Girl of Nightmares (7 page)

When he stops moving, the air grows immediately cold. I take a deep breath and open my eyes; I don’t remember closing them. The room is silent. When I look at the furnace, it’s dormant and empty, and if I touched it, it would be cool, like Anna was never there at all.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

They’ve given me something for the pain. A shot of something or other, and pills to take home for later. It would be nice if it would knock me right on my ass, if it made me sleep through the next week. But I think it’s going to be just enough to keep the throbbing down.

My mom is talking to the doctor while the nurse finishes applying ointment to my freshly and insanely painfully cleaned burns. I didn’t want to come to the hospital. I tried to convince my mom that a little calendula and a lavender potion would be enough, but she insisted. And now, truthfully, I’m pretty happy about having the shot. It was fun too, listening to her try to come up with the best explanation. Was it a kitchen accident? Maybe a campfire accident. She decided on the campfire, turning me into a klutz and saying I fell into the embers and basically rolled around in a panic. They’ll buy it. They always do.

There are second-degree burns on my shin and shoulders. The one on my hand, from the final blow of the athame, is pretty minor, first degree, nothing more serious than a bad sunburn. Still, a bad sunburn on the palm of your hand sucks a whole lot. I expect to be carrying around unopened cans of ice-cold soda for the next few days.

My mom comes back in with the doctor so they can start gauzing me up. She wavers between tears and consternation. I reach out and take her hand. She’ll never get used to this. It eats her up, worse than it did when it was my dad. But in none of her lectures, none of her rants about taking precautions and being more careful, has she ever asked me to stop. I thought she’d demand it after what happened with the Obeahman last fall. But she understands. It isn’t fair that she has to, but it’s better that she does.

*   *   *

Thomas and Carmel show up the next day, right after school, practically peeling into our driveway in their separate cars. They burst in without knocking and find me semi-comfortably drugged on the couch, watching TV and eating microwave popcorn, clutching an ice pack in my right hand.

“See? I told you he was alive,” says Thomas. Carmel looks nonplussed.

“You shut your phone off,” she says.

“I was sick at home. Didn’t feel like talking to anybody. And I figured you were at school, where policy says you are not to be frivolously texting and making phone calls.”

Carmel sighs and drops her schoolbag onto the floor before plopping down in the wingback chair. Thomas perches on the arm of the couch and reaches for the popcorn.

“You weren’t ‘sick at home,’ Cas. I called your mom. She told us everything.”

“I was too ‘sick at home.’ Just like I’m going to be tomorrow. And the next day. And probably the day after that.” I shake more cheddar into the bowl and offer it to Thomas. My attitude is wearing on Carmel’s nerves. To be honest, it’s wearing on mine. But the pills dull the pain, and they dull my mind enough so that I don’t have to be thinking about what happened at the Dutch Ironworks. I don’t have to wonder if what I saw was real.

Carmel would like to lecture me. I can see the admonishment dancing around her lips. But she’s tired. And she’s worried. So instead she reaches for the popcorn and says she’ll pick up my homework for the next few days.

“Thanks,” I say. “I might be out part of next week too.”

“But that’s the last week of classes,” says Thomas.

“Exactly. What are they going to do? Flunk me? It’d be too big of a pain. They just want to make it to summer like we do.”

They exchange this look, like they’ve decided I’m hopeless, and Carmel stands up.

“Are you going to tell us what happened? Why didn’t you wait, like we decided to?”

There isn’t an answer for that. It was an impulse. More than an impulse, but to them it must seem like a selfish, stupid move. Like I couldn’t be patient. Whatever it was, it’s done. When I confronted that ghost, it was just like before, in the hayloft. Anna came through, and I saw her suffer. I watched her burn.

“I’ll tell you everything,” I tell them. “But later. When I’m on fewer painkillers.” I smile and rattle the orange bottle. “Want to stick around and watch a movie?”

Thomas shrugs and plops down, digging his hand into the cheddar corn without a second thought. It takes Carmel an extra minute and a couple of sighs, but she eventually drops her book bag and sits in the rocking chair.

*   *   *

For all their horror at the prospect of missing one of the last days of school, curiosity gets the better of them and they show up the next day around eleven thirty, just before lunch period. I thought I was ready for it but it still takes me a few times to get it right, to tell them everything. I’d already said it once, to my mom, before she left to go shopping and drop spells around town. When I’d finished, she looked like she wanted an apology. An
I’m sorry, Mom, for almost getting myself killed. Again.
But I couldn’t quite manage it. It didn’t seem like the important thing. So she just told me I should have waited for Gideon, and left without looking me in the eye. Now Carmel’s got the same look.

I manage to croak out, “I’m sorry that I didn’t wait for you guys. I didn’t know I was going to do it. I didn’t plan it.”

“It took you four hours to drive there. Were you in a trance the whole time?”

“Can we just focus?” Thomas interjects. He asks it carefully, with a disarming smile. “What’s done is done. Cas is alive. A little crispier than before, but he’s breathing.”

Breathing and craving a Percocet. The pain in my shoulders is like a living thing, all throbbing and heat.

“Thomas is right,” I say. “We need to figure out what to do now. We need to figure out how to help her.”

“How to help her?” Carmel repeats. “We need to figure out what’s going on first. For all we know, the whole thing might be in your head. Or an illusion.”

“You think I’m making it up? Concocting some kind of fantasy? If that were true, why would it be like this? Why would I imagine her catatonic, throwing herself into a furnace? If I’m making this up, then I need several hours of intense therapy.”

“I’m not suggesting you’re doing it on purpose,” Carmel says apologetically. “I just wonder if it’s real. And remember what Morfran said.”

Thomas and I look at each other. All we remember is Morfran spewing a bunch of crazy. I sigh.

“So what do you want from me? You want me to sit here and wait, when what I saw might be real? What if she’s really in trouble?” The image of her hand, flung up against the furnace door, floats behind my eyes. “I don’t know if I can do that. Not after yesterday.”

Carmel’s eyes are wide. I wish we hadn’t gone to Morfran, because the things he said only scared her worse. All of his posturing, his forces spinning around the athame, something wicked this way comes B.S. My shoulders tighten and I wince.

“Okay,” Thomas says. He nods to Carmel and takes her hand. “I mean, I think we’re fooling ourselves thinking we have a choice anyway. Whatever’s happening is happening, and I don’t think it’s going to stop. Unless we really do destroy the athame.”

They leave a little while later, and I spend the afternoon on painkillers, trying not to think about Anna and what might be happening to her. I keep checking my phone, waiting for Gideon to call back, but he doesn’t. And the hours tick by.

When my mom gets home, close to evening, she makes me a mug of decaf tea and spikes it with lavender to heal the burns from the inside. It’s not a potion. There are no enchantments. Witchcraft and pharmaceuticals don’t mix. But even without the mojo the tea is soothing. Plus, I’ve taken another Percocet, because my shoulders feel like they’re ready to rip clean off. It’s kicked in nicely, and I want to crawl under the covers and pass out until Saturday.

When I walk into my bedroom, I half expect Tybalt to be curled up on my navy blanket. Why not? If my dead girlfriend can cross over, then my murdered cat probably can too. But there isn’t anything there. I get into bed and try to get comfortable against my pillows. Unfortunately, burned shoulders make that pretty much impossible.

When I close my eyes, a chill creeps up my legs. The temp in the room has plummeted, like one of the windows has come open. If I were to breathe out in a huff, it would be a cloud of vapor. Under my pillow, the athame is practically singing.

“You’re not really here,” I say to convince myself. Maybe to will it into truth. “If it was really you, it wouldn’t be like this.”

How would you know, Cassio? You’ve never even been dead once. I’ve been dead lots of times.

I let my eyes drift up, just far enough to see her bare feet pressed into the corner beside my dresser. Up just a little farther, to the white hem of her skirt, below her knees. I don’t want to see any more. I don’t want to see her break her own bones, or throw herself through my window. And her damn blood can stay inside of her nose too, thank you. She’s more terrifying this way than she ever was with black veins and drifting hair. Anna Dressed in Blood I knew how to face. The empty shell of Anna Korlov … I don’t understand.

The figure in the corner is half-encased in shadow, not much more substantial than moonlight.

“You can’t be here. Not really. My mom’s barrier spell is still up on the house.”

Rules rules rules. No rules anymore.

Oh. Really. Is that how it is? Or are you just a figment, like Carmel says? Maybe you’re not even you. Maybe you’re a trick.

“Are you just going to stand there all night?” I ask. “I want to get some sleep, so if there’s something mind-numbingly disturbing you want to show me, can we just get it over with?” My intake of breath is sharp, and a tight lump rises in my throat when her feet start to move, taking short, shuffling strides toward my bed. She comes so close, just outside of my reach. Then she lowers herself to sit beside my feet, and I see her face.

Anna’s eyes are her own, and the sight of them shakes me out of the drugs like ice water across my back. The expression on her face is the same as it was in all of my imaginings. It’s like she knows me. Like she remembers. We stare at each other for a long time. Shudders run through her, and she flickers, like an image from an old film strip.

“I miss you,” I whisper.

Anna blinks. When she looks at me again, her eyes are red with blood. A ripple of pain passes through her jaw as phantom cuts open and close across her chest, grotesque flowers of red blooming and disappearing down her arms.

I can’t do anything to help. I can’t even hold her hand. She’s not really here. The burns sear my shoulders as I sink back into my pillow and for a while we sit silently, passing pain back and forth. I keep my eyes open for as long as I can stand to, because she wants me to see.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

I finally get fed up with waiting, and call Gideon again in the morning. For a minute I think it’s just going to ring and ring, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe something’s happened to him, when he picks up.

“Gideon? Where have you been? Did you get my message?”

“Early this morning. I would have called, but you’d have been asleep. You sound terrible, Theseus.”

“You should see how I look.” My hand drags roughly across my face, muffling the last few words. Ever since I was a kid, Gideon could solve any problem. Whenever I needed answers, he had them. And he’s who my dad turned to, if things got rough. He has his own brand of magic, popping in and out of my childhood at the perfect times, coming through our front door in a dapper suit with some weird English food for me to try. Whenever I saw his bespectacled face, I knew everything was going to be okay. But this time I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to hear what I have to say.

“Theseus?”

“Yeah, Gideon?”

“Tell me what’s happened.”

What’s happened. He makes it sound so easy. I must’ve sat in my bedroom with Anna for four hours, watching her skin peel back and her eyes leak blood. Sometime between then and dawn, I fell asleep, because when I opened my eyes it was morning, and the foot of my bed was empty.

And now it’s daytime, full-on sunshine with its ridiculous sense of safety. It drives everything that happens in the dark a million miles away. It makes it seem impossible, and even though the memory of Anna’s wounds is fresh and the image of her burning inside that furnace is blasted onto the backs of my eyelids, in the daylight it almost feels like make-believe.

“Theseus?”

I take a breath. I’m standing on my front porch, and the morning is quiet except for the creaking boards beneath my feet. There’s no breeze, and the sun is livening the leaves, warming the fabric of my shirt. I’m acutely aware of the empty space in the bushes where I saw Anna standing, staring in.

“Anna’s back.”

On the other end of the line, something clatters to the floor.

“Gideon?”

“She can’t be. It isn’t possible.” His voice has gone low and terse, and somewhere inside me a five-year-old cringes. After all these years, Gideon’s anger still has power. One harsh word from him and I’m a puppy with its tail between its legs.

“Possible or not, she’s here. She’s contacting me, like she’s asking for help. I don’t know how. I need to know what to do.” The words fall out without a note of hope. All of a sudden it hits—how tired I am. How old I feel. Morfran’s words, about destroying the athame, melting it down, and letting it fall into deep water, twist in the back of my head. The thought is disconnected, but comforting, and it has something to do with Thomas and Carmel, and something else, if I let my mind wander a little farther. Something I said to Anna once, about possibilities. And choices.

“I think it’s the athame,” I say. “I think something’s happening to it.”

“Don’t blame the athame. You’re the one who wields it. Don’t forget that,” he says, his voice stern.

“I never forget that. Not for a single minute. Not since Dad died.”