by Anna Roberts
“Neighborhood dogs bring ‘em in,” says Gloria reflexively, then remembers she doesn’t have to lie to him. Not about this, anyway.
He brushes away the dirt, running fingertips over the surface of the bone with a little boy’s eager appetite for nasty things. He’s so tall it’s easy to forget he’s only twelve. When he kneels to snag a piece of backbone his shirt rides up, baring bruises at the base of his spine.
“Did your dad hit you?”
He stands up again, pulling down his shirt. “No. The bruises come out of nowhere, because I’m sick, I guess. That’s why he said I had to come here.”
She’s heard of this, although until now she’s thankfully never had to deal with it. Some boys just pop into wolves as easily as if their joints were made of elastic, but in others the wolf is so fierce that it tears them apart from the inside out. People start calling doctors and priests, blaming cancer or the devil. It almost never ends well.
If Yael had pants right now he’d be laughing fit to wet them.
“Do you remember me?” she asks.
West shrugs. “I think so. A little.”
“Do you remember when we lived in Miami?” she says, her heart beating hard behind her ears, her head full of malicious laughter. “You had a blue bedroom with fish painted on the walls. And there was an airplane hanging from the ceiling. Your dad built it for you.”
He nods. “It used to fly. In circles.”
He remembers too much. “Do you remember me coming into your room at night? To give you your milk?”
“No.”
She almost blurts the truth in that moment; I’m your mother and I fucked up. I fucked up bad. I sold you to a monster before I even saw your face, and I tried to run away to keep you safe, but he’s got me backed into a corner all over again. “Good,” she says, instead. “Good.”
*
You see? Even she admits it. She made a deal and tried to wriggle out of it.
Blue lay flat on the motel bed, staring up at the hairline cracks in the ugly coral pink ceiling. “Maybe she thought you were joking.”
Maybe, baby. Even you can’t bring yourself to believe that. She lied to you, Stormy Blue. With her last words she lied to you. She promised me plenty.
“She didn’t know what she was promising. If she knew she never would have done it; no mother would hand her child over to a thing like you, not knowing what you’d do with it.”
She had stopped bleeding. There was now a noticeable bump and she could feel him moving in there, a weird fluttering, stirring sensation that sometimes woke her up in the night, her bladder aching with the need to pee. It was all happening too fast and she knew it wasn’t doing her any good; one of her back teeth was loose.
Come on, now. There are perks. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.
The bed was lumpy, hell on her lower back. Only these days complaints had a way of resolving themselves, as miraculous as draining your bank account one day and finding a suitcase full of money in the yard the next. The ceiling came closer and the pressure on her spine vanished, as if she were floating on an invisible, inflatable cushion. He was singing through her veins, now that his blood supply and hers were intermingled, power tingling through the tips of her fingers and the roots of her hair. It tasted black on her tongue but she was silver, glowing, full as the moon.
You see? You know what it means to miss New Orleans, don’t you Baby Blue? You know what it feels like to be adrift, forgotten, powerless. You think you’ve moved on, but you’ll never quite get the stink of the Superdome out of your nostrils. When you’ve looked to all the people who were supposed to care for you, and you’ve seen just how little they really care, it’s overwhelming. They say hate is worse than love, but nothing hurts like indifference, not on that scale. It never leaves you, does it? Makes you mad. Makes you hungry.
“So this is the next stage of the temptation package?” Her breath misted the plaster of the ceiling. She could smell the chalky damp of it just inches from her nose. “First the money, then the power. What’s next? The armies of the world to command?”
You tell me. What is it you really want?
She lowered herself back down to the bed, concentrating hard to keep him from seeing her real desire. At the last foot her control slipped and she fell back with a thud, stirring the tourist information leaflets beside the bed. There was enough magic still in the air to lift them, and they floated up towards the ceiling, Busch Gardens plastered up there next to the light fitting.
Ow, said Yael.
“You felt that?”
Of course I did. I can feel all sorts of things now.
“Good luck with that,” she said, and tried to wish him pain.
You don’t have the will for that. And stop trying to change the subject. What is it that you want? Power, beauty, longevity? Want to spin straw into gold, or do you just want out of scrubbing the kitchen?
She thought once again of the rusted chain of butterflies, miles away and tangled up with Mardi Gras beads and the rest of the junk jewelry in Gloria’s old collection. The will and the why; it was all about the why. Somewhere lay the means of understanding him.
“She had you trapped, didn’t she?” said Blue. “Otherwise why wouldn’t you have just jumped into all of those wolf boys? Or into my dad?”
He didn’t answer. Instead she felt him stretch inside her and swallowed down nausea. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep again. Or maybe he didn’t answer because she’d guessed correctly.
Even when he slept she wasn’t completely alone or safe in her thoughts; if she plotted behind his back he’d wake up, rifle through her memories and figure out a way to punish her for it. And flying was out. The last thing she needed to be doing was leaving her body. After everything he’d said about comas she was sure he’d find a way to keep her from getting back in.
The more space he took up in her body, the more space he seemed to take up in her brain. Every day there seemed fewer dark corners in her mind, and the ones she did manage to seek out were already stuffed full of Yael. When she slept her dreams were vivid and ugly, full of bones, ax blows and screams, and the worst part was that she couldn’t always remember which parts were her memories and which parts were someone else’s.
But he’d shown her something he hadn’t meant to; she felt sure of it. That necklace. Gloria had been wearing it the night Yael had made a brief break for freedom, hopping into the body of the old lady in the cat shirt and killing her stone dead out of spite when Gloria tried to yank him back indoors. Blue tried to remember if Gloria had been wearing the necklace before or after – or had she taken it off when she called Yael back? Whatever happened, Gloria had figured out a way of keeping Yael contained all those years, trapped under her own skin. She’d always said that Yael found it harder to enter the bodies of young women – too potent, too juicy, she’d said – but maybe that same potency worked the other way, a set of bars that kept things in just as well as they kept them out.
She felt him stir again and froze stiff, quickly clearing her mind, like a kid stuffing a forbidden book out of sight. She’d gotten good at it lately, staring at some still spot between her closed eyes – your third eye, they said, in that meditation class that Mom had gone to during one of those brief, blessed periods when she consistently stayed on her meds. Blue had thought it horseshit at the time – why would you ever want to think of nothing at all? – but maybe those Tibetans or whoever had dreamed these things up had their own versions of Yael. Now she saw the point of craving silence.
Blue stared into the blank space, letting her ears fill with the hiss of emptiness, drowning out the sounds of the nearby highway. Nothing. Just silence, soft and fragile as satin, as necessary as air.
Then a plane.
She startled at the clarity of it. It just popped into her head – a toy plastic airplane, the kind you built from a kit. It was spinning in circles against a darkened ceiling. A chunk of light had slipped past the ragged edge of a blind, illuminating a fish
on the wall, a smiling, big lipped grouper painted in childish shades of blue, pink and yellow.
“Yael?”
No reply. She closed her eyes again and this time the bed seemed to lurch and sway beneath her, like she’d chugged half a bottle of vodka, or just one of Gloria’s terrible cocktails.
And then she was standing in sunlight, bare feet in the dirt of Gloria’s backyard, lifting a bone from the earth. She felt what the tapered fingers felt, but they were too small and too white to be her own, and the bone held the endless fascination that things only held when you were almost brand new and the world was full of wonder. The surface was rough at the edges, but under the dirt he could feel the perfect smoothness of the bone. Was this what they called ivory? The hole looked like an eye, like half of a fierce tribal mask...
Holy shit. She remembered how Yael used to sneak out and invade her dreams at night, but now maybe he had enough of a brain to have real dreams of his own. And she could just walk right into them.
Maybe he’d get her for this later, but she couldn’t stop now that the barrier had been breached. The boy was smashing up the bones with a rock, working their edges with a rusty file he found under the chicken house. He was hurting deep down in his own bones, like the monsters that had used to live in his closet had taken up residence inside his rib cage and started slashing and tearing with their claws. So he filed all the harder, taking his mind off it, sculpting the bone into little squarish pieces. Ivory beads.
He likes the word ‘ivory’ – it sounds beautiful and important.
She sees into him as clearly as if she could turn microscopic and float through his veins. She sees the corpuscles breaking under the skin, fresh bruises blooming up and down his spine. His very bone marrow is in revolt against the wolf, or the man, or both. It’s hard to tell. They’re all mixed up in there, but the wolf is winning. It’s a huge, howling why, like some devil spirit got into its ear and whispered ‘grow’ and that’s all it knows. Grow. Live.
Gloria knows it, too. Nature has a way of whittling out the weak. She salts the soup on autopilot, lifts the spoon with the translucent wet-paper skins of leeks clinging to it. She sips without really tasting and drops it back into the pot, unable to take her eyes off him kneeling there in the yard. His shirt’s rode up again in the back; the bruises are all kinds of yellow and purple and if she didn’t know better she’d accuse Maury of smacking him around.
Not that it would make any difference. Maury is long gone and she’s stuck here, with Yael snarling down her neck and a boy who’s about to be torn apart from the inside by a wolf.
She could teach him, if she had time. Over the years she’s learned to tame the wolf inside.
With my help, says Yael. And don’t you forget it, girlie-girl. There wouldn’t even be a kid if I hadn’t kept you from turning.
“I don’t need you to do it any more,” she says. “I can handle it myself. I can teach him to do the same.”
He starts to laugh, slow and nasty, breathing in her ear. And pigs might fly. It’s like the old joke goes, Gloria. Practice. You don’t go from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to playing Carnegie Hall in less than twenty-four hours. And that’s how long he’s got. I’m your only hope of him seeing the other side of the full moon.
She knows what will happen if she lets him slip his leash, a leash already pulled taut by the strength of her own stupid, offhand promise. That’s the worst part; knowing she said yes. She didn’t fully know what she was saying yes to, but she did say it. It’s a dirty, sneaky trick, like those boys who say they’re only going to put it in for a minute but carry on and come inside you, pleading that their balls will explode or something if they don’t.
“I said no,” she says. “He’s a child. Last thing he needs is a thing like you in his head; God knows what kind of a monster he’ll grow into.”
The boy picks up a rock, brings it smash down on the lamb bone. The bone flies off sideways and he yelps; he struck his thumb with the rock by accident.
Gloria goes to the door. “Come in,” she says. “It’s time you washed up for supper.”
He drags his growing feet as he comes, thumb in mouth. He’s pissed at being dragged from pillar to post, pissed at being dumped this way, but if you asked him he couldn’t tell you that; his hurt is still the formless hurt of a child, a hurt so huge and pervasive that he doesn’t yet have the words to explain it. He sucks harder on his thumb.
“Let me take a look at that,” says Gloria, but he shakes his head. He pulls his thumb from his mouth with a wet, audible pop and stuffs his whole hand under his armpit.
“Let me see,” she says.
West just glowers. She reaches for his wrist but he jerks away, and Yael lights up like a Christmas tree at the brief touch of the child’s hot, thin skin. So nasty. He’s like a pervert in the park, slobbering over child flesh. Gloria’s own skin crawls the way it used to back in Miami, back when the mere sight of her own child used to send Yael into such fits of covetous screaming that she didn’t dare touch the boy. And West hasn’t forgotten, it seems. The freckled, scowling boy has all but swallowed the golden haired toddler, but the blue eyes are the same, and so is the resentment glowering out of them.
She reaches for his hand again but he thrashes away, bumping his rib against the side of the counter. “Leave me alone,” he says. “I want to go home. You’re not my Mom.” He lobs the words like grenades, gasping with the effort of throwing them long. His hand comes out from under his armpit and goes to his bumped rib; she sees the thumbnail is red and purple and black.
“I am your mother,” she says. “And you’re stuck with me. So let me take a look at that hand.”
He jerks back once again, but this time – as he’s drawing in a sharp hissy, pissy little breath – something gurgles in the back of his throat. His eyes fill with confusion and then blood snakes down from his nose, from the corner of his lip.
The wolf’s been worrying the marrow of his very bones, says Yael. You know where this ends. A sad, bald-headed little kid who wants to go to Disneyland before he dies.
“Shut up, you sack of shit,” she says, and quickly says “No, not you,” because the poor kid thinks she’s decided to start insulting him on top of all his sudden fright. When he opens his mouth to protest his teeth are slick with blood, and he wipes his lips with the back of his hand, reeling back when he sees the red there. Jesus, he’s barely past the age where blood in his mouth would have meant another visit from the tooth fairy.
“It’s okay,” says Gloria, even though it’s not. “I can help you. You just have to...”
He looks at her with wide, scared eyes and she can’t finish that sentence. Have to what? Control your wolf? He’s just a baby. He can barely grasp his own rage.
You know what to do, Gloria.
Yael rattles the bars of her ribs. Jesus, he can smell it – blood and hormones and adrenaline. The boy’s howling terror is giving way to another kind of howling, the one that takes over when you’re too hurt to think in words any more, the kind of pain that used to come on when she was a bullied girl in the school basement. Only he’s a boy, and nobody told him to expect pain the way they tell growing girls to expect it.
The crack is loud and ugly; his hip’s out and it dumps him on the floor, screaming, his shirt riding up enough to show the ghastly purple red of a new bruise. Gloria drops to her knees, trying to reach out, trying to get between the substance of him and the wolf, but the wolf is red and wounded and baffled that it’s being dragged into existence in this bloody, hurting way. Yael pounds behind her eardrums and West never stops screaming, but she can still hear the crack of bone as her child’s skeleton gets rearranged from the inside.
His mouth is full of blood and he’s all but gargling it. He’s going to choke to death even before the pain kills him.
“You sonofabitch,” says Gloria, because there’s no choice any more. The boy’s spine is lengthening and there’s hair busting out on his forearms.
She
takes off the iron necklace.
Yael roars out of her so fast that she’s reminded of that last push, when they tell you the head and shoulders are out and just one more shove will do it, and then it all happens in a rush, a bony jangle of tiny elbows and knees. And then the silence, that breath-held life and death moment before you hear their voice for the first time. She kneels, gasping, the iron butterflies on the bare floor between her spread palms. West is silent once more and then it’s her turn to scream, because he’s lying there with his mouth full of clotting blood and his eyes wide open. Not a breath, not a bubble.
“West? West? Baby? Talk to me, baby.”
He’s staring into nothing, or maybe everything; she can’t tell, but then his eyes shift just enough to look at her and she lets out a weird whoop of relief. Then he gurgles and the blood fountains up into her face and all over her tits, but who even cares? She rolls him over quickly into the recovery position, crying, apologizing, pleading, lying to him that everything will be okay. Because it won’t. He’s got that thing under his skin now, but maybe it’ll be enough to buy him time. Enough to teach him to survive being a werewolf.
Out of old habit she checks her thoughts – keep them from Yael – but then she realizes she doesn’t have to do that anymore. He’s gone. She’s alone in her own head for the first time in nearly twenty years, and for a second the depth of the silence almost overwhelms her. But there’s no time.
She scrambles to a crouch, snatches up a roll of paper towels and kneels back down again, mopping and soothing. The hair has gone from his forearms and when she reaches behind him to touch the base of his spine she finds his tailbone right where it should be.
“Oh God,” she says, as he sputters all over the kitchen floor. The bleeding seems to be slowing, thank fuck for that. Her heart feels like it’s about to leap out of her chest.
West snorts and reaches for a paper towel. He blows his nose with the same honking sound as his father, and it’s such a normal, annoying sound that she almost laughs.