Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [48]
Carmel blinks. “How did you know that?”
“You shouldn’t do that,” I warn Thomas. “It makes people uncomfortable. Invasion of privacy, you know.”
“I know,” he says. “I can’t do it very often,” he adds to Carmel. “Usually only when people are having strong or violent thoughts, or keep thinking of the same thing over and over.” He smiles. “In your case, all three.”
“You can read minds?” she asks incredulously.
“Sit down, Carmel,” I say.
“I don’t feel like it,” she says. “I’m learning so many interesting things about Thunder Bay these days.” Her arms cross over her chest. “You can read minds, there’s something up there in that house killing my ex-boyfriends, and you—”
“Kill ghosts,” I finish for her. “With this.” I pull out my athame and set it on the table. “What else did Thomas tell you?”
“Just that your father did it too,” she said. “I guessed that it killed him.”
I give Thomas the eye.
“I’m sorry,” he says helplessly.
“It’s okay. You’ve got it bad. I know.” I smirk and he looks at me desperately. As if Carmel doesn’t know already. She’d have to be blind.
I sigh. “So now what? Can I possibly tell you to go home and forget about this? Is there any way that I can avoid us forming some peppy group of—” Before my mouth can finish, I lean forward and groan into my hands. Carmel gets it first, and laughs.
“A peppy group of ghostbusters?” she asks.
“I get to be Peter Venkman,” says Thomas.
“Nobody gets to be anybody,” I snap. “We are not ghostbusters. I’ve got the knife, and I kill the ghosts, and I can’t be tripping over you the whole time. Besides, it’s obvious that I would be Peter Venkman.” I look sharply at Thomas. “You would be Egon.”
“Wait a minute,” says Carmel. “You don’t get to call the shots. Mike was my friend, sort of.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to help. This isn’t about revenge.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about … stopping her.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly done a great job of that. And from what I saw, it didn’t even look like you were trying.” Carmel has her eyebrow raised at me. The look is giving me some kind of hot feeling in my cheeks. Holy shit, I’m blushing.
“This is stupid,” I blurt. “She’s tough, okay? But I have a plan.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says, rising to my defense. “Cas has it all worked out. I’ve already got the rocks from the lake. They’re charging under the moon until it wanes. The chicken feet are on backorder.”
Talking about the spell makes me uneasy for some reason, like there’s something that I’m not putting together. Something that I’ve overlooked.
Someone comes through the door without knocking. I barely notice, because that makes me feel like I’ve overlooked something too. After a few seconds of prodding my brain, I glance up and see Will Rosenberg.
He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. His breathing is heavy and his chin is lolling toward his chest. I wonder if he’s been drinking. There are dirt and oil stains on his jeans. The poor kid’s taking it hard. He’s staring at my knife on the table, so I reach up and take it, then slide it into my back pocket.
“I knew there was something weird about you,” he says. The scent of his breath is sixty percent beer. “This is all because of you, somehow, isn’t it? Ever since you came here, something’s been wrong. Mike knew it. That’s why he didn’t want you hanging around Carmel.”
“Mike didn’t know anything,” I say calmly. “What happened to him was an accident.”
“Murder is no accident,” Will mutters. “Stop lying to me. Whatever you’re doing, I want in.”
I groan. Nothing is going right. Morfran comes back into the kitchen and ignores all of us, instead staring into his coffee like it’s super interesting.
“Circle’s getting bigger,” is all he says, and the problem that I couldn’t think of snaps into place.
“Shit,” I say. My head falls back so I’m looking at the ceiling.
“What?” Thomas asks. “What’s wrong?”
“The spell,” I reply. “The circle. We’ve got to be in the house to cast it.”
“Yeah, so?” Thomas says. Carmel gets it right