Anna Dressed in Blood

“You have to find your way back into the world now,” I say gently.

Anna opens her mouth to speak, but I’ll never know what she was going to say. The house literally lurches, like it’s being jacked up. With a very large jack. When it settles, there’s a momentary jarring, and in the vibration a figure appears in front of us. It slowly fades in from shadow until he stands there, a pale, chalky corpse in the still air.

“I only wanted to sleep,” he says. It sounds like he’s got a mouthful of gravel, but upon closer inspection I realize it’s because all of his teeth have come loose. It makes him look older, as does the sagging skin, but he couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Just another runaway who stumbled into the wrong house.

“Anna,” I say, grabbing her arm, but she won’t let herself be dragged back. She stands without flinching as he stretches his arms wide. The Christlike pose makes it worse when the blood starts seeping through his ragged clothes, darkening the fabric everywhere, on every limb. His head lolls and then whips back and forth wildly. Then it snaps upright and he screams.

The sound of ripping that I hear isn’t only his shirt. Intestines spill out in a grotesque rope and hit the floor. He starts to fall forward, toward her, and I grab and yank hard enough to pull her to my chest. When I put myself between her and him, another body crashes through the wall, sending dust and splinters everywhere. It flies across the floor in scattered pieces, ragged arms and legs. The head stares at us as it skids, baring its teeth.

I’m in no mood to see a blackened, rotting tongue, so I wrap my arm around Anna and pull her across the floor. She moans softly but lets herself be pulled, and we rush through the door into the safety of daylight. Of course when we look back there’s no one there. The house is unchanged, no blood on the floor, no cracks in the wall.

Staring back through her front door, Anna looks miserable — guilty and terrorized. I don’t even think, I just pull her closer and hold her tight. My breath moves quickly in her hair. Her fists are trembling as she grips my shirt.

“You can’t stay here,” I say.

“There’s nowhere else for me to go,” she replies. “It isn’t so bad. They’re not that strong. A display like that, they can probably only manage once every few days. Maybe.”

“You can’t be serious. What if they get stronger?”

“I don’t know what we could have expected,” she says, and steps away, out of my reach. “That all this would come without a price.”

I want to argue, only nothing sounds convincing, even in my head. But it can’t be like this. It’ll drive her insane. I don’t care what she says.

“I’ll go to Thomas and Morfran,” I say. “They’ll know what to do. Look at me,” I say, lifting her chin. “I won’t let it stay like this. I promise.”

If she cared enough to make a gesture, it would be a shrug. To her, this is fitting punishment. But it did shake her up, and that keeps her from really arguing. When I move to my car, I hesitate.

“Will you be all right?”

Anna gives me a wry smile. “I’m dead. What could happen?” Still, I get the feeling that while I’m gone, she’s going to spend most of her time outside the house. I walk off down the driveway.

“Cas?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you came back. I wasn’t sure if you would.”

I nod and put my hands in my pockets. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Inside the car, I blare the radio. It’s a good thing to do, when you’re sick to death of creepy silence. I do it a lot. I’m just settling into my groove with some Stones when a news report cuts through the melody of “Paint It, Black.”

“The body was found just inside the gates of Park View Cemetery, and may have been the victim of a satanic ritual. Police can’t comment yet on the identity of the victim, however Channel 6 has learned that the crime was particularly brutal. The victim, a man in his late forties, appeared to have been dismembered.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The images before me may as well be news footage played on mute. Lights on all of the squad cars ring out in red and flashing white, but there are no sirens. The police walk around in drab black jackets, their chins tucked low and somber. They’re trying to seem calm, like this happens every day, but some of them look like they’d rather be off in the bushes somewhere throwing up their donuts. A few use their bodies to obscure the view of nosy camera lenses. And somewhere in the center of it all is a body, torn to pieces.

I wish I could get closer, that I kept a spare press pass in the glove compartment or had the money to keep a few cops in my pocket. As it is, I’m lingering on the edges of the press crowd, behind the yellow tape.

I don’t want to believe that it was Anna. It would mean that man’s death is on my hands. I don’t want to believe it because it would mean that she’s incurable, that there is no redemption.

As the crowd watches, the police exit the park with a gurney. On top of it is a black bag that should normally be shaped like a body but instead looks like it’s been stuffed full of hockey equipment. I suppose they put him back together as well as they could. When the gurney hits the curb, the remains shift, and through the bag we can see one of the limbs fall down, clearly unattached to the rest. The crowd makes a muffled noise of disturbed disgust. I elbow my way back through them to my car.

* * *

I pull into her driveway and park. She’s surprised to see me. I’ve been gone less than an hour. As my feet crunch up the gravel I don’t know whether the noise comes from the dirt, or from my grinding teeth. Anna’s expression changes from pleased surprise to concern.

“Cas? What’s the matter?”

“You tell me.” I’m surprised to find how pissed I am. “Where were you last night?”

“What are you talking about?”

She needs to convince me. She needs to be very convincing.

“Just tell me where you were. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I stayed near the house. I tested my strength. I—” She pauses.

“You what, Anna?” I demand.

Her expression hardens. “I hid in my bedroom for a while. After I realized the spirits were still here.” The look in her eyes is resentful. It’s the there, are you happy now? look.

“You’re sure you didn’t leave? Didn’t try to explore Thunder Bay again, maybe go down to the park and, I don’t know, dismember some poor jogger?”

The stricken expression on her face makes the anger leak out through my shoes. I open my mouth to pull my foot out of it, but how do I explain why I’m so angry? How do I explain that she needs to give me a better alibi?

“I can’t believe you’re accusing me.”

“I can’t believe that you can’t believe it,” I retort. I don’t know why I can’t stop being so combative. “Come on. People don’t get butchered in this city every day. And the very night after I free the most powerful murderous ghost in the western hemisphere, somebody shows up missing their arms and legs? It’s a hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“But it is a coincidence,” she insists. Her delicate hands have formed balled-up fists.

“Don’t you remember what just happened?” I gesture wildly toward the house. “Tearing off body parts is, like, your MO.”

“What’s an ‘MO’?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Don’t you get what this means? Don’t you understand what I have to do if you keep on killing?”

When she doesn’t reply, my crazed tongue plows ahead.

“It means I get to have a serious Old Yeller moment,” I snap. The minute I say it, I know that I shouldn’t have. It was stupid and it was mean, and she caught the reference. Of course she would have. Old