Chapter Twenty-Three: Don’t Interfere

Aaron paced the hallway, trying furiously to think through the miasma in his brain. Despite the mental and physical fog left over from his vision, he knew he had to push through it, at least long enough to deal with Leveille and find Ivy.

He pressed the phone to his ear and leaned against the window, resting his forehead against the cool glass. “If he sees us coming, he might kill her,” Aaron said. “Especially if he’s realized she can’t help him. I can probably use my power to sneak past him, but not if I don’t know where she is. I can’t hold it forever.”

“Besides, he knows what you can do.”  Over the phone, Selena had to shout to be heard over the noise of the rain and the car engine. She’d still been at the game, and by the sound of it was trying to set a speed record for crossing the distance btween the school and the dam. “He’ll be expecting you.”

Chapter Twenty-two: Side Effects

Things were happening, but it took Aaron a long time to make sense of the noise. It was like waking up from a deep sleep. He’d been dreaming, but he couldn’t remember what about. Nothing semeed to work; his thoughts were fuzzy and his arms and legs numb and heavy.

“—didn’t do anything to him,” a voice said. Aaron felt like he should recognize it. “We were just talking.”

“How long has he been like this?” Another voice asked. Carter?

“At least five minutes,” the first voice said. Molly. “I was about to call the paramedics—”

“No! No, don’t do that. He’s stopped seizing now. He’ll wake up any second. Aaron! Hey, can you hear me?”

Aaron tried to respond, but all he managed was a grunt. Maybe he should be scared, but it was hard to feel anything through the numb, groggy feeling in his head.

“He needs medical help. It’s been—”

“No.” Carter sounded upset. “No, he’ll be fine. It’s not even a real seizure. It’s—”

“Just because he sees things doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” Molly said.

It took some effort, but Aaron managed to open his eyes. Everything was blurry—even more than usual. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Molly and Carter sat on either side of him, staring at each other with more hostility than the situation really called for.

“How do you know these episodes aren’t causing permanent damage?” Molly continued. “How do you know they won’t kill him some day?”

Chapter Twenty-One: Toys in the Attic

Molly couldn’t stop thinking about what Ivy had said.

What did she know? What were they keeping from her? It had to be important, or Ivy wouldn’t have made a point to mention it. She waited until Dad and Clarissa had gone downstairs to watch a movie, and went up to investigate.

The stairs were kind of terrifying. Every rung sagged, and the wood smelled like something dredged up from a shipwreck. Molly half-expected it to give out from under her, even after testing each creaky step on the way. Luckily, she made it up without incidence, crawling into the dust-and-probably-mice-infested attic. The repairs/purge of the house hadn’t ventured up here yet; there was plenty of work to do downstairs and nothing really important up here anyway. From the looks of it, it didn’t look like Granddad had been up here himself in about twenty years.