The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1)

by Anna Roberts

  “Come on,” said Charlie, taking her thin arm. “Let’s get some ice-cream and have us a game of checkers. I’ll even let you cheat.”

  Gloria yanked her arm away, her vacant eyes suddenly bright with anger. “I never cheated,” she said, her voice rising. “It was just payback.”

  “Okay. Sure. Whatever you say.”

  She reached out and shoved ineffectually at him. “Get out of here!”

  “Ma, it’s me – Charlie.”

  “I know who you are,” she said, and there was something else in her eyes now. Something he’d never seen there before. Jesus, was she fucking scared? “Get out. Get the hell out of here!”

  Gloria turned and ran, half-stumbling, up the stairs. He reached out to calm her but she screamed so loud that he was sure everyone up and down the block would hear it. In the brief, panicked silence that followed Charlie could hear Reese retching and moaning. The light above the stairs was swinging. Jesus, was that thing still here after all these years?

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” said Charlie, holding up both hands, but Gloria kept on up the stairs, taking the top of the flight on all fours. He followed at a safe distance but it was too late; she had reached the top, got to her feet and he was just in time to watch her bedroom door slam. A lock clicked shut.

  Something else splattered in the downstairs bathroom. Reese began to sob and moan.

  “Shit,” muttered Charlie, and went down the stairs.

  Reese was on his knees in front of the toilet, crying. There was red around his mouth and smeared across the back of his hand where he’d wiped his mouth. The bowl was full of dark blood.

  “I’m dying,” he moaned, snot and tears streaming down his face. “There was something in the food.”

  “What? Vegetables?”

  Reese shot him a look of pure hatred. “It was her. I know it.”

  “Who?”

  “Her,” said Reese. “The old lady. She’s trying to kill me.”

  “Gloria? Why would she be trying to kill you?”

  Reese lurched to his feet. His wet eyes swam in their sockets and Charlie held his breath. Was this it?

  “Because she knows,” said Reese, and pulled a knife from the back of his jeans. He staggered past Charlie, shoving him hard into the stairs. In the few, scrambling seconds it took him to get up Charlie grasped what the boy meant and why he’d agreed to come here; the stupid little bastard had come to get even with his dad’s most fearsome old adversary. With Gloria.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” said Charlie, following Reese into the empty living area. “I mean it, Reese. She’s a sick old lady.”

  “Bullshit she is. I know what she did. I was there. I saw it.” Reese waved the knife wildly, blood still foaming at the corners of his mouth. “The flies and the footsteps and the writing on the fucking wall, Charlie. You saw it, too. That was what killed him. That was what killed my dad. It was her fucking voodoo.”

  “Put the knife down, Reese. If you lay a single fucking sausage finger on her...”

  Reese turned on a heel. For a second his gaze was swimmy and unsteady, like something had shaken loose in his brain, but then it solidified somehow, into that bratty, delighted look that Charlie recognized – and this was the funny part – as the exact same look Reese had been wearing when he’d pooped on the front seat of Lyle’s car.

  “Seriously?” he said, starting to giggle. “You really wanna be mentioning sausages, Charlie?”

  Charlie said nothing; for a second it was like his fury had stolen his breath. It wasn’t so much that Reese had brought it up, but that Reese had been dumb enough to bring it up. He probably didn’t even remember the original incident; he’d been a brat in a high chair at the time, drawing ketchup patterns on the plastic with his dirty, snot-crusted fingers.

  Daddy issues. Fucking little bastard had no idea. Try fifteen years of trying to rinse the taste out of your mouth. After all those years Charlie could still see Lyle laughing behind the grill, turning over the sausage links with a pair of tongs.

  Wes couldn’t make it today, but he said he’d be along in spirit. Sausage, son?

  “Gloria didn’t kill your dad, Reese,” said Charlie, and goddamn if it didn’t feel good to say it after all this time. “I did.”

  Reese let out a wild bellow and came thumping towards him, knife held over his head. He sent Charlie crashing once again into the banister and the blade flew out of his fingers and fell, scoring the stair wall as it went. Charlie saw the light swaying above his head for a second and then Reese’s face, all white and runny with blood and tears.

  Oh shit. This was not a good place to be. Reese was huge. Okay, it was all fat, but three hundred pounds was still three hundred pounds when it was sitting on top of you. As Reese shifted his weight back to take another shot, Charlie felt his bones grinding into the floor beneath him. If Reese chose to sit on his ribs he knew he’d suffocate in a matter of minutes.

  But Reese wasn’t thinking. He was just smacking and flailing, raining blows down on Charlie’s head and face, screaming the whole time.

  “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, fucking motherfucker!”

  Not if I kill you first, Charlie thought, starting to feel floaty. There had been a brief second of darkness just then, ended only when he felt blood trickling into the back of his throat, triggering his gag reflex and snapping him back to full consciousness. The teeth in his right lower jaw felt sharp and raggedy and one of them was loose. His cheekbone and eye socket were a swollen, sunken hole of pain that threatened to swallow his head whole. And Reese wasn’t even nearly done; the crazy little shit was just sat there riding out the storm of sobs, but his fists were still clenched.

  Just how much longer could he keep this up without busting out like Eli’s kid had done? He was only nineteen, after all.

  Now, there was a thought.

  Charlie swallowed very carefully. His tongue felt thick and he’d bitten it in several places. When he tried to speak it first came out in a lispy gurgle, so that he had to swallow again. “I did it slowly,” he said. “So he’d suffer.”

  A mistake. Oh God. The next thing he knew Reese’s hands were around his throat, squeezing. “I’m gonna kill you,” Reese said, still crying, his tears streaming down. “You fucking dirty piece of fucking shit - die! Die, you motherfucker.”

  The world was turning dark around the edges and Charlie thought he had overplayed his hand for the last time, but then air - beautiful, delicious air - came rushing into his lungs once more. Reese reeled over backwards on his heels. Oh, there it was. Bring on that Hulk rage.

  There was an unmistakable crack, and Reese howled in pain, his back arching as far as his fat would let him. No - he wasn’t too old for this, thank God.

  Charlie quickly drew his legs up and tried to stand. The room spun like a fairground ride - wheee - and in spite of his pain he started to giggle. The light was swinging and twisting, adding an extra dimension of queasy, disco-ball fun to the proceedings. Reese let out a low, keening moan; he was on his hands and knees now, his back cracking and snapping like logs on a fire. He retched once more and spat, and this time something hard landed on the floor along with the mouthful of blood. Teeth.

  “Okay,” said Charlie, stepping over him to get to the basement door. “Time out, kiddo. Sit down and think about what you’ve done.”

  Reese grabbed his ankle, but Charlie managed to kick him in the face. The key was where it always been - in the bottom of the blue vase on the shelf. Charlie shook it out and opened the door, then grabbed Reese by the back of his shirt, dug in his heels and pulled.

  The kid was in bad shape. The wrong shape - for a person, anyway. Even if he had been able to get to his feet, he wouldn’t have been able to walk. For some weird reason the spine and hips were always the first to go. Not the brain; oh no, that would have been the kinder way to go about it, so you didn’t have to experience all that pain with your big, shiny, easily-traumatized human brain. Mother Nature was a we
apons grade bitch like that; she always saved the seat of the central nervous system until last.

  Charlie slowly dragged Reese to the top of the stairs; even with adrenaline coursing through his veins his muscles still screamed with the effort. Goddamn, how was it even possible to get this fat? He’d always pegged Reese at around three bills, but it felt like more like four. He pictured Reese smashing through the stairs like a bouncing bomb, but there was no way he was dragging him down there. Not when he could let gravity take care of it for him.

  “Don’t you...” Reese started to say, slurring now that his big new teeth had busted through. His eyebrows had already joined up and his greasy brown hair thickened, crackled. The beginnings of a pelt.

  Charlie shoved.

  Reese fell with a sound like thunder. He screamed halfway down, stopped and then lay still.

  It was very quiet. Charlie stood there in the swaying silence, feeling the odd static of transformation heavy in the air. His bones ached, although he couldn’t be sure whether it was from exertion or a weird kind of physical sympathy, as if watching Reese start to bend and crack and snap and bleed had reminded his body of what was less than two weeks away. Something crashed in Gloria’s room upstairs, and Charlie jumped.

  At the same time Reese stirred. He breathed with a strained, wheezing whistle that reminded Charlie of the noises Lyle had made just before the end. Too bad.

  “Don’t you open that door, Gloria,” Charlie yelled, and started to walk down the stairs.

  It smelled the same in here; Lysol and bleach failing to mask the heavy, rank animal smell that seemed as though it had bled into the concrete and the cage. Charlie once again grabbed Reese’s ankles and pulled, but this time the kid wouldn’t budge, stuck fast on the frictionless floor.

  “Move,” he said, as though just telling him could make the difference.

  Reese groaned in the back of his throat, and then the cracking started up again as his spine stretched and poked at the seat of his pants, the fabric coming loose around an ass that was no longer human shaped. Or even Reese shaped.

  There was no time. Charlie stepped into the cage and locked himself in.

  22

  They were headed towards the nearest beach. As she stepped out of the Land Rover Blue heard a Cuban beat thrumming gently on the breeze, distant laughter.

  There was a beach bar.

  “Get back in the car,” said Gabe.

  She almost did as she was told, picturing people screaming and scattering, pina coladas spilling on the sand. She realized she had no idea what to expect - an actual wolf, as Gabe had said, or something more unsettling. Some kind of wolfman that had stepped straight out of a medieval woodcut, all hairy, soft-footed and starving hungry. “I’m going with you,” she said. Now that she’d braced herself to do so, she felt as though she had to see it, just to get it over with.

  “No, you’re not,” said Gabe. “Stay in the car and keep the keys in the ignition, in case we have to take off. And roll up the windows.”

  “And what happens if he...if this goes bad?”

  “Then we get killed,” he said. “And you don’t.”

  “That’s a bad plan.”

  “It’s better than all of us getting killed,” said Gabe. “Please, Blue. Just wait in the car.”

  “He’s right,” said Grayson. “This is no time to test your limits. Just sit tight.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  Gabe kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You’re not supposed to.”

  “Yay,” she said, under her breath, and opened the car door. She watched them walk down the palm edged path towards the sound of music and voices, wondering if it would be the last time she ever saw them. Perhaps just thinking that was an insurance in itself; she had never thought that about Clarissa next door, who one day had been insisting the storm would blow itself out before it hit the Gulf and then just never came home. Or her mother. Blue had lost count of the number of times she had believed she would never see her mother again; this time she would do it. This time would be the time when she tied the rope right or didn’t panic when the pills started to make her groggy.

  But she had never done it, never dropped out of the world the way Clarissa had. It was only when Blue had started thinking there was hope; that was when Regina Beaufort had got serious. That was maybe two weeks before Blue found her with powder burns around her lips and her brains splattered halfway up the bedroom wall.

  Blue sat in the dark, her heart too loud in her ears and throat, thudding through her guts and bones. She wanted to be brave, but she felt as though every heartbeat would shake her apart. A scream from the direction of the beach pulled her up sharp, and in spite of Gabe’s warnings she rolled down her window. Once again she saw the beach bar in her head - the laughing tourists with their silly cocktails full of paper parasols and candy colored liqueurs. And she saw the wolf walking among them, hungry and oblivious.

  She strained her ears to hear the inevitable soundtrack to her mental movie, the part where the music stopped and the single scream was joined with more and more voices, yelling and wailing and sobbing with fear.

  But it didn’t come. The Cuban beat pounded on. The tipsy laughter kept on floating up to the stars.

  Something stirred in the undergrowth beside the path.

  Blue forgot how to breathe. She sat stock still, not even daring to reach out and hit the control for the window. There was something moving out there, something big.

  She saw the light glance off something shiny and wet (an eye?) and then there was a snuffle, a soft, wild, furry kind of sound. Her heart seemed to be stopping up her throat entirely and she wondered how much longer it would take before she passed out. She almost welcomed it.

  There was a quick, sudden movement and she screamed – couldn’t help it – and then nearly laughed. It was a deer. Another one of those dumb, endangered rats with hooves. It had hopped out of the foliage and was now standing there in front of the car with its ears all a swivel and its little black nose tilted to the scents of hot bar snacks drifting up from the beach.

  “Jesus,” said Blue, and then remembered; someone liked these.

  And someone was hungry.

  The deer flicked its ears once more. Blue heard something else moving in the brush, but this was a different kind of noise altogether. Not the skittish, scuffling sound of a herbivore, but the sleek swoosh of something moving cleanly and efficiently towards dinner.

  *

  Reese had stopped.

  He lay face down on the concrete, a still hairless tail snaking out from above the sagging waistband of his pants. Charlie knew the worst was yet to come, the searing pain when it started to rearrange your guts and ribs, swiveling your limbs in their sockets until you thought they would pop out.

  This should have been easy for Reese, but it wasn’t. He was simply too sick.

  Charlie sat in the cage and waited for him to come back round. In the meantime he was within reach of cardboard boxes; boy’s toys, mostly. There was Eli’s old catcher’s mitt and Gabe’s first set of swimfins, along with the Ouija board that Gloria had yelled at them for messing with. Good times.

  Alongside the Ouija board was an old book of bedtime stories – Charles Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare. Charlie dug in eagerly and was just settling down to The Tempest when Reese stirred, wheezing like a set of busted bagpipes.

  “You got a couple of broken ribs there, buddy,” said Charlie. “Sorry about that.”

  Reese just whimpered.

  “Your ass was too heavy to carry down the stairs. Pretty much had to drag and drop.”

  This time Reese groaned. He turned his face towards Charlie, his sunken eyes full of hate and his tail – goddamn, that thing was gross – twitching like some kind of denuded ferret. When he spoke his voice was full of blood and teeth. “I’m...I’m gonna...kill you.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Nope,” he said, banging on the bars of the cage with the book. “I’ve been here be
fore, kiddo. And you should take it easy. I don’t wanna worry you, but you got a major case of wolf-ass back there, and you’re not in the best shape of your life, let’s be honest. You start screaming and getting all worked up and that’s how you check out. Brain bubbles. Aneurisms. Bad shit.”

  Reese stiffened, arching against the fresh spasms. Jesus, this was hard to watch. The worst way to go, when your body could no longer tolerate the monthly insanity and every bend and twist of rearranging flesh could be the last. Some got into pills in a big way, or heroin. Others had the sense to blow their brains out before it reached the point of no return. Lyle should have gone that way, but Lyle had been an idiot.

  “You ever read these?” said Charlie, waggling the book at him. “‘A most ancient and fishlike smell.’ You remember that? I love it when you finally remember when one of your random brainfarts is coming from, don’t you? Like scratching an itch right in the center of your brain.”

  There was an awful popping, sucking sound from somewhere inside Reese, and he screamed. Thank God for soundproofed basements.

  “AH MOTHERFUCK OH MY GOD IT HURTS IT HURTS - ”

  “ - yeah. From your lips to God’s ear, Reesy,” said Charlie, setting down the book between his feet. “But it’ll be over soon, and we’ll all be better off. You were never gonna be king of North Florida, let’s face it. At best you were the truckload of fish we were hauling around to hide the stank of your dear, decomposing daddykins.”

  Reese’s arms seemed to telescope in on themselves to match the length of his new legs. His hands stretched out with a noise like the scrunching of plastic soda bottles.

  “Colloidal silver,” said Charlie. “How’s that for poetry? Not great for ordinary people in big enough quantities, but for werewolves? Eesh. You may as well gargle arsenic.”

  It had stopped again. Reese was semi-conscious, breathing loud and hard. His pants had fallen off completely, along with a pair of boxer shorts so large that you could have used them to sail a yacht.

  “I could have just dumped a bunch in your soda,” Charlie said. “But I didn’t. And you just helped yourself to what was in my hip flask anyway, you little shit. So in a way, you did this to yourself.”