Magic Gambit (Hidden World Academy Book 3)

by Sadie Moss

  But I’ve never spoken to her. I know her so well, and yet not at all.

  Now, we’re about to meet.

  Yeah, I’m really glad I don’t have to do this alone. I’m not sure that I could.

  We get up to my room, and I close and lock the door behind us. Theo puts a kind of silencing charm around the frame so that nobody can hear us.

  “Okay,” Bianca whispers. “We’re ready.”

  Cross takes the device from me, turning it over and over, examining it. Then he fixes it onto the full-length mirror that hangs on the wall.

  “Concentrate on Roxie,” he tells me.

  My ruggedly handsome boyfriend is the best in our class for a reason. I trust him if he says that’s how this device works.

  I think about Roxie as hard as I can. I picture the girl who’s exactly like me in looks, but my opposite in personality. I think about her memories that I’ve felt, and how scared she’s been when we’ve swapped places. I think of everything that I’ve learned about her.

  For a few moments, nothing happens, and my heart beats harder and faster with every passing minute.

  “Do we have to wait until Roxie looks into a mirror?” Theo whispers.

  “If that’s the case, then we won’t have long to wait,” Cross jokes. I hear the sound of Bianca punching or slapping him, probably in the arm. “Ow!”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” Kasian murmurs, ignoring the two of them. “This is opening a window to another dimension. There’s no reason it can’t bend time as well. I think it’ll just find the closest moment in time when Roxie is at a mirror, and then make the connection happen.”

  As he speaks, the surface of the mirror flickers, and I inhale sharply as my reflection changes.

  It’s me. Or well, it looks exactly like me, but I’m wearing different clothing. More revealing clothing. Dammit, Roxie, would it kill you to wear a skirt that doesn’t look like you have to Marilyn Monroe anytime a breeze starts up?

  Behind Roxie, I can see a familiar room—Dean’s room. Ahh. Well then. I suppose it’s a good thing she’s not in my room? Dean, at least, knows the truth.

  Roxie’s got her face scrunched up in a way that is eerily identical to the face I make when I’m concentrating on something and annoyed about it. She’s fixing her hair—and then she seems to realize that her reflection is no longer her own.

  She screams.

  Dean comes rushing in. “Babe? What’s wrong?”

  Roxie stumbles back, her eyes wide.

  “It’s okay! It’s okay! It’s me!” I tell her, holding out my hands.

  “What’s okay?” Cross asks.

  “It’s Roxie. She’s there.” I gesture at the mirror. “Can’t you guys…?” I pause, as I see the other four shake their heads at me, confused.

  They can’t see Roxie. Only I can.

  “You look normal, in the mirror,” Bianca says.

  “Is that Bianca?” Roxie exclaims in the mirror.

  “Yes,” I say to Roxie. “And Roxie’s here, I can see her,” I tell the others.

  Bianca, to everyone’s shock, tears up immediately. Hell, I don’t even remember seeing her cry after she killed Gunner.

  “Is she okay?” Her voice is soft.

  “Yes. I’m okay,” Roxie says, putting her face closer to the mirror on her side and peering around. “She—she can’t hear me? She can’t see me?”

  “Rox, what is happening?” Dean asks. He still looks like he’s ready to fight someone.

  “It’s Gabbi, she’s in the mirror with…” Roxie squints. “Is that Cross? And Theo? What the fuck?”

  “Uh…” I wince. “Yeah, um, so, funny story. Cross and Theo and Kasian and I are… uh… we’re all together.”

  Roxie stares at me for a beat, and it occurs to me that even though I told Dean I was dating three guys, I’m not sure I ever gave him their names. Or if I did, maybe he didn’t want to gossip about me to Roxie. Because she definitely seems surprised by this information.

  “What is it?” Dean asks, resting his hands on Roxie’s shoulders.

  “My twin has three boyfriends, and I hate two of them,” she replies, her eyes a little wide.

  “They don’t hate you. Anymore,” I assure her with a lopsided half-smile.

  “Is she talking about me?” Cross asks. “Whatever she’s saying, tell her the feeling’s definitely mutual.”

  “She can hear you,” I tell him dryly. I would poke him in the ribs, but I can’t bring myself to turn away from the mirror. “I can see everything going on in her world and she can see everything going on in mine, you all just can’t.”

  Bianca waves at the mirror, still sniffling a little. The guys all sit down on the bed behind me, looking various levels of uncomfortable—and I can’t blame them, actually. The last time Kasian saw Roxie, he’d had a one-night stand with her in his office. The last time Cross saw Roxie, he… actually I don’t know what happened the last time they saw each other, but given their history, I’m sure it wasn’t anything pleasant. And the last time Theo saw Roxie, he was obnoxiously flirting with her because he knew it pissed her off.

  So yeah, I don’t blame any of them for wanting to stay out of the picture, so to speak.

  I refocus on Roxie, who’s staring at me like she’s not sure I’m real, but no longer in a suspicious way—more in a very good way, like when you get that news that’s so good it can’t possibly be real and you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re awake and not dreaming.

  “So,” I start to say, but Roxie cuts me off.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells me.

  Out of all the things I expected her to say, that was really not high up on the list. Actually, it wasn’t on the list at all. Wow. Um. I’m not sure what to do with this.

  “You are?” I ask her, like a dumbass. But seriously, what? Roxie’s whole thing is that she does what she wants and she never apologizes for anything.

  Roxie nods. Behind her, the olive-skinned man is looking at her encouragingly. Dean is a really nice guy, kind of… soft and gentle. It’s why he pined after me for a decade before he ended up getting with Roxie. He’s just a gentle person. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had helped Roxie with this. Helped her find the softer side of herself.

  “I’m really sorry, honestly.” And Roxie sounds it, she really does. “I totally screwed you over. I know what I did was shitty. It was the only thing I could think of to do, and I still think I was right to do it, but I could’ve found a way to warn you. Or prepare you for pretending to be me. I was frantic and I was thinking only about myself. I was selfish. I’m truly, really sorry for all I’ve done.”

  My mouth is open a little in shock. Roxie would never have apologized before all of… this mess. The Roxie of last summer certainly wouldn’t have. Maybe not even the Roxie of early September who had the prophecy hanging over her shoulders, if she had somehow gotten a chance to talk to me directly.

  But it looks like I’m not the only person who’s done some growing and changing over the last several months. I’m not the same person I was when Roxie first swapped us, but neither is Roxie.

  “Thank you,” I tell her, and I mean it. “Thanks for saying that. It means a lot to hear.”

  Roxie smiles at me, a little sadly, but also a bit relieved. I wonder if this whole time, while I’ve been hoping I could get a chance to yell at her, she’s been worried that I would do exactly that—yell at her. Take her to task for all that she’s stuck me in, this mess she’s dragged me into.

  “It’s not fair,” she adds. “What I did. Really, and if there’s any way that I can fix it—”

  “It’s okay,” I say, cutting Roxie off without planning to. But once the words are out of my mouth, I realize I mean it.

  Sure, this whole thing has been a mess and a half, and I wish Roxie had handled some things better. But at the same time, I don’t know if, given the chance, I’d change the fact that I was brought here.

  I love this world so much.

/>   And I love my guys.

  It’s been an unpleasant adventure at times, but it’s also given me some of the best moments of my life.

  And how much can I judge Roxie for her choice? She was trying to prevent the destruction of the world. She was trying not to hurt anyone. Yeah, I want her to have had a little more consideration for me but she was working for the greater good and I appreciate that. Especially now when it might in fact not be Roxie, but me, who’s going to break the world.

  Not that I want to think about that.

  But I do have to tell Roxie about it. I can’t keep her in the dark. So I fill her in about everything. It’s the first time Bianca’s heard this part about the prophecy too, and she gasps in surprise, her eyes going wide.

  “Are you telling me,” Roxie says when I finish, “that in bringing you to the Hidden World… I might have made the prophecy more likely to succeed?”

  I nod, feeling miserable because of the look on Roxie’s face. She risked everything, abandoned her family and best friend and all the rest without even saying goodbye so that she could save everyone. And now it’s looking like maybe she did it all in vain. No, worse than that, her actions might’ve helped cause this awful thing, when that was the opposite of her intention.

  It’s not exactly heartening. The shitty thing about prophecies is that people who try to fight them often only end up doing things to make them happen. Like a fly in a spider’s web, the more you fight against it, the worse of a mess you entangle yourself in, and the prophecy comes true because of your efforts rather than in spite of them. Roxie fled to a non-magical world in a last-ditch effort to nullify the prophecy, and even that didn’t help to stop it.

  But there’ll be a chance to take a different path. Madame Mulfrey said so, and I’m clinging to that.

  “Fuck,” Roxie swears quietly. She sounds different from me in a way only I can probably hear—the way she uses her voice, even the way she swears. “What do we do?”

  “I… I don’t know,” I admit.

  Roxie relays what I told her to Dean, who looks understandably upset to hear all of this but doesn’t say anything, just listens and nods. Then she turns back to me.

  “Okay, here’s the thing. We have to take these cult assholes out. They’re the ones who want this to happen, so if we stop them, that’ll be a big obstacle out of the way. We can worry about the prophecy itself once those bastards are done with.” Her jaw firms. “I’m sick of running.”

  I nod. “I agree. This whole thing is a mess, but if there’s not some crazy group of warlocks trying to force us to break the world, maybe neither of us will do it.”

  And, well, even if the world does get broken somehow, I’m not letting those dicks win. I’m not letting them rule whatever dystopia might be left in the aftermath. They’re going down, one way or another.

  Roxie and I talk for a long time, each sharing every bit of information we have. At one point, after our dozens of swaps the night we fought with Gunner, it occurred to me that Roxie and I could try to use the swaps to communicate, leaving notes or messages for each other as we went back and forth between worlds. But I worried what that much more swapping would do to both of us—and it’s almost impossible to control where we land when we swap. It seemed too dangerous to risk.

  Besides, nothing can take the place of an actual face-to-face conversation.

  It’s such a fucking relief to actually be able to pool information with Roxie, to share everything I know, to strategize with her and plan with her.

  And it’s easier to talk to her than I thought it would be. As different as we are, there’s something so familiar about her too, as if I’ve known her my whole life.

  “That nightclub, Night Elements, is where they have their little rallies,” Roxie explains a while later, reaching up to thread her fingers through Dean’s. He’s still standing behind her, although he’s only been able to hear her side of the conversation.

  “Yeah, we found that out thanks to Dean,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “The leaders have another place though. A headquarters. The club’s just a good cover so they can get all of their members into one big place without people really noticing. This other place though, that’s only for the people who are at the top of the food chain. Not all of the members even know about it—”

  “How do you know about it?” I ask, curious.

  Roxie sobers up, her confident air subsiding a little. It’s so odd to see her unsure or scared. It’s clearly not her natural state of being, and it’s like watching someone try to put on a coat that’s too big for them.

  “That’s where they first took me,” she whispers. “The first time I was taken back, when Gunner got me.” Roxie winces. “I’m sorry I couldn’t finish my message in time. I didn’t suspect him before then, but when he came for me, I recognized him. I didn’t know if or how he would get close to you guys, but I knew he was a TA at Radcliffe and that he would be able to get close to you because of that.”

  “So they took you to their headquarters?” I ask, my heart thudding painfully. “Were you okay? They didn’t…”

  Roxie sighs impatiently, as if to say that she’s not going to dwell on whatever unpleasantness occurred there. She honestly makes it look like being abducted and held captive is equivalent to someone showing up late to her birthday party.

  “They didn’t do anything you’d see in a horror film,” she scoffs. “But it… wasn’t fun. Less said about it the better. Point is, this new guy in charge, he’s the one causing all the problems. I tried to keep my ears open, and from what little I was able to pick up, which wasn’t easy—”

  “Yeah, I hear that,” I grumble, remembering what happened when the guys and I tried to research the Cult of Singularity ourselves. The cult was treated like a joke for so long that there’s been barely anything written on them, no research or whatever. It’s just got a couple entries in books and dismissed.

  “But he’s the one who’s made them into a threat,” Roxie explains. “Hawksmith. Before him, they were just a joke. Like those flat earth people here in the Dull World.”

  Dean groans. “Can Gabbi hear me?”

  “Yes,” Roxie answers.

  Dean looks directly at the mirror. “She’s been researching all that crazy stuff, and cults and everything. She yelled at me about Scientology for three hours the other day. Help.”

  I can tell by the twinkle in his eyes that he’s joking. He probably finds her type-A personality endearing, and I don’t exactly blame him. I bet that my guys get the same kind of expression on their faces when I go off about something. I’m sure that Dean is happy to let Roxie rant at him for hours about something that’s important to her.

  “I was checking to make sure that there were no equivalent cults in the Dull World who could possibly cause us more problems,” Roxie replies, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world and Dean should know it already.

  I find myself smiling in amusement. They really are well-suited for each other. I couldn’t ever have interacted with Dean that way, but he and Roxie are fondly rolling their eyes at each other and smiling like the other person is the greatest thing they’ve ever seen.

  “So now this Hawksmith guy is the one who’s whipping them all up into some kind of frenzy?” I ask. “Shit. I met him. I knew he was high up in the cult, but I didn’t know he was responsible for all of this.”

  Roxie nods in confirmation. “The idea of splitting worlds? Everyone thought it was crazy. It is crazy, but it’s also possible, and until Hawksmith came along, nobody thought it actually was. I think the entire cult was sort of sitting around thinking it would just spontaneously happen someday. I don’t think they really considered the idea that they could help make it happen. That they could have a part to play in it. Then Hawksmith swooped in, and now he’s ordering them all around and taking them from somewhat crazy to absolutely bonkers.”

  “You can say that again,” I mutter. “What do we do about it then?”


  “I think we need to take him down. Don’t focus on the cult as a whole. There are too many of them anyway. If we get their leader, the others will disperse. They weren’t anything before him, they won’t be anything after him. And besides…” Roxie has a ruthless glint in her eye. I bet Cross saw that glint a lot when they were competing against each other. “They’ll be freaking out over the loss of their leader. Nobody will be able to keep their head on straight.”

  “Cut off the head of the snake,” I say, following her train of thought, “and the body dies.”

  Roxie’s smile is grim. “Exactly.”

  Chapter 26

  I tell Roxie that I’ll talk to the others and we’ll see about what we can do, and then I’ll call her back.

  We might want to swap Roxie and me, so that Roxie can do her thing, but then again it might be safest to leave her in the Dull World so that the cultists can’t get her. Whether it’s her or me that’s the subject of the prophecy, the Cult of Singularity thinks it’s her, so that’s who they’ll go after. We shouldn’t make it any easier for them to complicate things by taking her from us and stranding me in the Dull World again.

  Roxie nods, and I take the device off the mirror, severing our connection.

  That was… weird.

  Good, but weird.

  We finally did it. Roxie and I spoke to each other, and we can do it again. Theoretically, we can do it whenever we want. It’s kind of crazy. I almost can’t wrap my head around it; it still seems a bit surreal.

  “Well?” Bianca demands, and I realize the others are all looking at me. “What did she say?”

  Taking a deep breath, I go and sit down on the bed. “Okay. So.”

  I explain to them what Roxie told me about how Hawksmith is the one responsible for making this cult into a serious threat, and how we need to go after him if we want to stop them.

  “Makes sense,” Kasian says, nodding slowly. “I agree, going after the cult leader needs to be our first priority. He and his disciples are going to keep coming at us unless we stop them, and once they’re out of the way we can tackle the prophecy issue.”