Aidan continues, “We believed we could create a luiseach powerful enough to handle multiple spirits at once, who could serve spirits from miles around.” His voice rises, as though he’s reciting words he’s said a thousand times before. He has no idea that he sounds more like a mad scientist to me than ever, like someone from a horror story: Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, men who messed with life and death and suffered the disastrous consequences. “If our experiment was successful, we decided, we would do the same thing to every other pregnant luiseach until our dwindling numbers were no longer a problem. Your mother and I were far from the only luiseach trying to procreate at the time. On this campus alone there were three other pregnant luiseach.”
“But I’m not powerful like that.” I press my legs into the bench beneath us, feeling the sweat on the backs of my knees. No wonder he didn’t take the bait when I suggested a protector might be able to help us figure out why I’m so sensitive. No wonder he could calmly say “interesting” the first time I absorbed a bit of a spirit I helped move on. He’s known why I’m different all along, even if he doesn’t know how to fix it. “Just the opposite.” I shudder with the memory of what happened this morning.
“I know,” Aidan answers. “I’ve suspected for a long time that your strengths would lie elsewhere.”
“What do you mean, for a long time? I haven’t even been a luiseach for a long time.”
“You’ve been a luiseach all your life.”
“You know what I mean,” I counter, exasperated. “I’ve only been able to sense spirits since I turned sixteen, right?” Aidan nods. “That was barely six months ago.”
“Do you remember what happened on New Year’s Eve?”
“Of course,” I answer. How could I forget?
“I was observing your every step.” Victoria told me that my mentor had been watching me, but hearing Aidan admit it out loud sends a chill down my spine. “I felt it when you gave up hope.”
“Then why didn’t you help me?” I ask.
“If I’d helped you, you’d never have dug deep enough to find the hidden stores of strength you didn’t know you had.”
Yep, Aidan would have been the kind of father who’d have thrown me into the deep end of the pool to teach me how to swim.
He continues, “The weapon Victoria gave you took longer to manifest than I would have liked.”
“It took longer to manifest than I would have liked too,” I mumble, remembering what happened that night: the roof disappeared from above our heads, the rain beat down until I was drenched. I’d begged the weapon to manifest, begged it to turn into whatever it needed to turn into to save my family.
“You couldn’t concentrate,” Aidan continues. “You may not realize this, but you bounce back from a spirit’s touch quickly: your temperature rebounds almost immediately, your heart rate slows to a normal pace.” I shake my head; it doesn’t feel like I bounce back quickly, especially lately. Aidan continues, “At first I was certain you’d make short work of that demon. I didn’t understand what was taking you so long.”
“I was trying,” I say miserably. “It was a little hard to concentrate when so many people’s lives were at stake.”
“Exactly!” Aidan snaps his fingers. The sound is sharp, echoing against the trees, causing a bird perched on a branch above us to take flight. “You were distracted by your concern for Katherine, for Nolan, even for Victoria and Anna—and you barely knew Victoria and Anna. When most luiseach face a demon, the rest of the world fades into the background. They are able to concentrate entirely on the task at hand. But you . . . I didn’t understand it until I began working with you here.”
“Understand what?”
“How sensitive you are. For you, the rest of the world doesn’t fade away. Instead, you feel the emotions of the spirits that touch you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Aidan admits. “Perhaps because Helena held spirits close for so long when she was pregnant with you, you don’t know what it feels like not to absorb their stories.”
I take a deep breath, trying to fit all of these pieces together. Their experiments made me weaker, not stronger. Just like all the characters in those mad-scientist stories, they opened me up to more risk. “So when I was born, Helena could tell right away that I would be”—I search for the right words—“abnormally connected to the spirits that touch me? She realized that your experiment was a failure, and she was so upset that she wanted to get rid of me altogether?”
Aidan shakes his head. “Your moth—Helena,” he corrects himself, “would never be so irrational.”
“Yeah, she sounds really levelheaded,” I mumble, looking at my feet. I kick the ground, knocking my lemonade over, sending a tiny splatter of mud into the air. It sticks to Aidan’s khaki pants, the first time I’ve ever seen him wear anything that wasn’t perfectly clean.
“Our experiment went awry,” he explains, and I look up at my mentor/father’s face. His expression is serious, somber. Sad. “When you were born—” He pauses, like this is the part of the story that’s hardest for him to say out loud.
What now? What could be worse than what he’s already said?
“Helena was in labor for more than twenty-four hours. Our doctors and midwives were attending to her all along, but she refused all aid. She was certain you’d come in your own time. And she was right. At precisely 7:12 p.m., Central Standard Time, August fourteenth, there you were, screaming your head off like a wild thing.”