Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [94]
The accusations make me want to be a kid again. Why isn’t my mommy calling them big fat liars? The seriously, completely wrong pants-on-fire kind? But my mother is standing silent, listening to all of this, and not disagreeing.
“You’re saying he’s been with me the whole time.” I feel sick.
“I’m saying that the athame is just like the stuff we take into this shop. He’s been with it.” Morfran looks somberly at Anna. “And now he wants her.”
“Why doesn’t he do it himself?” I ask wearily. “He’s an eater of flesh, right? Why does he need my help?”
“Because I’m not flesh,” Anna says. “If I were I’d be rotten.”
“Bluntly put,” Carmel observes. “But she’s right. If ghosts were actually flesh they’d be more like zombies, wouldn’t they?”
I start to waver by Anna’s side. The room is spinning slightly, and I feel her arm come around my waist.
“What does any of this matter, right now?” Anna asks. “There’s something to be done. Can’t this discussion wait?”
She says that for my benefit. There’s an edge of protection in her voice. I look at her gratefully, standing by my side in her hopeful white dress. She’s pale and slender, but no one could mistake her for weak. To this Obeahman, she must look like the feast of the century. He wants her to be his big retirement score.
“I’m going to kill him,” I say.
“You’re going to have to,” Morfran says. “If you want to stay alive yourself.”
That doesn’t sound good. “What are you talking about?”
“Obeah is not my specialty. It’d take more than six years to do that, Julian Baptiste or no. But even if I was, I can’t take that hex off of you. I can only counter it, and buy you time. But not much. You’ll be dead by dawn, unless you do what he wants. Or unless you kill him.”
Beside me, Anna tenses, and my mom puts her hand to her mouth and starts to cry.
Dead by dawn. Okay, then. I don’t feel anything, not yet, except for a low, weary hum all through my body.
“What’s going to happen to me, exactly?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Morfran replies. “It could look like natural, human death, or it could take the form of poisoning. Either way I think you can expect some of your organs to start shutting down in the next few hours. Unless we kill him, or you kill her.” He nods at Anna and she squeezes my hand.
“Don’t even think about it,” I say to her. “I’m not going to do what he wants. And this suicidal ghost schtick is wearing a little thin.”
She lifts her chin. “I wasn’t going to suggest that,” she says. “If you killed me, it would only make him stronger, and then he would come back and kill you anyway.”
“So what do we do?” Thomas asks.
I don’t particularly like being a leader. I don’t have much practice at it, and I’m much more comfortable risking just my own skin. But this is it. There’s no time for excuses or second-guessing. In the thousand ways I pictured this going down, I could never have imagined it like this. Still, it’s nice that I’m not fighting alone.
I look at Anna.
“We fight on our own turf,” I say. “And we pull a rope-a-dope.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A more ramshackle operation I’ve never seen. We’re driving in a nervous little caravan, stuffed into beat-up cars that leave dark exhaust trails, wondering if we’re ready to do whatever it is that we’re going to do. I haven’t explained the rope-a-dope yet. But I think that Morfran and Thomas at least suspect what it is.
The light is starting to get golden, coming at us sideways and getting ready to turn sunset colored. Getting everything into the cars took forever—we have half of the occult merchandise from the shop packed into Thomas’s Tempo and Morfran’s Chevy pickup. I keep thinking of nomadic native tribes, and how they could pack up an entire civilization in an hour to follow some buffalo. When did human beings start acquiring so much crap?
When we get to Anna’s house, we start to unload, lugging as much as we can. This is where I meant when I said “our own turf.