by Anna Roberts
“What does it mean?” she asked, and she heard herself speak the words clearly and carefully. There was something here she needed to learn and she willed herself to remember when she woke up. Not that she should have even been dreaming about this; she was no longer in the same house as Yael.
“What it always meant,” said the man. “I needed a body. I am wholly spirit, remember?”
“Oh God,” she said. “It’s you.”
He grinned and spread his hands. “And him,” he said. “And her. And maybe a little bit of you, too. It’s always a party when you have more than one person in your head, cher.”
He spoke with an affected Louisiana twang, but it was there underneath the words. That grimy stickiness. And somehow she knew that whoever he was he’d been inhabited by Yael, enough for the sound of it to stick on his tongue forever.
“Get out,” she said, unable to believe this was happening again. “Get out of my goddamn head...”
And then there was another voice – thin, but so unexpected that it jerked her awake. Gloria’s voice. “Take me back to the house before he gets out. I can’t hold him in here much longer.”
Blue woke up in the dark of the bedroom, Gloria’s voice still in her ears. Gabe lay sleeping beside her. And for a brief, scrabbling second of sanity she thought it would be both cruel and flaky to wake him up just because she’d had a nightmare.
Then she heard it.
It was a low, repetitive sound somewhere between a creak and a squeak, like the noise a mouse might have made chewing on something in the dead of night. It was coming from directly above their heads.
She had no idea what it was but her overriding urge was to get out from under it, so she leapt out of bed and turned on the light.
Gabe groaned and swore, but the shadows on the wall were already swaying and swinging in that dizzy, carnival funhouse way that Yael loved so much. The light fitting swung in wild, uneven circles.
“Move,” said Blue, pulling his arm.
He made a low noise of protest but rolled out anyway, his face screwed up against the light. “Oh, what the fuck,” he said, when he realized the light fitting was moving. “What now?”
He sounded tired and annoyed, and maybe he was. They had gone to all this trouble moving Gloria and it hadn’t worked.
“We brought it with us,” said Blue, quickly throwing on some shorts and a t-shirt.
“I thought you said the house was keeping it in?”
“I was wrong,” she said. “I don’t think the house was the only thing holding it.”
Gabe groaned again. “This is fucking stupid,” he said, his voice still growly with sleep. “Look, just calm down and...”
The ceiling creaked. They both instinctively stepped back, huddling in the bedroom door as they watched. The light was being pulled now, by unseen hands, the wiring coming loose so that the bulb began to flicker on and off. It was still being pulled in circles but this time the angle was so acute that the metal prongs of the candelabra-style fixing scored arcs in the plaster of the ceiling.
Gloria began to howl, and Blue realized there was no time to lose. There was a crash and a spattery rain of plaster and the lights went out, heightening her panic as she ran for the basement door.
Gabe turned on the lights behind her, but Yael was on a roll, swinging every fitting he could get his invisible hands on and turning the house into a queasy, flickering nightmare.
Gloria was pacing back and forth with a frightened, restless energy, her paws barely touching the floor. Heart in mouth, Blue reached for the padlocks, her hands shaking as she turned the key. She heard Gabe at the top of the stairs, but she kept on unlocking, despite the flickering fluorescents overhead and his panicked protest.
“No, what are you doing? Stop!”
Blue threw the cage open. “Let her out!” she yelled, as Gloria streaked past her and up the stairs. She heard Gabe curse and then there was quiet. The lights buzzed noisily and then stopped flickering. A second of quiet before Gabe erupted.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he said, as she surfaced from the basement. His face was white to the lips.
“Get the truck. We have to follow her.”
He gave her an incredulous look but did as he was told, grabbing the tranq gun on his way out. “Follow her where?” he said.
“Home.”
Gabe shook his head as he got into the truck. His jaw was set and hostile silence crackled around him like static. “You just turned a werewolf loose,” he said. “After everything I’ve told you –”
“ – I know, and I’m sorry but –”
“ – you’re sorry? Oh, well I’m sure that’s going to mean a lot to the victims’ families when Gloria starts doing what comes naturally and fucking eating people.”
“She needs to be back in her own house.”
“What are you even talking about?”
“The house,” said Blue, in desperation. “She needs to be there. There are spells there that make it like...a...a second line of defense.”
He sighed. “Right,” he said. “Of course. That makes perfect sense. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
She backed off; there wasn’t a thing she could do with him when he was being sarcastic. She just had to rely on her hunch paying off.
The house was alive when they reached it. Blue had been through every last inch of it making sure that appliances were switched off and unplugged, but the lights were flickering on and off indoors. The porch creaked and the windchimes clanked and jingled like they were caught in the beginnings of a hurricane.
Gabe stared at it with his mouth open. “What the hell is going on?” he said, opening the car door.
Blue made out a shaggy shape somewhere on the porch, and then Gloria padded into view. She sat down on the doormat like an obedient dog waiting to be let in.
“Perhaps we should go to the back door,” said Gabe, but Blue was already halfway to the porch, the key in her hand.
Gloria shuffled back on her haunches, her nose twitching. There was a strange, burnt smell in the air and Blue – who had never been at ease with the house’s elderly wiring – had visions of the place burning to the ground. Her fear pushed her forward despite the literal wolf at the door. She unlocked the door and Gloria nosed past her legs and into the house.
“Holy shit,” said Gabe, stepping up behind her. “How did you know she’d do that?”
There was never going to be a good time to tell him that she hadn’t, so she didn’t.
“What’s that smell?” he said, following his nose to the door frame. The windchimes had slowed now, but as Blue drew closer to where he was looking she saw that there were scorch marks in the wood surrounding the iron nails Gloria had hammered in there to keep Yael in. When she reached out to touch them she could feel the heat on her fingertip.
“Ow.” Gabe stuck his finger in his mouth.
“They’re hot.”
“Thank you. I noticed.”
Blue went inside the house. The shadows were still swaying on the walls in a way she had grown to heartily loathe. “Same old tricks, Yael,” she muttered. “Guess they were right about old dogs after all.”
Gloria whined from the darkness by the basement door, making Blue jump.
“Okay,” Blue said. “Let’s get you back home.”
But the whine turned to a growl; Gloria had spotted the gun in Gabe’s hands, her whole gummy upper lip vibrating in time with the deep, slow growl rising up out of the bottom of her chest.
Blue stood very still. Her guts felt as though they’d been replaced with a gallon of ice-water. She had the keys still in her hand but was suddenly very conscious of the sound they’d make if she moved to put them in the lock. Not that that was going to happen. Not with a snarling wolf in the way.
Gabe said nothing. He didn’t have to. She could feel the tension in his body mirroring that of her own from six feet away. Gloria rumbled like an earthquake, her tidy good-dog haunches now tensed with
a coiled power that was distinctly undomesticated.
She was still in there. She had to be in there somewhere; Blue had heard her voice so clearly on the edge of that dream.
And then a strange thing happened.
Blue tasted the tar-black of the spaces inbetween, those tiny gaps in nature where matter and mind were malleable and sticky. She felt the brown fuzzy substance of the wolf and the thin gray stuff of the woman, and saw in her mind’s eye the line where they blurred and bled into one another. But they were breaking apart – there were holes in the boundary line and between them was a black so deep it almost glowed, and she knew that black could only be one thing. Yael.
The wolf, the witch and the spirit – they were all there in the one body.
Make her stop.
The unspoken command weighed heavy at the top of Blue’s spine. She appealed directly to the human part of Gloria and she heard Gabe exhale as Gloria stopped snarling and stepped away from the door. Blue had first thought the wolf had got spooked, but as she saw the woman-substance and wolf-substance tighten their mesh above the void beneath she heard Yael howling with a rage that made her blood run cold.
He’d come so close, only to be thwarted. And he was mad as hell.
Gloria trotted down the stairs and back into her cage as she’d done before. Blue locked the cage with shaking hands, her back and brain feeling itchy and sparky with a low grade electrical crackle that she now recognized as witchcraft.
And there was pride, too. A little black poison prick of it; she’d done it. She’d pulled off a feat of real wolf witchery and subdued a wolf the way Gloria had subdued Axl.
She heard Gabe swallow loudly behind her. His mouth sounded as dry as hers felt. “What just happened?” he said.
Gloria stuck her nose in her water dish and began to drink with loud, wet slurps.
“I was wrong,” said Blue, watching her. “I see it now. All this time I thought the house was the thing holding it in, but it’s not.”
“So why did she need to come back here?”
“Because it helps,” said Blue. “Think of Yael as a prisoner. A really angry, dangerous prisoner. The house, the iron, the salt, the blood, the yew, the wards and the witchballs – they’re just the perimeter fence, the gun turrets with the guards.”
“Okay,” said Gabe. “So what’s the actual cell?”
Blue stared once more at the wolf slopping water all over the floor. “She is,” she said.
“You mean that thing is in her?”
“I think so. For a while now. I’ve been learning some things...”
“Good,” he said. “Can you explain them in words that I’d understand?”
She gave him a sidelong look. “It’s...ooga booga stuff.”
“Humor me.”
“Okay,” she said. “So it seems like some of the old wolf witches also worked with spirits like Yael. And they were powerful. Really powerful. I don’t know how these relationships between spirit and witch used to work but whatever went down with Yael and Gloria, it was messy. Ugly. And he’s turned into something she can’t control. All she can do is hold him. And I don’t know how much longer she can keep doing that.”
“So we get rid of him,” said Gabe. “Have an exorcism or something.”
Gloria came over to the bars and stuck her paw through them, indicating that she wanted the Ouija board.
Blue pushed it over. Gloria set a paw on the planchette and went to work.
K-E-E-P-Y-A-E-L-I-N
“Gotcha,” said Blue. “Sorry about that. We won’t do it again.”
“Is Yael in you?” asked Gabe.
YES
“Jesus,” he said softly, but Gloria wasn’t done.
B-O-U-N-D-2-T-H-E-W-O-L-F
“Bound to the wolf?” said Blue. “Yael is bound to the wolf?”
YES
“Makes sense,” she said. “He’s a pack spirit.” And then something clicked in her mind. “Oh my God. Is that why you shifted?”
“Huh?” said Gabe.
“It’s like you said; it’s a last resort. Like shifting to repair your injuries because it’s easier to heal as a wolf. A less complex body and brain. Maybe it’s easier for her to keep Yael inside when she’s a wolf. Is that it, Gloria? Is that why you won’t go back?”
The paw moved the planchette to YES.
“Great,” said Gabe. “How do we get rid of Yael?”
Gloria whuffed through her nostrils and gave him a long, dirty look.
“That’s probably a no,” said Blue, but Gloria was off again with the board.
Y-A-E-L-I-S-E-N-E-R-G-Y
“Yael is energy,” Blue echoed. “Okay. What does that mean?”
“Basic physics,” said Gabe. “Energy can’t be destroyed. It just transfers to another state. Is that what you mean, Gloria?”
YES
Blue shivered. If malice were energy then Yael could have lit up the entire panhandle. “You definitely don’t want to try extracting him,” she said. “He killed that woman and gave Candi Statham a minor stroke. And that was when Gloria was still holding him in check.”
“Super,” said Gabe. “So basically your pet spirit has gone nuts.”
Gloria pushed the planchette again. She was swaying a little on her hindquarters now, but she managed to spell out B-U-G-F-U, which was enough to give them a shot at guessing the final two letters of that message.
“She’s tired,” said Blue, but Gabe was pressing.
“What happens when you can’t hold him any more?” he asked Gloria.
B-A-D
That was all she said. Then she wobbled off to her bed and fell asleep.
“Bad?” said Gabe.
“You don’t want to think too much about that,” said Blue. “Trust me.”
*
Charlie came by the hotel. Blue saw him lurking near the boat shed as she took the vacuum cleaner back to the laundry. Stacy waved to him and Renee – who was so deep down good that it was bad for her – reared back as though the Devil himself had blown through Georgia and come all the way down to the Keys.
“What’s her fuckin’ problem?” Charlie muttered, cigarette already between his fingers.
“How long you got?” said Blue. Renee had a lot of problems, the biggest one being a one-legged diabetic husband who refused to switch to Diet Mountain Dew.
Blue caught hold of Charlie’s arm and tugged him out of sight behind the boat shed. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as always. I wanna see Gloria. But I figured I’d check with you first.”
She sighed and leaned back against the weathered boards of the shed, not sure whether to feel relieved or just more anxious. The acrid smoke from Charlie’s Lucky curled up and under her nose, tickling and stirring old cravings. In one way she appreciated that he wanted to check with her, but it didn’t help that he kept on pushing.
“It’s what you thought,” she said. “And worse.”
“Worse? What do you mean? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that she’s got that thing inside her. Like Meg McBride. She says Yael is bound to the wolf and he can’t get out as long as she stays...wolfy.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow. “You got all of that from a Ouija board?”
“We have a rapport.” She tasted smoke on her tongue and sighed. “Can I have one of those?”
“Sure.” He offered her the pack and a light. She almost repented when she breathed in and felt her tastebuds crisp and burn, but the oldest and dumbest habits were always the ones that died the hardest. Her head spun from the unaccustomed nicotine, but she couldn’t deny that it felt good to have a butt between her fingers.
“Did you ask her if she’d see me?” said Charlie.
Blue exhaled, holding down a schoolgirlish cough as she shook her head. “It was a rough night, okay? I didn’t really have time.” God, what a night. She kept trying to remember her dream – the words on the wall. Deep in her own sleep she’d tried to remember
that they were important, that she would have to wake slowly and carefully, cradling the fragile memory in her mind. Only she hadn’t had that luxury. She’d been jerked out of sleep by Yael and the precious words had got smashed like so much spun glass.
Her tongue watered in protest at the smoke parching it, and for an awful moment she thought she was going to be sick. “What’s the deal with you two anyway?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” said Blue. “What happened between you two? If you’re her darling...if she loves you so damn much why did Eli get the Keys and not you?”
He blinked. “You don’t fuck around, do you?”
“I’m done not getting a straight answer,” she said. “And I can’t fix whatever’s going on between you and Gloria if I don’t. So spill already.”
Charlie sighed and leaned back against the side of the boat shed. The wood creaked. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the thing. Did Gloria ever tell you about how I wound up with her?”
“About your uncle? Yeah. I heard something about it.” She had a feeling he’d locked himself in the cage for safety the night Reese had died and Gloria turned, and she’d always been curious. So much like what had happened to him as a child, when he’d been forced to watch from a cage while his werewolf uncle ate his mother.
“After my mom was killed Gloria dug me out of the foster system,” said Charlie. “Don’t know how, but that was just one of the things she could always do – red tape meant nothing to her. It was like witchcraft, the way she got past it. She was never the touchy-feely type, you know? Never forced me to talk about my feelings or the things I’d seen. I guess she just figured I’d get over them quicker if I didn’t dwell on it.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Blue, thinking of the survivors groups where well-meaning people had encouraged them to recount their experiences of the drowned city. They hadn’t helped. If anything they’d just refreshed her memory.
“So I got on with life,” he said. “And told myself I’d kill the fucker one day. My uncle, that is. I figured he had to pay for what he did to my mom. When I was eighteen I went looking for him, and Gloria somehow figured out what I was planning. Maybe Eli tattled or something; I never found out. Anyway, she was pissed. She said nothing good could ever come of it, and that if I went ahead and did it anyway then I shouldn’t bother coming back.”
