by Anna Roberts
There was graffiti on the wall and beer bottles on the floor; kids had come in to scare the shit out of each other, no doubt daring each other to spend the night. She saw something gold and squatted carefully to look; it was a gilded mermaid, perhaps part of the leg of a table or a light fitting, a sea creature out of place. When she touched it the mermaid fell apart at the waist, baring plaster white as bone.
Blue saw something dance in the corner of her eye and looked up sharply. It was a burning candle, just at the line of her vision, two steps up on a shallow flight of stairs. She got up and went to look. The candle was fat and red, the center cored so deep by the hot wax that the flame was flickering and almost drowned. Beside it was a bunch of dead flowers and a plastic rosary, along with a basin filled with something foul smelling and unidentifiable.
“Don’t touch those.”
She almost jumped out of her skin. She had thought she was alone, but here was Grayson, picking his way through the garbage with his cane.
“You followed me?” she said.
“I thought you might need some help.”
“Bullshit,” said Blue. “You followed me here. Is this you, or did Gabe send you?”
Grayson prodded the flowers with his stick. “Aconite,” he said. “Monkshood. Also known as wolfsbane. So poisonous you could die just from touching it. Are you sure you don’t need help?”
She pushed her hair back from her face, annoyed with him for being right. “What is this?” she said, waving at the guttering candle. “Santeria?”
“Looks like. You can feel it, can’t you? This place. It’s like psychic ground zero.”
Blue nodded. “Yeah. Can you hear anything?”
“Not a peep. It’s quieter than my woods.”
“That’s not good, is it?”
“No. It’s the kind of quiet you hear in a bomb crater.”
She turned towards the other archway out of the room.
“Don’t look in the kitchen,” said Grayson, with a sharpness that startled her.
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Just don’t.”
She shook her head. “Nuh uh. Nothing works without a why. That much I do know.” She stepped past him with a flash of shame – taking advantage of his bum knee like that – and into the next room.
It stank; a sweetish, musty odor that sent her mind spinning back through time, to bloated lumps floating past the tops of cars, hands that looked like inflated rubber gloves. The edge of the kitchen island had been smashed - probably the work of thieves trying to make off with the marble – and the cabinets had been torn down from the walls. The wall-mounted oven remained, its door flopping down and out like a slowly rusting tongue. Someone had spray-canned three sixes on the wall, along with the words SATUN MOFO in black and red. And yet in all this mess the floor seemed untouched – a uniform beige color. It was only when she looked down and saw it move that she realized why; the floor was alive with maggots.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, stepping back. There was no question in her mind what that smell was. Or why they were all over the floor like that. “Who died?”
Behind her, she heard Grayson exhale. “Swamp wolves,” he said. “I had a little...run in with them.”
“You killed them?”
She turned back to him, wanting to get away from the smell.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking as sick as she felt. “It was the full moon.”
“Oh God, Grayson...”
“I know,” he said, moving back towards the steps. “Joe was already...gone. He’d turned ahead of schedule. I thought he was going to kill me, but obviously he didn’t. When we woke up after the full moon they were both dead.” His brown eyes filled. “He won’t talk about it. Sometimes I think he’s fucking me just to keep from having that conversation.”
“He’s not,” she said, appalled to find she was almost jealous. Every night she curled tight in on herself and prayed Gabe wouldn’t touch her; faking it made her hate herself even more.
“You sound very sure.”
After holding them in for so long, the words just fell out of her mouth. “I killed Eli.”
He stared at her and she found herself babbling. “I can’t let him touch me with that on my mind, but I had to do it. I had to. There was spinal fluid and stuff on the floor, and Charlie couldn’t do it so I –”
“– slow down,” said Grayson, holding up a hand. “Charlie? And that’s another whole thing, when you said –”
“ – he’s my brother, yeah. Half-brother. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s all such a mess.”
“Have you talked to Gabe about this?”
“Part of it,” she said. “About Charlie. But not Eli. I can’t tell him, Grayson. And Axl. Oh God, I killed his dad.”
“Okay,” said Grayson, hand on her shoulder. “Shh. It’s okay. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can we go back to the part with the spinal fluid?”
She got a hold of herself. “He was all fucked up,” she said. “He could hardly speak. His teeth were all like...like wolf teeth. And his back was just...” A sob rose up at the memory.
“Like Reese,” said Grayson.
“Yes. Like Reese. Only he could still talk – enough to say ‘please’. And Charlie – the fucking coward – he just couldn’t do it. Poisons two people but doesn’t have the balls to put a bullet in a man’s head when he’s begging for it.”
“Shh. It’s all right now.” He drew her close and she snorted into his shoulder, half horrified at how light she felt, how much better for telling someone. And that this shouldn’t be about her or how she felt. There were other people who were going to feel this. People who – unlike her – had actually liked Eli.
“You’ve been sitting on this since the last full moon?” Grayson said.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. How?”
“I guess I’m not really one for talking through trauma,” she said, thinking of all those group therapy sessions, full of people half-drowned in loss and sorrow, their wet eyes swimming as they recalled the worst things that had ever happened to them – all in the interests of ‘healing’.
“You think?”
That made her laugh, emotions shooting out sideways the way they often did at moments of great stress. “I can’t do it,” she said, sniffling. “I can’t tell him.”
“You have to. You did nothing wrong, Blue. This is what wolf witches do.”
“What? Shoot people?”
“Amongst other things, yeah,” he said. “She has the ultimate power – over life and death.”
Blue shook her head. “I don’t want that.”
“And I’d like to see fifty, but as a much wealthier man than me once said, you can’t always get what you want. Wolf witches always did the hard things, the things that pack members couldn’t because of friendship, or loyalty. Or old grudges. Imagine how it would have looked if Charlie had killed Eli.”
“Believe me,” she said, moving away. “I’ve thought about very little else.”
She wanted out of this death-stinking, flyblown house of horrors, but there was still something she’d come to see. One piece of proof to reassure that – in all this madness – she hadn’t been going completely crazy.
It was a few feet away around a corner. The gory letters hadn’t faded, as if they’d been somehow burned into the wall. There was no graffiti in here, like not even the most compulsive tagger dared go toe to toe with Yael’s supernatural scrawlings. The name – WEST LAFAYETTE – was written in jagged, angry capitals, the blood turned nearly to black in places.
She heard Grayson’s footsteps. For a moment he didn’t speak; just stood there behind her looking at the wall, maybe trying to listen for echoes that weren’t there any
more.
“Do you know what it means?” he said.
“I do now,” she said. “Charlie thought it was Yael’s way of reaching out to him, tapping him on the shoulder. When Gloria sent Yael up here to haunt this place I think
she must have known it was a risk, that Yael would reach out to Charlie. It’s always been about Charlie for him. That was why she sent Charlie away in the first place.”
“Charlie Is My Darling,” said Grayson. “And now he has him.”
“Yeah.”
She had said too much already. The smart thing would be to move to Alaska while Yael burned through Charlie’s flesh and bone, but the smart thing and the right thing weren’t always the same thing. Now that she was here she began to realize why Gloria had said so little about witchcraft; you couldn’t afford to have others second guessing you and telling you that what you had in mind was nothing short of insanity.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Blue went back down the steps, past the burning candles. The wax had leaked out of one side and she pictured the flame catching on the poison dried flowers. “Should I blow these out?”
“No,” said Grayson. “Let this dump burn. It was always an eyesore.”
She went outside, to a once-neat gravel drive where the weeds poked up everywhere and the lawns had grown to knee height. The sky was glowering once more, the air thick as molasses on her tongue.
“So?” said Grayson.
“So what?”
“When are you going to tell Gabe?”
“Later,” she said.
“Later? Today?”
“No. Just later. And don’t you tell him, either.”
“I’m hurt that you think I would.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Just...one thing at a time, okay? Let’s get through the full moon first.”
In two days time the men would all be locked up, and she’d be alone. Really alone, without Stacy or Gloria. And then – and only then – would she be free to do what she had to do.
*
There was no such thing as a free lunch, but Ro was in no shape to turn it down. He looked like he hadn’t eaten a square meal in forty days and forty nights, his collarbones like knives and his eyes half crazy with the hunger that came on savage when the moon filled out. It got into your bones and belly and tastebuds, every scrap of you crying out so loud for protein that you got to understanding why wolves howled the way they did. Ruby felt it even through the fog of morning sickness; the full moon was coming, and she had no idea what to expect from Yael.
Would he turn? Or more to the point, would Charlie turn and drag Yael along for the ride? She’d kept herself from turning before, but that had been with the help of poor, lost little Clementine, and before she had this baby making demands of her already overtaxed body.
She needed him, and that was the worst part. After Ro she’d told herself she’d never need a man again, but here she was with both of them, no, three of them – her greasy ex-husband, her lover and the ravenous thing that had hollowed him out like a Halloween pumpkin.
She had locked the bedroom door last night. He’d threatened to kick it down.
“How is it?” asked Charlie. Or Yael.
Ro gulped down another mouthful of hunter’s chicken, almost gagging on it, so that for a second Ruby thought he was going to choke like he did that time with the mac and cheese and she’d had to give him the Heimlich. Instead he took a mouthful of water, nodded and kept right on shoveling it in.
When the plate was clean she thought he was going to lower his face and lick it, but instead he just leaned back, wiped the sweat off his upper lip with a fist and let out a loud, nasty belch.
“And you wonder why I left you,” she said.
“You shut your whore mouth.”
“Is that any way to talk to a lady?” This time it was Yael talking – no question about that. Whenever he was trying to be civil his voice got this oily quality, like a shimmery film on water. The kind of shimmer that said poison.
“She ain’t no lady if she’d spread her legs for you,” said Ro. “I heard o’ you, Charlie Silver. I heard what happened to the Raines kid.”
“And yet you came for lunch all the same.”
Ro tapped on the tabletop with a long fingernail. He had always kept the nails of one hand long because he was learning the guitar. He’d been learning the guitar for five years now and still couldn’t play more than two chords. She’d been sure he just used it as an excuse to keep his fingernails ugly like that. Sometimes he scratched her.
“Listen, you fancy cocksucker,” he said. “There are con-se-quences comin’.” He broke the word up – tap tap tap went his nail. “I want that big motherfucker. The one that killed Jared. And Kaiden. And I know for a fact he’s one of yours.”
“I haven’t seen him for weeks,” said Yael. “Could be dead, for all I know.”
“Well, he’s not. Him and that fuckin’ Jennifer. I only just made it of there alive.” He turned to Ruby and laughed. “Yeah – did I mention that, baby? Your favorite romance writer is a man. How’d you like that? A stuck-up English faggot named Grayson.” Ro laughed and started to cough.
“Let me get you some more water,” said Yael.
“Y’all started this,” said Ro, wagging his finger. “Not us. It’s gonna be bad enough already for them, so I’ll warn you right now, asshole – anything happens to me then you know what’s gonna happen to the rest of you Keys trash.” He wheezed and Ruby tossed him a paper napkin. “Remember your biker buddy from St. Augustine? Like that. Only slower.”
Yael turned back to the table, ice clinking in the glass in his hand. “That’s a shame,” he said, and Ruby saw for the first time that there were polka dots on the napkin. Red ones. They swelled as they soaked into the paper. Ro’s lower lip was slick with blood.
He hiccupped up a big messy spit up. It spilled out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. Ruby screamed and reached towards him, but he drew away sharply, his eyes like a drunk’s and the whole lower part of his face just red. “Oh my God,” she said, and she knew - despite not wanting to know, not ever - what had happened. The box was gone from the shelf.
“Oh shit, what did you do?” she tried to say, but it came out in a stupid, squealy whine, barely a human sound at all.
Yael just stood there with the glass in his hand, watching as Ro sort of overflowed. Every time Ro coughed more came out, splattering and spilling. He was trying to get to Yael, but his face was turning purple under all the red and he slid to his knees, knocking the salt grinder off the table, where it burst open on the floor, mixing rock salt and bad luck with all the smeared sticky red.
She had dreamed about this, thousands of times and in maybe as many ways. A cast iron skillet to the back of the head, a round that somehow happened to be in the shotgun he thought was empty and ready for cleaning. She’d pictured knifing him, suffocating him and bashing in his brains with the frozen leg of a deer, but now it was happening. He was really dying, right there in front of her, and she was so used to seeing him die that it almost seemed familiar.
When he fell face down on the floor, his breath gurgling and wheezing to a horrible halt, she almost expected him to get up again. Or for the flight of fantasy to end and she’d be right back in her trailer, with him sitting in front of the TV, hand down the front of his pants and yelling for her to bring him a beer. The way he usually did when she killed him.
Ro stopped gurgling and lay still. It was so incredibly quiet that when Yael raised his water to his lips the ice tinkling against the sides of the glass sounded loud as church bells. He took a noisy wet swallow and cracked an ice cube between his back teeth.
Ruby let out her held breath in a shudder. “What did you do?” she said. Her entire body felt as though it had been plugged into an electrical socket.
He just stood there, poking at the inside of Charlie’s mouth with his tongue. The whole world was broken. He’d broke it and he didn’t seem to care. She flung herself toward him, her bare heel skidding in the warm slimy blood. Yael reached out to catch her and they both fell to the floor, the glass breaking on the tiles. Furious, Ruby reached for the nearest and largest piece, meaning to slit his ca
reless throat with it and not giving a damn if she cut her fingers to the bone while she did so. She was screaming every curse word she knew and then some, Charlie’s body slithering between her thighs, a shard of glass driving into her knee. He kept ducking every blow and that made her madder; she was going to jam that glass right through his fucking eye and into his brain.
“Die!” she yelled. “You wanna live so fucking much? This is the flip side, you shithead.”
She missed his face. The glass gashed open his collarbone and his cry of pain somehow brought her back to her senses, reminded her that this was a person she was trying to kill. It was one thing to think it a thousand times or more, but doing it? Her vision went gray around the edges.
“Ruby?” said Charlie, and it was him. No doubt. He sounded every bit as scared and sick as she was. “Help me. Please. You have to help me.”
“Charlie?”
He nodded, holding together the edges of the wound with his fingers. “Get him out of me – oh God, you don’t know what it’s like in here, you can’t –”
“– I’m sorry,” she said, sobbing into his face. “I don’t know how to –”
“ – then learn! Figure it the fuck out. I’m dying in here, Ruby.”
The world turned gray again, and when she snapped out of it all she could see was the blood. Ro lay face down in his puddle. There were spatters all up the side of the kitchen surface, blood slick between her fingers.
Charlie was still talking, but she kept zoning in and out, staring at the mess and the body that had once been her husband. I’m a widow now, she thought.
“...why did you do it, Ruby? Wasn’t Gloria blowing her goddamn brains out warning enough for you? You called him – now send him the fuck away. You have to be able to do that...”
“Oh God,” she said, slowly getting to her feet, with no idea of whether her knees would support her. Why was he letting Charlie talk? He’d only done that once before and that was to scare Blue away...
“Do something,” he said. “Before he gets back in me.”
“He’s not in you now?”
Charlie looked over at Ro. “No,” he said.