Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  “Listen to me, Ruby,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you, and believe me, I’ve heard it all. Sedatives, strange herbs, sweatlodges, chanting – you name it. Scientific, pseudo-scientific and just plain mad.”

  “But I - ”

  “- no, please. Let me finish. I know you don’t want to hear it, but the sooner you accept the truth about what you are the happier you’ll be. We’re here for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things, and it’s not worth spending the blink of a life that you have trying to change things you can’t. And this is the truth – you’ll never escape the moon. When that wolf inside you wants to come out, it will come out. And it will keep on coming whether your body can take it or not, until your bones are ground down to powder and the only thing that’s left is to put a bullet in your head to save yourself from something far, far worse.”

  Ruby pressed her lips together in something like contempt. No, disapproval. She was young, after all.

  6

  Nothing ever looked quite right after a full moon. In some ways it was like being a little kid again; the most mundane of things held infinite fascination in their shapes and their names. Assuming you could even remember their names so soon after your brain had just got rewired.

  Right now Gabe couldn’t remember the name of the thing beside the kitchen sink, the rack thing you stacked other things on. Those hard flat things you had to eat off of to distinguish you from the animals. He drew another glass of water and blinked dumbly at it, still not entirely sure if he was even in the right house. He was pretty sure his place was never meant to be this clean.

  Blue came in, trailing a tempting girl-smell that made the wolf in him drool just a little. Her beautiful hair was scraped back into its usual tidy ponytail, all business. There was laundry to be done. The cleaning fairy – wasn’t that what she’d called herself? One of those invisible women who did everything and nobody ever noticed until they weren’t there to do it any longer.

  He wanted to tell her that she was magical, that he felt like a king because he was lucky enough to know who she was when her hair was loose and her clothes were all over the bedroom floor. But he couldn’t; he was trapped in a brainfart over what that fucking thing next to the sink was called.

  Desperate, he pointed to it. “What is that?”

  Blue frowned. “What?”

  “The rack thing. What do you call that?”

  “That’s a dish drainer.”

  “Right. Of course it is.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine. It just...takes a while sometimes. The whole language-brain thing.”

  The bathroom door opened and Joe came out. God, he looked terrible, like he’d been smacked over the head with a big caveman club and forgotten how to count even his own legs. He was wearing only boxers and a single sock and when he met Gabe’s gaze his eyes were all but empty of understanding. Just that blank, animal look that spoke of waking up in naked heaps, all feeling and no thought. Had they done anything? He couldn’t remember, but it was yet another thing he was going to have to explain to Blue, assuming his brain would ever let him form sentences again.

  Joe passed them with a grunted greeting and went off towards his room.

  “Jesus,” said Blue.

  “He’s fine. It just takes him a little longer since he got stuck that time.” Gabe stared down at the rack again. Dish drainer. Right. Fabric softener. Window. Sock. Try to get his head back into that thumb-having state of mind. Not so easy when you could still taste raw meat behind the toothpaste.

  “He said something about Charlie,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know. That he shouldn’t be around Axl. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Uh, no. Not really. Can you blame him?” The first time Charlie and the kid had both been in the same room Mr. No-Filter had opened his big mouth and dropped the babydaddy bomb on Axl. And hadn’t that been a whole heap of fun for all the family?

  “I guess not,” she said. “But there’s bad blood, isn’t there?”

  She didn’t say anything more, but it was hanging there in the air anyway. The thing he wasn’t telling her about them and North Florida. The thing he couldn’t tell her, not if he wanted her to ever look at him in the same way again.

  Later, he told himself. He’d do it. He had to do it, but not right now, not when she was so relieved to see him in one piece. She’d seen so much horror and he couldn’t cram any more down her throat. Let her deal with it one bit at a time.

  “It’s...complicated,” he said.

  She gave him a long, wary look and went quiet. Too quiet. Oh, she was going to do it. There was no doubt in his mind at that moment; she was about to tell him that she couldn’t handle it, and that was fine, because he’d told her to pull that trigger if she needed to. Only now he really, really wished he hadn’t.

  “Blue,” he started to say, but then there was a huge, house-shaking thud.

  It sounded a lot like six and a half feet of werewolf hitting the floor.

  “Joe?”

  There was no reply.

  “Oh God,” said Blue, in a hushed, appalled voice.

  Gabe hurried down the narrow hallway, praying to someone, anyone that the noise wasn’t what it had sounded like. Enough already; Gloria was a wolf and every time Gabe closed his eyes to sleep he remembered carrying Reese out to sea in a series of garbage bags. He wasn’t sure if he could take much more.

  Except nobody was listening. And you took what got thrown at you.

  He pushed open the door without knocking and saw Joe’s feet – one sock off, one sock on – sticking out from behind the bed.

  Joe lay in the narrow space between the dresser and his bed. “Oh God,” said Blue, and Gabe knew she’d seen it too, that widening puddle of red under Joe’s cheek.

  *

  Eli’s boy was a bag of bones. He looked skinny enough with his clothes on but with them off Charlie estimated the kid couldn’t have been much more than one hundred and forty stretched out pounds, all elbows, ribs and shoulder blades. Like that weird cowboy kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the one that had gotten shrunk somehow and ended up ten feet tall and thin as a wire when they tried to fix him on a taffy stretching machine or something.

  Charlie wondered if his name had cursed him somehow when it came to kids. The last one he’d taken care of had been like the fat kid who fell in the chocolate river.

  Rest in pieces, Reese.

  Some of those pieces hadn’t even matched. The wrong legs, the wrong skull and – the thing that had done him in – the wrong ribs. Charlie supposed all the mismatched scraps of him had been picked clean by fishes by now, those bits that hadn’t been dissolved in the acid bellies of gators, nature’s own garbage disposals.

  He felt very little, which was weird because he’d expected to feel more. But it hadn’t worked out like that. He’d just been tidying up a mess that Mother Nature had been too busy to work on. Reese would never have made it through one full moon in a month, let alone two.

  Charlie rinsed his mouth. His hand felt strange as he twisted the bathroom tap, like his brain was still trying to figure out how it felt to have thumbs again. And maybe it was; he felt like he’d been kicked all over by a pack of angry bikers wearing steel-capped boots. Trust Eli to blow smoke up his ass about his alpha potential; he felt every last second of his thirty-two years and then some.

  He rinsed again, but this time something felt loose in his mouth and with it came a cold shocky jolt of panic. Too much like those recurring dreams, where you smile and you smile and your gums turn soft and you can’t keep the goddamn teeth in your head no matter how hard you try. He tasted blood.

  It was one of the ones near the back. Not quite a molar, not quite a...whatever else they were called. Charlie spat the tooth into his hand and looked at it for a moment, fighting the thin, hysterical fear that had sunk its claws into the top of his spine. That tooth was
never going back. Beyond help. Beyond repair.

  He set it on the edge of the sink and splashed more water on his face, then – determined to be practical – he bared his teeth in a smile. Not the greatest grill on earth, but he’d always fallen back on the excuse that they worked. Why fuck them up with whitening treatments and all that cosmetic crap that ate into your enamel? (Except they don’t work anymore. They’re falling out of your fucking head, Charlieboy.)

  “Alpha, my ass,” he said, feeling ancient as he stumped out of the bathroom. The kid, Axl, was folded up under a blanket on the couch, sleeping it off. He didn’t stir as Charlie passed him.

  Eli was in the kitchen, talking to someone on the phone. His back was to Charlie but there was something in the set of Eli’s wide shoulders that made Charlie uneasy. That missing-tooth feeling of something being hopelessly, irreparably fucked.

  Oh, it was just turning out to be one of those days. Eli turned around and the look on his face said it all. This was serious. Dead serious.

  There was one of those strange, cold, suspended moments when you couldn’t decide what was worse – knowing or not knowing? But then Charlie found himself mouthing the word all the same; “Gloria?”

  Eli shook his head. “Joe,” he said.

  Joe? Charlie gingerly sat down on a bar stool, deciding that the rickety IKEA legs of the thing were still a safer bet than his own. He listened with only half an ear on the tail end of Eli’s conversation. “What happened?” he asked.

  Eli’s face looked like bread-dough. When the light caught his hair there were threads of silver that hadn’t been there a month ago and for maybe the first time Charlie saw that Eli wasn’t immune to any of it; jowls, cranky digestion, gum disease, early-onset arthritis. Kids, it seemed, sucked the very essence out of their parents.

  “I don’t know,” said Eli. “I’m going down there. It sounds like he’s had some kind of stroke.”

  “A stroke? He’s like twenty-three.” Maybe it was one of those ones where you couldn’t talk. Or smell. Now, that would have been lucky.

  Eli shook his head. “You know he’s not been right since that business with Lyle. Every full moon’s a game of Russian roulette with him now.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fuck. We talked about this. Or he tried. And I told him to shut the fuck up.”

  “Because nobody wants to talk about that,” said Charlie, sliding off the bar stool, his mind racing ahead. He had a terrible desire to laugh. It wasn’t personal – in fact he’d always kind of liked Big Joe, even if the feeling wasn’t mutual – but he knew he had to play this very carefully. God knows what Joe had told Gabe Arnot.

  “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” said Eli, a statement so totally un-Eli that Charlie wondered if he’d been swapped with a pod person. To make matters even more surreal, Eli squinted at the display screen of his phone and then popped open the case of a set of eyeglasses that Charlie hadn’t even noticed on top of the microwave.

  “What about Gloria?” asked Charlie. “Did you hear anything about her?”

  Eli blinked over the rims of his new, adult glasses. “Oof,” he said, in a way that said he was still in there. “Do you know? I didn’t even ask.” He sighed again. “Look, I’ll call you as soon as I get there. Just...just, please. Look after my son for me?”

  “Like you even have to ask, man.”

  “Thank you,” said Eli, and clasped him in an awkward hug. “I gotta go. The traffic is going to be hell. Oh, and Charlie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t let Axl know about this. He’s been through enough this month already.”

  “Sure. Wouldn’t dream of it.” So Daddy had obviously had the ‘Where baby werewolves come from’ talk with the boy, but not the one about how werewolves sometimes ended up in twisted messes of broken bone and failing organs, with frothy blood bubbling out of the slits at the sides of their nostrils because their heads hadn’t gone all the way back.

  Probably a difficult subject to broach. They had never told Axl about Reese for the same reason. As far as the kid knew, Charlie had come to Islamorada alone.

  Charlie heard the front door slam. He looked in on the boy, who was still drowsing in that floppy, bone-tired way of all teenagers. They were like elastic at his age. All that growth that was going on; changing shape, changing bodies, changing brains. It was a slower version of what went on once a month, but no less brutal in its own way. And sometimes all that energy just spurted out sideways and they popped into wolves like it was the most natural thing on the planet. There were others – adults – who could do it almost at will and didn’t need full moons to do so, but it took a frightening amount of strength to do it and it was almost always a last resort. Nobody had ever imagined a frail, seventy year old lady could do it, least of all one who nobody even knew was a werewolf in the first place.

  He had racked his brains for every full moon he could remember, looking for some indication that Gloria had been anything other than herself during the full moon. But there was nothing. When he was young she’d come with consoling hands and chicken soup, tucking him up in blankets and telling him he’d be fine – just get some rest. In his later teens she was more hands off, sometimes to the point where she would let him unlock himself and he’d find her upstairs in the kitchen, cigarette in mouth, dealing cards with Eli and Harry Coronado – Gabe’s grandfather. “If your thumbs still work, make up a four,” she’d say. “And let’s play some poker.”

  Once he’d told her that she should get a werewolf version of that dogs-playing-poker picture, and she’d laughed her ass off, showing the blank spaces in her lower jaw where her back teeth used to be.

  Axl stirred and opened his eyes.

  “Hey, kiddo,” said Charlie. “You feeling okay?”

  “Ngh.”

  “I’ll get you some water,” said Charlie, patting the bony lump of the boy’s shoulder under the blanket. “It’s very important you stay hydrated, okay?”

  “Mm.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Sleepy.” The kid squinted up at him. For the first time Charlie saw Eli in him; for a while he’d suspected that tow-haired little Wernicke woman had pulled a fast one, but there was no question about it. For all he favored his mother in looks, Axl had his old man’s eyes, his grandfather’s color blindness and a bad hereditary case of the werewolfs.

  “Is my dad here?” he asked, perhaps the first time he’d talked about Eli that way. So it began. Another round of daddy-addicted dingbats to carry the fucking torch.

  “He had some business to attend to,” said Charlie. “Bar’s heaving. Holiday weekend, don’tcha know.”

  “I know,” said Axl. “I missed the fireworks.”

  “Meh. Waste of money anyway,” said Charlie. “You hang in there. When you’re awake we’ll make something good to eat. Deep fried deliciousness. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a Charlieburger.”

  He took the kid some more water and went out onto the back deck to smoke. As he breathed in he imagined the smoke filling the empty socket of his tooth, coating the gooey hole with carcinogens. Russian roulette, like Eli said, but why not? When you were done changing shape for the month, sometimes one of your cells decided to keep on changing, seemingly just for shits and giggles. Bodies were fun that way.

  Charlie stretched in the sun, feeling it beat down through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, warming his bones. Bones that were making it clearer every month that they were officially sick of this shit. Maybe it had been something to do with watching Reese transform like that, like a cut that never hurts as much until you see the blood. Usually when he changed he was – like everyone – too preoccupied with his own pain to make it a spectator sport.

  His phone rang. Eli had made good time, considering the tourist traffic.

  “How bad?” said Charlie.

  Eli exhaled. “Bad.”

  “And Gloria?”

  Another catch of breath, like Eli was bracing
himself.

  “You’re fucking kidding me?” said Charlie.

  “I wish I was,” said Eli. “It’s like...double dipped in shit day or something. She hasn’t gone back.”

  *

  There was a fight going on and he knew it was about him, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t seem to move. It wasn’t like coming back and being so tired that you couldn’t move without what felt like superhuman. It was far worse than that. It was like the strings between his body and his brain had been cut.

  Maybe I’ll be a brain in a jar from now on, thought Joe, and he would have laughed if he could, because what else was he going to do about it? Scream? If he started he would never be able to stop.

  Bursts of darkness swelled behind his eyes. He could smell blood and something perfumed, some cleaning chemical whispering through the house, unsmelled by lesser noses than his. Oh, it’s all fun and games until someone breaks a blood vessel.

  Her voice was the most distinct, her usual softness turned strident, jerky and barky with her hard, flat a’s and weak, rising r’s. “Are you outta your minds? Take him to the hospital.”

  “...it’s not that simple.” Eli? When did he get here? “We talked about this. About what Joe would want.”

  “He talked to you about that?” That was Gabe. Jealous. And yes, he had talked to Eli, although it was only now that Joe really understood why he’d chose to talk to Eli instead of Gabe. He didn’t want to die, and he knew deep down Eli didn’t have the guts to kill him.

  The fight turned quiet, or maybe something had shut off his hearing. He didn’t know. All he could see were the cracks in his bedroom ceiling and he couldn’t seem to move his head. Another voice – crackthroated, brash and unmistakable. Charlie. Oh my God. Charlie was here.

  “...you brought Axl down here to this?” Eli’s voice rose. “I told you...”