“Do you want toast?”
“Not really.”
“What’s the matter with you?” My mom sits down in her bathrobe, looking worn around the edges. Last night I added a few more grays to her head, coming in with a bruised skull. She stayed awake while I slept, and shook me to consciousness every hour and a half, to make sure I didn’t have a concussion and die. Last night she didn’t ask questions. I suppose the relief of seeing me alive was enough. And maybe part of her doesn’t want to know.
“The drum worked,” I say quietly. “I saw Anna. She’s in Hell.”
Her eyes light up and burn out in the space of a blink.
“Hell?” she asks. “Fire and brimstone? Little red guy with a big fork and a pointy tail?”
“Is this funny to you?”
“Of course not,” she replies. “I just never thought it actually existed.” And she doesn’t know what to say either.
“For the record, I didn’t see any pointy tail. But she’s in Hell. Or someplace like it. I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s the Hell or not.”
My mom sighs. “I suppose that decades of murder is a lot to atone for. It doesn’t feel fair to me, but—there’s nothing we can do about it, sweetheart.”
Atonement. The word makes me glare so hard that heat rays might shoot out of my eyeballs.
“As far as I’m concerned,” I say, “it was all one big fuck-up.”
“Cas.”
“And I’m going to get her out.”
Mom’s eyes fall to her plate. “You know that isn’t possible. You know that you can’t.”
“I think I can. My friends and I just opened a window between here and Hell, and I’m willing to bet that we can open a door.”
There’s a long, simmering silence. “It’s an impossible thing to do and just trying it is probably enough to kill you.”
I try to remember that she’s my mother, and it’s her job to talk to me about impossible, so I sort of nod. But she sees through it, and her feathers are up. In one breath she threatens to move my ass out of Thunder Bay, to take me far away from Thomas and his witchy ways. She even says she’s going to take the athame and send it to Gideon.
“Don’t you listen? When Gideon or I tell you something, do you listen?” Her lips form a tight, thin line. “What happened to Anna, I hate it. It’s not fair. It might be the worst case of unfair I’ve ever heard. But you’re not trying this, Cas. You’re absolutely not.”
“Yes, I will,” I growl. “And it’s not just her either. It’s him. The bastard that killed Dad. He’s there too. So I’m going to go after him and I’m going to kill him again. I’m going to kill him a thousand times.” She starts to cry, and I’m dangerously close to it myself. “You didn’t see her, Mom.” She has to get it. I can’t sit at this table and try to eat eggs when I know that she’s trapped over there. There is only one thing I should be doing and I have no idea where to start.
I love her, I almost say. What would you do if it were Dad? I almost say. But I’m wrung out. She’s wiping tears from her cheeks and I know she’s thinking about the cost, how much this has cost us. I can’t think about that anymore. I’m sorry as hell, but I can’t. Not even for her. Not when I have work to do.
My fork clatters down on my plate. Food is out. And school is out too. There are only four days left, and most of them are pep rallies. I took my last test last Thursday, and passed with a B+ average. It’s not like they’re going to expel me.
* * *
Black Labs probably shouldn’t eat peanut butter cookies. Maybe they shouldn’t drink milk either. But they sure do like both of those things. Stella’s head is lodged into my lap, and she’s heaved most of her body onto the burgundy cushions of the sofa I’m sitting on. Her seal pup eyes flicker from my face to my glass of milk, so I tip it to the side to let her big pink tongue go to work. When she’s finished, she slurps a thank-you into my palm.
“You’re welcome,” I say, and give her a scratch. I didn’t want to eat anyway. I came to the shop right after my non-breakfast to see Morfran. Apparently he and Thomas sat up most of the night talking over the ritual, because he had this broody, sympathetic expression behind his glasses, and instantly plunked me onto this couch and served me a snack. Why do people keep trying to feed me?
“Here, drink this,” Morfran says, appearing out of nowhere. He stuffs a mug of some foul, herbal blend into my face, and I recoil.
“What is it?”
“Angelica root rejuvenation potion. With a little thistle tossed in. After what that Obeah did to your liver last fall, you’ve got to take care of it.”
I look at it skeptically. It’s hot, and it smells like it was brewed with ditchwater.
“Is it safe?”
“As long as you’re not pregnant,” he snorts. “I called Thomas. He’s on his way. He went in to school this morning, thinking you’d be there. Some psychic, eh?” We sort of smile and say, “It only works some of the time,” together in Thomas’s voice. I sip at the potion tentatively. It tastes worse than it smells, bitter and for some reason almost salty.
“This is disgusting.”
“Well, the milk was supposed to coat your stomach and the cookies would’ve taken the taste out of your mouth. But you gave it all to the dog, you idiot.” He pats Stella’s rear and she lumbers off of the couch. “Listen, kid,” Morfran says, and I stop sipping at his grave tone. “Thomas told me what you’re going to try to do. I don’t think I need to tell you that you’re probably going to get yourself killed.”
I look down into the brown-green liquid. A smart remark is creeping up on my tongue, something about how his potions are going to kill me first, and I swallow hard to keep quiet.
“But,” he sighs. “I’m also not going to tell you that you don’t have a chance. You’ve got the stuff, power rolling off you in waves I’ve never heard before. And they’re not just coming from that backpack.” He jerks a finger toward my bag, next to me on the sofa. Then he sits down, on the arm of the chair opposite, and runs his hand across his beard. Whatever it is he needs to say isn’t easy. “Thomas is going to go with you on this thing,” he says. “I couldn’t stop him if I tried.”
“I won’t let anything happen to him, Morfran.”
“That’s a promise you can’t make,” he says, his voice harsh. “You think you’re just up against the forces of the other side? That shadowy, dreadlocked dude who wants to finish digesting you from the inside out? You should be so lucky.”
I sip the potion. He’s talking about the storm again. The thing that he senses, coming at me, or pulling me, or tripping me, or whatever the hell he said in that vague, useless way of his.
“But you’re not going to tell me to stop,” I say.
“I don’t know if it can be stopped. I think maybe you’ve got to go through it. Maybe you’ll come out the other side. Maybe you’ll come out the other side looking like a spit-up owl pellet.” He rubs his beard, having gotten off track. “Look. I don’t want anything to happen to you, either. But if my grandson gets hurt, or worse—” He looks me in the eye. “You’ll have made an enemy of me. Do you understand?”
Over these months, Morfran has become sort of a grandfather to me too. Becoming his enemy is the last thing I want.
“I understand.”
He grabs me, his hand striking like a snake and holding mine fast. In the quarter second before a shot of energy makes my blood jump under my skin, I notice his ring: a small circle of carved skulls. I’ve never seen it on his hand before, but I know what it is, and what it means. It means that I won’t just have made an enemy of Morfran, but of voodoo itself.
“Be sure that you do,” he says, and lets go. Whatever it was that ran through me made sweat stand out on my forehead. Even on my palms.
The door to the shop jingles and Stella trots over to meet Thomas, her toenails clicking. At his entrance, the tension dissipates and Morfran and I take a deep breath. I hope Thomas’s psychic thing isn’t working right now, and that
he isn’t particularly observant, or he’s going to ask why we look so uncomfortable and embarrassed.
“No Carmel today?” I ask.
“She stayed home with a headache,” he replies. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I was thrown twelve feet through the air and landed on second-degree burns. You?”
“Groggy, and weak as a wet noodle. Plus, I think I may have forgotten a letter from the alphabet. If I hadn’t asked to leave, Mrs. Snyder would have sent me home anyway. Said I looked pale. Thought I might have mono.” He grins. I grin back, and we sit in silence. It’s strange and filled with tension, but it’s also kind of nice. It’s nice to linger here, to hold ourselves back and not barrel through this moment. Because whatever we say next is going to catapult us into something dangerous, and I don’t think either one of us really knows where it might lead.
“So, I guess you’re really going to try this,” he says. I wish he wouldn’t sound so hesitant, so skeptical. The quest might be doomed, but there’s no reason to paint it that way from the get-go.
“I guess I am.”
He smiles, lopsided. “Want some help?”
Thomas. He’s my best friend and sometimes he still makes it sound like he’s a tagalong. Of course I want his help. More than that: I need it.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“But I will,” he replies. “Do you have any idea where to start?”
I run my hand through my hair. “Not really. There’s just an urge to get moving, like there’s a clock ticking somewhere that I can barely hear.”
Thomas shrugs. “It’s possible that there is. Figuratively speaking. The longer that Anna stays where she is, the harder it might be for her to cross over to somewhere else. She might become embedded in it. Of course that’s just conjecture.”
Conjecture. Honestly, half-cocked guesses about worst-case scenarios aren’t what I need right now.
“Let’s just hope it’s not a real clock,” I say. “She’s already been there too long, Thomas. One second is too long, after what she did for us.”
Thoughts about what she did to all of the runaways in her basement—all the teens who wound up in the wrong place and the wanderers stuck in her web—flutter over his features. Other people might judge Anna’s fate as a proper punishment. Maybe lots of people. But not me. Anna’s hands were tied by the curse put on her when she was murdered. Every one of her victims was a casualty of the curse, not the girl. That’s what I say. I’m well aware that none of the people she tore apart would be likely to say the same thing.
“We can’t rush this, Cas,” Thomas says, and I agree. But we can’t keep treading water, either.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Morfran writes Thomas a note to get him out of the last days of school, saying he’s come down with a bad case of mono. We’ve spent every moment we’ve been awake poring over books—old, musty tomes that have been translated from older, mustier tomes. I was grateful to have something to do, to feel like we were moving forward. But after three days of minimal sleep and living off sandwiches and frozen pizza, we have virtually nothing to show for our efforts. Every book is a dead end, going on and on about contacting the other side, but never even addressing the possibility of punching through, let alone pulling something back. I’ve called every contact I know who might have information, and I got jack squat.
We’re sitting at Thomas and Morfran’s kitchen table, surrounded by more useless books, while Morfran adds potatoes to a pot of beef stew on the stove. On the other side of the windows, birds flit from tree to tree, and a few large squirrels are fighting for control of the bird feeder. I haven’t seen Anna since the night we contacted her. I don’t know why. I tell myself that she’s afraid for me, that she regrets telling me to come for her, and is staying away deliberately. It’s a nice delusion. Maybe it’s even true.
“Heard from Carmel lately?” I ask Thomas.
“Yeah. She says we’re not missing much at school. That it’s mostly a bunch of back-to-back pep rallies and friendship circles.”
I snort. I remember thinking the same thing. Thomas doesn’t seem worried, but I wonder why Carmel hasn’t called me. We shouldn’t have left her alone for so many days. The ritual had to have shaken her up.
“Why hasn’t she come by?” I ask.
“You know how she feels about this,” Thomas says without looking up from the book he’s reading. I tap a pen against the open page in front of me. There’s nothing useful there.
“Morfran,” I say. “Tell me about zombies. Tell me how voodooists and obeahmen raise the dead.”
A flicker of motion catches my eye: Thomas is flapping his hand toward his throat, giving me the cut-it signal.
“What?” I ask. “They bring people back from the dead, right? That’s crossing over, if I ever heard it. There’s got to be something there we can use.”
Morfran sets the spoon down on the counter with a sharp crack. He turns toward me with an irritated expression.
“For a professional ghost killer, you sure ask a lot of numb-nut questions.”
“What?”
Thomas nudges me. “Morfran gets offended when people say voodoo can bring you back from the dead. It’s sort of a stereotype, you know?”
“It’s utter Hollywood bullshit,” Morfran grumbles. “Those ‘zombies’ aren’t anything more than poor, drugged souls who got sedated, buried, and dug up. They shuffle around afterward because the drug was poison from a puffer fish and it boiled their brains tender.”
I narrow my eyes. “So there was never even one real zombie? Not even one? It’s what the religion is famous for.” I shouldn’t have said that last part. Morfran’s eyes bug out momentarily, and he sets his jaw.
“No real voodooist ever tried to raise a zombie. You can’t put life back into something once it’s gone.” He turns back to his stew. I guess that’s the end of that subject.
“We’re not coming up with anything,” I mutter. “I don’t think these people even knew what the other side really was. I think they’re just talking about contacting ghosts that were still trapped here, on this plane.”
“Why don’t you call Gideon?” Thomas asks. “He’s the one who knows the most about the athame, right? And according to Carmel, the athame was seriously pulsing the night of the ritual. That’s why she thought you were going to try to cross over. She thought you could.”
“I’ve tried to call Gideon about a dozen times. Something’s going on with him. He’s not calling back.”
“Is he okay?”
“I think so. I feel like he is. And I think someone would have heard and passed the news along if he wasn’t.”
The room goes quiet. Morfran is even stirring more quietly while he pretends not to listen. They would both like to know more about the knife. Inside, Morfran is dying to know, I’m sure of it. But Gideon has told me everything. He’s sung me that stupid riddle—The blood of your ancestors forged this athame. Men of power bled their warrior, to put the spirits down—and the rest has been lost in time. I say the riddle out loud now, absently.
“Aunt Riika said something about it too,” Thomas says softly, his eyes unfocused but looking in the general direction of the athame in my backpack. He starts to smile. “God, we’re idiots. The knife is the door? It swings back and forth? It’s just like Riika said. It’s never really closed.” His voice grows in intensity, his eyes swelling behind his glasses. “That’s why the drum ritual wasn’t just wind and voices like it was supposed to be! That’s why we could open the window to Anna’s Hell. That’s probably why Anna’s able to communicate with you from over there in the first place. The cut she took from the athame that didn’t send her away. She’s got her foot in the proverbial door.”
“Wait,” I say. The athame is a blade of steel and a handle of dark oiled wood. It isn’t something you can crack open and walk through. Unless … my head is starting to hurt. I’m no good at this metaphysical crap. A knife is a knife, it’s not also a door. “Are you s
aying I can use the knife to cut a gateway?”
“I’m saying the knife is the gateway.”
He’s killing me here. “What are you talking about? I can’t walk through the knife. We can’t pull Anna back through the knife.”
“Cas, you’re thinking in solid states,” Thomas explains, and smiles at Morfran, who I must say looks damned impressed by his grandson. “Remember what Riika said. I don’t know why I didn’t catch on sooner. Don’t think about the knife. Think about the shape behind the knife, about what the athame is, at its core. It isn’t really a knife at all. It’s a door, disguised as a knife.”
“You’re weirding me out.”
“We just have to find the people who can tell us how to really use it,” Thomas says, not even looking at me anymore, but at Morfran. “We have to find out how to blow it wide open.”
* * *
My backpack feels heavy, now that I’m carrying an entire gateway inside it. Thomas’s excitement is enough to lift him off the floor, but I can’t wrap my head around what he wants to do. He wants to open the knife. He’s saying that on the other side of the athame is Anna’s Hell? No. The knife is the knife. It fits in my hand. On the other side of the knife is … the other side of the knife. But this hunch is all we have to go on, and every time I question him about feasibility, he smiles at me like he’s Yoda and I’m just a dumbass without the Force.
“We’re going to need Gideon, that’s for certain. We need to know more about where the knife comes from, and how it’s been used in the past.”
“Sure,” I say. Thomas is driving a bit too fast, and paying a bit too little attention. When he brakes at the stop sign before the high school, it’s sudden and jerks me forward, almost onto the dash.