“What happened to you?” I asked softly.
He jumped, as if startled by my voice.
“Is someone else here?” I asked, hoping he sensed Liz, beyond the pale where I couldn’t see her.
“I thought I heard…” He studied me, frowning. “You brought me here?”
“I—I didn’t mean to. But…since you are here, can you tell me—?”
“Nothing. I can’t tell you anything.” He squared his shoulders. “Whatever you want to talk about, I’m not interested.”
He looked away, determined not to be interested. When he started to fade, I was ready to let him go. Rest in peace. Then I thought about Rae and Simon and Derek. If I didn’t get some answers, we might all join Brady in the afterlife.
“My name’s Chloe,” I said quickly. “I’m a friend of Rae’s. From Lyle House. I was there with her, after you—”
He kept fading.
“Wait!” I said. “I c-can prove it. Back at Lyle House. You tried getting into a fight with Derek, and Simon shoved you away. Only he didn’t touch you. He used magic.”
“Magic?”
“It was a spell that knocks people back. Simon’s a sorcerer. All the kids in Lyle House—”
“I knew it. I knew it.” He swore under his breath as he rematerialized. “All that time, they kept trying to shove their diagnosis down my throat, and I told them where else they could shove it, but I couldn’t prove anything.”
“You told the nurses what happened with Simon, didn’t you?”
“Nurses?” He snorted. “Glorified security guards. I wanted to speak to the real boss: Davidoff. They took me to see him at this other place, looked like a warehouse.”
I described what I’d seen of this building when we’d arrived.
“Yeah, that’s it. They took me inside and…” His face screwed up in thought. “A woman came to talk to me. A blonde. Said she was a doctor. Bellows? Fellows?”
Aunt Lauren. My heart battered my rib cage. “So this woman, Dr. Fellows…”
“She wanted me to say Derek started the fight. That he threatened me, punched me, shoved me, whatever. I considered it. A little payback for all the attitude I had to put up with from that jerk. I’d just been goofing around with him when Simon got all up in my face and smacked me with that spell.”
In the version I’d heard, Brady had been the one getting in Derek’s face. Simon had a good reason for interfering, too—the last time Derek took a swing, he’d broken a kid’s back.
“So Dr. Fellows wanted you to say Derek started the fight….”
“I wouldn’t. I’d have to deal with the fallout when I went back to Lyle House and I didn’t need that grief. That’s when Davidoff came in. He hauled her out of the room, but I could still hear him chewing her out in the hall. She kept saying Derek was a menace and the only reason Davidoff kept him was because he couldn’t admit he made a mistake by including Derek’s type.”
“Type?”
“In the experiment.”
A chill settled in my gut. “Ex-experiment?”
Brady shrugged. “That’s all she said. Davidoff told her to shove off. He said he made a mistake with the others, but Derek was different.”
Others? Did he mean other werewolves? Or other subjects in this experiment? Was I a subject in this experiment?
“Did they say any—?” I began.
His head whipped to the side, as if seeing something out of the corner of his eye.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Don’t you hear that?”
I listened. “What is it?”
“Whispering.”
“It could be Liz. She—”
Brady went rigid. His eyes rolled. Then his head flew back, the tendons in his neck popping out, bones crackling. His throat convulsed and he gurgled. Instinctively I reached out to help. My hands passed through him, but I could feel the heat of his body, a scorching heat that made me fall back in surprise.
As I recovered, Brady went still again. His chin lowered and he rolled his shoulders, as if working out the kinks. Then he looked down at me. His dark eyes were now a glowing yellowish-orange. The chill in my gut slunk up my spine.
“Frightened, child?” The voice coming out of Brady’s mouth was a woman’s, so high and light it was almost girlish. “Your instincts are excellent, but you have nothing to fear from me.”
“W-where’s Brady?”
She looked down at the body she was possessing. “Do you like him? He is pretty, isn’t he? All of dear Dr. Lyle’s creations are so very pretty. Perfect balls of perfect energy, waiting to explode.”
In a blink, “Brady” was in front of me, his face coming down to mine, bathing me in scorching hot breath that smelled strangely sweet. Those orange eyes met mine, the pupils slitted like a cat’s.
“The boy can’t help you, child. But I can. You just need to—”
Her eyes rolled back, darkening to Brady’s brown, then back to orange as she snarled.
“They’re pulling him back to the other side. Call me, child. Quickly.”
“C-call—”
“Call me forth. I can—”
Her eyes rolled again, her snarl deepening into something inhuman, a sound that made the chill in my veins harden to ice. I stepped back and smacked into the wall.
“Call me forth,” she said, voice going ragged, deepening into Brady’s. “I can answer all your questions. Call me—”
Brady’s image wavered, then popped, like a TV screen after the power cord is pulled. One flash of white light and he was gone. I thought I heard a knock at the door but couldn’t move, just stared at the spot where Brady had been.
The door opened, and Dr. Davidoff stepped in to find me plastered to the wall.
“Chloe?”
I staggered forward, rubbing my arms.
“Chloe?”
“S-spider,” I said, pointing to the bed. “It r-ran under there.”
Dr. Davidoff struggled against a smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll get someone to take care of it, while we’re gone. We’re going to go for a walk. It’s time you got a proper tour and a proper explanation.”
Four
AS I FOLLOWED DR. Davidoff down the hall, I tried to shake off thoughts of whatever had been in my room. I was a necromancer: ghosts were my one and only specialty. So it had to be a ghost, no matter how strongly every instinct in me insisted it wasn’t. All I knew for sure was that I was in no hurry to go back in there.
“Now, Chloe—” Dr. Davidoff stopped, noticing me rubbing the lingering goose bumps on my arms. “Cold? I’ll have them turn up the heat in your room. Your comfort is important to us.”
We started walking again.
“But comfort isn’t just physical, is it?” he continued. “Equally important, perhaps even more, is mental comfort. A sense of security. I know you’re upset and confused, and it didn’t help when we refused to answer your questions. We were eager to start checking those places you listed.”
He hadn’t been gone long enough to visit spots miles away. I knew what he’d really been checking: whether Rae corroborated my story. She would. She didn’t know the real rendezvous point, only that I’d said the guys would meet up with us.
Dr. Davidoff opened a door at the end of the hall. It was a security station, the wall lined with flat-screen monitors. Inside, a young man spun in his chair, like he’d been caught surfing porn sites.
“Why don’t you go grab a coffee, Rob,” Dr. Davidoff said. “We’ll take over.”
He turned to me as the guard left. “You’ll be seeing more of the building later. For now”—he waved at the screens—“consider this the one-stop tour.”
Did he think I was stupid? I knew what he was really doing: showing me how well guarded this place was, in case I was planning another escape. But he was also giving me a chance to study what I was up against.
“As you can see, there’s no camera in your room,” he said, “nor in any of the bedrooms. Just in the hallway.”
Two hall cameras, one at each end. I scanned the other screens. Some flipped between cameras, giving multiple angles of halls and entryways. Two showed laboratories, both empty, the lights dim, probably because it was Sunday.
An older model monitor was propped on the desk, cords every which way, like it had been quickly set up. The tiny picture screen was black-and-white and showed what looked like a storage room, all the boxes shoved along the walls. I could see the back of a girl in a beanbag chair.
She was slumped, sneakers stretched next to a game console, long curls spilling over the beanbag, the controller held between dark hands. It looked like Rae. Or maybe it was an impostor set up to convince me that she was okay, playing games, not locked up, screaming for—
The girl in the chair reached for her Diet 7UP and I saw her face. Rae.
“Yes, as Rae has informed us, that GameCube is terribly outdated. But once we promised to replace it with the latest model, she resigned herself to playing it.”
As he spoke, his eyes never left the screen. The expression on his face was…fond. Weirdly, the very word he’d used earlier for Derek seemed to fit here.
When he turned to me, his expression rearranged itself, as if to say I like you well enough, Chloe, but you’re no Rachelle. And I felt…bewildered. Maybe even a little hurt, like there was still part of me that wanted to please.
He waved at the screen. “As you can see, we weren’t prepared to have you kids with us here, but we’re adjusting. While it will never be as cozy as Lyle House, the five of you will be comfortable here, perhaps more so, with all those unfortunate misrepresentations corrected.”
Five of us? That must mean he didn’t plan to put Derek “down like a rabid dog,” as Aunt Lauren wanted. I breathed a soft sigh of relief.
“I won’t apologize, Chloe,” Dr. Davidoff continued. “Perhaps I should, but we thought setting up Lyle House was the best way to handle the situation.”
He waved me to a chair. There were two, the one the security guard had vacated and a second, pushed against the wall. As I stepped toward the second one, it rolled from the shadows and stopped right in front of me.
“No, that’s not a ghost,” Dr. Davidoff said. “They can’t move objects in our world—unless they happen to be a very specific kind, namely the ghost of an Agito.”
“A what?”
“Agito. It’s Latin roughly translating to ‘put into motion.’ Half-demons come in many types, as you’ll discover. An Agito’s power, as the name might suggest, is telekinesis.”
“Moving things with the mind.”
“Very good. And it is an Agito who moved that chair, though one who is still very much alive.”
“You?”
He smiled and, for a second, the mask of the doddering old fool cracked, and I caught a glimpse of the real man beneath. What I saw was pride and arrogance, like a classmate flashing his A+ paper as if to say top that.
“Yes, I’m a supernatural, as is almost everyone who works here. I know what you must have been thinking—that we’re humans who’ve discovered your powers and wish to destroy what we don’t understand, like in those comic books.”
“The X-Men.”
I don’t know what was more shocking, that Dr. Davidoff and his colleagues were supernaturals or the image of this stooped, awkward man reading X-Men. Had he pored over them as a boy, imagining himself in Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters?
Did that mean Aunt Lauren was a necromancer? That she saw ghosts, too?
He continued before I could ask anything. “The Edison Group was founded by supernaturals eighty years ago. And as much as it has grown since those early days, it’s still an institution run by supernaturals and for supernaturals, dedicated to bettering the lives of our kind.”
“Edison Group?”
“Named after Thomas Edison.”
“The guy who invented the lightbulb?”
“That’s what he’s best known for. He also invented the movie projector, which I’m sure you’re grateful for. Yet you, Chloe, have accomplished something he dreamed of but never succeeded in doing.” A dramatic pause. “Contacting the dead.”
“Thomas Edison wanted to talk to the dead?”
“He believed in an afterlife and wanted to communicate with it not through séances and spiritualism but through science. When he died, it’s thought he was working on just such a device—a telephone to the afterlife. No plans for it were ever found.” Dr. Davidoff smiled conspiratorially. “Or, at least, not officially. We adopted the name because, like Edison, we take a scientific approach to matters of the paranormal.”
Improving supernatural lives through science. Where had I heard something like that? It took me a moment to remember, and when I did, I shivered.
The ghosts I’d raised in the Lyle House basement had been subjects of experiments by a sorcerer named Samuel Lyle. Willing subjects, at first, they’d said, because they’d been promised a better life. Instead, they’d ended up lab rats sacrificed to the vision of a madman, as one ghost had put it. And that thing in my room had called Brady—and me, I think—Samuel Lyle’s “creations.”
“Chloe?”
“S-sorry. I’m just—”
“Tired, I imagine, after being up all night. Would you like a rest?”
“No, I-I’m fine. It’s just—So how do we fit in? And Lyle House? It’s part of an experiment, isn’t it?”