Full Fathom Five (The Keys Trilogy Book 3)

by Anna Roberts

  She ties his ankles and attaches one of the bowling bags. Then the other, to the rope around his wrists. It’s not perfect, but hopefully the blood will attract the sharks.

  Gloria shoves. He doesn’t budge.

  She shoves again and he moves maybe an inch. She screams into the dark, screams the way she did when she was trying to push him into the world. Then somehow she finds the strength and he goes over. Panting, she peers over the side, just in time to see him sink into the darkness.

  Oh God. That just happened. She just did that.

  For a moment she hangs there, her hands on the side of the boat, her head a million miles away and her guts dancing a wild fandango. And yet there’s a strange kind of silence in knowing that it’s done. It’s over.

  Then she hears a strange knocking coming from inside her purse.

  The frog. Yael’s no longer shivering the air or the water. He’s dived into the only available living creature, and the poor thing’s half dead already. Gloria scrambles on her hands and knees to the bag, already picturing the disaster when she opens the container and the frog goes flying on its spring-loaded legs. Into the ocean, out of reach. But there’s no time. She pulls off the iron necklace and tears open the lid of the Tupperware. The frog’s in no shape for jumping. It’s lying on its back, twitching like one of Galvani’s experiments, its tiny body and brain no vessel for the huge, howling thing currently filling it.

  She grabs it with both hands and stuffs it into her mouth. It looked so small but now it feels so big, like there’s no way it can ever fit down her throat without choking her, but she has no choice. Fighting her every impulse to gag she swallows.

  It sticks halfway down. She feels the legs kicking and it feels like it’s going to fight its way back up, but she swallows again, sobbing with horror at the sensation as she puts the necklace back on and reaches for the knife in her bag. Normally she would hesitate to turn a knife on herself but she feels the frog kicking as it goes down and when she slices across her palm the sensation is clean and familiar by contrast. The blood wells up and she sucks on the wound, filling her mouth with the blood of a witch.

  He roars in her ears as the frog dies, its kicks slowing to queasy little butterfly flutters somewhere behind her breastbone.

  Gloria gags, swallows down vomit. She sucks down more blood and laughs wildly into the bleeding palm of her hand. Got him.

  You liar. You snake. You dirty, double crossing...

  “Couldn’t let you do it. I know you, Yael. I know you’d go after my Charlie.”

  I’ll kill you, you dirty bitch. I will, I’ll kill you.

  “You can’t,” she says, and it’s a child’s taunt, but in many ways she and Yael never really grew up. “I had my fingers crossed behind my back.”

  He roars again and this time she feels something wet run from her ear. The words are so huge and so angry that they hardly sound like words anymore – they’re the snarl of a caged animal. I will make you suffer.

  She doesn’t reply. Can’t. Her tongue seems tied and her arm is numb, and she sways back in the boat, still with the taste of blood and frog in her mouth, and something burning under her nose. Gunpowder maybe, or maybe she’s going out the same way as old Celeste.

  Yael loves him some poetic justice.

  14

  “It was her. She did it. She knew it was the only way it would ever end.”

  Blue’s eyes were somewhere else, but Gabe didn’t want or need to find out where. Wherever or whenever she thought she was, the reality was that she was on her hands and knees on a filthy floor. His head swarmed with the million and one things that could go wrong here – hemorrhages, infections, placenta stuff – none of it good and all of it life-threatening even to a woman who hadn’t been dragged through pregnancy at freakish speed.

  She bent her elbows, screwed up her face and howled, clenching her teeth so hard he thought he heard enamel crack. There was a strange, heavy smell in the room, like sex but sweatier, stronger, and on some instinctive level he recognized it as the smell of birth. Her stretched out leggings were halfway down her ass, but he had no desire to pull them all the way down and take a look at what was going on down there. He didn’t even have two hands free to deliver a baby, never mind anything to cut the cord. Jesus, what was he supposed to do? Gnaw through it with his teeth.

  None of this made sense. None of it should even be happening; it was all impossible but here he was and here she was, screaming and helpless and about to deliver God only knew what into the world. And a month ago he hadn’t even known she was pregnant.

  Gabe had an ugly vision of an infant rushed to birth too soon, something even softer and more unfinished than the average newborn, a bulging brain overfilled with Yael’s poison consciousness, too big and straining the gaps between the plates of an unfused skull.

  But there was no time to think, and he was almost glad of it. The next heave of her bulging belly brought something gushing down the insides of her thighs, making dark spots in the dirt under her knees.

  Taking his nerve in both hands, Gabe skinned the leggings down over her legs. She moaned and tried to bring her knees together, but he heard a muffled but distinct crack, like the kind of noise he associated with full moons and incredible pain. He had a horrible feeling what he’d just heard; everything was meant to shift in there, hips and pelvis tilting to make room. Except that it was supposed to happen over months, not weeks.

  “I’m just gonna take a look, okay?” he said, his heart beating so hard he was amazed that he could even make himself heard over the noise of it.

  She barely nodded, her head drooping over her forearms and her ass in the air. The shadow beneath the cheeks of her butt scared him more than anything else he’d ever seen, but he had no choice. He pushed two fingers inside and found the familiar landscape in there altered beyond anything he recognized. Oh God – that was a head. Barely a knuckle deep. That was a goddamn head.

  “It’s coming,” he said, and his spine felt shaky and soft the way it did just before the wolf sank its teeth into him. Some kind of sympathy pain, perhaps. “I need something to cut the cord.”

  Blue caught her breath in a sharp hiss. “Sewing kit. In my...” But she trailed off, because it was on her again. The darkness between her thighs bulged ominously and he pictured the baby landing thud on its head.

  And the worst part was that the vision didn’t disturb him nearly as much as it should have.

  “Pant,” he said, remembering this much from First Aid training. “Pant like a dog. Head’s coming.”

  Blue whimpered. He could feel her straining against every instinct she possessed to squeeze this out in one push. To end this nightmare one way or another.

  The head filled his hand, the only one he could spare. Only the tips of his fingers protruded from the cast on his other arm. He was trying to figure out how this was going to work, but then she gave a long, tooth-bared yell and there was a head and shoulders. His own instincts rose up snarling like the wolf; he had to keep that little body from hurt, even though he feared it more than anything else he’d seen in his life. It was squished and crumpled and purple, but somewhere under the goo and the blood he could make out a squashed up nose, a tightly closed eye.

  “You’re doing it,” he said, with a breathless kind of wonder that only made him rage for the things they’d been cheated of. It was never supposed to go like this. There were supposed to be ice chips and a birthing plan and a clean bed. And she was supposed to yell at him and swear they were never doing this again, only to coast on fluffy clouds of wonderment when it was all over, when the tiny, finished miracle was cooing in her arms.

  Except it would never have gone that way. Even if things had been perfect, he’d still be a werewolf. He’d still have the same cursed genes.

  “You’re doing it,” he repeated, trying not to cry. “You’re doing so good.”

  “I can’t...” she said, but then she did. It came on fast and so hard that it seemed to have nothi
ng to do with her, like some giant invisible hand had come down and squeezed her like a toothpaste tube. The baby splooped out in a rush and landed in a jangle of limbs in his lap. Blue fell sideways, yanking on the cord and almost dragging the little body with her.

  For a split second Gabe just stared, his mind a few instants behind. Her breath rasped in the blood-tinged air and it was that sound that alerted Gabe to what was missing. Quiet. Quiet was all wrong.

  “Oh shit,” he said, not even sure if the thing was the right way up. The head seemed like just a blob and he fumbled, sure he was going to accidentally poke a finger in an eye while looking for the baby’s mouth. No. There. He had it. He pushed a pinky past the tiny lips and almost screamed; there were teeth in there. He – and yes, it was a boy – had been born with a whole set of teeth.

  The baby gurgled in the back of his throat. Gabe felt the edge of those teeth and then there was a wail, a thin, piercing sound so full of life that he wasn’t sure whether he should rejoice or start running.

  “Oh my God,” he said, staring down into the tiny, bawling mouth. A mouth that should have been toothless.

  “Give him to me,” said Blue, but her voice was all wrong. It was a witch’s voice, not a woman’s, and there was a look in her eye a million times more unnatural than the teeth in his newborn son’s mouth. Worse, he understood that look perfectly.

  “No,” he said, gathering up the baby as best he could. The screaming filled his ears. The small body seemed impossibly strong.

  “Gabe, it’s the only way...”

  “No,” he said. “He’s a baby. Our baby.”

  “He’s still Yael.”

  He shook his head, fighting against the unthinkable. “No, Blue. Just no.”

  If she did this terrible thing he knew he’d never be able to look at her again. Besides, how bad could it be? So the kid was a little possessed. Maybe they could learn to live with it. Better than the alternative.

  “He’s deep in that body,” she said. “But I don’t know for how long.” She tried to sit up, but another contraction caught her. She was bleeding all over the dirty-ass floor and the cord was getting covered in dust and crap; maybe that had been her plan in coming here, to doom them both to death in a slow, septic suicide.

  “Blue, no,” he said. “It’s a baby.”

  Then he saw the look in her eye, and that wasn’t a witch look. That was the woman. That was the mother. She couldn’t have harmed a hair on his squashed, goopy little head, not after she’d just pushed him into the world. “Let me see him,” she said, her voice breaking.

  Gabe shuffled over on his knees.

  The baby stopped crying and he saw the glint of a tiny eye above the mashed, punched-out looking nose. And if he wasn’t going completely insane – and he wasn’t ruling that out – Gabe could have sworn he saw a gleam of light in that eye. The kind of thinking, scheming light that they weren’t even supposed to have until a couple of years old; the structure of the brain simply wasn’t yet ready for that kind of cunning.

  But that really was nuts. Start thinking that kind of thing and you were headed into a world where even werewolves stopped looking like monsters.

  “He’s perfect,” said Blue.

  “Yep. Got a full set of teeth.” He found himself saying it with something like pride. And that was also nuts. Maybe – when this was over somehow, perhaps when the boy graduated high school – Gabe would take a nice vacation from reality. The kind that came with white rubber rooms. And those shirts that tied up in the back. Good times.

  Blue stared at him with a sort of fuzzy horror, and that was when he remembered that none of this was right. None of this was normal no matter how much they both wanted it to be. “It happens sometimes,” he said, but it was hollow. Hopeless.

  “Oh God,” she said, and it was barely a squeak in the back of her throat. But he understood. There were no other words for this.

  When she looked at him he saw – as if for the first time – how gray her skin looked. She reached for the tiny creature, but he held the baby tight against him. The frailty of those little limbs set Gabe staring down into a great, welling ugliness, an abyss so black and monstrous that he knew if he ever set so much as a toe near the edge he’d fall and never be able to crawl out.

  “Please,” she said. “Give me my baby.”

  He shook his head, because the thought of her falling – after every terrible thing she must have suffered at Yael’s hands – was a million times worse than contemplating his own ruin.

  “Gabe, please.” Her eyelids were too heavy. There was blood all over the floor and her voice was getting thinner and fainter. As he watched her sink he could have sworn the baby’s fists beat harder at the air, like he was sucking strength from his mother.

  Her eyes closed. Gabe quickly set the baby down out of reach and scrabbled at her neck, searching for her pulse.

  “Blue? Blue, wake up. Listen to my voice.”

  Oh God. Her heart was beating weakly, her breath faint. Her deflated belly heaved and she moaned. There was a squelching, gutty sound as she delivered the placenta, and the baby started to howl again, as if Yael was outraged to find his life support systems being squeezed out so unceremoniously onto the floor.

  “Blue, please,” said Gabe. “Don’t do this. Don’t you leave me now. Not after everything.”

  Her lips were turning white, but the baby kept right on screaming, oblivious to the way he’d left her wrung out and bleeding.

  “I need to sleep,” she said, and it was barely a wheeze in the back of her throat.

  “Not yet. Not yet. We’ll get you somewhere clean. A bed. With sheets. Then you can sleep as much as you like.”

  She shook her head. She’d lost so much blood. Once again he tried to find her pulse, thinking that nothing could be worse than this. Nothing.

  And then the baby stopped crying.

  The sound cut off abruptly with a wet gurgle, then Gabe turned to see the small limbs moving strangely, beating at the air. The baby made clucking noises. Blue sank down with a sound like a sigh, and Gabe looked frantically between them, appalled at the choice before him. Stifling his revulsion at those teeth he poked a pinky into the baby’s mouth, trying to find some obstruction, but the airway was seemed clear, even though it wasn’t. It couldn’t be; the baby was turning blue.

  “Oh fuck,” he said, and leaned down, covering the little nose and mouth with his own. He had only ever done this on a dummy before and he breathed carefully, fearful of inflating those tiny lungs too far. Two fingers on the breastbone. One two three four. He breathed again, and then he tasted...black licorice?

  It was the strangest sensation, like a huge, dark, rolling tide coming up out of that toothed infant mouth. It swelled in his head, the darkness so vast and so bitter that he thought his brain would explode with it. And it was fighting. It was furious, enraged that this was all going wrong after everything it had done to pull this miracle off. It had gone to all this trouble to get a body and now the body was dying.

  “You fucker,” said Gabe, tears filling his eyes. That was his son’s body. His baby’s body. Yael had killed Blue just to get it and now he was pissed that it wasn’t living up to expectations.

  Gabe leaned down again. He exhaled, breathing the blackness back into those small, failing lungs. He felt Yael claw at the inside of his skull; no, he didn’t want back in that body, not now. Because if he died in it he’d never get out. His roaring, howling energy would be trapped and would dissipate the way all human energy dissipates in the end, in fire or in blowflies and slow, teeming rot. Gabe breathed again, blowing death back into the baby’s body, pushing Yael out of his head and his lungs. You wanted it, you got it.

  The baby wasn’t moving. The black tide dimmed, but as it did so Gabe saw the suitcase of money open on Gloria’s kitchen table, saw himself staring up at the kind of bright full moon he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. He saw Blue bringing beers out onto the deck, and he knew what the pictures meant. A la
st gasp at temptation, a plea for mercy. Then he saw her face as she smiled at him, and saw only Yael in her eyes.

  He lowered his head and breathed air into the lungs. One more time.

  When it was over he sat there for what seemed like forever. Blue lay on her side a couple of feet away, motionless and broken beyond repair. The baby lay in front of him, so tiny that it was hard to believe that it had ever been alive. The inside of his head and lungs still felt tarry, like Yael had left a sticky residue, but that was all it was. He knew that now, now that he’d had Yael in his head for long enough to know what it felt like. Gloria, Charlie, Blue. God, they’d all carried Yael around, and look what had happened to them.

  Maybe it was better that she was dead. At least this way she was at peace. At least she wouldn’t have to keep living with the memory.

  Gabe looked up at the red wax candle flickering on the mantelpiece. Through all the birth and death and transferred souls that little fire had kept on burning. It seemed fitting that it should have the last word.

  He scrambled stiffly to his feet and walked over to Blue’s bag. He unzipped it and took out the first thing he found, a denim skirt that must have been too small for her at the end. It had fit her once, at the beginning of the summer. He remembered her shimmying into it – no underwear – in the hotel attic where he wasn’t supposed to be. And it hurt. It hurt like nothing else on earth, but he could move past the pain, since he wasn’t going to be feeling it for much longer.

  He thought of Joe – good, big Joe – and that was sad, but Joe would be okay. Joe was in love. Joe was the alpha. He had his business to rebuild. Plenty to live for. He’d hurt for a while, but he’d survive. He always did.

  Gabe held the skirt up to the candle. It smoldered at first, but then the flame caught and it licked up hot, high and bright. He dropped it and it landed next to the bag, setting that on fire, too. All her things. Under different circumstances he might have kept them, but he had no need of sentimental reminders. Not where he was going.