The Tiny Curse: Werewolf High Book 2(26)

The pounding got louder and more urgent but Astor took his sweet time in  coming out of the bathroom. Finally, he emerged, dragging his feet over  to the door, even though it sounded as if whoever was on the other side  was about to smash it open.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered, looking through the peep hole. He sighed and opened the door a crack. "What do you want?"

"Where is she?" said Llewellyn, and it suddenly clicked why the dog had  seemed familiar. "Bonkers. I know you have her. Just give her back. I'll  do anything you want."

He sounded so forlorn, so lost, that my heart twisted in my chest.

Astor slammed the door in his face. Bonkers had poked her nose out from  under the bed hopefully at the sound of her human's voice, and I could  hear the soft thump of her tail wagging, but when the door closed, her  head drooped again and she backed under the bed again.

Before Astor could make it back to the bathroom, the pounding on the  door started up again. He grumbled under his breath and swung the door  open, but it wasn't Llewellyn this time.

"Where is she?" Tennyson Wilde said, bursting into the room and looking around.

"Here!" I yelled, jumping to my feet and waving around.

Bonkers's nose emerged again, sniffing cautiously, but Tennyson didn't  even look in my direction. That made no sense, he should definitely have  been able to hear me. Astor smirked up at me and I realized that he'd  done something, some sort of magic or werewolf-proofing or something so  that Tennyson couldn't notice me. Man, who knew that Astor of all people  could be so wily. I had vastly underestimated him. But he'd obviously  underestimated me too if he thought he could keep me quiet so easily.

I edged my way over to the dead cactus. It was big and heavy but I had  to distract Tennyson from his argument with Astor, he was getting super  worked up and I knew better than anyone that once he got going, he never  let up on something. I whispered an apology to the cactus, then with  all my weight, I shoved it off the shelf.

It smashed loudly, sending shards of pottery everywhere. I hoped Bonkers  had managed to avoid any debris, but was pretty sure she had honed her  danger-avoiding skills enough to keep safe. Tennyson Wilde looked over  and I jumped up and down to get his attention. When he spotted me, a  funny look passed over his face. I could've sworn it was relief.

"Why are you dilly-dallying about, you jerk," I yelled. "Hurry up and get me out of here!"

He pushed Astor out of the way and took a step forward, toward me, but then stopped abruptly.

"What are you doing? Come on, this is no time for jokes!"

He looked down at his feet with dawning horror. A sparkly line of something ran across the polished floorboards.

"That's right, bitches," said Astor. "Silver." He pushed past Tennyson  to step in front of him. "Can't cross it, can you, you freaky, unnatural  beast."

Tennyson glared at Astor, ignoring me. I knew that, among other things,  silver obscured his cognitive function, confused him, but I wasn't sure  if that was why his attention was wandering or if he was just bothered  by what Astor said.

"Don't listen to him," I said, pushing the moldy cereal off the shelf.  "That thing about silver is just a folktale, it's all in your head." I  had no idea if that was true but it sounded legit. "Don't let Astor beat  you, you ninny. Just rip his face off!"

Astor laughed, a grating, ugly laugh. "Oh but he can't. Didn't you know?"

Tennyson's eyes went huge and all the color drained from his face.

"Oh, was it supposed to be a secret? But it's not. Not to the people who matter."

I had no idea what Astor was talking about. I'd never seen Tennyson  Wilde change before, that was true, but that didn't mean he couldn't.  The idea of Tennyson Wilde being unable to do anything he chose to  seemed preposterous. But the look on his face said otherwise.         

     



 

Astor laughed again. "The big bad wolf doesn't have any teeth."

"Shut up, Astor," I said. "Tennyson Wilde doesn't need to be a wolf to  lay the smackdown on you so put a sock in it. Literally nobody cares  what you think anyway."

He spun around to face me. "But they should!" he yelled. "I should be  number one! The king of this school! Captain of the polo team, the one  everyone looks to. But they just swoop in and take everything that's  rightfully mine!"

I rolled my eyes. Entitled white boys, is there anything more pathetic on this planet?

"And you!" Astor said, swooping down to pick me up. "You're even worse.  No money, no family, nothing. You come out of nowhere and act like  you're so much better than me?"

He squeezed me in his fist so tight I thought my head would explode.

"You're not better than me!" he roared in my face.

I was fairly sure the fact that I'd never cursed anyone with a  potentially fatal curse, or kidnapped anyone, or kicked a dog, were all  prime examples of why I was in fact better than Astor, but I couldn't  tell him so while my entire body was being crushed.

Tennyson Wilde roared, his eyes glowing as he tried to break past the  line of silver. I'd never seen him look so wolfy before and thought  vaguely that it really suited him. The silver thing was obviously a  physical barrier, not a mental one, because he looked to be trying very  hard to break through it, and I knew that he was headstrong enough that  he would if it was just a matter of will.

Astor moved around the room. I wasn't sure what he was doing, although I  was right there in his hand. The whole room was starting to get hazy as  I struggled to breathe, fought against the pressure squeezing the life  out of me.

"You want your stupid little girlfriend?" he yelled at Tennyson. "Come and get her."

He dropped me inside a glass box - a mason jar, I realized as he flipped  the lid closed. For a moment, my entire body cried out in relief that  he'd let me go, but not for long. The jar was sealed tight. Airtight. I  couldn't breathe.

I watched Tennyson Wilde continue to struggle as I fell to my knees,  banging on the side of the jar in the hopes of making a crack, just the  smallest crack to let some air in. The glass fogged up quickly and I  lost sight of the outside world. The last thing I saw was Tennyson  Wilde's face, contorted in anger.





Chapter 19


I woke up back on my shelf, feeling crappy but pleased to not be dead.  Someone had removed me from the glass jar - I assumed Astor because if  Tennyson Wilde had been able to reach me, I wouldn't still be there in  Astor's room. Tennyson was gone and so was Astor, so I set back to work  on my braided paper rope. One thing had become clear to me as my life  had been draining away in that mason jar, and that was that there were  some people in this world who had nothing to redeem them at all, no tiny  spark of goodness. Astor was one of those people. He would play with me  until he got bored of it and then he would kill me, and it wouldn't  even mean anything to him. He didn't see me as human, not as the same  species as himself. For him to kill me would be the same as me throwing  an empty candy wrapper in the trash. I had to get away from him, no  matter what.

I wasn't sure how much time had passed while I was unconscious, but it  was day, which meant that Astor was probably in class. I'd have a bit of  time before he returned. Folding the long bits of paper together was  time-consuming and physically awkward as I'd gotten even smaller, but at  the same time kind of soothing. It put me into some kind of meditative  state where I could see things objectively. From everything I'd read and  been told, magic was really just a way for power to be channeled that  had not been explored by science, but that didn't mean it didn't follow  the same rules of physics that everything else had to. In the olden  days, people had thought all sorts of things were magic, but it was only  that they didn't have the scientific knowledge to explain them. More  than anything else, people hated not being able to explain stuff, I  supposed, so if they didn't have the answer, they'd just make one up. I  didn't see why this should be any different. Wow, if I could understand  the principles of magic in a scientific way and explain them and prove  them, I wonder if I'd be heralded as some sort of genius. If you won the  Nobel, you got a cash prize, didn't you? Definitely worth the effort  then.

So, all I really needed to do was find the power that was making me  small and divert it to a different outlet. I assumed that the spell was  an ongoing thing, that my body was constantly trying to revert to its  natural state, so it would be a constant drain on the power source. It  was a massive assumption on my part, but I felt it to be true in my  bones, that I was constantly trying to grow, and that was why I had less  energy than usual. The smaller I got, the more tired I felt.         

     



 

It also made sense to me that the power source would be close by. If the  spell was ongoing, it would have to be close enough to me to not be  interrupted. I tied my paper rope to the brackets of the shelf, then  tied the other half around my waist. I don't know why - if I fell, I was  basically screwed - but people always seemed to do that when climbing  so I figured I should. I was a bit dubious that the rope would hold as I  climbed down over the shelf, gradually letting the rope go, running  through my hands as I lowered myself down. If it did break and I  splattered all over the floor, at least I'd be rid of Astor.