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CHAPTER ONE

I stared at my doppelganger in horror. Something about seeing her there, in familiar surroundings, in my own world , kept me frozen in place. It was different from when it had been me in her world, somehow. Maybe because I’d been the one who was out of place then, so I couldn’t see how completely wrong it was.

“My lodestone,” she repeated. “Hand it over and I’ll be on my way.”

“It was never yours to begin with,” said Tennyson.

The calm, solid warmth of him beside me jolted me out of my shock.

“Counterpoint,” I said to her. “You fix whatever you did to Althea and give me back my powers.”

Even though I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I wanted my powers back, I definitely didn’t want her to have them. There was no scenario where that would end well.

Other-me sighed and rolled her eyes. “Look, I don’t want to be here longer than necessary. You’re going to give it to me sooner or later, so why not do it now before anyone gets hurt.”

Behind me, Harper began to giggle. It spread to Nikolai and Hannah, and soon enough, even Tennyson’s lips began to twitch.

She was just so cartoonishly evil, sitting there in the wingback chair beside the fire, spewing out threats, it was hard to take her seriously. Though, to be fair, she took herself seriously enough for all of us.

“You’re in my world now,” I told her, enjoying the look of confusion on her face at our laughter. “We do things differently here.”

“We should lock her up.”

I turned in surprise. I hadn’t noticed Sam come in. I barely recognized him; the expression on his face as he looked at Other-me was so cold, so filled with hate that it turned him into someone else.

Though he had a fair point, we couldn’t exactly have her running around, causing havoc.

“We should send her back,” I said. “If she’s not going to help Althea, there’s no reason for us to keep her here.”

Sam shook his head. “If we send her back, she’ll only hurt more people. We should keep her here and take your power back from her. Then we should leave her to rot.”

Even though I was no fan of Other-me, it hurt a little that he could look at her face – my face – and say that. It made me wonder if part of him hated me for finding him and bringing him back. He’d been so withdrawn since we got home that I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

At his words, Other-me gave a laugh. “You can’t honestly believe that any of you have the power to contain me, but you’re quite welcome to try. I could use some entertainment.”

I glanced at Hannah. She nodded, then faded back into the shadows. Other-me didn’t have a Hannah, and if she had, she’d have just drained her, then tossed her aside, like a used-up AA battery. She thought that stealing other people’s power would make her strong, but that wasn’t true.

It was cringe to say, but I knew that it was the people themselves who made you stronger, not their magical abilities. I wouldn’t last one minute without my friends, my pack, my family. She didn’t have that, so there was no way she could beat me, even without my powers.

“Okay,” I said. I could see Hannah moving from the corner of my eye, but didn’t want to tip off Other-me to what she was doing. “Stay here if you want. Do what you like, but I think you’re underestimating how easy you had it in your world, being a nepo-baby and all that.”

She sneered at me. “Everything I have, I took myself. My father never gave me anything…” She trailed off and her face relaxed, then broke into a smile. “ Your father, on the other hand… Well, who knows what he might offer me?”

The lights flickered, which meant Hannah was done. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if Other-me teamed up with my father, and hopefully, I’d never have to.

“Great,” I said. “Well, there’s the door. Feel free to use it.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “What did you do?”

I shrugged. “What could I do? You stole all my power, remember? You should leave while you have the chance.”

She stood up slowly, unsure of herself. As soon as she moved, the restraints snapped into place, magically binding her by the wrists and ankles.

“Do we still have that dungeon downstairs?” I asked.

“We sure do,” said Nikolai, sounding way too cheery about it.

Hannah and Nikolai herded her out of the room. Sam glared darkly after them.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Hannah will put up all sorts of wards. She won’t escape.”

He shook his head, but I didn’t know what else he wanted from me. We couldn’t kill her. Moral objections aside, if we killed her, my power might die with her, and everything we’d gone through would be wasted. He didn’t want to send her back, so all we could do was keep her prisoner. It was the only thing that made sense, anyway.

“Well, I like her,” said Harper. “She’s like you, only hilarious and stylish. So, not actually like you at all.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t you have classes, or something?”

“Don’t you ?” she said. “You’ve missed so much of this semester, with your swooning around astral traveling or whatever. You’ll be lucky to graduate at this rate.”

I glared at her, but she wasn’t wrong. I’d missed a lot. School just hadn’t been a priority for me, with everything else going on. The whole reason for coming to Amaris in the first place had been to get into a good college, but somewhere along the way, that had gotten lost. As things were, another four years of school after this seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

Tennyson must have sensed how I was feeling and reached over to take my hand.

“We’ll deal with all that later,” he said.

I nodded, and without needing to talk at all, we both turned and headed toward Althea’s room.

She was so still and pale, I could almost believe she was only sleeping. There were some marks on her skin, where the goop from Other-me’s experiments had stuck to her and just never faded. We’d tried to clean it off a bunch of times, but that just seemed to embed it into her skin. It looked almost like a weird-colored birthmark, except for how it shimmered with a neon glow. It didn’t make her any less beautiful; rather, it highlighted her otherworldliness.

“I hate this,” said Tennyson quietly.

Although he sat at her bedside every spare hour he had, he never took her hand or stroked her hair or any of the things I’d have done if it were my brothers lying there. That just wasn’t his way, and I thought maybe that made it harder for him. He scowled so deeply that his two eyebrows became one. A stranger might have thought he was angry with her, but of course, he wasn’t. Angry with himself, maybe. With Other-me, definitely. But mostly, he was just scared. We all were. Althea was our brain, our heart. Without her, everything seemed hollow.

“It reminds me of when Sam was ill, after… you know.”

As soon as I started speaking, I could have kicked myself. The last thing Tennyson needed reminding of just then was his mother’s death.

“It reminds me of when you were in that world,” he said. “You were so still, like this.”

“You’ve sat at a lot of bedsides lately.”

He nodded. “Too many.”

We sat in silence, staring at Althea’s face for any sign that she was still in there. As we sat, I thought about what Tennyson had just said.

“You don’t think she may be stuck?” I asked him, eventually. “Partly still in that world?”

He shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. All of this is so far out of my realm of experience that anything might be possible.”

I sighed. If Sam’s mother had still been here, I thought she might have a clue. My father probably would too, but no way would I let him know that one of our pack was so vulnerable. He’d never help anyway.

Althea had always been the one who knew what to research, where to find the right texts, or who to ask. Anyone else we could’ve turned to, my father had killed.

The only other person – if he was actually a person – was Vucari, Nikolai’s family associate. He’d never helped us, exactly, but he had directed me to the lodestone. He seemed to think the lodestone was the answer to all our problems, but I had no clue how to use it.

“I need to get my power back,” I said. I’d been able to heal Tennyson’s horse one time when it had been injured. It wasn’t the same thing, but maybe I could heal Althea too. “If I get my power back and learn to use the lodestone, I’m sure I can heal her.”

Tennyson put his arm around my shoulders. I slumped into his side.

“You don’t need to fix the whole world,” he said quietly. “At least, not all at once.”

We fell asleep sitting there like that, awkwardly perched on chairs at Althea’s beside, and it felt like the safest place in the world.