Anna Dressed in Blood

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

My mom and I sit in her car on the edge of the school parking lot, watching buses roll in and unload, spilling students onto the sidewalk to rush in through the doors. The whole process is like something in an industrial plant — a bottling factory in reverse.

I told her what Gideon said and asked for her help making the herbal blend, which she said she’d do. I notice that she’s looking a little frayed around the edges. There are dark, pinkish-purple circles under her eyes, and her hair is dull. Usually it shines like a copper pot.

“You okay, Mom?”

She smiles and looks over at me. “Sure, kiddo. Just worried about you, like always. And Tybalt. He woke me up last night, jumping at the attic trapdoor.”

“Damn it, I’m sorry,” I say. “I forgot to go up and set the traps.”

“It’s okay. I heard something move up there last week, and it sounded a lot bigger than a rat. Can raccoons get into attics?”

“Maybe it’s just a bunch of rats,” I suggest, and she shudders. “You’d better get somebody out there to check it out.”

She sighs and taps the steering wheel. “Maybe.” She shrugs.

She seems sad, and it occurs to me that I don’t know how she’s getting on here. I haven’t helped her with much on this move — not around the house, not with anything. I’ve barely even been there. Glancing into the backseat, I see a cardboard box filled with enchanted candles of various colors, ready to be sold in a local bookshop. Normally I would have loaded them for her and tied the proper labels on with lengths of colored cord.

“Gideon says you’ve made some friends,” she says, looking into the school crowd like she might be able to pick them out. I should’ve known Gideon would spill. He’s like a surrogate parent. Not like a stepfather, exactly — more like a godfather, or a sea horse who wants to stuff me into his pouch.

“Just Thomas and Carmel,” I say. “The ones you’ve met before.”

“Carmel’s a very pretty girl,” she says hopefully.

“Thomas seems to think so.”

She sighs, then smiles. “Good. He could use a woman’s touch.”

“Mom,” I groan. “Gross.”

“Not that kind of touch,” she laughs. “I mean he needs someone to clean him up. Make him stand up straight. That boy is all wrinkles. And he smells like an old man’s pipe.” She fishes around in the backseat for a second, and her hand comes back full of envelopes.

“I was wondering what happened to all my mail,” I say, flipping through them. They’re open already. I don’t mind. They’re just ghost tips, nothing personal. In the middle of the stack is a large letter from Daisy Bristol. “Daisy wrote,” I say. “Did you read it?”

“He just wanted to know how things were going for you. And to tell you everything that’s happened to him in the last month. He wants you to come to New Orleans for some witch spirit skulking around the base of a tree. Supposedly she used to use the thing for sacrifices. I didn’t like the way he talked about her.”

I smirk. “Not every witch is good, Mom.”

“I know. I’m sorry for reading your mail. You were too focused to notice it anyway; most of them just sat on the mail desk. I wanted to handle it for you. Make sure you weren’t missing anything important.”

“Was I?”

“A professor in Montana wants you to come and slay a Wendigo.”

“Who am I? Van Helsing?”

“He says he knows Dr. Barrows, from Holyoke.”

I snort. “Dr. Barrows knows that monsters aren’t real.”

My mother sighs. “How do we know what’s real? Most of the things you’ve put away could be called a monster by someone.”

“Yeah.” I put my hand on the door. “You’re sure you can get the herbs I need?”

She nods. “You’re sure you can get them to help you?”

I look at the crowd. “We’ll see.”

The hallways today look like something out of a movie. You know, the ones where the important characters walk in slow motion and the rest of the people just whip by as different flesh- and clothes-colored blurs. I caught glimpses of Carmel and Will in the crowd, but Will was walking away from me, and I couldn’t get Carmel’s attention. I never saw Thomas, despite going to his locker twice. So I try to stay awake during geometry. I don’t do a great job. They shouldn’t be allowed to teach math so early in the morning.

Midway through a lesson on proofs, a folded rectangle of paper finds its way onto my desk. When I open it I see a note from Heidi, a pretty blond-haired girl who sits three rows back. She’s asking if I need help studying. And whether I want to go see the new Clive Owen movie. I tuck the note into my math book like I’ll answer it later. I won’t, of course, and if she asks about it, I’ll tell her I’m doing fine on my own, and maybe some other time. She might ask again, two or three more times maybe, but after that she’ll get the hint. It probably seems mean, but it isn’t. What’s the point in seeing a movie, starting up something that I can’t finish? I don’t want to miss people, and I don’t want them to miss me.

After class I slide out the door quick and get lost in the crowds. I think I hear Heidi’s voice call my name but I don’t turn around. There’s work to be done.

Will’s locker is the closest. He’s there already with — as usual — Chase hanging on his hip. When he sees me, his eyes do this shifty thing from right to left, like he doesn’t think we should be seen talking.

“What’s up, Will?” I ask. I nod at Chase, who gives me this stone face like I’d better be careful or he’s going to pound me at any minute. Will doesn’t say anything. He just glances my way and keeps on doing what he’s doing, switching out his textbooks for his next class. I realize with sort of a jolt that Will hates me. He’s never liked me, out of loyalty to Mike, and now he hates me, because of what happened. I don’t know why I haven’t realized it before. I guess I never give too much thought to the living. In any case, it makes me glad to tell him what I have to tell him, about being part of the spell. It’ll give him some closure.

“You said you wanted in. Here’s your chance.”

“What chance is that?” he asks. His eyes are cold and gray. Tough and smart.

“Can’t you get your flying monkey out of here first?” I motion toward Chase, but neither moves. “We’re doing a spell to bind the ghost. Meet me at Morfran’s shop after school.”

“You’re such a freak, man,” Chase spits at me. “Bringing this shit in here. Making us talk to the police.”

I don’t know what he’s whining about. If the cops were as casual as they were with me and Carmel, what’s the big deal? And I have to believe that they were, because I was right about them. Mike’s disappearance spawned only one small search party that combed the hills for about a week. There were a few newspaper articles that quickly fell off the front page.

Everyone is swallowing the story that he up and ran away. It’s only expected. When people see something supernatural, they rationalize it down to earth. The cops in Baton Rouge did it with my dad’s murder. They called it an isolated act of extreme violence, probably perpetrated by someone traveling through the state. Never mind that he’d been fucking eaten. Never mind that no human could have taken such big bites.

“At least the cops don’t think you’re involved,” I hear myself say absently. Will slams his locker shut.

“That’s not what matters,” he says in a low voice. He looks at me hard. “This had better not be another runaround. You’d better show.”

As they walk away, Carmel appears at my shoulder.

“What’s with them?” she asks.

“They’re still thinking about Mike,” I say. “Is there something strange about that?”

She sighs. “Just that we seem to be the only ones. I thought, after it happened, that I’d be surrounded by a herd of people asking a million questions. But not even Nat and Katie ask anymore. They’re more interested in how things are going with you, whether we’re a hot item and when I’m going to bring you around to parties.” She looks at the passing crowd. A lot of girls smile and some call out to her and wave, but none of them comes over. It’s like I’m wearing people repellent.

“I think they’re getting sort of pissed off,” she goes on. “Because I haven’t wanted to hang out lately. It’s shitty I guess. They’re my friends. But … everything I want to talk about I can’t say to them. It feels so separate, like I’ve touched something that’s taken the color out of me. Or maybe I’m in color now and they’re black and white.” She turns to me. “We’re in on the secret, aren’t we, Cas? And it’s taking us out of the world.”

“That’s usually the way it works,” I say softly.

At the shop after school, Thomas bounces around behind the counter — not the one where Morfran rings up sales of hurricane lamps and porcelain washbasins, but the one in the back, stocked with jars of things floating in murky water, crystals covered in dust cloth, candles, and bundles of herbs. Upon closer inspection, I notice that a few of the candles are my mother’s handiwork. How crafty of her. She didn’t even tell me they’d met.

“Here,” Thomas says, and pushes something up to my face that looks like a bundle of twigs. Then I realize they’re dried chicken feet. “They just came in this afternoon.” He shows them to Carmel, who tries to make an expression that is more impressed and less disgusted. Then he bounces off behind the counter again and disappears, rummaging around.

Carmel chuckles. “How long are you staying in Thunder Bay after all this is over, Cas?”

I glance at her. I hope she hasn’t fallen into her own lie to Nat and Katie — that she’s not caught up in some damsel fantasy where I’m the big bad ghost slayer and she’ll constantly need rescuing.

But no. I’m stupid to think so. She isn’t even looking at me. She’s watching Thomas.

“I’m not sure. Maybe a little while.”

“Good,” she says, smiling. “In case you didn’t notice, Thomas is going to miss you when you go.”

“Maybe he’ll have someone else to keep him company,” I say, and we look at each other. There’s a current in the air for a second, a certain understanding, and then the door jingles behind us and I know that Will’s here. Hopefully without Chase.

I turn around and wishes are horses. He’s alone. And three sheets of pissed off, from the looks of it. He stalks in with his hands stuffed into his pockets, glaring at the antiques.

“So what’s the deal with this spell?” he asks, and I can tell he feels awkward using the word “spell.” That word doesn’t belong in the mouths of people like him, rooted in logic and so in tune to the waking and working world.

“We need four people to cast a binding circle,” I explain. Thomas and Carmel gather around. “Originally it was just going to be Thomas casting a circle of protection in the house, but since Anna would shred him a new face, we came up with Plan B.”

Will nods. “So what do we do?”

“Now we practice.”

“Practice?”

“Do you want to mess up inside that house?” I ask, and Will shuts up.

Thomas stares at me blankly until I give him the nudging eyes. This is his show now. I gave him a copy of the spell to review. He knows what needs to be done.

He shakes himself awake and grabs the written copy of the spell off the counter. Then he walks around each of us, taking us by the shoulders and positioning us where we need to be.

“Cas stands in the west, where things end. Also because then he’ll be the first one in the house in case this doesn’t work.” He places me in the west. “Carmel, you’re north,” he says, and gingerly takes her by the shoulders. “I’m in the east, where things begin. Will, you’ll be the south.” He takes his place and reads over the paper for probably the hundredth time. “We’ll cast the circle in the driveway, lay a formation of thirteen stones, and take our positions. We’ll have Cas’s mom’s herb potion in bags around our necks. It’s a basic mixture of protective herbs. The candles get lit from the east, counterclockwise. And we’ll chant this.” He hands the paper over to Carmel, who reads it, makes a face, and passes it to Will.

“Are you fricken serious?”

I don’t argue. The chant does seem stupid. I know magic works, I know it’s real, but I don’t know why it has to be so damn fruity sometimes.

“We chant it continuously as we go into the house. The consecrated circle should come with us, even though we leave the stones behind. I’ll be carrying the scrying bowl. When we get inside, I’ll fill the bowl and we’ll get started.”

Carmel looks down at the scrying bowl, which is a shining silver dish.

“What are you going to fill it with?” she asks. “Holy water or something?”

“Probably Dasani,” Thomas replies.

“You forgot the hard part,” I say, and everyone looks at me. “You know, the part where we have to get Anna inside the circle and throw chicken feet at her.”

“Are you serious?” Will groans again.

“We don’t throw the chicken feet.” Thomas rolls his eyes at us. “We set them nearby. Chicken feet have a calming effect on spirits.”

“Well, that won’t be the hard part,” Will says. “The hard part’ll be getting her inside our human circle.”

“Once she’s inside, we’ll be safe. I’ll be able to reach in and use the scrying bowl without even being afraid. But we can’t break the circle. Not until the spell is finished and she’s weak. And even then we should probably get the heck out of there.”

“Great,” Will says. “We can practice everything but the thing that might get us killed.”

“It’s the best we can do,” I say. “So let’s get chanting.” I try not to think about what rank amateurs we are and how silly this is.

Morfran whistles as he walks through his shop, ignoring us completely. The only thing that betrays that he knows what we’re up to is the fact that he flips the sign on the door of the shop from “Open” to “Closed.”

“Wait a minute,” Will says. Thomas was just about to start chanting, and the interruption really takes the wind out of his sails. “Why are we going to get out of there after the spell? She’ll be weak, right? Why don’t we kill her then?”

“That’s the plan,” Carmel replies. “Isn’t it, Cas?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Depending on how things go. We don’t know if it’ll even work.” I’m not being terribly convincing. I think I said most of that while staring at my shoes. As luck would have it, Will is the one who notices. He takes a step back from the circle.

“Hey! You can’t do that during the spell,” Thomas yelps.

“Shut up, freak,” Will says dismissively, and my hackles rise. He looks at me. “Why should it be you? Why does it have to be you who does it? Mike was my best friend.”

“It has to be me,” I say flatly.

“Why?”

“Because I’m the one who can use the knife.”

“What’s so hard about it? Slash and stab, right? Any idiot could do it.”

“It wouldn’t work for you,” I say. “For you it would be just a knife. And just a knife isn’t going to kill Anna.”

“I don’t believe it,” he says, and plants his feet.

This sucks. I need Will in on this, not only because he completes the circle, but because part of me does feel like I owe him, like he should be involved. Of the people I know, Anna has cost him the most. So what am I going to do?

“We’ll take your car,” I say. “Everyone. Let’s go. Right now.”

Will drives suspiciously with me in the passenger seat. Carmel and Thomas are in the back, and I don’t have time to ponder just how sweaty Thomas’s palms are getting. I need to prove to them — all of them — that I am what I say I am. That this is my calling, my mission. And maybe, after getting soundly beaten by Anna (whether I’m subconsciously allowing it or not), I need to once again prove it to myself.

“Where are we going?” Will asks.

“You tell me. I’m no Thunder Bay expert. Take me where the ghosts are.”

Will digests this information. He licks at his lips tensely and glances at Carmel in the rearview mirror. Even though he seems nervous, I can tell he already has a good idea of where to go. We all grab on to something as he does an unexpected U-turn.

“The cop,” he says.

“The cop?” Carmel asks. “You’re not serious. That’s not real.”

“Until a few weeks ago, none of this was real,” Will replies.

We drive across town, through the retail district and into the industrial. The scenery changes every few blocks, from trees ripe with golden and reddish foliage to streetlights and bright plastic signs, and finally to railroad tracks and stark, unlabeled cement buildings. Beside me, Will’s face is grim and not at all curious. He can’t wait to show me whatever it is that he’s got up his sleeve. He’s hoping that I’ll fail the test, that I’m full of smoke and mirrors and bullshit.

Behind me, on the other hand, Thomas looks like an excited beagle who doesn’t know he’s being taken to the vet. I have to admit that I’m sort of excited myself. There’ve been few opportunities to show off my work. I don’t know what I’m looking forward to more: impressing Thomas, or shoving Will’s smug expression down his throat. Of course, Will has to come through first.

The car slows almost to a crawl. Will is peering out at buildings to his left. Some look like warehouses, others like low-rent apartment complexes that haven’t been used for a while. All are the color of washed-out sandstone.

“There,” he says, and mutters, “I think,” under his breath. We park in an alley and get out together. Now that he’s here, Will seems a little less eager.

I take my athame out of my bag and sling it over my shoulder, then hand the bag off to Thomas and nod to Will to lead the way. He takes us around the front of the building and down two more, until we get to one that looks like an old apartment. There are residential-style windows at the top with paned glass and an unused window box. I peer along the side and see a fire escape with the ladder hanging down. I test the front door. I don’t know why it’s unlocked, but it is, which is good. We’d have cut a damned conspicuous picture if we’d had to shimmy up the side.

When we walk into the building, Will motions to head up the stairs. The place has that boarded-up smell, sour and unused, like too many different people have lived here and each left behind a lingering scent that doesn’t mix well with the others.

“So,” I say. “Isn’t anybody going to tell me what we’re about to walk into?”

Will doesn’t say anything. He just glances at Carmel, who dutifully speaks.

“About eight years ago, there was a hostage situation in the apartment upstairs. Some railroad worker went crazy, locked his wife and daughter in the bathroom and started waving a gun around. The cops got called in, and they sent up a hostage negotiator. It didn’t exactly go well.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She means,” Will cuts in, “that the hostage negotiator got himself shot in the spine, right before the perp shot himself in the head.”

I try to digest this information and not make fun of Will for using the word “perp.”

“The wife and daughter got out okay,” Carmel says. She sounds nervous, but excited.

“So what’s the ghost story?” I ask. “Are you bringing me into an apartment with some trigger-happy railroad worker?”

“It isn’t the railroad worker,” Carmel answers. “It’s the cop. There’ve been reports of him in the building after he died. People have seen him through the windows and heard him talking to someone, trying to convince them not to do it. Once they say he even talked to a little boy down on the street. He hung his head out the window and yelled at him, told him to get out of there. Scared him half to death.”

“Could be just another urban legend,” Thomas says.

But in my experience, it usually isn’t. I don’t know what I’m going to find when we get up to this apartment. I don’t know if we’ll find anything, and if we do, I don’t know if I should kill him. After all, nobody mentioned the cop actually harming anybody, and it’s always been our practice to leave the safe ones alone, no matter how much they wail and rattle their chains.

Our practice. The athame is a heavy weight on my shoulder. All my life I’ve known this knife. I’ve watched the blade move through light and air, first in my father’s hand and then in my own. The power in it sings to me — it courses through my arm and into my chest. For seventeen years it has kept me safe and made me strong.

The blood tie, Gideon always told me. The blood of your ancestors forged this athame. Men of power, bled their warrior, to put the spirits down. The athame is your father’s, and it is yours, and you both belong to it.

That’s what he told me. Sometimes with fun hand gestures and a little bit of miming. The knife is mine, and I love it, like you would love any faithful hound dog. Men of power, whoever they were, put my ancestor’s blood — a warrior’s blood — into the blade. It puts the spirits down, but I don’t know where. Gideon and my father taught me never to ask.

I’m thinking so hard about this that I don’t notice I’m leading them right into the apartment. The door has been left ajar and we’ve walked right into the empty living room. Our feet strike the bare flooring — whatever was left over after all the carpeting was pulled up. It looks like chipboard. I stop so fast that Thomas runs into my back. For a minute, I think the place is empty.

But then I see the black figure huddled in the corner, near the window. It’s got its hands over its head and it’s rocking back and forth, muttering to itself.

“Whoa,” Will whispers. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“No one is here,” I say, and feel them tense as they catch my meaning. It doesn’t matter if this is what they meant to bring me to. Seeing it for real is a completely different ballgame. I motion for them to stay back, and walk in a wide arc around the cop to get a better view. He’s got his eyes wide open; he looks terrified. He’s muttering and chittering like a chipmunk, all nonsense. It’s disturbing to think how sane he must’ve been when he was alive. I pull my athame out, not to threaten him but just to have it out, just in case. Carmel gives a little gasp, and for some reason that gets his attention.

He fixes his shiny eye on her. “Don’t do it,” he hisses. She backs up a step.

“Hey,” I say softly, and get no response. The cop has his eyes on Carmel. There must be something about her. Maybe she reminds him of the hostages — the wife and daughter.

Carmel doesn’t know what to do. Her mouth is open, the beginning of a word caught in her throat, and she’s looking quickly from the cop to me and back again.

I feel a familiar sharpening. That’s what I call it: a sharpening. It isn’t that I start to breathe harder, or that my heart speeds up and pounds in my chest. It’s subtler than that. I breathe deeper, and my heart beats stronger. Everything around me slows down, and all of the lines are crisp and clear. It has to do with confidence, and my natural edge. It has to do with my fingers humming as they squeeze the handle of my athame.

I never once had this feeling when I went up against Anna. It’s what I’ve been missing, and maybe Will was a blessing in disguise. This is what I’m after: this edge, this living on the balls of my feet. I can see everything in an instant: that Thomas is genuinely thinking about how to protect Carmel, and that Will is trying to work up the nerve to try something himself, to prove that I’m not the only one who can do this. Maybe I should let him. Let the ghost of the cop give him a scare and put him back in his place.

“Please,” Carmel says. “Just calm down. I didn’t want to come here in the first place, and I’m not who you think I am. I don’t want to hurt anybody!”

And then something interesting happens. Something I haven’t seen before. The features on the cop’s face change. It’s almost impossible to see, like picking out the current of a river moving beneath the surface. The nose broadens. The cheekbones shift downward. The lips grow thinner and the teeth shift inside the mouth. All of this has happened in two or three blinks of an eye. I’m looking at another face.

“Interesting,” I mutter, and my peripheral vision registers Thomas giving me the is-that-all-you-can-say? face. “This ghost isn’t just the cop,” I explain. “It’s both of them. The cop and the railroad worker, trapped together in one form.” This is the railroad worker, I think, and I glance down at his hands just as he’s lifting one to aim a gun at Carmel.

She shrieks, and Thomas grabs her and pulls her down. Will doesn’t do much of anything. He just starts saying, “It’s just a ghost, it’s just a ghost” over and over very loudly, which is pretty damn stupid. I, on the other hand, don’t hesitate.

The weight of my athame moves easily in my palm, flipping so the blade isn’t pointed ahead but back; I’m holding it like the guy from Psycho did when he was hacking through that chick in the shower scene. But I’m not using it to hack. The sharp side of the blade is facing up, and as the ghost raises the gun on my friends, I jerk my arm toward the ceiling. The athame connects and slices most of the way through his wrist.

He howls and steps back; I do too. The gun drops to the ground without a noise. It’s eerie, the sight of something that should make a racket and yet you don’t even hear a whisper. He looks at his hand in puzzlement. It’s hanging by a thread of skin, but there isn’t any blood. When he plucks it off, it dissolves into smoke: oily, cancerous tendrils. I don’t think I need to tell anyone not to breathe it in.

“So what, that’s it?” Will asks in a panicked voice. “I thought that thing was supposed to kill it!”

“It isn’t an ‘it,’” I say evenly. “It’s a man. Two men. And they’re already dead. This sends them where they need to be.”

The ghost comes at me now. I’ve gotten his attention, and I duck and pull back so easily, so swiftly, that none of his attempts to strike even come close. I slice off more of his arm as I duck underneath it, and the smoke dances around and disappears in the disturbance my body made.

“Every ghost goes differently,” I tell them. “Some die again like they think they’re still alive.” I duck another one of his attacks and land an elbow to the back of his head. “Others melt into puddles of blood. Others explode.” I look back at my friends, at their wide eyes paying rapt attention. “Some leave things behind — ashes, or stains. Some don’t.”

“Cas,” Thomas says, and points behind me, but I already know that the ghost is on his way back. I sidestep and slice through his rib cage. He goes down on one knee.

“Every time is different,” I say. “Except for this.” I look directly at Will, ready to go to work. It’s at that moment that I feel the ghost’s hands grip both of my ankles and pull me off of my feet.

Did you hear that? Both hands. Yet I distinctly remember cutting one of them off. This strikes me as very interesting just before my head bonks off of the chipboard floor.

The ghost lunges for my throat and I just barely hold him off. Looking at the hands, one is different. It’s slightly more tanned, and has a completely different shape: longer fingers, ragged nails. I hear Carmel yell at Thomas and Will that they should help me, and that’s the last thing I want. It would take the piss out of the whole thing.

Still, as I’m rolling around with my jaw clenched, trying to angle my knife toward the guy’s throat, I wish that I were built more like Will’s football-playing physique. My leanness makes me agile and quick, and I’m pretty wiry, but when it comes to this up-close-and-personal stuff, it’d be nice to be able to hurl someone across the room.

“I’m fine,” I say to Carmel. “I’m just figuring him out.” The words come out in an unconvincing, strained groan. They’re staring at me, wide-eyed, and Will takes a jerky step forward.

“Stay back!” I shout as I manage to get my foot into the guy’s stomach. “It’s just going to take more,” I explain. “There are two guys inside here, get it?” My breathing is heavier. Some sweat trickles into my hair. “No big deal … it just means I have to do everything twice.”

At least I hope so. It’s the only thing I can think of to try, and really it boils down to a desperate slice and dice. This isn’t what I had in mind when I suggested we go a-hunting. Where are the nice, easy ghosties when you need them?

I steel myself and kick out hard with my foot, heaving the cop/railroad worker back off of me. Scrambling up, I get a better grip on the athame and refocus. He’s set to charge, and when he does I start slicing and cutting like a human Cuisinart. I hope it looks a lot cooler than I think it does. My hair and clothes are moving in a breeze I can’t feel. Black smoke erupts from below me.

Before I’m finished — before he’s finished — I can hear two distinct voices, layered on top of each other, like some somber harmony. In the midst of my slicing, I find myself looking into two faces occupying the same space: two sets of teeth gnashing, and one blue eye, one brown. I’m glad I was able to do this. The uneasy, ambiguous feeling I had when we came in is gone. Whether or not this ghost has ever harmed anyone, it has surely harmed itself, and wherever I’m sending them has to be better than this, trapped in the same form with the person you hate, driving each other more and more mad with every day, week, year that passes.

In the end, I stand alone in the center of the room, curls of smoke fading and dispersing into the ceiling. Thomas, Carmel, and Will are standing in a huddle, staring at me. The cop and the railroad worker are gone. So is the gun.

“That was—” is all Thomas can muster.

“That was what I do,” I say simply, and wish I was less out of breath. “So no more arguments.”

Four days later I’m sitting on the counter in the kitchen, watching my mom wash some funny-looking roots, which she then shaves and chops to be added to the herbs we’ll wear around our necks tonight.

Tonight. It’s finally here. It seems like it’s taken forever, and I still wish I had one more day. I’ve found myself in Anna’s driveway every night, just standing there, unable to think of anything to say. And every night she comes to the window and stares out at me. I haven’t been sleeping much, though some of that is attributable to the nightmares.

The dreams have been worse since we came to Thunder Bay. The timing couldn’t be worse. I’m exhausted when I shouldn’t be exhausted — when I can least afford to be exhausted.

I can’t remember whether my dad had the dreams or not, but even if he did he wouldn’t have told me. Gideon’s never mentioned anything either, and I haven’t brought it up, because what if it’s just me? It would mean that I’m weaker than my ancestors. That I’m not as strong as everyone expects me to be.

It’s always the same dream. A figure bending over my face. I’m scared, but I also know that the figure is linked to me. I don’t like it. I think it’s my father.

But not really my father. My father has moved on. Mom and Gideon made sure of that; they hung around the house where he was murdered down in Baton Rouge for nights on end, casting runes and burning candles. But he was gone. I couldn’t tell whether my mom was happy or disappointed.

I watch her now as she hurriedly snips and grinds different herbs, measuring them out, pouring them from the bowl of her mortar and pestle. Her hands are fast and clean. She’s had to wait until the last minute because the Five Finger Grass was hard to find and she had to go through an unfamiliar supplier.

“What’s this stuff for, anyway?” I ask, picking up a piece of it. It’s dehydrated and greenish brown. It looks like a piece of hay.

“It’ll protect from the damage of any five fingers,” she says distractedly, then looks up. “Anna does have five fingers, doesn’t she?”

“On each hand,” I say lightly, and set the grass back down.

“I cleaned the athame again,” she says as she adds shakes of slivered colic root, which she tells me is useful to keep enemies at bay. “You’ll need it. From what I read of this spell, it’ll take a lot out of her. You’ll be able to finish your job. Do what you came to do.”

I notice she’s not smiling. Even though I haven’t been around much, my mom knows me. She knows when something’s off, and she usually has a pretty good idea of what it is. She says it’s a mom thing.

“What’s wrong about this, Cassio?” she asks. “What’s different?”

“Nothing. Nothing should be different. She’s more dangerous than any ghost I’ve seen. Maybe even more than any Dad saw. She’s killed more; she’s stronger.” I look down at the pile of Five Finger Grass. “But she’s more alive, too. She’s not confused. She’s not some shifting, half-existent thing who kills out of fear or rage. Something did this to her, and she knows.”

“How much does she know?”

“I think she knows everything, only she’s scared to tell me.”

My mom pushes some hair out of her eyes. “After tonight, you’ll know for sure.”

I shove myself off of the counter. “I think I already do,” I say angrily. “I think I know who killed her.” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I keep thinking about the man who terrorized her, this young girl, and I want to pound his face in. In a robotic voice, I tell my mother what Anna told me. When I look at her, she’s wearing big soft cow’s eyes.

“It’s terrible,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“But you can’t rewrite history.”

I wish that I could. I wish this knife was good for something besides death, that I could cut through time and walk into that house, into that kitchen where he trapped her, and get her out of there. I would make sure she had the future she should have had.

“She doesn’t want to kill people, Cas.”

“I know. So how can I—”

“You can because you have to,” she says simply. “You can because she needs you to.”

I look at my knife, resting in its jar of salt. Something that smells like black jellybeans permeates the air. My mom is chopping another herb.

“What’s that?”

“Star anise.”

“What’s it for?”

She smiles a little bit. “Smells pretty.”

I breathe deep. In less than an hour everything will be ready, and Thomas will pick me up. I’ll take the small velvet bags secured with long strings and the four white pillar candles infused with essential oil, and he’ll have the scrying bowl and his bag of stones. And we’ll go to try to kill Anna Korlov.