“So, I guess you’re really going to try this,” he says. I wish he wouldn’t sound so hesitant, so skeptical. The quest might be doomed, but there’s no reason to paint it that way from the get-go.
“I guess I am.”
He smiles, lopsided. “Want some help?”
Thomas. He’s my best friend and sometimes he still makes it sound like he’s a tagalong. Of course I want his help. More than that: I need it.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“But I will,” he replies. “Do you have any idea where to start?”
I run my hand through my hair. “Not really. There’s just an urge to get moving, like there’s a clock ticking somewhere that I can barely hear.”
Thomas shrugs. “It’s possible that there is. Figuratively speaking. The longer that Anna stays where she is, the harder it might be for her to cross over to somewhere else. She might become embedded in it. Of course that’s just conjecture.”
Conjecture. Honestly, half-cocked guesses about worst-case scenarios aren’t what I need right now.
“Let’s just hope it’s not a real clock,” I say. “She’s already been there too long, Thomas. One second is too long, after what she did for us.”
Thoughts about what she did to all of the runaways in her basement—all the teens who wound up in the wrong place and the wanderers stuck in her web—flutter over his features. Other people might judge Anna’s fate as a proper punishment. Maybe lots of people. But not me. Anna’s hands were tied by the curse put on her when she was murdered. Every one of her victims was a casualty of the curse, not the girl. That’s what I say. I’m well aware that none of the people she tore apart would be likely to say the same thing.
“We can’t rush this, Cas,” Thomas says, and I agree. But we can’t keep treading water, either.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Morfran writes Thomas a note to get him out of the last days of school, saying he’s come down with a bad case of mono. We’ve spent every moment we’ve been awake poring over books—old, musty tomes that have been translated from older, mustier tomes. I was grateful to have something to do, to feel like we were moving forward. But after three days of minimal sleep and living off sandwiches and frozen pizza, we have virtually nothing to show for our efforts. Every book is a dead end, going on and on about contacting the other side, but never even addressing the possibility of punching through, let alone pulling something back. I’ve called every contact I know who might have information, and I got jack squat.
We’re sitting at Thomas and Morfran’s kitchen table, surrounded by more useless books, while Morfran adds potatoes to a pot of beef stew on the stove. On the other side of the windows, birds flit from tree to tree, and a few large squirrels are fighting for control of the bird feeder. I haven’t seen Anna since the night we contacted her. I don’t know why. I tell myself that she’s afraid for me, that she regrets telling me to come for her, and is staying away deliberately. It’s a nice delusion. Maybe it’s even true.
“Heard from Carmel lately?” I ask Thomas.
“Yeah. She says we’re not missing much at school. That it’s mostly a bunch of back-to-back pep rallies and friendship circles.”
I snort. I remember thinking the same thing. Thomas doesn’t seem worried, but I wonder why Carmel hasn’t called me. We shouldn’t have left her alone for so many days. The ritual had to have shaken her up.
“Why hasn’t she come by?” I ask.
“You know how she feels about this,” Thomas says without looking up from the book he’s reading. I tap a pen against the open page in front of me. There’s nothing useful there.
“Morfran,” I say. “Tell me about zombies. Tell me how voodooists and obeahmen raise the dead.”
A flicker of motion catches my eye: Thomas is flapping his hand toward his throat, giving me the cut-it signal.
“What?” I ask. “They bring people back from the dead, right? That’s crossing over, if I ever heard it. There’s got to be something there we can use.”
Morfran sets the spoon down on the counter with a sharp crack. He turns toward me with an irritated expression.
“For a professional ghost killer, you sure ask a lot of numb-nut questions.”
“What?”
Thomas nudges me. “Morfran gets offended when people say voodoo can bring you back from the dead. It’s sort of a stereotype, you know?”
“It’s utter Hollywood bullshit,” Morfran grumbles. “Those ‘zombies’ aren’t anything more than poor, drugged souls who got sedated, buried, and dug up. They shuffle around afterward because the drug was poison from a puffer fish and it boiled their brains tender.”