Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(92)

She lay bundled in blankets on the couch, day after day.

She had stitches in her knee and stitches across her abdomen, and three stitches in her hairline. She had no idea where those came from. It didn’t matter.

Dana did not have to go to school. School came to her. Mr. Sternholtz and the nurse stopped by. They brought flowers. They apologized. She said very little to them, and they went away.

Uncle Frank Hale came by with his partner. The detectives told her that they found Eclipse in the incense. They had testimony from Angelo Luz and Corinda Howell. No one believed Dana had willingly taken drugs. She didn’t say much to them, and they went away.

The school sent a psychologist. The hospital sent one, too. They told her that her visions were not visions at all, but merely the result of the Eclipse drug. At first Dana protested and argued, but with each day it became easier to believe that it had been just that. She had been drugged, and nothing she saw, dreamed, or remembered could be trusted. There were so many lies and betrayals wrapped up with Sunlight and Corinda and Eclipse that Dana wished she could carve it all out of her head.

The psychologists seemed happy with her newfound perspective. They smiled at her. And eventually they stopped coming around.

Corinda was in the hospital, but she was also on the news. On every channel and in the papers. Somehow she had become the one who had taken down a madman who called himself Sunlight.

Angelo was on the news, too. A tiny, passing reference about charges being dropped. No one interviewed him. He was in the hospital and would be for weeks, and the doctors weren’t sure he was going to pull through. Blood loss, shock, and severe trauma had pushed him all the way to the edge. That hurt Dana. She prayed for him every night, clutching her gold cross.

Ethan came over and sat with her every day after school. He brought her flowers and chocolate and books. They held hands and they didn’t say much. There would be time for that, though.

“What’s your verdict?” he asked one afternoon.

“About what?”

“All that psychic stuff. ESP, becoming, all of that. Everyone in the science club’s been hammering on me to ask you what you really think. Now, I mean. After all this. Does any of it make sense to you?”

“It’s a trust thing,” she said after giving it some long, serious thought.

“Trust?” asked Ethan. “What do you mean?”

“Everyone lied to me about it. It was all…” She stopped and shook her head. “I can’t even think about it now without feeling sick. I trusted them. I opened my heart to them, and they just made a fool out of me.”

“Yeah, but where’s that leave you? Aren’t you supposed to have ESP?”

“Who knows? I was being drugged the whole time. If so, I want to shut it off. It’s not like it’s done anything good for me. Everyone I know got hurt by it.” She shook her head again.

“Are you saying none of it was real?” asked Ethan. “Your visions were accurate.”

She took her time with that. “I … don’t know. There are some parts that I guess I can’t explain. The visions I had before we moved here. And how I saw Maisie so clearly, with such detail. If Eclipse made me see visions, then why did I see her? How could a drug make me know so much about her? I mean, what was that? What if it was just the power of suggestion, picking up details from Bible stories and the news?”

“Tisa insists that ESP is real,” said Ethan, “and she’s a pretty hard sell for anything weird or spooky. She thinks it’s a part of science that we just haven’t figured out how to measure or test yet.”

“Maybe. If so, then I’ll wait until we can measure it. Until then, I can’t trust it.”

“Then what do you trust, Dana?” he asked.

“Science,” she said. “This whole thing came down to that. Chemistry, psychology, forensic science. That’s all it really is, and if that’s what it is, then I can deal with it. So … yeah, science. I like science. I can trust science.”

“So does that mean you want to be a forensic scientist, too?”

She thought about Angelo, hovering on the edge of death in the hospital. She touched her crucifix. “Angelo could still die,” she said. “I wish I could help him. When he was there bleeding, I blanked. I should have applied a compress. I could have done something, but I didn’t.”

She sat quietly for a moment. “I held a garter snake once while it died in my hands.” Ethan raised his eyebrows but didn’t press. “I won’t ever let that happen again,” she vowed. “If I can help someone like that, I want to.” She thought about it and shook her head. “No, you can keep forensic science, Ethan. It’s cool and all, but it’s too far away from people.”

“Which leaves you doing what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe medicine.”

*

After he left, Melissa came and sat down on the end of the couch farthest from Dana. They looked at each other, and it took a long time before either of them spoke. Melissa wore a new strand of crystals around her neck, one Dana had never seen before. A recent purchase or a gift? In either case, Dana knew where it had come from.

“You’re wrong about her,” said Melissa.

“About Corinda?” Dana snorted and shook her head. “Oh, come on, Missy, you can’t sit there and tell me you still believe in her.”