by Anna Roberts
“I get it,” said Gabe. “You don’t like him.”
She didn’t and she couldn’t, and she disliked Eli all the more for forcing her into the role of That Woman Who Comes Between Men. “I’ll get used to him,” she lied, but with the lie came a strange little flash of something hungry and vindictive. When I’m the wolf witch...
It scared her and she wanted to tell Gabe about the things she’d seen and done, but then there was a hard rap at the door and when she craned her head to look she could see a human shape dark behind the stained glass panel. “Goddamit,” she said, and knew there was no wriggling out of it. Not with cars in the drive and the curtains wide open.
Candi Statham was standing on the porch, clipboard in hand. She looked impossibly fresh in spite of the late afternoon heat; her blonde bob was so smooth it could have been a wig. Blue reached up to flatten a strand of her own hair and caught a whiff of her own sweaty armpit behind the stink of cleaning chemicals.
“Hi,” said Candi. “I’m so sorry to bother you again, but I was hoping I could do a follow up with you?”
“Of course,” said Blue, because there was nothing else she could say. She had a brief, insane vision of punting Candi down the basement steps, pointing her to the Ouija board and letting her get on with it. Sorry – did I forget to mention that Gloria’s a werewolf? What’s the matter, Candi? You’re not prejudiced, are you?
She smothered a guilty smile. God, what was wrong with her today? No wonder the words witch and bitch were only a letter apart.
“Great,” said Candi. “And how are things?”
“They’re good, thanks. Wonderful.”
“And Gloria’s still in Sedona?”
“Yes.”
Candi nodded, her eyes searching the space behind Blue as Gabe came out into the hallway. “Beautiful part of the world, I’m told,” she said.
“It is,” said Gabe. “Wide open spaces. She can just run and run...”
Blue stealthily stepped on his foot, seeing no way this conversation could end other than with the police digging up Gloria’s backyard for bodies.
“So,” said Candi. “Here’s the thing. We at the outreach are part of a wider survey of patients and carers. It’s a study partly funded by the hospital...”
Blue nodded, catching only one word in every five...partly funded...with a view...comprehensive picture...challenges...needs...
“...I would really appreciate your input.”
“Sure,” said Blue, feeling as dizzy as she had when she looked down and saw the clouds below her. It was one thing to go off the grid but sometimes it was startling to see just how far off it you really were. She found herself saying “Why don’t you come inside?”, because some rusty reflex told her that that was a thing you were supposed to say when someone was standing on your doorstep.
Only Gabe made saucer eyes at her behind Candi’s back and at once Blue realized just how thoroughly she had screwed up here. She had just invited this well-meaning woman with her ‘challenges’ and ‘comprehensive pictures’ into a house where the owner was a wolf, who had last night – using a Ouija board and one paw – urged Blue to get drunk and naked and paint herself with hand lotion and the mortal remains of one Celeste Thibodeaux.
Poor Candi didn’t have a goddamn clue.
“Oh, this is charming,” she said, as they entered the kitchen. “I haven’t seen Shaker style chairs like that since I left Pennsylvania.”
Gabe swiftly snatched up a beer bottle from the side, half swallowing a barley-scented burp as he did so. He stood with his back to the bin and carefully lowered it into the recycling, wincing at the glass’s soft but telltale clink.
“And these little corn dollies,” said Candi, spotting the raffia figures on the shelf above the clock. “Does Gloria make them?”
“Yeah,” said Blue, realizing she had never asked Gloria just what those figures were for. She thought of the wax cocoons in the basement and suddenly their placement in front of the clock seemed ominous.
“She has a lot of hobbies,” said Gabe.
“She sure does,” said Blue. Voodoo. Levitation. Lycanthropy. Possibly even a little necromancy on the side. Who knew? “We encourage it.”
“You should,” said Candi, with an earnest nod. “I know it’s hard to be positive when you see them going downhill, but you have no idea how important it is to keep the mind active. There have been so many studies...thank you...” Gabe held out a chair for her and she sat down. “So many studies that impress the importance of mental activity. Even if it’s just a jigsaw puzzle. But this is great. Wonderful that she’s still keeping up her hobbies.”
“It is,” said Blue, although Gloria had been slacking on the witch-ball front lately on account of a plumbing problem. There was just no way to get a wolf to sit on top of a mason jar. She briefly scanned the kitchen for anything else that was weird or off-kilter, and at first her eyes slid past them. Then – with a cartoonish record scratch playing in her head – Blue snapped her gaze back to the draining board.
Gloria’s dentures were grinning right at her.
“Can I get you something to drink?” said Gabe.
“Oh, just a glass of water if you don’t mind,” said Candi, and Blue tried to signal to him with her eyes that the teeth were right there and what did that say that Gloria had apparently gone off to a happy Arizona sweatlodge without her goddamn teeth?
He was useless. He just looked puzzled.
Luckily Candi had her back to the sink and was busy with her questionnaire. “So, on a scale of one to five, how would you rate the local support network for the families of those suffering from dementia? Five is excellent, four is very good...”
Gabe shook his head again. Blue bared her teeth at him. He frowned and Candi’s neat blonde head came up just as Blue had time to adjust her mad rictus grin into something approaching an expression of neutral interest.
“...three okay, two below average and one being poor.”
“Uh...three, I guess,” said Blue.
“Good. Thank you. And where does most of this support come from? Is it a) the local community b) primary healthcare providers c) secondary healthcare providers or d) other. And please specify.”
It was on the tip of Blue’s tongue to admit defeat, but then the dentures went flying through the air. They landed squarely in the middle of Candi’s clipboard.
Oh God. Yael. In the middle of all her panic Blue had forgotten about him, and he clearly didn’t care for being overlooked.
Gabe, who had been standing three feet away, watched with the kind of narrow-eyed skepticism that Blue had come to expect from him. Like he was looking for fishing lines or some normal explanation.
“I’m so sorry,” said Blue. “I don’t know what happened there.”
Candi frowned down at the teeth. They grinned sarcastically back up at her. “Gloria left without her teeth?” she said. The edge of suspicion in her voice was like a sudden chill in the room.
“They’re an old set,” said Blue, her mouth running ahead of her brain. “They didn’t...fit any more.” It was partly true, after all.
“Receding gums,” said Gabe, in a masterstroke.
“Right,” she said. “Receding gums. Which are a thing.”
“We tell her to toss them out,” said Gabe. “But she’s kind of a hoarder.”
He was doing so well, and he deserved to win through, but Candi Statham was no fool. “What’s really going on here?” she asked.
“Um...” said Blue, looking down at the questionnaire as if it could offer some kind of inspiration. It couldn’t; she was pretty sure it didn’t cover lycanthropy. She heard a low, creaking squeak and she didn’t dare look up, because if she did she’d see what Gabe was looking at. She could feel the air move, the blades of the broken ceiling fan turning above her head. That fucking bogey. Why did it have to come back? Had it ever even left?
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’re going
to have to trust me...”
Candi looked understandably skeptical but Blue figured that if she was calm then she could get her point across. No point screaming. No point telling her to run. If anything Yael seemed to enjoy panic and heightened emotions. He’d been all but skipping in and out of heads while those evangelists had been praying and sobbing and falling all over the lawn.
And he’d drawn blood. And more.
“This is a very serious situation,” Candi began to say, and then the glass exploded in front of her. She let out a brief shriek and then her head went back, jerked by some unseen force, her arms limp at her side.
“Don’t you even think it, Yael,” said Blue, with a menace she didn’t feel.
Gabe rushed forward, his face the color of putty. Candi’s head rolled back forward, then she looked at him through unsteady eyes and began to laugh that sticky brown dirty laugh. And Blue knew with total certainty that the man in her dream hadn’t spoken in that voice, because nothing else in the world sounded like that voice. Only Yael.
“Did you tell her what you did yet?” said Yael, and Candi passed out, sliding sideways on the chair. Gabe caught her.
“Oh my God, he’s done it again,” said Blue, thinking of Dorothy and the thin snake of blood that had run from her ear when Yael was done and had dropped her.
Gabe fumbled around Candi’s neck, searching for a pulse. Thank God – he was an expert at CPR. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s breathing.” He looked up and there was fear in his eyes. “Blue, what the hell was that?”
“The same thing that happened before,” she said. “With the cat lady. It was Yael. He’s here. He’s back. And I don’t know if he ever left.” Candi moaned softly. “Oh God, I should have never let her in the house, but I panicked...”
Candi was coming around. “Oh, I’m all wet,” she said, and she was. The water had dripped all over her lap. “Where am I?”
“Wait there,” said Blue, reaching for her phone.
“Who are you calling?” said Gabe.
“Help.”
*
The words wouldn’t come and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t that much more complicated than following a simple recipe. Take one bland male character, describe his abs in drooling detail and then add one equally flavorless female character. Chuck a couple of ridiculous obstacles in their path to true love - or whatever fevered gropings they’ve mistaken for it - then send it off, sit back and count the cash.
“Stop fantasizing about Art,” Grayson told himself. And stop thinking that this lipglossed yawn of a heroine has anything on her pumpkin spiced mind besides Basic Blaine and his rippling abs. Unless you’re okay with making your last remaining years as miserable as humanly possible. Fuck art. Shut up and write things that allow you to eat something better than dog food.
He stared at the screen again. He was almost relieved when the phone rang. It was nice to have excuses. I can’t write because the phone kept ringing, because a female werewolf broke into my house and distracted me, because the dog ate my typewriter.
It was an unknown number, but he never got to answer it, because that was the exact same moment that he heard glass shatter.
Excuses were all very well, but this was just getting silly. “Right,” he said, picking out a hefty cane from the umbrella stand in the corner. “That’s it. Somebody is going to get hurt.”
There were two men in the kitchen. They were both skinny and stringy, but when they turned to look at him Grayson saw that their eyes were bright with the look of people who had spent their lives feeding off resentments so fierce that they were the fuel to a fire of vicious vitality.
“I’m looking for a girl,” said the larger one, and his accent was so thick that it took a moment for Grayson’s brain to catch up. Swamp wolves, he thought, and his stomach turned to lead. Once again he saw those bodies swinging from the trees, armless, headless, brutally neutered by a long, gutting slash from neck to crotch. This was Ruby; it had to be. He only prayed she hadn’t told them not to fear the ghosts.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, his fear making him waspish. “I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for.”
“Funny guy,” said the swamp wolf. “I know she was here. I can smell her. Little blonde. About yea high. Pretty brown eyes.”
“She’s gone,” said Grayson, adjusting his grip on the cane.
The swamp wolf reached behind him and pulled out a gun. “Where?” he said.
Grayson raised one hand and slowly lowered the cane to the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. Ruby had really understated the case when she said that her husband was not a nice man. And this was the husband – there was no doubt. He had the letters of her name tattooed in old, bluish ink on his knuckles. And the knuckle of that forefinger – R – was curled around the trigger.
R for Ro. Cicero. He wasn’t likely to forget a name like that, the old Latin consonants worn lightly by this streak of bitter white streak of piss and vinegar. “Oh, you know,” said Cicero. “I guar-an-tee you know. Y’all just ain’t sayin’.”
“I promise you,” said Grayson. “I don’t.”
The gun made a clicking sound and he thought that was it, but a split second later he was still alive. Somehow. “Did you touch her?”
“No.”
Cicero crossed the kitchen in one rangy bound. The barrel of the gun was against Grayson’s temple now, but it no longer felt so bad after that click. Click. Gone. That was how it would be. No self-preservation, no fear, no to-be-or-not-to-be. Amazing how easy it was when you didn’t have to pull the trigger yourself.
“Did you lay a finger on my Ruby, faggot?” said Cicero.
They could gut him and string him up just like they had the Halletts, and right then he realized that he didn’t care. Just so long as they shot him in the head first. “No,” he said. “I didn’t, for the reasons you have just so pithily outlined.”
Click. Gone. Gimme.
But Cicero put the gun in the back of his jeans. “Oh,” he said, arching a barely-there eyebrow. “Aren’t we fancy? I bet she just loved you. You a single man, Mr. Fancy Pants?”
“Yes. Very.”
Cicero grinned. Lost somewhere in the seams and pouches of his face was a boy – a child who had married too young and got stuck somehow in the drama-ridden rut of adolescent love. “‘Praps we should be more civilized,” he said, affecting an anglicized cadence. “Take this shit into the pah-lah, hey Mr. Fancy Pants?”
“Of course,” said Grayson, and led them through the house on a kind of autopilot. He felt as though he was floating down the hall and as he passed all the things – all the stupid little things around him that meant nothing really – sank their hooks into his mind. The mirror he had rescued from a pub refit back home in Littlehampton, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh prints in their driftwood frames. He pictured the frames splattered with his blood and brain matter and felt...annoyed. He liked those pictures. He’d paid for those frames.
God, was this it? Really? A couple of framed poster prints were the things that pulled him back from thoughts of suicide-by-redneck?
In the end it turned out to be even more absurd. There was a pile of print run copies on the coffee table. He had opened the package and left them there. Blue Moon, by Jennifer Devine. Cicero frowned at them the second he entered the room.
“This is Ruby’s favorite,” he said. “She leave these here?” He picked up a book and sniffed one. “Smells like new.” He glanced down at the others and his frown deepened another notch. “Hey – why you got all these copies of the same book?”
“Cause he wrote them,” said the other one, confidently, as he dropped down into an armchair. My armchair. My books.
Grayson had hated Blue Moon. It was his private joke that the heroine’s name was actually short for Lachrimosa, because all she ever did was cry, instead of getting off her beautifully shaped bum and trying to fix things. There had been times when that book had made him want to run a warm bath and open a v
ein or two, but it was his. And he was buggered if a book like Blue Moon was going to turn out to be his – or Jennifer’s – epitaph.
“What you say, Jared?” said Cicero.
“Cause he wrote them,” said Jared, once more. “That’s what they do when you write a book. They send you a bunch of copies of it, all the same. For your friends and family. My aunt wrote one about how her old man touched her bad when she was little. Got money and everything. They sent her like ten copies, with a little crying kid’s face on the cover. Real professional.”
Cicero hooted with laughter. “I’m guessing she didn’t sent one to her daddy?”
“Hell, he was top of the list.”
“Man, your family is fucked up,” said Cicero, and thumbed through Blue Moon. Grayson was horrified to find himself feeling the kind of impotent shame and rage he thought he had left behind when he was about sixteen years old and his classmates had finally grown out of being the evil little pricks who delighted in stealing his notebooks.
“Jennifer Devine,” said Cicero. “Why you pretending to be a woman, Mr. Fancy Pants?”
“It sells better,” said Grayson. “Romance readers are almost exclusively women.”
“It’s creepy. There’s sexy stuff in here. You putting sexy ideas in women’s heads while they don’t know you’re a man?”
“Shit’s fucked up,” said Jared, who was clearly the moral arbiter of the bunch.
“Perhaps,” said Grayson. The humiliation was back, hot and sour as acid. He could kill these people, and whatsmore he had a perfect legal right to do so, a law that had always struck him as comically American. Until now.
“Did Ruby know you wrote these books?” said Cicero.
“No.”
“She don’t know you’re Jennifer?”
“No.”
Cicero set down the book. He glanced around and nodded, thrusting out his chin. “Okay,” he said. “You know what, Jennifer? This is a nice house.”
