7:23 a.m. EST
Dani sipped her tea—Earl Grey, milk, and two Sweet’N Lows—while Tommy gulped down the last of his protein smoothie, made with milk, three eggs, whey powder, two bananas, and a cup of blueberries from his greenhouse.
She was still taking in the news that Julian and George were dead. She could tell herself they’d lived long fulfilling lives, but it didn’t ease the shock. She understood from the work she’d done as a psychiatrist that grieving moved at its own pace and that it was different for everyone, but right now there wasn’t time to process all the feelings she had—that would just have to wait. She was in the kitchen along with Quinn, who was playing back the footage taken by the security cameras the night before, after Tommy had filled the woods with light from the Helios 9000.
Dani stared at the images on the screen. “There must be hundreds of them.”
“At least,” Quinn said, frowning. “We still can’t get an exact count.”
“And we still don’t know why they’re here,” Tommy added.
“Maybe they’re after Reese?” Dani said.
“Maybe,” Tommy said. “He doesn’t remember anything from last night, but I think that ‘accident’ was an attempt on his life.”
“Not Julian’s?” Dani asked. “Did they know he was a member of the Curatoriat?”
“Probably,” Quinn said. “But they’d had plenty of other opportunities to kill Julian. Better opportunities. I’ve been thinking the same thing as Tommy—Reese is the new addition to the equation. They must be afraid of something, or they’d just storm the walls and take him.”
“Don’t forget what happened the last time they tried to storm the walls,” Tommy added, referring to the angel who’d come to their assistance. He turned to Dani. “You’ve worked with kids. What do you think of Reese?” He paused and looked up at the ceiling, listening. The boy was still asleep.
“He needs to trust us, and he needs to know we trust him,” Dani said. “As Dr. Villanegre pointed out, if Reese were a demon outright, or possessed by one, he wouldn’t be able to hold a Bible in his hand. I just wonder . . .”
“What?” Tommy asked.
“Well, just that we’re sort of at a crossroads. Between faith and science. We’re talking about something that was true a thousand years ago, or five hundred, but now—you know how in the old vampire movies, Dracula would cringe when Van Helsing held up a cross? Today, you could put Dracula on fluoxetine or citalopram and he might not have a problem with it.”
“And blood thinners as an appetite suppressant,” Tommy said.
“It’s an interesting question,” Quinn said. “Is it possible to create a medication that could enhance morality, for lack of a better word? It seems our friends at St. Adrian’s have been striving to do the opposite. Either way, I doubt pharmaceutically induced morality would be a substitute for the real thing.”
“Do you think Reese is telling us everything?” Tommy asked.
“He’s scared,” Dani said. “We should give him time to adjust. He needs love, and grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk.”
“Don’t we all?” Tommy said. “A lot of the time the troubled kids I’ve coached know what they need and try to tell us, but we’re too busy telling them what’s wrong with them for them to get a word in edgewise.” In the time since he’d retired from football, his goal as a trainer and coach for youth sports had been simply to treat everyone fairly and make himself accessible.
“Tommy’s right,” Quinn said. “Reese may also need to flush any medications he might have been on without knowing it from his system. If he was eating from the school cafeteria, there could have been any number of things they were putting in his food. There may be withdrawal symptoms.”
“Whether it’s Reese these things want or not, they’re gone now,” Tommy said, gesturing toward the monitor. “They don’t seem to stick around during the day. We’ll see if they come back tonight.”
Reese entered the kitchen a few minutes later, accompanied by Cassandra and Ruth.
“There’s the man of the hour,” Tommy said. “You hungry? Bacon and eggs?”
“That would be nice,” Reese said. “Did they find out any more about the accident?”
“I’ll get it,” Aunt Ruth said to Tommy, taking a frying pan down from the hook. “Cassandra?”
The actress shook her head. “I’ll just grab some coffee.”
“No one’s called,” Tommy said. Dani had explained to him that often when people tell a lie, they voluntarily bring it up a second time to see if the lie was believed. Was that what Reese had just done?
Tommy and Dani sat down at the kitchen table opposite the boy and watched his eyes light up as Ruth first prepared and then set the food down in front of him. He ate as if he was famished, pushing the last piece of bacon into his mouth, and then set his plate aside and leaned back.
“You good?” Dani asked him as Ruth cleared his plate.
Reese nodded, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “I appreciate what you’re all doing for me.”
“Tommy told me what happened last night,” Dani said. “I’m sorry.”
“I wish I hadn’t fallen asleep. Maybe I could be more helpful to you,” Reese said. “I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.”
“Were they able to fill you in on what’s going on?”
“They started to,” Reese said.
Dani moved her chair closer and faced him, her arms uncrossed, her body language open and nonthreatening.
“You need anything?” she asked. “Do you have family you’d like to call?”
“My parents have passed on,” Reese said. “In a car accident. There’s irony for you. They were killed and I was spared.”
“I’m sorry,” Dani said.
“It’s all right,” Reese said. “I’ve had a long time to get over it.”
Dani detected deception, but not mendacity—it was the sort of lie people tell themselves as a way of coping with something unbearable. No one gets over the early loss of their parents. They just find a way to pretend. She let it go.
“So you were raised by relatives?”
“We had a housekeeper in England,” the boy said. He seemed calmer now and didn’t fidget or look away. “Mrs. Carlyle. And Mr. Simons manages the house. You said last night that you think the school is planning something?”
“We do,” Dani said. “We think it has something to do with Linz Pharmazeutika and Udo Bauer, your distinguished alum.”
“The man who owns the painting?”
Dani nodded. “What made you come to us?” she asked. “I mean, how did you know about us?”
“You and Mr. Gunderson came to the school to investigate Amos Kasden. You’re with the police, aren’t you?”
Ruth refilled Dani’s tea and Tommy’s coffee and set a small pitcher of milk on the table.
“Technically, I work for the district attorney. Did you know Amos?”
“Not very well,” Reese said. “No one did, really. I was friends with his roommate, though.”
“A boy from Mexico, if I recall correctly?”
They’d been given access to Amos’s laptop by Dr. Wharton, the school’s sinister headmaster, but a search of the hard drive turned up nothing. They later learned that Amos had used his roommate’s laptop to coordinate his activities.
“Oliver,” Reese said. “He was from Costa Rica. He was my best friend. Even though he’s Man U and I’m City.”
Dani gave Tommy a puzzled look.
“Those are English football teams,” Tommy said. “Soccer rivals. Is City your local?”
“Tottenham,” the boy said, rolling his eyes and sighing heavily. “Don’t ask.”
“So Oliver was your friend?” Dani asked. She added milk to her tea and stirred it.
“After Amos . . . after he died . . . ,” Reese said.
Dani couldn’t help but flinch. Amos Kasden had died in her kitchen, having come there to do to her what he’d done to Julie Leonard. He might have succeeded if Tommy hadn’t come to her rescue. “After Amos died, then what?”
“I couldn’t reach Oliver at all,” Reese said. “He disappeared. I tried all his telephone numbers and e-mail addresses and Facebook pages. Even the secret ones his parents didn’t know about. He doesn’t answer. One day he was in school and the next day he wasn’t. I think they killed him because he knew.”
“What did he know?”
“He found the files Amos had left on his laptop. He knew that Amos was one of the Selected.” The boy looked around the room as if he expected a reaction.
“The Selected?” Tommy asked, looking to Dani for permission to interrupt. She nodded; Tommy continued, “Who are they?”
“A group of boys at the school,” Reese said. “There’s an initiation. Only boys who show special talents are chosen.”
“Boys like Amos Kasden?” Tommy said.
Reese nodded.
“What does being ‘selected’ mean?” Dani asked.
“Well, for one thing, you’re allowed to move into Honors House,” Reese said. “Oliver couldn’t have been happier. He said Amos gave him the creeps.”
“How so?”
“He just wasn’t normal,” Reese said. “Oliver loaned Amos his school scarf once, and when he got it back, he realized Amos had used it to wipe up something he’d spilled. Most people would apologize and offer to have it cleaned, but Amos couldn’t imagine why Oliver was upset.”
“We think Amos might have fallen somewhere on the autism spectrum,” Dani said. “An inability to identify or understand someone else’s feelings. He’d disassociate.”
“That certainly makes sense,” Reese said.
“What happens at Honors House?”
“You’re not allowed to say. Amos never talked about it.” Reese shook his head. “You can get in deep trouble if you do. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why would God allow something like what Amos did to that girl to happen? I’ve been trying to understand it, but I can’t.”
Dani looked to Tommy.
“We can’t either,” Tommy said. “Theologians have been asking that kind of question for centuries. We can do everything humanly possible to understand the specific causes of something like that, but in the larger sense all we know is that evil is something we have to react to and fight. We can move forward, but understanding it backward is often not possible.”
“I suppose only God really knows,” Reese said.
“I had the impression they don’t talk much about God at that school of yours,” Dani said.
Reese nodded. “They don’t.”
“But you have a Bible,” she said.
“Oliver gave it to me. We could have been expelled if we were caught reading it. It’s banned on campus.”
“No surprise,” Tommy commented.
“That was why I wanted to find out what was in it for myself,” Reese said.
“My father used to say the best way to get a kid to do something is to tell him not to,” Dani said. “He was a pediatrician.”
“So Amos was one of the Selected. Do you know what they’re selected for?” Tommy asked, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his coffee cup. “What is the criteria? Do they have some kind of mission or task?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “Once you’re in, you don’t really associate with the other students. You have special classes. You eat all your meals at Honors House. And after you graduate, your future is virtually guaranteed, because Honors House people promise to do business and help other Honors House people. It’s like the Skull and Bones at Yale or the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. All hush-hush. A lot of us on the outside think the whole thing is ridiculous, but it’s not ridiculous to the people on the inside.”
“Do you know how many others were chosen? What their names are?”
“Some,” Reese said, smiling apologetically. “Not sure how helpful I can be.”
“The first time we met,” Dani said, “you brought me a pill.”
“The blue pill,” Reese said, nodding. “I remember.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Oliver stole it from Amos. I gave it to you because I thought it might explain why Amos did what he did,” Reese said.
“And you thought it was a pill to help people study, like Adderall?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Reese said. “I thought it was one of the benefits of living in Honors House. They give you pills that help you get straight As.”
“Do you have any idea how long this might have been going on?”
Reese shook his head. “Did it help you?” he asked.
“It did,” Dani said. “We think it might be a beta version of Provivilan.”
“The drug the TV ads say is going to revolutionize the treatment of depression?”
“That’s what they’re saying,” Dani said, leaning away to give Reese more room. “Except that instead of being an antidepressant, it acts like a weaponized depressant. It affects changes in embryonic development, in the womb. Somebody whose mother took it grows up perfectly normal until they hit puberty, and then the drug combines with hormones to reduce empathy and create a craving for the kind of adrenaline that’s released through violence.”
“We’re still trying to crack the specific mechanisms,” Quinn added.
“Do you know who else at St. Adrian’s might have been taking performance-enhancing drugs?” Dani asked.
“We all do,” Reese said, sounding surprised at the question, as if it were common knowledge. “Everyone at the school does. They make us.”
“They make you?” Tommy sounded not just surprised but shocked.
“Yes. We take attention deficit drugs to help us study. It depends on what sort of things we’re studying. They’ve been trying to fine-tune it and personalize it. Last year they finished running every student’s genome. Some medications are better for creative types. Or sometimes if someone just needs help staying awake for a test, they give us the same drug they give astronauts who have to be awake for a mission. It’s apparently the same drug the president or the secretary of state takes if they’re flying long distances and can’t afford jet lag.”
“That’s what they told you?”
“Isn’t everyone doing it?” Reese asked. “Other schools?”
“I would hope not,” Dani said. “How much sleep a night have you been getting? On average?”
“Five or six hours,” Reese said.
“From now on, eight hours a night. Doctor’s orders,” she said. “What else? What other drugs?”
“Well, steroids and human growth hormones for the athletes,” Reese said. “And some other things for mood control.”
“Better living through chemistry,” Quinn said.
“Do you know what drugs they’ve been giving you?” Dani continued.
Reese shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t take them. I didn’t like the way they were making me feel, so I’d pretend to take them and then spit them out. But I got pretty good grades anyway.”
“Do you, by any chance, know how long the school has been doing this?” Dani asked.
“A long time,” Reese said. “One of the legacy students—both his father and his grandfather were Addies—he said his father told him he was on a drug program back in the sixties.”
“It would make sense to use one part of the student population as a test group and the others as a control,” Quinn said. “Unethical, but it would make sense from a scientific point of view.”
“Well, the ones who got the good stuff were definitely the selected ones,” Reese said. “I don’t know if their test scores proved it, but their experiences later in life certainly seem to.”
“Were those the names on the SD card you sent to my office—was that a list of alumni who’d been selected?”
Reese nodded.
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
“Oliver and I were snooping around in the school databases,” Reese said. “We sorted for the ones who’d lived in Honors House. Those were the names I got. But none of the ones from this year were on it.”
“Why did you send them to me?”
“I don’t really know,” the boy said, scratching his arm nervously. “I thought maybe you could do something with them. I think maybe I suspected there was something wrong with my school. Not the things you’ve been telling me. Just a feeling. I know the teachers are good and the facilities are state-of-the-art, and I know that if you graduate from there, you’ll be taken care of by the people who’ve graduated before you. But all the nonstop emphasis on achievement and excellence and single-minded purpose? Something about it . . . there’s just something missing. Do you know what I mean?”
“A soul,” Tommy said. “Humanity.”
“Dr. Villanegre said something about a thousand years,” Reese asked. “And Vikings? The school’s only two hundred years old.”
Dani looked at Tommy, who nodded. Ruth pulled up a chair while Cassandra swiveled on her stool at the food island.
“You’d better get comfortable, Reese,” Dani said. “I have a story to tell you.”
She explained then just what it was that was so terribly wrong with St. Adrian’s Academy, beginning from the time the school’s namesake, St. Adrian, a holy man and a scholar, arrived in England in 671 AD intent on spreading the Word of God. Adrian soon met resistance from a group of pagans and Satan worshipers, the Druids. With the help of a legion of holy warriors, led by an aide known as Charles the Black, Adrian drove the Druids from England, killing them to the last man. Or so he thought. As it turned out, a hundred or so of them escaped, sailing west from the English coast across the Atlantic in hired Viking ships. The shallow-drafting vessels eventually navigated the St. Lawrence River and off-loaded their passengers in what would become upstate New York. There, for an undetermined period of time, the Druids ruled over one of the Iroquois nations, spreading dark worship and black magic.
They were eventually defeated and driven underground, surfacing again after the American Revolutionary War when the school itself was formally established at its present location. The academy’s leaders proposed an institution to rival Yale in New Haven, or Harvard in Boston, or William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. But somewhere along the line the school returned to its true mission—to corrupt its students, tempt them with power, and lead them into sin, doing Satan’s bidding, protected by secrecy and “old-boy” collegiality behind the stone walls of St. Adrian’s Academy for Boys, where the world’s leaders sent their sons to be educated.
“The key has always been secrecy,” Dani said. “The fact that you’re unaware of what’s going on doesn’t surprise me. The names on that list you gave me—did you look at them?”
“A few,” Reese said. “They didn’t really mean anything to me.”
“They weren’t supposed to mean anything to you,” Tommy said. “St. Adrian’s didn’t teach the bad guys whose names you’d recognize. They taught the guys standing next to those guys. The anonymous guy no one remembers, who whispers in the other guy’s ear.”
Reese looked puzzled.
“For example, epidemiologists think the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 originated in Kansas,” Dani said. “The disease killed over fifty million people. Three percent of the world’s population. Most accounts point to a man named Albert Gitchell, who was a cook at Ft. Riley. He gave the virus to the troops, and they brought it to Europe with them.”
“And Albert Gitchell went to St. Adrian’s,” Tommy said.
“You gave us six hundred plus names,” Quinn said. “Men who lived in Honors House as students. We’ve been able to tie over four hundred of them to some kind of tragedy. Always indirectly. Never the guy with the gun.”
Reese fell silent a moment, thinking.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Tommy said. “It makes anybody who says it out loud sound like one of those conspiracy fanatics, but we’ve been putting this together for a while. The people before us were putting it together for even longer.”
“Actually, it makes sense,” Reese said. “It explains a lot of things I was wondering about at the school. Stories I heard that I wasn’t sure were true. Now I think they are.”
“Reese—we think the school psychologist is part of this,” Tommy said. “Did you have any interaction with him?”
“We all did,” Reese said. “You have to do a long interview with Dr. Ghieri before they let you in. They call it intake.”
“That’s probably where the selection process starts,” Dani said. “That’s where they find out who the best candidates are.”
“Best candidates for what?”
“Persuasion. The kids most susceptible to being influenced,” Dani said. “Kids who don’t know themselves or kids who’re bluffing that they do. Your sense of yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so, seems to be on strong footing. You know who you are and what you want and like, and you’re not terribly troubled if you don’t fit into someone else’s categories. That’s why you didn’t have any problem deciding not to take the medications they wanted you to take—you were ‘above the influence,’ as the commercials on television say. Would you say that’s fair?”
“I suppose,” Reese said.
“Not always, but sometimes it’s the kids who proclaim themselves the loudest—the ones with the Mohawks and tattoos or the long black trench coats—who are the least certain of who they are, so they brand themselves to a group they hope will accept them. It looks like confidence, but it’s a false confidence. Their sense of self is actually pretty fragile.”
It occurred to her that Tommy would have been the worst possible candidate for “selection.” He had always known who he was and what he stood for. There were other similarities between Tommy and Reese—a kind of resident calm, and maybe a capacity for simply listening. Whereas most people, while they listen, are trying to think of what they’ll say in response—the boy seemed fully present.
“What do you think they’re going to make the boys who’ve been selected do?” Reese asked. “If they’re susceptible to influence, what’s the goal?”
“We can’t be sure,” Tommy said, glancing out the window. Dani saw that it was snowing again. “We think that Linz Pharmazeutika developed a drug that they intend to put into the water supply. We’ve been calling it the ‘Doomsday Molecule.’”
“Let’s not give it more power than it deserves,” Quinn interrupted. “It’s an endocrine disrupting agent. That’s what I’m calling it. It’s harmless to adults, as far as we can tell, but it changes the way embryos develop.”
“Changes them how?” Reese asked.
“Emotional overload,” Quinn said. “More than the circuit can handle.”
“Into what?”
“Into an army of Amos Kasdens,” Quinn said. “Linz offered me a job awhile back, and I turned them down at first, but three days ago I told them I’d take it. Hopefully I can find out more about the drug from the inside. As far as I can tell, they haven’t connected me to Tommy and Dani yet.”
“The end result is, twelve or thirteen years from now, it all kicks in and the whole world goes crazy,” Tommy added.
“That’s what Provivilan is going to do?”
“Not all by itself,” Quinn said. “It’s a binary delivery system. When we take drugs, the metabolites eventually pass through the body and reenter the water system. During World War I, a German chemist named Fritz Haber, often called ‘the father of chemical weapons,’ devised binary compounds that were harmless on their own—you could store them and ship them without having to worry about them. But they’d combine inside the artillery shell at the time of detonation to form a gas, and then they were deadly. The world’s drinking water is already a soup of pharmaceutical metabolites. When Provivilan combines with what’s already in the drinking water, it forms the endocrine disrupting agent.”
“The Doomsday Molecule,” Reese said.
“They poisoned my pond out back as a practice run,” Tommy said. “We’re at the highest elevation in Westchester County. We dammed it up, but everything from here drains into Lake Atticus and from there into New York City’s drinking water.”
“But we don’t think they’re going to wait for Provivilan to go on the market,” Quinn said.
“We don’t?” Dani said.
“I was doing the math last night,” Quinn said, shaking his head. “Assuming Provivilan metabolites are environmentally persistent or that they bio-magnify through the food chain, it would still take a few hundred years to reach concentrations high enough to disrupt embryonic brain development, just by marketing a drug. That’s going to mask what they’re doing, but it’s not a very efficient delivery system.”
“It’s not?” Tommy said.
“Not really,” Quinn said. “But you’re right—poisoning your pond was a test run. I need to know more about how the drug works, but I think a single dump of the drug in a reservoir or catch basin would be enough to kick-start the process in a way that’s irreversible. You could have an amount equal to a bag of Starbucks coffee and pour it into Lake Superior, and you’d be on your way.”
The room grew silent as Dani and Tommy and the others considered Quinn’s dire prediction.
“Maybe the drug they’re putting on the market is just misdirection,” Tommy said. “The way a magician gets you to look at his right hand so you don’t notice what he’s doing with his left.”
“Okay,” Dani said, returning to Reese. “So we think we know what they’re doing. We just don’t know who’s doing it, or when it’s going to happen.”
“Christmas Eve,” the boy said.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Christmas Eve,” Reese said again.
“You sound pretty certain,” Tommy said.
“If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy,” Reese said. “I heard a voice. I can absolutely guarantee you it’s Christmas Eve, and that the voice is 100 percent reliable, but I can’t explain it any better than that.”
“Dani?” Tommy said, rising from his chair and carrying his dishes to the sink. “Can I talk to you for a second in the study? Reese, will you tell Cassandra and Quinn and Ruth about the classes you’ve been taking? Maybe there’s something we can learn from them.”
Cassandra sat down next to Reese, who sat up a little straighter. Tommy smiled. Dani knew the effect the beautiful actress had on grown men; the boy would answer any question she asked, obviously. In the meantime . . .
He led Dani into his study and closed the door behind them. He took her in his arms and kissed her.
“First things first,” he said. “I am once again absolutely awed by your intelligence and your compassion.”
“Well, shucks,” Dani said, smiling and kissing him back. “You’re worried.”
“A little,” Tommy said. “I’m worried that we’re telling him too much.”
“What would you consider too much?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “But last time they tried to get someone inside our circle, they preyed on Carl’s weaknesses and used him as a spy. How do we know they’re not doing it again?”
“Reese was holding a Bible,” Dani said.
“I know, but maybe we’re missing something. Maybe Reese doesn’t know he’s being used, somehow.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s lying,” Dani said. “I’m not detecting deception, at least as far as I understand the signs of it.”
“Your opinion is worth everything to me,” Tommy said, “but he doesn’t have to be lying to us to deceive us.”
“Meaning what?”
“That’s what disinformation does,” Tommy said. “Not misinformation—dis-information. What if they somehow have allowed Reese to think he’s discovered a secret about their timing—then he tells us that, totally believing he’s telling the truth? Maybe they let him escape knowing he’d come to us and tell us what they want us to believe.”
“Maybe,” Dani agreed, thinking. “That theory depends on a number of assumptions, but they’re all reasonable assumptions. Occam’s Razor says the theorem requiring the fewest assumptions is the one most likely to be correct.”
“Yeah, except I think by now Occam’s grown a very long beard,” Tommy said. “What do you make of the idea that Reese heard a voice?”
“Paracusia,” Dani said. “That’s the psychiatric term for it. Auditory hallucinations are generally significant in diagnosing various disorders. Schizophrenia. Mania. One psycho-anthropologist theorized that three thousand years ago the human brain was bicameral, meaning ‘two houses.’ His theory was that the corpus callosum hadn’t evolved to the point that the two halves were fully connected and mutually conversant. People would hear a voice in their head, and it was just the right half of the brain speaking to the left, but to them it sounded like the voice of some all-powerful outsider, some superior being commanding them to obey. It was the voice of God, to them. Or maybe it was plural and polytheistic, I forget. But then we evolved and our brains physiologically changed, so now the voice doesn’t sound like an outsider. I’ve read papers suggesting that in some psychiatric patients, that ancient bicameralism somehow gets restored.”
“Is that something you think is true?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Dani said. “As I recall, the argument against it was that evolution takes place over millennia. It’s not like some sort of switch gets flipped and all of a sudden, in a few years or a hundred, everything changes. But there’ve been new studies that say sudden paradigm shifts aren’t unprecedented. A sudden shift in the environment can cause radical alterations in how a species has to adapt to survive.”
“Joan of Arc heard voices,” Tommy said.
“And look where it got her,” Dani said.
“All I’m saying is, let’s be careful. Maybe they want us to think it’s Christmas Eve, but it’s not.”
“Reese was telling us something we think might be relevant,” Quinn said when Dani and Tommy returned to the kitchen. “Usually the selection process takes place over the Christmas break, and then when the boys get back, the graduating seniors move into Honors House for their final semester. This year they made the selection in October. Nobody’s moved into Honors House yet, but he’s pretty certain the boys know who they are.”
“Everyone was trying to guess, but they’d have been kicked out of Honors House if they told anybody before the moving-in ceremony,” Reese said.
“How did you get the names you sent me on the SD card? Where were you?” Dani asked. “Maybe we can get the names of the boys the same way.”
“We were in Dr. Ghieri’s office. Oliver and I. Ghieri stepped out for a minute, and when I had a chance, I sent them to myself in an e-mail from his computer, and then deleted it from his Sent folder and from the Recently Deleted folder.” Reese frowned. “I don’t think they found out. But Oliver is missing, so that might be why.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Dani said. “You did absolutely the right thing. I just wish we had more information.”
Suddenly the boy looked stricken.
“You’re not going to make me go back, are you?” he said. “I can’t go back there. I know this is important, but . . .”
“We won’t make you go back,” Dani said. “You can stay with us.”
“You’ll be safe here,” Tommy added. “The angels are looking after us.”
“The school knows who we are,” Dani said. “Tommy and I. We don’t think they necessarily know about Dr. McKellen or Miss Morton.”
“They know about me,” Ruth said. “I have a big hole in the side of my house to prove it.”
“We had a demon lurking in the garden,” Tommy explained. “We scared him off with a couple of shotgun blasts.”
“You can shoot demons?” Reese asked.
“Demons are fallen angels,” Tommy explained. “When they take on a physical form, they can feel pain. Only another angel can defeat them, though. They run away because they’re afraid of drawing the wrong kind of attention.”
“At least you can kill those things in the woods,” Reese said.
“How do you know?” Tommy said.
“The accident. Didn’t we hit one with the car?”
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I was,” Reese said. “My understanding was that we hit one with the car and killed it.”
“Your understanding, based on what?” Tommy asked.
“What the policeman said.”
“He told me he thought you hit a deer,” Tommy said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. For the record, I think you’re right. I think you’re right about Christmas Eve too. Under normal circumstances, I’m not sure what I think about people hearing voices, but these aren’t normal circumstances.”
After the breakfast meeting broke up, Reese told himself he had to be more vigilant about the things he said—another slip of the tongue like that and he would surely give himself away.
“Stop it,” the voice in his head said. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
No, you’re the one who needs to stop what you’re doing—it’s dangerous and it’s wrong. You’re the one who has no idea what he’s doing.
Where did you go? Why aren’t you listening to me? This is important.
His mind was a raging storm of fears and apprehensions, so he tried to calm it and focus on the love he felt instead.
Please—just talk to me—PLEASE!