by Dia Reeves
I rested my forehead against his and watched his lips pull up into a smile. “Your girlfriend will come after me with a rock if I go out with you.”
“Ex-girlfriend. And Pet ain’t the violent type. She’s … kind of a wuss.” He said it as though he were disclosing a shameful secret, like that she had a tail or a third nipple. “There’s a movie theater just down your street—the Standard. They’re showing French movies all week, but—”
“I love foreign films!”
“You would.” He tugged a wayward strand of my hair that gleamed blondly in the sun. “You’re Swedish, right?”
“I’m Finnish. And American. And white and black. And neither thing excludes the other, regardless of what you’ve been taught to believe.”
He smirked at me like I was being naive, like he was humoring me. “Say something in Finnish.”
I told him to get bent.
“What’s that mean?”
“I said you’re very charming.”
He ducked his head in this cute way that made me feel guilty for teasing him. “If you come tomorrow at six,” I told him, “I’ll cook dinner before we go.”
“Sweet.”
I gave him my number and he stored it in his cell phone, slim and green as a dragon’s scale.
The sound of squealing tires broke the mood. Far beyond the porch screen, a familiar lemon Jag screeched into the driveway.
Wyatt helped me to my feet. “Is that Rosalee?” He pressed his face to the screen, trying to peer around the side of the house.
“Do you want to meet her?”
He looked shaky-excited, like a girl at her first boy band concert. “Hell, yeah,” he said, following me into the kitchen.
We stepped through the back door in time to see Rosalee slam the car door shut. The man with the snakelike tongue got out as well, scowling.
As Rosalee stormed our way, the snake yelled her name. “Don’t walk away from me! Who the hell do you think you are?” He grabbed her arm, and before I could move, Rosalee turned and kneed him in the groin.
“What part of ‘it’s over’ don’t you understand?” she shouted.
The pained look in his face mixed with incredulity, as though his favorite teacup Chihuahua had somehow sprouted fangs and chomped his ass. He slithered to the ground like an oil spill in his expensively slick suit.
Rosalee hauled him up and shoved him back in his car. “Get out of here!” She kicked out his right taillight with her stiletto heel, but he peeled away in reverse before she could get the left one.
She pulled down the miniscule skirt of her dress and fluffed her hair, ignoring Wyatt and me as she walked past us into the house.
I was worried about what Wyatt would think of that little show, but he was beaming, staring through the glass of the door after Rosalee. “She’s such a badass.”
Envy swamped me in a surprising flood. “Maybe it’s not such a good time for introductions, after all.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, disappointed, and trudged down the back steps.
“But I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“At six,” he said, heading toward his dusty green Ford parked at the curb.
I wrapped my arm around the porch post and admired his no-nonsense stride. “Wyatt!”
“What?”
“I’m glad you’re a freak.”
“Thanks,” he said, and then frowned as if wondering what he’d just thanked me for.
I stayed on the back porch until he disappeared down the street in his truck.
Rosalee was in the kitchen in a frilly red apron, cutting potatoes while a big pot of water came to a boil on the stove. A pornographic Betty Crocker.
“Rosalee?”
She glanced at me, frowning and silent.
“Are you all right?”
“Obviously.” Her cheek was bruised wine-dark, as though that lowlife had smacked her. I felt bad then, mooning over Wyatt while Rosalee suffered alone, battered and bruised.
“Maybe we should call the police?”
She shrugged off the suggestion. “I know how to handle men. Who was that boy?”
“Wyatt Ortiga. He trains with the Mortmaine.”
“I noticed the green,” she said, not even slightly impressed.
I leaned my elbows against the counter beside her. “Did you know that there are monsters in this town?” I said it to hear what it would sound like aloud.
“Of course I know.” Since this was usually the point where I got shipped off to the psych ward, her agreement was more than a little deflating.
“I helped kill one—this weird thing that was living in the school windows.” I told her the whole story, minus the part about Wyatt pouring from the glass.
“Always something going on at that school,” she muttered, tossing her knife on the counter. “Turn around.”
I did as she said, stunned as she looked me over. She seemed almost … concerned. “You’re all right,” she decided before going back to her potatoes.
“I am,” I agreed. “You know why? Because I won the bet.”
The sound of chopping ceased momentarily, the knife trembling in Rosalee’s hand. “Is that right?”
“Yes. I have a friend now. Kids like me at school. They think I’m a hero at school. I win. I get to stay.”
“You got half-hypnotized by a lure,” she said, popping a raw potato slice into her mouth. “You admitted yourself that that boy of yours had to keep telling you what to do. If that’s your definition of a hero, it’s pretty lame.”
“But I get to stay, right?”
“You’re dead if you stay here. A ghost.”
“Is that why you want me to leave?” I said, the truth dawning on me like flowers unfurling. “Because you’re worried about me?”
She said nothing.
“I can take care of myself. I’ll prove it. Tell me how to prove it. Momma?”
Silence.
The flowers wilted. “So you’re going to ignore me?”
“Why not?” said Rosalee, dumping the potatoes into the pot. “What’s the point of talking to a ghost?”
Chapter Twelve
Wyatt came over the following evening in a green button-down shirt and black jeans, but from the way he carried himself, he might as well have been in full dress uniform. His every movement, every gesture, had an air of formality. Like the way he handed me the angel food cake he’d bought on the way over, half bowing as he held it out to me.
“It was Pop’s idea,” he said as I led him into the kitchen and sat him in the red chair. “He said it’d be classy to come bearing gifts.”
“He was right. Thank you.” I found a dish for the cake and poured Wyatt a cup of coffee.
“Is Rosalee here?” he asked, hopeful, as I handed him the cup.
“She’s in her office, working.” Actually, I had no idea what she was doing in her office. I’d knocked on the door earlier and told her that company was coming, but as far as Rosalee was concerned, I was still a ghost.
Wyatt was grinning.
“What?”
“It must be cool having her as a mom.”
I tried not to be mad that his smile hadn’t been for me. “Must it?” I brought the food to the table. “Why is everyone so in awe of my mother?”
“The whole Mayor thing. I mean, forget about it. Rosalee’s the badass of the universe.”
“The Mayor?”
“You don’t know?” Shocked. “Damn. Her own daughter, and you don’t even know. What’s all this?”
“Veriohukaiset,” I said, sitting in the garden chair. “It’s a type of pancake.”
“All that gibberish means pancakes?”
“It’s not gibberish just because you don’t understand it.”
“You burn ’em?”
“Of course not.”
“Why are they black?”
“The blood darkens them.”
“What blood?”
“Pig’s blood. Eat, eat,” I said. “A person would th
ink you’d never had blood pancakes before. And there’s more coffee. I can’t indulge anymore, so have as much as you like.”
“Why can’t you indulge?” he asked, staring at his forkful of veriohukaiset as though it might bite him.
“Caffeine no longer agrees with me.” I poured myself a glass of milk. “So tell me about Rosalee.”
He made the sign of the cross and then finally took a bite of my cooking; he seemed amazed that he didn’t fall over dead.
“It starts with Runyon Grist, this guy who used to be Mortmaine. Maybe the greatest one ever. Killed more monsters, saved more people. But then he lost his daughter and everything changed.
“The reason we have to deal with shit like lure is because of all the doors. Portero’s full of ’em, doors to everywhere and nowhere. Porterenes, the Mortmaine especially, keep an eye on the doors because things come through all the time. And sometimes, people go out. The way Runyon’s daughter did.
“She was walking home from school with some friends, just walking, and suddenly she wasn’t there anymore—disappeared right off the sidewalk.
“When she vanished, Runyon became obsessed with finding where she’d gone. So while he was trying to figure out where his daughter was, he ran across this woman who wasn’t all the way human and had a tongue-breaking name he couldn’t pronounce, so he called her Anna. Well, Anna could travel from one street, one city, one world to another anytime she wanted, and she didn’t even need to use any doors. She said the ability was innate. In her bones. So Runyon took ’em.”
“Took what?” I asked, when he paused to drink.
“Her bones. He made a Key out of them.”
“Out of her bones?”
“Not all of them. When I say Key, I don’t mean a house key. This is bigger than that—capital K. There’s five Keys spread out across Portero, including the one Runyon made—they’re the reason the doors exist. But the other four ain’t user-friendly, and they sure as hell ain’t man-made. What Runyon did, making his own Key, had never been done before.
“After he made the Key, he figured out which world his daughter had disappeared into and was gone see if he could get her back.”
“He was going to search an entire world?” I said. “That’s ridiculous. How would he even know where to start looking?”
“He stole a woman’s bones and made a Key out of ’em. I don’t think he was thinking too clearly by that point. It didn’t matter anyway. When the Mayor found out Runyon had tortured Anna and stole her bones, she put a stop to his travel plans. She forbade him to ever leave his house again, even after he died. He ain’t left that house in something like eighty years.”
“Wait. The Mayor forbade him to leave even after he was dead?”
Wyatt gave me a hard grin. “The Mayor can be pretty tough when she wants to be.”
“But what does this have to do with Rosalee?”
“I’m getting there. Thing is, when people found out Runyon Grist was haunting his own house, they started daring each other to run up and knock on the door, shit like that. The thing you gotta understand about Porterenes is we’ll do anything to prove how brave we are. Well, when the Mayor found out about people going over to Runyon’s house, she got pissed. She didn’t want Runyon to have any contact with people, not even pesky little kids playing ding-dong ditch. So she ordered the Mortmaine to ward off Runyon’s house.”
I put away the empty plates and served the soup.
Wyatt lowered his voice, his eyes shining. “The day before they put down the wards, Rosalee walked up to Runyon’s front door, and she didn’t just knock and run. Rosalee went inside the house. Just walked right in, even after the Mayor forbade it.” He blinked at the bowl I set before him. “What’s this?”
“Blueberry soup.”
“What is it with you and purple?”
“Wyatt, focus,” I said, taking my seat. “Rosalee went into the house and then?”
“And then she came out.”
“And? What was inside the house? Did she see Runyon?”
“Who knows?” He looked as frustrated as I felt. “She would never talk about it! She wouldn’t even tell the Mayor. After Rosalee left Runyon’s house, she was hit by a car, and she claims that she got amnesia, but I think Rosalee was just like”—he paused and looked over his shoulders before whispering—“fuck the Mayor. I can go where I want when I want and see who I want. Fuck her rules.”
I could believe that of Rosalee, that she had no regard for other people’s rules, approval, or feelings, but why a boy as high-minded as Wyatt—why an entire town, for that matter—could revere such qualities was beyond me.
“That’s why Rosalee is held in awe? Because she disobeyed the Mayor?”
“The Mayor who can control you even after you’re dead,” he reminded me.
I kept silent a long while, thinking about everything Wyatt had told me: doorways to other worlds, a mayor with power over the dead, a Key made of bone. I let it all sink in and found myself smiling. I was right to have come to Portero, a town more insane than I could ever hope to be.
“So my mother is the supreme badass of Portero,” I said, embracing the strangeness and letting it embrace me in return.
The look Wyatt gave me brought me back to earth, that mocking transies-are-so-lame look that I had come to hate. He shook the soup spoon at me. “You can’t ride on Rosalee’s back. You want respect, you gotta earn it.”
“True,” I said thoughtfully. “Very true.”
“I thought the movie was good,” Wyatt said as we left the Standard. It was full dark and humid, the street crowded with people walking home from the theater. “I just don’t get why it was called Breathless. It sure as hell wasn’t fast-paced. But that Jean Seberg was something else.”
I took his arm. “A scumbag. She turned her own boyfriend over to the police. I’d never do that.”
“She was doing her duty.”
“Duty schmuty. Plus, she was an idiot. Letting herself get pregnant.”
“She was in love!”
“She was bored. Don’t be such a romantic.”
“What’s wrong with romance? I don’t go to the movies for realism. I get plenty of that every day. And you got some nerve telling me not to be romantic. Look at you.”
Wyatt pulled me beneath an ornate streetlamp and spun me around by the hand like he was a cowboy and I the lasso. I laughed and laughed, my skirt whirling out in shameless ripples, dusty-winged moths dancing over our heads.
“Look at that petticoat,” he said. “You gotta be sorta romantic to even want a petticoat.”
“That’s not romance; that’s style.” When he stopped spinning me, I slid my arms around his neck, and in my heels, we were eye to eye.
People shuffled past us in the dark, beyond the lamplight, but I couldn’t see them; as long as Wyatt hid with me in the light, who else did I need to see?
I pushed his collar aside and bit his neck.
“Hey!” He shied away, clapping his hand over the bite mark. He laughed. Nervously. “Why’d you bite me?”
“Because I wanted to.” I pulled his hand away so I could see the mark I’d left on his skin. The tiny grooves of my teeth decorating his neck thrilled me. “Do you mind?”
He had to think about it a long time. “You a vampire or something?”
I laughed at him, not because he was leery of vampires—for all I knew this freaky-ass town was crawling with them—but because he was so uptight. I pressed my hips against his, earning another nervous chuckle.
“Vampires are lame.” I unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. “Do you think I’m lame?”
“No,” he said quickly, rebuttoning his shirt. “But what’re you doing? Don’t undress me out here.”
Such an old lady. I re-unbuttoned his shirt. “I’m not undressing you. I just want to bite you where no one can see it.”
“Under a lamppost?” He cast a half-annoyed, half-excited glance about the street.
“Under you
r clothes, doofus.”
“People’re looking at us.”
Wyatt’s disapproving tone was at such odds with his erection that I decided he secretly wanted to give “the people” something to look at. I would have obliged him, but the gold, heart-shaped locket gleaming warmly against his skin distracted me.
“How sweet!” I said, lifting it from his chest. “This looks like the one I had when I was a little girl.”
“It belonged to a girl,” he said, so reluctantly it put me on guard.
“Was it Petra’s?”
He shook his head, a dark look on his face, his erection lost. He pulled away from me. “It was my nana’s. I don’t wanna talk about it.”
I was sure he was lying, sure that if I opened the locket, I’d see Petra’s bony face smirking at me. But before I could call him on it, his phone rang, and I could tell he was glad for the reprieve.
“You found her house?” he said into the phone. “I know where that is. Well, I’m on a date, and you said I could—” He sighed. “Fine. I’m on my way.”
“What is it?” I asked when he put the phone in his pocket.
“Mortmaine stuff.” He left the circle of light beneath the lamppost and plunged into darkness, pulling me after him, and before I knew it, we were at my house, where Wyatt’s truck was parked at the curb.
Lights blazed in every window down Lamartine, except at my house, which was dark. Uninviting. Cold. I was not in a hurry to go inside.
“Where do you have to rush to?” I asked, trying to prolong my last moments with someone who actually liked having me around. “A hunt?”
“What do you know about hunts?” He sounded surprised.
“Lecy said something about dangerous hunts in the park.”
“The dark park,” he corrected.
An idea occurred to me. A marvelous idea. “Would a dark park hunt be considered badass?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And a person who went on a hunt would be considered badass—totally capable of handling herself ?”
He gave me a long look. “Yeah, but Hanna, you need permission. And the Mortmaine don’t give it to people just trying to show off.”
“Well then, let’s not tell them,” I said archly. “The way we didn’t tell them about how you used nonstandard weapons to defeat the lure. Actually, let’s not mention lure at all, since you were expressly forbidden to involve yourself in the first place.”
