I don’t think; I just throw the knife. It leaves my hand and runs into her chest with a meaty thock, like it just connected with the trunk of a tree. It drops her on the spot.
“What’s going on?” Thomas asks, running into me from behind and shoving past to get to Carmel.
“Good question,” I say, and move farther into the room so I can close the door. Jestine leans over the edge of her bed and stares down at the body. Before I can say something soothing, she reaches out and shoves it, turning it face up, the athame’s handle sticking squarely out of the chest.
“Isn’t it supposed to … disintegrate or something?” she asks, cocking her head.
“Well, sometimes they explode,” I say, and she backs off fast. I shrug. “He’d been disemboweled already, but when I put the athame into what was left, his gut sort of … blew up. Not into tiny bits or anything.”
“Eee.” Jestine makes a face.
“Cas,” Carmel says, and when I look at her, she shakes her head at me. I shut up, but really, if she expects delicacy then she probably shouldn’t have come back. I walk to the ghost. The eyes aren’t visible anymore; either they’ve disappeared, or they’ve fallen back into the skull. Despite the inherent grossness of the rotten, purple skin, and the way it shines like she was just lifted from the water, it isn’t any worse than the other things I’ve seen. If this is what the Order calls a test, I’ve been worrying too much. I toe the ghost tentatively. It’s just a corporeal shell now. It’ll degrade in its own way, and if it doesn’t, I suppose we could weigh it down and sink it into the lake.
“What happened?” I ask Jestine.
“It was strange,” she replies. “I was asleep, and then I wasn’t. There was something moving in the room. It was bent over Carmel’s bed.” She nods at Carmel, still standing by the door, with Thomas’s arm around her shoulders. “So I started chanting.”
I look at Carmel to confirm, but she shrugs.
“When I woke up it was by my bed. Jestine was saying something.” She leans into Thomas. “It was all pretty fast.”
“What was that chant?” Thomas asks.
“Just a Gaelic binding spell. I’ve known it since I was little.” She shrugs. “It’s not what I had planned on using. It was the first thing that popped into my head.”
“What do you mean it’s not what you’d planned on using? Why were you planning to use something?” I ask.
“Well I wasn’t; not really. I just knew this place was haunted. I didn’t know for sure if the ghost would show up. Just said a few words as we crossed the threshold, to entice it, and then went to sleep and hoped.”
“Are you f**king nuts?” Thomas shouts. I put my hand out, gesturing to keep his voice down. He presses his lips together and bugs his eyes out at me.
“You did this on purpose?” I ask Jestine.
“I thought it’d be good practice,” she replies. “And I’ll admit, I was curious. I’ve been taught about the athame being used, but of course I’ve never seen it.”
“Well, the next time you get curious, you might think about telling your bunkmate,” Carmel snaps. Thomas kisses the top of her head and squeezes her tighter.
I stare down at the corpse. Wondering who she was. Wondering if she would have been a ghost I would have needed to kill. Jestine sits unaffected at the foot of the bed. I’d like to throttle her, yell until her ears pop about putting people in danger. Instead I reach down to pull the athame loose. When my fingers close around the handle, they hesitate, and my stomach does a small flip when I have to jerk at it to get the blade out of the bone.
The knife slides out, coated with a faint tinge of purplish blood. As soon as the tip of the blade is clear, the wound expands, curling the skin back in layers, tearing through the faux-fabric of the nightgown. It takes the skin down to the bone and turns the bone to black and then to dust; the entire scattering of muscle, sinew, cloth, and hair takes less than five seconds.
“Don’t ever put my friends in danger again,” I say. Jestine locks eyes with me, defiant as usual. After a few seconds, she nods and apologizes to Carmel. But in those few seconds I saw what she was thinking. She was thinking I was a hypocrite to tell her that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
We move the girls’ things into our room, but after that, nobody goes back to sleep. Thomas and Carmel just sit together on his bed, snuggled up and not saying much. Jestine tucks herself into my bed, and I spend the last hours until dawn by the window, sitting in a chair and watching the black spot of the lake.