She knows that she’s dead. That’s interesting. Most of them don’t. Most are just angry and scared, more an imprint of an emotion—of a horrible moment—than an actual being. You can talk to some of them, but they usually think you’re someone else, someone from their past. Her awareness throws me off a beat; I use my tongue to buy some time.

“Sweetheart, my father and I have put more ghosts in the ground than you can count.”

“Never one like me.”

There is a tone in her voice when she says this that isn’t quite pride, but something like it. Pride tinged with bitterness. I stay quiet, because I’d rather she not know that she’s right. Anna is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Her strength seems limitless, along with her bag of tricks. She’s not some shuffling phantom, pissed off about being shot to death. She’s death itself, gruesome and senseless, and even when she’s dressed in blood and veins I can’t help but stare.

But I’m not afraid. Strong or not, all I need is one good strike. She’s not beyond the reach of my athame, and if I can get to her, she’ll bleed out into the ether just like all the rest.

“Perhaps you should fetch your father to help you,” she says. I squeeze my blade.

“My father’s dead.”

Something passes across her eyes. I can’t believe it’s regret, or embarrassment, but that’s what it looks like.

“My father died too, when I was a girl,” she says softly. “A storm on the lake.”

I can’t let her keep on like this. I can feel something in my chest softening, ceasing to growl, completely despite myself. Her strength makes her vulnerability more touching. I should be beyond this.

“Anna,” I say, and her eyes snap to mine. I raise the blade and the flash of it reflects in her eyes.

“Go,” she orders, queen of her dead castle. “I don’t want to kill you. And it seems that I don’t have to, for some reason. So go.”

Questions pop into my mind at this, but I stubbornly plant my feet. “I’m not leaving until you’re out of this house and back in the ground.”

“I was never in the ground,” she hisses through her teeth. Her pupils are growing darker, the blackness swirling outward until all the white is gone. Veins creep across her cheeks to find homes at her temples and throat. Blood bubbles up from her skin and spills down the length of her, a sweeping skirt dripping to the floor.

I thrust with my knife and feel something heavy connect with my arm before I’m tossed into the wall. Fuck. I didn’t even see her move. She’s still hovering in the middle of the room where I used to be. My shoulder hurts a lot where I connected with the wall. My arm hurts a lot where it connected with Anna. But I’m fairly hardheaded, so I scramble up and go for her again, going in low this time, not even trying for the kill but just for a slice of something. At this point, I’d settle for hair.

The next thing I know, I’m across the room again. I’ve skidded across it on my back. I think there are splinters in my pants. Anna continues to hover, regarding me with ever increasing resentment. The sound of her dress dripping onto the floorboards reminds me of a teacher I used to have who would slowly tap his temple when he was really annoyed with my lack of studying.

I get back on my feet, this time more slowly. I hope it looks more like I’m carefully planning my next move and less like I’m in large amounts of pain, which is the real reason. She’s not trying to kill me and it’s starting to piss me off. I’m being batted around like a cat toy. Tybalt would find this hilarious. I wonder if he can see from the car.

“Stop this,” she says in her cavernous voice.

I run at her, and she grabs me by the wrists. I struggle, but it’s like trying to wrestle concrete.

“Just let me kill you,” I mutter in frustration. Rage lights up her eyes. For a second I think what a mistake I’ve made, that I forgot what she really was, and I’m going to wind up just like Mike Andover. My body actually scrunches up, trying to keep from being torn in two.

“I’ll never let you kill me,” she spits, and shoves me back toward the door.

“Why? Don’t you think it would be peaceful?” I ask. I wonder for the millionth time why I can never seem to stop running my mouth.

She squints at me like I’m an idiot. “Peaceful? After what I’ve done? Peace, in a house of torn-apart boys and disemboweled strangers?” She pulls my face very close to hers. Her black eyes are wide. “I can’t let you kill me,” she says, and then she shouts, shouts loud enough to make my eardrums throb as she’s throwing me out through the front door, clear past the broken stairs and onto the overgrown gravel of the driveway.

“I never wanted to be dead!”

I hit the ground rolling and look up just in time to see the door slam. The house looks still and vacant, like nothing has happened there in a million years. I gingerly test my limbs and find that they’re all in working order. Then I push myself up to my knees.

None of them ever wanted to be dead. Not really. Not even the suicides; they changed their minds at the last minute. I wish I could tell her so, and tell her cleverly, so she wouldn’t feel so alone. Plus it’d make me feel like less of a moron after being tossed around like an anonymous henchman in a James Bond movie. Some professional ghost killer I am.

As I walk to my mom’s car, I try to get it back under control. Because I am going to get Anna, no matter what she thinks. Both because I’ve never failed before, and also because in the moment she told me she couldn’t let me kill her, she sounded like she sort of wished that she could. Her awareness makes her special in more ways than one. Unlike the others, Anna regrets. I rub the ache along my left arm and know I’ll be covered with bruises. Force isn’t going to work. I need a plan B.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

My mom lets me sleep through most of the day, and when she finally wakes me up it’s to tell me she’s brewed a bath of tea leaves, lavender, and belladonna. The belladonna is in there to temper my rash behavior, but I don’t refuse. I hurt all over. That’s what getting thrown around a house all night by the goddess of death will do to you.

As I sink into the tub, very slowly, with a grimace on my face, I start to think of my next move. The fact of the matter is, I’m outmatched. It hasn’t happened very often, and never to this degree. But occasionally, I need to ask for help. I reach for my cell phone on the bathroom counter and dial an old friend. A friend for generations, actually. He knew my dad.

“Theseus Cassio,” he says when he picks up. I smirk. He’ll never call me Cas. He finds my full name just too amusing.

“Gideon Palmer,” I say back, and picture him on the other end of the line, on the other side of the world, sitting in a proper English house that overlooks Hampstead Heath in northern London.

“It’s been too long,” he says, and I can see him crossing or uncrossing his legs. I can almost hear the mutter of the tweed through the phone. Gideon is a classic English gent, sixty-five if he’s a day, with white hair and glasses. He’s the kind of man with a pocket watch and long shelves of meticulously dusted books that reach from floor to ceiling. He used to push me on the rolling ladders when I was a kid and he wanted me to fetch some weird volume on poltergeists, or binding spells, or whatever. My family and I spent a summer with him while my dad was hunting a ghost that was stalking Whitechapel, some kind of Jack the Ripper wannabe.

“Tell me, Theseus,” he says. “When do you anticipate returning to London? Plenty of things that go bump in the night to keep you busy. Several excellent universities, all haunted to the gills.”

“Have you been talking to my mother?”

He laughs, but of course he has. They’ve stayed close since my dad died. He was my dad’s … I guess mentor is the best word. But more than that. When Dad was killed, he flew over the same day. Held me and my mother together. Now he starts going off on this spiel about how applications are going to have to go out next year, and how I’m really quite lucky that my father provided for my education and I won’t have to mess around with student loans and that business. It really is lucky because a scholarship for this rolling stone is just not in the cards, but I cut him off. I have more important and pressing issues.