Page 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I opened my eyes, it was Tennyson’s face I saw again, but not feral and attacking. It was my Tennyson. I wasn’t lying on a forest floor; I was on a soft bed.

I grabbed him and buried my face in his neck, just breathing him in until my heart stopped hammering. In that moment, I didn’t care about the weird distance that had grown between us, the coldness. I didn’t care about anything except that he was there and he was safe.

Sorry , I said finally, but didn’t pull away.

You met the other me?

I loosened my grip on him so I could look into his eyes.

The only other times I’ve seen you so afraid is when you’ve thought you’ve lost someone .

I nodded. You were so…

I didn’t have the words. The way he’d looked at me, with no recognition. It wasn’t even that he’d attacked me. Tennyson, my Tennyson, was always so controlled, so composed, that to see him so broken was incomprehensible to me.

“You’re bleeding,” he said aloud, pulling his hand away from the back of my head and staring at it.

“I hit my head,” I told him, not wanting him to feel guilty for something his counterpart had done.

I let him fuss around me, dressing the wound on my head, making me a cup of tea and a little tray of cakes. For the moment, things seemed back to normal with us, the weirdness between us, if not forgotten, at least ignored. It was so nice to be there, to be with him, in my own world. I didn’t want to go back. But I had to.

“I think I found Sam,” I said, once I’d finished my cakes and everyone had gathered to hear my news. I told them everything that had happened since the last time I’d been back. Nikolai was disgustingly proud of his other-self, catching on to the fact that I wasn’t who I said I was. He also seemed to like the idea of purple camo.

“Okay,” said Althea. “While you were gone, I’ve tracked down the sword. My mother apparently had a lot of security around it but I don’t know why. We can’t get to it for a few days, there’s some magic protecting it that needs to be dispelled and it can’t be done until the new moon. After that things should be easier.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I told her.

I wished I could take them all with me to the other world. Things would be so much easier if I weren’t all on my own. Even if other-Nikolai would work with me from here on, which I couldn’t bank on, it wasn’t the same. It seemed such a cold, barren world, compared to this.

I spent a bit of time looking up ways to hack into security systems similar to my not-dad’s, since I’d need it to get into the dungeons, but mainly I just wanted to hang out with my friends for as long as I could before I had to go back, but eventually, I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I fell asleep with Tennyson’s hand in my own, and I wished I could wake up the same way.

When I woke, Tennyson was right beside me, but his hand wasn’t in mine and he wasn’t my Tennyson. At least his fangs weren’t out though.

I blinked and looked around, though there wasn’t much to see. We were in a small cave, or maybe just under the overhang of a big rock. It wasn’t just Tennyson and Nikolai, there were a few others huddled together too. I assumed they were the surviving test subjects. They were so ragged and filthy, that it was hard to tell their ages or genders, let alone species, and I’d been so focused on trying to find Sam, I hadn’t memorized the details of the other test subjects to give me any idea.

“You’re finally awake then,” said Nikolai. “I’ve been explaining how we saved their lives.”

I raised my eyebrows but didn’t correct him. He’d been very little help but there wasn’t much point saying so. At least he hadn’t stopped me, I supposed.

“I need to get to the dungeons,” I told Tennyson. “I want to free everyone there. Can you help me?”

He stared at me for a moment, then sniffed at me, before nodding.

“Thank you,” I said.

“His sister’s there,” said one of the others, an older man. “He can’t speak but she seems to know what he wants to say.”

“Althea?” I asked.

Tennyson’s eyes widened and he nodded.

“Take me to her,” I said, trying to stand up. I didn’t see any point wasting time, but as soon as I sat up, I felt dizzy and had to lie back down.

“You hit your head,” Nikolai told me. “Maybe you should take it easy for a minute.”

“Really?” I said. “You think we should just hang out here and wait for him to find us?” I gestured vaguely to the outside world and not-dad.

“Good point,” said Nikolai. “Someone help her up.”

Tennyson took me by the arm and helped me up, careful not to stab me with his claws. I wondered if he was half-transformed because of something not-dad had done, or if it was because he was in hyper-alert mode. It seemed kind of rude to ask though.

I thought Tennyson and I would go alone on the rescue mission, maybe Nikolai too, but all of the test subjects came with us. I wasn’t sure I could keep them safe, but I supposed they couldn’t be in any more danger staging a badly planned rescue than out there having inhumane tests run on them, so I didn’t protest. They deserved a chance to fight, if it came down to it. Something told me the tests I’d witnessed were only the tip of the iceberg of what not-dad had going on in this world.

My head throbbed as we crept through the forest, staying as low as we could. Every so often, drones flew over us, and when they did, we froze in place until they were gone. He obviously still had control over some of his systems, I wondered if that meant they were on a completely different server, and what that meant in terms of the dungeons.

Eventually, we came to a clearing in front of a sheer rock face. Tennyson led us around the rock face to the north, then motioned toward a concrete slab built into it.

“That’s the door to the dungeon?” I asked in dismay. There was a small sensor pad to the side of it, but nothing that was hackable. In terms of security, I knew it made sense, but it left me out of ideas. I pressed my thumb to the sensor, hoping maybe that would activate it somehow, but nothing.

“Great,” said Nikolai. “What now? If we wait around long enough, we won’t need to break in, we’ll be given an escort right through those doors and into some disgusting little cell.”

Even though Nikolai was annoying, something he said sparked my brain. Mrs Spencer. She’d been in that cell back at Wilde Manor, and had just blipped out of it as easy as anything. Surely, I could do that too. She’d implied it was something to do with having spirit powers, so theoretically, it should be possible for me.

I shushed Nikolai and rested my hands against the concrete door. Technically, I wasn’t even in this place at all, I was back in my own world. That meant that I wasn’t physically standing there at all, it was just my consciousness, and my consciousness wasn’t bound by the laws of physics. The door existed in physical space, but physical space wasn’t a barrier to something with no physical form. I just had to project my consciousness through that door, and my body should go with it.

Deciding it was better not to overthink it, I closed my eyes, and mentally took a step through the door.

I didn’t expect it to work, not really, but when I opened my eyes, I was looking down a dark, concrete corridor. I blinked. That was actually insane. I’d just brain-walked through a door.

There was a panel on the left side of the door, with a big green button below it, so I pressed it and the massive door began to rise. Some of the others seemed hesitant to come inside, which was understandable, if this was where they’d been locked up. Nikolai wasn’t one bit worried though, he marched inside, glaring at me the whole time.

“What exactly are you?” he demanded.

I shrugged. “I don’t even know.”

“You just walked through the door ,” he continued. “The giant, very solid door.”

“Did it look awesome?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Of course it did. You walked through a door. ”

I turned back toward the others. “You don’t have to come in, if you’re not comfortable with it.” I mostly addressed Tennyson, because he was Tennyson and I could read him best, but I made sure they knew I included them all. Some of them seemed traumatized, but aside from their own wellbeing, I didn’t want any of them to freak out at the wrong moment either. It could be the reason we got caught.

But when I headed further into the building, they all followed me. It was better than staying out there and being hunted through the forest, I guessed.

The corridor was dim, and everyone else seemed to have trouble seeing where we were going as well, which I took to mean that the light there was somehow anti-paranormal vision, though I couldn’t even begin to fathom how that would work, or what other technology my evil not-dad might have developed.

I put it to the back of my mind and tried to focus on navigating the maze of tunnels. At the first T-junction, I started to turn left, thinking that would take us deeper into the mountain, so deeper into the structure, but other-Tennyson tugged on my elbow and gestured toward the other direction.

“You’re sure?” I asked him. “That’s where the other prisoners are kept?”

I wasn’t sure if lycanthropy worked the same way in this world, but if so, he’d be able to sense where Althea was, at least. I followed Tennyson, who led us along the corridor and down several flights of stairs. The light in the stairwell was a sickly green and it smelled like decomposing meat, so we hurried down the stairs as fast as we could.

When we got to the bottom of the stairs, there was another of those big doors with only a sensor to open it, so I brain-walked through it again. I wanted to keep my eyes open this time, but chickened out at the last minute, thinking I’d probably just hit the solid door if I could see it. That was definitely something I’d have to work up to.

The next floor down was even darker and more labyrinthine than the upper floor had been, to the point we were blindly following Tennyson. It crossed my mind that he might double-cross us somehow, but I just couldn’t believe it, not of him.

I had a vague sense of the doorways we passed having people behind them, without really thinking about who it might be, but as we turned yet another corner, down another hallway, something stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t anything to do with my powers, but somehow, I just knew.

“He’s in here,” I said, and without waiting to see if I was right, I closed my eyes and walked through the door and into the cell.

Even though I’d known Sam was in there, I was still shocked to see him. Not as shocked as he was to see me though. He scrambled back into the corner and started yelling hoarsely.

“Sam, it’s me,” I said softly, trying to approach him without spooking him any more than he already was. “It’s Lucy, your Lucy.”

He stopped yelling, but he looked terrified. In the darkness, he was all big, frightened eyes. I reached out and tried to touch his hand but he pulled it out of reach.

“I’m here to help you,” I told him. “I’m here to take you home.”

At that, he seemed to calm a little.

“No,” he said firmly. “You shouldn’t be here.”

I shook my head. “You don’t understand, Sam–”

“No, you don’t understand, Lucy,” he said, more coldly than I’d ever heard him speak. “Get out! Leave me alone!”

I had so many questions for him, arguments to make to him, but before I could speak again, an alarm started blaring all around him.