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“Father Hiisi, hear me, I come before you low and humble. Take this blood, take this power. Keep my daughter in this house. Feed her on suffering, blood, and death. Hiisi, Father, demon-god, hear my prayer. Take this blood, take this power.”
Malvina closes her eyes, holds up the kitchen knife, and passes it through the candle flames. Impossibly, it ignites, and then, in one fierce motion, she stabs the knife through the dress and into the floorboards.
Elias has come to the top of the stairs, holding a swath of clean, white fabric—A
Firelight is shining up from the hole in the floorboards, and Malvina slowly moves the knife, stuffing the bloodied dress down into the house as she chants. When the last of the fabric disappears, she pushes the rest of the knife in to follow it and the light flashes. The floorboard is closed. Malvina swallows, and gently blows the candles out, from left to right.
“Now you’ll never leave my house,” she whispers.
Our spell is ending. Malvina’s face is fading like a nightmare memory, turning as gray and withered as the wood she murdered A
“How could she?” Carmel asks softly, and we all look at each other. “It was terrible. I never want to see anything like that ever again.” She shakes her head. “How could she? She was her daughter.”
I look at A
“Did she know what would happen?” I ask Thomas. “Did she know what she was turning her into?”
“I don’t think so. Or at least, not exactly. When you invoke a demon, you don’t get to decide the specifics. You just make the request, and it does the rest.”
“I don’t care if she knew exactly,” Carmel growls. “It was disgusting. It was horrible.”
There are beads of sweat on all of our foreheads. Will hasn’t said a thing. We all look like we’ve gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight.
“What are we going to do?” Thomas asks, and it doesn’t look like he’s able to do much of anything at the moment. I think he’ll sleep for a week.
I turn away and stand up. I need to clear my head.
“Cas! Watch out!”
Carmel shouts at me but she isn’t fast enough. I’m shoved from behind and as I am, I feel a very familiar weight being pulled out of my back pocket. When I turn around, I see Will standing over A
“Will,” Thomas starts, but Will unsheathes my knife and swings it in a wide arc, making Thomas scuttle back on his haunches to get out of the way.
“This is how you do it, isn’t it?” Will asks in a wild voice. He looks at the blade and blinks rapidly. “She’s weak; we can do it now,” he says, almost to himself.
“Will, don’t,” Carmel says.
“Why not? This is what we came here to do!”
Carmel glances at me helplessly. It is what we came here to do. But after what we all saw, and seeing her lying there, I know that I can’t.
“Give me my knife,” I say calmly.
“She killed Mike,” Will says. “She killed Mike.”
I look down at A
And Will’s right. She did kill Mike. She’s killed dozens. And she’ll do it again.
“You killed Mike,” Will hisses and starts to cry. “You killed my best friend.” And then he moves, stabbing downward. I react without thinking.
I lurch forward and catch him under the arm, stopping the blow from going straight through her back; instead it glances off of her ribs. A
He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn’t try to come forward again. Looking from me to A
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “This is supposed to be your job, right? And now we’ve got her and you’re not going to do anything?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say honestly. “But I’m not going to let you hurt her. You couldn’t kill her, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not just the knife. It’s me. It’s my blood tie.”
Will scoffs. “She’s bleeding well enough.”
“I didn’t say the knife wasn’t special. But the death blow is mine. Whatever it is that lets that happen, you don’t have it.”
“You’re lying,” he says, and maybe I am. I’ve never seen anyone else use my knife before. No one except my dad. Maybe all that stuff about being chosen and part of a sacred line of ghost hunters was all bullshit. But Will believes it. He starts backing away, out of the house.
“Give me my knife,” I say again, watching it as it’s leaving me, the metal glinting in the odd light.
“I’m going to kill her,” Will promises, then turns and runs, taking my athame with him. Something inside me whimpers, something childlike and basic. It’s like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when that old lady throws the dog in her bike basket and rides off. My feet are telling me to run after him, tackle him and beat him about the head, take my knife back and never let it out of my sight. But Carmel’s talking to me.
“Are you sure he can’t kill her?” she asks.
I look back. She’s actually kneeling on the floor beside A
“She’s so weak,” Carmel whispers. “I think she’s really hurt.”
“Shouldn’t she be?” Thomas asks. “I mean, I don’t want to side with Will I’m-Bucking-for-an-Emmy-Nod Rosenberg, but isn’t that why we’re here? Isn’t she still dangerous?”
The answers are yes, yes, and yes. I know that, but I can’t seem to think straight. The girl at my feet is defeated and my knife is gone and scenes from How to Murder Your Daughter are still playing in my head. This is where it happened—this is the place where her life ended, where she became a monster, where her mother dragged a knife across her throat and cursed her and her dress and—
I walk farther into the sitting room, staring at the floorboards. Then I start stomping. Slamming my foot against the boards and jumping up and down, looking for a loose spot. It’s not doing any good. I’m stupid. I’m not strong enough. And I don’t even know what I’m doing.
“It’s not that one,” Thomas says. He’s staring at the floor. He points at the board to my left.
“It’s that one,” he says. “And you’ll need something.” He gets up and runs out the door. I didn’t think he had any strength left at all. The kid is surprising. And damned useful, because about forty seconds later he’s back, holding a crowbar and a tire iron.
Together we hack at the floor, at first not making a dent and then slowly cracking the wood. I use the crowbar to pry up the loosest end and fall to my knees. The hole we’ve made is dark and deep. I don’t know how it’s there. I should be looking at rafters and basement, but there’s only blackness. Only a moment’s hesitation, and my hand is searching in the hole, feeling depths of cold. I think I was wrong, that I was stupid again, and then my fingers brush against it.