Shannon’s Reviews > Anna Dressed in Blood > Status Update

OH CRAP oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap OH CRAP!

Wow, that was genuinely scary.

There's a stillness on her face that has to be deliberate. She's always so still, but I get the feeling that her mind is sort of like a shark, twisting and swimming, and all I've ever seen is a glimpse of a dorsal fin.

A thousand arguments pile up in my throat, but I clench my teeth on them. We're not children, neither of us. We don't believe in fairy tales. And if we did, who would we be? Not Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty. I slice murder victims' heads off and Anna stretches skin until it rips, she snaps bones like green branches into smaller and smaller pieces. We'd be the fricking dragon and the wicked fairy.

Anna's eyes soften, and the stubborn tears begin to recede. The way she stands, the way she breathes, I know she wants to come closer. New knowledge fills up the air between us and neither of us wants to breathe it in. I can't believe this. I've never been the type.

Anna is pissed off and trying very hard not to cry. As we look at each other, something inside me is trying to click, trying to fall into place. I feel it in my mind and in my chest, like a puzzle piece you know has to go somewhere so you keep trying to push it in from all different angles. And then, just like that, it fits. So perfect and complete that you can't imagine how it was without it there, even seconds ago.

"It's shitty I guess. They're my friends. But ... everything I want to talk about I can't say to them. It feels so separate, like I've touched something that's taken the color out of me. Or maybe I'm in color and thy're black and white." She turns to me. "We're in on the secret, aren't we, Cas? And it's taking us out of the world."
"That's usually the way it works," I say softly.

Oh shit. Anna doesn't fuck around.

Over the course of my life I've been to lots of places. Shadowed places where things have gone wrong. Sinister places where things still are. I always hate the sunlit towns, full of newly built developments with double-car garages in shades of pale eggshell, surrounded by green lawns and dotted with laughing children. Those towns aren't any less haunted than the others. They're just better liars.

Quite appropriate bookmark, if I do say so myself: