Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  He was looking at her in that punchy way again, and she stopped talking, knowing she’d said too much. She never usually got to talk about these things; Ro didn’t care for it.

  She wondered if he even knew she was missing.

  “What the hell are you jabbering about?” said Lyle. “You got one of these spirit things or not?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But mine’s a little minnow. The one that did this?” She looked up at the wall again, not knowing what the words meant beyond the intention behind them. “This thing is a goddamn Great White. I can’t help you.”

  He stepped forward, breathing too hard through his teeth. “You have to,” he said. “That bitch is killing me.”

  “Maybe,” said Ruby, fear making her reckless. “Maybe not. You got a son, don’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You did what an alpha was supposed to do - passed on your genes. Maybe you’re just fadin’.”

  The smack came out of nowhere. With Ro she sometimes had time to duck, but too late she remembered Lyle Raines had done some boxing back in his younger days. The world went spinny and dark for a moment, and perhaps it was the surprise of it that made her want to laugh, or perhaps he’d knocked something loose in her brain and turned her simple with one blow to the head.

  “You dumb sonofabitch,” she said, feeling Clementine edge closer. Clementine had never had a body, which was maybe why she kept Ruby’s from hurt. “You may as well yell at the sun for rising.”

  Whack. Down she went, her blood joining the dead flies on the marble floor. Clementine shivered like a heat haze on the lawn, rising up in indignation, stirring the chittering things in the underbrush and the heating vents. Ruby started to laugh out loud.

  “What are you doing?” said Lyle, a cowboy boot pointed right at her gut. “What’s so fucking funny?”

  Ruby dripped some more on the floor and wiped her nose. “Didn’t your mother tell you?” she said. “Never spill a witch’s blood, you dumbass.” Burn her, hang her, drown her on a ducking stool, but don’t you spill a drop of her blood. Even those Salem crazies somehow knew in their flinty cold bones that there was an unholy power in a witch’s blood.

  It was like a match to Clementine’s fuse. The little spirit lingered on the threshold, repulsed by the tarry residue of the wolf witch’s hoodoo, but there came a scuttling sound from the heating vents. Ruby kicked a foot against the grille and it fell forward, loosing a scurrying tide of skunkroaches, each one almost as big as her hand.

  Lyle leapt back against the wall, his face the color of whey. “I’ll kill you,” he said. “So help me God, I’ll kill you, you fucking swamp cunt.”

  Ruby got to her feet. “No, you won’t,” she said. “Because if you do I’ll never be able to call off my dogs. Only the witch that cast a spell can undo it. And while I can’t do a thing about what that old lady did to you, I’m pretty sure you can do without me making it worse.”

  He backed up further against the wall. The bugs were spraying now, adding their terrible stink to the smells already fugging up the house. Lyle held his pant legs tight against his cowboy boots, making her think absurdly of how women used to hold up their skirts and scream at mice in old cartoons. “What do you want?” he said. “What the hell is it you want from me?”

  “Nothin’,” said Ruby. “Although I guess it’s nice to be needed. And you do need me now. Or else a big ass can of Raid.”

  “Make it stop. And get the fuck out of my house.”

  “Going,” she said, and walked out, palmetto bugs crawling all over her bare feet.

  1

  Now

  The moon was full.

  That was how Charlie knew this wasn’t real; he hadn’t looked at a full moon with his own eyes since before his balls had dropped. But he was looking at it now, as a man. Silver edged clouds scurried across the night sky, the swaying palms black and all but invisible but for the distinct sound of their fleshy leaves knocking against one another.

  “Pretty, ain’t it?” said Lafe, and now there was no question this was a dream. Poor Lafe had been gone fifteen years by now, but he was standing there on the beach, a cold brew swinging between his fingers, his alligator boots empty and his bare toes in the sand.

  “Beautiful,” said Charlie. “But we both know this never happened.”

  Lafe took a swig of his beer. “We wanted it to. Ain’t that the same thing?”

  “No. It’s not. Not at all.”

  But Lafe went on talking, like he was a recording on playback, and maybe he was. “It’s what every werewolf wants,” he said, tipping the bottle toward the moon. “To see it full again. Pictures aren’t the same thing; I used to look at it just before, when there’s nothing but the thinnest of slices between waxing and full, and I’d narrow my eyes and pretend I could see the whole thing, but it’s not the same. Somehow my brain knew I wasn’t looking at a perfect circle.”

  Charlie looked down at the cooler on the sand. There was a heart in it, wedged in the ice between beers. The blood was dark in the moonlight, the lip of the severed aorta curled like a sneer. He could still feel the tubes slithering between his fingers and his gut did a barrel roll at the memory.

  “I was four years old when they went up there,” said Lafe. “You weren’t even thought of. Remember how you used to think there had to be an answer up there? On the moon? A reason why we turned the way we did?”

  “Yeah. If it was anywhere –”

  “ – if it was anywhere it was inside of us, Charlie. In our blood, in our bones, in our genes. Not on some lump of old rock spinning in space.”

  Charlie looked at Lafe. The moonlight was kind to the older man’s face, but it lit up the silver in his black hair like tinsel on a Christmas tree. “Why are you here?”

  Lafe smiled and put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “To say thank you. You did it, kiddo.” He nodded down at the heart in the beer cooler.

  “Lyle?” said Charlie.

  “Yup. You gave him what was coming to him.”

  Charlie heard the ice shift in the chest. When he looked down again the cooler was gone and Reese was lying in its place, dead. Reese’s face was half-snout and there was blood clotted around his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. His body looked squeezed, as if someone had wrapped a giant fist around his ribs and pushed all the fat downwards like Play-Doh. The ribs were all wrong and through the dream Charlie remembered how they’d opened Reese up to find that his lungs were crushed and deflated, human lungs shoved into an imperfect wolf rib cage, so that Reese had suffocated to death right there on the rug in Gloria’s bedroom.

  “And that?” said Charlie, but when he looked up again Lafe was gone and that black girl was there instead, barefoot and stepping fastidiously away from the blood on the sand.

  She was a strange one, a hard one. And that had happened too, the way she was looking down at Reese’s body, a gory abortion of wolf and man straight out of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. And when she’d looked up she seemed blank, like she’d gazed into the abyss so many times it had already left her empty.

  “Katrina,” Gabe had said, like that explained everything. And maybe it explained something, but not all of it.

  “I cleaned this up,” she said. “And I’m not doing it again, Charlie.”

  He heard noises in the waking world, tugging at the corners of his dream. He turned, sunlight slanting across his eyes, and then it was gone, like a silken backdrop whisked away by a conjurer. He was in Tavernier, and the birds were singing. And Lyle was still dead.

  Ding dong, the witch is dead. Only she wasn’t. She was very much alive. She’d just decided – for reasons best known to herself – to turn into a fucking wolf.

  Charlie sat up in Eli’s spare bed. He could hear Eli moving about in the kitchen, and the thought of food set his stomach growling. By rights he should have been off his feed, what with all the gross things he’d seen lately, but July was coming and July was going to be a bitch
. A blue moon. Two full moons in one calendar month. It was no time to start a diet.

  He rolled out of bed and – yanking on a pair of old sweatpants – went into the kitchen, where Eli was squinting at the nutritional information on the side of the cereal box. Good old Eli – big, beautiful and none too bright. So far he hadn’t tossed Charlie to the literal wolves and told him to get the hell off his turf, but that was probably just good manners on his part. The Keys were too small a territory for two alphas.

  “Don’t eat that shit,” said Charlie, reaching for a carton of eggs. “You need protein, not carb laden fart fuel.”

  Eli laughed and set down the box. “Fine,” he said, holding up both hands. “You wanna make me breakfast?”

  Charlie opened the fridge. Standard bachelor crap. Leftover Chinese food, beer and a slice of pizza as cold, hard and unforgiving as an ex-girlfriend who’d caught you in bed with her sister. “You’re a mess,” he said, and managed to find some ham and an onion that didn’t look too sprouty. “You need proper nutrition. We all do. Turns out the all-American diabetes diet doesn’t really agree with werewolves.”

  There was some cheese, too. Parmesan. He sniffed it – not bad – and closed the door.

  Eli looked uneasy. Reese had only been alpha because his old man said so, but then Eli was only alpha because Gloria had said so, so maybe the whole thing had hit a little close to home.

  Either way, North Florida wasn’t going to be on Charlie’s list of places to visit any time soon, not after he’d seen what those swamp wolves had done to Mike Hallett. Charlie had cut up more than one body in his lifetime, but not like that. Not scooping them hollow and hanging them up like pigs in an abattoir, like someone who knew the taste of a human sirloin.

  “Here,” said Charlie, tossing onion and ham into a pan. “It’s not that hard. Onion, ham. Little butter – don’t let it burn. Then you get your eggs – salt, pepper, herbs – and in they go. Spread ‘em around in there.”

  Eli leaned on his elbows and watched. “You always did love to cook.”

  “It’s a hobby.”

  “You could have done it for real, Charlie. You’re good. Even when we were sixteen you were still better than Gloria.”

  Charlie laughed and sprinkled cheese over the eggs. “Please,” he said. “That wasn’t hard. The only thing she ever did really well was spaghetti and meatballs.”

  “Remember that terrible chicken soup she used to make? She’d say it was Scottish or something, like that somehow made it okay. I don’t know how. Those people still eat haggis, for God’s sake.”

  “Cock-a-leekie,” said Charlie. He remembered it all too clearly - the film of oil on top of the soup, the wet paper texture of the floating leeks. One time he’d found a feather in the bowl – sodden, soupy and bedraggled, but unmistakably a feather. Gloria always made cock-a-leekie soup after she killed a rooster. More than one rooster in the yard and they fight, she’d say, picking up the ax. That’s just men for ya.

  “Cock-a-leekie. That was it,” said Eli. “Even the name was gross.”

  “I know. It sounds like an old timey name for incontinence.” Charlie slid the omelet onto the plate and handed it to Eli. “Here. Eat.”

  “Thanks. This looks great.”

  “It’s gonna be a rough month, man. We need to take care of ourselves.”

  Eli gave him a wary look, and Charlie couldn’t tell if it was whether it was because he wanted to talk about the elephant in the room or whether he was ready to reach for the wrath of the chef by reaching for the hot sauce.

  Charlie pushed the sauce towards him and came straight out with it. “I’m staying, Eli. For now.”

  Eli chewed reflectively for a moment, swallowed. “Two alphas? Are you sure that’s gonna work?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “It’s gonna have to. For fuck’s sake, Eli. We’re not gonna fight like roosters in a hen house, no matter what Gloria said. We’re human beings. I’d like to think we have higher brain functions than a bunch of fucking chickens, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess,” said Eli. “You’re healing fast, though.” He pointed to his eye, to the corresponding spot on his own face where the swollen, red-black bruising on Charlie’s was fading to yellow, purple and green. A regular Technicolor shiner, courtesy of the late Reese Raines.

  “Will you relax?” said Charlie. “I’m not leeching off your alpha mojo. I heal well because I eat well, unlike you. Cereal, for fuck’s sake. That’s not even food, Eli. It’s fad shit from the nineteen-hundreds, made up by cranks who thought it would stop little kids from touching themselves.”

  Eli laughed. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “The way your mind works. Who else can go from whole grains to masturbation?”

  “J. Harvey Kellogg. Seriously. Look it up. How’s the omelet?”

  “Amazing.”

  “See?” said Charlie. “There’s an exception to every rule. We can make this work, Eli.”

  “You think?”

  “I don’t see we have a choice,” said Charlie. “Because I’m not going anywhere while Gloria’s in...well...in bad shape.”

  “Wolf shape?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “That. Just goes to show – things can still surprise you. Exceptions to the rule.”

  Eli nodded and swallowed another mouthful. “You’re not wrong. Whoever heard of a seventy year old werewolf?”

  *

  The woman at the door was wearing pink. She had pink lips to match her sleeveless blouse, and when she stuck out her hand in greeting Blue saw that her fingernails were painted rose to match.

  It wasn’t a good omen, not considering what had happened to the last woman who favored that color.

  “Hi, my name’s Candi Statham,” she said. “I’m here on behalf of Memory Lane.”

  “Okay..?” said Blue, not quite managing to keep the question mark off the end of the word. She really didn’t have time for this.

  “We’re part of an outreach program,” said Candi. “For seniors with dementia.”

  Oh. Oh God. “Are you with the hospital?”

  “We’re affiliated, but we operate as a not-for-profit outreach association. Perhaps you might have heard of us through the EMTs or the doctors?”

  “Right,” said Blue, remembering. That night the catlady (Dorothy – her name was Dorothy) died – one of the EMTs had handed Blue a card with daisies on it and the words Memory Lane printed in a wistful swirly font. “Of course. Yes. I’m afraid Gloria’s not available right now.”

  Candi Statham looked politely interested, like she was awaiting more details. Which she was, naturally. Only she probably wasn’t ready to hear the real details. Nobody was ready for that. Blue was still having difficulty processing them herself.

  “She’s...away,” Blue lied. “At a clinic. It’s an...alternative place. They have sweatlodges and crystals and stuff. She’s very into that.”

  “A sweatlodge?” said Candi. “Really? That doesn’t sound...”

  “Oh no. It’s perfectly safe. They’re very scrupulous about keeping patients properly hydrated. In the desert and all.”

  “The desert?”

  “Arizona,” said Blue, thinking on her feet. “Near Sedona.”

  Candi nodded. “Do you any idea when Gloria will be back?”

  “Um...no. I know she’s staying for some kind of...uh...full moon ritual?” How much more of this was she going to have to invent before Candi took the hint? “Something like that. She won’t be back for a while, and obviously it’s the holiday weekend...”

  “Sure,” said Candi, with a cool, professional smile. “I’ll swing by another time. Thank you so much for your help.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome.” Go. Leave. Scram.

  As Blue closed the door she had a vision of Candi coming back, with reinforcements. Social workers with the same professional smiles, all with their noses finely tuned to the faint but oh-so-rank scent of elder abuse. Or worse. There was no way they would ever have imagined what was rea
lly down in Gloria’s basement.

  Joe Lutesinger was down there, his long legs folded up in front of him as he bounced a tennis ball at his side. Watching through the bars of her cage was a skinny, bored-looking gray-brown wolf. Her ears flicked at the sight of the ball, but Blue couldn’t be sure if this was enthusiasm or annoyance. She hadn’t had a lot of time to become fluent in Wolf.

  “Who was that?” asked Joe.

  “Some well-meaning lady from an Alzheimer’s outreach program,” said Blue. “Who definitely has never had anything to do with werewolves, let alone senior citizens who randomly turn into wolves with no warning.”

  “Yikes. What did you say to her?”

  Blue leaned against the cool concrete of the basement wall. She breathed deeply and remembered why it wasn’t a good idea to do that down there; Gloria’s personal hygiene had taken a dive since she turned into a wolf.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I kind of babbled about sweatlodges and hippie shit. Arizona. I remember that. Oh God, I said she was in Sedona...what? Don’t look at me like that.”

  “No, I’m impressed,” said Joe. “That sounds like something Gloria might actually do. It could have gone a lot worse.”

  “I guess. At least she didn’t start howling again.”

  Gloria yawned, baring a mouthful of gapped teeth. There was no such thing as dentures for wolves, so she tended to drool. When she stood up to start pacing again the bones of her shoulders were clearly visible, the shaggy hair on her thin flanks sparse enough in places for her ribs to show. Most werewolves didn’t get to be this old; the change was so hard on their bodies that fifty was considered ancient.

  “Do you think she’s okay?” she said.

  Joe shrugged. “I think she’s a wolf.”

  Blue sighed. It was an accurate – if unhelpful – assessment, and she’d hoped for a little more insight from Joe, of all people. He had been through this himself – spent two whole months as a wolf – but that had been as a result of a severe beating from a rival pack. But it was a sensitive subject, and she didn’t know him all that well.