by B. T. Alive
Secretly, I also couldn’t help hoping that Aunt Helen might dispel Fiona’s ridiculous charge that my whole Touch shock problem was basically me being paranoid. I’d been training with Helen for months, doing exercises to achieve a peaceful calm. But Fiona made it sound like I was choosing this nightmare. There was no way she knew what she was talking about.
Except about those other exes she’d disposed of. I wouldn’t mind Helen filling me in on those too.
I hustled up to the Inn and leapt up the spiral staircase taking two steps at a time, running my hand along the smooth wood of the railing all the way to the top floor. The westernmost hallway had a more severe air than anywhere else in the Inn; the rooms here were usually left unoccupied, except in direst need. The curtains were thick and drawn, and the sconces were dim, and the wainscotting was dark as ebony.
At the hall’s end, where the carpet gave way to bare wood, a small plain door on the side bore a tarnished, Victorian-era plaque that read, simply, “UTILITY”. The door was seemingly locked, but with a most obscure sequence of jiggles and twists (which had taken me weeks to memorize), it swung open into a dark little alley of tall, thin doors.
The alley must once have been lit with the sun, with small high windows on either side. But the windows had been shuttered, and the wood of the walls and the doors stained dark. At the top of every door was a strange, esoteric symbol, burned into the wood like a brand. And every door but one was boarded shut, with seven boards screwed into the studs.
As always, there was a faint smell of some pungent, potent incense that I’d never seen them burn.
Like now, I almost always passed through this passage alone, but in the beginning, when Aunt Helen was showing me the way, she’d had a certain reticence as we passed these doors that had always discouraged me from asking what on earth was their deal. Only once had I worked up the courage to ask.
In response, she’d only said, “The screws must be pure iron. Plated with silver.”
And given me a look that had kept me from ever asking again.
The one unboarded door opened into a round, narrow room, not much wider than a phone booth, which held only a metal spiral staircase. The stairs twisted up at least two stories, up the Western Tower to their “workshop” at the top.
I had no idea how Uncle Barnaby managed to squeeze his massive frame up and down this tiny spiral without acute attacks of claustrophobia. Even for me, the stairs were a tight fit. It helped that the round walls were painted as the night sky; the walls were black, but jeweled with strange stars and distant galaxies, so that if you forgot the sensations of climbing and breathing in the cramped and airless shaft, you could almost feel like pure awareness soaring out in space.
The stairs ended in another door, plain except for another symbol burned into the wood. I hesitated; it had to be almost noon by now, if not later.
I’d never disturbed them this late, and until this moment, I’d avoided imagining actually doing it. Aunt Helen loved me dearly and she could be practically mommish… when she’d gotten enough sleep. At other times, she could get a bit… Delphic. As in, oracular. And that was the best case scenario, if she’d actually stayed up so late that she was still at work up here.
As for Uncle Barnaby… he had to be asleep already, which meant he’d be downstairs, in his little bedroom at the end of the hall. That was all there was to that. Unless… he wasn’t…
Enough, Summer! I chided myself, suddenly embarrassed at all this waffling. So what if I bugged my nocturnal relatives with their strange powers in their admittedly creepy tower? Wasn’t Tina in danger? Besides, they were probably asleep downstairs, in their respective bedrooms. And what was the worst that could happen? I decided not to answer that, but to just freaking knock. Which I did.
No answer.
Before I could overthink it, I knocked again. And again.
Nothing.
Crud. Should I peek in? I could always come back that night, but now I had it in my head that Tina might have come back and have talked to her mom—she might even be catching up on her lost sleep here, where no one would think to bother her. Both Helen and Barnaby had always insisted that I knock before I intrude into the Workshop, but I’d been coming here for months now; would it really hurt to peek? Tina might be napping right there on the floor! I clicked the ancient latch and eased the door open a crack…
…shoving it right into the irate face of Uncle Barnaby.
“Summer!” he hissed in a stage whisper, opening the door just enough to jut out his meaty face and his massive beard. His Gandalf-style wizard hat, which he insisted helped him maintain focus, towered in the cramped space. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, still keeping up the pretense of a whisper. “You nearly woke your Aunt Helen with that ungodly racket!”
“She’s sleeping up here?” I said. My heart sank. Aunt Helen was devoted to her husband, my Uncle Denny; according to Tina, the highlight of her mom’s day was to crawl into bed downstairs in the wee hours of the morning, in time for a snuggle before he went off to his ordinary job pumping septic tanks. Only at the most dire extremity of exhaustion would she crash to get her sleep up here. “What did you all do last night?” I said.
Uncle Barnaby frowned, and even in the deep shadow of the stairwell, I could see that the bags under his eyes were hanging even more heavily than usual. “Worst night I’ve seen in years,” he grunted. “She was picking up some execrable waves out there, possibly instigated by a telempath.” He sighed, and muttered, almost to himself, “I may not have seen her this exhausted since the blasted business with Radcliff.”
“Dante Radcliff?” I said. “What business are you talking about? He’s the reason I need her help.”
Uncle Barnaby scowled and stiffened, and his tired eyes blazed into gleaming focus. “What would you know about Dante Radcliff?” he boomed, forgetting the fake whisper. “We ran that predator out of this town years before your time. He was the worst kind of telempath… God help the woman who finally fell under his spell.”
I gaped.
A telempath?
The legendary Dante Radcliff, the aging paramour, whom Tina had described to me as this handsome, mature man of mystery with devastating charm… the creep was a telempath? A telempath could make you feel whatever he wanted. And he’d used his secret power to make Tina fall in love with him… when she was in high school… and already hyper-vulnerable because she was a freaking untrained teenage empath.
A sudden rage at the man flushed the hot blood to my cheeks. No wonder Aunt Helen and Grandma could barely bring themselves to speak his name.
But why had no one told me about the telempath part? Why not Tina… the story had been bad enough when there was just the massive age gap and her still young enough for prom. Yet she’d told me the tale like there’d still somehow been this kernel of something real, something worthy of possible regret. But if he’d been a telempath, the whole thing had been a complete sham.
“No wonder Tina ran off,” I muttered. “I’d be humiliated too.”
“Tina? What what?” Uncle Barnaby snapped. “To what exactly do you refer?”
Quickly, I filled him in on the last twelve hours or so, everything from Tina’s outburst and ill-timed disappearance to the vandalism of the vineyard. Unlike Aunt Helen, who somehow imbibes the local gossip, Uncle Barnaby might not notice that an asteroid had hit Wonder Springs unless it actually took a chunk of the Inn. So he hadn’t even heard about Radcliff moving back into town and getting married… and I didn’t relish being the one to break the news.
“That swine!” he hissed. His thick cheeks had flushed red, and his already-imposing frame seemed to be literally swelling with indignation in the small space. The door nudged wider, revealing a glimpse of the darkened workshop. The round room of windows was now curtained against the sun, but a few candles flickered golden pools of light onto a thick oaken table heaped with old books and scrolls. His eyes widened. “And Tina missing? This could be the meaning o
f Grandma’s dream!”
(Yes, both he and Aunt Helen call their own mother ‘Grandma’. Pretty much the whole town does; I’ve heard the sheriff use her real name, Christina Meredith, but I suspect he has his own… unique… reasons for the preference.)
“Grandma’s dream?” I said. “What did she tell you? She just told me to stay away from the river.”
“Because she dreamt a drowning,” growled Uncle Barnaby. His huge fists clenched, and the massive sleeves of his robe shook. “If that man, that piece of excrement, has dared to lay a finger—”
“Whoa, hey, slow down,” I said. I admit, my own gut was trembling a bit—Tina was missing, and I’d seen Grandma’s dreams come true more than once. But I didn’t need my huge uncle prematurely freaking out. For one thing, he himself was a telempath; yes, he spent his nights working with his sister Helen (an empath) to use his powers for good, but what would happen if he lost it? Would half the block get hit with his panic attack? Starting with me? “Did Grandma see Tina in her dream?”
“She didn’t see the victim at all, only a body in a storm,” he snapped. “It could be Tina. You said that Radcliff bought that old house on the back island; that old walking bridge is decrepit, and the river there runs deep—”
“Tina’s fine,” I said. “She left me a note!”
“But do you know when?” He rubbed his wide, glistening forehead with a gigantic handkerchief. “This is intolerable.”
“Look, why would Radcliff want to drown Tina?” I said, trying to resist his infectious anxiety. “Revenge? That was all years ago. He came back here to marry some whole other woman.”
“You don’t know the man,” Uncle Barnaby said darkly. He drew himself up to his full, towering height. “Enough talk. The swine shall be questioned. We must go. At once.”
“Wait, what?” I said. “We?”
Chapter 9
“What exactly is your plan?” I said, as Uncle Barnaby rushed back into his workshop, shuffling through scrolls and blowing out the candles. “You can’t just storm down there—”
“I can indeed,” he boomed, his voice uncanny in the now-lightless darkness. “I can telempath that villain into a terror he’s never dreamed, until he tells us the truth of what he’s done with Tina.”
He was officially starting to creep me out. Sure, Uncle Barnaby was always pompous and emphatic, but I’d never seen him so agitated. As far as I knew, he was a lifelong bachelor with no kids of his own; even the chance of a threat to Tina seemed to be driving him to the edge.
He bustled back out and would have charged down the stairs, but I blocked his way. My outstretched arms looked tiny beside his bulk. “Wait!” I said. “Think for a second. You can’t just blaze around town and do your Jedi mind tricks in public, right? The one thing you all keep telling me is to keep all this secret.”
“Aren’t you coming?” he snapped. “When I’m done, you can wipe his memory for him. What’s left of him.”
“No, that only works if he’s alone,” I insisted. This wasn’t technically true, but it was definitely a solid guideline. “And he’s got psychic powers, so it might not work. It’s way more unpredictable. It might only wipe the last five seconds, or it might put him into a coma. How would we explain that?”
“Karma,” he said, grim.
He moved to push past me, but I didn’t budge. “Uncle Barnaby, I hate to say this, but I think you’re losing control.”
“I have perfect control!”
“No, right now you’re a walking fury machine,” I snapped. “You’re leaking wrath. You’re making me mad.”
“You’re always mad.”
At this, I seethed. But I managed to say, with a modicum of calm, “Look. I truly think that Tina is just off in the woods somewhere, communing with trees and feeling bad for hungry squirrels. But it does make sense to talk to this Radcliff guy, and you can come, but you’ve got to follow my lead.”
“Excuse me?” he thundered. Aunt Helen had to be sleeping like the dead back there. “You? Why?”
“Because I’ve actually solved multiple murders in the last few months,” I snapped. “And before that I was a sales rep. People skills. Whereas you’ve spent your whole adult life with your sister. In a tower.”
“I plumb the depths of the human psyche!” he roared. “I prevent suicides! Calm murderers! Avert affairs that would shipwreck lives!”
“That’s all great,” I said. “But then you go outside and walk around in a wizard hat.”
“You’re my niece,” he intoned. “I’ll do what I please, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Actually…” I said, and I held up my finger.
He flinched back, then eyed me warily. “You wouldn’t dare,” he growled.
“Only if I have to,” I said.
“You are delusional,” he said. He brandished a beefy finger inches from my face. “If you so much as think about such a disrespectful—”
I reached up and clasped his hand.
Ouch.
Wow, that particular jolt hurt. Whether it was because of Barnaby’s massive psychic powers or because Fiona was right and I jolted people to protect myself (meaning, a bigger “threat” would get a bigger shock), the pain seared up my arm like fire. I hunched against the staircase railing, gritting my teeth, while Uncle Barnaby rocked on his feet, dazed.
I know I’d said that thing about how a psychic might go in a coma, but that had mainly been bluster. So far, it’s only happened once. And the woman was like, ninety. And I had to jolt her multiple times… and yes, I did feel super bad. Even though I had thought she was a murderer. And Cade healed her. She was fine. Why are we still talking about her?
In less than a minute, Barnaby had recovered. Great. That had to be some kind of record.
He looked around the cramped space, frowning with confusion, then eyed me. His shrewd gaze noted the awkward crook of my arm, despite my attempt to hide that it was still in severe pain, and then he glared at me in wide-eyed disbelief.
“You used it… on me?” he stammered.
I gave him a prim nod. “You were being recalcitrant. Now, I don’t know how much you remember, but if you’re ready to work on this together like reasonable adults—”
My voice trailed off.
Because Uncle Barnaby was squinting at me with a glare of white-hot ferocity. And all at once, I felt a crushing, devastating guilt… more guilt than I’d ever felt in my entire life.
My mind swarmed with images that promised relief—I saw myself giving Uncle Barnaby a look of humbled repentance… I heard myself offering an elaborate, baroque, apology… I saw his bearded countenance beaming with angelic forgiveness… it all felt so right, so urgent and necessary and true…
But that inner, nitpicky voice of reason was shrieking, What the HELL? You are KIDDING me!
On that tiny little mental raft of rationality, bobbing like crazy on the rising flood of feeling, I realized I was under attack. From my own uncle. Geez.
I mean, sure, I’d used the Touch on him first. But that was totally different. He’d deserved it.
Also, I know I was biased, but could you really compare a minor memory wipe to this full-scale telempathic attack? No way.
I’d been attacked before. As you may know, there’s a whole sinister branch of the Meredith family, led by my nefarious Great-Uncle Vincent, who seeks out rogue psychics and enlists them as his minions. Here in Wonder Springs, most of them can’t hurt us, thanks to the Shield, but he had one agent who’d managed to sneak in undercover, undetected, because she was a master at personal shielding. She was a master empath and telempath, and more than once she’d pushed me into a sudden, severe panic attack.
At least, we thought it was her. She’d never been caught, and she seemed to have vanished months ago (along with millions in stolen gold that must have poured straight into Vincent’s war chest). We had no idea what she looked like, or if she’d even ever shown her face. We only knew her name: Malice Alice.
> Compared to Malice Alice, Uncle Barnaby’s telempathic aggression was blunt and overwhelming, like a battle-axe compared to Alice’s subtle scalpel. I wondered if he was always like this, or if he just wasn’t used to working at such close range.
Thing is, an axe may not be subtle, but it can still split your head open.
If I hadn’t known exactly what was happening, this morass of images and feelings might have felt like… me. To grovel and apologize would have seemed like my deepest, truest self.
Which was terrifying.
But I did know. I gripped the ancient metal railing of the staircase, and the cold bite of the iron gave me a toehold in the world outside my head. Through clenched teeth, I said, “Come on, uncle. What kind of example are you setting here, for your impressionable young niece?”
Uncle Barnaby scowled, and for a moment, the attack flared even more intense. But then I detected (or at least imagined), a look of grudging respect. He blinked and sighed and crossed his arms, and all the mad imagery drained away like a dream. The feelings persisted, as feelings do, but mostly as the bare physical sensations of anxiety, trembles and chills and a clench in the cut.
“You’re lucky I spent all night battling Radcliff, or whoever that telempath was,” he grumbled. “If I wasn’t so exhausted, you’d be on the floor.”
Privately, I worried he might be right. Resisting all that had been exhausting; on top of the lingering anxiety tremors, I felt like I’d run a mile. Uphill. In heels.
I was glad that I’d set a boundary with Uncle Barnaby… but I promised myself that, in the future, I would avoid open confrontation with telempaths at all costs.
Oh, wait. Radcliff was a telempath. Great.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” I said, respectful but firm. “I can see the merit of giving Radcliff a reasonable nudge… but nothing extreme.” I crossed my arms. “Or else.”
I was basically bluffing. I felt wiped out and sore, and my arm still hurt from the jolt. If he guilt-bombed me again, I couldn’t promise myself I’d hold up.
But he bought it. Aunt Helen’s the empath, the reader. All he can do is broadcast.