The Awakening of Sunshine Girl (The Haunting of Sunshine Girl, #2)(8)

“Mom?” I prompt. “I know this is a lot to take in—”

“Understatement of the century,” she says softly.

I nod. “I know.”

“Has he introduced you to your mother?” Her voice cracks on the last two syllables, and I put my arms around her.

“You’re my mother,” I insist fiercely, hugging her so tight it must hurt, but she doesn’t complain. Finally, when it feels like she’s stopped shaking, I say, “And no. He hasn’t told me anything about the woman who gave birth to me.” I choose my words carefully. “It’s just one of a long list of questions I have for him.”

Mom nods. “I think I’ve started a list of my own,” she says, then sighs. “I always knew this day would come.”

“You did?” I ask incredulously, smiling awkwardly, again raising my eyebrow without meaning to. Mom knows what I’m thinking.

“I didn’t mean the whole magical powers part of it,” Mom answers. She manages a small smile as she brushes tears from her eyes. We’re both crying now, but eventually Mom catches her breath and continues, “I meant that . . . I guess all adoptive parents wonder about the day their children’s birth parents might show up on their doorsteps, right? Though to be honest, I thought the odds in your case were pretty slim, given how we found each other.”

I nod. Someone—Aidan, perhaps?—left me at my mother’s hospital as an infant. There were no official papers for my birth parents to sign before they gave me away, no records hidden in some bureaucratic vault somewhere revealing who they had been.

“But,” Mom continues, now serious and dry-eyed. “I always knew it was a possibility. And I wanted that for you,” she adds quickly. “If you wanted to know, then I wanted you to have every detail about where you’d come from and why your parents gave you up. So I guess . . .” She pauses. “I guess part of me is relieved Aidan showed up.”

“Relieved?” I echo. That’s just about the last word I’d have expected her to use right now.

Mom nods slowly. “I was scared sometimes, worried that you’d want to know where you came from and we’d never be able to find out and you’d never have the closure you needed.”

“I still don’t have closure,” I protest. “This feels like the opposite of closure actually. It feels like the beginning of something that’s going to change everything. I’m not even technically human anymore.” I bite my lip. Technically I never was human—I was born a luiseach.

Mom shifts on the bed, lying down beside me and putting her arms around me. I rest my face against her shoulder just like I did when I was a little kid. “There’s one thing it hasn’t changed, Sunshine. One thing it never, ever could.”

I swallow. “What’s that?”

“It hasn’t changed how much I love you. You could tell me you were descended from a family of wolves or rabbits or aliens, and I would still love you all the same.”

I start crying all over again, but I’m smiling too, breathing in the scent of Mom’s mango-scented shampoo.

“As a matter of fact,” Mom continues, “this actually explains a lot.”

“It does?” I ask, my teary eyes wide.

Mom reaches out and tucks one of my curls behind my right ear. “I knew you were special,” she concedes, shaking her head. “I just didn’t know there was a name for it.”


By the time I wake up in the morning and the doctors have checked up on me, it’s clear there’s no reason for us to stay here any longer; they could run a million tests and never find out what’s wrong with me. Anyway, it’s not wrong with me anymore. For now at least.

Mom’s sitting in the chair beside the bed, exactly where she sat when Aidan showed up last night. It looks like she hasn’t slept a wink.

“’Morning, Sunshine,” she says groggily.

“There’s something else I have to tell you.”

“Okay.” Mom takes a deep breath. She sits up straight, like she’s bracing herself for something big. Guess I can’t blame her after last night.

“Aidan isn’t just my birth father. He’s also my mentor.” Ever since he showed up, in fact, I’ve been calling him my mentor/father in my head. I can’t think of him without imagining a slash cutting its way between the two words. Neither word feels natural.

“What does that mean?” Mom asks.

I recite the facts I know by heart. “Every luiseach has a mentor. When they turn sixteen, they’re supposed to begin working with them. Training, I guess.”

“What kind of training?”

I shrug. “I don’t really know. Nolan’s been trying to research it—”

“Nolan was there on New Year’s!” Mom interrupts, remembering some of what Aidan helped her see just hours ago. Sometimes I forget she wasn’t exactly all there over the past few months when Nolan and I became close. She probably doesn’t even remember the times he came over, helping me figure out what the heck was happening to her.

“Nolan is my protector,” I explain. “A luiseach has both a mentor and a protector. We didn’t know he was mine until New Year’s Day either.”

“As though you didn’t have enough going on that day.” Mom grimaces, and I know she’s thinking about Victoria. I bite my lip and wrinkle my nose, a habit I got from her. I sit up, my paper-thin hospital gown wrinkling beneath me. Instantly I decide not to tell Mom that Victoria isn’t actually dead anymore. Her entire belief system has already been monumentally shaken; I don’t want to completely shatter her understanding of the way the world works. She doesn’t need to know that sometime after the doctors and nurses declared her dead, Victoria stood up and walked out of the hospital, every bit as alive as she’d been before the water demon attacked her.