Psyched (8 page)

“Why?” She folded her arms and leaned away from him.

“I want to show you something.” He hurried back to the table where Zinnia and Colby still chatted animatedly. Aisi smiled a little at her friend, who caught her eye and grinned excitedly in return. Things seemed to be going well in Zinnia’s latest flirt fest. Vance hurried back with his digital camera.

Aisi pulled a face and looked at it warily. “Is that thing going to beep at me, too?”

“No,” Vance replied, once again Mr. Intensity as he switched it on. “What’s your mom’s name?”

“Jorja, but why—”

“Jorja!” he called, cutting her off. Jorja immediately came back out from the kitchen. As she approached, he reached toward a bank of light switches on the wall immediately behind where Aisi sat, but it looked and felt like he was putting his arm around her. She tried to act casual and not look completely confused.

Aisi managed to catch his eye as he turned back around. “You and your cousin are pretty rude, you know. I have never been interrupted so much in all my—”

“Did you call, boy?” Jorja asked as she approached their table. She looked a little smug as she continued. “I impressed you, didn’t I? You need me to look beyond this mundane world to give you the guidance you so desperately need.”

“Kind of,” Vance replied. He smashed Aisi against the wall of the booth as he reached over to spank the light switches. The diner plunged into temporary darkness, disrupted by three quick flashes of light. Just as Zinnia and Colby shouted in confusion, the lights came on again. Aisi sat blinking in the momentary blindness that comes after someone takes your picture, made worse by the fact that he took it in pitch darkness.

“What on earth did you just do?” Jorja asked, outraged.

“I just wanted to take the picture of the woman who…uh…warned me about my future.” Vance smiled sweetly at Aisi’s indignant mother. Aisi had to give him props. Whatever he was up to, he knew how to sweet talk her mother, who gazed down at him with a look of affection she and Leo hardly ever saw anymore.

“You are quite welcome, boy. Don’t forget to come visit me in my shop soon.”

As Jorja left, Aisi turned her attention to the camera. Vance changed the setting to review pictures, explaining, “I have this camera set to photograph in the infrared spectrum. This is where we can actually see paranormal activity. The first here?” He indicated a completely black screen. “This is your mother. She’s not psychic.”

“Well, duh. Just don’t tell her that,” Aisi warned. “She’s had enough disappointment in this life. I don’t think she needs any more.”

Vance looked at her oddly, but ignored it and switched to the second picture. The image was mostly black, but a faint blue glow which Aisi recognized as her own profile sat in the center surrounded by vibrant splotches of red, orange, and yellow. They seemed to pulse and glow, even in the still image. The hair on the back of her neck stood up as she realized they were around her, the ghosts who always sought her. Her forehead wrinkled in concern. Why couldn’t she see them right now? It was a faint comfort, to have that connection with another realm, as if maybe one day she could…She stopped herself with a sigh.

“And this next one? This is your dad.”

He switched to the third image and they both said, “Whoa!” at the same time. Vance had pointed the camera at the open kitchen window, creating a black frame around the deeply white-blue, pulsating outline of her father standing in the center. All around him, a bright silvery light filled the background except where a little blue head popped into the picture. Leo must have peeked up at just the right moment to see why the lights went off. Aisi groaned.

Vance flipped the camera off and turned to her. “Really? Your brother, too?”

Chapter 8 Picture on the Wall

Aisi sighed. Her best friend didn’t even know her secret. She hadn’t told her father either since she was little, when no one believed her, so she stopped trying to tell him. Apart from Zinnia, she was closer to him than anyone else. She had absolutely no reason to trust some guy she’d known for maybe ten minutes.

Her heart thudded inside her chest because she wanted to say it to someone, to finally share this burden. This morning she told Leo people would call them crazy if they knew the two were psychic. It was true—it happened to her, when she first started seeing spirits. Last thing she wanted was a one way ticket to the wacky shack when people found out.

And yet...as she looked into his sparkling gray eyes, something deep down told her he would get it. For the first time ever, she could really tell someone who would believe what she had to say. She didn’t know why, but she
knew
Vance was different. She closed her eyes, waiting for it. A quick image flickered into her mind of Vance running through smoke and flames toward her and then snuffed out, but it was enough. A time would come when she’s need him, and he’d be there.

Her thoughts raced back to her father, whose image in the picture shone so bright. He was surrounded by…something. She foolishly convinced herself that she had it all under control, but now she had so many more questions. Discovering Leo was haunted last night was tough enough. Seeing this picture of her father made her realize she didn’t know what she thought she knew. Maybe the demons were out of control because
she
had lost control.

“Will you show me that picture of my dad again?” Aisi asked quietly. “I need to look at it more closely. I think I might have some great information for your project, but I can’t explain why or how, or much of anything.”

He handed her the camera silently. She switched it back on and pushed the review button until it came to the third shot, the infrared image of her father in a glowing, pulsing blue, framed in black, surrounded by white light. She hit the crop button to zoom in on the white portion, and her stomach sank.

The closer she zoomed in, the more pixilated the image became, but what originally looked like faint specks of red scattered in the original shot became sets of red dots, two by two, around her father. How many? Aisi quickly counted them and realized that her father was at that very moment surrounded by at least ten demons not yet strong enough to appear to Aisi. If the rest of the day were any indication, they would be soon. She’d never tried to vanquish more than one at a time. Her heart pounded harder.

She gave the camera back to Vance. “Do you see those little dots in the white, set side by side?” She pointed to the screen, tilting her head toward him. Her curls fell over his shoulder despite being tied back in a low, loose pony tail, but he didn’t brush them away.

He looked closer, squinting a little. “Yes,” he answered.

“You just captured ten little baby demons in your picture,” she said simply. She smiled at the look of alarm on his face as he grabbed the camera and stared at the image. “You’re doing this fancy college project and you’ve never seen one? Well, here you go. I see them all the time, and I found out last night my baby brother does, too. I could handle them pretty well by myself until just today. So you showing up here right now either means this is the world’s biggest coincidence, or you’re the luckiest guy I’ve ever met. You just waltzed into demon central.”

“Wait, what?” Vance spluttered, still astonished. “How do you know these are demons?”

“I told you,” she replied impatiently, “I see them all the time. If I stay calm, I can vanquish them with some insults and a few Latin swear words. Today? Holy stinking wow…”

She sighed, and then she launched into the short version of her day. The night terrors. The demon in class and her ruined test. Getting spanked and burned by a demon strong enough to take on something close to human form without possessing someone else’s body. She stood up to show him char marks on the shredded pocket of the seat of her pants, a blackened hand print with claw rips still visible. As she sat back down, she finished, “And he farted at me! The demon actually farted at me.”

Vance could not have looked more perplexed. “Demons…can fart?”

Aisi almost laughed. She took a deep breath, pushing a shiny, spiral lock of hair out of her face. Her hair bothered her, so she pulled her long black tresses out of the rubber band which held them and twisted it up on top of her head. As she secured it with the elastic in her hand, she said indifferently, “This one did. Smelled like rotten eggs.”

Vance looked grim. He recovered a bit, thinking hard about all she said. “Sulfur. Hellfire and brimstone.”

Aisi shrugged. “He said his name was Malus Indolus. In Latin, that means evil genius, but I called him on it. I told him the name was stupid. He didn’t like that so much.”

Vance’s eyes grew wide. “You called out a demon? Whoa…” He looked at her with profound respect. “Aisi, you have no idea how exciting this is to me. I am totally blown away by this. I…I don’t even know what to do with all this information!”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Out of the corner of her eye she could see he father watching them, pacing inside the kitchen. Weird. She focused on the gold speckles in the cheap Formica table top, absently tracing patterns on it with her fingers. “I can’t help you much more with this school project or whatever. Everything that’s happened today is really confusing.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I told you all this, except maybe that you might be the first one to get it. I can’t tell my mom any of this. You’ve seen her. She’d use Leo and me to make more money. I never thought of telling my dad again. When they were still married I told them, and my mom kept dragging me to psychologists until I pretended I didn’t see anything and they said I was cured. The thing is, I never saw anything at all until…”

Aisi paused and looked at a small framed picture on the wall close to the restrooms. She stood and walked to it, a feeling of hopelessness washing over her. In it, identical twin girls stood holding hands, wearing matching white sun dresses. Their long black curls were pulled up into pigtails on either side of their heads with white ribbons streaming down to their shoulders. Smiling parents stood behind them on the porch of the house that was now an abandoned wreck near the church where Father J, the famous demonologist, built his church. She pulled the image from its hook on the wall and handed it to Vance with trembling hands.

“Everyone in town knows about my twin sister, Nakia,” Aisi said shakily. “She disappeared ten years ago. For a while, they said my dad killed her and threw her body into the old well behind the house. Then the police decided it must have been an accident after he passed all their lie detector tests. They never found a body…they said she fell down the well. They thought my dad just got nervous because he’s an immigrant and covered it all up so he wouldn’t get in trouble.”

Vance looked outraged. “Why would they think that?”

Aisi closed her eyes, wishing she didn’t have to remember any of it. “Because the night she disappeared, my father took cement and sealed the well.”

Vance’s forehead furrowed. “Uh, yeah. That looks bad.”

“He would never say exactly why or how he sealed the well, but they never pressed charges. Somehow his hands got horribly burned in the process, even though he swears those scars come from a grease fire here in the diner. All I know is one night my sister was here and his hands were fine, and the next day, she was gone and his hands got melted. The crazy thing is that the FBI came out with all their heavy equipment and were never able to pull out the cement plug,” Aisi said. “Some of their geology experts were able to figure out how deep it went. Well, everyone
thought
it was an old well. It was dry when we moved in, and it doesn’t go straight down. It’s kind of just like a hole in the ground by the hill, behind the old house. Any guesses how deep it went?”

Vance thought. “We have a well at my house,” he answered. “We had to drill about 500 feet down when our old one dried up.”

“The geologists said it couldn’t possibly be a well because it went down about a mile.”

“Old mine shaft, maybe?” Vance asked, leaning forward with interest.

“I doubt it,” Aisi replied with a shake of her head. “Not around here, anyway. Last year I caught my dad looking at the picture, saying something in his native language and crying. When he saw me, he just said, ‘I had to close it to protect you. I can’t lose you, too.’”

Aisi glanced sideways at Vance, feeling nervous. She wondered how he would react to what she said. Would he think her insane? She suddenly doubted her instinct to trust.

“Are you saying you only noticed your psychic abilities after your sister disappeared?” he asked after taking a long moment to process everything. “Do you think you have that connection to another world
because
she disappeared?”

Aisi sat back, propping her feet up on the booth’s other bench. She leaned her head against the wall. Her neck tingled. “Yeah. I mean, I think so. It all started when she vanished, and my mom thought I was going all nutballs because of it.”

“Sunshine, come here.”

Aisi’s head bolted up, and she looked at her father. He stood next to the diner’s counter, twisting a dirty, greasy rag nervously in his hands. She stood, unsure. Aisi knew he’d been watching them but she kind of thought it was because she never, ever talked to guys. The nervous vibe she picked up from her dad since Vance and Colby walked in must be from that, right? Her dad was always rock solid, dependable, yet there he stood, looking ten kinds of jumpy, wringing the rag in his scarred hands like a little kid who got caught with grimy hands in the cookie jar.

“What is it, Dad?” Aisi asked.

“I didn’t want to have to tell you so soon, if at all, but I must. I can see it in your face and feel it through this young man.” He nodded toward Vance. “The time has come. They grow stronger. They surround me, and they surround you. Now they have found Leo. It’s time you know the truth.”

Chapter 9: A Truth that Can’t Be Told

The truth.