Page 8 of The Other World

“He’ll be in more danger if you try to shut him out,” she said. “The two of you are tangled up so tight together that anything that tries to pull you apart will rip either you or itself apart. Better to be on the safe side, stay tangled.”

I raised an eyebrow and glanced at Tennyson. The more I tried to take her seriously, the harder she made it. But Tennyson looked as if, after rejecting her for so long, he was now buying the whole package.

“So, what do we need to do?” he asked, leaning toward her.

I elbowed him but he ignored me. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to hear her out.

“Firstly, you need to get into the right meditative state, close to sleep but still aware. A hypnagogic state, it’s called. Binaural beats in the four to seven hertz range should help, you can find that online easy enough. I have a special tea that will put you right in the zone, and we’ll ask some friends in the spirit realm to guide you, that should be just the ticket.”

As she spoke, she rummaged around in her things, looking for something. She turned back to us with a guilty look on her face.

“Forgive me for a moment, but I don’t have the tea with me.”

I blinked my eyes and was no longer looking at her. I looked around the small cell but she wasn’t there. Tennyson seemed just as baffled.

“What the…”

Before I could finish the thought, she was standing right in front of me, no longer in the cell.

“Here it is,” she said, pressing a small paper sachet into my hand. “Now, it needs to brew for at least 20 minutes, and make sure to both drink it at the same time. Only one bag each, or you’ll go too far.”

With another blink, she was back in the cell. If I wasn’t holding the packet of tea, I might think I’d imagined it.

“Could you do that this whole time?” Tennyson asked, his brow furrowed.

She shrugged. “Yes, but I wanted you to trust me and you wouldn’t exactly do that if I was popping out every five minutes, would you.”

She walked over to her desk and flipped open a notebook, then tore out a page. “So, tea, then the four hertz… you’ll need headphones but they don’t need to be great quality but do make sure you have the right side on your right ear and left on your left, that’s very important. By the time the tea kicks in, the guides should be with you, but if not, here’s what you do.” She poked the paper out through the hole in her door.

I took the paper and glanced at it. It didn’t make a heap of sense but maybe it would after I was tripping on shrooms, or whatever was in that tea.

“Okay, and then what?” I asked her.

“And then you’ll be ready to bring my Sam back to me.”

I nodded. That was exactly what I intended to do, no matter what.

CHAPTER FIVE

It wasn’thard to convince Tennyson to stay at the house for the night, but it was on the condition that we tried out the tea and whatnot. He thought it was safer than trying it at school, which made sense.

We had a light dinner, unsure if wandering the spirit realm would purge our physical bodies or something, which had the added benefit of not letting anyone know we were there. It was much easier to steal a ham sandwich from the kitchen than order up a four-course meal, if you wanted to stay low profile.

“Nervous?” Tennyson asked me, as we waited for the tea to steep.

“Of course not,” I said, even though I knew he’d know I was lying. I was petrified. Of turning into a spirit, of drinking weirdo psychedelic tea, of everything. “You?”

He shrugged. “If she’s managed to poison this tea somehow, we have lycanthropic constitutions on our side.” He lifted the lid of the teapot and sniffed at it, screwing up his nose in a way that I knew he didn’t mean to be half as cute as it was. “It smells too disgusting to be poison.”

It was so nice to just have that moment, just the two of us together without anyone or anything else encroaching on it. I mean, sure, we were about to drink magic tea that would send our spirits to the astral plane or something, but we were doing ittogether.

The timer went off to tell us the tea had finished steeping. We sat on the floor facing each other and I adjusted my headphones while Tennyson poured the tea.

“Ready?” I asked him, as he slid my cup toward me.

He took off his headphones and double-checked them, then put them back on and gave me the thumbs up. I pressed play on the app we’d found, and my ears were flooded with a dull sort of hum. Tennyson lifted his cup, so I mirrored him and we both sipped the tea at the same time. I coughed and almost dropped the cup. It wasdisgusting. Like, if someone had distilled the sweat from the socks of the entire polo team, it would taste better than this tea. Still, we’d made it this far, so I took another sip. Maybe my taste buds had given up and died, because it didn’t seem so bad on the second taste.

By the end of the cup, I was definitely already feeling it.

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