“That doesn’t mean you get to help. This isn’t about revenge.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about … stopping her.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly done a great job of that. And from what I saw, it didn’t even look like you were trying.” Carmel has her eyebrow raised at me. The look is giving me some kind of hot feeling in my cheeks. Holy shit, I’m blushing.
“This is stupid,” I blurt. “She’s tough, okay? But I have a plan.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says, rising to my defense. “Cas has it all worked out. I’ve already got the rocks from the lake. They’re charging under the moon until it wanes. The chicken feet are on backorder.”
Talking about the spell makes me uneasy for some reason, like there’s something that I’m not putting together. Something that I’ve overlooked.
Someone comes through the door without knocking. I barely notice, because that makes me feel like I’ve overlooked something too. After a few seconds of prodding my brain, I glance up and see Will Rosenberg.
He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. His breathing is heavy and his chin is lolling toward his chest. I wonder if he’s been drinking. There are dirt and oil stains on his jeans. The poor kid’s taking it hard. He’s staring at my knife on the table, so I reach up and take it, then slide it into my back pocket.
“I knew there was something weird about you,” he says. The scent of his breath is sixty percent beer. “This is all because of you, somehow, isn’t it? Ever since you came here, something’s been wrong. Mike knew it. That’s why he didn’t want you hanging around Carmel.”
“Mike didn’t know anything,” I say calmly. “What happened to him was an accident.”
“Murder is no accident,” Will mutters. “Stop lying to me. Whatever you’re doing, I want in.”
I groan. Nothing is going right. Morfran comes back into the kitchen and ignores all of us, instead staring into his coffee like it’s super interesting.
“Circle’s getting bigger,” is all he says, and the problem that I couldn’t think of snaps into place.
“Shit,” I say. My head falls back so I’m looking at the ceiling.
“What?” Thomas asks. “What’s wrong?”
“The spell,” I reply. “The circle. We’ve got to be in the house to cast it.”
“Yeah, so?” Thomas says. Carmel gets it right away; her face is downcast.
“So Carmel went into the house this morning and Anna almost ate her. The only person who can be in the house safely is me, and I’m not witchy enough to cast the circle.”
“Couldn’t you hold her off long enough for us to cast it? Once it was up, we’d be protected.”
“No,” Carmel says. “There’s no way. You should have seen him this morning; she swatted him like a fly.”
“Thanks,” I snort.
“It’s true. Thomas would never make it. And besides, doesn’t he have to concentrate or something?”
Will jumps forward and grabs Carmel by the arm. “What are you talking about? You went in that house? Are you crazy? Mike would kill me if anything happened to you!”
And then he remembers that Mike’s dead.
“We’ve got to figure out a way to cast that circle and do that spell,” I think out loud. “She’ll never tell me what happened on her own.”
Morfran finally speaks. “Everything happens for a reason, Theseus Cassio. You’ve got less than a week to figure it out.”
* * *
Less than a week. Less than a week. There’s no way I can become a competent witch in less than a week, and I’m certainly not going to get any stronger or more able to control Anna. I need backup. I need to call Gideon.
We’re all standing around in the driveway, having disbanded in the kitchen. It’s a Sunday, a lazy, quiet Sunday, too early even for churchgoers. Carmel is walking with Will to their cars. She said she was going to follow him home, hang out with him awhile. She was, after all, the closest to him, and she couldn’t imagine that Chase was being much comfort. I imagine she’s right. Before she went, she took Thomas off to the side and whispered with him for a few moments. As we watch Carmel and Will walk away, I ask him what that was all about.
He shrugs. “She just wanted to tell me she was glad that I told her. And she hopes that you’re not mad at me for spilling, because she’ll keep the secret. She just wants to help.” And then he goes on and on, trying to draw attention to the way that she touched his arm. I wish that I hadn’t asked, because now he won’t shut up about it.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m glad Carmel’s noticing you. If you play your cards right, you might have a shot. Just don’t invade her mind too much. She was pretty creeped out by that.”
“Me and Carmel Jones,” he scoffs, even as he stares hopefully after her car. “In a million years maybe. More likely she’ll end up comforting Will. He’s smart, and one of the crowd, like her. He’s not a bad guy.” Thomas straightens his glasses. Thomas isn’t a bad guy either, and someday maybe he’ll figure that out. For now I tell him to go put some clothes on.
As he turns and walks back up the drive, I notice something. There’s a circular path near the house that connects to the end of the driveway. At the fork of it is a small white tree, a birch sapling. And hanging from the lowest branch is a slim black cross.
“Hey,” I call out, and point to it. “What’s that?”
It isn’t him who answers. Morfran swaggers out onto the porch in his slippers and blue pajama pants, a plaid robe tied tight around his extensive belly. The getup looks ridiculous in contrast to that braided, mossy rock ’n’ roll beard, but I’m not thinking about that now.
“Papa Legba’s cross,” he says simply.
“You practice voodoo,” I say, and he hmphs in what I think is an affirmative. “So do I.”
He snorts into his coffee cup. “No, you don’t. And you shouldn’t, neither.”
So it was a bluff. I don’t practice. I learn. And here is a golden opportunity. “Why shouldn’t I?” I ask.
“Son, voodoo is about power. It’s about the power inside you and the power you channel. The power you steal and the power you take from your goddamn chicken dinner. And you’ve got about ten thousand volts strapped to your side in that bit of leather there.”
I instinctively touch the athame in my back pocket.
“If you were voodoo and channeling that, well, looking at you would be like watching a moth fly into a bug zapper. You would be lit up, 24/7.” He squints at me. “Maybe someday I could teach you.”
“I’d like that,” I say as Thomas bursts back onto the porch in fresh but still mismatched clothes. He scampers down the porch steps.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“Back to Anna’s,” I say. He turns sort of green. “I need to figure this ritual out or a week from now I’ll be staring at your severed head and Carmel’s internal organs.” Thomas turns even greener, and I clap him on the back.
I glance back at Morfran. He’s eyeballing us over his coffee mug. So voodooists channel power. He’s an interesting guy. And he’s given me way too much to think about to sleep.
* * *
On the drive over, the high from the events of last night starts to wear off. My eyes feel like sandpaper, and my head is lolling, even after downing that cup of paint thinner that Morfran called coffee. Thomas is quiet all the way to Anna’s. He’s probably still thinking about the feel of Carmel’s hand on his arm. If life were fair, Carmel would turn around and look into his eyes, see that he’s her willing slave, and be grateful. She’d lift him up and he wouldn’t be a slave anymore, he’d just be Thomas, and they’d be glad to have each other. But life isn’t fair. She’ll probably end up with Will, or some other jock, and Thomas will suffer quietly.
“I don’t want you anywhere near the house,” I say to snap him out of it and make sure he doesn’t miss the turn. “You can hang in the car, or follow me up the driveway. But she’s probably unstable after this
morning, so you should stay off the porch.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he snorts.
When we pull into the driveway, he elects to stay in the car. I make my way up alone. When I open the front door, I look down to make sure I’m stepping into the foyer and not about to fall face-first into a boatload of dead bodies.
“Anna?” I call. “Anna? Are you all right?”
“That’s a silly question.”
She’s just come out of a room at the top of the stairs. She’s leaning against the rail, not the dark goddess, but the girl.
“I’m dead. I can’t be all right any more than I can be not all right.”
Her eyes are downcast. She’s lonely, and guilty, and trapped. She’s feeling sorry for herself, and I can’t say that I blame her.
“I didn’t mean for anything like that to happen,” I say honestly, and take a step toward the staircase. “I wouldn’t have put you in that situation. She followed me.”
“Is she all right?” Anna asks in a curiously high voice.
“She’s fine.”
“Good. I thought I might have bruised her. And she has such a pretty face.”
Anna isn’t looking at me. She’s fiddling with the wood of the railing. She’s trying to get me to say something, but I don’t know what it is.
“I need you to tell me what happened to you. I need you to tell me how you died.”
“Why do you want to make me remember that?” she asks softly.
“Because I need to understand you. I need to know why you’re so strong.” I start thinking out loud. “From what I know of it, your murder wasn’t that strange or horrific. It wasn’t even that brutal. So I can’t figure out why you are the way you are. There has to be something…” When I stop, Anna is staring at me with wide, disgusted eyes. “What?”
“I’m just starting to regret that I didn’t kill you,” she says. It takes my sleep-deprived brain a minute to understand, but then I feel like a total ass. I’ve been around too much death. I’ve seen so much sick, twisted shit that it rolls off my tongue like nursery rhymes.
“How much do you know,” she asks, “about what happened to me?”
Her voice is softer, almost subdued. Talking about murder, spitting out facts is something I grew up around. Only now I don’t know how to do it. With Anna standing right in front of me, it’s more than just words or pictures in a book. When I finally spit it out, I do it quickly and all at once, like pulling off a Band-Aid.
“I know that you were murdered in 1958, when you were sixteen. Someone cut your throat. You were on your way to a school dance.”
A small smile plays on her lips but doesn’t take hold. “I really wanted to go,” she says quietly. “It was going to be my last one. My first and last.” She looks down at herself and holds out the hem of her skirt. “This was my dress.”
It doesn’t look like much to me, just a white shift with some lace and ribbons, but what do I know? I’m not a chick, for one, and for two, I don’t know much about 1958. Back then it might have been the bee’s knees, as my mom would say.
“It isn’t much,” she says, reading my mind. “One of the boarders we had around that time was a seamstress. Maria. From Spain. I thought she was very exotic. She’d had to leave a daughter, only a little younger than me, when she came here, so she liked to talk to me. She took my measurements and helped me to sew it. I wanted something more elegant but I was never that good at sewing. Clumsy fingers,” she says, and holds them up like I’ll be able to see what a mess they can make.
“You look beautiful,” I say, because it’s the first thing that pops into my stupid, empty head. I consider using my athame to cut my tongue out. It’s probably not what she wanted to hear, and it came out all wrong. My voice didn’t work. I’m lucky it didn’t do the Peter Brady and crack. “Why was it going to be your last dance?” I ask quickly.
“I was going to run away,” she says. Defiance shines in her eyes just like it must have then, and there’s a fire behind her voice that makes me sad. Then it goes out, and she seems confused. “I don’t know if I would have done it. I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to start my life,” she explains. “I knew I would never do anything if I stayed here. I would’ve had to run the boarding house. And I was tired of fighting.”
“Fighting?” I take another step up closer. There’s a tail of dark hair falling down her shoulders, which slump as she hugs herself. She’s so pale and small, I can hardly imagine her fighting anyone. Not with her fists anyway.
“It wasn’t fighting,” she says. “And it was. With her. And with him. It was hiding, making them think I was something weaker, because that’s what they wanted. That’s what she told me my father would have wanted. A quiet, obedient girl. Not a harlot. Not a whore.”
I take a deep breath. I ask who called her that, who would say that, but she’s not listening anymore.
“He was a liar. A layabout. He played love to my mother but it wasn’t real. He said he would marry her and then he would have all the rest.”
I don’t know who she’s talking about, but I can guess what “all the rest” was.
“It was you,” I say softly. “It was you he was really after.”
“He would … corner me, in the kitchen, or outside by the well. It was paralyzing. I hated him.”
“Why didn’t you tell your mother?”
“I couldn’t…” She stops and starts again. “But I couldn’t let him. I was going to get away. I would have.” Her face is blank. Not even the eyes are alive. She’s just moving lips and voice. The rest of her has gone back inside.
I reach up and touch her cheek, cold as ice. “Was it him? Was he the one who killed you? Did he follow you that night and—”
Anna shakes her head very fast and pulls away. “That’s enough,” she says in a voice that’s trying to be hard.
“Anna, I have to know.”
“Why do you have to know? What business is it of yours?” She puts her hand to her forehead. “I can hardly remember myself. Everything’s muddy and bleeding.” She shakes her head, frustrated. “There’s nothing I can tell you! I was killed and it was black and then I was here. I was this, and I killed, and killed, and couldn’t stop.” Her breath hitches. “They did something to me but I don’t know what. I don’t know how.”
“They,” I say curiously, but this isn’t going any further. I can literally see her shutting down, and in another couple of minutes, I might be standing here trying to hold on to a girl with black veins and a dripping dress.
“There’s a spell,” I say. “A spell that can help me understand.”
She calms a bit and looks at me like I’m nuts. “Magic spells?” A disbelieving smile escapes. “Will I grow fairy wings and jump through fire?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Magic isn’t real. It’s make-believe and superstition, old curses on the tongues of my Finnish grandmothers.”
I can’t believe that she’s questioning the existence of magic when she’s standing before me dead and talking. But I don’t get the chance to convince her, because something starts to happen, something twisting in her brain, and she twitches. When she blinks, her eyes are far away.
“Anna?”
Her arm shoots out to keep me back. “It’s nothing.”
I peer closer. “That wasn’t nothing. You remembered something, didn’t you? What is it? Tell me!”
“No, I—it wasn’t anything. I don’t know.” She touches her temple. “I don’t know what that was.”
This isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to be damned near impossible if I don’t get her cooperation. A heavy, hopeless feeling is creeping into my exhausted limbs. It feels like my muscles are starting to atrophy, and I don’t have that much muscle to begin with.
“Please, Anna,” I say. “I need your help. I need you to let us do the spell. I need you to let other people in here with me.”
“No,” she
says. “No spells! And no people! You know what would happen. I can’t control it.”
“You can control it for me. You can do it for them too.”
“I don’t know why I don’t have to kill you. And by the way, isn’t that enough? Why are you asking for more favors?”
“Anna, please. I need at least Thomas, and probably Carmel, the girl you met this morning.”
She looks down at her toes. She’s sad, I know she’s sad, but Morfran’s stupid “less than a week” speech is ringing in my ears, and I want this over with. I can’t let Anna stay for another month, possibly collecting more people for her basement. It doesn’t matter that I like talking to her. It doesn’t matter that I like her. It doesn’t matter that what happened to her wasn’t fair.
“I wish you would leave,” she says softly, and when she looks up I see that she’s almost crying, and she’s looking over my shoulder at the door or maybe out the window.
“You know I can’t,” I say, mirroring her words from moments ago.
“You make me want things that I can’t have.”
Before I can figure out what she means, she sinks through the steps, down, deep into the basement where she knows I won’t follow.
* * *
Gideon calls just after Thomas drops me off at my house.
“Good morning, Theseus. Sorry to wake you so early on a Sunday.”
“I’ve been up for hours, Gideon. Already hard at work.” Across the Atlantic, he is smirking at me. As I walk into the house, I nod good morning to my mother, who is chasing Tybalt down the stairs and hissing that rats aren’t good for him.
“What a shame,” Gideon chuckles. “I’ve been waiting around to call you for hours, trying to let you get some rest. What a pain that was. It’s nearly four in the afternoon here, you know. But I think I’ve got the essence of that spell for you.”
“I don’t know if it’ll matter. I was going to call you later. There’s a problem.”
“What sort?”
“The sort that no one can get into the house but me, and I’m no witch.” I tell him a little more about what’s happened, for some reason leaving out the fact that I’ve been having long talks with Anna at night. On the other end I hear him cluck his tongue. I’m sure he’s rubbing his chin and cleaning his glasses too.
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