Kendare Blake - Anna Dressed in Blood

Finally, he sighs. “We led them on a royal goose chase, just like you said. It was a blast. We actually had them convinced that if they hung sacks of sulfur above their beds, she wouldn’t be able to attack them in their sleep.”

“Jesus. Don’t make it too unrealistic. We need to keep them busy.”

“Don’t worry. Morfran puts on a good show. He conjured blue flame and did a fake trance and everything. Told them he would work on a banishing spell, but it would take the light of the next full moon to finish it. Think that’ll be enough time?”

Normally I’d say yes. After all, it’s not a matter of locating Anna. I know just where she is.

“I’m not sure,” I reply. “I went back last night and she kicked my ass all around the room.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“I spoke to a friend of my dad’s. He said we need to figure out what’s giving her all this extra strength. Know any witches?”

He squints at me. “Isn’t your mom one?”

“Know any black witches?”

He squirms around a bit and then shrugs. “Well, me, I guess. I’m not really that good, but I can cast barriers and make the elements work for me and stuff. Morfran is, but he doesn’t practice much anymore.” He makes a left turn and pulls up outside of the antique shop. Through the window I can see the grizzled black dog, its nose up against the glass and its tail thumping against the ground.

We go inside and find Morfran standing behind the counter pricing a new ring, something handsome and vintage with a large black stone.

“Know anything about spell-craft and exorcism?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says without looking up from his work. His black dog has finished welcoming Thomas and moves to rest heavily against his thigh. “This place was haunted as shit when I bought it. Sometimes still is. Things come in with their owners still attached, if you know what I mean.”

I look around the shop. Of course. Antique stores must almost always have a wraith or two swirling around. My eyes fall on a long oval mirror set onto the back of an oak dresser. How many faces have stared into it? How many dead reflections wait there and whisper to each other in the dark?

“Can you get me some supplies?” I ask.

“What sort?”

“I need chicken feet, a circle of consecrated stones, a banishing pentagram, and some kind of divination thingy.”

He gives me the stink eye. “Divination thingy? Sounds pretty technical.”

“I don’t have the details yet, okay? Can you get them or not?”

Morfran shrugs. “I can send Thomas down to Superior with a bag. Pull thirteen stones from the lake. They don’t come more consecrated than that. The chicken feet I’ll have to order in, and the divination thingy, well, I’m betting that you want a mirror of some kind, or possibly a scrying bowl.”

“A scrying bowl sees the future,” Thomas says. “What would he want with that?”

“A scrying bowl sees whatever you want it to see,” Morfran corrects him. “As for the banishing pentagram, I think it might be overkill. Burn some protective incense, or some herbs. That should be plenty.”

“You do know what we’re dealing with here, don’t you?” I ask. “She’s not just a ghost. She’s a hurricane. Overkill is fine by me.”

“Listen, kid. What you’re talking about is nothing more than a trumped-up séance. Summon the ghost and bind it in the circle of stones. Use the scrying bowl to get your answers. Am I right?”

I nod. He makes it sound so easy. But for someone who doesn’t do spells and spent the last night being tossed like a rubber ball, it’s going to be damn near impossible.

“I’ve got a friend in London doing the specifics. I’ll have the spell in a few days. I might need a few more supplies, depending.”

Morfran shrugs. “Best time to do a binding spell is during the waning moon anyway,” he says. “That gives you a week and a half. Plenty of time.” He squints at me and looks a whole lot like his grandson. “She’s getting the better of you, isn’t she?”

“Not for long.”

The public library isn’t all that impressive to look at, though I suppose I’ve been spoiled growing up with my dad and his friends’ collections of dusty tomes. It does, however, have a pretty decent local history collection, which is what’s really important. Since I’ve got to find Carmel and settle this whole bio assignment business, I put Thomas on the computer, searching through the online database for any record of Anna and her murder.

I find Carmel waiting at a table back behind the stacks.

“What’s Thomas doing here?” she asks as I sit down.

“Researching a paper.” I shrug. “So what’s the bio assignment about?”

She smirks at me. “Taxonomic classification.”

“Gross. And boring.”

“We have to make a chart that goes from phylum to species. We got hermit crabs and octopus.” She furrows her brow. “What’s the plural for octopus? Is it ‘octopuses’?”

“I think it’s octopi,” I say, spinning the open textbook toward me. We might as well get started, even though it’s the last thing I want to be doing. I want to be getting newsprint on my fingers with Thomas, searching out our murdered girl. I can see him at the computer from where I’m sitting, hunched over toward the screen, clicking away feverishly with the mouse. Then he writes something on a scrap of paper and gets up.

“Cas,” I hear Carmel say, and from the tone of her voice she’s been talking for a while. I put on my very best charming smile.

“Hm?”

“I said, do you want to do the octopus, or the hermit crab?”

“Octopus,” I say. “They’re good with a little olive oil and lemon. Lightly fried.”

Carmel makes a face. “That’s disgusting.”

“No, it isn’t. I used to eat it with my dad all the time in Greece.”

“You’ve been to Greece?”

“Yeah,” I say, talking absently while I flip through pages of invertebrates. “We lived there for a few months when I was about four. I don’t remember very much.”

“Does your dad travel a lot? For work or something?”

“Yeah. Or at least he did.”

“He doesn’t anymore?”

“My dad’s dead,” I say. I hate telling people this. I never know exactly how my voice is going to sound saying it, and I hate the stricken looks they get on their faces when they don’t know what to say back. I don’t look at Carmel. I just keep reading about different genuses. She says she’s sorry, and asks how it happened. I tell her he was murdered, and she gasps.

These are the right responses. I should be touched by her attempt to be sympathetic. It isn’t her fault that I’m not. It’s just that I’ve seen these faces and heard these gasps for too long. There’s nothing about my father’s murder that doesn’t make me angry anymore.

It strikes me suddenly that Anna is my last training job. She’s incredibly strong. She’s the most difficult thing I can imagine facing. If I beat her, I’ll be ready. I’ll be ready to avenge my father.

The idea makes me pause. The idea of going back to Baton Rouge, back to that house, has always been mostly abstract. Just an idea, a long-range plan. I suppose that for all of my voodoo research, part of me has been procrastinating. I haven’t been particularly effective, after all. I still don’t know who it was that killed my dad. I don’t know if I would be able to raise them, and I’d be all on my own. Bringing Mom is out of the question. Not after years of hiding books and discreetly clicking out of websites when she walked into the room. She’d ground me for life if she even knew I was thinking of it.

A tap on my shoulder brings me out of my daze. Thomas sets a newspaper down in front of me — a brittle, yellowed old thing that I’m surprised they let out of the glass.