Page 39 of The Evil Twin

I’ll talk to him, Tennyson told me. I’ll make him understand that you’re not her.

We all moved to stand up from the table, but Hamish cleared his throat loudly and raised his hand, as if he were in class.

“Excuse me, Tennyson Wilde,” he said. “What about us? We want to help, too.”

Tennyson took a moment, as if he were thinking it over carefully. “First, I want you to go to the kitchens and tell Amy that she shouldn’t be making up stories. Then I want the two of you to go back to your rooms and find every piece of information you can about your father. Anything he might have sent you, the times and dates he’s contacted you, everything. Even if you think it’s not important.”

The two of them nodded eagerly.

“Can we go through Liam’s stuff?” asked Fletcher.

Might be a good idea, I told Tennyson, though I’d never say it aloud. Liam’s been kind of hostile lately. I’d like to rule out my father as the reason.

“You can,” Tennyson told them. “But only if you make sure he doesn’t know about it. It’s a secret mission, got it?”

They were so happy to have a secret mission that they rushed off without even finishing the food they’d piled on their plates.

I was dreading the moment when I’d have to test my powers, but when it came down to it, it was incredibly easy.

When I thought about dark magic, it was along the lines of curses, inflicting damage, that type of thing. I told myself that I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but that wasn’t true. When I thought about my father, all the things he’d done and the people he’d hurt, the dark magic rose to the surface along with my anger.

I let it wash over me, that desire to inflict pain, to wipe my father from this world. It wasn’t only the dark magic that I was feeling, I realized. It was all the magic combined. I understood it in terms of light, of how we see color. We perceive the color white when all the colors are mixed together equally in the light spectrum. I mean, it probably wasn’t the same in a scientific sense, but it helped me to think of it that way. All my other powers were the different colors, but because they were channeled through the lodestone equally, they became this other power. That was what Mrs Spencer had meant by a “united being”.

“Uh, Lucy?” said Hannah.

I opened my eyes and found that I was floating a few feet above the ground.

“Woah,” I said. “I can fly?”

I couldn’t fly. When I tried to propel myself forward, I fell back on my butt. Still, the levitating thing had been cool.

“Honestly, I feel like I have a decent handle on all this,” I told them.

“We haven’t fully tested your limits,” said Althea, all business as usual.

“I’m not sure she has any limits,” said Hannah. “Apart from flying.”

“It’s time,” I told them. “I need to finish this. I’m ready.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The others had not been slacking off either. Nikolai and Harper had coordinated with the rest of the pack, and they were all on standby whenever we decided to make our move. Sam, however, was absent.

“He’s decided to take himself away for a while,” Tennyson said. “We found somewhere that we think can help him, somewhere peaceful where he can heal.”

I was sad that he hadn’t said goodbye, but I understood.

Finding the physical location of a rift in reality was not as easy as you might think. The portal had been all flashy and obvious, but the rift wasn’t like that. It wasn’t really visible at all, except for maybe a slight ripple in the air, like the heat coming off a hot road in summer. And it wasn’t static, it was in constant motion.

There were a few magic users in the pack now, people who had been drawn to the safety of it after the High Council had fallen. One or two fae as well, though they mostly kept to themselves. All of our magic users were tracking the rift constantly.

My father wasn’t physically inside the rift. At some point he must’ve siphoned the energy from some spirit entities, and that had given him the power to travel outside of his body to some extent. We didn’t have anyone in the pack who was a refugee from the spirit realm, so that was where I came in.

I had to find my father inside the rift and remove him, so that the magic users could close it. Once I had him out, if possible, we’d contain him. That part of the plan was dicey. It wasn’t easy to contain someone without a physical body to hold onto. The main thing was getting him out of the rift, anything else was gravy.

The rift was still quite close to the manor, since that was where it had been opened. I wanted to get physically as close to it as possible, but everyone else thought it would be safer for me to stay within the manor, where so many protections were already in place.

Hannah made an extra protective circle around me, on the floor of Tennyson’s room. I sat at the center of it, cross-legged, and closed my eyes. Hannah and Althea stayed in the room with me. I didn’t want a bunch of people watching me do this. Tennyson had wanted to stay too, but there was too much for him to do, too many other people who needed him. And besides, he was always with me anyway. He didn’t need to be in the room.

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