Page 62 of Lion's Share
Ben stared at the entry, and a chill ran down his spine. “Sidney, that’s — ”
“The exact same pattern we’ve been experiencing this past week,” she cut in, obviously too agitated to wait for him to finish his sentence. “Electromagnetic disturbances, power outages, interference with electronic devices.” She looked up at him, her gray eyes wide with a mixture of wonder and fear. “I caused this. Even as a baby, I was generating electromagnetic fields strong enough to disrupt the entire town’s power grid.”
“Keep looking,” Ben said. He wanted to find more patterns, more concurrences, anything that could help support their thesis. Once a Ph.D., always a Ph.D., he supposed. “If this happened when you were born, then maybe — ”
“Maybe it happened when my mother was born, too,” Sidney said, already reaching for some of the older journals. It took her a minute to find the right volume, but when she did, the entry was unmistakable.
“November tenth,” she read, her voice barely above a whisper. “I went into labor a little after midnight, and power fluctuations began at the same time — enough that the doctors talked about moving me to Eureka for the delivery, although they decided that wouldn’t be safe. As far as I can tell, no one has found a cause for any of the problems. At four-fifteen that morning, I gave birth to my lovely Josie, and the power problems seemed to fix themselves soon after.”
The two of them stared at each other across the desk, the implications hanging in the air heavy as the fog outside the window.
“It’s hereditary,” Ben said finally. “Whatever abilities you have, they’re passed down through the women in your family. And they manifest at birth.”
“But they don’t stay dormant,” Sidney said, flipping through more recent entries in her grandmother’s journal. “Look at this. Throughout my childhood, there were scattered reports of minor electrical disturbances. As far as I can tell, they seem to coincide with times when I was upset, or scared, or excited.”
“And you never noticed?”
She gave an eloquent lift of her shoulders. “We’re in a small town on an old grid. Power disruptions were never that big a deal around here.”
Ben leaned over to look at the entries she’d found. Sure enough, there appeared to be dozens of small incidents documented over the years — a power surge that blew out the streetlights on Sidney’s first day of school…radio interference during her high school graduation…a brief blackout during a massive thunderstorm when Sidney was ten and afraid of the lightning, some of which seemed to strike fairly close to the house.
“Your grandmother knew,” Ben said after a moment. “She was documenting your abilities as they developed.”
“She was protecting me,” Sidney said, and her voice trembled for just a second before she got it back under control. “Both of them, really. I remember how my mother would tell me to stay calm, how my grandmother would always say that getting angry and lashing out wasn’t the way to solve a problem. They weren’t trying to make me a ‘good little girl.’ If I’m right about all this, then they were teaching me to control abilities I didn’t even know I had.”
Had her mother and grandmother also been taught those things? He assumed they must, or they wouldn’t have known how to keep Sidney’s inborn powers from getting out of hand.
An idea popped into his mind. “Did you experience any weird power fluctuations when you were away at school?”
“Not really,” she replied immediately. “I mean, every once in a while, we’d lose power during a particularly bad storm, but nothing strange.”
That seemed to confirm a theory Ben had already begun to formulate. “What if there’s some kind of synergy between your gifts and Silver Hollow itself…or at least the portal? If that’s the case, then that would explain why you never had anything strange happen when you weren’t living here.”
Her brows drew together as she considered that possibility. “I suppose it makes some sense,” she said, voice thoughtful. “So…could it be as easy as just not being here? Should I leave?”
Maybe once upon a time, that might have been an option. Now, though, with the portal’s energy seriously out of whack and shadow stalkers running around in the forest, Ben had a feeling Silver Hollow needed Sidney, needed her extraordinary gifts.
“I’m not sure that would really help,” he told her. “For now, I think we should keep going through these journals and see if there’s anything else we can find.”
They spent another hour looking through the journals, although they didn’t find a whole lot. Or rather, while Ben saw accounts of magical creatures wandering in the woods mixed in with more commonplace observations of the goings-on in town, there was nothing to show that any of the women’s abilities had caused much trouble.
But then Sidney opened up the final journal, the one Emily Thompson had been keeping at the time she disappeared. In entries from just a few months ago, she’d begun documenting new patterns of electromagnetic disturbance.
“She knew something was changing,” Sidney said, and read the aloud, “‘The portal is becoming unstable, and I’m seeing an increase in otherworldly creatures crossing over.’” She paused there, then shook her head. “She was tracking all of it.”
Ben reached up to run a distracted hand through his hair. He realized it was getting toward seven o’clock, a time when they normally would have started thinking about dinner, but this was too important. “Did she say anything about why it was escalating?”
Sidney flipped to the very last entry in the journal. “Not really, although she also found some of the Ogham carvings and was trying to figure out what they meant. But she also says….” The words trailed off as she appeared to read the final paragraph.
“What is it?” Ben prompted her.
A breath, and then Sidney replied, “She says the instability was awakening dormant abilities in the bloodline. That the electromagnetic chaos could be acting like a catalyst, forcing me to develop powers that might not have manifested for years, or maybe not at all.” She looked over at him, her face pale. “But…how is that even possible? Nothing went weird when I was away at school.”
He reached over to take her hand. No matter what was going on…no matter what they learned…she needed to know this didn’t change anything between the two of them.
“We already know that these electromagnetic waves can travel far,” he said. “Otherwise, DAPI would never have detected anything strange going on in this part of the world. So it’s possible they were still affecting you, even at such a distance.”
Sidney was silent for a moment, clearly turning over the notion in her head, trying to come to terms with what he’d just told her. When she spoke, her voice was tight, worried. “Ben, I think my grandmother — and probably my mom, too — knew this might happen to me. They knew, and they disappeared before they could help me understand it.”
