by Anna Roberts
It was Grayson heard it first. “Jesus,” he said, turning his head at the sound of knocking. “Is that thing still here?”
“You might find yourself grateful for him yet,” said Ruby, in no mood for this.
“Might, yes. I might sprout wings and fly off the porch, but it doesn’t look likely, does it? Let it go, Ruby. Haven’t you learned anything?”
She handed him back the cigarette and scowled. “I learned plenty,” she said. “And for your information he saved my life back there. If it weren’t for Nox I’d be brain stew right about now.”
“Oh, well that makes it perfectly okay, then. By all means, keep him around. On the off chance that he isn’t going to turn out to be homicidally insane –”
“ - why not, we’ve got like twenty-four hours to live? What’s the problem?”
“Can you not?” said Joe, but neither of them was listening.
“I don’t believe you,” said Grayson. “After everything that happened with Yael –”
“ - they’re individuals. Like people. They’re not all –”
“ - going to fill your ex-husband with rat poison and attempt to hijack his corpse? What part of this experience –”
“ - shut the fuck up.”
They did, and turned to stare at Joe, who looked almost sorry for having spoken so forcefully. Grayson gave Ruby one last despairing look and limped off indoors, hissing like a busted teakettle. Joe stayed put, his lips pressed tight together like he was trying hard not to say anything worse.
“Y’all got an opinion too?” said Ruby, still on the defensive.
Joe shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “I just want to stay alive.”
She deflated, relieved. She wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about Nox. There was a time to discuss the morals of keeping captive spirits, but God knows it wasn’t now, not when they were about to get eaten. “I can work with that,” she said. “Staying alive.”
“Good,” said Joe. “Now tell me what happened back there.”
She told him. He listened, only interrupting to ask questions - “So I killed his grandson?” - and she started to see why Charlie had always had a good, if guilt-tinged, word for the big man.
And there was the other thing as well, the thing she wasn’t sure they should talk about, in case they jinxed it. The very word sounded unlucky on her lips, and it hadn’t gone well for the Raineses, for Eli Keane or for Charlie. Or for poor, stupid Ro, who’d thought all you had to do to become alpha was say so then go gather your buddies for some junior high dick-swinging in these old haunted woods.
“This is my fault,” Joe said. “The things I did...they’re the reason this is happening.”
“It wasn’t all you,” said Ruby. “And it wasn’t you-you. It was...”
“...wolf-me?” He sighed. “I guess. But I had some measure of control over it; I must have. Otherwise I probably would have killed Grayson, too.” He raked his hands through his hair and sighed again. “Jesus. Maybe if you just hit me over and over with a baseball bat or something until I turn or –”
“– wait, what?”
“Both times,” said Joe. “I turned without the moon, twice. Both times were...self-defense, I guess. The first time I got beat up by Lyle’s goons and the second time I had some kind of brain event and keeled over on the bedroom floor at home. I didn’t even know I could do it until I did, but I wish I could do it now. If it’s a white wolf they’re afraid of then I need to be that white wolf.”
When he raised his head to look at her she could tell what he was thinking. About how she’d been trying to keep from turning, how Gloria had kept her secret all those years. And if you could use a spirit to stop you from turning into a wolf...
Oh, there’d be a shitstorm. And he could probably forget about ever getting laid again if Grayson found out, but these were desperate times. “I wouldn’t need a baseball bat,” she said.
He pressed his lips together again and nodded slowly, understanding. “Okay,” he said, after a short pause. “Okay. Let’s try that.”
He was scared, she could tell, but that was normal. That was smart. He had every reason to be, after all. For a second she saw Charlie’s face. He was smiling at her over a candlelit dinner table, only it wasn’t him; it was like a Charlie-mask in front of a man shaped thing of fire and fury. And now she was seriously going to let one of those things into Joe? Maybe Grayson was right. Maybe she hadn’t learned a thing.
“Don’t tell him,” she said, knowing that if he did they would never get to even try.
“Don’t worry,” said Joe. “I wasn’t going to.”
8
The phone kept cutting out and Gabe was sure there were things Ruby wasn’t telling him. Her voice faded back in and he caught the tail end of a word that could only be ‘Tallahassee’. He was just on the outskirts himself.
“You saw her?” he said, not for the first time wondering how he’d come to rely on her for this. If only he’d been enough of a lunatic to stick GPS trackers in Blue’s underwear or something; sure, it was some next-level Twilight shit, but at least he wouldn’t be standing in a parking lot talking to an arguably batfuck swamp witch whose only means of pinpointing his girlfriend’s location was to ‘fly’. For which read ‘get naked and drink some gnarly green stuff that makes you hallucinate’.
“Yeah. She’s just past Tallahassee. Only she’s...” She cut out again. “...you mustn’t freak out, Gabe...”
“Ruby, what are you talking about? You can’t say ‘don’t freak out’ and expect me not to freak out. What’s going on? Are you guys okay?”
Goddamn, the signal was getting worse. The only thing he could really make out was that she was lying to him.
“Put Joe on,” he said, but he was speaking into nothing. He turned on his heel in frustration and there – like a mirage, like a miracle – was his car, standing at the pump of a nearby gas station.
“I’ll call you back,” he said, staring unblinking at the car, like if he dared to stop looking at it for even a fraction of a second it would vanish. The gas station windows stood in shadow, but then he heard a bell jingle and she was right there.
Blue stepped out of the gas station door, unmistakable with her head of wild, gold-streaked curls. The laws of love or fate or something should have determined that she looked up just then, and caught his eyes across the parking lot. But she didn’t, and as she turned to the side to get into the car he saw that her waist looked thicker than he remembered. And that was impossible.
He yelled her name, but she was already in the car. Gabe ran towards the gas station, but it was like time had slowed down, just for him alone. She rolled out of the gas station like she was picking up groceries, in a different world to the one where he was running towards her with nightmarish slowness. For a split second he stared at the puff of exhaust behind her, and that seemed to jerk his brain back into gear, remind him that he couldn’t outrun a car.
He turned to run back to the truck, but the world wasn’t done with him yet. Not today.
“Hands above your head,” said Lehman.
The crazy, obsessed lunatic fuck had followed him. And he had a gun.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Gabe.
“You wish,” said Lehman. “Come on, Arnot. Hands above your head.”
“Let me go, Lehman. I’m serious. You have no idea. You have to let me go right now.”
He shook his head and approached, doing that sleight of hand thing that cops do with cuffs and a gun. “No Miranda rights?” said Gabe, as the cuffs snapped around his wrists. It was a last ditch plea and he knew it; he’d been right the first time. Whatever Lehman was up to was way off the books.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, as Lehman frogmarched him across the parking lot.
“Because you know something,” said Lehman, putting a hand on his head and expertly ducking him into the passenger seat of a spotless silver Hyundai. A hire car. Yep. Definitely off the books. “And I know you
know something, but you’re not telling me.”
The door slammed shut. Gabe stared blankly through the windshield, trying in vain to understand even one of the things that had just happened to him. He kept seeing Blue walk out of the gas station, her long-waisted figure so familiar until she turned to the side. And then nothing made sense any more, not even the laws of nature. It had been weeks, not months. Or had it? Maybe somewhere along the line he’d gone so extravagantly nuts that he lost track of time.
No. That wasn’t possible. How did a werewolf lose track of the calendar month, for fuck’s sake?
Lehman got in and started the car.
“Hey,” said Gabe, shaking his cuffed wrists. “Uh, seatbelt? If you’re gonna kidnap me then at least do it in a way that I won’t go through the windshield if we crash.”
The maniac leaned over and snapped the belt in place. “Kidnapping is a very strong word, Gabe,” he said.
“Maybe. But if I was being arrested you’d have read me my rights.”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
“Nope,” said Gabe, although apparently he’d missed his girlfriend being about six months pregnant. The thought made him sick with fear for her, so he shoved it aside. Freaking out wasn’t going to help her, or get him out of this mess any faster.
“Okay,” he said, as Lehman pulled out of the parking lot. “What is it that you think I know, exactly?”
“Something,” said Lehman, with a vehemence that made Gabe even surer that the guy was insane. Worse, he didn’t even really know why he was doing this crazy thing. “All I know is you know something about what happened to Fernando. Or Lafayette. Or Gloria. Tell me, did you know that? About her knowing all those years that her kid was the Keys goddamn Cannibal and never saying a word? She just let him go right on killing all those people, didn’t she?”
Gabe shook his head. Oh God, they were going the wrong way. Lehman was turning back towards Tallahassee. “Look,” he said. “I appreciate you’ve been under a lot of stress –”
“ – I’m fine. I’m motherfucking dandy. I’ll be on top of the goddamn world once I close this case.”
Case? He didn’t have a case. Gabe was sure of it. How did you sell that to the boss? That because his partner went nuts and literally ate himself to death in an ugly lemon meringue pie incident that somehow meant they were on the trail of a serial killer?
“I want to think very hard about what you’re doing,” said Gabe.
“I am thinking,” said Lehman. “I haven’t thought about anything else. Do you know how many people went missing when that sonofabitch was active? He was Bundy and the Green River Killer rolled into one. Imagine if we knew who he was. We could look at his life, look at his family, look at whatever it was that made him that way. Do you know what it would mean if you could understand a monster like that?”
“You can’t understand them, Lehman,” said Gabe. “That’s what makes them monsters.”
He was too far gone. Maybe something had got into his head when Yael did, some dropped hint to throw him off balance. Blue had always said that Yael liked that kind of show and tell, like he’d walked her down into the basement that time, just in case she wasn’t clear she was dating a werewolf.
“Just...just let me go,” Gabe said. “Please. I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know Gloria had a kid until about two weeks ago. I can’t help you.”
“Bullshit,” said Lehman, his knuckles white on the wheel. “You know something. I’ve seen enough guilty men over the years to know what people look like when they’re sitting on a secret, and you’re sitting on so many you can barely sit still.”
He was breathing too hard and shaking, and Gabe was suddenly very aware of how fast they were moving. The surface of the road was still wet from a recent shower.
“Slow down, Lehman. For God’s sake.”
“No. Not until you start talking.”
Gabe sighed. “Fine,” he said, in desperation. “I’m a werewolf.”
“Right. Nice try.”
“No, I’m serious. I’m a genuine, hairy-ass, howling-at-the-moon Florida werewolf, just like my dad, just like my Pops, just like Charlie and Gloria and...fuck it. Everyone. Everyone is a fucking werewolf, okay? That’s what you’ve walked it. This is all happening because we are werewolves. Happy?”
Lehman slowed just enough for Gabe’s heart to crawl down out of his throat. “And your girlfriend?” he asked, in the tired tones of someone who’d been humoring lunatics for way too long.
“She’s not a werewolf,” said Gabe.
“Oh,” said Lehman. “Good.”
“She is a witch, though.”
Gabe glanced over at Lehman, who looked about as weird and glassy as he felt in that moment. He’d done the thing Gloria had always told him not to; he’d told someone in authority the truth. He sat back and waited for lightning to strike the car, or for the sky to open up and start raining toads.
“That so?” said Lehman.
“Yep,” said Gabe. “There’s also a really pissed off ghost currently hanging out in her uterus, so you might want to step away from the whole thing. Because I have no idea what that thing’s gonna...oh God, what are you doing?”
Lehman had taken his foot off the gas. His hands were on the wheel but his eyes were somewhere else, and Gabe remembered him saying something about seizures. The car slid wildly across lanes in a blast of horns and Lehman’s hands left the wheel and began to shake. Gabe screamed at him and struggled, but he was cuffed behind the seatbelt and although the car was slowing it was still roaring towards the crash barrier too fast and oh God, this was it, he was fucked.
He saw the speed dial at fifty and thought ‘no’ and then the world went flying upside down.
*
The kid cries every time he sees it, so they have to keep it in their bedroom during the day. Then at night they have to move the skeleton to the kitchen or somewhere else, because Charlie is two now and every bit as terrible as promised; he crawls into their bed most nights and sets up screaming blue murder if old Boney is still in there. Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around – and sure enough they do. The skeleton gets moved around the apartment at least four times every day.
And now he has to drop it off at the neighbor’s, because bones cost money and Linda’s not leaving this thing to get burglarized while they’re down in the Keys for Thanksgiving. True, it cost a fortune, but most people wouldn’t have known that. He hadn’t, until he heard the going rate for a fully articulated human skeleton, and then he’d had to jump up off the couch and rinse a snootful of sputtered Jack Daniel’s out of his sinuses.
“Hey man,” says Dozer, when he opens the door and sees West standing next to old Boney. He nods to the skeleton. “Oh, hey Linda. You lose weight?”
And then he laughs and laughs, like he’s been working on that one all afternoon. Dozer doesn’t get a great deal of opportunity to be creative; he used to work construction but his special forte is destruction, wrecking balls and shit. Only his destructive impulses extend to his own brain and the fog of weed in his place tells its own story about why he’s not allowed to operate cranes anymore.
“Jesus,” he says, as the giggles slowly subside. “It’s real lifelike, ain’t it?”
“That’s because it’s real, dingus.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“No,” says West. “Dozer, how do you think Linda’s gonna learn? From a fucking plastic ghost train skeleton? Shit’s complicated. It’s not like the shin bone’s connected to the knee bone – well, it is, but they have special names, okay?” He points out the bones of the lower leg. “See? For a start there’s more than one bone. You got your tib and fib there, then you got the patella, the kneecap, then this big boy here is the femur, biggest, strongest bone in the –”
“ – no, no. Dude, back up,” says Dozer. “Are you telling me this is a real live skeleton?”
“Are you retarded? I’m asking as a friend here.”
“Wes, is that fucking real? Like, that used to be a person?”
“Yes. I told you that.”
“You did not,” says Dozer, turning a weird color. “Holy shit. That’s like a dead body.”
“People donate their bodies to science. So people can learn. It’s not that big a deal.”
“It’s fucking creepy is what it is,” says Dozer. “No wonder your kid has nightmares.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, man. This is kinda fucked up.”
“It’s just for the holiday, Doze. I’d feel better if someone kept an eye on it; it’s expensive.” West sees a brief glint in the fat man’s eye and pounces, before that thought gets out of hand. “And don’t even think about taking it to the pawn shop. Anything happens to those bones I’ll boil your ass in vinegar until I’ve got a fresh set.”
The truth is that it’s more than just the money. He likes it. Linda’s medical books are full of goiters and rot and pus-filled holes, but the skeleton is as clean and dry as the rare moments of silence he manages to claw out for himself in this noisy, messy existence. He likes the proper names, the playful rhyming twins tib and fib, the more stately bones of the forearm – radius and ulna. Scapula sounds like a sickness, clavicle like a musical instrument, vertebrae like something shadowy and shifting. Or maybe that’s just his own experience talking.
Sometimes he looks at Linda, frowning over her flashcards and mnemonics, and thinks that she doesn’t really deserve the bones. They’re nothing but a study aid to her. She doesn’t really appreciate them the way he does, the way Yael does.
Yael loves them. They’re a map of a thing he wants to be. And he doesn’t think it’s weird that West loves them, too.
It’s Thanksgiving, and time to talk turkey in more ways than one. As he loads up the car he thinks she’s got him – she’s finally fucking succeeded in boxing him in, and him barely twenty. A husband, a father, a waste of a damn good werewolf. He’s done as he’s told, but it’s no good. Even if you can find a job and hold it down and not take three days off every month, you still get shitcanned without warning. You still have to buy your wife expensive bones and your kid stupid tapes of nursery music that are just about enough to drive you screaming up the wall.
