But before I can finish, the owl falls abruptly to the ground. I can see the ground now. I can see everything. Everything except Anna, who’s vanished.
I run out of the bedroom and down the stairs, opening the heavy front door. The moist night air covers me like a blanket as I go around the side of the house and pick up the owl, one of its wings stained brown with mud where it hit the ground. I hold it up, ready to flex every single muscle in my body, ready to concentrate in order to bring her back, but I can’t concentrate because I just noticed a tiny beam of light coming from the window of one of the stucco buildings across the courtyard.
The building Aidan angrily emerged from as Lucio and I returned from the fishing village. That must be the building where he does all his work.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Dark Discovery
Before 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.