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CHAPTER TEN

Even though he hated it, after he read through all the research, even Tennyson couldn’t deny that our plan was the best that we had. Nikolai confirmed that the details from Mrs Spencer’s notes matched up with his uncle’s story. All we had to do was flesh out the details of how to get Other-me back, and we could get things moving.

That was, until Sam.

I’d just assumed he was off meditating or whatever it was that he did when he was avoiding us, but he’d been hanging out in the shadows, listening to the whole plan. He didn’t approve, but we didn’t realize that until the next day, when his mother’s notes and our research were nothing but ashes in the fireplace.

I hadn’t seen Althea truly angry, not until that moment. I’d seen her irritated, a little snippy, but when she realized what had happened, she was livid. Her cheeks, normally so pale, flushed scarlet. Except for the shimmer on her skin, which began to glow.

“What have you done?” she said through gritted teeth.

“What you all should have done when you discovered this ritual,” said Sam. “Burned every trace of it.”

He stood squarely in front of her, between her and the ashes in the grate, trying to keep her from any scrap of the research.

“You had no right,” she said. The glow was getting brighter. It surrounded her whole body and almost looked as if it was lifting her off the floor.

“She’s right,” I said to Sam. “We worked so hard on that research. If you had a problem with it, you should have talked to us about it, not just destroyed all our work.”

“Most of it was my mother’s work,” he said. “And she’s just as bad as your father. Just as bad as the Other-you. They’re all evil, Lucy. I won’t let you turn into one of them.”

I shot a glance at Tennyson. I knew that Tennyson had found Sam a therapist, a good therapist who was involved in our world, so that Sam didn’t need to hold back with them, but apparently, the therapy hadn’t been doing the job.

“This is bigger than just me,” I told Sam. “My safety isn’t worth more than everyone else’s.”

Sam just shook his head and folded his arms over his chest stubbornly. I couldn’t even see if there was anything left in the ashes to salvage, but Sam obviously didn’t want to chance it.

“For all you know, this was her plan all along,” Sam said. “To put you in this situation where you feel like you need her, and then what? You activate the lodestone, and then she steals it? Or you go through with the whole ritual, and you become her? Then she has everything, all of your powers, your life .”

Everything he said made me angry, because it was all the niggling doubts I had myself. Still, he didn’t need to be so high-handed about it.

“Well, what do you suggest we do?” I snapped at him. “I don’t see you coming up with any great plan. You’re too busy wallowing in your own misery to help us out.”

Tennyson drew in a sharp breath, and the glow around Althea faded a little. I guess my anger made her own fade a bit. But Sam didn’t even react.

“Well, that’s better than barreling ahead with the first stupid plan you think of. That’s what you always do, and every time things turn out worse than they had been to start with. But you just keep barreling on and on until everyone is either captured or killed, and then you look around and wonder why everything is so terrible. It’s terrible because of you , Lucy. Because you never stop to think how your actions will affect anyone else. As long as you and Tennyson are safe, you don’t care about anything else.”

I took a step back and held my hands up in surrender. I was so angry at him that I couldn’t even speak. I was so angry that if I opened my mouth, I knew I’d burst into angry tears, and that would make me even angrier.

“Right,” said Tennyson. “I think we need –”

But I never found out what Tennyson thought he could possibly say to de-escalate the situation, because right at that moment, Althea dropped to the floor and went into another seizure.

My anger was gone in a second, replaced by worry for her. This fit seemed even stronger than the last. I remembered what Nikolai had done and grabbed a cushion from the nearest chair to put under her head. Tennyson helped me roll her onto her side. She was breathing fine, not choking or anything, so we just sat close to her and made sure she didn’t hurt herself.

The seizure seemed to go on much longer than the previous one, and just as I thought it, I realized I hadn’t been timing it. I glanced at Tennyson, and he’d obviously just remembered too. He took his phone from his pocket and started a timer, but as soon as he did, she started shaking less, and after a moment, her eyes rolled back down and she blinked.

“Urg,” she groaned, trying to sit up. We pushed her back down to put her head on the cushion.

“What did you see?” Tennyson asked.

Althea’s eyes widened, and she tried to sit up again.

“Just relax,” I said. “Take it easy on yourself.”

“I can’t,” she choked out. “What I saw…” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I think what I saw, it’s what happens if the Other-you stays here. If you don’t do the ritual.” She drew in a shaky breath, then went on, her words tumbling over each other. “The feedback… it causes a crack in the world, like a broken mirror. Your father… or her father? No, your father, he uses her as a bridge between the two worlds. All of the power, from both the worlds… he absorbs it. He’s not human… he becomes something… something else. Everyone… Every thing is gone. Everything is dark, and there’s this smell, a terrible, terrible smell, like when your hair straightener is too hot and burns your hair, only a million times worse. It’s not hair, it’s energy, people’s energy. Like their souls but not their souls, their souls are all lost in the darkness. They’re empty, everything is empty except for him.”

What she was describing sounded so horrific that it was hard to fathom. I couldn’t imagine a world like that existing, not really. Still, I couldn’t help but shoot Sam an “I told you so” glare. Except Sam wasn’t there. I didn’t remember him leaving, but I’d been so worried about Althea, it could have been at any time. I glanced at Tennyson to see if he’d noticed, and he gave me a small nod, followed by a shrug. He was right. Sam’s whole thing wasn’t exactly a priority just then. He could wait, at least until Althea was settled.

“I’m okay now,” she said, struggling to sit up.

We helped her into a chair, then Tennyson turned out the lights, as they were too bright for her headache.

“When you feel up to it, I want you to write down every little detail that you remember,” Tennyson said. “We had no time with the last attack, but as we’ve not all slid away into an abyss just yet, we have a chance to prepare. I’ll go find Nikolai and see if he has any of the notes.”

I nodded. “I’ll write down everything I can remember from the notes, and I’ll look through the ashes to see if I can salvage anything.”

There wasn’t much left in the fireplace, a word here and there, but nothing helpful. I still had the photos on my phone that I’d taken of the book, and the beginning of the translation I’d made that first night, but we’d done so much work since then.

I couldn’t believe how stupid Sam had been, how reckless. I was still so angry with him. I kept playing back what he’d said to me on repeat in my head. How everything had been my fault. How everything I did made things worse. How I was so selfish. Did he really think those things? Deep down, sometimes I thought them about myself, but I hoped nobody else did. Did Sam blame me for all the things that had happened to him? All the torture, all the experiments? Had he been holding all that inside for all this time, just letting it fester?

“Stop beating yourself up,” Althea said, from where she was furiously writing on a piece of scrap paper. “He said some mean stuff, you said some mean stuff too. You were both angry, it happens.”

I sighed and moved back to the table with the few scraps I’d found in the ashes.

“I know, but he wasn’t entirely wrong.”

She shrugged. “And neither were you. It was a real jerk move he pulled, trashing our research. At any rate, if my vision comes true, you won’t need to worry about any of it.”

“That’s a cheery thought,” I said.

I was reading back through what Althea had written about her vision when Tennyson came back, followed by not only Nikolai but also Hannah, Harper, and Sam. I was surprised Sam came back so quickly. Whenever we’d fought as kids, real proper fights, he’d hide away from me for a day or two, then come back as if nothing had happened. This wasn’t like that.

“Read this,” Tennyson said, handing Althea’s notes about her vision to him. “This is what will happen if we don’t go ahead with this soul-merging ritual. I don’t like it either, but if this is the alternative, I don’t see what else we can do.”

I cleared my throat. He was talking as if it was something he and Sam were sticking their necks out for, but I was the one doing all the heavy lifting. None of them had to merge with their Other-selves to avert the end of the world.

“Of course, the final decision is Lucy’s,” he added.

“Both Lucy’s, actually,” said Nikolai. “The original ritual states that it needs to be consensual on both sides.”

I spun to face him. “Original ritual? You found your uncle?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I found a colleague of my uncle. He’s a little more reliable than my uncle, honestly, though a lot scarier.”

“What did you have to give him in exchange for the ritual?” I asked, remembering my original agreement with Vucari. People around Nikolai’s family always needed something in exchange.

“Not much,” he said with a shrug. “Something to do with your firstborn, but nothing serious. I mean, if the world ends, there won’t be any-born, I figured it’s a reasonable deal.”

“You’re letting my firstborn be eaten by vampires, and you figure it’s reasonable?” I asked him.

He waved me off. “He’s super old. By the time you and Tennyson get anywhere near making babies, he’ll be in the ground. And he’s not a vampire, or a cannibal, or anything else that eats babies… probably.”

“So, you have the ritual,” Tennyson asked. “You’re sure it’s right?”

Nikolai pulled up the notes app on his phone and handed it to Althea. “There were a few differences from what we had, but most of it is the same.”

Althea nodded, scrolling through. “Yes, this clears a few things up, actually. There were a few places where the translation seemed strange, but this is better. Much better.”

Nikolai nodded. “He said it was originally a Romanian ritual, back, way back before it was Romania, before it was even Moldavia, which was, I dunno, ages ago? Then the Romans took over, and I guess some old Roman guy translated the ritual. Who knows, it might’ve been translated a few times. Anyway, the old guys said that most of the details are just for show, the main thing is that you both stay on different sides of the mirror. No matter what. It has to be consensual, and you have to stay on different sides of the mirror. No looking directly at each other.”

“What happens if they do?” asked Harper, eagerly leaning in. “Do they explode, or turn inside out, or something?”

Nikolai shrugged. “Nope, he just said it wouldn’t work. And this is a one-off type of deal. If you mess it up, the lodestone loses all its juice.”

“And the world falls into darkness,” Althea added.

“Right,” I said. “Stay on my side of the mirror, got it. Now we just need to get her here and convince her to do it.”

And that might be the hardest part of all.