Kendare Blake - Anna Dressed in Blood

The car slows almost to a crawl. Will is peering out at buildings to his left. Some look like warehouses, others like low-rent apartment complexes that haven’t been used for a while. All are the color of washed-out sandstone.

“There,” he says, and mutters, “I think,” under his breath. We park in an alley and get out together. Now that he’s here, Will seems a little less eager.

I take my athame out of my bag and sling it over my shoulder, then hand the bag off to Thomas and nod to Will to lead the way. He takes us around the front of the building and down two more, until we get to one that looks like an old apartment. There are residential-style windows at the top with paned glass and an unused window box. I peer along the side and see a fire escape with the ladder hanging down. I test the front door. I don’t know why it’s unlocked, but it is, which is good. We’d have cut a damned conspicuous picture if we’d had to shimmy up the side.

When we walk into the building, Will motions to head up the stairs. The place has that boarded-up smell, sour and unused, like too many different people have lived here and each left behind a lingering scent that doesn’t mix well with the others.

“So,” I say. “Isn’t anybody going to tell me what we’re about to walk into?”

Will doesn’t say anything. He just glances at Carmel, who dutifully speaks.

“About eight years ago, there was a hostage situation in the apartment upstairs. Some railroad worker went crazy, locked his wife and daughter in the bathroom and started waving a gun around. The cops got called in, and they sent up a hostage negotiator. It didn’t exactly go well.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She means,” Will cuts in, “that the hostage negotiator got himself shot in the spine, right before the perp shot himself in the head.”

I try to digest this information and not make fun of Will for using the word “perp.”

“The wife and daughter got out okay,” Carmel says. She sounds nervous, but excited.

“So what’s the ghost story?” I ask. “Are you bringing me into an apartment with some trigger-happy railroad worker?”

“It isn’t the railroad worker,” Carmel answers. “It’s the cop. There’ve been reports of him in the building after he died. People have seen him through the windows and heard him talking to someone, trying to convince them not to do it. Once they say he even talked to a little boy down on the street. He hung his head out the window and yelled at him, told him to get out of there. Scared him half to death.”

“Could be just another urban legend,” Thomas says.

But in my experience, it usually isn’t. I don’t know what I’m going to find when we get up to this apartment. I don’t know if we’ll find anything, and if we do, I don’t know if I should kill him. After all, nobody mentioned the cop actually harming anybody, and it’s always been our practice to leave the safe ones alone, no matter how much they wail and rattle their chains.

Our practice. The athame is a heavy weight on my shoulder. All my life I’ve known this knife. I’ve watched the blade move through light and air, first in my father’s hand and then in my own. The power in it sings to me — it courses through my arm and into my chest. For seventeen years it has kept me safe and made me strong.

The blood tie, Gideon always told me. The blood of your ancestors forged this athame. Men of power, bled their warrior, to put the spirits down. The athame is your father’s, and it is yours, and you both belong to it.

That’s what he told me. Sometimes with fun hand gestures and a little bit of miming. The knife is mine, and I love it, like you would love any faithful hound dog. Men of power, whoever they were, put my ancestor’s blood — a warrior’s blood — into the blade. It puts the spirits down, but I don’t know where. Gideon and my father taught me never to ask.

I’m thinking so hard about this that I don’t notice I’m leading them right into the apartment. The door has been left ajar and we’ve walked right into the empty living room. Our feet strike the bare flooring — whatever was left over after all the carpeting was pulled up. It looks like chipboard. I stop so fast that Thomas runs into my back. For a minute, I think the place is empty.

But then I see the black figure huddled in the corner, near the window. It’s got its hands over its head and it’s rocking back and forth, muttering to itself.

“Whoa,” Will whispers. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“No one is here,” I say, and feel them tense as they catch my meaning. It doesn’t matter if this is what they meant to bring me to. Seeing it for real is a completely different ballgame. I motion for them to stay back, and walk in a wide arc around the cop to get a better view. He’s got his eyes wide open; he looks terrified. He’s muttering and chittering like a chipmunk, all nonsense. It’s disturbing to think how sane he must’ve been when he was alive. I pull my athame out, not to threaten him but just to have it out, just in case. Carmel gives a little gasp, and for some reason that gets his attention.

He fixes his shiny eye on her. “Don’t do it,” he hisses. She backs up a step.

“Hey,” I say softly, and get no response. The cop has his eyes on Carmel. There must be something about her. Maybe she reminds him of the hostages — the wife and daughter.

Carmel doesn’t know what to do. Her mouth is open, the beginning of a word caught in her throat, and she’s looking quickly from the cop to me and back again.

I feel a familiar sharpening. That’s what I call it: a sharpening. It isn’t that I start to breathe harder, or that my heart speeds up and pounds in my chest. It’s subtler than that. I breathe deeper, and my heart beats stronger. Everything around me slows down, and all of the lines are crisp and clear. It has to do with confidence, and my natural edge. It has to do with my fingers humming as they squeeze the handle of my athame.

I never once had this feeling when I went up against Anna. It’s what I’ve been missing, and maybe Will was a blessing in disguise. This is what I’m after: this edge, this living on the balls of my feet. I can see everything in an instant: that Thomas is genuinely thinking about how to protect Carmel, and that Will is trying to work up the nerve to try something himself, to prove that I’m not the only one who can do this. Maybe I should let him. Let the ghost of the cop give him a scare and put him back in his place.

“Please,” Carmel says. “Just calm down. I didn’t want to come here in the first place, and I’m not who you think I am. I don’t want to hurt anybody!”

And then something interesting happens. Something I haven’t seen before. The features on the cop’s face change. It’s almost impossible to see, like picking out the current of a river moving beneath the surface. The nose broadens. The cheekbones shift downward. The lips grow thinner and the teeth shift inside the mouth. All of this has happened in two or three blinks of an eye. I’m looking at another face.

“Interesting,” I mutter, and my peripheral vision registers Thomas giving me the is-that-all-you-can-say? face. “This ghost isn’t just the cop,” I explain. “It’s both of them. The cop and the railroad worker, trapped together in one form.” This is the railroad worker, I think, and I glance down at his hands just as he’s lifting one to aim a gun at Carmel.

She shrieks, and Thomas grabs her and pulls her down. Will doesn’t do much of anything. He just starts saying, “It’s just a ghost, it’s just a ghost” over and over very loudly, which is pretty damn stupid. I, on the other hand, don’t hesitate.