by Anna Roberts
Joe swallowed. “We should –”
“– yeah. Help.”
Joe picked up the old ‘Hammer of the Witches’ once more. “What the hell do you suppose she’s doing out there?” he said.
*
The third thing was magic.
There was no more Gloria to contain it, and sometimes when she lay awake on the sofa bed Blue imagined it splattering all over everything like brain matter all over a wall, a thing from the inside that never should have been on the out. She was still careful to lie on her back or her left side at night, even though her scalp had healed over the hole in her head. Once she had poked it very, very carefully, and when she felt the edge of bored bone beneath the skin she had yanked her hand away as if she’d touched something hot, her nerves jangling for hours afterwards.
But maybe something else had poured into her skull along with Yael that time, like he’d left a residue of Gloria inside her head somehow, perhaps because the witch and the spirit had been one and the same for so many years. It was a strange kind of knowing that came from nowhere she could pinpoint, like seeing the picture of two black silhouetted faces and then realizing all along you’d been looking at a white vase. The few scribblings she remembered from Gloria’s book suddenly meant something new and potent.
Blue picked at the clotting scab on her palm, squeezing fresh blood to the surface. She took a length of sewing thread – white, so she could see where it was coated – and drew it through the fat bead of blood until the whole length was red. She held it between her teeth as she drove a brass pin into the earth, tying the end of the thread in a loop and securing it over the end of the pin. Then she took the other end and blew softly on the leaf litter, not daring to brush it away with her hands until she found the other pin she was looking for; this was delicate work.
There. The tiny head glinted in the dirt, and she pulled the thread taut across the ground like a tripwire for mice, securing the other end so that the bloody thread formed the last line, making a pentagram in her blood. Blue had no idea if she was doing it right, but she figured if she wanted it to work and knew why she wanted it to work then – according to Gloria’s rules – it had to work.
She had crisscrossed the whole yard with lines and devices, a complicated series of unseen barriers, like laser beams guarding jewels in a heist movie. She was all too conscious that she was making this up as she went along, but the book – the big, black pleather binder that might have contained some answers – was still in the Keys, no doubt being pored over by that thieving redneck Ruby. Grayson was trying to be helpful by digging around in his folklore collection, but people had told a lot of lies about witches over the centuries.
A gunshot rang out in the woods, startling her and stirring one of the ghosts, the Colombian. He always said the same thing – ayudame, no mas no mas – sprinkled with prayers and pleas for his children, but then came the shot and he was out of his body, over and over, doomed to repeat his death forever.
“Sometimes I think I should call a medium.”
Blue turned to see Grayson standing behind her. She hadn’t heard him come out. The dead could get noisy around these parts. “Aren’t you one?” she said, getting to her feet.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to do the whole ‘go towards the light’ thing with them myself, but they just get even more scared and bewildered. Raises the rather unsettling possibility that there isn’t actually a light in the first place. Just a long, dark dirt nap.”
Her spine stiffened at the sound of another shot. “Well, that’s...”
“...cheery, I know. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep.’” She must have looked distressed, because he quickly changed the subject. “What’s with the shooting gallery anyway?”
“Gabe,” she said. “He’s going kinda High Noon about all this. Teaching Axl to shoot.”
“With a mind to what?”
Blue shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m afraid to ask.”
“I take it you’ve explained to him that he can’t shoot Yael?”
“Of course I have. But he’s not gonna buy this for much longer, Grayson. He’s not the kind of person to sit on his hands, and it took him long enough to even believe in Yael. And now that he does I don’t think it even helps, because he’s so goddamn practical. I think he thinks Yael is like...I don’t know...dry rot. Or a disease. Something you can fix with vaccination, or moving house. Or calling in the exterminators. It’s ridiculous. Whoever heard of a skeptical werewolf?”
Grayson smiled. “He’s one of nature’s originals, all right.”
“I’m scared,” she said. “He keeps saying he won’t leave me, but part of me thinks he just wants to go back home and have this out with Charlie for once and for all.”
And the worst part is that the thing he wants to kill Charlie for? Charlie didn’t do that. I did.
The thought scuttled across her head like a cockroach when the light was switched on. She stomped it down quickly, the way she often did around Grayson. Although he said he couldn’t hear the thoughts of the living, she wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
“It’s hard,” she said. “Explaining to him why we ran in the first place, other than because Gloria said so.”
Grayson touched her shoulder. “I know. But you know you’re welcome here, don’t you?”
“Sure. Thank you. I just...I worry. Does distance even mean anything to a spirit?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not, but I can see Gloria’s reasoning. Didn’t she say it was like setting off a nuclear bomb at sea? Gives it a wider area for the energy to disperse. If she’d just...done what she did on land then Yael would hop into another person’s head, and we all know how that goes.”
“Yeah,” said Blue, who knew all too well and still had a hole in her head to prove it. “He’d go through the pack, trying them on like socks.” The Colombian ghost was crying, his sobs drifting back to them on the stiffening breeze. The sky between the treetops was a dilute shade of that angry gray that she would always associate with death, sorrow and stink. Hurricane season. She pictured Yael blowing in with the wind, carried on the arm of whirling catastrophe.
“There’s no way he can get back to shore, right?” she said. If it was Gloria’s will that Yael stayed out there then that surely should have been the final word, but Yael wasn’t like that. Time and time again Yael had demonstrated he was more than a match for the will of a witch.
“No,” said Grayson, and then spoiled it all by adding, “In theory.”
“In theory?” What if Yael hitched a ride in the head of a turtle? Or hijacked a reef shark? What if a passing boatful of illegals gained another stowaway?
“I suppose,” said Grayson. “That there’s always the possibility that someone could summon him.”
“No,” she said, more firmly than she meant to, needing to shut the whole thought down before it overwhelmed her.
“No?”
She exhaled. “No,” she said, remembering how much Ruby had wanted that baby. “She’s not that stupid. At least, I really, really hope she’s not.”
2
They were trying to hide it, like it was somehow unseemly to wring even a drop of happiness out of all this mess, but the bed squeaked at night and all afternoon Grayson had kept whistling whenever he thought he was alone. The tune settled into Blue’s head like an itch and it was only when she caught a fragment of words that she made the connection. High Noon.
...do not forsake me, oh my darling
Charlie is my darling, my darling Clementine. So many darlings and so many disasters.
She rummaged under the sofa bed; the books scattered all over the living room had offered little in the way of insights when it came to witchcraft, but stacked just right they could keep her bed from sagging so much in the middle that she sometimes woke with the strange sensation that she was somehow sleeping uphill. She didn’t roll onto her other side, for reasons
that still made her queasy, and the one time she had rolled down to the middle she had collided with Gabe. And he’d apologized, as if to a stranger.
“I guess those books came in handy after all,” he said. He was sitting on a nearby armchair, wearing a pair of pajama pants that were almost as big a red flag as his mumbled ‘sorry’ at three o’clock in the morning. You knew something was up when a werewolf wasn’t comfortable being naked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“I still don’t get what you’re expecting to find.”
“I don’t know,” she said, carefully smoothing her voice so that her raw nerves wouldn’t show. “Just...stuff. I’ll take anything right now. I mean, it could be bullshit, but I read somewhere that possessed people don’t bleed if you prick them.”
He narrowed an eye. “Does this mean you’re gonna start jabbing me with things?”
It was so much like something he used to say, back before everything got broken, that she laughed. And somehow the laugh was worse, because she knew he’d never want to make her laugh again if he knew what she’d done to Eli.
“Come on,” he said, and he had no idea, poor thing. “Leave the bed. If it sinks it sinks; sit still for a moment.”
She did as she was told. He reached for something down the side of the chair and then came over, reaching out for her head. She flinched away.
“Blue, quit it,” he said. “Please, baby. Let me look at it. That old dressing is gross – it needs a change.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just still freaks me out. When they first did it I kept thinking I’d wake up dumber and find half my brains puddled on the pillow.” Things on the outside that should have been in. In her nightmares she kept seeing Eli’s spine, crimped like badly made pastry. She hadn’t seen the hole, but she’d seen enough of the fluid that had leaked out of it, pale and streaky in all the blood.
“You have membranes,” said Gabe, gently peeling away the dressing from her head. “Skin. A whole bunch of things designed to keep your brain on the inside. Actually it feels like it’s pretty much grown over.”
“I know, but I can still feel the hole when I prod it.”
She felt his breath on her hair as he laughed. “So don’t prod it?” He ripped off a strip of tape. “The hair’s growing back white over the scar – did you know?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“It’s kind of cool. You should grow it out. We can have His n’ Hers skunk stripes.”
He came round to secure the dressing at the front, so she saw the streak of pale hair bright against his natural black. At first she had thought it was an affectation, a bleached stripe he’d put in on purpose, but more and more she realized it was probably the beginnings of premature gray. One time the sun had caught his morning stubble and lit up the silver in his beard, even though he was barely twenty-five.
His tan already looked as though it had faded and the calluses on his hands were going soft. He didn’t belong here in these gray-green whispering woods. He belonged in the sun and the surf, paddling like a seal over the coral. When he kissed her she barely tasted salt any more and that was just wrong. That wasn’t him. She pictured him wading naked into the crystal blue ocean, laughing at her, telling her that nobody could see. Just an afternoon of happy skinny dipping and open air sex on one of the islands off the reef.
It was so clear in her head that it could have been a memory; Gabe lying in the surf with the sun catching the grains of sand stuck to his bare thighs. But it wasn’t. It was only a fantasy they had talked about. In real life they had never had the time to be that carefree.
“There,” he said, pressing the tape into place onto her scalp. “Your brain’s not gonna fall out anytime soon.”
“Thank you.”
Gabe bit his lip, but the words sneaked past them anyway. “You should have stayed in the hospital. Just for future reference.”
“Why?” she said. “What difference would it have made?”
It wasn’t what he meant and she knew it, but she felt too tired to get into this again. And derailing him was easy enough; she’d had a lot of practice lately.
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” he said, after a short pause. “She tricked us all. Gave us the slip. She’d obviously been planning it for a long time.”
“How do you know?”
“Because. Before she got sick Gloria was always one of those people who did things on purpose. Even if they didn’t make sense at the time, she was always working towards something, you know? Something that made sense to her, I guess.”
The room was too quiet all of a sudden. Upstairs someone yawned. So he had faith in someone; it wasn’t completely alien to his nature, but that someone was dead now, and in death she was full of even more secrets than she was in life.
“Look,” he said, his dark eyes glittering in the lamplight. “I know you think I’m not always on your side –”
“– no, I –”
“– Blue, let me speak. Please.” He took her hand. “I won’t lie. It’s hard for me. Even through everything I’ve seen and done I can’t...I don’t know. There’s some little part of me that says ‘this is ridiculous’, and that we should go the fuck back to Islamorada and get on with our lives. If we even have lives to go back to.”
His boat. His business. Everything was in ruins because she’d dragged him all the way to the other end of the state on the say so on of a dead woman. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. She’d pulled that trigger. Twice. While she knew werewolves had their own points of view on life, death and euthanasia, she wasn’t sure she would ever be ready to tell him that she’d taken away someone he loved.
“I’m trying,” he said, while the tears splashed down onto her hands. “I’m trying to meet you halfway – I am. But you keep pushing, Blue. Just like you always accused me of doing. Now you’re the one pushing me away and I don’t know why. Can’t you just cut me some slack? I always struggled with faith, but I’m trying here, for you. For her. Just...please. Go easy on me, huh?”
She mopped her eyes with her sleeve. “You really love me, don’t you?” she said, and it hurt like hell.
“Of course I do, but I’m taking a lot on faith here, baby. And it’s not like it’s in my nature. Can’t we agree to cut one another some slack?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“I know you have a lot on your mind – we all do – but sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about what happened back there.”
What happened back there. The temperature seemed to drop in the room, or maybe that was just the blood rushing from her head. Fight or flight. This was it. This was the moment she’d dreaded and looked forward to at the same time. Time for the truth.
“About Charlie...” she said, and her lips felt like rubber as she started to speak.
“Yeah. Exactly. I’m not thrilled about the prospect of you being related to that scumbag, especially after what he did to Eli...”
And just like that it was gone. Her courage skittered out of the door. There was no telling him. He was talking but she was only catching words here and there. “...for practical reasons...darling Charlie’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes...and wasn’t there a husband? Gloria’s first?”
“Blanchard,” said Blue, dragging up the name from the depths of a nightmare. “She said his name was Blanchard.”
“There,” he said. “That’s something. We can work with that. We can figure it out. Together. And it’ll be one less thing on your mind.”
“Yeah,” she said, trying not to cry again. “It will. Thank you.”
*
Ruby set her haul down on the table, still dazed with the sheer plenty of things. The more she looked back the more her old life looked sad and muddy around the edges, faded like raggedy denim in shades of brown and green. Here the stores bulged at the seams with all kinds of sparkly things - fancy pantyhose, bath bombs with glitter and lingerie foaming with lace. And all this under the sa
me roof as bags of Cheetos the size of small kids and giant bottles of window cleaner whose fierce bright blue was only the merest shade darker than the crystal clear waters that lapped just under her window.
She’d bought only a handful of real treats – candy, some bath stuff and a cherry scented to candle to burn while she soaked and ate Hershey Kisses. The rest was practical stuff – plain white candles, chalk, rat poison and a live chicken in a crate. That one had been a challenge, but you could always find what you wanted if you were willing to look hard enough.
Ruby set the rat poison aside on a high shelf. No need to lock it up, at least not yet, but she was sure she had heard scurrying in the alley at night. It didn’t matter how much you scrubbed, they always managed to smell the blood and come running. Not that it helped with these prissy-ass city types. She could have got rid of the body and stocked the freezer in one go, but they weren’t so practical down here. Charlie had looked at her like she was a monster, which was pretty rich coming from him.
He came in from the balcony, trailing the strong odor of tobacco with him. She smiled, but he took one look at the hen in the crate and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Now,” said Ruby. “Is that any way to talk to your babymomma?”
He raked a hand through his dirty-gold hair. “That’s still happening, huh?”
“Yup. I did another test just to be sure. Two pink lines.”
“Show me.”
“I tossed it out,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d want a nasty old pee stick in the kitchen.”
“No. I wouldn’t. You got that right.” He eyeballed the chicken as he passed it and took a beer from the fridge. “That’s the worst thing about witches; you always gotta get your bodily fluids all over everything.”
She tried to smother her disappointment. This was Ro all over again. “Aren’t you happy, Charlie?”
He stared at her like she’d grown an extra head. “No,” he said, after a short, disbelieving pause. “No, Ruby. I am not fucking happy. I’ve been cleaning the bathrooms all morning because still I can’t walk in there without smelling gunpowder and goddamn brain matter. And I know that doesn’t freak you out, what with your swamp wolf, earth mother, circle of life bullshit, but me? I’m still smelling brains and spinal fluid in my sleep.”