Girl of Nightmares

CHAPTER THREE

The sound of that laugh. It plays back in my head for about the hundredth time. It was her voice; Anna’s voice, but it sounded mad, and shrill. Almost desperate. Or maybe that’s just because I heard it coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Or maybe I never really heard it at all.

A sharp crack makes me blink and look down. One of my mom’s white clarity candles lies in two pieces at my feet, rolled up against my toe. I’d been packing them into a box to take to Morfran’s shop.

“What’s the matter, son of mine?” She’s got this halfway smile on and a cocked eyebrow. “What’s got you so distracted that you’re breaking our livelihood?”

I bend down and pick up the two halves of candle, awkwardly shoving the broken ends together like they’ll magically merge. Why can’t magic work like that?

“Sorry,” I say. She gets up from the table where she was tying on incantations, takes the candle from me, and sniffs it.

“It’s okay. We’ll just keep this one. They work just as well broken as not.” She walks over and sets it on the windowsill over the sink. “Now answer the question, kiddo. What is it? School? Or maybe that date of yours went better than you let on.” The look on her face is half-teasing, but there’s hope there too.

“No such luck, Mom.” It’d be easy enough to say it was school. Easy enough to say I was daydreaming. And I probably should. My mother is happy here. After we found out that my father’s murderer had been renting out the attic of the house and ate her cat, I figured she’d move us. Or burn the house down. But she didn’t. Instead she settled and made the place ours, more than any of the rentals we’ve lived in since my dad died. The whole thing seemed like something she’d almost been waiting for.

I suppose it was something we were both waiting for. Because it’s over now. Closed.

“Cas? Are you okay? Did something happen?”

I give her my most reassuring smile. “It’s nothing. Just leftover crap.”

“Mm,” she says. She pulls a box of matches out of the junk drawer. “Maybe you should light this clarity candle. Get rid of the cobwebs.”

“Sure.” I chuckle, and take the match. “Shouldn’t I say the incantation first?”

She waves her hand. “The words aren’t always necessary. You just have to know what you want.” She pokes me in the chest, and I strike the match.

“You are playing horribly,” Thomas says to me from one couch cushion over.

“So what, it’s just Pac-Man,” I reply as my last guy runs smack into a ghost and dies.

“If you’re going to look at it that way, you’re never going to beat my top score.”

I snort. I’d never be able to beat it anyway. The kid has creepily accurate hand-eye coordination. I can hold my own in a first-person shooter, but he beats me at the old arcade games every time. He takes the controller and the theme music starts over. I watch as Pac-Man eats cherries and dots and sends ghosts back to the start box.

“You’ve memorized the boards.”

“Maybe.” He grins, then hits pause when his phone starts buzzing. The cell phone is new for Thomas. A gift from Carmel, which she uses to repeatedly text him to try to get us to meet her at the mall. But the mall is a thing that should not be suffered. Except maybe for Cinnabon.

Thomas sighs. “Want to meet Carmel and Katie at Cinnabon?”

I take a deep breath. He’d come over to give me a book he’d found that had theories about the afterlife. It’s sitting next to the Xbox, unopened. I’m tired of reading and coming up with more questions and no answers. I’m tired of chasing down my dad’s old associates and getting nothing but best guesses. It’s become an exhausting dead end, and even if it makes me feel guilty to think so, that’s the truth.

“Let’s go,” I say.

The mall is bright and smells like lotion. Every store we pass by must sell the stuff. Carmel met us at the entrance, alone. Katie bugged out the minute she heard we were coming.

“Does it bother you that your best friend dislikes me so much?” Thomas asks, his mouth stuffed so full of Cinnabon that he’s barely understandable.

“She doesn’t dislike you. You just never take the chance to get to know her. You both make her feel unwelcome.”

“That’s not true,” Thomas objects.

“It’s sort of true,” I mutter from just behind them. And it is. When it’s just me and Carmel and her friends, it’s fine. I can mingle if I have to. But when the three of us are together, it feels like a closed club. I sort of like that, and I don’t even feel guilty about it. The three of us together is safe.

“See?” Carmel says. She slows down a step or two so I can catch up and walk beside them. Thomas says something else about Katie and I hear Nat’s name come up too, but I’m not really listening. Their couples stuff is none of my business. I drop back to my regular spot just behind. The mall is too crowded to walk three-across without bobbing and weaving through people.

A multitude of voices call Carmel’s name, and I look up from my cinnamon roll to see Amanda Schneider, Heidi Trico, and a different Katie something-or-other waving their arms. Derek Pimms and Nate Bergstrom are with them too; guys that Thomas would call the next wave of the Trojan Army. I can almost hear him thinking it now, hear him gritting his teeth as we walk over.

“Hey, Carmel,” Heidi says. “What’s up?”

Carmel shrugs. “Cinnabon. And wandering around. Dropping hints for birthday gifts that some people are too dense to pick up on.” She nudges Thomas affectionately. I wish she wouldn’t have. At least not in present company, because it makes Thomas turn red as a beet, which makes Derek and Nate grin like jackasses. The other girls just glance first his way, then mine, smiling without showing their teeth. Thomas shuffles his feet. He never looks Derek or Nate in the eye, so I compensate by staring them down. I feel like an idiot, but I do it. Carmel just talks and laughs, at ease and seemingly oblivious to the whole thing.

And then something shifts. The athame. It’s secure, in its sheath, fastened with two straps around my ankle. But I just felt it move, the way it does sometimes when I’m hunting. And this was no small movement; it was an unmistakable twist.

I pivot in the direction it moved, feeling more than half-crazy. There is no dead thing haunting the mall. It’s too busy, too bright, and too lotion-y. But the knife doesn’t lie, so I search through the passing faces, faces that stare blankly on their way to American Eagle or laugh and smile with friends. All clearly alive in varying degrees. I pivot again and the knife jerks.

“What?” I mutter, and look ahead, at the window display of the store across from us.

It’s Anna’s dress.

I blink my eyes hard twice. But it’s her dress. White and simple. Beautiful. I walk toward it, and the mall has gone quiet. What am I seeing? Not just a dress that’s similar to hers. It’s her dress. I know it even before the leg of the mannequin steps down off of the pedestal.

She moves jerkily on plastic legs. Her hair is hanging down her shoulders, limp and loose like a synthetic wig. I don’t look at her face. Not even when my fingers are against the glass of the display and her mannequin-legs bend, rustling the white fabric.

“Cas!”

I jerk, and the noise of the mall hits my eardrums like a slamming door. Thomas and Carmel are on either side of me, concerned looks on their faces. My whole head is cloudy, like I just woke up. As I blink up at the glass, the mannequin stands like it always stood, posed and dressed in a white dress that doesn’t really look anything like Anna’s at all.

I glance back at Amanda, Derek, and the others. They look as shell-shocked as Thomas and Carmel right now. But by tomorrow they’ll be laughing hysterically as they tell everyone else they know. I pull my fingers away from the window awkwardly. After what they just saw, I can’t say that I blame them.

“Are you okay?” Carmel asks. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I thought I saw something, but it was nothing.”

She drops her eyes and looks quickly right and left. “You were shouting.”

I look at Thomas, who nods.

“I guess I got a little loud. The acoustics in here suck; you can’t really hear yourself.”

I see the look they give each other, and don’t try to convince them. How could I? They see the white dress in the window and they know what it means. They know what it was that I thought I saw.