Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

The athame is resting in its jar of salt, buried up to the hilt in white crystals. The morning sun coming through the window hits the glass of the jar and refracts in every direction, bright gold, almost like a halo. My dad and I used to sit and stare at it, stuffed into this same jar, having been purified by moonlight. He called it Excalibur. I don’t call it anything.

Behind me, my mom is frying eggs. A set of her freshest spell candles are stacked on the countertop. There are three different colors, each with a different smell. Green for prosperity, red for passion, white for clarity. Next to them are three small stacks of parchment bearing three different incantations, to be wrapped around the candles and tied with string.

“Toast or no toast?” she asks.

“Toast,” I reply. “Do we have any more saskatoon jam?”

She gets it out and I pop four pieces of bread into the toaster. When they’re done, I layer them with butter and jam and take them to the table, where my mom has already set our plates with eggs.

“Get the juice, would you?” she says, and as I’m half-buried in the refrigerator, “So, are you going to tell me how things went Saturday night?”

I stand up and pour two glasses of orange juice. “I was on the fence about it.” The ride back from Grand Marais was near silent. By the time we got home, it was Sunday morning, and I immediately passed out, only regaining consciousness to watch one of the Matrix movies on cable before passing back out and sleeping through the night. It was the best avoidance plan I’d ever come up with.

“Well,” my mom says chirpily, “get off the fence and dive in. You have to be to school in half an hour.”

I sit down at the table and set down the juice. My eyes stay trained on the eggs, which stare back at me with yellow yolk pupils. I jab them with my fork. What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to make sense of it for her, when I haven’t made sense of it myself? That was Anna’s laugh. It was clear as a bell, unmistakable, falling out of the farmer’s black throat. But that’s impossible. Anna is gone. Only I can’t let her go. So my mind has started making things up. That’s what the daylight tells me. That’s what any sane person would tell me.

“I messed up,” I say into my plate. “I wasn’t sharp enough.”

“But you got him, didn’t you?”

“Not before he pushed Thomas out a window and almost turned Carmel into shish kebab.” My appetite is suddenly gone. Not even the saskatoon jam looks tempting. “They shouldn’t come with me anymore. I never should have let them.”

My mom sighs. “It wasn’t so much an issue of ‘letting them,’ Cas. I don’t think you could have stopped them.” Her voice is affectionate, completely lacking in objectivity. She cares about them. Of course she does. But she’s also pretty glad I’m not out there by myself anymore.

“They were sucked in by the novelty,” I say. Anger flies to the surface out of nowhere; my teeth clench down on it. “But it’s real, and it can get them killed, and when they figure that out, what do you think is going to happen?”

My mother’s face is calm, no more emotion there than a slight furrow of her eyebrows. She forks a piece of egg and chews it, quietly. Then she says, “I don’t think you give them enough credit.”

Maybe I don’t. But I wouldn’t blame them for running for the hills after what happened on Saturday. I wouldn’t have blamed them for running after Mike, Will, and Chase got murdered. Sometimes I wish I could have.

“I’ve got to get to school,” I say, and push my chair away from the table, leaving the food untouched. The athame has been purified and is ready to come out of the salt, but I walk right past. For maybe the first time in my life, I don’t want it.

The first sight I catch after rounding the corner toward my locker is Thomas yawning. He’s leaning against it with his books under his arm, wearing a plain gray t-shirt that is ready to rip through in a few places. His hair points in completely contradictory directions. It makes me smile. So much power contained in a body that looks like it was born in a dirty clothes basket. When he sees me coming, he waves, and this big, open grin spreads across his face. Then he yawns again.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m having trouble recovering from Saturday.”

“Epic party, right, Thomas?” snickers a sarcastic voice behind us, and I turn to see a group of people, most of whom I don’t know. The comment came from Christy something or other, and I think, who cares, except that Thomas’s mouth has pinched together and he’s looking at the row of lockers like he wants to melt into it.

I look at Christy casually. “Keep talking like that and I’ll have you killed.” She blinks, trying to decide whether or not I’m serious, which makes me smirk. These rumors are ridiculous. They walk on, silent.

“Forget them. If they’d been there they’d have pissed themselves.”

“Right,” he says, and stands up straighter. “Listen, I’m sorry about Saturday. I’m such a dope, leaning out the door like that. Thanks for saving my skin.”

For a second, there’s this lump in my throat that tastes like gratitude and surprise. Then I swallow it. “Don’t thank me.” Remember who put you there in the first place. “It was no big deal.”

“Sure.” He shrugs. Thomas and I have first period physics together this semester. With his help, I’m pulling an A-minus. All of that shit about fulcrums and mass times velocity might as well be Greek to me, but Thomas drinks it up. It must be the witch in him; he has a definite understanding of forces and how they work. On the way to class, we pass by Cait Hecht, who makes a point of looking as far away from me as she can. I wonder if she’ll start to gossip about me now too. I guess I’d understand if she did.

I don’t catch anything more than a glimpse of Carmel until our shared fifth period study hall. Despite being the third leg in our strange, ghost-hunting trio, her queen bee status has remained intact. Her social calendar is as full as ever. She’s on the student council and a bunch of boring fundraising committees. Watching her straddle both worlds is interesting. She slides into one as easily as the other.

When I get to study hall, I take my usual seat across from Carmel. Thomas isn’t here yet. I can tell immediately that she isn’t as forgiving as he is. Her eyes barely flicker up from her notebook when I sit down.

“You really need to get a haircut.”

“I like it a little long.”

“But I think it gets into your eyes,” she says, looking right at me. “Keeps you from seeing things properly.”

There’s a brief stare down, during which I decide that almost getting pinned like a butterfly in a glass case deserves at least an apology. “I’m sorry about Saturday. I was stupid and off. I know that. It’s dangerous—”

“Cut the crap,” Carmel says, snapping her gum. “What’s bothering you? You hesitated in that barn. You could have ended it all, up in the loft. It was a foot away, its guts bared like it was serving them up on a platter.”

I swallow. Of course she would notice. Carmel never misses anything. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She slides her hand out and touches my arm.

“The knife isn’t bad anymore,” she says softly. “Morfran said so. Your friend Gideon said so. But if you have doubts, then maybe you should take a break. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

Thomas slides in next to Carmel and looks from one of us to the other.

“What’s the what?” he asks. “You guys look like someone died.” God, Thomas, that’s such a risky expression.