Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

Morfran looks at me through the smoke but I don’t drop my eyes. I’m not letting this go. I can’t. I owe her. And more than that. I can’t think that she’s suffering.

“Just drop it, all right?” he says, but I hear it. The resolve has gone out of his voice.

“What do you know, Morfran?”

“I know…” He sighs. “Someone who might know something.”

“Who?”

“Miss Riika.”

“Aunt Riika?” Thomas asks. “What could she know about it?” He turns to me. “I used to go over to her house when I was a kid. She’s not really my aunt, but you know, more like a friend of the family. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“We lost touch.” Morfran shrugs. “It happens sometimes. But if Thomas takes you to see her, she’ll talk to you. She’s been a Finnish witch all her life.”

A Finnish witch. The phrase makes me want to bare my teeth and put my fur up. Anna’s mother, Malvina, was a Finnish witch. That’s how she was able to curse Anna and bind her to the Victorian. Right after she cut her throat.

“She’s not the same,” Thomas whispers. “She’s not like her.”

My breath shakes out of my lungs and I nod at him fondly. It doesn’t bother me anymore that he sometimes breaks into my thoughts. He can’t help it. And the way I instantly seethed about Malvina must’ve lit his dendrites up like a Christmas tree.

“Will you take me to her?” I ask.

“I guess so.” He shrugs. “But we might not get anything besides a plate of gingersnaps. She wasn’t exactly ‘all there’ even when I was little.”

Carmel lingers on the outskirts, quietly petting Stella. Her voice cuts through the smoke.

“If the haunting is real, can this Miss Riika make her go away?”

I look at her sharply. Nobody answers and after a few long seconds, her eyes drop to the floor.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s just get on with it, I guess.”

Morfran puffs his pipe and shakes his head. “Cas and Thomas only. Not you, girl. Riika wouldn’t let you in the front door.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“Because the answers they’re after, you don’t want,” Morfran replies. “Resistance is coming off of you in waves. If you go with them, they won’t get anywhere.” He presses the ash in his pipe down.

I look at Carmel. Her eyes are hurt, but not guilty. “I won’t go then.”

“Carmel,” Thomas starts, but she cuts him off.

“You shouldn’t go either. Neither of you.” I’d speak up, but she’s looking at Thomas. “If you’re really his friend, if you care about him, then you shouldn’t indulge this.” And then she turns on her heel and walks out of the room. She’s all the way through the antique shop before I can say that I’m not an infant, I don’t need chaperones, or babysitters, or a goddamn counselor.

“What’s the matter with her today?” I ask Thomas, but from the way his jaw is hanging open in her wake, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t know.

Thomas’s Aunt Riika lives in the middle of bumble-fuck nowhere. We’ve been driving on unmarked dirt roads for at least ten minutes. There are no signs of any kind, just trees and more trees, then a brief clearing leading up to more trees. If he hasn’t been out here in years, I have no idea how he seems to be finding his way so easily.

“Are we lost? You’d admit it if we were lost, right?”

Thomas smiles, maybe a bit nervously. “We’re not lost. At least, not yet. They might’ve changed some of the roads around since the last time.”

“Who the hell are ‘they’? Road construction squirrels? It doesn’t even look like these things have been driven on in the last ten years.” The trees are thick outside my window. The foliage has come back to fill in the winter spaces. We’ve taken too many turns now, and my sense of direction is shot. We could be going northsouth for all I know.

“Ha! There it is,” Thomas crows. I sit up straighter in my seat. We’re approaching a small white farmhouse. There are early shoots of a flower garden cropping up around the front porch, and a walkway of flagstones leads from the driveway to the front steps. As Thomas pulls the Tempo onto the pale gravel, he beeps the horn. “I hope she’s home,” he mutters, and we step out.

“It’s nice,” I say, and mean it. I’m surprised there aren’t more neighbors; the surrounding property has to be worth something. Trees have been carefully planted around the yard, shielding it from the eyes of the road but opening up in front to sort of hug the house.

Thomas bounds up the steps like an eager hound. This must’ve been what he was like as a kid too, coming to see his Aunt Riika. I wonder why she and Morfran lost touch. When he knocks on the door, my heart holds its breath, not only because I want my answers, but also because I don’t want to see the disappointed look on Thomas’s face if Riika isn’t home.

I don’t have anything to worry about. She answers on the third knock. She’s probably been at the window since we drove up. I can’t imagine she gets many visitors way out here.

“Thomas Aldous Sabin! You’ve doubled in size!” She comes onto the porch and hugs him. While his face is pointed toward me I mouth “Aldous?” at him and try not to laugh.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Riika asks. She’s a lot shorter than I expected, barely over five feet. Her hair is loose and dark blond, shot through with white. Lines crack through the soft skin of her cheeks and pinch in the corners of her eyes. The cable-knit sweater she wears looks about three sizes too big and there’s support hose bunched around her shoes. Riika is no spring chicken. But when she claps Thomas on the back, he still jolts forward from the force of it.

“Aunt Riika, this is my friend Cas,” he says, and like he gave her permission, she finally looks at me. I push my hair out of my eyes and flash the Boy Scout smile. “Morfran sent us for help,” Thomas adds quietly.

Riika clucks her tongue, and as her cheeks pull in, I get the first glimpse of the witch she must be underneath the layers of floral print knit. When her eyes dart to my backpack, where the athame rests in its sheath, I have to fight the urge to back off the porch.

“I should have smelled it,” she says softly. Her voice is like the pages of a very old book. She squints at my face. “The power coming off of this one.” Her hand snakes into Thomas’s and she pats it firmly. “Come inside.”

The interior of the farmhouse smells like blended incense and old lady. And I don’t think she’s updated the décor since the 70s. Brown shag carpet stretches as far as the eye can see, beneath cluttered furniture: a rocking chair and long couch, both in green velour. A glass hurricane light fixture hangs over a yellow Formica table in the dining area. Riika leads us to the table and motions for us to sit down. The table itself is a mess of half-burnt candles and incense sticks. After we sit, she squirts some lotion onto her hands and rubs them together briskly.

“Your grandfather is well?” she asks, leaning forward onto her elbows and smiling at Thomas, one fist curled up against her chin.

“He’s great. He says hello.”

“Tell him I say hello too,” she says. Her voice bothers me. The accent and timbre are too close to Malvina’s. I can’t help thinking it, even though the two women look nothing alike. Malvina, when I saw her, was younger than Riika, and her hair was a black braided bun, not a mass of butterscotch and marshmallows. Still, looking into Riika’s face, images of Anna’s murder aren’t far behind. They flash up in my memory of the séance, Malvina dripping black wax onto Anna’s white dress, soaked with blood.