The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1)

by Anna Roberts

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Longbows,” said Grayson, knocking on the door frame once again. “What you have here is a sort of sandwich. Two layers of your standard building code pine for strength and inside it a layer of English yew, which would not be my choice for a door frame as it’s not known for its upstanding properties.”

  “Right,” she said. “But it’s a witch thing?”

  “It’s more than that. Yew is strong but whippy. If you look here – this lighter stripe. That’s what they call the sapwood, hard and protective. The darker – this lovely blush color – that’s the heartwood, soft and springy, but much more resilient than the hard wood. This is what made yew the perfect wood for that medieval game-changer – the English longbow. Interesting that she had the carpenter put the soft wood on the inside.”

  Blue shivered. “This whole time I thought she was trying to keep something out. But she wasn’t, was she?”

  Grayson shook his head. “No. She was trying to keep something in.” He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “The boy,” he said. “The one who was here earlier; he said something happened last night.”

  “Yes,” said Blue. “And I can’t explain it.”

  “You could try.”

  “Wait there,” she said. “I won’t be a moment.”

  She looked in the house and found that Gloria was sitting quietly with Joe Lutesinger, so she grabbed a couple of drinks and went back out onto the porch, where Grayson was smoking a cigarette. A second ago he had looked like driftwood that might carry her to shore, but now she felt like she was sinking all over again. There was so much to talk about, and all of it sounded insane.

  “Truthfully, I don’t know where to begin,” she said, sitting down beside him.

  Grayson popped the ringpull on the can with a satisfying little snap and fizz. “Start with the spirit,” he said.

  “The spirit?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The one in the house.”

  She blinked. “Wait, you can see it?”

  “No,” he said, and took a long slurp of soda. “But I can feel it.”

  “So, what? You’re psychic?”

  He sighed. “You’d think I’d get a bit of a genetic break, wouldn’t you? Like the lycanthropy and the early-onset arthritis weren’t enough.”

  “What does it feel like?” asked Blue. “The...spirit, I mean?”

  “Right now?” said Grayson. “It’s sulking. Possibly simmering. Whatever it is, it’s not happy.”

  “Figures,” she said, and before she knew it she was telling him all about last night, sometimes falling over the words in her haste to get them out in front of the only person she felt might be the one to make sense of them.

  “...it did that,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I thought I was dreaming but when it was in my head that time it said something like that. About giving me a stroke or an aneurism. It could do that, and I think it did. It killed that old lady.”

  Grayson stubbed out his cigarette and frowned. “Okay,” he said. “When you say it was in your head...”

  “It was in my head. I thought I might have been sleepwalking; I’ve done that before. But it was different.”

  “How?”

  “It’s hard to describe,” she said. “I was...” Get it out. “Post-traumatic, I guess. When I used to sleepwalk it was some kind of motor that kept on running after my body had fallen asleep. Some malfunctioning panic switch – I don’t know. But it was me. All me. This was different. Like something alien was pulling my strings. It walked me down to that basement. It gave me the key.”

  She sighed. “I feel so stupid. Like I should have known. I would never have touched that Ouija board if I had, I swear. This is all my fault.”

  “It’s all right,” said Grayson, putting a hand on hers. “There’s no need to be hard on yourself just because you don’t believe in spirits. Most people don’t.”

  “I know that. But I wasn’t helping. I pretty much poked this Yael thing with a stick, didn’t I?”

  “You can’t know that,” he said. “And if this beastie is hopping in and out of people’s heads like that, the chances are it was strong already. Stronger than it should be.” He paused, as if listening for something. “It’s not sulking. It’s growling.”

  “But what is it?”

  Grayson reached for another cigarette. “Do you know, I’m not completely sure,” he said. “But I have my theories.”

  “I’ll take them.”

  “Back in Europe,” he said. “They used to have werewolf trials. Like witch trials, but where the accused was said to have turned into a wolf. Sometimes the two ran together – werewolves and witchery in one trial. Very often witches were accused of turning into other things, wolves and large black dogs among them. Other times they would be accused of conjuring familiar spirits, demonic entities that did their bidding, often in the form of an animal. Often canine.” He paused to light the cigarette. “I think some of them may have acted as den mothers to werewolf packs.”

  “Like Gloria?”

  He nodded. “Something like that,” he said. “But there was more to it. There was a spiritual dimension that I didn’t understand for the longest time, until I came to the States. That’s when I met Gloria. The first time I laid eyes on her I knew she wasn’t alone.”

  “Alone?” said Blue. “How do you mean? There are more like her?”

  “No, not that. I could see she wasn’t alone. In herself. In her own skin. The familiar spirit - Yael – it lives in her.”

  Blue stared at him. “Oh my God. She said that. She said it rode her around like a busted truck.” So many things made sense and they shouldn’t, because they were nuts. “Do you think it has anything to do with her...recovery? And what the hell is it? A ghost or something?”

  “No,” said Grayson. “Not a ghost. A ghost is the spirit of a person. A personality formed from a human brain. This thing has never had a brain, or a body.”

  “It said that,” she said, feeling cold. “On the Ouija board. ‘I am wholly ghost.’ Spelled W-H-O-L-L-Y.”

  “My best guess is that it’s some kind of pack spirit,” said Grayson. “A protector, if you will.”

  “Some protector.”

  He folded his arms tight around himself. “Yes, well. Like I said, I don’t think Yael is very happy right now.”

  Blue glanced over her shoulder at the splintered door frame. The memory of having that thing in her head made the inside of her skull itch. “Should we be worried?” she said.

  Grayson swallowed hard. “Probably,” he said and paused to blow out a long stream of smoke. “Almost definitely.”

  20

  The heat seemed crazier than ever.

  Tired and sweaty, Blue moved slowly around the hotel bathrooms, unable to muster that efficient top speed where everything got done quicker and they all got to sit down and have a cold drink much sooner.

  But everyone was feeling it. Even Charmaine was muddled and Renee moved like she was underwater, floating through the sticky air. Stacy had dark rings under her eyes for more than one reason.

  “Has Eli even talked to Axl yet?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Blue. “They’re all in huddles a lot since yesterday. Fighting about some guy named Charlie.”

  Stacy snorted. “Oh boy. Charlie Silver?”

  “I guess. You know him?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Stacy, plucking the dust rag out of her belt and wiping down the TV screen. “He’s one of those people that sticks in your head.”

  “I got that. How come?”

  Stacy briefly checked the mini-bar one last time and straightened up. “Big personality,” she said, smacking her lips together in thought. “Huge. But fragile. Kind of like when you’ve blown bubble gum up too big and you’re like, uh oh – because you know when it bursts it’s gonna go everywhere, including your hair. That’s Charlie. He’s fun for about five minutes but he makes you nervous, like you know he’s gonna explode
somehow and it’s gonna get on ya. And it’s going to make one hell of a fucking mess when it does.”

  Blue followed her through to the next room. It was a vivid description and not one that made her feel any better. “Here’s here,” she said. “In Islamorada.”

  Stacy sighed. “Typical. He’s taking up their goddamn attention when Eli should be having The Talk with his son. Everything takes a back seat to Charlie – you just wait. They’ll all dance around that skinny little human bomb while I’m high and dry with the truant officer riding my ass about Axl.” She bent to help Blue stuff the used towels in a laundry bag. “I know you like Gabe and everything, but just be warned – werewolves are worse than high school girls for dumbshit drama.”

  At the end of her shift, Blue went to look for Gabe. She found him in the shade of the boat shed, sorting through a box of swim fins. He had taken off his wet suit in the heat and was all but naked in a brief Speedo, the ridge of his spine visible as he bent, kneeling, over the box. She pictured his back bending and cracking into the shape of something else, and it seemed insane. For all he was wiry his body was solid and strong and she had already spent so many stolen moments drinking in the heft and taste and smell of him that she couldn’t even begin to fathom how all that solidity could just...change.

  Maybe it was a joke. Some kind of elaborate, arcane joke that the whole island was playing on her, for reasons best known to itself.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He glanced over his shoulder then stood up, all brown and beautiful and somehow all the more tempting for that one item of clothing. “Hey,” he said, crossing the shed towards her. “You look...sweaty.”

  “I am sweaty,” she said, holding herself at a slight distance even as he embraced her.

  Gabe was having none of it and hugged her, sweat and all. “Interesting perfume,” he said, brushing the tip of his nose along her collar bone.

  “It’s new. A heady topnote of Febreze, mixed with blue-collar perspiration, dust bunnies and a haunting whisper of toilet cleaner.”

  He laughed and kissed her. “It’s delightful.”

  “Thank you. I thought you’d enjoy it.”

  Gabe groaned into her neck in a way that she knew meant there was no time to stop. But when he pulled away he was filling that Speedo in a way that was frankly indecent. “I would love to fool around,” he said. “But we both know you’re too gory for quickies right now.”

  “I am about done cleaning things up,” she said. “That much is true.”

  “You still crampy?”

  “No. I’m good. Thanks.” She didn’t tell him about this morning, when she’d crept downstairs at four in the morning and carefully smeared her blood in the cracks of the doorposts. There was a limit to how much grossness a man would find titillating, and she had a feeling she was well over it.

  “Do you know if Eli has talked to Axl yet?” she asked. “About...you know. Everything.”

  Gabe wound a towel around his waist, as if it were somehow inappropriate to be discussing this while wearing next to nothing. “It’s complicated,” he said. “These things have to be handled very, very carefully.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” he said. “More than just emotional. I told you – at that age we’re...volatile.” He sighed. “And Charlie is really the worst person to have around.”

  “Why? How do you know him, anyway?”

  “Long story,” said Gabe. “Short version is that Gloria raised him, along with Eli. They’re about the same age. She had Charlie from a lot younger than usual, which is why he’s her baby. Her blue eyed boy. She pretty much rescued him from the system after his mother was killed.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Gabe exhaled. “I don’t know if I want to get into this right now,” he said.

  “Why? You pushed for time?”

  “A little,” he said, and gave her a long, anxious look. He sighed again and met her eyes with difficulty. “Or maybe because there’s no easy way to say this.”

  “Say what?” she said, her heart starting to hurry in a way she knew meant this was trouble. This was more than just sex.

  “There’s a reason we lock ourselves in the basement, Blue,” he said. “Charlie was the same as the rest of us; no dad around to tell him what was what. But he had this uncle. His mother’s brother. Huge drunk. That’s just Charlie – all his life he’s been surrounded by people who are broken in some way. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “Anyway, this uncle would go on these insane benders – coke, booze, anything he could lay hands on. And he lost track of time, more often than not. Lost track of the calendar. And the moon.”

  “You mean he was...?”

  Gabe nodded. “He came home at the wrong time of the month. Charlie was maybe nine at the time. He was already a latchkey kid; you know how it is when your dad’s not around. But he loved his uncle. If there was anyone Charlie ever loved, it was his fun, boozy uncle.”

  Blue folded her arms tight around herself; the thought of changing shape like that made her flesh creep every time Gabe talked about it. And she knew where the story was going. Nowhere good.

  “As soon as Charlie realized he was in trouble,” said Gabe. “He locked himself in the cage – the one his mom kept in the basement for her brother. He was safe there, but then she came home.”

  “Oh.”

  Gabe scraped his hair back from his face with his fingers. “Yeah. He saw the whole thing.”

  “But didn’t the uncle know?”

  “That he was eating his own sister?” said Gabe. “No. I told you. It’s different. We’re different. We’re wild animals who don’t know any better. I’ve heard some people say it’s different for them, that a part of them knows, stays human. But I’ve never experienced that.”

  The look in his eyes hurt, and she knew why he didn’t want to talk about this. “I’m dangerous, Blue,” he said. “Really dangerous.”

  Her heart was beating too hard again, anger flashing up to keep her from tears. “I know that.”

  “I like you - ”

  “ - stop it.”

  “- I just think - ”

  “ - no,” she said. “Don’t do this. Don’t you dare do the Twilight thing with me. At least give me a chance to find out what I signed up for.”

  He pressed his lips together and nodded, his eyes too bright. “Okay,” he said. “I guess that’s fair.”

  “It is, and you know it.”

  Gabe sighed long and hard. “If things were different - ”

  “ - but they aren’t,” she said. “Like you always said, you have to work with what is. Not get hung up on the things you can’t do anything about.”

  *

  There was a kind of crackle and hum in the air all that day, a hangover from the party atmosphere cut short when that woman had dropped dead on the lawn. The story going around was that she had died of a stroke caused by dehydration; she had done so much singing and praying and speaking in tongues that she’d forgotten to drink and simply sweated herself dry, prompting that God of hers to mash his almighty finger down on the SMITE button.

  People couldn’t help it; death was exciting. They may have moved off Gloria’s lawn, but the buzz of their interest seemed to fill the air and mingle with the song of the cicadas. As Blue prepared dinner she recognized the atmosphere as that same state of whispering limbo that comes between a death and a funeral, the same sense of raw emotions filling the air like the strange static before a storm.

  Gabe had brought lobsters, fished up from the sea floor with his own hands. Blue wondered if he had done this to make a point, so that she would be forced to watch him kill something. He had put them in a beer cooler with rubber bands around their claws, and they came out sluggish from the ice water. “Numbs them up,” he said, and placed them on their backs, their weird insect legs waving in the air. Then he took a large knife, placed the tip where their heart might be
and brought the blade down through the head with a solid, queasy crunch. The legs kept moving.

  “It’s just a nerve thing,” he said. “Like cutting the head off a chicken.”

  This was the humane version, he said. The alternative was boiling them to death.

  All through the time they were making dinner, Gloria sat at the kitchen table, playing with pebbles and chicken bones like a child. So much for miracles. The paramedics had said that she had just been having a lucid period – sometimes they lasted for hours, other times a day or so. Just the other day she had been standing here making meatballs and now she was useless, aimless in her own kitchen.

  Grayson came with Joe, and brought flowers for the table. “Everyone seems so tense,” said Blue, as she arranged the spikes of white gladioli in a vase. “On edge.”

  “That will happen,” said Grayson. “It’s part of the whole Charlie experience.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure I’m looking forward to this.”

  There was a knock at the door. Grayson patted her on the shoulder. “Brace yourself,” he said.

  Charlie burst into the room like ball lightning. She heard his voice before she saw him; a rich throaty growl, punctuated with a loud crackly laugh. “...the fuckin’ humidity, man. What do you get for living in this climate? Prizes? It’s like you took Orlando and turned it up to eleven.”

  Gloria raised her head. Blue could hear Eli speaking indistinctly and Charlie muttering assent - some kind of mumbling male apology, she guessed. Hatchets buried. Grayson exhaled slowly through pursed lips and stepped out of the kitchen like he was about to walk across hot coals.

  There was a boy in the living room, not much older than Axl. This was Reese, Blue guessed - the other alpha. He looked less than impressive; in fact he looked downright sick. He was pale and sweaty and looked like he might somehow leak all over something. Not blood, but some other unpleasant, dirty looking fluid, like the stuff that had run out of the lobsters when Gabe had crunched the knife through their brains.

  Charlie saw Blue and whistled. “Well,” he said. “Who’s this fine looking creature?”