Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  Copyright © 2016 by Anna Roberts.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover photography licensed by Shutterstock.

  Isle of Spirits

  Book Two of The Keys Trilogy

  by

  Anna Roberts

  Isle of Spirits

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  If in Naples

  I should report this now, would they believe me?

  If I should say, I saw such islanders

  (For, certes, they are people of the island)

  Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note,

  Their manners are more gentle-kind, than of

  Our human generation you shall find...

  The Tempest Act III, scene III

  My familiar has no legs, no hands, no feet, nor even a body with which to do my bidding. In truth I do its bidding, and for all it has no head it has prodigious teeth with which to bite and tear, and for all it has no paws it has great scything claws. Ay, and eyes too – all the better to see you with – you milk-and-water mumblers of psalms. My body is the temple of this spirit, and if you slay me you set it loose upon the land, unchecked and ravening as the wolf.

  Testimony of Margaret McBride, Kirkaldy Witch Trials, 1598

  Prologue

  Then

  Ice melted on the pages. Here and there the paper was puckered where ice had once dripped and dried, a sure sign of love. The A/C hadn’t worked in years, so Ruby crunched ice cubes while she read, reckless of her teeth. This was the good part, where Cale first told Bree that he loved her, and more. That he needed her, like he needed air and water, that his life meant nothing without her.

  Ruby had read this one romance novel a dozen times or more, only this time the crunch of ice between her teeth didn’t drown out the mean little voice in her head, the one that said if she wasn’t there then Ro would keep right on breathing. And that he wouldn’t need much, beyond finding someone else to pick up his nasty underpants.

  Nothing had been the same since she found that werewolf drinking out of her rain barrel.

  The old water butt had no doubt tasted of frogs, since a family of them had gotten in there and raised pollywogs, but that werewolf drank it down like it was the finest champagne. Maybe to rinse the taste out of his mouth, since they found body parts all over – no head, but there was a foot, and one arm with the hand intact and a wedding ring still on the third finger. When they found the other arm the hand had been chewed to a frayed pink pulp.

  Bad news for Ro, worse news for the werewolf. When Ruby had first laid eyes on him he’d been wearing nothing but a crust of old blood, like he’d taken a bath in it and left it to dry on his skin. Only when Ruby had hosed him down he’d looked like one of the men on her romance novel covers, and maybe that was why Ro - being the jealous type - had called up Lyle Raines, of all the assholes to call.

  She cracked an ice cube between her teeth and turned the page, but the mood was gone now, her concentration broken. The words looked hollow and silly, a pantomime of love, a watery pink imitation of the real, red messy thing.

  That was when she heard someone coming.

  The trailer stood in the swampy woods, the ground soft and damp, thick with leaf litter and a million different kinds of rot. A normal person might not have heard a thing, but Ruby had never been normal and her ears were as sharp as her appetite. She rolled the melting ice over her tongue and listened.

  Yeah, there was someone out there, moving too quiet for comfort. Ruby reached for the shotgun and gingerly opened the door with her bare foot.

  Nothing. Or at least nothing she could see, but seeing wasn’t everything. Her eyes had never been all that great, but she knew the swamp well enough to know there was more here than just the gray-green wall of trees and the song of insects. There were things that ate other things, and things that ate them, and it was all connected, from frogs to grandmothers. And more besides; a beat like invisible wings, like a heart that had never had a body, a little living will. A spirit, moving through the trees, as much a part of the swamp as the waters and the weeds and Ruby’s extra toe. Witching was all about the will, and a spirit was pure will, only right now Ruby couldn’t even feel her, and calling her would just make a noise.

  She stepped down the rickety stairs, bracing the stock against her shoulder and squinting to make out the bead. Something stirred and she swiveled quickly, but then it was too late. A bag came down over her head and she instinctively pulled the trigger. The stock slipped and the recoil caught her in the collarbone, sending a thin, jagged streak of pain all the way down her arm. She dropped the gun and it dinged her kneecap on the way down, and this time the wincing, bony hurt of it dropped her to the ground.

  For a moment she saw the woods once more and then the smelly old bag came back down over her head, large hands grabbing her from behind and pulling her to her feet. She screamed because it was all she could do; her knee hurt too much to kick and she couldn’t see to reach out for the shotgun.

  “Goddammit, quit it,” said a man’s voice. “We’re not gonna hurt you, you stupid bitch.”

  Too late. Already did. Ruby bit out blindly, like a dog in a cage, and got a mouthful of sackcloth for her trouble. Someone tied her hands behind her back. She spat and screamed again, calling for Ro in the last desperate hope that he might be able to hear her, that he wasn’t sitting around stoned somewhere with the music turned up too loud.

  Stumbling on her sore knee, she went where she was pushed. Her shin caught on the bumper of a van and she let out a shriek of rage and pain, kicking out. She felt her foot connect with something that she hoped was a face. Someone howled. Good.

  “Get in.” She scrambled up, squinting through the coarse cloth to try and get a look at the color of the van. Dirty white. Florida plates. Oh, someone was gonna catch sweet merry hell for this; since when did they have the balls to come over into Georgia territory?

  Her leg stung where she’d bumped it and she hoped it was bleeding. Blood would help. As the van rumbled into life Ruby began to hum softly, an old summoning song from childhood. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine...

  “Shut your pie hole,” said a voice – a different one this time. Younger. “Jesus, I know you said they were inbreds...” Something hard and plastic snapped around her ankles.

  “I know, right? She’s got too many fucking toes. You couldn’t drown a toddler in that gene pool.”

  A hand jerked the sack up far enough to pinch her cheeks, squishing her lips out like the bill of a duck and cutting off her song. Another hand pushed a dirty rag between her teeth, and then the sack came down again. Her mouth was full of cloth and her head full of panic, leaving no more room for anything else.

  “Did Lyle say anything about an extra toe? Y’know – assuming we’ve got the right broad.”

  “Man, how the fuck should I know? I’m supposed to know her shoe size? All he said was that she was Ci
cero Jones’s old lady.”

  There was a brief pause. Ruby snorted against the gasoline smell in her mouth, her eyes watering under the bag. Someone touched her neckline and she flinched away, fighting panic.

  “Well, I’m guessing she is. She got his name tattooed on her right tit and all.”

  A laugh. “Cool. What’s she got on the other tit?”

  Ruby loosed her bladder. It took a moment to overcome a lifetime of potty training, but once she heard their boyish squeals of disgust it flowed like a dream, stinking up the back of the van. Grandma had always said that – “If a man tries to touch you wrong, make like a skunk. Gross ‘em the hell out.”

  “Ew. Jesus, fuck. Is she pissing? She’s fucking pissing.” A fist, hammered on metal. “Mike, pull over, goddammit. Holy Christ – witches are fucking disgusting.”

  Her nostrils stung and contracted with every labored breath through her mouth, and the rag seemed to be inching further back there, trying to lodge in her throat where it would finish her for good. Oh God, where the hell was Ro? Where the hell was Clementine?

  The whole world narrowed to the need to breathe. She barely heard the van stop and didn’t even care that she could once again see daylight through the sack. Then someone shoved her and she fell hard, landing on her back. The thump sent the rag flying out of her mouth and she breathed with a big, whooping shriek.

  “Up.” Rough hands jerked her to her feet. The bag came off, leaving her blinking for a moment in the bright daylight.

  She had never been here before, but she had a feeling she knew what she was looking at. The house was huge, a pale yellow stucco edged with stone, the high porch supported by tall white marble columns. A gravel drive wound around an island planted with palm trees, and when she looked down she saw she was standing on the kind of plush green grass that looked more like astroturf than the real thing. Sprinklers squirted rainbows into the lazy afternoon haze. There was only one person she knew of that could afford to live in a palace like this.

  Lyle Raines.

  One of the men – a big, mean, middle-aged bikerish guy – knelt to her side and unfastened the cable tie around her ankle. “Walk,” he said, and someone behind her jabbed her in the back with what felt like the barrel of a gun.

  As she moved toward the front door she saw another man get out of the van, a goblin-looking little old guy with a skullet and a sunken face. He was holding a rag to his nose.

  Under different circumstances she might have been impressed, but as she dripped pee all over the mosaic floor of the porch she realized that there were some things money couldn’t buy you. Like an exorcist. No wonder they’d kidnapped themselves a witch.

  Even before the big white doors swung open, she knew something was wrong. It was like the air – no, like the whole of reality – had been slashed open and all the dark things that lay behind it had come pouring out. And then when the door opened there was no mistaking the smell. The place stank like something had died. Someone had set flowers in a big red-bronze vase, but they’d wilted and nobody had bothered to throw them out and instead surrounded the vase with what looked like urinal cakes. Flies crawled lazily over the bright blue blocks. There were air fresheners plugged into every available socket, but Ruby knew none of it would do any good. This was more than just the smell of death; this was what your house smelled like when a witch wanted you dead.

  The biker guy shoved her forwards, into a big room with arched stained-glass windows like a church. In the nearest corner was a pile of dead flies, and on the large white couch a fat kid was hunched over a video game controller. Expensive rugs were rolled up at the side of the room, like nobody could be bothered to vacuum the flies off them; no amount of fancy furniture could take away the general grime of the place, the air of sickness and neglect. This was a house diseased.

  Ruby heard footsteps – a heel too high to be anything else – and turned to see Lyle Raines standing there in his famous cowboy boots. He stood maybe five foot nine, towering only over the little goblin-faced guy, but it wasn’t what Lyle was that kept North Florida in line. It was the beast he became.

  “Is that piss?” he said, pointing to Ruby’s bare legs. “On my floor?”

  “Sorry, boss,” said the goblin.

  “Jesus, stand her on some fucking newspaper or something. If I wanted to put up with that shit I’d get a goddamn puppy.”

  He came closer. His eyes were green as envy, his hair a coarse shock of salt-and-pepper brown. He’d been king of this place since before she was even thought of. “You a wolf witch?” he said, circling her like she was prey. His breath gusted briefly under her nose and it smelled terrible, like he – along with his house - was rotting from the inside out.

  Ruby unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “I guess.”

  “You guess? You either are or you ain’t. You don’t guess a thing like that, any more than you guess you’re a werewolf.”

  “Then yeah. I am.”

  “Good,” said Lyle, his heels clicking on the floor. “Then you can fix this.”

  “F-fix?”

  “Yeah,” he said, waving a hand around the room. “Chant. Wave some sage around. Stick pins in dolls. Whatever it is you bitches do. Just take this curse off of me.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say she couldn’t, any more than she could fly around on a broomstick; the only person who could take this curse away was the witch who cast it. But then she saw a chance, a means of summoning help. She was maybe fifteen miles away from home and fifteen miles was nothing to a spirit. The length of the entire state of Florida was nothing to the spirit that had blown up here from the Keys and haunted this house, a thought that set the hair on her nape prickling, not just with fear but with something like hunger.

  So much for the rumors that the old lady was dead. Not only was she alive, but she was packing some fearsome mojo.

  “I need to look around,” said Ruby. “Figure out how she done this.”

  Lyle looked her up and down. “Fine. Just don’t try laying any more curses on me, because if you do we’ll grab your weedlord husband and start posting his skinny ass back to you in bits. Your favorite parts first, you dig?” She dug. She still had no idea what they’d done to the werewolf she’d found drinking from the rain barrel, although she guessed it wasn’t anything good, not if the old lady had done this to Lyle. This was all Ro’s fault; if he’d just let Gabe go instead of thinking he could somehow get in good with Lyle by handing him over...

  ...and then what?

  The voice in her head sounded a lot like Ro’s, and worse, he was right. If that poor sonofabitch from the Keys hadn’t been there to take the blame then Lyle would have been glad of the excuse to kick the shit out of some swamp wolves.

  Ruby tiptoed between the piles of dead flies. Bad smells seeped out of the heating grilles and when she leaned down to sniff she could hear roaches stirring in the dark, but the bugs and the stink were nothing compared to the hole hanging over this place, the tear in the air where evil poured through. That was the thing nobody could fix, least of all a bush league wolf witch like Ruby. The will behind it was not only bigger and meaner than hers, but buoyed by a hurricane of a spirit that made her poor little Clementine look like a mere fart of marsh gas.

  She hummed all the same, hummoning, summoning, calling that lazy little thing to her side. In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine... Come on, Clementine. I need you.

  Ruby padded through the house, feeling Clementine rush through the trees, over the long grass and onto the manicured lawn. She whined some like she did now and again, but when she reached the sprinklers she stopped, dug in her invisible heels and said NO so loud and hard that it cut off the tune in Ruby’s head.

  Small wonder. At the same moment Ruby saw the writing on the wall – literally.

  WEST LAFAYETTE

  It was written in what had to be blood, only it was fresh instead of brown.

  “We washed it off,” said Lyle, and he didn’t
sound like the big alpha any more. “But it came back. Like the fucking wall was bleeding.”

  “Huh,” said Ruby, and touched her finger to the sticky tail of the Y. The chill came on sudden and fast and once again she had a sense of the darkness that was bubbling just under the bleeding plaster. Oh, it was big. Bigger than the ocean and just as careless of its strength and size.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said. “He walked out of here fifteen years ago. Never laid a finger on her goddamn son. I was just kidding, for fuck’s sake.”

  Ruby sniffed her fingertip. It smelled like tar. “Whose son?” she said, confused.

  “Gloria’s, dumbass. Who else?”

  Funny. Ruby didn’t remember ever hearing about a son. “I thought she did this because you beat up her boy,” she said. “The one Ro brought to you.”

  “It don’t matter,” said Lyle. “Can you fix this or not?”

  “Uh uh.”

  He drew in a sharp breath, and the glitter in his eyes reminded her to be afraid of him. “Can’t?” he said. “Or won’t?”

  “I can’t,” said Ruby. “Even if I knew why –”

  “– I just told you why.”

  “It’s not that kind of why,” she said. “And my little spirit ain’t tough enough to deal with the thing she sent to this house.”

  She heard his teeth grind in the echoey hallway. “What?” he said, with the slow, ugly patience of a man who’s thinking very hard about how much he’d like to hit you. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Spirits.”

  “Ghosts?”

  Ruby shook her head. “Nuh uh. Ghosts are just dead people who forgot they don’t have bodies no more. Spirits never had bodies, at least none of their own. They’re like a force, a will. A witch works with her will, but a spirit is will. It’s the voice that tells a blade of grass to grow, tells the cells how to divide when you make a baby. It’s the will, the only one that matters, and you better not piss off the witch who can work it.”