Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  Stacy shrugged. “Back then it was mostly weed. A little coke. Probably got into a lot worse; he wouldn’t be the first werewolf. Lycanthropy and opioids go together like conspiracy nuts and tinfoil.”

  “Do you think that’s why Gloria picked him over Eli?”

  “Nobody knows. Charlie was her golden boy; thought the sun shone out of his asshole. Everyone was surprised when it turned out Eli was the alpha.”

  “How is that determined, anyway?” asked Blue, conscious once again of how little she knew. “Is it handed down from father to son or something?”

  Stacy shook her head. “Not here. I’ve heard of other packs doing it that way, but I guess it’s a little more Darwin around these parts. Actually I think Axl was the reason Eli got Islamorada; the alpha is always super potent, sometimes to the point where it has this weird effect on the fertility of other males. As soon as it got out that he’d knocked me up it was a done deal. And Gloria’s not a woman to fly in the face of nature; she knows all too well that Mother Nature can be a royal bitch.”

  “So, what? Charlie had to leave?”

  “Pretty much,” said Stacy. “Two alphas in one territory is bad news. Besides, I think he’d worn even Gloria down by then. Like I say, Charlie’s not a bad guy. He’s just a chronic fuck up. One of those people who can’t stop mashing a finger on the self-destruct button every time things are going good for him, you know? He just can’t stop doing stupid shit. Every time he got a job he’d lose it in less than a month because he’d call the boss a cocksucker or blow his first paycheck on booze and call in sick with a hangover.”

  Blue swirled the ice in her drink, feeling slightly reassured. These were all excellent reasons not to let someone like Charlie hang around your teenage son. “So you don’t think he ever did anything really bad?”

  “Who knows? Like I say, I’m guessing heroin. He looks like he strolled off the set of The Walking Dead these days.” Stacy swallowed the dregs of her glass and grimaced. “Talk about losing his looks. You would never believe how hot he used to be.”

  “No, I believe it. I saw pictures.”

  “You did? Jesus, they were a fine-ass pair, him and Eli. All the girls wanted them, and some of the boys, too. The first time Eli kissed me I felt like I’d ascended to some...I don’t know...some higher plane of existence.” She laughed. “Stupid, I know. But that’s how it feels when you’re sixteen and you just took a huge leap up the social ladder. Being with Eli was like the most important thing in the world. When I was with him I was someone.”

  Blue nodded, close enough to high school age to vividly remember how painful and important those things had once seemed.

  “That’s the difference,” said Stacy. “Between Charlie and everyone else. We got older. We had kids, got jobs, got married and got mortgages, but he’s still there, somehow – King of the Teen Wolves. He’s that cool guy in high school who got his first tattoo with a fake ID when he was fourteen, and got suspended because he dyed his hair green. Only time has passed and he doesn’t seem to realize he’s thirty-three now.” She sighed. “It’s actually kind of sad. He can’t move on from being the cool guy in high school. It’s just one of the things that makes him so bone-deep irresponsible.”

  There was no way to tell Stacy that Joe seemed to have freaked out about Charlie being around Axl. Not without worrying her any more than she probably already was. “They don’t trust him,” Blue said, instead. “Gabe and Joe. Especially Joe.”

  “Oh, I know. There was some shit went down between here and the north.”

  “You know about that?”

  Stacy shook her head. Of course she couldn’t know all about it, especially the part where Reese had died upstairs and had to be sneaked out of the house and fed to the gators. “I wasn’t really in the werewolf drama loop for a while,” she said, and held out her glass for more rum. “Hell of a place to be, ain’t it?”

  The ice cracked in Stacy’s glass. Blue topped it off with Coke. “I’m in it,” she said. “Whether I like it or not. Jesus, I straight up lied to that Candi woman; sooner or later they’re going to realize I don’t have much experience in looking after senior citizens.”

  “In your defense, Blue, most senior citizens don’t turn into wolves.”

  Blue smothered a giggle against the lip of her glass. “I shouldn’t laugh, but I didn’t think it was real, you know? All her wind-chimes and superstitions and weird little rituals. I just thought it was nutty old white lady stuff, like crystals. Or homeopathy. And then she goes and...”

  “...turns into a wolf.”

  “Yeah.” Blue took another sip, another giggle bubbling up in her throat. “I mean, there has to be some way to turn her back, right?”

  “Right,” said Stacy. “I’m guessing you have a clue? Because I don’t.”

  “No. That’s just it. I don’t. I’ve turned the basement upside down. All I found were a couple of old voodoo dolls and her grandmother’s ashes.”

  Stacy glanced at the bookshelf, but Blue just shook her head. “Nope, nothing there either,” Blue said. “Just a bunch of cookery books from before the Nixon administration.”

  “Cool,” said Stacy, swiveling in her seat to look. “Lotta things that should never have been encased in Jell-O but are anyway.” She pulled a bulky, black binder full of magazine pages from the shelf and set it down in front of her with a solid whumph. “I love that terrible post-war shit. Weird pharmaceuticals and even stranger food. It’s like a chicken and egg thing; which came first? The mindbending new psychiatric drugs or the desire to make tuna flavored Jell-O in the shape of a smiling fucking fish?”

  Blue got up from the table. Chicken. There was a thought so simple she was ashamed that it hadn’t occurred to her sooner. She opened the fridge and took out a container of chicken scraps she’d picked from a carcass.

  “What are you doing?” said Stacy.

  “Bribery,” said Blue, holding up the container. “Maybe Gloria just needs some more incentive to get used to the Ouija board. We might get some more answers out of her.”

  “Or you’ll just teach her to drool whenever a bell rings,” said Stacy, getting up from the table. “This should be interesting.”

  Gloria was sleeping when they turned on the light; she looked up blinking, like an interrogation victim yanked from solitary. “This is for your own good,” said Blue, squashing down her guilt at bothering an old lady. “So play nice.”

  Blue opened the Tupperware and Gloria stirred from the floor with a plaintive whine. It was remarkable how doglike she seemed sometimes, how close to friendly compared with the snarling likes of Axl and Gabe. But then Gloria wasn’t like other werewolves – Blue felt sure of that. Gabe had said that when the full moon came around he was as wholly wolf as Yael was wholly spirit, but Gloria seemed more like a woman inhabiting a wolf skin. She could spell, for one thing.

  “Okay,” said Blue, setting down the Ouija board outside the bars, within reach of Gloria’s paws. “Come on, Gloria. Let’s do this thing.”

  “She’s done this before?” said Stacy.

  “Several times. Although a couple of those times were food related requests.”

  “Huh. Maybe the chicken was a mistake.”

  Gloria came close, huffing eagerly at the tasty-smelling air. A long string of drool stretched down from her mouth and puddled on the floor.

  “Maybe,” said Blue. “Help me out and you can have some chicken, okay?”

  Gloria seemed to get a hold of herself and sat down, although she didn’t stop drooling.

  “How we you fix you?” asked Blue.

  A paw stuck out and swatted clumsily at the planchette. The first time Gloria knocked it sideways, but Blue returned it back to the board and – heart in mouth – set the paw on top of the planchette.

  Gloria moved it straight to the top of the board. NO.

  “Come on, Gloria,” said Blue. “If we don’t fix this then people are going to start thinking I murdered you. And I know you don’
t want your backyard all dug up after you just put all those herbs in.”

  The wolf batted the planchette back to NO. Blue sighed.

  “Ask her about Lyle,” said Stacy. “Gloria, what did you do to those guys up there? We know you did something.”

  Gloria just huffed. She sat back on her haunches and narrowed her yellowish eyes. Stacy picked up the Tupperware and waved it suggestively, like a noir detective wafting a twenty under the nose of a police informant. “Does this jog your memory?”

  Gloria stuck out a paw again, unsteady and slow, as if the human intelligence inside her was struggling with the business of controlling an unfamiliar body.

  She spelled out the word K-E-E-N with slow, halting effort. Blue sounded it out for her and Gloria – with more practiced dexterity, since it seemed to be her new favorite word – swatted the planchette back to NO. Then P.

  “Keep?”

  YES.

  C-H-A-

  “Charlie?” said Stacy, like they were playing charades.

  Gloria stopped. YES.

  “Keep Charlie safe?” asked Stacy. “Keep Charlie away?”

  Gloria replied YES again.

  “Keep Charlie away?” said Blue. “Done. He’s in Tavernier, and he’s not going anywhere for the next three days. Why do I have to keep him away, Gloria?”

  Stacy let out a little snort of laughter, a wet sound that reminded Blue of just how drunk they both were. “Knowing Charlie he’s up to his neck in some shit that’ll lead the police right to her doorstep,” Stacy said. She leaned forward and addressed herself to the wolf. “Did he do something bad?”

  Gloria whuffed through her nostrils. When her paw moved again she seemed to be fighting to get it there; she was tired and they needed to stop.

  YES

  “Did he hurt you?” asked Stacy. “Are you afraid he’s going to hurt you?”

  Gloria emphatically returned to NO.

  “One question at a time,” said Blue. “Or we’ll never know which one she’s answering.” It was time to choose carefully and she thought for a moment. “Why does Charlie have to keep away?”

  C-H

  “Charlie?”

  YES

  I-S-M-Y

  Blue sighed. “Darling?” she said, before Gloria even had time to start on the next word.

  YES

  Stacy frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means she’s definitely in there,” said Blue. “But I still have no idea what’s really going on inside her head.”

  *

  It was the Fourth of July and the hotel was heaving.

  The heat was near unbearable and several times while cleaning the rooms Blue had been forced to stop and drink to keep from sweating all the water out of her body. Several guests roamed the lawns, looking disconsolately at Gabe’s boat, and every time Blue saw them looking she felt faintly sick. Kate, the manager, would tolerate his quaint island superstitions only up to the point where they added local color to the guest experience, but not when they started costing her money.

  “Gabriel Arnot doesn’t have a superstitious bone in his body,” said Charmaine, the housekeeper. “I go to Mass every Sunday and never see his face at the altar rail. He don’t fool me with that bathtub San Benito on his lawn; that boy’s a heathen and a goof-off.”

  Oh, there was trouble on the way. Blue went around all day with that old Creedence Clearwater Revival song jangling around in her head and told anyone who asked that she would ‘try’ to come to the hotel hog roast and firework display that night. The truth was she had no intention of going; mixing with the guests was always awkward and she didn’t like to leave Gloria alone.

  Stacy wasn’t around. She was busy with her other two kids, making up lies to tell them where their brother had gone (“When you’re older you’ll want to hang around with your friends all the time, too.”) and once more the world seemed both quiet and anxious at once, with all the men missing and in danger. Perhaps, Blue thought, this was what war felt like.

  The rum had gone. She sat in the kitchen drinking home-made slushies made from vodka and smashed up popsicles, while fireworks screamed and whooshed and burst like shell-fire all over Islamorada. At the back of her mind was a vague worry that she should stop drinking and start doing something, lest she end up like her mother, but she had no idea what to do. Or how to do it.

  She leafed through cookbooks instead, wrinkling her nose at tan-filtered photos of hams covered in pineapple rings, glazed roasts fussy with paper crowns and devilled eggs topped with single, staring slices of pimento-stuffed olives, all arranged on frizzy banks of bluish parsley. Whenever she tried to imagine Gloria serving up these dishes an image popped into her head, foggy with cigarette smoke; a mustached man in an eggplant-colored shirt frowning at a lumpy, pineapple-plated ham and saying “It looks like a fucking armadillo to me,” and a dark haired boy of maybe nine laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life. And then Gloria’s voice, trying to be proper, trying to be good in a way that she never could be; “Okay, now – don’t you go saying that in school now. I get enough grief from your teachers without you enriching the little kids’ vocabularies.”

  Blue didn’t know who they were, but her basement rummagings had told her that Gloria had spent much of her life surrounded by men and boys. It seemed that male werewolves outnumbered females to such a degree that Blue wondered if it was x-linked, like color-blindness or hemophilia. It would certainly explain why it often skipped generations like it had with Stacy and Axl.

  Blue reached for the binder that Stacy had pulled down. Its fake leather covering was coming loose at the corners, revealing the cardboard inside. Unlike the pages of the fancier cookbooks, the recipes here were spattered with splotches and grease marks that said the things written inside it had actually been made, and made often.

  When she opened the page on a faded, typewritten recipe for coq au vin, several feathers fell out, reminding her of the broken struts in the backyard that Gabe told her had once supported a henhouse. Maybe it was time to build another; Joe and Gabe had eaten a shocking number of eggs on the run-up to the full moon.

  Blue slurped on her popsicle drink; the heavier vodka had sunk to the bottom of the glass and surprised her with its chemical, adult taste in all that childish sweetness. The things we teach ourselves to like when we’re old enough, she thought, remembering when coffee was a sour witches’ brew and all booze was so foul that she had had no trouble believing that her mother was crazy; you’d have to be to put that stuff in your mouth on purpose.

  She turned the page. Some sort of shopping list. White thread, root ginger. Brass pins. The word BRASS was written in capitals and underlined twice. A parenthetical note in the same sloping caps said NOT STEEL!

  Blue shivered at the thought of those things she’d found in the cellar, those little newspaper pupae of pins and hair. Pupae or poupees? Or both? And who had Gloria meant the pins for? Lyle and his unlucky son?

  In a corner of the page someone had written “Red candles light easier,” and that gave Blue an idea, one that she was drunk enough to act on.

  There were birthday candles in a box down the side of the cutlery drawer. They had been used before; their wicks were burned and the tiny plastic petals of their holders had crumbs of old frosting clinging to them here and there. Blue had wanted to toss them out but Gloria had said no – they were still good. Good for what, Blue didn’t like to speculate. Giving people food poisoning?

  She couldn’t find any red ones. There were only pink. She stuck it upright in a stale hamburger bun and set it on the table in front of her. Somewhere a firework squealed up into the sky – wheeeeee BANG – only adding to her dizzy sense of madness.

  “You gotta start somewhere,” she said, aloud, and her voice sounded drunk. So drunk. God, she had to stop this. It ran in families. Bad blood, addictive personalities, some small but fatal flaw of will handed down from mother to daughter. She pictured herself sitting on a plastic ch
air in some gray, institutional place – a day room or a church hall. It works if you work it, thank you for sharing, my name’s Blue and I’m an...

  No. Tomorrow I’ll be sober and I’ll still be surrounded by werewolves.

  May as well work with what you had.

  She sat and stared at the candle. To her drunk mind it had seemed like a logical place to start. Move a few objects, light a few candles, see through walls and into people’s minds. Only her mood had shifted and now it seemed dumb, just parlor tricks.

  You thought it was going to be like Harry Potter, you moron.

  “Incendio,” she muttered, half giggling, then corrected herself. “Inkendio.” She remembered an old boyfriend telling her there was no soft C in Latin.

  The candle remained unlit, absurd, like a memory of the world’s most disappointing birthday. Salmonella candles and a stale hamburger bun for a cake. Good times.

  Fireworks exploded in a machine gun rattle and Blue began to laugh in earnest at the sheer foolishness of what she was attempting to do. Gloria never bothered with this kind of bush league bullshit; when had she ever lit a candle with her mind when she could have saved time and just used a match? Gloria dealt with bigger things, like the thing that had pulled Gabe apart at his joints and rearranged him in the shape of a wolf, some force or power that was everywhere and nowhere...

  ...in the spaces inbetween...

  Blue stopped laughing.

  It came to her in a flash. Less than a split second, but enough to see it and maybe only as long as anyone could stand to look without going stark, staring mad. A void, an inky black space, seemingly empty but not. Something barely contained, something she could feel in the root of her skull and between the spaces in her spine. She had an uncanny sensation that she was looking into some dimension unknown, somewhere between cells, molecules, atoms themselves. There was power in there, huge power, deadly power.

  The next firework made her jump and she pictured a blast, the shockwave radiating out in a perfect dome. The candle burst into flame and she blew it out immediately in panic.