Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [45]
“Having no choice doesn’t seem fair,” she says, seeming to read my mind. “But having all of them isn’t really easier. When I was alive, I could never decide what I wanted to do, what I wanted to become. I loved to take pictures; I wanted to take pictures for a newspaper. I loved to cook; I wanted to move to Vancouver and open a restaurant. I had a million different dreams but none of them was stronger than the rest. In the end they probably would have paralyzed me. I would have ended up here, running the boarding house.”
“I don’t believe that.” She seems like such a force, this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she’d had the chance.
“I honestly don’t remember,” she sighs. “I don’t think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp.” She clasps her hands comically to her chest and breathes in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. “I probably didn’t. For all my dreams and fancies, I don’t recall being … what would you call it? Perky.”
I smile and she does too, then tucks her hair behind her ear in a gesture that is so alive and human that it makes me forget what I was going to say.
“What are we doing?” I ask. “You’re trying to get me to not kill you, aren’t you?”
Anna crosses her arms. “Considering that you can’t kill me, I think that would be a wasted effort.”
I laugh. “You’re too confident.”
“Am I? I know that what you’ve shown me aren’t your best moves, Cas. I can feel the tension in your blade from holding back. How many times have you done this? How many times have you fought and won?”
“Twenty-two in the last three years.” I say it with pride. It’s more than my father ever did in the same amount of time. I’m what you might call an overachiever. I wanted to be better than he was. Faster. Sharper. Because I didn’t want to end up like he ended up.
Without my knife I’m nothing special, just a regular seventeen-year-old with an average build, maybe a bit on the skinny side. But with the athame in my hand you’d think I was a triple black belt or something. My moves are sure, strong, and quick. She’s right when she says she hasn’t seen my best, and I don’t know why that is.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Anna. You know that, don’t you? It’s nothing personal.”
“Just like I didn’t want to kill all of those people rotting in my basement.” She smiles ruefully.
So they were real. “What happened to you?” I ask. “What makes you do this?”
“None of your business,” she replies.
“If you tell me…” I start but don’t finish. If she tells me, I can figure her out. And once I figure her out, I can kill her.
Everything is becoming more complicated. This questioning girl and that wordless black monster are one and the same. It isn’t fair. When I slide my knife through her, will I cut them apart? Will Anna go to one place and it to another? Or will Anna get sucked away to whatever void the rest go to?
I thought I’d put these thoughts out of my mind a long time ago. My father always told me that it wasn’t our place to judge, that we were only the instrument. Our task was to send them away from the living. His eyes had been so certain when he’d said it. Why don’t I have that kind of certainty?
I lift my hand slowly to touch that cold face, to graze my fingers along her cheek, and am surprised to find it soft, not made of marble. She stands paralyzed, then hesitantly lifts her hand to rest on mine.
The spell is so strong that when the door opens and Carmel comes through it, neither of us moves until she says my name.
“Cas? What are you doing?”
“Carmel,” I blurt, and there she is, her figure framed in the open door. She’s got her hand on the knob and it looks like she’s shaking. She takes another tentative step into the house.
“Carmel, don’t move,” I say, but she’s staring at Anna, who backs away from me, grimacing and grabbing hold of her head.
“Is that her? Is that what killed Mike?”
Stupid girl, she’s coming farther into the house. Anna is retreating as fast