Page 5 of The Evil Twin

“Do you want me to come with you?”

I shook my head, then stood up. “Nah, you stay here with Althea.”

I wanted him with me, more than anything, but I had to get used to doing things alone, if this whole “cooling it” thing was going to work at all.

I glanced around for something, anything that would give me a reason to stay a little longer. Part of me felt as if once I left the room, that would be it. There’d be no going back for the two of us. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do, the only thing, I hated it.

I lingered in the doorway. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

He gave me a sad smile. “You know where to find me.”

The dungeon holding Other-me was not nearly secure enough. I’d have kept her in an electrified box that shocked her whenever she touched the bars. Even that probably wasn’t enough, not when I considered that Althea was currently a prisoner in her own body.

I recognized the dungeon from the time I’d been under the love potion and had to be restrained. Also, maybe the time I’d attacked Milo, though that was all a bit fuzzy in my mind. I’d been shackled, though, and Other-me was free to roam the room as she pleased. It was a sparse room, but not uncomfortable. Way better than the dungeons we’d found Sam in when we’d been in her world. Way, way better than she deserved.

“Finally,” she said when I entered the room. “I’m so sick of that creepy little witch. And your Nikolai is not nearly as much fun as mine. Do you have the lodestone?”

“No,” I said. “And you’re never getting it, so quit asking.”

“You don’t even know how to use it,” she said, her voice full of impatience. She paced back and forth across the room like a caged tiger.

I raised my eyebrow. I wasn’t sure I could bluff her, considering we were more or less the same person, but it was worth a try.

“Yes, I do, actually.”

She stopped pacing for a moment to roll her eyes. “If you did, you’d have taken your powers back from me and sent me home to my own world.”

I couldn’t help but smile. She thought she was so smart, but she’d just confirmed what I wanted to know. The lodestone could do everything I needed it to do. Now I just needed to trick her into telling me how.

Other-me snorted. “You didn’t even know it could do that? You’ll never figure out how to use it on your own; you may as well just hand it over. You don’t even know what it is.”

I mean, she wasn’t wrong. It was a magnetized rock, that was all I could find online, everything that wasn’t a videogame wiki. And all the musty old books I’d read hadn’t told me much more. A few spells had mentioned using a lodestone, but that was as a conduit for power they already had, not to reclaim power that had been stolen.

A conduit, though. That gave me an idea.

As much as I knew it was stupid to bring the lodestone this close to her, it felt worse to leave it somewhere unattended, so I’d been carrying it everywhere with me, in my pocket. I had a feeling it couldn’t be taken by force, anyway.

And having it there, together with the both of us, I wondered if I could use it as a conduit between the two of us, to tap into my power and pull it back to me. It was a stretch, but I’d kick myself if there was such an easy solution that I hadn’t bothered to try. I felt in my pocket and closed my fingers around the stone. Other-me paced back and forth across the room, and the moment she got close enough, I caught her by the wrist.

It was like being hit by a zillion watts of electricity. I was thrown backwards, flying into the stone wall behind me. My head cracked against it, and the world faded out.

When I opened my eyes again, the dungeon door was open and the room was empty.

Other-me had escaped.

CHAPTER THREE

“What were you thinking?” Hannah asked, handing me an ice pack for my head.

I’d dragged myself up the steps of the dungeon to the common room and alerted everyone to the escape.

“She clearly wasn’t,” said Sam.

I scowled at him and held the ice against the giant bump on the back of my head. Just because he hated Other-me, that was no reason to be mean to me. Even if she had escaped on my watch and was now out there somewhere, running amok.

“She obviously thought the stone might be able to conduct the power from Other-Lucy back to her,” said Tennyson. “It was a reasonable hypothesis.”

We smiled at each other shyly.

---