by Anna Roberts
The cage was empty. The door was open.
Gloria’s food and water bowls had been turned upside down and stacked neatly on top of one another next to the floor drain. The Ouija board and planchette were missing and it was only when Blue looked around that she realized they’d been put back in the cardboard box where she first found them.
The stairs creaked behind her. “Blue? Is she okay?” Stacy was behind her.
“She’s...gone.”
“Oh shit,” said Stacy, and then came far enough down the stairs to see what Blue was looking at. “Where is she?”
Blue shook her head. “You got me.”
The silence hissed in her ears. Too quiet. She’d learned early not to trust Yael especially when he wasn’t making a sound. The side of her head throbbed and she imagined him pouring his insubstantial self into the hole, displacing her brains and making them squish out like gray-pink Play-Doh. Her stomach rolled and she swallowed down bile.
There was a knock at the front door. Stacy looked at her, she looked back at Stacy, neither of them sure all of a sudden whether they should even be here; Blue couldn’t have looked more like a mental patient on the run if she’d tried. Stacy tiptoed up the stairs and stuck her head around the basement door.
“Oh my God.”
“What? Who is it?”
“I think it’s the cops.”
“What?”
“Here,” Stacy said, grabbing the sleeve of the shirt tied around Blue’s waist. “Wipe off the blood; we look like Manson cultists.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Oh really? Good luck explaining pentagrams to the boys in blue. It’s like the Nineties never ended round here.”
Blue found a pair of paint stained sweatpants in a box and pulled them on. She untied the t-shirt from around her waist and put it on. No shoes, but it was better than nothing. She pulled what was left of her hair down over her forehead and hurried up the stairs.
It was worse than she could have imagined. Through the stained glass she saw the dark shapes of police officers, and standing between them a smaller, pinker shape. Candi Statham. Of all the outreach workers in all of Florida, trust Gloria to land the one who actually gave a shit.
For a second Blue thought about ducking back into the basement, but one of the police officers spoke; “I can see you in there. Come on out.”
Heart in mouth, Blue opened the door. “Hello?”
“Is this Gloria Baldwin’s residence?” said the cop on her left. He was older than the other, with fried Irish skin and that shade of red hair that never goes gray but fades to tangerine.
“Uh, yeah...”
“And she’s still at the spa?” said Candi, with a snap in her eyes. “In Sedona?”
“Yeah,” said Blue.
“We’ve had some noise complaints,” said the tangerine cop. The other one, the younger one with the poised, hungry look of a well-trained retriever, glanced directly at the shovel still leaning against the wall where Blue had left it after burying mason jars. The look that darted between the officers was all too ugly and obvious.
“Please,” Blue started to say, wishing that they’d give her credit for not being that goddamn dumb. She heard a shuffling step behind her and then a voice she never thought she’d hear again.
“What seems to be the problem, officers?” said Gloria.
20
And there she was. Gloria.
She was wearing a sleeveless yellow print dress and looked all of about seventy-five pounds, her thin white hair wet and scraped back from her face.
“Miz Baldwin?” said the cop.
“Yup,” said Gloria. “What’s going on?”
“We had a report that you were missing.”
Gloria shook her head. “I don’t seem to be. Unless you’re all hallucinating, I guess.”
Blue glanced at Stacy to make sure that she wasn’t seeing things, but obviously she wasn’t; Stacy looked as thunderstruck as she felt.
“Is everything okay, Gloria?” That was Candi, all concern.
Gloria ignored her and addressed her answer to the taller cop. “Well, no. It’s not. My book is missing.”
Oh God, the book. In among everything else Blue had completely forgotten about it. Dumbstruck by confusion, she followed as Gloria tramped into the kitchen, leading the cops in her wake. Candi – who had learned something, at least – stayed right where she was.
“Here,” said Gloria, pointing to the gap in the shelf where the recipe book had been. “She just walked right in and took it. Just this afternoon.”
“Who?” said the cop.
“That girl. Trashy little thing. Blonde hair, black roots. Tattoos all over.”
Ruby?
“She let herself in and helped herself,” said Gloria, pointing to the sink. “See? Even left her gum stuck there for me to clean up. Disgusting.” She scowled at the younger cop. “Isn’t anyone writing this down? I’m giving you evidence here. There’s probably DNA all over that.”
The cop took out a notepad and started writing.
“It’s a black book,” Gloria told him. “More like a binder, really. Old, but don’t let that fool you. It’s worth something – my recipe for paprika chicken alone...” She peered at the notepad and rolled her eyes. “Figures. Us old broads have to be dead for anyone to take us seriously.” She turned to Blue. “You see this, girlie? He’s writing ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ over and over so we think he’s doing something. How’s that for your tax dollars at work?”
“That’s terrible,” said Blue, mostly because she had to say something and everything she wanted to say would make her look like a maniac in front of the forces of law and order.
“You...um...” The taller cop gestured to his head, as if she were somehow unaware that someone had recently drilled into her skull. “You got a little...”
“Just a ding,” said Blue. “It’s being treated. Everything is fine, officer.”
“Except for my book,” said Gloria.
“Except for her book, yes.”
“Right,” said the cop. “Just so we’re clear, we are talking about a recipe book here?”
“Yes.”
Stacy leaned over to the one with the notebook. “Tattoos, blonde hair, black roots, black binder. Suspicious odor of paprika chicken. You got that, detective?”
“Well, as long as everything is okay,” said the older one, with an air of finality.
“It’s not okay,” said Gloria. “She stole my book.”
“We’ll get right on that, Miz Baldwin,” said the cop, heading for the door.
“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt,” said Gloria.
“What’s that?”
“Nothin’. Just something the kids used to say. Off you go now. No cases of lurid elder abuse going on here; sorry to disappoint you, Missy.” The last was for Candi, who in all fairness did look somewhat crestfallen at not having uncovered something she could get truly and righteously mad about.
Gloria stood in the doorway and watched them go. The nails remained in the wood of the frame, and didn’t sizzle. The light fitting with its broken bulb hung straight down and didn’t move.
Where the hell was Yael?
Blue exhaled. “Gloria, what just happened?”
“Miss Ruby Tuesday stole my book is what,” said Gloria, turning back to the kitchen. “She was here.”
“How?” said Blue.
Stacy frowned. “What do you mean, how?”
“It’s a full moon,” said Blue. “Ruby’s a werewolf. She shouldn’t even have thumbs at this time of the month, never mind kleptomaniac tendencies.” She glanced at the sink and the pink blob stuck there like a final insult. “Can wolves chew bubblegum?”
“She did it,” said Gloria. “She figured it out. How to stay in shape during a full moon.”
“How?”
“Never mind the how,” said Gloria. “It’s all about the why, and she’s got a whole lotta why.
She really wants that baby.”
Blue listened once more to the silence, and she realized that Ruby had taken a lot more from the house than just the book. How had she even known to steal it? There was no question as to who – or what – had told her it was important.
“He’s not here,” she said. It was the only explanation. Yael should have been hopping in and out of heads with glee and abandon, especially that young cop who looked like he ran every morning and watched the red meat. He should have been prime real estate to Yael, but nothing had happened. Yael was gone and Ruby had figured out how to keep from transforming.
“He cut a deal with her,” said Blue. “Didn’t he? He promised he’d help her keep her baby and she promised she’d help him escape. It’s the only explanation.”
Gloria nodded. “Now you’re thinking like a witch.”
Stacy held up a hand. “Okay, let’s pretend I know what you’re talking about, but didn’t you say that this ghost thing getting loose would be a bad thing?”
“The hole in my head says yes, yes it would.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait until the full moon is over,” said Gloria. “Then we gather the men, and we run like hell.”
*
Ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes.
Somehow his foot was still there. Feet. A phantom sensation, like that hooker in the motel who had the heroin itches but no physical body to scratch any more. Was this what it was like? Being dead?
Grayson made the mistake of moving his leg. The pain that shot through his knee was all too meaty and mean to be anything to do with an afterlife. He remembered the color of his foot before he’d turned; surely this time he was going to be down to fifteen digits.
The floor beneath him was hard and there was an appalling smell, like if Dennis Nilsson and Jeffery Dahmer had got together and taxed the plumbing to its limits with the flesh of their victims. And right there he knew where he was. Lyle’s house. And for some reason he wasn’t dead.
He rolled onto his side and felt sweating skin against his. Alive. Warm. Just that small movement was exhausting and he lay still, forcing his eyes open. The floor was filthy, smeared in long streaks that said someone had scrambled to grab something, anything, while they were being dragged away, leaking and shrieking. He pressed his lips together, remembering Joe’s bloody muzzle and the thick, fleshy sound as that huge tongue lapped the red-pink from his enormous teeth.
“Joe,” he said, just to see if he could still talk.
He felt a hand on his thigh and the skin moved closer, hip and hair and warmth. Breath gusted against his ear.
“Hm?”
“Joe?” He covered the hand on his thigh with his own. The fingers stirred and splayed beneath his in a motion he knew all too well – one, two, three, four, five. Thumbs where they ought to be. All present and correct.
“You okay?”
Now there was a question for the ages. His thigh looked thin and pale under Joe’s large hand, but the knee looked normal. He bent it carefully and the joint groaned and creaked, but he found that it no longer felt as though a pile of stones were rattling around in there. As he straightened the knee his toes came into view; they were bruised and puffy, but when he tried to curl them they hurt, which was a million times better than the dead, doughy nothing they’d been before the full moon.
Joe got to his feet, his damp skin peeling away from Grayson’s in the heat. He stepped over Grayson and walked towards the boarded up window. Dust motes danced in thin slices of sunlight. Joe stretched up his arms to peel back part of the board and the light came pouring in, gilding the bloodstained hairs on his skin, so that he glowed as beautiful and fearsome as some crazy pagan God, Dionysus fresh from the grove where they’d torn poor Pentheus apart.
Slowly Joe turned around, his feet bare on the dirty floor, every inch of him so young and so strong that Grayson felt tears pour out of his eyes before he could even think about stopping them. It always left him like this – tired and brittle, swinging wildly from one mood to the next.
“Don’t cry,” said Joe, squatting beside him. “Please don’t cry.”
There was a note in that ‘please’ that Grayson knew meant something bad, but he was too dazed and bruised and rearranged to grasp it right now. Joe’s blond hair stuck up on one side in pinkish spikes; the beds of his fingernails were reddish brown. As Grayson leaned closer into his touch he realized that what he’d taken for freckles on Joe’s chest was actually a fine diffuser spray of blood, dried to brown.
“You came back for me,” he said, each word an effort. The dots danced in front of his eyes. He remembered screaming, the crunch of huge jaws on flesh. The sound of Joe’s tongue moving over his wolf teeth.
“I should never have let you go,” said Joe, and this time his tongue was human, and tasted like the curse of Cain. And the really fucked up part was that it didn’t even matter any more, not as long as he was here.
“Take me home,” he said, standing up and holding out a hand, as if it were that easy.
Grayson’s knee refused to co-operate. It buckled when he tried to stand, so Joe hunted up a broken piece of banister for him to use as a cane. Standing up the place looked somehow better, now that he was no longer on an eye level with the filth and the rags and the broken glass. Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
Except it was.
“Come on,” said Joe, and they hobbled along like contestants in a feral nudist three-legged race, through the dining room with the torn, overturned chairs, into the smashed once-white marble kitchen. The floor was covered in garbage and bloody pawprints, and as they passed the kitchen island Grayson saw a hand sticking out from behind it. The skin was almost as pale as the marble, the fingertips turning gray. There was a brushy smear of blood leading towards it, as if someone’s hair had dragged along the floor. The screaming rose up in his memory again.
“Don’t look at it,” said Joe, but then Grayson’s bare foot collided with something. A vertebra. It skittered across the floor, bouncing off its points like an obscene, blood-stained jack. Grayson reached for the counter island, but Joe held him up.
“We have to bury them,” said Grayson, and the words were absurd even to his ears. Fine, yes. Bury them. Send flowers. That’ll make everything better.
“Later. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Joe bent down and picked up something from the floor, where it lay in the hairy smear just beyond the dead fingertips. It clinked in his hand and Grayson – with a crazy certainty that he must be dreaming – recognized the brass discs of his own key fob.
“These yours?”
“Yes.”
For the first time ever Grayson was grateful for Ro’s magpie eye. Dead or alive, the idiot had done him a huge favor by stealing his car and bringing it here. Slowly, leaning heavily on Joe, Grayson made his way across the garage to the car.
“I’ll drive,” Joe said, and he let him. It was as much as Grayson could do to blink at the clock on the dashboard and try to make sense of the date. August. The last time he’d looked at a clock it had been July. The blue moon was over, and he’d survived it. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to think about how. Not yet.
They drove the fifty or so miles like a Florida headline – two bloodstained naked men behind the wheel of a car. As Joe pulled up outside his house, Grayson found himself looking across the yard for Kaiden’s hand, but that was long gone, carried off by something hungry. The screen door stood ajar.
“Home, sweet home,” he said.
“Shower,” said Joe, almost falling out of the car in his haste to clean up.
The runoff water was red-brown at first. Grayson perched on a shower stool and watched the blood and dirt stream down over Joe’s long thighs and flat belly. There was the difference that twenty years made; after a blue moon and God knows how long stuck as a wolf, Joe still had gas in the tank to rise to Grayson’s gaze.
“You’re beautiful,” said Grayson, when the water ran clear
. He kissed the streaming water pouring over Joe’s hip and curled his fingers around the thick, rearing cock. Joe shivered and bucked impatiently into his touch, but Grayson had other ideas. All that blood had stirred up an appetite for depravity, strong enough to stir even his exhausted flesh. “Turn around.”
Grayson had a feeling there had been boys as well as girls, but from Joe’s hesitation he could tell that there had never been a man. Joe flinched when Grayson first turned the shower jet between his cheeks, his erection wilting through what must have been surprise at first, because it came back harder and bigger as Joe got into the new sensation.
“Nobody ever fucked you, did they?” said Grayson, his mouth on the base of Joe’s spine, his fingers teasing the edge of the hole. Joe whimpered and gave his hips a little twist into Grayson’s touch, so that Grayson barely had to push to get in, and then he was and it went straight to the top of his bucket list, because Joe was hot and tight and smooth as heaven in there. Once he’d had a hot meal and a good night’s sleep in a clean bed he was going to load up on Cialis and spend the rest of his days fucking Joe Lutesinger into the clouds and beyond.
After the shower they landed on the couch, and Joe decided to return the favor on his knees, sucking with a straight-boy sloppiness that was so strangely touching that Grayson not only came but came hard enough for the afterglow to sink him into sleep once more.
The phone woke Grayson. The sunlight still had a golden quality and he had no idea how long he’d been asleep. The leather of the couch had stuck to his skin and someone had put a blanket over him. For a second he thought it had all been some kind of erotic nightmare, but then he rolled his head back on the arm and saw Joe standing there, still gloriously naked, phone in hand.
Joe handed it to him. “You have seventeen new messages,” he said.
“Nice to be popular.”
“Don’t get too excited. I think they’re all from the same person.”
Grayson peeled himself off the couch. “Even better. I asked for a stalker last Christmas, but all I got were socks.”
Joe smiled and it was like everything was all right with the world all over again. He sat down beside him and this time when they kissed they could almost taste one another’s mouths without thinking of that rare, full moon flavor. Almost.
