With eyes still closed, I concentrated on keeping my body still and breathing shallow. A man in a white lab coat entered my astral picture of the room. He lacked the lethal mercenary bearing of the other men, but still carried himself with military confidence and precision. Dustings of gray shone across his close-cut black hair, and his brown eyes were almost hidden behind thick, black, plastic rimmed glasses. It all gave the appearance of a middle-aged Clark Kent.
When he walked through Horse’s hindquarters, he shivered, rubbed his arms, and glanced toward the ceiling vent. After checking the monitors, he keyed a small walkie-talkie.
“Everything checks out,” he said. “Her respiration is a little low, but her oxygen levels are normal.”
“Check the EEG for brain activity,” Sarkis said over the small speaker. “Don’t make the mistake of trusting these paranormals. They can be tricky.”
Clark checked the paper tape, and then keyed the mike again.
“It does show increased activity lasting ninety-three seconds, ending about two minutes ago, but it’s subsided now.”
“Ten-four, that’s what it reads here,” Sarkis said. “Make sure the drug pump is still working. I want her visually checked every fifteen minutes until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clark open the windowed door of a white box attached to my IV pole, revealing two large tubes of cloudy liquid with mechanized plungers on top of each. After wiggling a few connections, he closed the little door, pushed a few buttons, and wrote numbers from the screen on a clipboard at the foot of my bed.
Little else occupied the room. Just me in my bed, an adjoining small bathroom, the IV contraption, and several other machines at the end of the sticky probes that covered my chest and head. And I couldn’t forget Horse, still standing next to my bed, taking up a majority of the ten-by-ten space.
Clark stopped when he walked through Horse again on his way to the door. He eyed the ceiling vent again, and then checked a thermostat on the wall. He put his hand on a small, white panel near the door, and punched in a five-digit code on a keypad attached to it. On his way out the door, he activated his mike again.
“Have Hector check this room. There’re cold spots. Combine those with the machine glitches, we may have another facilities issue.”
The door clicked shut, and I was alone again. Alone as I could be with cameras and monitors watching my every move, breath, and heartbeat, and a giant black horse staring at me.
Horse turned and walked to the doorway, stopping with his shoulders and head on the other side of the closed door and the rest of his body on my side. He twisted, and his face appeared through the wall. Dark eyes fixed on me, he shook his gleaming black head up and down then turned and walked all the way through the door out of sight.
Horse had abandoned me.
Momentary panic surged through me, and the monitors spiked before I regained control of them again. After a few tense moments, the man I now thought of as Clark still hadn’t come running back in, and I relaxed enough to think. If Horse could walk through walls and travel, maybe I could, too.
It proved tricky to move without a corporeal body, but after a few attempts, I pushed away from the bed. The white, flowing dress from my dreamlike moth encounter covered me. I stood as a semitransparent haze on the linoleum, aware and feeling my own being but feeling nothing else around me—not even the floor I stood on.
I took a few steps and moved across the room, still not feeling the ground beneath me, the sensation fraught with unreality. An ethereal gold cord as big around as a fire hose spanned from the bellybutton of my astral self to the bellybutton of my body on the bed. I took a few steps back and the cord lengthened, a few steps forward and it shortened—kind of like the retractable chain on a janitor’s key ring. I grabbed the cord. It sizzled and clung to my fingers like electrically charged cotton candy. Gross. I let it go and decided to check on it from time to time. It was no weirder than a horse that people could walk through, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t all a hallucination.
At the door, I closed my eyes and took two more steps. When I opened my eyes, I stood on the other side in a worn once-white hallway with Horse staring at me from three feet away. His immobile stance and slow blinking gaze exuded a tried patience.
I rolled my eyes at him and put my hands on my hips—childish and petty, and probably not even that impressive in my translucent state, but it made me feel better.
“Listen. I haven’t even decided you’re real,” I said. “Don’t get an attitude with me.”
He waggled his head from side to side and turned to walk down the hall, so I followed him. We turned right at the second intersecting hallway and stopped three rooms down. Horse struck his hoof on the floor near the closed door.
“What?” I said. “We go in here?”
He shook his head.
“Why can’t you talk like the moth?” I asked. A stupid rhetorical question since he couldn’t answer me.
He swung his head and nudged me toward the door. His touch tingled like a low electrical current.
“Hey,” I said, rubbing my arm. “How come I can feel you, but nothing else? And how come you can shove me, but Clark Kent could walk right through you? Who makes these rules?”
He nudged me again, harder this time, and I stumbled through the closed door.
The room was the same size as mine, but contained only a bed, table, and two chairs. Someone lay under the blankets, facing away from me, the covers pulled around the back of their head. I crossed the room and peered over the blanket mound to the person’s exposed face.
“Mom?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
M
OM
My mom pulled down the covers and raised her head a little. After a moment, she lowered her head again and pulled the covers back over her ear.
“Mom,” I said a little louder.
She removed the blanket from her head and sat up to look around the room. She looked right through me to the door.
“Mom, can you hear me?”
She tilted her head.
“Marlee? Is that you? Where are you?”
I scanned the room to see if anyone was around to hear her. In the corner of the ceiling there was a small camera like the one in my room. The little light wasn’t blinking, but better safe than sorry.
“I don’t want them to know you can hear me,” I said. “Lay back down like you were before and we’ll both whisper, okay?”
She laid back down and faced the wall again without hesitation. After years with my domineering father, she was obedient to a fault. To kidnap her, Sarkis’s men probably just just had to show up at the front door and tell her to get in the car.
Once she got settled, she said, “Okay. I’m lying down.”
I started to say, “No kidding,” then realized she didn’t know I could see her. She probably thought that I was in the next room talking through the wall.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”
“No, honey. They’ve been very nice. It hasn’t been too bad at all.”
Considering the life she lived day in and day out, this was probably like a vacation to her. I’d have to try harder to convince her to come stay with me—assuming, of course, that we both lived through this.
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m working on getting us out of here.”
“Where are you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m in a room near you. I’m okay.”
What was I going to say? I’m knocked out two halls over with a giant horse no one but me can see? No. Best to keep it simple with my mom.
“Are we going home soon?” she said. “That doctor fellow said we’d go home as soon as he had a chance to talk to you. You really shouldn’t have made him go to such lengths to meet with him.”
Good grief. She couldn’t even take my side against a homicidal mad scientist. Maybe I shouldn’t try to get her to live with me. I felt terrible as soon as I thought that. No one deserved to live with my dad. Well, except maybe Dr. Sarkis. I chuckled just thinking about that one.
“It’s not funny, Marlena. Your father is going to be very difficult when I get back. No one to cook or clean. He’ll be beside himself,” she said.
“About dad,” I said. “Were his mother and sisters shaman?”
Mom’s body went rigid under the blankets, and her breathing stopped.
“Mom, answer me.”
“We don’t talk about that, Marlee. Your father forbids it.”
Like he forbid me to use my telekinesis, and look what good that did.
“Mom, I have to know. It may make the difference in getting us out of here.”
She was silent so long, I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she let out a breath and continued.
“They were evil,” she said, her voice barely a whisper like she thought my father may hear from hundreds of miles away. “They tortured him.”
“Who?”
“His own mother and sisters. He would never talk about it. I only figured it out from his nightmares, and those only started after you—”
She sucked in a breath and turned her face into the mattress.
“After I what?” I asked.
“Started moving things.”
If I’d been flesh and blood, I’d have thrown up. I’d been right. My father hated me because of my telekinesis but the core of that hatred lurked even deeper.
“Is that when he started drinking?” I asked, thinking I already knew the answer.
“No. That started after he saw her in your room.”
“Saw who?”
“His mother.” She wrapped the blanket around herself and rocked back and forth. It was bad enough she was here because of me. Now I was making her more miserable, but I had to know the truth.
“So she came to visit?”
“No. She died before you were born.” Her rocking increased. “Marlee, he said to never talk about her, and to never, never say her name. He said your power brought her back. The more you moved things, the worse he got. We had to stop you from using your power.”
Thoughts raced through my brain too fast to catch. So many thoughts that I couldn’t think. Couldn’t absorb the information that crashed down on me. My mother whispered something else too low for me to hear.
“What?” I asked.
“He used to scream it in his sleep,” she said.
I really didn’t want to know, but this freight train of truth had too much speed now to stop.
“Scream what?” I asked, not really wanting her to answer but needing to know. It felt important, like my life hinged on her answer.
“The dark one is coming,” she said and sobbed into her pillow. “His mother was coming.”
Horse stuck the front half of his body through the door, shook his head, and snorted. I assumed that was nontalking horse language for “hurry up.”
“Mom, I think I have to go,” I said.
“Okay, honey.” Her voice sounded like a small frightened child.
“I’ll get us out of here.”
When I turned toward the door, a wave of vertigo hit me. The room blacked in and out a few times in rapid succession like a TV picture going on the fritz. When the room snapped back, my gold cord linking astral me to my body paled, becoming almost translucent.
What would happen if the cord disappeared? Would I be stuck outside my body? Maybe forever? I had to get back to my body and figure out a way to get mom out of here.
I ran back out the door.
“What’s wrong with my cord thingy?” I asked Horse, all of the horror from a moment ago coalescing into anger and frustration.
He nudged me toward my room as a reply.
“So I’m right, and the paleness isn’t a good thing?”
He pushed me almost knocking me on my ethereal face. The hallway blinked in and out, and again when I came back the cord turned even paler.
I ran as fast as my incorporeal legs would take me back to my room. At my bedside, I stopped next to my body—the real flesh and bone one. I turned back to Horse.
“So what?” I asked. “Do I lie back down or pull on the cord or . . .”
He just stood and stared at me, unblinking.
“Guide usually means a person who helps or, I don’t know,
guides
.”
Still the stare. Not even a head shake or snort.
The room blacked out longer this time. While it was gone, I didn’t feel my body—the translucent one or the real one. There was nothing but a gray, suffocating nowhere. In the distance, a dark-hooded person stood. Waiting. Pulses of evil washed toward me like black, oily waves on a contaminated beach. Each wave that hit me pulled energy as it receded. Pulled at my life force.
I wrenched myself away.
When the room snapped back, I launched myself at my body on the bed.
And prayed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T
ESTS
My body hurt. A bone-aching weariness weighed me down to the amazingly uncomfortable bed. Every ounce of my energy had disappeared, leaving me an immobile hunk of flesh unable to lift a finger or protect myself.
Moth?
I got no answer. He’d said that my energy served as a bridge to him and the other animals.
No energy. No bridge.
A hole loomed in my soul at the loss of my guides, similar to the gaping hole left by my grandmother’s passing but a bit less devastating. Grandma had kept me from being alone with my father. Moth and the others kept me from being alone with my curse.
Correction—curses. Now it wasn’t just telekinesis. It was a plethora of other powers guaranteed to make sure I’d never be a normal girl. I suddenly had a better appreciation for Pinocchio and his yearning to be a “real boy.” That thought would have been funny and made me feel a little better if I’d had enough energy to smile. I knew I was in real trouble if I was so listless I couldn’t even be snarky.
What had drained me? That thing in the ether? Had the dark figure in the nothingness been real or just overactive imagination after my mom’s revelation? It was far better to think the drain was the astral travel maybe in conjunction with the power draw from the telekinesis needed to control the machines.
Crud. The machines. I’d forgotten all about them.
Awareness of the room bloomed—sounds, temperature, the glow through my eyelids of the glaring fluorescents above me. And it seemed all hell was breaking loose. Alarms blared on the machines. Footsteps pounded outside the door, getting nearer. Beeps of the keypad outside, cussing, the door popping open. People rushing in, shouting orders at one another, most of their words just noise not processing in my power-depleted brain.
“Crashing,” someone said.
That wasn’t good. I was pretty sure they were talking about me.
More noise and garbled talking. Hands touching me, checking me, opening my eyes. Energy flowing to me from the contact, replenishing me, if only just a little.
Their words came into focus, making more sense.
“I don’t know what happened. She’s just slipping away.”
“Her vitals are coming back up now. Heart rate, respiration, BP all increasing.”
Someone else rushed into the room. A sticky aura crawled over me.
Sarkis.
“What happened here?” he said.
“We don’t know,” Clark Kent said. “She just faded for a few minutes. All her vitals except brain activity almost flatlined then came back.”
“And you did nothing before they returned?” Sarkis said.
“No, sir.”
“Did you check the drug pump for malfunction?”
“Yes, sir. No malfunction.”
“Set the alarms to more sensitive levels,” Sarkis said. “We’ll need to monitor her more closely. We’ll move up live testing. We can’t allow the subject to expire before we get the data we need.”
“And containment?”
“I have an idea,” Sarkis said. “All of you stay here. I’ll let you know when to shut off the drug pump.”
A single set of footsteps exited, and Sarkis’s fetid presence disappeared from the room. I’d absorbed enough power from the people in the room to be more aware of my surroundings, but my body needed more. I was still too weak.
I continued to pull at the energy from the three men left in the room in small amounts, not wanting to alert them to what I was doing. My body warmed with power, Zamora’s old marker site pulsing with extra heat. I was finally getting the hang of controlling the amount of power that I drew. A little late, it seemed, but still handy. If I got out of this, which was looking more and more unlikely, more restraint of my gift/curse would be wonderful.
“Why is this one so important to him?” one of the men asked.
“He had another subject like this one years ago. He’d almost cracked the science of it, but the subject escaped,” another man answered.
They were talking about Aunt Tibby like she was just a lab rat. I clamped down on my anger to keep from draining them dry.
“This type of power is rare,” Mr. Smith said. “The other subject was a relative of this one, but the trait doesn’t show in every generation.”
The massacre at the cabin flashed through my mind. The light fading in Aunt Tibby’s eyes. She’d died for me. Not
because
of me, but
for
me. Protecting me. She died because of Sarkis. And now I knew my dad hated me because of his mom. Not really because of me either. Sure, my telekinesis had sparked it, but that was because of genetics and heredity. None of this was my fault. It’d been circumstances beyond my control. Wheels set in motion long before I was born. Indignant rage filled the hole in my soul.
Time to get some control. Time to take control of my life. But I couldn’t be stupid about it. I had to form a plan. I had to be my own best advocate. Heck, I was my only advocate. Besides Moth and Horse, and no telling what their real agenda was.
I pushed my luck and upped my draw of power from the men. A walkie-talkie crackled to life nearby, and Sarkis’s voice came from it.
“I’ve got things set here. Decrease the drip to half, and bring her to the lab.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remember, use caution,” Sarkis said. “These things are not human. She might look like an innocent girl, but she’s a monster. A very dangerous, very valuable monster.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door of the drug pump clicked open, someone pushed some buttons, and then closed it again. The other equipment and my bed were readied for movement, and they wheeled me out of the room.
We traveled the opposite way from where Horse had taken me to find my mother. We passed two hallway intersections, the echoes of the bed wheels and the men’s footsteps loosening as we passed, then constricting again as the walls on either side returned. At the third intersection, we turned left and stopped a few feet down. More keypad punching, and we were in a large cavernous-sounding room. They locked my bed and busied themselves with moving other furniture and talking among themselves about where equipment was to be placed.
“You six go wait in observation,” Sarkis said. “I don’t want it too crowded in here.”
After some retreating footsteps, I felt eight people in the room—all men by the sounds of their voices. Within a few minutes, power buzzed through me.
“Stop the drug pump,” Sarkis said, and someone complied.
My immunity to the drug had kicked in more than an hour ago. I felt no difference when it was shut off, but I pretended to wake up. Sarkis’s face hovered over me when I opened my eyes. His smug smile and oozing aura made me gag.
“Now, now,” he said. “It’s just the drugs wearing off.”
“No. I’m pretty sure it was you,” I said and gagged again. The man’s energy was absolutely toxic.
He chuckled, and I pulled against my restraints.
“We’ll remove those in a moment. First, we need to understand each other and lay some ground rules.”
I pulled air into my lungs and concentrated on not getting sick.
“Really,” I said. “Can you please step away from me. Your aura is making me gag.”
That wiped the smarmy grin from his face. Irritation flashed in his eyes, but he backed up to a monitor on a stand.
“First, the ground rules,” he said.
He flicked the monitor on, revealing my mother zip-tied to the chair in her room. Dark Clothes Guy from the Escalade stood beside her.
Sarkis’s grin was back, looking like a demented kid pulling the wings off a fly.
“You cooperate, and Mr. Jones won’t have to punish your mother.”
Power balled and burned in my chest. I fought to keep it there, dealing with the pain.
“Leave my mother alone,” I said through clenched teeth. A stainless steel tray launched itself off a table in the corner and smashed against the far wall.
“Mr. Jones. Level one,” Sarkis said into the walkie-talkie.
Jones shook my mother’s chair, and she screamed in fear.
“That’s level one, Ms. Burns,” Sarkis said. “Would you like to see level five?”
“No,” I said, clamping down harder on the surging energy singing through my body.
Sarkis snapped his fingers and motioned to a chair. One of the gorilla-like men in the room pulled the chair away from the table it was tucked under.
“You will sit in that chair, and do only what I ask of you, or your mother will pay the consequences,” Sarkis said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” My teeth were so tightly clenched the word came out “Yesch.”
Moth appeared midair and flitted across the room to land on the chair. Some of the tension drained from my body, and I almost cried with relief. I blew out a breath and smiled. Control. I needed control. I didn’t have a plan yet, but I had to be focused and calm.
“Yes. I understand,” I said sweetly. “Let’s get this over with.”
Momentary concern flashed across the Sarkis’s face. I unfocused a little and was perversely happy to see orange worry swirl through the black and gray of his aura.
“No tricks,” he said.
I rolled my eyes for effect. “Okay. So unstrap me.”
He hesitated before he motioned to Mr. Smith to unstrap me. Mr. Smith motioned to a goon next to him to do the dirty work.
Coward
. I grinned at Smith and did my best to squint my eyes and look evil. He stepped back and looked uncomfortable, and another wave of perverse happiness washed over me.
The straps loosened, and I sat up. Two of the men stepped back and tensed. I acted like I was trying to get off the bed, and then put my hand to my head.
“I’m a little dizzy. I need some help,” I said.
Sarkis nodded to two of his men and they advanced and took one of my arms each to help me from the bed. The direct contact put my energy reserves over the top.
They led me to the chair, moving the IV pole and machinery that was attached to the sticky leads on my head, arms, and torso with me. I sat, and Clark Kent detached the probes on my scalp and replaced them with a cap of round sensors the size of fat dimes with wires connecting them like a high-tech shower cap. He checked all the wires leading to a computer-ish medical device on a bench behind my seat.
“We’re a go,” he said to Sarkis and then sat in the chair across from me.
The room was about thirty feet by thirty feet. It was surprisingly bare, but scrape marks on the floor showed that they’d recently emptied it, probably fearing that I’d destroy their expensive equipment. Smart guys. The walls were the same yellowed off-white of my room and the halls, and the ceiling was twenty feet at least with a bank of darkened windows high up along one wall. Six bodies watched from behind the glass, their energy glowing dark gold with anticipation.
Moth settled on my shoulder.
“Do I get any more animals now?” I whispered.
Your path does not require it at this time,
Moth answered.
I sighed, and then brightened when I noticed that Clark Kent and Dr. Sarkis looked worried at my whispering. Clark fidgeted with a few items on the table. I counted twelve shapes resting there, ranging from cubes, to balls, to triangles and trapezoids.
“Okay,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
Clark adjusted his glasses and picked up a clipboard. He glanced at two cameras, one mounted behind him to his left and one mounted diagonally across the room in the other corner. Satisfied, he turned his attention back to me.
“Um, well, yes. I’d like you to concentrate and levitate one of these items if you can.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Any of them. Take your pick.”
I looked over the items on the table as if deciding.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Which one would you lift?”
Clark looked uncomfortable. Clearly he hadn’t anticipated this question.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“The round one looks nice, don’t you think?” I asked.
He studied the round one.
“Of course, the triangle is interesting, too,” I said.
“Well, I . . . I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh for the love of—” Sarkis said. He stormed over to the table and lifted a conical piece. “Pick this one up.”
He slammed the piece back on the table and retreated to the corner.
I shrugged my shoulders at Clark in an “oh well” gesture and squinted at the cone as if I were concentrating really hard. Then I grunted like maybe I was constipated and had to hold back a chuckle. I finally let out a breath and leaned back in my seat.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I said. “It’s just too hard. I think maybe I’ll try the square one.”
“For God’s sake,” Sarkis said. “You threw a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man twenty feet away at the university.”
I gave a wide-eyed glance at Mr. Smith.
“Two-fifty, Mr. Smith? Really?” I said. “Wow, someone needs a diet.”
“That’s it,” Sarkis said, keying the walkie-talkie. “Mr. Jones—”
“No,” I shouted. “Okay, okay. I’ll lift the darn thing.”
All the pieces lifted off the table and hovered four feet above it.
“Tell that man to step away from my mother,” I said to Sarkis, letting anger seep into my voice.
His eyes and the eyes of his men were all on the shapes floating in the air. A few of them backed up. Without taking his eyes off the shapes, Sarkis keyed the mike.
“Stand down, Jones.”
I checked the monitor and found Jones standing a few feet from my cringing mom. Seeing her like that flashed me back to too many scenes of her cringing in front of my father.
“Sir,” a voice announced from the tinny speaker in the ceiling. “We just lost all brain function.”
“What?” Sarkis shouted.
“All her EEG lines just went flat,” the voice said. “They were almost all off the chart, then they just went flat.”
Sarkis glared at me. “Did you do that?”
I nodded.
“How?” he asked.
“I just thought of someone I dislike almost as much as I dislike you,” I said, and I let the memory of my father go.
“Sir, the readings are back,” the tinny voice announced.
Clark rushed to the machines behind me and checked a few paper tape printouts.