Isle of Spirits (Keys Trilogy Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  “Thank you.”

  “I think we’re gonna stay here, if that’s okay with you.”

  Of course. Mi casa es su casa. Just try not to bleed too much on the soft furnishings when I slit your thieving throat. Maybe I’ll do that bit in the bathroom. It could do with regrouting.

  Joe had wanted to retile and waterproof it. Grayson wondered if he’d had this coming; punishment for running out on Joe, after everything they’d been through together.

  “You take whatever you want,” said Grayson.

  “Oh, I will,” said Cicero. “I don’t know if you know, but there’s been a chance of management around these parts. That fat little Raines kid has gone missing, and ditto Charlie Silver.”

  “Really?” said Grayson. Oh, he knew all right. More than anyone he knew what had happened to Reese. And more than anyone he deserved to suffer for his cowardice. He just had no intention of suffering at Cicero’s hands, that was all.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Cicero. “Really. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  Cicero bared his crumbling teeth in a grin. “That’s right, Jennifer,” he said. “I’m the new alpha around these parts.”

  9

  The action wasn’t what it had used to be. Eli had said so at the start and Charlie had no reason to doubt him, even if he was prone to exaggerating. Maybe it was the glasses or the beginnings of chub around his middle, or maybe it was just that line between his eyebrows that had got a whole lot deeper ever since he acquired the responsibility of a kid.

  It could have been any one of a dozen things, and it seemed impossible, but there it was; Eli’s alpha star was fading.

  Once upon a time that blonde would have fallen into his orbit before she had time to blink twice. She would have walked into the bar and sat there with her spine held straight in anticipation and hope, trying not to turn towards him like a flower in the sun. Charlie knew the moves all too well, and how she’d slouch and smile and relax when Eli came over and she got the thing she hadn’t even realized she wanted or needed until now; his undivided attention.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead she walked into the bar whistling, her russet lips pursed around a simple tune so familiar that just a couple of notes were enough to set it rolling around – unrecognized and just out of reach – in Charlie’s brain. She had a big, sloppy canvas-looking sack thing slung over her shoulder like a cartoon burglar’s swag bag, and her eyes had the rock n’ roll raccoon look of a woman who had been applying this morning’s eyeliner over the smudgy gray of last night’s.

  Hot mess, thought Charlie. He hurried to the bar to serve her.

  “Hey,” he said. “What can I get you?”

  When she looked up her eyes were unexpectedly dark, a molasses sugar shade of brown that was almost black. “Oh, a beer, I guess,” she said. “Little early for spirits yet.”

  “Peroni okay?”

  “That sounds fine.” She pronounced the last with the kind of Scarlett O’Hara drawl that could only mean Georgia, but this was no sheltered Southern belle. She had an inch of dark root showing and the words NEVER AGAIN tattooed over her heart. There was a ring sized gap in the tan on her left hand and Charlie wondered just how big a loser you would have to be to let a sexy little wife like this slip off her wedding ring.

  Loser’s loss, his gain.

  “So,” he said, handing her a beer. “What brings you to paradise?”

  “The usual,” she said. “I always wanted to swim with dolphins.”

  He was disappointed in such an obvious answer and he was sure it showed on his face, because she broke into a sly, slow grin. “Kidding,” she said. “I wouldn’t swim with dolphins if you paid me. You know they kill little baby porpoises just for fun?”

  “Yeah, I’d heard about that,” said Charlie, resting his elbows on the bar. “I guess you should never trust anything that smiles all the time, huh?”

  “Amen,” she said, but she didn’t stop smiling.

  For the first time he noticed the pentagram around her neck – a cheap little thing with the gold plating worn off at the corners. “I like your necklace,” he said, which was moronic, but she was just one of those women. The kind who left you with your brains all squished up against the inside seam of your jeans.

  “Really?” she said. “You’re looking at my necklace?”

  He laughed, aware that he was leaning too close to her. But it was there, that pleasant crackle of back-and-forth electricity between them. And it was strong. Heady. “Okay,” he said. “I confess. I wasn’t looking at your necklace.”

  “No?”

  “No. I was actually looking at your tattoo.”

  She scrunched up her nose when she laughed. Her eyes creased up completely into dark little slits and he thought he glimpsed spaces in between her back teeth. The sight reminded him of Gloria and it struck a sour incesty note that put him on the back foot for a moment. “Do you mean it?” he said, hurrying to claw back the connection.

  “Never again?” she said, and shook her head over her beer. “I don’t know. I did, at the time, but I guess I should stop saying things like ‘never’. Every time I say I’m never gonna do a thing again I end up...you know...” She scrunched her nose again, politely swallowing a burp. “Doin’ it.”

  He giggled along with her, relishing the middle school euphemism, only then Eli came over and busted up the party with his brand new Daddy Dearest expression.

  “Charlie, can I speak to you for a second?”

  “Sure.”

  The girl picked up her swag bag and her beer. “I’m gonna go take a look at that pretty little verandah out there,” she said, and sidled off.

  “Seriously?” said Charlie, when she’d gone. “You worried I’m poaching on your turf or something?”

  Eli shook his head. “Don’t be juvenile. This is about North Florida.”

  Sure it was about that. They often got like this, the old alphas; protective and insular, ruthless with the competition. That was just one of the things that had finished old Lyle off.

  “Why?” said Charlie, humoring him. “What’s up?”

  “I heard from an old friend,” said Eli. “They got swamp wolves sniffing around up there. Some bunch of Okeefenoke inbreds who have bad blood with Greensboro and who then have bad blood with another and on and on and on...”

  “Trust me, I know. I only gave you the big picture about Mike Hallett. The details...well...they weren’t pretty.”

  “Yeah, and they’re not gonna get any prettier. Sooner or later it’s going to bleed south.”

  “Not this far south,” said Charlie. “Maybe as far as Miami, but that’s it. Not as long as they think Gloria’s still in the game. If there’s one thing swamp wolves respect, it’s witchcraft.”

  “Yeah, as long as they think that.” Eli ran his fingers through his hair. The silver glints seemed brighter, his eyelids thicker. “What happens if they find out she’s...you know...whatever?”

  “Well, we make sure they don’t.”

  Eli sighed. “Goddamn. This is the last thing we need. After everything that’s happened with Gloria. And Joe.” He let out a wry laugh. “Whoever thought I’d wind up missing Lyle Raines?”

  “It was always gonna be a clusterfuck,” said Charlie. “The way he held things together.”

  “It wasn’t all him. When he was dying...”

  Pathetic. Eli couldn’t even say it, just left it hanging in the air. That Charlie had been the one in control towards the end, that Charlie should have grabbed the grand prize for himself and none of this would have happened.

  Except it would have happened, because Eli had no idea what he was fucking talking about. Sometimes Charlie still dreamed about the headless, armless bodies swinging from the trees, pale as pigs in the moonlight, ribs and bellies scooped empty. Heads gone.

  “What?” said Charlie, impatient. Say it if you’re gonna say it; you’re signing my death warrant if you
send me back into that mess. “You want me to go back up there? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Eli rubbed the bridge of his nose. “God, no. I don’t know any more, Charlie. I’m just...I’m overwhelmed, I guess.”

  “You’re paranoid,” said Charlie, and it came out meaner than he meant, because Eli looked shocked. Or maybe Eli had no guts for this, like he’d always suspected. It was one thing to be the Keys alpha when everything was going fine and Gloria was around to lay the supernatural smackdown on the bad guys, but when the shit hit the fan? Eli was Mr. Blue Sky right down to the marrow of his bones; he’d never had the stomach for heavy weather.

  “You think I’m leeching off your alpha mojo,” said Charlie. “You think I’m a threat to you.”

  “I don’t. I’m not.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Eli. That broad looked at me first and now you’re thinking I’m the spare cock in the henhouse.”

  “Don’t be fucking ridiculous. We had this conversation –”

  “– yeah, we did,” said Charlie. “And we were doing great until you decided to mention North Florida. There are fucking dart frogs in the Amazon less poisonous than that particular chalice.”

  “What? You think I was –”

  “– about to pass me the cup? Yeah, I do. Or you were hinting at it. You know that’s the worst fucking part, Eli? That you don’t even have the guts to look me in the eye when you’re handing me a strychnine martini.”

  Eli snorted. “Jesus. And I’m paranoid?”

  “Yeah. You are.”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” said Eli, and stomped off. Poor little prince. He wasn’t built for bad times like these.

  The blonde came back, swinging an empty beer bottle between her fingers and whistling that old tune again. “Hey,” she said, setting the bottle on the bar.

  “Another?” asked Charlie, hoping she would say yes.

  The girl shook her head. “I’d love to, but I got a couple of things to do.”

  “You got somewhere to stay?” he asked.

  She gave him that slow, sly smile that crumpled the edges of her burnt-sugar eyes and then – like she could hardly believe she was doing it herself – she fished a motel matchbook out of her pocket and pushed it between his fingers as though she were teaching him a magic trick.

  “Number seven,” she whispered.

  “Always been my lucky number,” said Charlie.

  *

  Gabe drove Candi to the hospital. She was speaking and moving well, but she said she had a hole in her memory. A blank space. “Just a nothing,” she had said. “Like when they put you out for surgery.”

  Blue told Candi that she had zoned out while filling out the questionnaire, which was partly true, although when they left her at the hospital Blue was acutely conscious of the fresh stain on her soul.

  “I should never have let her in the house,” she said. “Not while that thing is still in there, messing with people’s heads.”

  Gabe pulled into the drive and shut off the engine, but he didn’t move from the driver’s seat. Just sat there looking at the house, watching the windchimes sway in a sudden breeze. For all she had been waiting for him to admit he was spooked, Blue took no pleasure in seeing him like this.

  “How long have you known?” he said. “That it was in there?”

  “Only last night,” she said. “And I wasn’t sure. It was a...a weird night. I honestly thought Grayson was wrong. I thought Yael had hopped a ride out on that poor woman with the cat t-shirts.”

  Gabe nodded, still so serious. “Was that who you were calling earlier? Grayson?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t even answer; Joe was right about him.”

  A fat, wet raindrop landed on the windshield and was rapidly joined with more. One of those sudden monsoon showers that cranked the humidity up even higher. They sat there without speaking for a while, listening to the machine gun rattle of the rain while Blue tried to work out the logistics of moving a live wolf out of one basement to another. She didn’t trust Yael not to hurt Gloria.

  “That thing,” said Gabe. “It knows things, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It gets in your head. Digs out secrets.”

  He swallowed and looked straight ahead, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear what he was going to say next.

  “Don’t you want to know what I did?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, Gabe. I told you – that’s just Yael. He likes to mess with peop–”

  “– I killed someone.”

  Oh.

  He turned to her, looking so terrified that she was actually relieved. Because he should look terrified; if he hadn’t been then there would have been an even bigger problem. But he was scared, and sorry. She could see it in his eyes.

  “You said I wasn’t being fair,” he said. “That I wasn’t giving you all the information you needed to make a decision. And you were right. I wasn’t. But I couldn’t figure out a way to tell you that.” He sniffed hard. “Because I’m a coward, I guess. I didn’t want to lose you, even when I was trying to push you away.”

  “Tell me now,” she said. “I’ll listen.”

  The rain had slowed a little, as if even it wasn’t prepared to give Gabe any further excuses not to talk.

  “I told you my mother was dead,” he said. “What I didn’t tell you was how recently. She had cancer.”

  He’d done it. She knew it as soon as he said it. He’d done the thing she could never do for Reggie, no matter how much she cried and begged and pleaded.

  “It was at the start of the year,” said Gabe. “January second. That’s when I found out. My dumbass stepdad called me. It had been going on for like a year before that and nobody had thought to call.”

  “It was bad?”

  Gabe nodded. “The worst. She found the lump in her breast like a year before. That stupid fucking church she loved so much – that was what did it. That church killed her in the end. She talked to some dingbat woman from the congregation and they decided to ask Jesus for healing. She swore the lump had gone and praise the Lord, hallelujah and so on. Probably just a cyst that had burst.”

  He took a breath and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Then I get a call from her husband, before I’d even finished sleeping off the last of New Year’s Eve hangover. He said...he said she’d had a fall. Busted her collarbone. So I said okay, that’s sad. Does she need anything, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stared out at the rain for a moment. “And he didn’t say anything,” he said. “And that’s when I knew. That’s when I knew for the first time that something was really, really fucked up. Because usually he would have been spouting about trusting in the Lord and healing and the power of prayer and all that happy Protestant horseshit, but he didn’t. This...this babbling fucking cliché factory of a man hadn’t got a single word of inspirational bullshit left in him.

  “They gave her a scan at the hospital. Cat scan, pet scan – whatever they call them. Looking for head injuries, trying to figure out why she’d gotten dizzy. And that’s when they found it. Size of a golf ball. The breast cancer had gone to her brain. I mean, we were talking weeks, tops. They couldn’t take that thing out without killing her outright or leaving her a vegetable. And besides, it had spread to her liver, too. Lungs. All they could do was make her comfortable and run out the clock.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Blue.

  He pressed his lips together, and when he started speaking again it was as if it had cost him effort to do so. “It was the second,” said Gabe. “And the first full moon of the year was on the fourth of January. Two days.”

  She had never even thought of that. This year he’d missed the Fourth of July, but how many other moments in life had he missed because of the lunar calendar? Christmases, Thanksgivings, graduations and goodbyes. It seemed terribly cruel.

  “We had our differences,” he said. “But she was still my mother. Only parent I had. So I had to go.
I didn’t know if she even had two days left. They were living up in Georgia by then, just over the stateline.”

  “But what about the full moon?” said Blue, and she had a horrible feeling where this was going. Not some deathbed act of mercy by a son. Something worse. Something harder to forgive.

  “There’s a network,” said Gabe. “Kind of like Craigslist, only for werewolf safehouses. Spitalls, some people call them. Places where you can hole up in a pinch. I found one in the area, hurried up there and managed to secure the cellar for myself. Figured I could hang out there during the full moon and hopefully she wouldn’t die during those three days when I wasn’t there to hold her hand.”

  The rain had stopped, but he made no move to get out of the car. “The boards could have been nailed down better,” he said. “I guess I was working on them throughout the full moon, and then on the third night – I think...”

  “...you got out?”

  Gabe nodded. “I woke up miles from anywhere, totally naked. Covered in blood.” He fished a water bottle out from under the seat; it must have been warm, but he drank anyway. “There was this...this filthy taste in my mouth. Like...like raw meat. Pork, I guess. Only...you know. Not.” He took another mouthful of water and didn’t look at her. “So. Now you know.”

  Blue had no idea what to say, but already her mind was spinning this into something rational. Hadn’t he told her enough times that he didn’t know who he was when he was a wolf? “Did you know?” she said. “Who it was?” Who you ate. Oh God.

  “No,” said Gabe. “This poor guy must have just stepped out of his car to take a piss and I just...I just tore him to pieces.” He screwed the cap tightly back onto the bottle. “And it was late in the moon, Blue. There was enough of me in there to know what I was doing, but the wolf wasn’t going to stop. I could...I could smell it before he even finished pissing against that tree. Cancer. He had it in his bladder, I think. And you can’t imagine how wrong that smell is. How spiteful. It was like a middle finger, and I know I can’t blame the wolf for that. For the part of me that wanted to tear it apart and kill it. That was me; that was my mother’s son.”