by Anna Roberts
“Sorry,” said Joe. “I smelled the damp under the tile. It’s like my nose got turned up to eleven or something.”
“That’s got to be an advantage in the plumbing business,” said Grayson, switching off the computer. The reflection of the screen blinked off in his glasses and Joe thought he saw a glimmer of social panic in the older man’s eyes. Joe’s nose was still a sore point.
“Grab a drink. Please. Make yourself comfortable.”
Joe ran a hand through his damp hair and took a seat opposite. There was a bottle of Scotch open on the coffee table, and the foggy, boggy smell of it filled the room, making Joe think of heathery moors and all those old Scottish songs that Gloria had used to sing; her maiden name had been McCormick.
He poured himself a glass. The coffee table was covered in books, some of the elderly, dusty variety that probably only answered to the name of ‘tome’. The other kind were new paperbacks, the covers featuring howling wolves set against full moons, or full moons gleaming down on impossible shining abs. Forget eight packs; some of these guys were sporting sixteens. They were all written by the same author – Jennifer Devine.
“You still doing that, huh?” said Joe.
Grayson removed his wrist bandage, a complicated strappy arrangement that looked like a beige, surgical version of an archer’s bracer. “When I can,” he said, flexing his fingers. “The arthritis is getting worse now.”
“You should get a secretary. Dictate them.”
Grayson smiled and shook his head. “God, no. It’s one thing to write purple prose. Quite another to say it out loud. I’d feel silly.”
“Is feeling silly worse than being in agony?”
“It is if you’re British, yes.”
Joe picked up one of the paperbacks, one of an identical stack. “It looks...interesting.”
“It’s not. People want to read the same tired Twilight knock-off story over and over again. Girl meets werewolf, werewolf removes shirt - ”
“ - werewolf ripples abs at girl?”
“For several hundred pages. Yep. I tried to make one a bit more authentic, but the publishers hmmed at me and the reader reviews were fucking savage. Won’t do that again. No amount of full moons and scary, hairy werewolf bikers prepare a man for dealing with romance reading housewives.”
“They’re not interested in the real-life experience, huh?”
“Not remotely,” said Grayson. “They just want to read about abs. And no, I don’t know either. I mean, I like a six pack as much as the next man, but...”
Joe laughed, surprised to find himself charmed. It was the smallest flirt but it felt good. He liked the way Grayson had thoughtlessly batted it into the air; no pressure, no stress. And maybe a little part of him was sore that he’d be off Gabe’s To Do list for now.
“I meant to ask you something,” said Grayson.
“What’s that?”
“Charlie. He’s not really Gloria’s son, is he?”
“Oh,” said Joe, disappointed. “No.”
“Funny. I never knew any of her other fosters refer to her as their mother.”
“Charlie’s different,” said Joe, picking up his drink again. “Gloria would say she never played favorites, but we all knew the score. There’s something in him that’s...I don’t know...just like her.”
“Kindred spirits, you mean?” said Grayson.
“That. Exactly. Same attitude. Same sick sense of humor.” He took a swallow of his Scotch; it burned. “And what happened to him was pretty horrible, I guess.”
“Everyone’s nightmare scenario. Yes. Everything we do to keep things like that happening; the basements, the bars, the provisions, the safehouses.” Grayson seemed to light up in spite of the subject. “Do you know Mike Hallett? Mike the Bike? Well, he referred to a safehouse as a spittal the other day. How’s that for a taste of the Old Country?”
“Which one?”
“Scotland.”
“Oh. Not my old country. I think my great-grandparents were from Trondheim or something. But Gloria would get a kick out of it, if she was...” Joe stopped talking before his tongue ran away with him. Things seemed to be in a state of flux here, with everything up for grabs and nobody in real control. The last thing he needed was to tip off anyone – even Grayson – that the wolf witch of Islamorada was...what? Dying?
No. He wasn’t ready to face that yet. None of them were.
Grayson sensed the shift in atmosphere and silence settled uneasily .
“To tell you the truth,” said Joe, feeling as though he should reveal something, at least. “Nobody was supposed to know I was here. I was just going to sneak in, take a look around. But then I walked into the bar and...well...”
“What you lack in espionage skills you make up for in first aid training,” said Grayson. “You saved his life.”
“What are you gonna do? Stand there and watch him choke to death?”
“Some might say you had every right.”
Joe sat up, startled by the flintiness in Grayson’s tone. “Some?”
“Not me. But some might.”
“No,” said Joe. “I’m not into that ‘sins of the father’ business. What Lyle did was nothing to do with Reese.”
Grayson cleared his throat. “No. I know this doesn’t help, or make up for what happened to you, but I tried to talk to Lyle about letting you and Gabe go. I did, Charlie did. Especially Charlie. God knows he has his flaws, but that man knows you don’t fuck around with Gloria’s kids, not unless you want to bring down the full force of her mojo down on your head.” He took a swallow of Scotch and sighed. “But you know how Lyle was. Never had time or respect for wolf witches. And my word never had any weight with him, despite what some people might say. I was quite amused to find that in some quarters they thought I was some sort of consigliere; in fact he thought I was – and I quote – ‘a snooty English cocksucker who writes kissing books for girls.’”
He drained his glass and went to pour another. He offered another to Joe, but Joe was still working on the first, still unsure as to whether he liked it or not. It felt like the wrong drink for swampy old Florida; Joe could picture himself sipping it happily in a cabin in some snowy corner of Minnesota, but here belonged to tall cocktails and iced white rum.
“How did Lyle die?” asked Joe, while the booze was still making him brave enough to do so.
“Slowly,” said Grayson, with that same stoniness as before. “He should have had the sense to put a bullet in his head before he turned forty-five, never mind fifty. But you know Lyle. He had a habit of hanging on by his fingernails when it came to power. Wouldn’t have a wolf witch, wouldn’t admit he was getting old. He had a billion pills and powders and nostrums he’d picked up off the internet; you look surprised. Didn’t you know he was a massive hypochondriac?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“He was obsessed. Protein supplements, overpriced vegetable juices – you name it. Half of them had the labels in Russian, and you can bet your pink pajamas that they weren’t FDA approved.”
“Roid rage?” said Joe. Through the red and black haze of it all he remembered thinking several times that Lyle would have to stop soon.
“Probably. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
There was another uncomfortable silence while Joe tried not to remember. Bloody knuckles, steel-capped boots, his head ringing like a bell with every blow and the crunch and squish of his own battered flesh. When they brought out the motorbike chain - that had been the moment when he curled into an even tighter ball and found that place deep inside the center of his self, the one he didn’t think he could even reach unless the moon was full. The place where the wolf lived.
“You look well,” said Grayson.
“You look gray.”
“That’s because I am.”
“No, I mean all gray. I don’t see color anymore. Since...you know.” He couldn’t forget the gray, swirling smellscape he had woken to, unable to make his tongue form words or his brain string
them together. And yet he’d known somehow – wordlessly – just how bad it was. The worst of all possible scenarios. You turn back into a human but your brain stays wolf. If you died straight away you were lucky.
“I’m so sorry.”
Joe shrugged. “I was colorblind before anyway. You know how it goes together sometimes.” He tapped his nose, determined that nobody was going to pity him. “And I got superpowers, like you say. I can sniff out a leaking pipe without even taking the floor up. Business is good.”
“We all have our quirks, I suppose. You know Lyle used to be able to turn at will?”
Joe sat still, determined not to reveal just how interesting he found this tidbit. “No. I didn’t know that.”
“Maybe it was one of the reasons he never felt the need for a wolf witch,” said Grayson. “Well, that and the heartfelt misogyny, of course. But he could turn just by wanting to. Didn’t need to be a full moon for him to do it. He always had a weird control over the wolf in him. Not to the point where he could keep from changing when the moon was full; you know how that goes.”
“Yeah.” First you felt the spaces between your bones gape, tendons started to ache and tingle, and then it was coming whether you liked it or not. Couldn’t fight the moon. No one could. “But he could turn at any other time he liked?”
Grayson drained his glass and nodded. “Yep. And he was himself, Joe. That was the other thing. He wasn’t just an animal when he turned. He was still Lyle, but with teeth. And claws.”
Gabe had been right all along; Lyle had killed that girl. “Jesus,” Joe said, trying to remember anything from the last time he turned, but there was nothing. Just the usual black space in his brain and the cold, aching aftermath, curled in a heap on the floor with every bone in his body groaning in pain.
“There you have it,” said Grayson. “Now you know why we were all so fucking scared of him.”
12
There was another Christian at the gate today. A woman, this time.
Yesterday it had been a man – a boy, really – with a patchy pubey mustache and a squirrelly look. He had been short, and when Blue stood up to speak to him he had stared directly between her sweating breasts for a moment before cutting his eyes away and afterwards addressing himself to a spot in the air maybe two inches beyond her left ear.
If she had answered his questions to his satisfaction – which she hoped she hadn’t, since they were none of his business – then he had been too busy avoiding the sightly temptations of the flesh to remember the answers. Which was probably why the woman was here now.
She was small and artificially bright, with curly hair dyed a butter-blonde. Her pink t-shirt had glitter on it, but Blue couldn’t make out the picture; it was creased between her folded arms. There were rhinestones on the corners of her glasses.
“Well,” she said. “Don’t you look busy?”
Blue untangled another skein of ivy from her gardening gloves and gave her a strained smile. Everyone was your friend when you were doing yard work. Every third person who came by paused to tell her what a good job she was doing or jokingly asked if she’d like to come by and do theirs later. “I’m getting there,” she said.
The woman smoothed down her sparkly t-shirt; there was a smiling cat on it, a child’s rendering, with sticks for whiskers and upturned triangles for ears. Blue caught her looking and laughed.
“Isn’t it cute?” she said. “My granddaughter designed it just for me and I took it to one of those t-shirt printed places. Then she jazzed it up with some sparkles.”
“It’s nice.”
“She’s very artistic. All her teachers say so.” There was another smile, a catch in the conversation. The woman glanced at the house and Blue pictured her gaze bouncing back off the mirror beside the door; maybe that was why it was there. She made a mental note to ask Gloria.
There was a shadow under the porch, a patch of darker earth where something smelly had spilled out of the deer and stained the soil. It was fading now, but it was all Blue saw in that moment, while the woman went on talking and shuffling some papers she’d pulled out of her bag.
“...you’ll forgive me for asking, but is this Miz Baldwin’s place?”
Blue turned back to her, jarred back to reality by the knowledge that she’d been living here for almost a full week and yet had no idea what Gloria’s last name was.
“Uh...I think so.”
“I’d very much like to speak with her.” There was a leaflet in the woman’s hand now. It was printed on shiny paper and was every bit as infantile as the sparkly cat on the woman’s sweatshirt. A snow-white, blue-eyed Jesus beamed an Ivory Soap smile over a gaggle of doe-eyed children, some of them rendered so aggressively cute by the artist that they’d looped right round to grotesque. Candy colored goblins grinning up at their God.
“She’s resting right now,” said Blue, taking the leaflet out of politeness.
The woman nodded, but there was a glint in her eye that told Blue that a lot of her fizzy, busy glitter was just there to hide her real shine. Hard as a diamond. “Perhaps you could help me, then?” she said. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” asked Blue, whose idea of what was true had been tested a lot lately. That the light fitting swung every time she went near the cellar door – that was true, but she had no idea what it meant. Or Gabe. Every time there was a little voice in her head telling her that this couldn’t be real, forcing her senses to scramble to take it all in; the touch and taste and smell of him.
“Why, the miracle, of course,” said the woman, with an evangelical smile.
Briefly Blue considered lying, telling her that Gloria’s recovery was down to some new drug, but that would only bring a whole new variety of pilgrims to her door, some of whom had television cameras and demands to see scientific proof.
“Are you from Renee’s church?” she said.
“Yes, dear. Do you know her?”
“I work with her.”
“Poor Renee. She’s been through so much in the last couple of years.”
“Yes, I know.”
The woman sighed. “Well, the Lord sends these things to try us.”
“He does?” said Blue.
“Of course. He tests those he loves dearest.”
Blue let out a snort of laughter before she could rein it in. “Sorry,” she said, in response to the woman’s diamond glare. “I don’t like to think of what he’d do to those he hates.”
“He forsakes them,” said the woman.
“Yeah,” said Blue. “I’m okay with that.”
The woman sparkled and sweetened again, but it was ineffective now that Blue had seen her real edge. “Well,” she said. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to hand on that leaflet to Miz Baldwin and I’ll come back another day.”
Another day when I’m not the dragon guarding the gate, thought Blue, watching her walk to her car. When the woman had gone she took another swipe at the ivy on the fence, but picking up the shears again made her forearms ache and it was time to start thinking about dinner.
There was salt on the doormat again. Gloria dropped it all over the house like dandruff and no sooner had Blue swept it up then she sprinkled some more. Walking barefoot in Gloria’s house was a gritty sort of experience, like tracking the beach in after yourself no matter how well you had thought you’d dusted the sand off your toes.
In the kitchen, Gloria was busy pricking out seedlings. To Blue’s relief she had at least spread a newspaper on the table before, which she hadn’t done when she was making her ‘witch balls’ - mason jars full of broken glass, rusty nails and other things Blue preferred not to think too much about.
The seedlings were less than a week old, tiny twin leaves on gossamer thin stems. Gloria lifted each fragile little plant from the seed tray, exposing its wisp of root, then pricked out the soil with a pencil before placing the plant in an individual pot. The pots were regular sized and the whole exercise seemed absurdly optimistic. Like the comically tiny seed
lings would never and could never get big enough to fill them.
Then again, Blue supposed that ivy out there once started as a seed and a pair of new green leaves. And it had defeated her for yet another day.
“What are you planting now?” she asked.
“Basil,” said Gloria, not looking up. “King of herbs. Repels evil, assures fidelity and makes red sauce worth eating.” She tapped the side of another pot with the pencil. “Marzanos. Maybe the goddamn blight won’t get them this year. My second husband had a knack with tomatoes, but then he was an Italian.”
“You were married?”
Gloria grinned, her lip folding toothless over the gums. With a sinking sense of inevitability, Blue glanced over at the dish drainer. Yup, there they were. Gloria’s dentures, bared right next to the dish soap.
“Three times,” said Gloria. “I was a hot little number; I guess I can say that now. Here, hand me those paper towels.”
“Is there anything in particular you’d like for dinner?”
“Nah. Surprise me. Old drybones here don’t need much anyways. Not like you - you’re still in the game of life, as it were.” She eyed Blue thoughtfully, and not for the first time Blue wondered if Gloria had that old lady thing going on, some kind of second sight that kicked in around the menopause. “You bleeding yet?” she asked.
“No,” said Blue, once again counting the days in her head. She’d had nature’s clock ticking away inside her for so many years that it seemed impossible that it could be stopped by something so small; a sigh, a shudder, a muffled melting spike of pleasure. She should have been more sorry, or more worried, but every time she thought of him between her legs all she ever felt was lust.
“Let me know when you do,” said Gloria. “I could do with some of that on the doorframes.”
“I’m sorry?
Gloria sighed and took off her glasses. “Squeamish,” she said. “It won’t do you any good, Shiny-New. I don’t suppose you noticed, hanging out with Gabe, but this place is haunted as all hell.”
