Текст книги "Anna Dressed in Blood"

Автор книги: Kendare Blake

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Behind me I hear a thud, and I turn away from the scene, grateful for the distraction. Inside the circle, Anna is no longer hovering. She’s collapsed onto the floor on her hands and knees. The black tendrils of her hair twitch. Her mouth is open like she might moan, or cry, but there is no sound. Streaky gray tears roll like charcoal-tinted water down pale cheeks. She watched her own throat get cut. She’s watching herself bleed to death, redness soaking down into the house and saturating her white dancing dress. All of these things that she couldn’t remember were just slapped into her face. She’s growing weak.

I look back at Anna’s death even though I don’t want to. Malvina is stripping the body and barking orders at Elias, who flees into the kitchen and comes back with what looks like a rough blanket. She tells him to cover the body, and he does. I can tell that he can’t believe what’s happened. Then she tells him to go upstairs and find Anna another dress.

“Another dress? What for?” he asks, but she snaps, “Just go!” and he scampers up the steps so fast that he stumbles.

Malvina spreads Anna’s dress out on the floor, so covered in red now that it’s difficult to remember that it used to be white. Then she goes to the closet on the opposite side of the room and comes back holding black candles and a small black bag.

She’s a witch, Thomas mentally hisses at me. The curse. It makes perfect sense. We should have known that the killer was some kind of a witch. But we might never have guessed it was her own mother.

Keep your eyes sharp, I shoot back at Thomas. I might need your help figuring out what’s going on here.

I doubt it, he says, and I guess I doubt it too, watching Malvina light the candles and kneel over the dress, her body swaying as she chants in whispers, soft Finnish words. Her voice is tender, like it never was for Anna in life. The candles glow brighter. She lifts first the one on the left, and then the one on the right. Black wax spills across the stained fabric. Then she spits on it, three times. Her chanting is louder, but I don’t understand any of it. I start trying to pick out words to look up later, and that’s when I hear him. Thomas. He’s speaking softly out loud. For a second I don’t know what he’s saying. I actually open my mouth to tell him to shut up, that I’m trying to listen, before I realize he’s repeating her chants in English.

“Father Hiisi, hear me, I come before you low and humble. Take this blood, take this power. Keep my daughter in this house. Feed her on suffering, blood, and death. Hiisi, Father, demon-god, hear my prayer. Take this blood, take this power.”

Malvina closes her eyes, holds up the kitchen knife, and passes it through the candle flames. Impossibly, it ignites, and then, in one fierce motion, she stabs the knife through the dress and into the floorboards.

Elias has come to the top of the stairs, holding a swath of clean, white fabric—Anna’s replacement dress. He watches Malvina in awe and horror. It’s clear that he never knew this about her, and now that he does, he’ll never speak a word against her, out of sheer terror.

Firelight is shining up from the hole in the floorboards, and Malvina slowly moves the knife, stuffing the bloodied dress down into the house as she chants. When the last of the fabric disappears, she pushes the rest of the knife in to follow it and the light flashes. The floorboard is closed. Malvina swallows, and gently blows the candles out, from left to right.

“Now you’ll never leave my house,” she whispers.

Our spell is ending. Malvina’s face is fading like a nightmare memory, turning as gray and withered as the wood she murdered Anna on. The air around us loses color and I feel our limbs beginning to unravel. We’re separating, breaking the circle. I hear Thomas, breathing hard. I hear Anna too. I can’t believe what I’ve just seen. It feels unreal. I don’t understand how Malvina could murder Anna.

“How could she?” Carmel asks softly, and we all look at each other. “It was terrible. I never want to see anything like that ever again.” She shakes her head. “How could she? She was her daughter.”

I look at Anna, still clothed in blood and veins. Her dark-tinged tears have dried on her face; she’s too exhausted to cry anymore.

“Did she know what would happen?” I ask Thomas. “Did she know what she was turning her into?”

“I don’t think so. Or at least, not exactly. When you invoke a demon, you don’t get to decide the specifics. You just make the request, and it does the rest.”

“I don’t care if she knew exactly,” Carmel growls. “It was disgusting. It was horrible.”

There are beads of sweat on all of our foreheads. Will hasn’t said a thing. We all look like we’ve gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight.

“What are we going to do?” Thomas asks, and it doesn’t look like he’s able to do much of anything at the moment. I think he’ll sleep for a week.

I turn away and stand up. I need to clear my head.

“Cas! Watch out!”

Carmel shouts at me but she isn’t fast enough. I’m shoved from behind and as I am, I feel a very familiar weight being pulled out of my back pocket. When I turn around, I see Will standing over Anna. He’s holding my athame.

“Will,” Thomas starts, but Will unsheathes my knife and swings it in a wide arc, making Thomas scuttle back on his haunches to get out of the way.

“This is how you do it, isn’t it?” Will asks in a wild voice. He looks at the blade and blinks rapidly. “She’s weak; we can do it now,” he says, almost to himself.

“Will, don’t,” Carmel says.

“Why not? This is what we came here to do!”

Carmel glances at me helplessly. It is what we came here to do. But after what we all saw, and seeing her lying there, I know that I can’t.

“Give me my knife,” I say calmly.

“She killed Mike,” Will says. “She killed Mike.”

I look down at Anna. Her black eyes are wide and staring downward, though I don’t know whether or not they’re seeing anything. She’s sunk onto her hip, too weak to hold herself up. Her arms, which I know from personal experience could crush cinderblocks, are shaking just trying to keep her torso off the floorboards. We’ve managed to reduce this monster to a quivering husk, and if ever there was a safe time to kill her, it’s now.

And Will’s right. She did kill Mike. She’s killed dozens. And she’ll do it again.

“You killed Mike,” Will hisses and starts to cry. “You killed my best friend.” And then he moves, stabbing downward. I react without thinking.

I lurch forward and catch him under the arm, stopping the blow from going straight through her back; instead it glances off of her ribs. Anna gives a small cry and tries to crawl away. Carmel’s and Thomas’s voices are in my ears, yelling at both of us to stop it, but we keep on struggling. With bared teeth, Will tries to stab her again, hacking through the air. I barely get an elbow up to knock his chin back. He stumbles away a few steps and when he charges I hit him in the face, not too hard but hard enough to make him think.

He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn’t try to come forward again. Looking from me to Anna, he knows I won’t let him past.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “This is supposed to be your job, right? And now we’ve got her and you’re not going to do anything?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say honestly. “But I’m not going to let you hurt her. You couldn’t kill her, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not just the knife. It’s me. It’s my blood tie.”

Will scoffs. “She’s bleeding well enough.”

“I didn’t say the knife wasn’t special. But the death blow is mine. Whatever it is that lets that happen, you don’t have it.”

“You’re lying,” he says, and maybe I am. I’ve never seen anyone else use my knife before. No one except my dad. Maybe all that stuff about being chosen and part of a sacred line of ghost hunters was all bullshit. But Will believes it. He starts backing away, out of the house.

“Give me my knife,” I say again, watching it as it’s leaving me, the metal glinting in the odd light.

“I’m going to kill her,” Will promises, then turns and runs, taking my athame with him. Something inside me whimpers, something childlike and basic. It’s like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when that old lady throws the dog in her bike basket and rides off. My feet are telling me to run after him, tackle him and beat him about the head, take my knife back and never let it out of my sight. But Carmel’s talking to me.

“Are you sure he can’t kill her?” she asks.

I look back. She’s actually kneeling on the floor beside Anna; she’s actually had the balls to touch her, to hold her by the shoulders and look at the wound Will made. It’s seeping black blood to strange effect: the black liquid is mixing with the moving blood of her dress, swirling like ink dropped into red water.

“She’s so weak,” Carmel whispers. “I think she’s really hurt.”

“Shouldn’t she be?” Thomas asks. “I mean, I don’t want to side with Will I’m-Bucking-for-an-Emmy-Nod Rosenberg, but isn’t that why we’re here? Isn’t she still dangerous?”

The answers are yes, yes, and yes. I know that, but I can’t seem to think straight. The girl at my feet is defeated and my knife is gone and scenes from How to Murder Your Daughter are still playing in my head. This is where it happened—this is the place where her life ended, where she became a monster, where her mother dragged a knife across her throat and cursed her and her dress and—

I walk farther into the sitting room, staring at the floorboards. Then I start stomping. Slamming my foot against the boards and jumping up and down, looking for a loose spot. It’s not doing any good. I’m stupid. I’m not strong enough. And I don’t even know what I’m doing.

“It’s not that one,” Thomas says. He’s staring at the floor. He points at the board to my left.

“It’s that one,” he says. “And you’ll need something.” He gets up and runs out the door. I didn’t think he had any strength left at all. The kid is surprising. And damned useful, because about forty seconds later he’s back, holding a crowbar and a tire iron.

Together we hack at the floor, at first not making a dent and then slowly cracking the wood. I use the crowbar to pry up the loosest end and fall to my knees. The hole we’ve made is dark and deep. I don’t know how it’s there. I should be looking at rafters and basement, but there’s only blackness. Only a moment’s hesitation, and my hand is searching in the hole, feeling depths of cold. I think I was wrong, that I was stupid again, and then my fingers brush against it.

The fabric feels stiff and cool to the touch. Maybe a little damp. I pull it out of the floor where it was stuffed and sealed sixty years ago.

“The dress,” Carmel breathes. “What—?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. I walk toward Anna. I have no idea what effect the dress will have on her, if anything. Will it make her stronger? Will it heal her? If I burned it, would she evaporate into thin air? Thomas would probably have a better idea. Together he and Morfran could probably come up with the right answer, and if they didn’t, then Gideon could. But I don’t have that kind of time. I kneel and hold the stained fabric before her eyes.

For a second she doesn’t do anything. Then she struggles to her feet. I move the bloody dress up with her, keeping it at eye level. The black has receded: Anna’s clear, curious eyes are there inside of the monstrous face, and for some reason that’s more disconcerting than anything. My hand is shaking. She’s standing before me, not hovering, just looking at the dress, crumpled and red and dingy white in some places.

Still not sure what I’m doing, or what I’m trying to do, I gather it up by the hem and slide it over her dark and writhing head. Something happens immediately but I don’t know what. A tension enters the air, a cold. It’s hard to explain, like there’s a breeze but nothing is moving. I pull the old dress down over her bleeding one and step back. Anna closes her eyes and breathes deep. Streaks of black wax still cling to the fabric where the candles dripped during the curse.

“What’s happening?” Carmel whispers.

“I don’t know,” Thomas answers for me.

As we watch, the dresses begin to fight each other, dripping blood and black and trying to merge together. Anna’s eyes are closed. Her hands are in fists. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, it’s happening fast. Every time I blink I open my eyes to a new dress: now white, now red, now blackened and mixed with blood. It’s oil and paint and things sinking into sand. And then Anna throws her head back, and the cursed dress crumbles off, cracking into dust to tumble to her feet.

The dark goddess stands looking at me. Lengths of black tendrils die in the breeze. Veins recede back into her arms and neck. Her dress is white and unstained. The wound from my knife is gone.

She puts her hand to her cheek in disbelief and looks shyly from Carmel to me, and over at Thomas, who backs up a step. Then she slowly turns and walks toward her open door. Just before she walks through it, she looks over her shoulder at me and smiles.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Is this what I wanted? I set her free. I’ve just let the ghost I was sent to kill out of prison. She’s walking softly across her porch, touching her toes to the steps, staring out into the dark. She’s like any wild animal let out of a cage: cautious and hopeful. Her fingertips trace the wood of the crooked railing like it’s the most wonderful thing she’s ever felt. And part of me is glad. Part of me knows that she never deserved anything that happened, and I want to give her more than this broken porch. I want to give her an entire life—her whole life back, starting tonight.

The other part of me knows there are bodies in her basement, souls that she stole, and none of this was their fault either. I can’t give Anna her life back because her life is already gone. Maybe I’ve made a huge mistake.

“We should get out of here, I think,” Thomas says quietly.

I look at Carmel and she nods, so I walk toward the door, trying to keep myself between them and Anna, even though without my knife I don’t know how much use I’ll be. When she hears us come through the door, she turns and regards me with an arched eyebrow.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I won’t hurt them now.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

Her eyes shift to Carmel. She nods. “I’m sure.” Behind me, Carmel and Thomas exhale and awkwardly move out from my shadow.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She thinks for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I feel … sane. Is that possible?”

“Probably not completely,” Thomas blurts, and I elbow him in the ribs. But Anna laughs.

“You saved him, the first time,” she says, looking at Thomas carefully. “I remember you. You pulled him out.”

“I don’t think you would have killed him anyways,” Thomas replies, but some color comes up to his cheeks. He likes the idea of playing the hero. He likes that the idea is being pointed out in front of Carmel.

“Why didn’t you?” Carmel asks. “Why weren’t you going to kill Cas? What made you choose Mike instead?”

“Mike,” Anna says softly. “I don’t know. Maybe it was because they were wicked. I knew they’d tricked him. I knew they were cruel. Maybe I felt … sorry for him.”

I snort. “Sorry for me? I could’ve handled those guys.”

“They smashed the back of your head in with a board from my house.” Anna is giving me a look with her eyebrow again.

“You keep saying ‘maybe,’” Thomas breaks in. “You don’t know for sure?”

“I don’t,” Anna replies. “Not for sure. But I’m glad,” she adds, and smiles. She’d like to say more, but looks away, embarrassed or confused, I can’t tell which.

“We should go,” I say. “That spell took a lot out of us. We could all use some sleep.”

“But you’ll come back?” Anna asks, like she thinks she’ll never see me again.

I nod. I’ll come back. To do what, I don’t know. I know that I can’t let Will keep my knife, and I’m not sure if she’s safe as long as he still has it. But that’s dumb, because who says she’s safe if I have it either? I need some sleep. I need to recoup, and regroup, and rethink everything.

“If I’m not in the house,” Anna says, “call for me. I won’t be far.”

The idea of her running around Thunder Bay doesn’t thrill me. I don’t know what she’s capable of, and my suspicious side whispers that I have just been duped. But there’s nothing I can do about it right now.

“Was this a victory?” Thomas asks as we walk down the driveway.

“I don’t know,” I reply, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like one. My athame is gone. Anna is free. And the only thing that seems certain in my head and heart is that this isn’t over. Already there’s an emptiness, not just in my back pocket or on my shoulder, but everywhere around me. I feel weaker, like I’m leaking from a thousand wounds. That a-hole took my knife.

“I didn’t know you could speak Finnish, Thomas,” Carmel says from beside him.

He grins lopsidedly. “I can’t. That was one hell of a spell you got for us, Cas. I’d sure like to meet your supplier.”

“I’ll introduce you sometime,” I hear myself say. But not right now. Gideon is the last person I want to talk to, when I’ve just lost the knife. My eardrums would burst from all the yelling. The athame. My father’s legacy. I have to get it back, and soon.

*   *   *

“The athame is gone. You lost it. Where is it?”

He’s got me by the throat, strangling the answers, slamming me back into my pillow.

“Stupid, stupid, STUPID!”

I wake up swinging, popped upright in my bed like a rock ’em sock ’em robot. The room is empty. Of course it is; don’t be stupid. Using the same word on myself brings me back into the dream. I’m only half-awake. The memory of his hands on my throat is lingering. I still can’t speak. There’s too much tightness, there and in my chest. I take a deep breath, and when I exhale it comes out ragged, close to a sob. My body feels full of empty spaces where the weight of the knife should be. My heart is pounding.

Was it my father? The idea brings me back ten years, and the guilt of a kid balloons sharply in my heart. But no. It couldn’t have been. The thing in my dream had a Creole or Cajun accent, and my father grew up in accent-neutral Chicago, Illinois. It was just another dream, like the rest, and at least I know where this one came from. It doesn’t take a Freudian interpreter to realize I feel bad about losing the athame.

Tybalt jumps up onto my lap. In the scant moonlight through my window I can just make out the green oval of his irises. He puts a paw up on my chest.

“Yeah,” I say. The sound of my voice in the dark is sharp and too loud. But it sends the dream farther away. It was so vivid. I can still remember the acrid, bitter smell of something like smoke.

“Meow,” Tybalt says.

“No more sleep for Theseus Cassio,” I agree, scooping him up and heading downstairs.

When I get there, I put some coffee on and park my butt at the kitchen table. My mom has left out the jar of salt for the athame, along with clean cloths and oils to rub it and rinse it and make it new. It’s out there somewhere. I can feel it. I can feel it in the hands of someone who never should have touched it. I’m starting to think murderous thoughts about Will Rosenberg.

My mom comes down about three hours later. I’m still sitting at the table and staring at the jar as the light grows stronger in the kitchen. Once or twice my head thumped down against the wood and then bounced back up again, but I’m half a pot of coffee in now, and I feel fine. Mom is wrapped in her blue bathrobe and her hair looks comfortingly fuzzy. The sight calms me immediately, even as she glances at the empty jar of salt and puts the cover back on. What is it about the sight of your mother that makes everything fireside-warm and full of dancing Muppets?

“You stole my cat,” she says, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Tybalt must sense my unrest; he’s been circling around my feet off and on, something he usually only does to my mom.

“Here, have him back,” I say as she comes to the table. I hoist him up. He doesn’t stop hissing until she brings him down to her lap.

“No luck last night?” she asks, and nods at the empty jar.

“Not exactly,” I say. “There was some luck. Luck of both kinds.”

She sits with me and listens while I spill my guts. I tell her everything we saw, everything we learned about Anna, how I broke the curse and freed her. I end with my worst embarrassment: that I lost Dad’s athame. I can hardly look at her when I tell her that last part. She’s trying to control her expression. I don’t know if that means she’s upset that it’s gone or if it means she knows what the loss of it must’ve done to me.

“I don’t think you made a mistake, Cas,” she says gently.

“But the knife.”

“We’ll get the knife back. I’ll call that boy’s mother, if I have to.”

I groan. She just crossed the mom line from cool and comforting to Queen of Lame.

“But what you did,” she goes on. “With Anna. I don’t think it was a mistake.”

“It was my job to kill her.”

“Was it? Or was it your job to stop her?” She leans back from the table, cradling her coffee mug between her hands. “What you do—what your dad did—it was never about vengeance. Never about revenge, or tipping the scales back to even. That’s not your call.”

I rub my hand across my face. My eyes are too tired to see straight. My brain is too tired to think straight.

“But you did stop her, didn’t you, Cas?”

“Yes,” I say, but I don’t know. It happened so fast. Did I really get rid of Anna’s dark half, or did I just allow her to hide it? I shut my eyes. “I don’t know. I think so.”

My mom sighs. “Stop drinking this coffee.” She pushes my cup away. “Go back to bed. And then go to Anna and find out what she’s become.”

*   *   *

I’ve seen a lot of seasons change. When you’re not distracted by school and friends and what movie’s coming out next week, you’ve got time to look at the trees.

Thunder Bay’s autumn is prettier than most. There’s lots of color. Lots of rustle. But it’s also more volatile. Frigid and wet one day, with a side of gray clouds, and then days like today, where the sun looks as warm as July and the breeze is so light that the leaves just seem to glisten as they move in it.

I’ve got my mom’s car. I drove it up to Anna’s place after dropping Mom to do some shopping downtown. She said she’d get a lift home from a friend. I was glad to hear that she’d made some friends. She does it easily, being so open and easygoing. Not like me. I don’t think it was quite like my dad either, but I find that I can’t really remember, and that bothers me, so I don’t push my brain too hard. I’d rather believe that the memories are there, just under the surface, whether they really are or not.

As I walk up to the house, I think I see a shadow move on the west side. I blink it off as a trick of my too-tired eyes … until the shadow turns white and shows her pale skin.

“I haven’t wandered far,” Anna says as I walk up.

“You hid from me.”

“I wasn’t sure right away who you were. I have to be cautious. I don’t want to be seen by everyone. Just because I can leave my house now doesn’t mean I’m not still dead.” She shrugs. She’s so frank. She should be damaged by all of this, damaged beyond sanity. “I’m glad you came back.”

“I need to know,” I say. “If you’re still dangerous.”

“We should go inside,” she says, and I agree. It’s strange to see her outdoors, in the sunlight, looking for all the world like a girl out picking flowers on a bright afternoon. Except that anyone looking closely would realize she should be freezing out here wearing just that white dress.

She leads me into the house and closes the door behind like any good hostess. Something about the house has changed too. The gray light is gone. Plain old white sunshine streams through the windows, albeit with a hampering of dirt on the glass.

“What is it that you really want to know, Cas?” Anna asks. “Do you want to know if I’m going to kill more people? Or do you want to know if I can still do this?” She holds her hand up before her face, and dark veins snake up to the fingers. Her eyes go black and a dress of blood erupts through the white, more violently than before, splashing droplets everywhere.

I jump back. “Jesus, Anna!”

She hovers in the air, does a little twirl like something’s playing her favorite tune.

“It’s not pretty, is it?” She crinkles her nose. “There aren’t mirrors left here, but I could see myself in the window glass when the moonlight was bright enough.”

“You’re still like this,” I say, horrified. “Nothing’s changed.”

When I say that nothing’s changed, her eyes narrow, but then she exhales and tries to smile at me. It doesn’t quite work, what with her looking like goth-chick Pinhead.

“Cassio. Don’t you see? Everything’s changed!” She lets herself down to the ground, but the black eyes and writhing hair stay. “I won’t kill anyone. I never wanted to. But whatever this is, it’s what I am. I thought that it was the curse, and maybe it was, but—” She shakes her head. “I had to try to do this after you left. I had to know.” She looks me right in the eye. The inky dark seeps away, revealing the other Anna underneath. “The fight is over. I won. You made me win. I’m not two halves anymore. I know you must think it’s monstrous. But I feel—strong. I feel safe. Maybe I’m not making sense.”

It’s actually fairly easy to get. For someone who was murdered the way she was murdered, feeling safe is probably top priority.

“I get it,” I say softly. “The strength is what you hold on to. Kind of like me. When I walk through a haunted place with my athame in my hand, I feel strong. Untouchable. It’s heady. I don’t know if most people ever feel it.” I shuffle my feet. “And then I met you, and all that went down the shithole.”

She laughs.

“I come in all big and bad, and you use me for a game of handball.” I grin. “Makes a guy feel damn manly.”

She grins back. “It made me feel pretty manly.” Her smile falters. “You didn’t bring it with you today. Your knife. I can always feel it when it’s near.”

“No. Will took it. But I’ll get it back. It was my father’s; I’m not letting it go.” But then I wonder. “How do you feel it? What do you feel about it?”

“When I first saw you, I didn’t know what it was. It was something in my ears, something in my stomach, just a humming below the music. It’s powerful. And even though I knew it was meant to kill me, it drew me somehow. Then when your friend cut me—”

“He’s not my friend,” I say through my teeth. “Not really.”

“I could feel myself draining into it. Starting to go wherever it is that it sends us. But it was wrong. It has a will of its own. It wanted to be in your hand.”

“So it wouldn’t have killed you,” I say, relieved. I don’t want Will to be able to use my knife. I don’t care how childish that sounds. It’s my knife.

Anna turns away, thinking. “No, it would have killed me,” she says seriously. “Because it isn’t only tied to you. It’s tied to something else. Something dark. When I was bleeding, I could smell something. It reminded me a little of Elias’s pipe.”

I don’t know where the athame’s power comes from, and Gideon has never told me, if he knows. But if that power comes from something dark, then so be it. I use it for something good. As for the smell of Elias’s pipe …

“That was probably just something you were frightened of after watching yourself be murdered,” I say gently. “You know, like dreaming of zombies right after you watch Land of the Dead.”

“Land of the Dead? Is that what you dream about?” she asks. “Boy who kills ghosts for a living?”

“No. I dream about penguins doing bridge construction. Don’t ask why.”

She smiles and tucks her hair behind her ear. When she does I feel a pull somewhere deep in my chest. What am I doing? Why did I come here? I can barely remember.

Somewhere in the house, a door slams. Anna jumps. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her jump before. Her hair lifts up and starts to writhe. She’s like a cat arching its back and puffing its tail.

“What was that?” I ask.

She shakes her head. I can’t tell whether she’s embarrassed or frightened. It looks like both.

“Do you remember what I showed you in the basement?” she asks.

“The tower of dead bodies? No, that slipped my mind. Are you kidding me?”

She laughs nervously, a fake little twinkle.

“They’re still here,” she whispers.

My stomach takes this opportunity to wring itself out, and my feet shift underneath me without permission. The image of all those corpses is fresh in my mind. I can actually smell the green water and rot. The idea that they are now roaming through the house with wills of their own—which is what she’s implying—doesn’t make me happy.

“I guess they’re haunting me now,” she says softly. “That’s why I went outside. They don’t frighten me,” she’s quick to add. “But I can’t stand to see them.” She pauses and crosses her arms over her stomach, sort of hugging herself. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Really? Because I don’t.

“I should lock myself in here with them. It’s my fault, after all.” Her voice isn’t sulky. She’s not asking me to disagree. Her eyes, focused on the floorboards, are earnest. “I wish I could tell them that I’d like to take it back.”

“Would it matter?” I ask quietly. “Would it matter to you if Malvina said she was sorry?”

Anna shakes her head. “Of course not. I’m being stupid.” She glances to the right, just for an instant, but I know she was looking at the broken board where we took her dress out of the floor last night. She seems almost scared of it. Maybe I should get Thomas over here to seal it off or something.

My hand twitches. I gather all my guts and let my hand stray to her shoulder. “You’re not being stupid. We’ll figure something out, Anna. We’ll exorcise them. Morfran will know how to get them to move on.” Everyone deserves some comfort, don’t they? She’s out now; what’s done is done, and she has to find some kind of peace. But even now, dark and distracting memories of what she’s done are racing behind her eyes. How is she supposed to let that go?

Telling her not to torture herself would make it worse. I can’t give her absolution. But I want to make her forget, even just for a while. She was innocent once, and it kills me that she can never be innocent again.