Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [9]
But somewhere out there is one that matters. Somewhere out there is the one that I came for, one who is strong enough to squeeze the breath out of living throats.
I think of her again. Anna. Anna Dressed in Blood. I wonder what tricks she’ll try. I wonder if she’ll be clever. Will she float? Will she laugh or scream?
How will she try to kill me?
CHAPTER FOUR
“Would you rather be a Trojan or a tiger?”
My mother asks this while she’s standing over the griddle making us cornmeal pancakes. It’s the last day to register me for high school before it starts tomorrow. I know that she meant to do it sooner, but she’s been busy forming relationships with a number of downtown merchants, trying to get them to advertise her fortune-telling business and seeing if they’ll carry her occult supplies. There’s apparently a candle maker just outside of town that has agreed to infuse her product with a specific blend of oils, sort of a candle-spell in a box. They’d sell these custom creations at shops around town, and Mom would also ship them to her phone clientele.
“What kind of a question is that? Do we have any jam?”
“Strawberry or something called Saskatoon, which looks like blueberry.”
I make a sour face. “I’ll take the strawberry.”
“You should live dangerously. Try the Saskatoon.”
“I live dangerously enough. Now what’s this about condoms or tigers?”
She sets a plate of pancakes and toast down in front of me, each topped with a pile of what I desperately hope is strawberry jam.
“Behave yourself, kiddo. They’re the school mascots. Do you want to go to Sir Winston Churchill or Westgate Collegiate? Apparently we’re close enough for both.”
I sigh. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take my classes and pass my tests, and then I’ll transfer out, just like always. I’m here to kill Anna. But I should make a show of caring, to please my mom.
“Dad would want me to be a Trojan,” I say quietly, and she pauses for just a second over the griddle before sliding the last pancake onto her plate.
“I’ll go over to Winston Churchill then,” she says. What luck. I chose the douche-y sounding one. But like I said, it doesn’t matter. I’m here for one thing, something that fell into my lap while I was still fruitlessly casting about for the County 12 Hiker.
It came, charmingly, in the mail. My name and address on a coffee-stained envelope, and inside just one scrap of paper with Anna’s name on it. It was written in blood. I get these tips from all over the country, all over the world. There are not many people who can do what I do, but there are a multitude of people who want me to do it, and they seek me out, asking those who are in the know and following my trail. We move a lot but I’m easy enough to find if they look. Mom makes a website announcement whenever we relocate, and we always tell a few of my father’s oldest friends where we’re headed. Every month, like clockwork, a stack of ghosts flies across my metaphorical desk: an e-mail about people going missing in a Satanic church in northern Italy, a newspaper clipping of mysterious animal sacrifices near an Ojibwe burial mound. I trust only a few sources. Most are my father’s contacts, elders in the coven he was a member of in college, or scholars he met on his travels and through his reputation. They’re the ones I can trust not to send me on wild-goose chases. They do their homework.
But, over the years, I’ve developed a few contacts of my own. When I looked down at the scrawling red letters, cut across the paper like scabbed-over claw marks, I knew that it had to be a tip from Rudy Bristol. The theatrics of it. The gothic romance of the yellowed parchment. Like I was supposed to believe the ghost actually did it herself,