Page 17 of The Evil Twin
He stared helplessly back at me.
Surprisingly, it was Nikolai who jumped into action. He took off his hoodie and balled it up, then put it under her head. Then he gently turned her on one side. He reached over to grab his phone from the table.
“If you record her –” Tennyson began, but Nikolai waved him off.
“You have to time seizures,” he said. “It might not be a vision. She was in a coma for weeks; there could be stuff going on with her brain. If there’s no magical explanation, the doctors will need to know how long she’s like this. I used to have a dog with epilepsy. If the seizure is longer than five minutes, we’ll need to get her medical help right away.”
I was about to ask him if I should pre-emptively go and get someone when she started to come out of it. I didn’t realize how my heart had been thumping so wildly until her eyes rolled back down and she blinked.
She tried to sit up, but Nikolai pushed her back down.
“Just take it easy for a minute, sheesh,” he said.
She groaned and covered her eyes. “Why’s it so bright in here?”
I glanced at Nikolai to see if that was because of something medical, but he shrugged.
“Was it… was it a vision?” Tennyson asked, hesitantly. I guess he’d been pretty dubious about the visions before, even after she’d been right about the attack. Seeing it in person was something else, though.
“Yes,” she said. “Just give me a moment, I feel like I might be sick.”
Tennyson set a bowl by her head in case she needed to be sick, and Nikolai fished around in his bag for some sunglasses. I just stood by uselessly.
I topped up her water glass and stood by, in case she needed it. That was the only thing I could think to do. Eventually, she sat up, so I passed her the water. She took a sip of it and then set it down by the bowl.
“He knows,” she whispered croakily. I suppose all that growling had been hard on her throat. “He knows it’s not really Lucy. He knows everything. He’s been feeding us false information for days.”
As she said it, I became aware of footsteps running up the mezzanine stairs. It was Harper. She was out of breath and bedraggled in a way I’d never seen her. She must’ve run the whole way from the Golden House.
“Tennyson,” she gasped. “All of you. You have to come. Now. There’s been a massive attack.”
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.
