by Anna Roberts
Tears sprung to her eyes, and Yael stretched.
See? he said. You take after your mother. Soft. Easily upset. Not like your old man.
*
The apartment is empty.
It’s all gone, the brightly colored plastic toys, the high chair, even the scribbles on the fridge that Linda pinned up there in the hope that someone would recognize the kid as a budding Picasso or whatever the fuck. She’s taken her medical books and he knows before he enters the bedroom what he’s going to see there.
Her half of the closet gapes open. She’s left nothing but a pair of old flip-flops and a broken hanger.
This is Gloria’s doing.
As soon as he thinks it he can feel Yael fizzing like a science fair volcano. This is the kind of trouble he loves, but West takes less satisfaction in knowing his own mother stabbed him in the back once more. He remembers that one night when he caught them together in the kitchen – Linda and his mother – bent over rum and Cokes, the room thick with cigarette smoke and conspiracy. And when he walked in they shut up, their faces watchful and studiously empty.
He doesn’t matter any more; it’s all about Charlie. He’s her darling now.
He tastes blood and realizes he’s been biting his lip. The inside of his head feels dark and swollen with the smooth texture of black, perfect rage. His legs are light as he walks to the phone. She’s even taken the piece of paper with the emergency contact numbers – his doctor, his pre-school, his play-dates – and Yael snickers as the blackness thickens between his ears and through his veins. This is all Gloria.
She doesn’t speak when she picks up the phone, but he hears her draw in a breath, like she’s been bracing for this since he left the Keys.
“What did you fucking say to her, Gloria?”
Yael doesn’t speak. Usually he’d be yammering in West’s ear like a cartoon devil, but even the snickering dies down as he waits to hear her voice. He holds his breath and waits to ride the wordless tide of thick, black feeling.
Gloria swallows. West hears the rasp of a lighter.
“I didn’t have to say much at all,” she says. “Linda did most of the talking.”
He doesn’t speak. Let her explain herself. There’s nothing he can say right now that isn’t going to give her a reason to hang up, and he wants to hear this.
“She was miserable,” says Gloria. “Said you were like two different people, Jekyll and Hyde –”
“ – I am two different people.” And whose fault is that? Who let Yael crawl into my head in the first place? Who signed me over to a demon before I was even born?
I’m no demon. You were the one who killed the cat.
“Shut the fuck up, Yael,” and it comes out in a scream, making him sound really, truly crazy.
“She said you sleepwalked,” says Gloria. “And she was scared, Wes. Some nights she’d find you standing over his crib, and she didn’t know what you were gonna do. You were under so much stress –”
“ – because I’m a fucking werewolf, Ma. I’m not supposed to live some Wonder Bread life in the suburbs.”
“See? So what are you complaining about? I did you a favor.”
Oh God, what the hell is wrong with her? “You manipulated me into it –”
“ – oh hell, no. I suppose I squirted the sperm up her –”
“ – you know what I fucking mean, Gloria. You told me to sack up and take responsibility, and I did. And now you’re taking it all away from me? It was a shitty fucking life, but it was my shitty fucking life. Where the hell do you get off treating me like a puppet?”
“She was afraid of you,” says Gloria. “And it sounds like she had good reason. You’re walking around in your sleep, talking to a goddamn skeleton, talking about how you want to change again. I can’t let you be around my grandbaby –”
“ – your grandbaby. Your precious, darling Charlie. He’s my son. I made him.”
There’s a silence and even Yael holds his breath in the wake of just how crazy that sounded. Gloria exhales – smoke, probably.
“Son,” she says, and her voice is quiet now. “Listen to me. If you love that boy, and I know – as much as you ever loved anyone – that you do, you’ll stay away from him. Let him go. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.”
He stares blankly across the kitchen, not speaking, not really thinking, not until he sees the clean patch on the counter where the sterilizer used to stand. She’s taken that, too. She’s taken everything Charlie-related and Yael nudges the thought towards him; how’d she afford a van for all that shit? They were flat broke, up to their ears in it after she had to buy Old Boney for school...
“The money you said you didn’t have,” he says. “You had it, didn’t you? You just weren’t gonna lend it to me.”
“West, listen to me –”
“ – bye, Mom.” He hangs up. Yael’s in full I-told-you-so and West has to admit there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing they really are out to get you. At least the paranoia is real.
The clean spot on the counter shines like a bruise. There’s tape still stuck to the wall where she took down the helpful phone numbers. He walks back through the empty apartment, looking at the spaces left where wife and child used to go, all of them edged with some kind of Charlie-residue – mac and cheese stains on the wall next to his high chair, a missing bright red Duplo block beneath the couch. He knows without picking it up that the block will have tooth marks in the plastic, and an inside coating of dried out Charlie-drool.
Little kids are worse than snails for getting their slime everywhere.
He kicks out, punting the coffee table from the underside and easily launching the light plywood and veneer thing into the air. It comes down with a smash, wobbling so stupidly on its three remaining legs that he keeps right on kicking, jumping, screaming at it until it’s nothing but cheap splinters. For a brief, beautiful second there’s silence in his head, and all he hears is his own ragged breathing and the thump of his heart.
But it can’t last. It never does, because Yael’s in there, too. He’s picked up a tune, the way he often does when he’s excited.
...the toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone...
Rich and rising, a tune to slowly lose your mind to. Dem bones. A gold mine, if he can bring himself to sell them, but right now he just needs to see them again. He paid for half of the goddamn things, after all. She got the kid, she got Gloria’s money, she’s not having those, too. They were never really hers. She never really got them.
Ironic, really. He packed the bones off to Dozer to keep them from burglars. Never imagined he’d have to keep them safe from his own fucking wife.
Yael’s a marvel in his own weird way. Forget Dolby, forget Bang & Olufsen; if you want real flawless sound reproduction you gotta get yourself a Yael. He sings all the parts of the quartet, all the harmonies, the sound filling West’s head as he drives across town, snarling at red lights, flipping off tourists.
When he pulls up outside Dozer’s place the sound is almost deafening, the kind of thing that used to get him kicked out of class for screaming because Yael never learned how to turn it down. If anything it just excites him; when bad things happen he just sings louder.
“Listen to me, you fuck,” says West, as he hammers on the door. “You shut your pie hole or I’m gonna go home and try scooping you out of my head with a fucking teaspoon, you hear me?”
Yael hushes, although the backbeat thunders away all the same. On some skittish, animal level West knows why Gloria spoke softly when she told him to keep away from Charlie, and that it’s something to do with Yael. And even if Yael can’t quite penetrate that part of West’s mind, he can tell – maybe from hormones or pulse rate or just that indefinable feeling of dread – that Gloria’s caught him out in some kind of ugly scheme.
He’s like a hyperactive kid that way; he acts up all the more when he knows he’s in trouble.
West bangs
on the door once more. He knows Dozer’s in; he heard the music before someone turned it off. And already he has a feeling why Dozer’s hiding from him.
“Dozer. Open this fucking door.”
When Dozer opens the door there’s no further doubt. The guy’s no genius but he’s smart enough to know when he’s got between a man and his wife.
“Oh hey, man,” he says, looking squirrelly. “Linda said you were staying on with your mom for another week.”
He shoves past Dozer into the apartment. The air indoors is rank with weed and sweat and somewhere the AC unit creaks and snarls in a way it shouldn’t. The couch has an ass sized dent in it, a clean patch among all the Dorito crumbs and hot rock burns. He left the skeleton right there by the kitchen door, but there’s just an empty space now.
“She swung by and picked it up,” says Dozer. “I thought you knew?”
West spins on his heel. He’s barely aware of throwing the first punch until he feels Dozer’s teeth under his knuckles. The texture of bone. Bones that cost him fucking money, and this dumbass has handed them over without a fight.
...now hear the word of the Lord...
And then it’s like that goddamn coffee table, when he kicked it once and it made such a piss poor effort at collapsing that he had to go on kicking and tearing and screaming. Because it got on his last nerve, because he doesn’t even have a last fucking nerve any more, because there’s a ghost singing in his head all day and all night.
At some point the noises stop, and there’s only the rattle and moan of the AC. Even Yael falls silent, out of respect for that raw meat taste that he likes to roll around in. It’s lingering on West’s lower lip, a memento of that wild, howling moment when the blood splattered in his face and made him even madder, if that was possible.
Dozer’s face doesn’t look like a face any more. It’s wet and red, like a dropped strawberry pie. West touches his neck, searching for a pulse, but he knows he won’t find one. There was a time in all the screaming when he squeezed and felt something snap in there. A delicate little bone, the hyoid. Easily pulled apart, like the wishbone from a chicken.
It’s like a prayer. Hyoid. Even in the mess and destruction of what Dozer made him do, the word has the ability to comfort him. Dem bones and their beautiful, interesting names. And there’s such a silence in their hard, dry deadness, a silence almost as deep as the one inside him now.
Is this what it takes?
He rises slowly from the floor, feeling his shoulders ache in their sockets (scapula, tubercles greater and lesser, coracoid process) and goes to the kitchen to find a knife. He wants that bone. He wants to see if it really did snap, like the others. The ones he felt under his fist (temporal, zygomatic, intraorbital foramen) going crunch under all that messy flesh.
He turns back to the body, the knife in his hands. Disconnect dem bones, dem dry bones.
*
The first thing she heard was the howling.
She’d heard it a million times before, in bedrooms and parking lots and anywhere else where men got the urge to raise their voices, only this time it was like a taunt. Olly olly oxenfree. They were out there, and they knew they were gonna win, but why not give the outsiders a fighting chance before storming in there and cutting out their hearts? Make a sport of it.
Grayson came out to join her on the porch, breathing hard like something hurt. “Ruby, I won’t ask you again. Where the hell is Joe?”
She waved him away, listening.
“Don’t you dare tell me he’s out there...”
“He’s safe,” she said, because he was. He was tooth and claw and thick blond fur – not white like they said, but near enough. She felt the undergrowth scratch her skin even as she was standing still; he was moving out there. When she breathed in she smelled earth, but not like any person would understand the smell of earth. More than just mud. She knew what time of day deer had walked across it, that there were earthworms wriggling just inches underneath, and that the deer had been frightened, because there was something new in the woods. Something big and hungry.
“What did you do, Ruby?” said Grayson. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing he didn’t ask me to,” she said, and another howl echoed through the trees. She turned back to him. “Now go. Lock the kids in the basement. They’re coming.”
Grayson gave her a look somewhere between terror and despair, but for once he did as he was told. “Just for the record, I don’t trust you as far as I can spit. And spitting was never my strong suit.”
“That’s fine,” she said, not really listening to him. Something stirred in the trees beyond, setting the tarot cards a-twirl. She filled her mouth with the scent of the breeze, tasting swamp mud and man sweat. They were coming and Joe was running in the wrong direction.
“You get back here,” she said, addressing the words not to Joe but to Nox, who was deep in Joe’s head where she’d put him, filtering his wolf senses back to her. “Don’t you puss out on me now, Nox.”
Shit. This had always been the risk; a lot of spirits had a yellow streak a mile wide. She had needed his help to turn Joe, to pilot him through the trees like a furry smart bomb, but she hadn’t counted on Nox turning chicken.
She could feel the tug-o-war going on in Joe’s head. His wolf-self wanted to tear at something with his teeth, but the spirit was running away from the fight. And there was nothing she could do.
There was a rustle ahead and she froze.
One of the swamp wolf twins stepped out from behind a bush. His face was blank and he had an ax in his hands.
He spoke, but her brain was so full of wolf and Nox and fight and panic that it took a moment for her to unscramble what he’d said.
“It’s time.”
“Ax won’t do you no good,” she said, her mouth dry. He’d learned nothing about spilling her blood, and then it came to her in a flash. If she bled then she could call Nox to her aid, and with any luck Nox would drag Joe along for the ride.
And then she felt the rope.
It cut off her breath in the same second. She stumbled backwards and saw the twin smiling as if to say “We can kill you without bleeding you,” and Lord, they could. The rope was tight around her neck, crushing her throat. As she swung her elbow back to try and hurt the man behind her she had a vivid sense of just how little fight she had left in her. And he wouldn’t even have to break the skin.
Ruby brought her teeth down hard on her lip. The world was starting to turn gray, but in the middle of the growing darkness she saw more people coming out of the bushes. They were carrying something, and as the light faded she saw that it was a chair, a lawn chair on some kind of homemade litter. The king.
Sonofabitch. She bit deeper and tasted blood, sure that this was the end, but then she felt the rush and shiver of a spirit waked to the taste of flesh. Or maybe it was because she was about to die. She felt Nox almost burst through Joe’s skin to get to her; the sound of his howl slackened the hands around her neck just long enough for her to catch a sip of air.
“Let. Go. Of. The. Rope.”
The voice seemed to come from far away, but she would have recognized the accent anywhere. Grayson. Her knees went out from under her but it was okay. It was all okay, because she could breathe, even if it hurt her throat like a million kinds of fire to do so.
Ruby spat blood onto the porch. She glanced up and over her shoulder to see Grayson standing there with Sarah-Lou’s gun held to Thing Two’s head. Thing One still had the ax in his hands, but his face had the same expression as all the others; scared, expectant, and – as she’d suspected before - sick to goddamn death of it all.
Except for him. The king was smiling like that Roman emperor watching Russell Crowe go at it with the tiger. A prideful old man with a lawnchair for a throne. Ruby rubbed her burning throat and spat once more. This time her ragged breath tasted of blood and fear and swamp wolf and sweat, but she could feel the wolf heart beating faster as Joe ran through the trees, pulled alon
g by a rushing, blood-drawn Nox.
She tried to speak, but the first couple of times all that came out was a busted clucking sound, like the voice of a sick hen. The old man narrowed his eyes, like he was anticipating more entertainment.
“It don’t have to be this way,” she said, in her sick-bird croak.
“Does too,” said the king. “Ya’ll turned on us, Ruby. We’re your kin.”
“Kin my ass. You’re gonna kill me for fun.” She gulped, her throat burning. “Cause you don’t know how to do anything else.”
The bushes rustled. A couple of the litter bearers turned to look and froze. She couldn’t see what they were seeing, but she could feel it; Joe was right there, lurking in the brush, his mouth wet with the anticipation of flesh, the spirit under his skin all but howling, high on blood.
“You can walk away,” she said. “Or have your litter friends pick your ass up and carry you home. We can end this. Here. Now. No more killing.”
Joe nosed out of the undergrowth. Ruby heard Grayson’s breath catch. The litter bearers were all staring now, but the king was still looking right at her. His beady old black eyes said it all; he wasn’t going to give an inch.
There was another rustle, a doglike whuff and then Joe was sailing through the air like it was his element. She barely had time to register the sound of his paws leaving the ground before his jaws came down on the old man’s neck. The swampers leapt back, drawing rifles and wicked looking knives, but it was over with one loud, crunchy bite. The old man hung limp like an oversized doll, held by the throat between the wolf’s massive jaws.
Goddamn, he was huge. Joe had gone deep into the woods to turn, just in case she wasn’t able to control him. This was the first time she had seen all of him and now she did she remembered the wolf at the end of the world. His dirty white hackles stood up as he snarled softly around his prize, baring the black edges of his lips against the torn flesh of the old king’s throat. She could feel the hunger burning in him and she could feel Nox pulling tighter, like someone trying to leash a big, savage dog that only wanted to bite everything in sight.