The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1)

by Anna Roberts

  Fly me to the moon, Stormy Blue. You’ll as you’re told, no mooncalf I. Caliban ban ban ban ban, has a new master got a new man. Shiny new, Stormy Blue. Oh yes, you’ll do.

  She snapped awake in the middle of a strong cramp. It was wet between her legs and she realized - with an almost welcome mundane annoyance – that she had probably bled all over the sheets. Gabe stirred and turned towards her, but his eyes remained shut.

  With her knees pressed together, Blue rolled gingerly to the edge of the bed and off. She could feel blood running down her thigh in the dark and wished she’d listened to Gloria’s advice about keeping her underpants on. She quietly opened a drawer and grabbed a pair, along with a pack of maxi pads.

  Too late to rummage in your drawers now, missy. The damage is done.

  If it hadn’t been for Gabe sleeping, she would have turned on the light. Anything to get rid of that voice in her head. She wasn’t awake. Not really. She was on autopilot, the way she was sometimes when her bladder drove her out of bed before she was fully conscious.

  She hurried for the bedroom door all the same, darting quickly down the hall. The bathroom was pitch black and for a second she flailed blindly at thin air, scrambling to find the pull cord of the light. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t, and the darkness had teeth and...

  Click.

  Got it.

  Blue breathed again. The blood running down her leg had almost reached the floor and she quickly wiped it up with a handful of toilet paper. She was in full flow now, red and messy, and the cramps that had woken her were working up to becoming the worst kind, the kind where it felt like your ass was trying to part company with the rest of your body.

  She cleaned herself up with wet toilet paper and put on a pad.

  That horse has bolted. No point shutting the stable door now.

  It spoke again as she was pulling up her underpants. It was a seedy little voice but so very knowing. The kind of voice that would whisper your dirtiest secrets back to you and cackle. She hadn’t a word for it but one of Gloria’s strange words came back to her. Bugaboo.

  That was the moment she realized she wasn’t dreaming. She only wished she was.

  Blue ran water, her heart roaring in her ears now. She hung onto the edge of the sink; the light was moving strangely across the porcelain. The last thing she wanted to do was look up, but it was as if someone had grabbed hold of the back of her hair and was pulling it down, forcing her to raise her head.

  The light fitting was swinging in circles.

  “Oh God,” she said, and it came out in a squeak.

  She thought she must have passed out. Through the thin, skittish darkness she heard the voice crooning an old song – I’ve Got You Under My Skin. When she could see again she was on her hands and knees in front of the cellar door, and the light was once again swinging its seasick shadows on the wall.

  Axl. He was right there. If she yelled he’d...

  ...don’t even think it, girlie. I’m in your head. Such a lot of blood in here, all young and juicy. Just crank up your pressure another notch and POP! goes the weasel. Not to mention your chances of walking, talking or breathing without a ventilator.

  Her lips were numb but she managed to whisper. “What the fuck are you?”

  It laughed.

  Someone to watch over you. Up you come now. Good girl.

  The bugaboo voice brought her hands up to the lock. She had a key in her hand. She had never seen it before in her life, hadn’t even known it existed, but here it was, in a hand she no longer had any control over. It slid into the lock as if magnetized and then turned.

  Here we are, Sister Anne. Welcome to the bloody chamber.

  The next thing she knew she was lying with her breasts bare against a cold floor. There was a hand on her shoulder.

  “Blue?” said Gabe.

  He put something around her shoulders. As she sat up she thought she might vomit; she felt as if she had just gone out and got blackout drunk and was now stirring to the awful, curdled, queasy feeling of a body that had no idea why she’d gone and poisoned it so thoroughly.

  Jesus, was this the basement?

  There was a cage down here. A big one, like an old fashioned lock-up from a Western.

  “Are you okay?” said Gabe. “I think you were sleep-walking.”

  She tried to say something - anything - just some reassuring noise to let her know that her body was under her own control again. Her tongue felt fuzzy and stuck to the roof of her mouth. The big bars danced back and forth in front of her eyes, making her feel even sicker. When she bowed her head to retch she saw what was on the floor in front of her. It was a Ouija board, old and battered.

  There were weird score marks in the floor, like the marks of fingernails. She blinked, forcing herself to try and see one of everything again, but the marks blurred into twos and threes when she tried to follow their tracks with her eyes. Beyond the bars, there were more. Big gashes scored into the plaster, some of them flecked with a dirty brown that could only be old blood. Claw marks. And there - smeared but still recognizable - was a big bloody paw print.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” said Gabe. “Let’s go upstairs and let’s all try to stay calm, all right?”

  She reached for the Ouija board; the voice was gone but she had this weird feeling that it was important somehow, and that she’d be in trouble if she left it down there. There were splinters in the back of the door and here and there it looked as though the bars had been replaced with newer, shinier ones. “Gabe,” she said. “What the hell was down here?”

  He swallowed, and when he met her eyes he looked like he was fighting every instinct he possessed in order to do so. “Me,” he said.

  A faded, rank animal smell hit the back of her throat as he helped her to her feet. Instead of making her gag the way it should, it tripped some buried switch of understanding. The paw print, the claw marks, the cage. The three days off every full moon even though he was the opposite of superstitious. He was trying to tell her that he was a werewolf, and that was insane, but then at least he wasn’t wriggling around in her brain, threatening to burst her blood vessels.

  He led her up the stairs and into the kitchen, creeping past the couch where Axl snored softly, one large foot hanging over the arm. Gabe closed the kitchen door and tucked the afghan tighter around Blue’s shoulders, then started opening all the cupboards.

  “Okay,” he said. “Do you have any idea where she keeps the booze these days?”

  Blue pointed to the cupboard at the end. Gabe took out a bottle of white rum and found a couple of shot glasses. “I was trying to work out the best time to tell you,” he said, but Blue couldn’t stop staring at the Ouija board on the table. What the hell had just happened? Was she still dreaming?

  “I know it’s a lot to deal with...” he said, and pushed a shot towards her.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I’m still me. It’s just...”

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t get it. Something walked me down those stairs.” She touched the board. She had thought it was wood but it was some kind of veneer. The back said MADE IN CHINA. “Whatever it was, I think it wanted me to find this.”

  “Yeah,” said Gabe. “I’m a werewolf, by the way. Did we cover that?”

  She laughed. Couldn’t help it. “I’m dreaming.”

  He didn’t smile. “No, Blue,” he said. “You’re not. I wish you were, but you’re not.”

  The rum smelled disgusting, but she drank it anyway. He filled her glass again.

  “The cage,” she said. “You mean you...you come here, what? Once a month?”

  “No,” he said. “I have my own cage now. In my basement.”

  Blue stared at him, clinging to the last vain hope that this was either a dream or a very tasteless joke on his part. “Does Joe know?” she asked, and the look on his face told her everything she needed to know.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said, into the short sp
ace of a silence. “Joe’s a werewolf?”

  Gabe nodded, guilt written all over his face.

  The alcohol was starting to wash through her bloodstream, a nice, boozy, rum-flavored buffer between her and this crazy new reality. No wonder her mother had loved it so much. She swallowed the second shot and poured herself another.

  “So,” she said. “How long has this been going on?”

  “A while,” he said, staring down at his folded hands. “Usually kicks in around puberty. When you’re a kid you just...grow normally, like nature is too preoccupied with that process to worry about anything else. But then the hormones get involved and it’s like our bodies get confused, I guess.”

  “Confused?”

  He looked up. “Yeah. Like they can’t figure out whether they’re supposed to turn a boy into a man or...something else.”

  Blue tightened her grip on the shot glass. Again that little switch clicked in her head, making strange sense out of total insanity, like naked teenage boys turning up on the doorstep. “Axl?” she said.

  Gabe nodded. “Yeah. He’s on the turn.”

  She stared at him. “Is everyone around here a werewolf?”

  “God, no,” said Gabe.

  “Really? Because there seem to be quite a lot of them from where I’m sitting.”

  “It’s a small town thing,” he said. “You probably didn’t meet any in New Orleans; most werewolves are kind of rednecks. Or Amish.”

  She was glad she wasn’t drinking anything when he said that. “Amish werewolves?”

  He shrugged. “Small gene pools, I guess,” he said. “Closed communities. It’s one of those things that pops up more often the more you have kissing cousins marrying one another. Like extra toes. Or color blindness. There are some packs out in the swamps where they’ve been keeping it in the family so long that they’re monsters even when the moon isn’t full, but we don’t - ”

  “ - wait, stop,” she said. “One thing at a time.”

  “Sorry. I realize this is a lot to take in.”

  She wondered what would happen if she just got up from the table now, walked away, packed her bags and went back to Louisiana. Probably nothing. That was when she knew she was already in this up to her neck, because that yawning, toilet-cleaning nothing suddenly seemed a whole lot more scary than dating werewolves and getting possessed by ghosts.

  “So it’s genetic?” she said, determined to make sense of this strange new world.

  “Yep.”

  “So your parents were...werewolves?”

  “Don’t know. My mom definitely wasn’t, but I don’t think it affects women the way it does men. I’ve heard of girl werewolves, but there’s never been like a population census or anything.”

  “You don’t say,” said Blue, finishing her drink. She held out the glass. “More, please.”

  “My dad could have been,” said Gabe, pouring the rum. “But there’s no reason to say he was. I think my mom must have carried the gene but not been affected.”

  “How’d you figure?”

  “Because her father was a werewolf,” he said.

  “Oh.” It was either the rum working its magic, or this was starting to make sense. “Is that why - ”

  “ - my mom went full on hallelujah Satan cult with me?” said Gabe. “Yep. She thought I could be fixed. She named me Benedict because that’s what you do if you’re worried your son is a werewolf, but obviously I always preferred Gabe - ”

  “ - wait, stop. Your name isn’t Gabriel?”

  “It’s my confirmation name,” he said. “Come on; anything was better than Benedict Arnot. Besides being one dropped consonant from Benedict Arnold, everyone kept fucking calling me Eggs.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But how does being named Benedict help with being a werewolf?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Gabe. “It’s just a superstition from a bunch of Latin countries. You name your son Benito as a blessing, so he doesn’t turn into a werewolf. But I turned anyway and Mom, – who thought religion was like some kind of broken slot machine, God rest her dopey soul – she figured Catholicism wasn’t working on me and joined the bugfuck Evangelicals.

  “And obviously that didn’t work either, because I got exorcised and prayed over and dunked in chlorine and I was still a werewolf. That’s why my grandfather turned up; he knew she was goddamn delusional and that I needed people around me who understood what I was going through.”

  “And he brought you here? To Gloria?”

  Gabe nodded. “She’s a wolf witch. Kind of like a den mother. She’s not a werewolf herself, but she can see things the way we do. I think it goes back to like the Native Americans and stuff – some kind of shaman lady who acted as a medicine woman and guardian for the tribe’s pack. Those guys used to think we were possessed by spirits, too, but not evil ones. Just nature spirits, I guess.”

  “And you believe that?” asked Blue. The strange waking dream that had taken her into the cellar was receding now, but she couldn’t help but wonder. That voice had been so real. Perhaps she was just going crazy.

  “I don’t know,” said Gabe. “Maybe not. But I get why they needed the wolf witches. They weren’t stupid when it came to nature, those First Nations. It’s not like these dumb hippies who think that living in harmony with nature is beautiful.” He sighed and stared into his empty glass. “I mean, nature is beautiful, but it doesn’t care that we find it beautiful. The coral reefs don’t care that I exist unless I do something stupid like jam a foot down on them or drop an anchor where I shouldn’t. Nature doesn’t give a shit about us; it’s not sentimental. It just is, and that’s all. I guess that’s why they felt they needed the wolf witches to intercede with it. They knew that raw Darwinism is fucking scary.”

  She thought of the dead deer, teeming with life, of the coral and the hundreds of species of shimmering fish, of gators and stinkroaches and big white pelicans soaring across the sky. For a moment the sense of their own smallness in the scheme of things almost overwhelmed her. Maybe it was the booze, but somehow – in the face of the huge, implacable swarming strangeness of nature – she could see herself adjusting to this. Gabriel Arnot is a werewolf. There.

  “So,” she said. “Do you...literally turn into a wolf?”

  “Yep.”

  “Every full moon?”

  “Yep.”

  There were about a dozen things in her head that made sense now, but at the edges was that one thing she didn’t want to make sense. “That murder,” she said, forcing the words out, because she knew if she didn’t ask now she would never get up the nerve again. “In Miami. Was that...?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, quickly. “All I know is that it was nothing to do with Eli. He grew up here with Gloria; he knows better.”

  “And he’s a werewolf, too?”

  “He’s more than that,” said Gabe. “He’s the alpha.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s the top dog. Not the boss, exactly, but he’s the guy you go to with problems. Fights.” He sighed again. “In theory, anyway.”

  She had never met the man, but from the way Gabe spoke she guessed there was some kind of bad blood there. “How is that determined?” she said. “Who gets to be the alpha?”

  “Depends,” he said. “Sometimes it gets passed on, father to son, but that’s not always possible, with the way it skips generations. The more natural way is a measure of health. Potency. Eli’s the perfect example. He’s a serial babydaddy who drinks too much, smokes cigars and eats red meat like it’s going out of style, but he has the joints and bloodwork of a man ten years younger. It’s usually the opposite for the rest of us.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Gabe sighed. “I mean we don’t last long,” he said. “It’s hard on the body to keep changing like that every month. It’s pure hell on the bones, all that cracking and stretching. Arthritis, rotator cuff injuries, herniated discs, scoliosis – all those fun things.”

  Blue remembered t
he bloody paw print. Part of her had maybe hoped they just sneezed or something and paffed into wolves, like those CGI things in the Twilight movies, but real life had a habit of doling out more pain than was necessary. She reached across the table and touched his hand, and he looked so pathetically grateful that she could have cried for him. “Does it hurt?”

  He just nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Gabe shrugged. “It is what it is. One day I just won’t be able to do it anymore. It stresses the heart, the whole circulatory system. A lot of old wolves check out in the throes of it, as it were. Their bodies just quit one day. Brain bubbles, strokes, massive MI’s. Sometimes they don’t change back; they don’t have the physical resources to do it. Or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “They don’t change back fully,” said Gabe. “Something sticks. A knee, a tooth, an eye. If it’s a major organ that doesn’t go back to human then you’re really fucked.”

  “Oh my God.”

  He gave a mirthless laugh. “Yeah. It’s not all ripped abs and playing grab-ass in the woods with your buddies. Even if you get fully stuck as a wolf you’re in trouble. The longer you stay that way the less likely it is that you’re going to come back the way you were before.” He held her hand and looked into her eyes. “Blue, it’s not like you’re a person trapped inside a wolf skin. You’re a wolf. Really a wolf. Different senses, different perspectives. You’re...nature. You just are.”

  She nodded her head, hoping that she was following him, but then she heard the couch springs creak and remembered that they weren’t completely alone. She pulled the afghan tight around her just in time; Axl opened the kitchen door and stood there, yawning.

  His eyes fell on the bottle. “Holy shitballs. You have booze? Can I have some?”

  “No,” said Blue.

  “Cool,” he said, reaching for the Ouija board.

  “Yeah, don’t play with that,” said Blue, lightly swatting the back of his wrist.