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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Thankfully, not-dad’s office was dark and empty when we emerged through the portal.

“Nice one,” I told Mrs Spencer, as she shook my fake finger at me.

I moved to not-dad’s computer and opened up the security system. I clicked through the different buildings, until I got to the prison. All of the cells were unlocked, which I took to mean we wouldn’t find Althea and Nikolai there. I glanced over to other-Nikolai, who was looking at the screen with a furrowed brow.

“Maybe they’ve escaped,” he said.

“Or maybe she’s got them in her secret laboratory,” I said.

“Or her father does,” said Mrs Spencer.

“This speculation doesn’t help us,” said Tennyson. “I can find Althea and Nikolai through the pack bond, but that won’t help us with the sword.”

“So, it’s plan B then,” I said.

Plan B was to lure out Other-me using our telepathic connection as bait. If she knew I was there, she wouldn’t be able to resist a chance to resume her experiments.

Tennyson nodded. “We’ll get everyone else out first,” he said. “Then you and I will get the sword. Nikolai, can we trust you here with the portal?”

He nodded and took the fake finger from Mrs Spencer.

“If I ever find out you’ve done something creepy with that,” I told him.

He laughed. “You won’t find out.”

I poked my tongue out at him and the three of us left. I really hoped he didn’t double-cross us.

We followed Tennyson down the stairwell, not trusting the elevator. Even though I knew his pack bond would lead him right to Althea and Nikolai, it wouldn’t take into account the maze-like layout of this place, and it wouldn’t lead him to other-Tennyson either. I hoped we’d be able to get everyone out, but with every step I took, I fought down panic. It seemed like every time we came to this place, we just made things worse for ourselves.

We found Nikolai so easily that I was sure it was a trap. He was locked up, yes, but the room was quite nice and he was fast asleep in an extremely comfortable-looking bed.

Tennyson kicked the door in easily, which I had to admit, was a little bit hot.

Nikolai jumped up, startled, but relaxed when he saw it was us. “Finally,” he said. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten me.”

“Do you know where they’re keeping Althea?” Tennyson asked, easily breaking the bed leg that Nikolai was chained to. He was really tapping into his caveman side. Even though it was hot, it wasn’t like him.

Nikolai put on his shoes, tucking the end of the chain into his sock on the side that still had the manacle around it. “Nope. They still think I’m the other one, so they just shoved me into one of the guest rooms and forgot about me. They tried questioning me, but I just played dumb.”

I snorted. “You weren’t playing.”

It still reeked of a trap to me, so we moved even more cautiously as we left that room and continued the hunt for Althea. A couple of times we almost ran into some guards but managed to duck out of sight before they saw us.

Tennyson led us down more stairs, down, down, until we were even deeper underground than Other-me’s creepy lab, or that creepy storeroom. This far underground, the walls were just packed dirt, basically just tunnels carved into the earth, with some strip lights running along the ceiling. Occasionally, the tunnels would diverge but Tennyson never hesitated about which direction to turn. There were no doors or rooms off the tunnels and the further we went, the more I started to get a bad feeling.

“This doesn’t seem right,” I said to Tennyson, as we turned down another tunnel, one that veered sharply downhill.

“We’re close,” he said. He had a glassy look in his eyes, as if his mind was far away somewhere. It didn’t reassure me.

Nikolai and I exchanged a worried look, but Mrs Spencer didn’t seem bothered. Somehow, that worried me even more.

We turned another corner and came to a dead end.

“What?” Tennyson said, looking around confusedly.

“The tunnels wind all around,” I said. “Maybe we should backtrack and see if there’s another way through.”

Tennyson stared angrily at the wall of dirt in front of us, and then he began to dig at the dirt with his bare hands.

“Tennyson, stop!” I told him, trying to grab hold of his arms. There was something wrong with him. I’d known it but I’d thought he was just worried for his sister, but this was something else entirely. “Come on, let’s just go back.”

He pushed me away, so hard that I slammed into the tunnel wall. I was winded for a moment, so Nikolai tried to stop him instead but Tennyson pushed him off as well, with even more force.

STOP! I yelled into his brain, putting all my fear and anxiety into that one word.

It got through to him. He stopped digging and turned around, staring down at his hands, which were covered in dirt. He always kept his hands so neat, his nails well-trimmed, but now they were ragged and bleeding.

He blinked and looked up at me. “What happened?”

I shook my head.

“I have a theory,” said Mrs Spencer, who, I’d noticed, had been no help at all. “I think she must be experimenting on this world’s version of you. When she had Lucy, she was working on the connection between the two of them, using that as a way to tap into Lucy’s powers and life force.”

“You think she’s mind-controlling Tennyson through other-Tennyson?” I asked. “Is that possible?”

Mrs Spencer shrugged. “She might not even realize that’s happening, it might just be a side-effect of whatever she’s doing to him.”

I sighed. This was the last thing we needed.

“So, we can’t rely on the pack bond to find Althea?” Tennyson asked.

“I can help,” said Nikolai. “I’m not the alpha so I can’t sense her so clearly but I still can. The bigger problem is what to do if you go all brain-addled again.”

I shrugged. “I’ll brain-slap him if he does. Come on, let’s keep moving. I’m sick of this place, I want to go home.”

We followed Nikolai back through the tunnels. I stuck close to Tennyson, watching for any sign that he wasn’t his usual self but he seemed fine. Maybe it was because he’d been using his own powers, that had somehow made him more susceptible to outward influences. I didn’t know. All I knew was that this place was toxic and I hoped I never had to come back.

“She’s close,” Tennyson said suddenly, when we were nearly out of the tunnels and back to the main building. I grabbed him by the hand, hoping he wasn’t about to go all trancey again.

“This way,” said Nikolai, leading us to a flight of stairs that was partially hidden behind a pillar.

The stairs were long and steep, and didn’t come out on any other floors other than the one at the very top. The closer to the top we got, the more nervous I felt.

“You okay?” Tennyson asked.

I wasn’t sure, but I nodded. Maybe I was just feeling bad from all the physical exertion when I hadn’t quite recovered. I hoped that’s all it was.

At the top of the stairs, we went through a narrow doorway. Once all four of us were through, the door slammed shut, leaving us in pitch black darkness. I reached for Tennyson’s hand.

She’s here , Tennyson said.

Other-me? Or Althea?

Both .

Just as he said it, the lights flooded on. For a moment, I was blinded, and then I wished I was, because the sight before me was horrible.

Althea was floating in a large glass tank full of greenish liquid. She was bound by the wrists and her feet were strapped to the bottom of the tank with iron bands. It almost looked as if she was standing upright in the water, except that she swayed side to side, her thick, dark hair billowing around her. Her eyes were closed and the only way I knew she was alive was that every few seconds, a stream of bubbles came out from her nostrils and trailed up to the top of the tank. I couldn’t see how she was breathing, but thankfully she was.

Other-Tennyson was tied to a table that looked a lot like the machine that the six-fingered man tortured Westley on in The Princess Bride. Other-me stood tinkering at some dials at the end of it.

There were a couple more people chained up along the wall, but I didn’t recognize any of them. Actually, that wasn’t true. I recognized the girl at the end, though I hadn’t seen her in a few years. Not since my father murdered her.

“Katie?” I asked, in a choked voice. I took a stumbling step forward, toward my old roomie.

Tennyson grabbed my arm. I looked back at him and he gave a little shake of his head. I knew what he meant. We had to follow the plan. We couldn’t risk it all to save just one person, we had to save as many as possible. I knew he was right. Even though I hated myself for it, I took a step back.

“You’ll forgive the theatrics,” Other-me said, finally turning to us.

“No, I won’t,” I said.

“Oh, you’re so funny ,” she said, not laughing. “As I was saying, I had to get you here at just the right moment. Too soon, and I wouldn’t have been ready. Too late and Daddy might have missed the whole thing.”

She nodded toward a smaller tank at the end of the room. The liquid in that tank was much thicker and darker than in Althea’s, so it was hard to see that there was someone inside there too. Not-dad was crammed in, not floating gracefully like Althea, but stuffed, like an overpacked suitcase, so full that some of the liquid sloshed over the sides.

His eyes blinked open and I stifled a scream.

“As it is, he’s almost finished brewing,” she said. “That liquid has a good color on it, doesn’t it. I might even be able to squeeze a second vat out of him before he’s out of juice.”

I made a face. Even for evil not-dad, this seemed harsh. “So you’re, what, boiling all the magic out of him? Cooking up him into a dad soup?”

“Something like that,” she said with an annoying smirk.

I would have to start trying to make that face in the mirror so I could be sure never to do it by accident. It was the most annoying face I’d ever seen.

“Enough,” I said. “Look, do what you want with your father, but you need to let everyone else go. You’re wildly outnumbered here. You’re not going to beat us, so just free these people and let us be on our way.”

“Funny,” she said again.

I gave Tennyson a little nudge, and nodded toward the back of the room, past the other prisoners. There was a desk with a bunch of equipment piled on it. If the sword was anywhere, I’d bet it was there. I could keep her distracted while he went to look. He nodded to show that he understood, so I started walking toward the Althea tank, so Other-me was looking the other way.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, pointing up at Althea. “You can’t make Althea into soup.”

“Of course not,” she said, in a tone that implied I was stupid for even thinking it. When she was the one making her father into magic stew. “But even if I explained, I doubt you’d understand.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re not smarter than me. Obviously more evil, but not smarter.”

“Very well,” she said, moving away from other-Tennyson and toward the tank.

I gestured to Nikolai to go free other-Tennyson while she wasn’t looking, but didn’t want to risk looking to see if he understood.

“I’m attempting a transmorphic exchange of power,” she said. “This is a special type of liquid that I’ve been working on, a type of acid comprised of various extractions I’ve made from the creatures my father keeps.”

I tried to keep my face passive but ew , she had Althea floating around in a bunch of bodily fluids.

“That’s what was in all those jars,” I said. “In the room where you knocked me out.”

She nodded. “I’ve been collecting them for years, ever since I realized what my father was doing.”

I mentally flicked through my evil guy catalog. “Creating a super solider?” I asked. “Stealing their powers to sell to the Department of Defence? Stealing their powers to become immortal?”

She rolled her eyes and started to turn away. Nikolai was halfway through unbuckling other-Tennyson.

I clapped my hands to get her attention back to me. “Stealing their powers to sell to aliens!”

“Honestly,” she said. “You are not as smart as me. No, he thinks he can cure them. Like they have some sort of disease. He planned to wipe all paranormal power from the world. And to do that, he needed to know what caused the powers in the first place. Once I realized that, I knew I had to gather as much data as possible. If he succeeded, so much valuable information would be lost. If he failed, I knew he’d decide to just wipe all non-human people from the world. He’d never suffer them to live. He thinks they’re abominations, crimes against nature. So, either way, I had to collect as many samples as I could.”

“You wouldn’t try to stop it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If it wasn’t my father, it would have been someone else. And this way, I could continue my research.” She placed a hand on the glass and stared up at Althea. “I’m so close,” she whispered.

I wondered if this was who I’d have been, if my father had taken me with him when he’d left. Would I be all twisted and warped by his beliefs like she was? I hoped not.

“So, after you squeeze out all their powers, then what?” I said, making sure she kept her attention on me. The last thing I needed was for her to see Tennyson’s reflection in the glass of the tank or something. “You’ll make a magic power smoothie, drink it down and be the queen of the world? Because that does not sound tasty. It sounds pretty nasty, actually.”

“Your ambitions are so tiny,” she said, turning back to me. She smiled at me then, and her smile was terrifying. “There’s no point,” she said. She looked over to Tennyson, to Nikolai. “You’re not getting out of here.”

She held out a hand and my sword came flying into it. She pointed it at my throat. I put my hands up in surrender. Nikolai had other-Tennyson almost free. We could definitely overpower her, sword or not. We could win this.

But before any of us could do anything, the room exploded.