Anna Dressed in Blood

“How did it kill him?” Anna asks softly.

“I don’t know,” I say. My hands are shaking. “I used to think it was because he was distracted. Or he was ambushed. I even had this idea that the knife stopped working, that after a certain time it just stops working for you, when your number is up. I thought maybe it was me who had done it. That I killed him just by growing older, and being ready to replace him.”

“That’s not true,” Carmel says. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. When you’re a seven-year-old kid and your dad dies and his body looks like it’s been taken to a buffet for goddamn Siberian tigers, you think up a lot of ridiculous shit.”

“He was eaten?” Thomas asks.

“Yeah. He was eaten. I heard the cops describing it. Big chunks taken out of him, just like what was taken out of Will and Chase.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the same thing,” Carmel reasons. “It’s kind of a large coincidence, isn’t it? After ten years?”

I don’t say anything. I can’t disagree with that.

“So maybe this is something different,” Thomas suggests.

“No. This is it. It’s the same thing; I know it is.”

“Cas,” he says. “How do you know?”

I look at him from under my brow. “Hey. I might not be a witch, but this gig does come with a few perks. I just know, okay? And in my experience, there aren’t exactly a boatload of ghosts who eat flesh.”

“Anna,” Thomas says gently. “You’ve never eaten anything?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“Besides,” I add, “I was going to go back for it. I always intended to. But this time I was going back for real.” I glance at Anna. “I mean, I thought I might. As soon as I was finished here. Maybe it knew.”

“It’s coming after you,” Anna says absently.

I rub my eyes, thinking. I’m exhausted. Seriously dragging ass. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I slept like a rock last night, for probably the first time in a week.

And then it clicks.

“The nightmares,” I say. “They’ve been worse since I got here.”

“What nightmares?” Thomas asks.

“I thought they were just dreams. Somebody leaning over me. But this whole time, it must’ve been like a portent.”

“Like a what?” Carmel asks.

“Like a psychopomp or something. Prophecy dreams. Foretelling dreams. A warning.” That gravelly voice, echoed out of the dirt and put through a buzz saw. That accent, almost Cajun, almost Caribbean. “There was this smell,” I say, my nose crinkling. “Some kind of sweet smoke.”

“Cas,” Anna says. She sounds alarmed. “I smelled smoke when I was cut with your athame. You told me then it was probably just a memory of Elias’s pipe tobacco. But what if it wasn’t?”

“No,” I say. But even as I say it, I remember one of my nightmares. You lost the athame, is what the thing said. You lost it, in that voice like rotting plants and razor blades.

Fear creeps up my back in cold fingers. My brain is trying to make a connection, poking carefully, dendrite seeking out dendrite. The thing that killed my father was voodoo. That much I’ve always known. And what is voodoo, in essence?

There’s something there, some knowledge just out of the reach of light. It has to do with something Morfran said.

Carmel raises her hand like she’s in class.

“Voice of reason,” she says. “Whatever the thing is, and whatever the link may or may not be to the knife, or to Cas, or to Cas’s father, it’s killed at least two people, and eaten most of them. So what are we going to do?”

The room falls silent. I’m no use without my knife. For all I know, the thing might have taken the knife from Will, and now I’ve gotten Thomas and Carmel into a ginormous mess.

“I don’t have my knife,” I mumble.

“Don’t start that,” Anna says. She walks away from me sharply. “Arthur without Excalibur was still Arthur.”

“Yeah,” Carmel intones. “We might not have that athame, but if I’m not mistaken, we’ve got her”—she nods toward Anna—“and that’s something. Will and Chase are dead. We know what did it. We might be next. So let’s freaking circle the wagons and do something!”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, we’re all inside the Tempo. All four of us—Thomas and me up front, Carmel and Anna in the back. Why we didn’t take Carmel’s much roomier, more reliable, and less conspicuous Audi is beyond me, but that’s what happens when you hatch a plan in fifteen minutes. Except that there isn’t that much of a plan, because we don’t really know what’s happened. I mean, we’ve got hunches—I’ve got more than a hunch—but how could we make a plan when we don’t know what the thing is, or what it wants?