Текст книги "Anna Dressed in Blood"

Автор книги: Kendare Blake

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CHAPTER TEN

I’m staring up at Anna’s house again. The logical part of my brain tells me that it’s just a house. That it’s what’s inside that makes it horrifying, that makes it dangerous, that it can’t possibly be tilting toward me like it’s hunting me through the overgrowth of weeds. It can’t possibly be trying to jerk free of its foundation and swallow me whole. But that’s what it looks like it’s doing.

Behind me, there is a small hiss. I turn around. Tybalt is standing with his forepaws on the driver’s side door of my mom’s car, looking out through the window.

“That’s no lie, cat,” I say. I don’t know why my mom had me bring him along. He’s not going to be able to help. When it comes to usefulness he’s more like a smoke detector than a hunting dog. But when I got home after school, I told my mom where I was going and what had happened—leaving out the part where I almost got killed and one of my classmates was split in two—and she must have guessed there was more to the story, because I’m wearing a fresh coating of rosemary oil in a triangle on my forehead, and she made me take the cat. Sometimes I don’t think she has any idea of what it is that I do out here.

She didn’t say much. It’s always there, on the tip of her tongue, to tell me to stop. To tell me it’s dangerous, and that people get killed. But more would be killed if I didn’t do my job. It’s the job that my father started. It’s what I was born for, my legacy from him, and that’s the real reason she keeps quiet. She believed in him. She knew the score, right up until the day he was murdered—murdered by what he thought was just another in a long line of ghosts.

I pull my knife out of my backpack and slide it free. My father left our house one afternoon carrying this knife, just like he had since before I was born. And he never came back. Something got the best of him. The police came a day later, after my mother reported him missing. They said that my father was dead. I skulked in the shadows while they questioned my mother and eventually the detective whispered his secrets: that my father’s body had been covered in bites; that chunks of him had been missing.

For months my father’s gruesome death plagued my thoughts. I imagined it in every possible way. I dreamed of it. I drew it on paper with black pen and red crayon, stick skeleton figures and waxy blood. My mother tried to heal me; singing constantly and leaving the lights on, trying to keep me out of the dark. But the visions and nightmares didn’t stop until the day I picked up the knife.

They never caught my father’s killer, of course. Because my father’s killer was already dead. So I know what it is that I’m meant to do. Looking up at Anna’s house now, I’m not afraid, because Anna Korlov is not my end. Someday, I’m going back to the place where my father died, and I’m going to drag his knife across the mouth of the thing that ate him.

I take two deep breaths. My knife stays out; there’s no need for pretense. I know that she’s in there, and she knows that I’m coming. I can feel her watching. The cat looks at me with reflector-eyes from inside the car, and I can feel those eyes on me too as I move up the weeded driveway toward the front door.

I don’t think there’s ever been a quieter night. No wind, no bugs, no nothing. The sound of the gravel under my shoes is painfully loud. It’s pointless to try to be stealthy. It’s like being the first one awake in the morning, when every move you make is as loud as a foghorn, no matter how quiet you try to be. I want to stomp up these front porch steps. I want to break one off, pull it up and use it to batter down the door. But that would be rude, and besides, I don’t need to. The door is already open.

Eerie gray light is leaking out without casting a beam. It just sort of melts with the dark air, like an illuminating fog. My ears strain to hear anything; in the distance I think I hear the low rumble of a train, and there’s a leathery squeak as I tighten my grip on my athame. I walk through the door and close it behind. I don’t want to give any ghost the opportunity for a cheap B-movie scare by slamming it shut.

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 and see what happens.

“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?”

“Yes?”

“In the meantime, get out to the library and try to find out what you can about the way this girl died. Knowledge is power, you know.”

I smile. “Legwork. Right.” I hang up the phone. He thinks I’m a blunt instrument, nothing but hands and blade and agility, but the truth is I’ve been doing legwork, doing research, since before I even started using the athame.

After Dad was murdered, I had questions. Trouble was, nobody seemed to have any answers. Or, as I suspected, nobody wanted to give me any answers. So I went looking on my own. Gideon and my mom packed us up and moved us out of the Baton Rouge house we were staying in pretty quickly, but not before I managed to make a trip back to the dilapidated plantation where my father met his end.

It was an ugly fucking house. Even angry as I was, I didn’t want to go in. If it is possible for an inanimate object to glare, to growl, then that’s exactly what this house did. In my seven-year-old mind I saw it pull aside the vines. I saw it wipe away the moss and bare its teeth. Imagination is a wonderful thing, right?

My mom and Gideon had cleared the place days before, throwing runes and lighting candles, making sure my dad was at rest, making sure the ghosts were gone. Still, when I walked up that porch I started crying. My heart told me that my dad was there, that he hid from them to wait for me, and that any minute he would open the door, smiling this great, dead smile. His eyes would be gone, and there would be huge, crescent-shaped wounds on his sides and arms. This sounds stupid, but I think I started crying harder when I opened the door myself and he wasn’t there.

I breathe deep and smell tea and lavender. It brings me back into my body. Remembering that day, exploring that house, my heart is pounding in my ears. On the other side of the front door I found signs of a struggle and turned my face away. I wanted answers but I didn’t want to imagine my dad beat to hell and back. I didn’t want to think of him being scared. I walked past the cracked banister and headed instinctively for the fireplace. The rooms smelled like old wood, like rot. There was also the fresher scent of blood. I don’t know how I knew what the smell of blood was, any more than I knew why I walked straight to the fireplace.

There was nothing in the fireplace but decades-old charcoal and ash. And then I saw it. Just a corner of it, black like the charcoal but somehow different. Smoother. It was conspicuous and ominous. I reached out and pulled it from the ash: a thin black cross, about four inches in height. There was a black snake curled around it, carefully woven from what I knew instantly was human hair.

The certainty that I felt when I grasped that cross was the same certainty that coursed through me when I picked up my father’s knife seven years later. That was the moment that I knew for sure. That’s when I knew that whatever coursed through my father’s blood—whatever magical thing that allowed him to slice through dead flesh and send it out of our world—it flowed in my veins too.

When I showed the cross to Gideon and my mother, and told them what I’d done, they were frantic. I expected them to soothe me, to rock me like a baby and ask me if I was all right. Instead, Gideon grasped my shoulders.

“Don’t you ever, ever go back there!” he shouted, and shook me so hard my teeth clacked together. He took the black cross from me and I never saw it again. My mother just stood far away and cried. I’d been scared; Gideon had never done anything like that to me before. He’d always been grandfatherly, sneaking me candy and winking, that sort of thing. Still, Dad had just been murdered, and I was angry. I asked Gideon what the cross was.

He stared down at me coldly, and then drew his hand back and cracked me across the face so hard that I hit the floor. I heard my mom sort of whimper, but she didn’t intervene. Then they both walked out of the room and left me there. When they called me in for dinner, they were smiling and casual, like nothing had even happened.

It was enough to scare me into silence. I never brought it up again. But that doesn’t mean I forgot, and for the last ten years I’ve been reading, and learning, wherever I could. The black cross was a voodoo talisman. I haven’t figured out the significance of it, or why it was adorned with a snake made of human hair. According to lore, the sacred snake feeds on its victims by eating them whole. My father was taken in chunks.

The problem with this research is I can’t ask the most reliable sources I have. I’m forced to sneak around and talk in code, to keep Mom and Gideon in the dark. Also making things difficult is that voodoo is some disorganized shit. Everyone seems to practice it differently and analysis is damned near impossible.

I wonder about asking Gideon again, after this business with Anna is over. I’m older now, and proven. It wouldn’t be the same this time. And even as I think that, I sink farther into my tea bath. Because I still remember the feel of his hand across my cheek, and the blank fury in his eyes, and it still makes me feel like I’m seven.

*   *   *

After I get dressed, I call Thomas and ask him to pick me up and take me to the shop. He’s curious, but I manage to hold him at bay. These are things that I need to say to Morfran too, and I don’t want to have to say them twice.

I’m bracing myself for a lecture from my mother about missing school and some grilling about why I needed to call Gideon, which she no doubt overheard, but as I walk down the stairs I can hear voices. Two female voices. One is my mother’s. The other is Carmel’s. I tramp down the staircase and they come into view, thick as thieves. They’re sitting in the living room in adjacent chairs, leaning toward each other and chatting away with a tray of cookies between them. Once both my feet are on the ground level, they stop talking and smile at me.

“Hey, Cas,” Carmel says.

“Hey, Carmel. What are you doing here?”

She reaches around and pulls something out of her schoolbag. “I brought your assignment from bio. It’s a partner’s assignment. I thought we could do it together.”

“That was nice of her, wasn’t it, Cas?” my mother says. “You don’t want to fall behind on your third day.”

“We could get started on it now,” Carmel suggests, holding out the paper.

I walk up and take it from her, glance over it. I don’t know why it’s a partner’s assignment. It’s nothing more than finding a bunch of answers from the textbook. But she’s right. I shouldn’t fall behind. No matter what other important, lifesaving stuff I’ve got going on.

“This was really cool of you,” I say, and I mean it, even though there is some other motive at work here. Carmel doesn’t give a crap about biology. I’d be surprised if she went to class herself. Carmel got the assignment because she wanted an excuse to talk to me. She wants answers.

I glance at my mom, and she’s giving me this creepy once-over. She’s trying to see how the bruises are healing. She’ll be relieved that I called Gideon. When I came home last night I looked beaten half to death. For a second I thought she was going to lock me in my room and dunk me in rosemary oil. But my mom trusts me. She understands what I need to do. And I’m grateful to her for both of those things.

I roll up the bio assignment and tap it in my hand.

“Maybe we can work at the library,” I say to Carmel, and she shoulders her bag and smiles.

“Take one more cookie for the road, dear,” Mom says. We both take one, Carmel a bit hesitantly, and head for the door.

“You don’t have to eat it,” I say to Carmel once we’re on the porch. “Mom’s anise cookies are definitely an acquired taste.”

Carmel laughs. “I had one in there and almost couldn’t do it. They’re like dusty black jellybeans.”

I smile. “Don’t tell my mom that. She invented the recipe herself. She’s totally proud of them. They’re supposed to bring you luck or something.”

“Maybe I should eat it then.” She looks down at it for a long minute, then lifts her eyes and stares intently at my cheek. I know there’s a long streak of black bruise across the bone. “You went back to that house without us.”