Psyched (2 page)

Aisi sighed, debating with herself whether she had the patience to deal with this.
Self-control
, she told herself. Flinging aside her covers, she sat up. “If I can’t see anything, it’s because you interrupted my sleep. I have a big test in a few hours, you know. If I can’t help, you have to come back tomorrow when I can be more focused.”

The figure nodded, a happy white glow brightening the gray in her shadowy form. “Anything,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

Aisi closed her eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Sarah Jane.”

As she closed her eyes and reached her hand slowly toward the ghost of Sarah Jane, Aisi felt the familiar rush of icy tingles racing down her back as she tuned into the girl. The tiny bedroom melted away and a grainy picture appeared to her, coming in and out of focus. She found herself on a rainy, dark road as the image in her mind sharpened. The barest hint of light appeared in the distance. She looked at the gravel road beneath her, and then to the black and white sign beside her, indicating she stood on Rural Road 42. The steady rain suddenly became a deluge, and water rushed down the low side of the banked road on the curve where she stood.

A pinprick of light far away separated into the two headlights of a car—a car that moved entirely too fast on the slick, wet road. She caught a glimpse of Sarah Jane and another, older woman who looked very much like Sarah as the old Desoto, aqua blue and white with chrome trim and fins, whizzed past. She knew it would happen before the car reached the curve. Tires squealed and brakes screamed in protest before the car shot off the embankment, into a ravine, and settled with a sickening crunch of ripping metal and shattering glass a hundred feet below.

Aisi pulled herself out of the vision, quaking, ignoring the sweat which dripped down her forehead and into her eyes. “There was a car accident,” she whispered. “You and your mother...”

Sarah Jane became frantic again. On some level, the girl must have known on some level she was dead, but she refused to accept it. “I can’t be dead! I was just voted prom queen, and Danny gave me his pin! I have so much to live for!”

As Sarah Jane said the name, in Aisi’s mind she saw an old man, laughing and tossing his grandkids into the air. She knew it was Danny now, but she had no desire to freak out the spirit before her by saying he clearly moved on. This particular spirit seemed kind of high maintenance. “Danny is fine. He misses you, but he’s fine. He always just wanted you to be happy.” Aisi closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them with as much of a smile as she could muster, considering her lack of sleep and high level of annoyance. “Your mom is waiting for you. She and your dad are right here, in the light. Just walk toward the light and you’ll find them.”

Sarah Jane’s lip trembled slightly. “My daddy? But he died when I was little.”

“I know!” Aisi said impatiently. “Just…look. Look around. Do you see a light? Anywhere? Any kind of light that’s not coming from my desk lamp?” She rubbed her eyes tiredly. “Come on, girl. Throw me a bone. Do you see it?”

Sarah Jane’s gaze moved past her, to something beyond Aisi. “I see…some shadows. But they’re light. Almost white. Is that my mother? Mother?
Mother! Daddy
!” With a rush of wind, the image of the girl shot through the wall and vanished from Aisi’s room. The lights flickered back off.

Even more exhausted, Aisi crawled back into her blanket fort with her little toes peeking out and dangling over the edge of her bed. She curled into a ball, shivering with the cold and sweat that still clung to her. “So ungrateful,” she muttered to herself as a vision of Sarah Jane hugging her mother filled her mind. A warm feeling enveloped her as a whispered “thank you” echoed vaguely in her ears.

I still have an hour or two
, she told herself as she closed her eyes.
I can still get some—

“Aaaayyyyyseeeeee!” a small voice shrieked her name from across the hall. “Help me!”

Spurred by unmistakable panic in her brother’s voice, she bolted up and tossed her blankets back to the floor. The dead bolts and chains shot open and her door jerked open of its own accord as she rushed out. A piece of lined paper from her school notebook, taped to her door with what looked like silly putty, fluttered to the ground. She looked down to see her mother scrawled a note before going to bed:
Aisi, I took two sleeping pills. Leo is all yours if he has night terrors tonight. Love, Mom
.

Fury flooded through Aisi before she refocused on her brother, whose screams of terror drowned out the raging snores rattling into the hall from behind their mother’s closed door. His bedroom door flung itself open before her, and she rushed into the room. Her presence seemed large and powerful compared to the skinny little boy trembling on his bed, his face buried in his mattress and arms protectively covering his head. The light of the full moon beamed brightly onto his bed and a black shadow hovered over him, growling and snarling. The wall switch popped up as she ran in, flooding the room with more light.

“Aisi! Aisi! It won’t go away!” Leo howled. Sweat dripped down his forehead as he shuddered in fear.

Aisi raised her hand commandingly and shouted, “
Abyssus, diabolus
!”

The black shadow, though it had no distinct form, turned to her. Glowing red eyes bore through her, demanding she fear it. When Aisi did not cower or shrink in terror, it growled, “
Ego ero tergum,
” before sliding back to the wall and sinking through the floor.

Ego ero tergum
, she repeated to herself as she climbed onto her brother’s bed and let him crawl into her lap
. I’ll be back
. She wrapped her arms around him and rocked him, whispering, “It’s gone, Leo. It’s gonna be okay.”

But in that quiet moment of calm and peace as her brother sank back into a fitful slumber in her arms, she knew it really wouldn’t be okay. Her heart plummeted to her stomach as reality hit her like a sucker punch. Leo didn’t really suffer from bad dreams or night terrors.

Just like his big sister, Leo was haunted.

Chapter 2: Morning Revelation

Groggy and grumpy, Aisi stumbled down the hall. She walked through the narrow galley kitchen with its blinding yellow cabinets and blue ceramic pulls, into the nook that housed a lopsided dining table and a few mismatched, rickety chairs. She plopped down and looked at the milk jug, which slid toward her as she poured herself a bowl of sugary goodness.

Leo already sat at the table, dressed in cargo pants, mismatched socks, his river sandals, and an inside-out tee shirt. His eyes followed the jug until Aisi grabbed it absentmindedly and tipped it over her bowl of cereal. “Why did the milk go to you all by itself?”

His innocent words jolted her awake. She was so tired she forgot to be careful. She said nothing, instead chewing her mouthful of chocolate frosted sugar bombs slower than necessary. When she swallowed, she looked at him. “You tell me. Thanks to a wobbly leg, the table tilts one way. Could that be it, smart one?” She shoved another spoonful into her mouth and stared at the back of the box, pretending she cared whether the frosting princess made it out of Lord Fiber’s maze of doom.

He chose to ignore her usual morning sarcasm, still staring at her. She shifted in her seat uncomfortably. With wide, innocent, black eyes, he blinked a few times as he thought. “You were nice to me last night,” he said simply. “Why?”

Aisi snorted. “Don’t get used to it, punk,” she said rudely, her mouth full of cereal. Some milk dribbled out of the corner and down her chin.

“Why could you do that last night, Aisi? How did you make it go away?”

Ugh. Here it was, way earlier than she hoped….the question she dreaded since she tucked him back into bed. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit it was really the question she hoped wouldn’t come up at all. Ever. It was the question she worried about since he was born.

“What was that thing, and how did you get it to go away?” he persisted.

Aisi took a deep breath. She glanced over her shoulder to ensure their mother was still asleep, although she didn’t need to. The woman was still snorting and moaning down the hall. “Before I can answer your question, I need you to pinky swear that you’ll never tell anyone what I say. If you breathe one word of this, I’ll paint your toenails hot pink in your sleep and give you an atomic wedgie every day for the next eighty-five years. And I’ll tell all your friends you play with dolls. Got it?”

Leo’s eyes widened, but he nodded and extended his scrawny pinky toward her. She grabbed it decisively with her own. “Okay. The pinky swear is official. This stuff is legit. You break this and I can sue.” She thought a minute, trying to decide where to start. “Is that the first time you saw that dark shadow, Leo? Or have you seen it before?”

“That’s the night terror,” he said simply, and Aisi closed her eyes with a shake of her head. Her mom had told them for months that night terrors were nothing more than bad dreams. He would grow out of them eventually, she promised. That promise to her kid was just as worthless as everything else she said.

Leo continued, swallowing hard and looking as terrified as he had the night before. He whispered to her, as if speaking about the night terror aloud would call it back to him. “It comes sometimes, and I scream because it won’t stop growling at me and then it goes away when Mom comes in. Sometimes I see other stuff, too. Kind of like people but…” He struggled to find the right words in his limited kindergarten vocabulary. “But kind of foggy, too. They can talk to me. They’re mostly nice, but the night terror growls at me. He laughs when I cry.” Tears filled his big brown eyes, but he rubbed them angrily on his sleeve. “Can you teach me how to make it go away?”

Aisi reached over and affectionately rubbed the tight curls on his mostly buzzed head. “Yeah. I can. First you need to know what they are. The foggy people…those are ghosts. They’re okay, mostly just annoying. They’re sort of lost, but you can help them not be lost anymore.”

She pursed her lips, remembering the whiner in bobby socks who wouldn’t let her sleep last night. A faint horn sounded in the distance as she thought, but she ignored it as she looked out the window and down the long gravel driveway that led from their dilapidated house to the two-lane highway leading to town. “You just have to tell them to look for a light. I never see it, but they always do. Then they go away.” ‘Go toward the light’ was cliché, but effective.

“I want to make the night terror go away,” Leo said.

She sighed. “That one is a little trickier. It takes work. That thing you call a night terror? That’s a demon. They’re pretty hard to get rid of. Once they decide they want to scare you, they keep scaring you. Fear is like…” Her eyes rested on the box of cereal between them. “…Fear is like chocolate frosted sugar bombs to a demon. They like the taste of it, you know? They’d eat it all day if we let them, but we can’t ever let them know we’re scared. That’s where they get their power.”

The little boy could not have looked more terrified. “But what is it? Why won’t they leave us alone? Does everyone get scared by them?”

The kid didn’t ask easy questions. Aisi’s lips and cheeks puffed as she blew out a sigh of frustration. “Not everyone gets scared by them, because most people don’t know they’re here. You and me, Leo, we’re different. We’re psychic.”

“Psychic?” he repeated, looking confused.

“It just means we know about things that most people can’t see or hear, and sometimes we can move stuff just by thinking about it. Like the milk jug.”

Leo’s jaw dropped. “You did that for reals? So I could do that, too?” he asked excitedly.

Aisi nodded. “Maybe, if you practice. Some people study what we can do at college, because it’s so rare. Other people, if you tell them, they’ll think you’re lying or you’re crazy.” She grimly remembered her own experience with that, but she continued, “That’s why you have to make sure you never tell anyone about this.” She looked at him firmly. “Not even Mom.”
Especially not Mom
, she thought. Their mother had quite the reputation around their little town as a fortune teller, or according to the town’s one police officer, a con artist. What would she do if she knew her children had the ability she pretended to have?

Leo’s brow furrowed with worry. “Why can’t I tell Mom?”

Aisi glared at him. “Because you pinky swore. Atomic wedgies, little man. I can hang you by your tighty whiteys from the mailbox if you break your pinky swear.” Her expression softened, her heart breaking all over for this kid she so fiercely hoped would be normal and free of her curse.

“But I get in trouble if I tell her a lie!” he whined.

“Leo, it’s not a lie if you just don’t tell her something,” Aisi reasoned, trying not to feel guilty. “Look, if she ever asks you straight up if you’re psychic, you can say yes. Otherwise, just keep this between us. We’re the only ones I know who have it, and these invisible people come looking for us.”

“Why?”

Aisi thought a minute, chewing another spoonful of cereal thoughtfully. “You know how it feels when the lights go out? You can’t see anything but you want to see, so you keep looking around until you see a light?” He nodded, so she continued, “To ghosts and demons, we’re like a light in the darkness. They can find us when they can’t find anything else, and they come to us. The ghosts want help. The demons? They’re just losers. They want to scare us.”

The terrified expression seemed magnified on his baby face. “How do we make them not be scary?”

“They will always be scary,” Aisi admitted simply, shrugging. “But there’s a trick. This took me years to figure out, so you’re lucky I’m a nice big sister and telling you all this crap so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did. A demon only has the power you give it. If you pretend you’re not afraid, it isn’t getting any food from you. If you tell it you’re not afraid and command it to leave, it can’t stay. So when the night terror comes, you tell it, ‘I’m not afraid of you. Go back where you belong.’”