by Anna Roberts
“Lady, what are the fuck are you playing at?”
“Get out of my way,” she said, suddenly exhausted. She was alone in her own head once again and Gabe was lost to her, stuck inside the body of the snarling wolf.
“Is that thing rabid?” said the man.
“Leave,” she said. “Before I open the door and let you find out.”
She pushed the gun through the gap in the window and slid it past Gabe’s snapping jaws to rest against what felt like a suitably fleshy part of his body. The last thing she wanted to do was accidentally fire the gun into a vital organ.
“Listen, you stupid bitch...”
Blue pulled the trigger. She got Gabe in the hip, pulled the dart gun from the window and turned around. The man towered over her. He had to be at least four hundred pounds and his fleshy knuckles were tattooed with letters, reminding Blue of the WOLF BITCH necklace she’d found in Gloria’s basement.
“I may be a bitch,” she said, lowering the gun. “But you’d better thank your lucky stars that I’m not that stupid.”
10
A year before she had come to Islamorada, Blue had briefly worked as a hospital cleaner in Baton Rouge. She remembered it now mostly because it was the only other time in her life she had ever paid any attention to the lunar calendar. Even some of the smartest doctors held this weird superstition that the full moon brought all the crazies out to play; that was why they called them lunatics in the first place. On a night when the moon was curled like a cheese rind they might get a gory domestic, a fender bender and a couple of the psych ward frequent fliers, but the glow of the full moon brought them all in; the idiot kids who decided to run the stretch of highway known as Blood Alley at 90mph, or the angry wife who tried to mince her cheating husband’s balls with a hand blender. Instead of the regular psych patients you got the rare and exotic birds, like the man who believed that a miniaturized Queen Elizabeth II was driving a nanobot sized silver car through his bloodstream, or the girl who thought she had lint under her skin and spent so much time digging it out with pins and fingernails that her entire body was a mass of bloody scabs.
It had seemed like a thing of great significance at the time, and she remembered hearing that therein lay the myth of lycanthropy; crazy people were more likely to believe they were turning into wolves when the moon was fat. Just a simple mix of mental illness and superstition.
In retrospect, it was a total pile of shit.
Lately she had come to see the moon as a time of frustration, a time of unwanted pause and reflection. Only this time it was a breathing space, and she couldn’t have been more grateful.
There was no sign of Yael. She guessed that maybe Charlie had turned and he was stuck inside the wolf the way he’d been stuck in Gloria for much of July. She wasn’t about to waste any more of Celeste’s ashes on taking a trip to Tavernier to find out. On the first day of the full moon she drove up there to see if she could sniff anything out, but there was nothing. The only signs of out of the ordinary animal life were the startling number of exterminator vans parked around the marina.
“Rats,” one of them said, when she asked. “Although I’m starting to think everyone around here is seeing things. If there were any rats around here they cleared out a while ago.”
“Do you know why?”
“Could be any number of things with rats. We might be standing over a sinkhole, or there’s another Katrina coming; they always know about it.” He adjusted the brim of his cap against the sun. “The story goes that they ran for cover about a week before Vesuvius blew; you know that? Everyone was so relieved to see ‘em go they didn’t think there was anything hinky about rats running away from Pompeii. Felt the seismic vibrations, you see.”
“That’s very interesting,” she said, with a good idea of what had caused the latest rodent exodus. Come to think of it, Gloria had never had any problems with vermin. In all her basement rummagings, Blue had never run across any rat traps, or poison.
She went home and back to work on the house, securing the iron nails in the doorposts, burying mason jars and scattering salt, smearing whatever blood she could draw; her period kept stopping and starting, a thing she blamed on stress. Gabe was safe in the basement, although some helpful someone had turned off the freezer and left it, so that all the meat inside had turned into a hellish, maggoty soup that had made Blue gag and retch as she cleaned it out. She restocked it with some of the last five hundred dollars in her bank account, but the hungry way Gabe paced and growled did nothing to assuage her fears; she could live on dollar cheeseburgers, but the men couldn’t afford to go hungry, not with what they went through every month.
On the second night of the full moon, Yael came to the door.
She saw Charlie’s face behind the glass and was so surprised that she opened it without thinking.
“Why aren’t you a wolf?” she said.
Charlie grinned, baring new gaps in his teeth. The circles beneath his eyes were so dark that he looked like a death’s head, yet strangely he seemed to have put on a little weight. In different circumstances it might have made him look healthy – he had always been too thin – but combined with his broken teeth and gray skin it looked like some kind of drug bloat. She remembered that news item about the cop who had ate until he burst, and knew – even without the sizzle and crackle of defenses around her – that she was talking directly to Yael.
“I am,” he said. “Or Charlie is. Underneath this skin he’s as hairy and howling as your boyfriend, but I’m strong enough to hold him in shape.”
Figured. She couldn’t even hear Charlie in there. The wolf couldn’t speak and Yael was a thing that had always been in love with words.
“This is what you did for Gloria,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
Another gapped grin. “Smart cookie. Yes, for Gloria. I kept her together all those years. It wasn’t dementia, by the way. She’d just shared a body with me a little too long; two people in one mind gets crowded, and she wasn’t the healthiest of individuals. Late nights, hard men, and Lord knows she liked the booze.”
Blue smelled scorched wood and hot iron; just standing there he was enough to heat the nails in the doorframe. Good. Now for a little reverse psychology, make him want what she didn’t want. Quickly she tried to close the door, but Yael stuck Charlie’s foot in it. At the same instant the mirror beside the door exploded, and she let out a thin, quavery scream.
“No need to get jumpy,” he said. “If I could come in then you’d have been a luckless little piggy a long time ago. But I can’t.”
She kept her hand on the doorknob, her heart beating double time.
“New protection,” said Yael, sniffing the air. “Nicely done. You’ve a lot of juice for such a young girl. Too bad for you that Gloria didn’t stick around to finish your education; you might have been a real head bitch in charge if she hadn’t given herself a thirty-eight mouthwash. Instead you’re...well...you’re trying, bless your heart.”
He might have been limited by occupying Charlie’s flesh, but he was still Yael. And he had still been inside her head too many times, rampaging through her dreams, that playground of all her fears and insecurities. She had only the thinnest thread of an idea of what he was, but he already knew exactly how she worked, and how to take her apart. If she let him in he wasn’t getting out, and she wasn’t sure she was ready yet, especially not with Gabe in the basement. Her whole plan had unraveled and she needed more information.
“What do you want, Yael?” she asked, her voice sounding as though it came from far away.
He held up Charlie’s hands, in a gesture so Charlie that it only served to make the whole situation look even more grotesque than it already was. “I come in peace.”
“No.”
“No?”
Blue swallowed, coaxing spit back to her dry mouth. “No,” she said. “No peace. You’re killing Charlie.”
“Pfft.” Yael waved a hand over Charlie’s body. “This old thing? It was coming a
part at the seams before I ever put it on. I’m the only reason he’s still alive.”
“Then let him die.”
Yael laughed. “Ice Blue,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “What a cold little creature you turned out to be.”
“There’s nothing cold about it. It’s straightforward mercy.”
He leaned towards the doorframe. The wood smoldered. “Is that what you told yourself when you did Eli? Your darling Charlie was left scrubbing the quality of your mercy off the bathroom tiles for days.”
Blue said nothing. She could almost feel Yael prodding at her silence, trying to gauge what it meant. He wasn’t used to reading social cues; he was used to knowing exactly what people were thinking and she guessed that this whole body thing was turning out to be a disappointment to him.
Good.
“The Alzheimer’s got her early, you know,” said Yael. “And it runs in families like you wouldn’t believe. Mood swings, aphasia. And probably incontinence, somewhere down the line, just to make things extra nasty. No mercy killings, no dying with dignity, Blue. Just a messy, broken, ugly limp to the finish line before you trip over it and fall on your face forever.”
“And you fixed it?” she said.
“That’s me. Mr. Fix-It.” He grinned and looked her up and down. “I hear you took the tour at Casa de Lyle.”
“Yeah. Very impressive. What’s your point?”
“Oh, I think you know,” said Yael. “You can fumble around down here, pissing in mason jars and saying boo to a bunch of baby spirits at the holy roller church, or you can take the fast track.”
“The fast track?”
“Come on, Blue. You know what you are. Wolf witches have always been spiritworkers. It’s in the DNA.”
She stared at him. Once his words would have been little more than gibberish to her, but lately she had been tuned to such frequencies that she knew exactly what he was offering. Power. Gloria’s kind of power, the means to protect her pack completely. No more infighting and mercy killings, no more dredging the bottom of her bank balance to keep them fed. Everything could be easy again, or as easy as it ever got for werewolves. Gabe could start up his tours again, Joe could save his plumbing business – maybe even teach Axl the trade.
The worst part was that she might have taken him up on his offer; did she really have any right to make their lives harder than they already were?
But Yael was there in front of her, his weird, wheeling, dealing self shining out of Charlie’s stolen eyes and face. And somewhere in there Charlie was falling apart, piece by painful piece. He hadn’t exactly been an angel, but no human being deserved that.
“I can help you,” he said, the shards of mirror crunching under his boot. “In so many ways.”
“What? So the devil comes right to my door to tempt me,” said Blue. “Is that it?”
“Damn straight. No forty days in the wilderness for you; you get the deluxe package delivered right to your front door.”
“Too bad,” she said, with a fearlessness she didn’t feel. “I never buy anything from door to door salesmen.”
He was so surprised he took a step back. She slammed the door.
“You’re making a mistake,” he called.
“I’ll live with it.”
When she put the chain on the door her hands were shaking; it would never have kept him out anyway, but it was something, and it was a relief that she could at least keep him standing on the threshold like a vampire that had to be invited in. If she could keep him out then maybe she could keep him in. He was so close to the other side of the door that she could hear the air rasping through Charlie’s stolen lungs, each breath with a wheeze in it that sounded a little like the tiny, doglike noise that a wolf might make if it were hurt to the point where nothing could be fixed any longer.
He was in there, a sad scrap of broken brown fur.
“Look under what’s left of the chicken house, Baby Blue,” said Yael. “If you don’t believe we’d be better off together.”
And with that he crunched off through the fragments of mirror, leaving her trembling and wanting to cry.
*
The moon was rising.
Ruby couldn’t see it from her cage in the cellar, but she could feel it in every joint, in the roots of her teeth and the core of her bones. Her body itched like a million ingrown hairs, a fur coat bristling on the inside. A little help would have been such a blessing right now, a little spirit to patch that join in the universe where woman and wolf blurred too close for comfort.
The key hung out of reach beyond the bars; even when the moon was done Yael had no intention of letting her let herself out. She could have reached it, once. Poor lost-forever Clementine could have flicked it off the hook, nudged it – scrape scrape – across the floor, the way she’d once lifted that red toy truck out from the bottom of the pool and saved Ruby’s ass a whupping.
At first she thought the shimmer in the air was just wishful thinking, and told herself it would do no good. But then the hairs on the back of her neck rose and she smelled the kind of smell that came when something was out of place, although with the change coming on her like a freight train she couldn’t be sure if the whiff of perfume and ozone was coming from a spirit or her own hurting brain.
Something tapped – knock knock, like a joke.
She couldn’t be that lucky, could she?
And yet she heard it, a little twist of disembodied consciousness, floating like a streamer just past her nose. It had come trailing in the smell of sacred oil and at once she saw the preacher, a big loud liar with an orange face and hands, anointing the heads of his flock as they wailed and shivered and babbled and held their hands to heaven in the hope of catching some holy spirit.
Only they’d sucked down any old spirit, and this one, this new nervous knocky one, had gotten trapped inside the church with the rest, until she came and set them loose...
Knock knock.
“Who’s there?” When she said it out loud her jaw ached at the corners, reminding her of how good it felt to reach out with your mind at times like this, how it went some way to taking your mind off the werewolf grind and crack of your poor, tortured bones. Her hips felt like they were about to tear apart and she knew that wasn’t good; it was the kind of pain that came with blood, and God only knew there had been enough of that already.
The new spirit shivered the air in front of her. Scaredy cat, scaredy cat, sitting on the door mat. They all took fright and flew away when she set them free, but not me. I’m not scared.
It tapped once more, clear as knuckles on wood. Ruby reached out towards it in desperation, her mind seeking the thin, dancing spirit mind.
“What’s your name?”
What’s a name?
“Never mind,” she said, but in her head this time, so as not to make her bones ache more. “Can you see that join in the universe?”
The knocking spirit hummed. Like all of its kind, it loved music. She heard footsteps on the stairs and mentally begged it to pay attention; it was her only chance.
You’re not what you’re supposed to be.
“Yes!” she said, and it came out loud, making her head ache and just in time for Yael to steer poor Charlie down into the cellar. The spirit fled – scaredy cat after all.
“Ruby, what are you doing?” said Yael. Charlie looked so bad, like a rag doll torn at every seam. She could have sworn she saw the darkness – a deep black darkness like in the eye of a shark – gleaming dully through the cracks.
“Nothing,” she said.
“You’re not thinking of flying away, are you?” he said. “Because it’s not a smart move in your condition, and definitely not in mine. Don’t want to go all astral and leave your body sitting empty; I might not be able to help myself. You might not get it back.”
No chance. She was going nowhere. There wasn’t enough moonshine in the world to let you fly out of a body that felt like hers right now. The pain ground deep between her hips and sh
e felt something hurt in there, the kind of hurt where it’s final and you have to make your peace with it, because there’s nothing left to do.
“You said you’d help me,” she said. “You have to help me.”
Yael shook his head. “No can do. Charlie doesn’t have it in him to go through another change. He’ll die, or worse. You ever have to put a bullet in a werewolf that got all fucked up like that, Ruby Tuesday? It’s not pretty.”
She’d done worse. She’d mopped up her husband, laid out her mother. When they opened up Momma they found a tumor with teeth and hair, and inside it a whole blue eye, staring at nothing in the darkness in her belly.
“If you let him go,” she said. “I’ll cut his throat myself.”
Yael ran his fingers across the bars. He touched things a lot; it was one of the things she had grown to hate about him. Always with his sticky paws all over everything. “Nope,” he said. “We need him. You’re going to lose that baby.”
“So help me.”
He shrugged. “Why would I? It’s not mine. Or Charlie’s. You have a last hurrah with that husband before you left him for good?”
“How does that make any difference?” she said, feeling wet between her thighs. She didn’t dare look down but she knew her underpants would be soaked and red.
Yael chewed Charlie’s lip for a moment. “Not sure,” he said. “But I think it might go better if it were Charlie’s. That little thing in you – technically he’s an unoccupied body, but then so was Cicero, and look how well that turned out.”
She stared at him in horror, her pain fogged mind struggling to keep up. And a part of her was glad, because she didn’t want to think about what he was thinking.
“I have a feeling that things will go better if we keep it in the family,” he said. “You of all people should understand that.”
She was bleeding freely now; there was no avoiding it. The smell had drifted up under her nose. And for once in her life she was glad to be miscarrying; she’d push it out on purpose if it saved him from what Yael had in store.