“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 Morfran’s—a long, theatrical-looking thing, with an engraved handle and a jewel at the end. Most people would say it’s far prettier than mine, and far more valuable. But it’s all show. Thomas can use it to cast a circle, but it’s his power that forms the protection. Without Thomas to wield it, that athame would be best used to cut a good steak.
Carmel stands in the center of the circle, holding a burning stick of incense and whispering the protection incantation Thomas has taught her. Thomas is whispering it too, two beats behind hers so it sounds like a round-robin. I set the camping lantern down, inside the circle but off to the side. The chanting stops, and Thomas nods at us to sit.
The ground is cold, but at least it’s dry. Thomas kneels and sets the Lappish drum on the dirt in front of him. He’s brought a drumstick as well. It looks basically like a regular drumstick with a big, white marshmallow at the end. In the low light, you can hardly see the designs painted across the stretched leather of the drum. When I had it with me in the car ride back from Riika’s, I saw that it was covered in faded, reddish stick figures that looked like a primitive depiction of a hunting scene.
“It looks so old,” Carmel comments. “What do you think it’s made of?” She smirks at me. “Maybe dinosaur leather?”
I laugh, but Thomas clears his throat.
“The ritual is pretty simple,” he says, “but it’s also powerful. We shouldn’t go into it with too light a mood.” He’s cleaning the dirt off his athame, wiping it down with alcohol, and I know why he’s going to the trouble. He was right when he said we would need blood. And he intends to use that athame to get it from me. “Since you’re curious, though, I can tell you that Morfran suspects this drum was made from human skin.”
Carmel gasps.
“Not a murder victim or anything like that,” he goes on. “But probably from the tribe’s last shaman. Of course he doesn’t know for sure, but he said the best ones were often made from that, and Riika didn’t mess around with second-rate product. It was probably passed down through her own family.”
He talks distractedly, failing to notice the way Carmel swallows and can’t quite stop looking at the drum. I know what she’s thinking. With this new knowledge, it looks completely different than it did a few seconds ago. It may as well be a human rib cage, dried out and sitting in front of us.
“What exactly is going to happen when we do this?” Carmel asks.
“I don’t know,” Thomas replies. “If we succeed, we’ll hear her voice. A few texts have vague references to fog, or smoke. And there might be wind. All I know for sure is that I’ll be in a trance when it happens. I may or may not know what’s going on. And if something goes wrong, I won’t be much use to stop it.”
Even in the sparse light from the camping lantern, I can see most of the blood drain out of Carmel’s cheeks.
“Well, that’s just great. What are we supposed to do if something happens?”
“Don’t panic.” Thomas smiles nervously. He tosses her something that glitters. When she opens her hands, she’s holding his Zippo lighter. “This is sort of hard to explain. The drum is like a tool, to find the way to the other side. Morfran says it’s mostly about finding the right beat, like tuning in the right frequency on the radio. Once I find it, the gateway has to be channeled by blood. The blood of the seeker. Cas’s blood. You’ll have to drip it onto his athame, which we’ll place in the center of the circle.”