The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (16 page)

“Yes, please.”

He smiled back up at her. Her hair was drying now, relaxing a little into its usual floating curls. He realized he had never seen it loose before; it had always been scraped back tidily from her face. He reached up and touched the springy little wisps at her temple, marveling at its softness. “You liked that, huh?”

Blue leaned into his touch like a cat, twisting her head so that her cheek filled his palm and the corner of her lips touched the inside of his wrist in a clumsy kiss. Oh, this was bad. This could only lead to trouble and heartbreak and worse, but when they kissed her mouth tasted like thirst and lust and before he knew it they were all wrapped up in each other once more. She was all there for the touching and tasting and he had this feeling that if she put her clothes back on, that would be it.

There were footsteps in the hall outside and Blue froze on top of him, her fingers still curled around his cock as she strained her ears to figure out who it was.

“Okay,” she said, in a low voice. “We should probably get out of here.”

He sighed. “Does this mean we have to stop being naked?”

She stifled a giggle. “It does unless you’re trying to get me fired, yeah.”

Blue released him and slid off the bed. The first thing she put on was a denim skirt that came just past her thighs, and somehow the thought of her wandering around with no underwear was even more exciting than her completely naked. As he watched her put her clothes on he knew that now he would never be able to look at her again without thinking about what was under them.

“If you need a shower, go ahead,” she said, shimmying her beautiful brown ass into a pair of sober black panties. “I have a couple more things to pack.”

Gabe sniffed his armpit. “Yeah, I might take you up on that. I’m still kinda...gamey.”

“Oh. Of course. Did you...get rid of it?”

“Yep. It’ll get eaten by something or another.”

She pressed her lips together. “It’s terrible. I feel like we committed a murder. What do you think
did
that?”

“Could have been anything,” he said, although he knew very well what kind of creature was responsible. “Car could have hit it and the driver just decided to stuff the evidence under nearest porch rather than go through the hoopla of admitting he hit a Keys deer.” He picked his clothes up from the floor. “I won’t be a minute, okay?”

When he came out of the bathroom her hair was tied back. She wore a plain t-shirt with her straight denim skirt. She was standing side on from him, her long neck bowed as she bent to flatten her clothes into her suitcase. At first she didn’t look up, and she looked so remote that he could hardly believe he had just been inside her. And with that came the thought of how much he wanted to do it again, how the touch of her skin made him want to hold her close and never let her go, as tight as if he was trying to crawl inside her and see every scrap of her, skin and bone and flesh and blood.

He was in so much fucking trouble.

“You ready to go?” he said.

She nodded and snapped the suitcase closed. “I think so,” she said, and grinned. “We’d better sneak. Your hair’s wet; everyone will know you used my shower.”

So they snuck, tiptoeing like children, down the hall and down the stairs. She left him in the car while she dropped off her key and he sat there for a while, alone, still in a kind of daze about what had just happened. If it hadn’t been for the smell of her hair lingering behind her he might have imagined it was some kind of vivid sex dream, one of those ones where the sensations were so real and delicious and the desire to come was so intense that sometimes you woke up in the throes of it, all sticky and shuddering.

She came back across the parking lot and jumped in beside him. “Done,” she said. “And nobody even looked at me funny. I think we got away with it.”

Her cageyness made him laugh. “Were you a spy back in New Orleans or something?” he said, starting the car.

Blue shook her head as she clipped her seatbelt. “Nope,” she said. “Just a teenage girl. Expert keeper of secrets.”

She sat back, pressing her lips together in that half-guilty, half-amused way that he already found so sexy.

“What kind of secrets?” he asked, wondering if this could be an icebreaker. Let’s talk secrets. You’ll never guess mine.

Her smile faded. “Not as dirty as you were probably hoping,” she said.

He paused at a stop sign, the engine thrumming away. He knew so little about her. “Your mom?” he asked. Just a gentle prod, but it was as good a place as any to start.

“How’d you figure that?”

Gabe shrugged. “Your old man wasn’t around, like mine. And moms are good at keeping secrets. Also you said that you were used to dealing with...troubled people.”

Blue arched an eyebrow, but then she sighed, softened. “She drank,” she said. “A lot. Self-medicating, mostly.”

“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I should talk about it at some point. Just to give you a heads up, in case I start going...well...”

“Going what?”

Blue cleared her throat. “Bipolar runs in families. I’m well past the age when it usually first manifests, but...” She sighed. “I still worry. You know how it is.”

“That must have been rough for you, growing up.”

She let out a humorless little laugh. “You know, it was funny. When I was very, very little I used to think I had the best mother in the whole world. She was so much
fun
. Sure, she’d get so sad sometimes that she wouldn’t get out of bed and I had to live on peanut butter and jelly, but she made up for it when she was happy. We’d go to the amusement park and the zoo and build blanket forts. And those pictures she painted were like real art to me when I was that young. One time she took me to the hardware store in the middle of the night and we bought all this stuff so we could paint that picture on the living room wall. Like a mural. It was like paradise for me, before I was old enough to realize that there was something really wrong. One time she said I never needed to go to school again, because I knew enough. I think I was about eight at the time. She said ‘You know enough to be happy, and that’s all you ever need to know, so I’m taking you out of school.’”

“And did she?”

“No,” said Blue. “It never happened. We were going to take a trip. A big adventure. She’d packed our bags and bought the bus tickets, but when the day came it was like someone had just...cut her strings. She couldn’t move or speak or do anything much besides cry, and even that wasn’t like real crying. It was more like leaking, I guess. This steady stream of salt water running out of her eyes. I think it was the first time I understood that she was actually sick.”

He reached over and briefly touched her hand. “Jesus, Blue. Do you want to stop?”

“No. Keep driving,” she said, misunderstanding him. “It’s okay. I expect I should talk about it more often. There were trauma specialists and counselors and stuff in Houston, but all they ever wanted to talk about was Katrina. Like none of us had been damaged before the storm, you know? People didn’t want to admit to that. Even some of the people with the best intentions in their hearts bought into this story - that Katrina had destroyed our lives. That is, assuming our lives weren’t already wreckage in the first place.”

She sighed. “Nothing as dramatic as a hurricane. Just the usual slow wreckage. Lousy schools, no healthcare, no shot at college, peanut butter and jelly for dinner again. In a way I think some of us were ready for it, when the storm blew into town. Not ready, maybe - but used to it. We’d been cut adrift our whole lives, so what was one more ride in a leaky lifeboat?”

He turned the corner. He fumbled for something to say. “The system sucks.”

“I know,” she said. “They were always the enemy to me. Mom told me; if they knew how bad she was then they’d put her an institution. And I’d go into foster care.”

“So you hid it,” said Gabe, as they neared the house. There were a couple of unfamiliar women milling near Gloria’s mailbox. “And tried to handle it yourself.”

Blue frowned. “Yes. How did you know?”

“Because,” he said. “You didn’t force me to take Gloria to the hospital.”

The women at the mailbox turned to look at him as he pulled up. They were both getting on in years, one thin and spindly and the other short and round. They both wore in their hair in the same silver-blonde bobs. “Excuse me?” said the short one. “Do you know Gloria?”

“Yes?” said Gabe. “Why?”

“We heard it was a miracle,” said the short woman. “She’s been cured of the Alzheimer’s. Is it true?”

Blue narrowed her lips. “Where did you hear that?” she said, in a tone that said she had almost expected something like this to happen.

“The Lord opens our eyes in strange ways,” said the short woman.

The thin woman offered Gabe a leaflet. The word RAPTURE was written in big blocky letters; the T had been rendered as a shining crucifix. “Yeah,” said Gabe, thinking of Gloria’s pentagram necklaces and her collection of old Black Sabbath vinyls. “Good luck with that.”

11

Mike ‘The Bike’ Hallett was a big man, some three hundred pounds with a small head on top, like the cherry on top of an angry werewolf sundae. Charlie smothered a grin at the thought; he’d had sundaes on the brain lately. He’d thought Reese had been comfort eating during his old man’s final illness, but if Reese’s current binge was any indication then the kid had just been getting started. Every day brought new, heart-stopping Paula Deen horrors. Donuts dipped in coffee concoctions that were more sweetened milk than coffee, burgers wrapped in bacon and folded between glazed, sugared donuts. Pancakes drowning in syrup and cream dredged French toast fried in foaming golden butter. So much sugar that Charlie said one day he was going to look under the bed and find Reese’s pancreas hiding under there like Saddam Hussein, all skinny and blinking with a big ass hobo beard.
Please don’t tell him where I am. I can’t take any more fucking Wendy’s.

Right now the Crown Prince of Velveeta was glancing between the bar menu and a bag of sweet and sour pork rinds, which was of no goddamn use to Mike the Bike. Or anyone, for that matter.

“It’s on my land,” Mike was saying, over the crunch of dead pig. “That’s always been my land and they know it.”

“...do you think I can get an order of bleu cheese with the onion rings?”

“Sure,” said Charlie, attempting find Reese’s ribs with his elbow. “Why not? Reese, pay
attention
, willya?”

Reese gave him one of those pissy, princely looks that were getting way too frequent lately. That was the trouble with telling some people they were in charge; they were actually dumb enough to believe you.

“They’re testing,” said Charlie, ignoring the scowl. “Change of management, you’re always going to get a couple of douchebags who want to see how far they can push the new boss.”

“S’right,” said Mike. “Those fucking hillbillies wouldn’t have been bellyaching about boundaries if your old man was still here, Reese. You gotta show them you’re not going to take their shit.”

“Can I get bleu cheese
and
garlic mayo?”

So much for ‘meet the new boss, same as the old’. Lyle would have simply shrugged and sent a couple of his biggest, meanest boot-boys around to kick some sense into Mike’s charming neighbors, but Reese couldn’t so much as tear his eyes from the menu. Mike looked like a volcano about to erupt, and Charlie quickly drew him away.

“Excuse us a moment,” he said, but Reese went on crunching up pork rinds.

“Are you kidding?” said Mike, just out of earshot.

“He’s young, I know.”

Mike arched a grizzled eyebrow.

“Let me talk to him,” said Charlie. “The eating – it’s a process with him. He’s working through a lot of stuff. He was close to his dad.”

“Right. And in the meantime what? I don’t get to build on my own goddamn land and Barb goes to bed every night with my old thirty-eight snub under her pillow?”

Ah, sweet Barb Hallett. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d taken something interesting to bed with her. Charlie still had fond memories of happily suffocating between her tan, nutcracker thighs. “I know,” he said. “It’s not ideal, but it’s natural. He’s young. He’s grieving. It just turns out he’s...kind of an emotional eater.”

Mike propped an elbow on the bar, glanced down at Reese, and then back to Charlie. “You know,” he said, in a conspiratorial tone that meant nothing good. “I had my doubts about you, Charlie.”

“Really?”

“Come on. Don’t act dumb. A lot of people thought you might want to snag the top spot for yourself.”

Charlie blinked up at him. “And where would that leave Reese, exactly?”

“You tell me. I know you had some bad blood, you and Lyle Raines.”

“Ancient history. I was
nothing
but loyal to him after that. Nothing.”

“Okay,” said Mike, backing off. He’d said too much and he knew it.

“I’m hurt, Bikerman.”

“Hurt?”

“Seriously,” said Charlie. “I know you haven’t always had the highest opinion of me, but I never thought you had me pegged as stupid.”

“When did I ever call you stupid?”

“You implied it,” said Charlie. Over Mike’s shoulder he spotted Grayson, who had just come in and pulled up a seat next to Fatty Arbuckle. “Step in? Me? Alpha? Of this clusterfuck? I’d have to be straight-up mouthbreathing fuckin’ retarded to even think about wanting it. We all knew shit was going to fall apart when Lyle croaked - ”

“ - yeah, I noticed. It’s currently falling apart all over my fucking backyard.”

“Leave it with me, Mike. I’ll talk to the kid.”

“You do that.”

Charlie do this, Charlie do that. Second verse, same as the first. He’d wasted his youth being Lyle’s bitch and now was he
really
about to do the same for Lyle’s stupid, rotten spawn?

“I don’t
know
,” Reese was saying to Grayson. “He called up yelling about drool or something.”

“Drool?” said Grayson.

“Yeah. Spit. Spittle. I looked it up on the internet. It’s
drool
.”