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CHAPTER EIGHT

It was the biggest attack my father had made yet. He’d wiped out nearly all of what had once been the Ellis pack. The only person who had escaped was this grumpy old guy, Franklin, and he was pretty messed up. They’d left him for dead; that was the only reason he was still alive. His report was chilling.

“He appeared out of nowhere,” Franklin said, sounding more rattly than ever through Tennyson’s phone speakers. “It was just him, him and that girl. You said we could trust her. You… you…” He wheezed loudly, then the wheeze turned into a cough. We waited for him to get his breath back, then he went on. “They appeared. Didn’t even say a word.

“I was in the main hall, so I saw ‘em as soon as they showed up. He started glowing, all green, then it felt like the air was gettin’ stripped right out of my lungs. Only it wasn’t just the air, and it weren’t just my lungs neither. Dunno if it was my soul or the lycanthropy or what, but everyone around me just dropped, and I dropped too. Couldn’t help it, it was like he was controllin’ us or summut.

“Anyways, I dunno why it is I survived and none of the others made it. Maybe I don’t have enough life left to make it worth takin’. Maybe he got what he needed and moved on. Alls I know is that everybody I ever cared about is dead and gone. Now I gots to go and try to clean up. I called in to you right away, seeing as you’re the big alpha now, but I got a stack of bodies here and no clue as to what to do with them. It's the whole pack, everyone…”

His voice broke off then, and Tennyson jumped in to say he was sending people out to help. He glanced over at me, and I could read his expression clearly. What help could we really send? We couldn’t bring his whole family, his whole pack, back to life. We couldn’t undo everything my father had destroyed.

Franklin said one more thing before he signed off. “I don’t got much life left in me, I know that. But whatever’s left, I’m gonna use it to bring him down. So if you’re making plans, make sure to include me in ‘em. I’m gonna end that man, if it’s the last thing I do.”

After the call ended, after Tennyson had sent out a team to help old Franklin bury his pack, we sat around the Golden common room in silence, lost in our own thoughts.

There were so many unanswered questions. What was my father doing? How was he doing it? Why had he taken Other-me with him? Was it just to destabilize my position in the pack? Had she sold us out, or was she still playing along?

My father had obviously found a way to block the pack bond, because nobody else felt it when he attacked, and normally the death of a pack member would be crippling to everyone. Not even Tennyson had sensed it. My father was clearly disrupting their lycanthropy powers somehow, but was it because he was stealing that power before he murdered them? If he was stealing their power, did he really need to kill them as well, or was that just his idea of fun?

Althea groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “What’s the point in these stupid visions if they come too late to be any help?”

None of us had any answers for her.

Eventually, we stopped wallowing and turned back to research. At least that gave us something to think about, other than a bunch of questions with no answers. Tennyson seemed distracted, understandably, and when I glanced over at what he was scribbling in his notebook, it wasn’t a Latin translation; it was a list of defensive tactics he wanted to employ.

It really was a lot to rest on his shoulders. From what I knew of his mother’s time as alpha, the worst she’d had to deal with was a few inter-pack squabbles. Nothing like an all-out war against her entire species. He was so young, so inexperienced. It wasn’t fair for all this responsibility to be dropped on him.

It made me more determined than ever to figure out the lodestone.

Over the next few days, Tennyson put his new tactics in place. Rather than living in a huge, communal house, like the Ellis pack had, and a lot of the Wilde pack did, he wanted people to stay in smaller groups. Werewolves preferred to be close to their pack members, but it was just too dangerous now. My father couldn’t be in multiple places at once, so the more locations everyone was spread across, the fewer people he could hurt.

Tennyson also increased security, both physical and magical. Different sections of the supernatural community were wary of each other, in general, but everyone was starting to see the sense in working together. Witches and werewolves, even some of the fae were helping each other out. It was as if the scale of the attack on the Ellis pack had shaken everyone so much that they didn’t know what was normal anymore; they only knew what was helpful. And Tennyson was the one orchestrating the whole thing. It was amazing. He was amazing.

The research on the lodestone was coming together, but I wasn’t sure I liked what we were finding. Althea and I didn’t discuss it, but there were a few passages in particular that took a dark turn. She’d say, “Did you check that this is the only definition of this word,” or I’d say, “This can’t be right,” and we’d exchange a look .

Of course, it was Nikolai who spoke it aloud.

He swaggered in one evening after a date with Hannah. Since I was always at the Golden House these days, the two of them were making full use of my absence in our dorm room. I didn’t want to think about it, but his self-satisfied smirk gave me the creeps.

He sat down with us and poured himself a glass of water from the carafe in the middle of the table, then started flicking through some of Althea’s notes. I didn’t pay much attention to him until his chair scraped and fell over when he jumped to his feet.

“This can’t be right,” he said, pacing as he shuffled through the pages. He glanced over at me and then back down at the papers.

“You’re being awfully dramatic,” said Althea, not looking up from the book she was reading through.

“Not dramatic enough,” he said. “Is this accurate? Do you know what this means ?”

Althea set her book aside with a sigh. “It obviously means something to you, so why don’t you sit down like a normal person and tell us.”

Begrudgingly, he picked up his chair and sat back at the table.

“You know that my family has some unsavory connections,” he began.

We nodded.

“We’ve had some dark magic users, even a few on the Dark Council. In-laws mostly.”

“Get to it,” said Althea. “You’re not on trial. We don’t care about your evil family.”

“Most dark magic is about causing pain or harm, obviously, but there’s a branch of esoteric study that’s about tapping into the darker parts of yourself and using that power. Rage, fear, hate.”

I nodded. “The path to the dark side, these are,” I said in my best Yoda voice.

Althea shot me an odd look. She really had a lot of gaps in her pop culture knowledge.

“This ritual,” Nikolai said, tapping the pages, “goes one step further. It talks about soul absorption. Merging another soul with your own to take on its power.”

“Do you think that’s what my father is doing?”

It sounded like what Franklin had described, like his soul being sucked out, but Nikolai shook his head.

“No. Whatever he’s doing is evil, but it’s not this. I heard one of my uncles talking about it once when he was drunk. He hadn’t done it, but he said he’d seen the ritual take place and there was no body left at the end. The second person just completely merged with the first. They became like a hybrid person. He was pretty drunk, so the details were sketchy, but it sounds a lot like this.” He tapped the notes again.

Althea and I exchanged a look. That was what we’d feared, but we’d been trying to find some other explanation, some mistake in our translation. I needed my power back to use the lodestone, but to activate the lodestone, I needed the power. Other-me had my power, so I needed to absorb her, and then I could use the lodestone freely.

“I’m sure there’s another way,” I said. “I mean, worst comes to worst, we get her to activate the stone, knock her out, and I take the stone, then I get my powers back from her. This can’t be the only solution.”

Althea nodded. “After all, you were able to use the stone and the sword to come back through the portal to our world, weren’t you. And who’s to say that this is the only text on the lodestone?”

“Right,” I said. “Exactly. I mean, why is this soul-absorption ritual even in with the text about the lodestone? It’s a highly specific situation that I’m in right now. How many people, when wanting to use a lodestone, have an evil twin on standby, especially one who has stolen your powers? Seems sketchy to me.”

“It’s not sketchy,” said Nikolai. “It’s prophetic.”

I snorted. “More like pathetic. And who’s to say that curator guy didn’t just plant this text there for me to find, for his own nefarious purposes? He led me right to this very book. That’s a much more likely scenario than anything you’re saying.”

At this, Althea shook her head. “No, I can’t believe that. The curator has been with our family for a very long time. Centuries, I think. He’s always been incredibly principled. And very protective of the books. He wouldn’t let you near one of the ancient texts unless it was very important. If he had planted the information, he’d have done it using a less precious book.”

It was all too much; it made my head swim.

“I mean, how would it even work?” I said. “Assuming it’s the only way. Assuming we can even get her back and convince her to go along with it. Would it be like when I eat a triple mega cheeseburger and feel uncomfortable for a few hours, then digest it? Or would she be a second consciousness inside my head?”

I definitely wouldn’t like that. Her voice was annoying enough when it was external, but at least then I could get away from it.

“I don’t know,” said Nikolai. “But probably not the cheeseburger thing.”

“I should go back to the manor,” said Althea. “Now that we have more to go on, I can ask the curator for more specific texts. And Nikolai, can you get in touch with your uncle and see if he remembers more about the ritual?”

Nikolai nodded and pulled out his phone. “Sure, but he doesn’t make a lot of sense most of the time.”

“What should I do?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Think of a way to convince the Other-you to go along with it, I guess. That’s going to be the hardest part.”