Home. Family. Taking back the things Cora stole from me.
“Okay,” Cade said, getting himself under control. “Since we’re stuck here until morning, let’s crash. We have a plan.”
Everyone mumbled and scattered. Kori and Cade headed back toward the one room, while G stayed where he was, but closed his eyes. “I’m gonna…”
“Yeah.” Noah sank back onto his end of the couch, eyeing G suspiciously. “See ya in the morning.”
...
Despite the situation, morning rolled around far too soon. The bed was unbelievably comfortable, and the sheets smelled like lavender. When Kori had knocked on the door, the last thing I’d wanted was to pick my head off the pillow, much less jump into the back of a smelly cab.
The ride to Phil’s house had taken close to half an hour, and when the car pulled up in front of the place, Noah paid with the last of his stolen money. “This looks more like Rabbit,” he said as we made our way up the concrete walkway.
Weeds grew through the cracks and in the spaces where there were chunks missing—which were a lot. The house itself wasn’t much better. In shambles and peeling, the siding was a sickly off-white color with tiny dots of black scattered at random. I couldn’t tell if it was mold or bugs.
Cade wedged himself between Noah and the door. “Do we need to go over this again?”
He rolled his eyes and reached around his friend to bang on the door. Three echoing slams and a grin like I’d never seen before.
A few moments later, the door creaked and a bleary-eyed Phil appeared. “Eh?” He had half a Twizzler hanging from his mouth and a beer in his left hand.
“You read my mind.” Noah threw open the screen door and pushed past him, grabbing the Twizzler from his mouth as he passed. “I’m starving, man.”
Phil grumbled something, then shuffled after him as Cade followed with a look of pure horror.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Phil jabbed his beer in my direction. “And why the hell are you here? Didn’t you swear to never come within ten thousand feet of him again?”
“I—”
“And stop eating my food. Every damn time…” He stalked over to where Noah was leaning against the wall and snatched the Twizzler back. He obviously knew this world’s Noah and me, but judging by the less than friendly welcome, it didn’t seem like he was a fan. “Babe, get up here. The disaster is back. You deal with it.”
“Babe?” Noah waggled his brows, not the least bit offended. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Phil stared at him like he had three heads, then shoved him out of the way. “You down there?”
“Dude!” Noah tried to poke his head around the corner to get a glimpse of Phil’s girlfriend. “Her turn to deal? Are you dating my sister?”
Phil’s stare grew even more confused. “Hurry, please. I think he’s on drugs again.”
A moment later, the stairs creaked and a woman wearing a crinkled white button-down shirt—and nothing else—poked her head out from around the corner. She had wild blond hair and dark, streaked makeup.
“Oh my God…” Cade made a sound almost like he was choking, then doubled over in a fit of hysterical laugher.
Noah didn’t find it as funny. His skin had paled and I thought he might be trying to speak, but no sound came. The woman let out a squeal when she saw him and ran to throw her arms around his. “My baby!”
I didn’t find it funny, either. Every muscle in my body stiffened as I took a long step back. I held my breath, waiting for the explosion even though this was not the woman I’d known most of my life.
Noah’s entire body went rigid. “Hands! You all see my hands, right? Not moving. Not moving an inch.”
This world’s version of Cora Anderson let go of him and laughed. “Always a joker.”
“I don’t think he’s joking,” Phil said. He came and rested an arm around her waist. “He thought I might be dating his sister.”
Cora laughed even harder. “Sister? Oh hun. One of you was more than enough for me.”
“I don’t get it.” Kori stepped forward. She actually looked like she might throw up. “What about Da—Karl? Is he—”
“I haven’t spoken to Karl since just after I met my little bunny here.” She mussed Phil’s hair and hitched her thumb toward the kitchen. “You hungry? I’m done in the lab for now. I could make—”
“Little bunny?” Wow. Now I was going to be sick. Both Kori and Noah had insisted their mother was a saint in other worlds, but my bad memories kept me on guard.
“Listen, this is entertaining in a way that you guys will never understand, but we have an issue and a tight schedule.” Cade shot Noah an amused grin. “We need to talk to you about something important. We need your help.”
“Money! He needs money,” Phil said. He threw up his hands and snorted. “What else is new?”
“Dude. This whole thing is beginning to freak me the fuck out.” Noah, still pale, was looking everywhere but at Cora. “And could you please put some clothes on, Mom?”
She huffed, but ran into the other room. When she came back, she had on a pair of super tight, low rise jeans. “Better?”
“Rabbit—” Cade cringed. “Assuming you go by Rabbit here?”
“Who are you, again?”
“My name is Cade. The other two are Kori and G—but that’s not important.” He pointed to Noah. “What’s important is who he is. Or, who he’s not.”
Phil didn’t say anything, but he and Cora exchanged a look and were suddenly serious.
“We’re not from around here,” Kori said.
A few moments passed. Neither Cora nor Phil said a word.
“Have you ever heard of the Infinity Division?”
More blank stares.
“Lab,” Noah tried. “You mentioned a lab?”
Cora narrowed her eyes. “Hun, you know all about my lab.”
“No, he knows about our Mom’s lab,” Kori said. “Because where we’re from, her set up is, um, a lot…bigger.”
Another moment passed in silence before Cora let out an earsplitting shriek. “Rabbit! They’re from another earth!”
Phil, not nearly as impressed as Cora seemed to be, rolled his eyes. “I got that a few sentences ago, babe.”
Cade glanced down at his phone. “The long and short of it is, yes, we’re from another dimension, and like I said, we need your help. The Rabbit from our last world was helping us with something. There was an accident and now he’s no longer able to help. We were hoping—”
I understood the need for delicacy in certain situations, but Cade was crawling around the bush and we didn’t have time. I knew they were sure Dylan wouldn’t hurt Sera, but I wasn’t. Someone as unhinged as him had no self-control. The first time she denied him something he felt she owed…well…I didn’t want to think about it. “We need you to pretend to be the Phil from my world so we can stop the bad guy and save the girl.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Noah
“Oh my God, you’re just as bad as him.” Cade groaned and Kori snickered.
Ash didn’t look apologetic. In fact, she was kind of smirking and I found it hot as all hell. “There’s a girl, her name is…Ava. Someone really bad took her.”
“And that involves me how?” This version of Phil wasn’t as much like mine as I’d hoped. He’d answered the door in a grungy, stained yellowing wife beater and a pair of jeans that barely stayed put. His hair was dirty and disheveled. Oh, and he was doing my mother. How the hell that had happened, I didn’t even want to know.
“You’re Rabbit. A stickier, less eloquent Rabbit, but still him.” I looked from him to Cora. I pointed to Kori. “Where I come from, you had two kids. Me and Kori. Dylan, this guy we’re tracking, killed Kori. We’re—”
“But she’s standing right there.” Cora’s eyes were wide. “Wow. Did we invent a way to raise the dead, too?” She nudged Rabbit. “How amazing would that be, bunny? We need to work harder.”
No wonder Infinity
didn’t exist here…
“I’m from another world,” Kori said. “They saved me from this guy, but now another girl needs saving. Dylan has her here and we have a limited window to get her back.”
“If you could just pose as the other Rabbit and tell Dylan there’s something wrong with his chip—”
“Chip?”
“That’s how we skip from one place to another,” Cade answered. He had more patience than I did. “Tell him his chip isn’t programmed right or something, get him to agree to meet us and we’ll take it from there.”
“Why do you need me to do it?” Rabbit eyed me suspiciously. “You know him—you tell him.”
“We’re the ones chasing him,” I said, resisting the urge to smack him across the back of the head. “I doubt he’d agree to a sit down.”
“Please,” Ash chimed in when he didn’t respond. “This guy is dangerous, and the girl, Ava? She’s already been through enough.”
Rabbit thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “I’ll help you—but in exchange, you have to give us something that helps with the cuffs. A tip—anything.”
“Deal,” Cade said. “Don’t try using cuffs.”
“Why?” Cora asked. “My prototypes are amazing. We made them pink with blue shimmer!”
“You—I—” It took me a minute to recover. Yep. This world would be better off without an Infinity. The universe didn’t need the people here traveling to other worlds. “The core overheats. It’ll take years to figure out and cost lives. Look into manufacturing a chip.” I held up my arm and undid the dressing. It was sore but the wound itself wasn’t that bad. It would heal in no time. I tapped the skin just below my wrist twice to wake the thing up.
Nothing happened.
“Uh…” I tapped my forearm again, this time harder. We couldn’t skip yet, but the chip should still be active.
“What’s supposed to happen?” Cora asked. She craned her neck, curious, while Rabbit stood there irritated.
“The chip must have gotten damaged when the dog bit me.” Fucking fantastic. Now what the hell was I supposed to do?
Cade rolled up his own sleeve and woke his chip, showing the control panel on his skin to Rabbit, who looked ready to pass out.
Cora squealed. “That’s so much prettier than the pink!”
“Noah, we’ll figure it out.” Cade must have noticed the look of horror on my face. “Until we do, you just have to stay with someone. Right now, we’re running out of time.”
Rabbit stared at his arm like he was seeing God. There might have even been drooling. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me what I have to do.”
...
It wasn’t easy to find Rabbit the things he needed to become Phil at his place. The closest we came before sending Cora out for supplies was one shoe that might have been black at one time—before the mildew set in—and a pair of tan pants that said stud across the ass.
This world had some fashion issues…
While she was gone, Cade coached Rabbit on what to say and how to act, and I called Dylan. Since he didn’t know about the four skips per twenty-four-hour-rule, getting him to agree to meet was easy. As we figured, he’d already tried—and failed—to skip off this world multiple times.
“You can do this, right?” I stood on one side of Rabbit while Cade took the other. Ash waited off to my left. We’d tried to get G and Kori to wait with Cora at the house, but they’d both refused. Kori because, well, she was Kori, and G because nothing was going to keep him from Ava. Sera. What-the-hell-ever she felt like calling herself. They were waiting in the woods that bordered Clifton Park.
“How hard could it be to act like a nerd?”
“And you understand that the guy we’re meeting looks just like G?” Cade had covered everything from Phil’s mannerisms—the way he’d tap his pointer when he was being impatient—to a well thought out script on what to say about the chip. We’d even dotted his shirt with red food coloring to simulate the wound Dylan had given the other version and told him to act injured.
All in all, I felt like we had this locked down. There was no contingency in place this time to keep us in line. No innocent person to worry about since we all knew he’d never hurt Ava. This was it. This was the day we took him down.
“Got it.”
Except that Dylan was late. Almost an hour had passed and just when we were sure he wasn’t coming, he ran up the path, Ava in tow, flying like a demon straight at Rabbit.
“What the hell did you do to my chip?”
Cade stepped between them, bracing a hand against his brother’s chest. “Cool down, man. Being an asshole will get you nowhere.”
For a second I thought Dylan would take a swing at him. I hoped. That would give me an excuse, not that I should have needed one. But Cade made me swear to keep this as civil as we could. He didn’t want things turning ugly and someone getting hurt in the commotion. We’d seen it happen too many times.
“I programmed in a failsafe,” Rabbit said. He winced and gingerly touched his side. Oh yeah. He was good. “Since you tried to kill me, I’m not exactly sorry.”
“I’d apologize, but, yanno, I never really liked you. Any of you.” He pulled out a narrow metal tube-like thing and pointed it at Rabbit. “Fix it. Now.”
“Are you insane?” I had no idea what the thing was, but Rabbit was freaked. He jumped back and stumbled, tripping over his own two feet and landing on his ass in the mud.
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. His gaze flickered from Rabbit to the metal thing, then settled on me with unadulterated fury. “Almost had me, boys. But judging by how skittish he is, he knows exactly what this is and that means he’s this world’s Rabbit—not the one who messed with the chip.”
Rabbit picked himself off the ground, eyes wide. Whatever it was, he was terrified of it. “How did you get that? Did you—”
“I looked up an old friend.” He grinned. “Did you know you can get anything you ask for on this world? Drugs, food—information? Come on out and say hello,” he shouted.
A moment later, this world’s version of my mother walked through the trees. She moved slowly and looked just as terrified as Rabbit did. As she got closer, I saw why. Whatever the thing Dylan had in his hands, there was another nestled in the ties around her hands.
“What are those things?” Obviously it was some kind of weapon, but the more we knew, the better we could deal.
“Cora’s first attempt at interdimensional travel,” Rabbit said.
“Okay…” That didn’t exactly sound world ending.
“It was a failure. Instead of shifting frequencies, it disrupts particles.”
“Huh?” Cade said.
“Basically that thing will scatter us into a trillion pieces,” I supplied, glaring at Rabbit. “Why the hell would you keep something like that in your basement?”
“I’ve made it a habit never to deal with you idiots without a backup plan—no matter what. Time was short so I decided to look up Mommy Dearest.” Dylan leaned closer and winked. “Gotta say, not the brightest bulb in the box, this one. Invited me in and just started babbling about all the toys she had in her lab!”
Rabbit looked sick. “It’s okay, Cora. He—”
“My chip,” Dylan snapped. “What the hell did Phil do to it?”
“We don’t know,” Cade lied. “We couldn’t skip out, either.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Dylan warned. He grabbed Ava’s arm and dragged her closer. “I want out of here. Now.”
“Then maybe you and I could work something out,” a new voice called.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” Ash came up beside me. She was tense and her expression was one of pure irritation, but I could feel the shudder that ran through her.
Crossing the field was her world’s version of Cora. Dressed in a white floor-length coat and flanked by three men in black on each side, she strode toward us, eyes locked on Dylan.
“Mr. Granger,” she said with a sickly sweet smile. “It’s n
ice to meet you.”
“Technically you’ve already met me,” he said with a snarl. He pulled Ava closer. “You had a version of me locked away in your basement.”
“I did,” she admitted with a laugh. “But I promise he was a pale shadow of yourself. I can see that already.”
“What do you want?”
“The chip you have in your arm, I created it. You don’t need Phil MaKaden to fix it. You only need me.”
“In exchange for?”
She waved a hand in Rabbit’s direction and groaned. “First off, get rid of that. I feel like it’s leering at me.”
There was no hesitation. No thought. Dylan simply shrugged and pointed the metal tube at Rabbit. He jabbed it out, poking him in the chest, and pressed the thin red button at the bottom. There was no sound. No screaming or pleas for mercy. One minute Rabbit was standing there, the next his body exploded into a trillion tiny pieces, scattered in every direction.
His Cora let out a horrible wail and threw herself forward, but she tripped. The second she hit the ground, her body exploded just like Rabbit’s.
Cora shrugged, her lips twisting into a wicked grin. “Better. The reason your chip isn’t working is because Phil designed it with an overheat failsafe. It can only be used four times within a twenty-four-hour period.”
Dylan’s lips split with a grin. “Really? Well, if that’s the case, then we’ll just be on our way. Time should be up by now.”
“Now, you may keep the chip, but I want the rest of my property back.”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t care less what you take. Take all of them with it for all I care.”
He thought she was talking about something material. A piece of tech or information. The truth was, I knew she was talking about Ash. If Ash was her way to get Omega off the ground, she wasn’t going to let go without a fight.
Which is exactly what she’d get.
“Like hell.” I moved to stand between Ash and Cora, ready to shred anyone who came at us. She thought it’d be that easy? She was in for one hell of a surprise. I spread my legs and readied myself. Cade was beside me in an instant, and from the tree line, Kori and Granger were already bolting forward.