“I know,” Nolan nods. “You have been helping me, sharing what you found in the professor’s papers. It’s just a matter of time before we find something that will be useful to her.”
The poor boy waits eagerly every day as I show up with a fresh notebook or file folder filled with the professor’s notes. He pores over them each day, as though all the information he’s supposed to be guarding is just another page away, as though the very next line might be the one that explains everything. He’s waiting to call Sunshine until he’s found the answers he’s looking for: why they can’t touch, why her mentor thinks luiseach are going extinct, why she’s been taken so far from him.
He has no idea that all of my research is fake. That I’m the one writing barely sensible scribbles in the tattered notebooks he believes sat in the university’s basement for so long.
“But,” he continues, “there’s been nothing to make heads or tails of Sunshine’s message.”
“Maybe we should listen to it again.”
Nolan reaches for his phone and presses play. I’ve heard this message at least a half dozen times by now, and every time my body reacts to that girl’s voice: goose bumps prickle on my skin; a knot of adrenaline surges across my belly.
Halfway through the message I reach out and press pause. “What does she mean by handling multiple spirits?”
“The day before she left with him, she had a sort of . . . breakdown in the hospital parking lot. There was an accident, and there were multiple casualties, and there were just too many spirits coming at her at once.”
“What do you mean, a breakdown?”
Nolan shrugs. “I wasn’t there. But she told me it was terrifying. Her heart was pounding, her temperature dropped, and she could barely move.”
“Wow. Sounds scary.” In fact, it sounds like a weakness. I force my lips into a straight line.
Nolan nods. “It was.” He presses play again. Sunshine’s voice fills the room once more, finally saying the words I was most hoping to hear: I wish you were here. Because if she wants Nolan there, he can go, even with Aidan’s protections in place. And I can go with him, as long as he wants me at his side.
“I should have called her back.” Nolan speaks over her voice asking him to do just that.
“You wanted to wait until we found some information that could help her.” He’s told me as much before.
“That’s not the only reason.”
“It’s because you can’t touch her.” Nolan nods like his head weighs a million pounds. I bite my lip as though I’m trying to decide whether or not to confess something. Finally I say, “There’s something I saw in my research. I wasn’t sure whether I should tell you—”
“Tell me,” Nolan interrupts, and his voice is so firm that it almost makes me jump.
“Well,” I begin, “I saw something in the professor’s notes about certain powers a luiseach’s mentor can have.” I pronounce the word correctly now, just as Nolan taught me. “A mentor can”—I pause as though I’m searching for the right word, as though I haven’t planned out every aspect of this conversation—“can control certain aspects of his mentee’s life.”
“Like what?” Nolan asks darkly.
I shake my head frantically. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just . . . I couldn’t think of any other explanation for why you two can’t touch each other! Not when other protectors and luiseach can.”
“So you think her mentor”—to Nolan’s credit, he’s never actually told me Aidan’s name—“put some kind of spell on her so she feels sick anytime she touches another person?” Nolan shakes his head, answering his own question. “No. I’ve seen her touch her mom, touch Victoria. There must be something different about when we touch.”
I look down at the table, tracing the wood with my fingers like I’m too shy to look into his eyes when I say, “Maybe it’s because when the two of you touch, it’s a romantic sort of touch. You know, not platonic.”
I figured this out weeks ago—Aidan’s machinations are the only explanation for what’s going on between Nolan and Sunshine. I was pleased that Aidan thought to do such a thing, to limit her attachments to the human world. At least some part of him couldn’t deny what might have to be done.
When I look up, Nolan is blushing feverishly. “But why would he do that?”
“To control her,” I answer simply. Oh Aidan, you made it so easy for me to turn this boy against you. “Like she’s nothing more to him than a puppet on a string.”
Nolan stands so quickly that his chair clatters to the ground behind him. “I have to tell her.”
“Maybe we should wait,” I say hesitantly. “I mean, we don’t know for sure—”
Nolan shakes his head, righteous indignation clear on his face. “She has to know what Aidan did. I’m supposed to be protecting her. If he could do something like this, who knows what else he’s capable of?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Almost