Anna Dressed in Blood

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Hey. Hey, man, are you waking up?”

I know that voice. I don’t like that voice. I crack my eyes open, and there’s his face, hovering over me.

“You had us worried there for a while. We probably shouldn’t have let you sleep so long. We probably should have taken you to a hospital, but we couldn’t really think of anything to say.”

“I’m fine, Thomas.” I reach up and rub my eyes, then gather my will and sit up, knowing that my world is about to swim and slosh hard enough that I might throw up. Somehow, I manage to swing my legs down to rest on the floor. “What happened?”

“You tell me.” He lights a cigarette. I wish he’d put it out. Beneath his scraggly hair and glasses he looks like a twelve-year-old who swiped a pack from his mother’s purse. “What were you doing in the Korlov house?”

“What were you doing following me?” I return, accepting the glass of water he holds out.

“What I said I was going to do,” he replies. “Only I never figured you’d need so much help. Nobody fucking goes into her house.” His blue eyes peer at me like I’m some kind of novelty idiot.

“Well, I didn’t just walk in and fall down.”

“I didn’t think so. But I can’t believe they did that, dumped you in the house and tried to kill you.”

I look around. I have no idea what time it is, but the sun is out and I’m in some kind of antique store. It’s cluttered, but full of nice things, not piles of old junk that you sometimes see in the seedier places. Still, it smells like old people.

I’m sitting on a dusty old couch near the back, with a pillow that is mostly saturated with my dried blood. At least I hope it’s my dried blood. I hope I wasn’t sleeping on some hepatitis-riddled rag.

I look at Thomas. He seems mad. He hates the Trojan Army; no doubt they’ve been picking on him since kindergarten. A skinny awkward kid like him, someone who claims to be psychic and hangs out in dusty curio shops, was probably their favorite target for swirlies and atomic wedgies. But they’re harmless pranksters. I don’t think they were really trying to kill me. They just didn’t take her seriously. They didn’t believe the stories. And now one of them is dead.

“Shit,” I say out loud. There’s no telling what’s going to happen to Anna now. Mike Andover wasn’t one of her usual transients or runaways. He was one of the school jocks, one of the party boys, and Chase saw everything. I can only hope that he was too scared to go to the cops.

Not that cops can stop Anna anyway. If they went into that house, there would only be more dead. Maybe she wouldn’t show herself to them at all. And besides, Anna is mine. The image of her conjures itself in my mind for a second, looming and pale and dripping red. But my injured brain can’t hold her.

I look over at Thomas, still nervously smoking.

“Thanks for pulling me out,” I say, and he nods.

“I didn’t want to,” he says. “I mean, I did want to, but seeing Mike laying in a sloppy pile didn’t exactly make me excited about it.” He sucks on his cigarette. “Jesus. I can’t believe he’s dead. I can’t believe she killed him.”

“Why not? You believed in her.”

“I know, but I’d never actually seen her. Nobody sees Anna. Because if you see Anna—”

“You don’t live to tell anyone about it,” I finish dismally.

I look up at the sound of footsteps on the brittle floorboards. Some old guy has come in, the kind of old guy with a twisting gray beard that ends in a braid. He’s wearing a very well-worn Grateful Dead t-shirt and a leather vest. There are strange tattoos up and down his forearms — nothing that I recognize.

“You’re a damn lucky kid. I have to say that I expected more from a professional ghost killer.”

I catch the bag of ice he tosses to me for my head. He’s smiling through a face like leather and peering through wire specs.

“You’re the one who tipped off Daisy.” I know it instantly. “I thought it was little old Thomas, here.”

A smile is my only reply. But it’s enough.

Thomas clears his throat. “This is my grandfather, Morfran Starling Sabin.”

I have to laugh. “Why do you goth types always give yourselves weird names?”

“Strong words coming from somebody walking around calling himself Theseus Cassio.”

He’s a salty old dude, and immediately likable, with a voice that belongs in a black-and-white spaghetti western. I’m not put off by the fact that he knows who I am. In fact, I’m almost relieved by it. I’m happy to come across another member of this peculiar underground, where people know my job, know my reputation, know my father’s reputation. I don’t live my life like a superhero. I need people to point me in the right direction. I need people who know who I really am. Just not too many. I don’t know why Thomas didn’t say as much when he found me by the cemetery. He had to be so damned cryptic.

“How’s your head?” Thomas asks.

“Can’t you tell, psychic boy?”

He shrugs. “I told you; I’m not that psychic. My grandpa told me you were coming and that I should look out for you. I can read minds sometimes. Not yours today. Maybe it’s the concussion. Maybe I just don’t need to anymore. It comes and goes.”

“Good. That mind-reader shit gives me the willies.” I look over at Morfran. “So, why did you send for me? And why didn’t you have Daisy set up a meeting for when I got here, rather than sending Mentok the Mind Taker?” I jerk my head toward Thomas and immediately curse myself for trying to be a smartass. My head is not healthy enough for smartassery.

“I wanted you here quickly,” he explains with a shrug. “I knew Daisy, and Daisy knew you, personal. He said you didn’t like to be bothered. But I still wanted to keep tabs. Ghost killer or not, you’re just a kid.”

“Okay,” I say. “But what’s the rush? Hasn’t Anna been here for decades?”

Morfran leans against the glass counter and shakes his head. “Something’s changing with Anna. She’s angrier these days. I’m linked to the dead — more so than you are in many ways. I see them, and I feel them, thinking, thinking about what they want. It’s been that way since—”

He shrugs. There’s a story there. But it’s probably his best story, and he doesn’t want to give it away so early on.

He rubs his temples. “I can feel it when she kills. Every time some unfortunate stumbles into her house. It used to be nothing more than an itch between my shoulder blades. These days it’s a full-on twist of my insides. Way things used to be, she wouldn’t have even come out for you. She’s long dead and no fool, knows the difference between easy prey and trust fund babies. But she’s getting sloppy. She’s going to get herself on the front-page news. And you and I both know that some things are better kept a secret.”

He sits down in a wingback chair and claps his hand against his knee. I hear the clicking of dog toenails on the floor and pretty soon a fat black Lab with a graying nose waddles in to put its head on his lap.

I think back to the events of the night before. She was nothing like I expected, though now that I’ve seen her I have a hard time remembering what I did expect. Maybe I thought she’d be a sad, frightened girl who killed out of fear and misery. I thought she’d trundle down the stairs in a white dress with a dark stain at the collar. I thought she would have two smiles, one on her face and one on her neck, wet and red. I thought she would ask me why I was in her house, and then come at me with razored little teeth.

Instead I find a ghost with the strength of a storm, black eyes, and pale hands, not a dead person at all but a dead goddess. Persephone back from Hades, or Hecate half-decayed.

The thought makes me shiver a little, but I choose to blame the blood loss.

“What are you going to do now?” Morfran asks.

I look down at the melting bag of ice, tinged pink with my rehydrated blood. Item number one is to go home and shower, and try to keep my mom from freaking out and slathering me with more rosemary oil.

Then it’s back to school, to do some damage control with Carmel and the Trojan Army. They probably didn’t see Thomas pull me out; they probably think I’m dead and are having a very dramatic cliff-side meeting to decide what to do about Mike and me, how to explain it. No doubt Will has some great suggestions.

And after that, it’s back to the house. Because I have seen Anna kill. And I have to stop her.

I luck out with my mom. She isn’t home when I get there, and there’s a note on the kitchen counter telling me that my lunch is in a bag in the refrigerator. She doesn’t sign it with a heart or anything, so I know she’s annoyed that I stayed out all night and didn’t call. Later I’ll think of something to tell her that doesn’t involve me being bloody and unconscious.

I don’t luck out with Thomas, who drove me home and then followed me up the porch steps. When I come downstairs from my shower, my head still throbbing like my heart has taken up a new residence behind my eyeballs, he’s sitting at my kitchen table, having a stare-down with Tybalt.

“This is no ordinary cat,” Thomas says through his teeth. He is staring unblinking into Tybalt’s green eyes — green eyes that flicker to me and seem to say, This kid is a knob. His tail twitches at the tip like a fishing lure.

“Of course he isn’t.” I rifle through the cabinet to chew some aspirin, a habit I picked up after reading Stephen King’s The Shining. “He’s a witch’s cat.”

Thomas breaks eye contact and glares at me. He knows when he’s being made fun of. I smile at him and toss him a can of soda. He cracks it very close to Tybalt and the cat hisses and jumps off of the table, growling irritably as he passes me. I reach down to scratch his back and he whacks me with his tail to tell me he wants this scruffy character out of his house.

“What’re you going to do about Mike?” Thomas’s eyes are wide and round over the rim of his Coke can.

“Damage control,” I say, because there’s nothing else I can do. I’d have more options if I hadn’t been unconscious all last night, but that’s spilled milk. I need to find Carmel. I need to talk to Will. I need to shut them both up. “So you should probably take us to school now.”

He raises his eyebrows like he’s surprised that I’ve ceased attempting to ditch him.

“What did you expect?” I ask. “You’re in it. You wanted in on whatever this is, well, congratulations. No time for second thoughts.”

Thomas swallows. To his credit, he doesn’t say anything.

When we walk into school, the hallways are empty. For a second I think that we’re busted, screwed, that there is some kind of candlelight vigil for Mike going on inside every closed door.

Then I realize that I’m an idiot. The halls are empty because we’re in the middle of third period.

We make stops off at our respective lockers and evade the questions of roaming faculty. I’m not going to class. We’re just going to wait around until lunch, hovering near Carmel’s locker in the hopes that she’s here and not pale and sick and lying in bed at home. But even if she is, Thomas says he knows where she lives. We can make a stop there later. If I have any luck left, she won’t have talked to her parents yet.

When the bell rings it just about jolts me out of my skin. It does nothing for my headache. But I blink hard and peer through the crowd, an endless flow of similarly dressed bodies striding into the hallways. I sigh with relief when I see Carmel. She looks a little pale, like she might have been crying or throwing up, but she’s still dressed well and carrying books. Not terribly worse for wear.

One of the brunettes from last night — I don’t know which one, but I’ll call her Natalie — bounces up to her elbow and starts prattling away about something. Carmel’s reaction is Oscar-worthy: the cock of her head and attentive gaze, the roll of her eyes and laughter, all so easy and genuine. Then she says something, some diverting something, and Natalie turns and bounces away. Carmel’s mask slides off again.

She’s less than ten feet from her locker when she finally raises her eyes high enough to notice I’m standing in front of it. Her eyes go wide. She says my name loudly before glancing around and walking closer, like she doesn’t want to be heard.

“You’re … alive.” The way she chokes on the phrase speaks of how strange she feels to be saying it. Her eyes move up and down my body, like she expects me to be oozing blood or have a bone exposed. “How?”

I nod to Thomas, who is skulking to my right. “Thomas pulled me out.”

Carmel spares him a glance and a smile. She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t hug me, like I sort of thought she might. The fact that she doesn’t makes me like her more for some reason.

“Where’s Will? And Chase?” I ask. I don’t ask whether anyone else knows. It’s obvious by the demeanor of the halls, the way that everyone is walking around chattering like normal, that nobody else does. But we still need to settle things. Get our stories straight.

“I don’t know. I don’t see them until lunch. I’m not sure how many classes they’ll be going to anyway.” She looks down. She’s getting the urge to talk about Mike. To say something that she feels like she should say, like she’s sorry, or how he wasn’t really all that bad and didn’t deserve what happened to him. She’s biting her lip.

“We need to talk to them. All together. Find them at lunch and tell them I’m alive. Where can we meet?”

She doesn’t answer right away, fidgeting around. Come on, Carmel, don’t disappoint me.

“I’ll bring them to the football field. Nobody will be using it.”

I nod quickly and she walks off, glancing back once like she’s making sure that I’m still there, that I’m real and she hasn’t gone crazy. I notice that Thomas is staring after her like a very sad, loyal hound dog.

“Dude,” I say, and head off toward the gym, to go through it out to the football field. “Now’s not the time.” Behind me I hear him mutter that it’s always the time. I let myself smirk for a minute before wondering what I’m going to do to keep Will and Chase on a leash.