Aidan was wrong. I’m not the luiseach to end all luiseach.
And if he’s wrong, then isn’t the next logical conclusion that Helena is right? That just by existing, I’m preventing the birth of more luiseach? And one thing is certain: the world needs more luiseach. Since my birth our numbers have diminished even further. No births, and now—thanks to the map—I know that there have also been deaths.
It only stands to reason that if I weren’t here, luiseach would have a better chance of survival. Nolan and Lucio are too busy poring over the map to notice I’m walking away from them.
Suddenly the sound of screeching brakes pulls me from my thoughts. Ashley’s car squeals to a stop across the street. She hasn’t even turned off the engine when Mom comes bolting out of the passenger side.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Falling
Mom freezes halfway across the street. For a second I think that the spirit force field has stopped her somehow, but then I see the look on her face. She’s staring at me, and she doesn’t like what she sees. She can tell that her daughter nearly had the life squeezed out of her.
Just by looking at me, Mom can see that everything is wrong.
“What’s going on?” she shouts furiously. She sent me away with Aidan so I could get stronger, and here I am, looking (I assume, as I can’t see myself) every bit as bad as I did that day in the hospital parking lot. Worse, probably.
“Where is he?” Mom shouts. “I’m going to give him—” I shake my head before she can say a piece of my mind. There was a time when all I wanted was to give Aidan a piece of my mind, back when he was just my nameless, faceless mentor. That was before I realized how horribly spooky that expression is. And before Aidan was an actual person with a name and a personality and an inexorable link to me.
“Sunshine!” Mom gasps, still frozen in place. “I don’t understand any of this, but I—”
“I love you too,” I call out before she can finish. My second time saying those words today. They’re so small—just one syllable each—but they sound enormous to me.
Mom is the first person I ever loved, but she’s not the last. I love Nolan, and I love Ashley. I love Victoria and Anna, and given time, I think I might have loved Aidan and Lucio and even Helena too. At least now I know that some part of her loved me. The part that couldn’t kill me.
I step onto the lawn, then turn to glance back at the Victorian house behind me. Lucio stands on the front porch, shivering not just because spirits are near but because of the Ridgemont chill. Maybe he’s never seen snow, just like the tall man from Lado Selva.
Nolan tears the map in half and flips one side to the other, rearranging the order of countries from left to right. He starts tracing invisible lines with his fingers from one red circle to another, his brain working to connect the mysterious luiseach deaths as Lucio watches over, answering any of Nolan’s questions that he can.
Through the front door I see Aidan’s profile. His face is contorted painfully, and his perfect hair has fallen across his forehead, but he’s too distracted to push it back in place. He looks like he’s fighting for his life. Actually, I guess he’s fighting for mine. Everything he’s done for the past sixteen years—all that research, allowing himself to become completely isolated—has been to save my life. With every failure he was reminded that I might have to die.
I turn around. Mom seems to have regained the ability to move because she’s finally stepping across the invisible—and, to her, imperceptible—spirit fence and onto Victoria’s front lawn. Just a few more steps and she’ll be next to me, putting her arms around me and whispering that everything’s going to be all right.
But it’s not. Not unless I do this.
I reach into my back pocket and grab the knife. It’s become a torch and a thunderstorm for me before. I just hope it will become what I need now.
On the porch behind me Nolan begins to slump over, still weak from Helena’s torture. He leans heavily against a pillar, panting. Blood drips from the wound on the left side of his face. I’m aware of each individual drip, drip, drip as his blood lands onto the map now laying on the ground below him.
A thought flashes across Nolan’s face, and he leans down and draws a fifth circle on the map, using his blood that has pooled up below him. It looks like he’s tracing the circle right where we are on the map, in Ridgemont.
Lucio reaches out a hand to steady Nolan, slumped over the map. Lucio, who stayed by Aidan’s side. Whose parents died for the greater good.
I finally understand: They didn’t die just to keep me safe. They believed they were keeping the world safe, because they believed Aidan was right and Helena was wrong.