Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  For a split second Charlie could have punched up and popped Joe on the nose for even letting that thought show on his face. The nose – that was the fucking problem. Joe was like that dog in the poem; “...even the scent of roses is not what they supposes.” He’d sniffed out poison like an airport dog sniffs out heroin. The nose knows all.

  Charlie smiled. “Okay, man,” he said. “Look, I get it. I do.”

  Joe said nothing. Just loomed there in the doorway.

  “Look, the last thing we need is static right now,” said Charlie. “This is...uncharted waters, right? We need to stick together. For Gloria.”

  “Sure.”

  Oh, this was hard. The man was like a brick wall.

  “You know, I’m sorry we never got to talk more when you were up north,” Charlie said. “Just me and you. Grayson kept on showing up.” He grinned. “You think he’s got a thing for blonds?”

  There was a little flash in Joe’s eyes then, and Charlie wondered if he’d misjudged it, but no. Joe wasn’t pissed at him; he was pissed at Grayson. Figured the chickenshit Brit would run the moment the going got tough. Small wonder those teabags managed to lose an empire.

  “Listen,” said Charlie, with careful seriousness. “I know we got some bad blood, me and you, okay? And I deserve it; I do. That whole thing with Lyle – I am so fucking sorry that I couldn’t do anything more to help you.”

  “I know,” said Joe. “It’s cool.”

  “No, it’s not cool. It’s never going to be cool. They beat the snot out of you and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. And I regret that. You have no idea how much.”

  “I’m over it.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Well, I’m not. But you gotta understand, man. It was crazy up there when Lyle was in charge. The things he did, the things he made people do – it was fucked up.”

  Joe nodded and Charlie almost breathed easy again. He could always rely on Lyle’s reputation to make his case.

  “I was there the night he died, you know,” he said. “It was like a party in that motel parking lot; everyone was so goddamn happy to see the sonofabitch go. You know he killed that pregnant girl, right? That little schoolteacher Eli was banging up in Miami?”

  “Yeah,” said Joe.

  “He laughed about that, you know. Said he’d seen her coming out of Planned Parenthood, and that he hadn’t done anything to her kid that she hadn’t thought about doing herself, so what was the big deal?”

  Joe swallowed, but said nothing. Good. He was listening. Smart guy.

  “Reese was there,” said Charlie, his heart pounding behind his eardrums as he spoke. “When his old man was laughing about it. I mean, maybe he was frightened and all – hell, we all were. And he was fucking nuts by then – crazy paranoid.”

  Silence. Even the weird strained song of the cicadas seemed to fade. He could hear Joe breathing.

  “I talked to him – to Reese,” said Charlie. “When we were alone. Asked him how he felt about it. That girl. You know what he said?”

  Joe pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  “He was it was natural selection,” said Charlie. “Didn’t even look up from the Xbox.”

  He left the implication hanging there. Shades of gray. Not everything was as clear cut as it looked at first glance. Joe ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and then wiped them with the back of his hand. “Yeah,” he said, and that was enough. For now.

  “I’ll see you around, Joe,” said Charlie.

  3

  Blue came home from work to find the kitchen table covered with grocery bags waiting to be unpacked. Just like a man to go and buy a bunch of things when the fridge was already full. Annoyed, she opened the door, wondering how it was all going to fit, but to her surprise she found the fridge empty but for half a container of milk, some pickles and some very old mustard.

  She closed the fridge door and jumped; Gabe was standing right behind it and she hadn’t heard him come in.

  “I got some food,” he said.

  “I can see that.”

  Oh, this was bad. She imagined the air freezing between them and was almost surprised when her breath didn’t come out in a puff of cloud.

  “We sort of ate everything else,” said Gabe, standing stiff and unnatural. “Sorry.”

  She didn’t think she could stand to hear him say that word again, so she took the turkey mince from the freezer and went downstairs to feed Gloria.

  Gloria all but wagged her tail, although Blue wasn’t sure if that was in response to her or the turkey. Probably the latter. Still, at least Gloria was eating. She’d been one of those eighty pound old ladies who pecked at a variety of old-people foods – oatmeal and prunes, canned tomatoes on toast and strange industrial salads involving Jell-O. As a wolf she had a much better appetite and Blue was encouraged to see that Gloria’s bony flanks looked a little sleeker than before.

  “Eat up,” said Blue, pushing the dish through the flap in the bottom of the cage. Gloria pushed her nose into it eagerly, standing close enough to the bars for her fur to poke through in tufts.

  The temptation to pet was always there. In some lights Gloria looked like nothing more than a large dog, especially when she was whining for dinner or cocking her head to watch Joe bounce a tennis ball. It was all too easy to forget she was still a wild animal.

  Blue reached out gingerly and touched the ends of the fur with the very tips of her fingers, ruffling it back and forth. Gloria kept on eating, smacking noisily with her toothless gums and spilling turkey all over the concrete.

  “Good girl,” said Blue, as if Gloria really was a dog. Then somehow her hand was all the way through the bars and she was stroking the soft, thick fur. Gloria didn’t so much as flinch; all her attention was on her food.

  Not so dangerous as all that. Gabe was just being dramatic.

  Blue knew logically that Gloria wasn’t typical; she was a woman, for one, and far too old for a werewolf. And she knew that the other fully transformed werewolf she had seen that night – Stacy’s eldest, Axl – had been young, hungry and every bit as ferocious as she’d been told to fear. But there was a small part of her that didn’t quite believe what was going on around her, a stubborn desire to test the world against her own experience. There were other things going on here, things she felt keenly that she was only on the very edge of understanding.

  The light bulb in the hall no longer swayed, and that meant something. The spirit, Yael, was silent, and that meant something, too. Had it escaped and borrowed the skin of another? Maybe it was walking around out there under the burnished bootleather complexion of the preacher who had tried to exorcise Dorothy the Catlady, with fatal consequences. Blue knew it could do that. There had been a time – a brief, terrifying few minutes – when she had shared a body with Yael.

  “That bugaboo rides me around like a busted truck,” Gloria had said, and Blue hadn’t understood at the time. Not until Grayson had explained that Gloria might not have been alone in her own body for years.

  And it meant something, Gloria being a wolf. Blue hadn’t figured out what it meant yet, but it had to mean something. Nobody could remember Gloria doing it before and it was too much of a coincidence that she’d done it round about the same time Yael stopped raising hell.

  It was in here somewhere. The answer. Blue had turned out several boxes and found nothing but dusty boy crap – old Transformers and story books and catcher’s mitts. She had even found an old baby monitor that would come in handy for keeping an eye on Gloria, but Gabe had promised to find batteries for it and just the thought of him was like lemon on a papercut. He was still upstairs.

  So she kept on looking.

  Stacked towards the back was another cardboard box full of junk – windchimes and oil burners, some cracked and others corroded to the point of no return. There was a crude necklace like the ones that children make out of macaroni, only this one appeared to be made of small bones, drilled and threaded through. Blue held it up to the l
ight to get a better look at it and saw that someone had scratched letters into the bones. W. B. T.

  There were ten bones on the necklace. The first four spelled out the word WOLF and then on the fifth was a crude cross. The last five spelled BITCH.

  Blue dropped it back in the box, unsettled. Why had Gloria kept a thing like that?

  Blue pushed the box away and pulled the next one towards her. This one had a one-eyed toy tiger in it, and a plastic triceratops with a chewed tail. Further down was a dusty box with a marquetry lid; it looked interesting and Blue was pleased to find it was secured only with a length of ribbon tied around it.

  When she unpicked the knot some hair fell out. It was blonde and braided, secured with sewing thread at either end. There was no doubt it had obviously been placed there on purpose, and when she touched it some kind of flakes fell off it, like it had been coated with wax or something.

  The hairs on the nape of her neck prickled as she opened the lid. Inside were two newspaper bundles, fat in the middle and tapered like pupae at the top and bottom. Each was secured with string and as she lifted the first one Blue felt her pulse speed in her throat and between her legs, the way it had always done whenever she sneaked a look at the sex books in her mother’s nightstand or stole a cigarette from her purse.

  Part of her wanted to untie the string and look inside. Another part wanted to dump the box back with the WOLF BITCH necklace and run all the way back to the Ninth Ward, but curiosity was a curse with her. She tugged gently at the string and it broke, perished in the damp air. She dropped the newspaper chrysalis in surprise and it landed in the lid of the open box. The fragile paper shell fell open, revealing little primary colored dots inside. Blue frowned as she realized what it was that she was looking at. Pins. They were household pins, the kind with round glass heads so that you didn’t lose them so easily. Somehow she knew that once upon a time these pins had been driven into something. Someone.

  But there was nothing left. Just a few flakes of wax among the rusting pins, like Gloria’s magic had offered up an effigy for destruction and whatever forces swirled around in this cellar had taken her at her word. Just swallowed it up into nothing and spat out the metal and plastic bones.

  There was a loud scraping sound and Blue almost jumped clean out of her skin, only to find it was just Gloria. She had finished her turkey and was now pushing the bowl across the concrete with her nose.

  “Oh God, Gloria,” said Blue, closing up the box. “What did you do?”

  Not for the first time she had a sense of power, but it was no longer that giddy feeling that came with knowing you could take some kind of control. It was the sick, foreboding feeling that she had almost forgotten now that the light fitting had stopped swinging and Yael had fallen silent. How easy it was to forget that you’d been dancing with the dark the whole time.

  She carefully tied the ribbon back up, wincing as she tied the braid back into the knot. There was something dirty about it, something deeply unclean. She had got over some of her squeamishness about using body fluids in witchcraft, but somehow this made her shudder. Perhaps it was all in the intention, or the intimacy of having a stranger’s hair in your hands. Either way it was disgusting.

  As she set down the box she saw the edge of something gold gleaming, a pot or a vase stuffed in the corner of the cardboard box. She wanted to go up, but she could still hear Gabe’s voice.

  It was an urn, glazed blue and edged with worn gold. On the base was a name – Celeste Thibodeaux. Blue peered inside and was surprised to find less than a small handful of ash in there. She remembered picking up her mother’s ashes and being shocked by how little there was left when you reduced a whole person down to carbon, but there had definitely been more than this. And Regina hadn’t been a large woman, not by any description.

  Gloria made the bowl scrape again and Blue replaced the lid of the urn, ashamed of her own morbid curiosity. She realized she had probably been staring like a creep at some relative’s ashes, a thing she would never have done in a million years if Gloria had still been human.

  She went back upstairs. Joe and Gabe were in the kitchen, eating like...well...like wolves. They were stuffing their faces with rotisserie chicken, hard boiled eggs and potato salad, and much as Blue wanted to avoid Gabe she had to admit that the chicken smelled delicious.

  “Is she okay?” asked Joe.

  “Yeah. Hungry. That’s a good sign, right?”

  He nodded and tore off another chicken leg. “Great sign. She could use the protein. Calories.”

  “Probably why Reese checked out the way he did,” said Gabe. “Got most of his energy from sugar and fat.”

  Joe looked uneasy, the way he often did these days. Despite his size he was a gentle person, and Blue had a feeling Reese’s death had shaken him up more than most. Too close to what had happened to him that time.

  “You want a chicken?” said Gabe, pushing the plate towards her.

  “Um...can I just have part of a chicken?”

  “Right. I forget sometimes that not everyone eats like a goddamn werewolf.”

  She sat down and pulled off a wing. “Did you ever hear of a Celeste Thibodeaux?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said Gabe. “Gloria’s grandma. Why?”

  “No reason. I think I just found her ashes.”

  “Gross,” said Gabe.

  “Did you find anything else down there?” asked Joe, setting down a chicken bone so thoroughly picked clean that it reminded her of that horrible bone necklace. “Any of her old voodoo that might make her go back?”

  “No,” she said, disturbed that he’d choose that word. “Yes. I don’t know. I don’t think it means anything.”

  “What do you think it’s supposed to mean?”

  Blue shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it means anything when you don’t know why you’re doing something. Intent is power. Believing in the why. Without a why it’s all just...wax. And bones. And body fluids.”

  “Mm, yummy,” said Gabe wryly, pushing away his plate.

  “What do you want me to do?” she said, annoyed. “Just tell the nice lady from the Alzheimer’s Outreach that Ms. Baldwin has turned into a goddamn dog?”

  Gabe sighed. “No. Of course not. You know me; I’m not into all this ooga booga shit.”

  “You should be. From what I heard she was the reason why you guys didn’t have more problems with Lyle.”

  “You don’t know anything about that,” he said, with a finality she had never heard from him before.

  “Well, how about you tell me?”

  Joe got up from the table. “I’ll come back later,” he said. “When you’re done.”

  Gabe glared after him but said nothing. He scooped another spoonful of potato salad onto his plate.

  “You’re not being fair,” said Blue.

  “Life generally isn’t.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. You’re not giving me a chance, Gabe. Do you think if you shut me out hard enough I’m just going to walk away?”

  He sighed hard enough to blow the flesh off the chicken bones and softened somehow. His eyes looked tired instead of flinty. “You could,” he said. “You still could.”

  “And you want me to?”

  He got up and took a couple of cold beers from the fridge. The caps snapped in the heavy, humid silence. “I don’t know,” he said, after a long pause. “You could go back to Louisiana tomorrow. Find a husband. A normal husband. Have babies without worrying your boys would turn into werewolves. Start a blog. Join the PTA. Be...ordinary. Like everyone else.”

  She took a cold mouthful of beer and set the bottle down on the table, shocked by how little they really knew one another. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “Normal people don’t grow up trying to keep their mothers on their meds and out of state institutions. Normal people don’t know how to scrape dried brains off a wall.”

  Gabe stared at her. “Your mom?”

  “Yeah. She put a gun in her mouth and pul
led the trigger. It turns out brain dries kind of hard if you leave it long enough.”

  He touched her hand. His fingers were icy from the beer. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because,” she said. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing I tell people when I want them to stick around. Or that she’d been sick for so long and Katrina was just the thing that finally pushed her over the edge. I’m not like other people, Gabe. It doesn’t matter what I do with my life or who I marry or how I feel about myself; there are always going to be people who think I’m less than them. And the worst part is that those people are the ones who really matter – the ones with the money, the ones with the power. The ones who left my whole city adrift after the storm. And there’s not a thing I can do to change their minds. I’m just a statistic. Just another poor black girl from a shitty school district.”

  “Come on – you know that’s not true.”

  “It is true, Gabe. I clean toilets. You know how people look at me when they see me in the hotel hallways? They look at me like I’m a leprechaun – some mythical being they were never supposed to see. The invisible toilet fairy. If you look her directly in the eye she trips all your guilt switches about being rich and white and lucky, and nobody wants that. I may not be a werewolf, but I know what it means to live in the corners of other people’s eyes. The way you all do down here.”

  He let out another long sigh and scraped his fingernails lightly up and down the skin of her forearm. “Let’s not do this again, Blue.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what. I’m dangerous.”

  “Stop. I don’t need you to New Moon me to know that, okay? You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t handle.”

  Gabe took another pull of his beer. “Listen,” he said, his eyes as dark and bright as she’d ever seen them. “Tomorrow night Joe and I are going to lock ourselves in a cage in our basement. And when the moon comes up, the thing inside of me is going to come out. It will...” He swallowed. “It will crack my bones, rearrange my organs and rewire my brain. That’s the last thing to go – the brain. For some reason it waits until last, so you can feel everything.”