Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake Page A

completely. The place where the house stood looks like an undeveloped lot, packed dirt and scrubby, fast-growing weeds. If they had looked any closer, or dug any deeper, they might have found the bodies of Anna’s victims. But the current of the dead and unknown was still too close, whispering that they should walk softly and leave it alone.
    “Tell me what we’re doing, again,” Carmel says. Her voice is steady but her fingers are curled around the steering wheel like she’s going to rip it off.
    “Should be relatively easy,” Thomas replies, scrounging around in his messenger bag, making sure he’s remembered everything. “Or if not easy, then at least relatively simple. From what Morfran told me, the drum used to be used by Finnish witches on a regular basis, to control the spirit world and talk to the dead.”
    “Sounds like what we need,” I say.
    “Yeah. The trick of it is to be specific. The witches never cared much who they got. As long as they got someone they figured they were wise. But we want Anna. And that’s where you and the house come in.”
    Well, we’re not getting any younger. I open the door and step out. The air is mild and there’s only a hint of a breeze. When my shoes crunch against the gravel the sound brings a flash of nostalgia, a jolt that takes me back six months, when the Victorian still stood and I used to come at night to talk to the dead girl inside it. Warm, fuzzy memories. Carmel hands me the camping lantern from the trunk. It illuminates her face.
    “Hey,” I say. “You don’t have to do this. Thomas and I can handle this one on our own.”
    For a second she looks relieved. But then the trademark Carmel squint is back in place.
    “Don’t say that shit to me. Morfran can ban me from his dead tea party if he wants, but not you. I’m here to find out what happened to Anna. We all owe her that.”
    When she walks by, she nudges me with her shoulder, to buck me up, and I smile even though the burns are still sore. After this is over, I’m going to talk to her; we’re all going to talk. We’ll find out what’s on her mind and set it right.
    Thomas is already ahead of us. He’s got his flashlight out and is strobing it around the lot. It’s a good thing that the nearest neighbors are half a mile away and separated by dense forest. They’d probably think a UFO had landed. When he gets to where the house once stood, he doesn’t hesitate, just jogs into the center. I know what he’s looking for: the space where Malvina poked a hole through worlds. And where Anna blasted through it.
    “Come on,” he says after a minute, and waves to us. Carmel goes, moving carefully. I take a deep breath. My feet won’t seem to cross the threshold. This is what I wanted, what I’ve waited for since Anna disappeared. The answers are less than twenty feet away.
    “Cas?” Carmel asks.
    “Right behind you,” I say, but every platitude I’ve ever heard about ignorance being bliss or being better off in the dark flies through my brain in an instant. It occurs to me that I shouldn’t have wanted this to be real. I should hope that the answers I get tonight tell me that it wasn’t Anna at all, that Riika was wrong and Anna is at peace. Let whatever is haunting me be something else, something malevolent that I can fight. It’s selfish to want Anna here again. She’s got to be better off wherever she is than being cursed and trapped. But I can’t help it.
    Just a few seconds more and my feet unfreeze. They carry me across the fresh dirt the city used to fill in the basement, and I don’t feel anything. No cosmic zap; not even a chill down my spine. Nothing of Anna or her curse remains. It all probably vanished the second that the house imploded. Mom, Morfran, and Thomas must’ve checked ten times, standing at the corners of the property and casting runes.
    In the center of the dirt patch, Thomas is drawing a large circle in the ground with the tip of an athame. Not mine, but one of