Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

“Why did you even bother to come?” Carmel asks. “If you were just going to act like that? You made Cait feel really bad.”

“ We made Cait feel really bad. I never wanted to do this in the first place. You were the one who got her hopes up.”

“She’s liked you since chemistry last semester,” Carmel says, scowling.

“Then you should have told her what an ass I am. Made me sound like a moronic jerk.”

“Better to let her see it for herself. You barely said five words to anyone.” She’s got this disappointed squint on her face that’s hovering close to disgust. Then her expression softens and she pushes her blond hair off of her shoulder. “I just thought it would be nice if you got out and met some new people.”

“I meet plenty of new people.”

“I mean living people.”

I stare straight ahead. Maybe she meant that as a jibe about Anna, and maybe she didn’t. But it pisses me off. Carmel wants me to forget. To forget that Anna saved all of our lives, that she sacrificed herself and dragged the Obeahman down to Hell. Carmel, Thomas, and I have been trying to figure out what happened to her after that night, without much luck. I guess Carmel thinks it’s time to stop looking and let her go. But I won’t. Whether I’m supposed to or not doesn’t matter.

“You didn’t have to leave, you know,” I say. “I could’ve had Thomas pick me up there. Or I could have walked.”

Carmel chews her pretty lip, used to getting her way. We’ve been friends for most of the year now, and she still gets this puzzled puppy face when I don’t just do what she says. It’s strangely endearing.

“It’s cold out. And it was boring anyway.” She’s unruffled in her camel peacoat and red mittens. The red scarf at her neck is carefully knotted, despite the fact that we left in a hurry. “I was just doing Cait a favor. I got her the date. It isn’t our fault if she couldn’t dazzle you with her charm.”

“She has good teeth,” I offer. Carmel grins.

“Maybe it was a bad idea. You shouldn’t force it, right?” she says, and I pretend not to notice the hopeful glance she gives me, like I should keep this conversation going. There’s nowhere for it to go.

When we get to my house, Thomas’s beat-up Tempo is parked in the driveway. I can see his silhouette inside, talking to my mom’s. Carmel pulls in right behind it. I expected to be dropped at the curb.

“We’ll take my car. I’m going with you,” she says, and gets out. I don’t object. Despite my best intentions, Carmel and Thomas have joined the ranks. After what happened with Anna, and the Obeahman, cutting them out wasn’t really an option.

Inside the house, Thomas looks like one big wrinkle plopped down on the sofa. He stands up when he sees Carmel, and his eyes do their usual googly routine before he adjusts his glasses and goes back to normal. My mom is sitting in the chair, looking comfortable and motherly in a wrap sweater. I don’t know where people get these ideas that witches all wear a metric ton of eyeliner and bounce around in velvet capes. She smiles at us and tactfully asks how the movie was, rather than how the date went.

I shrug. “I didn’t really get it,” I say.

She sighs. “So, Thomas tells me that you’re going to Grand Marais.”

“Seems like as good a night as any,” I say. I look at Thomas. “Carmel’s coming too. So we can take her car.”

“Good,” he replies. “If we take mine we’ll probably wind up on the side of the road before we even cross the border.”

There’s a brief moment of awkwardness as we wait for my mom to leave. She’s not a civilian by any means, but I try not to bother her with details. After my near death this past fall, her auburn hair has become peppered with white.

Finally she stands and presses three small but very smelly velvet bags into my hand. I know what they are without looking. Fresh, herbal blends of her classic protection spell, one for each of us. She touches my forehead with a fingertip.

“Keep them safe,” she whispers. “And you too.” She turns back to Thomas. “And now I should get to work on more candles for your grandfather’s shop.”

“The prosperity ones have been going faster than we can get them on shelves.” He grins.

“And they’re so simple. Lemon and basil. A lodestone core. I’ll stop in with another batch by Tuesday.” She goes up the stairs, to the room she’s taken over for spell work. It’s full of block wax and oils and dusty bottles of herbs. I hear that other mothers have entire rooms designated for sewing. That must be weird.

“I’ll help you pack the candles when I get back,” I say as she vanishes up the stairs. I wish she’d get another cat. There’s a cat-shaped hole where Tybalt used to be, floating in her footsteps. But I suppose it’s only been six months since he died. Maybe that’s still too soon.

“So, are we ready?” Thomas asks. Under his arm there’s a canvas messenger bag. Every scrap of info we get on a particular ghost, a particular job, he stuffs inside that bag. I hate to think how quickly he’d be tied to a stake and burned if anyone ever got hold of it. Without looking into the mess, he reaches in and does his creepy psychic thing, where his fingertips find whatever he’s after, every time, like that girl from Poltergeist .

“Grand Marais,” Carmel murmurs as he hands the papers to her. Most of it is a letter from a professor of psychology at Rosebridge Graduate School, an old crony of my dad’s, who, before buckling down and shaping young minds, expanded his own by participating in trance circles led by my parents in the early 80s. In the letter, he talks about a ghost in Grand Marais, Minnesota, rumored to inhabit an abandoned barn. Six deaths have occurred on the property over the last three decades. Three of them have been deemed as under suspicious circumstances.

So what, six deaths. Stats like that don’t make my usual A-list. But now that I’m rooted in Thunder Bay, my options are limited to a few road trips a year and places I can get to over the weekend.

“So, it kills by making people have accidents?” Carmel says, reading over the letter. Most of the barn’s victims appeared to be accidental. A farmer was working on his tractor when the thing slipped off the bricks and pinned him. Four years later, the farmer’s wife fell chest-down on a pitchfork. “How do we know they aren’t really accidents? Grand Marais is a long drive for a no-show.”

Carmel always calls the ghosts “it.” Never “he” or “she” and rarely by name.

“Like we have anything better to do?” I say. In my backpack, the athame shifts. The knowledge of it there, tucked into its leather sheath, sharp as a razor without ever needing to be sharpened, makes me uneasy. It almost makes me wish I were back on that damned date.

Ever since the confrontation with the Obeahman, when I found out that the knife had been linked to him, I … I don’t know. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. It still feels like it’s mine. And Gideon assures me that the link between it and the Obeahman has been severed, that the ghosts I kill now no longer go to him, feeding him and increasing his power. Now they go where they were supposed to go. If anyone would know, it would be Gideon, over in London, knee-deep in musty books. He was with my dad since the beginning. But when I needed a second opinion, Thomas and I went to the antique shop and listened to his grandfather Morfran run through a speech about how energy is contained on certain planes, and that the Obeahman and the athame don’t exist on the same plane anymore. Whatever that means.

So I’m not afraid of it. But sometimes I feel its power reach out and give me a shove. It’s a little bit more than an inanimate thing, and sometimes I wonder what it wants.