Anna blinks and smiles, fleetingly. She’s trying not to laugh herself.

“I was…” She pauses. “I was angry with you.”

“For what?” I ask.

“For trying to kill me,” she says, and then we both do laugh.

“And after you tried so hard to not kill me.” I smile. “I guess it must’ve seemed pretty rude.” I’m laughing with her. We’re having a conversation. What is this, some kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome?

“Why are you here? Did you come to try to kill me again?”

“Oddly enough, no. I—I had a bad dream. I needed to talk to someone.” I ruffle my hand through my hair. It’s been ages since I’ve felt so awkward. Maybe I’ve never felt this awkward. “And I guess I just figured, well, Anna must be up. So here I am.”

She snorts a little. Then her brow furrows. “What could I say to you? What could we talk about? I’ve been out of the world for so long.”

I shrug. The next words leave my mouth before I know what’s happening. “Well, I was never really in the world in the first place, so.” I clench my jaw and look down at the floor. I can’t believe I’m being so emo. I’m complaining to a girl who was brutally murdered at sixteen. She’s trapped in this house of corpses and I get to go to school and be a Trojan; I get to eat my mom’s grilled peanut butter and Cheez Whiz sandwiches and—

“You walk with the dead,” she says gently. Her eyes are luminous and—I can’t believe it—sympathetic. “You’ve walked with us since…”

“Since my father died,” I say. “And before that he walked with you and I followed. Death is my world. Everything else, school and friends, they’re just things that get in the way of my next ghost.” I’ve never said this before. I’ve never allowed myself to think it for more than a second. I’ve kept myself focused, and in doing so have managed to not think too much about life either, about living, no matter how hard my mom pushed me to have fun, to go out, to apply to colleges.

“Were you never sad?” she asks.

“Not a lot. I had this higher power, you know? I had this purpose.” I reach into my back pocket and pull out my athame, drawing it from its leather. The blade shines in the gray light. Something in my blood, the blood of my father and his before him, makes it more than just a knife. “I’m the only one in the world who can do this. Doesn’t that mean it’s what I’m supposed to do?” As the words leave my mouth I resent them. They take away all of my choices. Anna crosses her pale arms. The tilt of her head sweeps her hair over her shoulder and it’s strange to see it lying there, just regular, dark strands. I’m waiting for it to twitch, to move into the air on that invisible current.

“Having no choice doesn’t seem fair,” she says, seeming to read my mind. “But having all of them isn’t really easier. When I was alive, I could never decide what I wanted to do, what I wanted to become. I loved to take pictures; I wanted to take pictures for a newspaper. I loved to cook; I wanted to move to Vancouver and open a restaurant. I had a million different dreams but none of them was stronger than the rest. In the end they probably would have paralyzed me. I would have ended up here, running the boarding house.”

“I don’t believe that.” She seems like such a force, this reasonable girl who kills with a turn of her fingers. She would have left all this behind, if she’d had the chance.

“I honestly don’t remember,” she sighs. “I don’t think I was strong in life. Now it seems like I loved every moment, that every breath was charmed and crisp.” She clasps her hands comically to her chest and breathes in deep through her nose, then blows it out in a huff. “I probably didn’t. For all my dreams and fancies, I don’t recall being … what would you call it? Perky.”

I smile and she does too, then tucks her hair behind her ear in a gesture that is so alive and human that it makes me forget what I was going to say.

“What are we doing?” I ask. “You’re trying to get me to not kill you, aren’t you?”

Anna crosses her arms. “Considering that you can’t kill me, I think that would be a wasted effort.”

I laugh. “You’re too confident.”

“Am I? I know that what you’ve shown me aren’t your best moves, Cas. I can feel the tension in your blade from holding back. How many times have you done this? How many times have you fought and won?”

“Twenty-two in the last three years.” I say it with pride. It’s more than my father ever did in the same amount of time. I’m what you might call an overachiever. I wanted to be better than he was. Faster. Sharper. Because I didn’t want to end up like he ended up.

Without my knife I’m nothing special, just a regular seventeen-year-old with an average build, maybe a bit on the skinny side. But with the athame in my hand you’d think I was a triple black belt or something. My moves are sure, strong, and quick. She’s right when she says she hasn’t seen my best, and I don’t know why that is.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Anna. You know that, don’t you? It’s nothing personal.”

“Just like I didn’t want to kill all of those people rotting in my basement.” She smiles ruefully.

So they were real. “What happened to you?” I ask. “What makes you do this?”

“None of your business,” she replies.

“If you tell me…” I start but don’t finish. If she tells me, I can figure her out. And once I figure her out, I can kill her.

Everything is becoming more complicated. This questioning girl and that wordless black monster are one and the same. It isn’t fair. When I slide my knife through her, will I cut them apart? Will Anna go to one place and it to another? Or will Anna get sucked away to whatever void the rest go to?

I thought I’d put these thoughts out of my mind a long time ago. My father always told me that it wasn’t our place to judge, that we were only the instrument. Our task was to send them away from the living. His eyes had been so certain when he’d said it. Why don’t I have that kind of certainty?

I lift my hand slowly to touch that cold face, to graze my fingers along her cheek, and am surprised to find it soft, not made of marble. She stands paralyzed, then hesitantly lifts her hand to rest on mine.

The spell is so strong that when the door opens and Carmel comes through it, neither of us moves until she says my name.

“Cas? What are you doing?”

“Carmel,” I blurt, and there she is, her figure framed in the open door. She’s got her hand on the knob and it looks like she’s shaking. She takes another tentative step into the house.

“Carmel, don’t move,” I say, but she’s staring at Anna, who backs away from me, grimacing and grabbing hold of her head.

“Is that her? Is that what killed Mike?”

Stupid girl, she’s coming farther into the house. Anna is retreating as fast as she can on unsteady feet, but I see that her eyes have gone black.

“Anna, don’t, she doesn’t know,” I say too late. Whatever it is that allows Anna to spare me is obviously a one-time deal. She’s gone in a twist of black hair and red blood, pale skin and teeth. There’s a moment of silence and we listen to the drip, drip, drip of her dress.

And then she lunges, ready to thrust her hands into Carmel’s guts.

I jump and tackle her, thinking the minute I collide with that granite force that I am an idiot. But I do manage to alter her course, and Carmel jumps to the side. It’s the wrong way. She’s farther away from the door now. It occurs to me that some people only have book smarts. Carmel is a tame house cat and Anna will make lunch of her if I don’t do something. As Anna crouches on the ground, the red of her dress flowing sickly onto the floor, her hair and eyes wild, I hurtle myself toward Carmel and put myself between them.

“Cas, what were you doing?” Carmel asks, terrified.

“Shut up and get to the door,” I yell. I hold my athame out in front of us even though Anna isn’t afraid. When she springs, it’s for me this time, and I grab on to her wrist with my free hand, using the other to try to keep her at bay with my knife.