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.
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?”
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.”
