Anna Dressed in Blood

by Kendare Blake

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Is this what I wanted? I set her free. I’ve just let the ghost I was sent to kill out of prison. She’s walking softly across her porch, touching her toes to the steps, staring out into the dark. She’s like any wild animal let out of a cage: cautious and hopeful. Her fingertips trace the wood of the crooked railing like it’s the most wonderful thing she’s ever felt. And part of me is glad. Part of me knows that she never deserved anything that happened, and I want to give her more than this broken porch. I want to give her an entire life—her whole life back, starting tonight.

  The other part of me knows there are bodies in her basement, souls that she stole, and none of this was their fault either. I can’t give Anna her life back because her life is already gone. Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake.

  “We should get out of here, I think,” Thomas says quietly.

  I look at Carmel and she nods, so I walk toward the door, trying to keep myself between them and Anna, even though without my knife I don’t know how much use I’ll be. When she hears us come through the door, she turns and regards me with an arched eyebrow.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “I won’t hurt them now.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  Her eyes shift to Carmel. She nods. “I’m sure.” Behind me, Carmel and Thomas exhale and awkwardly move out from my shadow.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  She thinks for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I feel … sane. Is that possible?”

  “Probably not completely,” Thomas blurts, and I elbow him in the ribs. But Anna laughs.

  “You saved him, the first time,” she says, looking at Thomas carefully. “I remember you. You pulled him out.”

  “I don’t think you would have killed him anyways,” Thomas replies, but some color comes up to his cheeks. He likes the idea of playing the hero. He likes that the idea is being pointed out in front of Carmel.

  “Why didn’t you?” Carmel asks. “Why weren’t you going to kill Cas? What made you choose Mike instead?”

  “Mike,” Anna says softly. “I don’t know. Maybe it was because they were wicked. I knew they’d tricked him. I knew they were cruel. Maybe I felt … sorry for him.”

  I snort. “Sorry for me? I could’ve handled those guys.”

  “They smashed the back of your head in with a board from my house.” Anna is giving me a look with her eyebrow again.

  “You keep saying ‘maybe,’” Thomas breaks in. “You don’t know for sure?”

  “I don’t,” Anna replies. “Not for sure. But I’m glad,” she adds, and smiles. She’d like to say more, but looks away, embarrassed or confused, I can’t tell which.

  “We should go,” I say. “That spell took a lot out of us. We could all use some sleep.”

  “But you’ll come back?” Anna asks, like she thinks she’ll never see me again.

  I nod. I’ll come back. To do what, I don’t know. I know that I can’t let Will keep my knife, and I’m not sure if she’s safe as long as he still has it. But that’s dumb, because who says she’s safe if I have it either? I need some sleep. I need to recoup, and regroup, and rethink everything.

  “If I’m not in the house,” Anna says, “call for me. I won’t be far.”

  The idea of her running around Thunder Bay doesn’t thrill me. I don’t know what she’s capable of, and my suspicious side whispers that I have just been duped. But there’s nothing I can do about it right now.

  “Was this a victory?” Thomas asks as we walk down the driveway.

  “I don’t know,” I reply, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like one. My athame is gone. Anna is free. And the only thing that seems certain in my head and heart is that this isn’t over. Already there’s an emptiness, not just in my back pocket or on my shoulder, but everywhere around me. I feel weaker, like I’m leaking from a thousand wounds. That a-hole took my knife.

  “I didn’t know you could speak Finnish, Thomas,” Carmel says from beside him.

  He grins lopsidedly. “I can’t. That was one hell of a spell you got for us, Cas. I’d sure like to meet your supplier.”

  “I’ll introduce you sometime,” I hear myself say. But not right now. Gideon is the last person I want to talk to, when I’ve just lost the knife. My eardrums would burst from all the yelling. The athame. My father’s legacy. I have to get it back, and soon.

  * * *

  “The athame is gone. You lost it. Where is it?”

  He’s got me by the throat, strangling the answers, slamming me back into my pillow.

  “Stupid, stupid, STUPID!”

  I wake up swinging, popped upright in my bed like a rock ’em sock ’em robot. The room is empty. Of course it is; don’t be stupid. Using the same word on myself brings me back into the dream. I’m only half-awake. The memory of his hands on my throat is lingering. I still can’t speak. There’s too much tightness, there and in my chest. I take a deep breath, and when I exhale it comes out ragged, close to a sob. My body feels full of empty spaces where the weight of the knife should be. My heart is pounding.

  Was it my father? The idea brings me back ten years, and the guilt of a kid balloons sharply in my heart. But no. It couldn’t have been. The thing in my dream had a Creole or Cajun accent, and my father grew up in accent-neutral Chicago, Illinois. It was just another dream, like the rest, and at least I know where this one came from. It doesn’t take a Freudian interpreter to realize I feel bad about losing the athame.

  Tybalt jumps up onto my lap. In the scant moonlight through my window I can just make out the green oval of his irises. He puts a paw up on my chest.

  “Yeah,” I say. The sound of my voice in the dark is sharp and too loud. But it sends the dream farther away. It was so vivid. I can still remember the acrid, bitter smell of something like smoke.

  “Meow,” Tybalt says.

  “No more sleep for Theseus Cassio,” I agree, scooping him up and heading downstairs.

  When I get there, I put some coffee on and park my butt at the kitchen table. My mom has left out the jar of salt for the athame, along with clean cloths and oils to rub it and rinse it and make it new. It’s out there somewhere. I can feel it. I can feel it in the hands of someone who never should have touched it. I’m starting to think murderous thoughts about Will Rosenberg.

  My mom comes down about three hours later. I’m still sitting at the table and staring at the jar as the light grows stronger in the kitchen. Once or twice my head thumped down against the wood and then bounced back up again, but I’m half a pot of coffee in now, and I feel fine. Mom is wrapped in her blue bathrobe and her hair looks comfortingly fuzzy. The sight calms me immediately, even as she glances at the empty jar of salt and puts the cover back on. What is it about the sight of your mother that makes everything fireside-warm and full of dancing Muppets?

  “You stole my cat,” she says, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Tybalt must sense my unrest; he’s been circling around my feet off and on, something he usually only does to my mom.

  “Here, have him back,” I say as she comes to the table. I hoist him up. He doesn’t stop hissing until she brings him down to her lap.

  “No luck last night?” she asks, and nods at the empty jar.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “There was some luck. Luck of both kinds.”

  She sits with me and listens while I spill my guts. I tell her everything we saw, everything we learned about Anna, how I broke the curse and freed her. I end with my worst embarrassment: that I lost Dad’s athame. I can hardly look at her when I tell her that last part. She’s trying to control her expression. I don’t know if that means she’s upset that it’s gone or if it means she knows what the loss of it must’ve done to me.

  “I don’t think you made a mistake, Cas,” she says gently.

  “But the knife.”

  “We’ll get the knife back. I’ll call that boy’s mother, if I have to.”

  I groan. She just crossed the mom line from cool and com
forting to Queen of Lame.

  “But what you did,” she goes on. “With Anna. I don’t think it was a mistake.”

  “It was my job to kill her.”

  “Was it? Or was it your job to stop her?” She leans back from the table, cradling her coffee mug between her hands. “What you do—what your dad did—it was never about vengeance. Never about revenge, or tipping the scales back to even. That’s not your call.”

  I rub my hand across my face. My eyes are too tired to see straight. My brain is too tired to think straight.

  “But you did stop her, didn’t you, Cas?”

  “Yes,” I say, but I don’t know. It happened so fast. Did I really get rid of Anna’s dark half, or did I just allow her to hide it? I shut my eyes. “I don’t know. I think so.”

  My mom sighs. “Stop drinking this coffee.” She pushes my cup away. “Go back to bed. And then go to Anna and find out what she’s become.”

  * * *

  I’ve seen a lot of seasons change. When you’re not distracted by school and friends and what movie’s coming out next week, you’ve got time to look at the trees.

  Thunder Bay’s autumn is prettier than most. There’s lots of color. Lots of rustle. But it’s also more volatile. Frigid and wet one day, with a side of gray clouds, and then days like today, where the sun looks as warm as July and the breeze is so light that the leaves just seem to glisten as they move in it.

  I’ve got my mom’s car. I drove it up to Anna’s place after dropping Mom to do some shopping downtown. She said she’d get a lift home from a friend. I was glad to hear that she’d made some friends. She does it easily, being so open and easygoing. Not like me. I don’t think it was quite like my dad either, but I find that I can’t really remember, and that bothers me, so I don’t push my brain too hard. I’d rather believe that the memories are there, just under the surface, whether they really are or not.

  As I walk up to the house, I think I see a shadow move on the west side. I blink it off as a trick of my too-tired eyes … until the shadow turns white and shows her pale skin.

  “I haven’t wandered far,” Anna says as I walk up.

  “You hid from me.”

  “I wasn’t sure right away who you were. I have to be cautious. I don’t want to be seen by everyone. Just because I can leave my house now doesn’t mean I’m not still dead.” She shrugs. She’s so frank. She should be damaged by all of this, damaged beyond sanity. “I’m glad you came back.”

  “I need to know,” I say. “If you’re still dangerous.”

  “We should go inside,” she says, and I agree. It’s strange to see her outdoors, in the sunlight, looking for all the world like a girl out picking flowers on a bright afternoon. Except that anyone looking closely would realize she should be freezing out here wearing just that white dress.

  She leads me into the house and closes the door behind like any good hostess. Something about the house has changed too. The gray light is gone. Plain old white sunshine streams through the windows, albeit with a hampering of dirt on the glass.

  “What is it that you really want to know, Cas?” Anna asks. “Do you want to know if I’m going to kill more people? Or do you want to know if I can still do this?” She holds her hand up before her face, and dark veins snake up to the fingers. Her eyes go black and a dress of blood erupts through the white, more violently than before, splashing droplets everywhere.

  I jump back. “Jesus, Anna!”

  She hovers in the air, does a little twirl like something’s playing her favorite tune.

  “It’s not pretty, is it?” She crinkles her nose. “There aren’t mirrors left here, but I could see myself in the window glass when the moonlight was bright enough.”

  “You’re still like this,” I say, horrified. “Nothing’s changed.”

  When I say that nothing’s changed, her eyes narrow, but then she exhales and tries to smile at me. It doesn’t quite work, what with her looking like goth-chick Pinhead.

  “Cassio. Don’t you see? Everything’s changed!” She lets herself down to the ground, but the black eyes and writhing hair stay. “I won’t kill anyone. I never wanted to. But whatever this is, it’s what I am. I thought that it was the curse, and maybe it was, but—” She shakes her head. “I had to try to do this after you left. I had to know.” She looks me right in the eye. The inky dark seeps away, revealing the other Anna underneath. “The fight is over. I won. You made me win. I’m not two halves anymore. I know you must think it’s monstrous. But I feel—strong. I feel safe. Maybe I’m not making sense.”

  It’s actually fairly easy to get. For someone who was murdered the way she was murdered, feeling safe is probably top priority.

  “I get it,” I say softly. “The strength is what you hold on to. Kind of like me. When I walk through a haunted place with my athame in my hand, I feel strong. Untouchable. It’s heady. I don’t know if most people ever feel it.” I shuffle my feet. “And then I met you, and all that went down the shithole.”

  She laughs.

  “I come in all big and bad, and you use me for a game of handball.” I grin. “Makes a guy feel damn manly.”

  She grins back. “It made me feel pretty manly.” Her smile falters. “You didn’t bring it with you today. Your knife. I can always feel it when it’s near.”

  “No. Will took it. But I’ll get it back. It was my father’s; I’m not letting it go.” But then I wonder. “How do you feel it? What do you feel about it?”

  “When I first saw you, I didn’t know what it was. It was something in my ears, something in my stomach, just a humming below the music. It’s powerful. And even though I knew it was meant to kill me, it drew me somehow. Then when your friend cut me—”

  “He’s not my friend,” I say through my teeth. “Not really.”

  “I could feel myself draining into it. Starting to go wherever it is that it sends us. But it was wrong. It has a will of its own. It wanted to be in your hand.”

  “So it wouldn’t have killed you,” I say, relieved. I don’t want Will to be able to use my knife. I don’t care how childish that sounds. It’s my knife.

  Anna turns away, thinking. “No, it would have killed me,” she says seriously. “Because it isn’t only tied to you. It’s tied to something else. Something dark. When I was bleeding, I could smell something. It reminded me a little of Elias’s pipe.”

  I don’t know where the athame’s power comes from, and Gideon has never told me, if he knows. But if that power comes from something dark, then so be it. I use it for something good. As for the smell of Elias’s pipe …

  “That was probably just something you were frightened of after watching yourself be murdered,” I say gently. “You know, like dreaming of zombies right after you watch Land of the Dead.”

  “Land of the Dead? Is that what you dream about?” she asks. “Boy who kills ghosts for a living?”

  “No. I dream about penguins doing bridge construction. Don’t ask why.”

  She smiles and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she does I feel a pull somewhere deep in my chest. What am I doing? Why did I come here? I can barely remember.

  Somewhere in the house, a door slams. Anna jumps. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her jump before. Her hair lifts up and starts to writhe. She’s like a cat arching its back and puffing its tail.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. I can’t tell whether she’s embarrassed or frightened. It looks like both.

  “Do you remember what I showed you in the basement?” she asks.

  “The tower of dead bodies? No, that slipped my mind. Are you kidding me?”

  She laughs nervously, a fake little twinkle.

  “They’re still here,” she whispers.

  My stomach takes this opportunity to wring itself out, and my feet shift underneath me without permission. The image of all those corpses is fresh in my mind. I can actually smell the green water and rot. The idea that they are now roaming through the house w
ith wills of their own—which is what she’s implying—doesn’t make me happy.

  “I guess they’re haunting me now,” she says softly. “That’s why I went outside. They don’t frighten me,” she’s quick to add. “But I can’t stand to see them.” She pauses and crosses her arms over her stomach, sort of hugging herself. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Really? Because I don’t.

  “I should lock myself in here with them. It’s my fault, after all.” Her voice isn’t sulky. She’s not asking me to disagree. Her eyes, focused on the floorboards, are earnest. “I wish I could tell them that I’d like to take it back.”

  “Would it matter?” I ask quietly. “Would it matter to you if Malvina said she was sorry?”

  Anna shakes her head. “Of course not. I’m being stupid.” She glances to the right, just for an instant, but I know she was looking at the broken board where we took her dress out of the floor last night. She seems almost scared of it. Maybe I should get Thomas over here to seal it off or something.

  My hand twitches. I gather all my guts and let my hand stray to her shoulder. “You’re not being stupid. We’ll figure something out, Anna. We’ll exorcise them. Morfran will know how to get them to move on.” Everyone deserves some comfort, don’t they? She’s out now; what’s done is done, and she has to find some kind of peace. But even now, dark and distracting memories of what she’s done are racing behind her eyes. How is she supposed to let that go?

  Telling her not to torture herself would make it worse. I can’t give her absolution. But I want to make her forget, even just for a while. She was innocent once, and it kills me that she can never be innocent again.

  “You have to find your way back into the world now,” I say gently.

  Anna opens her mouth to speak, but I’ll never know what she was going to say. The house literally lurches, like it’s being jacked up. With a very large jack. When it settles, there’s a momentary jarring, and in the vibration a figure appears in front of us. It slowly fades in from shadow until he stands there, a pale, chalky corpse in the still air.