by Anna Roberts
She had only an instant to understand what this might mean, just long enough to set her mind reeling in terror, and then Ro’s hand moved. His shaking fingers stirred in the still runny blood, curling up under the palm. He made an awful grunting sucky kind of noise and then his wrist spasmed, twisting his hand towards his body in a way that Ruby somehow knew meant was wrong. Brain damage wrong. Broken beyond repair wrong. But that wasn’t going to stop Yael from trying.
Ruby reached for Gloria’s book on top of the microwave. She felt more broken glass embed in her heel as she moved, but she would deal with that later. Much later. Charlie had a point - if there was a way to summon these things then there had to be a way to banish them, right? It made perfect sense. It had to make sense.
Ro made a sound like a clogged toilet, then raised himself - still with those turned-in wrists - like a cat trying to hork up a hairball. Ruby frantically flipped the pages, chicken a la king and mojitos and hexes all mixed up in one big, and increasingly bloody mess. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ro raise his head, flopping and swaying from side to side in hideous confusion. Charlie - still sitting on the floor - yanked open the door of the dishwasher and grabbed hold of the big knife.
She didn’t want to look, but she knew she was going to have to. Just to confirm or deny if there really was anything left of her husband in there or it was just Yael trying to hijack an empty vessel that was already gator chow. All that blood. He’d probably bled into his brain. And he’d been dead for more than five minutes. Wasn’t that all it took before the brain started turning to mush?
Ruby turned her head slowly, blinking through her tears. Ro’s face was an even more ghastly purple than it had been before he landed on it. One big bloody bruise with eyes peeking out of it. The whites of his eyes were so red that she could barely see the blue-gray of his irises, but there was nothing there. Empty. He was nothing more than a flesh puppet.
Charlie pulled himself up on the kitchen surface, his hand shaking so bad that the knife in it was almost a blur. He breathed hard for a moment and then lurched forward with a scream of disgust. There was a loud, rasping sound that somehow couldn’t have been anything but knife on bone and then Ro sank back down to the floor, the big knife sticking out of the top of his skull.
“There,” said Charlie, ineffectually wiping his bloody hands on his shirt. “Done. He’s done.”
She gulped in a shaky breath. “Is it dead?” she asked, meaning Yael, but then Charlie reeled backwards with a grunt, as though some invisible hand had punched him in the stomach. And when he looked at she couldn’t believe this was still happening, because it wasn’t Charlie any more. And how had she ever mistaken the way that thing looked at her for Charlie? It looked at her the way that cold, cruel children look at insects, before they trapped them and got down to their experiments.
“Ow,” it said, raising a hand to Charlie’s collarbone.
Ruby started to sob again. She couldn’t help it. Maybe if she just started screaming and screaming someone would come and they’d take her away to prison or the nuthouse. And sure that would get complicated once they realized they had a live werewolf on their hands, but hey, at least she’d be away from Yael.
“Broke another tooth,” said Yael. “Goddamn, this body is just about done. This would never have happened if that old cunt had just come through like she promised. You know that, don’t you? This is all her fault. All Gloria’s. Trying to keep me from what was mine in the first place.” He shook his hands out, like he couldn’t understand why he was feeling all fizzy and weird. That’s what you get, asshole, thought Ruby. You want a body you get pain. And fear. It’s not all champagne and oysters.
“If I’d got a hold of him sooner,” said Yael, pointing a bloody finger. “He’d be in much better shape. I’d have taken care of him; nobody ever realizes that. But I would have. And he wouldn’t be losing teeth and having palpitations at the grand old age of thirty-three. This is what I get for all her double-crossing. This body. Crappy and occupied. Do you know how noisy it gets in here when there are two of you? They never stop screaming. Not once.”
He sighed and ran a hand through Charlie’s hair, streaking the dirty gold with red. “Oh, stop crying,” he said. “I was just trying to recycle your husband. He was a vacant lot. Just...didn’t count on how fast the brain turns to pudding. And I guess the rat poison didn’t help.”
Ruby reached for the knife. It was jammed solid in Ro’s skull and her fingers slithered on the handle. “Let go,” said Yael, and calmly drew it out with a scraping sound that made her shudder right down to the marrow of her bones. He turned away towards the sink and she heard water running, her mind already racing ahead.
Ro. Jared, Kaiden, Ro. Consequences. The old man would hear about this, and there would be a shitstorm. And Grayson – Jennifer – she’d had no idea this whole time and now she’d never get to tell him. The one person who had kept the loneliness at bay and made the world seem brighter. And now he was going to die too, and it was all because of Yael.
All because of her.
8
Dog days. Flat, sweaty days at the ass-end of summer, skies turning sulky and a wolf yawning between your bones.
Gabe felt it in his sleep, his dreams tinged with a raw meat taste, his hips aching whichever way he rolled. Half awake, he saw the empty space in the bed beside him, heard a toilet flush somewhere and – putting two and two together – settled back to sleep.
Only it didn’t take. His gums throbbed and the ends of his fingers itched, a premonition of tooth and claw. And she didn’t come back to bed. When he reached out and touched it her pillow was cold.
“Blue?”
There was an odd smell in the room, like dust disturbed, but he wasn’t going to think about that. Not right now. She was somewhere.
He rolled off the sofa bed, looking for a light in the kitchen, but there was none. The room hung in dead-of-night shadows, a silvered streak of moonlight crossing the floor. There was no wind, just the steady craak of frogs and the background hiss of insect wings. The ashtray sat empty on the table.
Outside. The back door was unlocked and he breathed a little easier; she must have sneaked out for a smoke, the way she sometimes did when she couldn’t sleep.
“Blue?”
The yard was empty. He stood shivering, naked in the light of the swelling moon, his mind filling with all those stupid rituals you were supposed to do when you’d lost something. Look down the back of the couch, pray to St. Anthony, retrace your steps.
He slammed the door too hard as he went back indoors, half-wanting someone to wake and half-wanting them not to, because if someone else noticed her absence then she really would be gone.
Gabe switched on the light. The sofa bed was as he’d left it, crumpled on his side, cold on hers. There was a piece of folded paper tucked under the base of a lamp, and as soon as he saw it he knew what that disturbed dust smell was, the smell of the inside of luggage.
“No,” he said aloud, as he reached for the note, but deep down he knew. You always want what you never had, and as an only child he understood that much, even if the long lost sibling was Charlie. “No, no, no – don’t you do this.”
And to think he’d once – just for five stupid minutes – entertained the possibility that she was into Charlie. If only it had been that; you could get over a crush on an older man. But blood? That was forever.
He opened the note and began to read.
I’m sorry. I tried so hard to tell you and I couldn’t do it. It was me. I killed Eli...
*
I didn’t even kill him.
Charlie said this somewhere in a tiny, untended corner of his mind, a neglected pocket of backbrain where it was safe to whisper over the roar that filled the rest. It struck him as mildly funny that out of all the horrible things about tonight he would choose to complain about the unfairness of it all. Here he was, chopping up yet another dead body when he hadn’t even killed the poor prick.
/> Not sure how that would fly in a court of law - “It wasn’t me, your honor; I was possessed by a pack spirit. What’s that you say? Oh, well a pack spirit is a kind of fancy ghost who is supposed to protect werewolves, but look how well that’s working out for me right now.”
Maybe he could swing an insanity defense. Actually he could definitely do that. Just tell them his goddamn life story and it would be so long lethal injection, hello cozy padded suite at the Cuckoo’s Nest Hilton.
His body paused for breath, caught up in the middle of gagging. The crunchy bits were always the worst. Yael prodded him in the top of the spine - a mean little jab of pain just to let Charlie know who was in control.
Get on with it.
Charlie brought the hammer down hard on the thing in the bag. It landed with an all-too fleshy sound.
Maybe should have boiled the meat off his bones first, but you can’t risk it with Ruby around. She might take it for soup and drink it.
Who knew psycho ghosts were so squeamish about cannibalism?
Oh, I’m not squeamish, Charlie-darling, but she’s having a baby. And our friend here is full of rat poison.
He could hear the voice distinctly in his head. It came booming out from somewhere in the front, while he whined from the back, a backseat driver in his own brain and body. He brought the hammer down again on something delicate and bony. Even through the flesh of Ro’s head he could feel it shatter. This is what it feels like to be insane, he thought, one of those serial killers driven by some monstrous internal turbine and voices that whispered to them to rape and kill.
Common misconception, said Yael, as he grabbed tight hold of Charlie’s arm and started to bang away at the bag. Red leaked out all over the dock. Most of those monsters were sane as Sunday. Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy - you’d like to think they were frothing-at-the-mouth crazy, but they weren’t. There wasn’t a single thing could be done to fix them. Not an exorcism, not a psychiatrist, perhaps not even an ice pick to the eye socket or a couple of dizzy go-rounds on the electro-convulsive carousel. They weren’t nuts in any fixable way; they were just broken.
Charlie’s arm ached in its socket. The gutty squishing sounds from the bag were truly disgusting now. It was dark, but not so dark that he couldn’t see something white winking up from a hole in the hessian.
- My arm hurts. Please.
Keep bashing.
- no, but...
DO IT.
Oh God, it hurt. Panic rose in a way that was becoming all too familiar. Yael had no idea how to be human. He had no idea of the limits of flesh or when pain meant you needed to stop. He treated Charlie’s body like a heavy-handed and curious child with a far too delicate and complicated toy. The pain in Charlie’s arm socket arced outwards, whipping across his spine. His hand, clenched against his will around the handle of the hammer, felt as though it had been caught in a vice. It was worse than any hell even Dante could have devised, and the worst thing was he had enough conscience left to know he deserved it. Served him right for dishing up daddy like that, out of nothing but spite and weariness.
Really? I thought that was natural selection.
Yael released Charlie’s arm, letting him sag on the dock. For a split second Charlie was in control, but he had already learned that these tiny respites were just Yael taking a moment to figure out how to deal with a new physical sensation.
I didn’t do anything to him that you didn’t do to Reese, Charlie.
- You weren’t there. You didn’t know him –
- like you knew him? But I do, Charlie. I know everything you know. I know how you justified it to yourself. Remember how when he was getting sicker you used to sit up at night reminding yourself of what a little shit he’d been? What a brat. How he’d laughed along with his old man when Lyle told the story about how you ended up with a mouthful of Daddy on the end of your fork? You knew very well that there was nothing natural about the kind of selection you were serving to Reese, but you did it anyway. Maybe, deep down, you were broken all along.
Something stirred in the water below the dock, something big hungry thing of ancient design and boiling appetite. Charlie seized enough control of his body to stick out a foot and push the head into the water.
We weren’t done.
- I am. And so’s my back. Besides, gators can digest anything.
Yael stood him up. There were hands still in the trunk of the car and Charlie knew they would have to drive somewhere else, to the shore or the edge of a different swamp, to safely dispose of them. When you wanted someone to disappear for good the best way was to spread bits of them over as wide an area as possible.
He washed his hands in the water and pictured an alligator leaping out at him, like those ones on National Geographic when the zebras came out to the watering hole to drink. How would that work out for Yael, if he ended up in a gator’s belly? Would he be stuck in Charlie’s body right up to the point where the old dinosaur’s stomach acid turned his bones to soup? Or maybe he’d just hang out in the gator. There was a lovely thought.
Move.
Charlie staggered back to the car on legs he was sure would collapse, but Yael kept them moving, kept him marching along like a clockwork toy wound too tight. He unlocked the car and flopped into the driver’s seat, his fingers reaching for the wing mirror even though his brain screamed no; whenever Yael looked in mirrors and saw a face there he got way too pleased with himself, even if it was only a borrowed face he was looking at.
Mine now. In a way you were always mine.
His face hadn’t gotten all splattered this time; that was one piss poor thing to be thankful for. There were just a couple of speckles of dried something that Charlie might have mistaken for freckles if he hadn’t felt the wet pinpricks of gore on his skin as he hammered. He wiped them off with a Kleenex and thought about death. Was this what it felt like to be Gloria? No wonder she’d blown her fucking brains out.
Yael laughed a dirty, dark-brown laugh. That and the lifetime of guilt.
- Shut your goddamn hole.
Really, Charlie? We’re casting Gloria in the role of sainted mother now? That’s rich, not to mention strange. Are we talking about the same salty old bitch who tossed you out and appointed Eli to run things? It’s a shame you and your old man never got to talk about her. He could have told you a thing or two.
- Whatever. You always say shit like this, but you never follow through.
I know, said Yael. But I didn’t have full access to your brain back then. And a story like this deserves the full cinematic experience that only the human imagination can provide. Surround sound, high definition. Sit back, Charlie-darling. It’s time.
Heels on a floor. Click click click. Smell of hospitals. He wouldn’t have recognized her. She was blonde, with big plastic sunglasses and one of those Farrah flick hairstyles that had crossed over the decade line into the eighties. She kept walking down the hospital hallway, glancing in rooms until she found who she was looking for; a pale redheaded girl, looking so young and so tired that at first Charlie didn’t recognize her. Then she looked up and he saw the shape of her eyes, the nearly-forgotten point of her nose and the way her lank hair fell across her forehead. Mom.
“Linda?” said Gloria, taking off her sunglasses.
“Yeah? Who are you?”
Gloria marched right over to the Perspex crib by the side of the bed. She looked down into it and Charlie looked with her. It was him. It had to be him, a tiny pink nugget of a thing with a scrawny little bald head sticking out of a too-large onesie like a turtle’s head peeking from a shell. “Well,” said Gloria. “I guess now you can start calling me grandma.” She reached down with a finger and prodded the baby’s stomach. “Girl or boy?”
“Boy.”
“Shit.”
“Excuse me?” Linda pulled herself up in the bed. “Don’t touch my baby.”
“Relax,” said Gloria. “I’d never hurt him. The world will do that soon enough. What are you calling him?”
“He’s a small one.”
Linda shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, well. He felt big enough.”
“No wonder. You’re a goddamn baby yourself. How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Great,” said Gloria. “Just old enough to know what you’re saying yes to, but not old enough to know that he’s full of shit when he says he won’t come inside you.”
“What do you want from me?”
Gloria fished in her big white purse. “Nothing. Just to hear from you now and again. See how he’s doing. If there’s anything strange about him –”
“ - strange, why would there be anything strange?” But she was faking outrage and Charlie knew it. Even if she didn’t yet know her babydaddy’s little secret she knew that her brother was the problem child of the family in more ways than one.
“Call this number,” said Gloria, unphased. “You hear me, Linda? There are...issues. Genetic things. We can help him with them.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and it was an outright lie this time, sullen and hostile.
Gloria bent over the crib once more and tickled the baby. “Blue eyes,” she said. “Like his father. Hey there, Charlie.”
“Charles. His name is Charles.”
“Perhaps,” said Gloria and when she walked back down the corridor her heels clicked at a new rattling pace, in time with the song in her head.
Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling, Charlie is my darling, the young chevalier.
Smell of cigarettes. Click, click, click, only this time it’s the boy playing with a lighter.
“Stop that,” says Gloria, reaching across the kitchen table and snatching it from him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”
“That’s nice,” he says, looking up with eyes so blue it’s hard to believe they’re real. His skin is as fair as hers but his hair is black, hanging almost to his shoulders. His narrow wrists and barely-faded freckles are those of a child, but he’s a man. He’s sure of that now. “Nice fucking way to greet your own long lost son, although I don’t know you could call me lost. Since you lost me on purpose and all.”
