The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (21 page)

“I’ll do it,” said Gabe. “You find me a lightbulb. I don’t know where Gloria keeps the spares these days.”

Blue couldn’t find one, so they cannibalized one from a table lamp. While Gabe spoke in a low, confidential voice to Stacy – “...well, you know, it’s the age...yeah, I know what he’s going through...” – she dug out some blankets and made up a bed on the couch for Axl. His big boy feet hung over the end but it didn’t seem to bother him. When she said goodnight he just grunted, his knees drawn up and his face blue-white in the glow of his phone.

“He didn’t see me either,” said Gabe, when he sneaked up into Blue’s room. “Still texting.”

“Is Stacy okay?”

“She’s fine,” said Gabe, carefully closing the bedroom door. When he turned back to face her, he wasn’t smiling. Which was weird. Usually when they were alone in a room with a bed in it he never stopped.

“So,” he said, his back to the door. “Did Gloria read you the riot act about boys?”

Blue shook her head. “She told me to keep my underpants on at night,” she said. “But I don’t know if she was talking about boys.” Something unseen had shifted between them and she knew she should ask, but she had gone all day wanting him and now he was here. Impossible not to lead a man around by his dick when the opportunity was right there in front of you.

She peeled off her t-shirt, unhooked her bra. His eyes turned soft and dark and sexy at the sight of her breasts, and she got up and put her arms around him. To her intense relief his kiss was as hungry as it had been when they were on the stairs. “Guess what?” she whispered in his ear.

“What?”

“Those jars you buried earlier?” He was sucking on her nipples now, the warm, wet pull of his mouth tugging little threads of pleasure all through her body. “At least one of those was mine.”

The gentle suction of his mouth sputtered out in a laugh. “You
did
it?”

“I was thinking of you. I thought you might get a kick out of it.”

He shook his head, but she could feel he was as hard as he’d ever been. “That’s...just...wow. That’s just wrong. That should not turn me on.”

“But it does.”

He squeezed her breasts in both hands and kissed her deep and rough. “Jesus, Blue – what am I going to do with you?”

“Everything?”

“Didn’t you just get your period?”

“It’s okay; I’m a slow starter. There won’t be much blood yet.” She caught hold of his belt and led him towards the bed. He had that hesitant, serious look on his face again, the one he had no business having when they had a whole night in front of them. She stepped out of her shorts and underpants and leaned back, letting her knees fall open to show him everything. He looked at her with such tender, scorching heat that it was almost as good as being touched. Almost.

“Come on, Blue,” he said, plucking a couple of foil wrapped condoms from the back pocket of his jeans. “Play nice.”

“Why?” The jeans were off. He was naked and beautiful and her hands itched to be all over him. “Now that I know you like nasty so much better.”

14

She knew she was dreaming. Again.

Smell of earth, old cellars, a woman’s hair, matted with blood. Her hand was turned palm up and stopped just beyond the wrist.

Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling,

Charlie is my darling, the young chevalier.

Cramp. Cracking, bones aching and bending in ways bones were never ever meant to...God, no. Stop. What is this?

Little pig, little pig, let me come in.

There was a voice, and it sang, and it spoke, but it was more like a breeze than a voice. A hot, sick-smelling breeze like the one that had carried the smell of the deer to her nostrils, dank with blood and rot. A brown, sticky, dirty kind of voice, like if the stink in the Superdome could talk.

Fly me to the moon, Stormy Blue. You’ll as you’re told, no mooncalf I. Caliban ban ban ban ban, has a new master got a new man. Shiny new, Stormy Blue. Oh yes, you’ll do.

She snapped awake in the middle of a strong cramp. It was wet between her legs and she realized - with an almost welcome mundane annoyance – that she had probably bled all over the sheets. Gabe stirred and turned towards her, but his eyes remained shut.

With her knees pressed together, Blue rolled gingerly to the edge of the bed and off. She could feel blood running down her thigh in the dark and wished she’d listened to Gloria’s advice about keeping her underpants on. She quietly opened a drawer and grabbed a pair, along with a pack of maxi pads.

Too late to rummage in your drawers now, missy. The damage is done.

If it hadn’t been for Gabe sleeping, she would have turned on the light. Anything to get rid of that voice in her head. She wasn’t awake. Not really. She was on autopilot, the way she was sometimes when her bladder drove her out of bed before she was fully conscious.

She hurried for the bedroom door all the same, darting quickly down the hall. The bathroom was pitch black and for a second she flailed blindly at thin air, scrambling to find the pull cord of the light. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t, and the darkness had teeth and...

Click.

Got it.

Blue breathed again. The blood running down her leg had almost reached the floor and she quickly wiped it up with a handful of toilet paper. She was in full flow now, red and messy, and the cramps that had woken her were working up to becoming the worst kind, the kind where it felt like your ass was trying to part company with the rest of your body.

She cleaned herself up with wet toilet paper and put on a pad.

That horse has bolted. No point shutting the stable door now.

It spoke again as she was pulling up her underpants. It was a seedy little voice but so very knowing. The kind of voice that would whisper your dirtiest secrets back to you and cackle. She hadn’t a word for it but one of Gloria’s strange words came back to her. Bugaboo.

That was the moment she realized she wasn’t dreaming. She only wished she was.

Blue ran water, her heart roaring in her ears now. She hung onto the edge of the sink; the light was moving strangely across the porcelain. The last thing she wanted to do was look up, but it was as if someone had grabbed hold of the back of her hair and was pulling it down, forcing her to raise her head.

The light fitting was swinging in circles.

“Oh God,” she said, and it came out in a squeak.

She thought she must have passed out. Through the thin, skittish darkness she heard the voice crooning an old song –
I’ve Got You Under My Skin
. When she could see again she was on her hands and knees in front of the cellar door, and the light was once again swinging its seasick shadows on the wall.

Axl. He was right there. If she yelled he’d...

...don’t even think it, girlie. I’m in your head. Such a lot of blood in here, all young and juicy. Just crank up your pressure another notch and POP! goes the weasel. Not to mention your chances of walking, talking or breathing without a ventilator.

Her lips were numb but she managed to whisper. “What the fuck
are
you?”

It laughed.

Someone to watch over you. Up you come now. Good girl.

The bugaboo voice brought her hands up to the lock. She had a key in her hand. She had never seen it before in her life, hadn’t even known it existed, but here it was, in a hand she no longer had any control over. It slid into the lock as if magnetized and then turned.

Here we are, Sister Anne. Welcome to the bloody chamber.

The next thing she knew she was lying with her breasts bare against a cold floor. There was a hand on her shoulder.

“Blue?” said Gabe.

He put something around her shoulders. As she sat up she thought she might vomit; she felt as if she had just gone out and got blackout drunk and was now stirring to the awful, curdled, queasy feeling of a body that had no idea why she’d gone and poisoned it so thoroughly.

Jesus, was this the basement?

There was a cage down here. A big one, like an old fashioned lock-up from a Western.

“Are you okay?” said Gabe. “I think you were sleep-walking.”

She tried to say something - anything - just some reassuring noise to let her know that her body was under her own control again. Her tongue felt fuzzy and stuck to the roof of her mouth. The big bars danced back and forth in front of her eyes, making her feel even sicker. When she bowed her head to retch she saw what was on the floor in front of her. It was a Ouija board, old and battered.

There were weird score marks in the floor, like the marks of fingernails. She blinked, forcing herself to try and see one of everything again, but the marks blurred into twos and threes when she tried to follow their tracks with her eyes. Beyond the bars, there were more. Big gashes scored into the plaster, some of them flecked with a dirty brown that could only be old blood. Claw marks. And there - smeared but still recognizable - was a big bloody paw print.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” said Gabe. “Let’s go upstairs and let’s all try to stay calm, all right?”

She reached for the Ouija board; the voice was gone but she had this weird feeling that it was important somehow, and that she’d be in trouble if she left it down there. There were splinters in the back of the door and here and there it looked as though the bars had been replaced with newer, shinier ones. “Gabe,” she said. “What the hell was down here?”

He swallowed, and when he met her eyes he looked like he was fighting every instinct he possessed in order to do so. “Me,” he said.

A faded, rank animal smell hit the back of her throat as he helped her to her feet. Instead of making her gag the way it should, it tripped some buried switch of understanding. The paw print, the claw marks, the cage. The three days off every full moon even though he was the opposite of superstitious. He was trying to tell her that he was a werewolf, and that was insane, but then at least he wasn’t wriggling around in her brain, threatening to burst her blood vessels.

He led her up the stairs and into the kitchen, creeping past the couch where Axl snored softly, one large foot hanging over the arm. Gabe closed the kitchen door and tucked the afghan tighter around Blue’s shoulders, then started opening all the cupboards.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you have any idea where she keeps the booze these days?”

Blue pointed to the cupboard at the end. Gabe took out a bottle of white rum and found a couple of shot glasses. “I was trying to work out the best time to tell you,” he said, but Blue couldn’t stop staring at the Ouija board on the table. What the hell had just happened? Was she still dreaming?

“I know it’s a lot to deal with...” he said, and pushed a shot towards her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m still me. It’s just...”

She shook her head. “No, you don’t get it. Something
walked
me down those stairs.” She touched the board. She had thought it was wood but it was some kind of veneer. The back said MADE IN CHINA. “Whatever it was, I think it wanted me to find this.”

“Yeah,” said Gabe. “I’m a werewolf, by the way. Did we cover that?”

She laughed. Couldn’t help it. “I’m dreaming.”

He didn’t smile. “No, Blue,” he said. “You’re not. I wish you were, but you’re not.”

The rum smelled disgusting, but she drank it anyway. He filled her glass again.

“The cage,” she said. “You mean you...you come here, what? Once a month?”

“No,” he said. “I have my own cage now. In my basement.”

Blue stared at him, clinging to the last vain hope that this was either a dream or a very tasteless joke on his part. “Does Joe know?” she asked, and the look on his face told her everything she needed to know.

“You’re kidding me,” she said, into the short space of a silence. “Joe’s a werewolf?”

Gabe nodded, guilt written all over his face.

The alcohol was starting to wash through her bloodstream, a nice, boozy, rum-flavored buffer between her and this crazy new reality. No wonder her mother had loved it so much. She swallowed the second shot and poured herself another.

“So,” she said. “How long has this been going on?”

“A while,” he said, staring down at his folded hands. “Usually kicks in around puberty. When you’re a kid you just...grow normally, like nature is too preoccupied with that process to worry about anything else. But then the hormones get involved and it’s like our bodies get confused, I guess.”

“Confused?”

He looked up. “Yeah. Like they can’t figure out whether they’re supposed to turn a boy into a man or...something else.”

Blue tightened her grip on the shot glass. Again that little switch clicked in her head, making strange sense out of total insanity, like naked teenage boys turning up on the doorstep. “
Axl?
” she said.

Gabe nodded. “Yeah. He’s on the turn.”

She stared at him. “Is everyone around here a werewolf?”

“God, no,” said Gabe.

“Really? Because there seem to be quite a lot of them from where I’m sitting.”

“It’s a small town thing,” he said. “You probably didn’t meet any in New Orleans; most werewolves are kind of rednecks. Or Amish.”

She was glad she wasn’t drinking anything when he said that. “Amish werewolves?”

He shrugged. “Small gene pools, I guess,” he said. “Closed communities. It’s one of those things that pops up more often the more you have kissing cousins marrying one another. Like extra toes. Or color blindness. There are some packs out in the swamps where they’ve been keeping it in the family so long that they’re monsters even when the moon isn’t full, but we don’t - ”

“ - wait, stop,” she said. “One thing at a time.”

“Sorry. I realize this is a lot to take in.”

She wondered what would happen if she just got up from the table now, walked away, packed her bags and went back to Louisiana. Probably nothing. That was when she knew she was already in this up to her neck, because that yawning, toilet-cleaning nothing suddenly seemed a whole lot more scary than dating werewolves and getting possessed by ghosts.