Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  “Do you have a number for Grayson?” she asked.

  Joe frowned. “Why?”

  “He knew stuff,” said Blue. “Witchy stuff. I don’t know. And then he just left.”

  “That’s because he’s an asshole,” said Joe, and returned to his tennis ball.

  Sensitive subjects all round. There was an uncomfortable silence and Blue quickly seized on the next – hopefully less controversial – topic. “Did she use the board again?” she said, nodding to a cheap old Ouija board that Gloria had used a couple of times, by placing a paw on the planchette. That was how they knew it was definitely her at first, but the more Blue saw of wolf-Gloria the more she came to wonder how she didn’t immediately recognize wolf-Gloria on sight. It was like something from a dream, like when your mother turned up looking exactly like Kathy Bates and yet it was still your mother. And Kathy Bates. At the same time.

  “Once,” said Joe. “And only to request more kibble.”

  Blue looked back at the board. She was still wary of touching the thing after everything else that had happened, but curiosity was like that. It got under your skin and into your bones and sure as Pandora opened that box, you were going to try and take a peek at that evil inside.

  “Does the name Yael mean anything to you?” she said.

  Joe glanced up in surprise. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. I’m not. What is it?”

  “It’s a dumb ghost story Eli used to tell us when we were kids,” he said. “Yael was the ghost of some guy who got chopped to pieces in this basement in like nineteen-hundred or something.”

  Blue folded her arms around herself, even thought it was nearly July and over ninety degrees in the shade. “Seriously?”

  Joe laughed. Gloria flicked her ears at him.

  “I can’t remember,” he said. “Or maybe he was the victim of the Keys Cannibal – you know? That serial killer from years ago. The story changed a lot, mostly because it was bullshit. This place wasn’t even built until 1947; you can tell from these really specific outflow pipes. They were only part of the building code for that one particular year and –”

  “– yeah, I’ll take your word for it,” said Blue.

  He glanced over at the pacing wolf and shook his head. “She was so mad at Eli. Chewed him out six ways from Sunday for putting dumb ideas in our heads. Don’t tell him I told you this, but Gabe got so freaked out that he took to wearing a rosary to bed at night.”

  “He’s such a hypocrite. He’s always saying he’s not superstitious.”

  Joe snorted. “He thinks it doesn’t count if it’s old school religion. A lot of Catholics are like that. They believe in evolution, birth control, even abortion – but you take them to church and they’ll wet their fingertips and bend the knee and kiss the book like it was still the Middle Ages. It’s not so much a superstition as it is a reflex.”

  “I guess,” she said, thinking of the mirror hung on the porch to keep the devil out. And then there was the yew wood in the door frame and the iron nails that she suspected were there to keep Yael in.

  “We should get her some more protein,” said Joe, his attention once more on Gloria. “Something soft she can chew. Shapeshifting is a high energy business.”

  “Sure.” Blue nodded. If this was a movie, she thought, this would be the part where I go down into the basement and find some big old book – no, beg pardon – a grimoire down there. And I’d learn the art of witchcraft, maybe to a montage of Nina Simone, and then I’d figure this all out.

  But it wasn’t a movie. No matter how many times she pinched herself, this was what real life looked like.

  2

  The silence was the worst thing.

  Joe’s mention of ghost stories hadn’t freaked Blue out as much as she thought it once would; it seemed that the last few weeks had stiffened her nerves. If anything it was reassuring to know that the name Yael meant something to him, had meant something in the past. It was no longer something plucked straight out of the ether, but something that young boys had whispered about to scare the shit out of one another, the stuff of urban legend, endlessly repeatable.

  What really bothered her was the picture of a house full of men and boys, rank with that sweaty fug peculiar to male teenagers. She imagined them dropping their cigarette butts on the porch, tracking sand in from the beach, grilling meat filled suppers in the kitchen and making the bedsprings squeak at night. And in the middle of it all, Gloria, a prickly yet tolerant female presence, tutting at the mess and sighing over drama.

  This house had been alive, once.

  Now it was quiet, too quiet. The light fitting in the hall had stopped swinging and its stillness lent the silence a coiled spring quality that made Blue want to scream. It was that same quiet that had settled over the Ninth Ward when the wind had stopped howling and the traffic was all under water, a stunned, scared oh-god-what-next sort of silence.

  S-T-O-R-M-S-C-O-M-I-N-G

  You couldn’t ignore a warning like that, but she had no idea what it meant. And the more the days wore on the less it seemed like there was anything left of Gloria inside the body of that skinny old she-wolf in the basement. That could happen, they said. The longer you stuck in the shape of a wolf the harder it was to go back to human, like the body forgot what it was supposed to be.

  When Gabe came in the back door it was all Blue could do not to leap all over him like a dog that had been waiting all day for its master’s return.

  He smelled of the sea but his embrace was stiff and strange.

  “Here,” he said, gesturing to the large bag of frozen minced turkey he’d set on the side. “Joe said she was still looking skinny.”

  “She is, yeah.”

  “Any change?”

  Blue shook her head. Just a couple of weeks ago she would have had her hands all over him by now, greedy for the salt taste of his skin and the touch of his clever, nimble-tongued mouth, but that honeymoon of uninterrupted lust had been cut short by whatever it was had crawled inside her brain one night and walked her down to the basement, where the cage and the paw prints and the bloody scratch marks told their own gory story.

  Oh, and he looked serious. Too serious.

  “Do you think she’ll go back at the full moon?” asked Blue, and she knew in her bones what this was about. It was only two nights away, and it would blow away any remaining doubt that this was real and not some bizarre dream. That Gabe really was what he said he was; a werewolf.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody does. We didn’t even know she could do that.”

  She wanted to just throw herself at him, offer him her breasts to suck and open her legs for him right there on the kitchen table. Anything to hold it off for a moment longer, because she knew what was coming. His straight black eyebrows were drawn down in the middle and he was biting the inside of his cheek the way he sometimes did when he was nervous.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “You know like what. Like you’re about to hurt me.”

  He covered his mouth with his hand. His eyes were too bright.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  His fingers curled into a fist. “I’m sorry,” he started to say, under his breath, but she cut him off.

  “Don’t.” Her voice sounded hard and crazy, but she couldn’t help it. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

  “I can’t,” he said, too fast, like he’d been trying to say it all day. Like he’d thought about it. “I’m sorry. I can’t drag you into this.”

  “I’m in it.” How was she not in it? She was opening cans of dog food for his surrogate grandmother, for God’s sake. She’d seen that thing on the rug, stuck between man and wolf, making noises like it was trying to breathe through milkshake, pink froth dripping onto the floor. “Gabe, I know what I’m in for.”

  Gabe shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t. And even assuming you can stand to see everything,
I can’t offer you the things you deserve.”

  Deserve? Who the hell was he to tell her what she deserved? Or what she wanted.

  “I’ll be ground down and worn out by the time I’m thirty-five,” he said. “And probably dead at forty. Maybe I have ten good years left in me, if I’m lucky. I can’t give you babies, and even if I could, would you really want them? Knowing that they might have to go through this, too?”

  The urge to jump on him was huge now, a last desperate gasp to remind him how good it could be, how good they could be. But she knew she mustn’t. It was a cheap trick and he was telling her the truth, no matter how much she didn’t want to hear it. And maybe it was only a part of the truth and he wasn’t seeing it all, but he was serious. She could tell.

  Silence stretched its jaws, threatening to swallow them both.

  “Say something,” said Gabe.

  “Why?” she said, setting coldness in front of her like a shield. “You’ve obviously made up your mind. Nothing I say or do is going to change it, is it?”

  It would have been so much easier if she could somehow switch off the way he made her feel, but hurt only seemed to make her want him more. Pain made his eyes look darker and his mouth more sensitive and everything in her burned to kiss it away. But it was gone. She didn’t know him nearly as well as she thought she did, but she was right about one aspect of his character; he was stubborn as hell.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Stop saying that. Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not, Blue – I swear.”

  “You are,” she said. “You’re telling me what I can and can’t cope with, and you don’t get to do that. I know what I can handle.”

  She stomped past him and opened the bag of minced turkey. He touched her arm and she shook him off, feeling strangely better now she had let herself get mad at him.

  “I’m dangerous,” he said. “And that’s the truth. And if anything happened to you because of me...”

  Blue shook a pile of frozen meat into a dish. “Are you done?” she said, not wanting or needing to hear any more.

  Good. He wasn’t expecting that. Too bad. You got what you wanted. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  She met his eyes. “Then we’re done,” she said. “I guess.”

  *

  The house sat quiet – too quiet.

  Before he’d even stepped out of his car, Charlie could feel the hush tickling like a whisper in the itchy little corners of his brain. The cicadas kept right on the way they always did, but there was a weird, frantic note to their song, the way someone might sing if you said ‘sing’ and held a gun to their head. Trying too hard to pretend everything was normal.

  But it wasn’t. Somehow they knew there was a big, bendy hole opened up in the center of reality, a hole as big as ‘Your old Ma’s a werewolf.’

  It was the first time he’d been here since it happened. If he was going to leave he wasn’t going before he’d seen Gloria one more time, and fuck Eli for even thinking he could leave her this way. Charlie had never been overtroubled with conscience, but whenever that voice piped up in his head it was always hers. On some level he couldn’t help thinking he had done this to her. If he hadn’t accidentally dropped a paternity bomb on Eli’s kid then said kid wouldn’t have wolfed out and maybe then Gloria would have no business turning herself into a wolf to go fetch him back.

  Although saying that it was hardly Charlie’s fault that Eli hadn’t talked to his own goddamn kid about what happened when a lady and a werewolf love one another very, very much...

  A whole fresh round of daddy issues. That was all they fucking needed. Some new little prince of the castle to get all high and mighty because his old man was the alpha. Like Reese. Poor baby butterball. In life he’d been a porky disappointment. In death he was an angel, a tragedy, a warning. Charlie had been eating vitamins like candy ever since it happened. Sure, Reese had had a little (okay, a lot) of help in getting too sick to survive a full moon, but weighing four hundred pounds hadn’t fucking helped. Charlie had always figured it was only a matter of time before Reese’s pancreas threw up its hands and was all ‘yeah, I quit this bitch’, and that would have been the end, too.

  Sometimes you just had to step in and give things a shove in the direction they were moving anyway.

  The windchimes clanked loudly in the quiet as he stepped up onto the porch. He glimpsed his reflection in the old, spotted mirror that hung beside the front door, and it caught him by surprise; he looked good. Younger. Maybe there was enough alpha mojo to go around after all.

  He knocked, but there was no answer. Had they all left her in there alone?

  Charlie made his way towards the back door. It was only when he had cause to be quiet that he realized how heavy his sudden anger had made his footfalls. That black chick – Blue – was there in the yard, her back towards him as she bent over a shovel. He froze for a second, suspecting the worst, but then she straightened and he saw what she was burying. Mason jars.

  Her thick curls were caught in a bunch at her nape, her long back sweating through an ugly red gingham blouse. Charlie ducked out of sight behind a fence panel to watch her better; people always showed their hands that much more clearly when they believed they were alone, and he wanted to know what was going on with the sorcerer’s apprentice here. Crazy, obviously. Crazy enough to bury those old jars full of piss and broken glass on Gloria’s say so.

  And hot. Those big blue eyes caught you like an unexpected salt breeze. Freckles, he remembered. And blonde lights in her brown hair. Maybe her old man had been Irish, making her a mix of Celt and Creole that was all New Orleans. The first time Charlie had laid eyes on her he’d figured her for a princess; pretty girls so often got told they were pretty that they were no damn use to anybody after that, not even themselves.

  But then he’d seen her on her hands and knees scrubbing the shit out of the upstairs bathroom like she didn’t know they’d been cutting up a monstrous half-werewolf body in there. Only she did know. She’d seen it all. Not only that, she’d figured out how to get Gloria to use the Ouija board.

  There was something going on with that girl. Something cold and more than a little weird.

  He saw her face side on as she turned to dig the next hole. She was frowning and her lips were moving in a way that he guessed had nothing to do with witchcraft and everything to do with an argument she was rehearsing in her head. Boyfriend trouble, maybe. Perhaps she’d finally figured out that Gabe Arnot was only a six pack and a bongload away from gay; that kid had spent his horny teenage years following Eli around with drool on his chin.

  She drove the shovel harder than she needed into the soft dirt, and looked pleased with the solid noise it had made. No, this was no princess. He guessed she was about twenty-five at the most, so she must have been a teenager when shit got real ugly down in New Orleans. Maybe – like Gabe had said - that was where the cold came from, although he couldn’t figure out the weird. She had a tinge of Gloria’s oddness about her, which made no sense at all, but it was interesting all the same.

  The girl stomped down the dirt over the last jar and set her shovel against one of the rotting struts that used to be part of the old hen house. She raised her head for a moment, like she guessed she was being watched. Charlie froze behind the fence but she didn’t see him; she just stood there staring back at the house with the tip of her tongue protruding past her teeth, like a snake tasting the air.

  Perhaps she also sensed the strange texture of the silence around the house. It had been so noisy once; queues for the bathroom, teenage turf wars, not to mention how the doors often banged on their own and light bulbs that blew every five minutes. Yael – wasn’t that what Gloria called it? “Settle down, Yael,” she’d say, when the dishes rattled in the cupboards or the dining room chairs tipped over. “You’ll get your pound of flesh one of these days.”

  Blue went inside the house. Charlie waited for a decent interval before approaching the back do
or; he didn’t want to come off as creepy. He saw a large shape moving beyond the screen door and realized she wasn’t alone in there. Lutesinger.

  Joe stuck his nose out before Charlie could even knock. Shit, he probably smelled me out there. The big man had never been quite right in the head after being stuck as a wolf for two whole moons. He’d made an impressive recovery considering, but there was some part of his brain that stayed wolf, specifically that part that was damn near hilariously underdeveloped in humans when compared to your average backyard mutt. He couldn’t see color any more, but as a payoff Joe got supernatural powers of smell.

  Which was a problem.

  “Hey,” said Charlie. “How’s it going?”

  Joe peered down from his towering height; the size of him was always a shock. Hands like shovels, huge feet. It was a testament to just how crazy-vicious Lyle had got that he’d managed to beat the shit out of a six and a half foot monster like Joe.

  “Going,” said Joe, his blue eyes like ice-chips. Yep, still a problem.

  The guy was just good. It was like a disability with him, a far bigger disadvantage than his inability to ever appreciate a sunset again. Eli could be childishly jealous and Gabe Arnot had an evil temper, but big Joe’s moral compass had always pointed north, back to that ya-sure-you-betcha place where failing to help a stranger in a snowdrift could leave you with their blood on your hands. There was no nice quite like Minnesota-nice.

  “How’s she doing?” asked Charlie.

  “No change. She’s resting.”

  “Good. That’s good. Can I...?”

  Joe stepped an inch to the left, filling the doorway with his massive shoulders. “We’re trying to keep her stress levels low right now,” he said.

  Figured ‘no’ would be too hard a word for him. “Stress?” said Charlie, too forcefully. “So what are you saying? I stress her out?”

  It was too much; he’d gone too hard and Joe was flailing for an answer. Charlie could see it in his face – the anxiety that he was going to have to be anything other than polite. And something else. Some protective fear, like he was afraid that Charlie was going to sneak down into the basement and slip some colloidal silver into Gloria’s kibble.