Anna Dressed in Blood

“What?” I ask.

“Your eyes are yellow.” I think she’s going to cry again. From another room, I hear Morfran swear. “It’s your liver,” my mom says softly. “And maybe your kidneys. They’re failing.”

Well, that explains the liquefying feeling in my side.

We’re alone in the living room. Everyone else has sort of scattered off to their respective corners. I suppose everyone’s doing some thinking, maybe saying some prayers. Hopefully Thomas and Carmel are making out in a closet. Outside, a flash of electricity catches my eye.

“Isn’t it a little late in the season for lightning?” I ask.

Morfran answers from where he’s hovering in the door of the kitchen. “It isn’t just lightning. I think our boy is working up some energy.”

“We should do the summoning spell,” my mom says.

“I’ll go find Thomas.” I heave myself off the sofa and make my way upstairs quietly. At the top, Carmel’s voice is coming from inside one of the old guest rooms.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she says, and her voice is scared, but also kind of snarky.

“What do you mean?” Thomas answers.

“Come on. I’m the freaking Prom Queen. Cas is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you, your grandpa, and his mom are all witches or wizards or whatever, and Anna is … Anna. What am I doing here? What use am I?”

“Don’t you remember?” Thomas asks. “You’re the voice of reason. You think of the things we forget about.”

“Yeah. And I think I’m going to get myself killed. Just me and my aluminum bat.”

“You’re not. You won’t. Nothing’s going to happen to you, Carmel.”

Their voices drop lower. I feel like some pervert eavesdropper. I’m not going to interrupt them. Mom and Morfran can do the spells on their own. Let Thomas have this moment. So I back softly down the stairs and head outside.

I wonder what things will be like after this is over. Assuming we all make it through, what’s going to happen? Will everything go back to the way it was? Will Carmel eventually forget about this adventurous time with us? Will she shun Thomas and go back to being the center of SWC? She wouldn’t do that, would she? I mean, she did just compare me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My opinion of her isn’t the highest right now.

When I step out onto the porch, tugging my jacket tighter, I see Anna sitting on the railing with one leg up. She’s watching the sky, and her face lit by the lightning is equal parts awe and worry.

“Strange weather,” she says.

“Morfran says it’s not just weather,” I reply, and she makes an I thought as much expression.

“You look a little better.”

“Thanks.” I don’t know why, but I feel shy. Now’s not really the time for it. I walk over to her and put my arms around her waist.

There’s no warmth to her body. When I put my nose into her dark hair, there’s no scent. But I can touch her, and I’ve come to know her. And, for whatever reason, she can say the same things about me.

I catch a whiff of something spicy. We look up. Coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms are thin tendrils of scented smoke, smoke that doesn’t break up with the wind, but instead stretches out in ethereal fingers to call something forward. The summoning spells have started.

“Are you ready?” I ask.

“Always and never,” she says softly. “Isn’t that what they say?”

“Yes,” I reply into her neck. “That’s what they say.”

* * *

“Where should I do it?”

“Somewhere that’s at least going to look like a mortal wound.”

“Why not the inside of the wrist? It’s a classic for a reason.”

Anna sits in the middle of the floor. The underside of her pale arm swims before my compromised vision. We’re both nervous, and the suggestions issuing from the upper level aren’t helping.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.

“You won’t. Not really.”

It’s full-on dark, and the dry electrical storm is moving ever closer to our house on the hill. My blade, normally so sure and steady, quivers and tremors as I draw it across Anna’s arm. Her black blood runs out in a thick line, staining her skin and dripping onto the dusty floorboards in heavy spatters.

My head is killing me. I need to stay clear. As we both watch the blood pool, we can feel it, a sort of quickening in the air, some intangible force that makes the hair on our arms and necks tighten and stand up.

“He’s coming,” I say, loudly enough that they’ll be able to hear me where they all stand on the second level, watching over the railing. “Mom, get into one of the back rooms. Your work is done.” She doesn’t want to go, but she goes, and without a word, even though she’s got a novel’s worth of worries and encouragement sitting on her tongue.

“I feel sick,” Anna whispers. “And it’s pulling me, like before. Did you cut too deep?”

I reach for her arm. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.” The blood is leaking, which is what we intended, but there’s so much of it. How much blood does a dead girl have?

“Cas,” Carmel says. There’s alarm in her voice. I don’t look at her. I look at the door.

Mist is coming in off of the porch, seeping in through the cracks, moving like a seeking snake across the floor. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I think I expected him to blow the door off its hinges and stand silhouetted against the moonlight, some badass eyeless specter.

The mist circles around us. In all our rope-a-dope glory, we kneel, exhausted, looking defeated. Except that Anna really does look more dead than usual. This plan could backfire.

And then the mist comes together and I’m once again staring at the Obeahman, who stares back with his stitched-over eyes.

I hate it when they don’t have eyes. Empty sockets or cloudy eyeballs or eyes that just aren’t where they should be — I hate all of it. It freaks me out, and that pisses me off.

Overhead, I hear chants starting, and the Obeahman laughs.

“Bind me all you want,” he says. “I get what I came for.”

“Seal the house,” I call to them upstairs. I heave myself to my feet. “I hope you came for my knife in your gut.”

“You are becoming inconvenient,” he says, but I’m not thinking. I’m fighting, lunging, and trying to keep my balance through the throbbing in my head. I’m slashing and spinning against the stiffness in my side and chest.

He’s quick, and ridiculously agile for something with no eyes, but I finally get through. My whole body tenses like a bow when I feel the edge of my knife slide into his side.

He feints back and puts a dead hand to the wound. My triumph is short lived. Before I know what’s happened, he’s come forward and smacked me into a wall. I don’t realize I’ve hit it until I’m sliding down.

“Bind him! Weaken him!” I shout, but as I do, he skitters forward like some god-awful spider and lifts the sofa like it’s inflatable, then hurls it into my team of magic-casters on the second level. They cry out at the impact, but there isn’t any time to wonder if they’re all right. He grabs me by the shoulder and lifts me up, then punches me into the wall. When I hear what sounds like twigs snapping, I know that it’s actually a whole bunch of my ribs. Maybe the whole effing cage.

“This athame is ours,” he says into my face, sweet smoke issuing from between rancid gums. “It’s like Obeah — it is intent, both yours and mine now, and whose do you think is stronger?”

Intent. Over his shoulder I see Anna, her eyes gone black and her body twisted, covered in the dress of blood. The wound on her arm has grown, and she lies in an oily puddle two feet across. She’s staring at the floor with a blank expression. Upstairs I see the tossed sofa and a pair of legs caught underneath. I taste my own blood in my mouth. It’s hard to breathe.

And then an Amazon comes out of nowhere. Carmel has jumped down the stairs, halfway down the wall. She’s screaming. The Obeahman turns just in time to catch an aluminum bat in the face, and it does more than it did to Anna, maybe because Carmel is way more pissed. It knocks him down onto his knees, and she strikes again