by Anna Roberts
When she spoke her voice was rough, like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. “Do you remember...” she began, and then stopped to cough, shaking something loose. “Remember that time when we took the boat out onto the reef. And we found that tiny little island, all to ourselves. We moored in the mangroves and then we took all our clothes off, like we were the only people left in the world.” The corners of her lips twitched, as if she’d forgotten how to smile and was still working through the muscle memory. “We were completely alone, and so in love. It was the only thing we could think about, how much we wanted each other. Do you remember that?”
He pulled her close to his side, her shoulders thin under his arm. “No,” he said, and it hurt like hell, but he had to say it. “We never did that, Blue. We only talked about it. We never found the time to do it.”
Gabe heard her sniff. She didn’t speak for a long moment, and when she did she caught him by surprise.
“Thank you,” she said, in the same crusty, rusty voice as before.
“Thank you for what?”
She drew away and pulled back her wet hair back from her face. “For not lying to me,” she said. “Even though I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” he said, but she kept talking, and he had no inclination to stop her, not after all these months of worrying she might never speak again.
“I used to lie to her all the time,” she said. “I’d tell her it would be okay if she took her meds, even though I knew it wouldn’t. Because she’d start feeling dead inside again, like always. And I never understood why she’d stop taking them, because how bad could it be? How could feeling numb be worse than those days when she couldn’t even find the strength to mop her own drool from the pillow?”
She let out a soft huff that might have passed for a laugh. “The Grand Old Duke of York, she used to call it. When you were up you were up, and when you were down you were down. But now I get it. Now I know, because when you were up you were up. And it’s worth being down, or even halfway up, because it tastes like blood, like black licorice and clouds. And it sings, Gabe, all through your body, right down to the tips of your toes and the ends of your hair.”
“What does?” he asked, afraid of the answer.
“Power.”
He wasn’t really following, but it didn’t matter. Not as long as she kept talking. He listened, the waves swooshing back and forth. Her silence went on so long he caught himself holding his breath.
“I only tasted enough,” she said. “Enough to know it’s like crack and heroin all rolled into one. That’s why she wouldn’t set him free.”
“Who? I don’t...”
“Gloria,” said Blue. “Gabe, I saw everything. The whole nightmare. When she first found Yael she wasn’t even fifteen years old. Just a girl being bullied in high school. And that’s when he got her. How he got her, with that promise of power. You can’t imagine what that means to someone who knows the pain of being totally powerless.”
She pressed her lips together and swallowed down tears. “Everything that happened between them,” she said. “All she had to do to end it was to set him free. But she couldn’t. At first she didn’t want to, because of what he gave her, then there was so much bad blood that she couldn’t, not without...” Her voice broke a little. “Not without fear of what he’d do to her when he was free.”
Gabe sat silent. He’d always known there would be things he didn’t want to hear about Gloria, but this was good. This was a beginning. And an end.
“So she kept him,” said Blue, her eyes bright with tears. “She kept him captive. And it drove him nuts.”
He put his arms around her. “I know. But it’s over. It’s done.”
She snorted into his shoulder and then she really started to sob, crying so hard that her breath came out in little squeaks. And when she finally did manage to speak she said the thing he’d been dreading all along.
“I killed my baby.”
“No,” he said, his own eyes filling. “No, Blue. You didn’t.”
She drew back and looked at him. And something in the certainty of his voice and the look on his face told her what he didn’t think he could say out loud.
“He did,” said Gabe. “He did that. He killed our baby. Our baby was dead from the moment he hijacked that little bundle of cells.”
“Oh my God,” she said, reeling away from him.
“Blue, please. He had to die in that body. It was the only way this was ever going to end.”
She started to sob again, and he wondered if they could ever crawl out from under the wreckage of this. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over again. “It was the only way. He was dying anyway. I had to just...let him go.”
Blue wept behind her hands. When she reached out to touch his face her fingers were wet with tears. One of the Band Aids had sloughed off in the sea and flapped against his cheek. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, he had to ruin you, too.”
“I’m not ruined,” said Gabe, maybe too forcefully. “I’m not. I’m broken. Maybe not as broken as you, but I’m not ruined. And neither are you.”
She pulled him close, resting his forehead against hers. “What we could have had,” she said. “At the start of the summer. Those days when we used to go out on the boat and talk and talk and talk –”
“– one day, Blue,” he said. “That was just one day. And then we sailed home and Joe was waiting on the pier to tell me that Eli had been arrested, remember?”
All of this mess. He’d dragged her into it and tried to push her away. What if she’d gone? What if she’d never found out who she was? Would she be happier? Less broken?
“We were never that innocent,” he said. “The world came in and fucked us up all too soon, before you even knew I was a werewolf. Before either of us were even born. So don’t cry over that – not over something that wasn’t even real. There’s enough to cry about as it is.”
She sniffed hard a couple of times. Her tears fell down and made clean spots in her damp, sand-caked skirt. He never thought he could be so happy to see her cry, but there it was. There was so much to talk about, so many nightmares to relive, but at least they could talk now. At least she could look him in the eye.
“What are we going to do?” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or herself, because he’d had the same thought often enough in the last months. Some mornings he opened his eyes and wanted to close them forever, because the world was just too fucked to even think about fixing.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we have each other still. That has to count for something, right?”
*
The old place was somehow even dirtier than it looked, but that was fine. Ruby relished the chance to make a place nice, even though she was queen and could have cried off breaking her fingernails any time she liked. The same men had been taking care of the housekeeping back when the old man was king, and look how that had turned out. Torn screen doors, duct tape all over the chairs and the stove all full of stink and rust. The first time she walked into that kitchen she’d looked down and seen the mirror-black waters of the swamp between the cracked, moldy floorboards. Good thing nobody around here weighed more than one seventy, or someone might have fallen through clean through the floor and into the mouth of whatever was waiting in the water below.
She’d had the men fix the floor, then sent them out to snag what they could from her own marital home. No way was she cooking on that rusty old stove all spattered with the fragments of diseased brains.
Ruby whistled while she worked, scouring the shelves of old bugs and the fuzzy green algae that seemed to have covered everything. She might put her novels here; some of them she’d got signed, even though ‘Jennifer Devine’ had his own opinions about some things, which was fine. He wasn’t a wolf witch. Didn’t have to get it.
Or maybe she’d get up a collection. Spun glass or crystal. Maybe swans. Or unicorns. She’d always liked unicorns. And she’d set them all on a shelf in the sun, a
ll glittery, and no one could tell her they were crappy or hurl one at her face when she told him to turn down the TV. Turned out there were a lot of perks to being a widow lady. Almost as good as being a little girl again.
The tune in her head found words, and she sang, scrubbing away. An old song from another place.
“...she looked so sweet from her two white feet to the sheen of her nut brown hair,
Such a coaxing elf sure I shook myself for see she was really there...”
Splash, dip. She squeezed out the sponge and cocked an ear. An oar. Someone coming, and she wasn’t expecting company. “...from Galway to Dublin Town, no maid I’ve seen like the sweet colleen that I saw in the County Down.”
She kept on singing all the same, softer now as she dropped the sponge into the bucket and straightened up. The thing she was listening for couldn’t even be heard by werewolf ears.
Ruby opened the door – the screen replaced and still smelling like new – and stepped out onto the porch. Sure enough there was a boat coming, a patched old kayak with a man inside. She knew him on sight as Vinegar Tom, one of the old guard who wasn’t especially happy about having a woman in charge, but had to suck it all the same because he’d seen her bite, chew and swallow.
She started to whistle again and saw the flinty gleam in his eyes; it was an old country superstition that a whistling woman was bad luck. Perhaps because you didn’t know what would come when she whistled.
“Tom,” she said, as he drew near to the little dock.
He reached out and grabbed a piling, but didn’t get up. “Ma’am,” he said, like it hurt him to do so.
“Well?” she said, wondering if she should have brought the shotgun.
“I’m not here for any trouble.”
“Really?” said Ruby. “’Cause your eyes say different.”
Vinegar Tom sighed, the edges of his mouth sour in a way that no doubt had made his nickname fit just right. He might have been a contender had the old man died of natural causes. “Can’t pretend I’m delighted,” he said.
“Y’all don’t have to be. Just get used to it, is all. What can I do for you?”
He had something to ask, she could tell. Because he looked like he hated it, but too bad. Lyle was gone and wolf witches were popping back up like mushrooms after rain. That Hallett girl was off working her thing in North Georgia and there were whispers of something big blowing in on the Gulf wind from New Orleans. Big mojo. Sure, it was a horror what had happened to the Beaufort witch but maybe she hadn’t been cut out for it after all. You could only rely so much on blood, even McBride blood.
I made it right, Ruby told herself, squashing down unhelpful guilt. I made it as right as I could. And I learned.
“My boy,” said Vinegar Tom. “The youngest. He’s on the turn an’ I think it’s gonna go bad for him.”
“Send him on over,” said Ruby. “I could use an extra pair of hands around the place.”
He looked startled, like he’d expected her to twist the knife some more. Oh, he had some ugly grudge festering away somewhere. “Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “Told you – I’m not looking to be in your debt. I’m not expecting y’all to even like me, but I’ll do what needs to be done. That’s what a wolf witch does.”
Vinegar Tom nodded. “Thank you,” he said, with a look like someone had pooped right under his nose.
“Go get him.”
She watched him paddle away, her lips pursed around the thin tune in her head. Yeah, he was up to something, maybe. Never hurt to have a look around. Sneak after him, see what was going on behind closed doors.
Ruby stopped whistling and bit her lip, hard. She tasted blood and listened, past the sounds of the swamp, through the thin veil of this world and into the spaces inbetween it and the next. Her spine tingled and she thought irritably of the signed copy of Blue Moon waiting to go on her clean bookshelf. How he’d tightened his lips and gave her that look when he wrote on the flyleaf.
It wasn’t the same. They were all individuals. Besides, she’d learned a lot since then.
She felt the air shiver. Knock. Knock. Clear and distinct.
Her heart gave a weird little jump.
Knock knock.
“Who’s there?
The End
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