by Anna Roberts
“Why?” said Blue. “Because she thought you were going to kill him?”
Charlie nodded. “Yep. And in all fairness to her, I was. I bought a gun and everything.”
Blue dropped her cigarette end onto the damp earth and ground it out under her shoe. Realizing she had smoked the whole thing made her feel even dizzier. “So did you?” she asked, wondering when her life had taken this turn to a place where you talked about killing people like it was a thing that happened all the time.
“He was old,” said Charlie. “When I caught up with him. He was living in South Carolina by then. I guess he must have been about forty-five, which is getting on up there in werewolf years. And he was sick. Really sick. You know how cancer starts, right? With one little cell gone insane? Imagine every cell in your body changing every full moon. Sometimes it’s not just the major organs that don’t go back – sometimes it’s just that one cell, and that’s enough. Enough to start eating you alive.”
He didn’t look at her. “It was bad. I hadn’t seen him since I was nine years old, so I remembered him as this huge guy. But when I got there he must have been all of a hundred pounds. He was dying by inches, and it was a miracle he hadn’t already come back from a full moon in bloody lumps, like Reese. And do you know what he did? You know what that sonofabitch asked me to do?”
Blue knew. “He asked you to kill him.”
Charlie exhaled. “Yeah. He’d torn my mother to pieces in front of me and he had the nads to look me in the eye and ask me to put him out of his misery. Can you believe that?”
“I can, yeah.”
He kept on staring ahead, out through the palms towards the sea. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I said ‘No, you don’t deserve that’ and left. Just left. I guess he died. I didn’t even look for his obituary, not that we usually get obituaries. Or gravestones. Most of us wind up as gator chow.”
She thought she saw the gleam of tears in his eyes. “He had no right to ask you to do that,” she said. “None at all.”
“I know,” he said. “Killing him wouldn’t have made me feel better anyway. Would have just...I don’t know...cut me adrift, I guess. He was the only blood I had left, that I knew about.” He quickly wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “And I didn’t come back. I knew Gloria would still be pissed. She took it a personal insult; she’d gone to so much trouble to make me move past what had happened. ‘And you just wanna roll around in it like a dog in stink,’ she said. ‘Don’t you come crying to me when you hurt yourself worse.’ So that was that. I didn’t.”
“She forgave you, though,” said Blue. “Didn’t she?”
Charlie shook his head. “No. Not until I came right out and admitted that she’d been right all along. Because she was. I did hurt myself worse. And I should have at least have put a bullet in that poor prick’s head.”
14
They said if you dreamed about falling that you’d die in your sleep when you hit the ground, but Charlie never fell. He always flew.
He was looking down on the Keys, his heart beating faster the way it always did when he saw it from the air, either in a dream or a film or a photograph – it didn’t matter. Nothing was so beautiful as that blue where the ocean shelf fell away, or the clear shimmering turquoise that lapped around the white fringes of the islands. He saw pelicans moving beneath him, their massive wings rowing through the air like a turtle moves through the water. Like air was a substance through which you could float. Or drown.
It was the same every time. He would reach that point in the air and then something always sucked him down to earth like a tractor beam, and it always took him to the same place.
A child’s room
He knew it was his room because it was kind of ramshackle, a box room that had been repurposed quickly for the kid of a shotgun marriage between two people who were little more than kids themselves. A teddy bear stared blank button-eyed from the top of an old filing cabinet. A crib mobile of dancing fishes had been made out of a coathanger and colored paper and placed far out of reach of small hands. The weirdest thing was the skeleton; not a vinyl Halloween skeleton but a full set of human bones, the kind you saw hanging up in a classroom. Every time he came here it was standing just outside the nursery door, as if on guard.
Every time he walked towards the crib. He saw himself as a infant, a tiny blond blameless thing with a head of Cupid curls and with his chubby cheeks rosy with the deep, slow breaths of sleep. And every time it was the same. The same strange feeling of not only watching himself, but wanting himself. Not sexually – no, it wasn’t anything as mundane as that. Sometimes he thought it might have been the natural longing to be that baby again, to be the cute little blank slate he used to be before everything got all fucked up in the inevitable way of all human lives. But it wasn’t. It was stranger than that, a fierce, covetous desire that he couldn’t adequately describe. And somewhere there was rage, too. A sense of being cheated out of the thing that he wanted.
Something tugged at the edge of his sleep – scent of skin and hair and girl – and the next time he closed his eyes he was once again standing in the great room of Lyle’s fugly-ass house. He was awake enough to feel how hard his heart was beating and to know that his mind had no reason to take him here anymore. He’d settled that score. He’d been there, done that, fed the pieces to the gators. So what the hell was he doing back here again?
Charlie walked up the two steps to the dining area, knowing what he’d see there, written in bloody letters on the wall.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I’ve seen you. I figured out what you meant. And I dealt with it. Once you showed me what they’d done.”
“He’d done.”
Charlie turned around to see Reese sitting at the dining table next to Lyle. They had bowls in front of him – big salad bowls filled with old blood, a human heart congealing in the center of each.
“He did it,” said Reese, nodding to his old man. “I didn’t do that. I was just four years old when it happened.”
He had that same sad, sorry-for-himself look that Charlie had always wanted to slap off his face when he was alive. Hate flared nearly as bright and hot as shame.
“Too bad,” said Charlie. “We don’t get to choose the sins of our fathers. Or how we pay for them. Besides, if it hadn’t been me it would have been swamp wolves that got you. That or your own fuckin’ blood sugar. So chow down, fuckers. You did this to yourselves.”
A thin, silver sound chimed through his dream, pulling him back to full wakefulness. His phone was ringing, making Ruby groan and pull the pillow over her ears.
It was Eli.
“Yeah what?” said Charlie
“You sleeping?”
“Was. What’s up?”
“Big Jim is dead,” said Eli, in a tone that left Charlie in no doubt as to who was getting the goddamn blame for this one.
“One second.” Charlie rolled out of bed, picked his jeans off the floor and shut himself in the bathroom. “Okay – what happened?” As soon as he said it he knew it was a dumb question. Same thing that had happened to Mike Hallett and his wife’s nephews; swamp wolves gonna swamp wolf.
“Are you alone?” said Eli.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Charlie. She’s there, isn’t she? That swamp wolf chick.”
“She’s in the other room. It’s cool. What happened, Eli?”
“They found Jim by the side of the road,” said Eli. “With his heart cut out.”
Charlie heard his own throat work as he swallowed. He could still feel the meaty thickness of all those tubes connecting the works together. And the smell. Nothing had prepared him for the sour, fleshy smell that had come out when he’d opened up Lyle’s chest, or the weird wheezing noises that had come out of Lyle’s dead mouth when Charlie’s rummaging knuckles pressed up against a lung.
“Say something,” said Eli.
“I don’t know what to fuckin’ say. They know who did it?”
&
nbsp; “Guess?” said Eli. “Heart chomping action? That’s swamp wolves, Charlie. You’ve got swamp wolves running around up there and you’re down here chasing swamp wolf pussy?”
“ – well, now you’re just being prejudiced.”
“They eat people, you moron. On purpose. And for all you know that broad could be some kind of honeytrap that Cletus and friends sent to sniff out the competition.”
“Yeah, don’t take this the wrong way,” said Charlie. “But you’re sounding a little paranoid again.”
Eli made an angry hissing noise. “I am not paranoid, Charlie. If there’s one thing I am not it’s paranoid. I’m sick – again. I can’t keep my food down; this pack is rotting from the inside out as it is. If your little Ruby Tuesday finds out that Gloria’s out of commission, what’s to stop her from running back to the swamp and telling her brothers-slash-boyfriends that the Keys are up for grabs?”
Charlie sighed. He really needed to pee, but he knew he couldn’t even do that without Eli hearing it splash and then probably having a further shitfit about Charlie taking care of vital bodily functions while Eli was in the middle of a meltdown.
“You know your problem?” said Charlie. “You’ve spent so much time as the chosen one that you think getting a case of the vomits is significant. You probably ate some bad grouper or something.”
“You would say that,” said Eli. “What if I’m losing my grip?”
“On account of me?” said Charlie. “I wish. I lost a tooth. Next month it’ll be two teeth. We’re getting old is all – werewolf old. Look, just drink some ginger ale. Lots of ice. Cold things are good for nausea.”
“Great. Good. Thanks, Charlie. What’s good for hearts being pulled out of chests? Got any helpful home remedies for that?”
“I’ll make some calls,” said Charlie, ignoring the sarcasm. “You get a hold of Grayson?”
“Nope. He’s vanished, too. First Joe, now Jim – he’s probably next.”
“I’ll head up to Miami,” said Charlie. “Maybe I can catch wind of a rumor. And try to relax, would ya? We don’t need you blowing out a blood vessel on top of everything else.”
Eli was right about one thing; they were in the middle of a shitstorm, but Charlie had smelled it coming far earlier than Eli. When Lyle died it had been right there on the wind, a sour death note that carried all the way down to the Keys. But it was more, somehow, a feeling. Something like the weird itch in your bones that came before the full moon, like they were trying to crawl out of your skin and rearrange themselves into a wolf shape. Something dark as velvet and fierce as the ocean. Something like love.
Ruby was awake in the bedroom, combing her tangled hair with her fingers. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Peachy,” said Charlie. “You want to get some breakfast?”
“Sure,” she said, and reached down the side of the bed for her clothes. She had the full set of white-trash tattoos – the feet, the tit, the ass-antlers. He’d seen every last one and still couldn’t figure out how that worked when she changed. Did she have them under her fur? Sometimes tattoos didn’t even take. He remembered one guy who had dropped a fortune on a full sleeve only to wake up after the full moon to find all the pain and money had been for nothing; the whole thing was gone, like his body had reconstructed itself from an earlier version, before the needle.
Ruby wriggled into a denim skirt and fastened up her bra. The straps snapped as she pulled them up onto her shoulders. “Who’s Yael?” she said, out of nowhere.
“Huh?”
Ruby pulled a t-shirt over her head and turned to face him. “You talk in your sleep,” she said.
Eli’s paranoia came back to bite him. What if she was watching out for her ex-husband back there in the swamp? “I don’t know any Yael,” he said.
“Coulda fooled me. It’s a woman’s name, ain’t it?”
Charlie laughed, back on familiar ground. “Now, why would I be dreaming about another woman when I’ve got you lying next to me?”
She giggled as he ran his hands down her arms, over her hips and down – humoring her – over her belly. He no longer called her crazy when she lay back with her knees up to her chest after sex. If anything he’d been banging her even harder since he learned she didn’t care if she got pregnant. And maybe – and here was the scary part – he wanted her to. Like he knew he was so far gone that he was trying to pass the torch to the next generation. This pack is rotting from the inside out.
Her eyes were like kaleidoscopes in the morning sun. They looked so black at night but when the light shrank her pupils he saw the halos of amber and gold at the center. The edges of her irises were the translucent brown-black of espresso, reminding him that he was hungry for a good hot shot of caffeine.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get something to eat. Feed the wolf.”
They went to the diner on the corner, a tired little place with faded murals of marlin and dolphins on the walls. Ruby ordered a tall stack of pancakes and drowned them in syrup; you could always spot a southern girl by her sweet tooth. He wondered how it all worked with her, what kind of demands that turning took on a body that was already taxed by the usual female processes.
“You should get some bacon,” he said, thinking of her iron requirements. And what the hell was that thought? Was he seriously thinking about knocking her up? And how did that even work when the full moon came? Surely she’d lose the baby anyway. There was no way something so little and fragile could survive that kind of violence done to the mother’s body.
“You want me to get fat as a house?” she said.
“No, I’m just saying. Get some protein with your carbs.”
She gave him a sidelong look. “You’re not one of those guys who wants to lock me in the basement and feed me Ben & Jerry’s through a hose and a funnel, are you?” she said. “Because I’ve seen that on YouTube and it’s just weird.”
He laughed. “At least have some eggs. It’s like two days away.”
Ruby sawed off another sliver of pancakes and sighed. “It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it? Doing it twice in one month.”
“Yeah.” He figured it was now or never. “I was wondering...if you, we...I don’t know...”
“Wondering what, Charlie?”
“If you got pregnant,” he said. “How does that work? You know, with the whole...thing.”
Ruby quietly cleared her throat and took a purse-lipped sip of coffee. “It doesn’t,” she said. “I usually lose it.”
“Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been working on something.”
“What? Surrogacy?”
She smiled. “Nah. Something to keep me from changing.”
Now he knew she was nuts. She was definitely strange, but now he knew for sure she was crazy. Even three days out his spine was already starting to prickle and burn with a kind of subdued force, like an ocean roar in the distance. He knew when it came you may as well have tried to outrun a tsunami; it was that powerful. “Everyone’s tried that,” he said. “For centuries. Prayers, fasting, special baptisms. Don’t you remember there was a bunch of poisonings when that Harry Potter book came out and some of the kids thought they could fix their shit with wolfsbane? It doesn’t work, Ruby. Most of the time it just makes matters worse.”
“I’m not talking about herbs and prayers,” said Ruby. “I’m talking about real magic. Spirit work.”
“What? Clementine?”
She nodded. “You got it. I’m getting there. I only turned for the two nights of the last full moon. Third night I got caught up on the laundry.”
Charlie buried his nose in his coffee cup. He had no doubt that Clementine was the same kind of thing as Yael, and his mind was already leaping ahead making connections. And they were all insane, but then you weren’t in the best position to define insane when you were a werewolf who grew up with a shithouse-rat crazy den mother who talked to poltergeists.
“Clementine can stop you from cha
nging?” he said.
“Yeah. I think so. She’s getting stronger. It’s like...” She frowned, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. “It’s like I can breathe her in, and when I breathe enough of her in it feels like she settles down the length of my spine. And holds it straight upright, like one of those back brace things, but from the inside.”
“But you said you changed anyway?”
“Well, sure,” said Ruby. “You know what it’s like. It’s like having a Mack truck drive right through your body. But like I said, she’s getting stronger. She can hold me for longer, hold me in the shape of a person.” The waitress came by with her coffee pot, and Ruby stopped talking while the girl refreshed their cups.
Charlie was sure he now knew what Gloria had been doing with Yael all those years. She’d done it; she’d figured it out. She’d fucking cured herself of lycanthropy and she hadn’t thought to share this secret with any of her boys. She got to celebrate her seventieth birthday and Charlie had teeth falling out of his head when he wasn’t quite thirty-three.
He washed his anger down with a mouthful of scorching coffee. Fuck it – maybe Ruby was some kind of swamp wolf spy. It hardly mattered now. Now that he realized just how he’d been cheated.
“That’s why I came here,” said Ruby, in a nervous little voice that he’d never heard before. “To try and do it better. To find a wolf witch who could teach me.” She waited, like she was trying to gauge his reaction. “I mean, she’s here, right? The wolf witch?”
Charlie set down his coffee cup. “Seriously? You do know how The Wizard of Oz ends, right, Ruby Slippers? I hate to be the bearer of spoilers, but it was the man behind the curtain the whole damn time.”
Ruby shook her head, her timidity melting like fog in the sun. “I know she’s the real deal, Charlie. I saw what she did to Lyle Raines.”
“You?” he said, surprised. “What do you mean, you saw?”