Bleeding Violet (28 page)

I trudged upstairs and hugged Swan.

“
You
missed me, didn’t you, Swanie? You noticed I was gone.”

Swan came to life in my arms and wrapped her wings around me.

“I had it, Swanie. The answer to all our problems, and then stupid Wyatt … God, what’s the point?”

Swan tapped her beak against my chest, at the wee silver swan dangling from my necklace.

“Isn’t she cute?”

Swan nodded and gave me a questioning look.

“Wyatt gave her to me. I know. It
is
hard to stay mad at someone that thoughtful.”

I draped the necklace around Swan’s long neck and then went to the bathroom to shower off the river water. As the warm spray relaxed me, I began to formulate a plan. Maybe Wyatt could help me after all. He wouldn’t want to. Probably he would refuse to. But screw him.

He owed me.

When I came back into the room, Little Swan was fluttering before Swan; they were whooping happily at each other.

“What are you two saying?” I laughed. “Are you talking about me?”

I pulled on a lilac shirtdress and thick tights and swapped my wet oxfords for mulberry booties, but before I could leave the room Swan whooped, as if in warning, and brought me up short.

Little Swan flew at my neck, flapping and tickling me in her desire to be worn.

“Okay, okay! I just thought you two might want to hang out, that’s all.”

As I fastened Little Swan around my neck, the front door slammed.

My heart lurched and pumped a sick feeling through my veins. I’d never before been reluctant to set eyes on Rosalee; I hated feeling this way. But I had a plan in place now, and I had to fix things between us—today.

Rosalee slumped in the chair by the floor lamp, arms bloody to the elbow, like she was wearing long red gloves. The gore didn’t even bother me; gore and I were old friends at this point.

“
Was
it babies this time?” I asked, in a surprisingly steady voice.

“Nope,” she said lightly, kicking off her shoes.

“Just a run-of-the-mill killing spree?”

“Define spree.”

She was making jokes while the world was shifting under me, breaking apart.

“Remember when I said I would get a priest when your head started spinning?” I reminded her. “What about murder? Who do I get now that you’ve started killing people?”

Her breezy humor vanished, as though it had never been. She just looked tired. “You can’t share your body with someone and not make compromises. As soon as he gets the Key
stop trying to explain things, Rosalee
.”

I jumped at Runyon’s sudden appearance, at his blue eyes staring out at me like radiation.

“She’s afraid you’re thinking bad thoughts about her,” he confided, then rolled his eyes. “Her desire for your good opinion makes her tiresomely provincial.”

“I’m not thinking bad thoughts about
her
.”

“See?” he said, cooing to Rosalee. “Hanna loves you. A person in love will forgive anything.”

I thought about Wyatt and hoped it was true. Then I steeled myself.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Me?” He seemed surprised. “What about?”

“I can get you that Key.”

He looked me over insultingly. “How are
you
going to get it?”

“Never mind how. But when I give it to you, you have to leave Rosalee. You can’t be doing her any good, no matter what she thinks.”

The hurt in his laughter pissed me off. Who was he to get his feelings hurt?

“Will you want her, without me?” he asked, smiling grimly. “Who would she be without me? The person you first met when you got here? You think it was easy to break her open?”

Break her open?

“Is it a deal or not?”

“How you think you can succeed where I failed—,” he began.

“I can go get the Key right now, or I can go upstairs and paint my toenails. I’m only going to ask you one more time:
Is it a deal or not
?”

“Fine,” he said, lifting my mother’s hands in surrender. “It’s a deal.”

Wyatt had been surprised to see me so soon after our fight, but he welcomed me in.

“My folks’re in the living room,” he’d whispered to me as we stood on his stoop.

“This is just a social visit,” I told him. “I’m not here to sleep over.”

“Damn,” he said, so disappointed that it made me laugh
and truly forgive him for ruining my wish. Besides, he didn’t know it yet, but he was about to make up for it tenfold.

I went inside and stayed until dark, playing ring-around-the-rosy with Ragsie and Paulie, and Go Fish with Asher and Wyatt, and nothing at all with Sera, who monitored my every movement, ensuring that Wyatt and I couldn’t be alone together. Finally, in the middle of Asher’s easy-listening rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” I whispered to Wyatt, “I have to talk to you. Alone.”

“Good,” he said, glaring at his father. “Whoever invented karaoke should be shot.” He took my hand and led me toward the stairs.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Sera bellowed.

“Yeah,” said Asher, “I’m just getting to the good part.”

Paulie snatched the mic from him. “There’s never any good parts when it’s your turn, Poppy.
I
want a turn.”

“We’re just going to talk,” Wyatt said over the heated debate that had broken out between Asher and Paulie.

“You can
talk
down here.”

“Can I at least take her into the kitchen? For five minutes?”

“Five minutes starting right now.” Sera clicked something on her watch.

Wyatt and I hurried into the kitchen. As soon as we were out of sight, he began kissing me, stinging kisses that made my heart fibrillate.

“Actually,” he whispered, smiling against my mouth, “an enterprising young man could get a
lot
done in five minutes.”

I stepped away from his kisses, regretful but focused. “We really do have to talk.”

“Hell.” He leaned against the counter, holding both of my hands. “You wanna yell at me some more about what happened at Evangeline?”

“No.” The words trembled on the tip of my tongue,
Wyatt, I need to borrow your Key
, but I couldn’t say them. Because he would say no, and if I insisted, he would demand to know why, and if I told him about Rosalee, about Runyon, he would deal with it the Mortmaine way—ruthlessly.

He watched me patiently, content to let me work it out, and suddenly I hated him for being so damnably thoughtful.

Finally I said, “You said you’d let me make a wish.”

He caressed my palm. “What about getting your hand chopped off ?” He said it in a joking way, as if he honestly didn’t believe his mother was capable of such a thing.

“It would be worth it.”

He snorted. “It must be something for Rosalee.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You can have your wish.”

Instead of thanking him, I kissed him, but this time his kisses didn’t sting; they hurt. Hurt something deep within me. I’d used boys all the time back in Dallas—they were
there
to be used—but I didn’t like using Wyatt.

But what choice did I have?

“
Time
.”

We scrambled apart as Sera frowned at us from the doorway. “That must’ve been some talk,” she said, drily.

It was dark and raining lightly by the time I left Wyatt’s house, splashing out onto his wet stoop. I pushed back the hood of my indigo coat, staring at the Key hanging unremarkably from the door, my elbows thrumming like crazy. I wrapped my fingers gingerly around the Key’s slick surface, wished with all my might, and then, with only a slight tug, pulled it free like a loose tooth.

I stared at the heavy black twist of shining bone in my hand in wonder, marveling at how easy it had been to take, when a spurt of blood shot from the gap where the Key had been and splatted against my throat in a warm burst.

It was like the breeders at the fountain all over again, only instead of a vein opening in the Earth, the vein had opened in the Ortigas’ door.

I gasped and sputtered, but before I could duck out of the bloody line of fire, the door opened onto a bright rectangle of light that Sera immediately filled, gaping at me and the bloody hole in her door.

And the Key in my hand.

“So I was right.” She gave me a smile as deadly as a scythe. “That
was
one hell of a talk you had with my boy. He say you could take that?”

I cradled the Key to my chest, ready to fight for it like a mother bear. “He said I could wish for anything.”

Sera slapped me so hard, I went flying backward off the stoop. I slammed into the wet sidewalk and lost my breath; Sera gave me no time to find it. She knelt on my chest and held a machete to my face.

“What did I tell you about negotiating with my son?”

“I don’t care,” I gasped, struggling under her weight. “Cut off my hand if that’s what you want, but I’m not giving it back!”

Sera traced the blade along my cheek. “I’m not gone cut off
your hand,” she said gently. “I’m gone cut off your
face
.”

I flinched from the touch of the cold blade and willed myself not to pee in my pants. “Are you
sure
you wouldn’t rather take my hand?”

Sera raised the machete, rain dripping from its murderously sharp edge like blood. “Positive.”

“Ma!”

Wyatt jumped down the stairs and yanked his mother off me. “What’re you
doing
?”

He shoved her back toward the stoop and helped me to my feet.

“What am
I
doing? She stole our Key!”

Wyatt’s eyes widened in disbelief when he saw the Key in my arms. He let go of me and reached for it, but I jerked away from him.

“No,” I said, breathing hard, trying to ignore the pain in my head from having cracked it against the sidewalk, and
trying to keep both Wyatt and Sera in sight so they couldn’t blindside me.

The look of betrayal in Wyatt’s eyes was as bad as I’d imagined it would be—worse, because it wasn’t my imagination.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but you need to give back our Key. Right now.”

“I can’t. I need it.”

“You have stolen our Key, craven!”

We all turned to find Asher on the stoop in a ridiculous Count Dracula cape; Paulie stood behind him, staring curiously from the doorway as Asher yelled at me, “Now you must pay the price!”

Asher raised his hands overhead, screaming in Latin, his eyes rolled to the whites.

“Aw, Christ,” Wyatt whispered behind me. “Ma, don’t let him—”

But Sera was already running up the stairs. “Asher, don’t—”

But Asher did. He was holding something in his hand, which he promptly hurled to the ground at my feet.

While Wyatt and I pinwheeled away from the exploding glass, a huge gray blob materialized before us. A blob that quickly hardened into a creature that looked like it had been
carved from rock. It sprang up as tall as the townhouses bordering the street, a creature with small, rheumy eyes, boulderlike teeth, and an earsplitting roar.

Somehow Wyatt wasn’t afraid to jump on this monstrosity. In his T-shirt, jeans, and bare feet he climbed the creature like a kid on a jungle gym, and the first thing he did was wrap his arms around the creature’s head and poke out its eyes.

The creature’s roar of anger became a roar of pain as it knocked Wyatt to the ground with one long arm and tried to stomp him. But Wyatt easily avoided the creature’s dark rampage.

“Wyatt!” Sera tossed her son the machete she’d nearly used on me. He caught it, climbed the creature again, and began to chisel away at it. If he had about a hundred years, he might even succeed in reducing the bloodthirsty mountain to rubble.

“Pop!” Wyatt screamed from atop the creature. “I need backup!”

“Here I come!” yelled Asher, staring at the creature with wide, blank eyes while he patted himself down, as if the change in his pockets might counteract the nightmare he’d unleashed on the street.

“Not
you
!” Wyatt yelled back in tones of horror. “Take Paulie inside and call Shoko!”

While I was distracted by Wyatt’s David-and-Goliath struggle, Sera tried to snatch the Key away from me. Without thinking, I kicked her in the kneecap, but instead of falling to the ground, she decided to show me what a real kick was—she got me right in the chest. I was the one who hit the ground, and as I did, Little Swan went skipping down the wet pavement, as well as the entire contents of my coat pockets.

I couldn’t breathe for a long moment—a good thing, as I was facedown in a rain puddle.

Sera flipped me onto my back and bent over me, her eyes bright with rain and malice. “You think you feel bad now,” she said, ripping the Key from my unresisting hands. “Think how bad you’ll feel after I tell the Mayor what you did. When she gets through with you …” Thinking of what the Mayor would do to me seemed to give her some satisfaction as she stormed away.

The items from my pockets lay nearby on the pavement, including one of Carmin’s little blue capsules.

I snatched it and, sucking in as much air as I could, ran after Sera, who’d made it to the stoop. She was reaching to set the Key back into the hole in her door, but before she could manage it, I leaped up the bloody stairs and onto her back, much as Wyatt had done with the rock creature.

Before Sera could react, I shoved the pill in her mouth and squeezed it. The contents burst over my fingers and down her throat. She ripped my hand from her mouth, gagging on the liquid … then froze, a faraway look in her eyes, a look of sadness.
“Mamá?”

I slid off her back, snatched the Key from her, ran down the stairs—and almost got nailed by a flying speed limit sign.

I ducked just in time and saw Wyatt still picking away at the roaring giant, cleverly dodging its attempts to knock him loose. The creature had chosen to deal with its annoyance at Wyatt by destroying the street. Its car-crushing assault brought people from their homes … but not too far. No one was rushing to Wyatt’s aid.

As I contemplated how
I
could help—call the SWAT team?—Shoko popped in from nowhere at a run, swinging her pink flails and grinning maniacally, more deadly than twenty SWAT teams. A running leap landed her beside Wyatt on the creature’s back, and on that note, I ran to Rosalee’s car and made my escape while I still could.