Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake
The foyer is empty, the staircase bare. The skeleton of the ruined chandelier hangs on the ceiling without twinkling, and there’s a table covered in a dusty sheet that I could swear wasn’t here last night. There is something off about this house. Something besides the presence that obviously haunts it.
“Anna,” I say, and my voice rolls into the air. The house eats it up without an echo.
I look to my left. The place where Mike Andover died is empty save for a dark, oily stain. I have no idea what Anna has done with the body, and honestly, I’d rather not think about it.
Nothing moves, and I’m in no mood to wait. Just the same, I don’t want to face her on the stairs. She has too much of an advantage, being as strong as a Viking goddess and undead and everything. I walk farther into the house, winding my way carefully through the scattered and dust-sheeted furniture. The thought crosses my mind that she may be lying in wait, that the lumpy sofa isn’t a lumpy sofa at all, but a dead girl covered in veins. I’m just about to stab my athame through it for good measure when I hear something shuffle behind me. I turn.
“Jesus.”
“Has it been three days already?” the ghost of Mike Andover asks me. He’s standing near the window he was pulled through. He’s in one piece. I crack a tentative smile. Death, it seems, has made him wittier. But part of me suspects that what I’m looking at isn’t really Mike Andover at all. It’s just the stain on the ground, raised by Anna, made to walk and talk. But just in case it isn’t …
“I’m sorry. For what happened to you. It wasn’t supposed to.”
Mike cocks his head. “It’s never supposed to. Or it’s always supposed to. Whatever.” He smiles. I don’t know if it’s meant to be friendly, or ironic, but it’s definitely creepy. Especially when he abruptly stops. “This house is wrong. Once we’re here we never leave. You shouldn’t have come back.”
“I’ve got business here,” I say. I try to ignore the idea that he can never leave. It’s too terrible and too unfair.
“The same business that I had here?” he asks in a low growl. Before I can reply, he’s ripped in two by invisible hands, an exact replay of his death. I stumble back and my knees run into a table or something, I don’t know what and don’t really care. The shock of seeing him collapsed into two grisly wet puddles again makes me disregard the furniture. I tell myself it was a cheap trick, and that I’ve seen worse. I try to get my breathing to slow down. Then, from the floor, I hear Mike’s voice again.
“Hey, Cas.”
My eyes travel over the mess to find his face, which is twisted around, still attached to the right side of his body. That’s the side that kept the spine. I swallow hard and keep from looking at the exposed vertebrae. Mike’s eye rolls up at me.
“It only hurts for a minute,” he says, and then he sinks into the floor, slowly, like oil into a towel. His eye doesn’t close when it disappears. It keeps on staring. I really could have lived without that little exchange. As I continue to watch the dark spot on the floor, I realize that I’m holding my breath. I wonder how many people Anna has actually killed in this house. I wonder if they are all still here, shells of them, and if she could raise them up like marionettes, shuffling toward me in various states of decay.
Get it under control. Now’s not the time to panic. Now’s the time to squeeze my knife and realize too late that something is coming up behind me.
There’s a flicker of black hair around my shoulder, two or three inky tendrils reaching out to beckon me closer. I spin and slice through the air, half expecting her to not be there, to have disappeared in that one instant. But she didn’t. She hovers before me, half a foot off the ground.
We hesitate a second and regard each other, my brown eyes peering directly into her oily ones. She’d be about five foot seven if she was on the floor, but since she’s floating six inches off of it I almost have to look up. My breathing seems loud inside my head. The sound of her dress dripping is soft as it bleeds onto the floor. What has she become since she died? What power did she find, what anger, that allowed her to be more than just a specter, to become a demon of vengeance?
The path of my blade sheared the ends off her hair. The pieces float down and she watches them sink into the floorboards, like Mike did moments ago. Something passes across her brow, a tightening, a sadness, and then she looks at me and bares her teeth.
“Why have you come back?” she asks. I swallow. I don’t know what to say. I can feel myself backing up even though I tell myself not to.
“I gave you your life, packaged as a gift.” The voice coming out of her cavernous mouth is deep and awful. It is the sound of a voice without breath. She still carries the faintest Finnish accent. “Did you think it was easy? Do you want to be dead?”
There’s something hopeful in the way she asks that last part, something that makes her eyes keener. She glances down at my knife with an unnatural twitch of her head. A grimace takes hold of her face; expressions pass crazily, like ripples on a lake.
Then the air around her wavers and the goddess before me is gone. In her place is a pale girl with long, dark hair. Her feet are firmly planted on the ground. I look down at her.
“What is your name?” she asks, and when I don’t answer, “You know mine. I saved your life. Isn’t it only fair?”
“My name is Theseus Cassio,” I hear myself say, even though I’m thinking what a cheap trick this is, and a stupid one. If she thinks I won’t kill this form then she’s dead wrong, no pun intended. But it’s a good disguise, I’ll give her that. The mask that she’s wearing has a thoughtful face and soft, violet eyes. She’s wearing an old-fashioned white dress.
“Theseus Cassio,” she repeats.
“Theseus Cassio Lowood,” I say, though I don’t know why I’m telling her. “Everyone calls me Cas.”
“You’ve come here to kill me.” She walks around me in a wide circle. I let her get just past my shoulders before I turn too. There’s no way I’m letting her behind my back. She might be all sweet and innocent now, but I know the creature that would come bursting out if given the chance.
“Someone’s already done that,” I say. I won’t tell her pretty stories about how I’m here to set her free. It would be cheating, putting her at ease, trying to get her to walk into it. And besides, it’s a lie. I have no idea where I’m sending her, and I don’t care. I just know that it’s away from here, where she can kill people and sink them into this godforsaken house.
“Someone did, yes,” she says, and then her head twists around and snaps back and forth. For a second her hair starts to writhe again, like snakes. “But you can’t.”
She knows that she’s dead. That’s interesting. Most of them don’t. Most are just angry and scared, more an imprint of an emotion—of a horrible moment—than an actual being. You can talk to some of them, but they usually think you’re someone else, someone from their past. Her awareness throws me off a beat; I use my tongue to buy some time.
“Sweetheart, my father and I have put more ghosts in the ground than you can count.”
“Never one like me.”
There is a tone in her voice when she says this that isn’t quite pride, but something like it. Pride tinged with bitterness. I stay quiet, because I’d rather she not know that she’s right. Anna is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Her strength seems limitless, along with her bag of tricks. She’s not some shuffling phantom, pissed off about being shot to death. She’s death itself, gruesome and senseless, and even when she’s dressed in blood and veins I can’t help but stare.
But I’m not afraid. Strong or not, all I need is one good strike. She’s not beyond the reach of my athame, and if I can get to her, she’ll bleed out into the ether just like all the rest.
“Perhaps you should fetch your father to help you,” she says. I squeeze my blade.
“My father’s dead.”
Something passes across her eyes. I can’t believe it’s regret, or embarrassment, but that’s what it looks like.
“My father died too, when I was a girl,” she says softly. “A storm on the lake.”
I can’t let her keep on like this. I can feel something in my chest softening, ceasing to growl, completely despite myself. Her strength makes her vulnerability more touching. I should be beyond this.
“Anna,” I say, and her eyes snap to mine. I raise the blade and the flash of it reflects in her eyes.
“Go,” she orders, queen of her dead castle. “I don’t want to kill you. And it seems that I don’t have to, for some reason. So go.”
Questions pop into my mind at this, but I stubbornly plant my feet. “I’m not leaving until you’re out of this house and back in the ground.”
“I was never in the ground,” she hisses through her teeth. Her pupils are growing darker, the blackness swirling outward until all the white is gone. Veins creep across her cheeks to find homes at her temples and throat. Blood bubbles up from her skin and spills down the length of her, a sweeping skirt dripping to the floor.
I thrust with my knife and feel something heavy connect with my arm before I’m tossed into the wall. Fuck. I didn’t even see her move. She’s still hovering in the middle of the room where I used to be. My shoulder hurts a lot where I connected with the wall. My arm hurts a lot where it connected with Anna. But I’m fairly hardheaded, so I scramble up and go for her again, going in low this time, not even trying for the kill but just for a slice of something. At this point, I’d settle for hair.
The next thing I know, I’m across the room again. I’ve skidded across it on my back. I think there are splinters in my pants. Anna continues to hover, regarding me with ever increasing resentment. The sound of her dress dripping onto the floorboards reminds me of a teacher I used to have who would slowly tap his temple when he was really annoyed with my lack of studying.
I get back on my feet, this time more slowly. I hope it looks more like I’m carefully planning my next move and less like I’m in large amounts of pain, which is the real reason. She’s not trying to kill me and it’s starting to piss me off. I’m being batted around like a cat toy. Tybalt would find this hilarious. I wonder if he can see from the car.
“Stop this,” she says in her cavernous voice.
I run at her, and she grabs me by the wrists. I struggle, but it’s like trying to wrestle concrete.
“Just let me kill you,” I mutter in frustration. Rage lights up her eyes. For a second I think what a mistake I’ve made, that I forgot what she really was, and I’m going to wind up just like Mike Andover. My body actually scrunches up, trying to keep from being torn in two.
“I’ll never let you kill me,” she spits, and shoves me back toward the door.
“Why? Don’t you think it would be peaceful?” I ask. I wonder for the millionth time why I can never seem to stop running my mouth.
She squints at me like I’m an idiot. “Peaceful? After what I’ve done? Peace, in a house of torn-apart boys and disemboweled strangers?” She pulls my face very close to hers. Her black eyes are wide. “I can’t let you kill me,” she says, and then she shouts, shouts loud enough to make my eardrums throb as she’s throwing me out through the front door, clear past the broken stairs and onto the overgrown gravel of the driveway.
“I never wanted to be dead!”
I hit the ground rolling and look up just in time to see the door slam. The house looks still and vacant, like nothing has happened there in a million years. I gingerly test my limbs and find that they’re all in working order. Then I push myself up to my knees.
None of them ever wanted to be dead. Not really. Not even the suicides; they changed their minds at the last minute. I wish I could tell her so, and tell her cleverly, so she wouldn’t feel so alone. Plus it’d make me feel like less of a moron after being tossed around like an anonymous henchman in a James Bond movie. Some professional ghost killer I am.
As I walk to my mom’s car, I try to get it back under control. Because I am going to get Anna, no matter what she thinks. Both because I’ve never failed before, and also because in the moment she told me she couldn’t let me kill her, she sounded like she sort of wished that she could. Her awareness makes her special in more ways than one. Unlike the others, Anna regrets. I rub the ache along my left arm and know I’ll be covered with bruises. Force isn’t going to work. I need a plan B.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My mom lets me sleep through most of the day, and when she finally wakes me up it’s to tell me she’s brewed a bath of tea leaves, lavender, and belladonna. The belladonna is in there to temper my rash behavior, but I don’t refuse. I hurt all over. That’s what getting thrown around a house all night by the goddess of death will do to you.
As I sink into the tub, very slowly, with a grimace on my face, I start to think of my next move. The fact of the matter is, I’m outmatched. It hasn’t happened very often, and never to this degree. But occasionally, I need to ask for help. I reach for my cell phone on the bathroom counter and dial an old friend. A friend for generations, actually. He knew my dad.
“Theseus Cassio,” he says when he picks up. I smirk. He’ll never call me Cas. He finds my full name just too amusing.
“Gideon Palmer,” I say back, and picture him on the other end of the line, on the other side of the world, sitting in a proper English house that overlooks Hampstead Heath in northern London.
“It’s been too long,” he says, and I can see him crossing or uncrossing his legs. I can almost hear the mutter of the tweed through the phone. Gideon is a classic English gent, sixty-five if he’s a day, with white hair and glasses. He’s the kind of man with a pocket watch and long shelves of meticulously dusted books that reach from floor to ceiling. He used to push me on the rolling ladders when I was a kid and he wanted me to fetch some weird volume on poltergeists, or binding spells, or whatever. My family and I spent a summer with him while my dad was hunting a ghost that was stalking Whitechapel, some kind of Jack the Ripper wannabe.
“Tell me, Theseus,” he says. “When do you anticipate returning to London? Plenty of things that go bump in the night to keep you busy. Several excellent universities, all haunted to the gills.”
“Have you been talking to my mother?”
He laughs, but of course he has. They’ve stayed close since my dad died. He was my dad’s … I guess mentor is the best word. But more than that. When Dad was killed, he flew over the same day. Held me and my mother together. Now he starts going off on this spiel about how applications are going to have to go out next year, and how I’m really quite lucky that my father provided for my education and I won’t have to mess around with student loans and that business. It really is lucky because a scholarship for this rolling stone is just not in the cards, but I cut him off. I have more important and pressing issues.
“I need help. I’ve run into a completely sticky mess.”
“What sort of sticky mess?”
“The dead sort.”
“Of course.”
He listens while I tell him about Anna. Then I hear the familiar sound of the ladder rolling and his soft huffs as he climbs it to reach for a book.
“She’s no ordinary ghost, that seems certain,” he says.
“I know. Something’s made her stronger.”
“The way she died?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. From what I’ve heard, she was just murdered like so many others. Throat slit. But now she’s haunting her old house, killing whoever steps inside, like some goddamn spider.”
“Language,” he chides.
“Sorry.”
“She’s certainly not just some shifting wraith,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “And her behavior is far too controlled and deliberate for a poltergeist—” He pauses, and I can hear pages being flipped. “You’re in Ontario, you say? The house isn’t sitting on some native burial ground?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hmm.”
There are a couple more hmms before I suggest that I just burn the house down
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” he says sternly. “The house could be the only thing binding her.”
“Or it could be the source of her strength.”
“Indeed it could be. But this warrants investigation.”
“What kind of investigation?” I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to tell me not to be a layabout and to get out there and do the legwork. He’s going to tell me that my father never shied away from cracking a book. Then he’s going to grumble about the youth of today. If he only knew.
“You’re going to need to find an occult supplier.”
“Huh?”
“This girl must be made to give up her secrets. Something has—happened to her, something has affected her and before you can exorcise her spirit from that house, you must find out what it is.”
That’s not what I expected. He wants me to do a spell. I don’t do spells. I’m not a witch.
“So what do I need an occult supplier for? Mom’s an occult supplier.” I look down at my arms under the water. My skin is starting to tingle, but my muscles feel fresh and I can see even through the darkened water that my bruises are fading. My mom is a great herbal witch.
Gideon chuckles. “Bless your dear mother, but she’s no occult supplier. She’s a gifted white witch, but she has no interest in what needs to be done here. You don’t need a circle of posies and chrysanthemum oil. You need chicken feet, a banishing pentagram, some kind of water or mirror divination, and a circle of consecrated stones.”
“I also need a witch.”
“After all these years, I trust you have the resources to find at least that.”
I grimace, but two people have come to mind. Thomas, and Morfran Starling.
“Let me finish researching this, Theseus, and I’ll e-mail you in a day or two with the complete ritual.”
“All right, Gideon. Thanks.”
“Of course. And Theseus?”