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CHAPTER NINETEEN

The others had not been slacking off either. Nikolai and Harper had coordinated with the rest of the pack, and they were all on standby whenever we decided to make our move. Sam, however, was absent.

“He’s decided to take himself away for a while,” Tennyson said. “We found somewhere that we think can help him, somewhere peaceful where he can heal.”

I was sad that he hadn’t said goodbye, but I understood.

Finding the physical location of a rift in reality was not as easy as you might think. The portal had been all flashy and obvious, but the rift wasn’t like that. It wasn’t really visible at all, except for maybe a slight ripple in the air, like the heat coming off a hot road in summer. And it wasn’t static, it was in constant motion.

There were a few magic users in the pack now, people who had been drawn to the safety of it after the High Council had fallen. One or two fae as well, though they mostly kept to themselves. All of our magic users were tracking the rift constantly.

My father wasn’t physically inside the rift. At some point he must’ve siphoned the energy from some spirit entities, and that had given him the power to travel outside of his body to some extent. We didn’t have anyone in the pack who was a refugee from the spirit realm, so that was where I came in.

I had to find my father inside the rift and remove him, so that the magic users could close it. Once I had him out, if possible, we’d contain him. That part of the plan was dicey. It wasn’t easy to contain someone without a physical body to hold onto. The main thing was getting him out of the rift, anything else was gravy.

The rift was still quite close to the manor, since that was where it had been opened. I wanted to get physically as close to it as possible, but everyone else thought it would be safer for me to stay within the manor, where so many protections were already in place.

Hannah made an extra protective circle around me, on the floor of Tennyson’s room. I sat at the center of it, cross-legged, and closed my eyes. Hannah and Althea stayed in the room with me. I didn’t want a bunch of people watching me do this. Tennyson had wanted to stay too, but there was too much for him to do, too many other people who needed him. And besides, he was always with me anyway. He didn’t need to be in the room.

It only took a moment to shove myself out of my body. I let myself float up, up, out of the room, out of the manor. I let my awareness expand outward, searching for the rift, for a sense of where my father might be.

It barely took a second. His spirit – if it could be called that – broadcast itself out like a siren, just as loud, just as jarring. He had twisted and mutilated the spirits of so many others in his quest for power, so it was no surprise that what he took from them was twisted and mutilated as well. He was like some sort of eldritch monster, grotesque and inhuman.

As soon as I became aware of him, I was there with him. I saw him from outside the rift, as he saw me from within it. His massive form writhed in amusement. Up close, he almost seemed to be a clump of tentacles, tentacles made from toxic fumes. They darted in and out from the central mass of him, squirming like a nest of vipers – just as fast, just as deadly.

If I’d been in my physical form, I might have wet myself. I was horror-struck. Next to him, I felt tiny, insignificant. Even with all my power, how could I hope to defeat that ?

It was only for a moment, but I was frozen in fear.

Then a part of me kicked into action. The part that I knew was her .

He had grown so large because he’d stolen power. None of it was his. His power couldn’t be united, not like mine was. My power was something pure and beautiful – the perfect blend of every part of a spectrum. His was like a child mixing together every color of paint until it became burple. A muddy, awful brownish-purple that you couldn’t make anything with, all you could do was wash it down the sink and start again.

He only looked scary, but I could look scary, too. I could look like anything at all. But I didn’t need to show off my power. I had nothing to prove, not to him, not even to myself anymore. I’d looked into the darkest mirror, and I’d embraced what I saw there. I was whole. I was united . And I was going to win.

I moved into the rift, toward the monster that was my father.

As I crossed into the rift from the real world, the air seemed to fizz around me. This place wasn’t right , it wasn’t natural. When we’d gone through the portal to the other world, it had been almost instantaneous, just a quick jolt as we’d passed through. Lingering there, though, it was obvious that this wasn’t a place that was supposed to exist. It was an in-between place, a nothing place. Being there made me understand what Althea had seen in her vision. It was what would happen if this rift tore wide open and swallowed our world.

I didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. Everything about the place was hostile, as if it was trying to rip my soul apart. I didn’t know how my father could stand to be in there for so long, but then, he was toxic and unnatural himself. Maybe he felt at home there.

But he couldn’t stay.

The closer I moved toward him, the smaller he got. It was like when the cave in the wall of Tennyson’s mind had grown large enough for me to fit through, only in reverse. Or perhaps I was the one getting larger. Either way, as soon as I got close to him, I towered over him. With all his hideous power, he was tiny. Insignificant.

I tried to grab him, but he slipped through my grasp. I had to stop thinking like a person and think like a spirit. The only thing I knew that could trap a spirit was a sigil – one of those weird symbols Althea used during the ritual, or Hannah drew on the floor in Wicca club. I didn’t know which particular sigil I needed. I could never memorize that kind of stuff like they could, but in that place, that unreality, the actual form of things wasn’t important. It wasn’t the shape of the sigil that mattered; it was the intent behind it.

I drew the sigil in the air, and it turned into smoke, wafting around him. Soon, he was barely visible from within the cloud of smoke, and I knew I had him trapped. He fought against it, struggled with every bit of his stolen power, but I used all of my will to hold him. I pushed him back toward the rift with all my might, and he resisted with all of his. He was strong, so strong. But I was stronger.

Finally, I had him there, right at the mouth of the rift. All it needed was one hard shove to push him back through to the real world.

YOU’LL REGRET THIS , he said, giving up the struggle and falling back through.

The moment he was out, I followed him. As soon as I’d passed through, I felt the magic users swarm to get the rift closed.

I was still in the spirit realm, my body safe back at the manor. I stretched out my consciousness as far as I could, but I didn’t sense my father anywhere. He’d returned to his body. He was out of my reach. For now.