by Anna Roberts
“...will you relax? I dropped him off at his mom’s. I told him we were coming down to see about Gloria...”
“...you were supposed to be keeping him from this. I asked you, Charlie. I specifically asked you as a favor to me and you looked me in the eye and said ‘yes’...”
Oh shit. Oh no, no, no. He left his son with Charlie?
If he could have spoken at that moment, Joe would have been screaming. If he could have moved he would have been frantically waving his arms, but no matter how he tried to force himself up off the bed he couldn’t move so much as a toe.
And the stupid fight kept rumbling on regardless.
“Look, we have to make a decision. About what Joe would want.” Oh Eli, you picked a fine time to grow a spine.
“Forget it,” said Gabe. “He’s come back from worse than this.”
“And he might suffer worse in the future. He’s not going to get any better, Gabe.”
Silence. Then Blue’s voice. “Please don’t tell me you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about.”
There was another pause. “Excuse me?” said Eli. “And you are here why, exactly?”
“Oh, you did not just fucking say that...” A predictable flare up from Gabe.
“She’s here for Gloria,”...and Charlie came out of left-field, in a move so surprising that Joe could almost hear them all catching their breaths out there in the hallway.
“I can’t speak for Gloria,” said Blue.
“Bullshit,” said Gabe. “I trust you to speak for her.”
“Really? So what do you think Gloria’s opinion would be, Blue?” Eli sounded arch. Weird. Joe never imagined Eli would ever meet a pretty young woman he didn’t like.
“I think if you’re planning on unloading a gun in Joe’s head you may as well go round there and shoot her, too. If that’s the way the wind is blowing.”
“Thank you,” said Charlie, and then it hit Joe with a clarity all the more horrible because he was sure he would never have seen it had he been able to run away: Charlie was rushing to his defense because Charlie couldn’t let on just how much he wanted Joe dead.
When had Charlie figured it out? When had he made the connection that Joe was a loose end? When Grayson turned chicken and ran off? And now Charlie was playing the good guy. It couldn’t have worked out better for him, but that was Charlie for you, lucky as the Devil and smart enough to turn luck to solid advantage.
The voices were still going, but Joe was no longer listening. He had to tell them. He had to let them know that Charlie had killed Reese. Oh God, why had he been so stupid as to sit on that information before? He’d been sat in the basement watching Gloria pace back and forth, knowing full well something smelled rotten as all hell in the state of Denmark but doing fuck all about it because he was worried about placing anyone else in danger.
That smell. That sickly metallic edge. Colloidal silver. You could buy it easily on the internet – turn yourself Papa Smurf blue with it, if you were so inclined. Dangerous to humans in high doses, but deadly to werewolves. Charlie had fed it to Lyle, and then to Reese, and then – and this was one of the many reasons why Joe had kept quiet, because it made no sense – Charlie had dug up some old pack tradition just so he could cut out Lyle’s poisoned heart and feed to his son.
Which was nuts.
With a fierce effort of will, Joe tried to force the word free of his throat. The corners of his jaw ached and he thought absurdly of the tin man from The Wizard of Oz. No, not me – I’m the cowardly lion, the cowardly wolf. It was a croak in the back of his throat at first, a sound so broken and busted that he realized he was really and truly fucked this time.
Somehow he got his tongue in the right place to form the S, and then the second syllable was easy. Ver. You could say that in a breath or a grunt. It was the sibilant that was the tricky part. Sil.
Put it all together. Sil. Ver.
Got it. Oil your hinges one more time, tin man. Say it, scream it, shout it.
“Sil. Ver.” Good. Louder. “Sil. Ver.”
They came running, dark faces crowding above him over the bed.
“Joe? Are you okay? Are you in there?”
“Silver!” It came out in one go this time. Oh God, and it worked. It worked. He saw the blink-and-you-miss-it flash of fear on Charlie’s face, before it was quickly smothered with an appropriate look of concern. Strange how being turned into half a vegetable sharpened up your perceptions of people.
“Silver?” said Gabe, and Joe wanted to scream, shake him. Yes, silver – he poisoned them with silver and now you’ve hired him as a babysitter and it’s all my fault because I should have told you, I should have said...
“Who, me?” said Charlie.
He heard Blue’s voice at a distance, somewhere behind the shape of Eli’s big shoulder. “A silver bullet?”
Eli snorted. “No, that doesn’t work.”
“It does if you fire it into their head,” said Charlie.
Joe tried to speak again but the tiredness was closing in once more. The edges of his vision had gone gray and fuzzy and soon he knew it would be black once more.
Gabe’s voice rose again. “Would you stop talking about it in front of him? He’s right here. He can hear you.”
Joe felt a hand on his shoulder, and dimly realized this was good. He could feel it. Then as his vision turned dark again he knew whose hand it was, because there was that voice again, that cheery big-brother tone. “Take it easy, big guy. Rest up. We can talk more later.” The hand withdrew, and then a sigh. “Poor old Lutesinger. You always did have a nose for trouble.”
7
Gabe had never meant to fall asleep, but the moment he’d rested his head against the arm of the couch he’d been sucked down too fast into a ragged, guilty slumber. When Blue shook him awake he was relieved at not having to fight it on his own any more.
“Wake up,” she said. “Joe’s gone.”
And then he was awake and thought he’d never sleep again. “When?” he said, standing up. He was halfway to the bedroom door with the word still hanging in the air. Why hadn’t she woken him? Didn’t she think he might want to hold Joe’s hand at the end or something and...
Oh.
The bed was empty. Joe had gone. Literally.
“What the fuck...”
“Keep your voice down,” said Blue. “I don’t want to wake Eli.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
Gabe searched the room, glancing down the sides of the bed and almost opening the closet before checking himself. What next? Was he going to go looking down the cracks in the couch cushions on the off-chance that a six and a half foot, two hundred pound werewolf was hanging out down there with the loose change and stale peanuts?
“He took his truck,” said Blue.
“What? Oh my God. He’s driving?” Two hours ago Joe could hardly speak, let alone move.
“I know. That’s why I woke you. I thought you might know where he’d go.”
“Yeah,” said Gabe, although he hadn’t got a clue. He just knew he had to keep moving. He took Blue by the arm and led her out of the house, past Charlie who was snoring on the recliner. God, they were all so useless now – worn out and wasted from changing. She was the only one who was half alert, and even she had to be exhausted.
“Give me your keys,” she said, as soon as they were out of the house. “Your eyes are rolling around in your head; there’s no way I’m letting you drive.”
He was in no shape to argue. He’d known this July was going to be brutal, but this was worse than anything he’d braced himself for. And it was only the first full moon.
Time felt muddled and blank the way it often did after he came back to himself. It was evening now and he couldn’t remember the last time that anything he’d seen on a clock had made sense. Blue drove to Gloria’s first and there was no sign of Joe there, but as soon as he saw the house Gabe wanted to get out. He pictured Gloria gone b
ack, sitting naked and cold and confused in a cage in her own basement.
“I need to see her first,” he said, and Blue understood. He supposed she was getting used to his Doubting Thomas nature.
“I should get her some fresh water,” said Blue, and let them both inside.
As he went down the stairs Gabe wondered what the hell was wrong with him that part of him wanted to see a naked old lady shivering in a cage, but his heart sank when he saw her; she was a still a wolf. Gloria picked her chin off the floor and yawned when she saw him, drooling extravagantly as she did so.
“Well, shit,” he said.
Blue came down with some more water and ground meat. Gloria tried to stuff her nose in the dish before Blue had even finished pushing it through the flap. “She’s eating enough,” said Blue.
“Good for her.”
Blue straightened up and frowned. “What? You’re getting sarcastic with a wolf now?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. All I know is that if we ever needed a wolf witch it’s now, only Gloria is taking the wolf part of the picture a little too fucking literally.”
“I think she has her reasons,” said Blue, heading back up the stairs after him. They locked up and got back in the car. Reasons. What possible reason could Gloria have for playing fetch and filling her face with ground turkey while they were all twisting in the goddamn wind? There had been nothing but trouble these last six months or so, and lately it was concentrating into the kind of category five shitstorm that surely wolf witches were supposed to prevent.
“She said something,” said Blue, ignoring Gabe seething beside her in the passenger seat. “Something about Charlie. That we needed to keep him away.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. Charlie is her darling.”
Gabe exhaled, frustrated beyond belief. “It’s a song, Blue. A stupid old Scottish song that she’s always sung.”
“But if he’s her darling, why does he have to keep away?” she said. “Most people want to keep their darlings close to them, don’t they?”
The worst part was that he could almost follow what she was thinking, or he could have done, if his mind wasn’t so full of fear and worry. They were driving north, the darkening ocean either side of them, electric lights coming to life in the gathering dusk. “Why are we going this way?”
“I have an idea,” she said, and kept right on thinking aloud. “Don’t you think it’s weird that she’d say that? And that Joe was trying to tell us something about Charlie?”
“How’d you figure?”
“Silver,” she said. “That’s his name, right? Charlie Silver?”
“So? Why didn’t he just say Charlie?”
“Maybe he couldn’t,” said Blue. “He could barely get ‘Silver’ out of his mouth. Think about it. You have to clench your teeth and push your lips out to say the ‘Ch’ in ‘Charlie’.”
He glanced over at her, pleased to find that in spite of everything she could still impress him. He had never set much store in the supernatural aspects of witchery, but he had heard of witches described as ‘cunning women’ before. And once Gloria had pointed out a thing so obvious he was shocked that he’d missed it. A clairvoyant, she said, is just someone who sees things clearly.
Maybe all you really needed to be a witch was a sharper than average brain.
“What was your idea about going north?” he said.
“Grayson,” she said. “There was something going on between them and I never figured out what.”
Oh boy. There was another can of worms he didn’t want to open right now. “Thank you for sticking up for Joe,” said Gabe. “For what it’s worth.”
She shook her head, her jaw set firm as she looked at the road ahead. “It’s nothing,” she said. “You don’t want to kill a person. You don’t want that on your conscience, ever.”
Gabe sat very still, as if he was afraid the next bump in the road might jar something loose from his mouth. Everything was getting like a minefield lately. “You...killed someone?” he asked.
“No,” said Blue. “She just asked me to.”
“Your mom?”
She nodded. “She figured she had the right. Said she gave me life, so I should give her death.”
“Jesus, Blue.”
“She was so miserable,” said Blue, with a matter-of-fact weariness that made him partly understand why it had taken her so long to tell him. There were some traumas that smashed you up, beat you around the head and left it ringing, and then there were others that ground you down so steadily and completely that even the thought of revisiting them was enough to make you want to die of despair on the spot.
“When she was down,” she said. “She was so far down that she couldn’t even move. And I guess it takes...something to kill yourself. Desperation, anger, regret. It’s a big thing to do, taking your own life. It requires motivation, and that’s a thing she didn’t have at the worst of times. At the very worst she said it was like a tar pit, only instead of being filled with tar it was filled with sticky black nothing. And it held you down in the nothing until it was hard work even to breathe because every single breath was filled with the same tarry nothing.”
Blue paused and exhaled, like she was trying to huff the same darkness out of her own lungs. “That’s when she’d ask me,” she said. “She’d ask me to count out the pills and hand them to her.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No,” said Blue. “I didn’t. Because I knew there were some things I couldn’t live with.”
He listened to the sound of the tires on the road beneath them, the lights shining brighter now and the ocean turning to black. And the words were right there, behind his teeth. There’s something I need to tell you.
But they didn’t come out. He couldn’t seem to swallow the air he needed to say them, and he understood just how hard it must have been for Joe, lying there and trying to get the words out.
He stared out at the darkened road, and it was then that he saw it. He’d wanted to see it so much that he barely dared to blink, in case it vanished like a mirage. It was Joe’s truck.
“Stop,” he said. “There!”
It was parked at an angle, nose deep in the edge of the mangroves. The door was open and the unsmashed brake light was still blinking. Gabe scrambled out on shaking legs and hurried around to the front, thinking he would kill Joe for putting him through all this. Not really kill him, but some kind of cartoon death. Rope and anvils, a whistle and a dust cloud. The kind of death that killed only for a moment.
The front seat was empty. The keys were still in the ignition. There was a splatter of blood on the inside of the windshield. “Get the flashlight,” he said. “In the glovebox.”
“Is he in there?”
“No.”
Blue brought the light. She saw the blood and inhaled sharply. “Oh shit. What happened?”
“I don’t know. He’s not here.” He took the flashlight from her and swiveled it around, then it caught something red. Gabe swallowed hard as he swung the light back, determined to look at whatever he needed to look at, but the red was nothing more than a sock. Joe’s sock. One of the two items of clothing he’d been wearing when he left the house. The other, a pair of gray boxer briefs, were hanging on the end of a branch a couple of feet away, like a relic of the world’s shortest (and weirdest) striptease.
“He’s changed,” said Gabe, running a hand through his hair.
“Is that even possible?”
“Yeah. He’s done it before. When he was hurt. For some reason it’s easier to heal up a wolf body than a human.”
“Oh my God,” said Blue. “What does this mean?”
“It means he’s about to get a whole lot easier to find,” said Gabe. “On account of the trail of body parts he’s gonna start leaving behind him.”
*
But he didn’t.
Joe melted away like a ghost, and the only other conclusion was the one that nobo
dy wanted to come to.
“Eli’s acting heartbroken,” Blue told Gloria. “Like he didn’t jump the gun in the first place.”
Gloria said nothing, her tail swaying back and forth between her bony hocks as she devoured her dinner in a series of wet smacking sounds. Maybe she was just hungry, but so far she’d made no attempt to defend Eli every time Blue talked shit about him. And maybe there was a reason for that.
“Frame of reference, my ass,” Blue said. “I know his type.”
Every Mardi Gras brought hundreds, maybe thousands of Elis to New Orleans. All those hearty, blinkered white boys with their fraternity rings and their beery smiles. They weren’t bad people, but they were thoughtless and somehow hollow, like they had been left unfilled by all the bad times in life, the hardships that were supposed to build character. And they never would, not really, because they had hit the triple – rich, white and male. When times were tough they tossed themselves out of windows like it was 1929, or they stomped off to their plush hunting cabins to rinse the bad taste of life out of their mouths with the barrel of a shotgun. Unweathered, thought Blue. Yes, that was it. That was Eli.
Only putting her finger on it gave her no satisfaction. If anything it made her more anxious.
“You could help, you know,” she said. “I mean, I can accept your physical limitations up to a point, but on some level you gotta realize it’s all going to shit here, Gloria.”
There was a loud metal scrape as Gloria nudged the dish across the concrete.
Blue clenched her teeth. “They’re your boys. Your pack. You’re the wolf witch. I’m just the...the cleaning lady.”
Gloria padded purposefully to the side of the cage and stuck her paw through the bar, signaling that she wanted the Ouija board.
Okay, thought Blue. I’m going to get a mouthful. Or a boardful. Whichever. I probably deserved it for talking back to my elders. She was not in the least surprised when the first letter Gloria pointed to was F.
F-I-N-D-H-I-M
“Joe?” said Blue, as she knelt. “Find Joe?”
YES
“How? I’m no use.”
The paw came out again. Y-O-U-C-A-N-F-