Girl of Nightmares

by Kendare Blake

  “I suppose I have really bad timing,” she says. “With everything that’s happening with Anna.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “And it isn’t selfish. I mean, it is, but … it’s good. What’s less good is you throwing Derek in Thomas’s face like that.”

  She shakes her head guiltily. “It was the only way I could think of that would make him let go.”

  “It was cold, Carmel. The kid loves you. You know that, right? If you talked to him, he’d—”

  “Give it all up?” She smiles. “I’d never ask him to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I love him too.” She bites her lip and fidgets. Her arms are crossed over her chest to the point of hugging herself. Whatever it looked like on that last day of school, the decision Carmel made didn’t come easy. She’s still wavering on it. I can see it swirling around in her head. She wants to ask whether she’s making a mistake, whether she’ll regret it, but she’s scared of what I’d say.

  “You’ll take care of him, won’t you?” she asks.

  “I’ll be here if he needs me. I’ll watch his back.”

  Carmel smiles. “Better watch all sides. He can be downright clumsy sometimes.” Her face sort of crumples and she wipes at her cheek quickly, maybe wicking away a tear. “I’m going to miss him, Cas. You have no idea how much I’m going to miss him.”

  That’s my cue to walk over and deliver the most awkward hug she’s ever received. But she takes it, and leans what feels like her whole weight onto my shoulder.

  “We’re going to miss you too, Carmel,” I say.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Thomas, you home?”

  I knock a few times, but the door’s open when I try it. Poking my head into the house, I don’t see anything out of place. Morfran and Thomas keep things pretty clean, for a pair of bachelors. The only complaint anyone could have is that they’re always killing the houseplants. I whistle for Stella, but I’m not surprised when she doesn’t come. Morfran’s car is gone and she’s always with him at the shop. I close the door behind me and walk farther in, through the kitchen. There’s muffled music coming from Thomas’s closed bedroom door. I knock briefly and then twist the knob.

  “Thomas?”

  “Hey, Cas.”

  The scene isn’t what I expected. He’s up, dressed, and on the move, walking from his cluttered desk to his even more cluttered bed. There are books open everywhere, and loose-leaf papers strewn around. He’s got his laptop up too, sitting in the middle of about three filled ashtrays. Gross. There’s a lit cigarette between his fingers and smoke follows him in a languid, lifting tail.

  “I tried to call,” I say, stepping farther in.

  “I shut my phone off,” he says, and puffs on the cigarette. His hands are shaking and he’s not looking at me. He just keeps on turning pages. This is what Thomas looks like on a bender, chain-smoking and drowning in research. How long has it been since he’s eaten? Or slept?

  “You should ease up on those.” I gesture to the cigarette, and he looks at it like he forgot it was there before snuffing it out in an already full ashtray. The action seems to jar him a bit and he stops and scratches his head like someone waking up from a dream.

  “I guess I have been smoking a lot,” he says, and licks his lips. When he swallows, his face is disgusted and he pushes the ashtray away. “Yuck. Maybe now I’ll finally quit.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, what are you doing here?”

  I give him an incredulous look. “Checking up on you,” I say. “It’s been four days. I thought at the very least I’d come over here and find you with your hair dyed black, listening to Staind.”

  He smiles. “Well, it was touch and go there for a few days.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  His no is so abrupt that I almost take a step backward. But then he shrugs and shakes his head.

  “Sorry. I was going to call you today. Honest. I’ve just been up to my eyeballs in paper, trying to come up with something useful. Not having much luck.”

  I almost say something about how he didn’t need to do that at a time like this, but the twitchy way he scratches his head is practically pleading with me not to. Distraction is good, that gesture says. Distraction is necessary. So I pull the photograph of a young, robed Gideon out of my pocket.

  “I guess I had a little,” I say. Thomas takes it and studies it. “It’s Gideon,” I add, because he probably couldn’t tell. He’s only seen one or two pictures of Gideon when he’s really old.

  “The knives,” Thomas says. “They all look exactly like yours.”

  “For all I know, one of them is mine. I think what we’re looking at are the people who created the athame. That’s what my gut tells me.”

  “You think? Where did you get this?”

  “Someone sent it to me under Gideon’s address.”

  Thomas scans the photo again. When he does, he notices something that makes his eyebrow arch up two inches.

  “What is it?” I ask as he starts sifting through his bedroom, shuffling piles of papers and stacks of books.

  “I don’t know if it’s anything,” he replies. “Just that I feel like I saw this somewhere.” He flips through a stack of photocopies, black ink smudging his fingers. “Here!” He pulls out a paper-clipped bundle and folds back pages until his eyes light up.

  “Look at the robes,” he says, showing me. “The Celtic knot design on the ends of the rope belt, and again at the collar. The same as the photograph.”

  What I’m looking at is a photocopy of a photocopy, but he’s right. The robes are the same. And I can’t believe that just anyone can buy them at a Renaissance fair. They’re custom. Worn by only a specific and select group of people that apparently call themselves the Order of the Biodag Dubh.

  “Where did you get this?” I ask.

  “One of my grandpa’s old friends has an amazing occult library. He’s been copying everything he’s got and faxing it to me. This one’s collected from an old issue of the Fortean Times.” He takes the pages back and starts to read, pronouncing the Gaelic phonetically, which is more than likely extremely wrong. “The Order of the Biodag Dubh. The Order of the Black Dagger. Supposedly they were a group that controlled something they called ‘the concealed weapon.’” He pauses and eyeballs my backpack, where the athame sits. “It’s unknown exactly what the weapon was, but it is believed that the Order forged it themselves around the time of their creation, estimated to be between the third and first centuries BC. The exact power of the weapon is also unknown; however, several documents allude to the use of a black dagger in the slaying of loch monsters, similar to the modern-day Nessie.” He makes a face and rolls his eyes. “It is unknown whether the black dagger and the concealed weapon refer to the same artifact.” He flips through the remaining pages, looking for more of the article, but comes up empty.

  “That’s the vaguest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s pretty bad. They’re usually much better. Must’ve been a fly-by-night contributor.” He tosses the fax down on the bed. “But you have to admit, if you take out the part about the Loch Ness monster, there’s a shadow of something there. The references to an unknown weapon, a concealed dagger maybe, and the two matching photographs—I mean, come on. These are dots that need connecting.”

  The Order of the Biodag Dubh. Is that right? Are they the ones who created the athame? And why do these things always have to call themselves the Order of Something?

  “How much do you know, anyway, about Gideon Palmer?” Thomas asks.

  “He’s a friend of my father’s. He’s like a grandfather to me,” I say, and shrug. I don’t like the tone in Thomas’s voice. It’s too suspicious, and after seeing the photo, I’m suspicious enough for everyone. “Look, let’s not jump to conclusions. This picture could be from anything. Gideon’s been involved in the occult since he was a kid.”

  “But that is your athame, isn’t it?” Thomas asks, checkin
g the photo again to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell,” I say, even though it isn’t.

  “You don’t really think that,” he says, breaking into my head. “You’re trying to talk yourself out of it.”

  Maybe I am. Maybe Gideon’s involvement in all this is the one thing I’d rather not know. “Look,” I say. “It doesn’t matter. We can ask him in person.” Thomas looks up. “My mom’s springing for two tickets to London. Want to go?”

  “Face down an ancient secret druidic order that obviously wants you to know they exist?” Thomas scoffs. His eyes drift to his pack of cigarettes, but after a second he just runs his hand across his face, roughly. When his eyes are visible again, they look tired, like the distraction mask is wearing off and he doesn’t care much one way or the other. “Why not?” he says. “I’m sure we can take ’em.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know why you don’t want me to tell him you’re coming,” my mom says as she tucks another pair of socks into my suitcase. The thing is stuffed to the gills already but she keeps adding more. It took me ten minutes to convince her to take out the rosemary herb packs because the reek would set off the security dogs.

  “I want it to be a surprise.” It’s the truth. I want to get the drop on him, because ever since I saw that photo I feel like he’s had one on me. I trust Gideon with my life. I always have, and so did my dad. He’d never do anything to harm me, or put me in harm’s way. I know that. Or am I just being stupid?

  “A surprise,” my mom says in that way moms have of repeating things just to have the last word. She’s worried. She’s got that crease between her brows, and the meals these past few days have been stupendous. She’s feeding me all of my favorites, like it’s my last chance to eat them. Her hands wring the life out of my socks, and she sighs before closing my suitcase and zipping it up.

  Our flight leaves in four hours. We’ve got a connection in Toronto, and should touch down at Heathrow at 10 PM, London time. Thomas has been texting for the last hour and a half, asking what he should pack, like I should know. I haven’t been to London, or to see Gideon, since I was four. The entire experience is a fuzzy, patchy memory.

  “Oh,” Mom says suddenly. “Almost forgot.” She unzips the suitcase again and looks at me, her hand out expectantly.

  “What?”

  She smiles. “Theseus Cassio, you can’t fly with that in your pocket.”

  “Right,” I say, and reach for the athame. It seems like a dumb mistake, one that my mind was making on purpose. The thought of putting my knife into checked baggage, risking the loss of it, makes me more than a little queasy. “You sure you can’t just put some mojo on it?” I ask, only half joking. “Make it invisible to metal detectors?”

  “No such luck,” she replies. I hand it over and watch with gritted teeth as she tucks it in deep, right in the center, and covers it with clothes.

  “Gideon will keep you safe,” she whispers, and then again, “Gideon will keep you safe,” like a chant. Second thoughts hover around her like slow insects, but her arms are still and tight by her side. It occurs to me that I’ve bound her to this act as surely as if I’d tied her with rope, through my stubbornness, my refusal to let go of Anna.

  “Mom,” I say, and stop.

  “What is it, Cas?”

  I am coming back, is what I was going to say. But this isn’t a game, and that isn’t a promise I should make.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Thomas does okay on the flight to Toronto, but spends the first hour and a half of the London flight clutching the business end of a barf bag. He doesn’t actually throw up, but he’s definitely green. A couple of ginger ales later, though, he’s settled in, comfortable enough to try reading the Joe Hill hardback he’s brought with him.

  “The words won’t hold still,” he mutters after a minute, and closes the book. He looks out the window (I let him have the window seat) at bleak darkness.

  “We should try to get some sleep anyway,” I say, “so we won’t be dogging it when we land.”

  “But it’ll be ten PM there. Shouldn’t we try to stay up so we can fall asleep?”

  “No. Who knows how long it’ll be before we have a chance. Rest up while you can.”

  “That’s the problem,” he grumbles, and punches the inadequate in-flight pillow. Poor kid. He has to have a million things on his mind, the least of which is a fear of flying. I haven’t worked up the nerve to ask whether he’s talked to Carmel, and he hasn’t mentioned it. And he hasn’t asked me much about what we’re doing going to London, which is very un-Thomas-like. It might be that this trip is a convenient escape. But he’s fully aware of the danger. The lingering handshake he exchanged with Morfran at the airport spoke volumes.

  He rolls over as far as he can in the cramped coach seat. Thomas is polite to a fault, and hasn’t reclined his chair back. His neck is going to feel like a trampled pretzel when he wakes up, if he manages to sleep at all. I close my eyes and do my best to get comfortable. It’s close to impossible. I can’t stop thinking about the athame, buried inside my luggage in the belly of the plane, or at least it goddamn better be. I can’t stop thinking about Anna, and the sound of her voice, asking me to get her out. We’re traveling at over 500 miles per hour, but it’s nowhere near fast enough.

  * * *

  By the time we touch down at Heathrow, I’ve officially entered zombie mode. Sleep was fleeting: a half hour here, fifteen minutes there, and all of it with a kink in my neck. Thomas didn’t fare much better. Our eyes are red and scratchy and the air on the plane was so dry that we’re about ready to flake off and fall into a pair of Thomas- and Cas-colored piles of sand. Everything is surreal, the colors too bright and the floor not quite solid beneath my feet. The terminal is quiet at ten thirty at night, and that at least makes things easier. We don’t have to swim through a torrent of people.

  Still, our brains are slow, and after collecting our luggage (which was a nerve-racking chore—waiting around the carousel on the balls of my feet, paranoid that the athame didn’t make it onto the connecting flight from Toronto, or that someone else would grab it before I did), we find ourselves milling around, unsure of where to go next.

  “I thought you’d been here before,” Thomas says crankily.

  “Yeah, when I was four,” I reply, equally crankily.

  “We should just take a cab. You’ve got his address, right?”

  I look around the terminal, reading the overhead signs. I’d been planning on getting travel cards and taking the Tube. Now it just seems complicated. But I don’t want to start this trip with compromise, so I haul my suitcase through the terminal, following the arrows toward the trains.

  * * *

  “Wasn’t so hard, was it?” I ask Thomas a half hour later, as we sit, exhausted, on the bench seat of the Tube train. He gives me an eyebrow, and I smile. After one more only mildly disconcerting line change, we get off at Highbury and Islington station and drag ourselves up to ground level.

  “Anything familiar yet?” Thomas asks, peering down the street, lights illuminating the sidewalk and the shop fronts. It looks vaguely familiar, but I suspect that all of London would look vaguely familiar. I breathe in. The air is clear and cool. A second breath brings in a whiff of garbage. That seems familiar too, but probably only because it isn’t any different from other large, urban cities.

  “Relax, man,” I say. “We’ll get there.” I flip my suitcase onto its side and unzip it. The minute the athame is tucked into my back pocket, my blood pumps easier. It’s like a second wind, but I’d better not dawdle; Thomas looks tired enough to kill me, hollow me out, and use me for a hammock. Luckily, I Google-mapped Gideon’s address from this station, and his house isn’t more than a mile away.

  “Come on,” I say, and he groans. We walk quickly, our suitcases wobbling on the uneven pavement, passing by Indian-owned diners with neon signs and pubs with wooden doors. Four blocks down, I head right on my best gue
ss. The roads aren’t labeled well, or maybe they are and I just can’t make them out in the dark. On the side streets, the lamps are dimmer, and the area we’re in looks nothing like Gideon’s neighborhood. Chain-link fences border us on one side, and there’s a high brick wall on the other. Beer cans and garbage litter the gutter, and everything seems damp. But maybe this is the way things always were, and I was too young to remember. Or maybe this is just how things have become since then.

  “Okay, stop,” Thomas breathes. He pulls up and leans on his suitcase.

  “What?”

  “You’re lost.”

  “I’m not lost.”

  “Don’t bullshit me.” He taps his index finger to his temple. “You’re going round and round, in here.”

  His smug face sets me off, and I think very loudly, This mind-reading shit is fucking annoying, and he grins.

  “Be that as it may, you’re still lost.”

  “I’m turned around, that’s all,” I say. But he’s right. We’ll have to find a phone, or get directions in a pub. The last pub that we passed was inviting; the doors were propped open and yellow light streamed onto our faces. Inside, people were laughing. I glance back the way we came and see one of the shadows move on its own.

  “What is it?” Thomas asks.

  “Nothing,” I reply, blinking. “Just tired eyes.” But my feet won’t carry me back in that direction. “Let’s keep going.”

  “Okay,” Thomas says, and glances over his shoulder.