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CHAPTER THREE

“What were you thinking?” Hannah asked, handing me an ice pack for my head.

I’d dragged myself up the steps of the dungeon to the common room and alerted everyone to the escape.

“She clearly wasn’t,” said Sam.

I scowled at him and held the ice against the giant bump on the back of my head. Just because he hated Other-me, that was no reason to be mean to me. Even if she had escaped on my watch and was now out there somewhere, running amok.

“She obviously thought the stone might be able to conduct the power from Other-Lucy back to her,” said Tennyson. “It was a reasonable hypothesis.”

We smiled at each other shyly.

Nikolai caught us and narrowed his eyes. “What’s this, then?” he asked, waving a hand between the two of us. “Did you…” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, which we took as our cue to ignore him.

Hannah sighed and flopped down in the seat beside me. “It’s so easy to forget you didn’t grow up with all this. You never even learned the basics.”

“Basics?”

“Well, you know that magic is energy, right?”

I nodded, but it hurt my head, so I stopped.

Hannah furrowed her brow and chewed on her thumbnail, obviously trying to find a way to explain it to a dunce like me.

“It’s like feedback,” she said, finally.

“Feedback?” I said. “Like ‘nice paper, Lucy, but don’t forget your friend, the semi-colon – A-’?”

Hannah laughed. “No, like when Assistant Head Noel tries to use the microphone for morning assembly, and it makes that squealing noise. Or classic rock guitars.”

I nodded. “I get it. Kinda.”

“So, you and the other-you have the same energy signature, right? Which means you shouldn’t exist in the same place, but because you do, when you touched her, it caused this kind of magical feedback.”

I sighed. It made sense.

“But surely I touched her when I was in her world…” But when I thought back, I couldn’t think of a time when I had.

Hannah shrugged. “Even if you had, your actual body remained here, asleep. Whatever projection of you appeared in that world probably didn’t have the exact same energy signature.”

I shifted the ice pack on my head. The condensation was making my hair wet, and some trickled down my neck.

“So, I just won’t touch her again.”

“If we ever catch her,” said Sam glumly.

Hannah exchanged a look with Nikolai and Tennyson.

“It might be more complicated than that,” Hannah said. “The two of you simply aren’t meant to co-exist in the same universe. It’s against all the laws of nature and magic. She can’t stay here indefinitely.”

“So, what will happen if we don’t get rid of her?”

Hannah wouldn’t meet my eye. “Nothing good,” she said.

“It’s not exactly a common occurrence,” said Tennyson. “Everything written on the topic is pure speculation.”

I raised an eyebrow. Had he known this was on the cards? Was this yet another thing he’d been keeping from me?

He must’ve sensed what I was thinking because he shook his head. “It came up a few times when you were in that place and we were researching how to get you back, but because there was no reaction between the two of you, or any of us and our counterparts, I just assumed it was only speculation.”

“This is literally the last thing we need right now,” I said.

“We need to find her,” said Sam. “Before she hurts someone.”

He had a point. We couldn’t let her run around willy-nilly. Especially not with her wearing my face. But in the end, she wasn’t hard to find.

She was holding court in the dining hall. She sat at the table with Milo and Fatima, but they were surrounded by half our class, all hanging onto every word from Other-me’s mouth.

At our entrance, they all glanced over but then turned their attention straight back to her. Even though I was standing between Tennyson and Nikolai, who the lot of them normally fawned all over, they were still more interested in Other-me. Had she cast a spell on them? What was the deal with her?

She’d been stuck in a dungeon for days, and yet she looked immaculate. Glowing, even.

“Are they hypnotized?” I whispered.

“I think they just… like her,” said Tennyson. “There’s no trace of magic here.”

That seemed even worse, somehow.

“What’s our move here?” asked Nikolai. “We can’t exactly chain her up in front of all these people.”

“She’d do it to you,” said Sam.

I was all for it. I could quite happily club her over the head in front of the whole school and drag her away, but I didn’t want to get too close to her. The lump on my head was still quite painful.

“Let me handle this,” said Nikolai. “My other guy used to date her, right? So, she’s not immune to the old Volkov charm.” He smoothed down his eyebrows and started walking toward the table.

“This is not going to go well,” I predicted.

But I was wrong. He slipped into the seat beside her and within seconds, the two of them were laughing like old friends.

“Are we quite sure we brought the right one back?” I asked.

“Quite sure,” said Hannah, popping up beside me where Nikolai had been a moment ago. She’d obviously just finished with her part of the search, and we’d agreed to meet back here.

“You might not want to watch this,” I told her.

“I definitely don’t,” said Tennyson, turning away.

“We can’t just let her go unsupervised,” said Sam. “You don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“My sister has been lying unconscious for weeks. I know perfectly well what she’s capable of,” Tennyson said.

Sam looked abashed but stood his ground.

“Sam and I can eat down here,” said Hannah, pulling him into a seat. “We’ll keep an eye on them. You two go have your lunch.”

She waved us off, which is how I found myself awkwardly sitting across from Tennyson, picking at a plate of sashimi.

“Um,” I said. “Thanks for having my back, back there.”

He shrugged. He wasn’t normally that interested in food, but he seemed transfixed by his neatly-sliced tuna. “Sam was being unfair to you.”

I nodded. Sam had been through a lot and definitely needed help, but I didn’t know how to approach that with him without sounding accusatory, and I couldn’t talk to Tennyson about it in the middle of the dining hall, not when Sam had werewolf hearing. I didn’t even trust my mental connection with Tennyson, not when I knew Other-me could hear his side of the conversation. But when he glanced up at me, I knew he understood me.

“I’ll talk to him,” Tennyson said. “He’ll be fine.”

Warmth flooded through me at his words. Even without our bond, without anything, Tennyson still understood me. He stood by me. That was why it was so difficult to be apart from him.

I started gobbling down my lunch to hide my feelings. It felt disrespectful to the fishes to eat them so quickly. They were high-quality fishes and very tasty, but I was in no headspace to appreciate them properly. Not when Tennyson sat opposite me, being so sweet and understanding.

“I have to go,” I said. “I told Harper I’d sit with Althea because she’s got a math test this afternoon.”

I stood up before he could say anything and fled the dining hall.

I spent the next few days avoiding both Tennyson and Other-me. It was too hard to be around Tennyson and not with Tennyson, and I hoped that time would make that easier. Other-me was harder to stay away from. She popped up everywhere: the dining hall, the dorms, even my classes. I didn’t only want to avoid another bolt of magical feedback from her, I just straight up didn’t like her. And she knew it, that’s why she was always there, rubbing it in my face.

People seemed to think she was my identical twin, which I supposed was logical. But they also had the idea that I’d kept her prisoner and she’d only just escaped from my evil clutches. Which I couldn’t deny. It was technically true, but it had left out some key points. Not that I felt any need to defend myself to the student body. It just irked me that everyone had immediately taken to her when they’d immediately hated me.

Everything about her irked me. She was a very irksome person.

“She’s doing it to annoy you,” Hannah said, as we watched her in English class chatting to Mr Porter. Honestly, I’d have expected better from him.

“It’s working,” I said.

Other-me glanced over at me and raised an eyebrow, as if she’d heard me. And maybe she had, who knew what kind of stolen powers she had.

“No, it isn’t,” Hannah said sternly.

Other-me let out a fake-sounding laugh and clutched Mr Porter by the arm, in a very flirty way.

“He’s a teacher ,” I hissed. “She’s being gross.”

Hannah laughed. “Wait until she starts acting like that with your boyfriend.” She seemed to forget Other-me for a moment and turned to me. “Speaking of, I haven’t seen you and Tennyson together in the past few days. Is everything okay?”

I shook my head. “I can’t talk about it,” I told her. “But it’s fine, really.”

She didn’t look convinced but was distracted by a loud peal of laughter from Other-me.

“I need to figure out that lodestone,” I said. “The sooner the better.”