Girl of Nightmares (31 page)

I look at Anna, using her broken arm now like she doesn’t care if it tears off completely. Because she doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, not the ragged remains of my shoulder, or my crushed chest. The Obeahman kicks one of Anna’s legs sideways at the knee and she tumbles.

I push myself up onto my elbows and spit blood onto the stone. The pain is dulled, still strong but no longer intense. It feels … inconsequential. I bend my knees, get my legs under me, and stand up. When I look down at my good arm, I smile. Did you see that, Dad? The athame never left my fist.

The Obeahman sees me rise, but I barely notice. I’m too busy watching the ghosts try to break free of his body, tracking their movements to see where they emerge the most. The vibrations of the knife are singing up through my wrist. Get in. Get out. Cut.

When I dive forward he’s unprepared. The first cut catches a ghost trailing out of his left leg. I kick out and put him on one knee, then get to my feet and cut across his bent back, severing another spirit before jumping away. Two more twist and spin out of his chest, and he screams, music in my ears. A four-jointed arm swings for my head; I duck and cut down beneath his ribs, then once more behind his head. No time to think, no time to look. Just get them out. Set them free.

Two more. Then one more. My dad’s voice is in my ear. Every piece of advice he ever gave me flashes through my mind and makes me faster, makes me better. This is what I was meant to do, what I’ve waited for, trained for.

“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” I say, wondering if he can hear me, if he’ll know what I mean. It doesn’t feel like I thought it would. I thought there would be rage. But there’s only elation. He and Anna are with me. The blade flashes and the Obeahman can’t stop us. Every time a ghost flies the Obeahman gets angrier, more frustrated. He tries to plug the hole in his chest, pressing his fingers down into the wound. The ghosts only tear it wider.

Anna fights with me, pulling him to the ground. I cut and count and watch them fly. The last of them leave him in a storm; they erupt from his chest, forcing the wound wide. He lays on the stone, split nearly in half, empty of everything but himself.

It all happened so fast. My eyes scan the blankness that should be sky, but there’s no one there. My dad’s not there. I missed him, in the middle of all of it. All that remains is the son of a bitch who took him away in the first place.

I step forward and kneel. Then, without really knowing why, I drag the athame across the stitches of his eyes.

The lids snap open. His eyes are still in there, but they’re rotten and black. The irises have turned an unnatural yellow, almost iridescent, a snake’s eyes. They swivel toward me and fix me with a look of disbelief.

“Go to wherever your Hell is,” I say. “You should have gone there ten years ago.”

“Cas,” Anna says, and takes my hand. We stand up and back away. The Obeahman watches, his pupils maddening pinpoints against the yellow iris. The wound in his chest is no longer growing larger, but the edges are drying out, and as we stand, the dryness spreads, turning his flesh and clothing to an ashy brown before caving in. I look into his eyes until the decay takes them over. For a second he lies there like a cement statue against the rock, and then he collapses, and the pieces of him scatter in all directions, until they disappear.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE

I never saw my dad.

After I realized that the blood didn’t matter, it all went so fast. I just cut and cut and didn’t think. And they all left. Around us now, everything feels empty.

“It’s not empty,” Anna says, even though I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything out loud. “You set him free. You let him move on.” She puts her hand on my shoulder and I look down at the athame. The blade shines bright, brighter than anything else here.

“He’s moved on,” I say. But part of me hoped he would stick around. Even if it was just long enough for me to see him. Maybe to tell him—I don’t know what. Maybe just to tell him that we were okay.

Anna wraps her arms around my waist and rests her chin on my shoulder. She doesn’t say anything comforting. She doesn’t tell me something that she doesn’t know for certain. She’s just here. And that’s enough.

When I take my eyes off of the athame, everything is different. With the Obeahman gone, the landscape is changing. It wrinkles and reforms around us. Looking up, the dark, bruised void is brighter. It looks clearer, and I can almost make out the faint twinkling of stars. The rocks are gone too, and so are the cliffs. There are no more sharp edges. There are no edges at all. We’re standing together in the middle of something beginning.

“We should go,” I whisper. “Before Thomas gives me a nosebleed.”

Anna smiles. The dark goddess is gone, receded back under the skin. She’s just Anna, looking at me curiously in her plain white dress.

“What’s going to happen now?” she asks.

“Something better,” I reply, and take her hand. She looks beautiful here. Her eyes sparkle, and the sunlight warms the color of her hair to a shining, chocolate brown.

“How do we get back?” she asks. I don’t reply. Instead I stare over her shoulder, at the changing landscape. I don’t know if I’ll be able to remember what it was like to see this. If I’ll be able to remember what it was like to watch creation. Maybe it’ll all fade, like a dream after waking.

The world behind her rises out of the mist, only there was never any mist. It comes upon us, up and around us, like watercolor spilling across a blank page. Sunlight beams down on uncut green grass, grass that I could fall down on and sleep for hours. Maybe days. Farther off are trees, and on the edge of that, there’s the Victorian, Anna’s Victorian, standing white and tall and unbroken. It never looked like this when she lived there. It never, ever looked like this. So bright and straight in the sun. Not even when it was newly built.

“Cas? Is it Thomas? Do we have to hurry?” She looks into my eyes, starts to follow them. I grab both of her hands.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t look.”

She doesn’t. Her eyes widen and she listens, trusting me, afraid of what she might see if she does. But I can’t hide the feel of the breeze as it moves through our clothes. I can’t muffle the sound of warm things, of birds singing and insects buzzing in the flowers near the house. So she looks. Her hair falls over her shoulder, and I expect to feel her fingers pull loose from mine any second. This is her place. Her other side. The blemish of the Obeahman is gone. She belongs here.

“No.”

“What?”

“I don’t belong here.” She squeezes my hands, tighter than before. “Let’s go back.”

I smile. She crossed over death to call me. I crossed through Hell to find her.

“Anna!”

We both look toward the sound of my voice. There’s a silhouette in the open doorway of the Victorian.

“Cas?” she asks uncertainly, and the figure steps out into the light. It’s me. It’s impossibly, completely me. Anna smiles and tugs at my hands. A small laugh escapes her throat.

“Come on,” he calls. “I thought you wanted to go for a walk.”

She hesitates. When she half turns back and sees me, the real me, she looks confused, and squeezes her eyes shut.

“Let’s go,” she says. “This place lies. For a minute I—I didn’t remember where we were. I didn’t remember you were here.” She looks back toward the Victorian again, and when she speaks, her voice is far off, almost there already. “For a minute I thought I was home.”

“Come on,” the other me calls again. “Before we have to go meet Thomas and Carmel.”

I look back over my shoulder. The candlelit room is still there. I can see Thomas, kneeling on the ground, his hands working frantically. I don’t have much time. But everything is happening too fast.

If I let go of Anna’s hands, she’ll forget me. She’ll forget everything except what lies across that field. It will all be gone. Her murder, and her curse. She’ll forever live out the life she should have had. The one we might have had together, if everything had been different. This place lies. But it’s a good lie.

“Anna,” I say. She turns back to me, but her eyes are wide and conflicted. I smile, and let one of her hands go to slide my fingers into her hair. “I have to go.”

“What?” she asks, but I don’t answer. Instead I kiss her, one time, and try to tell her in that single gesture everything that she’ll forget as soon as she turns away. I tell her I love her. I tell her I’ll miss her. And then I let her go.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

There’s the sound of something shattering, and the feeling of being slammed into something, all without moving. My eyes crack open and see a room filled with candlelight and red robes. There isn’t much sensation in my body that isn’t straight pain. Thomas, Gideon, and Carmel are on me immediately. I hear their voices as three distinct squawks. Someone is applying pressure to my stomach. Other members of the Order stand around looking useless, but when Gideon barks, there are a few red flutters. At least some of them have run off to do something. I stare up at the ceiling that is too high to see, but I know it’s there. I don’t have to look to the right or left to know that I came back alone.

*   *   *

This situation is vaguely familiar. I’m lying in a bed with an IV stuck in my arm and stitches in my guts, both internal and external. My back is propped up by four or five pillows and a tray of uneaten food rests on the bedside table. At least there’s no green Jell-O on it.

They say I was out for a week, and that my survival was touch and go for most of that. Carmel says that I pushed the limit on blood transfusions, and that I’m incredibly lucky that the Order has basically a fully functioning ER built into their basement. When I woke up, I was surprised by the head of auburn and silver hair zonked out by my bed. Gideon flew my mom into Glasgow.

There’s a knock at the door, and Thomas, Carmel, and my mom walk in. Mom immediately gestures to the tray of food.

“You’d better eat that,” she says.

“I’m taking it easy on my stomach,” I protest. “Come on. It just had a knife in it.”

Not funny, her narrowed eyes say to me. Okay, Mom. I pick up the bowl of applesauce and slurp it down, just to make her smile, which she does, reluctantly.

“So, we’ve decided that we’ll all stay on until you’re well enough to travel,” says Carmel, taking a seat on the foot of the bed. “We’ll fly back together, just in time for school to start.”

“Whoop-de-do, Carmel,” Thomas says, spiraling his finger in the air. He gives me a look. “She’s so damn excited to be a senior. Like she didn’t run the whole school already. Personally, I’m in no rush. Maybe we can take one more swing through the Suicide Forest on the way out, just for kicks.”

“You’re hilarious,” Carmel says sarcastically, and shoves him.

One more knock at the door, and Gideon comes in with his hands in his pockets and sits down in the chair. I notice the uncomfortable look traded between him and my mom. I don’t know if things will ever be the same for them after this. But I’ll do my best to explain that it wasn’t Gideon’s fault.

“I just got off the phone with Colin Burke,” Gideon tells us. “Jestine is apparently doing very well. She’s up and about already.”

Jestine didn’t die. The wounds she received at the hands of the Obeahman were no more fatal than mine were. And she came back earlier than I did, so she didn’t lose quite as much blood. She was also apparently more careful about where she took her wound, because she didn’t do as much internal damage to herself as I did either. Maybe someday I’ll get her to come clean with all of her secrets. Or maybe not. Life’s more interesting with gray areas.

Silence lingers in the room. I’ve been conscious now for three days, but they keep pussyfooting around, and haven’t asked too many questions about what happened over there. But they’re dying to know. I won’t mind telling them. It’s just sort of fun to wait and wonder which one is going to burst first.

I look around at their uncomfortably curious faces. None of them does anything but give a closed-lip smile.

“Well, I’m going to see about dinner for the rest of us,” my mom says, and crosses her arms. “You’re still on mushy food for a while, Cas.” She claps Thomas on the shoulder as she leaves. No doubt she knows that I chose him to be my anchor. If she was fond of him before, she might just adopt him now.

“Did you at least see her?” Thomas asks, and I smile. Finally.

“Yeah. I saw her.”

“What … what happened? Was it the Obeahman?” He asks so hesitantly. Carmel’s eyes are bugged out, watching me for signs of stress, ready to jump on Thomas and stop the questions. It’s sort of silly, but I appreciate their worry.

“It was the Obeahman,” I say. “You were right, Gideon. They were trapped there together.” He nods, and his eyes go dark. He didn’t really want to be right, I suppose. “But he’s finished now. I finished him. And I freed the others. All of the others he took into himself over the years. All those ghosts. And Will and Chase.” I nod at Carmel. “And my dad.” Gideon closes his eyes. “Don’t tell Mom yet,” I say to him. “I will tell her. But—I didn’t see him or anything. I didn’t talk to him. It’s hard to explain.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Tell her in your own time.”

“What about Anna?” Thomas asks. “Was she all right? Did you free her too?”

I smile. “I hope I did,” I reply. “I think I did. I think she’ll be all right now. I think she’ll be happy.”

“I’m glad,” Carmel says. “But are you going to be okay?” She puts her hand on my knee and squeezes it through the sheets. I nod. I’ll be fine.

“What about the Order?” I ask Gideon. “Jestine brought metal back with her, to forge another athame. Did they tell you that?”

“They alluded to it.” Gideon nods. “She always was a clever girl.”

“Another athame?” says Thomas. “Can they do that?”

“I’m not sure. They seem to think so.”

“So what,” Carmel groans, sounding exhausted. “Does that mean we’re going to have to take out the entire Order? Not that I’d mind, but seriously?”