The Awakening

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?”

His chin lifted, not much, just enough of a reaction to tell me I’d caught him off guard and that he didn’t like it. A pleasant smile erased the look and he eased back in his chair.

“It is an experiment, Chloe. I know how that must sound, but I assure you, it’s a noninvasive study, using only benign psychological therapy.”

Benign? There was nothing benign about what had happened to Liz and Brady.

“Okay, so we’re part of this experiment….” I said.

“Being a supernatural is both a blessing and curse. Adolescence is the most difficult time for us, as our powers begin to manifest. One of the Edison Group’s theories is that it might be easier if our children don’t know of their future.”

“Don’t know they’re supernatural?”

“Yes, instead allowing them to grow up as human, assimilating into human society without anxiety over the upcoming transition. You and the others are part of that study. For most, it has worked. But for others, such as you, your powers came too quickly. We needed to ease you into the truth and ensure you didn’t harm yourselves or anyone else in the meantime.”

So they put us into a group home and told us we were crazy? Drugged us? That made no sense. What about Simon and Derek, who’d already known what they were? How could they be part of this study? But Derek clearly was, if what Brady said was right.

What about that thing calling us Dr. Lyle’s creations? What about Brady and Liz, permanently removed from this study? Murdered. You don’t kill a subject when he doesn’t respond well to your “benign psychological therapy.”

They’d lied all along—did I really think they’d fess up now? If I wanted the truth, I needed to do what I’d been doing. Search for my own answers.

So I let Dr. Davidoff blather on, telling me about their study, about the other kids, about how we’d be “fixed” and out of here in no time. And I smiled and nodded and started making my own plans.