Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

I want to hear her say just one word.

He swings his right fist; it slices the air inches from my right ear, hot enough to sting, and I catch the distinct smell of burnt hair. My burnt hair. There’s something Daisy said about the corpses … leathery bones and ash. Fuck. The corpses were fresh. The ghost just burns them up, dries them out, and leaves them. His face is a ruin of rage; the nose is gone and the nasal cavity scabbed over. His cheeks are as dry as used charcoal in places and wet with infection in others. I backpedal to stay clear of his blows. With his lips burned away, his teeth seem too big and his expression is a sick, constant grin. How many homeless people woke up to this face, right before they were cooked from the inside out?

I drop to the ground and kick, managing to drop him, but also singeing the shit out of my shins in the process. My jeans are fused to my skin in one spot. But there’s no time to be dainty about it; his fingers reach for me and I roll. The fabric rips loose, taking who knows how much skin with it.

The hell with this. He hasn’t made a peep. Who knows if he even has a tongue left, let alone whether Anna feels like speaking through it. I don’t know what I was thinking anyway. I was going to wait. I was going to be good.

My elbow cocks back, ready to slam the athame down into his ribs, but I hesitate. The knife could end up bonded to my skin literally if I don’t do it right. The hesitation lasts barely a second. Just long enough for the flutter of white to drift through the corner of my eye.

This can’t be. It must be someone else, some other spook who died in this godawful factory. But if it is, it didn’t die by burning. The girl walking silently across the dust-covered floor is pale as moonlight. Brown hair hangs down her back, falling over the stark white of her dress. I’d know that dress anywhere, whether it was too white to be real or made entirely of blood. It’s her. It’s Anna. Her bare feet make a soft, scraping sound as they pad across the concrete.

“Anna,” I say, and scramble up. “Are you all right?”

She can’t hear me. Or if she can, she doesn’t turn.

From the floor, the burning man grasps on to my shoe. I kick free and ignore both him and the smell of scorched rubber. Am I going insane? Hallucinating? She can’t really be here. It isn’t possible.

“Anna, it’s me. Can you hear me?” I walk toward her, but not too fast. If I go too fast she might disappear. If I go too fast I might see too much; I could pull her around and see that she has no face, that she’s a jerking corpse. She could turn to ash in my hands.

There is a gristly sound of meat twisting as the burning man crawls to his feet. I don’t care. What is she doing here? Why won’t she speak? She just keeps walking away, ignoring everything around her. Only … not everything. The dormant furnace is in the back of the room. A sudden sense of foreboding clamps down in my chest.

“Anna—” I scream; the burning man has me by the shoulder and it’s like someone just shoved an ember down my shirt. I twist away, and in the corner of my eye I think I see Anna pause, but I’m too busy ducking and slicing with the knife and kicking this ghost’s feet out from under him again to really tell.

The athame is hot. I have to toss it back and forth between my hands a second, just from that small, nonlethal slice that is now a narrow fissure of red-orange across his ribcage. I should just put him down now, jab the knife in and pull it out fast, maybe wrap the handle in my shirt first. Only I don’t. I just incapacitate him temporarily, and turn back.

Anna stands before the furnace, her fingers slipping lightly across the rough, black metal. I say her name again but she doesn’t turn. Instead she curls her fist around the handle and draws the broad door open.

Something in the air shifts. There’s a current, a ripple, and the dimensions skew in my vision. The opening of the furnace yawns wider and Anna crawls in. Soot stains her white dress, streaking across the fabric and across her pale skin like bruises. And there’s something wrong with her; something about the way she moves. It’s like she’s a marionette. When she squeezes through the opening, her arm and leg bend back unnaturally like a spider being sucked into a straw.

My mouth is dry. Behind me, the burning man drags himself onto his feet again. The sear in my shoulder makes me move away; I barely notice the limp brought on by the burns on my shins. Anna, get out of there. Look at me.

It’s like watching a dream unfold, some nightmare where I’m powerless to do anything, where my legs are made of lead and I can’t scream a warning no matter how hard I try. When the decades-dead furnace surges to life, sending flame spewing into its belly, I scream, loud and without words. But it doesn’t matter. Anna burns up behind the iron door. One of her pale hands, blistering and turning black, presses against the slats, like she’s changed her mind too late.

Heat and smoke drifts up from my shoulder as the burning man grasps my shirt and twists me around. His eyes bulge out of the dark mess of his face and his teeth gnash open and shut. My eyes flicker back to the furnace. There’s no feeling in my arms or legs. I can’t tell whether my heart is beating. Despite the burns that have to be forming on my shoulders, I’m frozen in place.

“End me,” the burning man hisses. I don’t think. I just shove the athame into his guts, letting go immediately but still scorching my palm. I back away as he falls jerking to the floor, and run up against an old conveyor belt, hanging on to it to keep from going down on my knees. For a long second, the room is filled with mingled screams as Anna burns and the ghost at my feet shrivels. He curls in on himself until what’s left looks barely human, charred and twisted.

When he stops moving, the air grows immediately cold. I take a deep breath and open my eyes; I don’t remember closing them. The room is silent. When I look at the furnace, it’s dormant and empty, and if I touched it, it would be cool, like Anna was never there at all.

They’ve given me something for the pain. A shot of something or other, and pills to take home for later. It would be nice if it would knock me right on my ass, if it made me sleep through the next week. But I think it’s going to be just enough to keep the throbbing down.

My mom is talking to the doctor while the nurse finishes applying ointment to my freshly and insanely painfully cleaned burns. I didn’t want to come to the hospital. I tried to convince my mom that a little calendula and a lavender potion would be enough, but she insisted. And now, truthfully, I’m pretty happy about having the shot. It was fun too, listening to her try to come up with the best explanation. Was it a kitchen accident? Maybe a campfire accident. She decided on the campfire, turning me into a klutz and saying I fell into the embers and basically rolled around in a panic. They’ll buy it. They always do.

There are second-degree burns on my shin and shoulders. The one on my hand, from the final blow of the athame, is pretty minor, first degree, nothing more serious than a bad sunburn. Still, a bad sunburn on the palm of your hand sucks a whole lot. I expect to be carrying around unopened cans of ice-cold soda for the next few days.

My mom comes back in with the doctor so they can start gauzing me up. She wavers between tears and consternation. I reach out and take her hand. She’ll never get used to this. It eats her up, worse than it did when it was my dad. But in none of her lectures, none of her rants about taking precautions and being more careful, has she ever asked me to stop. I thought she’d demand it after what happened with the Obeahman last fall. But she understands. It isn’t fair that she has to, but it’s better that she does.