The Haunting of Sunshine Girl, Book 1

by Paige McKenzie

  “And it’s my test to destroy it before it does to my mother what it did to your husband?” The words I don’t say are stuck in my throat, choking me: . . . before it kills her too.

  Suddenly Victoria’s role in all of this becomes clear.

  “And you made a deal with my mentor to make Anna’s demon my test? Because it needs to be fully exorcised before her spirit can move on?”

  This time when Victoria nods, it looks like her head weighs a thousand pounds, like she can only move it with great effort. “It was hardly a coincidence that your mother was offered her dream job in a town with one of the wettest climates in the country.”

  “My mentor got my mother her job?” I ask incredulously. “How long has this been going on?”

  “He’s been putting the pieces of your test in place for months. I’ve been helping as much as I could.”

  “How?” I ask breathlessly.

  “Luiseach can guide spirits, but they cannot move them, not without great strength. When I relinquished my powers, it gave off the energy he needed to set the test in motion—to put Anna in your house. Then I just had to wait until you revealed yourself to me.”

  “Are you even an art teacher?”

  “No,” she answers, smiling. “He arranged that job. All he told me was that one of my students would be the young luiseach living with my daughter.”

  “That explains a lot,” I say softly.

  “It does?” Victoria asks, weary but almost laughing. “Was I really that bad?”

  “Let’s make some art, shall we? You weren’t exactly teacher of the year.” I force myself to smile in the midst of all this anguish, and Victoria does too.

  I shouldn’t be smiling at her. I should be angry at her—this test has put my mom’s life in danger—but I can’t. Even through her smile Victoria’s pain is written clearly on her face. She’s a mother trying to save her daughter.

  “Why can’t my mom hear Anna, perceive that we’re living in a haunted house?”

  “The demon has grown clever.” Victoria presses her lips into a straight line. “He must have blocked your mother’s ability to perceive spirits in order to cause strife between you, to make it that much more difficult for you to protect her.”

  I’m finally beginning to understand. When we first moved to our new house Anna was happy—laughing, begging to play, whispering good night. The demon was a few steps behind—just like Victoria said—but he hadn’t quite arrived yet. But then, that horrible night when the bathroom door was locked, when Mom and I heard Anna’s voice pleading for mercy—that was when Anna’s demon arrived. Nolan was right again: there was more than one spirit in the house. Even Victoria sensed its arrival; I remember the next morning she told us she’d had nightmares and barely slept.

  Almost immediately after that night Mom went from denying that the noises I heard were paranormal—There’s no such thing as ghosts, Sunshine—to being unable to hear the noises at all. She went from busy and tired to so distant that sometimes it felt like she wasn’t there at all.

  Somehow, even with the demon in our house—in Mom—Anna found the strength to reach out to me. She wanted to make sure I knew she was still there, that I wasn’t alone. No wonder the house was shaking when Nolan and I finally began to put the pieces together, no wonder the lightbulb burst above our heads. Nolan was right. Anna was excited. Maybe she understood this was my test all along. Maybe she was trying to help me, the only way she could.

  And no wonder the demon tried to stop us when Mom came home and it saw what we were up to. Gosh, does the demon have access to Mom’s thoughts and memories? Did it go through her brain, discover that I’m scared of spiders, and plant that daddy longlegs there just for me?

  “I think it’s obvious by now that I’m not cut out to pass this test, right?” I rub my hands together anxiously. If my mentor’s been watching me like Victoria says he has, surely he can see that. “So can’t you just tell my mentor to come out of the shadows or wherever he’s hiding, do his best luiseach sorcery, and get rid of the demon and save my mom?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Victoria answers sadly.

  “How does it work?”

  “You have to exorcise the demon yourself.”

  “What if I can’t? I mean, my mentor will swoop in to save the day, right?” My palms are moist with sweat.

  Victoria doesn’t answer.

  “What happens then?” My voice is so small that I don’t know if she can hear me. “Will my mom’s spirit be unsettled, the way Anna’s is?” I can barely say the word spirit. Those two tiny syllables feel like saying that Mom will die.

  “Anna wasn’t possessed by the demon herself. Rather, she was a victim of its possession of my husband. Tormented though she is, her spirit survived. The same cannot be said for the poor souls the demon actually inhabits. As it inhabited my husband.”

  The warmth of Victoria’s house shifts from cozy to oppressive. I yank at the neck of my sweater as though it’s choking me and brush my hair from my forehead, the sweat on my palms making them sticky. My throat feels dry, so I reach for the tea Victoria poured for me and sip it, even though the cup threatens to slip through my sweating fingers. The liquid is so hot that it scalds me. I swear it wasn’t that hot a few minutes ago.

  “How did the demon make your husband’s death look like a heart attack?” I ask hoarsely.

  “When a water demon—or any demon, really—is finished possessing another person, that body becomes nothing more than dead weight to them. They want to rid themselves of it as quickly as possible.”

  A lump rises in my throat, choking me as she continues. “Possession means that the demon is literally living inside another body, and within that body it can move freely. This demon had one goal in possessing my husband—use his body to drown my daughter.”

  “Why?” I whisper, the tiny word struggling to fit around the lump in my throat.

  “I told you that once a spirit turns wholly dark—once it becomes a demon—it will do whatever it takes to remain strong enough to stay on Earth. Releasing a spirit from a mortal body makes a demon stronger.”

  Releasing a spirit. “You mean killing someone?”

  She nods. “If it had been a fire demon, it would have burned Anna to death. An earth demon often buries its victims alive. And a water demon drowns them.”

  I shake my head, thinking about the little girl who’s determined to beat me at Monopoly. How could someone hurt her?

  “After Anna was dead the demon had no more use for my husband. So it reached its watery demon hand inside my husband’s chest, squeezing his heart until it simply stopped beating.”

  I close my eyes, trying not to imagine a cold, wet hand hovering near my mother’s heart, just waiting to take hold. Tears start streaming down my face.

  “And his spirit?” I manage to whisper. “What happens to the souls of the people the demon inhabits?”

  Victoria looks away from a moment, taking a deep breath before she turns back and says, “Those spirits do not survive. The demon destroys them completely.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Long Way Home

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they do not move on. They simply . . . cease to exist.”

  “I don’t understand.” The lump in my throat is so big, I’m surprised I can get any words out at all.

  “Slowly, over time, every single person whose lives they touched will begin to forget them. Until no one can remember having known them at all.”

  “But you still remember your husband.”

  “I do. But it’s only a matter of time.” Victoria shifts her weight uncomfortably, as though she’s sitting on a hard wooden chair, not a plush one. “Already I cannot recall just how we met, how he asked me to marry him, the color of his eyes.”

  “You have pictures of him,” I try.

  “Yes, but someday I’ll simply throw those pictures away, wondering why there are photographs of a stranger in my
house.”

  I think about my mother—the inside jokes and shared clothes, the way she laughs, her perfectly straight auburn hair and freckled skin. I could never forget all that.

  Could I?

  I stand up and start for the door. “I should go.” I grab my coat from the twisted wooden rack by the door, trying to ignore the fact that beneath my own jacket there’s a smaller one that must have belonged to Anna before she died. I wonder what other relics of her remain in this house. I wonder whether the turreted top floor was her favorite place to play. Did she play there with her father? Will Anna’s ghost remember him even after Victoria’s memories vanish? Maybe it would be better if Anna forgot him—forgot that his body drowned her, even if it was just carrying out the demon’s will. Did he know what he was doing as it was happening? I close my eyes and press the heel of my hand to my forehead, overwhelmed.

  I spin around on my heel. “How can you sound so casual about forgetting your husband? How can you be so resigned to it? If it were me, I’d paper my house with blown-up photographs. I’d write down all my memories so I could remember every detail.”

  Victoria puts her hands on my shoulders, her voice still frustratingly calm. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t make a difference, Sunshine. Eventually you’d throw them all away, wondering how they got there in the first place. Believe me. I’ve seen it happen.” I can feel the warmth of her palms through my T-shirt, my sweater, my jacket.

  I twist myself from her grasp. “Well, it’s not going to happen to me. I’m going home to my mother. I should never have left her alone.” Hot tears overflow from my eyes and roll down my cheeks. “She’s already hurt herself once.” I finger the scar at the base of my left thumb.

  Victoria looks directly into my eyes. “But not seriously, right?”

  The lump in my throat is getting bigger by the second. “She sliced her wrist open with a knife. Then she turned the knife on me,” I add. “It looked plenty serious to me.”

  “I know this must be overwhelming, Sunshine, but I need you to listen to me now. Think about it. Your mother is a nurse. She has medical expertise. If she wanted to cause any real damage, she’d know how. The demon only made her do that to get your attention—not to inflict any real damage.”

  “Why did the demon want my attention?”

  “For a demon, that’s part of the fun—wreaking havoc, frightening people, destroying their lives. It knew that the surest way to scare you was to make you worry about your mother’s safety, to drive a wedge between two people who’d always been so close.”

  How does Victoria know so much about us? Maybe she’s been lying to me all this time. Maybe she is my mentor. Maybe this is part of my test.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” My voice shakes as an even more awful thought occurs to me. “How do I know you’re not possessed by the demon too? Maybe you’re just keeping me here so I can’t get home in time to save my mom!” I open the front door, grateful for the gust of cool air that blows in from outside. I step onto the front porch and begin sprinting down the stairs and across the front yard.

  “You have until New Year’s Eve!” she shouts, speaking quickly to get the words out before I’m out of reach.

  I spin around. “Why New Year’s Eve?”

  “That’s when he killed my family—at midnight on New Year’s Eve last year. The demon has tormented its share of people in the year that’s passed, but hasn’t destroyed one since. It draws strength from the turn of one year into the next. The strength it needs to actually take a life.”

  New Year’s Eve. One week from today. I press the heels of my sneakers into Victoria’s snow-spattered yard. Without looking up I say, “So I have some time to figure out how to save her?”

  “You do.” She nods. “I promise you that she will be safe until then. But there is one more thing,” Victoria adds softly, and now I do look up. “Once a full year has passed since Anna’s death without the demon’s exorcism, her spirit . . .” She pauses. Now I think she’s the one who’s going to burst into tears. But she swallows her tears and sets her mouth into a straight line long enough to say, “Anna’s spirit will be destroyed too. I will forget—”

  “I understand,” I say quickly so she doesn’t have to say it out loud: I will forget that I ever had a family. That I ever was a mother.

  “I can help you,” Victoria begins, but I shake my head.

  “I thought you said it was my test, not yours.”

  “It is. But I’m allowed to help, now that you’ve found me.”

  I nod. “I’ll come back,” I promise. I need all the help I can get.

  Even though I’m longing to see our house filled with Mom’s knickknacks, her clothes, her fingerprints—all that proof that she is a real, solid person and not a fading memory—I walk home slowly, going over in my mind everything that Victoria just told me. She said I had time, so I may as well take it. I’m about halfway home when I reach into my pocket for my phone and begin typing.

  You’ll never believe what I found out.

  Delete.

  I have so much to tell you!

  Delete.

  You were right and I was wrong.

  Delete.

  It’s impossible to find the right thing to say to Nolan. I draft and discard a dozen text messages on the walk from Victoria’s house to my own. Finally I type I’m sorry and hit send. The tiniest little bit of snow is falling, just a flurry. I dig a hat out of my jacket pocket and shove it on my head, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. I’m still cold, colder maybe than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And that’s saying something, because I’ve spent most of the past few months freezing.

  I’m tempted to resend the text a dozen times, but I settle for once. And then I wait. I must have checked my phone twenty times before I turn onto our street. I’m so busy looking down that I trip and fall nearly flat on my face in front of someone’s driveway.

  “Ow,” I say out loud, even though there’s no one around to hear me. It’s still early, and for once the fog isn’t blindingly thick. I think it’s too cold for fog, like the deep freeze has made everything crystal clear.

  I’m a luiseach. A guardian angel. A supernatural warrior. A light bringer. Just like Nolan said I was. And it’s up to me to save my mother.

  Not just my mother. And not just Anna’s spirit and Victoria’s memories. It’s up to me to save myself. Because who will I be if I don’t have Mom? If I can’t even remember that I used to have her? She’s the only family I have.

  Though I can’t help wondering whether Victoria knows who my real parents are. The two luiseach who gave me up. Maybe she knows why.

  I shake my head. I don’t care whether Victoria knows. I don’t care whether she offers to bring me to them. They aren’t my parents. Mom is all the parent I’ll ever need. The only one I want.

  Still on my knees, snow melting into my jeans, I glance around to make sure there’s no one around and try saying it out loud, like I just want to know what the sentence will feel like: “I’m a luiseach.”

  Butterflies flutter in my stomach, but otherwise nothing happens. I say it again, louder this time: “I’m a luiseach.”

  Still nothing, not even a bird or a squirrel to startle with the sound of my voice. Almost as if I wasn’t saying something earth shattering, something that—just a few months ago, back in Austin, when Ashley and I were arguing over which movie to see, which boy was cutest, which ice cream flavor best—would have sounded unbelievable, incredible, even to a weirdo like me.

  Ashley would say that I’d lost my mind. She’d say Mom probably just needs therapy—and me too, for believing all this. Her response would be so utterly normal. I wipe the dirt and pine needles and snow from my palms and stand up. The knees of my jeans are wet from my fall, and the right leg is ripped open. I guess texting and walking is almost as bad an idea as texting and driving. I sigh. All the words Victoria spoke are dancing around in my head, twisting and turning over one another, forming an e
normous ball of anguish.

  For just a few minutes I want to think about something else, anything else. Something that’s a little bit easier to wrap my head around. Even the most seasoned luiseach probably has to take a break once in a while, right? Standing still, I send another text, this one to Ashley.

  Merry Christmas, I write. I miss you.

  It’s the truth. Last year at this time Ashley and I were texting each other pictures of our Christmas trees, arguing over which of us had done a better job stringing the lights, and giggling over the ornaments we’d made for each other out of popsicle sticks back when we were six.

  Ashley responds right away. Merry Christmas! I miss you too.

  How are things with Cory Cooper?

  So amazing. I can’t believe I’m actually going to have someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve for once!

  I almost laugh out loud at the difference between Ashley’s and my New Year’s Eve plans. Ashley’s still living the life of a normal teenager, still trying to get me to be normal with her, just like she has for years—telling me to shop at normal stores, to wear normal clothes, to try normal hobbies. At least now I know that it wasn’t entirely my fault that I was never any good at being normal. I wasn’t born normal. Apparently I wasn’t even born human.

  I couldn’t help it that I love taxidermied animals and vintage clothes and books written two centuries ago. But the truth is, although I never cared about fitting in, I do miss the normal things Ashley and I used to do together. Just regular stuff like going to the movies or to a party. Lying out around the pool in her backyard. Listening to music. Studying SAT words. Eating pizza while we watched TV.

  Ashley writes, How are you? How’s Kat?

  So much for thinking about something else. I have no idea how to answer that question. I could tell Ashley that my mom is sick. She would care—she loves my mom. When we were growing up she and I spent as much time at each other’s houses as we did at our own. She’d probably offer to beg her parents for a plane ticket so she could fly up here and help me take care of Mom. Of course, she’d probably think that care involved making soup and picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy, not evil spirits and exorcisms.