Haunted by Joy Preble Page A

after a whispered conversation, calls her mother and informs her that she’s sleeping at Tess’s. “Fine, then,” she snaps into the phone. “Don’t believe me. I am not spending the night at Ben’s.”
    Anne flashes me a sheepish expression. The color rises in her cheeks. She isn’t at Ben’s. She’s with me.
    “Well,” she says when she’s finished the call, “looks like we’re back to where we started.” She gestures to the mugs of tea on my small kitchen table. We first talked over tea that day last fall, across from each other at the table in my loft, her face so pretty and earnest.
    She takes a tentative sip of tea, then resumes pacing, mug in hand. “Could you stop being so calm? I’m freaking out here, Ethan. And you’re serving tea.”
    “Would you rather have coffee? Water? Just tell me.”
    “I’d rather not be here. I’d rather not have just singed Ben’s face with my hand and run out of his house like a maniac. I’d rather a lot of things.”
    “You did what?” I try to keep my voice even but fail. Foolishly, when she said hurt , I’d thought of something other than physical. “How? When?” I follow her into the living room. Our footsteps echo on the wood floor. Carpets , I think ridiculously. I haven’t bought any carpets for this room. I need to make it feel less empty. This, I’ve learned, is what happens sometimes when a problem is too big to easily solve. The brain shifts to something more feasible.
    The story pours from her—not all at once, but in waves. She sips the tea, although she tells me she doesn’t want it, and later, she eats the sandwich I make her, even though she protests that she isn’t hungry. I butter thickly sliced bread, add tomatoes and salt. She pulls off small bites with her fingers, eats as she continues to pace, coming back to the table now and then until she’s finished it all.
    “I keep dreaming about her—Baba Yaga. Only I don’t think it’s just a dream. I’m with her in her hut. I talk to her, and she tells me things. It’s like—well, it’s like she’s confiding in me or something. Really weird. And Viktor’s there too, I think, only I can’t see him. And it seems to upset her that he has to be there. I think she’d kill him if she could; only she can’t.”
    Anne paces some more, the mug of tea clutched in her hands. She sets it gently back on the table. “God, Ethan, this is what I haven’t told anyone. Not you, not Tess. I mean, I guess you two are the only ones I could tell. But I haven’t. And I’m sorry. The power didn’t fade away after Anastasia went back to die. Or even after you left. It kept getting stronger. There were little things at first, things I could explain away. I nicked my thumb one day while slicing an apple, and then I wrapped my fingers around the cut so it would stop bleeding. But when I let go, the cut was gone. Not just healed over, but gone like it had never been there. Another time, I was having an argument with my mom while we were at Starbucks. My hands were around my latte, and all of a sudden, I could feel it boiling in the cup. I can’t make people do stuff, I don’t have a clue about spells or anything like that—not like you and the Brotherhood. But I can change the nature of things somehow. It’s more than what you taught me I could do before. More than just warding spells or getting a padlock to open. There’s something in me, Ethan. And I need to figure out what. And why.”
    I take Anne’s hands in mine. They’re warm against my skin. A thin silver bracelet slips down her arm; the round disc hanging from it taps lightly against my wrist. “Show me. You showed me today with the padlock. Now you need to show me this.”
    “I don’t know if I can. I haven’t consciously tried. Well, not much, anyway.” Her cheeks color again. “Tess was right. I did poke Brett Sullivan with my pencil. But he deserved it. All that staring at girls’ boobs—it gets annoying. So I figured it