Prophecy Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

housed with a bunch of girls who cried all the time from seeing dead people.
    Mr. Quinn didn’t immediately answer. Instead he smiled at the overly-curious flight attendant, who was looking the headmaster and Eva up and down. He finally turned and went back to the front of the plane.
    “Leprechauns,” Mr. Quinn said.
    Eva burst out laughing. When the flight attendant snapped his neck around, she slapped a hand over her mouth.
    When she regained her composure, she said, “Leprechauns! Is this some joke?!”
    “You shouldn’t be laughing,” the headmaster said in a low, but stern voice. “You can see omens of death. A Leprechaun isn’t so farfetched.”
    Eva’s grin disappeared. “Well, are they like…really short?”
He smiled, shaking his head. “No. Some are average height, and some are tall like me.” He looked around, especially at the flight attendant, who was now busy straightening his name tag. All the passengers were already asleep and no one paid them any attention. He turned back to her, smirking. “Watch this.”
    Eva furrowed her brow, confused, but soon Mr. Quinn, the man who she was on an inescapable plane with, was slowly turning into some sort of dark mist. She watched as his facial features and the outline of his body faded away to an empty seat. Then the dark mist reappeared and he was back—solid, humanoid, patchy cap and all. 
    Her mouth hung open, until she recovered, and asked, “You can become invisible?”
    He smiled. “No, but that’d be neat,” he answered, adjusting his circle-framed glasses, and then his patchy cap. “Leprechauns like me—all male—can teleport. I transform into a black fog, vanishing as I was, and then I can travel. Earlier, I just stayed in my seat—disappearing, teleporting, and reappearing almost immediately—but a practiced Leprechaun can leave and go anywhere, returning in the exact spot from his departure, and any object he is in contact with, the clothes he wears for instance, teleports with him too.” He smiled. “Thank goodness!”
    “How?”
    He pointed his finger up in the air. “ That is another long story.”
    “I’m all ears,” she said eagerly.
    Eva was now fascinated by Mr. Quinn and Leprechauns, who she had always imagined to be little ugly men, hoarding pots of gold at the end of rainbows. 
    “Well, it all goes back to Saoirse, the secretive witch. She was widowed young, but Laoise wasn’t her only child. She had another by a man—a man she wasn’t married to, frowned upon in those days—named Cianan. He was known by two other names: the ‘Leper’ and ‘Con’—hence, Leprechaun . He was a warlock, known to have wandered around the earth for decades. It is said he returned to his home, a cavern deep in the mountains, a dwelling place for the supernatural, never to be seen again, but no one knows for sure.” He shrugged. “Anyway, after Cianan left her, she disguised the fact that she was pregnant—she was a witch after all—and nine months later gave birth to a boy who she named Cormac. 
    “She knew what the other villagers would think: she, unmarried with a newborn son. So she hid the boy away from the world. Well, this was no ordinary boy. He had both the blood of his mother—a witch—and Cianan—a warlock. Well, when Cormac got older, he discovered that he had powers too. Whenever he would become nervous or upset, he would just disappear—”
    “Just like you did,” Eva interrupted, awed by his tale.
    “Yes, just as I did. But in Cormac’s case, his mother had put a spell over the house, so that he couldn’t teleport. So he was forced to stay inside. But…that wasn’t the only special skill he had. Cormac found out that he could enter people’s minds, making them believe whatever he wanted. He is the true Father of the Leprechauns today, but his line has been so diluted over time that not all of his descendants turn out to be Leprechauns.”
    Eva was shocked. “Can you do that? Enter someone’s