Aidan wraps his fingers around my arm and pulls me gently to sit down. Lucio’s footsteps fade into the distance as he makes his way back to the house, giving us some privacy. Now this shady little refuge feels less like the perfect place for a romantic picnic than it does like a hiding place. I look around, darting my gaze this way and that, staring at the back of the building where Aidan keeps his lab, at the trees above our heads. In front of us is a stone sculpture that looks like it used to be a fountain but has long since gone dry. Beyond that a half-circle of single-story stucco cottages, crumbling under the weight of the vines growing up around them like long, heavy arms.
Aidan said he brought me here to keep me safe. I should have known better than to think he wanted to keep me safe from dark spirits. A dark spirit can’t destroy a luiseach.
He was trying to keep me safe from the woman who gave birth to me. Lucio said I was only safe on the grounds of Llevar la Luz. This entire campus is some kind of hiding place. No wonder he was so mad at Lucio for taking me off campus.
“So when you said someone might use multiple spirits against me?” I wipe sweat from my cheeks. This sounds more like something out of a Greek myth than real life. “What about the nursery?” I don’t know much about Aidan, and I know even less about Helena, but one of them must have been responsible for that cozy white room with its subtle touches of pink.
“Let me explain,” Aidan begins calmly.
How is my mentor/father always so composed? (And why couldn’t he have handed some of that composure down to me in his genetic bag of tricks? Composed would come in handy right about now.)
“Long before you were born, luiseach birth rates were dwindling.”
I let my head drop into my hands, wishing (again) that Nolan were here. All of this is just too much to absorb at once. I need Nolan sitting calmly on one of the other benches, taking careful notes in his messy boy handwriting so we can go over all of this alone together later.
“Your mother and I believed—”
“Don’t call her my mother,” I interrupt hoarsely, looking up. “My mother is Katherine Griffith, and she would never let anyone hurt me, let alone try to eliminate me herself.”
Aidan reaches for the pitcher of lemonade on the ground below us and pours some into the glass Lucio left behind. He hands it to me and I take a sip.
“With our shrinking gene pool, fewer and fewer luiseach were being born, yet the human race continued to grow. Helena and I knew that in a few generations the situation would become dire: there would no longer be enough luiseach on Earth to help all human spirits move on, to fight against dark spirits when necessary, to exorcise demons when they arose. But we weren’t hopeless, like so many of our brethren. We believed we might be able to produce a child strong enough to help matters.”
“Because you were two of the most powerful luiseach ever, right?” They just assumed their offspring would be as special as they were.
“No,” Aidan says carefully. “We weren’t counting on genetics alone.”
“Then how?” I ask, my voice shaking. I’m not totally certain I want to hear the answer.
“When Helena was pregnant,” Aidan explains, “we conducted . . . experiments, trying to make the child in her womb even more powerful.”
I almost drop my glass of lemonade all over again. This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard, and given what’s happened to me in the last six months, the bar on what I call creepy has been set pretty high.
“What kind of experiments?” I ask carefully.
“We exposed you to spirits practically from conception. Throughout her pregnancy, before Helena helped a spirit move on, she held it close so that it touched you as well. She pulled as many spirits to her as she could, spirits from miles around, every chance she got. Even in her third trimester, when her belly had grown so big that she could barely move,” Aidan pauses, almost smiling at the memory, “Helena was still exorcising demons, going on missions normally reserved for those in top physical shape.”