The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl)

by Paige McKenzie

  “Where’ve you been?” he shouts when he sees me. “I was worried sick.”

  Worried sick? Guess I’m not the only one who goes around using expressions usually reserved for people at least twice my age. But then I guess that’s a luiseach thing. We’re drawn to things not quite our age—my vintage clothes, Lucio’s old-fashioned language. Even Aidan’s formal way of dressing is a remnant from an era when people dressed differently.

  Sometimes I forget the three of us actually have something in common.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” I answer, only half-joking.

  Lucio doesn’t laugh. “You can’t just wander off,” he says solemnly. He rubs the tattoo on his right hand.

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t safe.” He stamps at the ground like a racehorse just itching to start running. Like he has all this pent-up energy just waiting to get out.

  “I thought the whole point of bringing me here is because it is safe.”

  “Llevar la Luz is safe,” Lucio answers. “But outside our borders . . .”

  “There’s a dangerous demon and another spirit on the verge of going dark,” I supply. Instinctively I reach for my back pocket, then remember I’m in my pajamas. The weapon is still tucked beneath my pillows. I feel kind of naked without it, so I fold my arms across my chest.

  “Well, that too,” Lucio answers mysteriously.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, but Lucio shakes his head, not willing to reveal any more. “Maybe we should take a day off,” I try. “Don’t luiseach get weekends off? Vacation days?”

  “National holidays?” Lucio suggests. “Summer Fridays?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Come on.” Lucio grins, leading the way around the house. Much to my surprise, he doesn’t head for the front door. Instead, he keeps going, across the quad and behind the building where I nearly passed out a few hours ago.

  Lucio leads me to a circle of benches behind the courtyard, set in the middle of an overgrown shady grove. Most the benches are overgrown with vines and covered in fallen leaves, but around one of the benches someone has made an effort to pull back the vines and clear a path. This place must have had a groundskeeper once, but now there’s only Lucio.

  The spot looks cool and inviting, and in front of the bench is a jug of lemonade and two glasses. I scratch at my fresh mosquito bites—courtesy of early-morning phone calls in the jungle—and tug at my Care Bear T-shirt. I wonder how long Lucio’s been looking for me—the ice in the jug has melted down to almost nothing.

  “What’s all this?” It’s the kind of thing that would make Ashley squeal with delight—a handsome boy setting up a lovely picnic for two.

  “This is my favorite spot on all of Llevar la Luz,” Lucio answers. “When I was little, it was my go-to spot for a game of hide-and-seek.”

  “Couldn’t they always find you if you hid in the same place every time?”

  “No one ever seemed to catch on.”

  I try to imagine what this place must have been like before the rift: a hive of activity, luiseach students and mentors and protectors scattered across the quad, scrambling from one building to the next. Luiseach children playing tag and hide-and-seek. Back then the buildings weren’t dilapidated. They were in such good shape that they practically shone in the sunlight, and hot water came right out of the tap. Each building had air conditioning turned up so high that, despite the heat outside, everyone wore sweaters to work, class, and wherever else they were going.

  “I thought you might want to talk about what I said the other day. I’m sure you have questions. You know, about our species going extinct.”

  “Oh that,” I joke. “I almost forgot about that.” Questions is an inadequate word for the thoughts running through my head. Questions are what you have in math class when a geometry proof doesn’t make sense. There should be a bigger word than questions that’s specially reserved for times like this.

  Although I’m not sure anyone has ever experienced a time like this before.

  “I followed Aidan to his lab this morning,” I confess. In this humidity the temperature barely drops when you go from sunshine to shade. But when Lucio sits on the bench, I drop down beside him. This bench is small, meant for two. It’s easy to imagine teenage luiseach-in-training meeting here for secret rendezvous when their mentors weren’t looking. Lucio and I sit so close that our knees touch. Through my mud-splattered pj pants I can feel the heat coming off his skin, but I don’t move to avoid it. It’s nice to be around a boy I can sit close to for a change. If Nolan were here, I’d be struggling to not get sick.

  Seriously, Sunshine, I command myself, Stop comparing Nolan and Lucio! Now’s not the time for those kinds of thoughts anyway.

  “Aidan thinks spirits need to learn to move on without luiseach help,” he replies.

  I lean back and stare at the leaves on the tree branches above us. That’s why he wasn’t helping them. He was trying to force them to do it on their own. Trying to answer his own question: How will spirits move on when we’re no longer on this planet to help them?

  A chill runs down my spine as I remember what I saw. What I felt. “He was torturing them,” I whisper.

  “I know it’s hard to watch.” Another word that feels wrong. Chemistry tests are hard. This is . . . I don’t know what this is. “But if Aidan is right, it changes everything. It’s the first step in proving humans can learn to move on without us.”

  “Because I’m the last luiseach,” I say softly. How I hate the sound of that.

  Lucio nods. “If human spirits are capable of moving on by themselves, then your birth—and the lack of luiseach births since then—isn’t the calamity that Helena thinks it is.”

  “Helena?”

  He claps his hand over his mouth so hard the bench shakes beneath us.

  “Lucio,” I prompt, growing hotter despite the cool glass of lemonade in my hand. I turn from gazing at the leaves to face this dark-haired boy and square my shoulders. “Who is Helena?”

  Lucio sets his jaw. This boy may feel sorry for me, but his loyalty is to Aidan, no doubt about it.

  “Helena was your mother,” a deep voice answers from behind us. I jump in surprise.

  Suddenly I can smell her perfume and see the strands of hair left behind in her brush.

  I stand and see Aidan walking toward us. “Was? Is she . . . gone?”

  “She left Llevar la Luz a long time ago.” His voice gets louder with each step he takes. “But I don’t think that’s the kind of gone you were getting at. She leads the luiseach on the other side of the rift.” He reaches into his pocket for a perfectly white handkerchief to wipe invisible sweat from his brow. “And she’s wanted to eliminate you from the day you were born.”

  “To eliminate me?” Aidan can’t possibly mean what it sounds like he means. I’m not the kind of person another person would want to eliminate. I’m not evil or powerful or anything at all really. I mean, I know I’m not normal, but I’m not . . . I don’t know. I’m not enough to warrant elimination, right? “Just to make sure I know what you mean”—I gulp—“you’re saying she wants to kill me?”

  “Yes,” Aidan confirms with a terse nod. “And she won’t rest until she succeeds.”

  I step backward away from them, tripping over a root from one of the trees surrounding us. I gasp as I fall forward, flinging my arms out in front of me. The glass I’d been holding goes flying, lemonade and all. It lands in the dirt at Aidan’s feet, shattering into what looks like a thousand pieces, kind of like what’s happened to my life ever since I turned sixteen.

  Kindred Spirits

  This is harder than I thought it would be. Our first day together the boy barely looks up from his book, and on the second day, when I find him sitting in the exact same spot with the exact same book—just turned to a page much closer to the end—he’s so absorbed in his studies, I’m not sure he even recognizes me from the day before.

  He’s trying to find out more about his rol
e as her protector. He’s trying to see whether he can protect her from this many miles away.

  On the third day I try another tact. “Got a thing for ghosts?”

  This time he practically snaps to attention. Finally. “What?” he asks.

  “Your book,” I prompt, gesturing toward the ancient-looking tome spread out on the table between us, the one he’s been reading over and over since I first saw him. “I recognize it.”

  “You do?” he asks dubiously. And he’s right to be dubious. The book he’s studying is more than a century old, and although he doesn’t know it, there are only two copies in existence. One is mine, and the other belonged to a friend of Aidan’s named Abner Jones, who taught paranormal studies at the nearby university from which I’m pretending to be a student. Aidan must have used Abner to give this boy the book. Which gives me an idea.

  I slouch and let my hair fall across my face like I’m embarrassed. “That’s why I’m here,” I say shyly. “In Washington, I mean.”

  “I thought you were in school at the university a couple of towns over,” Nolan supplies, and I nod. At least he’s been listening enough to retain that bit of information.

  “Yeah, but there’s a reason I chose this school. Years ago there was a professor there. His work was kind of”—I pause as though I’m searching for the right word—“controversial. In some circles he was lauded as a genius, in others laughed off as a quack. But the university agreed to let me go through his old papers and books and files as research for my thesis.”

  “What’s your thesis about?”

  I take a deep breath and sigh heavily, like I’m debating whether or not to confide in him. Finally I bite my lower lip and say softly, “It’s about ghosts.”

  Nolan shifts from a slouch; now his spine is straight as an arrow. “Ghosts?”

  “Not just ghosts,” I say quickly, like I’m trying to cover up my own foolishness. “You know, the paranormal. Spirits. What happens to us after we die. That kind of thing.”

  The more I say, the more excited Nolan looks, like we have a special connection he’s never had with anyone before. Well, with almost anyone.

  “This professor,” I continue, “his name was Abner Jones.”

  “You’ve heard of Abner Jones?”

  “You’ve heard of Abner Jones?” I echo incredulously. And then I grin like I think Nolan might be a sort of kindred spirit. And from the look on his face, I can see the boy feels the same way.

  But then, just for an instant, he presses his lips together solemnly. As though perhaps he’s thinking of the last girl he spoke of such things with.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Extinction

  Aidan wraps his fingers around my arm and pulls me gently to sit down. Lucio’s footsteps fade into the distance as he makes his way back to the house, giving us some privacy. Now this shady little refuge feels less like the perfect place for a romantic picnic than it does like a hiding place. I look around, darting my gaze this way and that, staring at the back of the building where Aidan keeps his lab, at the trees above our heads. In front of us is a stone sculpture that looks like it used to be a fountain but has long since gone dry. Beyond that a half-circle of single-story stucco cottages, crumbling under the weight of the vines growing up around them like long, heavy arms.

  Aidan said he brought me here to keep me safe. I should have known better than to think he wanted to keep me safe from dark spirits. A dark spirit can’t destroy a luiseach.

  He was trying to keep me safe from the woman who gave birth to me. Lucio said I was only safe on the grounds of Llevar la Luz. This entire campus is some kind of hiding place. No wonder he was so mad at Lucio for taking me off campus.

  “So when you said someone might use multiple spirits against me?” I wipe sweat from my cheeks. This sounds more like something out of a Greek myth than real life. “What about the nursery?” I don’t know much about Aidan, and I know even less about Helena, but one of them must have been responsible for that cozy white room with its subtle touches of pink.

  “Let me explain,” Aidan begins calmly.

  How is my mentor/father always so composed? (And why couldn’t he have handed some of that composure down to me in his genetic bag of tricks? Composed would come in handy right about now.)

  “Long before you were born, luiseach birth rates were dwindling.”

  I let my head drop into my hands, wishing (again) that Nolan were here. All of this is just too much to absorb at once. I need Nolan sitting calmly on one of the other benches, taking careful notes in his messy boy handwriting so we can go over all of this alone together later.

  “Your mother and I believed—”

  “Don’t call her my mother,” I interrupt hoarsely, looking up. “My mother is Katherine Griffith, and she would never let anyone hurt me, let alone try to eliminate me herself.”

  Aidan reaches for the pitcher of lemonade on the ground below us and pours some into the glass Lucio left behind. He hands it to me and I take a sip.

  “With our shrinking gene pool, fewer and fewer luiseach were being born, yet the human race continued to grow. Helena and I knew that in a few generations the situation would become dire: there would no longer be enough luiseach on Earth to help all human spirits move on, to fight against dark spirits when necessary, to exorcise demons when they arose. But we weren’t hopeless, like so many of our brethren. We believed we might be able to produce a child strong enough to help matters.”

  “Because you were two of the most powerful luiseach ever, right?” They just assumed their offspring would be as special as they were.

  “No,” Aidan says carefully. “We weren’t counting on genetics alone.”

  “Then how?” I ask, my voice shaking. I’m not totally certain I want to hear the answer.

  “When Helena was pregnant,” Aidan explains, “we conducted . . . experiments, trying to make the child in her womb even more powerful.”

  I almost drop my glass of lemonade all over again. This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard, and given what’s happened to me in the last six months, the bar on what I call creepy has been set pretty high.

  “What kind of experiments?” I ask carefully.

  “We exposed you to spirits practically from conception. Throughout her pregnancy, before Helena helped a spirit move on, she held it close so that it touched you as well. She pulled as many spirits to her as she could, spirits from miles around, every chance she got. Even in her third trimester, when her belly had grown so big that she could barely move,” Aidan pauses, almost smiling at the memory, “Helena was still exorcising demons, going on missions normally reserved for those in top physical shape.”

  Aidan continues, “We believed we could create a luiseach powerful enough to handle multiple spirits at once, who could serve spirits from miles around.” His voice rises, as though he’s reciting words he’s said a thousand times before. He has no idea that he sounds more like a mad scientist to me than ever, like someone from a horror story: Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, men who messed with life and death and suffered the disastrous consequences. “If our experiment was successful, we decided, we would do the same thing to every other pregnant luiseach until our dwindling numbers were no longer a problem. Your mother and I were far from the only luiseach trying to procreate at the time. On this campus alone there were three other pregnant luiseach.”

  “But I’m not powerful like that.” I press my legs into the bench beneath us, feeling the sweat on the backs of my knees. No wonder he didn’t take the bait when I suggested a protector might be able to help us figure out why I’m so sensitive. No wonder he could calmly say “interesting” the first time I absorbed a bit of a spirit I helped move on. He’s known why I’m different all along, even if he doesn’t know how to fix it. “Just the opposite.” I shudder with the memory of what happened this morning.

  “I know,” Aidan answers. “I’ve suspected for a long time that your strengths would lie elsewhere.”

 
“What do you mean, for a long time? I haven’t even been a luiseach for a long time.”

  “You’ve been a luiseach all your life.”

  “You know what I mean,” I counter, exasperated. “I’ve only been able to sense spirits since I turned sixteen, right?” Aidan nods. “That was barely six months ago.”

  “Do you remember what happened on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Of course,” I answer. How could I forget?

  “I was observing your every step.” Victoria told me that my mentor had been watching me, but hearing Aidan admit it out loud sends a chill down my spine. “I felt it when you gave up hope.”

  “Then why didn’t you help me?” I ask.

  “If I’d helped you, you’d never have dug deep enough to find the hidden stores of strength you didn’t know you had.”

  Yep, Aidan would have been the kind of father who’d have thrown me into the deep end of the pool to teach me how to swim.

  He continues, “The weapon Victoria gave you took longer to manifest than I would have liked.”

  “It took longer to manifest than I would have liked too,” I mumble, remembering what happened that night: the roof disappeared from above our heads, the rain beat down until I was drenched. I’d begged the weapon to manifest, begged it to turn into whatever it needed to turn into to save my family.

  “You couldn’t concentrate,” Aidan continues. “You may not realize this, but you bounce back from a spirit’s touch quickly: your temperature rebounds almost immediately, your heart rate slows to a normal pace.” I shake my head; it doesn’t feel like I bounce back quickly, especially lately. Aidan continues, “At first I was certain you’d make short work of that demon. I didn’t understand what was taking you so long.”

  “I was trying,” I say miserably. “It was a little hard to concentrate when so many people’s lives were at stake.”

  “Exactly!” Aidan snaps his fingers. The sound is sharp, echoing against the trees, causing a bird perched on a branch above us to take flight. “You were distracted by your concern for Katherine, for Nolan, even for Victoria and Anna—and you barely knew Victoria and Anna. When most luiseach face a demon, the rest of the world fades into the background. They are able to concentrate entirely on the task at hand. But you . . . I didn’t understand it until I began working with you here.”