Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

“This is not easy for you,” Riika says to me severely, which doesn’t help. She reaches for a tin with cardinals painted on it and pries it open, offering the gingersnaps inside to Thomas, who grabs two handfuls. A wide smile spreads on her face as she watches him stuff a few into his mouth before looking back at me impatiently. Was I supposed to say something? Was that a question?

She clucks her tongue again. “You are a friend to Thomas?”

I nod.

“He’s the best, Aunt Riika,” Thomas affirms over crumbles of gingersnap. She smiles at him briefly.

“Then I will help you, if I can.” She leans forward and lights three of the candles, seemingly at random. “Ask your questions.”

I take a deep breath. Where do I start? There doesn’t seem to be enough air in the room for me to explain the situation with Anna, how she came to be cursed, how she sacrificed herself for us, and now, why she can’t possibly be haunting me for real.

Riika slaps me on the hand. Apparently I took too long. “Give,” she says, and I turn it palm up. Her grip is gentle, but there’s steel beneath her fingers as she squeezes my bones together and closes her eyes. I wonder if she was the one who helped Thomas develop his mind-reading talent, if such a thing can be taught or developed.

I glance at Thomas. He’s paused in mid-chew, his eyes intent on our joined hands, like he might see electricity or smoke passing between us. This is taking forever. And I’m not really comfortable with all this touching. Something about Riika, maybe the power emanating off her, is almost making me sick to my stomach. Just when I’m ready to pull free, she opens her eyes and lets go with a brisk pat on the back of my hand.

“He’s a warrior, this one,” she says to Thomas. “A wielder of a weapon older than all of us.” There’s a pointed way that she isn’t looking at me and her hands are curled like crabs. They skitter across the Formica, fingers tapping the tabletop. “You want to know about the girl,” she says into her lap. With her chin tucked low her voice takes on a choked, froggy quality.

“The girl,” I whisper. Riika looks at me with a sly smile.

“You were the one who took Anna Dressed in Blood out of the world,” she says. “I felt it when she passed. It was a storm dying over the lake.”

“She took herself out,” I say. “To save my life. And Thomas’s.”

Riika shrugs to say it doesn’t matter. There’s a velvet bag resting on a gold plate; she empties out the contents and stirs them around. I try not to look too closely. I’m going to pretend that they’re carved runes. But I think they’re actually small bones, maybe from a bird, or a lizard, maybe from human fingers. She looks down into the pattern and raises her pale eyebrows.

“The girl is not with you now,” she says, and my heart thumps. I don’t know what I’m hoping for. “But she was. Recently.”

Beside me, Thomas inhales fast and sits up straighter. He adjusts his glasses and nudges me with his elbow, I think to be encouraging.

“Can you tell what she wants?” he asks after a minute of me sitting dumb as a rock.

Riika cocks her head. “How should I know that? You want I should call the wind and ask it? It would not know either. Only one person to ask because only one person knows. Ask Anna Dressed in Blood to give up her secrets.” Her eyes slant toward me. “I think she would give up much, for you.”

It’s hard to hear anything over the pulse pounding in my ears.

“I can’t ask her,” I mutter. “She can’t talk.” My head is starting to come out from underneath the shock; it’s starting to think ahead and trip over itself. “I’ve been told that it’s impossible to come back. That she shouldn’t be able to be here.”

Riika leans back in her chair. She motions tensely with her hand, toward my backpack and the athame. “Show me,” she says, and crosses her arms over her chest.

Thomas nods, giving the okay. I unsnap my bag and pull out the knife still in its sheath. Then I lay it on the table in front of me. Riika jerks her head, and I take it out. The flames of the candles flicker along the blade. Her reaction as her eyes move over it is odd, just an uneasy tic of emotion in the corner of her wrinkled mouth, something that looks like revulsion. Finally, she looks away and spits onto the floor.

“What do you know about this?” she asks.

“I know that it was my father’s before it was mine. I know that it sends ghosts who kill to the other side, where they can’t hurt the living.”

Riika shoots Thomas a raised brow. It looks a lot like the old-lady version of the “get a load of this guy” expression.

“Good and bad. Right and wrong.” She shakes her head. “This athame does not think on these terms.” She sighs. “You do not know much. So I will tell you. You think this athame creates a door between this world and the next one.” She holds up one hand, and then the other. “This athame is the door. It was opened long ago and since then has swung, back and forth, back and forth.”

I watch Riika’s hand sway left and right.

“But it never closes.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “That’s wrong. Ghosts can’t pass back through the knife.” I look at Thomas. “It doesn’t work like that.” I take the athame from the table and stuff it back into my bag.

Riika leans forward and smacks my shoulder. “How do you know how it works?” she asks. “But no. It doesn’t work like that.”

I’m starting to see what Thomas meant about her being not quite all there.

“It would take a strong will,” she goes on, “and a deep connection. You said Anna was not sent away with this knife. But she would have to know it, sense it, in order to find you.”

“She was cut,” Thomas interjects excitedly. “After the scrying spell, Will took the knife and stabbed her, but she didn’t die. Or pass on, or whatever.”

Riika’s eyes are on my backpack again. “She is connected to it. To her it would be like a beacon, a lighthouse. Why the others cannot follow it, I don’t know. There are still mysteries, even for me.” There’s something strange about the way she’s watching the knife. Her eyes are intense, but disconnected. I didn’t notice before that they have an odd, yellow tint to the irises.

“But Aunt Riika, even if you’re right, how can Cas talk to her? How can he find out what she wants?”

Her smile is broad and warm. Almost joyful. “You must make the music come in clearer,” she says. “You must speak the language of her curse. The same way we Finns have always spoken to the dead. With a Lappish drum. Your grandfather will know where to find one.”

“Can you help us do that?” I ask. “I’m assuming we need a Finnish witch for this.”

“Thomas is more than witch enough,” she replies, but he doesn’t look too sure.

“I’ve never used one before,” he says. “I wouldn’t know where to start. It would be better if you did it. Please?”

Regret clouds Riika’s features as she shakes her head. She can’t seem to meet his eyes anymore and her breath sounds heavier, more strained. We should probably go. All these questions have to be taxing. And really, she’s given us the answers and a good place to start. I lean back away from the table and catch a draft moving through the room; it makes me realize how cold my fingers and cheeks are.

Thomas is babbling, quietly sputtering reasons why it shouldn’t be him to do the ritual, and how he wouldn’t know a Lappish drum if it smacked him in the face, and that he’d probably wind up channeling the ghost of Elvis. But Riika keeps shaking her head.

It’s getting colder. Or maybe it was cold when we came in. She might not have a good central heating system in such an old place. Or she just keeps the heat turned down to save money.