by Anna Roberts
“What about Miz Baldwin’s housekeeper? I can’t get a hold of her either.”
“There’s your answer,” said Charlie, and got up from the plastic chair. His knees still felt shaky but he needed air - muggy, sticky, sweaty Florida air - more than anything else right now. Anything to rinse the chill of the morgue off his skin and out of his lungs. Fernando followed, his mind obviously already treading the well-worn cop paths, where the nephew fakes the old lady’s suicide for the life insurance and runs off with the maid. Only that was strangely hilarious, because Blue was more likely to shack up with him than Eli; she’d never even liked him.
“Look, just give me a break, okay?” said Charlie. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”
“Of course, but...”
Charlie stopped at the door. “Please,” he said. “She was like a mother to me. I’ll answer any question you like at another time, but not now. Please. I’m still trying to figure out why she’d do this to us.”
Fernando patted him on the upper arm. “I understand,” he said. “I just ask that you make yourself available.”
“I can. I will. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
Charlie escaped across the hospital parking lot, his stomach in open revolt. For a moment he thought he was going to have to stop and vomit into the nearest trash can, but a couple of deep breaths seemed to lash his head back securely to its moorings, even if his gut felt lousy. Ruby’s Okefenokee ideas of recycling had put him off his feed in a big way, and he had no idea why. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done the same thing himself. And worse.
Maybe that was it. Maybe there was no way you could cut out a man’s heart and feed the thing raw to his lardball son. It had felt like poetic justice at the time, but these days it was just weighing heavy on his conscience.
And that was a fucking trip in itself. He hadn’t even realized he had a goddamn conscience.
Charlie reached the car. He rummaged in the glovebox for a smoke and lit up in the vain hope that the nicotine might take the edge off the nausea. His gums felt sore and not for the first time he was conscious of every last tooth in his head, checking they were where they left them. He’d lost three in the last few weeks and there was a dull ache kept settling over what he feared might be his liver. Whoever Mother Nature had picked out as the new alpha of the Keys, he was pretty damn sure it wasn’t him.
Cops. Jesus. He had a dizzying sense of just how much of a mess he was in this time. All Eli’s fault. Should have flown under the radar better, but he’d wanted to be normal, wanted to run a business and file tax returns and all that shit they couldn’t afford. Except werewolves were werewolves and no matter how hard you tried there was always the possibility that someone somewhere was going to get et.
He checked his phone. He’d texted several times – talk 2 me – but there was no reply. Figured she’d make him sweat. The more he thought about it now the more it made sense; that look in her eyes when she pulled the trigger. Her hands had been shaking, but it had been a look he knew all too well, the same one in Gloria’s eyes when a chicken needed killing or the moon was getting fat. Didn’t have to like it, but it had to be done.
In his mind’s eye he kept seeing her hands, drawing a cigarette from his pack. He remembered thinking that she had pretty little hands, even though the nails were broken here and there and her skin got regularly parched with cleaning products. And he hadn’t seen it at the time, but now he knew he was amazed he hadn’t seen it sooner - the same tapered fingers and oval nails he’d watched shuffling cards, lighting cigarettes and gutting chickens. Blue had her grandmother’s hands.
He tried again, one last time. The phone rang and rang and he was just about to hang up when it stopped ringing.
Silence, like the number had been disconnected. He waited for the beep and the recorded voice that would tell him so, but instead he heard a sigh.
“What?” she said, in a voice as flat and frosty as an ice floe.
“Hey. You picked up.”
“Yeah, I did. So what? Talk. What is it that you want from me?”
“I don’t...” He hadn’t thought about that. He hadn’t thought about much beyond wanting to hear her voice and maybe feel a little less like he was drifting out to nowhere all alone, floating weightless through the Gloria-sized hole in the universe. “I’m sorry,” he said, because he was. “I’m so fucking sorry about everything, Blue. I just got done with the cops. They wanted me to...they wanted me to ID the body, since you guys skipped town and all. So...you know. Thanks for that.”
Blue took a breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. Everyone seemed to be saying that a lot lately. “Gloria told us to leave. I didn’t really have any choice.”
“Cause of Yael?”
“Yeah. He’s out there, Charlie. Somewhere on the ocean. I’d move inland if I were you. Who knows if hurricane season is going to blow him back to shore?”
“Fuck Yael,” said Charlie. “I’ve got bigger things to worry about than some poltergeist that crawled up my ass one time. What about us?”
“Us?”
“What we are,” he said. “I want to hear you say it, Blue, because it’s been driving me nuts ever since I started to put the pieces together. I want you to admit that there’s a possibility that you and I are...you know...family.”
She exhaled slowly down the phone. “Yeah.”
“Okay. Then...where the fuck are you? I’m supposed to bury our grandmother all by myself?”
“No,” said Blue. “You’re supposed to cremate her. And don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t try to manipulate me. Not again.”
“I wasn’t...” he started to say, but she cut him off.
“– yeah, right,” she said. “I’ve thought this through a hundred times since. About what happened. About what you made me do.”
“I didn’t make you do anything,” he said, although he had. Kind of. He should have had the nerve. Whenever he closed his eyes he kept seeing the handprints on the tile wall, all fucked up and with the wrong number of fingers. Someone had had to do it; they couldn’t have left Eli to die slowly, not like that.
“You did,” said Blue. “I think on some way you wanted to drag me down to your level.”
Oh, there was no question about it. There it was – his own homegrown variety of piss and vinegar, running through her veins. “How fucking dare you,” he said. “I choked. That was all. I couldn’t do what needed to be done –”
“– so you handed the gun to your little sister, so that she could be a killer, just like you.”
And here came the moral superiority, right on cue. “Hey, I did what I had to do. Lyle –”
“– Lyle was old and sick, Charlie. But Reese? That’s the one I don’t get. Did you seriously take your daddy issues out on a sad little fat kid who never did you any real harm?”
“You didn’t know Reese, okay?”
She snorted. “Please. Quit acting like you were killing the werewolf version of Ted Bundy or whoever. As far as I can see you did it because you wanted to, because you were still mad at a child for laughing at the look on your face when you found our deadbeat father on the end of a fork.”
It wasn’t that, he started to say, but the words died on his lips. There was no point explaining that it had never been just one thing with Reese. It had been an endless drip feed of stupidity and slights, but explaining them would only have made Charlie look even pettier than the picture already in her head.
“I guess it was different,” she said. “When you had to look Eli in the eye and pull that trigger.”
Charlie swallowed. “Fine,” he said. “You got me. I’m a coward.”
“No. You’re not,” said Blue. “You just chose to be. There’s a difference.”
She hung up.
*
Things spilled over in the wake of disaster.
The first thing was rage,
the sudden, flashing heat of blame or vengeance. Gabe carried a gun these days, and smelled cordite on his fingers more often than not. Without the cool of the sea to soothe him the inside of his head felt overheated, a pressure cooker fit to blow, and nobody seemed to be doing a thing to help.
Blue slept with her back to him more often than not, and he didn’t know why.
She was out in the yard, kneeling in the dirt and the leaf litter, her head – still with its surgical dressing – bent over a spool of sewing thread. He had no idea what she was doing and no real inclination to ask; ever since that awful day she’d retreated further into what he’d once jokingly referred to as ‘ooga booga stuff’, a jocularity he now recognized as a way of hiding just how much it scared him. That thing in Gloria’s house had almost killed Blue, and maybe it would kill Charlie, too – and that was just fine, because Charlie had it coming.
Gabe came up behind Blue, stamping a little as he walked, hoping she’d look up and ask him how he was doing. As he drew nearer he saw that the palms of her hands were bloody, and he didn’t want to ask. He knew the answers would only make him frightened and angry.
She looked up and saw the gun in his hand. “What are you doing?” she asked, with a weariness that hurt him. Everything hurt these days. He felt like a raw nerve, or a tooth with an abscess in the root, when even the tiniest jolt or touch could set you off, curled in on yourself against the kind of pain that made you wish you were dead.
“Shooting,” he said, obscenely happy to hurt right back. He knew the sound of guns made her jittery, but it was all he could do. It seemed to be the only thing to reach her, remind her of just how fucked everything was. He had this strange feeling that if he didn’t fire the gun that she would drift somehow, retreat so far into witchery that he could no longer reach her.
“That’s not going to help, Gabe,” she said.
“And your thing is?”
There were cuts on her palms. As far as he could tell she was running the sewing thread through the blood, coating each strand, but that was as much as he understood. He didn’t want to ask, so he kept on walking.
The trees here hung heavy with Spanish moss, giving the woods a ghostly quality. Grayson said they were haunted, but even Axl was too old for such campfire stories.
Gabe found the kid sitting by the makeshift gun range he’d set up, the tell-tale smell drifting through the trees and under his keen nose. Axl didn’t realize he was there and went right on smoking, his big feet kicking morosely to the beat of the unheard music piping through his earbuds.
Gabe coughed and Axl quickly stubbed his cigarette out on a log and composed himself with that flurry of innocence common to teenagers caught on the hop.
“Quit while you’re ahead,” said Gabe, and Axl looked pathetically clueless. “And don’t look at me like that; you think a werewolf can’t smell you smoking?”
Axl dropped the act. “Excuse me if I’m kind of stressed out right now.”
“I know you are, but it’s not worth giving yourself cancer.”
“I only do it now and again.”
“So does everyone,” said Gabe. “When they start. Do yourself a favor and kick the habit before it starts kicking you.”
The kid sighed. “Ugh. Did you seriously come all the way out here to give me the anti-smoking PSA?” He glanced at the gun.
“No. I was just gonna fire off some rounds. Work on my aim. You want in?”
“Sure.” If he’d been maybe six months younger Axl might have jumped up in excitement, but he’d been through a lot this summer. More than even the average fifteen year old. “Did you see Blue?” he asked, perhaps trying to cover his enthusiasm, or perhaps just out of genuine anxiety.
“Yeah. Briefly. Why?”
Axl shrugged. “I dunno. Are you guys fighting?”
Good question. Gabe fished in his pocket for a pair of earplugs. “No,” he said, although he had to think about it, and he had no idea if they were. He almost wished they were – screaming, yelling, insults – something to latch onto. Something petty and real, not like whatever it was she was doing these days. Or why she turned away whenever he touched her.
“She’s just got a lot on her mind, is all,” said Gabe. “I know she didn’t know Gloria that long but I think they got pretty close.”
It sounded ridiculous when he said it; Gloria had been a wolf for most of the time the two women had known one another, but there was no denying that Blue had figured out Gloria a lot faster than most people. And maybe there was a reason for that, even though Gabe didn’t place much faith in whole personalities being handed down like heart conditions or eye colors.
And then there was Charlie, and nobody was in any shape to talk about that right now, least of all Axl. The last thing the kid needed right now was to discover that the new wolf witch may very well have been related to the asshole who murdered his father.
“Earplugs,” said Gabe. “And I don’t care if you hate them. If you don’t wear them you don’t shoot, understand?”
“Yeah. Whatever.”
“Good. Now...you’re gonna want to use both hands when you’re starting out. Under the trigger guard...that’s it...”
*
The second thing was love.
Or maybe it was lust, but it didn’t matter either way, because it was safety and sanity and a kindness desperately needed in the wake of so much pain.
“Malleus Malleficarum,” said Joe, peering at the book he’d just lifted from the shelf. His tongue stumbled a little over the Latin but that didn’t matter either, because in the right context his tongue was as perfect as the rest of him.
“That won’t help,” said Grayson.
“You sound very sure.”
“I am very sure. It’s a pile of paranoid nonsense. Pure propaganda. Real witches don’t ride around on broomsticks, or make broth out of babies.”
Joe flipped it open and peered into the pages, standing with the sloppy, off-center grace that already made Grayson’s heart hurt with the knowledge that there was no fool quite like an old fool. Twenty years was forever when you practically aged in dog years. “You hope,” said Joe, the tip of his tongue exploring a rosy pink stubble burn at the corner of his mouth.
“Hope what?” Grayson hoped a lot of things lately. That was the big thing he’d neglected to write about love, in all those silly books full of trembling lips and burnished abs; it gave you hope, even when you had no business having such a thing.
“That witches aren’t making baby stew. Blue said that little blonde witch was a swamp wolf, and we know what that means, right?”
Grayson swallowed hard, remembering the ribs bare in the moonlight, the tattooed skin pale as bone. “Cannibalism,” he said. “And probably a brain full of interesting prion diseases. Is it kuru you get from eating your relatives?”
Joe closed the book with a thump and came closer, the sun catching the gold hairs on his forearms. He wore a pair of Grayson’s old pajama bottoms, too short in the leg and too tight around the hips, so that he filled them out indecently at the crotch. He was big down there, thick and long and cut in the manner of hygiene-neurotic Americans. He was unquestionably male, but whenever Grayson took him in hand Joe’s gasps would turn almost girlish, a dim, dirty echo of the sexy, helpless sounds he made when he was being fucked.
“Don’t ask me,” Joe said. “Weirdest thing I ever ate was lutefisk, and that was bad enough.”
His hip was warm under Grayson’s hand, that raw patch by his mouth a reminder of how his tongue had poked out just that morning when he was on his knees, frowning in concentration as he leaned back, breathing deep and hard as he eagerly impaled himself once more.
“Are we helping?” Joe said. “I don’t feel like we’re being very helpful.”
“We’re trying,” said Grayson, but he could see the outline of Joe’s erection and all he wanted to do was tear off those stupid pajama pants and go back to bed.
“What are we even supposed to be looking for?
A spell? A weapon?”
Grayson put his arms around Joe’s waist, his head against the little dip where the ribs joined the bottom of the breastbone. “I don’t even know myself anymore,” he said. “All I know is I can’t seem to keep my hands off you.” He looked up and saw that look on Joe’s face, the one he couldn’t get enough of – slutty and smug and tender all at once. “What on earth do you see in me?”
Joe laughed down his nose, pressing his lips tight together as if he was embarrassed about what might come out if he opened them. He moved his feet apart, his thighs either side of Grayson’s knees like a lap dancer. “A lot,” he said, and that was half of it right there and more, just having someone smile at you when the world was so very, very ugly. “Your voice. Your eyes.” He caught his lip between his teeth. “The way you fuck me.”
“Ah. And there was me thinking you loved me for my mind.”
Joe shook his head. “God, no. It’s all about your dick. Sometimes your hands, sometimes your mouth, but it’s mostly your penis. I’m very shallow like that.”
“Come here.”
There were a million things Grayson needed to say – I’m too old for you, I’m going to die soon, may as well spare yourself the pain – but he couldn’t bring himself to say them. Why cut off the only light in the world just because you wanted to be a realist right to the end? “I love you,” he said, instead. “And you don’t need to say it back, because I don’t care. I just wanted you to know.”
Joe’s ribs heaved raggedly against his cheek, fingers in his hair. “And what if I want you to care? Did you ever think about that?”
Grayson looked up into Joe’s pale blue eyes, their edges unlined. The sun lit up the spikes of his dirty blond hair. So young. So beautiful. I did think about it, thought Grayson, but why push my already amazing luck?
He didn’t get to speak the words out loud, because he was interrupted by a cough from the yard, reminding them both that Blue was nearby. The books piled around them suddenly looked like a reproach; they were supposed to be finding something useful to her, not pawing one another like horny teenagers.
