Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [26]
“I wanted you here quickly,” he explains with a shrug. “I knew Daisy, and Daisy knew you, personal. He said you didn’t like to be bothered. But I still wanted to keep tabs. Ghost killer or not, you’re just a kid.”
“Okay,” I say. “But what’s the rush? Hasn’t Anna been here for decades?”
Morfran leans against the glass counter and shakes his head. “Something’s changing with Anna. She’s angrier these days. I’m linked to the dead—more so than you are in many ways. I see them, and I feel them, thinking, thinking about what they want. It’s been that way since—”
He shrugs. There’s a story there. But it’s probably his best story, and he doesn’t want to give it away so early on.
He rubs his temples. “I can feel it when she kills. Every time some unfortunate stumbles into her house. It used to be nothing more than an itch between my shoulder blades. These days it’s a full-on twist of my insides. Way things used to be, she wouldn’t have even come out for you. She’s long dead and no fool, knows the difference between easy prey and trust fund babies. But she’s getting sloppy. She’s going to get herself on the front-page news. And you and I both know that some things are better kept a secret.”
He sits down in a wingback chair and claps his hand against his knee. I hear the clicking of dog toenails on the floor and pretty soon a fat black Lab with a graying nose waddles in to put its head on his lap.
I think back to the events of the night before. She was nothing like I expected, though now that I’ve seen her I have a hard time remembering what I did expect. Maybe I thought she’d be a sad, frightened girl who killed out of fear and misery. I thought she’d trundle down the stairs in a white dress with a dark stain at the collar. I thought she would have two smiles, one on her face and one on her neck, wet and red. I thought she would ask me why I was in her house, and then come at me with razored little teeth.
Instead I find a ghost with the strength of a storm, black eyes, and pale hands, not a dead person at all but a dead goddess. Persephone back from Hades, or Hecate half-decayed.
The thought makes me shiver a little, but I choose to blame the blood loss.
“What are you going to do now?” Morfran asks.
I look down at the melting bag of ice, tinged pink with my rehydrated blood. Item number one is to go home and shower, and try to keep my mom from freaking out and slathering me with more rosemary oil.
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