by Anna Roberts
Charlie sighed, like he was too tired to deny it any more. “I always said that nose of his would get him into fucking trouble.”
“You did it?”
“Look, it wasn’t what you think. It was...it was natural selection, in a way.”
“Natural selection?” Holy shit, he’d justified this. He’d talked it over with himself the way she had talked it over time and time again, when her mother was begging her to count out the pills or turn on the gas, anything to make it stop. Only he’d reached the wrong answer.
“It was a mercy killing,” said Charlie, his voice rising.
There was another moan from behind the door.
“He would never have cut it,” Charlie said, dropping his voice. “If it hadn’t been me it would have been swamp wolves, and then he’d have taken all of us with him.”
“Get out of my way,” said Blue, as the moan rose to a hurt, horrible pitch she knew all too well from darkened basements.
“No, listen to me...”
He touched her arm and she shoved him roughly away. He stumbled back against a beer keg; it scraped across the floor and later she remembered thinking that he shouldn’t have had enough meat on his bones to move it, and that maybe the keg needed changing. One of those cool, sane thoughts you cling to after the world has changed forever.
She opened the steel door. It led into a narrow hallway, painted the same pale yellow as the bar, with the green dado rail running through it. Only there was a mark on the pretty yellow paint – a reddish handprint that was not quite a handprint. No thumb, and the fingers looked all wrong. The smeared trail of body fluids led from the steel door to another one at the end of the hall, with a sign saying GUYS. The other one, she remembered, the one upstairs, had said DOLLS.
Blue sidestepped the smear and entered the men’s room with the same license she’d entered a dozen or more men’s rooms in the past; nobody cared if you were going in there to clean up.
Only she had never come across a mess like this before.
The blood was one thing, but it was the other stuff that made her lightheaded, a pale fluid too clear to be piss, streaking the blood to pink. The word lymph kept dancing around in her head, some liquid that should never have been on the outside. There was another mangled hand print on the door of one of the stalls, a bare foot sticking out.
Eli sat naked in front of the toilet, one leg stuck out a strange, unnatural angle. His head was down and in one hand he held a gun, but awkwardly, as if it wasn’t his dominant hand. It was then that she saw that his other hand was thumbless, the fingers fused and useless.
“Oh God,” she said, and he stirred, so that she saw the state of his lower spine. The bones stuck up at weird angles, the skin ridged and puckered like an imperfect seam. And there – oh shit – there was a hole in it, leaking that clear stuff that made her the side of her head itch in sympathy.
He was paralyzed; he had to be, otherwise he would have been screaming himself hoarse. For an instant she hoped that some part of his brain had stayed animal, so that this would be easier for everyone, but as he raised his head to meet her eyes she saw that he wasn’t that lucky. He was in there, stuck in the unholy mess the moon had made of his body.
Eli tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was blood. His face was distorted, one side twisted up as if by a stroke. He slurped noisily and whimpered, clumsily raising the gun to his lips, but it was the wrong hand, and as he opened his mouth she saw that there were teeth in the way, huge teeth that had no business being in a human head. He had bitten his tongue almost in two.
His lips moved, his voice drowning in blood and slurred by his half a wolf jaw, but she managed to make out the thing he kept saying. Please. Please.
The gun fell to the floor. He pushed it towards her, the metal scraping on the tile.
“No,” said Charlie. Blue hadn’t even heard him come in behind her.
Eli gurgled at him, coughing as the blood filled his mouth.
“Jesus, no,” said Charlie. He was white to the lips, shaking his head. “Fuck that.” And then he looked right at her.
“Don’t look at me,” Blue said. “You’ve done this before.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” she said, and waited for him to pick up the gun. He didn’t.
He was her brother. She knew it in that moment, not because Yael had told her so, but because she’d been here before. And so had he, and in their own ways they had both said no in the same way – because the person asking it of them had no right to do so. Only he’d gone to a different place, a darker place, a place of poison and cowardice that she might have visited herself, if she’d allowed resentment to eat her the way it had eaten him.
“You fucking chickenshit,” she said, as if they’d played in the dirt together all her life.
She bent and picked up the gun. She wanted to drop it almost right away, but Eli was looking at her like she was the answer to his prayers, the hissy gurgle starting up again – please, please. The trigger was slippery under her finger and hard to squeeze, so that the first shot caught her by surprise, shattering Eli’s jaw. Her ears rang and over the buzz she heard Charlie saying “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.” His hand was on her wrist and Eli was screaming, his wolf teeth bared through the mess she’d made of half his face, so she fired again and this time his head jerked back. The wall behind him went red and lumpy and he slid down and lay still, a hole in the middle of his forehead.
She was in a nightmare and the only thing to do was walk away, her ears still ringing and the gun clattering on the floor behind her. As she hurried up the stairs it began to settle on her what she’d just done; she’d killed somebody that Gabe loved. She’d killed Axl’s father.
Charlie’s voice faded in. She felt his hand reach out to touch the back of her shoulder but she shrieked in fury, pushing him away for what he’d made her do. She heard him fall but she kept right on, looking for a way up to the apartment; she had come here to get Axl, that was all.
A door opened and Ruby stuck her head out. “What’s going on?” she said. “Where’s Charlie?”
Blue glimpsed the stairway behind Ruby and guessed that was the way up, but Ruby was standing right in front of it, all full of Yael. The book, Blue thought. She has the book, and who told her to get it?
“Move,” Blue said, expecting a fight, expecting her brain to start bleeding again. Ruby’s glow had dimmed somewhat, like her aura had drawn in closer to her shape, holding her as a woman when she should have been a wolf.
“What happened to you?” said Ruby. Blue pushed her and she stumbled to one side of the stairs, a skinny little jangle of bones with nothing inside her but that baby. Wherever Yael was, he wasn’t there.
The door at the top of the stairs was open, and Blue ran for it. She found herself standing in the hallway of the apartment, an arch at the end opening onto a living area with big windows and a grand sea view.
“Axl?”
No reply.
“Axl, come out here. It’s okay. It’s me, Blue.”
The boy slunk into sight, his hair still damp from a shower. “What the hell happened to you?” he said, and she remembered he’d been out of this for three whole days.
“This?” she said, gesturing to her head. “Don’t worry about it. We have to go. We have to leave. I’m taking you to your mom.”
He backed away. “Your shoes.”
She looked down. Her sneakers had left a trail of red prints across the floor and the tasteful green rug. The canvas was soaked with blood and spinal fluid, and a chunk of something pinkish-gray was stuck to her laces. “Oh, right,” she said, (it was brain it was brain you have brain on your shoes) “That.”
“Did I hear shots?”
“Charlie has a gun,” she said. “Now, move. How do we get out of here?”
Axl seemed to understand, at least enough for his sense of self preservation to kick in. Someone was coming up the back stairs and that was enough to make him m
ove; he hurried Blue to the front door, down the stairs leading to the waterfront.
“In,” she said, waving him to the car. “Come on. Go.”
She jumped in and slammed the door. “Where’s my dad?” asked Axl, as Blue pulled out and turned back towards Islamorada.
“Blue, where is he?” said Axl, his voice cracking as it rose. “Where’s my dad, Blue?”
She kept driving, unable to stop thinking about the mess she’d made. The smell of powder lingered in her nose, the way it had hung in the air long after she’d finished scrubbing the stain of her mother’s blood off the wall.
“Eli’s dead,” she said.
Axl let out a short, hurt cry and covered his mouth with both hands, like he was horrified such a sound could come out of him. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
“Here,” she said, and reached over to clip him in, like a child. “Don’t want to get into an accident like that.”
He stared at her. “Did Charlie kill my dad?”
The poor kid. She knew what it meant to be fatherless, and it must have hurt him all the more since he’d barely had time to get used to the idea in the first place. If she told the truth, what would he do? She pictured him screaming, lashing out, sending the car over the edge of the road into the ocean.
“I knew it,” said Axl, taking her silence as a yes. He started to sob, hiccupping through the words. “I knew it; that skinny, junkie-looking fuck. I knew there was something...something rotten about him.”
Blue bit her lip as she drove. She tasted blood and the smell of cordite came back to haunt her. Oh God, what a mess. What a godawful fucking mess.
22
Gloria.
As Blue passed the house she remembered why she’d been driving around in the first place, before Joe had called, before the world had gone to a whole new kind of hell.
Stacy’s truck stood in the drive and Axl unclipped his seatbelt and all but rolled out of a moving car in his desperation to see his mother. The wind chimes jangled as he ran up to the front door and Blue reached out to grab the back of his t-shirt too late; he went right on running into what may well still have been a Yael-infested house.
She remembered Yael pulling teeth out of Charlie’s head and hurried after him; the boy was all Yael’s Christmases come at once.
The door was open. Stacy stood in the kitchen, white-faced as if she’d heard already, and maybe she had. Axl ran towards her in tears, an outsized child in awful pain. Stacy had to reach up to put her arms around him and Blue hung back, knowing she had no right to step in on this moment. She’d caused it.
The telephone rang – Gloria’s ancient, crusty landline. Blue grabbed it without thinking and then realized she had nothing to say. Her mouth was dry and she seemed to have forgotten what you said when you picked up a telephone.
There was a long, hissing pause, and then someone said ‘hello?’, reminding her of how this worked.
“Hello?”
“Gloria?”
“No,” said Blue. “She’s not here right now. Can I take a message?” It was like she was on autopilot, saying the things she had to say, but she had no idea how she was going to keep functioning beyond the next thirty seconds or so. Just keep making the right noises, pretend you’re a normal person capable of remembering messages.
“It’s Hank here,” said the caller. “From the marina? I’m trying to get Gabe but his phone’s off and I’ve got Gloria listed as his emergency contact here –”
“ – oh my God, is he okay?” If he was mixed up in this mess, right in the guts and the gore and the bone fragments of it like she was...Any more than he was already. Any more than he would be when she had to tell him what she’d done...
“I don’t know,” said Hank. “All I know is someone’s stole his boat.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll pass that along.”
Axl was wailing in the kitchen, struggling to fill his lungs enough to say the terrible words. Stacy kept saying “What, baby? What happened?” and it was time to face the music. Time to say something. This couldn’t go on.
There was a note on the kitchen table. Stacy nodded to it as Blue came in.
Two lines, written in Gloria’s mannered, wobbly handwriting.
Yael’s coming. RUN. Whatever he tells you, remember I never owed him dick.
P.S. Cremate me.
“The boat,” said Blue, and it all made sense – to her anyway. Yael wasn’t here. Yael wasn’t in Ruby either. Gloria had said that as a diversion, to keep them focused on getting the hell out while she did what she needed to do.
I can cut him adrift, that’s all. Miles from anyone. Set the fucker off at a safe distance.
“She took the boat,” said Blue, panic rising dark as the water. “Oh my God – she’s on the boat.”
*
Row row row your boat, gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream
Once upon a time he might have sang along with her, back when she was enough of a child to be amused by that kind of thing. Back when he tagged along like a formless puppy, flipping up the skirts of her enemies and planting annoying songs in their heads. He had always loved songs.
No songs now. And she was no longer a child. She was an old bag of bones and inside it was hard to tell where she ended and he began. He roared behind her ribs, thrashing against her heart, but he was trapped, and he was furious; he’d done this to himself.
Gloria stopped the engine. The sun had dipped below the horizon and the waves that lapped around the boat now were dark as ink. Deja vu. A shot, a splash, and an ending.
It won’t be over. It’s never over.
“Oh, it’s over,” she said, and opened the locker. There was a bottle inside – the cloudy old absinthe she’d made poor Blue gag down – and there was the gun. “You fucked up, Yael. You went too far. You spilled her blood. Blood of a witch.”
She felt him beating against her ribs, invisible fists hammering her from the inside. The roots of her hair tingled. He’d been part of her so long that he didn’t know how to be part of anyone else. She was counting on that. That and the distance.
Gloria took a drink. She didn’t need it, but she’d thought this through so many times that she’d pictured being drunk off her ass when she did it.
I’ll find someone. I’ll find something to bring me to shore, even if I have to jump into the head of a tuna fish.
“You can’t,” she said. “You need a human host. You always did.”
She set down the bottle and picked up the gun. Maybe it would be just like flying. Ash and booze and the right words and the right why and off you went. Fly me to the moon, baby.
Yael clawed at her liver, but it only made her smile. Pain held no more threat.
I’ve traveled farther than this before.
“Only because I sent you. And I brought you right back when I was done.”
You lied. You promised.
Gloria shook her head. It was nice out here, with the stars and the ocean, miles from anywhere. You could talk out loud to your spirit without anyone around to think you were a crazy old coot.
“You’re a cunning sack of shit, Yael,” she said. “But sometimes you’re dumber than dirt. Did you really think for a second I’d give you Charlie? My Charlie? After everything that happened with West?”
You had to. We made a deal.
He was flailing. Oh, he hadn’t seen this coming. His desire to live had blinded him to the reality of death. We’re not all immortal spirits, she thought. We’re threescore and ten and we look at it every day in the mirror with every new gray hair and every Christmas day. Her loose teeth jiggled against the barrel of the gun. Wouldn’t have to worry about them any more...
...you can’t do this, you can’t do this..
...can and will. You’re a nuke, Yael. Gotta set you off miles out to sea. Disperse the energy...
...someone will find me. Someone who knows what I am...
Yeah. And God fucking
help them.
The trigger was stiff under her finger. And then it wasn’t.
And then there was nothing.
*
It was late afternoon when the police launch came in. The soles of Blue’s feet were numb from standing so long. When she saw the black of the body bag her knees turned to liquid and the pier seemed to swim and ripple beneath her, putting her in mind of Yael when he’d made the floorboards surge like waves under her feet.
Where was he now? Cast adrift?
“Oh God,” she heard herself say, and saw Gabe’s arm come down to catch her. He’d caught the sun.
“It’s okay,” he said, in that gentle way that people got when the world was so horribly smashed and broken that every false move or word could expose you to a whole new hurt. “I’ll do this, baby. You don’t have to look.”
Somewhere behind her Stacy was crying. “Oh God. What did she do? What did she do?”
“Stay here,” Gabe said, and his voice was like she was hearing him through water. “I’ll be right back. Okay?”
He kissed her numb lips and she watched him step down into the launch with the cops – dark uniforms, thumbs hooked in the backs of their belts, serious nods and shoulder pats. She knew the postures and the expressions all too well. She heard the zipper as clearly as if someone had torn the air open in front of her, and saw the slump of Gabe’s shoulders.
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s her.”
Stacy made a sort of whooping, gasping noise. She was shaking all over and Axl was clinging to her like the child he was, only he no longer fit on his mother’s hip the way he used to and he was all elbows and angles. How much more could he take? His dad and now this, all in one day.
Gabe stepped back onto the pier. “She shot herself,” he said.
“What?”
“One bullet,” he said. “Her old man’s service revolver.”
Stacy covered her son’s ears, but he peeled her hands away. “Oh my God. Why? Why would she do that?”
“Yael,” said Blue, and it sounded so, so stupid right now, here in the middle of everything that was real and awful. “She said it was the only way, only she tricked me. She told me he’d gone off with Ruby, but she was holding him all along. She meant to do this – to set him off at a distance, she said. Like a bomb.”
