Bobby’s face flushed red. He looked away.
“Right. Annie’s different,” Adam said. He sounded cruel, but he wanted this settled now. They weren’t kids anymore, and he wouldn’t be bullied, let alone parented. Not by this asshole. “You wouldn’t do that to her, just me.”
Bobby flinched. He opened his mouth to say something but closed it again.
“Well you’re going to need a bigger ward,” Adam said. “With beds for about a dozen.”
Anger and curiosity warred on Bobby’s face.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“She’s not the only one,” Adam said. “What has a hold on her is big. It’s old, and it’s got someone more powerful than me spooked, and it’s connected to people all over the city.”
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. He clenched his fist, the old denial flaring.
Adam thought Bobby might punch the wall, like Dad would have, but his brother forced his hands to open. He ran his palms over his jean pockets.
“I can prove it,” Adam said. “I just need to track them down.”
“Fine,” Bobby said, raising a hand in surrender. “It’s late and Mom’s waiting with supper.”
“What time is it?” Adam asked, realizing the light from the basement window had darkened.
“Nine o’clock,” Bobby said.
“Man,” Adam said. “I didn’t think I was gone that long.”
He felt drained. The spirit walk had taken a lot from him.
“Mom must have decided you needed to sleep,” Bobby said, leading Adam out of the basement.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Adam snarled. “And I didn’t come here for you to mock me.”
“Whatever,” Bobby said, already heading up the stairs.
Adam clenched his fists, but he followed without argument. He wanted to eat more than he wanted to go another round.
Climbing the stairs, he could smell his mother’s cooking, salmon patties and steamed green beans. The memory took him back to Guthrie, to eating outside when it got too hot in the trailer. He’d douse the greasy little cakes in ketchup, craving the sugar more than the fried fish and breadcrumbs.
Their mother had worked long hours at the gas station after their dad left. She’d kept them fed, but hadn’t had the chance to cook. Adam’s early years were filled with cheap microwave dinners, popcorn, and boxes of off-brand macaroni. Bobby learned to cook out of necessity, though he never managed anything more complicated than pasta and meatballs. He’d cook in bulk, and they’d get by on a stock pot of pasta for a full week, digging down into the noodles for whatever bits of flavor and sauce might remain near the bottom.
Adam would go to his grave hating spaghetti and that cheap Parmesan cheese that tasted like sawdust. He and Sue ate cheap, but she spared him that, even if it meant they sometimes ate instant oatmeal for dinner.
Upstairs, his mom had set three places. Bobby looked at the unset fourth spot with open sadness.
No one spoke as forks and knives scraped plates. Adam almost asked his mother how she’d been, to at least be polite and ask what she’d done with the land and trailer back home. He knew it was important to her. She’d always insisted on keeping it, even when Bobby and Adam were gone. But he bit down on the questions, afraid the acid roiling in his gut would spill out.
By the time he rose to rinse his plate in the sink, his jaw ached.
He sat back down.
“When did it start?” he asked.
His mother and brother exchanged a glance.
“I can’t help if I don’t know the details,” Adam said.
Bobby took a long breath, let it out. “We tried to have a baby. She miscarried, got depressed. It happens, but she never came back. Then, this.”
Deflated, Bobby ducked his head.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, meaning it, though the news didn’t really help him. Depression might open a door, something the spirit could exploit, but it didn’t explain it. He braced for a harder question.
“Before, did Annie have any Sight? I mean, is she like me?”
“No,” Bobby said, shaking his head without looking up. “She’s normal. Completely normal.”
Normal.
The urge to lash out rose in Adam’s throat, but he swallowed it down.
“You said there were others?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah. I need to find them. Do you have a computer I can use?”
“It’s in the den,” Bobby said, nodding to a room just off the dining room, down a few steps, though his eyes didn’t look that way.
“Okay,” Adam said.
The den had an air of disuse. Books lined the desk hutch. Things were organized in a haphazard way that could not have been Bobby’s doing.
The computer, an older desktop with a large monitor, woke up slowly. It wanted about a million security updates. Adam told it to run them later. He didn’t want to wait all night. While it booted, he scanned the books Annie had stockpiled: How to Raise Happy Children. How to Help Your Baby Sleep through the Night.
Despite Bobby and his mother, despite the ball of black and red in his throat, something blue poured into Adam’s heart. He squeezed his eyes shut, let the weight of it press him into the chair. This wasn’t any kind of life like what he wanted, but this was Annie’s dream. Kids. This ugly house. Bobby. It all floated around him, soaked into the walls and carpet.
“I’ll help you,” Adam told her picture, a smiling photo from their wedding. “I’ll figure it out.”
The local practitioners were dead, and that was another thing he needed to understand. Without them he had far fewer options for help or information, but it also meant a lurking threat might be gunning for him.
Spirit walkers were rare. But sensitives, people who might feel the spirit realm but not see it, were common.
Maybe the local sensitives could feel the spirit hovering over the city without attracting its attention. There had to be something on the internet, something someone had spotted and reported.
In high school, when his Sight became unbearable, all he’d wanted was for his mother and brother to understand it. Understand him. Now he had to wonder if their safety wasn’t worth his loneliness, if having more Sight would have made them targets too.
If the spirit had killed the local practitioners, then why hadn’t the watchtowers intervened? The Guardians were supposed to protect the world from larger threats, and it didn’t get much larger than a giant floating organ hanging over the city.