The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1)

by Anna Roberts

  No, this was something else. Like a lightning rod. Gloria had done nothing to encourage them – quite the opposite in fact – and yet still they came. Psalm singers and abortion nuts and that glittery little woman in the cat t-shirt. Ever since the lights had started flickering, it was like they knew. Like they sensed that some otherworldly energy was crackling through the house, and they turned towards it like plants towards the sun, hands open to heaven, eyes closed, lips moving, their blind faces twisted with strange ecstasy as they swayed to the bland jangle of acoustic guitars.

  Stacy carefully picked her way through the worshippers and stepped onto the creaking porch.

  “Well,” she said. “This is officially the most Florida thing I’ve seen since our senior residents’ committee got up a petition about pythons.”

  “They’ve been trickling in for a couple of days now,” said Blue.

  “More like a damburst. It’s like the levee broke and let all the Jesus out all over the place. Call the cops already.”

  “They’re not bothering anyone,” said Gloria, coming out with a hammer in her hand. She was wearing an ugly necklace made of spotted metal butterflies, a piece of junk jewelry that Blue hadn’t seen before. “I know these types. You give them an inch of trouble and they cry persecution and all but nail themselves to the goddamn cross all over again. Something about the Beatitudes, I don’t know. Hold that.”

  She handed Stacy the hammer as she pinched a nail into position.

  “Interesting necklace,” said Stacy, but her words got lost in the babble of the worshippers and the heavy blows of Gloria’s hammer. Or so Blue thought.

  “Iron,” said Gloria, twitching the rusty butterflies in Stacy’s direction.

  “Iron Butterfly?” said Stacy. “Very cool.”

  She wandered into the house, humming Inna Gadda Da Vida.

  Iron. Blue folded her arms tight around herself, as if she could squeeze any unwelcome visitors out of her body. Gloria had said something about blood and iron, and keeping your underpants at night. And Blue hadn’t. She was still unsure if what had happened last night had been a dream or something else.

  Earlier she had tried to go back down to the cellar, but the key was nowhere to be found once more. And Gloria had been brusque and twitchy all day, yelling at Gabe when she found out he’d drank half of her rum.

  Meanwhile, he was still a werewolf. Blue had made a point of asking him when she was fully awake and completely sober; the answer had still been yes.

  “Are you just gonna stand there?” said Gloria, still hammering away at the door frame. “Either hold the nails or get out of my way.”

  Blue retreated.

  There were vinyls scattered all over the living room floor, in a way that she knew would make Gloria nuts if she saw them. Axl had been going through the records as if they were alien artifacts; it had given Blue a nasty turn when she realized he was probably too young to even remember CDs.

  Stacy came out of the kitchen with a drink in her hand. All those people gathered outside had lent the day a party atmosphere. “He’s lurking in the bathroom,” she said, presumably talking about Axl. She knelt and started sifting through the records. “Holy shit. Iron Maiden.”

  She held up the cover for Blue to see. There was some sort of monster on it, and despite her anxiety Blue couldn’t hide her amusement; it seemed like exactly the kind of album that people like the ones on the lawn liked to freak out about.

  “Seventh Son of A Seventh Son,” said Stacy importantly. “One of their few that could genuinely described as a concept album, and some might say a flawed masterpiece. But not me. Can I Play With Madness is worth the price of admission all on its own.”

  She set it back in the pile with a reverence that would have pleased Gloria.

  “Wasn’t there some kind of lawsuit about them?” said Blue. “Subliminal messages from the devil. Or something.”

  Stacy shook her head. “Not Iron Maiden, no. That was Judas Priest. Gotta love ‘Priest.” She sucked her teeth as she found what she was looking for. “There you are, you little one hit wonder.” She held it up and grinned. “Inna gadda da vida, baby.”

  She set the needle in the groove, turned up the volume and got to her feet, tiptoeing behind the screen and beckoning to Blue. Blue joined her and together they watched as the famous heavy riff grind out over the crowd of worshippers. Some of them even stopped speaking in tongues.

  “Fuckin’ awesome,” said Stacy. There was a whiff of alcohol on her laugh.

  “Please tell me that’s not Gloria’s rum you’re drinking. She chewed Gabe out enough this afternoon.”

  “That’s why he replaced it. And bought an extra bottle. Out of consideration for the conversation I’m going to have to have with my terrible child. He’s thoughtful like that.”

  “Aren’t you worried about Axl?” asked Blue.

  Stacy shrugged and dropped down onto the couch. “He’s in good hands,” she said, tilting her head to where Gloria was hammering away in time with the drums. “I would have worried more if she hadn’t got this new lease of life...”

  “And you don’t think that’s weird?”

  “Honey, this is Islamorada. I’m used to weird. You go into the hospital around here and you could be howling at the moon bugnuts crazy, and you know how they sign you off in the psych report? NFF.” She paused for her punchline. “Normal For Florida.”

  “I guess, but - ”

  “ - but nothin’, Blue. You know why I’m here. I know why I’m here. When I was like twelve or something my mom says ‘Stacy, I have to talk to you’, right? So I’m thinking it’s time for the tampon talk, because she doesn’t realize the Kotex lady already came to our school. But instead she’s all ‘Your daddy was a werewolf, just so you know.’”

  Blue stared at her, but Stacy just carried on.

  “Why do you think I was so bummed to get three boys? Not only are they never out of the bathroom and they make the place smell like ballsweat, but they turn into goddamn werewolves at the drop of a hat. I guess I must carry the gene or something, although I really should have known better than to hook up with Eli Keane.” She sighed. “But that’s seventeen year olds for you; he gave me a bad case of the panty sweats and nine months later I had Axl.”

  The hammering redoubled, prompting Stacy to get up and turn up Iron Butterfly. “What the hell is Gloria doing?”

  “I have no idea,” said Blue. “I think she’s trying to keep something out.”

  “Yeah. The fucking Jim Jones cult out there.” Stacy moved back towards the door and Blue followed, restless.

  Gloria was further down the porch, driving nails into a window frame. Several of the holy rollers had moved along with her, as if the porch rail was nothing more than a piece of paper between two magnets. “We only want to witness the miracle, Miz Baldwin,” said a large bald man. “Speak to us.”

  “I got three words for you,” said Stacy. “Stand. Your. Ground.”

  The sparkly cat lady stepped out from behind the bald man’s bulk. She was wearing another bedazzled cat shirt, but there the similarity ended to the blunt, perky little woman who had bothered Blue the other day. This woman’s face was strange and soft, with a deliberate blank intensity that made her look almost naked. Embarrassing. Her eyes were closed and her hands raised towards Gloria.

  “In the name of Jesus,” she said, in a stilted, drawn out cadence borrowed from some megachurch somewhere. “In the name of Je-sus, I casta thee ou-ut, dark spir-its of dem-men-tia.”

  Stacy exhaled and glanced over at Gloria, who was still ignoring them.

  “Bakalakalala kush,” said the cat lady, swaying with the Holy Spirit. “Omnalalalala kree lakalaka...”

  “See what I mean?” said Stacy, turning back to go indoors. “Normal For Florida.”

  16

  After hammering nails into every door frame and window sill she could reach, Gloria fell asleep in her recliner. The songs and prayers of her impromptu worshippers washed o
ver her like they were nothing, like she had magically shored up her own personal boundaries when she donned the iron necklace.

  Blue remembered that Gabe had once told her that Gloria – like a lot of old people – was a light sleeper, but Blue had never seen anyone sleep as deep and thorough as Gloria. It was as if someone switched her off, or cut her strings, as though when awake she was being powered by some force bigger than herself.

  The thought creeped Blue out and she went to pour herself another rum and coke. In the kitchen Stacy was on the phone; she held her hand over her glass when Blue offered to fill it.

  “...no, okay...okay. You’re right. I did promise...” She rolled her eyes and sighed. “...okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna keep my promise and you’re gonna promise me you’ll go to sleep, okay? No crawling out of bed and complaining about it...”

  She held the phone to her ear and gave Blue a long-suffering look. “...I told you. You lock the closet door and they can’t get out. We’ve been through this...”

  Blue ran the ice tray under the tap, waiting for the little rubber blisters to release their hold. The cubes clunked loudly into the glass, but Gloria’s distant snores remained deep and steady.

  “I gotta go,” said Stacy, hanging up her phone. “Marcy has a mutiny on her hands. There are monsters in every closet and I did promise bedtime stories. They’re feeling left out enough as it is.”

  “Are you sure?” said Blue, thinking uneasily of the large adolescent lurking somewhere in the house.

  Stacy grabbed her big brown leather purse from the dresser and shook her head. “Welcome to the joy of kids,” she said. “Whenever one of them really needs your attention, the other two will want it. Just because. They’re assholes like that.” She sighed again. “You know, his father would be really useful right about now, but I guess that’s too much to count on.”

  Gabe was currently up in Tavernier, trying to bring Eli down to help out with the tricky matter of telling Axl that he was a werewolf. Blue only knew Eli through Gabe’s stories, but she had an unsettling feeling that she wasn’t going to like him. He sounded a lot like one of those people who was only around when the going was good, and she had no time for anyone like that. And it would be a problem, she knew. Because Gabe clearly loved him.

  “It’s fine,” said Stacy, misinterpreting Blue’s anxious expression. “If he shows any signs of wolfing out, wake Gloria. She’ll know what to do.”

  “What to do about what?” asked Axl, sloping in from the other room, Ouija board under his arm.

  “You,” said Stacy. “Blue’s in charge, so don’t be an asshole, okay? I gotta go deal with your brothers.”

  “Why? What did they do?”

  “Nothing. Other than being little assholes. That’s why I need you not to be an asshole, please.”

  Axl yawned. “You’ll be shocked to know that my first word was ‘asshole’,” he told Blue. “Can I have some rum?”

  “Nope.”

  “Gabe let me.”

  Stacy tiptoed to kiss her towering child. “Well, Gabe’s going to get my fist up his ass sometime soon, isn’t he?”

  “It’s all asses all the time in our house,” said Axl, watching his mother leave. “If I get like some kind of bunghole fixation, it goes without saying that it’s her fault.”

  “She won’t be long.”

  “Yeah,” said Axl. “That’s what my old man said when he stepped out for cigarettes.”

  Blue wondered if Stacy had told him that he was going to meet his father, but she didn’t say anything. The boy was raw enough as it was, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what Gabe had said about the volatility of youngsters. How was this going to go down? Were they going to shut him up in the cage while they told him the truth about himself?

  “Don’t touch the booze,” she said, and went upstairs.

  She found herself standing in the doorway to her room with no idea of what she’d come up here for. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled and she could have sworn she felt something blow past her, a chill reminder of last night and whatever it was that had sent her sleepwalking down the stairs.

  She stepped over to the chest of drawers and grabbed an extra pair of her most unwelcoming looking panties. No frilly Victoria’s Secret confections – these were the plain, black time-of-the-month panties, strong in the crotch and tight enough to hold a maxi pad in place on heavy nights. She was already wearing one pair, but she pulled on the second, just to be sure.

  The sound of singing floated up to her window, and while she felt silly for the extra pair of underpants, Blue realized she was probably no sillier than the holy fools howling outside the house. They had banners now – CHRIST IS LORD, REPENT FOR THE DAY IS AT HAND. The music droned on, generic noise full of banalities that could have served as bad love songs if you hadn’t known that the boyfriend they were singing to was actually Jesus. You complete me. You showed me the way. You lit my path and brightened the day.

  If only Gloria hadn’t been asleep; it would have been a good time to bust out the Iron Maiden.

  When Blue went back downstairs, the rum bottle was exactly as she left it. Instead Axl was playing with the Ouija board.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Relax,” he said. “It’s bullshit. I tried it with my friends once and it said its name was like ‘Barkslob’ or something.”

  “Barkslob?”

  “Seriously. Who’s called Barkslob?” He blew his hair – light and lank like his mother’s – from his forehead and leaned back in the kitchen chair. “Then we asked it what it wanted and it said ‘grapefruits’ and ‘pussy’.”

  Blue pressed her lips together to keep from laughing; she wasn’t an expert on teenagers but she was sure she wasn’t supposed to find this kind of thing amusing. It probably fell under the umbrella of encouraging bad behavior. “Oddly specific,” she said.

  “It’s just a dumb game,” he said. “Everyone who’s not a total idiot knows that when you’re dead you’re dead.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything else out there?” Blue inclined her head towards the noise outside.

  “I said ‘everyone who’s not an idiot,’” said Axl.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “It’s just a thing people tell themselves to stop from going nuts,” he said, with the unshakable authority of youth. “Like you tell yourself it doesn’t matter if you suffer in this life because the next one is gonna be just peachy. But the truth is, you’re just dead. There’s nothing out there. You just don’t exist anymore, like you did before you were born.”

  She had been through this a hundred times already. And it was easier to stop believing, because the alternative was that God really was that much of a monstrous jerk.

  Axl looked up from the board at her. It was a look Blue knew all too well. That polite, yet prurient look. The surprising thing was to see it on someone so young. He was supposed to be indifferent; he must have been all of about four when it happened.

  “Gabe says you’re from New Orleans,” he said.

  He bit his lower lip. “Is that when your mom died? Like, Katrina?”

  She shook her head and sat down at the table, scrambling for a distraction. She was really in no mood to talk about it again. “No,” she said. “It was sometime after. She’d been sick for years.”

  “But you were there, right? When the storm hit?”

  Blue put her fingers on the planchette. Some panicky little instinct inside her was screaming no, but she didn’t listen. Those parts of last night had faded into the texture of a bad dream, and it wasn’t the first time in her life she had gone sleepwalking.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I was. Now – what do you want to ask Barkslob?”

  *

  Gabe sat in the car for a long time, staring at the bar.

  There were still lights twined around the green railings, but the women had gone, leaving just echoes of half remembered conversations and pictures posted to Instagram.
Of candle lamps and artsy driftwood sculptures and bright Blue Moons.

  The slow burn of irritation had been eating at him like acid for a while. While he knew that it wasn’t Eli’s fault that it had all fallen through with the promised RN, there was a mean little voice in Gabe’s head that kept on whispering to him. That it was typical. That it was just Eli being Eli and that’s all he ever would be. And that when Gabe had been seventeen, jumping off piers and trying to fuck girls with green glitter nail polish, Eli had been in his mid-twenties. Older than Gabe was now. And Eli had had a kid by then. At least one.

  Was this what happened? You got older and colder and more unforgiving, and the people who had burned so bright in your younger days just looked sad and dim in retrospect. Was this growing up, or was it just getting over it?

  Gabe got out of the car and went inside.

  The jukebox was playing one of those songs that he didn’t know the name of. One of those breathy, girly moany songs, full of bad lyrics and plinky guitars. The kind of thing Eli liked. He liked things because girls liked them and he could talk to them about them. Or he liked things because they were cool, like he’d once handed Gabe a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and declared it the best book in the world and his all time favorite. Only the spine had been more or less pristine.

  Eli was sitting at the empty bar, hunched over, peering into a beer. He was wearing a black shirt and jeans and could have been a shadow.

  Are you even in there? asked the groaning girl on the jukebox. Are you even real?

  So like Eli to make the soundtrack of his life sync up with his moods.

  Gabe sat down beside him. Eli didn’t look up. He hadn’t shaved for several days but like the shadows under his eyes, the beard-stubble just made him look brooding and complicated. Or would have done, if there were any women around to admire the effect.

  “You want a beer?” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m having another; you may as well join me.”

  “I’m driving.”