Tim wakes up, and accidentally breaks a frame with his mother's photo.
He finds the letter Molly wrote to him a couple issues ago. However, he also finds his father, who last issue woke up with his magic arm fallen off. He has gotten drunk. At first Tim thinks it's because of Holly's death, but then he sees that his dad had bandaged the arm to his body. When he takes the bandages off, the arm falls off again,then turns to dust. Tim runs off to get help.
Tim gets him to the hospital, but when they hear about the arm, and that his face was also healed of major burns by Vasuki, they think it's all a delusion on Bill's part. They say he is going to be committed to an institution for the insane.
Tim blames himself for all of it--that his father needed Vasuki in the first place, that Tim wasn't there for Bill when Holly died, instead being with Thomas re-learning magic.
Thomas shows up with his clothes on backwards to hide his presence. He tells Tim that the Other is here.
They realize that when Bill said he saw Tim before the car crash, he actually saw the Other. Now Tim blames the Other for the accident.
Back at Tim's original house, Thomas makes him some tea. He says Tim is not ready to reclaim his magic and fight the Other, who has absorbed all the magic from all the other Tims that were splintered off among the other worlds.
Thomas's plan is to let the Other think he took Tim's place, and become this reality's Tim until the true Tim is ready to fight him. Tim refuses. However, Thoimas drugged the tea.
Tim passes out. Thomas, in his diaries, writes at how displeased he is with Tim. He is not up to Thomas's standards, due to his constant changing of his mind, his hypocrisy, his self-centeredness. He is further unhappy that this weak child is the creature that created him, for what does that say about himself? Thomas will act without him.
When Tim wakes up, he sees Molly's letter and reads it, realizing that Molly wrote it thinking that the Other was Tim. Tim refuses to let Molly be hurt by the Other. He goes to the room where his magic is kept, and takes it back, saying (more maturely than normal) that magic requires sacrifice.
Thomas goes to Bill's hospital room. Bill wakes up, and worries that he scared Tim. Thomas hypnotizes him, and either has him jump out the window, or throws him out. Bill is, after years of unhappiness, dead. Currie says that he would do anything to stop the Other, including things that people who have not seen worlds be destroyed would not do. That is his sacrifice.
In the back-up story, a long time ago in Faerie, a girl whose family mistreats her runs along a beach. She looks for the boy she has been meeting lately. They talk of running away together, but then his magical guise falls away, and she sees that he's a kelpie--a creature that can turn into a horse or a man, that seduces girls and then drowns them.
He says that he's not like the others, and that he loves her. She makes him promise to stay human, and to bring her to his land safely. He promises, and they swim off.
The next morning, her drowned body washes up on shore.
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