Then again, neither am I.
Finally Aidan responds. “Nolan is human and you’re luiseach.”
“Victoria was married to a human.”
“It’s complicated,” he says, then looks away, distracted. It takes me a second, but soon I feel it too. A man who passed away seconds ago.
“Where did he come from?”
“We’re over Northern California right now. Even though we’re airborne, for some of the spirits being set free from their bodies, we’re the closest luiseach. They can’t help being drawn to us.”
I feel it when the spirit disappears. Aidan helped him move on without blinking an eye, too quickly for me to focus and see him. He looks like he barely felt anything at all, not the chill when the spirit arrived nor the peace when he left.
Aidan folds his arms across his chest and closes his eyes. “I’m going to get some sleep before we land.”
I watch him for a moment, expecting him to shift in his seat, settle into his sleep, but he doesn’t move. No one falls asleep that fast, right? But I know that it’s even harder to rouse a fake sleeper than a real sleeper if the faker is determined to keep his eyes closed. From the way Aidan is squeezing his shut, I can tell he’s more than a little determined.
I turn from my mentor/father to stare out the window at the clouds floating beneath us, trying to ignore the nagging thought that’s running on a constant loop in my brain: if Aidan won’t even give me a straight answer about Nolan, then what’s he going to say when I finally do start asking some of the bigger questions?
Why did you abandon me?
Who is my birth mother?
Where is my birth mother?
Why isn’t she here with you—with me?
I lean my forehead against the window and squeeze my eyes shut, pretending to sleep, determined not to open them until we get to Mexico.
Another thing that Aidan and I have in common.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Llevar la Luz
We land in Mazatlan and follow—or actually lead, given our place in first class—the plane’s other passengers to the customs line. This is my first time getting my passport stamped, and I can’t help feeling a little bit excited when the official-looking stamp presses down on the otherwise blank paper. I steal a glance at Aidan’s passport on the counter beside my own. It’s so covered in stamps that the customs officer has trouble finding a blank space to mark it. He finally smacks the stamp down directly on top of another one that looks like it’s in French. Aidan speaks to the official in perfect Spanish.
At least I think it’s perfect. I don’t know enough Spanish to tell the difference.
The airport is crowded and hot. I mean, it’s air conditioned, but no amount of artificial air can mask the heat that’s beating down on this building from all sides.
We have to go through security again before they’ll let us outside. Our bags go through an X-ray conveyer belt just like they did at the airport in the states. I wonder whether they’ll notice the knife tucked away in my backpack. Maybe it will manifest as something else when the X-ray passes over it, disguising itself as a T-shirt or a book so security won’t notice it.
An enormous black SUV with tinted windows is waiting for us in the parking lot. But unlike the car we left behind in Washington, this one is caked with dried mud in the wheel wells and along the bottom of the doors. I climb inside, trying to keep the bottom of my pants from rubbing against the dirt. We drive north along the coast for more than two hours. At first it looks like Mexico is the opposite of Ridgemont. Instead of gray, the world here is a collage of yellows and tans—sand and sun and not much in between. There are no towering Douglas firs to provide relief from the heat, no damp chill in the air to make me shiver.
But then the landscape shifts, going from arid desert to dense jungle. Definitely nowhere near those resorts you see in tourism commercials.
And it’s still damp. As in humid. As in I think the frizzball on top of my head might actually grow bigger here than it was in Washington.
By the time Aidan stops the car, I have no idea where we are. Not that I’ve known where we’ve been from the moment we landed in Mazatlan, but now it feels like I know even less.