Chương 17: Chapter 16 - Pointed Questions

"Emerra?" Why did that name sound familiar? And that voice.

"Mera?" Was that me? No. But…why did it call to me? Why did I want to call back? A hand shook my foot. Panic flooded my body. I jerked awake. Who was there? How did they get in? I had been watching the door! But now my eyes were open. All I saw was Conrad, crouched at the end of the sofa. I turned my head to look at the door to the room. It was the wrong door. I checked my arm. It was clean. I put my hand over my eyes and groaned. I had been dreaming. It was only a dream.

"I didn't mean to scare you," Conrad said.

"Scare me?" I sleepy-grumbled.

"What would be scary about waking up and seeing the yellow eyes of an apex predator peering over the arm of a couch at you?" My brain sent up an "uh-oh" flag. Too late, I remembered I wasn't supposed to tease Conrad. I split my fingers to watch his reaction. He turned his head. I could see the slight smile on his dark lips, and he let out a quiet chuff. When he turned back, he pointed a lazy finger at me.

"You've got bed head." My hand flew up to my hair—only, I didn't have hair.

"You jerk!" I grinned and threw my pillow at him. He didn't bother dodging; it hit the side of his head and dropped to his lap. His quiet laugh would forever remind me of a doggy laugh.

"Let me guess." I pointed to the side of my scalp.

"Is it flat on this side?"

"A bit." He sat on the floor and scooted over so he could lean back on the front of the couch.

"Darius told me to wake you up. He'll be out in a second. He wants to talk to us."

"Okay. Thank you, Conrad." I stood up and started folding my blanket.

"Were you having a nightmare?" Conrad asked. My folding slowed.

"I don't know." That was the truth. I didn't know if I could call it a nightmare. Nightmares are scary. Nightmares drowned you in horror until you wake up with a spasm—sometimes making you tumble out of bed with all the grace you'd expect from a sack of potatoes. But it occurred to me that there was a deep relationship between the concepts of horrifying and horrible. The dream had certainly been horrible. I finished folding my blanket. Conrad passed me my pillow, and I put them next to the desk.

For the sake of Count Vasil, I did my best to keep them neat.

"Was I flopping around like a maniac again?" I asked. I'd been told that I did stuff like that. Not in those words, but when everyone looks that worried when you wake up, you kind of get the idea that the phrase "tossing" doesn't do it justice.

"You were still," Conrad said.

"It was weird."

"Still? Like, motionless? Aren't most people still when they're asleep?" I turned back to the couch. Conrad's ears were ever-so-slightly dipped back toward his head.

"Not like that," he said. The door to the bedroom swung back. Darius held it open with his foot while he finished drying his hands.

"Was it the same dream, Emerra?" he asked.

"No," I said. Darius tossed the towel back in the room before coming out to join us.

"Can you tell us about it?" He went over to the armchair and sat down.

"I was lying on a bed," I said.

"It was bare. No pillow. No blankets—""Were you cold?" Vasil asked. I closed my eyes to better remember the dull sense of oppressive heat.

"I was hot— really hot—but my arms and legs felt…icy."

"Icy?" Conrad said.

"Yeah. It felt like I should have been shivering, but I couldn't."

"Were you being restrained?" Darius asked.

"No, I was alone, but I couldn't move. I felt too lethargic. Like it was taking everything I had just to lay there. I had my eyes open, and I was staring at my arm. Beyond it, I could see the door. There was a small window set in it, but it was blurry because that wasn't what I was focused on."

"What were you focused on?"

"I told you, my arm."

"Why would you be focused on your arm?" Conrad said. I sighed through my nose. I could tell them what I saw, but how could I make them understand the big, fat, wad of emotions that defined everything. Like a picture made out of a million words spaced to create an image, the dream had been a tangle of feelings that couldn't be separated from the scene. If you took away the feelings, there'd be nothing to see. But I didn't know how to describe that. I guess they'd have to take what they could get.

"I was staring at my forearm," I explained.

"There were tracks on it." Conrad's fuzzy brow furrowed, but FBI's Special Agent Darius Vasil had enough experience to catch my drift.

"You mean needle tracks, don't you?" he said. I nodded.

"How many?"

"Lots. I was staring at one in particular. There was a giant bruise around it, and the hole was still red."

"Did you feel anything? Any emotions?" Gosh. Where to start? I decided to take the easy route and named the big one. The one that had been poisoning everything. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Despair," I said. There was silence. I cleared my throat and walked back over to the couch. They had asked, and it wasn't even my emotions I was describing, but I felt as if I'd blurted out an embarrassing secret.

"Was there anything else?" Darius asked. I thought about it as I sat down. There had been something. It had fit in the dream so well, I didn't think about it at the time, but now, I realized how odd it was.

"My teeth," I said.

"Most of my teeth were gone. They'd been pulled." The sour, metallic taste of blood was still in my mouth even though the holes that seemed to suck at my tongue were no longer empty. There it was. My dream in a nutshell. I sat back and waited for the world to react. Darius rubbed his forehead.

"I don't suppose you can tell us if this was a seer's dream or not?" I threw up my hands for maximum shrug effect.

"Merry Christmas! Have another puzzle."

"Thank you," Darius said dryly.

"I'll put it in a pile with the others. Conrad, did you finish looking over the building yesterday?"

"I've done most of the places I can easily get into. I was planning on finishing the open areas today."

"Did you find anything?"

"Nothing." Darius looked at me.

"How much of the school did you cover yesterday?"

"Uhhhhh, not much," I admitted.

"But I did learn that Wuller's delusional about there being no advantage to claiming you have powers." As I explained what happened with Ivers, Darius's expression darkened. When I finished, he said, "Seth Ivers is a pyrokinetic. Has he ever used his power to terrorize the other boys?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I can ask, but even if he has, they might not tell me."

"I'll ask Reisig about his abilities. That'll give us a better idea how much of a threat he is."

"Even if he has used his power to threaten another student, unless he's actually hurt them, I don't think Wuller's going to do much."

"If I find out that he's used his power to terrorize anyone, Wuller will be the least of his problems. In the meantime, both of you should know, Iset's gone through the files I've sent her, and there's reason for us to suspect that someone's doing something to these boys deliberately. The school's been open for seven years, but the powers only showed up a year ago, and they only showed up in first- and second-year students." Conrad's ears twitched low.

"That sounds like someone wanted to make sure they had more time…" I picked up where he left off: "More time with the experiment." The count pointed at me.

"Exactly. From this moment on, we're treating this as a crime."

"What were we doing before?"

"We were politely asking questions and demonstrating our curiosity."

"And now?"

"Now we'll be asking pointed questions. We need to figure out how this is happening, and who, if anyone, is making it happen. To do that, we're going to have to look into who has the means, the motive, and the opportunity.

"We don't even know what the means are," Conrad pointed out.

"That's true," Darius said, "but we know that the person doing this would need to have an in-depth knowledge of magic or psychic powers, and they would have to have some kind of tool or ability related to one or both of them."

"So we're looking for someone with a background in magic?" I asked.

"Magic. Medicine. Psychic abilities."

"Medicine?" Conrad said.

"You think a drug could do this?" Darius said, "Two weeks ago I didn't think anything could do this. Now I'm trying to keep an open mind." I raised my hand to get their attention.

"If we're talking about motive, isn't that pretty much going to be Wuller? I mean, he built this school. His standing will only go up if he can train a bunch of psychics."

"That's true, but we don't have a really clear picture of why he built the school. I would like to learn more about that." Conrad said to me, "By your argument, Aaron Reisig has almost as much motive as Wuller. He may not have built the school, but he's the one training the psychics, and he wouldn't have a job if they weren't around." Darius added, "There's also a chance that someone else wanted to experiment and Wuller's school made a convenient cover for their work." Ohhhhhhh, I did not like that idea.

Not one bit. Neither did the hairs on the back of my neck. In protest, they all stood up and tried to leave.

"Are we talking about a mad scientist?" I asked. Darius frowned.

"We are!" I cried.

"We're talking about someone experimenting on these kids, maybe before doing it on themselves. Paging Dr. Freaking Jekyll!"

"Dr. Jekyll at least had the decency to experiment on himself," Darius said.

"Are there any other motives we can think of?" The long silence was broken by Conrad.

"There might be someone who hates Wuller." My head jerked back. Twice. Once because—who could possibly hate old Wooly? The second time was because I couldn't see how that would be a motive.

"How does that work?" I said.

"If someone is making this happen," Conrad said, "then they can probably make it stop happening. Say it's a drug of some kind. What happens when you stop giving the boys the drug? Their powers go away. Someone could be waiting until Wuller's whipped up a lot of publicity, then they take away the drug. It's all fake, and Wuller's ruined."

"It's possible," the vampire admitted.

"None of the psychics have left the school, so we don't know what will happen to their powers when they do."

"They have breaks though," I said.

"They just got back from one."

"That's a good point. Ask Mr. Osborn about that when you get the chance." I nodded.

"Which brings us to the question of opportunity," Darius said.

"That will primarily depend on the means they're using, but I think it's likely that whoever is doing this would need to be close to the boys."

"Meaning they work here," I said.

"Work here, or attend school here. We can't eliminate the possibility that a student is involved." I didn't like that idea either, but I remembered the bit about the open mind. He went on, "I got a chance to talk to the Torr about what they investigated. They said that all their tests showed that the food and water were clean, there was nothing suspicious in the rooms, there were no suspicious drugs in the nurse's supply, and there was no magic detected in the school."

"That doesn't leave a lot for us to investigate," Conrad said.

"Only if you assume that their findings were accurate. Before I make that assumption, I want to know what you and Emerra find."

"But I can't see any of the psychic powers," I reminded him, "and Conrad couldn't smell them. We learned that with the demonstration yesterday." Darius raised a finger. He did that to warn people when he was about to get technical.

"You couldn't see anything with those powers. And I'm not asking you to look for the powers. We're trying to find the source. Emerra?"

"Sir!"

"I want you to focus on looking around as much of the school as you can. If there's anything to be seen, you're our best chance at seeing it. Keep spending time with the students, try to figure out if they know anything, but whenever you aren't busy with them, explore the school."

"Got it."

"Conrad, you finish sniffing around. I'll try to gather as much information as possible from Wuller and the other teachers."

"And we're trying to find out if it's Wuller or Reisig?" I asked.

"Yes, but we're also trying to find anyone else who might have a motive, or anyone with a magical or psychic background."

"You said that this only started about a year ago?" Conrad asked.

"As far as we know," Darius said.

"The earliest files are from mid-October. About a month and a half after the term started."

"Did anything change around that time?" Darius snapped his fingers." That is an excellent question. We'll have to look into it, but at the moment, we're here as Wuller's guests. I'd rather not upset him if we can avoid it."

"You don't think he'll want all those pointed questions pointed at him?" I said.

"Something like that. Conrad, talk to Miller. As Wuller's secretary, he probably knows everything that goes on around here—""I'm sorry, Darius." The vampire stopped. Conrad's voice was soft.

"I can't." I understood the count's hesitation. He probably felt as bewildered as I did. Conrad respected Darius—like, in an unspoken, bone-deep, manly kind of way. The only response I'd ever heard Conrad give to Darius's instructions was some version of "yes, sir."

"May I ask why?" Darius said.

"Miller's afraid of me." There was another short silence.

"Is it that bad?" the count asked.

"If I'm the one asking questions, I don't think we'll get the answers we need." I almost— almost —made some smart aleck comment about underestimating the power of intimidation, but, thank god, my common sense cut in fast enough to stop me. My eyes moved from Darius's somber face—his brow, faintly creased with worry—to Conrad's drooping ears, and for the first time, I wondered what it would be like to know that everyone was afraid of you.

"I could do it," I said.

"I can talk to Miller, then go sneaking around the school. I mean, you'd have to tell me what you want me to ask and all that, but I don't mind."

"Thank you, Emerra," Darius said.

"I would appreciate that. I want you to ask him about anything that might have changed a year ago. Who was hired, who was fired, did they bring anything in, or build anything—all of it. You can be honest with Miller about why we're asking. The lad is smart. I think he knows that we're suspicious about what's going on, and I don't think he disapproves."

"I'll corner him at breakfast." Darius glanced at his watch.

"Which will be very soon. I presume you'll need the bathroom to change?" I stood up and went for my luggage.

"If you don't mind."

"Be sure to ask Miller if Reisig was hired before or after the first psychics were found," Darius said. I paused as I was lifting my bag.

"Wouldn't that be after?"

"That seems like the obvious answer, doesn't it?" The way the count said that made me realize things weren't always as obvious as they seemed. I finished straightening up.

"Darius, yesterday, why did you ask how they found the psychics?"

"Because there's a large difference between training someone who's already manifested a power, and training someone who then manifests a power." I puzzled over that line the whole time I was getting dressed.