The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl) (2 page)

Right, it’s time to drive.
As I shift the car into drive and pull out of the parking lot, Nolan’s tousled sandy hair is visible in my rearview mirror. He must have taken off his hat, and I can’t help but smile. It doesn’t occur to me that this might be the last time I smile for a very long time.

CHAPTER TWO

Emergency

T
hese aren’t nice, pretty, baby flurries. They’re big, fat, wet snowflakes, so heavy that the windshield wipers can barely move across the glass in front of me. The already intimidating drive from Ridgemont High to Mom’s hospital has turned downright treacherous. I inch along at a snail’s pace, which gives me plenty of time to think about the fact that the drive isn’t the only reason I’m not looking forward to picking Mom up. I mean, I’m definitely looking forward to the picking-her-up part; it’s the
hospital
part I’m not so crazy about.

I never used to be queasy about hospitals. Mom was—is—a neonatal nurse, and when I was a baby, I was a regular at the hospital’s day care back in Austin. Later, when Mom’s schedule was crazy and she couldn’t find a sitter for me after school, sometimes I’d hang out at the nurse’s station, quietly doing my homework. I got used to the sound of sirens and crying babies and even doctors and nurses shouting for aid.

But everything’s different now. The last time I was at this hospital I helped a spirit move on. In fact, it was my very first time helping a spirit move on. But that’s not what’s making me drive even slower than the slowest of cars on the road in front of me; it’s the fact that the last time I was at this hospital was also the day they told me Victoria was dead. Hearing those words was like a punch to the gut, like I’d never catch my breath again.

My thoughts are drowned out by the sound of sirens screaming. Ambulance after ambulance comes careening out of the hospital parking lot, and I’m barely able to pull into a spot before it starts.

It’s just one spirit at first. A young man who died seconds ago, a victim of a multiple-car pile-up on the freeway I just left behind. His name is Matt, and he’s sitting in the passenger seat beside me, his piercing blue eyes unwavering as he stares at me. He died from some sort of major trauma to his torso. I try not to let my gaze drift down to his midsection. I know seeing his wounds will be terrifying, so instead, I stare back into his eyes, which are filled with sadness. His was the car that started it. His bald tires skidded over a slick patch, drifting across the median and into oncoming traffic. I can feel the tremendous guilt saturating his spirit; he won’t know peace until he moves on.

But before I can help him, I feel something else. Another spirit. A woman this time, Kimberly, who’s only a few years older than I am. She’s standing beside the driver’s side door waiting for me. Her injuries don’t look as traumatic as Matt’s, but blood is dripping from her ear. A head injury killed her, mostly hidden by her hair.

Two spirits this close to me, this quickly, is overwhelming. Even though heat is blasting from the vents behind the steering
wheel, it’s suddenly so cold in here that I can see my own breath coming out in hyper little pants because my heart is pounding, beating faster than it ever has before.

Another spirit is near. I gasp at what I see and look away as quickly as I can. His wounds are horrific. No one told me I’d see spirits in such graphic detail. But then again, I’ve been avoiding my mentor, the one person who can tell me things like that. Before I have time to process what’s happening, another spirit is here, waiting for my help. I can’t see Matt anymore, the man whose bald tires caused this tragedy. I want desperately to help him move on, but I can’t find him. I can only feel the overwhelming cold from all of them at once. I sink into the gray upholstery of my seat as though someone has placed an enormous weight around my neck, pressing me down, down, down.

I’ve never known cold like this before. I should have zipped my jacket before I got in the car, should have put on the multicolored crocheted hat and gloves that are sitting uselessly in my backpack in the backseat. I should have put on boots with thick socks instead of my sneakers when I got dressed this morning. I should have borrowed Nolan’s ridiculous hat.

I manage to focus on my fingers, still gripping the wheel, and I’m not surprised when I see they’re turning blue at the knuckles. I try to catch my breath, but it’s run away without me. I can’t keep my eyes open; I’ve been deprived of oxygen for too long, and I’m about to pass out. Mustering whatever strength I have left, I press down on the horn as hard as I can, like I think I can scare the spirits away.

Mom opens the door on the passenger side, and my overworked heart leaps. “Didn’t want to run out in the snow to pick up your poor old mom so you just honked the horn?” she
says with a smile that fades away the instant she sees the state I’m in.

“Sunshine!” she shouts, reaching across the car and putting her warm fingers on my neck. When she feels my pulse, she pulls back for a second in shock. But then she goes right into nurse-mode. She unclicks my seatbelt and pulls me across the car and onto my back on the snowy ground. She starts performing CPR and somehow manages to get the attention of the EMTs across the lot at the same time. The next thing I know, I’m on a gurney being wheeled into the hospital, my mother squeezing one of those airbags I’ve only ever seen on television, trying to breathe air back into my lungs.

If I could talk, I’d tell her it’s no use. The doctors can’t help me; they’re not qualified to treat this kind of thing. Thanks to Nolan’s research, I know that a luiseach like me can’t be killed by a dark spirit, but I find myself wondering whether an onslaught of light spirits can kill me. I’m panting so hard that my lungs ache. The doctors and nurses are shouting around me as I’m wheeled into the ER and hooked up to their tubes and machines.

“We need to stabilize her heart!”

“We need to raise her body temperature!”

“We need to figure out why the heck an otherwise healthy sixteen-year-old girl just got wheeled into the ER with hypothermia and cardiac arrhythmia.”

Okay, maybe they didn’t shout that last one. But it’s not difficult to guess it’s what they’re all thinking.

In all the chaos, as I drift in and out of consciousness, I can feel the warmth coming from my mother’s touch. Her hand on my arm is a tiny source of heat keeping me connected to the world of the living, a small flame in the darkness. Suddenly I
have a better understanding of what it must be like for the spirits who find me after they pass.

And then, it all stops. Not the flurry of physicians around me but the pounding in my chest, the freezing of my extremities. The sound of the heart monitor they’d hooked me up to shifts from a screeching wail into a steady beep. The warming blankets they’d packed around me feel too hot; in a snap I go from shivering to sweating.

The weight on my shoulders lifts. The spirits have vanished. My tunnel vision fades, and everything is bright again. Mom slips out of nurse-mode and back into mom-mode. She shoves the machines aside and leans down over me, wrapping me up in a tight hug.

“Mom,” I gasp. “I just started breathing again. I don’t think smothering me is the best idea.” I expect her to laugh at my joke, but instead she goes on hugging me, her cheek pressed against mine. I can feel that her face is wet with tears.

“I’m okay,” I say, and she finally releases me. She turns to face the doctors surrounding my bed, each of them looking more baffled than the last.

“What happened to my daughter?”

“We don’t know, Kat,” someone answers. I look at his ID tag and see his name is Dr. Steele. The same last name as Lucy from
Sense and Sensibility
by Jane Austen. Apparently with my vital signs back to normal—I think—I’m back to relating my life to the stories of my favorite writer. At least some things never change.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mom stands, looking confused. “There has to be an explanation for an episode of this magnitude.”

I close my eyes. There’s an explanation all right, just not one my mother—or pretty much anyone—would believe. Like most people—like me, before the past four months—Mom believes in science and reason, not magic and mystery. I couldn’t convince her our house was haunted even after a demon had taken possession of her body. Especially after the demon possessed her.

“We’d like to admit her for observation,” Dr. Steele offers finally. “You can stay with her overnight.”

“Of course I’m going to stay with her,” Mom snaps, and I actually feel kind of sorry for Dr. Steele. It’s not his fault he doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. Not his fault he’ll never be able to answer my mother’s questions to her satisfaction. Not his fault that from now on she’s probably going to be haunted by the idea that he’s a terrible doctor.

“I’m okay, Mom,” I say again, and she turns from the doctor to face me, fresh tears brimming in her eyes.

It’s clear she doesn’t believe me. I’m not sure I do either.

CHAPTER THREE

The Truth

T
hey put me in a private room in the pediatric wing. One of the perks of being a nurse’s daughter, I guess. The bed is right next to the window, and I gaze outside, looking at the snow coming down. Like the rest of our little town, Ridgemont Hospital is surrounded by towering Douglas firs, and the snow clings to their branches, making the evergreens look ever-white instead. Even though my temperature has rebounded, a chill runs down my spine.

Why did whatever was happening to me stop all at once like that? Why did my heartbeat go back to normal and my fingers turn from blue to pink? Did I help those spirits move on without realizing it? Or did they just float away when they discovered how useless I was, in search of a better, more competent luiseach to help them? Of course, deep down inside I already know the answer. When I turn from the window to the door, I see him standing right in front of me.

He
was the better, more competent luiseach. He helped all those spirits move on, drawing them away from me like a magnet. And he’s been waiting patiently ever since for the right moment to talk to us.

The last time I saw Aidan it had been only twelve hours since my mother was released from a demon’s possession. It had been just a few minutes since I learned Nolan was my protector, since I learned that although Victoria was declared dead right here in this very hospital, she stood up and walked away—very much alive, still enough of a luiseach that a demon couldn’t kill her.

Once again it feels like there are about a million questions bubbling up in my throat, like the words are literally fighting among my vocal chords, arguing over which one of them gets to be spoken first. But before I can say a thing, Mom looks up from her chair beside my bed and says in her calm, collected, professional nurse voice, “Can I help you?” She probably thinks he’s lost, that he’s here at the hospital to visit someone else.

She has no idea that he’s here to see me.

Aidan steps inside the room, his right arm extended formally in front of him. He’s wearing a perfectly tailored black suit and black wing-tip shoes; a gunmetal-gray tie is tied tightly around his collar. His hair is several shades darker than mine, almost black, and his skin is paler. His nose is straight as an arrow, and I bet he never wrinkles it like Mom and I wrinkle ours.

He looks nothing like my mother, in her pastel-colored scrubs and black clogs, and nothing like me, in my hospital gown and socks. Most everyone else in this hospital is probably dressed more like Mom and me than they are like him. Still, somehow he makes me feel like we’re the ones who are inappropriately dressed.

“My name is Aidan,” he begins. “It’s nice to meet you, Katherine.”

“Kat,” Mom corrects automatically, the way she always does whenever anyone calls her by her full name. She stands up, no doubt wondering how he knew her name.

“I just wanted to see how Sunshine was doing,” Aidan continues, and I bite my lip so hard it hurts. Because now Mom is about to ask how he knows
both
of our names.

I shake my head. I don’t want him here, filling Mom’s head with questions.

All those words that had been battling it out in my throat calm down long enough for me to say, “I think you should probably leave.”

It’s the first real sentence I’ve ever managed to say to him, and I can’t help feeling a little bit proud of myself. If I can manage one sentence, soon I’ll be able to manage another, which means I’ll be able to ask him all of my questions eventually. But I don’t want to ask them now. Not here. Not in front of Mom. Not yet.

“I think I should probably stay,” Aidan counters calmly, settling into a chair across from Mom’s on the other side of my bed. He gestures for her to sit and she does, perhaps off-put by how at ease he seems in here with us. His pants don’t even wrinkle when he sits. Before I can protest, Aidan continues, “She’s not going to believe you if I’m not here to prove it.”

“To prove what?” Mom stands again, her arms folded across her chest. She takes a deep breath, still anxious about what happened to me, still waiting for the doctors to show up with an explanation for why her daughter nearly had a heart attack. “Are you some sort of specialist?” she asks, still searching for
a reasonable explanation for this poised man’s presence. Her voice is more high pitched than normal, so I can tell she’s anxious. “Did they call you in for a consult? Do you have new information on my daughter’s condition?”

Mom must think Aidan’s here to deliver some kind of hopeless diagnosis. And in a way I guess he kind of is. It probably doesn’t help matters that he’s dressed like he runs a funeral home or something. I reach out and take her hand in mine. Her skin is clammy and cold.

I close my eyes, like I believe that maybe when I open them, Aidan won’t be here and maybe Mom and I won’t be here either. Maybe we’ll be magically transported back home. And not home to our house here in Ridgemont. Home to our old house in Austin, with its sun-dappled backyard and the windows flung open wide to let the warm air in. The house where we lived for the sixteen years before I discovered I wasn’t even human. Before I knew ghosts and demons really existed. The house where I lived when I was still normal.

Well, as normal as I ever was.

But when I open my eyes, of course we’re still here. Aidan is still here. And worst of all, Mom is staring at him. She pulls her hand from mine and covers her mouth instead. Because she’s just noticed Aidan’s eyes. The eyes that look exactly like mine.

“Someone please tell me what’s going on here,” she whispers breathlessly, her eyes darting back and forth between us.

I’ve never wanted to tell anyone anything less. I mean I’ve never kept a secret from Mom. (Not unless you count the past few months, when she wasn’t really Mom at all, but a shell of herself while the demon took up residence, and I definitely don’t count that.) This whole not-telling-Mom-about-everything-
that-I’ve-discovered-about-myself-and-about-everything-that-happened-to-her feels really, really unnatural. I’ve spent sixteen years telling her
everything.

But once I tell her,
everything
will change. Will she still look at me the same way when she knows what I am? Will she still laugh at my jokes, make fun of my clumsiness? Will we still argue over who gets the last slice of pizza and cook together using recipes we printed off the Internet? Will she still tell me she loves me more than anything else?

A lump rises in my throat. Part of me thinks she’d rather hear Aidan offer up some diagnosis than the truth. At least she’d know what to do with a diagnosis. But there’s no cure for being born a luiseach.

I sit up, blinking away my tears. “How are you going to prove it?” I ask slowly. My second full sentence aimed in his direction.

“Trust me.” He looks directly into my eyes. Trust him? He’s the one who put my mother’s life in danger. Who turned my entire life upside down, turned me into Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Does he even care that he’s about to change everything again?

“Sunshine,” she begs with a gasp. I wish I could hug her, but I’m attached to so many wires and tubes that I can’t figure out how to put my arms around her. “Please explain this to me.” The sound of her voice makes me realize I have no choice but to do what Aidan says. Because I can’t go on keeping the truth from my mother. Gently I pull her down to sit on the edge of the bed beside me. I square my shoulders and swallow the lump in my throat and start talking.

I start with the fact that Aidan is my birth father. Before she can launch into her own tirade of questions—
How did you find
my daughter? How could you abandon her as a baby?
—I rush ahead, explaining I’ve inherited certain special traits from my birth parents.

“What kind of traits?” Mom asks sharply. “Recessive genes carry all kinds of traits.” She’s speaking so quickly that all of her words run together. “Look at your eyes. And I suppose you might have inherited certain medical conditions—but I can’t think of any genetic explanation for what happened to you this afternoon—”

“It’s not that kind of condition,” I break in. “I mean, it does explain what happened to me this afternoon, but not for any
medical
reason.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mom shakes her head, standing up once again. She walks around the bed and stands over Aidan, still seated calmly in his chair. Mom is tall, taller than I am, but Aidan is taller. (Clearly I didn’t get my vertical-challenged-ness from him.)

“Allow me to explain, Katherine—”

“Kat,” she interrupts, her arms still hugging her own chest.

“Kat,” he echoes. “When your daughter arrived at the hospital today—” I exhale, grateful he referred to me as
your daughter.
“She was met by an onslaught of spirits that had recently been released from their mortal coils, victims of the accident on the freeway.”

Mom’s mouth drops open. I think she wants to protest, but something in Aidan’s voice keeps her quiet. Even when he’s talking about spirits, he sounds every bit as calm and rational as a college professor talking about facts and figures.

“The presence of so many spirits at once overwhelmed her.” He continues, “It takes a great deal of training to handle multiple spirits, and even among the well trained, few of us are prepared when taken unaware like that.”

“Few of us?” Mom echoes. “Few of who?”

“Luiseach,” I say quietly. “Luiseach.” I repeat the word, louder this time. “It’s an ancient species of guardians who’ve been around as long as humans have been living and dying. It’s their job to help spirits move on after people die. And to exorcise spirits who’ve gone dark.”

Mom looks at me like I’m speaking Chinese. I’m tempted to tell her the word
luiseach
is actually Celtic in origin, that it means light-bringer, although Nolan thinks the word might be so old that it predates the Celtic language altogether. He was going to look into it, and if anyone can find out, it’s Nolan.

“This is absurd,” Mom declares. “You don’t even have proof that you really are my daughter’s birth father, and you certainly can’t just show up sixteen years after abandoning her in a hospital and lay claim to her with these outrageous stories.” Unlike me, clearly Mom isn’t tongue-tied around Aidan. “I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve here, but you can’t just brainwash my daughter into believing fairy tales. I’d like you to leave right now, and if you don’t, I’m calling security.” She reaches for the phone at the side of my bed, but I can see that her hands are shaking. Still, she tries to sound as calm and authoritative as Aidan as she says, “My daughter is recovering from a serious cardiac episode, and I don’t think this kind of stress—”

Before she can finish, Aidan takes hold of her arm, shocking her into silence. She drops the phone.

Mom’s face goes slack, her eyes closing heavily. “What are you doing?” I ask frantically, sitting up and reaching for her. Immediately I get tangled up in the myriad wires and tubes I’m connected to.

“Don’t worry,” Aidan says.

“Don’t worry?” I shout. “The last time you did something to her she was possessed by a homicidal demon!”

It’s the most I’ve ever said to him, and much to my surprise, the words slipped out easily. My worry for Mom’s safety is so much bigger than my fear of and anger at Aidan.

“I’m showing her what happened on New Year’s Eve,” he explains calmly.

I’m overwhelmed by the idea of Mom seeing what we went through on New Year’s. I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to tell her about the danger we were all in that night. I knew she’d blame herself, even though it wasn’t her fault. My eyes well up with tears as I watch her face, knowing she’s experiencing those horrifying moments for the first time.

“I don’t know if . . .” my voice fades away, unsure how to express my thoughts.

“It’s all right. I’ll show her something more positive now,” Aidan says, as if he’s reading my mind. “I’ll show her a little of what you and I can feel. The spirits that float through this hospital, coming loose from their bodies as death grows near. The spirits that have left this place behind, leaving nothing more than a shadow in their wake.”

Even though Mom is here in the room with us, it feels like she’s somehow absent.

“I’m not sure I can feel that,” I protest, but Aidan nods slowly. “You can.” His voice is soft but insistent. “Close your eyes. Concentrate.”

I don’t want to take my eyes off Mom, but I also want to know exactly what she’s feeling right now, so I let my eyelids drop. “Concentrate,” Aidan whispers.

“On what?” I squeeze my eyes tight.

“Relax. Let it flow over you. Open yourself up to receive it.”

I take a deep breath and try to relax all of my muscles, rolling my shoulders down my back, slouching so my stomach curls into a C. Almost like I’m trying to fall asleep.

And then I feel it. It’s nothing like the cold shiver that a spirit’s actual presence or touch brings; it’s more like a hum, a heartbeat, a sense that the very air is alive, a sort of electric charge in the air.

“Wow,” I say, opening my eyes. For just a second I swear Aidan smiles at me.