Bleeding Violet (29 page)

I rushed into the living room, breathless and damp from the now heavy rain thundering outside. Runyon was waiting for
me, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that for him the wait had been a long one. He’d used the time constructively at least, cleaning the blood off Rosalee and letting her change into her comfy lounge clothes—a black top and yoga pants.

I tossed Runyon the shiny twist of bone. He almost fumbled it, such was his surprise, eyes widening in shock as he held it in his hands.

“If you want to hang around long enough to wish us off to Brazil,” I called, shrugging out of my sodden coat and racing upstairs, “I won’t stop you, but Rosalee and I have got to hit the road!”

I packed quickly, as I had before fleeing Aunt Ulla’s house, but at least this time I’d have company. Maybe Rosalee would want to go to Helsinki to see the house I’d grown up in. Or maybe we
could
go to Brazil; no one would expect us to go there. But no. Wyatt had family in Brazil. Or was it Argentina? I had to stop thinking about Wyatt. I had to focus. Why was it so hard to focus?

I carried my trusty pack downstairs and tossed it at the front door … and beheld a second door near the metal floor lamp. Rosalee, my Rosalee with her black eyes, stood before it, a door-shaped hole that looked as though it had been stamped
out of the air with a cookie cutter. Through it, the rain fell on a huge skeletal tree standing alone in the center of a field.

“That’s Cherry Glade,” said Rosalee, disappointed.

Her eyes changed.

“I must have got the shape wrong,” said Runyon, frustrated. “Shut up and let me concentrate.”

I ignored the unease spreading in my sore chest—Sera had a kick like a mule—and ran into Rosalee’s bedroom. I rummaged around until I found a bright red suitcase; I shoved her clothes into it, mostly the things I’d made her. I would have packed her precious red box, but as usual, it was in the locked drawer. I carried the suitcase out and set it next to my purple pack.

The scene in the doorway had changed. The rain was now falling on a river, the same river where I’d met Wet William.

“That’s not it either,” said Rosalee, as though bored with Runyon’s failures. “Unless they have a Nudoso River in Calloway, too.”

“I know what river it is!” Runyon screeched, kicking over the floor lamp in frustration. “What I don’t know is why it’s not working!” He slashed the Key in a series of movements, shaping the air with precise strokes. “This is the glyph for Calloway. I know it!
Why isn’t the right door opening?
”

“Who cares about your stupid problems, Runyon?” I cried, fed up. “We had a deal. I don’t even know why you’re still here, and I don’t want to know. All I want is for you to get the hell out of my mother!”

He whirled on me, blue eyes boring into mine. “Do you think you can trick me and get away with it? What did you do to this Key?” He held it outstretched toward me like a sword, like he meant to skewer me with it.

I charged forward and poked him in his stupid, wrong-colored eyes.
“Get out of my mother!”

He wheeled away, tears squeezing through his squinted eyes. When they opened, though, they were the right color.

“Thank God,” I said. “Is he gone?”

In reply, Rosalee bashed my head with the Key. I crumpled, and a weight seemed to lift from her face as I hit the ground.

The pain was immense, but I could barely feel it compared to the pain of betrayal, of rejection. Rosalee had hit me.

My own mother.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It’s better this way. This whole ‘mother’ thing isn’t working out, not for either of us. If anybody asks, tell ’em I made you steal it. Or that Runyon did. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She bent and hit me again with the Key, splitting my lip. “This is just so they buy it.”

I wanted to say something, but there was too much blood in my mouth.

Rosalee turned her back on my agony and faced the doorway. “We should try this at your house,” she said calmly. “You’re stronger there, right? They say she can’t control you there.”

“That’s true,” said Runyon. “She had to sacrifice something in order to put that great a curse on me.”

“Well, I figure if you can’t make it work inside your own house, you can’t make it work nowhere.”

“You’re right. We also have an ace up our sleeve as far as the Mayor is concerned.” Runyon laughed. “One way or another, we leave for Calloway tonight!”

He made a different glyph shape in the air, and the view within the doorway changed, revealing the porch of a large white house.

I swallowed the blood. “Momma,
please
.” But she didn’t look at me. Instead she went through the doorway and vanished.

I was alone.

I lay prostrate long enough for the stars swimming across my vision to disappear and a knot the size of a marble to sprout
from my skull. I arose and staggered into the kitchen, a trail of blood running from my head into my eye. I was always getting blood in my eyes.

I removed the carving knife from the stand on the counter. I held the sharp blade to my wrist, and just as I’d known she would, Swan came barging into the kitchen, white wings spread, diving at the knife.

I whirled it away from her beak, slicing upward at the same time, and cut into her wing. Swan crashed into the wall behind me in a burst of feathers.

“Ha!” I screamed at her. “Not this time, Swan. It doesn’t matter anymore. Rosalee said she wouldn’t let anything happen to me. That I should trust her.
But you see what she did to me?
”

I slit my left arm open from elbow to wrist. The pain was immediate and hot.

“I
said
I’d paint the walls with my blood,” I said, bleeding all over my dress, all over the floor. “Unlike
her
, I keep my word!”

I smeared my bloody hand along the white kitchen walls like a kid who’d gotten into the forbidden stash of watercolors.

Swan, bleeding and crippled, righted herself and hobbled
after me, her black feet clicking across the white tile, whooping mournfully, but at her pain or mine, I couldn’t say.

I easily dodged her censorious beak and spread my art to the living room walls. I didn’t feel on the verge of death; all things considered, I felt pretty good. So I slit my other forearm to speed things along.

I went all over the downstairs part of the house, even into Rosalee’s room. Swan almost wrested the knife from me in the tight confines of the hall bathroom, but I eluded her with a few well-aimed kicks and an arsenal of Dove soap.

I shut Swan inside the bathroom, crawling on the floor by that point, tired from struggling with her and depleted by blood loss—more of it ran along the walls than inside my veins. I collapsed in the living room, almost directly on the spot where Rosalee had fled through the doorway. Fitting, since what was really killing me wasn’t blood loss but rejection.

I whispered the words to “Gloomy Sunday” and thought of her, filled my head with her. I wanted to die thinking of her.

Death crept over me like cold water, nothing like what I’d imagined. I’d thought I’d feel a tingling or witness something visionary. Something prophetic or enlightening. But I only felt a need to sleep.

Sooooo sleepy.

“Hanna Järvinen?”

I had no strength to respond.

“Are you dead?” The voice seemed to be coming from miles away. From Seattle or Slovenia.

Something flipped me over and squeezed my cut arms. Something painful. “Stop it,” I moaned. But it didn’t stop.

“Now, now. I can’t have you committing suicide in your
house
.”

A sudden vigor and wakefulness filled me.

The hell?

I opened my eyes and beheld a tallish woman crouched over me.
She
was squeezing my wrists, squeezing the wounds closed, her face shadowy and wraithlike beneath a long, black hooded robe. Unlike Asher’s costume party cape, this was the real thing.

“Are you Death?” I asked, looking for the scythe that would match the robe.

“No, transy,” she said, an amused curl to her red lips. “I’m the Mayor. And you aren’t allowed to die yet.” She hauled me to my feet, then finally released my wrists.

But for a few smears of blood, the skin of my arms was whole and unblemished, pulsing with life.

I don’t remember ever being as pissed as I was at that moment.

“Why did you save me?”

“Because, transy”—the curl to the Mayor’s lips deepened as four burly Mortmaine stepped up beside her, flanking her—“you must be put to death
properly
.”

The Mayor drew back her hood, heedless of my blood on her birdlike hands. From what I’d heard of her, I’d known better than to expect an old fogey in a pantsuit, but she rather exceeded expectation.

She was my height and striking, with golden Egyptian skin and strange Asian eyes with mirrored irises. My twin reflections gazed back at me as she faced me. I looked confused as hell.

I said, “You saved my life so you could
kill
me?”

“Killing yourself here alone where no one can see would be unsatisfying to too many people. Porterenes like to see for themselves that justice has been served.”

“Justice?”

“You have a lot to answer for. You stole that cursed Key and gave it to Runyon, and for what? Do you think to free someone I mean to keep caged?” She tsked at me. “Is he such a charmer, then?”

“I was trying to get him to leave Rosalee. He’s been possessing her!”

“Yet he didn’t become a problem until you showed up. Why is that?” She licked my blood from her palm.

If I was the type to run away from things, I’d have run right then. She had a tongue like a snake. Not forked, but long and slimy, and now coated in my blood.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, excited, as though my blood had fueled the lightbulb that now burned over her head. “Because you smashed Rosalee’s skull and awakened him! If not for you, she might have gone to her grave never knowing he was there.”

“You knew all along that Rosalee was possessed?”

“How could I not know? Runyon hasn’t been in that house for twenty years, and Rosalee was the last person to go anywhere near it. It’s not exactly rocket science, Hanna.”

“But if you knew, why didn’t you do something?” I rubbed my healed arms. “With your power—”

“Why should I do anything for Rosalee? She disobeyed me. A person who messes her bed must lie in it. If I cleaned up after all my children, I’d never have time for myself.”

“So why interfere now?”

Her mirror eyes narrowed. “Because this is personal.”

The Mayor had her guards drag me out of the house and down the dark street in the cold rain—and me with no coat or any protection.

But I would be dead soon; catching a cold was beside the point. I should have been dead
already
. Why couldn’t I ever die when I wanted to?

The Mayor didn’t have to worry about catching cold. The rain seemed to part for her as she walked through it. Even stranger, when her billowing black robe passed over a dead armadillo in the street, it twitched to life and lumbered away.

I understood for the first time why everyone had been so impressed that Rosalee would cross someone like the Mayor.

What the hell had Rosalee been thinking?

The Mayor laughed softly at my expression. “Just for the record,” she said, staring after the armadillo, “that wasn’t one of your hallucinations.”

When we reached the corner, the Mayor pulled me through
a hidden door. We went straight through with no unseemly sidestepping or falling, and when we came out the other side, we were in Fountain Square.

After the four Mortmaine came through behind us, we all walked to the colonnade beyond the lit amphitheater, in the space between the courthouse and the hotel where the last suicide door had been erected. I knew then that that was what she was planning for me. Wyatt had said only the Mayor herself could open a suicide door, and now she would open one for me. I felt almost special.

Several Porterenes stood beneath the colonnaded arches out of the rain, the gas lamps that lighted the square illuminating their grave faces as they watched us. The Mayor and I, and her coterie, joined a larger group of Mortmaine, about twenty in all, who semicircled me as I shivered in my pale shirtdress. Wyatt wasn’t among them, nor any of the initiates, only tough folk all in green.

The Mayor stood next to me and addressed the waiting crowd. “This transient, Hanna Järvinen, took the Ortiga Key and gave it to our enemy Runyon.” Her voice carried easily over the driving rain, to people I knew would soon be laughing in anticipation as they waited for a chance to squeal over my corpse.

“Runyon has possessed Rosalee Price these past twenty years, and when her daughter, Hanna, found out, she decided to steal the Ortiga Key and simply hand it over—”

“I didn’t just hand it over,” I shouted. I could barely get the words out through my chattering teeth, but if the Mayor was going to tell my life story, I wanted her to tell it right. “Runyon promised he’d leave Rosalee if I did!”

The Mayor smiled at me condescendingly. “And you believed him?”

The warm shame of my own näiveté chased away the cold.

“Why shouldn’t she have believed me?”

Everyone turned and gasped to find Runyon in a doorway several feet behind the Mayor and me.

He was still in Rosalee’s body, standing in what looked like a toolshed, I thought, noting the can of motor oil and a gutted electric drill on a shelf behind him. Rosalee’s hair was peppered with sawdust.

Runyon smiled at the Mayor, blue eyes full of sardonic humor. “I’ve been told I have a very trustworthy face.”

“Are you still here?” asked the Mayor, feigning surprise. “I thought you’d be long gone by now. Whatever could be keeping you?”

The bitter humor fled. “You know what,” he said coldly.

“It doesn’t matter how many Keys you make or use,” said the Mayor with equal coldness. “You can never leave this town.”

“Unless you remove the curse. Which you will.” Runyon was supremely confident. “I’m not the bodiless eunuch you remember.”