Page 2 of The Other World

I stared at her blankly for a moment, a thousand sarcastic responses running through my mind, but none of those would help me out here. “You said there was evidence,” I said finally.

She nodded. “There is, and I can show you, but you’ll need to trust me.”

I snorted. “Right,” I said. “Let me guess, I just need to let you out of here for five minutes and you’ll go get the evidence.”

She laughed. “I have far more regard for your intelligence than that,” she said. “I just need you to touch my hand, just for a moment. You know that human brains are similar to a powerful, organic computer, think of it like a file transfer, from my brain to yours. That is the way of the spirit realm, a connection merely needs to be established for energy to be transferred. For those of us with physical form, the fastest and most efficient way to do that is through physical touch.”

I looked at her skeptically. Nothing I knew of could harm me just from a simple touch, but the things I didn’t know would fill volumes and the thought of facing Tennyson and telling him Sam’s mother had escaped because she'd duped me... that made me hesitate to agree.

She sighed. “It’s not right that this world has made you so wary at such a tender age, but I understand your distrust. There are other ways, of course, but I will need time to prepare them.”

I took a deep, fortifying breath and stood up. “No, it’s fine. Let’s do it now.” There were wards on her cell, dozens of wards, not to mention other security all through the manor and grounds. Plus, I was super powerful myself. Even if she had nefarious intentions, I could probably take her. Even if I didn’t trust her, I had to trust myself, and it seemed worth the risk.

There was a small slot by the door of her cell where the guards put her meals. Warily, I poked the tip of my index finger through.

She laughed and touched her fingertip to mine.

It was like a bolt of lightning right into my brain, only not lightning but information.

I saw Sam, like a series of snapshots. He looked dirty and scared but otherwise fine, uninjured, and definitely alive. He seemed to be hiding from something, running. In some images, he was in a wooded area, in others an abandoned building.Nowhere looked familiar but that didn’t mean it was necessarily another world.

It wasn’t only Sam I saw, and the knowledge wasn’t only in snapshots, some of it was in just a sort of knowing, though I could tell it was all tinted with Mrs Spencer’s perspective, in the same way that when I’d been able to feel the werewolf pack bond, I’d known when I was feeling something from Althea, or Nikolai. It was hard to separate the facts from her beliefs so I just tried to remember everything I could to sift through later. She had so much knowledge, magic and science and just general life stuff. It was a lot.

And there was something else. The power inside me began to stir, and I knew that whatever her touch had done to me, wasn’t just a file transfer. Already I could feel that power begin to change. She’d set something in motion, something that pushed me further along that path. The path to the spirit realm.

Whatever the heck that meant.

CHAPTER TWO

The restof the day and the next morning was so busy with getting ready to go back to school, that I barely had time to think about what had happened with Mrs Spencer Spencer. I didn’t have a chance to talk to Tennyson about it. It wasn’t as if I was hiding it from him, there just wasn’t a right time. By the time I’d packed, argued with my brothers about being homeschooledagain, broken up an argument between Althea and Harper about a leather jacket I’d never seen either of them wear, and repacked because Nikolai had swapped all my regular clothes with his fashion “improvements”, I barely remembered what had happened myself. I was back at school before I knew it, in my little corner room with Hannah, only this time on the top floor of the Red House.

“This year is going to be amazing,” Hannah said, stretching out on her bed like a starfish. “We’re seniors, I have my magic back. I have a hot boyfriend?—”

I snorted. Nikolai wasnothot. He was a bug. Not even a cute bug but a creepy bug, with poisonous antennae. I pulled open another drawer to unpack more of my stuff.

“Tennyson is alpha, so we don’t have to worry about stupid Henry. Everything’s coming up Hannah!” She shot some silvery sparks toward the ceiling with her fingertips.

I didn’t want to ruin her good mood, so I didn’t remind her that my evil father was still out there with his evil plans brewing. Or that Sam was still missing. Nobody else even believed he was still alive anyway, or seemed to miss him that much.

“Are we still doing Wicca club this year?” she asked me.

I took a deep breath, thinking I had to tell someone, and Hannah would be the last person to judge me. “About that,” I said. “If the goal is still to help me with my powers, it might be less of the magic and more of the…” I waved a shoe around vaguely in the air. “Spirit… something.”

Hannah sat up and stared at me. “You’re changingagain? Geez Louise, girl, pick a lane!”

I told her what had happened with Mrs Spencer as I finished unpacking.

“I don’t even know what it would mean, to change into spirit form, or whatever,” I said, sitting down on my bed with a sigh. “Will I lose my body completely or just be able to astral travel around or something?”

Hannah shrugged. “Nobody knows much about them, as far as I know. But I can ask my –” She broke off. Out of habit, she’d been about to say she’d ask her aunt, but her aunt was gone now, like so many others my father had murdered. Hannah forced a smile. “You should talk to Nikolai; his family has all sorts of connections. You had access to the library at Wilde Manor all summer, you didn’t look it up there?”

“I’ve been trying to get a handle on the powers Idohave, not ones I might have someday in the future. It’s not as if I’ve been slacking.”

“Sure,” said Hannah in a sing-song voice. “And I’m sure that having that big old manor with all those empty bedrooms and the alpha curse broken didn’t distract you at all.”

I shoved the last of my clothes into the bottom drawer and forced it shut with a slam.

“… or not,” said Hannah.

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