The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) (24 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The Awakening

I
wake up on the front porch, my teeth still chattering. What just happened? How did I end up out here? Am I dead—is this just my spirit escaping all that chaos?

I look down at my body. It’s still there. I rub my hands together, still cold. I exhale, and vapor floats out of my mouth. I feel my heartbeat, faster than it should be, but at least it doesn’t feel like my heart is about to explode anymore.

I’m still inside my body. I’m still alive.

“Sunshine?” I look up. Lucio is crouched beside me. Nolan stands over him. “Are you okay?”

There’s no way to answer that question, so I counter with one of my own: “What happened?”

Lucio looks up at Nolan like he’s asking a question. Nolan nods. “Helena couldn’t go through with it,” Lucio says finally.

“Couldn’t go through with it?” I echo.

“She couldn’t kill you,” Nolan answers. As always, he provides the information I need to complete the picture. Helena
couldn’t kill her own daughter—the girl who shares her hair and her mouth, the girl who is exactly her height.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nolan says, reaching down and pulling me up to stand. I immediately feel queasy. Guess our kiss couldn’t break the spell completely.

“We wouldn’t get much farther than the edge of Victoria’s front yard.” Lucio nods toward the street in front of us.

Nolan can’t feel it, but Lucio and I can. Helena arranged all the spirits that were criss-crossing Victoria’s living room into a ring around the house. They’re lined up around Victoria’s house like a fence.

“We never covered this particular trick in my lessons,” I say to Lucio.

“I don’t think Aidan actually knows how to do this.”

“I guess he wasn’t the only one who spent the past sixteen years doing research.”

“Guess not,” Lucio agrees.

“Will someone please tell me what the heck is going on here?” Nolan can’t see or feel the spirits. He might even be able to walk right through them if he wanted to. I explain that we’re surrounded. “Helena is holding us prisoner,” I finish.

In unison we look back at the house. The front door is open wide. We can hear Aidan and Helena shouting at each other.

“Now we know why he made Anna my test.” I don’t know why I’m speaking so softly; it’s not like they’d be able to hear me over the sound of their own voices. “He needed her spirit to be part of this.” Lucio and Nolan both nod.

“I’ve never heard him yell like that,” Lucio says softly. “Not even at you,” he adds with a smile. Nolan doesn’t seem pleased with Lucio’s inside joke.

“The darkness is growing stronger,” Helena shouts. “There isn’t a moment to waste.”

“Then why didn’t you eliminate her when you had the chance? You must still believe—”

“Belief has nothing to do with it.”

Aidan doesn’t respond. Helena’s voice is calm, even when she says, “There’s no one left on your side but a powerless woman and an orphan boy.” Lucio flinches. I place a hand on his forearm.

“There may be fewer of us, but that doesn’t make us wrong,” Aidan counters.

“They could go on like this all night,” I whisper breathlessly.

“All night?” Lucio laughs, but there’s no joy in it. “They could go on like this
forever
.”

I glance at Nolan, pressing my hands to my lips. Blood still drips from the wound on his right temple, and even though I can’t see them, I know his arms are bruised beneath his jacket. This isn’t the first time he’s been hurt because of me. The shouting inside the house grows louder.

I might be able to put an end to all of this. Repair the rift, protect Nolan, protect Kat, protect the entire human race. I shiver, shoving my hands in my pockets to keep warm, wrapping my fingers around what’s inside.

“Nolan, I have something for you.” I slide a wrinkled piece of paper from my back pocket.

“That’s Aidan’s map!” Lucio exclaims, recognizing it at once.

“I thought Nolan might be able to make some sense out of it.”

Nolan immediately starts scanning it with his eyes. “Four places, four dates?” he murmurs thoughtfully.

“Those are the four dates and places across the globe where
one luiseach has died suddenly.” Lucio hesitates before adding, “One luiseach every four years since Sunshine was born.”

I gasp. Nolan’s face looks grave, but he keeps his eyes focused on the map in his hands. Just as I thought, Nolan will make sense of the map. And now that he and Lucio are both distracted, it’s time for me to act.

I take a step backward, away from my friends.

Did the spirits in Aidan’s lab really move on without help after I left? Or was Helena right when she accused Aidan of lying? I shake my head. After what happened inside Victoria’s house, I know that it doesn’t matter whether or not Aidan was lying.

I’m not strong enough to help all the spirits in the world.

Aidan was wrong. I’m not the luiseach to end all luiseach.

And if he’s
wrong,
then isn’t the next logical conclusion that Helena is
right?
That just by existing, I’m preventing the birth of more luiseach? And one thing is certain: the world
needs
more luiseach. Since my birth our numbers have diminished even further. No births, and now—thanks to the map—I know that there have also been deaths.

It only stands to reason that if I weren’t here, luiseach would have a better chance of survival. Nolan and Lucio are too busy poring over the map to notice I’m walking away from them.

Suddenly the sound of screeching brakes pulls me from my thoughts. Ashley’s car squeals to a stop across the street. She hasn’t even turned off the engine when Mom comes bolting out of the passenger side.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Falling

M
om freezes halfway across the street. For a second I think that the spirit force field has stopped her somehow, but then I see the look on her face. She’s staring at me, and she doesn’t like what she sees. She can tell that her daughter nearly had the life squeezed out of her.

Just by looking at me, Mom can see that everything is wrong.

“What’s going on?” she shouts furiously. She sent me away with Aidan so I could get stronger, and here I am, looking (I assume, as I can’t see myself) every bit as bad as I did that day in the hospital parking lot. Worse, probably.

“Where is he?” Mom shouts. “I’m going to give him—” I shake my head before she can say
a piece of my mind.
There was a time when all I wanted was to give Aidan a piece of my mind, back when he was just my nameless, faceless mentor. That was before I realized how horribly spooky that expression is. And
before Aidan was an actual person with a name and a personality and an inexorable link to me.

“Sunshine!” Mom gasps, still frozen in place. “I don’t understand any of this, but I—”

“I love you too,” I call out before she can finish. My second time saying those words today. They’re so small—just one syllable each—but they sound enormous to me.

Mom is the first person I ever loved, but she’s not the last. I love Nolan, and I love Ashley. I love Victoria and Anna, and given time, I think I might have loved Aidan and Lucio and even Helena too. At least now I know that some part of her loved me. The part that couldn’t kill me.

I step onto the lawn, then turn to glance back at the Victorian house behind me. Lucio stands on the front porch, shivering not just because spirits are near but because of the Ridgemont chill. Maybe he’s never seen snow, just like the tall man from Lado Selva.

Nolan tears the map in half and flips one side to the other, rearranging the order of countries from left to right. He starts tracing invisible lines with his fingers from one red circle to another, his brain working to connect the mysterious luiseach deaths as Lucio watches over, answering any of Nolan’s questions that he can.

Through the front door I see Aidan’s profile. His face is contorted painfully, and his perfect hair has fallen across his forehead, but he’s too distracted to push it back in place. He looks like he’s fighting for his life. Actually, I guess he’s fighting for
mine.
Everything he’s done for the past sixteen years—all that research, allowing himself to become completely isolated—has been to save my life. With every failure he was reminded that I might have to die.

I turn around. Mom seems to have regained the ability to move because she’s finally stepping across the invisible—and, to her, imperceptible—spirit fence and onto Victoria’s front lawn. Just a few more steps and she’ll be next to me, putting her arms around me and whispering that everything’s going to be all right.

But it’s not. Not unless I do this.

I reach into my back pocket and grab the knife. It’s become a torch and a thunderstorm for me before. I just hope it will become what I need now.

On the porch behind me Nolan begins to slump over, still weak from Helena’s torture. He leans heavily against a pillar, panting. Blood drips from the wound on the left side of his face. I’m aware of each individual
drip, drip, drip
as his blood lands onto the map now laying on the ground below him.

A thought flashes across Nolan’s face, and he leans down and draws a fifth circle on the map, using his blood that has pooled up below him. It looks like he’s tracing the circle right where we are on the map, in Ridgemont.

Lucio reaches out a hand to steady Nolan, slumped over the map. Lucio, who stayed by Aidan’s side. Whose parents died for
the greater good
.

I finally understand: They didn’t die just to keep
me
safe. They believed they were keeping the
world
safe, because they believed Aidan was right and Helena was wrong.

Saving the world is
the greater good
. Maybe it’s the greatest good there is.

Nolan’s tawny hair falls across his amber eyes, the way it always does when he’s figuring something out. With Ridgemont as the fifth circle, Nolan traces lines between the five circles on the map, using his blood-link ink. It looks like he’s drawing a star.

Suddenly he looks up, and I know he’s figured out what I’m about to do.

“No!” he shouts. He tries to run down the stairs, but in his current condition he isn’t fast enough.

I throw the knife onto the ground. The earth splits open at my feet, leaving an unbridgeable chasm between Nolan and me. Now he won’t be able to stop me.

The knife materializes against my sneakers. Its work isn’t done yet. I turn back to Mom. The ground shook as it opened up, and she’s fallen onto her hands and knees.

“Sunshine, what are you doing?”

“You said you’d support me no matter what.”

Her face twists with shock. Mom
always
understands what I’m talking about. “I can’t support
this
,” she counters, tears streaming down her face. I pick up the knife and throw it into the ground a second time.

Once more the ground opens up, this time on the other side of me. Now Mom can’t reach me either. I’m standing on an island all alone.

Standing next to her pretty blue car across the street, Ashley screams. Maybe she’s trying to make sense out of this—maybe she thinks it’s an earthquake or some kind of natural disaster, not a paranormal weapon at work. Everyone else knows better.

Aidan and Helena run onto the front porch, followed by Victoria, drawn by the sound of the earth breaking in two. Mom’s eyes go wide at the sight of my old art teacher—I never actually told her Victoria was still alive.

“Sunshine!” Aidan shouts. “What are you doing?” He looks nearly as horrified as Mom, his voice every bit as desperate.

Despite the space that divides me from everyone else, I’m suddenly,
blissfully
aware of all the love that surrounds me. It
practically emanates from each of my friends and family, almost like how it feels when a spirit touches me. But instead of making me cold, this love envelopes me with warmth. Even Helena’s face—the face of the woman who wanted me
eliminated
for so many years—looks different. Except for our eyes, she looks more like my mirror image than ever.

Aidan was right about one thing: I
feel
everything. I never could hide my emotions. Mom always said I’d make a terrible gambler. Love is written all across my face. Love is all I feel.

What I do next comes as easily as water flowing downstream. I focus on the electricity in the air, on all the spirits surrounding us. Hundreds more join us within moments. This time their lives and their deaths don’t overwhelm me. This time my feelings are strong enough to overwhelm
them.
They feel what I’m feeling: love. Feeding off my emotions, the spirits spark a windstorm ten times stronger than what happened at Llevar la Luz, when all I could feel was anger.

The love I feel at this moment is so much more powerful than my rage was then.

The spirits and I work together. They swirl around me, lifting me. They raise me up above Mom, Nolan, Lucio, Aidan, Helena, Ashley, and Victoria, wonder written plainly on their faces. They shout as I go higher and higher, but the wind is so loud, I can’t make out the words they’re saying.

I won’t linger. There is no unfinished business waiting down there for me. Once the spirits have lifted me high enough, I begin to help them move on, sending them all my love.

I feel serene, just like the spirits releasing their bonds to Earth. Before, I struggled with helping multiple spirits move on because I repressed my emotions. But right now helping hundreds of spirits move on at once is as easy and natural as taking my next breath.

I’ve become a luiseach unlike any other.

The wind ceases, and there is a moment when everything is still. Time moves in slow motion as I begin to fall. Gravity starts pulling me down, down, down, and time slows. What happens to luiseach when we die? Nolan never came across
that
in his research. Do we move on, as humans do? Do we go dark if we linger too long?

I look down toward my friends and family, shouting my name: Lucio, with the tiniest hint of an accent; Ashley, high pitched and terrified (I hope someone will explain this to her when it’s over); Victoria, mournful and melodic; Helena, hoarse and surprised; Aidan, solemn and deep.

And Mom. She crawls toward the edge of the chasm, reaching out to me, but the space between us is too wide. Her voice doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before. She sounds like she’s outside of herself somehow, but not the way she was when the demon possessed her. This sound is unmistakably
human
. It’s the sound of anguish.

Then Nolan, clear as a bell.

He holds up the map so I can see it. I look at the lines he traced between the circles. The last circle around Ridgemont is the final point on a perfect five-pointed star.

“Someone was expecting another luiseach death in Ridgemont!” he shouts loud enough for me to hear. “Someone
organized
this!”

Lucio said the darkness was organized.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a gray-black blur in the distance. A man surrounded in shadow. I’ve seen him before. Seen his black coat and wide-brimmed hat. Seen his face. The face of the darkness.

He’s been watching all of this.

He’s been waiting for it.

He wants me to die here today.

My death will complete whatever powerful spell the darkness has been conjuring up. A spell that stretches the world over.
I was wrong about all of this.

Suddenly, instead of peace, I’m filled with terror. Instead of falling in slow motion, I’m accelerating toward the ground rapidly. The fear of death consumes me. My ears ring as the pressure of making such a terrible mistake builds inside my head. I thought I was freeing the world of my burden on it, on everyone, but my death will only make things worse. The voices of the people I love fade, and suddenly I’m alone as I fall toward a mistake of my own making.

The chasm below me opens even wider, deeper into the earth. I look down. Swirling at the center of the chasm below me is a whirlpool of darkness. No, not just darkness. Dark
spirits.
Hundreds, thousands of demons are waiting for me down there.

Terrified, I close my eyes. In my mind’s eye I see an enormous white owl flying toward me. No, not flying: a little girl is throwing a stuffed animal up and down, laughing as its cotton wings flap back and forth in the breeze.

Her youthful voice calls my name, getting louder, following me down. But why? Anna can’t stop me from falling. She’s a spirit, nothing more than a presence beside me. She can’t take shape, can’t hang onto me, can’t pull my weight upward against gravity to save me.

I gasp as Anna’s ice-cold hands twine their fingers through mine.

And pull.