Kendare Blake - Anna Dressed in Blood

There’s something hopeful in the way she asks that last part, something that makes her eyes keener. She glances down at my knife with an unnatural twitch of her head. A grimace takes hold of her face; expressions pass crazily, like ripples on a lake.

Then the air around her wavers and the goddess before me is gone. In her place is a pale girl with long, dark hair. Her feet are firmly planted on the ground. I look down at her.

“What is your name?” she asks, and when I don’t answer, “You know mine. I saved your life. Isn’t it only fair?”

“My name is Theseus Cassio,” I hear myself say, even though I’m thinking what a cheap trick this is, and a stupid one. If she thinks I won’t kill this form then she’s dead wrong, no pun intended. But it’s a good disguise, I’ll give her that. The mask that she’s wearing has a thoughtful face and soft, violet eyes. She’s wearing an old-fashioned white dress.

“Theseus Cassio,” she repeats.

“Theseus Cassio Lowood,” I say, though I don’t know why I’m telling her. “Everyone calls me Cas.”

“You’ve come here to kill me.” She walks around me in a wide circle. I let her get just past my shoulders before I turn too. There’s no way I’m letting her behind my back. She might be all sweet and innocent now, but I know the creature that would come bursting out if given the chance.

“Someone’s already done that,” I say. I won’t tell her pretty stories about how I’m here to set her free. It would be cheating, putting her at ease, trying to get her to walk into it. And besides, it’s a lie. I have no idea where I’m sending her, and I don’t care. I just know that it’s away from here, where she can kill people and sink them into this godforsaken house.

“Someone did, yes,” she says, and then her head twists around and snaps back and forth. For a second her hair starts to writhe again, like snakes. “But you can’t.”

She knows that she’s dead. That’s interesting. Most of them don’t. Most are just angry and scared, more an imprint of an emotion — of a horrible moment — than an actual being. You can talk to some of them, but they usually think you’re someone else, someone from their past. Her awareness throws me off a beat; I use my tongue to buy some time.

“Sweetheart, my father and I have put more ghosts in the ground than you can count.”

“Never one like me.”

There is a tone in her voice when she says this that isn’t quite pride, but something like it. Pride tinged with bitterness. I stay quiet, because I’d rather she not know that she’s right. Anna is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Her strength seems limitless, along with her bag of tricks. She’s not some shuffling phantom, pissed off about being shot to death. She’s death itself, gruesome and senseless, and even when she’s dressed in blood and veins I can’t help but stare.

But I’m not afraid. Strong or not, all I need is one good strike. She’s not beyond the reach of my athame, and if I can get to her, she’ll bleed out into the ether just like all the rest.

“Perhaps you should fetch your father to help you,” she says. I squeeze my blade.

“My father’s dead.”

Something passes across her eyes. I can’t believe it’s regret, or embarrassment, but that’s what it looks like.

“My father died too, when I was a girl,” she says softly. “A storm on the lake.”

I can’t let her keep on like this. I can feel something in my chest softening, ceasing to growl, completely despite myself. Her strength makes her vulnerability more touching. I should be beyond this.

“Anna,” I say, and her eyes snap to mine. I raise the blade and the flash of it reflects in her eyes.

“Go,” she orders, queen of her dead castle. “I don’t want to kill you. And it seems that I don’t have to, for some reason. So go.”

Questions pop into my mind at this, but I stubbornly plant my feet. “I’m not leaving until you’re out of this house and back in the ground.”

“I was never in the ground,” she hisses through her teeth. Her pupils are growing darker, the blackness swirling outward until all the white is gone. Veins creep across her cheeks to find homes at her temples and throat. Blood bubbles up from her skin and spills down the length of her, a sweeping skirt dripping to the floor.

I thrust with my knife and feel something heavy connect with my arm before I’m tossed into the wall. Fuck. I didn’t even see her move. She’s still hovering in the middle of the room where I used to be. My shoulder hurts a lot where I connected with the wall. My arm hurts a lot where it connected with Anna. But I’m fairly hardheaded, so I scramble up and go for her again, going in low this time, not even trying for the kill but just for a slice of something. At this point, I’d settle for hair.

The next thing I know, I’m across the room again. I’ve skidded across it on my back. I think there are splinters in my pants. Anna continues to hover, regarding me with ever increasing resentment. The sound of her dress dripping onto the floorboards reminds me of a teacher I used to have who would slowly tap his temple when he was really annoyed with my lack of studying.

I get back on my feet, this time more slowly. I hope it looks more like I’m carefully planning my next move and less like I’m in large amounts of pain, which is the real reason. She’s not trying to kill me and it’s starting to piss me off. I’m being batted around like a cat toy. Tybalt would find this hilarious. I wonder if he can see from the car.

“Stop this,” she says in her cavernous voice.

I run at her, and she grabs me by the wrists. I struggle, but it’s like trying to wrestle concrete.

“Just let me kill you,” I mutter in frustration. Rage lights up her eyes. For a second I think what a mistake I’ve made, that I forgot what she really was, and I’m going to wind up just like Mike Andover. My body actually scrunches up, trying to keep from being torn in two.

“I’ll never let you kill me,” she spits, and shoves me back toward the door.

“Why? Don’t you think it would be peaceful?” I ask. I wonder for the millionth time why I can never seem to stop running my mouth.

She squints at me like I’m an idiot. “Peaceful? After what I’ve done? Peace, in a house of torn-apart boys and disemboweled strangers?” She pulls my face very close to hers. Her black eyes are wide. “I can’t let you kill me,” she says, and then she shouts, shouts loud enough to make my eardrums throb as she’s throwing me out through the front door, clear past the broken stairs and onto the overgrown gravel of the driveway.

“I never wanted to be dead!”

I hit the ground rolling and look up just in time to see the door slam. The house looks still and vacant, like nothing has happened there in a million years. I gingerly test my limbs and find that they’re all in working order. Then I push myself up to my knees.

None of them ever wanted to be dead. Not really. Not even the suicides; they changed their minds at the last minute. I wish I could tell her so, and tell her cleverly, so she wouldn’t feel so alone. Plus it’d make me feel like less of a moron after being tossed around like an anonymous henchman in a James Bond movie. Some professional ghost killer I am.

As I walk to my mom’s car, I try to get it back under control. Because I am going to get Anna, no matter what she thinks. Both because I’ve never failed before, and also because in the moment she told me she couldn’t let me kill her, she sounded like she sort of wished that she could. Her awareness makes her special in more ways than one. Unlike the others, Anna regrets. I rub the ache along my left arm and know I’ll be covered with bruises. Force isn’t going to work. I need a plan B.