Then it’s back to school, to do some damage control with Carmel and the Trojan Army. They probably didn’t see Thomas pull me out; they probably think I’m dead and are having a very dramatic cliff-side meeting to decide what to do about Mike and me, how to explain it. No doubt Will has some great suggestions.
And after that, it’s back to the house. Because I have seen Anna kill. And I have to stop her.
* * *
I luck out with my mom. She isn’t home when I get there, and there’s a note on the kitchen counter telling me that my lunch is in a bag in the refrigerator. She doesn’t sign it with a heart or anything, so I know she’s annoyed that I stayed out all night and didn’t call. Later I’ll think of something to tell her that doesn’t involve me being bloody and unconscious.
I don’t luck out with Thomas, who drove me home and then followed me up the porch steps. When I come downstairs from my shower, my head still throbbing like my heart has taken up a new residence behind my eyeballs, he’s sitting at my kitchen table, having a stare-down with Tybalt.
“This is no ordinary cat,” Thomas says through his teeth. He is staring unblinking into Tybalt’s green eyes—green eyes that flicker to me and seem to say, This kid is a knob. His tail twitches at the tip like a fishing lure.
“Of course he isn’t.” I rifle through the cabinet to chew some aspirin, a habit I picked up after reading Stephen King’s The Shining. “He’s a witch’s cat.”
Thomas breaks eye contact and glares at me. He knows when he’s being made fun of. I smile at him and toss him a can of soda. He cracks it very close to Tybalt and the cat hisses and jumps off of the table, growling irritably as he passes me. I reach down to scratch his back and he whacks me with his tail to tell me he wants this scruffy character out of his house.
“What’re you going to do about Mike?” Thomas’s eyes are wide and round over the rim of his Coke can.
“Damage control,” I say, because there’s nothing else I can do. I’d have more options if I hadn’t been unconscious all last night, but that’s spilled milk. I need to find Carmel. I need to talk to Will. I need to shut them both up. “So you should probably take us to school now.”
He raises his eyebrows like he’s surprised that I’ve ceased attempting to ditch him.
“What did you expect?” I ask. “You’re in it. You wanted in on whatever this is, well, congratulations. No time for second thoughts.”
Thomas swallows. To his credit, he doesn’t say anything.
* * *
When we walk into school, the hallways are empty. For a second I think that we’re busted, screwed, that there is some kind of candlelight vigil for Mike going on inside every closed door.
Then I realize that I’m an idiot. The halls are empty because we’re in the middle of third period.
We make stops off at our respective lockers and evade the questions of roaming faculty. I’m not going to class. We’re just going to wait around until lunch, hovering near Carmel’s locker in the hopes that she’s here and not pale and sick and lying in bed at home. But even if she is, Thomas says he knows where she lives. We can make a stop there later. If I have any luck left, she won’t have talked to her parents yet.
When the bell rings it just about jolts me out of my skin. It does nothing for my headache. But I blink hard and peer through the crowd, an endless flow of similarly dressed bodies striding into the hallways. I sigh with relief when I see Carmel. She looks a little pale, like she might have been crying or throwing up, but she’s still dressed well and carrying books. Not terribly worse for wear.
One of the brunettes from last night—I don’t know which one, but I’ll call her Natalie—bounces up to her elbow and starts prattling away about something. Carmel’s reaction is Oscar-worthy: the cock of her head and attentive gaze, the roll of her eyes and laughter, all so easy and genuine. Then she says something, some diverting something, and Natalie turns and bounces away. Carmel’s mask slides off again.
She’s less than ten feet from her locker when she finally raises her eyes high enough to notice I’m standing in front of it. Her eyes go wide. She says my name loudly before glancing around and walking closer, like she doesn’t want to be heard.
“You’re … alive.” The way she chokes on the phrase speaks of how strange she feels to be saying it. Her eyes move up and down my body, like she expects me to be oozing blood or have a bone exposed. “How?”
I nod to Thomas, who is skulking to my right. “Thomas pulled me out.”
Carmel spares him a glance and a smile. She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t hug me, like I sort of thought she might. The fact that she doesn’t makes me like her more for some reason.
“Where’s Will? And Chase?” I ask. I don’t ask whether anyone else knows. It’s obvious by the demeanor of the halls, the way that everyone is walking around chattering like normal, that nobody else does. But we still need to settle things. Get our stories straight.
“I don’t know. I don’t see them until lunch. I’m not sure how many classes they’ll be going to anyway.” She looks down. She’s getting the urge to talk about Mike. To say something that she feels like she should say, like she’s sorry, or how he wasn’t really all that bad and didn’t deserve what happened to him. She’s biting her lip.
“We need to talk to them. All together. Find them at lunch and tell them I’m alive. Where can we meet?”
She doesn’t answer right away, fidgeting around. Come on, Carmel, don’t disappoint me.
“I’ll bring them to the football field. Nobody will be using it.”
I nod quickly and she walks off, glancing back once like she’s making sure that I’m still there, that I’m real and she hasn’t gone crazy. I notice that Thomas is staring after her like a very sad, loyal hound dog.
“Dude,” I say, and head off toward the gym, to go through it out to the football field. “Now’s not the time.” Behind me I hear him mutter that it’s always the time. I let myself smirk for a minute before wondering what I’m going to do to keep Will and Chase on a leash.
CHAPTER NINE
When Will and Chase get to the football field, they find Thomas and me sacked out on the bleachers, staring at the sky. The day is sunny, mellow, and warm. Mother Nature does not mourn for Mike Andover. The light feels fantastic on my throbbing head.
“Jesus,” one of them says, and then there are a whole lot of expletives that don’t bear repeating. The tirade finally ends with, “He really is alive.”
“No thanks to you dicks.” I sit up. Thomas sits up too, but stays slightly hunched. These jerks have kicked him around one too many times.
“Hey,” Will snaps. “We didn’t do anything to you, understand?”
“Keep your fucking mouth shut,” Chase adds, pointing a finger at me. For a minute I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought that they would be coming to try to keep me quiet.
I brush off the knee of my jeans. There’s a bit of dust on them from where I leaned against the underside of the bleacher. “You guys didn’t try to do anything to me,” I say honestly. “You brought me to a house because you wanted to freak me out. You didn’t know that your friend would wind up getting torn in half and disemboweled.” That was cruel. I admit it. Chase goes immediately pale. Mike’s last moments are playing behind his eyes. For a second, I soften, but then my throbbing head reminds me that they tried to kill me.
Standing beside them but down a bleacher, Carmel hugs herself and looks away. Maybe I shouldn’t be so angry. But what, is she kidding me? Of course I should be. I’m not happy about what happened to Mike. I never would have let it happen if they hadn’t rendered me useless with a board to the head.
“What should we tell people about Mike?” Carmel asks. “There are going to be questions. Everyone saw him leave the party with us.”
“We can’t tell them the truth,” Will says ruefully.
“What is the truth?” Carmel asks. “What happened in that house? Am I really supposed t
o believe that Mike was murdered by a ghost? Cas—”
I meet her eyes levelly. “I saw it.”
“I saw it too,” Chase adds, looking like he might throw up.
Carmel shakes her head. “It’s not real. Cas is alive. Mike is too. This is all just some messed-up prank that you all cooked up to get back at me for breaking up with him.”
“Don’t be so self-obsessed,” Will says. “I saw her arms reach through the window. I saw her pull him in. I heard someone scream. And then I saw Mike’s silhouette split in two.” He looks at me. “So what was it? What was living in that house?”
“It was a vampire, man,” Chase stutters.
Idiot. I ignore him completely. “Nothing was living in that house. Mike was killed by Anna Korlov.”
“No way, man, no way,” Chase says with increasing panic, but I don’t have time for his waves of denial. Luckily, neither does Will, who tells him to shut up.
“We tell the cops that we drove around for a while. Then Mike got mad about Carmel and Cas and got out of the truck. None of us could stop him. He said he was going to walk home, and since it wasn’t that far away, we didn’t think anything of it. When he didn’t show at school today, we figured that he was hungover.” Will’s jaw is set. He can think on his feet, even when he doesn’t want to. “We’ll have to put up with a few days or weeks of search parties. They’ll question us some. And then they’ll give up.”
Will’s looking at me. No matter how big a dick Mike was, he was Will’s friend, and now Will Rosenberg is trying to wish me out of existence. If there wasn’t anyone else watching, he might even try it—tap his heels together three times or something.
And maybe he’s right. Maybe it is my fault. I could have found another way to Anna. But to hell with that. Mike Andover hit me across the back of the head with a plank and threw me in an abandoned house, all because I talked to his ex-girlfriend. He didn’t deserve to be split down the middle, but he had a kick in the nuts coming to him at the very least.
Chase is holding his head in his hands, talking to himself about how messed up this is, what a nightmare it’s going to be to lie to the cops. It’s easier for him to focus on the non-supernatural aspect of the problem. It’s easier for most people. That’s what allows things like Anna to stay secret for so long.
Will pushes him in the shoulder. “What do we do about her?” Will asks. For a second I think he’s talking about Carmel.
“You can’t do anything about her,” Thomas says, speaking for the first time in what feels like decades, catching on before I do. “She’s out of your league.”
“She killed my best friend,” Will spits. “What am I supposed to do? Nothing?”
“Yeah,” Thomas says, and he’s got a shrug and a lopsided smirk to go with it that’s going to get him punched in the face.
“Well, we have to do something.”
I look at Carmel. Her eyes are wide and sad, her blond hair hanging across them in streaks. This is as emo as she has probably ever looked.
“If she’s real,” she continues, “then we probably should. We can’t just let her keep on killing people.”
“We won’t,” Thomas says to her comfortingly. I’d like to toss him down the bleachers. Didn’t he hear my “now’s not the time” speech?
“Look,” I say. “We’re not all going to jump in a green van and go take her out with the help of the Harlem Globetrotters. Anyone who goes back into that house is dead. And unless you want to end up torn down the middle and staring at a pile of your own guts on the floor, you’ll stay away.” I don’t want to be so harsh with them, but this is a disaster. Someone I’ve involved is dead, and now all these other newbs want to join him. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get myself in such a clusterfuck. I’ve messed things up so quickly.
“I’m going back,” Will says. “I’ve got to do something.”
“I’m going with you,” Carmel adds, and glares at me like she’s daring me to try to stop her. She’s obviously forgetting that I was staring into a dead face crisscrossed with dark veins less than twenty-four hours ago. I’m not impressed by her tough-cookie routine.
“Neither one of you is going anywhere,” I say, but then I surprise myself. “Not without being prepared.” I glance at Thomas, whose mouth is hanging slightly ajar. “Thomas has a grandfather. Some old spiritual guy. Morfran Starling. He knows about Anna. We need to talk to him first, if we’re going to do anything.” I cuff Thomas in the shoulder and he tries to piece a normal expression back on his face.
“How do you kill something like that anyway?” Chase asks. “Stake her through the heart?”
I’d like to mention again that Anna isn’t a vampire, but I’ll wait until he suggests silver bullets to shove him off the bleachers.
“Don’t be dumb,” Thomas scoffs. “She’s already dead. You can’t kill her. You’ve got to banish her or something. My grandfather’s done it once or twice. There’s this big spell, and candles and herbs and stuff.” Thomas and I share a look. The kid really does come in handy now and again. “I can take you to him. Tonight, if you want.”
Will is looking at Thomas, and then at me, and then at Thomas again. Chase looks like he wishes he didn’t have to pretend to be such a big strong meathead all the time, but whatever, that’s the bed he’s made for himself. Carmel is just staring at me.
“Okay,” Will says finally. “Meet us after school.”
“I can’t,” I say quickly. “Mom stuff. But I can be at the shop later.”
They all make their way down the bleachers clumsily—which is the only way to go down bleachers. Thomas smiles as they go.
“Pretty good, huh?” He grins. “Who says I’m not psychic?”
“Probably just women’s intuition,” I reply. “Just be sure that you and old Morfran give them a convincing enough wild-goose chase.”
“Where are you going to be?” he asks, but I don’t answer. He knows where I’m going. I’m going to be with Anna.
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 be
en 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.