by Anna Roberts
Charlie’s limbs felt like cold lead. Janis got cut off again and started up once more, her plaintive ‘Oh Lord’ echoing the scream playing out in Blue’s head as she fumbled for the phone. It was in his jeans pocket, the screen shining through smeared blood, the display reading RUBY.
“Give me that,” said Gabe, reaching over. Fear flared up hot again and she sprung past him towards the door.
“Darling, listen to me,” Gabe was saying, but she knew it wasn’t him any more. When had he ever called her darling before? She stuffed the bellowing phone in her pocket, meaning to run out of the door, but the money was right there in front of her. Yael’s gift.
She would use it to get the hell away from him.
Blue grabbed the ax.
“What are you doing?” said Gabe, in a level voice. Exactly the kind of voice Yael would choose when imitating him. Oh my God, would this ever end?
“Stay away from me. I know what you are.”
“Blue, it’s me. It’s Gabe. It’s okay. You’ve had a shock. You’re not thinking straight.”
She pulled the case towards her with one hand, waving the ax with the other. Her hand shook as she snapped the locks back together, and when she went to lift it she could feel that she’d need two hands.
Blue dropped the ax, almost amputating Gabe’s toe, and ran into the night, Janis Joplin still wailing in her pocket. She saw him run from the house and then stop and turn back when he realized he was stark naked and covered in blood. As she jumped in the car and put her foot on the gas pedal she could feel the stickiness against the sole of her sandal, but there was no time for disgust. She needed distance, safety, somewhere where she could gather her thoughts and figure out a way to get that monster out of Gabe without killing him.
The screaming phone flashed bright on the dashboard. RUBY.
*
Ruby flung the door open like she’d been waiting for someone. She took one look at Blue and tried to close the door again, but Blue elbowed her way in.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Charlie?”
Blue locked the door behind her. Eli’s apartment looked clean and normal compared to the carnage she had left behind in Gloria’s kitchen, but then she smelled the bleach and knew what it was masking. Reddish work, she thought, a phrase that had followed her from a high school English class – maybe Houston, maybe Baton Rouge. Hard to remember. There had been so many high schools after the storm.
Under the bleach was a whiff of sweat, fear and wolf, the lattermost coming from Ruby, who was wearing nothing but a mandala patterned throw tossed over her bony shoulder like a toga. There was a knife in her hand, like she’d stumbled out of the world’s scariest amateur production of Julius Caesar. Slowly she looked Blue up and down, her gaze lingering on Blue’s feet, where Charlie’s blood had spattered up her shins and dried there.
“He dead?” she said.
“What?” said Blue, the word coming out of her like the breath of someone who had just been punched hard in the stomach.
“Is he dead?” Ruby’s voice squeaked at the end of the question. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t do it. God help me, I couldn’t do it, even though I could see him in there sometimes...and he was screaming...”
Blue nodded, dizzy with the insane relief that she was once again talking to someone who understood these things. “He’s gone. It’s okay. He’s gone.”
The knife clattered to the floor. Ruby could hardly speak for crying. She gulped down several huge breaths and managed to get the words out. “And Yael?”
“In my boyfriend,” said Blue, and the sudden rage of it was more than she could bear. She reached out and grabbed a handful of Ruby’s hair. “You did this. You fucking did this, you fucking stupid bitch.”
Ruby let out a wail of pain. The throw fell off as she struggled, leaving her naked, just a little white streak of bones and bad tattoos. Blue’s anger simmered back down like milk taken off the heat, leaving nothing but terror and the tears she had tried to hold back for so long. Somehow in their fright she and Ruby reached for one another and stayed there that way, embracing and crying.
“I didn’t mean it,” said Ruby, her breath hot on Blue’s collarbone through her shirt. “I didn’t know. I thought he could help me.”
Blue soothed her instinctively, spotting the book on top of the microwave. Thank God. Maybe there was a solution in there. She had money, she had the book within reach. And maybe she could make an ally. Ruby owed her that, helping her find the means to save Gabe.
“I just wanted my baby.” Ruby’s voice broke in a wail on the word ‘baby’ and she crumpled, like the effort of standing was too much for her in all her grief. And maybe it was. There was dried blood on the inside of her thighs.
“Oh God,” said Blue, reaching down to cover her.
“I lost him,” Ruby said. “I lost my baby. I lost my husband. Did you know?” She looked up, her eyes streaming. “I’m a widow now. Yael killed my Cicero. Fed him rat poison and watched him bleed to death.” She pointed to the dining chairs. “Right there.”
“Sit down,” Blue said. “You’re still bleeding. I’ll make you some tea.”
Ruby did as she was told. She was still wearing the hit-by-a-truck expression of a recently transformed werewolf, and the usual brutal bone-cracking had gone even harder in her condition. Now that Ruby was no longer pregnant Blue supposed she could do what she had been itching to do for a long while and punch her, but now that she could she found that she didn’t want to.
There was root ginger in the fridge. Blue grated some and waited for electric kettle to boil. She took from the book from the microwave, relieved by the overstuffed weight of it. It was an unlikely grimoire, the peeling pleather cover filled with faded magazine recipes for things no sane person would eat in the twenty-first century, pages stained here and there with marinara sauce, ink turned translucent where butter or oil had splattered.
It was all she had as far as an instruction book went. Here among the pineapple-glazed hams and typewritten curry recipes were clues as to how to light candles with your mind or cover yourself in grandmother’s ash and go flying over the moon. No complete instructions for anything, of course; Gloria hadn’t been that dumb, but Blue had a feeling she stood a better chance of making use of it than Ruby ever had. Ruby had never even met Gloria, let alone had a chance to know how the old lady’s mind bent around corners and thought sideways in moves that reminded Blue of the way that knights moved in a game of chess.
“How did you do it?” she said.
“Huh?”
“How did you summon him? Was it in the book?”
Ruby shook her head. “Same way I summoned Clementine. I sang a song, killed a chicken and wanted him to come.” Her eyes filled again and her face crumpled. “I would never have done it if I knew; I swear to God.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Blue.
“I think they come when you kill something on purpose. You open like a gap in the universe when you take something out of it, and they can slip through.”
She thought of the church, holy rollers with their hands raised to heaven. Nobody had died there, or needed to. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. All I know is I need a way to open up a fresh hole and punt Yael’s ass back through it for good.”
“I swear, I didn’t know,” Ruby said, her voice breaking once more. “I didn’t know what he could do.”
“Will you stop saying that?” said Blue. “I believe you.”
Ruby wiped her nose on the throw and sniffled. “You do?”
“Of course I do. Nobody who knew the first thing about Yael would ever summon him on purpose. I’m beginning to wonder what Gloria was thinking in the first place; something tells me we were never supposed to mess with these things.”
The kettle finished boiling. Blue poured hot water over the ginger and scooped in several large spoonfuls of honey from a jar she had found in the cupboard.
“Here,” she said, taking the cups to the table. �
�It’ll settle your stomach.”
Ruby mouthed a thank you and adjusted her makeshift garment, tossing it over her shoulder like a toga. She had the words NEVER AGAIN tattooed over her heart, a Celtic band around her upper right arm and a climbing red rose winding around her left. The only other times Blue had seen her she had been wearing thick black eyeliner, most of which had been streaming down her cheeks. Without it Ruby’s eyes looked small and soft, her eyelids as smooth as flower petals. Blue realized she didn’t even know Ruby’s age.
She took a scalding sip of ginger tea, no longer sure whose stomach she was trying to settle; her own had been doing somersaults every time she remembered that fleck of skull flying across the kitchen. “How do you get him out of someone?” she said.
Ruby shook her head, her eyes filling once more.
“Don’t cry,” said Blue, meaner than she meant to be. “Just figure it out. He’s in Gabe. And I saw what he did to Charlie.”
Ruby swallowed. “I know this probably counts for shit,” she said. “But I helped him once. Gabe, I mean. When he got loose on the full moon. He came to my house. Ro wanted to kill him there and then –”
“ – I know. He told me.”
“I liked him, for what it’s worth.”
“Don’t. Don’t say it like he’s already dead.”
This was Ruby’s cue to say something reassuring, but she didn’t. Instead she just pushed out her jaw, catching the point of her upper lip between her lower teeth. She swirled the spoon in her tea, watching the shredded ginger float up the surface. “You gotta understand,” she said. “Yael’s not gonna be satisfied with a body he has to share.”
“I don’t see he has a choice.”
Ruby swallowed and set down her cup. “He killed Ro,” she said. “So he could have a body.”
It took Blue a moment to understand, and when she did a bulging, dirty-green wave of nausea swelled underneath her, despite the clean, stinging smell of the ginger under her nose.
“It didn’t work,” said Ruby. “Ro had been dead for like, five minutes. But that was enough, and he was full of rat poison – bleeding into his brain, out of his mouth. God, he was even bleeding out of his eyes –”
“ – Jesus Christ, Ruby.”
Ruby sniffed and shook her head hard, like she didn’t want to be pitied. “After that didn’t work...that was when he started talking about the baby.”
“What do you mean?” The nausea rose again, only this time it was gray, the kind of dark, murky gray that filled the edges of the world in those moments before the lights went out.
“I asked him,” Ruby said, composing herself with some difficulty. “I begged him to help me like he’d helped Gloria – so that I wouldn’t change and I wouldn’t miscarry. But he said he couldn’t leave Charlie. If he left Charlie then Charlie would die, and he’d be out of a body again, and he couldn’t have that.”
“So he was stuck?”
“Yeah. He said I should resign myself to losing this baby, but we could always...make another one.”
Oh God. “Ruby, you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“No. I have to,” she said, with a sudden vehemence that was something like her old hard, white-trashy glitter. “Because he’s an evil piece of fucking shit and you need to know how evil.” She took a mouthful of tea, her eyes watering. “He – Yael – he said he didn’t want this baby. Somehow he knew it wasn’t Charlie’s. I guess I must have already been pregnant when I left Ro; my periods have never been regular, unlike the other. That’s regular as fucking clockwork.
“He said the next one would be Charlie’s, or at least made with Charlie’s body. And that that one would be more...compatible.”
The room felt very cold all of a sudden. All those things Yael had said about a timeshare, a body past its prime. Blue wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what came next.
“It was like a blank slate, he said,” said Ruby. “No personality yet. The brain isn’t finished forming. A whole new body, but he wouldn’t have to share. He’d be...” She took a breath. “He’d be in the baby. Charlie’s baby. And then he’d be born. Human.”
Blue held both hands over her mouth, one on top of the other. The swell came up black now, and she was suddenly queasily conscious of the space between her hips, that empty organ with only one purpose and a million mysteries.
Her head spun and the memories that rose up were sweet, delicious memories that would always be stained now. Gabe’s hands tearing down her wet underwear, his tongue parting her flesh and the way he felt inside her, unsheathed again despite their mutual promises to get better at using condoms.
Absinthe. Oh my God, the absinthe. Ergot, pennyroyal and wormwood – these were the potions witches handed out in the past, when girls came sneaking to their back doors in tears, seeking a solution to an age old problem. Absinthe contained wormwood, and she’d been spotting right after. That and the tender breasts, the sickness, the weird mood swings...
She leapt up from the chair and vomited into the sink.
12
There was a noise, a sort of burring that the human part of him knew meant something important but left the wolf – barely below the surface – growling softly in irritation. Joe stirred, his mouth dry and his skin unpleasantly sweaty against Grayson’s. The noise came closer.
“Uh?”
He opened his eyes to see Axl standing in the bedroom doorway, a stringbean in an old towel, a phone in his hand. When he handed it over Joe could have sworn he said ‘fern’, only he wasn’t sure what wasn’t working – his ears, Axl’s mouth or both.
The thing – the screen – said BLUE. Good. He could still read.
“‘lo?”
“Hello?”
This wasn’t right. This was how it started – you said hello and then you talked but it wasn’t working and who was this anyway. “I...uh...who are...”
“Ruby. It’s Ruby.”
Joe sniffed hard, his sinuses throbbing along with the rest of him. Grayson moaned and rolled over, his eyes creased at their edges. “Who the fuck is Ruby?” said Joe. The phone said Blue and this was red. Was this some kind of joke at the expense of the colorblind?
“Gimme,” said Grayson, and took the phone from him. “Ruby?”
Joe’s ears were definitely working. He heard her clearly, a thin little voice with a redneck twang. Right. Ruby. The swamp wolf chick.
“Hello?” she said again.
“Hi,” said Grayson, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “Remember me? We woke up naked together once. What are you doing with Blue’s phone?”
“She left it,” said Ruby, her voice fast and full of tears. “She just puked in the sink then took off. I told her she’d left it behind but she just ran out of the apartment –”
“ – o-kay, slow down. I’m still kind of wolf-brained right now, so...”
“You have to get out of there,” said Ruby, and this time even Axl – standing on the other side of the room – heard her. “You killed them, didn’t you? Jared? And Kaiden?”
Grayson exhaled. And there it was. The big, bloody, murderous elephant in the room. “Yes,” he said.
“Then run like hell. Because my husband came down here asking questions and I know for a fact he’s not going back. And if the old man sent him –”
“ – where’s Blue, Ruby?”
“I told you. She ran off. Charlie’s dead and I think her boyfriend’s possessed –”
“Charlie’s dead?” said Grayson.
“Seriously?” said Axl.
“I’m sorry,” said Ruby. “About all of it. I’m so sorry. I have to go.”
“Ruby, don’t...” Grayson sighed. She’d obviously gone. “Shit.”
“What did she mean? What was she talking about?” asked Axl. “Is he dead? Is he really fucking finally dead?”
Grayson shushed him. “Just...one minute.”
“Who’s the old man?” said Joe.
“Swamp King,” said Gr
ayson, offhand. “We’ll worry about that later. If Charlie’s dead then Yael...”
Oh shit. “Gabe.”
“Yeah.” Grayson swung a foot out onto the floor. The wrong foot. The knee almost went out from under him and tipped him into the nightstand. “I’m okay,” he said, as Joe and Axl helped him back upright. “You’re going to have to help me. I need –”
“ – an egg, a glass and a candle, right?” said Axl.
Grayson looked at him in mild surprise.
“What?” said the kid. “I pay attention. Sometimes.”
“Yes, you do.” Grayson watched him go. “I thought he had that ADHD thing?”
“He’s a fifteen year old werewolf,” said Joe. “If he had a normal attention span I’d worry.” He knelt and rubbed the back of Grayson’s calf, coaxing the cramped muscles to loosen. “You don’t think...” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought. While he’d never seen as much of Yael in action as the rest of them he was pretty sure you didn’t want to fuck with a thing that had put down a psycho like Lyle Raines. And you definitely didn’t want that thing inside of you.
“Who knows?” said Grayson. “It’s Ruby. She’ll say just about anything, that one.”
“And the Swamp King?”
“Exactly what it says on the tin. He’s the patriarch of the Okefenokee wolves, although God knows how much clout he has these days. Especially since Cicero was trying to set himself up as the new alpha; I’m pretty sure the Swamp King would look on that as a palace coup. Maybe those...those people weren’t supposed to come back.”
“And I took them out,” said Joe.
“We did,” said Grayson. “I don’t remember much after the Raines place, but I don’t think it was all you.”
Axl came back in, carrying a candle in a pewter sconce. In his other hand was a wine glass full of water, a shell-on egg bobbing at the bottom. “Okay, I think I got everything,” he said. “What happens now?”
Grayson tapped the egg on the nightstand and broke it carefully apart with a thumb. The translucent white slopped over the sides and plopped into the water, sinking slowly to the bottom.