Chapter Eleven
Emily and Hanna were sitting at a picnic table in the park, Hanna tapping idly on her phone, flipping through pictures, Emily bouncing her knee and twisting her hands while looking around frantically.
"Em, you need to calm down. You're making me seasick."
Emily glared at Hanna. "I don't know how you're so calm right now. Spencer is going to kill us."
"Spencer's not going to know until we want her to."
"We are talking about the same Spencer, right?"
"Listen, even if she does find out, she'll understand."
"Understand why we went behind her back to talk to authorities we just met yesterday?"
"Okay, well, when you put it that way..."
"Exactly. Besides, who knows if we can even really trust them. If they're secretly ex-cohorts of Wilden's or something, Spencer will never let us live it down."
Hanna shivered dramatically. "Can you not say his name?"
"Sorry. All I'm saying is I'm having second thoughts. Maybe we should have just told Spencer and have her tell the agents."
"Well it's too late now, because here they come."
The girls looked up to see the agents approaching them. They smiled at the girls and settled into the bench across the picnic table from them.
"Good morning, girls."
"Good morning, Agent Bering, Agent Wells."
"Please, call us Myka and H.G." H.G.'s voice had the same soothing effect that it did the first time Emily met her.
Somehow the permission to not refer to them as agents anymore made Emily feel a little more relaxed. "Thanks for coming early."
"If you don't mind my asking, why did you want to meet now if your friends are meeting up with us later?"
Emily hesitated, unsure how much to tell Myka. Hanna jumped in instead. "Spencer never would have let us tell you what we saw. She has a hard time trusting people."
Emily rushed to finish, "For good reason - it's been a crazy few years."
Myka and H.G. nodded understandingly. "So what is it you wanted to tell us? What did you see?"
This time both girls hesitated, knowing how crazy their stories were going to sound coming out of their mouths. Emily reminded herself that they did say they were used to the unusual, so she steeled her nerve and spoke first.
"I thought I was losing my mind the first time...I thought it was just PTSD flashbacks, you know? I had seen him before, though usually just in my nightmares. But then when I saw him again this morning, I knew it was more than that. It wasn't my eyes playing tricks on me...it was something else..." Emily's sentences all came out in one breath, her eyes growing wider with every word.
"Who, dear? Who did you see?" H.G. prodded.
"The guy who kidnapped my girlfriend," she said, her jaw tensing. "The guy I-he's dead now. There's no way who I saw was really him...but it looked just like him. And he was staring at me." Emily's eyes darted from Myka's face to H.G.'s and was a little surprised to see how not surprised they were. "Do you know what's going on?"
"Not yet," Myka said, emphasizing the word 'yet'. "But we're working on figuring it out. It's not just you who has seen someone that they shouldn't have - couldn't have - been able to see."
"You're telling me," Hanna scoffed.
"You saw someone, too?" Myka asked.
Hanna shrugged. "Yeah, at least I think I did. Outside my window, Officer Wilden." She shuddered at the name again. "He used to...give me and my mom a lot of trouble." She looked at Emily. "All of us, really. He was kind of a creep."
Myka took out a little notepad and started scribbling.
Emily still wasn't sure what to make of how calm Myka and H.G. were at this news that seemed insane. While things that were hard to believe and explain weren't exactly uncommon in their lives since Alison disappeared, they had never had an outsider react to anything they said happened to them with any kind of open mind.
H.G. and Myka asked the girls a few more questions about exactly where and when these sightings occurred, and what the figures were doing when they saw them, Myka taking notes all the while. When they were done, Myka tucked her notebook into her pocket and asked, "Now, when Spencer and Aria get here, are you sure you don't want to tell them what you saw? What you told us?"
"No, we can't," Emily rushed. "Spencer will be upset we trusted you without consulting her first."
"And if there's anything I've learned in the past two years, it's don't make Spencer Hastings angry," Hanna added.
The agents agreed to keep their secrets, causing both girls to sigh with relief. Emily looked at the time on her phone to see that Spencer would be there any minute. She had a feeling the agents sitting across from her had never had to deal with a teenager who would question their authority as boldly as Spencer was sure to.
When Spencer and Aria entered the clearing where they were meeting Agents Bering and Wells, Emily and Hanna were already sitting with them. Spencer found this a little suspicious, since not only was she usually the first one to arrive places (when Aria wasn't holding her back), but Hanna Marin was rarely, if ever, early. She tucked the information in the back of her mind, but chalked it up to Emily being more punctual and probably urging Hanna along.
The woman with the curly hair noticed the two girls arrive first and smiled at them. "Hi, you must be Spencer and Aria! I'm Agent Bering, and this is Agent Wells, but you can call us Myka and H.G." She gestured toward the woman sitting next to her on the bench.
"H.G. Wells?" Spencer asked, one eyebrow cocked, looking at her incredulously.
Aria looked curious, too. "Like the author?"
"My parents had a sense of humor," H.G. joked.
Spencer's face remained expressionless. "Yes, I'm Spencer. This is Aria." They exchanged handshakes, and Aria offered the women the smile that Spencer didn't. Emily and Hanna scooted over so all four girls could sit on one side of the table, facing the agents.
Spencer wasn't about to make this easy for them, not until they proved they could be trusted. They could be on the A team or some of Garrett's old coworkers for all she knew. No, she knew better than to blindly trust people just because they had a badge pinned to their hip. In fact, maybe that was all the more reason to be hesitant.
"So, Emily and Hanna tell me you're from the secret service."
"Yes, a special branch that deals with more unusual cases."
"How unusual?"
H.G. smirked. "More unusual than local police departments are usually equipped to handle."
"And how does that have anything to do with the president?"
Hanna looked confused. "What does the president have to do with anything ever?"
Spencer looked startled by the interruption, she had been zoned in on her interrogation. "That's what the secret service is, Hanna. They protect the president."
Hanna looked a little affronted at the tone Spencer took with her.
Myka took this question. "Well, usually in the strange cases we deal with, one person or thing is causing strange and potentially dangerous things to happen. Our job is to find and stop these strange things from happening, before it becomes an issue of national security."
"For example?"
"I'm sorry?"
"I want an example of something you stopped from becoming a bigger problem. What kinds of things are we talking about? Weapons?"
Myka seemed a little taken aback. "Not exactly, it's rarely as simple as that. We..." Myka paused, her face seeming to search for the best way to answer the question.
Aria leaned in and whispered, "Don't you think you're being a little harsh, Spence? They said they want to help."
Spencer threw a silencing glare at Aria, who then pulled back and kept her mouth shut.
H.G. suddenly straightened, looked Spencer dead in the eye, and gave her the answers she was looking for. "The things we're talking about are called artifacts. They're objects that often manifest energy from an event or extreme emotion. That object becomes its own entity, infused with power and with the ability to do unnatural things."
Myka looked surprised that H.G. had been so frank, but followed suit. "For example," she said significantly, "Once H.G. was almost frozen to death by a piece of driftwood from the Titanic."
The truth hung in the air between them for a moment. Aria, Hanna and Emily tensed up as they looked to Spencer to see what her next move would be.
"So, what you're saying is, if one of us were to say we saw something impossible...like someone who is long dead...that could have been caused by an artifact?"
Hanna and Emily's bodies seemed to physically relax next to her. Spencer looked over at them, "You guys, too?"
Emily's words poured out of her. "I saw Lyndon James twice and I really wanted to tell you but I thought Myka and H.G. could help us and I knew you wouldn't want us to tell them or I thought so at least I'm sorry we went behind your back and told them before we told you."
Spencer realized this was why Emily and Hanna were there early. "It's fine, I understand. You're right, I wouldn't have let you tell them, not before I talked to them." She turned to Hanna, "You, too?"
"I saw Wilden the other night."
Spencer took in the information and nodded. She turned forward again and told the agents, "I saw Ian when I was in my car waiting for Aria."
Everyone at the table turned to Aria, whose doe eyes were bigger than ever. She slowly shook her head back and forth, her mouth slightly open. "I... I haven't seen anything."
Hanna crossed her arms. "Lucky you."
After Spencer told the agents about her Ian sighting, she asked, "What now?"
H.G. answered, "Now we tell our colleagues what you told us, and see if they can't figure out what kind of artifact would cause you to have such visions."
Spencer stiffened. "Colleagues? What colleagues? How many people?"
"Only four colleagues," Myka assured her. "They do the same thing we do, I've worked with all of them for years. You can trust them, Spencer. You can trust us." Myka was looking at Spencer, the compassion in her eyes genuine.
Spencer still had questions. "And if and when you do find this...artifact? What then?"
"We neutralize it." Myka said. "Strip it of its powers and put it away where it can't hurt anyone anymore."
Spencer still wasn't sure how to feel about these agents. On the one hand, they were the first people outside their tight-knit circle, specifically the first adults, who believed their story without any hesitation or judgement. The agents' story seemed legitimate; they did seem to have experience in the strange and unexplainable. But on the other hand, it seemed pretty convenient that they showed up around the same time as the strange things started to happen - well, stranger things than usual - and she couldn't help but wonder if they were part of the problem, not the solution. Still, she wasn't sure what other option they had, and she surely didn't want to see Ian, or anyone else who had died for that matter, ever again. It was hard enough thinking Alison was dead all those months, never sure if she was hallucinating when she had visions of her, and then having her reappear in the flesh, clear as day.
"Alison." The rest of the people at the table had been chatting about Rosewood. The conversation fell to a stop when Spencer's voice interrupted.
"What about Alison?" Emily asked.
"If whatever this thing is can make you see dead people, or take the form of dead people, or whatever, maybe it wasn't really Alison at all we saw."
"But she talked to us, Spence."
"That doesn't mean anything, Hanna. Were any of you close enough to your ghosts to see how real they looked? For them to speak?"
Emily and Hanna shook their heads somberly.
Spencer's mind was whirring. "If Alison wasn't real, if it's all because of this artifact, what about all the other times we've seen her? Were those because of this artifact too? If so, why is it all of a sudden taking on more forms than just Ali?"
H.G. reached across the table and put her hand over Spencer's. "Sweetie, this is what we're here to find out. Why don't you tell us all about Alison and we'll get to the bottom of it all."
