by Anna Roberts
“Now,” said Grayson, lighting the candle. “You stand well back. If it’s anything like last time, there could be flying glass.”
He was trying to lighten the mood, but it didn’t work. Because if there was flying glass then it meant Gabe was done for.
Nobody spoke for a moment. “You want me to do it?” said Axl, like he was desperate to get it over with.
“No,” said Joe, and picked up the phone. He dialed.
It rang for a long time. He thought it was just about to go to voicemail, then Gabe – please be just Gabe - picked up.
“Gabe?”
“Oh God. It’s you.”
So far so good. Nobody else in the room met his eyes; they were both looking at the glass on the nightstand. The candle flame burned orange, which he hoped was the right color.
“Are you okay?” asked Joe.
Gabe gave a half sigh, then swallowed, like he was trying to keep something down. “Uh...define ‘okay’.”
“I’m hoping you didn’t eat anyone on your way down to the Keys?”
“No,” said Gabe. “Although I am kinda busy.” He gulped down the phone again. “Dexter busy. You know?”
It was him. It was so him, it couldn’t be anyone else. An air bubble splooped out from under the egg white, and Joe could have strangled even Grayson for the way he flinched at it.
“Charlie?” said Joe.
“Ugh,” said Gabe, and there was no longer any question in Joe’s mind. “He’s just...I mean, he’s fucking everywhere. All over the kitchen. It’s...I just can’t even begin to tell you.”
“Ruby called. On Blue’s phone. Where the fuck is Blue, Gabe?”
“Would you believe,” said Gabe. “There was an ax and screaming and a suitcase full of what is very likely buried drug money and...oh God, fuck it. It’s complicated. Short version – Charlie bit it upstairs while I was howling around down in Gloria’s basement. And now I think Blue thinks that invisible fucking butt-goblin or whatever it is has crawled up my ass and that I’m about to start spewing pea soup or whatever it does these days for kicks. So, you know. There’s that.”
The candle burned steady. The egg white didn’t move. Grayson turned to Joe and this time there was a cautious light of optimism in his eyes.
“It hasn’t,” said Joe, letting out a breath he hadn’t even known he was holding. “Crawled up your butt, that is.”
“How do you know?” asked Gabe.
“I don’t. Not for sure. But I’m reasonably confident that you’re you.”
“Uh, thanks. I think.”
“You’re welcome,” said Joe. “Although that kinda raises another question.”
“Like?”
“Like if Yael’s not in you, where the hell did he go?”
*
There were banners outside the clinic, like so many others. Messy, splatty photographs of tiny limbs and bisected bodies, some fresh butcher-shop shades of bright pink and red, others faded from being held up in the sun all day long, like the people waving them had nothing better to do. And maybe they didn’t, but Blue was in no mood.
The crowd was chanting ‘Womb is God’s, womb is God’s’, and as Blue approached the door a woman stepped in her way, holding out a placard saying ‘AMERICA’S NEW HOLOCOST’. Blue swatted it out of her way. “You really don’t want to do that,” she said.
“You really want to kill your baby?”
Her sudden rage was so clear and so uncomplicated that she almost loved it; ignorant people who harassed strangers, not caring if they piled grief upon more grief, refusing to believe there might be such a thing as the lesser of two evils. Blue turned to look the woman in the eyes, but as she did so a strange thing happened, as if she could reach into the substance of this woman and almost feel the organ – the one she so loudly insisted belonged to God – in the palm of her hand.
One squeeze, one word – Blue knew it was all it would take from her to curse this woman as roundly as a witch ever cursed anyone, the kind of old fashioned curse you laid on a marriage bed. The bright sharp edge of her own malice shocked her and she cut her eyes away and walked through the sliding doors.
I shouldn’t be able to do things like that.
But she almost had. Maybe it was just fear-adrenaline, but she was humming all over with a new, strange ferocity, a malice so black and witchy that it had to be him, settling into her veins. Wasn’t that what Gloria had said? The placenta plumbed right into your arteries, taking, taking, taking, a tiny and endlessly powerful why.
She gave her name at the desk and was told to take a seat, a plastic chair in a waiting room full of posters offering counseling, advice about date rape, STI testing, all those wonderful things that happened to women. It was impossible; it had to be. She’d had periods, although maybe they hadn’t been as regular as normal since she started dating a werewolf; it was a stress thing.
That struck her as funny and she almost started laughing, which she thought might have helped; act a little crazy and people start looking at your pregnancy as less of a blessing and more of an oops.
Then that train of thought led to her mother, and that wasn’t so funny any more. How close had she come to not existing because some well-meaning doctor had figured Regina was too nuts to care for a child?
A nurse called her in and she answered all the questions automatically, impatiently.
“How far along do you think you are?”
“It’s hard to say. I’ve been...spotting, I guess.” That’ll be the wormwood. Tell her you have reason to believe it’s deformed and so messed up that it won’t live anyway. And for the sake of my sanity it has to come out. Today.
“And the father?” The nurse gave a little shrug of apology. “We have to ask.”
Gabe. Jesus. In some parallel universe somewhere she could picture him doting on his children, blowing bubbles in the yard, teaching them to swim. Only they lived in this universe, where he was a werewolf and the baby...well...
She would have to think about that some other time.
“No,” she said, fighting back tears. “He’s not in the picture. And I can’t afford a kid.”
Those words seemed to be the keys to the kingdom. One of the few perks of walking into an abortion clinic while black, she thought wryly; say you can’t afford it and everyone believes you.
“Just hop up on the table there,” said the nurse. “Take off everything below the waist and cover yourself with the paper.”
“Okay. Thank you.” It struck Blue as a weird thing to say thank you for – thank you for sparing my worst blushes with a piece of paper – but she had no idea what else she was supposed to say. She lay back on the padded table, a thin pillow behind her head, her knees drawn up under the paper.
“Okay,” said the nurse, slipping on a pair of gloves. “Bring your heels up to your butt and let your knees flop apart...great, that’s good.”
She felt the nurse’s gentle fingers, parting and then probing. Then a hand on her belly, pressing firmly. “Huh. Okay. And you don’t think it could have been more than a month?”
“It couldn’t have been,” said Blue. “I’ve had periods. Kinda.”
“Kinda?”
“They’ve been spotty, like I said.”
The nurse pushed at her belly again, frowned into the middle distance. “Huh,” she said, again. “Well, you feel pretty bulky in there. You have fibroids or anything like that?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“Let me just check something out,” said the nurse, straightening up and removing her gloves. “Do you mind us doing an ultrasound?”
“Wh...why?” Oh my God, this was real. This was real.
“It’s okay,” said the nurse. “It’s just that your uterus is much larger than it should be at a month along. Now, normally I’d say you got your dates wrong, but we’re talking sixteen weeks size. Are you absolutely sure?”
Blue counted backwards. “Yeah. That would be like...June.” Almost the first time. No
body could be that unlucky, surely. Besides, she’d had her period, and there had been no spotty about that one. Cramps, clots, all the fun stuff. “No, it can’t be.”
“Well, let’s take a look. And don’t worry. If it is fibroids they’re almost always benign. Did your mother have them? They run in some families, gallop in others.”
The nurse left and Blue lay alone on the table, feeling to her heart beat weirdly in her throat and behind her eardrums. She tried to remember if her mother had ever mentioned fibroids, but few doctors paid much attention to Reggie’s uterus, not when there was so much going wrong in her head. Ironic, really; a hundred years ago they would have gone there right away – the wandering womb. Hysteria.
She heard wheels on a polished floor and the nurse was back, pushing the little trolley with a screen on it. “Okay, lie flat,” she said, and Blue realized she’d been lying there with her legs up the whole time.
“Just a little cold here,” said the nurse, and squeezed clear gel on her belly. It smelled faintly antiseptic, reassuringly medical. There were few deep secrets left in this world. Every nook and cranny of the human body could be scanned and x-rayed. These days they could put you in an MRI or whatever while you prayed to heaven, and watch your brain light up with raw faith.
There was nowhere for Yael to hide here.
At first there was silence. It stood out clear and stark, because she’d seen this on the TV a dozen times; they put the goo on your belly, busted out the wand and then – to everyone’s delight – a swooshing, amplified heartbeat filled the room. A little miracle.
But there was nothing. Blue exhaled for what felt like the first time in forever.
The nurse was frowning. “Oof. Yeah, I’m afraid you might have them.” She pointed out a roundish lump on the screen. “They’re a pain in the ass, but not dangerous. For some reason they’re more common in African-American women.”
“That’s okay,” said Blue. “That’s fine. I’ll take fibroids over the other.”
“Well, we’ll do a pregnancy test to be sure.”
Blue nodded. She could have laughed, peed on a million sticks in the knowledge that she definitely wasn’t pregnant.
The nurse moved the wand over to the other side of her belly.
And then she heard it.
Boom boom boom. Small but steady, fluttering just behind a solid object that was probably another fibroid. She stared into the screen, into the shifting planes of fuzzy gray-black, and thought she saw the shape of a head. “Oh my God.”
“Okay,” said the nurse, and removed the wand, took off her gloves. She gave Blue’s hand a squeeze. “It’s all right, honey. We’ll do a test.”
A formality. Blue was pretty sure if you had an extra heart beating inside you it meant you were either Doctor Who or very, very pregnant.
“Just slip your things back on and I’ll be right back, okay?”
She pulled her pants back on and stared at her socks as though she’d never seen them before, her head so full of the horror of it all that she could hardly see straight. This was the reason they wanted you to have ultrasounds, she supposed. So that you saw that tiny fetal heartbeat on the screen and – just like on TV – were so overwhelmed by the miracle of life that you went ahead and had the baby.
Yeah, right. Blue couldn’t have been more horrified if she’d been told she had a tapeworm living in her brain. She remembered Gloria sitting at the kitchen table. The womb was a proving ground, the old lady had said. Razor wire and landmines. It flushed out everything that might not survive, because there was no point risking your life for the weak.
She thought of hot baths, buckets of gin, throwing herself down the stairs like Scarlett O’Hara. It was going to have to come out, one way or the other. No way was she doing this, not if there was a chance that Yael had...
...had what? Possessed an unborn baby?
A blank slate. An unformed brain. No personality yet. No humanity to fight him the way Charlie had, right up to the point where Blue smashed the ax into his skull. Sure, the genes were there, the ones that made it half of her and half of Gabe, but even at full term there was no way you could call a newborn baby finished. There was so much growth to go.
And I’ll grow too.
Blue let out a short scream. The voice was so clear, so much like someone was talking directly into her ear that she turned her head to look. But she knew where it was coming from.
“No,” she said, and once she started she couldn’t stop saying it. “No no no no.”
Put your shoes and socks on and walk out of here, Baby Blue.
“No,” she said. “You’re not doing this. I won’t let you. Not to an innocent –”
- innocent what? Bunch of cells? Mistake? It’s not like you to be sentimental.
“You can’t be in me,” she said, desperately trying to remember the rules. She was a woman. She was a witch. The only way he was getting inside her was by engraved invitation. “I’ve kicked you out before and I’ll do it again, even if I have to drill into my own head this time.”
I’m not in you, said Yael. I’m in him.
Him?
It’s a boy.
“No,” she said, and she wasn’t sure if she was speaking aloud or in her head any more. “Uh uh. You’re not doing this. This ends now.” There were shots, hormones. If he really hung on then they’d just have to scrape him out the old fashioned way, but he was not doing this. It was obscene. Monstrous. She’d kill herself rather than go through with it.
And then she went blind.
Just like that. One minute she was looking down at her feet and the next it was totally dark, as if she couldn’t even see light through her eyelids. But her eyes were open. When she touched her hands to her face she could feel her lashes moving over open eyes. A small, stupid whimper escaped her lips and she bit them, hard, afraid that she was going to scream. Really scream.
You were saying? said Yael. Self-preservation’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it?
Part Two
1
He had always hated that tacky-ass linoleum. It was meant to imitate Italian marble and failed so miserably at it that it needn’t have fucking bothered. The number of times he’d offered to take it up and put down a new kitchen floor, but Gloria had always said no; it would be expensive.
Well, it was going to have to come up now. Blue had used to scrub it with warm water (never hot) and a little bleach, but there wasn’t enough warm water and bleach in the world to get Charlie off of the linoleum.
Charlie’s arm was stuck to the floor. When Gabe tried to lift it the sodden flooring came up underneath it, gaping like a toothless, bloody mouth on the concrete below, a sight that somehow made him queasier than any of the brains and body parts currently scattered all over Gloria’s kitchen. Guess you could get used to looking at anything.
“Jesus, fuck,” he said, dropping the arm, the hand turned downwards . Not for the first time he thought about just leaving this – taking off and running after Blue, wherever she’d gone. Not that she’d be pleased to see him, but sooner or later she’d have to realize he was the only person under his own skin.
Or maybe – and this was the really tough part – she’d done what he was always telling her to do. She’d grabbed the money and ran, away from the pain and the poverty and the messy deaths. He could hardly blame her at this point; he was sick to death of stuffing people into garbage bags.
He picked up the ax again. This was still Gloria’s kitchen, and if he just left Charlie there to rot then what? Someone would smell something, and then there’d be police and forensics. And then he’d have to admit she was really gone, officially and forever. She’d never walk into this kitchen again and go bugnuts about him ruining her precious crappy linoleum.
Hands. He’d done the head. That was the worst part. He raised the ax to bring it down on Charlie’s wrist.
And then the hand moved.
Gabe froze, the ax still held over his head. Charlie’s hand lay palm down
, fingers slightly curled, the tips dabbled in the clotting blood. Through all the gore Gabe could still see the yellowish stain of nicotine between the middle and index fingers, and somehow that made it worse, a cold reminder that this wasn’t a horror movie prop. This had been part of a living person’s body.
He lowered the ax, telling himself he was seeing things, he’d been up too long, that at this point in the full moon he should be showered and sleeping it off in his comfy bed, letting his brain and body recuperate.
The hand moved again, fingers curling in towards the palm in a way that couldn’t be written off as just tendons and muscles breaking down. Holy shit – it was making a fist, as if Charlie was trying to reach out and smack him from beyond the grave. Or wherever. Was it really from beyond the grave when you were still in bits all over the kitchen floor?
The wrist flexed, bringing Charlie’s knuckles from off the floor with a weird, jerky movement, then they came down hard on the linoleum. Knock. Knock.
Gabe watched, sure he was about to pass out from fright, and that was just fine. That was just dandy, because much more of this and his brain was going to go boom like all those crazy old geezers in Victorian horror stories.
Knock knock – at the door this time...
(...so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door...)
...the hand loosened its fist, hung there just above the floor, shaking slightly like it was fighting to hold itself there. Someone knocked at the door once more and Gabe no longer cared if he was bloody and there was a man in bits all over the place – just so long as he didn’t have to be alone in here any more. He opened the back door.
“Ruby?” At least, he thought it was her. His initial memories of her had always been fuzzy. She had been a voice behind the barrel of a shotgun or the siding of a trailer, a thin, tattooed ragdoll girl, where you couldn’t tell where the eyeliner stopped and the bruises began.
She looked past him into the kitchen. “Oh God,” she said, all in an exhalation.
