After putting the spiderlings to bed, and making sure that they stayed there (Jesse double checked his backpack before they left the Vanderwebb house just to be on the safe side), the group headed over to Dr. Rotbart’s lab.

  “Are we sure he won’t already be asleep?” Siobhan asked as they climbed the stairs to his porch.

  She had a point, it was already past midnight, and while most of the other residents of Gravewood were nocturnal, if they slept at all, Rotbart was a human and probably went to sleep at regular human times. But when Noah rang the doorbell, a few seconds later the doctor threw open the door, smiling at them as if it was two o’clock in the afternoon and not the middle of the night.

  “Apparently not.”

  “Ah, if it isn’t the ingenious imp-catchers,” he greeted. “To what do I owe this visit?”

  “We had something we thought you could help with. Uh, is now a bad time? We could come back tomorrow.”

  But he just waved off their concerns. “Nonsense, there’s no such thing as a bad time for science.”

  “Were you sleeping?” Alicia asked, skeptically looking the doctor up and down. He looked the same as ever, wearing his lab coat and a pair of safety goggles. There was no sign at all that he had been asleep.

  He laughed. “No, fraulein, I never sleep. I have too much to get done to waste time on such trivialities.”

  Jesse couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, and decided it was best not to ask right now.

  He led them down to his basement lab where a bouncy techno song was blasting from no less than five different speakers, the lyrics sung in a language Jesse didn’t understand but sounded like Finnish.

  “Sorry about that,” Dr. Rotbart said as he used a remote to turn all of the speakers off at once. “I craft all of my best inventions to Eurobeat. It helps me think.” He settled into the same chair he had when they came to him before about catching the imp queen. Apparently, he liked to have all of his meetings down here in the basement. “Now, what do you need my help with?”

  “Well, there was this ghost...”

  Jesse gave the doctor the gist of their evening, everything from the ghost of Joseph Waylor to the nightmare illusions and the strange lighter they found in the attic. He finished by dumping the contents of his backpack onto the nearest table, the shattered pieces of Sophia spilling across its surface.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “I see...” The doctor’s eyes shone with fascination as he picked up a piece to examine. “That is an interesting story indeed. And you want me to...?”

  “If there’s anything you can glean from examining her, maybe even fixing her up, we’d be grateful,” Alicia said. “Right now, she’s our main lead on figuring out what’s going on.”

  “We thought this might be more in Bella’s wheelhouse, but-”

  “With all due respect to Miss Cardenas, anything she can do with magic, I can do ten times better with science. She may be talented in the fields of the arcane, but nothing beats the groundedness of the natural law. And where is this lighter you mentioned?”

  Jesse fished it out of his pocket and placed it alongside the shards of Sophia. The entire walk over, he’d kept one hand anxiously wrapped around it, as if she would somehow spring back to life and try to steal it again. But she remained broken on the table, the pieces unmoving.

  Dr. Rotbart picked up the lighter and held it up to examine, muttering to himself. “Faszinierend. What kind of metal is this? It’s not silver, the hue is wrong. Maybe nickel? Platinum? That might explain why it’s still in such good condition after all these years. When did you say this Joseph Waylor fellow lived? The 19th century,” he answered his own question without waiting for a response. “I’ll have to run experiments on that later. Right now, the doll is top priority. Sophia, you called her? She- hmm....” He cut himself off, running a finger over the crack in the red jewel of the animation amulet.

  “Is something wrong?” Alicia asked.

  “No, not wrong per say. This crack here just means that this project will be more challenging than I anticipated.” But rather than looking troubled, he turned to them with a wide grin. “Thank you for bringing this to me. Things had been getting a bit too monotonous around here lately. It seems that whenever you four show up, you always bring something exciting with you.”

  “We don’t mean to,” Jesse said dryly.

  “Regardless, anytime you need help, why don’t you come to me instead of Bella? I’m sure she has other things to do, and unlike her, my door is always open.”

  “Uh, we’ll keep that in mind.”

  “By the way, where’s Adam?” Noah asked. He was on guard, looking around for the doctor’s giant assistant. Jesse couldn’t blame him. Last time he was here, the man had picked him up as if he’d weighed nothing, and anyone who could outmatch Noah physically was not someone to mess with.

  Dr. Rotbart on the other hand, seemed oblivious to his discomfort. “He’s on an errand right now. Why, did you want to see him?”

  “No, that’s okay. Just curious.”

  “Well then, I will get started on your project right away. As soon as I find out anything of note, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  “Uh, can that not involve sending Adam to our school in the middle of the day?” Siobhan said.

  The last time the doctor needed to tell them something he had sent the hulking assistant to wander around town to look for them. While effective, Jesse couldn’t help but worry about the man heading straight into human territory without a care in the world.

  Rotbart looked perplexed. “I suppose I could just give you a call or something. Though I’m not entirely certain what the problem is.”

  After exchanging phone numbers with the doctor, (Jesse was a bit surprised to see that for all his eccentricities and inventiveness, the man had a regular smartphone), the night finally came to an end and they parted ways. Now all he and his friends could do was wait for Rotbart to hopefully give them the answers they were looking for.