by Anna Roberts
Gabe touched her shoulder. “Blue...”
“...no, Gabe,” she said, knowing what was coming next. “Listen to me. I love you so much, but we don’t have time for this right now. He’s loose. He’s out there.”
Gabe turned to Stacy in a mute appeal for sanity, but she just shook her head. “She’s right, Gabe,” she said. “Gloria told us to run. Like when Gandalf says ‘fly, you fools,’ you better damn well fly, you know?”
“Where are we supposed to go?” said Gabe.
“And what about my dad?” asked Axl, who couldn’t even say it without setting himself off crying again. Blue tried not to think about the sneakers she had dropped in the trash.
“We’ll go to Joe,” said Blue, and Gabe just looked at her like she was crazy. He didn’t know – oh God, at least there was one good thing she could tell him on this horrible day. “He’s alive,” she said. “He’s with Grayson. He called me.”
Gabe covered his mouth with both hands, like he was ashamed to even think about smiling right now. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. He’s fine. He’s okay.”
He nodded and lowered his hands, staring out at the sea with an expression she knew all too well by now, the look he got when he was scrambling for some kind of explanation for all this madness and mess. “And Yael?” he said. “You’re saying he’s...what? Gone? Dissipated? Is he going to blow back to shore like a hurricane?”
“I don’t know,” said Blue. “But after what he did to me I think we’d be smart to do as Gloria said. Stacy – you were gonna take the boys to Oregon?”
“Yeah. Marcy’s mom lives out there.”
Axl frowned. “Granny Pam? And when were you planning on telling her I’m a werewolf?”
Stacy sighed. Clearly she hadn’t thought this all the way through.
“He can come with us,” said Gabe. “We’ll take care of him. We’re pack.”
Stacy shook her head. “Is it safe? I heard there were swampers...”
“I don’t know.”
“Mom, just take the kids and go. Please. I’ll be okay.”
She shook her head again. “This is nuts, Axl. All of it. Eli, and now Gloria...”
“...go. They’re just kids, Mom.”
“So are you, baby.” Stacy reached up to hug her towering child. She kissed him on his cheeks and mouth. “Be brave, be good. I love you.”
Axl started to cry again and Blue turned away, self-conscious. She heard the weird barking call of a pelican and realized it was the first thing she had heard clearly in a while, as if the third gunshot that day, the one she hadn’t heard, had damaged her hearing worse than the two she had.
Gabe touched her hand and the horror of it came flooding back, the smudgy trails of blood and fluid snaking between the kegs in the cellar. She’d drove home barefoot, stopping to drop her brain-spattered sneakers in a public trash bin. Stupid – covered in DNA, but if Gabe had seen them...
How did you begin to tell a man that you’d killed someone he loved?
“...it’s gonna be okay,” Stacy was saying. “I promise, baby. Things look bad right now, but one day – one day it’s gonna be okay.”
Blue heard Axl sniff. “You have to say stuff like that,” he said. “Because you’re my mom. It’s like, your job.”
*
Charlie laid out the tools on the tile floor. Saw, hammer, bolt cutters. Reduce everything to the smallest pieces.
He’d done this before, but that seemed to make it harder somehow, like every time he reached for the saw it came back like karma - the smell, the cold stiffness, the tubes slithering under his fingers as he fumbled his way around Lyle’s atrophied heart.
And now he was supposed to do this to Eli?
Fuck that noise.
He sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor. Eli slumped where he’d fallen, his face half a ruin and his brain sprayed like a gory halo on the white tiles behind him. “I’m sorry,” said Charlie, but it was useless now. It was one thing to feed a man poison, but to look him in the eye and pull the trigger? “I thought I had the guts. But I don’t.”
He picked up the saw. Even as he did it he knew it was useless. His hand was shaking and when he touched Eli’s cold wrist his head started to reel in a way that said he was doomed to fail at this. Little too close to home for an ageing alpha like him.
The saw scraped against Eli’s skin and the sensation was so wrong, so absolutely dead that Charlie began to sob, big, heaving sobs so hard that the saw fell from his shaking fingers and clanged on the floor. He swayed back on his heels, landing on his ass, a small, evil voice in his head whispering that this was what he’d wanted all along, wasn’t it? Why should he get tossed out on his ass - by his own fucking grandmother, no less - while Eli got to be king of the Keys?
You got it, Charlieboy. You’re there. Where you always wanted to be.
“Not like this,” he said. “Not like this.”
He heard a light step behind him. A hand on his shoulder.
“Charlie?” Ruby’s voice.
He didn’t look up. “What?”
“Y’all want me to take care of this for you?” She could have been asking him if he wanted her to put the groceries away. He turned to look up at her, her sharp-angled, lovely face angelic against the white of the clean side of the bathroom. A price beyond rubies - wasn’t that what the book said? Lucky for him she wasn’t all that virtuous.
“It’s okay,” she said, and set something down beside him on the tile before picking up the bolt cutters. It was something small and white - plastic. He blinked at it as she stepped forward and picked up the saw, tears blurring his eyes.
“I keep trying to do it,” he said. “But I can’t. I keep remembering...you ever dig a heart out of a man’s chest, Ruby?”
She had her back to him and he heard snipping sounds. Fingerprints first. Jesus, what a thing. “No,” she said. “A woman, though.”
He blinked back at the white plastic thing. Anything was better than thinking about what she was doing. He stared down at the stick on the tiles. It had a window in it with two pink lines, all watery on what looked like blotting paper. Huh.
“That was my grandma,” said Ruby, the snipping sounds turning crunchier as she worked. “Heart was black as coal when we took it out. Smoked her own meat, if you catch my meaning - Pall Malls, mostly, although she was partial to a cigar.”
What did two lines mean? Was that yes or no? “You ate her,” said Charlie, realizing maybe for the first time just what Ruby really was.
“We loved her, we ate her. That way she’s always with us.”
He heard his own throat work as he swallowed. “Ruby?”
“Yeah?”
“What does two lines mean?”
Squatting, she glanced over her shoulder at him. Then she saw the pregnancy test she’d set on the floor and smiled a weird coy smile. When she reached up to push her hair back from her face her fingers were redder than her name. “Oh,” she said. “That. That’s positive. I didn’t lose the baby during the full moon. Isn’t that great?”
“Glorious,” said Charlie, and wondered how this day could possibly get any worse.
Then the phone rang, and it did.
*
The house – a squarish, two-story clapboard with an antebellum-looking porch – rose like a mirage out of ghostly drifts of Spanish moss and unkempt banks of once-genteel firebush and rhododendron. Grayson stood frowning on the porch, cigarette in one hand, cane in the other.
Someone was moving inside the house, and then a tall shape appeared in the doorway.
“Joe,” said Blue.
“Holy shit,” said Gabe, and went stumbling forward to his friend, somewhere between laughter and tears. Axl lingered back with Blue for a moment, but then he sidled up to the men, clearly needing to be a part of it all.
Under different circumstances she might have been hurt to be left out, but as she watched them she realized she had no appetite to deliver bad news all over ag
ain. She knew the body language all too well – hands over mouths, shaken heads, consoling pats.
Instead she went to pop the trunk, but as she carefully tuned out the sound of their sorrow something strange happened. Like she stumbled upon a different frequency, a voice whispering in the gaps between heart beats.
...please let me go home I wanna go home to my bed...
Blue set the bag down behind the car and listened. It was coming from somewhere near water, a girl’s voice, with a tang to it like Yael’s, but the flavor in her mind was peppermint rather than tar. Peppermint pink like the bed the girl wanted more than anything else in the world.
Another spirit?
She walked slowly into the woods, the air wet and cool on her tongue. The sun was barely up; they’d drove all night. For once she had the time to realize how tired she was, and once she did she felt like she was asleep on her feet. Maybe it was just the product of an overtaxed mind, but she could have sworn she heard another voice, another channel – a man’s this time, praying and begging in Spanish.
...ayudame...respecto...no entiendo...
Just a handful of words she fished out of high school memory.
The gunshot startled her so much she nearly screamed. Another one, another body – oh God, who was shot now?
She spun round on her heels to look, but there was no-one. Just the guys in a huddle on the porch and Grayson limping towards her.
“You okay?” he said.
Blue shook her head.
“It’s all right. Was it the cartel guy? The gun-shot at the end can be startling.”
She stared at him, unsure if she was staring into the face of madness or the one person left who had a chance of helping her make sense of all this.
“The ghosts,” he said. “You can hear them, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, her dry tongue clicking in her mouth. “I think so.” So that’s what it took to hear the dead; all you had to do was kill someone. “There was a man talking in Spanish, and a girl who wants her bed.”
“Hitchhiker,” said Grayson. “She’s the saddest. Someone bashed her head in with a rock down by the river. All she wants to do is go home, poor little thing.”
Blue pressed her lips together, but her eyes let her down. The tears came down like sudden rain.
“It’s all right,” said Grayson, folding her in a stiff, smoky hug. “I know it’s a mess. But everything is going to be okay.”
No, it isn’t, she wanted to say, but she was crying too hard to speak now, standing lost in a haunted wood, miles from anywhere, with nowhere to call home. Again. Every nerve and every cell felt braced and yet somehow numb, the way she’d felt when the neighborhood was underwater and Clarissa was missing and Reggie was drunk and the bodies kept on floating by. The way she’d felt when she first saw a human hand, so bloated up with water that it looked like a rubber glove full of air – tired, sick and scared to death, but somehow resigned to more. To worse.
“She told me...” she said, swallowing down more tears. “She told me to get her book – a spell book, I guess. But I couldn’t even do that. It got stolen. I couldn’t even get that much right. Some sorcerer’s apprentice.”
“You’ll manage. Don’t worry.”
Blue wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “She said you could help.”
“I will,” said Grayson. “I’ll do my best. And so you will you. Gloria would never have done what she did unless she had faith in you as a wolf witch.”
“But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” Protect the pack? Yeah, that had gone well. Blue couldn’t even keep the social workers off the doorstep, never mind anything else.
“We’ll work it out,” said Grayson. “I promise. You’ve got this, Blue. You can do it.”
She wiped her eyes again. “I guess,” she said.
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Also available
Three misfits, three smoke breaks and one series of extraordinary events.
An angel appears on Brighton beach, a hospital patient bursts into flames in Plymouth and a goth spontaneously combusts in a churchyard in Sidmouth; it’s all in a day’s work for stage magician and freelance paranormal investigator Francis Eliot. For pathologist Camilla O’Hare it’s nothing short of lunacy, particularly when one of the victims’ bodies disappears from the morgue in the length of time it takes her to answer the phone.
When the two of them join forces to figure out what’s really going on behind the sudden rash of spontaneous human combustions taking the West Country by storm, neither can predict just how weird things are about to get. A missing cat, a dog-eared copy of Dracula, a guitar case full of garlic and a priest so turbulent that even Henry II’s drunken knights would think twice – all add up to a hypothesis so extravagantly nuts that nobody wants to come out and say the V-word.
Except at some point you’re going to have to admit the obvious. Especially when the obvious keeps trying to eat you.
This fast-paced British urban fantasy is the first in a brand new series that will delight fans of Bram Stoker, Jonathan Creek and anyone who was ever sceptical about the idea of sparkling vampires.
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