Kendare Blake - Girl of Nightmares

“Nothing,” I say. “Carmel’s just concerned about why I hesitated on Saturday.”

“What?”

“He hesitated,” Carmel replies. “He could have killed it, in the hayloft.” She stops talking as two kids walk by. “But he didn’t, and I wound up staring down the wrong end of a pitchfork.”

“But we’re all okay.” Thomas smiles. “The job got done.”

“He’s not over it,” Carmel says. “He still wonders if the knife is evil.”

All the talking about me as if I’m not here is getting on my nerves. They go back and forth for a minute or so, Thomas defending me feebly and Carmel asserting that I need at least six sessions of paranormal counseling before I return to the job.

“Do you guys mind catching a little detention?” I ask suddenly. When I jerk my head toward the door and stand, they both get up too. The study hall monitor shouts some question about where we think we’re going, or what we think we’re doing, but we don’t stop. Carmel just calls out, “Uh, I forgot my note cards!” as we go through the door.

We’re parked in the lot of a rest stop off 61, sitting in Carmel’s silver Audi. I’m in the back, and both of them have twisted in their seats to look at me. They wait, patiently, which makes it worse. A little prodding wouldn’t hurt.

“You’re right about me hesitating,” I say finally. “And you’re right that I still have questions about the knife. But that’s not what happened on Saturday. Questions don’t keep me from doing my job.”

“So what was it?” Carmel asks.

What was it. I don’t even know. In the instant that I heard her laugh, Anna bloomed red behind my eyes, and I saw everything she had ever been: the clever, pale girl in white, and the black-veined goddess dressed in blood. She was close enough to touch. But the adrenaline is gone now, and there’s daylight all around. So maybe it was nothing. Just a wishful hallucination. But I brought them all the way out here to tell them, so I might as well tell them something.

“If I told you that I couldn’t let go of Anna,” I say, looking down at the Audi’s black floor-mats, “that I need to know she’s at peace, would you understand that?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Thomas says. Carmel looks away.

“I’m not ready to give up, Carmel.”

She tucks her blond hair behind her ear and looks down guiltily. “I know. But you’ve been looking for answers for months. We all have.”

I smile ruefully. “And what? You’re tired of it?”

“Of course not,” she snaps. “I liked Anna. And even if I didn’t, she saved our lives. But what she did, sacrificing herself—that was for you, Cas. And she did it so that you could live. Not so you could walk around half dead, pining for her.”

I have nothing to say. The words bring me down, far and fast. Not knowing what happened to Anna has driven me close to insane these past months. I’ve imagined every imaginable hell, the worst possible fates. It would be easy to say that’s why letting her go is difficult. It would be true. But it’s not all. The fact is, Anna is gone. She was dead when I met her, and I was going to put her back in the dirt, but I didn’t want her to go. Maybe the way that she left was supposed to wrap things up. She’s deader than dead and I should be glad; instead I’m so pissed off that I can’t see straight. It doesn’t feel like she left. It feels like she was taken away.

After a minute, I shake my head and words fall out of my mouth, practiced and calm. “I know. Listen, maybe we should just cool it for a while. I mean, you’re right. It isn’t safe, and I’m sorry as hell for what happened on Saturday. I really am.”

They tell me not to worry about it. Thomas says it was nothing and Carmel makes a joke about getting harpooned. They react like best friends should, and all of a sudden I feel like a total dick. I need to get my head straight. I need to get used to the fact that I’m never going to see Anna again, before someone really does get hurt.

The sound of that laugh. It plays back in my head for about the hundredth time. It was her voice; Anna’s voice, but it sounded mad, and shrill. Almost desperate. Or maybe that’s just because I heard it coming out of a dead man’s mouth. Or maybe I never really heard it at all.

A sharp crack makes me blink and look down. One of my mom’s white clarity candles lies in two pieces at my feet, rolled up against my toe. I’d been packing them into a box to take to Morfran’s shop.

“What’s the matter, son of mine?” She’s got this halfway smile on and a cocked eyebrow. “What’s got you so distracted that you’re breaking our livelihood?”

I bend down and pick up the two halves of candle, awkwardly shoving the broken ends together like they’ll magically merge. Why can’t magic work like that?

“Sorry,” I say. She gets up from the table where she was tying on incantations, takes the candle from me, and sniffs it.

“It’s okay. We’ll just keep this one. They work just as well broken as not.” She walks over and sets it on the windowsill over the sink. “Now answer the question, kiddo. What is it? School? Or maybe that date of yours went better than you let on.” The look on her face is half-teasing, but there’s hope there too.

“No such luck, Mom.” It’d be easy enough to say it was school. Easy enough to say I was daydreaming. And I probably should. My mother is happy here. After we found out that my father’s murderer had been renting out the attic of the house and ate her cat, I figured she’d move us. Or burn the house down. But she didn’t. Instead she settled and made the place ours, more than any of the rentals we’ve lived in since my dad died. The whole thing seemed like something she’d almost been waiting for.

I suppose it was something we were both waiting for. Because it’s over now. Closed.

“Cas? Are you okay? Did something happen?”

I give her my most reassuring smile. “It’s nothing. Just leftover crap.”

“Mm,” she says. She pulls a box of matches out of the junk drawer. “Maybe you should light this clarity candle. Get rid of the cobwebs.”

“Sure.” I chuckle, and take the match. “Shouldn’t I say the incantation first?”

She waves her hand. “The words aren’t always necessary. You just have to know what you want.” She pokes me in the chest, and I strike the match.

“You are playing horribly,” Thomas says to me from one couch cushion over.

“So what, it’s just Pac-Man,” I reply as my last guy runs smack into a ghost and dies.

“If you’re going to look at it that way, you’re never going to beat my top score.”

I snort. I’d never be able to beat it anyway. The kid has creepily accurate hand-eye coordination. I can hold my own in a first-person shooter, but he beats me at the old arcade games every time. He takes the controller and the theme music starts over. I watch as Pac-Man eats cherries and dots and sends ghosts back to the start box.

“You’ve memorized the boards.”

“Maybe.” He grins, then hits pause when his phone starts buzzing. The cell phone is new for Thomas. A gift from Carmel, which she uses to repeatedly text him to try to get us to meet her at the mall. But the mall is a thing that should not be suffered. Except maybe for Cinnabon.

Thomas sighs. “Want to meet Carmel and Katie at Cinnabon?”

I take a deep breath. He’d come over to give me a book he’d found that had theories about the afterlife. It’s sitting next to the Xbox, unopened. I’m tired of reading and coming up with more questions and no answers. I’m tired of chasing down my dad’s old associates and getting nothing but best guesses. It’s become an exhausting dead end, and even if it makes me feel guilty to think so, that’s the truth.