The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (12 page)

“This doesn’t happen very often, Reese,” Grayson was saying. “You know how it usually skips a generation. It’s not often so cut and dry as alpha being handed down from father to son...”

“...I don’t
wanna
be alpha.”

“I know that. But this is what we have to work with. And you won’t be alone. But it’s going to go a whole lot easier if we can win over the swamp wolves. They respect family.”

That was one way of putting it. Charlie heard Reese snort and then there was a bang on the door. Somewhere a new voice joined the others; Big Jim, Charlie guessed. A five foot nothing graybeard with Manson family eyes and a head balder than a porn star’s snatch. Jim knew the score. Like Grayson, he was old enough to remember the bad times.

Charlie felt something solid under his fingers and his own heart skipped a beat; finally he was close. The smells of blood and poison and the beginnings of rot swam up to meet his sensitive nose and he reeled for a second, leaning back from the edge of the tub. He vaguely registered doors opening and closing in the next room, but then he tasted the tang of metal on the edge of the blood. Not the regular iron. Something colder and sharper and all his. He closed his eyes and waited for someone else to smell it, waited for the whole thing to unravel there and then. In a way it would feel good to tell.

Instead Grayson tapped on the bathroom door. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, just dandy.” Charlie fastened his fingers around the heart and pulled. It didn’t budge. Great. More tubes.

“It’s ironic, really.”

Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Really?” he said, with slow, simmering patience. “You picked a fine time for musing, Alanis.”

“Why?” said Grayson. The door opened. Charlie didn’t look up from what he was doing, knowing that if he turned away he would never want to turn back. He heard Grayson gag and step back behind the door.

“Oh,” said Grayson. “Oh, fuck me.”

“In your dreams, Sugarplum.”

Grayson cleared his throat loudly. He was breathing slow and loud like someone trying very hard not to throw up. “Oh God,” he said. “Why did I look?”

“Yeah, you just clutch your pearls out there,” said Charlie, feeling something thick connecting back there. Come on – this had to be it? Surely. How many things did a heart actually connect to anyway? “I’ll just be in here digging out the goddamn giblets.”

He nudged something and greenish fluid oozed out of a neighboring organ – the stomach, Charlie guessed. The telltale metal tang rose up over the sour smell. “So?” he said, determined to keep talking. Businesslike. Like he was tinkering under the hood of a car. “What’s ironic?”

“That we’re even making him do this,” said Grayson, from the other side of the door. “All those years Lyle derided the swamp packs as halfwits and inbreds and now we’re kowtowing to
their
customs in the hope that they won’t spot an opportunity and recycle the lot of us as hog roasts.”

“He made fun of them because he was scared of them,” said Charlie. Long pig. Wasn’t that what they called it? The room swayed as the stomach fluid oozed away into the maze of Lyle’s other parts. Goddamn, what a piece of work is man, as Gloria liked to say. What a sack of guts and gristle and all kinds of nasty. And who knew where the rest went when all that was left was just meat?

“Can you hear him?” Charlie asked. If anyone knew it was Grayson.

“Who?”

“Lyle.”

“No,” said Grayson. “Not yet. Someone killed a hooker in room five and she’s not happy about it. Apparently heroin jones is twice as bad when you no longer have a body to feel it. Think phantom limb itching, but all over.”

“That’s fucking creepy.”

“I’m used to it.”

Charlie’s hands cramped inside of Lyle’s chest cavity, and for a panicky second he thought he’d never get his thumb to go back to its proper position and it would be caught behind a rib forever. And the stink under his nose would only get worse.

He wrenched his hands free with a hideous sucky sound, and reeled back before those baby carrots came right back up on a tide of sweet tea. His hands were red to the elbows and beyond, the blood so deep under his fingernails that he knew he’d be looking at the clotted little crescents long after the rest of Lyle had gone to the gators.

“You had that all your life? That Haley Joel Osment thing?” Charlie said, determined to talk about something other than flesh. Spirit would do just right.

“Yep. Even before I knew I had the werewolf gene.”

“So? You think Lyle will show up?”

“Why?” asked Grayson. “Are you expecting him for some reason?”

A lot of reasons. The pills were still in Lyle’s bag, but nobody would look twice at them; those homeopathic things were nothing more than overpriced sugar pills. Besides, he’d been old. Fifty was ancient by werewolf standards, long past the age where you could expect to wake up from a rough moon with dog brains or the wrong liver.

“I don’t know,” said Charlie, choosing his words carefully. He thought of angry ghosts, chairs knocked over, light bulbs swinging for no reason. No, Lyle wasn’t here. If he was they would know about it. “I guess I’m expecting him to be pissed. He hung on for so long, you know? Stubborn.”

Charlie looked back at the body, a skinny bare arm hanging over the edge of the tub, one eye already starting to sink back into its socket and the other a half-lidded glare. Belligerent old bastard; even in death he wasn’t giving an inch. “Right. I’m going back in. That thing has
got
to come out.”

“Try not to cut it too much.”

“Yeah. Thanks for the advice. You want to get in here and give it a shot?”

Grayson went quiet. Charlie dug in again. It was cool inside Lyle now, like butcher meat left out overnight.

“You know what was strange?” said Grayson.

“I have no idea.”

“Lyle’s place. The last time I was there it was silent.”

“Fascinating.” Something gave in there. Was this it?

Grayson ignored his sarcasm. “Not a whisper. Nothing. No resonance, no voices. I know it was a relatively new house but you still get a background noise, even if humans haven’t lived and died on that exact spot before. Like a hum, like something plugged in to life. Gophers, earthworms, anything. I expect even bacteria make it on some level.”

The heart came away in Charlie’s hand. Finally.

“And?” he said, staring at the cold lump of muscle. It was threaded with thick ropey veins and its shallow valleys were clotted here and there with yellow fat. Lyle had always gone heavy on the red meat. Once again Charlie wished his ghost were standing here to watch this; those sausage links weren’t so fucking funny now, were they, Lyle? Look at the mess they made of your old pump.

“There was
nothing
in Lyle’s place,” said Grayson. “Like something had come roaring in there and scared away everything living and dead. And when it was gone even the flies were afraid to come back.”

The hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck rose. He knew the roaring thing only as a prankster, a tipper of chairs and a smasher of plates, but he knew who had sent it. She was the only one who had that kind of mojo. All that time he’d thought Lyle had a cranky prejudice against wolf witches. They were a joke to him – nagging women, whiny bitches.

Except it was just like the swamp wolves; he mocked them because he was shit scared of them. Especially her.

“I got it,” Charlie said. “Get everyone in here.” He set the heart down on a blue plastic plate. Not exactly the silver platter on which Reese had everything else handed to him in his life, but it would do. Lyle’s heart was already turning the color of an old scab, and if Charlie breathed in through his nose he thought he could just taste the faintest, metallic taint in the back of his throat. He tilted his head, sure he could see a gleam in there, a thread twisting through the fat like silver spun through blown glass.

But it wasn’t. It was just the light shining on the wet.

He picked up the now pink cake of guest soap and scrubbed until the thing folded into a mushy half between his fingers. The label said gardenia but all he could smell was blood, bile and metal. Just another quack remedy in Lyle’s arsenal of potions. Nobody had noticed it there. And nobody gave a shit for wolf witches, pack spirits or those old stories about McBride. Perhaps if they had they’d have remembered that silver was as fatal to werewolves as arsenic was to regular people.

The door opened again and Charlie could hear Reese crying in the next room. Wah wah, I don’t wanna. Lyle’s evil, squinting eye stared back and Charlie imagined he could see disappointment beyond the sinking lid. Poetic justice, of a sort. He retrieved the red washcloth and covered Lyle’s face. “You did this to yourself,” he said, under his breath. “And if you see him? Tell him I said hi.”

He walked out of the bathroom, carrying the plate ahead of him. Reese covered his eyes when he saw it, but his exit was blocked. The witnesses had arrived – Lyle’s various underbosses and shitkickers. Big Jim, Mike the Bike, Psycho Dan.

Someone murmured behind them and the captains leapt out of the way. Reese kept on sobbing, like someone pretending to be a baby too young to understand. Everyone else fell silent.

The old swamper was barely as tall as Big Jim. He leaned heavily on a knotty cane, and either side of him - like bookends - were two youngsters. Their flat, blank faces were so similar that they might have been brothers. Or cousins. Or both.

“Stop crying,” Grayson whispered, but Reese didn’t.

“This ‘un?” said the old man, looking at Reese. His eyes were dark sparks set back against so many wrinkles that his crow’s feet had crow’s feet of their own. One side of his face sat higher than the other and when he spoke Charlie saw why; the old swamp king had a wolf sized fang on one side.

“That’s him,” said Charlie, and waited for the old man to catch the whiff of metal on the air, to cry out and cry foul and for all hell to break loose.

Only it didn’t. Instead the old man took his seat in the pleather chair, helped by the
Deliverance
twins. He folded his hands over the head of his cane, and as he did so Charlie saw that he had too many fingers, and a couple of them looked as though they had too many joints. All three had the same eyes, alive with an animal cleverness that made Charlie feel soft and trivial. They looked through Reese, like they could see he was weak and lazy and none-too-bright.

Deep down Charlie knew this was a farce; they’d never accept Reese as alpha.

Reese gagged as Charlie set the plate down in front of him. “I
can’t
...” he said, white to the lips.

“Do it,” said Charlie, staring back into those three pairs of black, gleaming eyes. He reached behind him, screening the motion of his arm behind Reese’s bulk. He heard Grayson’s breath hitch as he fished the gun from the back of his jeans, but the Brit sensibly said nothing. It was going to have to be under duress, but the swamp wolves didn’t need to know that.

Reese had stopped crying, as if on some smarter, unReeselike level he knew that his theatrical sobs weren’t going to get him out of this. Instead he sat still and white, like something carved out of lard. With a barely perceptible motion, he shook his head.

“Do it,” Charlie said, again. He nosed the gun against Reese’s flesh, pushing into where a thinner person might have felt the barrel against his spine. A new sharp smell joined that of death, and with ever deepening disgust Charlie saw liquid puddling out of the hems of Reese’s pants. There was no way the swamp wolves hadn’t smelled that; either way this went down they were fucked. The whole purpose of the exercise was for Reese to show strength, and the kid didn’t have any to show.

Charlie cocked the gun, letting everyone hear the click. Three pairs of black, beady eyes glittered back at him, watching, testing. “Do it,” he told Reese, in an undertone. “Or I’ll fucking shoot you right here.”

Reese picked up the heart with both hands. He was shaking like a landslide as he lifted the raw muscle to his mouth. He made a strange, soft, gagging batsqueak in the back of his throat and then - hallelujah and praise the fucking Lord - he sank his teeth into Lyle’s heart.

It squished.

*

Blue had never meant to fall asleep.

It was the same dream she often had, one that had always come in hurricane season ever since she was old enough to remember. She was sitting on the living room floor of the house in New Orleans, watching the weather forecast on television, staring at the time-lapse swirl of a storm as it moved closer to the gulf. It wasn’t so much the picture that was familiar as the feeling - the hopeless, helpless fear that this thing was
coming
. And nobody - not Mom, not prayers, not even locking the closet door and checking it three times - could stop it.

She told herself to wake up. Somewhere under her thin, curdled sleep was the awareness that she was in trouble and needed to deal with it, but her eyelids had gotten heavier and heavier and then...boom. Back in time. When she was little she had always thought the storms looked like poached eggs, when Regina spun the boiling water around in the pan but the egg wasn’t quite fresh enough. Wisps of white like whirling clouds. Oh, we’re not in Kansas any more - and you have to wake up.

The egg turned into a donut, sizzling and swelling in boiling fat. Slather of white frosting, pink sprinkles.

In her mind’s eye she saw red - liquid and glossy - and for a moment she thought it was raspberry sauce, but then she saw it all dripping down the side of a bath. Circling the drain of a sink. Blood. So much blood.

“Hitchcock used chocolate sauce,” said Gabe, who had appeared at her side from nowhere. “For blood in the shower scene. Red didn’t photograph dark enough in black and white.”

“Who died?” she said. A gore streaked shower curtain obscured the upper body, but she could see a hairy white arm dangling through the semi-transparent plastic. A kneecap peeked up over the edge of the tub, but Gabe had moved behind her and his mouth was on her shoulder, his fingertips working down under the waistband of her pants. And she knew that when he touched her it was going to be better than anything ever, better than weed, better than ice-cream, better than life. All she had to do to have him was sink a little deeper. Just give in. Just sleep.