Anna Dressed in Blood

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.

The weight of my athame moves easily in my palm, flipping so the blade isn’t pointed ahead but back; I’m holding it like the guy from Psycho did when he was hacking through that chick in the shower scene. But I’m not using it to hack. The sharp side of the blade is facing up, and as the ghost raises the gun on my friends, I jerk my arm toward the ceiling. The athame connects and slices most of the way through his wrist.

He howls and steps back; I do too. The gun drops to the ground without a noise. It’s eerie, the sight of something that should make a racket and yet you don’t even hear a whisper. He looks at his hand in puzzlement. It’s hanging by a thread of skin, but there isn’t any blood. When he plucks it off, it dissolves into smoke: oily, cancerous tendrils. I don’t think I need to tell anyone not to breathe it in.

“So what, that’s it?” Will asks in a panicked voice. “I thought that thing was supposed to kill it!”

“It isn’t an ‘it,’” I say evenly. “It’s a man. Two men. And they’re already dead. This sends them where they need to be.”

The ghost comes at me now. I’ve gotten his attention, and I duck and pull back so easily, so swiftly, that none of his attempts to strike even come close. I slice off more of his arm as I duck underneath it, and the smoke dances around and disappears in the disturbance my body made.

“Every ghost goes differently,” I tell them. “Some die again like they think they’re still alive.” I duck another one of his attacks and land an elbow to the back of his head. “Others melt into puddles of blood. Others explode.” I look back at my friends, at their wide eyes paying rapt attention. “Some leave things behind — ashes, or stains. Some don’t.”

“Cas,” Thomas says, and points behind me, but I already know that the ghost is on his way back. I sidestep and slice through his rib cage. He goes down on one knee.

“Every time is different,” I say. “Except for this.” I look directly at Will, ready to go to work. It’s at that moment that I feel the ghost’s hands grip both of my ankles and pull me off of my feet.

Did you hear that? Both hands. Yet I distinctly remember cutting one of them off. This strikes me as very interesting just before my head bonks off of the chipboard floor.

The ghost lunges for my throat and I just barely hold him off. Looking at the hands, one is different. It’s