by Anna Roberts
He laid down on the floor behind her, draping an arm over her waist the way they used to when they were spooning in bed. He felt the heat of the fire behind him, saw the wall glow orange and the smoke seethe upwards.
You only had to breathe a couple of lungfuls and that was that. Smoke inhalation got you fast before the flames did.
Gabe brushed back Blue’s hair and kissed her cheek. “It won’t be long,” he said. “I’m coming, baby. I’ll see you there.”
She coughed.
“Shh,” he said, like a reflex, like he’d gotten so used to soothing her that it was all he knew how to do. Or perhaps he hadn’t thought it was real, but it was. She coughed again, her back moving against him.
“Blue? Oh my God. Blue?”
She wheezed, waving a hand in front of her nose. Gabe looked over his shoulder. Oh shit – the whole back wall was ablaze now, the smoke already so thick that he couldn’t see the ceiling. Thank God they were lying on the floor.
“What’s that smell?” she said. Her voice was faint but so totally her that he started to cry again. Funny how he hadn’t shed a tear when he was expecting to die but had started right up again now that there was a chance they might live. Perhaps it was hope that made you cry.
“Crawl,” he said, pulling her to her knees. “Don’t walk. All you have to do is crawl out of here.”
“The baby...”
“Go,” he said, and pushed her towards the door. Her knee stuck on the placenta and he thought for a second she might turn and see the body lying there, but she shook it off with a cold shudder and crawled towards the door. Gabe followed, for all the world like a three legged dog with his arm in a cast. As he pushed her out the door he saw the briefcase, its contents ablaze, dead presidents floating up as they turned to ash. And he’d never cared less in his life.
As he crawled out into the open air he heard something crash behind him, some part of the ceiling coming down. Blue rolled, half naked and bleeding, down the steps and onto the bald lawn.
“Yael...” she said.
Gabe tugged at her, afraid of more collapses. Time to go. Time to get to safety.
She looked at him like she was staring up from underwater. “Did he get you?” she said.
“No,” he said. “He’s gone. It’s done. It’s over.”
*
A bump and a blue sky. She stares right up and sees clouds scudding by. The bottom of a boat. She can’t remember how she got here, but there’s a slippery, struggly taste in the back of her throat – a frog he would a wooing-go – and a whiff of gunpowder clinging to the hairs inside her nostrils.
Someone cast her adrift and she can’t remember who. The Duke of Naples, perhaps – who knows? She raises her head to peer over the side and sees the tangled roots of...something. Trees, but they have a name, a name she can’t remember for the life of her. There are holes inside her head, like someone’s torn the middle out of a photograph. There’s a girl, a tiny black girl with eyes like a lost princess. Or maybe her t-shirt said princess; Gloria doesn’t remember. Only that she was connected to something very important. Something that’s been torn out of the picture.
Mandrake. Was that it? The name for those tangled roots? Mandragora. Something that grew on the banks of the River Lethe, and she can remember that just fine – that Lethe was the river of forgetfulness. But the princess and the picture, and the reason why there’s blood under her nails and black powder under her nose? Forget it.
Her head spins as she sits upright. There’s blood on the side of the boat and she knows it has to go. That much she can figure out; if they catch you covered in blood they start asking questions, and nobody has time for questions, not when the moon’s getting round and you can’t afford to get locked up.
Frankie. Frankie couldn’t afford it. Whoever he was. Was he on the boat?
She swings an awkward leg over the side. Splash in the shallows. The water’s clear as mud, clear as her mind, but it all washes off the same way. She scrubs her nails with sand, sloshes the port side clean. That’s how you remember it – there’s a little port left in the bottle. A mnemonic. Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.
Mandrakes. No, that still doesn’t sound right. What are those trees?
She staggers through the water to the shore. Her breath sounds loud in her ears and the sun shines too bright in her eyes, so that she has to shade them to make out the figures just beyond the beach. Men. Two of them. Maybe they know what the trees are called.
She waves and hurries forward.
They’re young, so young they’re practically shiny with newness, but she’s used to that. All those boys and men coming and going over the years. The short one has a red thing around his neck and she knows it’s not called a banana but that’s the word stuck in her head right now. He speaks, but she only understands every third or fourth word and the hole in her mind opens up wider, baring the ragged edges of the photograph. It’s all been torn out and somewhere in the back of her head she knows who did this, but there’s no point talking about him, because he’s not real. Or not real in any way that these boys would understand.
“Habla ingles?”
“I don’t understand,” she says, and then it comes to her in a rush of relief like blinding light. She didn’t understand because they were talking Spanish.
“Oh,” says the tall one. “You’re American?”
“Si. I mean, yes. Where am I?”
“Summerland.”
“I don’t think I am,” she says. Summerland. That’s what they used to call it back in the day. “A pretty name for a long dirt nap,” she says. “Rapping and tapping on tables, looking for ghosties. Don’t look like any kind of afterlife I’ve ever seen.”
“Summerland Key,” says the one with the red thing. “You’re in Florida, lady. Is there someone we can call for you?”
“Go easy,” says the tall one. “She’s obviously confused. Honey, do you remember your name?”
She does, but her tongue doesn’t. So she spells it instead. “G-L-O-R-I-A.”
“Gloria. That’s good. That’s great. Do you remember how you got here, Gloria?”
Those trees. It’s itching at the inside of her brain and she won’t be able to think straight until she knows. “What do you call those?” She points.
“Trees?”
“No. What are their names?”
“Mangroves?”
There. Oh, that’s better. So simple. Man. Groves. Man-trees. Green man. Easy to remember. One might say it’s a moot point, and that thought makes her smile. “Wait there,” she says, remembering something else that was important. “I have to get my purse.”
She splashes back to the boat. The men are talking in soft voices, but she has better ears than the young would give her credit for.
“...my aunt went the same way. It’s fucking heartbreaking...”
I’m fine, you little squirts. Just fine. Mangroves. There. She’d got it now. All coming back to her.
Epilogue
A tapping on the edge of sleep, soft but steady. If he’d had wolf ears he might have flicked them in annoyance.
Joe slowly opened his eyes to the glow of a laptop screen. The light filtering through the blind was the pale, delicate gray of a winter dawn, but his eyes were so full of sleep he couldn’t make out the blurred figures on the alarm clock. He groaned and rolled over.
Besides him Grayson was typing away, wearing nothing but glasses and that big strappy wrist bandage. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a brute; I thought I could get away with not waking you.”
“What are you doing?”
“We romance writers are like sharks; we die if we don’t keep moving.”
Joe propped himself up on an elbow, wary. One day he was going to wake up to this and it was going to be permanent, but he wasn’t sure if he was ready to discuss that yet. “Oh. So we’re talking about death again?”
Grayson stopped typing. “It’s a fact of life. I don’t have many miles left on the clock. Yo
u should probably find someone with a life expectancy longer than your average celebrity marriage.”
“But I love you.” The words just fell out of Joe’s mouth, surprising even him, but they felt right, if a little petulant. “And I know you said you didn’t care if I said it...”
“Well, what I say and what I mean are different things.”
“Well, I do mean it. I love you right back and you’re just going to have to live with it.”
Grayson folded the laptop and removed his wrist bandage. The Velcro made a loud, unromantic ripping noise in morning quiet, and he apologized as he set it aside. “Joe,” he said, turning to face him. “I haven’t had a great deal of luck in life; it’s like the deck was stacked against me from the start. It was hard enough growing up gay in the Eighties, without being a fucking werewolf on top of everything else. I had to carve out what little life I could for myself, and it wasn’t great, but it was mine. And it worked. Up to a point. Just so long as I taught myself not to expect too much.”
He swallowed, his voice cracking a little at the end.
“Luke,” Joe said, reaching for him.
“No, let me finish. Please. You’re young. And you’re gorgeous, and you’re funny and you’re kind, and every time I look at you I’m afraid. Because if you love me it’s going to be even harder to leave, and I have to, darling...please don’t cry because you’ll set me off, too...there’s no getting around it. I could have months.”
“It’s not fair.” It was a pathetic complaint.
“It never is,” said Grayson. “But we’ll just have to make the best of what time we have.” He blinked too fast behind his glasses and forced a smile. “So, I’m thinking Singapore Slings for breakfast, literal sex on the beach for lunch and round out the evenings with MDMA with a Viagra chaser. I hear that molly stuff rips the tits off the shit we used to do in the Nineties. Or maybe you can just fuck me to death; I wouldn’t mind bowing out that way.”
Joe sniffed hard, swallowing down tears. “Okay.”
“Just promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“When I’m going, let me go. I have to. I don’t want to be one of those poor sad ghosts hanging on by their invisible fingernails, clinging on to something they can no longer have. I just want to be dead.”
Joe nodded. “Okay. Although I’m not sure how you make that happen. That sounds like a job for a wolf witch. Maybe Ruby can –”
“– no.”
This again. Joe sighed and Grayson needled him with a look. “She saved our lives, Gray.”
“And she learned nothing. If anyone’s going to have to exorcise my ghostly arse then it better damn well be Blue.”
Joe hugged his knees to his chest, thinking of spilled salt and nightmares. She was in no shape for an exorcism. “And how is she going to do that?” he said.
“In time.”
“You don’t have time.”
“I know,” said Grayson. “I suppose I’ll just have to have faith instead.”
*
There was salt all over the floor again. Gabe had scrubbed the walls just last night, but when he looked in there was blood on them once more, fingerprints and elaborate sigils dredged from some dark corner of her head. Or Gloria’s, or anybody’s. How many heads had Yael occupied over the years?
Blue’s fingertips were clotted with dark red. Her torn fingernails were never clean any more. Gabe took the bottle of antiseptic from its hiding place and advanced across the gritty-floored bedroom, cotton balls in his other hand. Blue sat quiet on the old Shaker style rocking chair by the window. Her cheekbones were too sharp and the thin white streak in her hair stood out stark in the morning light. Today, he thought, is going to be one of those beat-down days, the ones that are somehow worse than the screaming.
She barely moved as he uncurled her fingers from the arms of the chair. He dabbed away at each nail, taking care to get into the quick and the cuticle. The last thing she needed was another infection.
“There,” he said, strapping a Band Aid around a particularly bad nail. “That’s better, isn’t it?” He stroked the hair back from her face and she barely blinked. Another day of wrecked silence. “I thought we could go and sit on the beach today. Get some fresh air. Sunshine.”
Her skin, once so bright and brown with its lively freckles, was a sad pale gray. She had yellowish rings around her eyes, as if she’d been punched and the bruises were almost faded. She’d lost maybe twenty pounds since they brought her home, and the loss had left her looking scrawny. Her spine showed when her shirt rode up, and her once delicate hands now looked like the bony claws of a madwoman.
Gabe opened the drapes, feeling a strange, sadistic glee when she winced at the light. If only it were that simple. If only he could shake her out of this somehow. Sometimes he was furious with her; she wasn’t the only one hurting here, but then he’d remember and he’d hate himself for entertaining the thought, even for a second. In those awful, unthinkable moments he’d only briefly felt the scale of it all, the great rolling black poison tide that was Yael. Those few seconds had nearly swept his mind away; she’d had that thing inside her for weeks.
He talked constantly to her as he brushed her hair, washed her face. It was the kind of forced running commentary that you keep up with a child or an old person, but it was easier than not hearing her answer back. At least today she was in the mood to lift the spoon to her own lips, even if she ate only three bites of cereal.
She walked slowly, her eyes somewhere else. When they left the house he took her arm and led her gently. He put a sunhat on her to shade her face, but there was always someone who looked into the shadows under the brim and saw that her eyes were empty, and that something was very, very wrong.
“Never mind them,” he said, as another couple whispered and worried in their wake. “They’re not like us. They don’t understand.”
Blue stumbled a little and he steadied her. One time she’d stubbed her toe so hard that the entire nail had come off. She hadn’t even noticed. That was a couple of months ago, when she was really deep into it. She looked at him more now. More than she did then.
The beach was quiet. The only people about were a family of four, with the two kids occupied in building an elaborate sandcastle. The oldest was maybe eight and yelling orders to his little sister – “No, get the wet sand, Hayley. The wet sand,” – and she was grinning, gathering up handfuls of dry white sand for the fun of feeling it stream out of her fists. Gabe glanced at Blue, worried that this might upset her, but Blue wasn’t looking at them. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular.
“Sit down,” he said, and she did so while he took off her shoes. He sat to unlace his own shoes, but as he did so she got up, so unexpectedly that he was startled for a second.
She moved with a swift purposefulness that was almost like her old self. Almost. She walked straight through the children’s’ sandcastle without even noticing it, carelessly trampling ramparts and prompting screams of outrage. “Oh shit,” said Gabe, and hurried over the sand, somehow getting tangled in the parents along the way.
“...what the hell? They worked all morning...”
“...I know, I’m sorry. She’s been sick. She’s not herself...”
“Oh God, that’s awful.” That was the mom. “What happened? Where’s she going?”
It was obvious where she was going. Blue kept walking until her feet were in the ocean, then she kept right on walking, up to her knees, her thighs, her white skirt billowing out like a jellyfish.
“Blue!” Gabe ran down, splashing beside her. “Honey, what are you doing? Come on. Let’s go back. Let’s go back now.”
She flung herself forward and he grabbed her, but she thrashed loose and smacked him hard across the upper arm. “Blue,” he said, again. She swung clumsily at his head, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if she was trying to drown them both because for the first time since New Orleans she was looking at him, instead of through him.
“And what if I’m already there?” Her eyes were bright and crazy, but he’d never seen or heard anything so beautiful as her in that moment.
“You’re not,” he said, trying not to laugh with the joy of hearing her voice again. Because this was serious. This was still so very serious, but for the first time since it happened he felt like there might be hope. “You made it. You’re alive.”
She breathed hard, water streaming off the ends of her hair, her fists clenched. She let out a weird, screaming grunt and swung at him once more. She lost her balance and landed up on her ass in the shallow water, her skirt plastered to her drawn up knees and her mouth open in the kind of soundless wail a child makes while filling their lungs for some real, serious screaming.
The family on the beach was watching anxiously, the older kid with his face plastered against his mother’s hip, the little one staring so unashamedly that the father kept covering her eyes. “It’s okay,” Gabe called, dismissing them from the uncomfortable scene. “Everything’s fine. Thank you.”
They shuffled away as Blue drew in several huge, shuddering breaths. Gabe scooped her up from the water and led her back to the sand. She walked like someone who had forgotten how to breathe, every step jarring loose some fresh gasp of horror.
“It’s okay,” said Gabe. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
He set her down on the sand beside him. For a second she stared into nothing and he thought this whole thing was going to be another chapter in the nightmare, one of those ones where that taunt you with hope, only to blacken your despair when it turns out to be an illusion.
But then she gave a couple of whooping breaths and stared out at the sea, her mouth a little open and her eyes full of more hurt than anyone should be able to stand. She closed her eyes, breathed deep and seemed to get a grip of herself. The creases of her frown looked out of place and yet somehow wonderful, and he realized that her face had been motionless for too long.