Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  “I’m working on it,” said Ruby. “But I heard the old ones can do it. They can keep the wolf down every month, like a cure. A real, actual cure.”

  And they could. At least, Gloria could. And just like that he was angry; why the hell hadn’t she told any of them about this voodoo? All those men and boys who had lived under her roof over the years. Where was our cure, Gloria? When did we get to take the month off?

  “How do you know all this?” said Charlie.

  “Clementine tells me things,” Ruby said, and her expression turned knowing, sly. Right. Because there was no such thing as a free lunch. Or a free motel bang and bath. Whichever.

  “She says she’s here in the Keys,” said Ruby. “The big one. The witch who went after Lyle Raines.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie, still dizzy with the kind of figures he had never even thought were worth thinking about for someone like him. Fifty, sixty, seventy. Maybe even eighty. “She’s here.”

  “You know her? Like, do you think I could meet her?”

  Yeah, there was always an ulterior motive. It figured she was just fucking the roadie to get to the rock star, but she was here now and they were both still naked. “Maybe,” he said, and patted the mattress. Let her work for it.

  *

  Blue dreamed she was in Key West, following Gabe’s dark, seal-sleek shape over the reefs and through the shimmering shoals. He pointed to something and she paddled a little harder, kicking her finned feet to catch up, and then he was gone, vanished in the way of dreams. Ahead of her was the statue – Christ of the Abyss - arms stretched up and out towards the shifting planes of blue filtered sunlight, face and figure crusted with coral and algae.

  She swam closer, obeying the instincts of all divers who came across the sculpture. To look, to marvel, to touch like Thomas. The fish swirled and darted around it. Some feathery growth of seaweed had anchored itself beneath the statue’s left ear, making him look as though he’d grown some kind of strange gill. Suffered a sea change.

  The face was mottled, eyes empty, a mask of holy serenity, a blank slate on which you poured out your prayers.

  The eyes opened. They were blue.

  Salt water slid down the tube and at the same time she tasted it she felt the pain in her lungs that said she had inhaled. Instinctively she spat out the snorkel and knew she was done for; the surface was miles away and she had no breath left to hold, just the saltwater burn under her ribs. And those fallen angel eyes kept on looking, staring, smiling, watching her drown...

  She must have breathed then – let out a breath she had been holding in her sleep.

  “You need to let me out,” said Yael, his voice as clear as she’d ever heard it. “I’m stuck in here and she won’t let me out.”

  Blue thought she smiled in her sleep; she could feel the muscles of her face move as clearly as if she were awake. “You can stay put, you bugaboo.”

  There was a pause and she drank in the sticky quality of his black-brown silence, like the soft, shifting crackle of something being pulled loose from tar. “The wolf won’t let me out,” he said. “But you can.”

  She breathed easy, no longer drowning, the spaces between her vertebrae crawling with the strange knowledge that she was somehow plugged in. This was the closest thing she had ever come to a real conversation with Yael. And there were so many questions.

  “Give me one good reason why I should do that,” she said. She was half awake. She could feel the pillow beneath her cheek shift with the movement of her lips.

  “Because you know me,” said Yael. “And I know you, Shiny-New.”

  “I don’t know you. And you killed that woman. You threatened me. And you tried to kill Candi.”

  Yael laughed and the sticky, crackling sound of it almost brought back the drowning panic. “Just a game, Baby Blue. Had to laugh when I saw those teeth smiling back at me. I’d never harm you, any more than I’d harm Charlie.”

  Right. “Because Charlie is your darling?”

  “That’s right. You see? You’re getting it, cher. She owes me, but she’s stubborn. Stubborn as you. Guess it runs in the family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Figure it out. They weren’t even your grandmama’s ashes, but you took off all the same, didn’t you?”

  Once more Blue had that feeling that something big was just out of reach, some fundamental thing that would make sense of the spaces inbetween and set the void in motion in a way she could control. Power. It tasted like black licorice on the tongue, the kind of thing you either loved or hated. And both ways it could make you sick.

  But then there was a flash, a kind of fizz of interference like the one that had come on when she was flying. She saw words written on a wall, daubed up there in some red-brown substance that had to be blood. Only they made no sense – it was like her brain had forgotten how to read and the letters were once again the weird, potent glyphs they had been in the days before she knew that A is for Apple.

  Another flash. Flies. A big, buzzing cloud of the things, their tiny carrion bodies gleaming blue-green-black as they swarmed over the surface of something bad in a fruit bowl. A carnival of rot, and a smell like death in the back of the nose.

  “Help me,” Yael said, his voice fading now. “Set me free and set the world to rights. No more trouble, no more fighting, no more putting one another down like dogs...”

  Fsst. An unknown man stuck his tongue out a medicine cabinet mirror. His red-rimmed eyes were green, his tongue was covered in huge, translucent blisters.

  She can’t hold on anymore...

  A lightbulb swung somewhere in the house. Blue heard a chair scrape across a floor, the sound of retching. Yael was all but gone now, but she heard him one last time.

  “The pack needs a new wolf witch. And you know who that is, don’t you?”

  “Get out of my head,” she said, and woke up to the sound of a slamming door.

  It was Gabe. She lay there on the bed, listening to him moving about downstairs. There was no question of resuming her nap; she had jolted out of sleep and felt sweaty and uncomfortable from falling asleep in all her clothes. The licorice taste was still lingering in her mouth and she found to her unease that she didn’t hate it.

  She went downstairs, hoping that the sight of him could make her feel like something was still normal, but he took one look at her and frowned. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just fell asleep. This place is giving me nightmares.” She went to the sink and drew a glass of water. He watched her with the kind of wariness she hated to see from him; if he was spooked then it meant the world really had gone mad.

  “Good news,” he said. “I’ve found a traveling cage. We’ll find a safe way to knock her out and get the hell out of Amityville.”

  “You know she won’t take pills,” said Blue. “I’ve tried to give her vitamins, but she just eats around them when I try to hide them in her turkey.”

  Her teeth threatened to clatter on the edge of the glass when she drank: she set it down.

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “So we just tranq her.”

  “No, Gabe. No. We’ve been through this. She’s still so skinny. What if we accidentally give her too much?”

  They all had reasons to dread Gloria’s death, but Blue had a new, uneasy feeling that there was something far worse than grief. What if Gloria was the only person who could hold Yael in check?

  Gabe sighed. “Fine,” he said. “But we can’t stay here. Who knows what that thing is going to do to us all?”

  Blue stared down at the glass and figured she may as well just say it. “I’m so scared.”

  He touched her shoulder and turned her around to face him. “I know,” he said. “Me, too. But we’re going to be okay. I promise. Once we get out of this house everything is going to be a lot easier to deal with.”

  Everything was simple with him. If your house was haunted, tell yourself you didn’t believe in ghosts. If that didn’t work, leave the house. And
take the werewolf in the basement with you. Blue felt a strange urge to laugh, but Gabe misinterpreted the shiver than ran through her.

  “Can you stand to be here a little longer?” he said. “I’m gonna go down to Marathon to pick up this cage. I shouldn’t be long, providing the traffic isn’t too crazy.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Get it done.”

  He kissed her lightly. “Okay. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, and meant it. She had no idea how crazy she might have already become without his practicality to steady her. She watched him go and wondered if this was – in a very strange way – his element. For all he could be hot-headed at times he was accustomed to taking care of people in a dangerous place. He could tell you all the horrible ways you could die out there on the reefs, but he did it in such a level, informed way that you felt safe.

  And was this her element? The haunted house, the Ouija board, the witch balls and the sacred yew and the blood smeared on the doorpost. That Yaelish voice was back and she wasn’t sure if it was really him or something in her, the same something that kept quibbling over tranquilizer doses because deep down it wanted to stay here. Just to see what happened.

  There was a knock at the door. She ignored it, but it turned to a pounding and she could hear Gloria howling over the soundproofing in the basement. Blue crossed the kitchen, moving slowly and carefully the way you often did when you were trying to pretend you weren’t home. She turned to sit down and almost screamed when she saw him; Charlie had moved to the back door and was peering in through the glass, his hands cupped over it to try and see inside.

  Blue opened the door. “You can’t be here,” she said, more irritably than she meant to. Her nerves were in shreds.

  Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Uh...looks like I am,” he said, and stuck his head into the door. He caught the sound of Gloria’s howling. “Is that her?”

  “She doesn’t want you here,” said Blue.

  “Really?” said Charlie. “You know that for a fact?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded. His eyes were the same shade of blue as her dream. “So, what?” he said. “You speak wolf now?”

  “I...kind of do,” said Blue. “Yeah. And she’s made it very clear she doesn’t want you around.”

  Charlie ground his back teeth and at once she could see the edge in him, that nervous, jittery quality that had repelled her so thoroughly the first time she had met him. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know who you think you are...”

  “I was asked to take care of Gloria,” she said, appalled at how much she wanted to slap him down all of a sudden. “So I’m taking care of her, in whatever shape she happens to be in at the time. Believe me, you do not want to be in this house if she doesn’t want you here.”

  He curled his lip. “Why? What’s she gonna do? Poop on the floor?”

  “If you must know, yeah,” said Blue. “She does tend to...show her displeasure that way. And I’m just about sick of cleaning up wolf shit.”

  Charlie said nothing for a moment. His mouth was a compressed line but she could see something in his eyes that betrayed a smile. A sense of humor. There was charm in there somewhere, when he relaxed enough to quit coming on like a juggernaut.

  Gloria right on howling, and that was when Blue noticed that the iron nails in the door frame were once again shivering and squirming on their own, like they were trying to work themselves loose from their holes. Charlie turned to look and the smile drained from his eyes, replaced by the same dreadful curiosity she felt sure was going to land her in trouble one of these days.

  “See?” she said. “You woke it up. The last time it got this lively it gave an old lady a stroke.”

  “Holy shit,” said Charlie, staring at the nails. “Is that Yael?”

  11

  Neutral ground, Charlie said, and that worked for Blue. She met him at the nearest beach, where he was sitting on a picnic bench with two vivid blue slushies in front of him.

  “Here,” he said, pushing one towards her. “Got you something to drink.” He smiled and his teeth were already tinged with it. “She stop howling yet?”

  “Yeah. As soon as you left.” Blue poked the straw into the crushed ice and stirred it around. “So what do you know about Yael? And don’t tell me some moldy old ghost story you used to tell when you were a kid, because I know Yael isn’t the ghost of a person. I’ve figured that much out.”

  He let out a short laugh. “Jesus. I can see why Gloria likes you.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “You channeling her or something?”

  “If I could do that,” said Blue. “I’d have a whole lot more answers. And my previous source of supernatural information has dried up. So help me out here.”

  “Okay,” said Charlie, scratching the back of his neck. She could almost smell his skin frying in the sun. “The way I always understood it, Yael is like a...spirit. Or a force. You know, like in Star Wars.”

  “Star Wars. Right. And has he always been in that house?”

  “He’s always been around,” said Charlie. “I don’t know about the house, specifically. Spirits are kind of hard to pin down like that.”

  “He said he’d never harm you.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. “Well, that’s good to know. So why doesn’t he want me around?”

  “Maybe he does,” said Blue. “But Gloria doesn’t. Like a conflict of interest with herself. Once she told me that Yael rode her around like a busted truck, and I think he can do that. I’ve felt him do it. Like he can crawl into your skin and walk around in it.”

  He pulled a face. “That sounds...awful.”

  “Oh, it’s only slightly terrifying,” she said. “Nothing I’m not getting used to.” She took a sip of the cold, sugary slush. “Luke Grayson told me that he thought she’d been sharing a body with this thing all these years, but how does that even work when her body is...well, you know? Yael said something about a deal she made with him, but she broke it. Do you think that was how she broke it? Like she’d made a deal to share a human body with him but broke it when she turned into a w...”

  Charlie held up a hand. “Cool your jets, sparky. Jesus. And keep your voice down.”

  “Sorry. I spend so much time trying to figure stuff out that I’m desperate for anyone to bounce ideas off of.”

  Charlie slurped his drink. “Gabe’s not much help with that, huh?”

  “Gabe’s practical. He’s plenty of help.”

  He gave her a teasing, skeptical look and prodded the ice in his cup with the straw. “Whatever you say.”

  “I can’t get hold of Grayson,” she said, annoyed that he appeared to be ribbing her, of all things. “And it’s not exactly easy to talk to Gloria right now.”

  “Right,” said Charlie. “Which is why you’re so desperate you’re talking to a man whose main frame of reference is Star Wars.”

  “Okay. Yael is like The Force. Let’s go from there.”

  Charlie shook his head. “No, he’s not.”

  “No?”

  “Uh uh. He’s more like...he’s more like Obi Wan. Or Yoda. After they died, obviously.” He screwed up his forehead in thought. “But less like a mentor and more of a servant, I guess.”

  “That’s nothing like Obi Wan. Or Yoda. They were masters.”

  “Right,” said Charlie, frustrated. “Bad analogy.”

  He took out his phone. “Let’s try this instead,” he said, and after a couple of minutes he handed it over.

  Blue cupped her hands over the screen to shut out the glare of the sun, but the words were inky and blotched, like the earliest and cheapest moveable type. She enlarged the screen and squinted.

  My familiar has no legs, no hands, no feet, nor even a body with which to do my bidding. In truth I do its bidding, and for all it has no head it has prodigious teeth with which to bite and tear, and for all it has no paws it has great scything claws. Ay, and eyes too – all the better to
see you with – you milk-and-water mumblers of psalms. My body is the temple of this spirit, and if you slay me you set it loose upon the land, unchecked and ravening as the wolf.

  “What am I looking at?” she said.

  “Trial testimony of Meg McBride,” said Charlie.

  “I’ve heard that name,” she said, and in that instant she could see it all - the bedraggled witch with the marks of torture all over her body, her dirty hair straggling either side of her bruised face. She was standing in some dank medieval hall where the cold was so deep that it seemed to seep out of the old gray stones themselves. “She was a witch?”

  “The biggest,” said Charlie. “And the baddest. She was like Gloria’s great-great-great something grandmother. That familiar sounds a lot like our Yael, don’t it?”

  Blue frowned down at the screen again. “It’s a threat,” she said. “Like she’s saying that she’s the only one holding it in check and that if they...”

  “...if they strike her down then she will become more powerful than they can ever imagine.” He reached over for his phone, looking almost moronically pleased with himself. “Obi Wan. Told ya.”

  “So what happened?” she said.

  “Well, they burned her. This was in Scotland in like fifteen something or other. The king was James – the Bible guy. He was fucking obsessed with witches. Wrote a book about demons and everything. The only thing he hated nearly as much as witches were wolves, and there were plenty of those around. They used to tear up sheep and pick off travelers. Dig up graveyards for the fresh corpses.”

  “How lovely.”

  “I know, right?” Charlie grinned. “And then there were the wolves who were witches and the witches who were wolves, like our girl McBride. She gave that little speech there after they’d finished pulling out all her finger nails, and when she was done they put her in a scold’s bridle – you know? One of those Hellraiser contraptions they strap on your head and it drives spikes into your tongue and –”