Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [52]
“Anna?”
Her arm shoots out to keep me back. “It’s nothing.”
I peer closer. “That wasn’t nothing. You remembered something, didn’t you? What is it? Tell me!”
“No, I—it wasn’t anything. I don’t know.” She touches her temple. “I don’t know what that was.”
This isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to be damned near impossible if I don’t get her cooperation. A heavy, hopeless feeling is creeping into my exhausted limbs. It feels like my muscles are starting to atrophy, and I don’t have that much muscle to begin with.
“Please, Anna,” I say. “I need your help. I need you to let us do the spell. I need you to let other people in here with me.”
“No,” she says. “No spells! And no people! You know what would happen. I can’t control it.”
“You can control it for me. You can do it for them too.”
“I don’t know why I don’t have to kill you. And by the way, isn’t that enough? Why are you asking for more favors?”
“Anna, please. I need at least Thomas, and probably Carmel, the girl you met this morning.”
She looks down at her toes. She’s sad, I know she’s sad, but Morfran’s stupid “less than a week” speech is ringing in my ears, and I want this over with. I can’t let Anna stay for another month, possibly collecting more people for her basement. It doesn’t matter that I like talking to her. It doesn’t matter that I like her. It doesn’t matter that what happened to her wasn’t fair.
“I wish you would leave,” she says softly, and when she looks up I see that she’s almost crying, and she’s looking over my shoulder at the door or maybe out the window.
“You know I can’t,” I say, mirroring her words from moments ago.
“You make me want things that I can’t have.”
Before I can figure out what she means, she sinks through the steps, down, deep into the basement where she knows I won’t follow.
* * *
Gideon calls just after Thomas drops me off at my house.
“Good morning, Theseus. Sorry to wake you so early on a Sunday.”
“I’ve been up for hours, Gideon. Already hard at work.” Across the Atlantic, he is smirking at me. As I walk into the house, I nod good morning to my mother, who is chasing Tybalt down the stairs and hissing that rats aren’t good for him.
“What a shame,” Gideon chuckles. “I’ve been waiting around to call you for hours, trying to let you get some rest. What a pain that was. It’s nearly four in the afternoon here, you know. But I think I’ve got the essence of that spell for you.”
“I don’t know if it’ll matter. I was going to call you later. There’s a problem.”
“What sort?”
“The sort that no one can get into the house but me, and I’m no witch.” I tell him a little more about what’s happened, for some reason leaving out the fact that I’ve been having long talks with Anna at night. On the other end I hear him cluck his tongue. I’m sure he’s rubbing his chin and cleaning his glasses too.
“You’ve been completely unable to subdue her?” he asks finally.
“Completely. She’s Bruce Lee, the Hulk, and Neo from The Matrix all rolled into one.”
“Yes. Thank you for the entirely incomprehensible pop-culture references.”
I smile. He knows perfectly well who Bruce Lee is, at least.
“But the fact remains that you must do the spell. Something about the way this girl died is imbuing her with terrible power. It’s just a matter of finding secrets. I remember a ghost that gave your father some trouble in 1985. For some reason it was able to kill without ever being corporeal. It was only after three séances and a trip to a Satanic church in Italy that we discovered that the only thing allowing it to remain on the earthly plane was a spell placed on a rather ordinary stone chalice. Your father broke it and just like that, no more ghost. It will be the same for you.”
My father told me that story once, and I remember it being much more complicated than that. But I let it go. He’s right anyway. Every ghost has its own methods, its own bag of tricks. They have different drives