The Wolf Read online

  The Wolf

  L.C. Mortimer

  Published by Sophie Stern, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE WOLF

  First edition. October 3, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 L.C. Mortimer.

  Written by L.C. Mortimer.

  Also by L.C. Mortimer

  Swords of Darkness

  Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse: Episode 1

  The Lost Fallen

  Outbreak: A Zombie Novel

  The Wolf

  The Wolf

  Enchanted Academy

  L.C. Mortimer

  Story copyright by L.C. Mortimer

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Author

  Hybrid Academy: Year One

  *

  Once upon a time...

  To taking chances.

  Boarding schools aren't for the faint of heart.

  Neither are fairy tales.

  A lot can go wrong in a fairy tale.

  You can have your prince stolen, your eyes poked out, or your parents murdered.

  High School is kind of the same way.

  Anything can happen, and usually the things that do won't lead to a happy ending.

  Hi.

  I'm Jessica.

  I'm the only non-magical student at Enchanted Academy, and I'm kind-of crazy about the school bully. I shouldn't be, but I am. That's high school, right? My school has a lot going for it, but there's also a lot going wrong. For example, my roommate's life is totally going up in flames. See, Wolf loves this guy, Red. She's totally fallen for him. She's like completely, absolutely, over-the-top crazy about him. This story is all about Wolf and whether she finally gets the nerve to make a move on Red. After all, high school is all about taking chances and chasing your dreams, right?

  There's just one problem.

  He doesn't know she exists.

  Prologue

  (From the closing of THE BEAUTY)

  Wolf stared at the cauldron in front of her. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. It should have been easy. Neat. Nice. The world was too messy for her taste, and that was the problem. She was supposed to be big and bad and wild, but things were just...well, they were hard.

  “Rough morning?” A familiar voice said, and she turned to see him. The boy with the yellow hair and the bright red hooded jacket smiled at her. It made her insides turn all gooey and mushy, and she hated herself for it.

  “You could say that,” she said.

  “Sorry to hear it,” Red said. He made himself comfortable on the stool beside her, and she couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited that he’d chosen her, out of all of the girls at the school, to sit by. Red could have any girl he wanted.

  Any girl at all.

  “Yeah, well,” she said awkwardly. “Mondays, am I right?”

  Inwardly, she cringed.

  Mondays?

  Am I right?

  Who talked like that?

  Definitely not someone brave and strong and worthy of carrying the Wolf family name. Definitely not someone like her. Natasha Wolf was a lot of things, but awkward wasn’t something she was striving for.

  “I feel you,” he said, and he looked down at his own cauldron. Red started grabbing ingredients and throwing things in as the professor started talking about their project for the day.

  “Miss Wolf?” He said suddenly.

  “Mr. Codsworth?” Natasha looked up at the grumpy little man. He’d been cruel and conniving since she met him as a freshman. He was the type of man who was mean for no reason at all except that it made him feel bigger and stronger than he actually was.

  Now he was staring at her cruelly, glaring at her. Obviously, he had said something that she hadn’t heard because she’d been too busy thinking about Red.

  “What do you think about that?”

  “Uh,” she blushed, because he wasn’t going to let her get away with it, was he? He wasn’t going to let her escape from his glare. Nope. Mr. Codsworth was going to make Natasha admit out loud that she hadn’t been paying attention, and oh, she hated him for that.

  Well, perhaps hate was a bit of a strong word.

  “Could you repeat the question, please?” She asked quietly. Her face was bright red. She could tell. The entire classroom was staring at her and Natasha wanted to sink down into the ground and just die. She wanted to disappear, to vanish from plain sight, because not only was she making a huge fool of herself, but she was doing it in front of Red.

  “Why, of course,” Mr. Codsworth said. “Were you having trouble paying attention?”

  “No, sir. I just didn’t hear the question.”

  “Well, it seems to me, Miss Wolf, that you’ve been having a lot of problems paying attention in class.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Why don’t you see me during your lunch period?” Mr. Codsworth said. “Today, and every day for the rest of the week.”

  She slumped down in her seat and stared at the cauldron in front of her. She mumbled that she understood, and Mr. Codsworth turned his attention to someone else, but it was too late. If Red didn’t know who she was before, well, he definitely knew who she was now.

  A troublemaker.

  Shit.

  Chapter 1

  “Five.”

  “Four.”

  “Five.”

  “Okay, three.”

  “Five,” Wolf said. I watched as she gestured toward the box of gingerbread cookies on the floor. “There are more than enough for everyone to have five and there will still be some left over to show your teacher.”

  Stacy, our roommate, pushed back her long hair and frowned at the cookies. She had spent the afternoon baking instead of attending class, and we all knew she was a little obsessive about the cookies she’d created. She was a little bit of a perfectionist and, according to her, these were the best cookies she’d ever crafted.

  “Everyone can have five,” she finally agreed. “And that will leave enough of the good ones for class tomorrow. But,” she held up a finger. “You have to eat the bad ones. That means you need to choose the cookies that are crumbling or that look a little defective.”

  Defective cookies?

  Was there really such a thing?

  “Whatever,” Wolf said, reaching for the cookies. Beauty and I exchanged knowing looked and followed suit. I wasn’t about to miss out on some witchfully delicious cookies. Not when it was spooky season at Enchanted Academy. The high school was known for being elegant and classy, but around Halloween-time, everything got a little spooky and crazy.

  “These are amazing,” I said through a mouthful of cookies. If my foster parents could see me now, they’d freak out. Eating with your mouth full was a quick way to get on the no-fly list in foster kid world. Nobody wanted a kid who didn’t have manners or who stuck out like a sore thumb. Here, though, I got to relax a little bit, and if I wanted to talk with my mouth full of delicious, savory cookies, well, nobody was going to stop me.

  “I know,” Stacy said proudly, watching us eat her creations. She looked very smug and very self-assured. Sometimes I wondered how my roommates all managed to be so confident all of the time. I constantly felt like a not-so-hot mess.

  “How did you get them to taste both gingery and sweet?” Beauty asked. She flipped her cookie over a few times
, as though doing so was going to let her in on Stacy’s secrets. The rest of us knew better than that. Stacy was the type of person who was very private, even to a fault. She’d take her secrets to the grave with her if she could. We all knew it.

  As expected, Stacy avoided Beauty’s question. Instead, she just shrugged and reached for her own cookie. She bit into it, satisfied, and then she started counting the cookies again.

  “If you’re so worried,” Wolf said, glaring at her. “Then just bake more.”

  “I can’t,” she said, looking up. “I’m out of...well, I’m out of something.”

  “Of what?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she snapped. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she stood up and grabbed the box. “Sorry. I’m feeling a little tense, I guess. I’m just going to go in my room now.” She took the box of cookies, went into the bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

  “Wait,” Wolf said. “We didn’t get five.”

  We heard the lock turn on the door in response. Wolf narrowed her eyes and glared at it. She’d been doing a lot of glaring lately in Stacy’s general direction. Things weren’t so good in roommate paradise these days.

  “Locked out of my own room,” she said. “Cool.”

  She threw her body back on the pillows that covered our living room floor and let me know that this was definitely, totally, absolutely not cool. None of it was. Stacy had been obsessing about her cooking class for awhile now, but I knew that Wolf had the same problem. They were in different classes. Stacy was in Baking With Spells and Wolf was taking a class called Cooking in Cauldrons. Her teacher was driving her crazy.

  Well, that might be a nice way of putting it.

  He was a total jerk to her.

  Constantly.

  “So,” I said, looking over at Beauty. She had been much calmer about her schoolwork ever since she’d returned to living in the suite with us. She’d vanished for awhile, caught in a world of magic and temptation. She’d been trapped in a case with a rose thanks to an ill-timed wish that hadn’t turned out exactly the way she’d thought that it would.

  “So,” she said.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “What homework do you have tonight?”

  “Well, I’m not taking any cooking classes,” she pointed out. “So not nearly as much as everyone else.”

  “Good,” Wolf said from her place on the floor. “Cooking classes are the worst.”

  “Why’d you sign up for yours, anyway?” I asked her. “You hate it. You don’t like the teacher. All you ever really do is homework for that one class.” The rest of her workload seemed easy in comparison, almost. Her cooking class had spiraled out of control, though. It was a nightmare that she hated, but Wolf couldn’t seem to find a way out of it.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. I made myself comfortable beside her. I didn’t like seeing my friend feeling so stressed or anxious. It wasn’t really fair that she had so much to deal with. We all had a lot of magical spells to learn and potions to create as students at Enchanted Academy, but somehow, things seemed worse than usual for Wolf. I hadn’t been a student long enough to know whether this sort of thing was normal, but it didn’t feel normal.

  It felt wrong.

  She sighed and looked over at me. For a second, I didn’t think Wolf was going to answer me. She could be closed-off sometimes, just like Stacy could, but Wolf was a bit more tender than our other roommate. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to tell me why she signed up for the class.

  “My mom,” she said.

  “Your mom made you take the class?” Belle asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “We’ve got all night,” Belle motioned to the empty space around the room. “In case you didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “So you can tell us. We aren’t going to judge you.”

  If there was one thing I’d learned since coming to live at Enchanted Academy, it was that other witches, and students of magic in general, could be quite fantastic. Oh, we all had our own little worlds we could get swept away in, but Wolf and Belle both seemed really trustworthy. I had the feeling that if I ever told them the truth about my own family, that they’d understand.

  At the very least, I didn’t think they’d treat me differently.

  That had to count for something.

  Back when I went to Millbrook High School, I never had friends like this. The people I knew were cutthroat. They’d do anything if it meant getting ahead of each other. I guess that was one of the reasons I was happy to transfer. Winning a scholarship to Enchanted Academy meant more to me than anyone would possibly understand. It meant that, for the first time, I could be in a place where I felt safe.

  Despite all of the adventures I’d already had and the dangerous spells I’d encountered – Belle did get trapped inside a glass box, after all – I really did feel like I was going to be okay. I felt like everything around me was going to be fine.

  I was safe.

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Wolf said. Her tone changed a little. She sounded...hesitant. She knew we weren’t going to judge her. She knew that we weren’t going to tease her or give her trouble. She knew that no matter what happened, we’d be by her side, so why was she afraid to talk with us about her class? About her mom? Surely her family wasn’t nearly as messed up as she thought it was.

  Then again, maybe it was worse.

  “Then what is it?” I asked. I looked at Wolf anxiously. She was a good person: a kind person. She wasn’t someone who deserved to have bad things happen to them. What could be wrong with her family that made her feel like she couldn’t drop a class she hated?

  It seemed to me that if she disliked her course so much, she should have the option of walking away from it. I knew that the administrators at Enchanted Academy were actually fairly calm and understanding. They were pretty much always willing to work with students who were struggling. I thought that if Wolf talked to them, they would totally be up for helping her find a solution.

  Wolf didn’t seem to want that, though.

  “I’m an only child,” Wolf said. That wasn’t really unusual. As far as I knew, Belle was an only kid, too. I definitely was. I mean, I’d grown up in foster care, so it wasn’t like I had been alone, but I’d never had anyone who was, you know, on my team. All of the people I met were having a terrible time with life. Everyone I encountered was struggling in the same way I was.

  “So?” I asked the question I was certain Belle was also thinking.

  “So, there’s a lot of...” She hesitated, searching for the right word. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what she was going to say. There was a lot of pressure? A lot of stress? A lot of anxiety? Being an only child probably had its perks, but I had a feeling that it also had its downsides and those could be truly incredible.

  “Chores?” Belle offered up helpfully.

  “What? No!” Wolf shook her head. She smiled, just a little. “That wouldn’t be so bad. If that was the only downside to being an only child, then I’d be set.”

  “Hey,” I frowned. “Watch what you say about chores.”

  I wasn’t exactly a big fan of them.

  Who was?

  “There are just a lot of...expectations,” she finally said. She breathed out heavily and frowned. She was obviously lost in thought. I recognized the look on her face. If we let her, she’d get trapped in the past, and I wasn’t ready to let that happen to my friend. Whatever she was thinking about, it was over now.

  Done.

  And she was safe here with us.

  “What does your mom expect from you?” I asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Everything,” she said. Wolf looked like she wasn’t quite believing that she was spilling her guts, but I mean, that was fine. That was one of the perks of having female roommates who were also into magic. They understood. At least, I hoped we
did.

  I was the least magical of the bunch.

  As in, I couldn’t do magic at all.

  I hoped that it didn’t matter to Wolf at a time like this. I didn’t think it did, but you could never really be totally sure. I’d come to Enchanted Academy on a scholarship and that was going to have to be good enough because it was all that I had. There was a part of me that wished desperately that I’d be able to learn to do some sort of magic. Anything would be acceptable at this point. It had been more than a month since I’d arrived, and I was still struggling with the most magic of tasks.

  My peers could do things like levitate objects.

  They could move books or tools or objects just with the right words or the right flick of their wands.

  Me?

  I was just glad I had stopped getting lost on my way to classes.

  “She expects that I’ll be a perfect witch,” Wolf said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is your mom a witch?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Wolf sighed.

  “What?” Belle asked. She shook her hair and her soft curls bounced, falling over her shoulders. She made being beautiful seem easy and simple.

  She made it seem like something she didn’t even have to think about.

  “She’s the head of a coven,” Wolf said.

  “Woah, seriously?” I asked. Even I knew that leading a coven was a big deal. A witch’s coven was like a special club or group of women or men or both. The people in a coven could get together and do magic or solve problems or work up enchantments and spells together, and because they spent so much time working as a group, they really began to understand one another in beautiful and magical ways.

  And their spells became stronger and greater over time. It was one of those things that non-magical people didn’t really understand.

  I hadn’t, at least not until I’d come to Enchanted Academy. Now I knew more about witches, warlocks, goblins, and ghouls than any teenage girl ought to know, and I was only a sophomore in high school. I still had plenty to learn.