Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [92]
“Cross the threshold, beauty girl,” he says.
“You cross mine,” she says back. She’s straining against the barrier spell; her head must feel almost as tight as mine. A thin rivulet of black blood dribbles from her nose and over her lips. “Take the knife and come, coward,” Anna shouts. “Come out and let me off this leash!”
He’s seething. His eyes are on her and his teeth grind. “Your blood on my blade, or the boy will join us by morning.”
I try to tighten my grip on the knife. Only I can’t feel my hand. Anna is shouting something else, but I don’t know what it is. My ears feel stuffed with cotton. I can’t hear anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The sensation is something like staying underwater for too long. I’ve foolishly used up all my oxygen, and even though I know the surface is just a few kicks away, I can barely get there through the suffocating panic. But my eyes open on a blurry world, and I take that first breath. I don’t know if I’m gasping. It feels like I am.
The face I see upon waking is Morfran’s, and it’s far too close. I instinctively try to sink farther into whatever it is that I’m lying on in order to keep that mossy beard at a safer distance. His mouth is moving but no sound is coming out. It’s completely silent, not even a buzz or a ringing. My ears haven’t come back online yet.
Morfran has stepped back, thank god, and is talking to my mom. Then suddenly there’s Anna, floating into view, settling down beside me on the floor. I try to turn my head to follow. She sweeps her fingers along my forehead but doesn’t say anything. There’s relief tugging at the edges of her lips.
My hearing comes back strangely. At first I can hear muffled noises, and then when they finally become clear, they don’t make sense. I think my brain figured it had been torn apart, and now it’s putting out its feelers slowly, grasping at nerve endings and shouting across synapse gaps, glad to find everything still there.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my brain-tentacle having finally located my tongue.
“Jesus, man, I thought you were toast,” Thomas exclaims, appearing at the side of what I can see now is the same antique sofa that they put me on when I got knocked out that first night at Anna’s. I’m in Morfran’s shop.
“When they brought you in…” Thomas says. He doesn’t finish, but I know what he means. I put my hand on his shoulder and give it a shake.
“I’m fine,” I say, and sit up a little with only a minimal struggle. “I’ve been in worse scrapes.”
Standing on the other side of his room with his back to all of us, acting like he’s got a lot more interesting things to be doing, Morfran gives a snort.
“Not likely.” He turns around. His wire specs have slid most of the way down his nose. “And you’re not out of this ‘scrape’ yet. You been Obeahed.”
Thomas, Carmel, and I all do that thing you do when someone is speaking another language: we look around at each other and then say, “Huh?”
“Obeahed, boy,” Morfran snaps. “West Indian voodoo magic. You’re just lucky that I spent six years on Anguilla, with Julian Baptiste. Now that was a real Obeahman.”
I stretch my limbs and sit up straighter. Except for a little tenderness in my back and side, plus the swimmy head stuff, I feel fine.
“I’ve been Obeahed by an Obeahman? Is this like how the Smurfs say they smurfing smurfed all the time?”
“Don’t joke, Cassio.”
It’s my mother. She looks awful. She’s been crying. I hate that.
“I still don’t know how he got into the house,” she says. “We were always so careful. And the barrier spell was working. It worked on Anna.”
“It was a great spell, Mrs. Lowood,” Anna responds gently. “I could never have crossed that threshold. No matter how much I would have liked to.” When she says this last part, her irises get three shades darker.
“What happened? What happened after I blacked out, or