The Sacrifice of Sunshine Girl

by Paige McKenzie

“How?”

  “The necklace.”

  “The necklace?”

  “Dubu gave it to me when we were together, to protect me. His existence is what powers it. If he were to… die… it would crumble to dust, disappear.”

  Oh my gosh.

  “This is Dubu’s necklace? How could you?” Angry and horrified, I reach up to tear it off my neck.

  But Helena stops me by grabbing my wrist with supernatural speed. “No! You must continue wearing it. It’s crucial you stay alive, that you have every means at your disposal to do so. This necklace is a powerful tool.”

  “I can’t, I won’t wear something that belongs to him!”

  “If you die, you know what will happen. The pentagram spell will be completed. And we believe—the council believes—that the completion of the spell is what will trigger the Second War. We’re working frantically to figure out how to stop it, how to reverse it. But until we do, you must stay alive.”

  I sit there, stunned, trying to take all this in.

  “Why me, though? Why not one of the other luiseach?”

  “You’re the most likely candidate. Dubu has made other attempts on your life. You’re an extremely powerful and important luiseach. Also…” Helena hesitates.

  “What?”

  “I know him. Aidan took the life of his child. And no doubt he now wants to exact revenge…”

  My stomach twists.

  Helena doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to.

  Aidan killed Dubu’s son Selarion. So now Dubu is going to kill me.

  Even-steven.

  And if I die, the pentagram spell will be triggered.

  Then… apocalypse. No more luiseach. No more humans.

  Just darkness.

  CHAPTER 26

  Visions

  That night I sit cross-legged on the pink shag carpet next to my bed and try to conjure a vision. Several visions, actually. As I breathe deeply and try to still my thoughts, I’m aware of the cool, delicate sensation of Dubu’s necklace against my skin. I have to fight the temptation to tear it off and throw it into a volcano, Mordor, anywhere to make sure it’s destroyed once and for all.

  But I can’t risk it.

  So I guess I’ll just have to find Dubu himself and throw him into a volcano or Mordor or wherever.

  The question is how?

  Helena said I was unique, a combination of multiple luiseach abilities passed down through the generations. Aidan said once that I’m a luiseach like no other. The two of them also exposed me to who-knows-what while Helena was pregnant with me, which contributed to my luiseach skill set in a bizarre but apparently useful way. Except for the part when my birth released a massive wave that may have caused the spontaneous death of a bunch of unborn luiseach babies and pregnant luiseach women. Helena didn’t reference that bit of history during our heart-to-heart.

  When Zalea said I could end this war quickly, maybe that’s what she meant, that I could do so by using my special, one-of-a-kind menu of superpowers. Aidan thinks it’s his burden to find and stop Dubu, but maybe it’s destined to be my burden instead?

  I just have to figure out how to find and stop Dubu—before he kills me and completes the pentagram and launches the apocalypse. Dubu, the demonest of demons, who also happens to be the ex-boyfriend of my biological mother…

  … which isn’t weird or anything.

  I also promised Victoria I would try to find Anna.

  So two birds with one stone. It’s time for me to go into luiseach GPS mode.

  Dubu, where are you? I ask silently, gazing up at the ceiling. Make yourself known already. Time to stop playing hide-and-seek. And Anna, where did you go? Your mom’s worried. She wants to see you.

  Nothing. Just a faint circle of tiny glow-in-the-dark stars blinking down at me. I never noticed them before. The Wildes lived in this house way back when. Did the stars belong to Anna?

  From downstairs I can hear the rattling and clinking of plates and glasses, random strands of conversation, laughter. Ashley and Mom are doing the dishes from our Thai takeout dinner: spring rolls, shrimp pad Thai noodles, chicken curry, and jasmine rice. Mom had a pretty brutal day at the hospital—another violent incident, this one at a little league baseball game, with no fatalities but many injuries. So I’m glad she’s able to relax a bit.

  “Sunshine State? You want some ice cream, sweetie? Ashley and I are making sundaes!” Mom calls up the stairs.

  “In a sec, Mom!”

  “Do you want Fudgelicious Frappemocha or boring old vanilla?” Ashley yells.

  “Boring old vanilla!”

  I uncross my legs and recross them yogi style. I let my eyelids flutter shut to a soft, relaxed half gaze.

  Apparently—or according to Aidan anyway—visioning is not a common luiseach ability. He and I both seem to have it, and Zalea too, and also Helena? I’m not sure who else. The thing is that these visions kind of come and go unbidden and are sometimes intermingled with dreams, like the one of Aidan and Helena having a conversation about me and about killing Dubu. I haven’t been able to make the visions happen yet.

  Maybe I can make one happen now.

  I just have to go all Jedi in my head somehow.

  Lex Luthor purrs and rubs up against my knees. “Not now,” I whisper. “I’m trying to have a psychic experience.”

  I feel him plop down on the carpet beside me and curl up into a warm, furry ball, purring like a motor. Through a crack in the window a cold breeze stirs the curtains and grazes my skin. I hear Ashley exclaim, “… and she ate the entire thing in one bite!” and she and Mom crack up.

  Come on, Dubu. Where are you?

  Anna, I miss you! Your mom misses you!

  Even though Mom has been a little more cheerful with Ashley around—Ashley does have that effect on people—she hasn’t let down her guard when it comes to keeping me safe and alive. She continues to text me, like, twelve times a day when we’re apart. On Tuesday she had our landlord change all the locks on our doors and install new locks on our windows. I’m not sure locks will keep Dubu and other demons out, but still. She’s even talking about getting a fancy, expensive security system with codes and passwords and a Bat phone–style automatic link to the police. Again, not sure how effective the police can be against a Markon and his crew.

  My thoughts wander.

  Algebra homework. Spring dance committee. Tiffany is mean. I need new socks. Did I eat the last English muffin? Where is Aidan? Helena and Dubu. Nolan. When is Lucio coming back from Mexico? Kirsten. That word she said—ded-something. The spider-web mark. Spiders. Latoya. Hospital food. Anna. I’m descended from luiseach royalty. The guy with the machete. Mrs. Ostricher. Those animals in the state park. Lex Luthor and Oscar. Did I change the cat litter? Zalea. Queen Laoise—did Helena pronounce it like “lee-sha”? Rocks. Fossilized poop. The end of the world.

  Random pinpricks of light dance against my eyelids. My muscles start to relax, go heavy. And then an image of Nolan materializes in my head, flittering and floating, and my heart skips a beat. He’s sitting in the library, at one of the big oak tables, alone. His tawny hair falls across his forehead as he pores over a big leather-bound book with yellowed pages. The pages are covered with Latin words, charts, and graphs. Also strange illustrations of scientific instruments, celestial bodies, and monstrous beasts. Nolan takes furious notes with one hand while his other hand flies across the pages.

  An elderly man, a librarian, approaches him. He’s dressed in flannel slacks, a rumpled black shirt, and a black cardigan with one button missing. “We’re closing in fifteen minutes, young man,” he says, tapping his wristwatch.

  Nolan nods without looking up and flips to the next page. And then he straightens in his chair and exclaims, “Queensland, Australia!”

  The old librarian stares at him. There’s something familiar about the man. Have I seen him before? At that library? But I haven’t been there in ages, and in any case I don’t remember him—just the red-haire
d lady who shushes people a lot and the other librarian who’s always reading a book of Percy Bysshe Shelley poems.

  Then my vision shifts, and I see Anna standing in the middle of a field.

  Yes, finally—Anna!

  I try to call out, but no sounds come out of my mouth. All around her, tall green grass undulates in the wind. The sky above her is a cloudless, Technicolor blue. She’s wearing a white cotton nightgown and clutching her stuffed owl.

  And then she notices me and waves. She begins to quote Shelley to me in a grown-up voice:

  O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being

  Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing…

  Anna says something else, but I can’t hear the words.

  “What, Anna? What was that last part?”

  “Be. Careful,” she repeats in her normal voice, her ten-year-old voice.

  “Be careful of what? And where are you? Your mom had this scary dream, and she’s super-worried about you. I’m worried about you too because you’ve lingered on Earth too long, and you know what will happen if—”

  “The enchanter is after you,” Anna says.

  She giggles and vanishes.

  “Anna!” I shout. “Anna!”

  But she’s gone. The wind picks up, and the green grass undulates more violently. Storm clouds pass across the blue sky, gray and boiling.

  Wait. That isn’t a field of grass. It’s a field of rice. Mom and I watched a TV documentary about Japan last summer, and the rice fields there looked just like that.

  A light shimmers, and Anna reappears. But no, it’s not Anna. It’s another girl, taller, older—a teenager, wearing a white kimono. She has long black hair and pale, pale skin. Her brown eyes are wide with terror.

  “Ki-yo-tsu-ke-te,” she whispers to me.

  “What?” I ask loudly, trying to be heard over the rising wind.

  “Ki-yo-tsu-ke-te!” she screams.

  Trembling, she rolls up the sleeve of her kimono and thrusts the underside of her wrist at me.

  I start to tremble too.

  No.

  She has the spider-web mark, the same one Kirsten, the light-spirit-turned-dark, left on my wrist.

  What does this mean?

  The kimono-clad girl cries out in pain. On her wrist the mark twitches and pulsates and doubles in size. The ten—no, fifteen—short lines that make up the spider-web shape-shift around rapidly.

  After a moment they settle into a new shape.

  A pentagram.

  CHAPTER 27

  Urgent News

  The next day at school I’m definitely not myself. I am so not myself that when Mr. Okafor calls on me to name three generals from the American Revolutionary War, I blank. Which is not like me, as I’m usually the nerd girl who knows all—my nickname in middle school was the Brainiac.

  Of course, as soon as the bell rings and I walk out of the history classroom, a ton of names come to me: Richard Montgomery, Richard Howe, Benedict Arnold, “Mad Anthony” Wayne, and—how did I not remember this one?—George Washington. Argh.

  I can’t stop thinking about my vision from last night—if it was a vision, that is. I’m sure the part about Nolan was because I called him right afterward and confirmed he was at the library doing exactly what I saw him doing. I told him about my entire vision, dream, whatever, and he suggested the kimono girl might be linked somehow to the luiseach who died in Japan and that the dead yellow bird I found was indigenous to Queensland, Australia. As for the part about Anna, was that real too? Or was my subconscious mind just free associating and making up scary, random stuff at that point?

  I also can’t stop checking my wrist. So far the mark hasn’t returned. No spider-web, no pentagram. The mark hasn’t returned since a week ago in English class, when it vanished along with Wesley’s ghost. If Nolan hadn’t seen it, I might have dismissed it as a hallucination.

  But I can’t help having this sick, bad, worried feeling I haven’t seen the last of it yet.

  Is the mark related to the demons’ pentagram spell?

  What do Kirsten and the kimono girl have to do with all of this?

  Where on Earth is Anna?

  When the last-period dismissal bell rings, I make a beeline for my locker, drop off a bunch of books, and head up to Room 236. In English class I spoke to Bastian briefly and convinced him to meet me at the spring dance committee meeting so we could have a safe place to talk; I want to see how he’s doing after his luiseach initiation experience on Saturday. Plus we need to schedule more training sessions if possible—he needs to exercise his powers, learn about them, feel comfortable with them. Later Nolan and I are hanging out at the Dream Bean Coffee Shop so I can tell him about my epic conversation with Helena yesterday along with everything else that’s happened.

  And speaking of training sessions, Aidan canceled ours again this morning, no explanation.

  What’s going on with him? I need to talk to him about the new information I learned from Zalea and Helena.

  “Sunshine!”

  Tiffany stands in the doorway of Room 236 and gives me a big, sparkly smile—bigger and sparklier than usual.

  “Thanks so much for coming by again. Hey, you look so pretty today. Love your outfit!”

  I stop and stare at her. Huh? Tiffany likes my taste in clothes all of a sudden? I’m in one of my usual get-ups: jeans, Chuck Taylors, and a nineties plaid flannel shirt with a cranberry juice stain from lunch. Nothing has changed here. Ashley hasn’t been able to corral me into a fashion makeover yet. Is Tiffany being sincere, or is she setting me up for another insult? Likely the latter.

  “Your friends are already here. Ashley and Bastian are making decorations. We’re up to fifty crepe-paper roses! So only fifty more to go—yay!” Tiffany throws her arms up in the air and does a little shimmy dance.

  More bafflement. What happened to Mean Tiffany? Did aliens take over her body?

  Except I don’t have time to ponder this mystery because Ashley and Bastian. It didn’t occur to me they might run into each other here, introduce themselves, have a conversation—not today anyway, as Ashley mentioned she had ballet again after school. There’s no way she said anything to him, right? Like, “Hey, I hear you’re a Loose Peach paranormal superhero! Can you levitate and talk to ghosts and exercise with demons and stuff?” I promised him total confidentiality.

  Maybe it was a bad idea to let her read Nolan’s notebook.

  “Excuse me, I have to…” I rush past Tiffany, trip on an extension cord, right myself, and survey the room. I recognize some of the same student volunteers from last week; they’re busy with posters, playlists, and updates to the school’s Twitter feed, Facebook page, and Instagram.

  Ashley and Bastian are by the window making roses. Green pipe cleaners and pink crepe paper cover the table in front of them.

  “Ashley, Bastian, hi!” I say breathlessly.

  They both glance up.

  “Hello, Sunshine. Your friend Ashley is teaching me how to create these very interesting floral decorations,” Bastian says by way of a greeting. I notice he ditched his baggy navy blazer and is wearing just the white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  “Hi, Sun! Did you know Bastian used to live in Washington, DC? And in Europe before that? Switzerland, right, Bas?” Ashley beams at him.

  “Geneva, yes. We also lived in London while I was in grades two through six.”

  “I promised Bas I’d show him around Ridgemont maybe this week. You know, a mini-tour. Here, you want to get started on some roses?”

  Ashley hands me a handful of pipe cleaners and crepe paper. On the plus side, it doesn’t seem like she mentioned the luiseach business to Bastian. On the minus side—or on the confusing side anyway—why is she offering to show him around Ridgemont? She’s been here for, like, all of ten days, ergo she hardly knows the town… and Bastian and his family have their vacation home—correction, mansion
—in the mountains, so he must already be familiar with the area, right?

  “I thought you had a ballet class today, Ash.”

  “I did, but Madame Gergiev had to cancel. She has the flu. Lucky for me!” Ashley beams at Bastian again.

  I smile, trying to mask my bewilderment. “Uh huh.”

  I shift my gaze to Bastian to see how he’s taking all this. The Ashley charm offense. But he seems to be okay, or not freaked out by it anyway. He’s looping a pipe cleaner around a paper rose slowly, meticulously.

  “Is this correct?” he asks Ashley.

  “Perfect! So have you got a date for the dance yet, Bas?”

  No, no, no. “Ash, could I talk to you? In private?” I say quickly.

  “Sure!”

  I pull her aside out of Bastian’s earshot. I bang my elbow into a metal filing cabinet and stifle a PG-rated swear word.

  “Ash, you can’t flirt with him.”

  She shrugs innocently. “Whaaat? I’m just being friendly.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re flirting. Or he may think you’re flirting. I know it’s just your way of talking to guys and it doesn’t mean anything, but… Bastian is… fragile. He and I…” I hesitate, wondering how to explain this. I want to tell her she can’t distract him with flirty, datey stuff. He’s my luiseach-in-training. A warrior for the greater good. He has to focus. “You just can’t” is the best I can do.

  “Sure. Fine. But honestly I’m just being nice. He’s new here. And you know, with a little work, he could be super-cute…”

  “Ashley!”

  “I’m just saying!”

  A motion catches my eye. Someone’s waving to me from the doorway.

  It’s a familiar hot-pink-clad figure. Dyed platinum hair. Dr. Martens boots.

  Victoria, a.k.a. Ms. Warkomski.

  I wave back. She crooks her finger, gesturing me into the hallway. Maybe she wants to know if I’ve made any progress on my search for Anna?

  Ashley notices Victoria too, and her face lights up. “Hey, is that—”

  “No! It’s not! It’s Ms. Warkomski, the new sub in my English class. I need to speak to her about… um… a paper I’m writing. Yes, that’s it. On the themes of self-examination and introspection in Jane Austen’s books! Just stay here, and don’t repeat any of what I said to Bastian!”