Page 10 of The Other World

CHAPTER SIX

I said a very bad swear.

I stepped back from the tree and looked around. I seemed to be behind the Golden House, in the clearing where my magical tree stood in my world. Only, it wasn’t my tree or my world, and the Golden House wasn’t golden. It was a dark, dull grey, like some haunted Victorian mansion.

“There you are,” said a familiar voice.

I started guiltily and spun around to come face to face with Nikolai.

“What are you doing out here, you silly old thing? And wearingthat.”

I looked down at what I was wearing. A pair of Tennyson’s old sweats and a t-shirt, nothing too out of the ordinary, though maybe not something I’d wear out to the opera. If I were to ever go to the opera.

Nikolai reached out and took my hand, pulling me away from the tree and toward the house.

I’d have blamed it on the trippy tea, only that seemed to have worn off the moment I arrived in this world. Or maybe it hadn’t, and this was all a very realistic hallucination. I could hope.Because Nikolai was swinging our arms together and grinning at me like a loon, and I didnotlike what that implied.

“You’re not really Marie Antoinette, you know,” he went on. “You don’t have to cosplay as a peasant, no matter how fabulously wealthy we are. But if you’re bored, we can go and throw peanuts at the scholarship kids. I know how much you love that.”

There were so many things wrong with what he was saying. He was wearing bright purple corduroy pants, a yellow shirt with roses embroidered on the back, and a floppy purple fedora, so at least his terrible fashion was consistent across all universes. I tried to focus on that.

“Where are the others?” I asked, hoping to get a read on whether the rest of the pack was here or if it was just Nikolai.

He waggled his eyebrows at me suggestively.

“Oh, don’t worry, we have the place to ourselves. Is that why you wore that hideous outfit, so I could take it off you?”

I tried not to gag, unsuccessfully, so I turned it into a cough.

He dropped my hand and took a step back. Nice. If he was a germophobe, I could get him to keep his distance without raising suspicion. I had no idea how this other Lucy might act. A Lucy who would date Nikolai and thought she was some sort of aristocrat.

“Sorry, I’m not feeling great,” I said. I decided to take a gamble. “I actually missed class and was hoping to get the notes off Althea.”

I crossed my fingers behind my back, hoping this would pay off. From the look on his face, it didn’t.

“Althea Wilde?” he said, as if I’d said poopy boogers or something.

I stared at him impassively, not wanting to dig myself any deeper. Then he started laughing.

“Oh, that’s nasty,” he said, slapping my shoulder. Then he walked on, still chuckling. “Althea Wilde,” he muttered.

Well, that really cleared things up.

“Come on,” he called back to me when he reached the gate through to the not-Golden House. “You know your father hates it when we’re late.”

It was lucky that Nikolai had already passed through the gate and didn’t see the expression on my face because that would’ve been a total giveaway. It was bad enough that I had to be all cozy with Nikolai, but making nice with my evil dad was a step too far. I couldn’t fake that, not when the thought of him made my blood boil.

As I followed him through into the house, I faked a coughing fit.

Nikolai stopped, turned and stared at me. I gave another little cough. Had I gone too far? Was he onto me? Werewolves didn’t get sick, but maybe I didn’t have any powers in this world. I was working blind here. I needed to fall back, gather some intel. Scope the lay of the land, and all that.

“You’re really not well?” he asked, taking a small step toward me. He raised a hand as if he was going to touch me, maybe test my forehead for a temperature. I wasn’t sure, and instinctively, I stepped back. He gave me a strange look, almost a smile but not, as if he’d been expecting me to do exactly that but he wished I hadn’t. He was definitely onto me, right? I was cooked. I almost turned around and fled but he’d catch me before I got to the door.

It was a long, narrow hallway, as dark and gloomy as the outside of the house had been. There were dusty chandelabras hanging from the ceiling but they gave off only a dim, grey light, that flickered over the glowering portraits that lined the walls. It felt like I’d stumbled into Resident Evil 7 or something. I half expected something to jump out at me from a shadowy doorway.But the only sign of movement was from Nikolai. Which was scary enough, to be fair.

I had to be smart about this. In a way, I was lucky that I’d run into him straight away. He was a valuable source of information about this world, if I didn’t mess it up. I just had to play it smart. I knew a few things already, about this version of him and this version of me, I just had to take the next logical step from there.

“I’m fine,” I said. “My father… he’s waiting.”

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