Wild-born Read online

  Adrian Howell’s PSIONIC

  Book One

  Wild-born

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Adrian Howell on Smashwords

  Wild-born

  Copyright 2009 by Adrian Howell

  Cover Design: Pintado ([email protected])

  All characters, places and events in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, and information storage and retreival systems without the permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Book Description: Wild-born

  (Psionic Pentalogy, Book One)

  When young Adrian Howell discovers he possesses powerful telekinetic abilities, he is plunged into a sinister world of warring paranormal factions and terrifying government organizations. Adrian must discover what really happened to his missing sister. But to do this, he will first have to find his place among fugitives like himself, and protect the life of a deeply scarred child who can speak only through her mind… a child who will change Adrian’s life forever.

  Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy

  Print Length: 266 pages

  Titles Avaliable in the Psionic Pentalogy

  Book One: Wild-born

  Book Two: The Tower

  Book Three: Lesser Gods

  Book Four: The Quest

  Book Five: Guardian Angel

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: A Summer Secret

  Chapter 2: The Berserker

  Chapter 3: Escape from Escape

  Chapter 4: Night Heights

  Chapter 5: The Hider and Finder

  Chapter 6: The Other Guest

  Chapter 7: Life in Hiding

  Chapter 8: The Windmaster

  Chapter 9: Cindy and the Guardians

  Chapter 10: Everything that Matters

  Chapter 11: The Wolf’s Lair

  Chapter 12: End of the Line

  Chapter 13: First Impressions

  Chapter 14: Dr. Howell

  Chapter 15: The Telephone Game

  Chapter 16: Last-Minute Surprises

  Chapter 17: The Countdown

  Chapter 18: Nightmare

  Chapter 19: The Long Road Ahead

  End Materials

  Introduction

  When I was young, I often woke up screaming in the middle of the night, but it didn’t bother me too much as long as I woke up on my bed as opposed to hovering near the ceiling, which could sometimes happen. On those occasions, I usually hit the floor the moment I woke, which was at least as painful as it was embarrassing. Still, as I reflect upon those turbulent years, I must conclude that sleep-hovering was probably the least of my problems.

  Before going any further, I should warn you that the story you have in your hands is not a happy one. This may seem pretty obvious, but it is not fun to be lost, scared or injured, and it is never entertaining when someone you love dies. Nor is this a story about courage and noble deeds, for this is the real-life account of many things that I wish had never happened.

  If this were a fairytale, it would involve a prince or great warrior. Or perhaps someone who starts off as a nobody but rises to greatness through heroic deeds. In real life, you start off as nobody and usually you end that way too. You do what you can, and what you have to, but no one is destined to live or die, and your fate is determined not so much by courage or brains as it is by sheer dumb luck – or lack thereof.

  For the record, there are no ghosts, goblins, witches or vampires in our world, but that doesn’t mean there are no real monsters out there. I sometimes wonder if people make up fantastical demons to avoid having to face the real ones living among us every day. There is no great battle between good and evil either. Good is whichever side you think you are on, and evil is whichever side you are fighting, or running from. I am not, nor have I ever met, a true hero.

  My experiences have taught me much that I would have lived happier being wholly ignorant of, but nevertheless I have chosen to share my past with you in the firm belief that you would be better off in the know.

  Because it could happen to you too.

  However, if you would rather dream about wish-granting fairies, noble dragon slayers and other such nonsense, now is the time to put this book back on its shelf.

  Still reading? In that case, let me introduce myself.

  My name is Adrian. For your own safety as much as for mine, I’m not going to tell you my real full name. I will completely change many of the other names. Let’s say that my name is Adrian Howell. I was named Adrian by a distant, part-Italian relative, and the reason behind that is a story in itself that has absolutely nothing to do with this one, so I’m not going to go into it. And no, I won’t tell you why I chose “Howell” as my family name for this story. Otherwise, it would be too easy to find me.

  I am older and arguably wiser than I was when I lived the events you are about to read. I had a family once, and was young and naive enough to believe that things would always be the way they were. Take this from someone who has been there: Your whole life can change in the blink of an eye, and change again in the next blink. Even end.

  And speaking of change…

  I don’t want to alter many parts of my story because that feels too much like lying. Instead, often I’ll just leave certain information out. Not just people’s names, but places too. I know that can be annoying to you, but if it were entirely up to me, I would tell you every little detail. Unfortunately, truth is dangerous. There are just too many people who could get hurt, including you.

  Anyway, here is most of my story from the start…

  Chapter 1: A Summer Secret

  In the early lukewarm spring near the end of my sixth-grade year, our class went on a three-day camping trip up in the mountains, a four-hour bus ride from our comparatively quiet and peaceful little town. We went hiking on a narrow woodland path, fished in a small pond, and slept in sturdy log cabins set in a circle around a grassy field where, at night, we sat around a campfire roasting marshmallows and telling stupid ghost stories. It was the last school trip I ever went on.

  On the second night, after the teachers had gone to sleep, some of the bolder girls snuck out of their cabins and into the boys’, and some twelve or thirteen of us resumed our storytelling in the dark. I didn’t know any really scary stories back then, but when my turn came, I tried my best to impress.

  Then something bizarre happened. This was what started the chain of events that would change my life forever. Just as I was getting to the climax of my story (about a bloody ghost that lived in a toilet), a picture frame fell from the wall, its old glass cover shattering into tiny shards.

  That the picture fell wasn’t what was strange, at least to me. I actually expected that to happen, so I didn’t jump in fright. But boy did everyone else! I looked around at my classmates, worried that we might have woken the teachers sleeping in the next-door cabin.

  “What is it with you all?” I whispered anxiously. “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Tell what?!” one of the girls demanded in a much-too-loud whisper, her voice shaking. The boys didn’t look at all better off.

  “That the picture was about to fall, of course,” I answered, still baffled by their overreaction.

  How very, so very wrong I was.

  It never occurred to me that it was at all unusual for things to suddenly fall off of walls, shelves and tables. For me, that was just a part of daily l
ife.

  Usually there was some pattern of events, and it would go like this: I would be sitting, calmly watching TV, reading, or doing homework when, in the corner of my eye, something would seem to move, and I would look up at it. It was usually a card or a book, or perhaps one of my mother’s many ridiculous house ornaments such as a green glass penguin. I would glance at it for a split second, just to make sure that nothing was amiss, though by then, I usually sensed what was about to happen. When I turned my attention back to my reading or whatever, I would hear the crash or soft thud as the item I had just looked at fell to the floor. It always seemed to happen the moment my attention was removed from the object.

  When the picture frame fell from the cabin wall, I had sensed that too, and though I didn’t actually look up at it while telling my ghost story, my attention did wander to it for a brief moment. It wasn’t like I was the one who made it fall. I didn’t do anything directly to it. I just knew that it was going to fall. That’s really all it was, or so I thought at the time.

  What surprised me more was that none of my classmates agreed that it was commonplace for things to suddenly fall off of shelves. After all, it happened once or twice a week in my house, and sometimes at school too, or at least wherever I went. I told them as much.

  “That’s weird!” said one of the boys, and the others nodded in agreement. “That’s a really scary story. Forget about ghosts!”

  I was dumbfounded.

  After we returned from camp, very few of my classmates made any great deal about what I had told them. Most of them probably thought I had made it all up anyway. But sometimes, when a poster fell off a wall near me (and of course, I knew a split second before that it was about to, as I usually do), my friends looked at me, but I just shrugged and kept my mouth shut. “Weird!” That was not how I wanted to be thought of as at school.

  Still, I won’t deny losing some sleep over it, for what I once thought was ordinary was now extraordinary, and I knew that I was somehow different. But in what way? Was this power that I had simply the ability to see into the future of soon-to-fall items on shelves? Part of me – the sensible part – hoped so. But another part of me wondered if perhaps I was, in fact, causing the objects to fall. Could it be that I was mildly telekinetic? I had heard stories about telekinetic powers, but I was also old enough not to believe in magic and spells. Nevertheless, here I was, wondering if it was possible to somehow take control of this ability, if, that is, I really had it. The two parts of me, the sensible and the hopeful, feared and wondered, What if?

  The hopeful won.

  One day after school, I spent well over two hours shut away in my room, willing things to move. I stood an eraser up on its end and stared at it with more concentration than I ever knew I was capable of. In my mind, I repeatedly told the eraser to move. It didn’t. I tried picturing in my mind that the eraser was moving. It didn’t move. I even talked to it. The eraser didn’t budge.

  Every time I failed to move the eraser, I felt like a fool, but then I would snap back into hopefulness. If I really had this power, what fun it would be to use it at school to disrupt a boring history class! I imagined myself sitting in the classroom and controlling a piece of chalk to draw on the blackboard while my teacher and classmates looked on in amazement. Naturally, I would pretend to be amazed, too. “Weird.” I realized that I didn’t mind being just that, as long as no one knew. But of course, it was all in my head. The eraser didn’t move. It just lay there on its side and did nothing.

  One morning, about two weeks later, I was hit by a minivan while running for the school bus.

  Actually, I have no memory of the accident, which is probably a good thing because it must have really hurt. Instead, I remember the morning before it. I remember vividly that Mom made pancakes which were a bit soggy on the inside while Dad complained about the cost of getting a new oven. Our current one was nearly baked out. It was a warm and sunny spring morning, and the sunlight hit the table at just the right angle to make me squint and sneeze.

  “Cat, stop playing with your food,” said Mom.

  Cat, at least according to Mom, was not a house pet. Cat is what we called Catherine, who was my sister. She was two years younger than me, and she could be annoying at times. Actually, most of the time. Looking back, I often wonder how different her life would have been too if none of this had happened, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  That morning, Cat was cutting her pancakes into tiny squares and stacking them up on her plate, which even I thought was a bit childish for a ten-year-old.

  “Quite a tower you got there, Cat,” Dad said amiably as he sat down with the newspaper.

  Mom shot him a stern look. “Richard!”

  “Oh, right,” chuckled Dad. “Cat, eat your breakfast.”

  “Yeah, Cat, we’re gonna be late for the bus!” I said loudly. Cat’s elementary school and my middle school were side by side, so we still had to ride the same bus, which was a royal pain in the neck.

  I used a butter knife to knock over Cat’s leaning tower of pancakes. Cat elbowed me hard, and I pushed back, a bit stronger than I intended, shoving her off of her chair.

  Mom’s frown jumped from Dad to me. “Addy! Let your sister eat.”

  “I wish you’d stop calling me that, Mom,” I said, grabbing Cat by the shirtsleeve and hauling her back into her chair.

  Addy was the baby name I used to be called when I was much younger, and only Mom still used it. Cat liked taunting me with it, but only with a running start.

  “Oh, Addy, you know old habits die hard,” said Mom as Cat smirked at me.

  “At least Dad knows my name,” I grumbled, and finished my orange juice in one long swig. “Hurry up, Cat, or I’m going without you and you can come jogging after the bus.”

  “Adrian, wait for your sister,” Dad said without taking his eyes off his paper.

  “If you like, I’ll go trade her for a new oven?” I asked hopefully.

  Dad laughed, but Mom glared. “Addy!”

  “Bye, Mom. Come on, Cat, let’s go!”

  The brain is kind of strange that way. I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast this very morning, but that day’s breakfast is burned into my memory for life.

  The next memory I have is of waking up on a hospital bed with plastic tubes stuck up places you wouldn’t believe. I had been unconscious for two days. The minivan that hit me hadn’t been going much faster than I usually cycle, but even so, I ended up with a couple of broken ribs, broken right arm, lower left leg, two fingers on my left hand and, of course, a complimentary cracked skull. In short, I was dressed for the pyramids and cursed with a dull throbbing pain that lasted weeks. If it had only been an arm or a leg, rather than both, I might have been able to return home in a few days wearing a cast hard enough to hit Cat with, but as it was, my parents both worked and my home environment wasn’t suitable for my recovery, or so the doctors said.

  I was moved to and spent nearly two months in the hospital’s long-term recovery ward. There, I met a kind nurse I came to know as Miss Julia who sometimes took me outside in a wheelchair, and Cat often came to visit after school along with some of my friends and a bag full of homework from my teachers. It’s very painful to laugh with broken ribs, but nevertheless my friends and I were so rowdy that, after repeated reprimands to which we never listened, I was moved to a private room.

  And it was in that room that I learned how to do my homework without touching my pencil.

  At first, it was just a daydream pastime. If you have ever been hospitalized, or been forced to stay indoors for a few days with nothing to do, then you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Television can be really boring in the mornings and early afternoons, and when you’re stuck on a bed, there’s not much else to keep you occupied. You can only sleep so much at a time. I whiled away the dead hours staring at the clock and hoping time would go faster so that I could see my friends. They didn’t come over every single afternoon, but even Cat’s company
would be better than none at all.

  Sometimes I would concentrate on a picture on the wall, or the get-well cards on my bedside table, seeing if I could make something happen. Nothing ever happened, so I went back to willing the clock to go faster as I slowly fell into a half-sleep in which I dreamt of flying erasers and spinning clock hands.

  When I woke, it was nearly six in the evening. No one had visited. I lay there groggy and dejected, wishing I hadn’t woken up. Dinner was always at six, but that day Miss Julia did not come with the tray. Although I wasn’t really hungry yet, I was beginning to worry that I had been forgotten. I was just about to push the “call” button when in walked Cat.

  “Homework, Addy,” she said, using my baby name on purpose. If I had been able to get up and do something about it, she wouldn’t have dared. At least not at this distance.

  I frowned. “Don’t call me Addy.”

  Cat started singing, “Addy-baby! Addy-baby!”

  “I’m warning you, Cat!” I growled.

  Cat just laughed. “What are you going to do, sneeze at me?”

  “You just wait till I get better!”

  “Okay, okay. But until then, Addy-baby, here’s your homework,” said Cat, plopping the books and papers onto my bedside table.

  “Why didn’t you stop by on your way back from school?” I demanded, remembering my original annoyance at her lateness.

  Cat rolled her eyes. “That’s what I’m doing, dummy!”

  “It’s 6:30, Cat.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s 3:30 like always!” said Cat, and then looked at the wall clock and laughed. “Your clock is fast. Look out the window.”

  She was right: It was just a bit too bright outside. Cat showed me her wristwatch. I must have only been asleep for an hour and a half. Time had not sped up for me – but the clock had!