“Whoa! Yes, ma’am!” Ashley pretends to salute.
I hurry off. When I reach the door Victoria smiles nervously and directs me into the hallway, presumably so we can have privacy. Well, with as much privacy as we can have with hordes of students hanging out or passing by.
“Hi, Vic—… hi, Ms. Warkomski.”
“Hello, dear.”
I lower my voice. “I’m still working on that… thing we discussed.”
She smiles sadly. “I’m not here about that. I have something for you.”
She presses a folded-up note into my palm.
“I think you’ll understand,” she says and hurries away.
I open the note. It’s written on old-fashioned ivory stationery in Victoria’s strange, spidery handwriting. The paper smells faintly of peppermint and lemon verbena.
Lucio is back from Mexico.
He has urgent news and is waiting for you.
CHAPTER 28
Four Girls
I read Victoria’s note again. I glance around—Lucio’s nowhere in sight.
Fading footsteps. I spot Victoria at the far end of the corridor, the one that leads to the gym—the new gym, which was completed last fall and is almost the size of the rest of the school combined.
Just before rounding the corner Victoria peers over her shoulder at me. She crooks her finger again.
I feel a little bit like Alice, following the white rabbit down the hole.
She starts down a set of stairs in the back of the building, then ignores the entrance to the gym and instead opens a set of double doors with an ominous red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. DO NOT USE.
I cringe and wait for a zillion alarms to go off. But nothing happens.
Whew.
Victoria heads outside, and I trail after her. It’s started to rain—a damp, misty, cling-to-your-skin Washington rain. I can feel my hair reacting, puffing out, becoming enormous; the frizzball does not care for humidity. I’ve never been to this part of the schoolyard. There’s a parking lot that’s deserted except for a large brown dumpster piled high with cardboard boxes and one lone sneaker. Weeds sprout out of cracks in the asphalt, and the paint delineating the parking spots have faded to ghostly white flecks. In the far distance the cross-country team is doing laps around the track, small as ants from my vantage point.
Some instinct makes me pause and spin around. Behind us the lit-up windows of the school building glow eerily in the mist. In the northwest corner of the second floor a face appears in a window, then vanishes. It looked like a blond girl, but I’m not totally sure. Was it Ashley? Or some random student?
“Sunshine, please! We must be on our way,” Victoria calls out.
“I’m coming!”
Beyond the parking lot is a patch of overgrown grass and fuzzy milkweed. Beyond that are dense woods, mostly pine trees but also some maple and birch too as well as a thick undergrowth of motley shrubs and ferns.
Victoria heads straight for the woods, doubling her pace, and I half run so I don’t lose her. Here, what little sunlight there was to begin with is immediately snuffed out by the dark canopy of branches overhead. My Chuck Taylors squish and slosh on the muddy path. The air smells like dead leaves.
Something stirs in a shrub. Something big. I jump.
“What was that?” I shout-whisper to Victoria.
Just then Lucio steps out from behind the shrub. “Good, you’re here.”
“Wah! Lucio, you scared me. Why are you being all cloak-and-daggerish?”
“Because I didn’t want anyone to see us. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” He turns to Victoria. “Thank you for finding her. Where’s Nolan?”
“I’ll go back and retrieve him, dear. He was just finishing up a makeup algebra test, and I didn’t think I should disturb him. I believe teachers—real teachers anyway—get annoyed about that sort of thing.”
Victoria takes off her chunky black glasses and blows on the fogged-up lenses. Then she slips them back on and quietly disappears through a stand of trees.
Even as a pretend eighties rocker, she seems mysterious.
The rain intensifies. Lucio frowns up at the invisible sky.
“I think I passed a lean-to around here somewhere.”
“A lean what?”
“A lean-to. People build them near hiking trails and campsites to keep themselves and their stuff out of bad weather. We’re maybe fifty yards away from one of the trailheads for Ridge Mountain.”
“And you know this how, Mr. I’ve-never-been-away-from-Mexico?”
“Nolan gave me a ton of maps. Street maps, hiking maps, geological survey maps. Plus I’m a quick study. Come on!”
He grabs my hand and leads me deeper into the woods. There’s something comforting and familiar about Lucio’s warm, strong hand grasping mine; he used to lead me around the jungles of Llevar la Luz this way. Of course, that was before things got confusing between us. I don’t feel confused anymore, though. I wonder if he does?
After a few minutes he takes me off-trail to a small, scraggly wooden hut—or rather, half a small, scraggly wooden hut; it’s completely open on one side. Twigs, pine needles, and leaves litter the makeshift roof.
“Ta-da! Lean-to,” Lucio announces grandly. “After you.”
“Allrighty.”
I enter awkwardly, head bowed, and manage to trip on a mushroomy log.
“Ow!”
“Easy!”
There’s very little room inside, which forces the two of us to stand close together. I comb my fingers through my puffy wet hair. “Sorry I’m such a mess.”
“You’re not a mess. You look—” Lucio stops and crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah, so… um…”
Awkward, awkward, awkward.
“I have a lot to tell you,” I say. “But you go first. Victoria said you had something urgent to share? By the way, how did you get down to Llevar la Luz and back so fast?”
“Aidan chartered a private jet. He needed a bunch of files, and besides, he was worried because we left the place in such a rush. He wanted to make sure it was totally locked up, that there hadn’t been any attempted break-ins.”
“Were there? Any attempted break-ins?”
“No.” Lucio reaches inside his jacket pocket and extracts a large manila envelope. “This is the urgent thing I wanted to share with you. Nolan too when he gets here. I came across the contents in Aidan’s lab. I don’t think I was supposed to see them.”
He opens the envelope and pulls out several black-and-white photographs.
“Brace yourself,” he warns.
“Um, okay.” I bite my lip nervously.
He hands me a photograph, then a second and a third and a fourth.
I blink and stare at each one. Then I begin to shake, and not because of the rain or the cold or my soaking-wet clothes and hair.
I clamp my hand over my mouth.
There’s a dead girl in each photo—a different dead girl. All four girls appear to be lying on morgue tables, partially covered with white sheets.
“Who are they?” I whisper, horrified.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out. What’s Aidan doing with these photographs? Obviously, he never shared them with me. And he has no idea I have them now.”
“Oh my gosh! This is so—”
“I know, I know.” Lucio wraps his arm around my shoulder, and I nestle closer. Dreadful thoughts are swirling around in my head.
What is my father doing with pictures of dead girls?
Outside the lean-to the rain continues to fall. I study the photos again, more carefully, one by one. The images are grainy and somewhat blurry, so it’s hard to make out all the details.
When I get to the fourth one I do a double-take… and gasp.
“Lucio, I know her!”
CHAPTER 29
Nolan’s Theory
What do you mean, you know her?” Lucio demands.
Speechless with shock, I gape at the girl lying on the morgue table. Dea
d girl number four. Her long black hair fans out across the steel surface, her pale skin is as translucent and lifeless as marble, and her brown eyes are wide with terror.
“I-I saw her last night,” I stammer.
“You saw her?”
“Yes. In my vision… or maybe it was a dream, I don’t know. She was wearing a white kimono. She said something to me… I think it was in Japanese? She showed me her wrist, and it had the same mark—the spider-web mark. Except hers got all twitchy and weird and morphed into a…”
“Morphed into a what?”
“A pentagram,” I whisper.
“What?”
My gaze automatically drops to my right wrist. Nothing.
Lucio and I fall silent. I listen to the steady spit-spit-spit of the rain on the roof of the lean-to. What’s happening? As with the spider-web mark, I could have dismissed the kimono girl before—as a hallucination, a nightmare, whatever. But now I absolutely can’t. Because my father has a photograph of her.
I pull out my phone and shine the brightly-lit screen on the photo of the Japanese girl. For a second my screensaver is visible, and Lucio catches sight of it. It’s a selfie Nolan and I took last fall when we went on a mystery-solving road trip to the university. He’s about to start his car, and I’m leaning in with my phone while he’s smiling happily at me. A rare beam of Washington sunlight falls across our faces, casting a golden glow.
I quickly slant the screen away. Lucio pretends not to have seen it and busies himself with the clasp of the manila envelope. I’m so lame. I really need to change that image, maybe replace it with that one of Oscar and Lex Luthor fighting over a chew toy. Or the one of me wearing my come to the dork side T-shirt that Ashley gave me for my birthday last year.
Argh.
But back to the matter at hand. I squint at the photo of the Japanese girl and try to make out a mark on her wrist.
There’s something there…
“She might have a mark. The photo is so grainy, though,” I inform Lucio.
He holds up the other three photos. “They all are. Looks like they may have been scanned first, or rephotographed and scanned maybe, and then Aidan printed them off the computer? It’s hard to tell.”
I take the photos and try to illuminate them with my phone. “These other three girls may have marks on their wrists too. Or it’s just dirt on the camera lens and we’re on a wild goose chase or barking up the wrong tree or whatever the correct metaphor is. Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“Yeah, that’s the sort of thing I carry with me all the time,” Lucio jokes.
“I’ve got one.”
Nolan dips his head and enters the lean-to, closing an umbrella behind him.
“Hi, guys. Victoria said I’d find you out here.”
I’m so happy to see him and at the same time so not happy to see him. It would have been better if he showed up when Lucio and I weren’t squished together inside a closet-sized space.
Lucio and I both step back to try to make more room.
“I assume something has happened?” Nolan asks, his gaze moving between the two of us.
For a second I think he’s asking if something’s happened between Lucio and me, and I blush furiously. Guilty conscience?
Fortunately Lucio doesn’t make the same mistake.
“Yeah, something’s happened. Check these out,” Lucio says, handing Nolan the four photographs.
He sifts through them. “These are… they’re very disturbing. Where did you get them?”
Lucio explains. When he’s finished, Nolan reaches into his backpack and pulls out a magnifying glass along with a small penlight, poising them over the four photos.
“Look! On the right wrists of each one. Sunshine, hold your phone up a little higher.”
I do so, and Lucio and I peer at the photos. Nolan shifts the magnifying glass and penlight from one photo to the next.
All four girls have a small pentagram mark on their wrists.
“So what does this mean? Who are they? And why do they all have the same mark?” Lucio says.
“And why does my father have these photos?” I add.
“We should ask him to explain. But I have a theory,” Nolan volunteers.
“Really? Great, what’s your theory?” I ask.
To my surprise Nolan puts a hand on my shoulder and stares into my eyes. His expression is meant to be reassuring, comforting, but I can tell he’s trying to cover up something he feels inside.
Fear.
“Nolan, what is it? Hey, you’re worrying me.”
“I think these girls are luiseach. The four luiseach who died four years apart in those four places on the pentagram.”
The Fifth Girl
The fifth girl is even more powerful than I imagined.
Yes, yes… the energy wave, the prophecy. But there’s something else.
She can see me and sense me in my current incarnation, unlike anyone else, including her biological parents. Which is most unprecedented. I wanted to remain completely invisible, undetectable, so I can do what must be done with no interference from their faction, not even from my beloved.
But the girl has—how can I describe it?—an extraordinary inner radar. Empathy. She misses nothing and feels, intuits everything.
I must make adjustments so I can obscure my identity from her, at least some of the time.
There’s one benefit to her having such a thin psychic membrane, however. I’ve been able to invade her dreams, manipulate them. Oh, how I enjoy her terror!
Although whenever I enter her psyche, others are there as well—warning her, trying to protect her. The little human-luiseach halfling, the one whose father soul terminated her after my dark servant Bezl possessed him. The luiseach girl from Hokkaido. The luiseach girl from Queensland who actually sent her a tangible, Earthly warning in the form of a dead bird.
I thought my presence in her bedroom and taping shut the beak of the other bird, that taxidermy specimen, would scare her into silence and submission. Also the red vehicle—that telekinetic display was child’s play. Also the spirit of that woman Kirsten: I accelerated her journey to darkness, ordered her to mark the girl, and she obeyed so beautifully. And the four Nemean lions and other dangers I have thrown her way.
But despite all this the girl is still determined. The only thing that gives her pause is her new knowledge that I have the capacity to terminate her. Especially if I am mindful of the clock.
Perhaps I need to rethink the plan.
Perhaps the prophecy can be fulfilled with a slight variation.
Perhaps she can be useful to me in another way.
Fortunately her new charity project continues to distract her. Empathy, indeed! I have also sent another little surprise.
Her pathetic father continues to run around in circles, thinking he can capture me with his absurd pseudoscientific device and his… what? Delusions of superior mental and physical acumen? He has no chance. The sooner he realizes this and gives up, the sooner I can lure him into my trap and terminate him.
And claim his mate for my own.
And avenge my firstborn son.
Deditio, Aidan Adis Cadeyrn.
Surrender.
CHAPTER 30
Spycraft
I can’t reach Aidan. Of course. Again. It’s funny (actually, it’s not in the least bit funny) that he can be a helicopter parent-mentor when he wants, hovering and micromanaging and being a big, annoying bossypants, but he’ll disappear off the face of Earth when he has other plans and priorities—especially with his military-grade, GPS-enabled phone protocol that he forced on all of us.
Fortunately Lucio is able to reach him—or he has access anyway. Aidan prearranged a time and place to meet up tonight (I saw the text: “Danby Industrial Park, last warehouse on the main service road, 7 p.m., please be punctual”) so he can get the file folders he needed from Llevar la Luz. I asked Lucio what the folders contained—he said there were pages and pages of handwritten notes with
lots of abbreviations and numbers. Nolan took a quick look, and not even he could decipher them.
The three of us are on our way to Danby Industrial Park now in Nolan’s car. The rain stopped a while ago; now it’s just damp and muggy outside—the air isn’t warm exactly, but it’s thick and oppressive like an unwanted layer of clothes against your skin. As we cruise down Main Street we pass the used bookstore, Spotless Sam’s Dry Cleaners, and the Dream Bean Coffee Shop. Through the pleasant, glowy window of the café, I see people I know from school—talking, laughing, drinking tea, studying together. I feel a pang, like I wish I could be doing all that normal stuff right now instead of, say, driving to the middle of nowhere to confront my father—my weird, inscrutable, not-human father—about photos of dead girls.
Earlier I spoke to both guys about everything that’s happened: my afternoon with Bastian, the arrival of the council, my conversation with Zalea, my conversation with Helena, and my dream-vision from last night. I left out some details, like about my necklace, because Helena did swear me to secrecy about that, although I really wish I could tell at least Nolan.
They were—are—beyond outraged about Helena’s past relationship with Dubu. And Lucio got very stressed out by the mention of the council being in town. After all, one or more of its members may have participated in his parents’ execution.
“Turn right at the next light,” I instruct Nolan, pointing out the front passenger side window. “According to Granville Perry Swift, the industrial park should be about five miles down that road.”
“Five-point-three miles exactly,” Nolan says, glancing at the odometer.
“Who’s Granville Perry Swift?” Lucio asks me.
“It’s my new nickname for the GPS on my phone. He was a nineteenth-century gold miner, plus he was related to Daniel Boone. Like a nephew. Hey, it’s awfully spycrafty of Aidan to want to meet up at an industrial park,” I remark. Silence. “You know, spycraft, as in, stuff spies do. I learned that word from a movie. Mom and I watch a lot of spy thrillers on our pizza-and-movie nights.”
The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl Page 16