Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  His eyes were dry. She touched his hand but his fingers were still clenched tight on the bottle cap. “It was an accident,” she said.

  He swallowed. “Are you saying that because you want to believe it?”

  “No. Because you did everything you were supposed to do. You took every precaution, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  “You tried,” said Blue. “That’s all any of us can do.”

  “I failed,” he said. “And I killed someone.”

  “What were you supposed to do? Not try and see your mother?”

  He started to shake. “She died anyway,” he said. “On the second night of the full moon. Even if I had been able to make the funeral, I doubt my stepfather would have wanted me there.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Blue.

  “Don’t be.”

  “Then what? What do you want from me? You want me to punish you for it? Because that’s not my place.”

  His knuckles were white, his jaw set. “I should have told you sooner,” he said.

  “One thing at a time,” she said. “I had to get to grips with you being a werewolf.”

  He shook his head. “There’s still time to run for the hills, you know.”

  It was so quiet now that she could hear her throat work as she swallowed. “I hate hills,” she said. “I’ve lived most of my life below sea level.”

  He smiled and for a moment she thought they were going to laugh, however inappropriate that was, but the sound caught in his throat in a hiccup and left him mute, his mouth open and his throat clenched against the kind of noise he’d no doubt been told that big boys never make.

  “It’s okay,” said Blue, and he dropped the water bottle and leaned over, burying his face in her shoulder. It came out of him in a long, wailing moan and she could feel his teeth through her t-shirt and his tears wetting her neck. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  He cried for a long time and she sat there holding him, thoughts running through her head, once again feeling as though she was on the verge of making sense of something. When he raised his head it was raining again, only this time the sun was still shining, glinting through the slanting drops.

  “The Devil’s beating his wife,” said Blue.

  “Huh?”

  “You don’t say that? When it rains and the sun shines at the same time?”

  Gabe scrubbed a hand over his eyes. In a weird way he looked better, lighter. “Yeah, I’ve heard it,” he said. He accepted a Kleenex from the pack she held out and blew his nose. “My mamere used to call it ‘the wolf’s wedding’. Le mariage du loup. I don’t know why.”

  He took a moment, gathering himself back together.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Is that...is...what happened the reason you and Joe got into trouble in the first place? With those guys up north?”

  Gabe nodded. “Yeah. It turned out there was a cherry on the whole shit sundae; I woke up in Georgia but the man...the one I killed. He was from Florida. And you don’t kill someone on another werewolf’s turf. Not without consequences.”

  “And they found you?”

  “No. Some swamp wolf girl found me,” he said. “I think she might have let me go, but her mean redneck husband had his weed farm nearby, and when they found that guy’s...” Gabe trailed off and swallowed. “They found his arm in the woods. Cops all over. Cletus was pissed, so he handed me over to Lyle Raines.”

  “When you say consequences...”

  “I think Lyle would have killed me,” he said. “Probably. Once he was done trying to figure out how to use me against Eli. Then Joe came up looking for me...” He crumpled the Kleenex in his fist. “I wish I knew where he’d gone.”

  “You said he’d been through worse than this before.”

  “Yeah,” said Gabe, but it was like a pat on the head and Blue was surprised by how angry it made her.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said. “How you can do that. How you can defend Eli.”

  “I told you,” said Gabe. “Different frame of reference. He was just throwing it out there because it was what Joe wanted.”

  “To be killed?”

  He sighed. “We all make arrangements, Blue,” he said. “Agreements. If I ever end up like Reese did –”

  “– which you’re not. So we don’t need to talk about that.”

  This time there was an edge of irritation to his sigh, and she was almost glad to hear it. Gabe stared through the windshield at the house once more. “Okay,” he said. “And what about...this. Yael. Are we going to talk about that?”

  “So you believe me?” she said. “You finally accept that there’s something there?”

  “Let’s say I do, for the sake of argument. What is it? A ghost?”

  “No,” said Blue. “A ghost used to be a person. Yael was never a person. It was always a spirit. Some kind of...I don’t know...pack spirit, Grayson said. Like a guardian.”

  Gabe snorted. “Some guardian.”

  “Like you say,” she said. “Different frame of reference. Yael isn’t like us. It does things we don’t understand.”

  “Like getting in people’s heads and busting blood vessels for fun?” he said. “No, I understand that well enough.”

  He went quiet again, and Blue had the creeping, uncomfortable feeling that the house was staring right back at them, its arched windows recessed like narrowed eyes peering out from the weathered siding. She knew he was thinking the same thing as he was; that Gloria was still in there. And they had no idea how to get her out.

  10

  Blondie came like a woman who only got fucked once in a blue moon. She had all but pulled Charlie into that motel room by his fly buttons and when he got his hand in her shorts he found her already wet. He was going to ask her if she’d done this before, but she wouldn’t take her tongue out of his mouth long enough to let him speak, and then he decided it was better not to know. Better – and hotter - to believe that she was some backwoods housewife gone wild.

  Not that many men, he thought. At least none that knew what they were doing, not if the way she reacted when he went down was any indication. She came in less than five minutes, her fist stuffed in her mouth and her pussy muscles clenching in and out around his fingers.

  And now she was going for the main event. Charlie hung on with his teeth clenched as she went at it, good old missionary style but with no question of who was fucking who here. It was all he could do to hold himself still enough for her to take her pleasure, her soft white ass bouncing up and down on the mattress, her heels dug in and her open thighs tensed.

  “Come on,” she said. “Give it to me, you sonofabitch.”

  She hadn’t mentioned condoms and neither had he, and he figured you should never look a gift fuck in the twat. “You sure?”

  “Yesss. Sure. Please.”

  He let out a groan of relief as he cut loose, fucking her hard and deep. The balled sock he’d stuffed behind the headboard fell out almost right away and the headboard slammed against the wall with his thrusts. The bed heaved and groaned beneath them and he had to smile at the thought of other people hearing the noise they were making.

  He could feel her starting to come, all strong and slippery, and the little shivers building up inside her and around his cock. Right there, oh yeah. Scream if you wanna go faster. She bucked and moaned and all but howled, and then it hit him – the source of that faint smell of blood and marrow that she’d tracked into the bar with her – but then it was done. He was coming, spurting so long and hard into her tight, twitchy cooch that he thought his balls would turn clean inside out.

  She held him fast when he was done, crossing her ankles above his butt. And he was in no position to object, slowly softening inside her as he gradually relaxed his white-knuckle grip on the headboard. He had no idea what he’d done to deserve this, but he was pretty sure he needed to find out. Just so he could do it again.

  Charlie fe
lt her shudder beneath him and around him, and when he drew back far enough to look at her he saw that she was giggling. “What?” he said, and it felt like an effort just saying it, like she’d rewired his brain. And maybe she had. Her eyes were sloe-dark and her cheeks were flushed a deep pink, a blush that had spread all the way down to her nipples, he noticed, with a glimmer of pride. That was how you knew you’d done your job well; when a woman’s chest got flushed that meant the orgasm had been especially intense.

  “I don’t even know your name,” she said.

  “Huh,” he said. “You think we should get the introductions out of the way?”

  “I don’t know. Should we?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what Emily Post has to say about how you handle introductions when you already have your dick in someone, so...”

  She started to giggle again and he felt it shake all the way through her, but he was soft enough to slip out now. He rolled to the side and looked down at her body; narrow hips, trashy tattoos and a dumb little black stripe of hair that confirmed what her dark eyes and roots had led him to suspect. She pulled her knees up to her chest and scooted a pillow under her ass and that was when he realized what the catch was. Of course a woman this hot had to be nuts; it stood to goddamn reason.

  “What are you doing?” he said, although he knew. It was like the mirror opposite of those dopey girls in high school who ran off to douche with Coca Cola the moment you came. This little hot piece of crazy was doing everything she could to bathe her ladyparts in his baby-gravy. More fool her. As far as he knew the fucking sperm were still swimming in circles.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything. You’ve already done your part.”

  He stared at her feet for a moment. She had ivy tattooed around her ankle, but there was something else, something else strange about them. With a mounting sense of craziness he counted her toes. She had eleven.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want my baby and you don’t even want to know my name?”

  “Why is that so weird?” she said. “Rich ladies go to sperm banks and do it all the time. Although I never said I didn’t want to know. I’m Ruby, by the way.” She slid a hand out from behind the back of her knee and offered it in a handshake. He was pretty sure this never came up in Emily Post either.

  “Charlie,” he said, as she rolled over and reached down the side of the bed for something. “I’d say it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, but that would be the goddamn understatement of the century.” She fished out a battered pack of smokes and dumped them on his chest. “Should you be smoking?”

  “I’m healthy,” she said, plucking a cigarette from the pack. “Real healthy. I don’t even get colds.”

  “Sure,” he said, skeptical. “But I’m guessing your time of the month is a real bitch, right?”

  “Rude,” she said, sitting up to light up. Her breasts were like little ski-jumps, the nipples pink-beige.

  “You can smoke as much as you like,” he said. “I’m still gonna smell it on you. And I know you smelled it on me.”

  She gave him a sidelong look and he grinned. “It’s lingering this month, ain’t it?” he said. “The wolfy senses?”

  Ruby nodded. “Oh my God, yes,” she said, in a little outrush of breath like she was relieved to hear it. “So much.”

  “Too much moon in the month, I guess,” he said, taking a cigarette from the pack. “What with the blue moon and all.”

  “I always wanted to see a blue moon.”

  “You’d be disappointed. It’s not actually blue. It just means there’s more than one full moon in a calendar month.”

  She frowned. “Huh. So why do they call it a blue moon?”

  “Cause that’s the color of the streak you curse when you realize there’s two of the fucking things in a single month.”

  Ruby laughed. Not a polite laugh, but a real belly laugh. “I’m gonna take a bath,” she said, swinging a foot onto the floor. “You wanna join me?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  She bent to rummage in her bag for something. He could see the knobs of her spine when she bent over and her ass was just a little soft thing. One of those trailer park bodies fed on peanut butter and Wonder Bread, where the most exercise was hitting ‘continue watching’ on Netflix. And yet she was right – she hadn’t been bragging, just stating a fact. Somehow she was glowing with health, the way Eli had in his prime. Not to mention that she was on fire to make babies.

  Was there such a thing as an alpha female werewolf?

  Ruby fished out some plastic tube of girl-nonsense – some of those red squishy beads full of goo that exploded when you dropped them in hot water. There was a ribbon tied around the tube, like a gift. “I don’t have a bathtub at home,” she said. “Just a shower. So I bought myself something nice.”

  “Is that like that orange smelling perfume you’re wearing?” he said, wondering where home was. He had a feeling he already knew, what with the extra toe.

  “Oh, that ain’t perfume,” said Ruby. “That’s just Clementine.”

  “Clementine?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and went into the bathroom. He heard water running and lay back, noting with some satisfaction that the headboard had made a little ding in the aqua-colored plaster of the wall behind the bed. Ruby was singing something in the next room and he caught enough for it to connect with the tune she’d been whistling when she walked into the bar. It was Janis Joplin – Mercedes Benz.

  The smell of sweet oranges floated under his nose, but it wasn’t the kind of smell that could have come from those squashy bath beads, or even from the snootiest shop of the finest perfumier in all of Paris. This was real, that sharpness of the zest that only comes from piercing the peel with a fingernail. At the same time he felt something like nails on the back of his brain, scratching gently but firmly like a talented masseuse.

  When he opened his eyes he was looking at a woodsy backyard somewhere. There was a swimming pool – one of those above-ground things like an oversized kid’s wading pool – and playing on the edge was a little girl. Even before he saw the dark of her eyes he knew that it was Ruby. Her pigtails were the darkening brown of a child growing out of her baby blondness, so that she’d be reaching for the bleach bottle ever after to get it back. She was humming that tune – dwelt a miner, forty-niner - and pushing a red plastic truck back and forth along the edge of the pool and he somehow also knew that the truck didn’t belong to her. It was her brother’s, and he loved it so much that he took it to bed with him and slept with his fingers wrapped around it. And she wanted it – maybe not the truck, but the mystery of how and why he loved it, even though she was still far too young for the words to explain such a thing.

  She’d pried the truck loose from his sleeping fingers during a nap, and come outside to play with it. She knew she was doing wrong, and that was why she jumped when she heard a noise. But it was nothing. She didn’t get busted, only when she turned back to her game her elbow caught the truck and sent it – with a ploop noise – tumbling down to the bottom of the pool.

  Charlie watched her watch the toy fall. Little bubbles rose from under the chassis – blowing bubbles, soft and fine...oh my darling – and he was afraid for her. Afraid of what she might do to get it back, because she was only maybe four and you could drown in three inches of water. He watched her looking back and forth between the pool and the house, chewing her lip and thinking of sticks and ways to get the water out so she could retrieve the truck. And she was still humming, only louder now – dreadful sorry, Clementine - in an attempt to cover her sin and pretend everything was okay.

  And yet as she sang the truck started to move, like it was being lifted by an invisible hand. Up and up through the water until she could reach down and grab it and pull it out, water streaming from under the wheels...

  “...how’d you like your bath?” Ruby’s voice jolted him back to the present.

  C
harlie stared around the motel room like he had never seen it before. He’d never been wanting for an imagination, but that was something else. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Wet.” He could still taste the tang of oranges on his tongue.

  She stuck her head around the door to smile at him, then the rest of her followed. Another girl might have draped a towel around herself, but then she was a werewolf; she spent a lot of time naked. “Wet,” she said. “That’s funny.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What just happened?”

  Ruby frowned. “Well,” she said slowly. “When a girl werewolf and a boy werewolf love one another very much, or just when they’re really, really horny...”

  “No, not that,” he said. “I just had a...a vision, I guess.”

  She tilted her head.

  “I saw you,” Charlie said. “When you were a little girl, by the side of a pool. And you were playing with a truck. A red truck. That belonged to your brother...”

  “...and it fell in the water and she reached down in and got it for me,” said Ruby. “Yeah. That was Clementine. The first time.” She leaned on the bathroom door and gave him a long, thoughtful look. “She showed you that? She must like you.”

  “That’s good, right?” he said, thinking again of Gloria and the way the lightbulb swayed in the hallway, and how there was a corner of the coop that the chickens wouldn’t even shit in. And just how bugfuck she’d gone that night when she caught him and Eli dicking around with the Ouija board. He had a good idea of what went down when things like Clementine didn’t like you, and it wasn’t very pretty.

  “She likes flesh,” said Ruby. “Things that get your heart pumping. She’s kind of sexy like that.”

  “Are you a wolf witch?” asked Charlie.

  She shrugged. “I guess. More wolf than witch.”

  “But you have a familiar spirit.”

  Ruby shook her head again, her lower lip caught between her teeth for a second. “No,” she said. “I don’t got the power. Not like the big bad mamas. If I had that kind of power I’d never turn again.”

  “You can stop yourself from turning?” said Charlie, and it made a spine-tingling kind of sense. Was that how Gloria had done it? All those years nobody had even suspected she was a werewolf. And she was almost seventy-one; none of them ever lasted that long, but there it was. The possibility. How many more years of life could he live if his body didn’t have to suffer the stress of being pulled apart and rearranged every month?