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CHAPTER THREE

Although I was curious about what Vucari wanted, I was also a little worried. I didn’t know much about him but if he needed a favor from me, I was fairly sure it wouldn’t be anything good.

Not that it was much of an issue. I was suddenly, overwhelmingly, busy. SATs were less than a month away and I was not prepared. I wasn’t prepared to think about the future at all, let alone college applications, which were looming. But whether I wanted to think about it or not, I had to study, and study hard. Luckily, I was surrounded by bossy people, like Althea and Hannah, who had strict study schedules and expected me to join in with them, and who didn’t tolerate any kind of slacking off.

That didn’t leave much time to sneak off and meet with shady magical folks, or even to plan how to do it. As busy as I was, Tennyson was a zillion times more so, which made it so much easier to keep the whole Vucari thing a secret from him, not to mention that I might be entering my spirit era. And if I felt a little bad about hiding things from him, I told myself that it would only add to his list of ever-growing worries, so really I was doing him a favor by keeping him in the dark.

The SATs were in the first week of October, so I crammed like crazy in the weeks leading up to it. The days passed in a blur of flash cards and sugar crashes, until finally, the test came. And then it was gone. All that preparation and it was over in just a few hours. I had no idea if I’d done okay or totally bombed, and I knew that if I had bombed, I’d be able to re-sit it, but I definitely didn’t want to go through all that again.

After the test, I went straight back to my room and passed out on my bed. It seemed like so long since I’d slept peacefully, without test questions chasing me through my dreams. But before I could settle nicely into a nap, Hannah and Nikolai burst into the room.

“Come on, let’s go!” said Nikolai, in an urgent whisper.

“What’s wrong?” I sat up, still sleepy but worried there’d been an emergency.

“Vucari,” he said, waving his phone at me. “He’s ready to talk to you.”

I grabbed my hoodie off the back of my chair and followed the two of them out, grumbling about bossy weirdos who interrupted naps.

“How will we get off the island?” I asked, after we left the house and I was a bit more awake.

“Magic!” said Hannah.

I thought she was joking until Nikolai explained. “We don’t need to meet him physically; we just need to get past the magical barriers around the island. We just need to follow the train tunnel until we’re far enough away for Hannah to conjure a portal.”

I didn’t like the idea of a portal, not after seeing Sam vanish through one, but it was probably a lot safer than a helicopter. I couldn’t exactly look up the statistics on that though, I supposed. It was funny how even after being a witch for a while and a werewolf, I didn’t know much about being either of those things. I mean, I hadn’t been either of those things for very long, so it was probably like the difference between reading the wiki on something versus studying it for a PhD. I’d only ever learned enough about anything to control my power, but I’d never be able to use it as a reference on an academic paper. It was enough, I figured. In the grand scheme of things, a wiki was probably a lot more useful than super specific knowledge. Unless you were a surgeon, which I wasn’t, so it was fine.

I’d been down the train tunnel a few times, when my old roomie Katie and I had snuck out of school, and then a few times for pack meetings the year before. It was dark and cold, and the sound of dripping water echoed around us.

“What do you think he wants?” I asked Nikolai, my words bouncing back from the tunnel walls.

Nikolai shrugged. “Probably just your Netflix password or something, who knows with that guy.”

I felt briefly reassured, until he continued talking.

“Either that or a human sacrifice. He’s got a lot of varied interests.”

It hadn’t really occurred to me before; how incredibly risky it was to promise a favor to someone I barely knew. A morally dubious, supernatural someone. I didn’t know what kind of magic bound me to keep my promise to him, but it seemed like more than just a matter of honor. There would be no take-backsies when it came to Vucari.

I didn’t even really know what the guy was. I knew he was down with the Dark Council, and Nikolai’s family had some dodgy connections, but apart from that and an unhelpful google search, I was going in blind.

“This should be far enough,” said Hannah.

We stopped walking and she started the ritual to open a portal. I watched as she sprinkled some silvery-black powder in a circle beside the tracks and chanted under her breath. She placed a round mirror in the center of the circle and poured a few drops of liquid onto it. The surface of the mirror turned black and a cloud of smoke puffed up into the air. When the smoke had cleared, Vucari stood there. I stared at him for a moment, wondering what exactly it was about him that looked kind of wrong, then realized he was slightly transparent.

“It’s a projection,” Hannah explained.

“We couldn’t have just set up a Zoom meeting?” It seemed unnecessarily complicated to do this whole magic ritual instead of just using a laptop.

“This is the most secure method of communication,” Vucari said, unsmiling. “You trust far too easily.”

I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong.

“So, you’re ready to cash in your favor?” I asked him.

“I am,” he said. He stared at me as if he could look straight through me, which he probably could, since I could see through him.

I really hoped he wasn’t weighing up whether or not I’d make a good child bride for his demon overlord or something. Because I definitely wouldn’t.

“It is a favor that will also benefit you.” He paused. I wasn’t sure if he was waiting for me to say something or just letting his words sink in.

I waited. Eventually, he continued.

“You have begun the next phase of your transition.” He wasn’t asking. “This is good. It will make my task much easier for you. There is a relic. An ancient relic of my family. It has been stolen and taken from this physical realm. I need to you retrieve it.”

“Right,” I said. There was a lot to unpack there and I didn’t even know where to start.

Vucari stared at me. After a few minutes of him staring, I realized he expected me to say something else.

“So…” I said. “I don’t really have any idea what you expect me to do.”

He gave a small smile, like I’d said something funny. “There is a ritual. It is complicated and you will need to progress along the path to Spirit before you will be successful in breaking through to the other world, but once you are there, I believe the plan will be straightforward.”

“Other world?” I repeated. I didn’t know what I’d thought he meant by “taken from this physical realm”, maybe like stuck in the spirit world or a dream or something, but this sounded like something entirely different. “Do you mean like an alternate reality?”

He shrugged. “More or less.”

I filed that away to think about later, because I didn’t want my brain to explode. That was what Mrs Spencer had said as well. That was a heck of a coincidence.

It took me a moment to come back to the here-and-now.

“Right,” I said. “Okay. Alternate universe. Cool. So, I have a few questions…”

“The relic is a stone,” he said, either pre-empting my questions or cutting them off, I wasn’t sure. “A type of magical lodestone. You will be magnetically drawn to it. It will call to your power, so your power will guide you to it.”

I nodded, that sounded simple enough. “So, now I just have to become a spirit and get to the parallel world? Sounds easy.”

“Yes,” he said, obviously not getting the sarcasm. “You have people in your life who can help you with that, while I prepare things for the ritual.”

“You said that this would benefit me somehow,” I said. “Is becoming a spirit really that great?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. “You do not seem to yet understand what this phase of your transition will mean. I advise you strongly to speak to the elders of your people, try to share in their wisdom. However, that is not what I meant. You have lost someone precious to you. They too have been taken to this other world. If you agree to my favor, you may be able to bring him back.”

My knees buckled. “Sam?” I asked faintly, hardly registering Hannah grabbing me by the arm to hold me up. Unless Vucari and Mrs Spencer were in some unlikely sort of cahoots, two entirely different people saying the exact same thing about Sam in a parallel universe couldn’t just be coincidence, could it?

Vucari nodded, then started to fade away as the smoke cloud began reforming in the magic circle.

“He’s alive?” I asked, before he could vanish completely.

“He was alive yesterday, when my informant contacted me, but precognition is not one of my abilities.” He had faded so much that I could barely hear his last words. I could barely hear anything over the thumping of my heartbeat.

“He’s alive,” I whispered.

It was the only thing I could say as Hannah led me back down the tunnel. I repeated it over and over, trying to convince myself of its truth. It was the only thing I could think of until we climbed the steps out of the tunnel and back into daylight. Where Tennyson stood waiting.