The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1)

by Anna Roberts

  Blue snatched away her hand. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, hear me out. Just until we work something out with a professional.”

  She laughed. “Right. So in the meantime an amateur will do? Have you forgotten how well that worked out last time? She gave me the goddamn slip and drove to Miami.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But she likes you. She likes having young people around her - always has done. Besides, do you really want to stay in that sweatbox hotel room listening to that waitress bang her way through the Keys all summer? Please, Blue. You’d be doing me such a favor.”

  She was on the verge of telling him where to stick it when Gloria came back in, her arms piled high with several - thankfully empty - mason jars. Gabe stepped in to help her set them down and she squinted suspiciously through her cataracts at him. “What are you kids conspiring about?” she asked, making Blue wonder if this had been how she’d been before the Alzheimer’s. If the disease had blunted her edge she must once have been sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Okay, so this is just an idea,” said Gabe. “But what if Blue stayed here for a while?”

  “Fine with me,” said Gloria, looking Blue up and down. “You need a place, I got a bunch of empty rooms. So long as you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, I guess. This place looks like a hurricane blew through it. And smells a sight worse.” She rummaged in one of the lower cupboards and pulled out an ugly, chunky cut glass vase. This she set on the table next to the mason jars, said “Nails,” and was gone again before Blue even had time to talk her way out of it.

  “Just like that?” said Blue.

  Gabe shrugged. “That’s how it generally works with Gloria.”

  She sighed. “Just so you know, I am not even remotely qualified - ”

  “- that’s fine - ”

  “ - and if she winds up in Georgia next time, just remember I told you so, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He’d been manipulative, and she tried to punish him by not looking pleased, but deep down she knew she couldn’t take much more of the attic. The heat was bad enough, but being kept awake by the same boring porn soundtrack every night was fraying her nerves to the point where she was seeing things - little flickers of movement on the edge of her peripheral vision every time she straightened up from rinsing a bathtub or turned to check a room. This, she thought, was how stories of hauntings started; tired people with overactive imaginations.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the light swinging in the hallway, so vividly recalling the seasick feeling it gave her that she almost gagged. There was a sweetish, heavy smell in the air and she scrunched up her nose as she breathed in. Gabe looked puzzled, making her laugh.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. She really wasn’t kidding about the smell, was she?”

  He grinned. “No. She wasn’t.”

  “What do you think it is? It’s not palmetto bugs, is it? Please tell me it’s not that. The size of those things alone...” She shuddered.

  “Ah, skunkroaches,” said Gabe, sticking his head out of the kitchen door and taking a long sniff. “Just one of the rare joys of the Sunshine State.”

  His eyebrows creased in the middle and he moved through the house with a weird purposefulness that reminded her of the way he was on his boat, when he was doing things she didn’t understand and moving in response to forces that were beyond her. She followed him onto the porch, and there he stood, sniffing and frowning.

  “What is it?” she said, catching sight of her face in the old, scarred mirror. The windchimes shivered and clacked in response to their combined weights on the creaky old decking.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and looked down at his feet. The sun was slanting in such a way that it shone under the boards, illuminating the space beneath. Blue saw something pinkish shining under there – a shade so bright that she thought it must have been a toy, a child’s ball or something.

  Then she remembered that children didn’t play ball in Gloria’s yard. Something dark and shimmering moved into view, and several large, blue-black flies buzzed up out between the boards.

  “Oh my God,” said Gabe, and the tone of his voice made Blue’s stomach flip all over again.

  “What is it?”

  He jumped off the edge of the porch and bent at the waist, tilting his head to see what was under there. She didn’t join him; she knew without looking what was under there. Something dead. Or someone. The pink something under the boards had taken on all kinds of sinister new meanings. Which part? Which organ? And why was it hanging out like that?

  “Oh shit,” he said, and he sounded exhausted. Disgusted.

  “What is it?”

  “Karma,” he said, screwing up his face as he straightened up. “Paying me back for ducking one load of red tape, I guess.”

  Blue swallowed hard. “Gabe, what is it?”

  He scraped his fingers through his hair. “A deer,” he said. “A stupid fucking endangered dumbass deer.”

  She stepped down onto the lawn, reluctant but emboldened by the knowledge that at least it wasn’t a person.

  The deer’s head was maybe a foot beneath the porch, the sun gleaming on its cloudy, flyblown eyes and lolling, leathery tongue. A delicate leg stuck out at a weird angle, and below its shoulders it was a mass of open flesh and bulging organs, blown up with gasses and swarming with the innumerable hungry things that thrived in the humid air.

  “It’s probably part of some conservation study,” he said, and sighed. “Great. I’m gonna have toss this thing before I get a bunch of scientists wanting to know a blow by blow account of its last hours and probably its last goddamn words.”

  “What do you think killed it?”

  He shrugged. “Dog. Alligator. Python. Who knows? Told you – that’s Florida. Roaches and caimons and snakes, oh my.”

  10

  Florida ate its own.

  Nothing dead stuck around in the heat for long. Instead it became a whole new ecosystem, swarming, buzzing, stinking and heaving with over two dozen different forms of life. Some said that when a person died, they became exactly twenty-one grams lighter. It was energy, they said - not the nebulous darling of the New Age mind, but actual energy. Electrical. Human. Calorie driven. The raw energy of life, the thing that kept lungs breathing and bowels working and brains crackling with those mysterious, miniscule electrical charges that had fired the construction of the Great Pyramid, put a man on the moon and split the atom.

  Energy never dies. It only dissipates. And some people said that nobody could account for that twenty-one grams. Some even said it was the weight of the soul, but Gabe knew better. He figured if there even was such a thing as that missing twenty-one grams, it could easily be accounted for by decomposition. Once you were dead, you were food. There was more to gut flora than the things they told you in order to sell yoghurt; those energetic little buggers got to work even before your limbs were done stiffening.

  There was life in death. He had seen drowned dolphins turned into all you can eat buffets, stripped to the arching white bone in a matter of days. Toss anything organic into the ocean and it became fish food of one sort or another.

  He had the deer in a garbage sack. Blue had offered to help him wrangle it in there, but when they pulled its forelegs something back there went splut and flopped out with a smell that had turned her face an interesting shade of gray. Instead he had told her to go back to the hotel and get her things, and hurriedly butchered the ripe corpse right there under the porch. Now he was Dextering it up in his boat, looking for a prime spot to dump some endangered venison.

  Gabe tipped the body parts overboard near an area he knew to be a favorite spot for sharks, then headed back to shore. He passed a tiny island on the way - just a curve of sand and a crop of mangroves - and it reminded him of Blue and all of the things he wanted to show her. Maybe should take her out there the next time they went out on the boat, but the promise of her and isolation brought back the kind of thoug
hts that the stink of the dead deer had been so good at keeping at bay. He pictured her back rising bare above the water, her breasts facing the sea. Smiling as she looked over her shoulder at him, the crystal blue waves lapping just above the crack of her butt.

  As he steered the boat back to the pier he could almost taste the salt on her skin, the two of them naked in the bottom of the boat, skins bared to the sky and nobody around for miles.

  And then what? Tell her the truth?

  No. He would tell her first. Before things got out of hand. She had a right to know what she was getting into.

  He moored the boat and walked up to the hotel, already rehearsing in his head what he was going to say. I need to tell you something, and I don’t want you to freak out...

  ...hey, remember that full moon superstition I told you about?

  No.

  So. Did you ever see Twilight?

  Ow. Worse. Way worse.

  He knocked on her door. The second she opened it he knew he couldn’t say any of those things, or anything at all that resembled a sentence. She wasn’t playing fair. She was still damp from the shower and was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped tightly above her breasts.

  “What are you doing?” she said, her eyes widening with some kind of alarm he was too stupefied to understand at that moment.

  “Me? What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? Taking a shower.” She hustled him into her room. “Jesus, Gabe - you can’t be here. Kate was reading Miss Nympho the riot act just this morning.”

  Her hair was a mass of shining, blonde-streaked corkscrews, dripping onto her bare, brown shoulders. Her cheeks were a little flushed and he couldn’t keep from wondering if she had been touching herself in the shower. If he was her he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off himself.

  Okay. Words. He had come here for a reason.

  “I need to...” he started to say, but she shushed him with her lips on the side of his.

  “Shh. We have to be quiet. Silent.”

  He turned his head just a fraction of an inch to meet her mouth, and when his tongue parted her lips she made a low, back-of-the-throat sound that made his brain catch fire with the thought of just how hard this was going to be. She had her arms around him and he could feel the slip and slide of the towel between their bodies. When it fell he wanted to cry out from the sudden shock of all that bare skin under his hands. He crushed his mouth closed against her shoulder, his blood already roaring through his veins, wanting to look at her but not wanting to let her go.

  She fumbled down between their bodies, wrestling with his belt. When he leaned back to help her he saw her breasts, round and wide-spaced, with plum-brown nipples. In his desperation to touch them he somehow caught them both off balance and she stumbled back onto the white sheeted bed, falling with her legs slightly apart so that he could see a sliver of pink shadowed under the tidy strip of dark hair. He imagined tracing it with his tongue and his head reeled at the thought of tasting her. She was already breathing hard as she looked up at him, opening her legs wider to let him see her.

  “You are so...”

  Her flat belly quivered in a laugh as she cut him off, shushing him once more. He yanked off his t-shirt and dropped his jeans, not thinking much beyond feeling her skin against his. She reached out for him with a little cry that she quickly smothered with her hand, so that when he joined her on the bed her hand was still over her mouth. She held it there even as she shifted her hips, nudging him between the lips of her pussy. When he felt the wet of it on his dick he couldn’t stop and he heard her sort of squeak behind her muffling hand, her eyebrows drawn down in a frown and her hips coming up to meet him. In. All the way in. Oh God.

  She wouldn’t let him in her mouth. When he tried to peel her fingers away she just shook her head, like she didn’t trust herself not make a sound. He knew he should stop, but she was warm and tight and with every slow, experimental thrust he felt her muscles ripple and clutch and she made more sexy, stifled noises into her hand. And then there was no getting away from it; he wasn’t just trying it on for size. He was fucking her; he was fucking Blue, and she was tender and horny and so goddamn into it that he wanted to explode.

  “I won’t come inside,” he whispered. “Okay?”

  She didn’t answer. Her lovely little boobs jiggled as she rode his thrusts. Her head was back, her hand still over her mouth and the veins in her neck standing out. She took her hand from her mouth and for a second her mouth gaped wide open in a soundless moan, then she scrabbled across the bed, pulled a pillow over her face and screamed into it.

  Oh. Oh my God.

  Her hips were rocking and writhing and doing all kinds of amazing things. He fucked her hard through it, pounding between her trembling thighs, more and more sparks dancing in his brain and belly as she ooohed and mewed into the pillow. He felt her clutch him in tight contractions and he was gone, the sudden sweet shock of her climax dragging him along with her. And then it was too late because it was spurting out of him and into her, and even if he had been able to pull out she wouldn’t have let him; she had her ankles crossed over his back and was holding him in there, her muscles gently squeezing him where he was now wincingly sensitive.

  “Oops,” he said, when he remembered how to talk.

  Blue tossed the pillow to one side. Her just-fucked face made her look like she should have been coasting into rooms on a clamshell. Shining eyes, glowing cheeks, pillowy red lips and eyelids at sexy half mast.

  “What?” she said.

  “I just...I came inside.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Surely that’s my line?”

  She laughed and he could feel it vibrating through her body. “I’m at the tag end of my cycle,” she said. “Unless you’re super potent I don’t think you need to worry. Besides, I can always pick up a morning after pill.”

  Reluctantly, he slid out of her and rolled on his back. “You really don’t want to have my baby,” he said. “I’m not good parent material.”

  Blue propped herself on one elbow and blinked down at him for a moment. “Did anyone ever tell you that’s it’s kind of déclassé to talk about babies before your dick is even dry?” she said.

  He laughed, embarrassed. “In my defense, at least I didn’t wipe it on the curtains.”

  She looked properly grossed out and was once again the prim, sexy creature who had pulled a face when he told her to spit in her dive mask. He couldn’t quite square it with this new woman, the one who had wrapped her legs around him and gone off like a Fourth of July firework, but he liked the contrast.

  They lay quiet for a moment, her hand on his belly and their feet touching and tussling, his toes stroking her instep. He wanted to ask her a million questions but the only one that sounded right was, “So what happens now?”

  She shrugged, her finger circling the sweaty cup of his navel like she had known his body forever. “I don’t know,” she said. “Stock up on condoms, I guess.”

  “Is that your way of saying you want this to happen again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He smiled back up at her. Her hair was drying now, relaxing a little into its usual floating curls. He realized he had never seen it loose before; it had always been scraped back tidily from her face. He reached up and touched the springy little wisps at her temple, marveling at its softness. “You liked that, huh?”

  Blue leaned into his touch like a cat, twisting her head so that her cheek filled his palm and the corner of her lips touched the inside of his wrist in a clumsy kiss. Oh, this was bad. This could only lead to trouble and heartbreak and worse, but when they kissed her mouth tasted like thirst and lust and before he knew it they were all wrapped up in each other once more. She was all there for the touching and tasting and he had this feeling that if she put her clothes back on, that would be it.

  There were footsteps in the hall outside and Blue froze on top of him, her fingers still curled around his cock as she str
ained her ears to figure out who it was.

  “Okay,” she said, in a low voice. “We should probably get out of here.”

  He sighed. “Does this mean we have to stop being naked?”

  She stifled a giggle. “It does unless you’re trying to get me fired, yeah.”

  Blue released him and slid off the bed. The first thing she put on was a denim skirt that came just past her thighs, and somehow the thought of her wandering around with no underwear was even more exciting than her completely naked. As he watched her put her clothes on he knew that now he would never be able to look at her again without thinking about what was under them.

  “If you need a shower, go ahead,” she said, shimmying her beautiful brown ass into a pair of sober black panties. “I have a couple more things to pack.”

  Gabe sniffed his armpit. “Yeah, I might take you up on that. I’m still kinda...gamey.”

  “Oh. Of course. Did you...get rid of it?”

  “Yep. It’ll get eaten by something or another.”

  She pressed her lips together. “It’s terrible. I feel like we committed a murder. What do you think did that?”

  “Could have been anything,” he said, although he knew very well what kind of creature was responsible. “Car could have hit it and the driver just decided to stuff the evidence under nearest porch rather than go through the hoopla of admitting he hit a Keys deer.” He picked his clothes up from the floor. “I won’t be a minute, okay?”

  When he came out of the bathroom her hair was tied back. She wore a plain t-shirt with her straight denim skirt. She was standing side on from him, her long neck bowed as she bent to flatten her clothes into her suitcase. At first she didn’t look up, and she looked so remote that he could hardly believe he had just been inside her. And with that came the thought of how much he wanted to do it again, how the touch of her skin made him want to hold her close and never let her go, as tight as if he was trying to crawl inside her and see every scrap of her, skin and bone and flesh and blood.

  He was in so much fucking trouble.

  “You ready to go?” he said.