Tethered Souls (Tethered Twins Book 2)

Chapter Two

I felt myself drift in and out of consciousness, alternating between visions of Rex and Rufus trying to help me and Will saying the word "capstone" over and over.

I badly wanted to wake up and see Will again, or at least see the world through his eyes but Rufus was the first sight I saw when I finally awoke.

"Was it real?" was all I could ask.

"What honey?" asked Rufus.

Rex rushed over, seeing that I was awake. He lent down next to me and delicately placed his hand on top of my own, presumably to show that he cared but that he didn't want to risk hurting me. "Thank God you're ok," he said.

"What happened?" I asked, starting to feel a pounding in my head.

"You fell and hit your head on the sink," explained Rex. "The next thing we knew you were passed out mumbling about Vlad and your brother."

I instinctively reached my hand out to the source of the pain in my forehead and felt the lump that had started to form. Rex handed me some painkillers and a glass of water to take them with.

"I saw them" I said. "It was Will and Vlad."

"They're alive?" asked Rex, not doubting the absurdity of my statement. He had seen so much in the last few months that I doubted he would believe anything was impossible any more.

"Are you sure you weren't dreaming?" asked Rufus, who had not lost his sense of scepticism despite all that had happened.

"Yeah, I'm sure. I felt connected to Will in the same way I had done before he died," I interrupted myself, realising that those words no longer made sense. I had become so used to saying he had died that the thought he could be alive clashed with the prior truth in my mind.

This was amplified by knowing that I no longer felt connected to him, even now. Whatever connection had been rekindled was now gone. If Will was alive then the Tether we had once shared still remained severed.

I knew what I was saying sounded crazy and that perhaps it had just been a dream bought on by the likely concussion of my injury but I wasn't prepared to let it go. From the look in their eyes Rex and Rufus - or R&R as I liked to call them - understood that too.

Rex put on his coat and handed me some clothes. "So where do we find him?"

As I rode my motorcycle to London with R&R trailing behind in a duocycle I called my father to explain what I had seen. He was shocked that Will could still be alive but I could hear from his voice that he was ecstatic at the thought of seeing his son again. It was in stark contrast to how disconnected he had seemed when he abandoned us years ago.

My father couldn't explain why Vlad was alive again, nor why his eyes were still orange when they had dismantled Tobias' machine, which had previously allowed Vlad to live on even when he should have died. Whoever was controlling Vlad now it certainly wasn't The Deck or Tobias; there was another player in this game that I had yet to meet. Vlad and Will's mutual friend.

Although my father urged me to travel to The Deck's base so he could check I was ok, I refused, knowing that every second they spent performing tests would be further time for Will to slip away from me. As a compromise it was agreed that Chris, Grace and a small support team would meet me on the outskirts of London. When I tried to argue that even meeting up with them would add time to the journey my father insisted that without them I'd never get into London alive.

It certainly was a fair assessment. London had changed in the months since I had last been there. In fact, the whole world had. With almost every single person sharing a Tether event that almost killed them it wasn't something that could be easily covered up.