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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She wasn’t quite solid, I could see through her to the door behind, but she wasn’t exactly ghostly either, she wasn’t fuzzy or out of focus. She held my sword in her hand as if she were prepared to strike down anyone in her way. There was some sort of commotion behind me, but I ignored it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Is everyone okay? My father hasn’t…” I knew he’d attack at some point, it was always in the back of my mind. I’d just hoped I’d have all this dealt with first. Ideally, I’d be fully ascended and invulnerable, able to squish him like a bug.

“Everyone’s fine,” she said, her voice sounding a little drippy. She shook the sword at me. “We think we’re ready to open a secure doorway, but we need you there or the ritual won’t work.” She glanced behind me. “We could use their help, if you think we can trust them.”

I wasn’t sure but I nodded. “What do you need?”

She thought for a moment. “The portal needs to open somewhere safe. We can’t have any old bozo wandering through. Is Sam there with you?” She craned her neck to look around, as if he’d be hiding behind me or something.

“Not yet,” I told her. “I got knocked out during the escape and woke up back here. I don’t know if Sam got out.”

“That’s a shame,” she said. “But not a dealbreaker. It might be easier to have the portal stabilized beforehand anyway. We don’t want to throw anyone out to a different parallel world, and have to go through this whole thing again!”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Is that possible?”

She shrugged, which I took as a yes. “So, get your people to set up where you think is best and then haul that butt of yours home. Okey dokey?”

I nodded and she faded away.

When I turned back to the other four, they’d stopped arguing and were staring again.

“Did you get all that?” I asked them.

“You want our help to set up a portal from your world,” said Other-me. “What guarantee do we have that you won’t just march an army through and take over our world?”

I rolled my eyes. “We don’t want your crappy world.”

“We only have your word for that,” she said. “No deal.”

I shrugged. I didn’t exactly need her permission, so I turned to Althea and Tennyson.

“We’re in,” Althea said. “You helped us escape, so we owe you. But if you double-cross us, we will kill you.”

“Sounds fair,” I said, not doubting for a second that she meant it. “Do you still have the manor in this world?” I figured that would be the safest place to open the portal, but from the look on Althea’s face and the way Tennyson started growling, it seemed like a touchy subject. “Somewhere on the school grounds then? Maybe near the lighthouse?”

If Sam wouldn’t come willingly, I might need to restrain him, so being close to the magic door to my not-dad’s compound would be good for that, though I didn’t want to be too close and tip off anyone we wanted to keep from entering our world.

“If it’s too close to the lighthouse, there will be interference from the doorway to my father’s compound,” said Other-me, as if we were stupid for not knowing this already.

“I thought you weren’t helping,” I told her.

She waved a hand at me dismissively. “I just don’t need you causing any more trouble than you already have."

I turned back to Althea. “The clearing behind the house here?” I asked her.

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t see any reason why not, except…” She glanced over at Other-me.

Other-me huffed. “I’m not going to interfere in your silly little plans,” she said. “I’m too busy trying to fix the mess you made of my own plans. But at the first sign of funny business, I will shut this whole thing down so fast your head will spin.”

“Okay,” I said to Althea. “Let’s do this.”

As we turned to leave the library, Nikolai started to get up from his chair, but with a look from Other-me sat back down. This Nikolai was much more well-trained than the one we had at home, though I doubted I’d want to use her training methods.

“This is where I came through,” I told Althea and Tennyson, once we were outside. “Around here somewhere.”

We all stared at the spot, but there was no sign of anything magical.

Now that we were out of the house, away from Other-me and Nikolai, I took the chance to pump Althea for information. Out of everyone I’d met in this world, she was the one I trusted the most. Well, and Tennyson, but he couldn’t talk.

“So,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Things are pretty bad here? For lycanthropes, I mean. And magic users.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. The shrewdness of her look was so like my Althea that I almost felt like I was home.

“You’re really not from here?” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, if you’re planning to take down that establishment, count me in.”

“Establishment,” I repeated. Something about the word triggered a memory, but I couldn’t quite place it. It gave me a bad feeling though.

Althea nodded. “The Establishment. Your father… that man’s organization. The ones who rounded us all up like cattle when we were children and stuck us in those places to be their lab rats.” Her voice failed for a moment and I felt bad for bringing the subject up, just to satisfy my own curiosity. Tennyson moved closer to her, so that he was squished right up beside her. “There’s none of us left. Only what you saw at that place. My family, we hid. We were some of the last. Us, the Yorks, the Volkovs…”

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how little that helped. I reached out and took her hand. “I promise you, I’ll do everything I can to stop them. In this world and my own.”

She cleared her throat, then squared her shoulders. “What do you need us to do?”

I thought for a moment. I needed to get back home, and there was only one way for that. I only hoped this whole thing wasn’t going to end with permanent damage.

“Knock me out,” I told her.

She blinked at me.

“I need to be unconscious,” I explained. “So that I wake up in my world.”

She was still turning the idea over when there was a flash of movement to my left and Tennyson launched himself at me. I only had a moment to mumble, “thanks” before I hit the ground, my head bounced once and I was out cold.

“This is not fun,” I said, opening my eyes to Tennyson’s room, and my version of Tennyson and Althea staring at me. “Where’s Mrs Spencer?”

They glanced at each other.

“About that…” Althea said.

I pinched the bridge of my nose to stave off the oncoming headache. “Let me guess, she’s vanished, taking my magic sword with her?”

“I believe her intentions are good,” said Althea.

“I don’t,” said Tennyson.

“She literally just appeared to me and told me to come home,” I said. “Why would she do that if she planned to double-cross us?”

“I’m not sure she’s in her right mind,” said Tennyson.

I sighed. It was definitely easier to talk to other-Tennyson. He didn’t talk back.

“She’s never been in her right mind,” I said. “Not exactly. That doesn’t make her evil. She has the sword. She told me to come home so we could do the ritual to open the portal between our worlds, so if she’s betraying us, she must have said that to get me out of the way in that world, right?”

They both nodded.

“But will the ritual work without you?” Althea asked. “I thought you needed to be the one to wield it, since it came from your magic.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t exactly been in the loop about this,” I said.

“It’s mainly been Sam’s mother and Hannah working on it,” said Tennyson, narrowing his eyes in suspicion.

“I trust Hannah,” I said, and he raised his eyebrows. “Don’t give me that face, she wouldn’t betray us again.”

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t.

“Unless…” Althea said slowly. “I mean, the reason she tried to hurt us in the first place was because her father is missing. He’s never been found, not a trace of him.”

A terrible feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. “You think he might be there? In that world?”

“It’s not impossible,” said Althea.

“In fact, it’s quite probable,” said a voice from the doorway.

All three of our heads snapped around to stare at Hannah.

“Any trace of him, magical or otherwise, vanishes from this world at the exact same time. Even if he were dead, he’d leave a spiritual residue, but there’s nothing. It tracks that he might have fallen through a portal like Sam did, and for some reason, that world, in particular, seems to be the easiest to access from ours.”

Tennyson moved to stand up, maybe to throw her out, I didn’t know, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “You had enough going on and I didn’t want you to think I had a secret agenda or something.”

“Even though you did have a secret agenda,” Tennyson snapped, though he didn’t shake my hand from his arm.

“There’s something else,” she said, moving into the room to sit by my bed. “Don’t be mad that I didn’t tell you.”

“I can’t promise that,” I said. If my head hadn’t already started pounding and distracting me, I’d probably be mad already.

“The relic that Nikolai’s cousin is after, I think my father was after it too. I think that might be why he vanished.”

“Okay,” I said. It wasn’t something that I could compute at that moment. “And what exactly is this relic that makes everyone want it so badly? What does it do?”

It was probably something I should have asked Vucari before, though he was so cagey he probably would have just vanished into a cloud of smoke if I had.

“I don’t know,” said Hannah. “I know as much as you do, that it’s a lodestone.”

I tried to think back to what Vucari had said about it. He’d said I’d be drawn to it somehow, but I hadn’t felt any magical pull toward anything. Well, except for that time with the dripping, but that couldn’t have anything to do with it, could it? I sighed. If I knew anything about my evil dad, no matter what world we were in, he couldn’t resist a magical artifact.

You know where it is? Tennyson asked me silently.

I think my evil alternate dimension dad has it , I told him. But I don’t know how that helps us, with Hannah or Mrs Spencer or anything.

But it did remind me of something. When Mrs Spencer had appeared to me in the other world, her voice had sounded drippy. I’d assumed that was just how all spirits sounded but maybe not.

“I think I know where Mrs Spencer is,” I said. “But I’m going to need your help to get there. All of your help.”

I glanced at Tennyson nervously. He was so busy taking care of the pack, keeping us all safe from whatever my father might throw at us next. It felt wrong to ask him for more when he was already giving so much. He nodded, without a second of hesitation.

“Just tell us what you need,” he said, in a way that made my heart hurt from missing him. He was so present right then, so completely there with me in a way he hadn’t been since he’d become alpha.

If my suspicions were right, Mrs Spencer was in that temple, the spirit temple. I had absolutely no proof of it, but my gut said I was right. I knew she was able to get there, she’d been there with Tennyson and Vucari and I, kind of. Maybe she’d thought that, with the sword, she could get from the temple to the other world and save Sam without anyone’s help. That was the least nefarious reason I could think of for her to steal my sword and get me out of the way. There were a bunch of much worse reasons I could think of, but I couldn’t dwell on those. Either way, I needed to find her and get my sword back.

It took a few hours to prepare everything, but eventually we gathered in the clearing behind the house, the same place our counterparts were gathered in the other world, except here we had Hannah and Harper as well as Tennyson, Althea, and Nikolai. Hannah had been studying Mrs Spencer while I’d been world-hopping, so she was pretty sure the tea she’d brewed up was the same as the one Mrs Spencer had given Tennyson and me, only this time Althea and Nikolai were going to drink it as well. Hannah was staying behind to do the ritual on our home turf, and to stabilize the portal if we managed to open it. Harper was staying behind as a bodyguard for Hannah.

It went much more smoothly this time, with the four of us. Maybe because we were pack and trusted each other. Maybe because Mrs Spencer had been doing something to mess with us last time. Maybe just because I knew what to expect this time, but we seemed to be transported to that temple as soon as I set the teacup back in the saucer.

“Woah,” said Nikolai, looking around. “This place could really do with a makeover.”

Althea didn’t comment, but I could tell she was taking everything in to process later.

Tennyson didn’t let go of my hand as we looked around the temple. It didn’t take long to find Mrs Spencer. She wasn’t exactly hiding. She stood at a small dais at the far end of the temple, where a sunbeam shone directly down through a gap in the stone.

“I knew you’d come,” she said. “You’ve always been such a good girl. Your father never appreciated you, I always said so.” She stood casually, leaning her weight on my sword as if it was a cane and she were about to launch into a tap routine. At this point, I’d have barely been surprised.

“You lied to me,” I said.

She shrugged. “You figured it out though, didn’t you.”

I was starting to lose patience with her. “Quit playing, why did you lure us here? Why did you steal my sword? Why any of it?”

Her brow furrowed and she held the sword out to me by the hilt. “You’re afraid of your power,” she said. “I knew that if you were here, in this special space, a safe space, you could embrace your powers and become what you were meant to be.”

I shook my head. “I just want to get Sam back. I don’t care about any of the rest of it.”

“I want that too,” she said. “But I want so much more for you.”

I stepped up on the dais beside her and took the sword. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t care about any of that. What was the point if I couldn’t protect the people I loved? But before I could open my mouth, the beam of light hit the sword and Mrs Spencer began chanting something in what sounded like Latin, but who even knew with her.

I looked to Tennyson in panic and saw that the three of them were surrounded by beams of light as well.

Are you… I began to ask him, but I couldn’t finish the thought before the light bounced back from all four of us and converged into a central point. It was too bright to look at for a moment but it soon began to fade, and when it had faded enough to look directly into, I could see through it. On one side, I could see Hannah and Harper, staring with their mouths open through the light to us. And I knew that if I walked around the room to look into the light from the opposite direction, I’d see the other world version of Tennyson and Althea, in the same clearing.

“I knew you could do it,” Mrs Spencer gushed from beside me.

I reached out to grab her, to restrain her somehow, but she was too fast for me. She darted forward and into the light, circling around so that she entered from the other direction, into the other world. From beyond the light, I could hear her calling to me.

“Come on, you miraculous girl,” she said. “Let’s go find my Sam.”

The other three moved to follow her.

“Wait,” I called out, wanting to warn them that they’d come face to face with other versions of themselves, but they were too fast for me. I followed them through the portal and into the other world.