Bleeding Violet (16 page)

An unearthly chorus of insectile chittering greeted me. The greenish cave was full of motion, hardheads scrambling to and fro like cockroaches caught in the light. Actually the hardheads looked more like fleshy scorpions than insects, only instead of tails curling up from their bodies, their cone-shaped heads did, whipping to and fro on the long stalks of their necks like malevolent wrecking balls.

Wyatt and Shoko flew among the creatures, attacking them while simultaneously defending themselves against the hardheads’ rock-breaking skulls. The two of them moved with such quick, easy grace that, if not for the spurting blood, they could have been dancing.

Wyatt, his fists curled around the handles of his push daggers, stabbed one hardhead after another in the neck or back, while Shoko bashed them on the backs of their curved necks with her swinging flails.

“Hanna!” called Wyatt, far down below me, alien in the green light. “Kill the queen!”

Queen? My view of the cave and its inhabitants was limited and would remain so until I got free of this hole. As I attempted to wiggle out, a buzzing screech sounded behind me.

I turned and realized I didn’t have to look for the queen; I was
in
her, poking up from her school-bus-length back. She was ten times bigger than the others, her cone-shaped head nearly half the size of my own body and glinting with a hard metallic sheen.

“For Christ’s sake, Hanna!” Wyatt screamed. “Kill her!”

I had to laugh at the absurdity of it, my upper body shiver
ing in the coolness of the cave, even as my lower half baked within the queen’s warm body. Might as well ask an ant to kill an elephant.

But I tried. I brought the ax down onto her back.

An ugly screech bubbled from the queen’s sickeningly wide mouth and unnerved me. But when she whipped her head at me, I was ready with the ax; I swung it right at her skull … and the blade snapped clean off the handle.

The force of the blow numbed my hands, and the numbness brought me alive all over, alive and ready to stay that way. When the queen swung at me again—her head wasn’t even scratched!—I took a deep breath and ducked back inside her.

I no longer had the ax, but I had built-in tools—my hands, with their lovely opposable thumbs, perfect for snatching and ripping anything that pulsed. Deep inside the queen, I rediscovered the childhood joy of destruction. With no Lego Space Station or Malibu Dream House to crush underfoot, the queen’s organs made an excellent stand-in.

A long, messy time later, the queen quivered around me and fell, an impact I was cushioned against, encased as I was in her flesh.

I popped out of the hole in her body, the pleasurable zing
of destruction still speeding along my veins, but the vibe in the cave had changed; the hardheads shambled aimlessly, their piss and vinegar lost. No fun at all.

Wyatt and Shoko stayed busy, however, picking off the now tame creatures, putting them out of their misery. Sort of. Wyatt was a considerate executioner, usually requiring only one blow to their necks to fell them, while Shoko left several twitching in agony.

I wriggled free of the queen, covered in goo and trying not to stumble in the loose piles of animal bones, wet rock, and mounds of hardhead eggs. Wyatt bounded over to me, dodging long pillars of color where the stalagmites and stalactites had grown together.

“So how was it?” he asked.

I puked.

Wyatt and Shoko laughed.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s intense, right?”

Shoko swatted me on the back. “Especially once you get past that first stomach.”

I wiped my mouth and reached to straighten my dress out of habit, but it was a slimy ruin; I straightened my shoulders instead. “Do either of you have another ax?”

“Nope,” said Wyatt. “Just this.” He pulled the machete from the back of his pants.

I took it and stumbled back to the dead queen. Her long, whippy neck was surprisingly easy to saw through, considering the hard head it had had to support.

Wyatt and Shoko watched knowingly, like maybe they’d hacked their own share of trophy heads.

I lifted the queen’s head and balanced it against my hip. It was heavy and so wide I could barely wrap both arms around it, but I was determined to carry it home with me, even if I had to roll it through the streets like a barrel.

After destroying all the eggs, we climbed out of the stone-bordered tunnel, and then out of the dark park, crossing the street back to St. Michael’s. The night seemed magically bright after the crushing darkness of the woods, the stars like disco lights, everything abnormally loud, as though the volume had been turned to eleven: Shoko’s slow heartbeat, the click and buzz of gears inside Wyatt that made him tick.

Because he wasn’t human. He couldn’t be.

“So how we gone celebrate our victory, kids?” Wyatt asked at the truck, which glowed like swamp fire in the lit parking lot.

Shoko leaned against the fender like a chick in a lowrider magazine, only way overdressed. “There’s another hive upsquare we can tackle,” she said.

“
Hell
, yeah.” Wyatt grinned at me. “You wanna help us with the new hive?”

“You killed me.”

His grin faltered.

“You made me drink that stuff. You killed me.”

He rolled his eyes, like my death had meant nothing. It hadn’t, of course, not to him. Robots couldn’t feel. “It only seemed like it,” he said. “And it was just to fool the hardheads. How else were you gone do any damage? You’re not a fighter.”

“I can’t believe Poppa warned
me
not to hurt
you
!” I hitched the head higher on my hip and stormed off.

“Where’re you going?”

“Away from you, murderer!” I began to jog, the heels of my boots ringingly loud against the sidewalk.

“You can’t run around in the streets this close to the dark park! Are you crazy?”

“What do you care? Afraid I’ll get killed?
By someone else?
Do you own that privilege, Wyatt?”

He grabbed me from behind and hustled me across the street toward the dark park. Probably to push me in with all the monsters and let them finish me off. When I whirled on him, to clobber him with the head, I realized I was about to take my anger out on Shoko, not Wyatt.

I also realized that she and I weren’t anywhere near the dark park, but down the street from my house. She must have taken me through a hidden door; I hadn’t even noticed.

But my stomach noticed. The disorientation made me hurl again.

Shoko watched me unload all over the sidewalk, impassively, and when I was done she marched me up the street to my house.

She said, “I don’t give a damn one way or another, but Wyatt would be crushed if something happened to you, and then he’d be no good to us.” She looked me over. “It’d be a shame to lose a good fighter over something stupid.”

She pushed me toward my porch, and I nearly toppled over, the weight of the head unbalancing me. She waited for me to go inside, so I did just to get away from her.

Rosalee sat in the living room, reading. Pretending to read. Whenever she was home and I was out, she always waited up
for me in the living room. Seeing her reminded me why I had put myself through all the past weeks of danger and weirdness. Because I
knew
she cared deep down, and now she could admit it.

“Catch.” I heaved the head at her, and she dodged out of the way. A good thing, as something in the chair snapped beneath the weight of the hard head.

Rosalee stared at it wide-eyed, watched it leak onto the chair. “What’s that?”

“I went on a hunt with the Mortmaine.” Just Shoko and Wyatt, who was only an initiate, but Rosalee didn’t need to know everything. “I killed a hardhead queen. That’s her head. Now you know I can take care of myself. Now you can stop treating me like a ghost.”

Rosalee put her hands over her mouth, the way beauty queens do just before they burst into tears. Had I moved her to tears?

I reached for her. “Momma?”

Her hands fell away from her face. She wasn’t even close to tears. Just the same stony expression as she grabbed my slimy arm and pulled me toward the front door.

“Where are we going?”

“Dallas. I’m driving you there right now.”

I felt as though I were inside the queen again, upside-down and suffocating.
“Why?”

Rosalee brought me to a halt and shook me. “You went alone into the dark park—”

“I wasn’t alone!”

“—and fought a monster! You think that’s what I want? You think that makes me happy? That after Joosef went through all the trouble to bring you up right, two weeks with me and you become
this
?”

She took me in, the goo and filth. “Maybe you think this is an improvement, but I don’t. You’re going back to Ulla. I’ll work something out with her so she’ll—”

“Aunt Ulla doesn’t want me!”

“I don’t care what she wants! I don’t care what
you
want!” Her stony expression had cracked wide open, her true feelings plain to see, but none of those emotions was happiness. Or love. Only fear. “You’re not staying here in this goddamned town!”

As Rosalee yanked me toward the door, I snatched up a table lamp and swung it at the back of her head, hard enough for the bulb to explode.

She hit the front door and bounced off it, falling over backward to the floor.

I froze, the lamp cold in my hands.

I was caught in an endless loop—first Aunt Ulla, now Rosalee. Maybe I would always come back to this place—a weapon in my hand, a body at my feet.

Poppa stepped up from behind me, a cold presence in his vanilla suit and violet tie. “This is your hell,” he said, “and this time an ax won’t free you.”

Pieces were still missing from the left side of Poppa’s face, as though something had been nibbling on him. But he was a welcome sight just the same. “Oh, Poppa, what did I do?”

“You bashed your mother over the head,” was his prompt reply.

“Oh my God.” I dropped to the floor beside Rosalee’s body, beyond grateful to see the rise and fall of her chest. I scrambled to my feet, hauled her closer to the end table, and positioned the broken lamp beside her head, careful of the squishy dent I’d made in it.

“Now when she wakes up,” I whispered, “she’ll think she tripped, fell, and hit her head on the end table. She won’t know
I
did it. She won’t blame
me
.”

“Who says she’ll wake up?” Poppa said, with his fearless ability to face facts.

Not like me.

The anger, the fear, everything fled, whooshing out of me as though I were a tire and someone had run up behind me and slashed me with a knife. I escaped upstairs, sank into bed, and pulled the covers over my head so that no one would see me. I stank of blood and sweat and hardhead gloop. Maybe the gloop was toxic; maybe it would poison me, like radon.

Poppa crowded next to me on the bed, the way he did sometimes when I was scared. He said, “We have to talk.”

“What’s there to talk about? Rosalee’s dead. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To take her with you?”

“Then why I am up here with you?”

“Because I’m going to die too. Because I’m going to slit my throat. Better death than a hospital for the criminally insane.”

“You need to fix this.”

“How?” I was surprised he wasn’t in support of the throat-slitting idea. Then I remembered his run-in with Swan, how she’d altered his views on suicide.

Or maybe Poppa had changed his mind about wanting to
be with me. After what I’d done to Rosalee, I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be with me either.

Poppa said, “Remember what Wyatt said about the door knocker on his house?”

“He said it’s a Key.”

“What else?”

I had to think about it. “He said … it opens doors?”

“That’s not all it does. It grants wishes. All Keys do.”

“Like a stupid fairy tale?”

“It’s no fairy tale.”

“It
is
. You’re not even here. You’re not real. I’m dreaming. It’s all a dream. Please?” I thought of Rosalee lying downstairs, and a layer of ice formed in my belly. “Please, be a dream.”

“In Portero, many strange things are real. And so if everything is real, why not wishes?” Such logic my Poppa had. “Wouldn’t it be nice to wish away the crater you put in Rosalee’s head?”

“Really nice.” I hardly dared say the words. Hardly dared believe it could be true.

“All you have to do is touch the Key and make a wish.”

“That’s all?”

“Well”—he ripped the covers off me and shooed me out
of bed—“there are always complications, aren’t there?”

“Like what?”

But he was too busy rifling through my armoire to answer. “All this purple is ridiculous,” he told me, handing me a nightgown. “You don’t even like purple.”

“
You
like it.”

“I never immersed myself in it the way you do. You need to learn moderation, Hanna.”

“I know.” I removed my sticky dress and boots and washed up in the bathroom. I wasn’t embarrassed for Poppa to see me naked. We’d sauna’ed together, after all. What was nudity between family?

I put on the nightgown and went downstairs, careful not to look at Rosalee sprawled on the floor—if I couldn’t see she was dead, she wouldn’t be.

I went to the garage for the bike. No. Where would Poppa ride? The handlebars? I went back inside and snagged Rosalee’s car keys from the rack by the front door.

I remembered the way to Wyatt’s house and soon found myself on Carmona. Poppa rode shotgun, less animated than before, light snaking over his pale face.

“What’s it like being dead?”

“Like anything else.”

“Are you … did you go to heaven, at least?”

“There’s no such thing as heaven. Or hell. Not for me.”

“So what do you do all day?”

He turned his gray gaze on me. The longing in his eyes was bottomless. “I think about you. And Rosalee.” He looked out the window. “We’re here.”

I slammed on the brakes, surprised, and hit the steering wheel hard with my chest because I had forgotten to buckle up.

As I went up Wyatt’s stoop, the stone beneath my bare feet still warm from the day’s heat, I heard sounds from the open windows of his neighbors: a sitcom laugh track, people arguing about a burnt roast.