Bleeding Violet (17 page)

The smell of the burnt roast turned my stomach, and I realized I was frightened. The twisted Key swam before me, gleaming darkly. If this didn’t work …

“It will.” Poppa stood at the curb near Rosalee’s red Prius. The light from a nearby streetlamp gave him a weird broken shadow. “Make your wish.”

I touched the Key, and a hideously unpleasant zap rocketed through my elbow, as though someone had whacked my funny bone with a ball-peen hammer. But I held on. “I wish—”

The pain was immediate. Searing. I screeched and skipped backward, but I couldn’t skip far. My hand stuck fast to the Key, sizzling.

“Poppa!”

No answer. I looked back for him, but he was gone. Of course Poppa was gone; he’d never
been
. But I wasn’t alone. Someone raced up the stoop toward me.

Wyatt’s dad.

He dropped a flat box at my feet, spilling leftover pizza near the door. The aroma of sausage and garlic eclipsed the burnt roast smell. He put his hand on the door above the Key. “Let go.”

“I can’t!”

But he wasn’t talking to me. It was weird, but the Key let go of
me
. I collapsed to the stoop, cradling my hand to my stomach.

Wyatt’s dad crouched beside me. “Let me see.” He coaxed me to uncurl my hand. The skin of my palm was blackened and peeling like charred paper. Inflamed tissue peeped here and there, red and angry-looking.

Sera climbed the stoop and joined her husband, Paulie asleep on her shoulder, a blue balloon tied around his tiny wrist. She rolled her eyes at me. “Stupid transy.”

Asher retrieved the dropped pizza box, opened the door, and stepped aside to let his wife and child move past him into the house. He took me by the elbow. “I think you’d better come in too.”

“My hand.” He seemed confused until I showed him my burnt flesh again.

“We can take care of that,” he said as he took me inside.

Even worse than my hand was the pain of knowing that I’d failed, that Rosalee was dead or dying and I hadn’t even made the wish.

Wyatt’s dad parked me in a chair, shushing me and patting my back because I was crying and useless and alone.

A moment later a cool, soothing tingle settled over my burnt palm. I wiped my eyes as Asher knelt before me and slathered the popcorn-colored contents of a brown jar into my hand. “Better?”

I nodded. Much better. Only a vague memory of pain remained. I fingered the paste. “What is this?”

Asher frowned at me, and I understood then that he was confused because I was still speaking Finnish. I had been all along with Poppa and hadn’t switched gears. I repeated myself in English.

“Just something Wyatt whipped up.” He looked chagrined. “Did he tell you about making wishes on our Key?”

Actually my dead father had told me, but I knew better than to say that aloud. “It came to me in a dream,” I said, almost truthfully.

Sera came downstairs. She’d changed clothes and, as if she weren’t scary enough, now looked like a ninja. She went to Asher. “Paulie’s fast asleep, so I’m gone join Wyatt and Shoko, okay?”

“Where are they?”

“Upsquare near the mill. Depopulating hardheads. How did she know about the wishing?” She frowned at me. “Did Wyatt tell you?”

“It came to her in a dream,” said Asher, impressed.

Sera was not. “Well, don’t think you can get a bigger allowance or a new car by sneaking wishes off our Key.”

“I wasn’t—”

Asher said, “I’ll handle it, dear.”

Sera gave me one last glare, then kissed Asher’s forehead. “Please yourself. I’ll see you later.”

“Have fun.” When the door closed behind his wife, Asher shot me a conciliatory look. “Trust me. You do not want to get her riled. Now.” He rubbed his hands gleefully. “With her and Wyatt out of the way, there’s no one to interfere.”

“With what?”

He shot to his feet. “There’s a spell I’ve been wanting to try out. If it works, it’ll fix the unfortunate
sticking
side effect of the Key. You want a cool drink?”

I nodded, and after some time, he returned with a cart, wheeling it over to the couch. A number of items littered the cart, including a pitcher of lemonade, several bundles of herbs, a mixing bowl, a long, thin knife, and several jars.

One of the jars rattled.

“A feisty one,” said Asher.

“A feisty what?”

He poured my lemonade. “Even with the Key
outside
the house, sometimes a door opens in here and something gets through. Fortunately,” he nodded to the rattling jar, “we have ways of trapping them. Now, listen up.”

He gave me a stern look. He didn’t do stern well—discipline was obviously more his wife’s thing. “I don’t want to have to explain this again: The Key isn’t there to be misused.”

“By wishing for cars and bigger allowances?”

“And old girlfriends back and rivals to die or loved ones to come back from the dead. You have no idea how chaotic things would get if people started getting their wishes granted willy-nilly. You use the Key to knock on the door, fine. You use the Key to make a wish, forget about it. As you saw, Keys have built-in defenses to keep them from being abused.”

“If it’s your Key, couldn’t you give me permission to make a wish?”

“Of course!” he said brightly. “But I won’t, so don’t waste your breath. Nobody’s made a wish on that Key since 1989.” I guess he must have heard every excuse, seen every trick, every angle.

He probably thought he had.

“I’ll have to insist, Asher. I’m in a real bind.”

He seemed to really see me for the first time. I must have looked like a Dickensian orphan, with my dirty bare feet and voluminous nightgown. “You don’t have to stare,” I said, tucking my feet away. “I know what I look like.”

“You look fine.” His voice was deep with feeling. “You look—” He cleared his throat. “You look like your mother.”

I had seen that look on Poppa’s face too often not to recognize it. “Do you love her?”

“Yes.” He didn’t even hesitate.

“I bet you’d give
her
a wish.”

“You’re not your mother,” he said, gentle but firm.

I decided to back off. Temporarily. “How did you get control over the Key?”

“I don’t control it. No one does. I watch over it and protect it, but I don’t control it.”

“But why you?”

“It’s been in my family for generations. It was fashioned from my great-grandmother’s bones.”

I thought back to Wyatt’s story.

“The creature Runyon tortured was your
aunt
? How’s that possible?”

“She wasn’t a
creature
,” he said indignantly. “She was
human. Human enough for him to get her pregnant.”

My mouth dropped. “Runyon
raped
her?”

Asher blinked at me, abashed. “Wyatt said he told you.”

“Not that Anna was raped. Jesus.”

“Oh, yeah.” His smile was bright and bitter as poison. “Runyon got Anna pregnant so that if his Key-making scheme didn’t work, he’d have a backup in place. A spare to practice on. But a year after Anna’s daughter was born, the Mayor got wise to what Runyon had done and paid him a visit. She took the Key and Anna’s daughter and put them in the hands of the Mortmaine.

“Eventually the daughter grew up and had daughters of her own, one of whom was my mother, who got possession of the Key. It used to be there, over the mantel, but having it inside the house opened too many doors. Couldn’t even open the pantry without something leaping out at you. Do you have a feather, by chance?” he asked, patting himself down.

“No. Sorry.”

He pulled a feather from his own pocket and dropped it into the mixing bowl, turning its contents a hideous hot pink.

I watched Asher with new respect. “Wyatt said there’s no such thing as magic.”

Asher harrumphed. “Typical teen. Thinks he knows everything. Doesn’t understand that the world’s full of mysteries. ‘You only call it magic when you don’t understand it.’” His mockery of Wyatt was spot-on. “If the world is full of mysteries, can anything ever truly be understood?”

He shook his head at his son’s presumption, running the knife along his finger, letting his blood drip into the bowl. The contents turned from hot pink to the crystal clear of springwater. Then he wheeled the cart to the front door and opened it. The heat outdoors quickly sucked the cool air from the room as he painted the Key with the clear mixture, making it glossier.

Asher then used an oven mitt to lift a red licorice-length needle from the cart. It smoldered when he touched it to the door and carved a small ring of shapes. Glyphs.

He tossed the stick onto the cart and, without looking, reached back for one of the jars, the rattling one, which he smashed against the door as if christening a ship.

A concussive boom blew him out of the doorway and flung me and the yellow chair I was sitting in backward to fetch up against the wall.

Standing in the open doorway was a freakishly tall man-shaped creature that was so much taller than the ceiling, it had
to curl downward like a hooded cobra. Red, lobsterlike armor covered it, except for its maggoty white arms and lower legs.

Lobsterman observed Asher lying stunned on the floor and fell on him, trying to bite Asher with its teeth like razor blades—sharp, white, and unbroken. Asher managed to hold it off, but he wouldn’t be able to for long.

I left the chair and crept to the cart, assessing the situation and pleased by how calm I was. I think I was smiling.

“Asher?” I said, lifting the knife Asher had used to cut up the plants. I rolled it thoughtfully between my fingers. “Why don’t we make a deal?”

“I know you don’t like people wishing on your Key, but just this once, why don’t you make an exception?”

Fear had rounded Asher’s eyes, giving him an interested, focused look as Lobsterman tried to eat his face.

“I’m going to help whether you agree or disagree, but I want you to consider the great favor I’m doing you, particularly since I’m putting my life at risk to save yours. And since I’m only sixteen, my death would be the greater tragedy.”

As I talked, I circled behind Lobsterman, who whipped around to face me, blood on its odd, bladelike teeth from where it had managed to nick Asher’s cheek. Its yellow eyes glowed like sunlight. If I closed my eyes, I’d see spots.

I backed off and dropped carefully to my knees, still close enough to Lobsterman to see mites crawling in the gaps of its red-orange armor, but not close enough to cut it. I was, however, close enough to cut Asher.

I grabbed one of Asher’s thrashing legs and pared a substantial slice of hairy white skin from his calf muscle. Asher screamed, but I ignored him.

“Oh, Lobsterman.” I waggled the bit of flesh in the creature’s face and just managed to toss the skin into its mouth as it lunged at me, snapping.

I sliced another piece from Asher’s leg and fed it to Lobsterman as well. “Good boy,” I said, because there was something oddly doglike about the creature, the eagerness it displayed for the paltry scraps in my hand.

But after I’d sliced a third piece, instead of feeding it into Lobsterman’s wickedly sharp mouth, I turned and flung the meat.

I had meant to throw it out the door, but it landed
on
the door, on the Key, which was still sticky from Asher’s ministrations, and hung there like grisly, overcooked pasta. Lobsterman sprang after the meat with the helplessness of a dog going after a stick and lunged into the Key, face-first. While Lobsterman stuck to the Key, trapped and howling, I
crawled to it and stabbed it in its soft, armorless parts.

Ripping the queen apart had been fun, but this was something else—killing something after you’ve fed it isn’t exactly a carnival.

Finally Lobsterman quieted, and its dead weight unstuck it from the Key.

Asher looked away from Lobsterman lying in a heap in the doorway and stood awkwardly, lifting his pant leg to examine the bloody area where I’d peeled his skin away in neat strips.

He frowned at me. “I don’t know whether to thank you or backhand you.”

After meeting his wife, Asher didn’t scare me. I tossed the bloody knife on his cart. “I’d rather you thanked me, if it’s all the same.”

“
Thank you
. I guess you earned it. In the most half-assed, unethical way possible.”

“I would have saved you, no matter what. I told you that.”

He was quiet a long time. “Go on,” he said, after he’d bound his wounds. “Make your wish. But you only get one!”

I had to tread on Lobsterman to get to the Key, which I reached for gingerly, afraid of more pain. But I touched it despite my fear, ignoring the zing in my elbow, hoping it wasn’t too late.
When I saw Asher staring incredulously at his cart, wondering where he’d gone wrong, paying not the slightest attention to me, I whispered, “I wish Rosalee’s head wasn’t damaged.”

A brightness bloomed behind my eyes, like a camera flash.

When my vision cleared, I said good-bye to Asher and rushed to the car. After I finally made it home, I dropped to Rosalee’s inert form on the floor of the living room. I tested her head, the way I tested melons, feeling for overripe patches. Finding none, I whispered, “Rosalee?”

No response. Her head was perfectly sound, but she was as still as a corpse. Why hadn’t I wished she were alive instead of that her head not be damaged? Jesus Christ, how stupid was I?

“Rosalee?” I shook her, knowing it was futile, but helpless to stop. “Rosalee!”

Her eyes opened and locked on me. They were bright blue. Electric. She sat up and immediately seemed to regret the move, grabbing her head in her hands. “You’re not Bonnie.”

I recoiled, not from Rosalee—from her voice. It wasn’t Rosalee’s voice. Not her eyes and not her voice.

“And you’re not Rosalee,” I said.

“Ahh, yes,” said the voice, the intruder.
“Her.”
Rosalee slumped over to her side, unconscious.

I pried opened my mother’s eyes, desperate to prove to myself that I hadn’t seen and heard what I’d just seen and heard, but her eyes had rolled to the whites, their color hidden.