Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [64]
A figure moves through the room, a girl in a dark brown skirt and plain gray blouse. She’s carrying schoolbooks. Her hair is tied up in a long, brown ponytail, secured with blue ribbon. When she turns at a sound on the staircase, I see her face. It’s Anna.
Seeing her alive is indescribable. I thought once that there couldn’t be much left of the living girl inside of what Anna is now, but I was wrong. As she looks up at the man on the staircase, her eyes are familiar. They’re hard and knowing. They’re irritated. I know without looking that this is the man she told me about—the man who was going to marry her mother.
“And what did we learn in school today, dear Anna?” His accent is so strong that I can barely make out the words. He walks down the stairs, and his steps are infuriating—lazy and confident and too full of their own power. There’s a slight limp to his stride, but he’s not really using the wooden cane he’s carrying. When he walks around her, I’m reminded of a shark circling. Anna’s jaw tightens.
His hand comes up over her shoulder and he traces a finger across the cover of her book. “More things that you don’t need.”
“Mama wishes for me to do well,” Anna replies. It’s the same voice I know, just with a stronger flavor of Finnish. She spins around. I can’t see, but I know she’s glaring at him.
“And so you will.” He smiles. He has an angular face and good teeth. There’s a five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, and he’s starting to go bald. He wears what’s left of his sandy blond hair slicked back. “Smart girl,” he whispers, lifting a finger to her face. She jerks away and runs up the stairs, but it doesn’t look like fleeing. It looks like attitude.
That’s my girl, I think, and then remember I’m in the circle. I wonder how much of my thoughts and feelings are running through Thomas’s mind. Inside the circle, I hear Anna’s dress dripping and sense her shudder as the scene progresses.
I keep my eyes on the man: Anna’s would-be stepfather. He’s smirking to himself, and when her door closes on the second floor, he reaches into his shirt and pulls out a bundle of white cloth. I don’t know what it is until he puts it to his nose. It’s the dress she sewed for the dance. The dress she died in.
Fucking pervert, Thomas thinks inside of our heads. I clench my fists. The urge to run at the man is overwhelming, even though I know I’m watching something that happened sixty years ago. I’m watching it like it’s playing on a projector. I can’t change any of it.
Time shifts ahead; the light changes. The lamps seem to get brighter and figures flash by in dark blurry clumps. I can hear things, muffled conversations and arguments. My senses struggle to keep up.
There’s a woman at the foot of the stairs. She’s wearing a severe black dress that looks like it must be scratchy as hell, and her hair is pulled back in a tight bun. She’s looking up at the second floor, so I can’t see her face. But I can see that she’s holding Anna’s white dress in one hand and shaking it up and down. In the other, she’s clutching a string of rosary beads.
I feel more than hear Thomas sniff. His cheeks twitch—he’s caught wind of something.
Power, he thinks. Power from the black.
I don’t know what he means. I don’t have time to wonder.
“Anna!” the woman shouts, and Anna appears, coming out from the hall at the top of the stairs.
“Yes, Mama?”
Her mother holds up the dress in her fist. “What is this?”
Anna seems stricken. Her hand flies to the rail. “Where did you get that? How did you find that?”
“It was in her room.” It’s him again, walking out of the kitchen. “I heard her say she was working on it. I found it for her own good.”
“Is it true?