“Listen, don’t worry about me, all right?” I say, and stand up. “Dammit,” I mutter, feeling the wet backside of my jeans.
“What?” Gideon asks, concerned.
“Oh, nothing. I’ve got a huge wet spot on my ass from sitting under this tree. I swear the ground around here never dries up.” He laughs, and we hang up. On my way back into the school, Dan Hill hits me in the arm.
“Hey,” he says. “Did you get the history notes from yesterday? Can I borrow them during study hall?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, sort of surprised.
“Thanks, man. Usually I borrow from one of the girls, you know”—he flashes this rake’s grin—“but I’m pulling a low C and you got top score last test, right?”
“Yeah,” I say again. I did get the top score. To my extreme surprise and my mom’s utter glee.
“Cool. Hey, I heard you were on acid or something at the mall last night.”
“I saw a dress Carmel wanted and pointed it out to Thomas Sabin.” I shrug. “People make up some crazy shit at this school.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought. Later, man.” He walks off in another direction. Dan’s pretty cool, I guess. If I’m lucky he’ll pass my mall alibi on to a few others. Not likely though. Retractions show up in the back of the newspaper. The boring story loses out, truth or not. That’s just how it goes.
* * *
“How can you not like roasted garlic chicken pizza?” Carmel asks, her phone out to place the order. “Seriously? Just mushrooms and extra cheese?”
“And tomatoes,” Thomas adds.
“Just regular, cut-up tomatoes?” She looks at me incredulously. “He’s unnatural.”
“I’m with you,” I say from the refrigerator, where I’m grabbing sodas. We’re chilling at my house, streaming movies off Netflix. It was Carmel’s idea, and I’m choosing to believe it was because she wanted to relax, not because she wanted me away from the public.
“Maybe he’s trying to be a gentleman, Carmel,” my mom says, walking through to get a refill of iced tea. “Keeping away from the garlic for you.”
“Gross,” I say, and Thomas laughs. It’s Carmel who blushes this time.
My mom smiles. “If you order one of each, I’ll split the tomato one with Thomas and you and Cas can split the other.”
“Okay. But you’re going to want the chicken when it gets here.” She orders, and the three of us head into the living room to watch reruns of Scrubs until the pizzas arrive and we start the movie. We barely sit down before Carmel jumps back up, her phone between her fingers, texting away.
“What’s up?” Thomas asks.
“Sort of a finals studying party-thing,” she says. She heads for the front porch. “I told Nat and Amanda I’d show up there if the movie didn’t get over too late. Be right back.”
After the door closes, I poke Thomas.
“Doesn’t it bother you that she goes off like that?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I start, but I don’t quite know. I guess it’s just that where Carmel has sometimes tried to mingle me in with her other friends, she doesn’t really with Thomas. I’d think it would bother him, but I don’t know how to ask that tactfully. And what the hell finals does she still have to study for? I’ve already taken all of mine but one. Teachers here really like to dial in the last few weeks. Not that I’m complaining. “Aren’t you her boyfriend?” I blurt finally. “Shouldn’t she be dragging you out with her friends?”
It wasn’t the best way to word things, but he doesn’t seem offended, or even surprised. He just grins.
“I don’t know what we are, technically,” he says quietly. “But I do know that we don’t work like that. We’re different.”
“Different,” I mumble, even though the moony look on his face is sort of touching. “Everybody’s got to be different. Did it ever occur to you that ‘same’ is a classic for a reason?”
“Big talk for somebody whose last girlfriend died in 1958,” Thomas replies, and then hides behind a gulp of soda. I grin and look back toward the TV.
Anna is at the window. She’s standing in the bushes outside my house, staring at me.
“Jesus!” I scramble up the back of the couch and barely wince when my shoulder rams into the wall.
“What?” Thomas jumps up too, looking first at the floor like there might’ve been a rat or something before following my gaze to the window.
Anna’s eyes are empty and dead, completely hollow and without any trace of recognition. Watching her blink is like watching an alligator cut through thick, brackish water. As I try to catch my breath, a wormy, dark rivulet of blood runs from her nose.
“Cas, what is it? What’s wrong?”
I glance at Thomas. “You mean you don’t see her?” I look back at the window, half expecting her to be gone, half hoping that she’s gone, but she’s still there, immobile.
Thomas scours the window, moving his head to see around the reflections of light. He looks terrified. It doesn’t make sense. He should be able to see her. He’s a goddamn witch for fuck’s sake.
I can’t take it anymore. I bolt off the couch and head for the front door, throwing it open to barge onto the porch.
All I see is Carmel’s surprised face, her phone halfway to her ear. In the bushes in front of the window there’s nothing but shadows.
“What’s going on?” Carmel asks as I plunge down the steps and beat my way through the brush, branches scratching my arms.
“Give me your phone!”
“What?” Carmel’s voice is scared. My mom’s out here now too, all three of them frightened by they don’t know what.
“Just throw it here,” I shout, and she does. I press a button and point it at the ground, using the bluish light to scour the dirt for footprints or disturbances. There’s nothing.
“What? What is it?” Thomas squeaks.
“Nothing,” I say loudly, but it isn’t nothing. Whether it’s all in my head or not, it isn’t nothing. And when I reach back for the athame in my pocket, it feels cold as ice.
* * *
Ten minutes later, my mom sets a steaming mug down in front of me at the kitchen table. I pick it up and sniff at it.
“It’s not a potion; it’s just tea,” she says, exasperated. “Decaffeinated.”
“Thanks,” I say, and sip it. No caffeine and no sugar either. I don’t know what about bitter brown water is supposed to be soothing. But I make a show of sighing and settling farther into my chair.
Thomas and Carmel keep exchanging these furtive glances, and my mom picks up on it.
“What?” she asks. “What do you know?”
Carmel looks at me for permission, and when I don’t say anything, she tells my mom what happened at the mall, with Anna’s look-alike dress.
“Honestly, Cas, you’ve been acting sort of weird since Grand Marais last week.”
My mom leans up against the counter. “Cas? What’s going on? And why didn’t you tell me about the mall?”
“Because I like to keep my crazy all to myself?” Obviously deflection isn’t going to work. They just keep on staring. Waiting and staring. “It’s just—I thought I saw Anna, that’s all.” I take another sip of tea. “And in Grand Marais, in the hayloft—I thought I heard her laugh.” I shake my head. “It feels like—I don’t know what it feels like. Like being haunted, I guess.”
Above the rim of my mug, the expression that ripples through the room is plain. They think I’m hallucinating. They pity me. “Poor Cas” is written all over their faces, hanging on their cheeks like ten-pound weights.
“The athame sees her too,” I add, and that gets their attention.
“Maybe we should call Gideon in the morning,” my mom suggests. I nod. But he’ll probably think the same thing. Still, he is the closest thing I have to an athame expert.
The table falls quiet. They’re skeptical and I don’t blame them. After all, this is what I’ve wanted, since An
na’s been gone.
How many times have I imagined her, sitting beside me? Her voice has rung around in my head a million times, some lame attempt to have the conversations we missed out on. Sometimes I pretend that we found another way to defeat the Obeahman; one that didn’t mess everything up.
“Do you think it’s possible?” Thomas asks. “I mean, is it even possible?”
“Things don’t cross over,” I reply. “Gideon says things don’t cross over. They can’t. But it feels—like she’s calling to me. I just can’t hear what she wants.”
“This is so messed up,” Carmel whispers. “What are you going to do?” She looks at me, then at Thomas and my mom. “What are we going to do?”
“I have to find out if it’s real,” I say. “Or if I’m officially nuts. And if it’s real, I have to find out what she wants. What she needs. We all owe her that.”
“Don’t do anything yet,” my mom says. “Not until we talk to Gideon. Not until we have more time to figure it out. I don’t like this.”
“I don’t like it either,” Carmel says.
I look at Thomas.
“I don’t know whether to like it or not like it.” He shrugs. “I mean, Anna was our friend, sort of. I can’t believe that she’d want to hurt us, or even scare us. It’s the athame that bothers me. That the athame responds. We should probably talk to Morfran too.”
They all stare at me. “Okay,” I say. “Okay, we’ll wait.” But not for too long.
CHAPTER FIVE
After a night of crappy sleep, I’m sitting at Thomas’s kitchen table with Carmel, watching Thomas and Morfran cook breakfast. They move smoothly through their domestic routine, shuffling between the table and stove, still only half-awake. Morfran’s wearing a plaid, flannel bathrobe and he looks ridiculous. You’d never guess that underneath that bathrobe is one of the strongest voodoo men in North America. He’s sort of like his grandson that way.
There’s a sizzle as meat hits a hot skillet. Morfran has this habit of making ring bologna for breakfast. It’s sort of weird, yet actually pretty good. This morning I’ve got no appetite, but Thomas slides a big pile of ring bologna and scrambled eggs in front of me, so I cut it up and push it around to make it look like I ate. Across the table, Carmel is doing pretty much the same thing.
After Morfran dishes up his own plate, he slides a section of bologna into Stella’s dog bowl. The black Lab mix comes barreling into the kitchen like she hasn’t eaten in years. Morfran pats her fat rump and leans against the counter with his plate, watching us from behind his specs.
“Mighty early for a junior Ghostbuster meeting,” he says. “Must be dire.”
“It’s not dire,” Thomas mutters. Morfran snorts through his eggs.
“You didn’t just wake up and come over for the sausage,” he says, and that’s another thing. He calls the ring bologna “sausage.”
“The orange juice is delicious.” Carmel smiles.
“I buy pulp-free. Now spit it out. I’ve got to get to the shop.” He’s looking right at me when he says it.
I had this whole line of questioning worked out in my head. Instead I blurt, “We need to find out what happened to Anna.” It must be the tenth time I’ve told him so, and he’s as sick of hearing it as I am of saying it. But it has to get through. We need his help, and he hasn’t offered any since the night that we fought the Obeahman, when he worked countercurses to keep me alive after I’d been Obeahed and helped Thomas with the protection spells at Anna’s house.
“How’s the sausage?” he asks.
“Fine. I’m not hungry. And I’m not going to stop asking.”
His eyes drift to my backpack. I never take the athame out when Morfran’s around. The way that he looks at it when I do tells me it’s unwelcome.
Thomas clears his throat. “Tell him about Marie La Pointe.”
“Who’s Marie La Pointe?” I ask, while Morfran gives Thomas a glare that says he might be grounded later.
“She’s…” Thomas hesitates under his grandfather’s stare, but I win out this time. “She’s a voodooienne in Jamaica. Morfran’s been talking to her about … your situation.”
“What about my situation?”
“About the Obeahman, mostly. The fact that he was an eater of flesh, that he could ingest power and essence even after death; I mean, flesh-eating in itself is rare. What the Obeahman became after he died, by eating your father, linking himself to the athame, feeding off it, that makes him almost a fricking unicorn.”
“Thomas,” Morfran snaps. “Will you shut your trap?” He shakes his head and mutters “unicorn” under his breath. “What that ghost did was take an ancient craft and twist it into something unnatural.”
“I didn’t mean—” Thomas starts, but I cut him off.
“What did your friend say?” I ask. “Marie La Pointe. Did you ask her about Anna?”
“No,” he says. “I asked her about Obeah. I asked her if the tie between the Obeahman and the knife was severed, if it could be severed.”
There are prickles on the back of my neck even though we’ve been over this before. “What did she say?”
“She said that it could. She said that it was. She said that it will be.”
“Will be?” Carmel says loudly, her fork ringing off her plate. “What the hell does that mean?”
Morfran shrugs and feeds Stella a piece of bologna off his fork when she paws his knee.
“Did she say anything else?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he replies. “She said what I’ve been trying to tell you for months. Stop poking your nose where you shouldn’t be poking it. Before you make yourself an enemy that cuts your nose off.”
“She threatened me?”
“It wasn’t a threat. It was advice. There are some secrets in this world, kid, that people will kill to keep.”
“What people?”
He turns, rinses his empty plate in the sink, and loads it into the dishwasher. “Wrong question. You should be asking what secrets. What power.”
At the table, we make frustrated faces and Thomas mimes a scream and a motion that I guess is him shaking Morfran silly. Always with the cryptic. Always with the riddles. It drives us nuts.
“Something’s happening with the athame,” I say, hoping that if I’m direct often enough, it’ll start to rub off. “I don’t know what it is. I’m seeing Anna, and hearing her. Maybe because I’m looking, and the athame is seeking her out. Maybe because she’s looking for me. Maybe both.”
“Maybe more than that,” Morfran says, turning around. He wipes his hands on the dish towel and eyeballs me in that way that makes it feel like I’m just a skeleton and a blade. “That thing in your pocket doesn’t answer to the Obeahman anymore. But what does it answer to?”
“Me,” I say. “It was made to answer to me. To my line.”
“Maybe,” he replies. “Or was your line made to answer to it? The longer I talk to you the more my head fills up with wind. There’s more than one thing going on here; I can feel it, like a thunderstorm. And so should you.” He nods his chin toward his grandson. “And you too, Thomas. I didn’t raise you to be off the ball.”
Beside me, Thomas straightens up and looks at me quickly like I’m a page he’s been caught not reading.
“Can you not be creepy this early?” Carmel asks. “I don’t like any of this. I mean, what should we do?”
“Melt that knife down to scrap and bury it,” he says, clapping his palm against his knee for the black Lab to follow him back to his bedroom. “But you’re never going to do that.” On his way out of the kitchen he pauses and takes a deep breath. “Listen, kid,” he says, looking at the floor. “The Obeahman was the most twisted, hungry thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across. Anna dragged him out of the world. Sometimes your purpose is fulfilled. You need to let her rest.”
* * *
“Well that was a bust,” Carmel says on the drive in to school. “What did Gideon say this morning?”
?
??He didn’t answer. I left a message,” I reply. Carmel goes on a bit behind the wheel, about how she doesn’t like what Morfran said and something about having the willies, but I’ve only got half an ear on her. The other one’s on Thomas, who I think is still trying to hone in on the vibe Morfran got off the athame. From the look of near constipation on his face, I don’t think he’s having much luck.
“Let’s just get through the day,” Carmel says. “Another day of skating through the end of the year, and we’ll figure all this out later. Maybe we can hit up a different ghost this weekend.” She shakes her head. “Or maybe we should lay off everything for awhile. Until we hear from Gideon at least. Shit. I was supposed to do an inventory of the decorations for the hall before the Graduation Committee meeting.”
“You’re not even graduating this year.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not on the committee.” She huffs. “So. Is that what we’re going to do? Lay off and wait for Gideon?”
“Or for Anna to come knocking again,” Thomas says, and Carmel gives him a look.
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s what we should do.”
* * *
How did I get here? It wasn’t a conscious choice. At least it doesn’t feel that way. When Carmel and Thomas dropped me at home after school, the plan was to eat two servings of my mom’s spaghetti and meatballs and vegetate in front of the TV. So what am I doing in my mom’s car, four hours and I don’t know how many miles of highway behind me, staring at dormant smokestacks jutting up against a darkening sky?
This is something from the recesses of my memory, something that Daisy Bristol told me about only a month after Anna’s house imploded with her inside it. I’d listened with half an ear. I was in no condition to hunt, no condition to do much of anything but walk around with a hole in my center, wondering. Constantly wondering. The only reason I answered the phone was because it was Daisy, my loyal tipster from New Orleans, and because he had been the one to lead me to Anna in the first place.
“It’s a place in Duluth, Minnesota. A factory called Dutch Ironworks. They’ve been finding the remains of bums on and off for the last decade or so,” Daisy said. “They find them in batches, but I think that’s only because they rarely look. It takes someone reporting a broken window, or a bunch of drunk kids partying in the lot, before anyone does a walk-through. The factory’s been closed down since sometime in the sixties.”