Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [50]
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“Back to Anna’s,” I say. He turns sort of green. “I need to figure this ritual out or a week from now I’ll be staring at your severed head and Carmel’s internal organs.” Thomas turns even greener, and I clap him on the back.
I glance back at Morfran. He’s eyeballing us over his coffee mug. So voodooists channel power. He’s an interesting guy. And he’s given me way too much to think about to sleep.
* * *
On the drive over, the high from the events of last night starts to wear off. My eyes feel like sandpaper, and my head is lolling, even after downing that cup of paint thinner that Morfran called coffee. Thomas is quiet all the way to Anna’s. He’s probably still thinking about the feel of Carmel’s hand on his arm. If life were fair, Carmel would turn around and look into his eyes, see that he’s her willing slave, and be grateful. She’d lift him up and he wouldn’t be a slave anymore, he’d just be Thomas, and they’d be glad to have each other. But life isn’t fair. She’ll probably end up with Will, or some other jock, and Thomas will suffer quietly.
“I don’t want you anywhere near the house,” I say to snap him out of it and make sure he doesn’t miss the turn. “You can hang in the car, or follow me up the driveway. But she’s probably unstable after this morning, so you should stay off the porch.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he snorts.
When we pull into the driveway, he elects to stay in the car. I make my way up alone. When I open the front door, I look down to make sure I’m stepping into the foyer and not about to fall face-first into a boatload of dead bodies.
“Anna?” I call. “Anna? Are you all right?”
“That’s a silly question.”
She’s just come out of a room at the top of the stairs. She’s leaning against the rail, not the dark goddess, but the girl.
“I’m dead. I can’t be all right any more than I can be not all right.”
Her eyes are downcast. She’s lonely, and guilty, and trapped. She’s feeling sorry for herself, and I can’t say that I blame her.
“I didn’t mean for anything like that to happen,” I say honestly, and take a step toward the staircase. “I wouldn’t have put you in that situation. She followed me.”
“Is she all right?” Anna asks in a curiously high voice.
“She’s fine.”
“Good. I thought I might have bruised her. And she has such a pretty face.”
Anna isn’t looking at me. She’s fiddling with the wood of the railing. She’s trying to get me to say something, but I don’t know what it is.
“I need you to tell me what happened to you. I need you to tell me how you died.”
“Why do you want to make me remember that?” she asks softly.
“Because I need to understand you. I need to know why you’re so strong.” I start thinking out loud. “From what I know of it, your murder wasn’t that strange or horrific. It wasn’t even that brutal. So I can’t figure out why you are the way you are. There has to be something…” When I stop, Anna is staring at me with wide, disgusted eyes. “What?”
“I’m just starting to regret that I didn’t kill you,” she says. It takes my sleep-deprived brain a minute to understand, but then I feel like a total ass. I’ve been around too much death. I’ve seen so much sick, twisted shit that it rolls off my tongue like nursery rhymes.
“How much do you know,” she asks, “about what happened to me?”
Her voice is softer, almost subdued. Talking about murder, spitting out facts is something I grew up around. Only now I don’t know how to do it. With Anna standing right in front of me, it’s more than just words or pictures in a book. When I finally spit it out, I do it quickly and all at once, like pulling off a Band-Aid.
“I know that you were murdered in 1958, when you were sixteen. Someone cut your throat. You were on your way to a school dance.”
A small smile plays on her lips but doesn’t take hold. “I really wanted to go,” she says quietly. “It was going to be my last one. My first and last.” She looks down at herself and holds out the hem of her skirt. “This was my dress.”