Three

I PREPARED FOR A séance. As set pieces went, this one was so lame I’d never put it in a movie. No sputtering candles to cast eerie shadows on the walls, no moldy skulls forming a ritual circle, no chalices filled with what the audience would suppose was red wine but secretly hope was blood.

Did experienced necromancers use stuff like candles and incense? From the little I’d learned about the supernatural world, I knew some of what we see in movies is true. Maybe, way back in history, people had known about necromancers and witches and werewolves, and those stories are based, if very loosely, on old truths.

My method—if I can call it a method since I’ve only used it twice—came from trial and error and a few grudging tips from Derek. As a guy who was taking college-level courses at sixteen, being confident of his facts is important to Derek. If he isn’t sure, he’d rather keep his mouth shut. But when I’d pushed him, he’d told me that he’d heard that necromancers summoned ghosts either by being at a graveside or by using a personal effect, like Liz’s hoodie, so I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, clutching it.

I pictured Liz and imagined myself pulling her out of limbo. At first, I didn’t try very hard. The last time I’d focused all my power into summoning a ghost, I’d summoned two right back into their buried corpses. I wasn’t near a grave this time, but that didn’t mean there weren’t bodies around somewhere. So I kept the voltage low at first, gradually ramping it up, focusing harder and harder until …

“What the—? Hey, who are you?”

My eyes flew open. There stood a dark-haired boy about my age with the build, looks, and arrogant chin tilt of a star quarterback. Finding the ghost of another teenager in this place wasn’t a coincidence. A name popped into my head— that of another Lyle House resident who’d been taken away before I arrived, supposedly transferred to a mental hospital, like Liz.

“Brady?” I said tentatively.

“Yeah, but I don’t know you. Or this place.”

He pivoted, scanning the room, then rubbed the back of his neck. I stopped myself before asking if he was okay. Of course he wasn’t okay. He was dead. Like Liz. I swallowed.

“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.”