ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD - SNIPPET

I tiptoe into the bathroom and pull my knife out of my leather backpack. After I finished off the hitchhiker I wrapped it up in a black velvet cloth, but not neatly. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to be on the road anymore, or anywhere near the bridge. Seeing the hitchhiker disintegrate didn’t scare me. I’ve seen worse. But it isn’t the kind of thing you get used to.

“Cass?”

I look up into the mirror and see the sleepy reflection of my mum, holding the black cat in her arms. I put the athame down on the counter.

“Hey, Mom. Sorry to wake you.”

“You know I like to be up when you come in anyway. You should always wake me, so I can sleep.”

I don’t tell her how dumb that sounds; I just turn on the faucet and start to run the blade under the cold water.

“I’ll do it,” she says, and touches my arm. Then of course she grabs my wrist, because she can see the bruises that are starting to purple up all along my forearm.

I expect her to say something motherly; I expect her to quack around like a worried duck for a few minutes and go to the kitchen to get ice and a wet towel, even though the bruises are by no means the worst mark I’ve ever gotten. But this time she doesn’t. Maybe because it’s late, and she’s tired. Or maybe because after three years she’s finally starting to figure out that I’m not going to quit.

“Give it to me,” she says, and I do, because I’ve gotten the worst of the black stuff off already. She takes it and leaves. I know that she’s off to do what she does every time, which is to boil the blade and then stab it into a big jar of salt, where it will sit under the light of the moon for three days. When she takes it out she’ll wipe it down with cinnamon oil and call it good as new.

She used to do the same thing for my dad. He’d come home from killing something that was already dead and she’d kiss him on the cheek and take away the athame, as casually as any wife might carry in a briefcase. He and I used to stare at the thing while it sat in its jar of salt, our arms crossed over our chests, conveying to each other that we both thought it was ridiculous. It always seemed to me like an exercise in make-believe. Like it was Excalibur in the rock.

But my dad let her do it. He knew what he was getting into when he met and married her, a pretty, auburn-haired Wiccan girl with a strand of white flowers braided around her neck. He’d lied back then and called himself Wiccan too, for lack of a better word. But really, Dad wasn’t much of anything.

He just loved the legends. He loved a good story, tales about the world that made it seem cooler than it really was. He went crazy over Greek mythology, which is where I got my name.

They compromised on it, because my mum loved Shakespeare, and I ended up called Theseus Cassio. Theseus for the slayer of the Minotaur, and Cassio for Othello’s doomed lieutenant. I think it sounds straight-up stupid. Theseus Cassio Lowood. Everyone just calls me Cas. I suppose I should be glad—my dad also loved Norse mythology, so I might have wound up being called Thor, which would have been basically unbearable.

I exhale and look in the mirror. There are no marks on my face, or on my gray dress button-up, just like there were no marks on the Rally Sport’s upholstery (thank god). I look ridiculous. I’m in slacks and sleeves like I’m out on a big date, because that’s what I told Mr. Dean I needed the car for. When I left the house tonight my hair was combed back, and there was a little bit of gel in it, but after that fucking kerfuffle it’s hanging across my forehead in dark streaks.

“You should hurry up and get to bed, sweetheart. It’s late and we’ve got more packing to do.”

My mum is done with the knife. She’s floated back up against the doorjamb and her black cat is twisting around her ankles like a bored fish around a plastic castle.

“I just want to jump in the shower,” I say. She sighs and turns away.

“You did get him, didn’t you?” she says over her shoulder, almost like an afterthought.

“Yeah. I got him.”

She smiles at me. Her mouth looks sad and wistful. “It was close this time. You thought you’d have him finished before the end of July. Now it’s August.”

“He was a tougher hunt,” I say, pulling a towel down off the shelf. I don’t think she’s going to say anything else, but she stops and turns back.

“Would you have stayed here, if you hadn’t gotten him? Would you have pushed her back?”

I only think for a few seconds, just a natural pause in the conversation, because I knew the answer before she finished asking the question.

“No.”

As my mum leaves, I drop the bomb. “Hey, can I borrow some cash for a new set of tires?”

“Theseus Cassio,” she moans, and I grimace, but her exhausted sigh tells me that I’m good to go in the morning.

Thunder Bay, Ontario, is our destination. I’m going there to kill her. Anna. Anna Korlov. Anna Dressed in Blood.

“This one has you worried, doesn’t it, Cas,” my mum says from behind the wheel of the U-Haul van. I keep telling her we should just buy our own moving truck, instead of renting. God knows we move often enough, following the ghosts.

“Why would you say that?” I ask, and she nods at my hand. I hadn’t realized it was tapping against my leather bag, which is where Dad’s athame is. With a focused effort, I don’t take it away. I just keep tapping like it doesn’t matter, like she’s overanalyzing and reading into things.

“I killed Peter Carver when I was fourteen, Mom,” I say. “I’ve been doing it ever since. Nothing much surprises me anymore.”

There’s a tightening in her face. “You shouldn’t say it like that. You didn’t ‘kill’ Peter Carver. You were attacked by Peter Carver and he was already dead.”

It amazes me sometimes how she can change a thing just by using the right words. If her occult supply shop ever goes under, she’s got a good future in branding.

I was attacked by Peter Carver, she says. Yeah. I was attacked. But only after I broke into the Carver family’s abandoned house. It had been my first job. I did it without my mum’s permission, which is actually an understatement. I did it against my mom’s screaming protests and had to pick the lock on my bedroom window to get out of the house. But I did it. I took my father’s knife and broke in. I waited until two a.m. in the room where Peter Carver shot his wife with a .44 caliber pistol and then hung himself with his own belt in the closet. I waited in the same room where his ghost had murdered a real estate agent trying to sell the house two years later, and then a property surveyor a year after that.

Thinking about it now, I remember my shaking hands and a stomach close to heaving. I remember the desperation to do it, to do what I was supposed to do, like my father had. When the ghosts finally showed up (yes, ghosts plural—turns out that Peter and his wife had reconciled, found a common interest in killing) I think I almost passed out. One came out of the closet with his neck so purple and bent it looked like it was on sideways, and the other bled up through the floor like a paper towel commercial in reverse. She hardly made it out of the boards, I’m proud to say. Instinct took over and I tacked her back down before she could make a move. Mr. Carver tackled me though, while I was trying to pull my knife out of the wood that was coated with the stain that used to be his wife. He almost threw me out the window before I scrambled back to the athame, mewling like a kitten. Stabbing him was almost an accident. The knife just sort of ran into him when he wrapped the end of his rope around my throat and spun me around. I never told my mom that part.

“You know better than that, Mum,” I say. “It’s only other people who think you can’t kill what’s already dead.” I want to say that Dad knew too, but I don’t. She doesn’t like to talk about him, and I know that she hasn’t been the same since he died. She’s not quite here anymore; there’s something missing in all of her smiles, like a blurry spot or a camera lens out of focus. Part of her followed him, wherever it was that he went. I know it’s not that she doesn’t love me. But I don’t think she ever figured on raising a son by herself. Her family was supposed to form a circle. Now we walk around like a photograph that my dad’s been cut out of.

“I’ll be in and out like that,” I say, snapping my fingers and redirecting the subject. “I might not even spend the whole school year in Thunder Bay.”

She leans forward over the steering wheel and shakes her head. “You should think about staying longer. I’ve heard it’s a nice place.”

I roll my eyes. She knows better. Our life isn’t quiet. It isn’t like other lives, where there are roots and routines. We’re a traveling circus. And she can’t even blame it on my dad being killed, because we traveled with him too, though admittedly not as much. It’s the reason that she works the way she does, doing tarot card readings and aura cleansing over the phone, and selling occult supplies online. My mother the mobile witch. She makes a surprisingly good living at it. Even without my dad’s trust accounts, we’d probably be just fine.