The Tiny Curse (Werewolf High Book 2) (7 page)

He wasn't a full wolf. He still retained his human form, just with added wolfy bits, like fur and claws and teeth. And wow, those claws and teeth were scary enough when they weren't bigger than me. He growled, so deep and low that it made my tissue box bed rumble like an earthquake.

"Hey, Sam? Buddy?"

But Human-Sam had left the building. His nose switched as he sniffed in my direction. Oh man, to the wolfy part of Sam's brain, I probably smelled tasty like a bunny. Talk about an extreme reaction to bad news. It wasn't even particularly bad news, just new information, really, but I supposed if you believed you'd murdered your whole family, no news was good news.

"Let's think this through rationally," I said to him. "We were having a conversation, remember? Everything is fine and we're all good and safe, and we're just having a bit of a chit-chat."

He growled. Yeah, logics did not work on the wolf. Logics seemed to annoy the wolf.

He lunged for me, swiping his arm out and knocking my tissue bed. Luckily, I didn't go flying off the nightstand and end up a crumpled heap on the stone floor. I fell out of the tissue box in the other direction, rolling until the bed lamp stopped my momentum. Sam's face was right beside me, so close I could see every detail. I stayed as still as I could, not breathing. I knew his wolfy senses would find me, but maybe I could use that to my advantage. He wasn't thinking like a human. The drawer of the nightstand was open, just a crack, but if I could just get in it, I didn't think he'd be able to get the drawer open to crunch on my bones.

With all my might, I pushed my tissue box bed and it clattered off the night stand and onto the floor. While Sam was distracted by it, I dove for the drawer.

The drawer was dark and I couldn't see out of it enough to know if Sam had seen where I'd gone. I had no clue where he was or if I was safe. I crouched in the darkness, staring up at the thin sliver of light as I listened and waited. There was some thumping and sounds like things being knocked over but maybe Sam was just clumsy as a wolf. Eventually, I relaxed. If he hadn't found me, maybe he'd given up looking, or forgotten, or fallen asleep. I sighed and tried to make myself comfortable. It was a little difficult — I didn't know what Sam kept in the drawer of his nightstand but figured it was probably personal stuff and I didn't want to invade his privacy by going through it. Before I could settle in too much, the drawer was pulled open and cold blue eyes stared down at me. It seemed to have become a recurring pattern.

"What are you doing in there?" Tennyson Wilde asked. "Where is Sam? What have you done?"

I didn't answer him. I thought the answer was fairly obvious and I didn't even have enhanced senses.

"You upset him again?" He huffed. "Why do you have to be an endless source of trouble?"

"Oi!" I got to my feet and waved my fist at him angrily. "Don't victim blame me, you big giant jerk! I'm the one who keeps getting attacked, and cursed, and bullied. Don't make out like I'm the cause of any of this when you're the one who can't keep your little wolf pack under control!"

He rolled his eyes and plucked me up out of the drawer between his fingers. No matter how I struggled, he kept tight hold of me.

"Do you want me to drop you on the floor?" he asked.

I stopped struggling. It was a long way down.

"You obviously can't be trusted so until this situation is resolved, I'm going to keep watch on you."

Before I could say anything in response, he dropped me into his pocket and buttoned it up.

As much as I hated to admit it, being looked after by Tennyson Wilde was far more comfortable than being looked after by Sam. He squished a cushion inside his sock drawer for me to sleep on, which was both comfortable and safe, and then vanished into the night. I assume he went to find Sam, and while I was worried, I knew that Tennyson Wilde was the best person to sort it out. Mostly, I was happy to be left alone to sleep.

I was
not
happy, however, to be woken up by a big wolfy face staring down at me the next morning. Its cold, wet nose nudged me. I squealed and ducked under the fluffy sock that I'd been using as a sleeping bag. When I peeked back out, it was to see Nikolai Volkov laughing at me.

"Ah, why am I so hilarious?" he asked, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. "Anyway, I'm first on tiny commoner-sitting duty. Tennyson's drawn up a whole color-coded schedule for us and I made this to carry you around in." He held up a mustard-colored bowler hat with a hideous big sunflower pinned to the front. "See, there's a concealed section in the top here behind the flower, and this front part is actually one-way glass so that you can see out, though the fabric covering it will obscure your vision a little. It will make our heads look a little big but it's still rather stylish, don't you think?" He looked at me, squinting his eyes as if he was trying to figure something out. "You really need new clothes but we'll worry about that later."

He sat the hat down on my cushion and flipped the top of it open for me to climb into.

"I don't like that you're talking as though this is a long term situation." The hat room wasn't big enough for me to stand up but I could sit down and stretch out quite comfortably, and it felt very secure. I could even see fairly clearly through the fabric, though everything was in a mustard-colored haze. I was fairly impressed at Nikolai for making it so well at such short notice. He always acted as if he was playing around in C&C club but obviously he took it more seriously than I thought.

"Well, being unprepared never solved anything." He reached out toward me. "Okay, hold tight. And remember, I can hear you if you whisper, but I won't be able to respond."

That made sense, and I didn't know what I'd ever have to chit-chat about with Nikolai Volkov anyway.

He settled the hat on his head and then we were off. Riding in a hat was a new sensation, but not bad. It felt more sturdy than being in Tennyson Wilde's pocket. I didn't jiggle around as much, and I could feel the warmth from Nikolai's head through the hat; he really threw out some heat. Everything seemed much further away than usual and we seemed to be moving at an extremely fast rate, but not in a bad way. It definitely wasn't the worst way to travel.

We headed out of the Golden House and up to the school. Nobody was around, though it didn't feel that early, and I remembered that I'd hardly ever seen any of the Golden at morning classes. They seemed to just do whatever they felt like, on their own schedule, and I wondered if I'd get super behind in all my classes. I supposed that was probably the purpose behind the curse.

"Do you know Fatima?" I whispered to Nikolai.

He had said he couldn't reply, so it was probably a bit mean to ask him questions, but we were walking through the school grounds alone so there was nobody to see him muttering to himself.

"I doubt it," he said. "Why? Is that one of your commoner friends?"

"I think she's the one who did this to me."

"Point her out then, if you see her."

He didn't head toward the classrooms even though it was definitely class time.  Instead he turned toward the dining hall. That was fine with me, it was French Toast day.

The normal dining hall was fancy enough, but the little balcony area where the Golden ate was something else. Everything seemed literally made of gold, and they had a whole special menu that wasn't available to the regular students. I didn't even know what some of the things on there meant.

"Where is she?" asked Sam, before Nikolai could sit down. He looked fine, maybe a bit tired. "Don't tell me you left her at the house on her own?"

"Of course I didn't," Nikolai said, pressing the button for coffee about fifty times in rapid succession.

"And even if he had, it's not as if I couldn't survive for a few hours alone in a sock drawer."

The three of them started, looking at Nikolai in shock.

"Ventriloquism?" Tennyson Wilde asked, furrowing his massive eyebrows and cocking his head to the side.

"You didn't tell them?" I asked Nikolai.

"I was hoping we could have some fun with it first," he said.

"She's in that ugly hat?" asked Althea. "Did you make that? Do you expect the rest of us to wear it, because you know how I feel about touching anything that's been in contact with your skin."

"I don't have any diseases, Althea," Nikolai said, sighing in relief when the coffee appeared. "I'm a werewolf."

"And yet you always make such dubious fashion choices," she said.

"Have you eaten?" Sam asked, staring at the flower on Nikolai's hat, where he obviously thought I was hiding. "You can come out, there's only us here."

Nikolai lowered the hat so that I could climb out onto the table and Sam sat a plate of French toast in front of me. It was like an actual mountain of French toast, the most luxurious French toast in the whole world. There have been many happy moments in my life, but never before had I experienced such a complete and pure feeling of joy as when I faced down that French toast mountain and vowed to make it my own.

At first, I was in such a French toast frenzy that the world around me faded into nothing, but as I began to fill up, bits of the conversation going on around me filtered in.

"Look at her eating that thing," Nikolai said. "Just like a tiny human-shaped rodent."

"The security people have been over everything again and still can't explain how the orb was taken," Tennyson Wilde said. "They are also at a loss to explain this spell."

"Well, you can't fire this lot," Althea said. "After last time, there won't be anyone left."

"They were supposed to be the best
in the world
," Tennyson said. "And they clearly were not. Why should I pay them for a service I'm clearly not receiving?"

"You sound like Mother," she said.

"Did you retrieve the book?" Tennyson said, ignoring Althea and turning his entire body toward Sam.

Sam glanced down at me with a guilty expression on his face. I waved a chunk of bacon at him to let him know I didn't care that he'd told the others. Things like that, you keep them a secret because they're confusing or worrisome or whatever, but that only leads to trouble in the end, and I was too small now to keep something that big inside. Better to let it out and have someone else deal with it. Any extra space I had needed to be filled up with French toast.

Sam pulled the book out of my backpack. Both the bag and book had seen better days. The book had gone all stiff and yellow from being soaked and then dried out. Tennyson picked it up, but the pages had dried together and it wouldn't open. Still, the names on the cover were there for anyone to see.

"I'll have our people look into it. I doubt it's a coincidence that her father is involved in all this."

I stopped eating and stared up at Tennyson Wilde.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You know very well what I mean," he said.

"I want to hear you say it to my face." I brandished a piece of toast at him. "Go on, explain to me how you think my father was responsible for what happened to Sam. How you think everything that's happening now is some grand O'Connor family conspiracy. Tell me how you understand everything that's happened to my family over the past ten years so much better than I do."

I was all sticky with maple syrup, and a little bit nauseated from overeating and the conversation, but I was too angry to stay there with this jerk. I stormed off the plate and started walking away, but when I got to the edge of the table, I realized I had nowhere to go. I was totally helpless. It was so frustrating that I wanted to scream.

"It's okay, Lucy," Sam said, holding out his hand for me to climb onto. "Nobody thinks that."

Tennyson Wilde cleared his throat.

"But what if he's right," I said, as Sam held me up to his face. "My dad just vanished. He could be anywhere, doing anything." I looked away. I didn't want to say it, didn't even want to think it, but I needed to acknowledge the possibility. "He could be behind what happened to you."

Sam shook his head. "You know what I remember about your dad?" he asked softly. "That year when my little sister was an angel in the Christmas pageant and she was so excited, you remember? She loved having wings so much. But then our car wouldn't start on the way to the school and we were running late, and she was so upset thinking she'd miss it. And your dad told her not to cry, he had magic hands and he'd make everything okay, and popped the hood and got that old car going within minutes, remember?"

"Wait, that doesn't make sense," said Nikolai. "Why didn't he just call a driver?"

I rolled my eyes and Sam laughed.

"The point is," Sam went on, "that your father was a good man. He'd never hurt me or my family. Never. Wherever he is, whatever he's doing, you have to believe that it's for the best, that's he doing the right thing."

I wanted to believe that, I really did. But would a good man really walk out on his sick wife and four children, leaving them with nothing?

"Either way," I said. "It would be irresponsible not to investigate him. If he has any connection to what's happening now, we need to know about it. I don't think this is him though."

I explained to them about Fatima, how she'd been the ringleader in driving me into the bamboo forest. Fatima had more motive than anyone, I told them. As I was telling them, a few other things occurred to me too, like how whoever made the fake social media accounts had some pretty personal knowledge about me, and it wasn't as if I had a whole bunch of friends at Amaris to choose from.

"We'll have her looked at as well," said Tennyson Wilde.

The bell rang but nobody seemed in a hurry to move.

"The mages should have the analysis of the magical activity over the past day to us by tonight," Althea said, scrolling through her phone. "They don't sound hopeful though. They say if they found nothing last time, it's unlikely they will this time. But they think that based on how the spell was broken last time and any trace magic left this time, they might be able to extrapolate a counter-curse."

I had like a thousand questions about what she'd just said, but one was definitely the priority.

"They can biggen me?"

She shrugged. "Hopefully."

"The restoration of your size is hardly the priority here," said Tennyson Wilde. "We need to find whoever is behind this. You are either in league with them or they are targeting you specifically, and either way that makes you more useful in your current state."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm ignoring you and going back into the hat."