Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  Charlie’s eyes snapped open. In the same instant his hand came up and grabbed her wrist, making her scream in surprise. One of the whites of his eyes was bloody – like Gabe’s – and she knew on some spine-crawling level just who was looking back at her.

  And it wasn’t Charlie.

  “Get out of him,” she said. “Get out, right now.”

  Yael laughed. “Oh, I don’t think so. Possession is nine tenths of the law.”

  Previously Blue had only heard Yael speak through the vocal chords of women, so that while there was no mistaking his cadence and his cackle there were low notes he couldn’t quite reach. Now, with a male larynx at his disposal, he spoke with the tar-baby drawl she knew from her nightmares.

  He released her and slowly got to his feet, swaying a little like he couldn’t remember how to put one foot in front of the other. Blue almost sympathized; her own feet had turned to dumb lumps of lead.

  “At last,” he said, cracking his neck – Charlie’s neck. “The young chevalier.” He poked his tongue into his cheek, making it bulge. Blue watched in horror, knowing that somewhere Charlie was still in there, unable to stop the thing that had taken over his body.

  Yael poked two fingers into his mouth and pulled out a bloody tooth. “Huh,” he said. “Not so young any more, I guess.” He grinned, baring a gap where Charlie’s canine used to be. “You pay through the nose for prime beachfront property and wind up in a sinkhole. Fuckin’ Florida.”

  Blue inched towards the open basement door, hoping against hope that Gloria would wake up and suck Yael back down the stairs the way she had when he’d got into Ruby. But Charlie – Yael – saw her feet move and shot out a hand, grabbing a handful of her hair and pulling her towards him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said. “We have unfinished business, you and I.”

  “I know what you are,” she said, digging her nails as hard as she could into his forearm. With Yael animating him from the inside, Charlie looked maddeningly familiar, like one of those faces whose name kept bobbing out of reach.

  “You don’t know shit, honeychile,” he said, laughing that bubbling black laugh again. “You haven’t even begun to scratch the surface when it comes to me.”

  “I know what you did, Yael. I know what you did for Gloria.”

  He gave her hair a hard, vicious twist, making her cry out and wonder why she hadn’t thought of just screaming before. The door was open; Gloria would hear, if she still could.

  “All of it?” said Yael. “Everything I did? The whole enchilada? Full fathom five? Everything she did? I’ll bet she didn’t tell you that, Baby Blue.”

  Blue filled her lungs and yelled. “Gloria!”

  Yael just laughed. “She’s all but done. And I just got a whole load of fresh juice from poor darling Clementine. Swallowed her down like the foaming brine –”

  “ - GLORIA! –”

  “ – dreadful sorry.” He giggled. Actually giggled. “Forgive me – but laughter feels so good, you have no idea. How it vibrates. Tickles the brain. Je me ri de me voir –”

  “ – GLORIA!” She kept struggling, even though she could feel the hair pull away from her scalp.

  Yael, still laughing, started singing that old Hendrix song along with her screams. “Gee, Ell, Oh, Ah, Iaaaaaaayyyyaaaa...”

  “GLORIA!”

  Yael smacked her hard across the face. Her head rang with the blow, but she dimly heard him say something about “ – a walking ‘yo momma’ joke,” and then he was drowned out by the sound of Gloria’s howls.

  His fingers loosed in her hair and she dropped to her knees, crying with pain and terror. She remembered thinking that the neighbors were going to have all kinds of things to talk about, and so much for soundproofing the basement. The howls coming up the stairs were clearly lupine; no way could they have been mistaken for those of even the largest dog. Only a wolf could produce a note as cold and clear and unforgiving as the full moon rising above frosted pines.

  Yael – or maybe Charlie – staggered and grasped the stair rail for support. Blue could feel something tug past her and when he said “Oh my God,” in a thick, bruised sort of voice she knew for sure that this time it was Charlie speaking. Yael was half-in, half-out of him. The spirit was trying to hang onto Charlie’s body for dear life, but Gloria was making him fight for it.

  The world went black.

  She tasted licorice and salt and her ears rang with hysterical laughter. She didn’t tell you shit. Because she knew you’d hate her.

  Blue tried to speak, but her lips wouldn’t move. When her vision cleared she could see Charlie, his face covered in blood and sweat, but she knew she was no longer the only person in her head. Yael was still laughing, and then she found herself on a boat, miles out to sea in the middle of the night. The stars were out and the crescent moon hung like a sickle over the queasy, bobbing waves, and in the bottom of the boat was a man, face down, with a sack over his head.

  There was a gun in her hand.

  Grandma had some wild times back in the day, didn’t she?

  Blue heard the bang, and the recoil seemed to jolt her back into full control of her body. She could have sworn she could have heard a splash, but then she was alone in her head again, curled on the floor with Charlie kneeling next to her.

  “Get up,” she said, fighting to catch her breath. “We gotta get out of here.”

  For once he didn’t have to be told twice. He helped her to her feet and they staggered out of the house like they were escaping from a burning building, wheezing and holding one another up. Having Yael inside you, even for a moment, took a toll. God only knew what poor Gloria must have felt like.

  Charlie threw open the door of his rusty truck and they scrambled inside. He reached into the glove compartment, took out a hip flask and knocked back a shot. “Here,” he said, passing it to Blue without ceremony. It was whiskey, but she drank it anyway. She was still shuddering through the burn of it when she realized they were moving; Charlie was driving.

  “Wait. We can’t...I didn’t lock the back door.”

  He raised an eyebrow, his face still streaked and his left eye a gory shade of red. “Anyone who breaks into that place,” he said. “Is gonna get what they deserve.”

  “Nobody deserves that.”

  Charlie shrugged. “You’d be surprised.”

  Blue took out her phone and stared at it, wondering how to tell Gabe to stay away from the house in a way that wouldn’t make him want to immediately go over there and check out what was wrong. She had no idea, so she just called him and hoped she’d figure it out as she went along.

  “Hey,” he said, as soon as he picked up. “Listen, I’m running late, so don’t hang around waiting for me if you’re hungry, okay?”

  She frowned out at the road for a moment; his words were so normal that he may as well have been speaking some ancient dialect of Mandarin. She had almost forgotten that there were such things as dinner time and boyfriends. “Wait,” she said, struggling to reorientate herself in reality. “Where are you? The marina?”

  “No. Tavernier. Didn’t you get my message? Eli’s sick.”

  Charlie pricked up his ears. “Is he still throwing up?”

  “Uh, I have no idea.”

  “Is that Charlie?” said Gabe.

  “Yeah,” said Blue. “Look, stay put. We’re on our way.”

  “Blue, what’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. This probably isn’t something you want to hear over the phone.”

  “That will help,” said Charlie, when she’d hung up. “That is if you want to keep the guy bouncing off the walls for the next ten minutes.”

  “What was I supposed to tell him? That Gloria’s dying and you just got possessed by a psychotic pack spirit?”

  Charlie shrugged again. “I don’t fuckin’ know. Sometimes you got to just get it over with. Like ripping off a Band Aid.” He poked his tongue into his upper lip. “Jesus – am I missing another too
th?”

  Blue sat quiet in the passenger seat, watching the sinking sun glittering red-gold on the surface of the ocean. She kept replaying the sound of the gunshot in her head. A shot and a splash. And it had meant something; she was sure of that. Everything Yael showed her meant something. He loved dirty secrets, especially the ones that would set people fighting or make them suspicious of one another.

  Full fathom five...grandma had some wild times back in the day...

  She thought of the horrible bone bitch necklace she had found in the basement, and the crumpled newspaper chrysalis with nothing but wax flakes and rusty pins inside. It gave her the same queasy, uncertain feeling as the things Yael showed her, and for a tiny, treacherous instant she wondered if Gloria might have done something so bad that she almost deserved to die alone in that awful house.

  No. That was wrong. Nobody deserved that.

  Charlie pulled up outside a small, pink stucco bar on the edge of a marina. Eli’s place, Blue realized, and that she’d never been here before. She hadn’t been expecting any invitations any time soon; she and Eli seemed to have a knack of rubbing one another all the wrong ways.

  Gabe was inside, polishing the bar rails with a restless energy that Blue knew was born of the desperate desire to do something. Usually he would have been cleaning dive equipment or tinkering with the boat; the thing was so much an extension of him that he seemed lost without it.

  Eli, meanwhile, slouched behind the bar. He looked tired and gray around the gills; the last couple of weeks seemed to have made him look jowly and brought out the threads of silver in his black hair. Blue thought she knew why he was fading, now that Charlie had apparently got Ruby pregnant. Or maybe that was just her own dislike talking.

  “Are you okay?” said Gabe, seeing Charlie’s bloody eye. “What the hell happened?”

  “Yael happened,” said Blue.

  Gabe understood. “Gloria?” he said.

  She shook her head. “No. Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”

  Eli frowned. “Wait – what? Did you just leave Gloria alone to die?”

  “Bro, we did not have a choice in the matter,” said Charlie, staggering towards the nearest open bottle of spirits. “Believe me. I barely got out of that house in one piece.”

  “What do you mean? She got out of her cage and went nuts?”

  Charlie shook his head, poured himself a shot of bourbon and tossed it back. “Nope. It was Yael. Remember that old poltergeist who used to rattle around the place? And Gloria kicked our asses for playing with the Ouija board? Yeah – well, turns out she had good reason, because that is one angry, crazy spirit.”

  Eli only looked more confused.

  “Gloria’s the only thing keeping it from going berserk,” said Charlie.

  “I don’t understand. Did you lose a tooth?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie, slamming down the glass. “Yael decided to perform a little dentistry while I was possessed.”

  “Possessed?” said Gabe.

  Charlie poured another shot. “You better believe it. The full fucking Linda Blair. I got to casting aspersions on people’s mothers, but thankfully Gloria yanked the sonofabitch back out before I started cramming crucifixes in places they had no right to be.”

  There was an unpleasant silence. Gabe exhaled slowly. “Okay,” he said. “So what happens when Gloria...you know...when she...”

  “Bad things. She said so.”

  “Yeah, she wasn’t very specific.”

  “My guess?” said Blue. “Is that Yael goes looking for a new home.”

  The quiet closed around them again, a silence she knew all too well. It was that hushed, waiting silence when you’d gathered all of the bottled water and the canned food and nailed down everything that could be nailed down. That stomach-coiling quiet that couldn’t be drowned out by the sound of the weather forecast.

  S-T-O-R-M-S-C-O-M-I-N-G

  “Wouldn’t want to be that guy,” said Charlie, but his attempt at bravado just struck a sour, discordant note. When the silence settled again Blue could hear Eli breathing, ragged and careful, like someone trying to breathe against broken ribs.

  “Excuse me a minute,” he said, and headed towards the restroom door. As he passed she thought she smelled blood, and some weird shark instinct raised up inside her and said he would be trouble, trailing that vital smell under Yael’s disembodied nose. A liability. She was relieved when Gabe got up and went after him; someone had to be kind to Eli, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her.

  *

  The moon was just a thin silver rind away from showing its full face, and the scents of perfume and teenage lust came floating along the edge of the water. There was a girl in the picture, a smudge-eyed little white thing whose black chiffon clothes always smelled of weed. On a better day Eli had named her Marla Singer and laughed to watch his gangling, big-footed kid following her around.

  She stopped a way down the terrace and lit up a long, thin black cigarette that put Gabe in mind of in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And at once he knew she was one of those theatrical girls who had posters of Audrey Hepburn on their wall, like his old crush Tori, who had wanted to be Sally Bowles and had painted her fingernails with green glitter polish. Divine decadence, darling.

  It seemed so long ago, but it wasn’t. Not really. They just aged in dog years, so that when Axl came along smelling like bong water Gabe didn’t have the heart to be mad at him.

  “Is my dad okay?” Axl asked. Reluctance seeped out of him like sweat and Gabe knew that what Axl really wanted – what he himself had wanted not so long ago – was the luxury of retreating into his incredible teenage self-absorption, a world where the only things that mattered were looking cool and how song lyrics made you feel.

  “He’s fine,” Gabe said, hating himself for lying the way he always swore he never would, back when he was Axl’s age. But it was too cruel; the kid had already been dumped in the deep end and it wouldn’t hurt to give him a last gasp of normal life. “You going out?”

  Eli came out onto the terrace. The circles under his eyes looked darker and his hand shook as he leaned heavily on the rail. “Hey,” he said. “You’re supposed to be staying home tonight, remember?”

  “So what?” said Axl. “You gonna drive me back to Islamorada?”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” said Gabe.

  “No, it’s okay,” said Eli. “I know this isn’t easy...”

  Axl rolled his eyes; he was clearly desperate for Eli to rise to his role and play the hardass sitcom dad so that they could carry on pretending everything was okay.

  But it wasn’t, and Axl was stuck with reality. “You look awful,” he said, after a short, sullen pause.

  “I’m fine. I told you, it’s just a touch of stomach flu –”

  “ – whatever,” said Axl, and flounced off to join Marla. Gabe saw her round, white face for a moment as she looked over her shoulder, and then they were gone.

  “That went well,” said Eli.

  “He’s scared. You know how it is when you’re that age; he wants the truth but at the same time he wants more than anything to stay in his safe little bubble.”

  Eli pulled out a chair and sat down. “It’s the worst timing. All of it. Everything at once.” He swallowed hard, like he was trying not to puke. “Maybe we’re just cursed.”

  “We’re werewolves,” said Gabe. “So, yeah.”

  “No. Not like that. I mean really cursed. Like Gloria did to Lyle.”

  Gabe leaned on the railing, listening to the sound of the wind clanking through the forest of masts before him. In normal circumstances it was a soothing sound, but there had been all kinds of evil winds blowing lately.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “How is it ridiculous? Joe’s gone, Gloria’s dying, I’m sick. What else is going to go wrong?”

  Gabe had no idea what to say. He heard voices coming from inside the bar – Charlie keeping Blue captive with some monologue that she coul
d only interrupt in single syllables. In different circumstances Gabe might have been jealous, but there was too much going on, and big messes had a way of throwing unlikely people together.

  He found himself speaking before he had finished deciding whether it was a good idea to say it or not. “Did I ever tell you about that night when Gloria stole my car and drove up to Miami?”

  “No.”

  Gabe pulled up a chair and sat down, remembering how this little terrace had once been alive with women and fairy-lights and flickering candles. It was dark now. “We waited for you,” he said. “At the police station. Me and Joe. And you know how he w...is. He could smell something, and so could I, blowing in on the wind.”

  “Smell what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gabe. “I think it might have been the same night Lyle died; it smelled like death, but it was more than that, somehow. Something bigger even than death.”

  Eli frowned. There were cracks at the corners of his lips and one had started to bleed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Death’s pretty big.”

  “So is life. Maybe that was it, I don’t know. But it was huge, and it got into everything. Right into the gaps between your bones, you know?”

  Eli rubbed the back of his neck and nodded, and Gabe knew that he knew it all too well. The spaces between their vertebrae felt stretchy and strange, as if empty space could itch. And it could. It could do more besides; it could open and roar and rearrange blood and guts and bone. In the end, was it really that insane to believe that a thing like Yael could exist in nature?

  “It was the weirdest thing,” Gabe said. “More than death. Bigger. Death just stops things. This was...this was like something that wanted to change things. Change everything, and what we wanted or feared wouldn’t matter. Ever. It served its own purposes, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Kind of like the wolf, but turned up ten thousand times and huge enough to make hairs stand on end all up and down the state. I mean, it was scary, Eli. Scary like that smell of salt that comes up off the Gulf before a big one blows in. That powerful, that irresistible, like a force of nature.”

  Eli looked out at the yachts. Some of the lights were on in the cabins and somewhere a woman laughed – a bright, tipsy, moneyed sound. He tongued the sore crack at the side of his mouth; the stubble on his chin had gray in it and he had never looked more alone or so distant, so far away from the colorful, vibrating center of things where he had always held sway.