by Anna Roberts
“What kind of problems?” asked Blue, becoming impatient as to what this had to do with West Lafayette.
“Someone was killing people on Lyle’s turf. And you know that’s a big no-no, right?”
“Sure.”
“Taking them three at a time every full moon,” he said. “Then disappearing like a ghost right after. Lyle was...well, Lyle. He was a goddamn blunt instrument even then. It would have been worse if it hadn’t been for Lafe – Lafayette.”
“He was part of Lyle’s pack?”
Charlie nodded. “Sergeant-at-arms. Ironically the guy Lyle kept around to break heads was a whole lot less savage than the boss himself. I liked Lafe. I guess some part of me knew he had something to do with me. Guy was smart, and there were a couple of others who knew the way the wind was blowing. Lyle wanted another kid because Reese was already spoiled as shit, but it wasn’t happening. And you know what that means; people took it as a sign he was losing his alpha mojo.
“Then one day Lafe knocks on the door and comes in with a beer cooler. One of those Styrofoam ones with the lid. I thought I was gonna pass out when he opened that thing; I’d seen some shit, but it brought it all back. The colors, you know? You think a person’s all red inside, but they’re all kinds of shades. Pink and gray and yellow.”
She swallowed, not sure if she wanted to ask.
“He said ‘Got your swamp wolf heart right here, boss,’” said Charlie. “And there it was. All kinds of gory colors, lying there on a bed of ice. Lafe said it was the heart of the swamp wolf who’d been picking all those people off, three a time. And maybe it was, but I think it was more than that. It was like a dare. Like ‘Is Lyle really dumb enough to bring down a shitstorm by eating that heart?’ Like I said, it’s a kind of respect with swamp wolves. You want to really piss off a swamp wolf, eat one of their relatives.”
“And did he?”
Charlie nodded. “Yep. And then the weirdest thing happened.”
“What?”
“Nothing. We were all expecting swamp wolf armageddon, but they just seemed to be sitting on their hands. And the murders had stopped, but Lyle had lost face by eating that heart. A lot of the pack was talking about how goddamn stupid he’d been to do it in the first place. And maybe that was Lafe’s whole plan. I mean, Lyle’s wife was talking about tests; she was gobbling pre-natal vitamins like crazy and left her ovulation predictor kits and all that baby junk around in the bathrooms, no matter how loud Lyle screamed at her to keep it out of sight. It was a weakness, and I guess Lafe smelled blood in the water. Just gave Lyle the nudge he needed to do something straight-up retarded.”
Blue shifted her feet under the bar stool. “What I don’t understand is why anyone would even want to be in Lyle’s pack in the first place.”
“Lots of reasons,” said Charlie. “Money, mostly. Lyle knew all the local biker gangs, coke dealers, people smugglers. He knew how to hook you up with big scores for very little work. I’m not proud of the things I did, but werewolves don’t get much of a shot at earning an honest living; there aren’t many employers willing to give you at least three days off every month. And Lyle was kind of like Saddam Hussein, you know? Or any of those other foaming-at-the-mouth dictators or bugfuck guerillas we’ve tossed dollars at over the years: they’re nutty-ass despots, but my God they’re better than the alternatives.”
He stepped back behind the bar and grabbed another beer and another Coke for her. “And there was talk of alternatives,” he said. “For a while. And then Lafe disappeared.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. That was when I realized I was next on the block if I didn’t watch my ass. I was young, I was healthy and I was a threat.” He leaned back against the surface behind him and once again she could see the dream face reflected in his. The same wry planes and angles of the face, the same blue eyes and thin-lipped, curly cornered mouth.
“Lyle invited me round to dinner,” said Charlie. “To talk about my future. I had to sit at the table with the kid, which knowing Lyle was on purpose. This little snot had never been taught ‘sit still’ or ‘don’t touch’ or ‘you are not the fucking center of the universe’. It’s a bummer what happened to him, but Reese could be a real little asshole back then. When I walked in he was in the middle of a tantrum because he wanted barbeque and the meat on the grill wasn’t cooked yet. Red faced, just bawling because he couldn’t cram a sausage link in his mouth fast enough. He was yelling ‘I want it!’ over and over and over and Lyle didn’t do dick. He just talked over him while Reese yanked on his pants leg and cried like he was starving. And bear in mind this is a kid of maybe ninety pounds – and he wasn’t even five yet. It was like his spirit animal was a tapeworm, I swear to fucking God.”
He took a swallow of his Cerveza. “Anyway, Lyle gave me this speech about loyalty and its rewards. Got kind of drowned out by the kid, but I got the message. No more Lafe. No more talk about how lucky Lyle had got when the swamp wolves decided not to go after him when he ate that heart. And definitely no delusions of alpha grandeur. Got that?” He nodded, like he was back there, reliving the whole thing. “So we were eating, and the kid had finally crammed a burger in it and shut the hell up, and then Lyle said ‘I heard you liked barbeque.’”
Blue had a horrible feeling what was coming next.
“So I said ‘Sure, who doesn’t?’ and he goes off talking about these sausage links. Handmade. Made them special. ‘Sausages are a hell of a thing,’ he says. ‘Mostly lips and assholes, but everyone likes them. You can toss all kinds of garbage meat into them and they still come out delicious. Ears, eyeballs, liver, kidneys...’”
Charlie swallowed. “And then he looks me right in the eye and he says ‘heart’. Right when I had a mouthful, that sonofabitch.”
For a while she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say; nothing that was tactful or tasteful. She could have said “I’m sorry,” but that was for funerals with satin stuffed caskets and chrysanthemums. Not for a man who had found his own father on the end of a fork.
Eventually she found the words. They weren’t polite, but they were right. “Why didn’t you kill him?”
Charlie gave a dry laugh, breaking the tension in the air. “Remind me never to piss you off. I told you, Lyle was the mad dictator. That was how he ran the show; he kept us scared out of our minds. Besides, I didn’t know at the time.”
“Know what?”
“That Lafe was my dad,” said Charlie. “I was pissed at Lyle for a while, but he buttered me up in the wake of it. Set me up with good work. Connections. Back then there were days when my kitchen looked like Pablo Escobar’s, and I got over it. Would have been different if I’d known it had been my father, of course.”
“When did you find out?”
He peered down the neck of his empty beer bottle and tossed it into the recycling with a loud clink. “Now that,” he said. “Was the weird part.”
“How so?”
“The dreams,” said Charlie. “They started round about that time there was all that shit with Gabe and Joe. I hadn’t thought about Lafe in years and then I was fucking dreaming about him; blue eyes, black hair, alligator boots and that accent – like he’d stayed too long in New Orleans...”
“...and he was trying it on for size,” said Blue. “Yes. Exactly that.”
Charlie leaned back on his stool and peered at her. “Huh. Seriously?”
“Yeah, but please. Go on. These were just dreams?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He called me ‘son’ in the dreams and I never really connected the dots in my head, but it was weird. Witchy weird. By then Gloria had broken out a can of supernatural whoop-ass on Lyle, and it was like...I don’t know...maybe her old voodoo hanging in the air did something to me. Turned up the temperature on my dreams. I started seeing the heart again, and all that fuckin’ nasty barbeque, and then there’d be Lafe sat there with a napkin tucked into his collar, hanging down all bloody. And he’d say ‘You gon
na let him get away with that, son? You really gonna let that motherfucker get away with what he did to me?’”
“And that was how you knew?” asked Blue. “That he was your father?”
Charlie shook his head. “I did some digging. Turned out my uncle was useful for something after all. When I asked him if he remembered West Lafayette he said yeah, and that my mom had hooked up with the dirtbag back in ‘eighty one and I was born in ‘eighty two, so you know – do the math.”
“That’s...”
“...bizarre?” he said. “Tell me about it. And then – then I got my front door kicked in by a couple of Lyle’s heavies and they dragged me off to Lyle’s place, right?”
“Right,” she said, not following.
“Of course, by this time Lyle’s freaking the fuck out because his place has turned into the house from The Amityville Horror, courtesy of Gloria. I hadn’t seen it until then, which is maybe what saved my ass, I don’t know. All I know is that when I saw that for the first time I couldn’t believe what she’d done, from all those miles away. Nobody ever suspected she still had that kind of juice. And I guess it must have showed on my face that I’d never seen it before, because even Lyle – paranoid as he was - believed me when I said I knew nothing about it.”
“Knew nothing about what?” said Blue, still confused.
“The writing,” said Charlie. “On the wall. Someone had written ‘WEST LAFAYETTE’ up there on the wall. Naturally he suspected me of doing it, dogpiling on the ghostie action already going on.”
Something clicked into place in her head, just out of reach. “But it wasn’t you?”
“No,” he said. “That was the weird part of it. Like something was reaching through the curse to tap me on the shoulder and say ‘Hey, remember West?’ Maybe it was a way of turning me against Lyle, just to make his life even fucking worse. I don’t know. It doesn’t explain why you’d be dreaming about –”
“- no, it does,” she said. And there it was, another piece of lunacy that somehow made sense. She rummaged for her wallet. “That thing reaching out to you? That was Yael. It had to be Yael. It’s totally his style.”
Guess it runs in the family.
Blue pulled out the photograph of Gloria on the beach. “Look,” she said. “On the back.”
Her hands were trembling as she passed it to Charlie. West 1967.
“How old was he?” she said. “West? When you knew him?”
Charlie’s mouth hung open for a moment. She could almost hear the abacus click in his head, echoed in her own. If West Lafayette had been around thirty-five at the turn of the century...
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” he said.
“She spent her life surrounded by boy children. What if one of them...”
“...was her own.”
Charlie covered his mouth with his hand, and Blue knew she was right; it explained why Charlie was Gloria’s darling, why her curse on Lyle reached out to him, why she and Charlie dreamed the same dreams...
Blue could hear a woman’s voice outside, but she wasn’t really listening. It was the smallest leap of faith, but it made so much sense. All Blue had ever known about her own father was that he was a white man with blue eyes, who had broken her mother’s heart and sent her back to the state facility where Blue was born. But now it was all coming together.
No wonder she’d shot up like a rocket when she’d smeared herself with Celeste Thibodeaux’s ashes. Gloria always said grandma’s ashes worked best, but what if they were great-great grandma’s ashes?
She needed to ask Gloria while there was still time – if there was still time – but then the door opened and the next thing she knew Ruby was stomping across the bar, her fierce-eyed face all angles and fire.
“What did you do with her?”
The slap caught Blue unaware. Charlie was more than half drunk and sluggish, so that when she toppled back against his body he thought he was going to fall off his stool and take them both down like dominoes. The stool toppled over but Charlie gained his footing and swayed forward to grab Ruby’s wrist. She thrashed for a moment and slowed, panting, tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Where is she?” she said. “What did you do with my Clementine, you witch bitch?”
18
Blue stared back at the girl struggling in Charlie’s grip. “I didn’t do a damn thing to your spirit,” she said, her head still ringing with Ruby’s slap. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“She’s gone! She won’t come when I call. Someone did something, and if it wasn’t you it was the other one.”
Swallowed her down. Wasn’t that what Yael had said? Oh shit.
Ruby seemed to shine red as her namesake, murder in her black eyes and her tattoos standing out dark against her pale skin. She was glowing, but nobody else seemed to notice it, and Blue – dizzy as if she’d been the one doing the drinking – realized she was probably seeing Ruby’s aura.
Good God, that girl was packing some power.
Blue felt it the way she felt it when she’d seen Ruby with her thumb out on the road to the Keys. She smelled that crack-bone, meaty, marrow doggy smell that she now recognized as the smell of werewolf, and something more. Something bloody and female and altogether fertile, perhaps the scent of protective power that repelled Yael.
You’re a big one, she thought, on some vague, witchy level, and then Ruby swung an elbow back against Charlie’s ribs. He let out a soft ‘oof’ and folded up like a beach chair. “Where the fuck is my fucking Clementine?” yelled Ruby, and sprung forward once more, her hands in Blue’s hair, pulling hard enough to knock Blue off balance and onto her ass.
“I don’t know!” Blue sank her fingernails into Ruby’s arms, hoping to cause her enough pain to let go. Somewhere beyond the fight she saw Gabe hurrying across the floor towards them. Male voices. Hands pulling Ruby away.
“Don’t hit her!” Blue said instinctively. “She’s pregnant.”
Gabe and Eli pulled Ruby to her feet. She was breathing hard and there were half moon marks on her arms; Blue’s nails hadn’t even managed to draw blood. As she turned to look at Charlie, Ruby’s face went soft, expectant.
He laughed. “Oh, honey,” he said, in the sudden, panting quiet. “And there I was, thinking you might be all mine.”
She scowled back at him. “It’s yours, you dirtbag.”
Gabe frowned and looked at Ruby like he was seeing her for the first time. “Wait,” he said. “You?”
Ruby stared. “Oh my God,” she said, and Blue almost laughed as she wondered when life had taken such a turn for the Jerry Springer.
“You two...know each other?” she said, in a brittle voice that seemed like it had nothing to do with her.
“It’s not like that,” said Gabe, too quickly.
“It most certainly is not,” said Ruby. “I’m married.”
Charlie laughed. “Oh yeah. ‘Cause you take your marriage vows so seriously.”
“There was only you!”
“That’s enough, dumbass. It didn’t matter if you banged one guy or twenty – cheating is cheating...”
“I’m out of here,” said Blue, her head too full for any more of this particular reality show.
She barely took a breath of the outside air when Gabe came after her. “Blue, what the fuck? Where are you going?”
“Home. Gloria’s still in that house.”
He sighed and hurried to keep pace with her across the parking lot. “That girl,” he said. “That was the one I was telling you about.”
“I don’t care, Gabe.”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her round to face him. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Which is why you went all ice queen on me in there. You remember the swamp wolf chick I told you about? The one with the winner of a husband who turned me over to Lyle Raines?”
“Right,” she said, her head no clearer. Father, grandmother, brother? “Okay. It’s fine. I believe you. Just drive me home, please.”
<
br /> The werewolf smell lingered in Blue’s sense memory long after she climbed into the passenger seat, and she rolled down the window to blow it away.
She knew, deep down. Just like she knew where she’d got her blue eyes and why her mother had kept painting that beach scene over and over again. It was a tribute to her Keys lover, the one who had breezed through New Orleans and left her with a daughter.
Oh God, and hadn’t it been worse that year? 2001 – Blue remembered it clearly, even though she had been only eight. That summer she had holed up with Clarissa next-door, because Reggie had been back in a state institution. Two days before her mother was due for release, they all got sent home from school because something bad had happened and nobody would say what; they were too young to know.
Everyone remembered where they were that day. Blue remembered seeing the planes crash into the World Trade Center and thinking, “Well, this isn’t gonna help.”
It didn’t. Reggie got out for less than a week. She turned on the TV, stared deep into the eyeball of human monstrosity and sank straight back to the bottom of a bottle. It was a bad end to a bad year, and Blue thought she knew why. Maybe that was the year her mother had heard about West’s death.
I have a brother, she thought. And perhaps a grandmother, and I left her rotting in that house with Yael.
She knew she’d been quiet for too long, because Gabe let out a long sigh.
“It’s not you,” she said.
“Sure it’s not. You’re pissed at me; it’s coming off you in waves.”
Blue didn’t speak. If she told him she was just thinking then he would ask what about, and she hadn’t got the whole thing straight in her own head yet. She kept trying to do the math; if West was two in the photo then he would have been born around 1965, making Gloria...what? Too young? No, twenty. Young, but plausible. Except everyone said she spent her glory days getting shitfaced, dating rock stars and banging her way around Europe, not grounded in Florida with a toddler on her hip...