Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  I did not do that. (Do it again.)

  She tried, but she couldn’t see into that darkness again, and maybe it was just as well.

  5

  Slowly. Slowly.

  Fingers. Toes. Eyelids. Tongue. Everything where it was supposed to be.

  The floor was cool beneath him and when he breathed in through his mouth he tasted something rank and sour. A zoo cage smell, of piss, shit and restless rage turned to pacing boredom. He drew his hands up to cover his mouth but his fingers seemed to want to flex instead, stretching and clutching at air with the reflexive movements of an unfinished brain.

  Light skewered through the gaps between his eyelids. He felt his wrists bend back, wilting under the weight of his hands until his knuckles touched concrete. His belly ached and groaned when he moved, the acid gurgles rising in the back of his throat with a taste so bad that he dreamed of a toothbrush and a bottle of bleach.

  “Gabe?”

  He half opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was her hair, the golden streaks in the brown gleaming like the rays of a halo in one of those old, gold holy pictures made of mosaic and precious things. He couldn’t remember her name.

  Something sacred? Something churchy. Mary. Saint. Heaven.

  Gloria.

  That was wrong. Wrong, but right somehow. Then she leaned closer and he saw her face, brown skin, full lips and those eyes, those amazing, unexpected eyes.

  “Blue.”

  “You’re okay,” she said, and the look in her eyes scared him on some level he couldn’t yet articulate. “Take it easy. Everything is going to be okay.”

  No, it wasn’t. There was a jackhammer pounding behind his eyes and there was something else, something big and broken in the world. Like the way he’d known his mother was dead and it was all because of that rotten church of hers. Trust in the Lord, hallelujah, kyrie eleison, Gloria in excelsis Deo...

  Gloria.

  There. That was it. Big, broken. Oh shit.

  “Gloria,” he said. “She go back?”

  “It’s okay,” Blue said, like a recording. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  She was a lousy liar. “No.” It was never going to be okay again, not if Gloria was still stuck. The world still had that hole in it, that thing they couldn’t fix.

  “Take it easy,” said Blue, and he realized that the look in her eyes was nothing but love. No wonder it had scared him so. He reached up and tried to touch her hair, those beautiful corkscrew curls that looked like a lion’s mane, but his hand missed and she caught it in hers, pressed it to her lips. Her eyes were shining with tears.

  “I love you,” he said, because he had to.

  “I know. I love you, too...shh, don’t try to move. It’s okay.”

  No, it’s not. It’s fucked, but you love me anyway. Thank you.

  He closed his eyes, and couldn’t remember opening them again.

  *

  Ten fingers, ten toes.

  It always started the same way. The way it must have started back when Elvis was still alive and the moon landings were still near pristine in public memory. Congratulations, Mrs. Grayson – it’s a boy. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes; he’ll be checking that number every lunar month of his adult life. Did we mention he’s a werewolf?

  Except the foot he was looking at had six.

  He counted again in his head, with the frowning patience of a slow child. But it was the same. When he got to five the toes kept going for one more. Something was tattooed on the instep but he knew it would be as long as thirty more minutes before his brain was up to a complex task like reading, especially something in such a loopy, girly-swirly font.

  The relief that it was someone else’s foot was short-lived; there was someone in here with him, and that was never good.

  Grayson braced himself for the worst, his muddled brain coming up too slow for the bends and swerves ahead. He slowly peeled his cheek from the floor, fully expecting the foot to end in a bloody mess further up the leg, only this foot was full of surprises.

  It was still attached to a woman.

  He could tell it was a woman because she was as naked as he was. She lay sprawled face down on the scratched and gouged boards of the cellar floor and he could see the pale bulge of one breast crushed beneath her slight weight. Her face was turned away from him. Her hair was a dirty blonde, maybe several shades darker than usual from the sweat and dirt of her transformation.

  Because she had transformed. It knew it in his bones and in his nostrils. It was the only way she would have been able to be down here with him and live to tell the tale.

  The cage door was closed, the key in the lock. Somehow she had let herself in, and that was a mystery in and of itself, but he would think about it later. Right now all he wanted was a shower and a toothbrush and a very strong cup of tea.

  She groaned and stretched out, turning her face towards him, her eyes still closed. Her eyebrows were as dark as the roots of her hair and when her lashes flickered he saw that they were a thick, luxuriant black. She would only have to roll over a fraction further for explicit confirmation that she wasn’t a natural blonde.

  Grayson rose slowly and painfully from the floor, his head a throbbing fool’s bladder wobbling atop the stick that was his aching, creaking spine. Darkness bloomed at the edges of his vision and for a moment he thought he was going straight back down, but he squeezed the fingers of one hand tight and the splintered shards of pain in his arthritic knuckles were enough to bring him back.

  On a high shelf were a handful of old blankets, folded and kept for exactly this purpose. He reached up – his shoulder protesting mightily – and took down a couple, winding one around his waist like a beach towel. The other he draped over the girl.

  She muttered something that sounded like ‘no’ but wasn’t and rolled over, baring her breasts. Grayson demurely twitched the edge of the blanket up to cover her and she slowly opened her eyes. She looked confused, like a princess stirring from a hundred year sleep to wonder why her rescuer hadn’t planted one on her already.

  “Hey,” she said, in a voice still creaky from screaming.

  “Hello,” said Grayson.

  The girl (she couldn’t have been much more than twenty) sat up slowly, the blanket still pressed to her breasts. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black and the point of her chin was maybe too sharp for modern, manufactured standards. It was a shrewd, expressive, squarish little face that flitted between frowns and embarrassed smiles as she realized the implications of where she found herself.

  “Did we...?” she started to say.

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Her frown deepened. “How do you know we didn’t?”

  “Oh, I know,” said Grayson. “Trust me on this.”

  “Shame,” she said, rising from the floor with an easy, youthful grace that made him sick with envy. “I just love that accent.”

  “Who are you?” he said, more irritable than he meant to be. “And what are you doing in my house?”

  She bit her lip. “I smelled wolf,” she said apologetically. “And I needed a place to crash. I hope y’all forgive me but my husband is not a nice man.” She stuck out a small hand. “Ruby.”

  “Grayson,” he said, his brain still sluggish. Something didn’t fit, and it wasn’t just the fact that she was a girl. She was obviously a swamp wolf, but they didn’t come here, being superstitious and afraid of the ghosts that whispered between the trees. At least, not until now. “Come upstairs. Shower. Clothes. Tea. I can’t fucking do this when I’m naked.”

  He let her have first go in the shower and lent her some pajamas, but when she came out she was wearing a spaghetti strap top and a pair of cut off jeans so short that the linings of the pockets showed beneath the frayed hems of the leg holes. With her hair wet and pulled back from her face it was easy to see how dark she was beneath the bleach job. She had obviously left her clothes upstairs before coming down to
the cellar, but he had no recollection of her entering the cage. And while it was true that he passed out a lot these days, he felt sure that his wolf-self would have been more acutely conscious of having company. Or the door being unlocked, even for a second.

  Grayson reluctantly left her alone for a moment and took a scalding shower. The tile floor looked like it had warped some more with the leak that Joe had pointed out. When Grayson asked him if he could reseal it, Joe had sucked air through his teeth in a very plumberish way and said the whole floor of the shower would probably have to come up. And did he have a sledgehammer?

  He hoped Joe was okay. It was a pitiful hope, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  When Grayson came back out – clean and dressed – Ruby was curled in one of the fake-leather wingback chairs with a book open on her knees. He hoped she hadn’t found the romance novels on the shelves behind the sofa; it was bad enough that this strange woman had seen him naked.

  But it wasn’t. When he glanced to see what she was reading she held it up – casual as if they’d known each other since childhood – and showed him the spine. It was a history book. Ronald Hutton. A good one, he remembered.

  “Gosh, you got all these books,” she said, and closed the book on her lap.

  “Yeah, they’re mostly for sound insulation,” said Grayson, perching on the edge of the opposite chair. He sank too easily into it and he knew it would be an effort of body and will to get out. That’s what nobody told you about getting old; every damn chair held the promise of a nap.

  Ruby blinked her sharp dark eyes at him and tilted her head to one side. “Now that is exactly the kind of thing a smart person would say,” she said.

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “Because a dumb person would be all braggy about it. They’d be all ‘Oh yes, I have all these books because I’m super smart and I read a lot.’ But you don’t.” She chewed her lip for a second. “Or maybe it’s just that self-deprecating thing y’all got going on. I don’t know.”

  He could almost hear her brain ticking away from across the room and he wished he had the talent to see inside it, but his psychic ability had always been something of a lemon. Had she been dead he would have heard her loud and clear; from as far as he could remember Grayson had heard the voices of ghosts, which was not nearly as exciting as it sounded. Most dead people were remarkably boring, on account of them being dead; they never got to expand their repertoire.

  The living were much more interesting, but he could never get into their minds. It had never stopped him from trying, though. Except when he pushed at Ruby’s he smelled sweet citrus so strongly that he thought this was it; he was finally having that stroke. He heard a brief whine, like that of a tied dog, and a voice – not hers – clearly saying “I can’t. I won’t. Not again.”

  Grayson waited for the inevitable drooling and darkness to come and get him, but nothing happened. She just sat there looking back at him and he realized there was something witchy about this wolf-girl. Something she’d tried to tether to her, something he could hear on account of it not having a living brain.

  Something like Yael.

  “Let’s get some things straight,” he said. “You broke into my house and let yourself into my cage?”

  “I’m sorry...”

  Grayson held up a hand. “What are you doing in my woods in the first place? You people don’t come here.”

  “You people?” She raised a pointed dark eyebrow and shifted the chair, pulling her leg out from under her so that he could see her foot once more. It was the strangest thing; the extra digit didn’t sprout from the side of another. It was just there, an extra toe so like the others that you might not have noticed unless you looked long enough to count.

  “I apologies for how that sounds,” he said. “But you’re one of the...Okefenokee crowd, right?”

  “Yup.” She swung her foot and peered steadily at him, giving him nothing.

  Great. He was going to have to say it out loud and it sounded ridiculous. “So you know these woods are haunted, don’t you?”

  Ruby grinned. Her teeth were small and short, like a child’s. “I ain’t fraid of no ghost,” she said.

  Even better. Swamp wolves who weren’t superstitious. It was the only reason he’d felt safe enough to return here in the first place.

  “They’re just dead people,” she said. “No big deal. You’re not afraid of them.”

  “I’m used to them,” said Grayson, who was more than a little rattled by the prospect of swamp wolves who weren’t sufficiently scared of ghosts. “Are there others like you? Your husband?”

  She waved a bony white hand. “Ugh. He’s an asshole.”

  “He threw you out?” A definite asshole move on his part if he had. Nobody who wasn’t a stone-cold sociopath would risk letting a hungry young werewolf roam around eating whatever – and whoever – she liked.

  “I threw myself out,” said Ruby, folding her arms.

  “Right. And what on earth did you think was going to happen when you changed?”

  She shrugged, pressing her cleavage together. She had the words ‘NEVER AGAIN’ tattooed above her heart and he wondered how fresh the ink was. She seemed so young to be married, but that was how it went with a lot of them. Plunge into life headlong, because you didn’t get a choice about dying young.

  “You know about witches?” she said.

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

  “You got a lot of books about them.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” said Grayson. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  She gave him a secretive little smile. “I’m getting to that,” she said. “I heard you went down to the Keys.”

  “Yes,” said Grayson. And came back with my tail between my legs. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You saw her?”

  “Who?”

  “Her,” said Ruby, like it was obvious. “The wolf witch. She’s still alive, ain’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Grayson, glad that he didn’t have to lie. Admittedly Gloria was a lot more canine than he remembered her, but she was still – hopefully – very much on this side of the clouds. “But I don’t think you grasp the seriousness of this situation. What if you’d killed someone? You can’t just leave home in a huff when the full moon is coming.”

  “I know that,” she said, with mounting impatience. “I never meant to change.”

  He snorted. “What? You had a choice in the matter?”

  She smiled. No, grinned. “What if I said I did?” she said.

  “I’d say you were deluded. You obviously did change, because there’s no other earthly reason why you would be naked in my basement.”

  Ruby’s grin melted as fast as it had appeared. “Rude.”

  “Gay.”

  “Oh.” When she spoke again her demeanor shifted, subtly but in a way he recognized from long experience. No more flirting; this was business. There was a steeliness to those black eyes, a look he was surprised he hadn’t noticed before when he remembered the low, puppyish whine of that entity she held tethered to her somehow. A pack spirit, but soft and shy. He thought of the fanged thing that Yael had become and was suddenly afraid for her.

  “You have to let it go,” he said.

  “Let what go?”

  “The...thing. The spirit. I can feel it.”

  Ruby arched an eyebrow at him. “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about witches?”

  “I know enough,” he said. “Enough to know that you’re playing with fire. Those things can turn vicious.”

  “She’s not though. She’s soft. Gentle. A darling.” She. Oh God. So she was already deep enough to have assigned a gender to the sexless thing. She’d probably given it a name, too.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t know what they can do.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Ruby, with a glitter in her eye. “I know what happened to Lyle Raines.”

/>   “You don’t know the half of it,” said Grayson, and went to get up from the chair to find a book that might explain it all to her better than she could. But his wretched left knee turned to vile jelly on him as he rose, making him stumble and stagger like an old man.

  Ruby bounced up out of her chair to help. The bolt of pain had shot all the way up to his hip, but worse – far worse – had been the sick, dead sensation of trying to place his weight on that soft, failing knee. He swallowed hard a couple of times as he balanced on the other, working up the courage to put his foot back down. He wasn’t going to sit down again, not when he was this afraid that he might never get up again.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine,” he said, gulping down nausea. “My knee went to sleep; that’s all.”

  “This was rough on you, huh?”

  His foot tingled unpleasantly as he set it down on the floor. “I’m getting old. Forty-three next birthday. I was thinking I might make it my last.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” said Ruby, with a consoling thoughtlessness that made him wonder if she was even younger than twenty.

  “Why not?” said Grayson. “You don’t get to choose a thing about how you come into this world, so you may as well choose when and how you leave it. I was thinking I’d spend my last six months trying all those things I never had the guts to try before.” He limped towards the bookshelf. “You know. Dangerous thrills. Heroin. Buttchugging. Auto-erotic asphyxiation. Maybe even line dancing.”

  Ruby darted over to the bookshelf and put her hand on his wrist. Her eyes were glittering again and he had the clear and unsettling sense that what Ruby wanted, Ruby got. Always. “What if,” she said. “I told you there was a cure?”

  “If there was a cure,” said Grayson. “I would have to rethink my position on line dancing.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” he said. “At least when heroin and auto-erotic asphyxiation go wrong you end up safely dead, and not haunted by the knowledge that you once did some kind of heel and toe step to the sound of Achy Breaky Heart.”

  She looked confused, as well she might have been. Her cultural references were probably more in step with those of the kid who had been paddling around in Billy Ray’s scrotum back when he had recorded that appalling earworm. Grayson suddenly felt far, far older than forty-two.