The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) (11 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Dark Discovery

B
efore heading upstairs to bed tonight, I managed to pull Lucio aside and ask him the question I hadn’t had the chance to ask before: “What did you mean, Aidan thinks we’re going extinct?”

“Well, not you and me personally. But the
species.
Which I guess is sort of you and me personally, if you’re the last luiseach to be born, right? He thinks that’s your destiny—you’re the last luiseach.”

I wrinkle my nose.
The Last Luiseach
sounds like the name of a movie, and not one I want to have a starring role in. What will happen to humanity if luiseach go extinct? I remember what the water demon almost did to my mother. What it succeeded in doing to Anna and her father when there wasn’t a luiseach to save them.

Will the rest of humanity suffer the same fate? With no one around to exorcise them, will the entire world be blanketed in dark spirits? I close my eyes and imagine such a world: humans
running away, as though it’s possible to hide from a demon. People dying, their spirits trapped here on Earth. Will this be the result of the growing darkness Lucio was telling me about?

“But
why
does he think we’re going extinct?” I asked. If I really am the last luiseach, then someday I’ll be here on Earth all alone after the rest of the luiseach are gone. A single person trying to do the work that a whole species used to manage together. “He wouldn’t just let the planet descend into chaos. That must be what he’s working on in his lab at all hours.”

“You should ask him yourself,” Lucio said.

No time like the present, right? In my bare feet and pajamas—worn-out sweatpants and an old T-shirt—I make my way across the courtyard.

I stop and carefully lie the stuffed owl down on the house’s front porch. I won’t give up until I get Anna to agree to move on.

Even at this hour the air is thick with humidity, as warm as a touch on my skin. The building where Aidan does his work is in surprisingly good shape. In the moonlight I can see that there’s no dust on the floor, which is covered with enormous, cream-colored tiles. I hear footsteps clicking above me, and I head toward the stairs on the far right, even though there are no windows along the staircase so after the first few steps it turns pitch black. I cross my fingers and hope there aren’t any missing steps that need to be hopped over.

I nearly fall flat on my face when I get to the top of the stairs and bite my lip to keep from crying out. I hear noises coming from down the hall. Blindly I head in the direction of the sound, but soon my steps become heavy, labored. The air feels thick, like walking through quicksand. I can barely put one foot in front of the other.

And the temperature is plummeting.

I manage to make it to the open doorway all the way down the hall. There’s a circle of light coming from inside, where Aidan has a flashlight perched on a cold-looking metal table, the sort of surface you’d expect to see in a doctor’s office or a morgue. Nothing else in this room looks like I expected; it doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to my high school’s chem lab. Just shelves with books, hundreds of newspaper clippings tacked to the wall, and a large map of the world with four spots circled in red and what looks like dates next to them. There aren’t any beakers of fluid bubbling up in the corner, no microscope so Aidan can study specimens through its lens.

But there are
specimens
in there.

The room is filled with spirits, but I can’t see them like I usually can. They’re worked into such a frenzy, so upset for some reason that they swirl the room in a blur. I think there might be dozens of them. Hundreds of them? I remember the chill I felt when I first arrived here, the presence of spirits so close and yet unable to touch me. Now, from the doorway, I can hear their voices drifting in and out of my head.

I sink to the floor. I’ve never heard such agony. They’re
begging
for my help, begging to be set free. Pleading with me to help them move on, beseeching Aidan to stop what he’s doing to them. Flashes of their lives and deaths spring up behind my eyes, as vivid as images on a movie screen: a man throwing a ball for his beloved dog, a woman rocking her baby to sleep, a toddler taking his first, uncertain steps. Then, a hospital heart monitor flatlining, a car skidding across the meridian, a pair of eyelids dropping heavily and permanently shut.

I press my hands to the sides of my head, like I think I can squeeze them out.

I’m shaking so hard that my teeth are chattering, making it almost impossible to get the words out. My heart is pounding so fast I can’t even feel each individual beat; instead, it feels like my heart is humming, just like the woman hummed in my nightmare before she tried to kill me.

I manage to curl into a ball, trying to keep myself warm, rocking back and forth like a crazy person in a padded room. Mom wanted me to come here so what happened in that parking lot would never happen again.

What would she say if she could see me now?

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Behind Closed Doors

A
idan must hear me because he turns to see me crouching in the doorway. He’s at my side almost before I take my next labored breath. He lifts me up and carries me into the hallway with one arm, slamming the door to that room shut with the other.

I had no idea my mentor/father was so strong. I feel like a baby in his arms. And not the helpless kind of baby I feel like in my dreams. This feels like something else entirely. This feels warm, familiar, comforting.
This
must be why little kids are always begging their fathers to pick them up, carry them, give them a piggy-back ride. In Aidan’s arms I feel safe.

Gently he lays me on the ground in the hallway and presses his hand to my forehead, like a mom checking whether her child has a temperature. Soon my teeth aren’t chattering and my fingertips aren’t blue with cold. My heart slows until it feels normal again, one beat after another, steady and strong.
Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum.

But it doesn’t feel like it did that day at the hospital. Aidan helped all those spirits move on then. This time I can feel the spirits are still trapped on the other side of that door, here on Earth.

As soon as I open my eyes he takes his hand away from my head, like he doesn’t want me to see him touching me. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” I shake my head, still slightly out of breath. “What are
you
doing here? In there?” I point weakly toward his lab.

“That’s my work,” he says simply, as though that’s enough to explain anything.

“Your work is
not
helping spirits move on? Isn’t that completely at odds with the whole maintaining-the-balance thing you said was so important?”

He shakes his head and backs away from me slightly, still crouching on the floor like a frog. “Of course not.” His voice sounds completely normal, as though he wasn’t just tormenting a roomful of spirits desperate to move on. As though his daughter/mentee hadn’t just nearly passed out in front of him.

“How can you say that?” I press my hands onto the cool floor and push myself up into a seated position. I cross my legs beneath me and straighten my spine. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re still in your pajamas. Especially when your pajamas include a T-shirt with a picture of a Care Bear. “What am I doing here?” I ask finally, even though Aidan asked me the very same thing just seconds ago.

“You tell me. You’re the one who came to my lab.”

“Your
lab?
Is that what you call that torture chamber?” Aidan doesn’t answer, so I keep talking. “I don’t mean
here,
in
this building right now. I mean here on this campus, in this country, a zillion miles away from my mom and my protector and everything and everyone I’ve ever known.”

“You’re honing your skills.”

“Why do I need to get better at helping spirits move on if your work is all about
not
helping them move on?” Frustration is making me nearly as hot as I was cold before. In my head I can still hear the faintest cries from behind the closed door, and I can hear Aidan’s voice answering them loudly:
No. Not yet.
I shudder. Anna said the same thing to me earlier tonight.

“What do you mean
not yet
?” I ask, as though he said the words out loud.

“I mean I’m not going to help them move on right now.”

“But why?” I ask. “If you wait too long, they’ll go dark, one right after the other. Just like the demon who killed Anna. Just like the demon I saw tonight.”

I push myself up to stand, using the rough stucco wall behind me to steady myself. “You’re
torturing
them. These spirits came to you for help, sensing the presence of the nearest luiseach. They
want
to move on.” Unlike Anna. In my head I recall her sweet voice,
Not until the time is right.

“I can’t help them, not yet. My work—”

“I
know
what happens to spirits who linger on Earth too long,” I shout, the anger in my voice surprising even me.
This
is what Lucio meant on my first night here when he said one of our spirits had escaped. The one he’s looking for, on the verge of going dark—it came from this lab. “The spirit of even the kindest person can turn dark. Can turn into a demon, just like the one who killed Anna and her father. The one who almost killed my mother.” I look at Aidan meaningfully.

“I would never have let anything happen to Kat,” he says softly.

“It sure didn’t look that way,” I mumble. “And whatever your work is, how could it be more important than whether my mom lives or dies? Your work isn’t more important than making sure that all of those spirits in there move on before they have a chance to escape and hurt someone else.”

“Yes,” Aidan says firmly. “It is.”

Despite the fact that not a single hair on his head is out of place, Aidan looks like a mad scientist. Someone who uses innocent people and spirits as his guinea pigs. Even if my frizzball is a mess and my clothes are wrinkled from hours of restless sleep,
he’s
the crazy one.

I stand and cross the hall, placing my hand on the door to his lab. I plant my feet firmly on the floor, then close my eyes and concentrate, trying to reach out to just one of the spirits on the other side of the door. I stretch my arms in front of me as though I think I can grab hold of them one at a time and help.

I should be able to do this.

I should be strong enough after everything I’ve learned.

I was strong enough to bring Anna to me.

A dozen voices fill my brain at once, but this time I’m able to pick out a single voice among the others. It’s not a spirit’s voice, but Aidan’s firmly shouting
No
. He pulls me away from the door before I collapse all over again.

“Lucio told me your theory,” I declare, opening my eyes. “You think luiseach are going extinct!”

Aidan nods calmly. “I do.”

“So shouldn’t we help as many spirits move on as possible while we’re still here?”

He shakes his head. “Think about it, Sunshine,” he says, patient as the best teachers have to be. “How will spirits move on when we’re no longer on this planet to help them?”

A lump rises in my throat. “I don’t know,” I whisper.

“Neither do I,” Aidan admits, his voice as even as ever. “But I’m determined to find a solution.”

He opens the door to his lab then quickly closes it behind him. I stand in the darkness, shocked that he’s just left me here, but then the door opens again, bringing a beam of light along with it. Aidan holds his flashlight out in front of him.

“Take this and go back to the house,” he says.

“Are you sending me to my room?” I ask. Like he’s a strict father, punishing me for sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. Is he going to try to ground me next?

Not that there’s anywhere to go around here.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Girl Talk

I
trudge back to my room with the stuffed owl in one hand and Aidan’s flashlight in the other. No. Not that this room feels like
mine,
but it’s the room with the bed that I sleep fitfully in. I feel ridiculously, absurdly, enormously homesick. Homesick for
Ridgemont,
not Austin, something I never really thought would happen. But they say home is where the heart is, and I guess my heart is in Ridgemont now. That’s where Mom is. And Nolan. Maybe even where Anna returned to after she left me behind.

I want to try to pull her close again, but I’m not strong enough after what happened across the courtyard. I wish Nolan were here. Wish I could share all of my questions with him. If anyone can make sense of Aidan’s senseless experiments and if anyone might be able to answer his answerless question—how will spirits move on without luiseach?—it’s Nolan. Or, at least, he’d be able to do the research that will get us closer to the answer. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out what Anna’s waiting for,
what the
right time
means. Maybe Nolan will be so intrigued by figuring all of these things out that he’ll forget he’s mad at me and that we haven’t actually spoken since I left Ridgemont.

I reach for my phone. There’s no reception in here, but I’ve been able to talk to Mom a few times by pacing the campus, holding the phone out in front of me until the bars in the upper right-hand corner go from zero to something, anything higher. I make my way out of the bedroom and to the stairs, almost tumbling down them altogether. I tighten my grip, suddenly terrified I might drop my phone, that it might shatter into a thousand pieces and my only link to the outside world would be broken.

Not that it’s much of a link because there’s no signal on the first floor either. I open the door and head outside. Dawn can’t be too far away; the tiniest pricks of sunlight are edging their way up into the sky. I pace back and forth, desperate for cell service.

I don’t want to take a single step toward the building where I know Aidan is tormenting spirits, so I head around to the back of the house.

Still no signal. I keep walking, into the jungle beyond the garden. I must be about fifty yards from the house, halfway up the hill with the playground on top by the time I’m finally able to make a call.

Ring. Ring. Ring
. There’s no answer. Maybe he’s still sleeping. I glance at the clock on my phone. Of
course
he’s still sleeping. It’s four in the morning back home. Maybe my call woke him up. But maybe once he saw who the call was coming from, he hit
ignore
. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to the girl who gets sick when she touches him.

But I need to talk to him! I need him to whip out his protector super-sleuth skills so we can find some answers. But then . . . am I just
using
him? What is he getting out of this friendship? Being a protector suddenly seems ridiculously unfair.

After the fifth ring, his voicemail picks up. How can I ask him for help when I’ve hurt him? I still haven’t found an answer when the telltale beep lets me know that it’s too late to hang up—his voicemail has already started recording.

“Um, hi,” I say. “It’s me. I mean, it’s Sunshine. I was just calling because—” Because why? Because I’m confused and alone and homesick? “Because there’s some really weird stuff going on down here. In Mexico. That’s where I am now. And I thought you might be able to . . . help. If you want to. You don’t have to, you know, just because you’re my protector. It’s just that”—I take a deep breath, surprised to feel a lump rising in my throat—“Aidan thinks that luiseach are going extinct. He’s doing these . . . experiments. I don’t understand any of it. And I’m not getting any better at handling multiple spirits. It’s all just a big”—I bite my lip, searching for the right word to describe just how bad it is—“a big
clustercuss
, you know? I mean, I know you don’t know, because we haven’t talked in a while.” The words I’ve been thinking for so long tumble out of my mouth before I can stop myself: “I wish you were here because—”

Beep.
Nolan’s voicemail cuts me off. Not that I knew exactly what I was going to say after
because
anyhow. A bird coos in the trees above me, and I slap at the mosquitoes that are threatening to eat me alive. Still, I don’t want to leave the forest yet. I want to take advantage of my link to the outside world while I’m standing in the one place in Llevar la Luz with a decent cell phone signal.

So I call my mom. Just hearing her say
Hello
makes me feel better. When Nolan didn’t pick up, it felt like my life back home was even farther out of my reach than it already was.

I can hear the beep of machines in the background, and I know she’s at the hospital, working the overnight shift. I close my eyes and imagine her walking down the brightly lit halls of the neonatal unit, her pink pastel-colored scrubs bringing out the red in her hair.

“Sunshine!” Mom exclaims when she hears my voice. “I haven’t talked to you in days.”

“Sorry,” I answer. “The service here sucks. And”—I pause, biting my lip—“I’ve been busy.”

“I guess that means you’re learning a lot.” She’s trying to sound casual and nonchalant, but I can detect the edge in her voice. She doesn’t want to hear that I still can’t manage even just two spirits on my own, let alone that I was face to face with a terrifying demon only hours ago. And no matter how much I want to tell her, no matter how much I want to sink to the ground and cry until she swears to rescue me from this terrible place, I can’t do that to her. I can’t make her even
more
worried than she already is.

“I
have
learned a lot,” I answer, hoping Mom can’t recognize the false brightness in my voice the way I did in hers. “Aidan is really nice.” That’s sort of true. I mean, he may be imprisoning spirits, but he also carried me across the hall from his dastardly lab and held me until I felt better.

“I’m so glad to hear it.” Mom sounds so relieved that it even makes me feel calmer.

“I miss you, though.” The lump that appeared when I called Nolan rises even higher in my throat.

“I miss you too, baby,” Mom answers. “So much.”

“Up to the moon and back?” I ask, an old game of ours.

“No,” Mom says. “Moon’s too close. I miss you to Mars and back.”

“I miss you to the sun and back.”

I hear her name being called from somewhere on the other end of the line.

“I’m so sorry, sweetie. I’ve got to go.”

“Okay.” I bite my lip to keep from crying. “I love you.”

“I love you too. To the moon and the sun and Pluto and around the world and back again.”

After she hangs up, I take a deep breath and turn around, knowing the mansion is just beyond the trees in front of me. I’m not ready to go back there, not yet. I just want a few more minutes of reaching out to people in the real world. I mean, it was nice to hear a familiar voice when Anna arrived, but that’s not exactly the kind of girl talk that makes a person feel like she’s on the right side of
normal
.

So I dial Ashley’s number, even though she’s definitely sleeping. If I’m right about what time zone I’m in, it’s the same time in Austin as it is here. Ashley will pick up; she sleeps with her phone under her pillow even though her parents have begged her not to—she doesn’t want to miss out on anything.

“Sunshine!” she shouts groggily. “I haven’t talked to you in ages!”

“I know. I’m sorry. There isn’t good cell reception where I am.”

“Where are you?” she asks, and I remember Ashley thinks I’m still in Ridgemont. I look down at the moist dirt staining my sneakers. I can’t tell her the truth. Or, anyway, I can’t tell her the
whole
truth.

“I’m in Mexico,” I say finally. “I, um, I found my birth father, and he brought me down here—he lives here—so we could . . . get to know each other better.”

“What?” Ashley sounds wide awake now. I imagine her sitting up in bed, her straight blonde hair just as perfect at the crack of dawn as it was when she fell asleep last night, not a hint of frizz anywhere. “You found your birth father? I didn’t even know you were
looking
for your birth father.”

“I wasn’t. I guess he found me.”

“Are you okay?” Ashley sounds so kind and loving and concerned that I actually sink down to the ground in gratitude, even though it means literally sitting in a pile of mud. Finally I let my tears spill over.

“I’m kind of okay. I mean, he’s nothing like I ever thought he would be. He’s . . .” There’s no word for what he is, so I say, “He’s odd.”

“Has he told you why he gave you up?” she asks gently.

“Not exactly,” I answer honestly, sniffling. “I think he thought it would be better for me somehow.”

“That’s good, right?” Ashley offers gently, and I nod. I never thought of it that way, but maybe she’s right: it was
good
of Aidan to give me up.

I shake myself like our dog Oscar after a bath. “Can we please talk about something normal?” I beg. “Let’s talk about you. Tell me the latest between you and Cory Cooper.”

“Oh my gosh, Sunshine. We totally broke up.”

“What?” I yelp. “Last I heard you were so excited to kiss him on New Year’s Eve!”

“I was,” Ashley concedes. “But it turns out having a boyfriend isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I shrug. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe not yet.” I can practically hear her smiling. “But you’re going to.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Haven’t I always told you I’m wise beyond my years?”

I shake my head. “I literally don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that.”

“Well, maybe I haven’t said it out loud, but I
think
it all the time.”

I laugh out loud, and on her end of the phone—all the way in Austin, Texas, in her pretty room where we used to have sleepovers and movie nights and study sessions—Ashley does too.