
“I think you get my point,” she said, staring down at me, her face covered in shadow like a comic book villain.
I opened my mouth to tell her that if her point was that she was an A-grade butthole then I got it loud and clear, but Hannah poked me in the shoulder from her seat behind me, and I was saved from answering by the bell ringing. Charlotte gave me a haughty look and went to her seat.
“You don’t want to mess with those girls,” Hannah told me later, as we made our way to lunch. “They take themselves very seriously.”
“No kidding,” I said, though mostly I’d already forgotten them. I had better things to think about than bossy rich kids. Like the lunch menu.
“Their aim is to marry Golden and they don’t let anything stand in their way,” Hannah said, looking around for a free table.
“I kind of got that from their whole stock market analogy thing,” I said, pointing over to a spot in the far corner. “Have they discussed their plans with Tennyson Wilde? Because I’m fairly sure his reaction to being thought of as a commodity would be hilarious. We could film it, it would go viral in seconds.”
Hannah gave me a strange look as we sat down. “What did he want with you anyway? I thought you’d sorted out your problems with him?”
I shrugged and opened up the app on my tablet to flick through the lunch menu. “The workings of his mind are so far beyond my understanding that I couldn’t hope to know what he’d want from me.”
It was only a teeny tiny lie. It wasn’t that I didn’t know. It was that I didn’t
want
to know. There were only two possible things that Tennyson Wilde would want to talk about with me: magic or werewolves. He was still suspicious of me after everything that had happened back in the fall, even though I’d clearly had nothing to do with it. No matter what I said or did to prove my innocence, he still treated me as if I was some sort of dark mage or something. It wasn’t as if we met up every Sunday for tea and cakes to chat about it, but every so often I caught him glowering at me out of the shadows.
And if he wanted to talk about werewolves, that was a whole other problem. I’d tried to keep as far away from all of that as I could – any time I’d had anything to do with werewolves they’d tried to use me as a chew toy. I knew Sam was having problems with it, that was why he hadn’t been around, why we were like strangers now when once we’d been closer than anyone. If Tennyson Wilde wanted to talk to me about werewolves, that meant Sam. And if things were bad enough to ask for my help, they’d have to be pretty bad. But Sam had seemed fine that morning. He’d been going to classes regularly all month, and the only problem I’d seen him have with it was his new legions of fans.
“Let me know if you need back up when you go to see him,” Hannah told me, giving me a bracing smile.
“I have no intention of seeing him,” I said. “But thanks.”
The rest of the school was not nearly as easy to convince though. It was the most attention I’d received since I got to Amaris. The people who weren’t outright hostile were overly friendly, in that creepy fake way that people like that somehow think is convincing. By the end of the day, I was over it and snuck out of class before the bell to get a head start on the morbidly curious crowd.
Instead of taking the path down toward the Green House, I crossed the school lawn as quickly as I could and vanished into the forest. The forest was big and wild, and took up most of the island. There was so much of it I hadn't explored, so I was always careful not to stray too far, but the paths closest to the school were becoming familiar to me. I knew that night would fall early and there were monsters out there, so I hurried my way along until I broke out of the trees and onto a clifftop, to where the lighthouse rose up before me.
It felt so good to be away from the school, to be in a secret place where nobody knew to find me, that I sprinted my way up the stairs to the top of the lighthouse and burst into the little room there.
“I expected you an hour ago.”
The table was spread with all sorts of delicious little treats, cakes and pastries and little cheesey wonder things.
“You were in France?” I asked, taking a seat at the table and looking over the display of goodies.
Althea Wilde shrugged and placed a protective cover over the food. “Family business,” she explained. I didn’t know if she meant actual business or werewolf business or what, I was too busy trying to lift up a corner of the food cover to sneak a pastry. “Sorry I couldn’t meet up last week.”
I shrugged. I found it odd that she wanted to meet up at all, though I liked Althea and I really like the treats she supplied on our weekly get togethers. I couldn’t see what she was getting out of it at all, unless maybe she was doing some sort of social experiment but as long as the tasty food kept coming, I was in.
"Cakes later," she said, throwing a punch at my head and making me fall out of the chair. "Training first."
Althea was teaching me to fight, to defend myself. She said that even if I didn't want to be involved in their world, I was close enough to it to be in danger and I had to know to how to protect myself, so she was bribing me with delicious foods to learn. We trained for an hour and then I collapsed back into my chair. Althea removed the cover and I piled my plate high with treats.
“You know my brother wants to talk to you.”
I nearly choked on my cheesy puff thing. The entire time we’d been hanging out, not once had either of us brought up her brother or Sam. Occasionally we talked about Nikolai, in a general sort of way, but things never got personal.