by Anna Roberts
Fernando. Charlie was sure it was the same detective that had talked to him at the hospital. Tall and tubby, with neat hair, tidy suit and a studio smile. And now he was dead. He’d picked up a fork and literally ate himself to death in front of his partner and a diner full of horrified onlookers.
Charlie stubbed out his cigarette and folded the newspaper. “Hey, honey,” he said. “You’ll never fucking believe this...”
She looked up from the cushions she was punching - maybe a little too enthusiastically - into shape. “Look at what?” she said, and burst into tears.
Charlie sighed and set the newspaper down. “Oh Jesus, again?”
Ruby made a low, awful wailing noise, both hands over her face. Ah, sweet domesticity.
“Come on,” he said, putting his arms around her. “Don’t start that again. You know it doesn’t make you feel any better.”
She wailed into his shirt. He could feel her mouth wide open and her fists balled so tight in the fabric he thought it might tear at any moment. Time of the month, dear? he thought, and nearly laughed. The moon was fattening fast, which no doubt didn’t help, but the sooner she got the inevitable miscarriage over with the happier she’d be. In the long run. Not at first, obviously.
“Come on, Ruby,” he said. “Get it together.”
Ruby let out a low moan; there might have been words in it but he couldn’t make them out. She snuffled, swallowed and tried again. “I tried,” she said. “I tried so hard to call him, but it didn’t work. And now I’m going to lose my baby.”
“Called who?” said Charlie, at first wondering if she meant a doctor, one of those fertility guys who brewed up kids in petri-dishes for rich couples too bloodless to remember how to fuck.
Only there was no way Ruby could afford that, and deep down he knew exactly what she meant by calling. Not the phone, but the kind of calling you did with candles, live chickens and a goddamn meat cleaver.
“Ruby,” he said, pushing her away so he could look into her eyes and see the truth. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
She snorted and snuffled, her eyes black in her tear-stained face, her mascara all Alice Cooper down her cheeks. “You want me to lose this baby, don’t you?” she said.
“Oh Jesus. You did, didn’t you? You tried to call Yael.”
“I don’t know what else I was supposed to do!”
“Accept it!” said Charlie. “Oh my God, Ruby - you’re a fucking werewolf. What kind of mother do you think you’re going to be anyway? You can’t take three days off every month from caring for a fucking baby; they need you twenty-four-seven for as long as it takes for them to grow enough to dump ‘em in daycare. Kids plus werewolves - think something through for once in your life. It doesn’t end well, Ruby. I figured this out when I was like ten fucking years old.”
She didn’t scream back. Just stood there, tears trickling from her angry eyes. And he thought he’d done it, at last. Finally broke her, or got through to her. Or maybe they were the same thing. She swallowed and walked away into the bedroom.
For a moment it was as quiet as if a bomb had just gone off, but then he tuned back into the clank of tackle on masts, the wind moving across the water. Behind him a cloud covered the sun, turning the room that nervous gray color he would always associate with hurricane season.
There was a knock at the door.
Charlie opened it on a kind of autopilot. Behind it stood a youngish man with a douchey hipster haircut, one of those ones designed to make it look like you’d just rolled out of bed. He wore his shirt rolled to the elbows and it was this that tipped Charlie over the edge into recognition. The partner. He’d met him at the hospital with Fernando and thought it an amusing cop cliché that someone like the pristine Cuban should be partnered with someone as self consciously scruffy as whatshisname here.
“Lehman, right?” Charlie said. Like the Wall Street brothers, the cop had said, but no relation. Thank God.
The guy had been trying hard back there, doing everything to make everything feel normal, only now he was like a pod person. The mild quip sailed right over his stupidly sculpted hair and Charlie figured it probably had something to do with seeing Fernando bow out like something from Se7en.
“Hey,” Charlie said. “Are you okay?”
Lehman held out a police file. “You should have this,” he said robotically. “Burn it.”
Charlie took it from him. “I don’t understand.”
“The case is closed,” said Lehman, and then Charlie saw the blood trickling from his ear onto his shirt collar.
“Holy shit,” said Charlie, instinctively reaching out to the other man.
The second his fingers touched Lehman it was like an explosion in his brain, a whirlwind of sounds and smells and memories and a mad babble of human voices collected over centuries or God only knew how fucking long. He could have sworn he felt his body and brain strain at the seams with the sheer size of the thing that was flooding him. His heart was going to burst; he was too weak, too sick, too old, and he was going to die, and that was okay. That was fine, that was just fucking dandy, because he knew he’d rather be dead than live like this a moment longer.
Because he knew what was happening to him, just like it had happened before.
Yael.
*
The moon was close enough to add a new dimension to the woods.
They had been tracking the musk of deer for several miles now, sometimes coming close enough to breathe in the thick gamey scent of beating, bloody hearts and warm meat. Grayson was shocked by how hungry it made him feel and he didn’t want to ask how it smelled to Joe, whose nose was sharper than most.
Grayson could smell the living things, although he couldn’t hear them. His ears had always been attuned to those gone beyond the flesh, or those who had never had such a thing in the first place. They whispered through the woods, the hitchhiker girl with the smashed-in skull, the teenage runaway and the cartel casualty. Sometimes Kaiden - wretched, stupid-named boy - came to whine through the trees, but even his idiot ghost had enough sense to stay away from his killer.
They hadn’t talked too much about that. Perhaps because Grayson knew that Joe wouldn’t be sorry, and he didn’t want to hear that. Because he wasn’t sure if he was sorry either.
Monster is as monster does.
Joe raised his head from the rifle sight, his lips parted as if he were rolling the air over his tongue.
“What is it?” said Grayson, in a whisper.
“Don’t know. Something big. Nothing good.”
“Oh. Well. That’s reassuring.”
Joe started walking again, moving through the brush with a stealthy silence all the more surprising for his size. Or maybe it was just because Grayson had seen the massive, ghost-pale creature Joe became every full moon. Such deadly grace was bound to leave a lasting impression.
The sky between the lush, moss-grown canopy was a dark iron gray, turning the woods the color of twilight. A growling sky, a Florida sky, promising apocalyptic rain and then humid sunshine just half an hour later. The tree tops rustled; September was coming, bringing ill-winds and insurance claims.
Grayson felt the hairs on his nape stir, and then – as if his ordinary senses were a second behind his others – he could have sworn he tasted blood. He breathed in deeply. The air had that brackish tang that blew up from the Gulf, but there was something else, something akin to the sickly smell that had filled the motel parking lot on the night that Lyle died.
“Joe...”
“I know. You smell it?”
“Yes.” It was like iron and – this was really bizarre – black licorice. Or molasses, maybe. Something sticky and tarry and blackish brown. He remembered Blue picking up nails on Gloria’s porch and then realized where he’d encountered that smell before, but before he could speak his ears were filled with a huge, distant roar, like the sound of a squall blowing in.
It swelled, but there was no rain, only voices, the kind only
he could hear. The girl, that poor little murdered hitchhiker who usually only cried pitifully about wanting to be warm in her own bed, began to scream and sob, the sounds of her panic surging into Grayson’s head like water.
He clutched the nearest tree-trunk for support. Oh God, it was like a flood. Like a dam had burst and all the spirits in the wood were being caught up and swept away, screaming as they went, only instead of water it was something even stronger and more destructive, roaring and babbling and laughing.
Big mojo. Bad mojo. A spell and a spirit so big that the dead could feel it over two hundred miles away.
He tried to talk but his lips wouldn’t move. Once again he tasted licorice and tar and his legs went to jelly, catching his weight on the bad knee so that a cry – all breath – burst from his numb lips. Joe’s was saying something but his words were drowned in the roar and the laughing and the hitchhiker screaming and the cartel corpse moaning no mas, no mas over and over in a rising, hysterical voice.
It hit Grayson like a tidal wave, catching him from behind and tipping him over on his face. For an instant he tasted mud and leaf litter, but then his mouth was full of salt and his head was full of something else’s spite, and at once, in a fierce flashing burst that he thought might kill him, he saw it all.
He felt the boat move underneath him in the fathomless, far-out to sea darkness. He felt the gun in his mouth and how it trembled, rattling the loose teeth in his lower jaw. He felt the kick of it and then the cold, and how angry it had made him to be blown out of a nice cozy brain and splattered all over the bottom of a boat in cooling pieces.
And then she was singing, that stupid, stupid girl. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine...
Blood and song and the will of a witch. Oh shit, Ruby, what did you do, you moron?
He was walking up a flight of stairs to the sound of her voice, and he had a hand with which to knock on the door. Not his hand, but that of someone pressed into service. Someone who was still screaming in there, deep down in the body that Yael was working like a marionette.
The door opened. Charlie was standing there, looking tired and sick and shabby.
Charlie frowned. “Lehman, right?” he said, and then everything went dark.
*
For once, Gabe held his tongue. The rational voice in his head wanted to tell Blue to knock it off, that this was the silliest thing he’d ever heard and – worse than that – it was unhealthy, a sure path to suffering and disappointment, to dying of a cancer you could have fought if you’d caught it sooner, or running away from the hospital when you’d just had brain surgery.
But something else was alive here, and that was why he drove in silence, because if he opened his mouth he thought he might start screaming, and not remember how to stop. There was a tang on the breeze that said something he didn’t understand, even with his keen sailor’s nose for rain, but he recognized it all the same. As soon as he breathed it in he was right back there in Miami with Joe, kicking their heels in the police precinct while they waited anxiously for news of Eli. And then Gloria had shuffled in, a miracle in fuzzy blue slippers.
The same night – Gabe later learned – Lyle Raines had died in a cheap motel, and Charlie had cut out his poison heart and fed it to his son.
Gabe wasn’t one for coincidences or miracles, but he understood forces bigger than himself. He understood the tides and the currents and the thing that rearranged him every time the moon was full. And this was something like that, like the scent on the wind that promised not rain, but change. It was a storm warning vibrating on some frequency that he didn’t have sensory equipment for right now, but would have made perfect sense to him had he been a wolf.
Blue drew in a sharp, ragged breath as they bumped up the road to Grayson’s house.
“You okay?” Gabe asked.
She hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “It’s quiet.”
“What is?”
“The woods.”
He pulled up, cut the engine and listened. He heard the wind moving through the trees, bugs chirping, birds calling. Nothing but the humid, jungly sound of living things.
“There were ghosts here,” she said, as she stepped out of the truck. “Like the ones back at the nursing home. Only they’re gone, too.”
He watched her as she walked round the side of the house to the kitchen door, her back straight and her fingertips spread as if she were walking through a field of tall grass, touching the tops as she went. As he did all too often, he wished he’d never asked.
There was no let up. When he got inside he found everyone in the kitchen, huddled around a white, wilted-looked Grayson, who was scribbling things on the back of an envelope.
LEMON MERINGUE
LEMON/LEEMAN?
GIRLS IN A BASEMENT – HURT, CRYING
OH MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
“What’s going on now?” said Gabe.
“I don’t know,” said Joe, in a low voice. “He just had some kind of...turn, I guess. Out in the woods. Then as soon as I got him back to the house he started writing.”
Grayson shushed him and kept on writing.
FERNANDO
ANGER
FULL FATHOM FIVE THY FATHER LIES
“Good,” said Gabe. “Is it a new novel?”
Axl, who was leaning against the refrigerator, glanced up from his phone. “Yeah,” he said. “Based on The Shining or something.”
Grayson sighed. “Will you please...” He trailed off and caught Blue’s eyes, and there was a look of fear and understanding between them, the kind that Gabe now knew never ever meant anything good. “That thing,” Grayson said. “The thing that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Blue just nodded.
“I think it just happened,” he said, and she nodded again.
“I think so, too,” she said, in a small, shaky voice that Gabe had never heard before.
“Okay,” he said. “Would one of you psychic superkids care to fill us ordinary dumbasses in on what’s going on here?”
“Ruby,” said Blue. “I think she summoned Yael. In the parking lot at the nursing home – it was like a bomb had gone off somewhere, like a nuclear wind sweeping up all those ghosts –”
“ – and carrying them away,” said Grayson. “The same thing happened in the woods. The Colombian, the hitchhiker – they’re gone. All of them scared out of their minds.”
She leaned over the writing. “What’s this?”
“Things I saw. Things I think Yael saw. Oh Blue, it was as if I was out on the boat with Gloria when she...you know.” He ran a hand through his hair and reached for a cigarette. “I don’t think it worked the way she meant it to. Actually I think she only managed to piss Yael off.”
There was an unpleasant hush, broken only by the rasp of Grayson’s lighter and the sound of Axl sucking his teeth.
“Okay,” said Gabe. “Even I understand why that would be bad. And Ruby’s done what? Called the thing back to shore?”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
“Cool. Did she miss the part where Yael was such a goddamn psycho that Gloria turned her house and herself into some kind of paranormal Colditz just to contain the fucker?”
“Apparently she did,” said Blue. “And if you could watch the language...”
“Whatever,” said Axl, not looking up from his phone. “Heard it all before. Say, does this thing like pie?”
“Pie?” said Joe.
“Yeah. Pie.” Axl held out the phone. Gabe looked and saw the headline – a Florida headline if ever there was one. Cop Eats Self To Death In Key Largo Diner.
“His name was Fernando,” said Axl. “And it says there that he got into the lemon meringue pie first. Before he pulled the gun.”
Gabe skimmed the article, garnering just enough information to make him feel queasy. The man’s stomach had literally burst, reminding him of something Blue had said to him in one of the few times where he’d asked her to explain and he
’d promised to listen with an open mind; Yael had never had a body of his own and probably didn’t know how to have a body. And that if he ever got one he might not understand its limitations and fragility.
“Yeah,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry. “I think it’s safe to say it likes pie.”
Axl snatched the phone back, scowling. “I don’t get it. Why is this happening? What does it even want? Besides fucking pie, I guess.”
“It wants to be alive,” said Gabe, and it was a hell of a reason when he thought about it. All those things under the water that grew extra teeth, spikes, venom, the ability to blow up like a balloon. All in the interests of staying alive. “To eat, to sleep, to breathe. It wants a body of its own. I guess you always want what you never had.”
The kid sighed hard enough to stir the envelope on the table. “Great,” he said. “I hope he’s disappointed. I hope the whole thing sucks for him.” He turned and stomped out, and Gabe couldn’t blame him, all the way up here without his moms and brothers, his long lost dad shot to death in a basement.
“I’ll go,” said Joe, and went after Axl.
“Okay,” said Gabe, after a moment. He turned to Blue, hoping for her to give him some credit. He thought he’d done pretty well – Ooga Booga Shit 101. “So...if Yael is back in town then where is he? Doesn’t he need someone to piggy back around in the way he did with Gloria?”
“Well, he’s obviously not in that poor Fernando,” said Grayson. “Or he was.”
Blue swallowed. “And he broke him.”
“Yeah.”
“So what? He’s hanging out in Ruby?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. Not what he could have what he really wants.”
“Which is?”
“Charlie,” said Blue.
Gabe blinked. “So you’re telling me that this psycho thing could have crawled all up in Charlie’s brain and is currently riding him around –”
“ – like a busted truck. Yeah.”
He pressed his lips together, but not because he was still afraid of screaming. “I hate to say this,” he said, but said it anyway. “But it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy."