The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (28 page)

“Little pig, little pig,” said the cat lady, in that sticky, dirty-brown voice. “Let me come in.”

Blue stepped backwards into the house. Axl was right behind her, a reedy jangle of too-long limbs. “Get away from here,” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“Get
back!
”

The truth was that she had no idea what was going on, but that dream hadn’t been a dream, had it? That thing – the thing that was staring back at her through the cat lady’s eyes – had been crawling around in her own brains and bones, walking her down to the cellar like she was some kind of meat puppet.

“Not by the hair of your chinny chin chin,” said the cat lady, with a lopsided smile. “Hello, Blue; it’s good to finally meet you.”

A stranger, but not. Oh God, she had been so
stupid.
Playing around with a Ouija board while those idiots hung around outside with their mouths open, trying to suck the Holy Spirit into their bodies.

There was a scuffle behind Blue and Gloria – pushing hard for such a thin old woman – shoved in front of her. She had taken off her iron necklace.

“Get out of that woman, you bogey,” said Gloria. “Get out right now. You think she’s strong enough to carry you around?”

The various guitars had died out in a series of plinks and jangles. Now the evangelicals, with their fierce appetite for theater, had turned towards the cat lady.

“And you are?” said the cat lady, with a laugh. “Well, that’s gratitude for you.”

A preacher drew closer to the spectacle. He had shiny black hair and a shiny orange face, and the pants of his blue suit were as shiny as the rest of him. His dark magpie eyes, stretched out at the corners by a Burt Reynolds facelift, were bright with a belligerent, infantile need; someone was getting more attention than him and he didn’t like it one bit.

“I-ah call to ya Lor-ud Jeeesus...”

The cat lady ignored him. “I could leave you,” she said to Gloria. “Right back where you were before. With holes in your brain and drool down your blouse.”

“Like you did that out of the goodness of your heart, Yael,” said Gloria, and Blue’s heart skipped a beat. “You did it for the same reason you do anything; because I made you.”

The cat lady began to laugh, slow and sarcastic. Her mouth was wide and her head went back far enough to show the metal fillings in her upper back teeth. The preacher raised his hands again, the greedy gleam in his eye almost feverish now.

“Sure, Gloria,” said the cat lady. (Yael? Seriously?) “Why don’t you tell your little sorcerer’s apprentice there just what
you made me do
?”

The preacher started up again. “Inna tha nayum of Jeeesus...” His hands came down on the cat lady’s head. She glanced at him in surprised silence for a split second and then the laughter started again – Yael’s laughter. There was no way that cat lady had a laugh like that in her. It was mad and mocking all at once, and came from deep in her throat as though the disembodied thing inside her was reveling in the fleshy sensation of vocal chords vibrating.

“Is she gonna puke pea soup?” whispered Axl.

“Inna tha nayam of a-Jeeesus Ah cast thee ou-at of this wo-man,” said the preacher, his voice rising to a megachurch howl, his hands pressing down on the cat lady’s blonde head. “Be-
gone
unclean spirit! Be-gone!”

There were wails and moans and amens from the crowd. The cat lady stopped laughing and shuddered under his touch, swaying on the balls of her feet as she seemingly strained upwards towards him. She moaned and then Blue saw it – a thin stream of blood trickling down from her nose.

Gloria saw it, too. She almost fell down the porch stairs and smacked at the preacher with small, bony hands. “Get out of my way, you goddamn amateur.”

The preacher pushed at the cat lady’s head, whipping her skull back on her spine. With a grand, theatrical “A-
MEN!
” he released her, and she dropped to the grass. There was blood on her cat sweatshirt, but he didn’t see it; he was too busy bellowing to the crowd, hands in the air, giving thanks to the Lord.

Gloria got down on her knees and felt for the woman’s pulse. Blue followed her down and knew without asking that it was bad; the cat lady’s eyes were staring at nothing and one of her pupils was huge, blown.

“You piece of shit,” said Gloria. “She never did a damn thing to you.”

Blue took hold of the cat lady’s wrist, feeling for a heart beat. Oh God, the voice had said that, hadn’t it? Last night it had threatened to blow out a blood vessel in her brain, put her in a wheelchair for life. The cat lady’s wrist was still warm and soft, but it was too late. She was already broken beyond repair.

Several of the crowd knelt to carry her away; presumably they thought she had been ‘healed’.

“She’s dead, you idiots,” said Blue, sounding shrill and childish to her own ears. But the horror of it was closing in on her; so fast, so sudden, and nothing you could do about it. “She’s dead! Don’t you understand? She’s
dead!
”

*

An ambulance passed Gabe on his way home, screaming past him along the water-edged strip of highway. Eli didn’t say a word as it went, but the sound of the siren left a ringing texture to the silence in the front seat. Everyone had the same guilty thought when an ambulance flew by like that; at least it wasn’t me.

Except it was, or at least too close to home.

There were police cars parked outside Gloria’s house. Cops moved in and out of the crowd, nodding and taking notes. With panic already fizzing behind his eyes, Gabe searched the scene for the ambulance and found it, its back door a little ajar. He glimpsed a stretcher within. It was covered with black plastic. A body bag.

Eli caught his elbow; he hadn’t even realized he was about to fall.

“Let me go,” said Gabe, in one breath, and rushed forward towards the house.

Blue was sitting on the porch steps, Axl at her side. He wore the helpless expression of a kid completely out of his depth, and she didn’t look much better.

“Blue, what the hell happened?”

For an endless second she just looked at him like he’d beamed down from a spaceship in front of her, then she shook her head. “I...I don’t know.”

“Where’s Gloria?”

“Inside. The paramedics are checking her over.”

“Oh my God,” said Eli, coming up behind. “Is she okay?”

Blue nodded. “I think so.”

“Will someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?” said Gabe, nearly out of his mind with fear and confusion. There was a dead person in that ambulance and none of this made any sense whatsoever.

“It’s my fault,” said Blue.

“What?”

“We were playing with the Ouija board,” said Axl, in a guilty rush. “Then one of those goofy old Jesus ladies got possessed – like, for real. And this guy tried to cast the devil out of her and whatever and she just...died. Like literally.” He pointed to the lawn. “She was right there. Dead.”

Gabe pointed to the ambulance. “That’s her? In there?”

“Yes,” said Blue. “It was that woman I told you about. With the cat t-shirts. She had some kind of stroke or seizure and then...oh God, Gabe, it happened so fast. Like switching out a light.” She started to cry and Axl put a nervous hand on her shoulder. Gabe so badly wanted to comfort her, too, but he was still trying to put the whole thing together in his head. Right now it was the only thing he seemed to be able to do.

“She was sick?” he said. It made some sense. A lot of those people outside were elderly, some of them none too healthy. Maybe the old girl had just had a heart attack on Gloria’s lawn.

Axl shook his head. “No. I told you. She was
possessed
. Like she was saying all this weird stuff, like nursery rhymes – the three little pigs or something. And Gloria came out and told this...like ghost or whatever to get out of her head.”

“Well, this is turning out to be a trip down memory lane,” said Eli.

Axl looked up at Eli with a who-the-fuck-are-you coolness that told Gabe that this trip was going to be a shitshow from start to finish. “Wait there,” said Gabe, and went into the house with Eli. There were nails all over the hallway and the wood of the doorframe was split, like someone had taken a battering ram to it.

Gloria was sitting in the living room, a paramedic crouched at her feet. “Are you guys family?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Gabe. Gloria looked up at him. She looked dazed, but in a way that was horribly familiar. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid as to take it for granted that she might one day look at him that way again. “Look who’s here,” he said.

Gloria gazed up at Eli and smiled, slow and vacant. “Charlie,” she said, reaching out a hand.

Eli took her hand and moved round to the front of her chair. “No, it’s me,” he said. “Eli. I came down from Tavernier.”

She frowned at him for a moment. “Where’s Charlie?”

The paramedic straightened up and spoke softly to Gabe. “I’m sorry about this, man,” he said, putting a hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “It’s rough.”

“I know,” said Gabe, although he didn’t. He only had half an idea of what was going on.

“How long since she was diagnosed?”

“Diagnosed?”

“The Alzheimer’s,” said the paramedic. “It’s pretty far gone.”

“But she was fine,” said Gabe. “She was...her old self.”

The paramedic squeezed his shoulder, still talking very gently. “I know how it looks sometimes, I do. But at this stage...you shouldn’t be doing this on your own...”

His words faded out into snatches of officialdom. Outreach programs, home help, support network. And absolutely none of it made any sense to Gabe.

*

The rain stopped outside Orlando. The streetlights gleamed on the wet, turning the puddles gold.
We’re off to see the wizard.

Reese snored softly in the passenger seat. In the backseat Grayson was talking about something
National Geographic
, his voice blurring in and out with the hiss of water on the tires. Follow, follow, follow.

“What are you talking about back there?” said Charlie, determined to keep his brain awake.

“Qin Shi Huang..”

“Oh. Obviously.”

“The terracotta army guy,” said Joe.

“Oh. Him.”

“United a bunch of warring city states and created the Chinese nation,” said Grayson. “It was always going to fall apart when he died, and he knew it, so he decided it would be easier if he didn’t die.”

Charlie glanced at Reese. “Sounds a little like someone we used to know.”

“He became obsessed with living forever,” said Grayson. “Or at least becoming a God when his mortal spell was up. He’d take mercury pills and drink these weird concoctions full of crushed pearls and precious metals, thinking they’d turn his flesh into something divine.”

Joe, folded up like a lawn-chair beside him, stirred. “But they just poisoned him?”

Charlie caught Grayson’s eye in the rear view mirror; this was all a little close to the bone, but if Grayson knew that then he was giving nothing away. He just kept rambling on in that teacherish way that Charlie guessed was his way of soothing himself.

“When he finally died his chief minister arranged for a cartful of rotting fish to be dragged behind the Emperor’s palanquin, to disguise the smell of the corpse and buy him time to figure out how to prevent chaos.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t remember, exactly. But I have a feeling it didn’t.”

Reese yawned. The inside of his mouth looked too dark and his tongue was a strange shade of gray. When he moved he released the smell of sour sweat from his folds.

“A most ancient and fishlike smell,” Charlie said.

Grayson leaned forward. “Hmm?”

“Nothing. Just a brainfart.” Something Gloria had used to read to him. “You guys want to stop for coffee or anything?”

“No,” said Joe, his voice uncharacteristically hard. “Let’s keep moving.”

19

The bar was on the edge of a marina, with a terrace fringed with cute little green railings. The building itself was a pale pink stucco, the entrance to the apartment up a winding flight of steps at the rear. At first glance, it looked like what it was – the property of a man who had spent his whole life falling on his feet – but then Charlie realized the terrace was empty. It was the middle of the afternoon and the surrounding restaurants were heaving with late lunchtime customers, but there was nobody at Eli’s.

The sign on the door was turned to CLOSED.

“Wait there,” Charlie told Reese, but Reese shook his head.

“No way. I’m coming up with you.”

“Reese, this is personal.”

“I don’t give a shit. You’re not leaving me alone to get turned into barbeque. Dad
said so
.”

It would have been unkind to point out that Dad was a fucking doornail, but that wasn’t why Charlie held off on doing so; he simply couldn’t be bothered to get into it right now. His brain was already firing on all cylinders trying to figure out what to say to Eli after all these years, and while Lutesinger seemed to have forgiven him, Charlie knew he couldn’t be assured of even a veneer of civility from the likes of Gabe Arnot.

“Fine,” he said, and hopped up the steps to the door. He knocked and waited, his heart speeding up as he heard footsteps approach.

Eli opened the door. He looked shorter than Charlie remembered, but somehow fleshier, the sun slanting across the front of his hair and lighting up a couple of silver ones among the black, along with one of those asshole white eyebrow hairs, the ones that seemed to delight in growing longer and thicker than all the others, the better to proclaim your impending geezerdom to the whole wide world.

“Well, holy fucking shit,” said Eli slowly.

“Hey, bro.”

“Are you kidding me? What the hell are
you
doing here?”

“We got a little situation,” said Charlie, gesturing to Reese, who was still catching his breath on the landing below. “Up north. I guess you heard Lyle bit the big one, huh?”

Eli blinked down the steps at the other alpha. White eyebrow hairs aside, his eyes were the same shade of panty-remover blue that Charlie remembered. And those lady-killer eyelashes. Jesus, he should have been up to his ears in pussy, but here he was with a CLOSED sign up while the girls sipped their mojitos on other people’s terraces.