Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  “I just want my baby...”

  ...of his bones are coral made...

  Her knees buckled, her head feeling like it was going to burst. Her heart roared in her chest. It was too much, too big. God, how had the old lady stood it? A great white, she’d once called it, and it was. A monster. A thrashing beast that was going to tear her apart from the inside.

  And it was going to give her the thing she wanted more than anything in the world.

  *

  Gabe called when Blue was upstairs making the beds. “The police were here,” he said. “This is bad.”

  “Police?” she said, holding the phone with her shoulder as she wrangled a fresh pillow slip. “Looking for Gloria?”

  “No,” he said. “Joe, this time.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know.”

  “Please don’t tell me you told them he was in Arizona.”

  Gabe sighed. “No, but it gets worse.”

  “Why? What happened now?”

  “They showed up at the marina,” he said. “I’m probably going to lose my mooring there now that Kate’s turfed me off the pier. I told Hank I was good for the deposit – it’s like two grand – but I can make that back in less than a week so long as I have a boat.”

  “Well, did you tell him that?”

  “Obviously,” said Gabe. “But then the cops come sniffing around making the misere and now Hank thinks I’m into coke, or Cubans. Or worse.”

  Blue plumped the pillows in place. “I can get the money,” she said.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Yes, I can. I have some savings. And you said yourself all you need is a boat and somewhere to moor it. You’ll always be able to make money taking tourists onto the reef.”

  He sighed again. “I can’t ask you to –”

  “– you didn’t ask. I offered. There’s a difference.”

  She heard something thud downstairs and froze. “Wait,” she said.

  “Wait? Blue, what are you talking about? Look, it’s real simple – I am not taking your money, okay?”

  “ – no, shh,” she said, like whoever was in the house could hear him. Someone was definitely down there in the kitchen. Or something. She heard a slow rattle, as if the all the china in the cabinets were vibrating like the house was built on a fault line. She heard a woman’s voice whimpering – “Please, please, no,” – and felt the floorboards surge and swell under her feet like a wave. Holy mother of God, was that Yael?

  “I’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up. Her first thought was that Gloria had died and Yael had escaped into the body of an Avon lady or some innocent caller who’d stuck her head around the back door. Blue hurried down the stairs as quietly as she could; someone was moaning and crying softly in the kitchen, and as she drew closer – and this was the weirdest part – she smelled something sweet and tart, like the fine spray of zest that comes when you pierce the skin of a ripe orange with your fingernail.

  And it had a voice. The smell had a voice, just like Yael, only this voice was soft and scared and all it said was help and then Yael’s voice bubbled up like black tar, laughing and singing...

  ...so I kissed her little sister, and forgot my Clementine. Come to join the party, Baby Blue?

  “You can go fuck yourself, Yael,” said Blue, and she thought if she hadn’t known any better she might not have heard the tremor in her own voice. She opened the basement door and quickly flicked on the light, rousing Gloria from a nap. And just like that she felt Yael yanked past her ankles and down the stairs and back into the body of the blinking wolf below. With just a yawn Gloria had sucked him back into his cell, but it was becoming more and more obvious that she could no longer hold him when she was asleep.

  “Wait there,” Blue said, and went to the kitchen.

  There was a blonde girl on the floor. She was curled in a tiny ball against the door of the cupboard below the sink, a skinny bundle of tattooed limbs. She was still whimpering – help me, help me, please – and shaking hard enough to rattle the cupboard door. The roots of her hair were dark and when she looked up her eyes were black, but her name was red and Blue somehow connected the dots and the smell of her with the girl she’d seen hitchhiking when she was flying over the Keys.

  “Ruby?” she said.

  The girl stared. “How...how do you know my name?”

  “Long story,” said Blue. “What the hell are you doing in my kitchen?”

  Ruby’s eyes overflowed, and not for the first time, by the looks of it. Her pale face was streaked with mascara tears. “I didn’t mean it,” she said, in a squeaky, scared voice. “I swear, I didn’t.”

  “Which part? The breaking or the entering?”

  The girl held up her hands. “Please. I’m pregnant. Don’t hit me.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” said Blue, and deliberately reached for the phone on the kitchen wall. “Guess I’ll just call the police instead.”

  She waited for Ruby to plead or panic, but Ruby didn’t take the bait. “You don’t need ‘em,” she said. “They don’t do spirits. Besides, that thing is afraid of you.”

  Blue replaced the receiver. “What thing?”

  “That thing. That voice. It started showing me nasty things – hearts and blood and someone getting shot and thrown into the ocean.”

  Blue held out a hand and helped Ruby up from the floor. “Yeah. It’ll do that,” she said, still not sure about this stranger. The delicate orange peel smell was gone now, as was the soft little voice that cried help, but there was a distinct witchy vibe clinging to Ruby, in spite of how her pentacle necklace and black eyeliner spoke of affectations.

  “You’re a werewolf,” said Blue, remembering her night flight once more.

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Again, long story. Sit down, please. You’re making me nervous.”

  Ruby sat, her bony white elbows on the kitchen table. “I thought you’d be older,” she said. “And whiter.”

  Blue raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, I’m not being racist,” said Ruby. “I just thought she was an old white lady. The wolf witch, that is.”

  “I’m the cleaning lady,” said Blue, with some asperity.

  Ruby shook her head. “Nah. You’re a wolf witch. You might not be the wolf witch, but you’re a wolf witch. Tough enough to scare off that spirit beastie, anyhow.”

  “I know how to rattle the keys to his cage. That’s all.” And who knew how much longer the cage would hold?

  Blue poured out a couple of glasses of water and handed one to Ruby; not so much out of good manners but out of the knowledge that Ruby would desperately want to try and rinse the taste of Yael out of her head.

  “Thank you,” said Ruby. “Your name is Blue, right? Like the color?”

  “Yes. I’d ask how you know, but...”

  “...long story. Right.” Ruby sipped. “It’s pretty. Unusual.”

  “Thank you. But don’t get cozy; you’re still uninvited.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “So,” said Blue, swallowing water. “What do you want?”

  Ruby took a breath, like she was launching into a rehearsed spiel. “I came down from Tavernier...”

  Ah. “From Eli’s?” said Blue. “Well, I guess that explains how you got pregnant.”

  “It’s not his baby.”

  Blue sat down. No wonder Eli was pouting lately, although she had always suspected that ‘pouting’ was his default state. “Okay,” she said, taking a wild guess as to why a pregnant woman would come to a witch. For ergot and pennyroyal, for reasons as old as human error. “And you don’t want it?”

  Ruby shook her head vehemently. “No, I do. All I ever wanted was a baby, but if I do get pregnant I never keep them. The moon comes and I change and it’s like...” She trailed off, like she thought she was talking to someone who didn’t understand.

  “No, I get it,” said Blue, thinking of Gabe’s weird dangling thumb and the blood in his eye. �
�I know it’s violent. And painful.”

  Ruby’s eyes glistened. “I always lose it,” she said. “And it’s nearly time. Again.”

  “And there’s something you think Gloria can do?”

  As soon as she’d said it Blue realized she’d been stupid; she’d given away that Gloria was still around. To a stranger, no less.

  Ruby quickly sniffed back her unshed tears and seemed to light up with a terrible hunger, one that Blue knew all too well. Power. Nothing that made you want it that much could lead to anything good.

  “I work with spirits,” said Ruby. “They can keep me from changing.”

  It was an extraordinary announcement, and for a moment Blue let the possibility hang there in the air, like a coin flip spinning in slow motion. All that pain, all that danger – it could be avoided?

  Heads, tails, heads, tails.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Just that,” said Ruby. “I call on spirits and they keep me human. Or at least, they try. I got the one right now – Clementine – but she’s little, and soft. She can do it for a whole night now, so’s I only turn two days of the full moon instead of three, but I’m pregnant now, and she don’t got the juice. I need a stronger spirit.”

  The coin in Blue’s mind came tumbling down. “No,” she said.

  Ruby frowned. “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “Just that,” said Blue, wondering if the girl was stupid, insane or both. “If you’re thinking of working with...” She was about to say ‘Yael’ but stopped herself. Somewhere she remembered that if you had a name for a thing you had the power to call it. “The spirit in this house won’t help you,” she said. “It’d be like trying to put a leash on a full-grown bull alligator; it’ll eat your pets, your family and you.”

  “I know it’s scary –”

  “– scary? Are you nuts? It shows you blood and murder and you want to invite it into your goddamn baby oven?”

  “It can help me,” said Ruby, almost shouting. “It’s done it before. It said so. Like with Gloria – the old lady. She kept from changing, didn’t she? She kept her baby.”

  “What baby?” Blue stiffened, thinking of the picture she’d stuffed in her wallet. West 1967. She’d explored every possibility, raked through every last conversation with Gloria and everyone around town.

  Ruby leaned back in her chair. “Why, Charlie, of course.”

  “Charlie?”

  “Sure. He’s her son, right?”

  “No,” said Blue. “His mother was a nurse up in Pensacola. She was killed when Charlie was nine.”

  Ruby seemed to deflate. “Are you sure?”

  “Very. I heard the story from more than one person. As far as I know Gloria doesn’t have any children.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I asked her. And because she’s lived here for years and nobody around town ever mentioned anything about her having kids of her own. Fosters, sure, but none of her own that anyone knows of.”

  Deep down Blue knew that Ruby was onto something; Gloria must have figured out a way to keep lycanthropy at bay, long enough for her to surprise all those foster-sons when she’d turned into a wolf. But how long ago had she figured it out? And did it make it possible that Yael knew something of the truth?

  Guess it runs in the family...

  “I don’t understand,” said Ruby. “It showed me –”

  “ - it lies, Ruby. It lies and it hurts and it kills. Don’t even think about trying to make friends with it.”

  “But it did, didn’t it? It stopped her from changing.”

  Blue stood up. “We can’t help you,” she said. “You need to leave.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Both.”

  Ruby looked belligerent, and for an awful moment Blue wondered if she was going to have to call Ruby’s bluff and take a swing at a pregnant woman, but then Ruby pushed back her chair and slunk – scowling - out of the back door.

  Blue locked the door behind her. Dust motes danced in a sudden bright burst of sunshine streaming through the window. The air felt heavy and charged, the way it often did when Yael was restive. Blue stood and listened to the silence, testing its weight and qualities, feeling the blood gently thud against her eardrums.

  Nothing.

  She went back to the basement.

  Gloria was awake, but she had the look of a wrung-out mop. Her belly was on the ground and her hips stuck up sharp through her fur, as though Yael had been devouring the very substance of her, like a tapeworm or a tumor.

  “I hate to bug you,” said Blue, pushing the Ouija board in front of her. “But I need answers.”

  Gloria just blinked.

  Blue knelt down on the floor. “Come on, Gloria. Help me out. Yes or no. Did Yael keep you from changing all these years? Is that how nobody knew you were a werewolf?”

  Gloria looked directly back at her but didn’t move. Not a paw.

  “You know the answer,” said Blue. “It’s simple. Yes or no. Was it Yael?”

  No reply.

  “Right. So you know and you won’t tell me?”

  Gloria stuck out a paw and shakily batted the planchette over to YES. Blue guessed why Gloria wouldn’t tell her explicitly; for the same reasons she had tried to scare off Ruby not five minutes ago. Whatever magic Yael had worked was not worth it; Gloria had lived long past a werewolf’s normal life expectancy, only to get sucker punched by Alzheimer’s and being forced to share a body with a homicidal maniac.

  “Just tell me straight,” said Blue. “Was letting him share your body part of the deal?”

  The paw moved shakily – YES – and kept on going. I-M-D...

  Blue watched, wondering once again what was going to happen when Gloria could no longer contain the crazy spirit.

  ...Y-I-N

  Gloria was too weak to push the planchette over to G, but she didn’t need to. Blue got the message.

  16

  She didn’t tell Gabe.

  He had enough on his mind with the boat and trying to hang onto his livelihood, and the moon was only a day away, pressing home just how much food werewolves needed in the run up to the change; they had spent a small fortune on meat for Gloria alone.

  Blue’s stomach rumbled when she saw the empty shelves in the pantry, but with anxiety came a strange sense of recognition; it wasn’t as though she hadn’t been here before. She knew how to live off ramen and ninety-nine cent hamburgers. Besides, they’d have bigger things to worry about soon, and death had a way of blunting the appetite.

  The other thing she had been expecting was Charlie, so that when he knocked on the door it hardly came as a surprise.

  “You can’t be here; you know that,” she said, feeling Yael once again bending the floorboards beneath her feet. The nails sizzled in the scorched wood of the door posts.

  “Like I give a fuck,” said Charlie. “Eli sent me on a goddamn goose chase to Miami, and I’m not in the best of moods. So don’t you go dicking me around, girlie.”

  “I’m not dicking you around. Can’t you feel it? Smell it?”

  Charlie glanced past Blue’s shoulder into the house, addressing himself to an invisible antagonist. “Whatever, Yael. I’ll get to you later; I got business with my Ma.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Do too.” He stepped forward and Blue stretched her arm across the door frame, but the heat from the nails made her snatch her hand back. Charlie walked in.

  “She’s sick,” said Blue, in desperation.

  Charlie shrugged. “Yeah, and I’m still all out of fucks. When was she gonna tell us, Blue? That she knew how to stop it? All these years she knew and we don’t get let in on the secret? That’s bullshit. How comes she gets to see seventy when I’m gonna be lucky to see fifty?”

  “It’s not a cure. It’s a deal with the goddamn devil, okay? Now get out of here. I’ll meet you like before and tell you everything. Just get out before she smells you and starts howling and freaking ou
t all over again. She doesn’t need the stress right now.”

  “Oh, sure – she doesn’t need the stress,” said Charlie. “You think I need the stress? Two full moons in one month –”

  “ – she’s dying!”

  There. It was out. It was said. She’d done it. Charlie looked so horrified that she had a mad, monstrous desire to giggle.

  The silence settled into something heavy, loaded. She could feel Yael crackling like static under her feet. Gloria was either sleeping or already dead, because the floorboards once again warped and surged like a wave under her feet. She could see from the shift in Charlie’s scared expression that he felt it, too, but he was busy grappling with one frightening thing at a time.

  “How long?” he said.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. And she’s getting too weak to use the Ouija board.”

  “Let me see her.”

  “No. You have to leave, Charlie. Please. She’s barely holding Yael as it is...”

  He ignored her and headed for the basement door. As soon as he reached the hallway the lightbulb exploded; it hadn’t even been switched on.

  Charlie shook broken glass from his hair and stared up in amazement. The floor creaked and moaned audibly now, and Blue saw a thin crack snake up through the plaster on the stair wall. The smell of sizzling wood was even stronger now, and she wondered how much more it would take before the house caught fire.

  “What the fuck?” he said, and then the basement door burst open with so much force that Blue saw the wood bend around the edges, as if someone was kicking it from within. Charlie went flying backwards and hit the wall like a rag doll. He slid down and didn’t move.

  It went quiet then, like the shocked silence after a bomb went off, before your ringing ears returned to normal and let you know that the screaming had already started.

  Blue touched her fingers to Charlie’s neck, fumbling for a pulse. His nose was bleeding and she thought of Yael’s other victims as she tried to find a heart beat, but she couldn’t feel a thing. Fear seemed to have numbed her fingers and Charlie slumped motionless, the edges of his lips turning blue. More than anything she wished Gabe were here; she couldn’t remember nearly enough about CPR.