AN:

BMSH: Thanks. Things are slowly but surely starting to make sense.
Candylou: The twins are going down a certain path. Whether it's the right one or the wrong one remains to be seen ;) Their friends are definitely sus characters...

Chapter 12 - Willow Eliana Saunders

"Something is not right with those Phillips girls," Joe said as they walked on the cobbled path that led to their dormitory building. He was feeling much better now and his headache was gone completely. After some time talking with the six of them, they had begged off without staying for dinner. "There was something predatory about them…"

"It was the eyes, I think," Frank agreed. "They had the same cold look, like daring you to make a mistake so that they could just tear you to pieces."

Joe felt a shiver run down his spine at his brother's words. That was exactly what he had felt the moment he had seen the two of them too. He had a feeling he and Frank weren't the only ones who had been disconcerted either."I think whatever they've been talking about before we went out shook Temperance and Constance. They looked kinda caught off guard–"

"I noticed," Frank said as they entered the common area of their dormitory building. "Anything from Gray?" he asked as they waited for the elevator.

"Oops, I almost forgot! Let me check."

Sure enough, there was a message from the spy waiting for him, asking them both to call him the moment they got back.

"We'll go see what he's found, then," Frank said, reading the screen over his shoulder.

"How did you find out?" Was the first thing Gray asked as the call connected. They were both sitting on Frank's bed with the phone on speaker. It was just after midnight and the spy's agitated tone told them that he had been waiting impatiently for the call.

Joe looked to Frank who shrugged and gestured to go on. "Uh, Temperance got very upset when we were talking about her family?" He hedged. It wasn't as if he could tell the spy that he had seen a spirit through the younger Saunders twin. "She didn't really want to say much."

"It's like you kids have these two girls under a spell or something, they tell you everything–" Gray muttered over the sound of pages being turned. Joe smirked. "I didn't know about this either. There was no mention of the death of a family member in the file we have. Even Black didn't know anything about it when I asked him–"

"That can't be right," Joe insisted.

"I wasn't so sure either," Gray agreed. "So I did a bit of digging. I contacted the agent who was the head of security for the Saunders family before Black. He didn't want to admit to anything at first, but..."

"What did he say, Gray?" Joe prompted when the spy went silent.

"Halliday spoke to him and implied that the girls were showing signs of depression and a form of psychosis that would be a result of the death of a close family member. That was when agent Green caved. Apparently, there had been a death - or an almost death - a little over four years ago, and he said that the mayor insisted on keeping the condition of their third daughter out of the official files."

Third daughter. Joe knew then what he had felt, what he had glimpsed earlier.

"So what did you find?" Frank asked when he stayed silent, trying to process what it meant.

"There was another girl. Turns out Temperance and Constance were triplets," Gray said, confirming Joe's instinctive realisation. "Willow Eliana Saunders was the sister in the middle. She was in a fatal car crash on the day she turned sixteen–"

Joe looked up and saw Frank staring at him with the same troubled expression. Joe was confident that what reached out to him through Constance must have been Willow. Underneath the painful chaos the spirit unleashed, he had felt a glimmer of familiarity in that torturous moment.

"I pulled the investigation file from Lakeshore county," the spy carried on, reading from the police report, oblivious to that particular element in their case. "Her boyfriend, Garrett Vincent, was at the wheel. They had both been drunk according to the witnesses and tests on the bodies they ran afterwards. Garrett died on the scene and Willow was admitted to the county General with a number of broken bones, contusions, burns and a bad head injury. She was then transferred to a private hospital in NY, Hope Memorial, where she was later admitted to their long-term care unit, where she is still a resident."

"During all this time?"

"Yes," Gray sighed. "She's in a coma. Her body is kept alive by machines, and they haven't pulled the plug due to the unusual activity of her brain that spikes at random intervals. The family is spending a lot of money to keep her going."

"Not dead, not alive, but somewhere in between–" Joe muttered softly. No wonder she was so desperate, he thought, shivering as he recalled the painful screams of her trapped soul.

"Yeah," said Gray, just as quietly. "That would describe it."

"The name of the hospital sounds familiar," Frank frowned. "Isn't that where Melvin is?"

"Right again," Gray replied. "Melvin Winters had apparently been transferred into the same unit as Willow yesterday night. I found out about this when I was digging into Willow. I spoke to Halliday and she agrees that this would have been the reason that drove the girls towards their, um, unconventional hobby–"

"I'm guessing their fascination turned into an obsession when they saw that ritual in Nigeria," Frank said thoughtfully.

"Pretty much," said Gray.

"Is there anything interesting you can tell us about the Quentin and the Phillips twins?" Frank asked. "We met them today. They seemed pretty tight with the Saunders girls."

"Oh, those families go way back," Gray said. "They've known each other since birth. They were the other four kids who went to that Nigerian ceremony. There's another pair: Aline and Harry Fairweather. They were only recently recruited for their circle from Lincoln, so they are not as tight with the girls as others just yet. They are also not here at the moment. According to the records at the dean's office, they are to return in three days."

"Well," Frank said, stifling a yawn. "We still haven't seen any concrete evidence that would suggest they were up to anything illegal."

"Apart from the funny vibes, that is," Joe added. He was also tired. It had been a long day and they still had to wake up early to get to classes the next day.

"You're already in their inner circle. It won't be too long until they slip up, keep your eyes and ears open," Gray said, finishing the conversation. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, boys. Goodnight."

-oOo-

Forty-five-year-old Ian Wills, the night attendant, started his shift at the Coma Unit in NY - Hope Memorial, just as he had been doing for the past eight years. He signed in just after eleven p.m. and changed into his uniform, humming a tune to chase away the silence. There were only ten patients in the wing, and the shift had only three attendants. It was always quiet in the changing areas, staff break room and the vast empty corridor that led to the wing of private rooms. The strict rules of the hospital prohibited them from making loud noises or playing tv or radio, despite the fact that their patients were completely oblivious to the rest of the world. So, to keep his mind away from the cold desolation and the empty suffocating silence, he learned to softly sing to himself.

He even did that when he did the rounds. He even changed songs from patient to patient when he checked their charts, supplies, meds and made notes on the readings of their monitors. He did it even when he knew that he wasn't supposed to. The hospital was a private establishment and all these coma patients were from wealthy families who could afford to keep their loved ones going with the support of modern machinery. But it was a very rare sight for those rich people to actually visit every once or twice in a while, sit with their sick family members and maybe say a few words, even if they couldn't really respond.

Ian Wills knew it was not his place to intervene in these patients' care. The hospital had its rules for a reason. But, as a man with a large, extended family who was so close to each other that everybody was in everybody's business all the time, he felt bad for these neglected and lonely souls.

So his solution to that, without losing his job, was to softly hum songs to them as he did the rounds.

He started with Willow Eliana Saunders, just as he did every night. She was their longest resident. She was a young girl, wasting away in a bed in what should have been the prime of her life. He had no idea what girls her age liked. According to his own twelve-year-old niece, 'Spice Girls' were the best thing in the world. So he had learned a few songs figuring that Willow wouldn't mind the upbeat tunes and assertive words too much.

"Hmm, there was another spike," he muttered to himself as he updated her chart. It seemed that there was an increasing amount of brain wave activity detected by her monitor tonight. Maybe she is taking a turn for the better after all these years, he felt a flicker of hope.

"If you put two and two together
You will see what our friendship is for, oh
If you can't work this equation
Then I guess I'll have to show you the door…"

He sang with an extra bit of volume and joy, nodding along to the music playing in his mind. He would love to kick her out of this particular door, he thought, so that she could finally get out of this hell and start living a life as a twenty–year–old beautiful girl should.

"There is no need to say you love me
It would be better left unsaid–"

It would be better left unsaid–"

His pager went off at that moment, distracting him from folding the set of clean blankets he had brought with him to place inside her closet. The message was an automated response to an EEG alarm from Room 610 informing him that the patient's brain waves had changed - that was an occurrence which required immediate human intervention.

"610, Melvin Winters, age twenty-one," he read his information chart aloud. "Huh. That's our latest admit Larry took in. Already demanding attention." Maybe that was good news, he thought as he left Willow's room in a hurry to attend to the emergency. Maybe this Winters would be the lucky kid who didn't get stuck in a vegetative state after all.

The place was in a state of chaos when he entered the last private room at the end of the wing. The EEG monitor was ringing loudly and he silenced the alarm as he took the readings.

"How weird!" He mumbled, taking notes rapidly. The readings and the spikes were remarkably similar to the notes he had just taken from Willow's monitors.

Besides that, the heart rate monitor was going haywire, showing tachycardia: Melvin's pulse was palpable, but was going through the roof. That occurrence was alarming because, according to the information on the chart, his heart was severely damaged with a heavily decreased cardiac output. It was not supposed to be capable of producing the output that was glaring at him from the medical screen.

A quick read on the rest of the patient's chart told him that Melvin Winters was in very bad shape. His lungs were collapsed and he required the ventilator to breathe for him. He had broken ribs and a fracture on his right knee, which was in a cast. His brain was the worst of it all; it was swollen beyond normal and he had a surgical incision on his skull just to relieve the pressure with a probe to measure his intracranial pressure.

All in all, the readings on the monitors contrasted heavily with the medical chart. Melvin Winters continued to lay peacefully on his bed, oblivious to the drama he was causing on his monitors. Now, Ian wasn't a doctor, but the conflicting data on the real time monitors against the patient's chart told him that young Melvin's condition had taken an unexpected turn.

He called the station using the emergency phone hooked to the wall next to Melvin's bed. "Larry, it's Wills," he said to the phone when the call was picked up by his co-worker at the nursing station. "You need to get the resident on duty to 610 STAT–"

He glanced at the serene patient, studiously ignoring the dancing numbers on his monitors that screamed emergency in silence.

"What's going on?" Larry demanded. "He was just admitted a few hours ago,"

"I know! His monitors are going crazy. I'm sure you can see the readings on your end too."

"I'll be damned!" The moment of silence from Larry's end was broken by a soft curse. Ian heard the sound of furious clicking and some swearing before the other nurse came back on the line. "Dr Trevor is on her way now. Don't leave him out of your sight."

"Thanks. I won't," he promised before hanging up the phone.

"Oh, kid," he said quietly to the banged-up Winters kid. Even though he looked peaceful, Ian knew the extent of his injuries that were hiding under the thin material of the blue scrubs. "I hope this means something good. I really don't want you to end up in this place stuck in a limbo like the rest of them–"

It was the truth. He hated seeing these young kids ending up in this place in a strange, hopeless state that was neither closer to living nor dying.

Then, of course, the most impossible thing happened.

Melvin opened his eyes and focused his bright-green gaze full of raging fury on Ian, drawing out a surprised gasp from him.

"I agree." He snarled.