Full Fathom Five (The Keys Trilogy Book 3)

by Anna Roberts

  “Come on, you bastard,” says West, holding out the loop of rope. The jaws snap shut with a force that shakes the earth, but he’s got it. The rope is under the gator’s chin and he pulls the loop tight around its nose. It thrashes and almost pulls his arm from his socket, the rope burning his palm, but his brain is alight with the itch now, the boiling noise of blood and chaos and the whole fleshy mess of life. And he has to stick that knife in, or die in the attempt.

  The knife bounces off the gator’s head. He feels the rope slip and thinks this is it, this is the part where he gets his leg bitten off by an alligator, but he strikes again and this time the angle is right. The knife goes in and he feels something squish in there. The old reptile jerks, stiffens and shudders to a final halt, and then comes the quiet, the perfect, silken silence as life slips away. Even Yael holds his breath in these moments.

  Itch well and truly scratched.

  When he’s caught his breath he ties a rope and heaves the beast onto the back of the truck. There’s a fine pair of boots in that carcass somewhere, and as he drives back to town he wonders where you’d go about finding someone to do the job. A taxidermist, maybe? There have to be people in this flybitten state who know how to make alligator leather.

  He stops at the payphone, dials the number. Yeah, it’s done. So long, Stinky. He’s flipping birds in heaven now. Or, y’know, not. Probably not.

  Home again. He parks the truck and wonders where he’s going to put the gator in the meantime. Would someone seriously boost a dead gator from the back of a pickup? They would in Florida, land of the free and home of the nuts, but here in New Orleans they have a subtler flavor of crazy. A slow burn, shabby-genteel Southern crazy, like Blanche Dubois slowly losing her boozy little mind, or that hot black piece of loony who got stuck on painting the same lousy seascape over and over again. Goddamn, what was her name now?

  The answer comes from the last place he’d expect. There’s a message on the machine and there it is. Regina. Regina Beaufort. And she’s in the hospital because she’s lost her mind, and wouldn’t you know she gave his name? Like he didn’t have enough troubles trying to figure out what to do with a dead alligator.

  He goes to the fridge for a beer, but the thought of her burrows down between the spaces of his neck bones and in the base of his skull. Or maybe it’s just Yael; he really liked her, the way he always likes crazy broads. They’re kind of his thing.

  West puts the beer back unopened and closes the fridge. He knows without asking that Yael’s not gonna cut him a break on this one, so he may as well just call the hospital back. In case she’s dead or something.

  Only she’s not. She’s the opposite of dead, it seems like; she’s popped out a baby girl.

  He drives to the hospital with the gator still in back, and of course some putz in the parking lot starts bitching when he sees the tail sticking out the back of the tarp. “You can’t leave that here,” says the putz. “It’s a health hazard.”

  “It’s not rotting,” says West. “Corpse is barely cold.”

  “Sir, this is a hospital parking lot.”

  West raises a middle finger – salute to old Stinky – as he strolls away. “Yadda. Please address all complaints to my future pair of fine-ass new alligator boots, ‘kay?”

  There’s a hell of a buzz in having people know that you have a big, dead, dangerous thing in the back of your truck. Usually that’s the kind of thing you have to keep secret, ‘cause some people get all precious about dead heroin dealers for some reason, even though most of the shitbirds he dumps in the swamp have racked up body counts that would make a gator jealous.

  “I’m in waste management,” he’d told that chick. “Nah, just kidding. I’m a hit man for a drug cartel.”

  Jesus, when was that? A year ago? November now, but that had been Valentine’s Day; there were red paper hearts strung up above the bar. February, November – as the elevator ascends he does the math. It’s quiet enough in his head for figures, but Yael’s doing that fizzy thing in the background, like he’s waiting to pounce on something.

  He always did like children.

  “Calm your disembodied ass,” West tells him. “Probably ain’t even mine.”

  The mother’s not there. He gives his name at the desk and the nurse takes him to a room full of plastic cribs, half of them full with squirming little babies in various shades of pink and brown. “She’s here,” says the nurse, and lifts out this tiny brown wrinkled thing with a squished looking head. He’s surprised at the solid weight of it, and Yael holds his breath, something like the way he holds his breath at the moment of death. Or maybe the opposite.

  Around her tiny baby wrist is a hospital tag – Baby Girl Beaufort. She could have been anyone’s. She probably is.

  “Where’s her mother?” says West.

  “Psych,” says the nurse. “She came to us from East Louisiana with a detached placenta.”

  “East Louisiana? You mean the mental hospital?” Holy shit, what a start in life. The baby yawns, oblivious, baring smooth pink gums. “And she put my name on the birth certificate?”

  “Yep.”

  He doesn’t want to ask what’s going to happen if he doesn’t take the baby. That little thing is going to get sucked up into the foster care system and passed around forever while people try to figure out what to do with her. And it’s sad, but it’s not his problem; even his own mother admits he’s not parenting material.

  “Well, shit,” he says, and then she opens her eyes at the sound of his voice. Her eyes are the same very dark blue that Charlie’s were when he was first born. “She’s got blue eyes. Is that normal?”

  “Almost all babies are born with blue eyes,” says the nurse.

  “Yeah. White babies. But she ain’t white.”

  She’s not black either. She’s brown – lighter than her, darker than him. And what could be more goddamn likely? Especially with those eyes. She yawns again and he sees it in the shape of her chin. She’s gummy as a grandma and all but chinless, but it’s exactly the same as Charlie’s was. And he can see it, how that soft little baby chin is going to firm up when the teeth come in, coming forward to the point that Linda worried about underbite, like the kid needed orthodontics on top of probably being a werewolf.

  He must have just turned ten. October fifth; West was going to get it tattooed and never did. And now this little one. October, November. Both fall babies.

  “Okay,” he says, and Yael is still too quiet. “What do I have to sign to take her out of here?”

  11

  He’s turned ten. It would be almost poetic, in that asshole way that life often has. Just as the howling in her own head quietens down it starts up somewhere else, in the new generation.

  When she sees West behind the screen door she realizes she’s been expecting that call, and that it’s only right that he should be the harbinger of shitty news; he always is. He’d want to show up in person to tell her that she could keep his own son away from him, but she couldn’t keep the kid from his own unfortunate genes.

  Except West’s not alone.

  “Hey Ma,” he says, looking harried and tired, and it’s not hard to see why. In one hand is a suitcase and in the other is a pink plastic car seat. Inside is a tiny brown baby, a girl, judging by the pink onesie that says PRINCESS in sparkly letters. Poor little thing is so new she doesn’t even know she exists, but they’re already cramming her sex down her throat. Like she’ll ever be allowed to forget it.

  “What the fuck have you done this time?” says Gloria, and it’s a dumb question. Because it’s obvious. Her coloring may be different, but this little girl is the dead spit of Charlie at the same age.

  “Your newest grandchild,” says West, setting the car seat on the kitchen table. “Ain’t she a beauty? Look at those eyes.”

  Blue. If there was any question about paternity, that settles it. Gloria reaches up, aiming a smack at the back of her son’s head. “Twenty-seven years old and you still haven’t figured
out how to put on a goddamn condom? Where’s her mother?”

  West pulls up a chair uninvited. “Mother’s crazy,” he says. “Twice as crazy as you, even. She’s like a kid; I told her about the Keys one time and now all she does is paint crappy pictures of beaches and ask me to take her there. Like it’s Disneyland or something.”

  “So you took her child? Well, that’s gonna help with her state of mind.”

  “She’s in the goddamn boobyhatch, Ma. The kid would have been born in East Louisiana if it hadn’t been for something up with the placenta or whatever. You would have wanted that for her? Ward of the state, before she even knew how to count her own toes?”

  “It’s hard to want anything,” says Gloria. “For someone I didn’t know exists until just now. Give me a moment.”

  The baby burbles, making bubbles with her spit. Her eyes, with their adult-sized irises, are full of light and wonder, and although she can’t be more than three months she’s already looking around, taking everything in. Gloria’s been around growing boys so long that a baby girl looks like a miracle to her, but there’s something else in the room, some covetousness even bigger than her own feelings towards the baby girl she always wanted and never had.

  And Yael is far too fucking quiet.

  She turns away and flicks on the electric kettle. The cupboards hold all kinds of tea these days – ginger and lemon and chamomile – and he wouldn’t know pennyroyal from valerian. Just as well. Her mind is racing ahead, trying to figure out what Yael would do with a baby girl, especially a McBride. Maybe jump into her little head early and raise a wolf witch who’s better bent to his will than Gloria ever was. Sure, those two X-chromosomes might go some way to protect her, but Yael’s like a vampire that way; he can crawl around under the skin of the most potent witch, provided that she invites him.

  Gloria sets the tea down on the table. It’s scorching ginger, the kind he always liked, laced with a little something extra.

  “So,” she says. “What’s going on with you and Yael?”

  West ignores the question completely. The shadows under his eyes are darker even than the ones usually sported by brand new parents, and when he grasps the cup he doesn’t seem to mind the burn of the hot china. He’s been awake for a very long time.

  “You have to take her,” he says. No cajoling, no bullshit, no smiles. It’s not like him.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  He’s scared, and she hasn’t seen that kind of fear in his eyes since he was a sick little boy. He all but pours the tea down his throat, seeking comfort.

  “That’s no answer, Wes,” she says.

  His fist comes down on the table, jarring the car seat. The baby frowns. “Look,” he says. “Just...help me out here, okay? Like you tried to help out with Charlie. I would have thought you’d jump at the chance of stealing one of my children from me.”

  I never stole...

  But she stops herself. There’s no point saying it, because he won’t believe her. She put Charlie and Linda out of harm’s way, that was all. And this little one needs the same thing.

  His eyes are starting to look unfocused. Good. “You hear from them?”

  “No,” says Gloria, and she doesn’t want to, no matter how much the silence hurts. If there’s any spark of kindness in the world she’ll never get that call about Charlie. He’ll just slam doors and squeeze zits and go through all the usual hormone storms of puberty, oblivious to the ways in which it could have been far worse for him. “Leave them alone. They have a shot at a normal life.”

  West gives a soft, nasty laugh. “No chance. That boy’s got too much werewolf in him. Both sides of the family.”

  “And this one?”

  He shrugs and reaches for the suitcase, swaying a little as he does so. “Dunno. Might get lucky, being a girl.” He tries to lift the case, but finds he can’t and instead pushes it across the floor towards her with his feet. “There’s cash in there. Fifty grand in all.”

  Gloria swallows. More money than she’s ever seen in one place in her life before. The kind of sum that means nothing good, once you do the math. “What was it?” she says, while he’s woozy and likely to tell the truth, if only by accident. “Heroin?”

  “Dealer,” says West. “He was skimming, amongst other things. I made him disappear.” He blinks rapidly and when he speaks again there’s a faint slur. “Not a good guy. Not by any description. It’s basically like garbage disposal...”

  “I don’t want your murder money, Wes.”

  He frowns and sways sideways. “God, fuck you, mother. It’s for her...you fucking drugged me...”

  She hurries to his side before he falls. He slumps sideways against her, threatening to slide off the chair. He’s solid enough to almost knock her off her feet, but she pushes and he falls forward instead, his cheek against the table, his lips still moving but no words coming out.

  “There,” she says, and the baby looks at her with those big, solemn dark blue eyes. “Don’t you look at me like that, girlie-girl. This was for his own good. And yours.”

  He’s out, and right now Yael should be filling the room like a vapor, floating free, unbound by West’s conscious mind. But he’s not; Yael’s skulking, and if there’s one thing she knows well it’s never to trust him when he’s skulking.

  Thankfully she doesn’t have to look far for the board. The last set of foster kids kept dicking around with it and so she stashed it where growing boys almost never look; in the back of the cleaning cupboard. She rummages past jostling plastic bottles of Windex and Lysol, and hooks the old Ouija board out. Yael whines and feigns exhaustion, but he’s never had eyelids to close, never mind a need to sleep.

  “No dice, you,” she says, setting the board on the table. “What are you up to?”

  The planchette is motionless beneath her fingers. She feels it tug at the spaces between matter, between bones and breaths and atoms, the invisible places where Yael lives. Has always lived. He’s an old, old beastie, a creature who stood at the childbed of long dead queens and crawled under the skins of executioners at the moment the ax came down; he can’t resist shiny new things like this perfect baby girl.

  The baby watches. The planchette moves.

  N-O-T-H-I-N-G

  “Nothing, my ass,” says Gloria. “You’re always up to something. What do you want with my granddaughter, you old bogle?”

  And then just like that he’s in her head, easy as breathing. Figures. She doesn’t have the protective pentacle of blood any more, just spotting, flushes and fibroids like softballs. The wolf fades with every passing month, and her new, thinning old lady blood is no match for Yael.

  He doesn’t want her. Not really. He doesn’t even remember.

  “Remember what?”

  Flash of a bedroom. Tequila and lust and laughter, a black girl with fine bones and a lost look in her eye, swinging her slender leg over West’s hip.

  Love, says Yael. He only remembers death. It’s the only thing that keeps him quiet.

  Gloria shakes her head to clear away the image. She’d blush if she remembered how. “You can quit showing me that. I’m his mother; I don’t care to see it.”

  Don’t play prim. You were young once.

  Oh, she was. And a lousy wife, a worse mother. All those bars and all those men, and right then she gets it; Yael always sucked at hiding his hand. That night in that bedroom, he was along for the ride, the way he tagged along whenever she went looking for fleshy distractions.

  I wasn’t riding that night, says Yael. I was driving.

  The baby yawns and Gloria barely resists the urge to cover the little mouth with her hand, lest Yael dive in there and work more mischief. “What are saying?” she says, although she’s a step ahead.

  I’m saying it was me, says Yael. It was his body, that night we made her. Just that. His body, but he was too drunk. I was the one in control.

  *

  So you see? We were always meant to be, Baby Blue. From the mo
ment you were conceived.

  She swayed on her aching feet, wanting to sit, but there was nowhere to do so. “You’re not my father. You can’t be.”

  Why not? I am the father, the son and the wholly ghost.

  “It doesn’t work like that. DNA means something. You said it yourself; it was still his body. You may have been driving, but it was still a rental car.”

  She’d given up waiting for this nightmare to be over, given up hoping that it couldn’t get worse. Because it did. It always did.

  Come on. Don’t be like that. Growing up, didn’t you always know you were different? Didn’t you know you were special?

  Special. That was a thing that happened in books. Some ninety pound heroine discovered she was a princess in hiding and all of her mundane, white-girl oddnesses suddenly made sense. To Blue, who had spent her life acutely conscious of hopping from one leaky lifeboat to the next, it was nothing short of insulting.

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said.

  You were the child of spirit –

  “- no, I wasn’t,” she said. “I was the child of crazy, on both sides. I’m half my mother and half my father, just like everybody else. Don’t you dare tell me you gave me special powers, because you didn’t, Yael – you fucking didn’t. I had to carve out my own way a child, as a woman, and as a witch, and I did it. Not you. I figured it out, and that was nothing to do with you. That was all me, same as always.”

  She had never been more her mother’s daughter than in that moment. A vivid memory of Reggie, tossing Legos across this very room, caught in one of those short storms that came before the flat gray doldrums of depression. The vines and the decay fell away and once again Blue was standing in the actual room she remembered from her early childhood, just like that time she’d been in two different versions of Gloria’s kitchen at the same moment in time.

  Oh, he was powerful. There was no doubt about it.

  I could twist time itself just to make you happy.

  There were her old Legos on the floor, next to the pink plastic doll house. The details of the room had faded from memory, so that when she approached the mantelpiece she was amazed to see things she had all but forgotten; the carved ebony bust of an African lady, a sun-faded photo of her Beaufort grandmother, the big pink-hearted conch shell that she sometimes used as a doorstop. And everything clean, gleaming in a way it had never gleamed in real life, because Blue had been too small to dust that high and Reggie’s efforts inconsistent at best.