Bleeding Violet

by Dia Reeves

  He looked glad to see me, and as I beheld his smiling face, it seemed impossible that he could have carried out the pitiless slaying I’d witnessed Saturday, impossible that he could be both a hero and a killer.

  People were surprisingly complex.

  “I missed you at school today,” I told him.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said. “The Mortmaine won’t need me till afternoon.”

  “How are you able to skip school like that?”

  He didn’t shrug exactly, just shifted his shoulders as if he wanted me to see how broad they were. “It’s not skipping. I don’t even have to go to school. It’s a pain in the ass trying to do schoolwork and fight the forces of evil. I’m the only initiate who bothers.”

  “Why do you bother?”

  “I hate being stupid more than I hate school.” He smiled at me. His lips looked bitable. I hated that he hadn’t kissed me good night when he’d dropped me home Saturday, but after getting to second base with me twice in one night, maybe he hadn’t seen the point.

  “I was gone call you,” he said. Something in his voice brought me over in goose bumps.

  “Good. Saturday was … fun?” The pre-Melissa parts had been.

  “I thought you wasn’t into him.” Petra’s interruption disoriented me; I’d forgotten other people were crowding around.

  “I thought he was too beastly for you,” Petra said, wilting against Wyatt’s side in a way that grated, as though she didn’t have enough backbone to sit up on her own.

  “He is beastly,” I said, flashing back to Wyatt’s dagger jabbing into Bob’s nose. “In part. I was just thinking about how complex people can be. How the good and the bad can mix up and make these intricate layers.”

  “Qué una egghead,” said Petra, her broad accent doing weird things to the Spanish words.

  “Really,” said Lecy, agreeing with Pet. She gave me an assessing look, a wreath of orange tiger lilies decorating her dark hair. “You’re too blond to be that smart.”

  “Sunlight alters my hair.” I pulled the length of my spiraling ponytail over my shoulder so they could study it. “Some days it looks blond, other days it looks red, but it’s actually brown.” I frowned at the sun. “It’s a very confusing phenomenon.”

  “Such an egghead.”

  Wyatt poked Petra in the side. “You’re as much of an egghead as she is, Miss Honor Roll. How is that an insult?”

  “I wouldn’t insult Hanna,” said Petra, as though wounded to the quick. “I barely know her.”

  I had to focus on something else, anything but the two of them bantering like an old married couple, so I peeked at Carmin’s list. “What’s that for?”

  Carmin was stressing big-time, tugging the tie at his neck as if he meant to strangle himself. “I’m trying to figure out who to invite to my birthday party, but it’s impossible. How the hell do I know so many people?” he asked me, as if I had the answer.

  Since I had no answer for him, I asked a question of my own. “Why isn’t my name on your list?”

  He gave me a considering look, his eyes almost the same shade of blue as the cobalt frames of his glasses. “Well, you did fight off that lure. …”

  “Who fought off the lure?” Wyatt asked.

  “Don’t be a glory hog, Wyatt,” said Lecy. “The Mortmaine don’t hold the patent for bravery. Go ahead and add Hanna’s name, Carmin.”

  With an almost unholy amount of satisfaction, I watched Carmin scratch my name into his already overcrowded list.

  I was joining the herd.

  “What’s with the guest list, anyway?” Wyatt asked. “You gone hold the party at the country club?”

  “Don’t be like that,” said Petra. “This is a big deal. Carmin’s sweet sixteen party. He’s gone have a little tiara and everything.”

  Carmin flipped Petra the bird, and someone screamed.

  The screamer was on the other side of the amphitheater, but I could barely see past the fount of water, let alone the growing crowd of people standing above on the square.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked carefully, unsure whether the sound had been hallucinatory.

  “What?” said Carmin. “The scream?” He waved his hand dismissively. “It’s just a suicide door. Tweener-wieners always go apeshit over ’em.”

  “It’s so junior high,” said Lecy derisively.

  “Suicide door?”

  “I told you about all the doors,” Wyatt said. “But suicide doors are special. Only the Mayor can open one, and she only opens ’em for cowards.” He laughed. “She’s gone open one for Pet any day now.”

  Petra slapped Wyatt hard across the face.

  In the silence that followed, Petra looked more shocked by the slap than we did. Certainly more than Wyatt did.

  He smiled at her. Smiled. “I wish you’d do that more often.”

  Petra flushed all over, blinked her waif’s eyes at him. “Really?”

  “It’s good to see you show some spirit,” he said, in the same tone that had given me goose bumps. But he wasn’t talking to me.

  Ex-girlfriend my ass.

  I hopped up and followed the crowd in the direction of the scream.

  I doubted anyone noticed my absence.

  At the colonnade between the hotel and the courthouse, a deep mahogany door with a silver handle stood a foot off the ground, attached to nothing. I shoved through the crowd, wanting to see this oddity from every angle, but no matter how I looked at it, it remained a door hovering freely in the air.

  A group of eleven- or twelve-year-old boys were goading and shoving one another before it. “You open it.”

  “You first.”

  “No, you.”

  “I’ll open it,” I said.

  The crowd immediately silenced and parted until I stood alone before the floating door, like a girl in a surreal painting. The silver handle was icy, despite the heat, and I had to strain to swing the door open on its invisible hinges.

  A man hung by his neck inside a gray space the size of a coffin, his face blue, his tongue out as though he was making an ugly face at me, as though I’d put the noose around his neck. The rope wasn’t attached to anything; it disappeared beyond the outline of the door.

  I wasn’t attached either. I could have floated away on the slightest breeze.

  The kids behind me were squealing. I slammed the door, thinking I’d traumatized them, but the squeals were happy squeals. Horror movie squeals. Many of the tweens waited impatiently behind me for their turn to open the door, like it was all a game.

  I walked back to the amphitheater as the cathedral bells struck. It was four o’clock. Broad daylight, yet it felt like three a.m. I gazed at the little kids splashing barelegged in the fountain below, mere yards from a dead body shoved in a door. Not a care in the world.

  I sat well away from Wyatt and his friends, but suddenly they were all around me. “Have some of my smoothie,” said Lecy, offering me a cold plastic cup full of orange slush. “It’ll calm your nerves.”

  “Why?” Carmin asked, curious. “Did you put gin in it or something?”

  “Yeah, Carmin.” Lecy rolled her eyes. “Tons.”

  “Can I have some?”

  “She’s kidding, you retard,” said Petra, putting her arm around me. Petra’s embrace would have shocked the hell out of me, but my shock had been used up for the day. “She’s shaking,” she told the others. Then she said to me, “Maybe one day I’ll take you to Evangeline Park. That’s where I always go when I get scared.”

  “Whenever you get scared?” said Carmin. “They must make you pay rent up there.”

  “Ha, ha, asshole.” Petra poked her tongue out at him.

  “Hanna don’t need to go anywhere,” Wyatt said. “She’s tough.”

  “You really are,” Petra assured me, as though I’d denied it. “I thought for sure you’d run back to Finland after seeing that corpse.”

  “Finland has corpses too,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like it belon
ged to me. “My poppa’s buried there. He died in our summerhouse in Turku. From bone cancer. I took him his breakfast one day and saw him just lying there. And it wasn’t like what the doctors said. He wasn’t at peace. He didn’t look peaceful; he looked weird and shrunken and empty. Like snake-shed skin.”

  “Exactly,” Wyatt said, sounding worried about me. “A dead body’s just meat. No reason to get upset over meat.”

  “Meat?” I scanned the square, tried to encompass the breadth of it. “Jesus Christ, where did I move to?”

  “So your mind’s finally blown?” asked Wyatt. I thought he’d be disgusted by such a transy reaction, but he only seemed amused.

  Amused!

  “Maybe a little, Wyatt. Maybe the idea of living in a town full of magic and monsters is worthy of at least a small blowout!”

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Carmin said, as though it were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of.

  “That door was standing in the middle of nothing—”

  “Nothing that you could see.”

  “—and a man was inside it, but that wasn’t magic?”

  “No.” Carmin was adamant.

  “So what was it? Advanced physics?”

  I watched the four of them exchange a helpless look, the kind of look you reserve for a kid who wants you to tell her why she can’t see the wind.

  “We’re Porterenes, Hanna,” said Wyatt. “Doorkeepers. Death is just another kind of door.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Early Wednesday evening found me again in Rosalee’s room, but I wasn’t being nosy this time. True, I was rifling through her tiny wooden dresser drawers, but I was looking for something specific. It wasn’t my fault her belongings kept distracting me: her bottle of Chanel No. 22—I hadn’t even known there were other numbers!—her bottle of lavender nail polish that was the same shade as my gauzy, sleeveless dress, which cinched so tightly at my waist that if I wanted to take a deep breath, I had to breathe from my chest. A pain to wear, but Wyatt would like it—what else mattered?

  As I tried on a pair of Rosalee’s silver drop earrings, I spied the red box on her nightstand. Also not what I was looking for, but maybe what I was looking for was inside the box. That’s what I told myself as I lifted it, noting the almost invisible golden inlay, the puzzlelike design. By the time I figured out how to open the box—

  “Hanna!” Rosalee, in black yoga pants and ladybug slippers, stood in the doorway holding a glass of water.

  I almost dropped the box, more startled that she had spoken at all, even to yell. It had been ages since I’d heard her voice.

  “Put it down.” She snatched the box from me before I had a chance to obey. “You ever go near this box again, you die.”

  “Literally?” I asked, staring at my hands. Portero was so strange, I couldn’t take anything for granted.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.” Rosalee locked the box away in the nightstand drawer. “What’re you doing in here?”

  “I’ve decided to have sex with Wyatt,” I told her. “I was looking for condoms.”

  Rosalee drank her entire glass of water in two gulps and didn’t say anything for a long time. Just when I’d decided she’d gone back into silent mode, she said, “That might not be a bad idea. If you put out for him, maybe he’ll look out for you. Tit for tat, so to speak.”

  “That’s such a call girl rationale,” I snapped. “Not everyone uses sex for barter.”

  She smiled down at her empty glass, a secret, bitter smile. “Unlike me?”

  “Very unlike you.”

  “I’m not a call girl.”

  Now I was the one in silent mode.

  “If I charged for sex,” Rosalee said, the bitter smile lingering like a canker sore, “I’d live in a mansion.” She unearthed a box of condoms from her nightstand and handed the whole thing over to me. “I translate manuscripts. German to English.”

  As I stood waiting for her to disclose more precious information about herself, she said, “You need anything else? Lube? Instructions? Handcuffs?”

  “No.”

  “Then get out.”

  I thought about what Rosalee had assumed about Wyatt and me, how she thought I was trying to use him for protection the way Petra had suggested I should. I guess I was using him, not for protection, but as a way to connect. Even a simple physical connection would be more than I had now.

  I was tired of feeling cut off from everyone.

  Wyatt had bought me a snow cone at Fountain Square, where we’d agreed to meet, and we now wandered the streets sucking raspberry ice in the warm, muggy twilight.

  “I think we should have our sex talk,” I said, bumping against his shoulder. “I think it’s time.”

  He fell over laughing. Not quite the reaction I was expecting.

  “That’s almost word for word what Ma said to me when I turned thirteen,” he explained, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  “You got the sex talk from your mother?”

  “Yeah. I guess she didn’t think Pop was up to the task.” He grimaced. “So to speak.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t feel like that toward you.” I looked him over. “Not motherly.”

  He pulled a purple flower off a crepe myrtle tree and tucked it behind my left ear. “So let’s talk.”

  We trashed the cones and left the busy street for a quieter one, the only street in town that fall had managed to infiltrate.

  “You mean talk about all our diseases and partners and all that?” he asked as we kicked through the drifts of decaying leaves littering the sidewalk.

  “You’ve had diseases?”

  “Hell, no! You?”

  “Of course not. STDs are for losers. But I have had lots of practice. So much that it’s not really practice at this point. It’s more like art.”

  Wyatt regarded me, curious. “How long you been practicing, braggart?”

  I smiled. “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, during Juhannus.”

  “Yu what?”

  “Juhannus.” I thought about it, but it didn’t translate into anything meaningful. “It’s a day in June—the longest day of the year.”

  “The summer solstice?”

  “That’s it!” Maybe it did translate. “In Finland, the summer solstice is a holiday. Poppa and I went back every year to celebrate, but we went back that year mainly because Poppa was dying, and he wanted to spend his last days in his homeland. The problem was, I didn’t want to spend the whole holiday watching him die, so I found this boy.

  “His name was Mika. He was upright, like you. Upright and uptight. I had it in my head that I wanted my first time to be in the sauna, but Mika thought the idea was sacrilegious—you’d have to be Finnish to really understand that part. But long story short, I told him my way or the highway, so he gave in and did it my way. And I almost died.”

  “Why?” Wyatt asked, as if he expected the answer to enrage him, like he thought Mika had held a knife to my throat or something.

  “It wasn’t anything Mika did; it was the sauna. Having sex in a thousand-degree room is not a good idea. I passed out in the middle of it, and Mika had to drag me out and dump me into the lake to revive me.” I laughed. “But that almost killed me too; I almost drowned.”

  “Sex and death,” said Wyatt good-naturedly. “Like hot dogs and mustard. Hey, wait!” he said, when I would have crossed the street. “Let’s keep going this way. There’s a shop I need to stop at.”

  “It’s your turn,” I said, as he draped his arm around my shoulders.

  “I was fifteen.” He smiled in remembrance. “Shoko was my first.”

  “Ugh!” I pushed him away.

  “What the hell?”

  “Shoko? That mean green woman from administration? She’s, like, ten years older than you!”

  “Four.” He looked thoughtful. “You think she looks old? I think she looks hot.”

  “Of course she looks hot, damn it! That’s not the point. Why lose
your virginity to her? She’s so bossy. I bet she ordered you around the whole time.”

  “You don’t even know her.” When I just stared at him, he ducked his head. “Okay, she’s a little bossy, but she’s cool! A great fighter—really knows her shit. She took me on my first hunt, and I was so excited. …” His ears turned red. “That’s why we ended up doing it, right there in the dark park. She figured it’d be the quickest way to calm me down.”

  “Sounds real romantic,” I said, and kicked some thoughtless kid’s half-deflated football the hell out of my way. “Are you and Shoko still—?”

  “No way,” Wyatt assured me. “I have better control of my nerves than I used to. Better control of my hormones, too.”

  “So who else?”

  He laughed. “Jesus, Hanna, you want a hit list?”

  “Petra?”

  The laughter dried up. He shrugged. “Yeah.” When I opened my mouth, he hurried on, “But I don’t wanna talk about her.”

  “Why not?” I demanded. “Is it too painful?”

  “Me and Pet are just friends, Hanna. Seriously.”

  By this time we had reached a tiny herbal shop, and Wyatt disappeared inside, leaving me to brood about questions like, if Wyatt was seriously over Petra, why wouldn’t he talk about her? Was the sex with her so pure and sacred he didn’t want to sully it by describing it to me?

  A few minutes later, Wyatt came out with a package wrapped in brown paper.

  “Good thing we came down this street,” he said. “I almost forgot I needed to get some stuff for the hunt.”

  I pulled him to a stop, my hurt feelings and unanswered questions scattering on the wind. “Our hunt?”

  “Yeah. I’m working on it.”

  “When are we going?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Before next Sunday?” The two weeks would be up by then.

  “Look,” he said, exasperated. “I’m having to sneak past a shitload of rules for you. Be patient, okay?”

  What choice did I have? “Okay. I trust you.”

  He looked startled. “You do?”

  “Sure. I thought you were nice the first time I saw you. Nice boys tend to be trustworthy.”