Kendare Blake - Anna Dressed in Blood

She didn’t say much. It’s always there, on the tip of her tongue, to tell me to stop. To tell me it’s dangerous, and that people get killed. But more would be killed if I didn’t do my job. It’s the job that my father started. It’s what I was born for, my legacy from him, and that’s the real reason she keeps quiet. She believed in him. She knew the score, right up until the day he was murdered — murdered by what he thought was just another in a long line of ghosts.

I pull my knife out of my backpack and slide it free. My father left our house one afternoon carrying this knife, just like he had since before I was born. And he never came back. Something got the best of him. The police came a day later, after my mother reported him missing. They said that my father was dead. I skulked in the shadows while they questioned my mother and eventually the detective whispered his secrets: that my father’s body had been covered in bites; that chunks of him had been missing.

For months my father’s gruesome death plagued my thoughts. I imagined it in every possible way. I dreamed of it. I drew it on paper with black pen and red crayon, stick skeleton figures and waxy blood. My mother tried to heal me; singing constantly and leaving the lights on, trying to keep me out of the dark. But the visions and nightmares didn’t stop until the day I picked up the knife.

They never caught my father’s killer, of course. Because my father’s killer was already dead. So I know what it is that I’m meant to do. Looking up at Anna’s house now, I’m not afraid, because Anna Korlov is not my end. Someday, I’m going back to the place where my father died, and I’m going to drag his knife across the mouth of the thing that ate him.

I take two deep breaths. My knife stays out; there’s no need for pretense. I know that she’s in there, and she knows that I’m coming. I can feel her watching. The cat looks at me with reflector-eyes from inside the car, and I can feel those eyes on me too as I move up the weeded driveway toward the front door.

I don’t think there’s ever been a quieter night. No wind, no bugs, no nothing. The sound of the gravel under my shoes is painfully loud. It’s pointless to try to be stealthy. It’s like being the first one awake in the morning, when every move you make is as loud as a foghorn, no matter how quiet you try to be. I want to stomp up these front porch steps. I want to break one off, pull it up and use it to batter down the door. But that would be rude, and besides, I don’t need to. The door is already open.

Eerie gray light is leaking out without casting a beam. It just sort of melts with the dark air, like an illuminating fog. My ears strain to hear anything; in the distance I think I hear the low rumble of a train, and there’s a leathery squeak as I tighten my grip on my athame. I walk through the door and close it behind. I don’t want to give any ghost the opportunity for a cheap B-movie scare by slamming it shut.

The foyer is empty, the staircase bare. The skeleton of the ruined chandelier hangs on the ceiling without twinkling, and there’s a table covered in a dusty sheet that I could swear wasn’t here last night. There is something off about this house. Something besides the presence that obviously haunts it.

“Anna,” I say, and my voice rolls into the air. The house eats it up without an echo.

I look to my left. The place where Mike Andover died is empty save for a dark, oily stain. I have no idea what Anna has done with the body, and honestly, I’d rather not think about it.

Nothing moves, and I’m in no mood to wait. Just the same, I don’t want to face her on the stairs. She has too much of an advantage, being as strong as a Viking goddess and undead and everything. I walk farther into the house, winding my way carefully through the scattered and dust-sheeted furniture. The thought crosses my mind that she may be lying in wait, that the lumpy sofa isn’t a lumpy sofa at all, but a dead girl covered in veins. I’m just about to stab my athame through it for good measure when I hear something shuffle behind me. I turn.

“Jesus.”

“Has it been three days already?” the ghost of Mike Andover asks me. He’s standing near the window he was pulled through. He’s in one piece. I crack a tentative smile. Death, it seems, has made him wittier. But part of me suspects that what I’m looking at isn’t really Mike Andover at all. It’s just the stain on the ground, raised by Anna, made to walk and talk. But just in case it isn’t …

“I’m sorry. For what happened to you. It wasn’t supposed to.”

Mike cocks his head. “It’s never supposed to. Or it’s always supposed to. Whatever.” He smiles. I don’t know if it’s meant to be friendly, or ironic, but it’s definitely creepy. Especially when he abruptly stops. “This house is wrong. Once we’re here we never leave. You shouldn’t have come back.”

“I’ve got business here,” I say. I try to ignore the idea that he can never leave. It’s too terrible and too unfair.

“The same business that I had here?” he asks in a low growl. Before I can reply, he’s ripped in two by invisible hands, an exact replay of his death. I stumble back and my knees run into a table or something, I don’t know what and don’t really care. The shock of seeing him collapsed into two grisly wet puddles again makes me disregard the furniture. I tell myself it was a cheap trick, and that I’ve seen worse. I try to get my breathing to slow down. Then, from the floor, I hear Mike’s voice again.

“Hey, Cas.”

My eyes travel over the mess to find his face, which is twisted around, still attached to the right side of his body. That’s the side that kept the spine. I swallow hard and keep from looking at the exposed vertebrae. Mike’s eye rolls up at me.

“It only hurts for a minute,” he says, and then he sinks into the floor, slowly, like oil into a towel. His eye doesn’t close when it disappears. It keeps on staring. I really could have lived without that little exchange. As I continue to watch the dark spot on the floor, I realize that I’m holding my breath. I wonder how many people Anna has actually killed in this house. I wonder if they are all still here, shells of them, and if she could raise them up like marionettes, shuffling toward me in various states of decay.

Get it under control. Now’s not the time to panic. Now’s the time to squeeze my knife and realize too late that something is coming up behind me.

There’s a flicker of black hair around my shoulder, two or three inky tendrils reaching out to beckon me closer. I spin and slice through the air, half expecting her to not be there, to have disappeared in that one instant. But she didn’t. She hovers before me, half a foot off the ground.

We hesitate a second and regard each other, my brown eyes peering directly into her oily ones. She’d be about five foot seven if she was on the floor, but since she’s floating six inches off of it I almost have to look up. My breathing seems loud inside my head. The sound of her dress dripping is soft as it bleeds onto the floor. What has she become since she died? What power did she find, what anger, that allowed her to be more than just a specter, to become a demon of vengeance?

The path of my blade sheared the ends off her hair. The pieces float down and she watches them sink into the floorboards, like Mike did moments ago. Something passes across her brow, a tightening, a sadness, and then she looks at me and bares her teeth.

“Why have you come back?” she asks. I swallow. I don’t know what to say. I can feel myself backing up even though I tell myself not to.

“I gave you your life, packaged as a gift.” The voice coming out of her cavernous mouth is deep and awful. It is the sound of a voice without breath. She still carries the faintest Finnish accent. “Did you think it was easy? Do you want to be dead?”