The Otherworldlies by Jennifer Anne Kogler Read Free Book Online Page A

practically stood guard outside Fern’s door. If Fern wasn’t going to fess up and talk to her, Mrs. McAllister reasoned, then she wasn’t going to talk to anyone else either. The Commander had spent the entire night before with her door open, half awake, listening for any sign that Sam might be trying to sneak into Fern’s room. Fern was to be under bedroom arrest for six more days.
    After spending a whole day unable to talk about the disappearance, Sam couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to talk to Fern so badly, he was willing to risk it, even though his punishment, should he get caught, would probably include his spending a significant portion of his adolescence grounded with Fern. As he peered around the corner of the hallway and realized the Commander was still downstairs, probably watching the evening news, Sam figured he had at least a half hour before she would come upstairs to her room. He carefully crept around the corner of the hallway as Fern followed behind. They snuck into their mother’s office, where they could talk and research with less chance of the Commander bursting in on them.
    Once the twins were safely in the office, Sam plopped down in the chair in front of the computer. Fern kneeled next to him, silently.
    “Fern, what in the world’s going on with you? What really happened?” Sam said, looking at his sister. He was whispering, but having had no opportunity to really talk to his sister since yesterday, he was excited and unable to keep his voice low.
    “I don’t know what happened, exactly. One second I was in class and then the next second I was on the beach.”
    “You really don’t remember anything?” Sam said. “Like being taken to the beach or something?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Unbelievable! Do you realize what this means?” He had no idea how to even process the information. He looked at his sister with wide, wild eyes. That’s when he noticed the fear in Fern’s. She had been remarkably composed throughout the whole ordeal up to this point, so it was easy for Sam to forget that she was probably terrified. He calmed himself down.
    “What did it feel like?” Sam asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
    “You mean disappearing?”
    “And the reappearing.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Was it scary?”
    “You know what it was like?” Fern said, trying to describe something that there were no words for. “The second drop in Splash Mountain. When your stomach feels like it flies out of your body and everything goes dark. You come out of it in a totally new place. Except, there was nothing to hold on to.”
    “So you really did just disappear.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Was it instantaneous?” Sam whispered.
    “What do you mean?” Fern whispered back.
    “When you disappeared,” Sam said. “Did you go to the beach right away?”
    “Yes,” Fern said, anxious to confess to the only person who believed her. “Well, almost. Things went black for a few seconds. There was a strange person waiting there, Sam.”
    “On the beach?”
    “Yeah. This sunburned man—he was the only other person at Pirate’s Cove and he had this weird voice and a metal detector. He knew that I’d ‘disappeared.’ He said I disappeared because it was a celebration of the end of the Titanomachy. At least I think that’s what he said, but I’ve never heard that word in my life.”
    “He sounds like he was talking gibberish.”
    “It wasn’t gibberish.”
    “He was probably just some crazy guy. There are lots of those people at the beach.”
    “No, it was like he was waiting there for me. He seemed crazy but he wasn’t. He knew I’d come from school, and he told me to go into the cave by the stairs. I found initials there that were the same as Mom’s. M. L. M.”
    “Those could have been anybody’s initials. The Commander would never deface anything.”
    “I know you’re probably right.” Fern said, feeling foolish for bringing it up. She continued, “There was also a second cave behind