The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) (14 page)
Read The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) Online
Authors: Paige McKenzie
“I
’ll draw you a bath,” Lucio offers later.
Draw you a bath.
A phrase that doesn’t exist outside of old novels. Except, apparently it does for me.
Lucio fills the tub in the bathroom on the second floor until it’s nearly overflowing with warm water.
“You should let it cool down a little before you get in,” he says, lingering in the doorway. “Too much heat might be a shock to your system.”
I nod. I haven’t said an actual sentence since we got back to the house. My throat is so hoarse from screaming that I’m not sure what I’ll sound like.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Lucio says, shifting from one foot to the other awkwardly, like he’s feeling shy.
“Lucio?” I manage to croak before he walks away. He turns back to face me.
“You said you’ve lived in Llevar la Luz all your life, right?”
Slowly he nods. I think he knows what I’m getting at.
“You would have been one year old,” I say finally.
He nods again. “I remember the sound of them screaming,” he says.
“The women?” I prompt. “When they miscarried?” Lucio hesitates, and I add, “I can handle it. I promise.”
He takes a deep breath. “I’ve never heard anything like it since. Not until today,” he adds, gesturing to my neck. To the raw, red, exhausted throat beneath. “I crawled into the living room downstairs,” he continues. “My parents thought I was sleeping.” I imagine Lucio crawling, following the sound of arguing voices. Hiding behind one of the enormous antique chairs. “When my mom saw me crouched in a corner, she carried me back to my room, even though I kicked and screamed bloody murder.”
I smile. “Sounds like you were a real angel.”
“Let’s just say I had a strong sense of self from an early age.”
“Right.”
“But my mom never lost her patience with me, not even that night, with everything that was going on. She put me to bed and sang to me until I fell asleep.” He smiles softly at the memory, then swallows it away. “But I didn’t stay sleeping for long. That night I had a nightmare that would recur for weeks.”
“What did you dream?”
He doesn’t answer right away, like he’s not sure he should tell me.
“Say it,” I plead. Steam rises from the bathtub behind me.
“I dreamed about Helena squeezing a tiny baby so tight, it was like she was squeezing the life out of her. I dreamed she was trying to kill you.”
I shake my head. “Aidan said he was the one who offered to do it.”
Lucio shrugs. “I know. But I was a baby. I probably heard one thing and imagined that I saw another, you know?”
“Sure.”
“Anyhow, I have to go.”
I nod, knowing that in a few minutes I’ll hear the familiar roar of Lucio’s motorcycle, Clementine, taking off the way it does every day as he tracks the missing spirit.
“Any luck?”
Lucio shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“But it still hasn’t turned dark, right?”
“I’m not sure,” he admits. Before I can say anything—and I was about to say something along the lines of
What do you mean you’re not sure? Does the demon we saw have something to do with all this? Is it here to help turn the lost spirit dark?
—Lucio says, “It looks like your bath is the right temperature now.” He gestures to the tub behind me. I glance at the still water and am suddenly aware of the ache in my muscles, more intense than anything I’ve felt before. I guess I never had to work as hard as I did today.
“Thanks,” I say as Lucio closes the bathroom door behind him. I listen to his footsteps fade as he walks through the hallway and down the stairs. Then I undress and sink beneath the warm water until my own splashing is the only sound I can hear.
It’s the first time I’ve taken a bath since I learned how Anna died.
After my bath, I change into sweatpants and a sweatshirt I stole from Mom months ago. I grab the owl from the nursery and stick my head outside the open window in my bedroom. I try to concentrate. Try to focus. But instead of Anna, when I close
my eyes, the same images I saw in Aidan’s lab play out in my mind’s eye.
Aidan is right. I can’t focus. Because all I can see is the lives led by the spirits I couldn’t help.
If I can’t even help the spirit of one little girl move on before she turns dark, how will I ever help all of them?
I slam the window shut. Well,
slam
is a bit of an overstatement. My muscles are about as useful as rubber at the moment, so it’s more like I struggle to get the window about halfway shut and then give up, leaving the stuffed owl on the windowsill.
Eliminate.
Quietly I say the word out loud. Then again, louder this time. Helena isn’t the only one trying to eliminate something. Aidan wants to eliminate the need for luiseach. And he thinks I might be the key to that elimination. Just like
The Last Luiseach
and
The Luiseach to End All Luiseach,
it sounds like the name of a movie, a summer blockbuster:
The Eliminator.
Lucio carried me down the stairs from Aidan’s lab and out into the sunlight today. As we crossed the courtyard, Aidan said, “We’ll try again tomorrow.” My throat was so sore from screaming that I didn’t protest, even though I was literally too frozen in place to be useful in his lab today. If Aidan is wrong, then my . . .
elimination
could save the luiseach species so that they could go on protecting the human race like they have for millennia.
I
will
try again tomorrow. Because if we can’t eliminate the need for luiseach in Aidan’s lab, then . . .
I shake my head. Aidan will never let Helena eliminate me.
Will he?
What a stroke of genius it was to invoke the name Abner Jones; the boy seems more than a little in awe of Aidan’s old friend. Each afternoon I come to the coffee shop on Main Street bearing news of another revelation from Professor Jones’s files. (No matter that I make them up as I go along.) Nolan takes frantic notes, hanging on my every word. He pretends his interest is just academic, like mine, and I pretend to believe him. I pretend that I don’t know that he’s trying to make sense of everything that’s happened to him since he met the girl he’s now tied to.
I think the boy will be particularly excited about today’s discovery.
“So,” I begin my lie, twirling my curly hair around my finger like I’m unsure of myself, “the university said they can’t find most of Professor Jones’s files anymore. His wife must have taken them when he died or something.”
“Or something,” Nolan murmurs, trying to hide a knowing grin.
“But they did manage to find a couple of boxes in their archives, and they let me take them. I think they were glad to get rid of them, honestly.” I pause and smile. Reminding him that other people don’t care about these
things like we do is an opportunity to strengthen our bond. “Anyway, I keep coming across these words in Professor Jones’s files that I don’t understand.”
“What kind of words?” Nolan asks. He shifts in his seat as though he knows what’s coming.
“Well, it’s strange. I see the words mentor and protector—and obviously I recognize those words—but they’re always used in reference to a word I’ve never seen before: luiseach.” I pronounce the word incorrectly on purpose, pretending not to notice the way the extra syllables make Nolan squirm.
“You’ve never heard that word before, have you?” I ask innocently.
Nolan doesn’t answer, so I go on talking. “In one of the professor’s notebooks he writes that relationships between luiseach and their protectors are often incredibly intense. Like, their bond is stronger than the bond between parents and their children, between brothers and sisters.”
“So it’s like a familial kind of bond?” Nolan breaks in.
“Not exactly,” I say. “At least, not according to the professor’s notes. Sometimes the intensity of their connection can lead to romance.” Nolan can’t hide his discomfort: he presses his hands onto the table and tosses his hair away from his face and shifts in his chair.
“You’re sure the professor’s notes said romance?” he asks.
“Definitely,” I answer. “He made it sound really intense. Like protectors and their luiseach literally can’t keep their hands off each other.” I sigh wistfully, resting my chin on my palm. Nolan lifts his hand off the table, flexing and releasing it restlessly. “I have no idea what all of it means, but it sure sounds romantic, doesn’t it?”
Nolan leans back in his chair, raising his arms up like he’s given up. “I have never been this confused in my entire life,” he says miserably.
I blink innocently. “What do you mean? Because of the word luiseach? I’m sure I can find some sort of explanation for that word in Professor Jones’s notes. I just need to keep digging.”
“No,” Nolan answers. “I don’t mean because of the word luiseach.” He pronounces it correctly.
“Then what?” I ask.
Nolan takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. I sense the instant he decides to tell me everything.
I
spend every day in Aidan’s lab, every evening soaking in a tub of warm water, and every night tossing and turning with nightmares while Lucio is out hunting the missing spirit and Aidan is back to his lab to write about what happened during the day in his log.
“Does luiseach work always wear you out like this?” I ask Lucio as I take a bite of soggy cereal one morning. (It’s so humid here that Cheerios lose their crunch even before you add any milk.) I’m so hot that my skin itches, even though I know a world of cold waits for me in Aidan’s lab like a paranormally powered air conditioner.
He shakes his head. “Just the opposite, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, think about how you feel when you help a spirit move on.”
I sigh dramatically. “It’s been so long that I can barely remember.”
“Sure you can,” Lucio counters with a smile, and of course he’s right. Because helping a spirit move on usually feels
wonderful.
“All luiseach gain strength from helping spirits move on.”
I nod. Luiseach literally means
light-bringer
; I never feel quite so much light as when a spirit has just passed through me to the other side. But now every day at Aidan’s lab I’m not just overwhelmed by spirits; I’m also resisting my instincts: all I want is to help them move on, and I can’t allow myself to so much as try. I feel like the least sunshine-y version of myself. I don’t know how Aidan has done this for so long, though I guess it explains why he seems to be the world’s most serious luiseach. It explains Victoria too: by the time I knew her, she had given up her powers and was unable to follow the instincts that had guided her since her sixteenth birthday—so she was a whole lot creepier than she was cheerful.
“After so many days of
not
helping spirits move on, I think my light is about to go out.”
Lucio smiles sympathetically. “I know it’s hard.” He drums his fingers on the table across from me. I watch the white tattoo dance on his finger as he moves.
“What does it say?” I ask finally.
“What does what say?”
“Your tattoo.” I point with my spoon. “I can tell that it’s words, but I don’t know what they are or what they mean.”
“They’re not really words,” Lucio explains. “They’re names.”
“Whose?”
“My parents.” He reaches his arm across the table and spreads his fingers so I can see. “Argi,” he says, tracing the letters on one side. “That’s my mother. And Jairo,” he adds, turning his hand. “That’s my dad.”
When he says the names out loud, I finally understand something that eluded me before now. How did I not put the pieces together sooner? If Nolan were here, he’d have figured it out ages ago.
Lucio said that his parents were killed for what they believed in, that luiseach on the other side of the rift were interrogating them for information. But Argi and Jairo kept their secret. And now I finally understand that their secret was
me
. They must have ventured outside the borders of Llevar la Luz, where Helena found them and overpowered them, trying to force them to reveal where I was. They died rather than give me up.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, tears springing to my eyes.
“Not your fault,” Lucio answers firmly. His hand is still splayed on the table in front of me, and I put my own on top of it. His fingers lace their way through mine. I squeeze. “It was for the greater good.” I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallows. “Our work is more important than two people’s lives, even if those two people were my parents.”
I blink away the tears trying to work their way to the surface; it doesn’t seem right that I should be crying when Lucio isn’t. Maybe Aidan is right: my sensitivity is a weakness. I don’t think I could be as strong as Lucio. I don’t think I could give my mother up for anything.
“I can ask Aidan to give you a day off,” Lucio offers. “You don’t look so good,” he adds, with a grin, trying to make a joke. “Your hair seems to have taken on a life of its own.”
I reach up and pat my frizzball. I’m pretty sure it’s growing straight out from my scalp instead of, you know, down my back like other people’s. “My hair has
always
had a life of its own. I’m pretty sure it regularly goes on adventures that I’m not a part of.”
“Like when you’re sleeping, it just walks away and heads to the nearest town to party with the locals?”
I nod. “Exactly. Then before I can wake up, it plops itself right back on my head, too tired from living a life more exciting than mine to bother trying to look halfway presentable.”
Lucio laughs, but I shake my head, standing up so quickly that my chair falls to the floor beneath me. I shouldn’t be sitting here having fun. Not when people like Lucio’s parents died to protect me. I decide that there will be no days off and no more complaints about how hard this is. The very least I can do in return is try my best.
“Where are you going?” Lucio asks.
“To work,” I answer quickly. I practically run out the front door, hoping Lucio won’t follow because I can’t staunch my tears any longer and I don’t want him to see me crying.
Who am I to be so protected? What is my life up against Lucio’s parents or Aidan’s or all of these spirits he’s forcing to remain on Earth?
I open the door to Aidan’s lab, and the spirits take hold all at once.
My teeth are chattering as I finally begin to understand: Lucio doesn’t think he lost his parents for any
one
life. He thinks that protecting me—saving me—will save
every
thing. Everyone. And that’s bigger to him than a few lives lost along the way.
But only if Aidan is right about me.
I close my eyes. Last night my hot bath was waiting for me the instant I arrived at the mansion. I undressed, my muscles sore from the effort of staying upright. I thought I’d never want to take another bath again after I learned how Anna died, but for the past few days I’ve luxuriated in the warm water. Before I
stepped into the tub, I paused to stare at myself in the mirror. I studied the bulge of my biceps and triceps, the shadow of a six-pack across my belly. I never knew I would be this strong. After all, klutzes like me are rarely athletic, right?
Despite my new muscles, I felt weaker than ever before. Each day, no matter how I beg these spirits to move on, no matter how I plead with them to come to me only one at a time, I can’t gain control. They overtake me every time.
I submerged my head under the bathwater, trying to literally drown out the sound of the voice in my head reminding me each and every day that I’m a failure.
Today I know Lucio’s parents died because they believed in Aidan’s theories, because they believed in
me
.
I open my eyes. I’m sitting on the floor outside Aidan’s lab; Aidan is crouching on the ground beside me. He must have dragged me here after I failed once more.
“
Again
,” I say, peeling myself off the floor for the umpteenth time. I will do this all day long until the sun goes down and my fingers are blue and my tear ducts have frozen shut. “I’m ready to try again.”