“It’ll give me acne,” I protest, but make no move to wipe it off. “I have to start school in two weeks.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just stares down at her herbal thumb like she might press it between her own eyes. But then she blinks and wipes it on the leg of her jeans.
This city smells like smoke and things that rot in the summer. It’s more haunted than I thought it would be, an entire layer of activity just under the dirt: whispers behind peoples’ laughter, or movement that you shouldn’t see in the corner of your eye. Most of them are harmless—sad little cold spots or groans in the dark. Blurry patches of white that only show up in a Polaroid. I have no business with them.
But somewhere out there is one that matters. Somewhere out there is the one that I came for, one who is strong enough to squeeze the breath out of living throats.
I think of her again. Anna. Anna Dressed in Blood. I wonder what tricks she’ll try. I wonder if she’ll be clever. Will she float? Will she laugh or scream?
How will she try to kill me?
CHAPTER FOUR
“Would you rather be a Trojan or a tiger?”
My mother asks this while she’s standing over the griddle making us cornmeal pancakes. It’s the last day to register me for high school before it starts tomorrow. I know that she meant to do it sooner, but she’s been busy forming relationships with a number of downtown merchants, trying to get them to advertise her fortune-telling business and seeing if they’ll carry her occult supplies. There’s apparently a candle maker just outside of town that has agreed to infuse her product with a specific blend of oils, sort of a candle-spell in a box. They’d sell these custom creations at shops around town, and Mom would also ship them to her phone clientele.
“What kind of a question is that? Do we have any jam?”
“Strawberry or something called Saskatoon, which looks like blueberry.”
I make a sour face. “I’ll take the strawberry.”
“You should live dangerously. Try the Saskatoon.”
“I live dangerously enough. Now what’s this about condoms or tigers?”
She sets a plate of pancakes and toast down in front of me, each topped with a pile of what I desperately hope is strawberry jam.
“Behave yourself, kiddo. They’re the school mascots. Do you want to go to Sir Winston Churchill or Westgate Collegiate? Apparently we’re close enough for both.”
I sigh. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take my classes and pass my tests, and then I’ll transfer out, just like always. I’m here to kill Anna. But I should make a show of caring, to please my mom.
“Dad would want me to be a Trojan,” I say quietly, and she pauses for just a second over the griddle before sliding the last pancake onto her plate.
“I’ll go over to Winston Churchill then,” she says. What luck. I chose the douche-y sounding one. But like I said, it doesn’t matter. I’m here for one thing, something that fell into my lap while I was still fruitlessly casting about for the County 12 Hiker.
It came, charmingly, in the mail. My name and address on a coffee-stained envelope, and inside just one scrap of paper with Anna’s name on it. It was written in blood. I get these tips from all over the country, all over the world. There are not many people who can do what I do, but there are a multitude of people who want me to do it, and they seek me out, asking those who are in the know and following my trail. We move a lot but I’m easy enough to find if they look. Mom makes a website announcement whenever we relocate, and we always tell a few of my father’s oldest friends where we’re headed. Every month, like clockwork, a stack of ghosts flies across my metaphorical desk: an e-mail about people going missing in a Satanic church in northern Italy, a newspaper clipping of mysterious animal sacrifices near an Ojibwe burial mound. I trust only a few sources. Most are my father’s contacts, elders in the coven he was a member of in college, or scholars he met on his travels and through his reputation. They’re the ones I can trust not to send me on wild-goose chases. They do their homework.
But, over the years, I’ve developed a few contacts of my own. When I looked down at the scrawling red letters, cut across the paper like scabbed-over claw marks, I knew that it had to be a tip from Rudy Bristol. The theatrics of it. The gothic romance of the yellowed parchment. Like I was supposed to believe the ghost actually did it herself, etching her name in someone’s blood and sending it to me like a calling card inviting me to dinner.
Rudy “the Daisy” Bristol is a hard-core goth kid from New Orleans. He lounges around tending bar deep in the French Quarter, lost somewhere in his mid-twenties and wishing he were still sixteen. He’s skinny, pale as a vampire, and wears way too much mesh. So far he’s led me to three good ghosts: nice, quick kills. One of them was actually hanging by his neck in a root cellar, whispering through the floorboards and enticing new residents of the house to join him in the dirt. I walked in, gutted him, and walked back out. It was that job that made me like Daisy. It wasn’t until later on that I learned to enjoy his extremely enthusiastic personality.
I called him the minute I got his letter.
“Hey man, how’d you know it was me?” There was no disappointment in his voice, just an excited, flattered tone that reminded me of some kid at a Jonas Brothers concert. He’s such a fanboy. If I allowed it, he’d strap on a proton pack and follow me around the country.
“Of course it was you. How many tries did it take you to get the letters to look right? Is the blood even real?”
“Yeah, it’s real.”
“What kind of blood is it?”
“Human.”
I smiled. “You used your own blood, didn’t you?” There was a sound of huffing, of shifting around.
“Look, do you want the tip or not?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” My eyes were on the scrap of paper. Anna. Even though I knew it was just one of Daisy’s cheap tricks, her name in blood looked beautiful.
“Anna Korlov. Murdered in 1958.”
“By who?”
“Nobody knows.”
“How?”
“Nobody really knows that either.”
It was starting to sound like a crock. There are always records, always investigations. Each drop of blood spilled leaves a paper trail from here to Oregon. And the way he kept trying to make the phrase “nobody knows” sound creepy was starting to wear on my nerves.
“So how do you know?” I asked him.
“Lots of people know,” he replied. “She’s Thunder Bay’s favorite spook story.”
“Spook stories usually turn out to be just that: stories. Why are you wasting my time?” I reached out for the paper, ready to crumple it in my fist. But I didn’t. I don’t know why I was being skeptical. People always know. Sometimes a lot of people. But they don’t really do anything about it. They don’t really say anything. Instead they heed the warnings and cluck their tongues at any ignorant fool who stumbles into the spider’s den. It’s easier for them that way. It lets them live in the daylight.
“She’s not that kind of spook story,” Daisy insisted. “You won’t ask around town and get anything about her—unless you ask in the right places. She’s not a tourist attraction. But you walk into any teenage girls’ slumber party, and I guarantee you they’ll be telling Anna’s story at midnight.”
“Because I walk into a ton of teenage girls’ slumber parties,” I sighed. Of course, I suppose that Daisy really did, back in his day. “What’s the deal?”
“She was sixteen when she died, the daughter of Finnish immigrants. Her father was dead, he died of some disease or something, and her mom ran a boarding house downtown. Anna was on her way to a school dance when she was killed. Someone cut her throat, but that’s an understatement. Someone nearly cut her head clean off. They say she was wearing a white party dress, and when they found her, the whole thing was stained red. That’s why they call her Anna Dressed in Blood.”
“Anna Dressed in Blood,” I repeated softly.
“Some people th
ink that it was one of the boarders that did it. That some pervert took a look at her and liked what he saw, followed her and left her bleeding in a ditch. Others say it was her date, or a jealous boyfriend.”
I took a deep breath to pull me out of my trance. It was bad, but they were all bad, and it was by no means the worst thing I’d ever heard. Howard Sowberg, a farmer in central Iowa, killed his entire family with a pair of hedge shears, alternately stabbing and snipping as the case allowed. His entire family consisted of his wife, his two young sons, a newborn, and his elderly mother. Now that was one of the worst things I’d ever heard. I was disappointed to get to central Iowa and discover that the ghost of Howard Sowberg wasn’t remorseful enough to hang around. Strangely enough, it’s usually the victims that turn bad in the afterlife. The truly evil move on, to burn or turn to dust or be reincarnated as dung beetles. They use up all their rage while they’re still breathing.
Daisy was still going on about Anna’s legend. His voice was growing lower and breathier with excitement. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or be annoyed.
“Okay, so what does she do, now?”
He paused. “She’s killed twenty-seven teenagers … that I know of.”
Twenty-seven teenagers in the last half century. It was starting to sound like a fairy tale again, either that or the strangest cover-up in history. Nobody kills twenty-seven teenagers and escapes without being chased into a castle by a crowd holding torches and pitchforks. Not even a ghost.
“Twenty-seven local kids? You’ve got to be kidding me. Not drifters, or runaways?”
“Well—”
“Well, what? Someone’s pulling your chain, Bristol.” Bitterness grew in the back of my throat. I don’t know why. So what if the tip was fake? There were fifteen other ghosts waiting in the stack. One of them was from Colorado, some Grizzly Adams type who was murdering hunters on an entire mountain. Now that sounded like fun.
“They never find any bodies,” Daisy said in an effort to explain. “They must just figure that the kids ran away, or were abducted. It’s only the other kids who would say anything about Anna, and of course nobody does. You know better than that.”
Yeah. I knew better than that. And I knew something else too. There was more to Anna’s story than Daisy was telling me. I don’t know what it was, call it intuition. Maybe it was her name, scrawled out in crimson. Maybe Daisy’s cheap and masochistic trick really did work after all. But I knew. I know. I feel it in my gut, and my father always told me when your gut says something, you listen.
“I’ll look into it.”
“Are you going?” There was that excited tone again, like an overeager beagle waiting to have his rope thrown.
“I said I’ll look into it. I’ve got something to wrap up here first.”
“What is it?”
I briefly told him about the County 12 Hiker. He made some asinine suggestions on how to draw him out that were so asinine I don’t even remember them now. Then, as usual, he tried to get me to come down to New Orleans.
I wouldn’t touch New Orleans with a ten-foot pole. That town is haunted as shit, and all the better for it. Nowhere in the world loves its ghosts more than that city. Sometimes I worry for Daisy; I worry that someone will get wind of his talking to me, sending me out on hunts, and then someday I’ll have to be hunting him, some ripped-up victim version of him dragging his severed limbs around a warehouse.
I lied to him that day. I didn’t look into it any further. By the time I had gotten off the phone, I knew that I was going after Anna. My gut told me that she wasn’t just a story. And besides, I wanted to see her, dressed in blood.
CHAPTER FIVE
From what I can gather, Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate & Vocational is just about like any high school I was ever at in the United States. I spent all of first period working out my schedule with the school counselor, Ms. Ben, a kindly, birdlike young woman who is destined to wear baggy turtlenecks and own too many cats.
Now, in the hallway, every set of eyes is on me. I’m new and different, but that’s not the only thing. Everyone’s eyes are on everybody, because it’s the first day of classes and people are dying to know what their classmates have turned into over the summer. There must be at least fifty makeovers and brand-new looks being tried out somewhere in the building. The pasty bookworm has bleached her hair white and is wearing a dog collar. The skinny kid from the track team has spent all of July and August lifting weights and buying tight-fitting t-shirts.
Still, people’s eyes tend to linger on me longer, because even though I’m new, I don’t move like it. I’m barely looking at the numbers of the rooms passing by. I’ll find my classes eventually, right? No reason to panic. Besides, I’m an old hand at this. I’ve been to twelve high schools in the past three years. And I’m looking for something.
I need to be plugged into the social pipeline. I need to get people talking to me, so I can ask them questions that I need answers to. So when I transfer in, I always look for the queen bee.
Every school has one. The girl who knows everything and everybody. I could go and try to insta-bond with the lead jock, I suppose, but I’ve never been good at that. My dad and I never watched sports or played catch. I can wrestle the dead all day long, but touch football might knock me unconscious. Girls, on the other hand, have always come easy. I don’t know why that is, exactly. Maybe it’s the outsider vibe and a well-placed brooding look. Maybe it’s something I think I see sometimes in the mirror, something that reminds me of my father. Or maybe I’m just damn easy on the eyes. So I scour the halls until I finally see her, smiling and surrounded by people.
There’s no mistaking her: the queen of the school is always pretty, but this one is downright beautiful. She’s got something like three feet of layered blond hair and lips the color of ripe peaches. As soon as she sees me, she dips her chin. A smile comes easily to her face. This is the girl who gets everything she wants at Winston Churchill. She’s the teacher’s pet, the homecoming queen, and party central. Everything I want to know, she could tell me. Which is what I hope she’ll do.
When I walk by, I pointedly ignore her. A few seconds later she leaves her group of friends and jumps in beside me.
“Hey. Haven’t seen you around here before.”
“I just moved to town.”
She smiles again. She’s got perfect teeth and warm chocolate eyes. She is immediately disarming. “Then you’ll need some help getting acquainted. I’m Carmel Jones.”
“Theseus Cassio Lowood. What kind of a parent names their kid Carmel?”
She laughs. “What kind of a parent names their kid Theseus Cassio?”
“Hippies,” I reply.
“Exactly.”
We laugh together, and mine isn’t completely false. Carmel Jones owns this school. I can tell by the way she carries herself, like she’s never had to kneel down in her life. I can tell because of the way the crowd is flitting away like birds from a prowling cat. Just the same, she doesn’t seem haughty or entitled like many of these girls do. I show her my schedule and she notes that we have the same fourth period biology class and—even better—the same lunch hour. When she leaves me at the door of my second period, she turns back and winks at me over her shoulder.
Queen bees are just a part of the job. Sometimes that’s hard to remember.
* * *
At lunch, Carmel flags me down, but I don’t go over right away. I’m not here to date anyone, and I don’t want to give her the wrong idea. Still, she’s pretty hot, and I have to remind myself that all that popularity and ease has probably made her unbelievably boring. She’s too much of the daylight for me. Truth be told, so is everyone. What do you expect? I move around a lot, and spend too many late nights killing stuff. Who’s going to put up with that?
I scan the rest of the lunchroom, making a note of all the different groups and wondering which one would be most likely to lead me to Anna. The goth kids would know the story best, but they’re also the harde
st to ditch. If they got the idea that I was serious about killing their ghost, I’d probably wind up doing it with a gang of black-eyeliner-wearing, crucifix-carrying, Buffy the Vampire Slayer wannabes twittering around behind me.
“Theseus!”
Shit, I forgot to tell Carmel to call me Cas. The last thing I need is for the “Theseus” thing to get around and stick. I make my way to her table, seeing eyes growing wider as I do. Ten or so other girls probably just developed instantaneous crushes on me, because they see that Carmel likes me. Or so the sociologist in my brain says.
“Hey, Carmel.”
“Hey. How are you finding SWC?”
I make a mental note never to refer to it as “SWC.”
“Not bad, thanks to your tour this morning. And by the way, most people just call me Cas.”
“Caz?”
“Yeah. But softer on the s. What do you get for lunch around here?”
“Usually we do the Pizza Hut pizza bar over there.” She gestures vaguely with her head, and I turn and glance vaguely in that direction. “So, Cas, why did you move to Thunder Bay?”
“Scenery,” I say, and smile. “Honestly, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me,” she says. The thought occurs to me again that Carmel Jones knows exactly how to get what she wants. But she’s also given me the opportunity to be completely frank. My mouth actually moves to form the words, Anna, I’m here for Anna, when the damn Trojan Army rolls up behind us in an assembly line of Winston Churchill Wrestling team t-shirts.
“Carmel,” one of them says. Without looking I know that he either is, or was until very recently, Carmel’s boyfriend. The way that he says her name sticks to his cheeks. From the way that Carmel reacts, with a lifting of her chin and an arch of her eyebrow, I figure that he’s more of the ex type.
“You coming out tonight?” he asks, completely ignoring me. I watch him with amusement. There’s a blue light special on territorial jocks in aisle four.