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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When we woke, the world was in chaos.

I’d known that Althea and Hannah were being cagey when I’d asked them about the crack in reality. It was bad news. Or, as bad as news could be over a slap-up breakfast banquet like the one laid out in front of us.

“Don’t be mad,” said Althea, pushing a stack of pancakes toward me. “I’d known it was likely to happen once the ritual began, but I thought I’d taken enough precautions to contain the crack.”

“It was your father,” said Nikolai, through a mouthful of toast. “He’s always one step ahead of us. Why did you not inherit his genius?”

I shrugged, piling berries and syrup onto my pancakes. “Other-me did, and now she’s all up here, in the old noggin.” I tapped the side of my head, but my finger was sticky.

“How’s that going, actually?” asked Hannah.

“Seems fine,” I said. “Not sure yet, but don’t change the subject. What did my father do?”

“He must have known that once the Other-you escaped, more cracks would appear. He just waited for it to happen, and once it did, he pounced.”

“Bam!” said Nikolai, slapping his hand down on the table, making us all jump. “Like a jaguar!”

“Someone take that jug of syrup away from him,” Althea said. “He’s had too much sugar.”

I reached for another pancake. But there were waffles too. Could you put a pancake on top of a waffle? Would that be weird? Only one way to find out. There was bacon too. Tennyson handed it to me before I even asked.

“So, my father pounced on the crack… sorry, can we stop calling it a crack?”

“Makes it sound like a butt,” came a voice from under the table.

I knew who it was before I bent to look down there.

“Hamish, what are you doing down there?”

To be fair, Fletcher was there too. They’d swiped a few plates of food and sat cross-legged, feeding their faces and eavesdropping. It was a wonder we hadn’t heard the noise of them chewing.

“What do you expect us to do?” said Fletcher. “You never tell us the good stuff.”

“Yeah,” said Hamish, with a mouthful of chewed sausage. “He’s our dad, too. If he’s doing evil stuff, we gots to know about it.”

“You don’t gots to know anything,” I said. “Where’s Liam? Why isn’t he keeping an eye on you?”

Hamish shrugged and took another bite of sausage.

“Please, Lucy,” said Fletcher. “We were just worried about you.” He gave me his best puppy dog eyes, and it almost suckered me in.

“No, we weren’t,” said Hamish, ruining all Fletcher’s good work. “Lucy’s got superpowers. We just wanted all the juicy details. Amy from the kitchens said you was all covered in blood and crawling around the halls like the girl from The Ring , is that true? Were you covered in blood because you ate someone? When can I start learning magic too?”

I looked at Tennyson helplessly.

“May as well let them stay,” he said. “It’s better they hear the real story instead of these fictions.”

“Fine,” I said, over their cheering. “But come up here and sit at the table. And bring your manners!”

“Where were we?” I said, once the boys were settled.

“At the crack,” said Nikolai, with a snort.

“Fine,” said Althea. “Let’s call it a tear then, or a rift. It all means the same thing. Your father started to wedge it open.”

“Like in your vision?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’m sure that’s what he intended, but because the ritual had already begun, he couldn’t form a bridge between the worlds. I have no doubt that’s what he’s working on right this minute. I’m not sure what he plans is even possible anymore, now that the ritual has been completed, but the rift is still big enough for him to do a lot of damage with it nonetheless. There’s no precedent for this, so we don’t know how far he can push it, but obviously we need to stop him.”

I glanced around the table for where my brothers had found those sausages, but the serving plate was empty.

“So, what do we need to do? I’m not sure what I’m capable of yet, but I can probably zap him with my brain or something.”

I glanced around the table, but nobody met my eyes. Well, nobody except Hamish, who gave me a big thumbs up. Maybe not the best plan then.

“I think first we really need to discover what you are capable of,” said Althea, exchanging a glance with Hannah.

I could see their point.

“You’re worried about how much of Other-me is in here?” I said.

“Obviously there’s not a lot,” said Harper. “Considering how badly you still dress.” She laughed at her own joke.

I waggled my fingers at her, making them glow. She stopped laughing.

“It’s a valid concern,” said Sam. He hadn’t looked at me once since the ritual. I wondered if I’d lost him forever, now that part of her was in me.

“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t know how I’d prove to you that I’m the same person as before.”

“Well, you haven’t run off to that other world yet, so that’s a good start,” said Althea. “I suppose it will just take a little time to build up trust.”

“How much time do we have?” I asked. “I’m sorry, I understand why you’re all wary. If it were the other way around, I would be, too, but we’re on a deadline here. You should know enough by now to not underestimate my father. He’ll find a way to tap into that power. We need to stop him before that happens, and if that means I have to go rogue and lose all your trust, well, I wouldn’t like that, but it would be better than the alternative.”

“I trust Lucy implicitly,” said Tennyson.

I smiled at him.

“No offence, buddy,” said Nikolai. “But we can’t be sure you’re thinking clearly when it comes to her.”

Tennyson stiffened in offence. “You think I don’t know with whom I share a soul bond?” He always went super formal when he was angry. “Do you imagine that our sacred bond is something so easily hoodwinked? That I am?”

Nikolai grimaced. “I said ‘no offence’.”

“I trust Lucy implicitly,” Tennyson repeated. “And I am the alpha of this pack. Does any at this table question my command?”

Hamish opened his mouth, and I shot him a look. He made like he was just stuffing more food in there, but I wasn’t fooled.

“Very well,” Tennyson continued. “We don’t have much time, but we need to be prepared. While the rest of us are co-ordinating our attack, Althea and Hannah, I’d like you to work with Lucy to test her powers. We need to know what she is capable of, as well as what her limits are.”

He glanced between Sam, Nikolai, and Harper, and I could tell he was trying to decide which combination of the three would be the least damaging. It was a tough call. I felt like all three were fairly opposed to me at the moment, but I doubted they’d actively work against us. Except for maybe Harper.

“Nikolai and Harper, the two of you are best at strategy. I want you to liaise with our other teams and figure out a way to approach this.”

The two of them preened at Tennyson’s praise.

That left him and Sam.

I’ll talk to him , Tennyson told me. I’ll make him understand that you’re not her .

We all moved to stand up from the table, but Hamish cleared his throat loudly and raised his hand, as if he were in class.

“Excuse me, Tennyson Wilde,” he said. “What about us? We want to help, too.”

Tennyson took a moment, as if he were thinking it over carefully. “First, I want you to go to the kitchens and tell Amy that she shouldn’t be making up stories. Then I want the two of you to go back to your rooms and find every piece of information you can about your father. Anything he might have sent you, the times and dates he’s contacted you, everything. Even if you think it’s not important.”

The two of them nodded eagerly.

“Can we go through Liam’s stuff?” asked Fletcher.

Might be a good idea , I told Tennyson, though I’d never say it aloud. Liam’s been kind of hostile lately. I’d like to rule out my father as the reason.

“You can,” Tennyson told them. “But only if you make sure he doesn’t know about it. It’s a secret mission, got it?”

They were so happy to have a secret mission that they rushed off without even finishing the food they’d piled on their plates.

I was dreading the moment when I’d have to test my powers, but when it came down to it, it was incredibly easy.

When I thought about dark magic, it was along the lines of curses, inflicting damage, that type of thing. I told myself that I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but that wasn’t true. When I thought about my father, all the things he’d done and the people he’d hurt, the dark magic rose to the surface along with my anger.

I let it wash over me, that desire to inflict pain, to wipe my father from this world. It wasn’t only the dark magic that I was feeling, I realized. It was all the magic combined. I understood it in terms of light, of how we see color. We perceive the color white when all the colors are mixed together equally in the light spectrum. I mean, it probably wasn’t the same in a scientific sense, but it helped me to think of it that way. All my other powers were the different colors, but because they were channeled through the lodestone equally, they became this other power. That was what Mrs Spencer had meant by a “united being”.

“Uh, Lucy?” said Hannah.

I opened my eyes and found that I was floating a few feet above the ground.

“Woah,” I said. “I can fly?”

I couldn’t fly. When I tried to propel myself forward, I fell back on my butt. Still, the levitating thing had been cool.

“Honestly, I feel like I have a decent handle on all this,” I told them.

“We haven’t fully tested your limits,” said Althea, all business as usual.

“I’m not sure she has any limits,” said Hannah. “Apart from flying.”

“It’s time,” I told them. “I need to finish this. I’m ready.”