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Being possessed by the devil isn't ideal, but turning into my mother?
Yikes.
I can hear Luke following me, his footsteps fast behind me. I open the door to the yellow house, but there's no one in the living room or in the sunroom.
“Mom?“ I call out, my stomach tightening when I realize that there's no response. Every second that passes without talking about this makes things weirder and harder, and I don't want to deal with it. Luke's hand is on my shoulder, and I turn to look at him.
There's concern written all over his face. “I don't think she's here,“ he says.
“How do you know?“
“What color is her car?“
Before I open my mouth to tell him that I don't know, I hear Misha? calling us from a different room. “You're right, she's gone,“ he says. “You two need to come in here now.“
Luke? flashes me a quick look, then waits for me to walk with him. ?Misha? and ?Rei? are kneeling on the tile floor of a room that has been converted into an office, documents placed all around them.
“Do you know where my mom is?“
Rei? stands up, walking over to me. The sunlight streaming in from the window catches his jet black hair and reflects off his glasses. “She just needed to get some air,“ he says.
I try to swallow down my anxiety, but the way he's looking at me isn't making this easy. Everything about the way he's staring is meaningful and terrifying. “What did you find?“ I ask.
Obviously they found something. If they didn't, there wouldn't be this urgency in his eyes.
“What is it?“
“Before your mom left, she started to see signs of possession in you,“ ?Misha? says from behind him, still kneeling on the floor with papers scattered all around him.
“We said we were going to break it to her softly,“ Rei says.
“That wasn't what you had in mind?“ ?Misha? asks. I wonder if I'm supposed to think this is funny, but I don't. It's awful. This is all terrible. He stands up, walks up to me. I look at his feet, at the way his lace-up boots are landing on the tile floor, at the way his weight is distributed.
“Trine?, listen,“ ?Misha? says. “When your mom left, she said we could have indiscriminate access to her files. We found a pretty large folder on you. At first, it just seemed like...I don't know, like a kind of memory folder?“
Rei? watches him intently, while I stand there, unable to do anything but listen.
“But it was more than that,“ ?Misha? says, suddenly a little bashful under ?Rei?'s scrutiny. I'm just aware enough for it to be surprising. I don't think it happens to ?Misha? often.
“It was a medical file,“ Rei says when Misha stops speaking. “Or, I suppose more accurately, a research file. It had your medical records in it, and notes from your mom.“
They look at each other then, something unspoken happening between them.
“Your mom started to notice weird things about you since right after you were twelve, thirteen,“ ?Rei? says. “It's not...like, there wasn't much evidence to back it up, so we thought it was a little weird. Just a mom scared of her daughter getting older. Then...“
“Then we found these recordings,“ ?Misha? says. “Well, more accurately, these mentions of these recordings. She transcribed them, but we didn't find the actual files. At first they're just you talking to your friends on the phone, chat logs, that kind of thing. But then, I don't know, at some point you start talking in your sleep.“
“Right,“ ?Rei? says. “And the things you're saying are…inappropriate.“
A cold chill runs down my spine. “Wait,“ ?Luke? says. “How can you tell that she was asleep? If Aura was always spying on her?“
“Because what you were saying wasn't always in English,“ ?Rei? says. “And unless you're some sort of hidden polyglot, I don't really think there's any way for you to be saying the things you were saying in German, French...“
Misha nods, his arms crossed over his chest. I trace the line of his tattoo with my gaze. “Arabic, Latin...“
I blink. “What?“ I ask. I understand what they're saying, but I'm having a hard time processing it.
“That must've been why she thought she needed to leave,“ ?Luke? says.
