by Anna Roberts
“That’s right” he said. “Give into it. Flush the works. Once the moon’s over we’ll have a clean slate. Start over. No more part ownership.”
*
The freezer was emptying too fast.
Nothing had prepared Blue for just how much food Gabe would need. She had been able to feed Gloria on pounds of cheap ground turkey, but Gloria had had the faint appetite of a little old lady. Gabe had used to buy three whole lamb carcasses for him and Joe every full moon, but there was no question of that now that the tourist cash had dried up.
Blue fed him a bowl at a time, but from the way he prowled and drooled in his cage she knew it wasn’t enough.
She didn’t know how long Yael had been around, but she guessed it was a long time. Longer than any human. Perhaps he had come here by ship, stowed away in the body of some flinty-faced old pilgrim father, waiting to find the right girl, the one whose brain was boiling under her starched white cap, her palms itching with the desire to work her will on the world. Or perhaps he had been here already, daring black buckle shoes to step on tribal lands, waiting to play havoc with the newcomers, who – unlike the locals – didn’t yet know how much they should fear him.
It had been a while, long enough for him to intimately understand the problems of the wolf witch, and how he might profit from them.
There was hardly anything left of the chicken house – just a couple of foundation poles sticking up out of a patch of weeds that nobody had found the time to clear yet. Blue had never paid much attention to it before, but now it was like trying not to think of an elephant. The half-rotted struts stuck up black as exclamation points, drawing her eye and pricking a terrible curiosity.
The first time she had gone to look she had only poked the ground with her foot. Something had grown across the foundation in the way things can only grow in the South – kudzu, Spanish moss. A thick root had cracked right through the old cement. She walked away, unsettled by the thought that Yael somehow might have made it grow faster on purpose, snaking apart the cement like on a time-lapse film. Some other power to tempt her with.
On her way back to the house she almost stumbled over a python, a monstrous thing sliding slowly through the long grass. She wondered if there was someone she could call – some local government department used to removing the things; they weren’t native to Florida, a nuisance likely to eat people’s pets. Its body was as thick as her calf and she found herself wondering if wolves could eat python. They weren’t venomous, were they?
Blue took an ax from the shed before she had even had time to think about what she was doing. It was only when the snake had slithered off that she realized she was now in the insane position of thinking of python as a source of protein for her werewolf boyfriend.
“Fine,” she said, out loud. Yael had won this one. She could look. It didn’t mean she had to say yes.
She took the ax and swung at the root. The first blow cut deep, but the second only frustrated her and the third glanced off the cement, sending a bolt of pain up her arm and across the back of her shoulders.
“You could have dug the goddamn hole for me,” she said. So much for the deluxe package. All Eve had had to do was take a bite.
She pushed the shovel into the crack in the cement, leaning her weight on it with a foot. It was soft underneath and she worked and wiggled the shovel, sometimes bouncing on the blade with both feet like she was riding a pogo stick. She could feel sweat running down her ribs from under her arms, but she couldn’t stop – not now. If she let her common sense stop her she’d be locked back in another duel with her own curiosity, and she knew she couldn’t win. Better to get it over with. Besides, when she worked the shovel under the cement and lifted the whole thing in one piece it felt so much like a victory that she actually cheered.
Gasping, she hacked through a few more roots and felt the shovel bounce off something hard. She dropped to her knees and scrambled through the mess of roots and earth. Metal.
There was no going back now. She dug frantically with her bare hands, realizing just what she was looking at here. It was one of those briefcases – Samsonite, she thought they were called. One of those metal ones where people hid bombs in movies.
Maybe it was a bomb. Maybe Yael meant to blow her sky high, but she doubted it. He needed her for something, and while she didn’t know nearly enough about him, she knew that when Yael needed you it was rarely for anything good.
She pulled up the case, leaning on the handle of the ax as she did so. The numbers on the combination lock were all set to zero, although she was sure it couldn’t be that easy.
Blue wiped the sweat from her face and chest, smearing her skin with dirt. The sun was starting to set – the last night of the full moon. And then what?
She had no idea.
Later, much later, she would go through the reasons why she took the ax back into the house. To lean on the handle as she walked back? She’d been pretty tired from digging, but why hadn’t she taken the shovel? And would that have made a difference?
Or maybe she had just known.
She kicked open the backdoor with her foot, almost fell through it and screamed.
Yael was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking his way through a pack of Gloria’s stale old menthols.
“What are you doing in here?” Blue said. “How did you get in?”
In the fading light, and if she hadn’t known any better, Blue might have thought it was Charlie sitting there, but when he looked up there was no mistaking that it was Yael in there. He looked at her the way that python might have looked at a house cat or a Chihuahua.
“You know when I said I couldn’t get past your protection?” he said, stubbing out the smoke in a souvenir ashtray from Key West. “I lied.”
Blue set down the briefcase. She held on to the ax.
“Charlie here could always pretty much come and go as he pleased anyway,” said Yael. “Gloria could cast all kinds of hoodoo to keep him away, but in the end – as you know – it’s all about the will behind the work. And he was always the weakest point of her will; deep down she never really wanted him to stay away, you see. You know how grandmothers get, especially with the firstborn grandchild.”
She could hear her throat work as she swallowed. She knew what was coming next.
“Not that she didn’t sock away a little for the granddaughter,” said Yael, nodding to the briefcase. “Happy birthday.”
“It’s...it’s not my birthday.” Her mouth felt like it was full of glue.
“It could be,” he said, getting up from the chair. “For all you really know. You don’t even have a father on your birth certificate.”
Blue backed towards the door, but she heard the lock snap behind her, closed by unseen hands. Yael smiled, baring Charlie’s ruined teeth. There was no Charlie in there anymore, she felt sure of it. The wolf was all but dead and now there was just Yael, shining through blacker than black, filling her head with the smells of licorice and tar.
She adjusted her grip on the ax. “Get away from me.”
“Really?” said Yael. “You’re going to go all Lizzie Borden on your only living relative? Your brother from another mother?”
He stepped closer. She swung out wildly and he ducked, laughing. Her arms sung with pain and her head swam; she was so tired and thirsty from digging.
“The whole thing about your old man being turned into sausage was bullshit, by the way,” said Yael, his smile a clown’s rictus by now. He spoke with Charlie’s voice and Charlie’s speech patterns but there was nothing of Charlie in those eyes. Just an angry, hungry spirit. “It happened a lot differently, but make no mistake, Shiny-New. He’s sleeping with the fishes.”
“You got what you wanted,” said Blue, her hands shaking on the ax handle. “You wanted a body, you got one.”
Why wouldn’t he stop? Why wouldn’t he just leave her alone?
Yael stopped smiling. “I was promised a home,” he said. “I ended up with a timeshare. Which has
not been treated all that well, I have to say. Missing teeth, high cholesterol – to say nothing of the nicotine habit.”
He lurched closer and she ducked towards the other door, only it slammed before she could get through it. She had an insane flashback of Yael sending Gloria’s dentures flying across the kitchen in a wild, grinning arc.
“What do you want?” she said, and it came out in a wail, revealing just how desperate she’d become.
“Isn’t it obvious, Blue?” he said. “I want to be a real boy.”
He reached for her, his hand stretching out towards her belly, towards the place where all women are taught to guard from men, the horror of it only sharpened by the fact that he was in the body of her brother. She heard herself shriek ‘NO’ and then she felt the ax hit something solid. Fleshy.
Yael gave a scream of pain and rage, like he had never expected being human to hurt this much. The sound of it lit a wicked fire in Blue and she swung – without looking at the mess she’d made – once more. This time the ax stuck on something, jarring her arms and making her stagger back.
The first blow had caught him in the side of the face. His cheekbone was shattered and through the gash she could see the ragged red edges of his teeth, his tongue moving in a foam of blood like he was trying to talk, but she’d severed something in there. Or maybe his brain wouldn’t let him, because there was an ax in it. The second blow had caught him above the ear and the blade had stuck on some part of his skull, because the handle was still sticking out, bobbing against gravity as he reeled back against the kitchen table, knocking over the chairs and flinging the ashtray to the floor.
Her first thought was that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It was like some horror movie effect designed to be as gory as possible. The ax, weighted by its own handle, fell out of Charlie’s head, the blade flicking loose a fragment of skull that ricocheted across the kitchen like a sitcom toenail, the blood spurting out so sudden and strong it could only have been propelled by a pump placed there by the prop department.
He dropped to the floor, twitched a couple of times, and then lay still.
11
It was the quiet that finally made her understand what was happening. Nobody pressed pause or yelled ‘cut’ or went to get a refill of popcorn. There was just a swelling, cooling silence. The blood had stopped spurting, but the puddle beneath Charlie’s body grew almost imperceptibly larger, darker around the edges and perfectly shiny in the middle.
Blue picked up the fragments of the ashtray and sat down. Her knees wouldn’t let her stand up any longer. She reached for the pack of stale menthols and lit one automatically, as if she had never quit in the first place. The muddy briefcase was still on the table; for a second back there she had thought it would go flying along with the chairs, but it had only slid a short distance. Strange to think there had been so much activity, so much frantic energy in the room just a handful of minutes before. And now he had just stopped, along with everything else that had used to make sense.
The zeros on the combination lock grinned back at her like dirty teeth. She reached out – dreamlike – and turned them with a finger. They rolled around more easily than she had expected.
Happy birthday.
She tried it. Eleven, zero nine, ninety-two.
Nothing happened. She hadn’t expected it to. She coughed on a mouthful of smoke and realized she had to pull the little catches apart to make the locks pop open. She held the cigarette between her lips and pushed at the catches with both thumbs.
It opened. The case was full of money.
Blue’s head swam, from the smoke or the murder or the stacked banknotes – she didn’t know. All she knew was that she had crossed over into a new level of insanity and that it had left her numb in a way she wasn’t sure would ever leave her. As if to make matters even more surreal, she heard locks being drawn back downstairs; Gabe once more had hands to open them.
He padded in, dirty, barefoot and stark naked. His eyes had the vague, punch-drunk look they always got when his brain was still rewiring itself back from wolf to human. He sniffed the air, taking in the mud and the blood and the stale cigarette smoke, his unsteady gaze reeling from the money to her to the body cooling on the kitchen floor.
“I killed Yael,” said Blue, and her face felt strange when she spoke, like her voice was coming out of the mouth of a mask. “Maybe. And Charlie. I mean, I definitely killed Charlie.”
Gabe turned the color of putty. He didn’t speak, and for a moment she found herself hoping that he couldn’t, that he hadn’t remembered how to do so just yet. Then he said – slowly but distinctly – “Holy fucking shit,” and once again everything was far too real.
He gagged a little as he took in the brain fragments on the ax blade, making her stomach twist and writhe in sympathy. She jumped up and skidded across the floor to the sink, her retching only intensified by the feel of the cooling, clotty blood on her feet.
And yet it felt good to throw up, like the relief it brought from nausea. At least it proved some part of her was human enough to still be disgusted.
Blue drew water, gagged and spat. When she lifted her foot the sole of her sandal made a sticky, ripping noise and she knew that even if by some miracle she could get them clean, she would never want to wear those shoes again.
She felt Gabe’s hand on her shoulder. “Blue? You wanna tell me what happened?”
“I was scared,” she said, horrified to find she was already justifying this thing in her mind. “I panicked.”
He took a breath, but said nothing, like he was deciding there was nothing he could say without treading on the ugliest reason why a woman would be afraid of a man. Not a discussion he wanted to have when there were practical matters to deal with.
“Well,” he said. “This is...getting ridiculous.”
She stared down into the drain, knowing that when she turned around it would still be there. A body on the kitchen floor. It was a good thing Gloria wasn’t here to see the mess it had made of the linoleum.
“I don’t think I can do this,” said Blue, panic bubbling up once more. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I can’t...I can’t...cut him up.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay,” she said, furious with herself. “Everyone else ends up cleaning up my messes. And I should do it myself. The way I’ve always done it. He was my brother, for God’s sake.”
“You don’t know that for sure.” God, he was still going to hang this on DNA, like they were on Maury or something.
“Like it matters any more,” she said. “I killed him. That’s two now. How many do you have to do before you’re officially a serial killer?”
His hand squeezed her shoulder. “Come on. You had to do what you did with Eli; he asked me to do the exact same thing.”
“He did?”
“Yes, Blue. I guess the only one he didn’t ask was Charlie, but only because he was afraid Charlie would actually do it.” She felt his breath as he sighed. “Poor prick. If he’d had a spine he’d have been dangerous.”
Bad choice of words. Awful pictures rose in her mind, bringing a fresh fog of nausea. The smell of blood was like a scream drowning everything else out; she was afraid if she turned around to face the body she’d pass out.
“You weren’t supposed to come back here,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to understand.”
“How was I not supposed to understand?” said Gabe. “I’m a werewolf. It always ends ugly; the best you can hope for in the end is a bullet in the head.”
She forced herself to turn around. He was crouching on the kitchen floor, sideways on to her. His bare feet were in the blood and as usual he looked more at ease naked than some people did when fully clothed. His thigh flexed as he straightened up and she was horrified that even in this abattoir setting she could still find his body so beautiful.
Assuming he was the only one in it. She’d forgotten all about Yael.
“I think I saw some bolt cutters
in the basement,” he said, wiping his hand on his bare hip, leaving streaks of blood.
Blue mentally rummaged through the cutlery drawer behind her. There was a meat skewer in there, a good sharp one. Wasn’t that what it said in the old books? If you pricked a possessed person then they didn’t bleed?
But then Charlie had definitely been possessed, and look at the unholy goddamn mess of him all over the kitchen.
She forced herself not to panic. The last thing she ever wanted to do was hurt Gabe. If Yael had jumped into him there had to be some safer means of getting him out.
“Don’t look so worried,” said Gabe. “We’ve cleaned up worse.”
He sat down to rinse off his feet, blocking the way to the back door. “At some point we should probably talk about that,” he said, nodding towards the money.
“Yeah.”
She was staring at him; she couldn’t help it. She waited for the grin or the pun or the ‘ha ha, fooled you’ that would identify him as Yael, but it didn’t come.
“Relax,” said Gabe. “You said you killed it, right?”
A woman’s voice burst out of nowhere, and Blue nearly screamed.
“I’d like to do a song of great social and political import...” It was a laughing, crack-throated voice, coming from somewhere in Charlie’s clothes, and it was only when it started singing that Blue recognized it as Janis Joplin’s. Mercedes Benz. He must have set it as a ringtone.
“Oh Jesus,” she said. Her heart felt like it was going to leap out of her body.
“Leave it,” said Gabe.
“What if it’s important?”
He looked at her with a wry expression that was so much his own that she allowed herself a brief second of relief. “Well, Charlie can’t come to the phone right now.”
Janis got as far as complaining that her friends all drove Porsches and then cut off. There was a moment’s silence and she started up again, from the very beginning; “I’d like to do a song of great social and political import...”
“I can’t stand it,” said Blue, and wondered what the hell it said about her sanity that she would rather search a corpse than leave a phone to ring. Nothing good, she was sure.
