Then I remember that I’m really pissed. I wave my hand back toward the kitchen and basement door. “What the hell was that about?”
“I thought you should know what you’re dealing with.”
“What? Some bratty girl throwing a hissy fit in the kitchen?” I narrow my eyes. “You were trying to scare me off. That sad little display was supposed to send me running for the hills.”
“Sad little display?” she mocks me. “I bet you almost wet yourself.”
I open my mouth and quickly shut it. She almost made me laugh, and I’d still like to be pissed. Only not literally. Oh crap. I’m laughing.
Anna blinks and smiles, fleetingly. She’s trying not to laugh herself.
“I was…” She pauses. “I was angry with you.”
“For what?” I ask.
“For trying to kill me,” she says, and then we both do laugh.
“And after you tried so hard to not kill me.” I smile. “I guess it must’ve seemed pretty rude.” I’m laughing with her. We’re having a conversation. What is this, some kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome?
“Why are you here? Did you come to try to kill me again?”
“Oddly enough, no. I—I had a bad dream. I needed to talk to someone.” I ruffle my hand through my hair. It’s been ages since I’ve felt so awkward. Maybe I’ve never felt this awkward. “And I guess I just figured, well, Anna must be up. So here I am.”
She snorts a little. Then her brow furrows. “What could I say to you? What could we talk about? I’ve been out of the world for so long.”
I shrug. The next words leave my mouth before I know what’s happening. “Well, I was never really in the world in the first place, so.” I clench my jaw and look down at the floor. I can’t believe I’m being so emo. I’m complaining to a girl who was brutally murdered at sixteen. She’s trapped in this house of corpses and I get to go to school and be a Trojan; I get to eat my mom’s grilled peanut butter and Cheez Whiz sandwiches and—
“You walk with the dead,” she says gently. Her eyes are luminous and—I can’t believe it—sympathetic. “You’ve walked with us since…”
“Since my father died,” I say. “And before that he walked with you and I followed. Death is my world. Everything else, school and friends, they’re just things that get in the way of my next ghost.” I’ve never said this before. I’ve never allowed myself to think it for more than a second. I’ve kept myself focused, and in doing so have managed to not think too much about life either, about living, no matter how hard my mom pushed me to have fun, to go out, to apply to colleges.
“Were you never sad?” she asks.
“Not a lot. I had this higher power, you know? I had this purpose.” I reach into my back pocket and pull out my athame, drawing it from its leather. The blade shines in the gray light. Something in my blood, the blood of my father and his before him, makes it more than just a knife. “I’m the only one in the world who can do this. Doesn’t that mean it’s what I’m supposed to do?” As the words leave my mouth I resent them. They take away all of my choices. Anna crosses her pale arms. The tilt of her head sweeps her hair over her shoulder and it’s strange to see it lying there, just regular, dark strands. I’m waiting for it to twitch, to move into the air on that invisible current.
“Having no choice doesn’t seem fair,” she says, seeming to read my mind. “But having all of them isn’t really easier. When I was alive, I could never decide what I wanted to do, what I wanted to become. I loved to take pictures; I wanted to take pictures for a newspaper. I loved to cook; I wanted to move to Vancouver and open a restaurant. I had a million different dreams but none of them was stronger than the rest. In the end they probably would have paralyzed me. I would have ended up here, running the boarding house.”
“I don’t believe that.” She seems like such a force, this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she’d had the chance.
“I honestly don’t remember,” she sighs. “I don’t think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp.” She clasps her hands comically to her chest and breathes in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. “I probably didn’t. For all my dreams and fancies, I don’t recall being … what would you call it? Perky.”
I smile and she does too, then tucks her hair behind her ear in a gesture that is so alive and human that it makes me forget what I was going to say.
“What are we doing?” I ask. “You’re trying to get me to not kill you, aren’t you?”
Anna crosses her arms. “Considering that you can’t kill me, I think that would be a wasted effort.”
I laugh. “You’re too confident.”
“Am I? I know that what you’ve shown me aren’t your best moves, Cas. I can feel the tension in your blade from holding back. How many times have you done this? How many times have you fought and won?”
“Twenty-two in the last three years.” I say it with pride. It’s more than my father ever did in the same amount of time. I’m what you might call an overachiever. I wanted to be better than he was. Faster. Sharper. Because I didn’t want to end up like he ended up.
Without my knife I’m nothing special, just a regular seventeen-year-old with an average build, maybe a bit on the skinny side. But with the athame in my hand you’d think I was a triple black belt or something. My moves are sure, strong, and quick. She’s right when she says she hasn’t seen my best, and I don’t know why that is.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Anna. You know that, don’t you? It’s nothing personal.”
“Just like I didn’t want to kill all of those people rotting in my basement.” She smiles ruefully.
So they were real. “What happened to you?” I ask. “What makes you do this?”
“None of your business,” she replies.
“If you tell me…” I start but don’t finish. If she tells me, I can figure her out. And once I figure her out, I can kill her.
Everything is becoming more complicated. This questioning girl and that wordless black monster are one and the same. It isn’t fair. When I slide my knife through her, will I cut them apart? Will Anna go to one place and it to another? Or will Anna get sucked away to whatever void the rest go to?
I thought I’d put these thoughts out of my mind a long time ago. My father always told me that it wasn’t our place to judge, that we were only the instrument. Our task was to send them away from the living. His eyes had been so certain when he’d said it. Why don’t I have that kind of certainty?
I lift my hand slowly to touch that cold face, to graze my fingers along her cheek, and am surprised to find it soft, not made of marble. She stands paralyzed, then hesitantly lifts her hand to rest on mine.
The spell is so strong that when the door opens and Carmel comes through it, neither of us moves until she says my name.
“Cas? What are you doing?”
“Carmel,” I blurt, and there she is, her figure framed in the open door. She’s got her hand on the knob and it looks like she’s shaking. She takes another tentative step into the house.
“Carmel, don’t move,” I say, but she’s staring at Anna, who backs away from me, grimacing and grabbing hold of her head.
“Is that her? Is that what killed Mike?”
Stupid girl, she’s coming farther into the house. Anna is retreating as fast as she can on unsteady feet, but I see that her eyes have gone black.
“Anna, don’t, she doesn’t know,” I say too late. Whatever it is that allows Anna to spare me is obviously a one-time deal. She’s gone in a twist of black hair and red blood, pale skin and teeth. There’s a moment of silence and we listen to the drip, drip, drip of her dress.
And then she lunges, ready to thrust her hands into Carmel’s guts.
I jump and tackle her, thinking the minute I collide with that granite force that I am an idiot. But I do manage to alter her course, and Carmel jumps to the sid
e. It’s the wrong way. She’s farther away from the door now. It occurs to me that some people only have book smarts. Carmel is a tame house cat and Anna will make lunch of her if I don’t do something. As Anna crouches on the ground, the red of her dress flowing sickly onto the floor, her hair and eyes wild, I hurtle myself toward Carmel and put myself between them.
“Cas, what were you doing?” Carmel asks, terrified.
“Shut up and get to the door,” I yell. I hold my athame out in front of us even though Anna isn’t afraid. When she springs, it’s for me this time, and I grab on to her wrist with my free hand, using the other to try to keep her at bay with my knife.
“Anna, stop this!” I hiss, and the white comes back into her eyes. Her teeth are grinding as she spits her words through them.
“Get her out of here!” she moans. I shove her hard to knock her back one more time. Then I grab Carmel and we dive through the door. We don’t turn until we’re down the porch steps and back on dirt and grass. The door has shut and I hear Anna raging inside, breaking things and tearing things up.
“My god, she’s awful,” Carmel whispers, burying her head in my shoulder. I squeeze her softly for a moment before pulling free and walking back up the porch steps.
“Cas! Get away from there,” Carmel shouts. I know what she thinks she saw, but what I saw was Anna trying to stop. When my foot hits the porch, Anna’s face appears at the window, her teeth bared and veins standing out against white skin. She slams her hand against the glass, making it rattle. There is dark water standing in her eyes.
“Anna,” I whisper. I go to the window, but before I can put my hand up she floats away and turns, glides up the stairs, and disappears.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carmel won’t stop chattering at me as we stomp quickly down the gravel of Anna’s unkempt driveway. She’s asking a million questions that I’m not paying attention to. All I can think is that Anna is a murderer. Yet Anna is not evil. Anna kills, but Anna doesn’t want to kill. She’s not like any other ghost I’ve faced. Sure, I’ve heard of sentient ghosts, those who seem to know that they’re dead. According to Gideon they’re strong, but rarely hostile. I don’t know what to do. Carmel grabs me by the elbow and I spin around.
“What?” I snap.
“Do you want to tell me exactly what you were doing in there?”
“Not really.” I must’ve slept longer than I thought I did—either that or I was talking to Anna longer than I thought I was, because buttery shafts of light are breaking through the low clouds in the east. The sun is gentle but feels harsh to my eyes. Something occurs to me and I blink at Carmel, realizing for the first time that she’s really here.
“You followed me,” I say. “What’re you doing here?”
She shifts her weight around awkwardly. “I couldn’t sleep. And I wanted to see if it was true, so I went over to your house and saw you leaving.”
“You wanted to see if what was true?”
She looks at me from under her lashes, like she wants me to figure it out for myself so she doesn’t have to say it out loud, but I hate that game. After a few long seconds of my annoyed silence, she breaks.
“I talked to Thomas. He says you…” She shakes her head like she feels stupid for believing it. I’m mostly feeling stupid for trusting Thomas. “He says you kill ghosts for a living. Like you’re a ghostbuster or something.”
“I’m not a ghostbuster.”
“Then what were you doing in there?”
“I was talking to Anna.”
“Talking to her? She killed Mike! She could’ve killed you!”
“No she couldn’t.” I glance up at the house. I feel strange, talking about her so close to her home. It doesn’t feel right.
“What were you talking to her about?” Carmel asks.
“Are you always so nosy?”
“What, like it was personal?” she snorts.
“Maybe it was,” I reply. I want to get out of here. I want to drop my mom’s car off and have Carmel take me to wake up Thomas. I think I’ll rip the mattress right out from under him. It’ll be fun to watch him bounce groggily on his box springs. “Listen, let’s just get away from here, okay? Follow me back to my place and we can take your car to Thomas’s. I’ll explain everything, I promise,” I add when she looks skeptical.
“Okay,” she says.
“And Carmel.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ever call me a ghostbuster again, all right?” She smiles, and I smile back. “Just so we’re clear.”
She brushes past me to get into her car, but I grab her by the arm.
“You haven’t mentioned Thomas’s little blurt to anyone else, have you?”
She shakes her head.
“Not even Natalie or Katie?”
“I told Nat that I was meeting you so she’d cover for me if my parents called her. I told them I was staying at her place.”
“What did you tell her we were meeting for?” I ask. She gives me this resentful look. I suppose that Carmel Jones only meets boys secretly at night for romantic reasons. I run my hand roughly through my hair.
“So, what, I’m supposed to make something up at school? Like we made out?” I think I’m blinking too much. And my shoulders are stooped so I feel about half a foot shorter than she is. She stares at me, bemused.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“Haven’t had a whole lot of practice, Carmel.”
She laughs. Damn, she really is pretty. No wonder Thomas spilled all my secrets. One bat of her eyelashes probably knocked him over.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll make something up. I’ll tell everybody you’re a great kisser.”
“Don’t do me any favors. Listen, just follow me to my place, okay?”
She nods and ducks into her car. When I get into mine, I want to press my head into the steering wheel until the horn goes off. That way the horn will cover my screams. Why is this job so hard? Is it Anna? Or is it something else? Why can’t I keep anyone out of my business? It’s never been this difficult before. They accepted any cheesy cover story I made up, because deep down they didn’t want to know the truth. Like Chase and Will. They swallowed Thomas’s fairy story pretty easily.
But it’s too late now. Thomas and Carmel are in on the game. And the game is a whole lot more dangerous this time around.
* * *
“Does Thomas live with his parents?”
“I don’t think so,” Carmel says. “His parents died in a car accident. A drunk driver crossed the line. Or at least that’s what people at school say.” She shrugs. “I think he just lives with his grandpa. That weird old guy.”
“Good.” I pound on the door. I don’t care if I wake up Morfran. The salty old buzzard can use the excitement. But after about thirteen very loud and rattling knocks, the door whips open and there’s Thomas, standing before us in a very unattractive green bathrobe.
“Cas?” he whispers with a frog in his throat. I can’t help but smile. It’s hard to be annoyed with him when he looks like an oversize four-year-old, his hair stuck up on one side and his glasses only on halfway. When he realizes that Carmel’s standing behind me, he quickly checks his face for drool and tries to smooth his hair down. Unsuccessfully. “Uh, what are you doing here?”
“Carmel followed me out to Anna’s place,” I say with a smirk. “Want to tell me why?” He’s starting to blush. I don’t know if it’s because he feels guilty or because Carmel is seeing him in his pajamas. Either way, he steps aside to let us in and leads us through the dimly lit house to the kitchen.
The whole place smells like Morfran’s herbal pipe. Then I see him, a hulking, stooped-over figure pouring coffee. He hands me a mug before I can even ask. Grumbling at us, he leaves the kitchen.
Thomas, meanwhile, has stopped shuffling around and is staring at Carmel.
“She tried to kill you,” he blurts, wide-eyed. “You can’t stop thinking about the way her fingers were hooked
at your stomach.”
Carmel blinks. “How did you know that?”
“You shouldn’t do that,” I warn Thomas. “It makes people uncomfortable. Invasion of privacy, you know.”
“I know,” he says. “I can’t do it very often,” he adds to Carmel. “Usually only when people are having strong or violent thoughts, or keep thinking of the same thing over and over.” He smiles. “In your case, all three.”
“You can read minds?” she asks incredulously.
“Sit down, Carmel,” I say.
“I don’t feel like it,” she says. “I’m learning so many interesting things about Thunder Bay these days.” Her arms cross over her chest. “You can read minds, there’s something up there in that house killing my ex-boyfriends, and you—”
“Kill ghosts,” I finish for her. “With this.” I pull out my athame and set it on the table. “What else did Thomas tell you?”
“Just that your father did it too,” she said. “I guessed that it killed him.”
I give Thomas the eye.
“I’m sorry,” he says helplessly.
“It’s okay. You’ve got it bad. I know.” I smirk and he looks at me desperately. As if Carmel doesn’t know already. She’d have to be blind.
I sigh. “So now what? Can I possibly tell you to go home and forget about this? Is there any way that I can avoid us forming some peppy group of—” Before my mouth can finish, I lean forward and groan into my hands. Carmel gets it first, and laughs.
“A peppy group of ghostbusters?” she asks.
“I get to be Peter Venkman,” says Thomas.
“Nobody gets to be anybody,” I snap. “We are not ghostbusters. I’ve got the knife, and I kill the ghosts, and I can’t be tripping over you the whole time. Besides, it’s obvious that I would be Peter Venkman.” I look sharply at Thomas. “You would be Egon.”
“Wait a minute,” says Carmel. “You don’t get to call the shots. Mike was my friend, sort of.”
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