by Anna Roberts
“Nuh uh uh uh!”
“Speak,” said Blue, but it didn’t work like that. She’d wanted that girl to shut up, wanted it far too badly. She thought of frogs and scalpels and shuddered; she could almost feel herself glowing from the inside with the kind of meanness that had led to all of this trouble in the first place.
She staggered to her feet, feeling something wrench deep in her belly. The nurse reached for her but she said “Don’t touch me,” and something in her eyes and her tone made the woman start back. The tongue-tied girl was still grunting and flailing for attention and the best Blue could hope for in that moment was that her random malice would dissolve with distance and regret. Or maybe it would die with Yael.
And he was dying. He had to be. As she stumbled across the parking lot she felt fluid – blood or something else – streaming down the inside of her thighs. He’d overplayed his hand. Like sleep or anything else about the human condition, he didn’t understand why it took nine months.
“You’re gonna die, you sonofabitch,” she said, bumping over the kerb in her hurry to get out of the rest area. She didn’t even know where she was driving to, but she knew she had to keep going. Anything to stay out of the hospital. “You are not going to do this to me, even if it takes a goddamn coathanger.”
The sun was bright and the signs glared green. Lowry Park – was that the zoo he’d been talking about? Red wolf, blue wolf, black wolf, white. She blinked hard, forcing herself to stay awake, only it was day and she wasn’t tired; she’d just lost so much blood. Her thighs were already sticking to the upholstery.
So maybe if she just kept driving. Just long enough to not feel fear when she plowed the car into a crash barrier at eighty. That should do the trick. No more noise. No more malice. Maybe in whatever came after she’d have the freedom to think about...
Kick.
That was a kick.
5
Over the years Grayson had learned a few things about ghosts and things that weren’t ghosts.
There were dozens of things - besides ghosts - that could make you think a place was haunted. All the usual suspects - drafts, warped doors that no longer hung flush on their hinges and closed on their own, elderly plumbing and strange acoustics, to say nothing of the weird noises foxes made at night when they were either eating, fighting or making more foxes. Out of all the things required for a house to acquire the reputation of one haunted, an actual ghost was a long way down the list.
He carefully lifted his newest craft project up to the light. It was a Blair Witch construction of chicken bones lashed together to form an inverted pentacle. To the bottom he’d attached one of Sarah-Lou’s reluctantly surrendered tarot cards - the Moon. It didn’t have the obvious horror movie flash of the really good ones - Death, the Hanged Man, the Devil - but Axl had snapped those up immediately and they were already hanging from sewing threads in the great gothic drifts of Spanish moss.
Besides, Grayson figured even a swamp wolf had good reason to fear the moon. Especially now with that ghostly white wolf wandering around in the woods.
Said ghostly white wolf now wandered into the kitchen, his delicate nose screwed up against something he didn’t like the smell of. “Jesus,” he said. “Is that vinegar?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” said Grayson. “I was just trying to get the smell off the bones, since you said the last lot still smelled like KFC.”
Joe opened a window. “That’s actually worse.”
“I know. Now it smells like a chip shop.”
“Yeah. And looks like occult Pinterest.” Joe leaned back against the kitchen surface, sighing hard enough to stir the edges of tarot cards two feet away. “You really think this is going to scare off a bunch of swamp wolves?”
“Not on its own, no, but your new reputation as the Hound of the Baskervilles is bound to work to our advantage. And I have a couple of other tricks up my sleeve.” Grayson reached across the table for his laptop. “That is assuming you won’t just take the kids and get the hell out of here, like I asked you to.”
Joe shook his head. “It’s a day’s hike. At least.”
“Only if you insist on dragging me and my fucked knee along for the ride.”
Joe exhaled slowly, closing his eyes. His jaw was set firm in a way that Grayson knew meant he was mentally counting to ten. “Can you not?” he said, after a short pause.
“You know it makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. We stick together. That’s what pack means; maybe you’ve been a lone wolf too long.”
There was no arguing with him when he was like this. Joe had the same stubborn do-the-right-thing look he’d had when he’d berated Grayson for leaving the Keys and coming back here, for being so cowardly as to trust that his haunted wood would keep him safe from the Okefenokee packs. And hadn’t that come back to bite him?
“Can’t you just leave me to be old and belligerent?” said Grayson.
Joe appeared to consider it for a moment, then said “No,” just as Axl sloped into the kitchen, evidently bored of craft projects.
“There you are,” said Grayson. “I need to borrow your iPod.”
“Uh, why?”
Grayson hit play on the sound file. Nothing happened. Axl came over and frowned into the laptop screen. “Wait, you got it on mute.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I can’t hear anything. What were you gonna do anyway? Play spooky music at them?”
“Seriously,” said Joe. “Between that and the decorations they’re just going to think we’re having an early Halloween party.”
“Listen,” said Grayson.
“But I can’t hear anything.”
“That’s because what you’re hearing is below a frequency that the human ear can perceive,” said Grayson.
Joe frowned. “Like a dogwhistle?”
“A little. Although you can’t hear it you might be able to feel it. Pass me the salt, would you?”
Joe pushed the shaker across the table. Grayson unscrewed the lid and poured salt onto the tabletop, prompting a groan from Axl; “Great - more bad luck. Just what we need.”
He turned up the sound. At first nothing happened and he thought he’d be back to searching for another file, but then the scattered salt began to shiver and move, forming rippling waves.
“What the f...hell?” said Axl.
“Infrasound,” said Grayson. “They’ve clocked similar frequencies before earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which might account for those people who say they ‘just knew’ something was going to happen and moved away before it did. It’s a regular feature of a great many haunted locations. These days they use it in horror movies to generate sensations of unease and fear; enough of it and you’ll experience anxiety, panic attacks, even mild hallucinations.”
Axl actually looked impressed, which was good news, considering his usual teenage emotional range was that of a bored Roman Emperor wishing the gladiators would start killing each other in more entertaining ways; one could only stand so many mundane decapitations. “Holy shit,” he said. “The brown note?”
Grayson laughed. “Well, if we do manage to make them shit their pants then that’ll be...”
“...gravy?”
“Gross,” said Joe, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, is that thing giving me a headache?”
“Hopefully. It’s supposed to do that.” Grayson switched off the sound and went out to set up the speakers. Joe followed, dragging his heels like he had no better place to be; he turned clingy when he was nervous, to the point where Grayson sometimes lay awake wondering whether Joe had only dived into bed with him for the simple reason that it was better than being afraid and alone.
The hair on his neck rose as he stepped out into the yard. As a man he was at a disadvantage, but he supposed that a lifetime of hearing dead people had left him just witchy enough to feel the remnants of Blue’s magic lingering beneath his feet. Gabe had told Joe and Joe had told him, and Grayson was inclined to believe
it; Blue had a gift that just had to be genetic. If she really was Gloria’s granddaughter then that meant the McBride line was still alive.
When he breathed in he thought he could taste blood, or maybe he was just remembering the slaughterhouse smell from that awful night at the Halletts’ place. If they came tonight there was nothing they could do; he didn’t even have a gun in the house.
The woods were far too quiet. It wasn’t quite that deathly Yael-shocked hush from the Raines house, but he was still getting used to the lack of voices. Sometimes he thought he heard them at night, but then he’d open his eyes in the dark and realize he’d only dreamed them. The steady hiss of the wind in the trees filled his ears.
Something knocked. It was as clear as if someone was standing behind the nearest tree with a wood-block – knock knock. He stiffened and turned quickly to Joe, who didn’t react.
“Did you hear that?” said Grayson. A stupid question. He’d been asking it his whole life and knew the answer all too well; they never heard it. Because they weren’t him.
Joe shook his head. “Hear what?”
The knocking came again, only this time he heard music – a snatch of song floating through the air just beyond his nose – drove she ducklings to the water...
“Nothing,” said Grayson.
“Probably your whatdoyoucallit,” said Joe. “Infrathing. Didn’t you say it could make you hear things?”
“Perhaps.” Grayson walked further across the yard, towards the tree where he’d watched Joe kill Kaiden. He could feel Blue’s wards sizzle and itch under his feet, which was a worry, since she’d put them there to protect the place. If her paranormal alarm system was going off them something wicked this way came.
He heard the music again, weird and thin, like piano wires pulled too tight. Joe was just a few feet away but as Grayson walked further he knew where he was going Joe couldn’t follow; this was - to borrow a phrase from Gabe – ooga booga shit.
There was something white under the tree. Some sick, fearful part of him knew what it was before he got close enough, but he kept limping towards it with the same dumb instinct that made horror movie heroines peer through the crack in the door. He saw the antlers first, bleached and forked like coral. The eye sockets were dark and empty.
Beneath the skull, crossed like a pirate flag, were a pair of long bones.
“Oh shit,” he said.
Someone touched his shoulder. He screamed, stumbled, clawing at the dirt in blind panic as he turned on his hands and knees to get back to the house. Blue’s wards burned hot, so hot that he thought he could smell the hairs on his legs singeing. Joe was just standing there, staring at him like he’d lost his mind, and that was the thing that made Grayson turn, just to make sure he wasn’t. Just to make sure there really was someone there.
The sun was behind her, so it took him a moment, but then he saw her face – dark roots, black eyeliner, a bony little hand held out towards him. She was frowning.
“Ruby?” he said.
“Hey,” she said. “Heard y’all was having a little swamp wolf trouble?”
*
It took over twenty-four hours just to get the tail-light fixed and now Gabe was crawling through traffic on the edge of Miami.
Nobody enjoyed this, but as a sailor he had a specialized loathing for dragging his ass along roads when once he could have sailed straight and simple across the Gulf. Only the sky was dark and the tops of the palms were swaying hard in the wind. The sea was gray and the rain kept coming in short, angry spatters, like the weather was spitting in your face as a prelude to another screaming, swirling September tantrum.
The worst part about standing still was that it gave him time to think, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps and gone bugfuck bananas nutso. After all, these things – like so many others – might be genetic. He wanted to believe that, that what was wrong with Blue could be managed with therapy and medication, but somewhere in the roots of his soul he knew that if she was crazy she was only crazy in the same way Gloria had been crazy, in that way where there was always some witchy method to her madness. That was the hardest part of it all, because that was the part that told him to believe. And what he was being asked to believe was insane and horrible.
His child. Their child. And that thing had scooped it hollow before it was even born...
The traffic began to move. He turned up the radio, trying to drown out his thoughts. Move. Go. Just go, go, go. Far easier to keep moving, even if the weather had forced him to follow these sluggish roads all the way to Louisiana.
He drove until the lights turned blurry, reminding him that he needed to stop. He was no use to her dead, or maybe he was. Again, didn’t want to think too much about that; up until now he’d had no difficulty staying awake, courtesy of Yael and what he’d done to Ruby’s ex-husband. Every time he closed his eyes he heard Charlie’s dead hand knocking on the kitchen floor.
The sun was coming up, but its light did little to take the edge off the darkness. Filtered through thick cloud, the day took on the moody gray-blue cast of hurricane season. Gabe nodded over coffee and pie in a truck stop diner, watching the rain stream down, thinking of accidents.
He was so tired. Colors looked too bright: the red plastic chairs almost hurt his eyes to look at them. People talked too loud, conversations drifting in and out...
“...they do it keyhole these days. You’re out the next day...”
“...yeah, well he ate the whole thing...”
“...and she was like ‘Oh, well I need the money for my teeth’...”
Gabe wondered if this was like what Ruby had described, hanging around in mid-air listening to people’s thoughts, trying to untangle one thread from the many. He wasn’t sure what it said about his state of mind that he felt almost close to understanding. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision and he blinked rapidly. Great. He was seeing things now. Weren’t you legally insane after about seventy-two hours without sleep?
He swallowed down a yawn and looked around. A guy in a flannel shirt was standing at the counter, and for some reason Gabe’s gaze snagged on him. And then he turned his head and Gabe – with a sick, sinking feeling – figured out the reason why.
It was Lehman.
The cop turned and caught Gabe’s eye. Gabe gave him a look of tired disgust, but Lehman had obviously been expecting this. Besides, the prick looked way too happy to have caught up with him.
“Hey,” said Lehman, taking a seat opposite. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Yeah. Fancy.” Somewhere in the back of his frayed mind, Gabe knew there was something else going on here. If Lehman was going to arrest him, surely he would have done so by now? That cop’s got dick on you, he thought, only in his mind he heard the words in Gloria’s voice. She’d always had a knack for keeping everyone’s nose clean.
“You look tired,” said Lehman. “Like, ragged. You know you’re legally required to pull over and get some rest, right?”
Gabe poked a fork into his cooling apple pie and took a mouthful. “I am,” he said. “Resting. Relaxing. Eating some pie.” He chewed, remembering the headlines. “It’s good. I think they have lemon meringue.”
Lehman didn’t flinch, but Gabe thought he saw a telltale flicker of tension at the corner of the other man’s eye. Or maybe he was just tripping out from lack of sleep. It was interesting, in a crazy kind of way. Your mind bent round corners it might not have otherwise traversed. “Is that why you’re following me?” he asked.
“What would you know about that?” said Lehman.
Gabe shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just one of those things, I guess. Florida headlines. You hear them all the time. Bath salts zombie, human leg found in dumpster, something alligator related, blah blah blah. Man versus pie.”
Oh, there was no mistaking it now. Dude was pissed. “B
lah blah blah?” said Lehman. “His name was Ramon. I held his wife’s hand at the funeral.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Gabe. “But I don’t know why you’re fixating on me.”
There was no connection, at least not one that a normal person like Lehman would see. Sure, Grayson had seen it, but even without the weird psychic thing, Grayson was still a gay English werewolf who wrote romance novels. Gabe pictured Lehman trying to sell probable cause in a poltergeist-driven lemon meringue massacre; the best case scenario he could see ended with Lehman given some paid leave on account of ‘stress’ - for which read ‘gone whacko’.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” said Lehman. “And stop me if I’m getting warm, won’t you? You’ve always been the good boy, right? You bring home the bacon, you drive Gloria to the optometrist, you clean the gutters, you pick up the phone in the middle of the night.”
“With you so far.”
“And then Blue Beaufort shows up. You, the dutiful foster kid, the good son - you get pushed aside for a long lost granddaughter. Because blood is thicker than water. All your love and loyalty and cold hard cash matters dick, just because Gloria’s kid might have banged this chick’s mom.”
Gabe took a swallow of cooling coffee. “So what? I got jealous and killed her?”
“Am I warm?”
“Freezing,” he said. “I’d sooner stick a gun in my mouth than harm a single hair on her head.”
Lehman nodded, like he was taking mental notes. “Speaking of hair,” he said. “I got your samples tested.”
“And?”
The cop shrugged and pulled out a couple of printouts. “I don’t know what kind of scam your girlfriend is trying to pull,” he said. “But I’m guessing she flunked biology. If she was trying to prove she was related to Gloria then she’d have done better grabbing a sample of Gloria’s hair, instead of something she snagged from some old geezer.”
Gabe squinted at the graphs. Lehman’s finger came down and tapped on the page. “See?” said Lehman. “That white hair sample wasn’t even from a female. This is genetics 101.”