“Any luck?”
Lucio shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“But it still hasn’t turned dark, right?”
“I’m not sure,” he admits. Before I can say anything—and I was about to say something along the lines of What do you mean you’re not sure? Does the demon we saw have something to do with all this? Is it here to help turn the lost spirit dark?—Lucio says, “It looks like your bath is the right temperature now.” He gestures to the tub behind me. I glance at the still water and am suddenly aware of the ache in my muscles, more intense than anything I’ve felt before. I guess I never had to work as hard as I did today.
“Thanks,” I say as Lucio closes the bathroom door behind him. I listen to his footsteps fade as he walks through the hallway and down the stairs. Then I undress and sink beneath the warm water until my own splashing is the only sound I can hear.
It’s the first time I’ve taken a bath since I learned how Anna died.
After my bath, I change into sweatpants and a sweatshirt I stole from Mom months ago. I grab the owl from the nursery and stick my head outside the open window in my bedroom. I try to concentrate. Try to focus. But instead of Anna, when I close my eyes, the same images I saw in Aidan’s lab play out in my mind’s eye.
Aidan is right. I can’t focus. Because all I can see is the lives led by the spirits I couldn’t help.
If I can’t even help the spirit of one little girl move on before she turns dark, how will I ever help all of them?
I slam the window shut. Well, slam is a bit of an overstatement. My muscles are about as useful as rubber at the moment, so it’s more like I struggle to get the window about halfway shut and then give up, leaving the stuffed owl on the windowsill. Eliminate. Quietly I say the word out loud. Then again, louder this time. Helena isn’t the only one trying to eliminate something. Aidan wants to eliminate the need for luiseach. And he thinks I might be the key to that elimination. Just like The Last Luiseach and The Luiseach to End All Luiseach, it sounds like the name of a movie, a summer blockbuster: The Eliminator.
Lucio carried me down the stairs from Aidan’s lab and out into the sunlight today. As we crossed the courtyard, Aidan said, “We’ll try again tomorrow.” My throat was so sore from screaming that I didn’t protest, even though I was literally too frozen in place to be useful in his lab today. If Aidan is wrong, then my . . . elimination could save the luiseach species so that they could go on protecting the human race like they have for millennia.
I will try again tomorrow. Because if we can’t eliminate the need for luiseach in Aidan’s lab, then . . .
I shake my head. Aidan will never let Helena eliminate me.
Will he?
Strange Words
What a stroke of genius it was to invoke the name Abner Jones; the boy seems more than a little in awe of Aidan’s old friend. Each afternoon I come to the coffee shop on Main Street bearing news of another revelation from Professor Jones’s files. (No matter that I make them up as I go along.) Nolan takes frantic notes, hanging on my every word. He pretends his interest is just academic, like mine, and I pretend to believe him. I pretend that I don’t know that he’s trying to make sense of everything that’s happened to him since he met the girl he’s now tied to.
I think the boy will be particularly excited about today’s discovery.
“So,” I begin my lie, twirling my curly hair around my finger like I’m unsure of myself, “the university said they can’t find most of Professor Jones’s files anymore. His wife must have taken them when he died or something.”
“Or something,” Nolan murmurs, trying to hide a knowing grin.
“But they did manage to find a couple of boxes in their archives, and they let me take them. I think they were glad to get rid of them, honestly.” I pause and smile. Reminding him that other people don’t care about these things like we do is an opportunity to strengthen our bond. “Anyway, I keep coming across these words in Professor Jones’s files that I don’t understand.”
“What kind of words?” Nolan asks. He shifts in his seat as though he knows what’s coming.
“Well, it’s strange. I see the words mentor and protector—and obviously I recognize those words—but they’re always used in reference to a word I’ve never seen before: luiseach.” I pronounce the word incorrectly on purpose, pretending not to notice the way the extra syllables make Nolan squirm.
“You’ve never heard that word before, have you?” I ask innocently.
Nolan doesn’t answer, so I go on talking. “In one of the professor’s notebooks he writes that relationships between luiseach and their protectors are often incredibly intense. Like, their bond is stronger than the bond between parents and their children, between brothers and sisters.”