Page 2 of The Evil Twin
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Hannah will put up all sorts of wards. She won’t escape.”
He shook his head, but I didn’t know what else he wanted from me. We couldn’t kill her. Moral objections aside, if we killed her, my power might die with her, and everything we’d gone through would be wasted. He didn’t want to send her back, so all we could do was keep her prisoner. It was the only thing that made sense, anyway.
“Well, I like her,” said Harper. “She’s like you, only hilarious and stylish. So, not actually like you at all.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t you have classes, or something?”
“Don’t you?” she said. “You’ve missed so much of this semester, with your swooning around astral traveling or whatever. You’ll be lucky to graduate at this rate.”
I glared at her, but she wasn’t wrong. I’d missed a lot. School just hadn’t been a priority for me, with everything else going on. The whole reason for coming to Amaris in the first place had been to get into a good college, but somewhere along the way, that had gotten lost. As things were, another four years of school after this seemed an insurmountable obstacle.
Tennyson must have sensed how I was feeling and reached over to take my hand.
“We’ll deal with all that later,” he said.
I nodded, and without needing to talk at all, we both turned and headed toward Althea’s room.
She was so still and pale, I could almost believe she was only sleeping. There were some marks on her skin, where the goop from Other-me’s experiments had stuck to her and just never faded. We’d tried to clean it off a bunch of times, but that just seemed to embed it into her skin. It looked almost like a weird-colored birthmark, except for how it shimmered with a neon glow. It didn’t make her any less beautiful; rather, it highlighted her otherworldliness.
“I hate this,” said Tennyson quietly.
Although he sat at her bedside every spare hour he had, he never took her hand or stroked her hair or any of the things I’d have done if it were my brothers lying there. That just wasn’t his way, and I thought maybe that made it harder for him. He scowled so deeply that his two eyebrows became one. A stranger might have thought he was angry with her, but of course, he wasn’t. Angry with himself, maybe. With Other-me, definitely. But mostly, he was just scared. We all were. Althea was our brain, our heart. Without her, everything seemed hollow.
“It reminds me of when Sam was ill, after… you know.”
As soon as I started speaking, I could have kicked myself. The last thing Tennyson needed reminding of just then was his mother’s death.
“It reminds me of when you were in that world,” he said. “You were so still, like this.”
“You’ve sat at a lot of bedsides lately.”
He nodded. “Too many.”
We sat in silence, staring at Althea’s face for any sign that she was still in there. As we sat, I thought about what Tennyson had just said.
“You don’t think she may be stuck?” I asked him, eventually. “Partly still in that world?”
He shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. All of this is so far out of my realm of experience that anything might be possible.”
I sighed. If Sam’s mother had still been here, I thought she might have a clue. My father probably would too, but no way would I let him know that one of our pack was so vulnerable. He’d never help anyway.
Althea had always been the one who knew what to research, where to find the right texts, or who to ask. Anyone else we could’ve turned to, my father had killed.
The only other person – if he was actually a person – was Vucari, Nikolai’s family associate. He’d never helped us, exactly, but he had directed me to the lodestone. He seemed to think the lodestone was the answer to all our problems, but I had no clue how to use it.
“I need to get my power back,” I said. I’d been able to heal Tennyson’s horse one time when it had been injured. It wasn’t the same thing, but maybe I could heal Althea too. “If I get my power back and learn to use the lodestone, I’m sure I can heal her.”
Tennyson put his arm around my shoulders. I slumped into his side.
“You don’t need to fix the whole world,” he said quietly. “At least, not all at once.”
We fell asleep sitting there like that, awkwardly perched on chairs at Althea’s beside, and it felt like the safest place in the world.
CHAPTER TWO
Although I had no idea where to start, I decided I had to research. We weren’t short on material, that was for sure. There was the library at Wilde Manor, which was massive, plus the combined libraries of all the other packs, not to mention the magical knowledge of Hannah’s family. She hadn’t been able to access a lot of it since my father killed everyone on the Magic Users’ Council, but now that her father was back, all sorts of wards could be broken or changed.
It was overwhelming, but most people were willing to help. We’d saved Hannah’s dad from the other world, so he was more than obliging. He not only sent us a bunch of cool old books but had been scouring them himself.
