Girl of Nightmares

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The door slides shut softly behind me. I’m surprised, because I want to slam it, rattle it around on its track. But Gideon is still in the study, thinking quietly, or maybe even napping, and his voice in my head says that throwing such a fit just won’t do.

“How’d that go?” Thomas asks, poking his head out of the kitchen.

“He’s napping,” I reply. “So what does that tell you?”

Walking into the kitchen, I find Thomas and Jestine seated together at the table, sharing a pomegranate.

“He’s old, Cas,” she says. “He was old the last time you were here. Napping is nothing out of the ordinary.” She spoons up a load of the purple fruit and chews carefully past the seeds.

To my right, Thomas crunches through his pomegranate and spits seeds into a mug.

“We didn’t cross an ocean to cool our heels and ride the Eye,” he snaps. At first I think he says it for my benefit, but no. He looks irritated and surly; the shower-wetness of his hair gives him the air of an almost-drowned cat.

“Hey,” I say. “Don’t bite Jestine’s head off. It’s not her fault.” Thomas curls his lip, and Jestine smiles.

“What you two need is a distraction,” she says, and gets up from the table. “Come on. By the time we get back, Gideon will be up.”

Someone should tell Jestine that distractions only work if you don’t know you’re being distracted. Someone should tell Thomas too, because he seems oblivious to everything but her; they’re talking animatedly about astral projection or something. I’m not sure really. The conversation’s taken at least six turns since we got off the Tube at London Bridge Station and I haven’t bothered to keep up. Jestine has won him over with witch talk. The fact that she’s an attractive girl didn’t hurt either. Who knows, maybe she’ll help him get over Carmel.

“Cas, come on.” She reaches back and pulls me up alongside by my shirt. “We’re nearly there.”

The “there” that she’s referring to is the Tower of London, the castle-like fortress that sits on the north bank of the Thames. It’s touristy and historical, the site of numerous tortures and executions, from Lady Jane Grey to Guy Fawkes. Looking at it as we cross the Tower Bridge, I wonder how many screams have bounced off the stone walls. I wonder how much blood the ground remembers. They used to put severed heads up on pikes and display them on the bridge until they fell into the river. I glance down at the brown water. Somewhere underneath, old bones might still be fighting their way out of the silt.

Jestine buys our tickets and we go inside. She says we don’t need to wait for the tour guide; she’s been here often enough that she remembers all the interesting parts. We follow her as she leads us through the grounds, telling stories about the fat, black ravens toddling across the lawn. Thomas listens, smiles, and asks a few polite questions, but the history doesn’t quite hold him. About ten minutes in, I catch him gazing wistfully at Jestine’s long blond hair, a hangdog look on his face. It reminds him of Carmel, but it shouldn’t; Jestine’s is shot through with those streaks of fierce red. She doesn’t look anything like Carmel, really. Carmel’s eyes are warm and brown. Jestine’s look like green glass. Carmel’s beauty is classic, where Jestine is mostly just striking.

“Cas, are you even listening?” She smiles and I clear my throat. I’d been staring.

“Not really.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Once. That summer when I was visiting, Gideon brought me and my mom. Don’t feel bad. It was pretty boring then too.” Wasting time like this, my mind turns to Anna. She suffers in my imagination and I suffer with her. I picture the worst, every pain I can conceive of, to torture myself. It’s the only penance I can do, until I get her out.

Behind us, one of the Beefeater tour guides is leading a group of visitors, making wry comments that lift good-natured laughter from their throats, telling the same jokes he tells a dozen times a day. Jestine watches me quietly. After a few seconds, she leads us on, up into the White Tower.

“Wasn’t there anywhere to go that has fewer stairs?” Thomas asks after touring the third floor. It’s full of shields and statues of horses and knights in chain mail and armor. Kids ooh and aah and point their fingers. Their parents do it too. The whole tower vibrates with footsteps and chatter. It’s warm from the June heat and too many bodies, and the buzzing of flies is audible.

“Do you hear that buzzing?” Thomas asks.

“Flies,” I reply, and he gives me a look.

“Yeah, but what flies?”

I look around. The buzzing is loud enough to be the inside of a barn, but there aren’t any actual flies. And no one else seems to notice. There’s a smell too, cloying and metallic. I’d know it anywhere. Old blood.

“Cas,” Thomas says in a low voice. “Turn around.”

When I turn I’m looking at a display case of used weapons. They haven’t been cleaned or polished, and are caked with drying red and bits of tissue. One half of a long spiked mace has a piece of scalp and hair hanging off of it. It was used to cave in someone’s head. The buzzing of phantom flies makes Thomas swat at the air even though they aren’t real. Looking around, the rest of the exhibit is the same. Case after case filled with relics of war, splashed and streaked with red. Beneath one of the knights’ armor, a curl of intestine shows a rubbery pink. My hand strays to my pocket, to the athame, and I feel Jestine touch my back.

“Don’t go pulling that out again,” she says.

“What’s going on here?” I ask. “It wasn’t like this when we came in.”

“Is it the way they were used?” Thomas asks. “Did this really happen?”

Jestine looks around at the gory display and shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s quite possible. But maybe not. It might just be a show, impotent anger from the dozens of dead things running through this place like a current. There are so many that they don’t have separate voices. They have no idea who they are, anymore. They just manifest, like this.”

“Do you remember this from when you were here, Cas?” Thomas asks. I shake my head.

“I thought you’d have been tuned to it right away,” says Jestine. “But maybe they didn’t show you. Most people can’t see it of course, but the last time I was here, a little girl walked in and started to cry. No one could make her stop. She wouldn’t say why she was upset, but I knew. She walked around this room with her family, crying, while they tried to get her to look at the disemboweled knight, like he would cheer her up.”

Thomas swallows. “That’s disturbing.”

“When did you first see it?” I ask.

“My parents brought me here when I was eight.”

“Did you cry?”

“Never,” she says, and lifts her chin. “But then, I understood.” She tilts her head toward the door. “So, do you want to go meet the queen?”

The queen is in the chapel. She sits in the first row, silent, far off to the left. Dark brown hair hangs down her back, and her posture is straight, strapped into a bodice. Even standing in the back, thirty feet away, there’s no mistaking that she’s dead.

The chapel is in between tours at the moment, and a young couple was just finishing taking a picture of the stained glass as we came in. Now we’re alone.

“I don’t know which queen she is,” Jestine says. “Most say that she’s the ghost of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII. But she might be Lady Jane Grey. She doesn’t speak. And she doesn’t resemble any of the portraits.”

This is weird. There’s a dead woman in front of me like dozens of other dead women I’ve seen. But this one is a queen, and a famous one. If it’s possible to be starstruck by the dead, then I guess that’s what’s happening.

Jestine moves to the back of the chapel, near the door.

“Does she respond?” I ask. It’s unlikely. She isn’t corporeal; if she were, she’d be visible to everyone, and the couple in here snapping photos had no idea they had company. I wonder, though, if she’ll show up in a few of their developed shots and give them a good story to tell their friends and neighbors.

“Not to me,” Jestine replies in a whisper, as the queen turns, in a slow rotation, to face me. The movement is regal, or careful. Maybe both. She is balancing her severed head on her neck. Below the cut, she’s nothing but blood, and there’s something else. I can hear the rustle of her dress against the bench. She’s not just vapor anymore.

I’ve never seen the portraits Jestine mentioned, so I can’t speak to any resemblance. But the woman facing me looks not much more than a girl. She’s tiny, thin-lipped, and pale. Only the eyes are beautiful, dark and clear. There’s a delicate dignity about her, and a little bit of shock. It’s how any queen would react, if she were suddenly presented with a kid with hair hanging in his eyes and wrinkly clothes.

“Should I bow or something?” I ask out of the corner of my mouth.

“You should hurry up, is what you should do,” Jestine says, peering out the door. “The next tour group is going to be popping in here in two minutes.”

Thomas and I exchange a look. “Hurry up and do what?” I ask.

“Send her,” Jestine whispers, and arches her brow. “Use the athame.”

“Has she killed people?” Thomas asks. “Has she even harmed people?”

I doubt it. I doubt if she’s even scared people. I can’t imagine that this girl, this one-time queen, has ever implied a threat to anyone. She’s somber, and oddly at peace. It’s hard to explain, but I think she’d find the whole concept rude and inappropriate. The thought of stabbing her, or “sending” her, as Jestine apparently calls it, makes me blush.

“Let’s get out of here,” I mumble, and walk toward the door. In the corner of my eye, I catch Thomas sketching an awkward curtsy as he follows. I glance back one more time. The queen is no longer facing us. She resides in her church with no care for the living, balancing her head on her ragged neck.

“Am I missing something?” Jestine asks once we’re back in the open air. I lead them quickly toward the exit. Gideon’s got to be up by now, and I’ve had enough of this place.

“Hey,” she says, and takes my arm. “Did I offend you? Do something out of order?”

“No,” I say. Deep breath in, and out. She’s brash, and sort of pushy. But I’m trying to remember what she already apologized for; her habit of running in fists first, without thinking. “It’s just that … I don’t ‘send’ ghosts unless they’re a threat to the living.”

The look on her face is genuine surprise. “But that’s not your purpose.”

“What?”

“You’re the instrument. The wielder of the weapon. It’s the weapon’s will that’s important. Not yours. And the athame doesn’t make distinctions.”

We’re stopped before the steps near the exit gate, facing each other. She said the words with conviction. With belief. She’s been indoctrinated with that law probably for as long as she can remember. The way she’s looking at me, right into my eyes, it’s a challenge to tell her different. Even if it won’t change her mind.

“Well, I’m the wielder, as you say. It’s my blood in the blade. So I guess now that it’s in my hand, the athame does make distinctions.”

“Wait a minute,” says Thomas. “Is she a member of the—”

“A member of the Order of the Blah Blah Blah. Yes, I think she is.”

Jestine lifts her chin. She hasn’t done anything to cover up the bruise across her jaw. No makeup, no nothing. But she doesn’t wear it like a badge either.

“Well, of course I am,” she says with a grin. “Who do you think sent you the photograph?”

Thomas’s mouth drops slightly open.

“Weren’t you worried that your uncle might be pissed about that?” I ask. Jestine shrugs. I think she shrugs even more than I do.

“The Order thought it was time for you to know,” she says. “But don’t be too cross with Gideon. He hasn’t been a true member for decades.”

He must’ve broken away with my dad.

“If he’s not a member anymore, then what are we going to do?” Thomas asks.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jestine answers. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Standing in the study, Gideon stares at the three of us for a long time. When his eyes finally settle, they rest on Jestine.

“What have you told them?” he asks.

“Nothing that they didn’t really know already,” she replies.

I feel Thomas give me a look but don’t return it. It would only add to the sense of Hitchcockian vertigo that’s been slowly creeping up my throat ever since we left the Tower of London. It’s the feeling that none of this is our show. Everyone seems to know more than I do, and being on the shallow end of the information pool is starting to piss me off.

Gideon takes a deep breath. “This is the turn-back point, Theseus,” he says, staring down at his desk. And he’s right, as usual. I can feel that. I’ve felt it since I decided to come here. But here we are. This is the last moment, the last second, that I could turn away, and Thomas and I could return to Thunder Bay, and nothing would change. We would remain as we are, and Anna would stay where she is.

I glance at Jestine. Her eyes are downcast, but there’s this odd, knowing look on her face. Like she knows full well that we passed the turn-back point a few countries ago.

“Just tell me,” I say. “What exactly is the Order of—the Black Dagger?” Jestine scrunches her nose at the Anglicizing, but I’m in no mood to tie my tongue up and butcher the Gaelic.

“They’re the descendants of the ones who created the knife,” replies Gideon.

“Like me,” I say.

“No,” Jestine says. “You’re the descendant of the warrior they bonded with it.”

“These are the descendants of those who harnessed the power. Magicians. They used to be called druids and seers. Now they have no real name.”

“And you were one of them,” I say, but he shakes his head.

“Not traditionally. They brought me in after I befriended your father. My family has ties to it, of course. Most old families do; just about everything is diluted and bastardized by thousands of years of time.” He shakes his head, drifts off. He makes it sound like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one, but it took me seventeen years.

I feel like I’ve been spun around blindfolded, then had my eyes uncovered and shoved into daylight. I never figured that I was an outsider to this ancient club. I thought I was the club. Me. My blood. My knife. The end.

“What about the athames in the picture, Gideon? Are they just props? Or are there others out there like mine?”

Gideon holds out his hand. “May I have it, Theseus? Just for a moment.”

Thomas shakes his head, but it’s all right. I’ve always known that Gideon has secrets. He must have lots more than even this. It doesn’t mean I don’t trust him.

Reaching into my back pocket, my fingers slide the athame out of its sheath, and I flip it gently to place it handle out in Gideon’s palm. He accepts it solemnly and turns toward a dark oak shelf. Drawers open and close. He’s working close to the vest, but I still glimpse a flash of steel. When he turns back to us, he’s holding a tray, and on it are four knives, all of them identical. Exact replicas of my athame.

“The traditional athames of the Order,” Gideon says. “A bit more valuable than a dime a dozen, as you’d say, but—no. They’re not like yours. There are no others like yours.” He motions to Jestine, and curls his fingers for her to step closer. When she does, there’s a look of reverence on her face that almost makes me snort snarky laughter. But at the same time I feel sort of ashamed. She looks so … respectful. I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at the athame that way.

Gideon sets the tray on the edge of his desk and rearranges the knives once, shuffling them like a three-card monte dealer. When Jestine stands before the tray, he straightens and commands her to select the real one.

Even though my athame has never been damaged, and there are no nicks or scars to identify it from the others, I know immediately. It’s the third from the left. I feel it so strongly that it may as well be waving at me. Jestine has no idea, but her green eyes glitter at the challenge. After a few deep breaths, she extends her hand over the tray and passes it slowly back and forth. My pulse quickens as she hesitates over the wrong one. I don’t want her to choose correctly. It’s petty, but I don’t.

She closes her eyes. Gideon’s holding his breath. After thirty tense seconds, her eyes fly open, and she smiles before reaching down to the tray and picking up my knife.

“Well done,” Gideon says, but he doesn’t sound pleased. Jestine nods and hands the knife back to me. I slide it into its sheath, and try not to look like a kid with a broken toy while I do it.

“This is all fun,” I say, “but what does that have to do with anything? Listen, does the Order know how to cross over to the other side, or not?”

“Of course they do,” Jestine replies. Her face is flushed from whatever parlor trick she just used to identify my knife. “They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again for you, if you’re willing to pay the price.”

“What price?” Thomas and I ask together, but the two of them are tight-lipped, ignoring the question like it wasn’t even asked.

“I’ll contact them,” Gideon says, and when Jestine looks at him he says it again, more firmly. He never once looks at me, instead focusing on the dummy knives, wiping them with a soft cloth like they’re important before placing them back in their drawers. “Get some rest, Theseus,” he says, implying heavily that I’m going to need it.

Upstairs in the guest room, Thomas and I sit silently on our respective bunks. He’s uneasy about all this. I don’t blame him. But I haven’t come this far to do nothing. She’s still waiting for me. I can still hear her voice, and her screams.

“What do you think the Order is going to do?” he asks.

“Help us open a door to Hell, if we’re lucky,” I reply. Lucky. Ha ha. The irony.

“She said there would be a price. Is she sure? Do you have any idea what it’s going to be?”

“I don’t. But there’s always a price; you know that. Isn’t it what you witches are always going on about? Give and take, balancing things, three chickens for a pound of butter?”

“I’ve never said anything about bartering farm goods,” he says, but I can hear that he’s smiling. Maybe tomorrow I should send him home. Before I get him hurt, or tangled up in something that after tonight feels like only my business.

“Cas?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think you should trust Jestine.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because,” he says quietly, “when she was doing the athame lineup downstairs, she was thinking about how much she wanted it. She was thinking it was hers.”

I blink. So what? is my knee-jerk response. It’s an unattainable wish. A fantasy. The athame is mine, and it always will be.

“Thomas?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you have identified the athame off of that tray?”

“Never,” he says. “Not in a million years.”