“You think I’m a nice boy?” He seemed to find the idea hilarious.
“Aren’t you?”
We had paused by a tall, scraggly fence pasted over with missing-person flyers of happy faces that had probably stopped being happy long ago. Arc sodium lights lent an orangey-red, almost hellish tint to the flyers and to Wyatt’s eyes as he looked at me. Hellish, but intriguing. He slipped his hand up the slope of my bare shoulder around to the back of my neck, which he squeezed as he leaned toward me … and then his phone rang.
He groaned when he saw the number. “What, Pet? Why do I need to be there? No. No. Because you need to learn how to handle things on your own. I said no, damn it.” He hung up. “I swear to God she’s like …”
I watched him struggle to find the perfect words, wondering if I’d ever inspire that sort of passion in anyone.
“I can’t even say she’s like a four-year-old,” he griped. “My little brother’s four and I’d trust him to take care of himself better than Pet could.”
“She’s a transy too, right?”
“Not anymore. She’s been here long enough to get a key of her own and everything. But she acts like she just moved here.”
“Like me?”
“She’s nothing like you.” He leaned next to me against the fence, the package under his arm nearly poking me in the chest.
“A key of her own.” I remembered the key on Petra’s necklace, the key on Rosalee’s red bracelet. “A silver key?”
Wyatt pulled a thin chain that snaked from one of his belt loops into his back pocket. At the end of the chain were several keys, including an old-fashioned silver key, nearly identical to Petra’s and Rosalee’s. “Everybody gets one,” he said.
“I didn’t get one.”
“You gotta be born here.” He tucked his keys back into his pocket. “Or be like Pet. If you survive long enough, like a year, I think, the Mayor comes around and gives you a key. To welcome you to the neighborhood.”
Yet another thing that set me apart from everyone. I watched Wyatt pulling the edge of one of the flyers between us, ripping into some kid’s fake say-cheese grin. He was deep in thought. I didn’t have to guess who he was thinking about. “Are you going to leave me and go to her?”
“What?”
“Well, you seem distracted.”
“Not because of Pet.”
“Then why?”
He stopped picking at the flyer and kissed me, pressing me back against the fence. His tongue was cold and raspberry-flavored and, like the snow cone, seemed to melt when I sucked it. He was like an eclipse, the way he blotted out everything except the sugary taste of him, the hard push and pull of his body, the way he made me want to climb all over him.
“Let go of my arm,” I murmured between kisses, wanting to squeeze him. I couldn’t get a good grip with just one arm free.
He pulled back slightly, frowning. “I’m not holding your arm.”
His hands were on either side of my face. Yet I couldn’t move my right arm.
I looked down at a long pink … appendage, attached to the inside of my elbow, where all the green veins stood out so prominently—a glistening appendage as long as my arm.
“Shit,” Wyatt breathed, his eyes following the attachment at my inner elbow to where it curled out of sight through a gap in the boards of the weathered fence.
“You can see it too?” I whispered, relieved that even a brain like mine wasn’t faulty enough to hallucinate something so heinous.
“Yeah, but don’t worry. I got it.”
Wyatt backed up into the street and took a running jump at the fence, throwing himself over it like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat.
A feeling of loneliness galvanized me. I grabbed the slimy thing attached to my arm, felt its rhythmic squeeze as it sucked blood from me like a mutant leech. I could feel it draining me.
No amount of tugging on my part compelled it to release me. Instead the appendage tightened and did some pulling of its own, yanking me forward to smack headfirst into the huge wooden fence.
Talk about an eclipse.
Chapter Sixteen
I was on the ground, dazed, but not too dazed to recognize Poppa, despite the fact that he was dressed in a vanilla suit he’d never owned in life. But I recognized the purple paisley tie I’d made for him—his favorite. He looked hale and fit, and so tall it hurt my neck to look at him. So neat and clean while I sprawled on the ground like a ragamuffin.
“It’s not my fault,” I told him, trying to straighten my dress with my free hand. “I can’t get up. This thing won’t let me up.”
“It’s not a thing.” How strange to hear his voice outside my head, for the first time in a long time—how deep and perfect. “You know what it is. Say what you mean, Hanna.”
I was dying, and he was scolding me.
Unbelievable.
Of course I knew what it was. I watched the Discovery Channel. I knew leeches when I saw them, even pink ones, and I knew how I felt—like a girl-shaped juice box, warm and surreal.
“You’re forgetting the herbs,” Poppa said. He knelt next to me, all grace and blond serenity as he opened the bundle that Wyatt had dropped. Poppa went through the contents. “Here we are. Panic grass.”
He tossed me a bound cluster of brownish-green grass. I caught it, and before I could wonder what the hell I was supposed to do with it, the grass burst into flames. I yelped and tossed it aside.
“No.” Poppa picked up the smoking, flameless clump and held it out to me. “Take it.”
Because it was Poppa, I took it, and it immediately burst into flames again.
“Steady,” said Poppa, as I struggled with the urge to drop it before the flames could …
But the grass wasn’t burning me. The flames in my palm were cool as air, but the flames engulfing the leech attached to my arm licked hotly over the creature, partly melting it.
When Poppa leaned down and blew out the gentle flame in my hand, the flames cooking the leech also blew out. The blackened leech hurriedly detached itself from my inner elbow and zipped out of sight through the gap in the fence.
If not for the stinging, penny-size hole in my arm and the grassy ashes smearing my palm, I would have been sure I’d hallucinated the whole thing.
Wyatt landed beside me with a thud, startling me, a bloody switchblade in his hand that quickly disappeared into his pocket and a familiar penny-size hole on his left forearm. My relief that he was still alive left me shaken. That or the blood loss.
He gathered his bundle under one arm and me under the other. “We gotta piss off. There’s a whole nest of ’em in there. And the mother’s none too pleased about losing an arm.”
“A nest of what?” I asked as we jogged down the street. I felt dizzy, too dizzy to jog. I wondered how much blood I’d lost. Well, not lost. How much I’d had stolen. “A nest of leeches?”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t think so. It fed on us with its tentacles. Leeches don’t have tentacles.”
“Leeches don’t fly, either,” Poppa said behind me. “But this one does. You might want to jog a little faster.”
I looked back. Poppa was pointing at the sky, at the wide, glistening, pink weirdness spiraling over the fence like a horrific party favor, lashing its tentacles about as if it meant to bleed the air itself. A wingless abomination, and yet it attracted me, the way a grizzly would. Or a pouncing tiger. Who could resist being wanted, even if only for a meal?
It rushed us.
Wyatt pushed me to the sidewalk and out of harm’s way, but the leech was content to settle for the tall, half-green target standing guard over me. Wyatt had just enough time to pull a red card from his pocket before the leech snatched him off the ground and entwined him in its long, pink coils.
“Wyatt!” I scrambled to my feet as the leech U-turned against the starry sky, high above the street, and flew Wyatt back over the fence.
To its waiting nest.
Smaller, skinnier tentacles whipped high in
to the air, striking inexpertly toward Wyatt’s thrashing legs as the mother leech dangled him above her hungry children.
“Wyatt!” I screamed again, flitting back and forth along the fence in search of a way in, but before his name stopped echoing down the street, the leech mutated from pink to red, a rapid discoloration that reminded me of how the lure in the administration window had changed. And just like the lure, the leech exploded—not into glass fragments, but into a huge, misty ball of redness, like a burst water balloon, spraying me with fine bloody droplets.
Within seconds, Wyatt vaulted gracefully over the fence, drenched in blood as if he’d bathed in it. He grabbed my hand and pulled me into a run down the street.
He was laughing.
“This is the night you should’ve cooked those blood pancakes. I think I’m down a pint. How ’bout you?”
“At least a pint. What about the rest of them? The ones in the nest?”
“They’re just babies,” he said, whipping out his cell. “They can’t even fly yet.” He sent a text one-handed, holding on to me with the other. I could see the screen, see the message urging the Mortmaine to deal with the baby leeches before someone got hurt. Someone else. “In the meantime, we can go to my house. We need orange juice, antibiotics, bandages …”
“Is he a Boy Scout?” Poppa asked while Wyatt went on and on. Poppa didn’t run like us or even walk. He skated along, his shadow looping crazily over the asphalt.
“Kind of,” I explained. “But they call them Mortmaine here.”
“What?” Wyatt was watching me. “Was that Finnish? Something about Mortmaine?”
“I have to stop.” I think I said it in English. God, I was dizzy.
We had reached Carmona Boulevard, and Wyatt parked me against the wall of a music store. He used a couple of stray wet wipes he’d found in his pocket to clean the blood off me and off himself as well. He was far bloodier than I was—Carrie-at-the-prom bloody.
“You’ll be all right,” he said, and after a few minutes, I began to believe him.
“Good thing you thought to use panic grass. That stuff’s real handy. Runyon figured out a long time ago that plants that grow near Keys tend to grow a little differently. That Runyon was clever as hell. Too bad he was such a dick. How did you know to use it?”
“I didn’t.”
“Lucked out, huh? My house is right down there,” he said, pointing. “You’ll feel better once we’re inside, okay?”
“Okay.”
He helped me stand. I thought my legs would give out, but they didn’t. They were soldiers.
“You holding up?” People looked at us curiously as we passed them in the street. Not shocked, not horrified, not concerned.
Curious.
“Why not?” I said, trying to match Wyatt’s long stride. “It was just a leech. Just a huge monstrous flying leech. With tentacles.”
“Is Rosalee gone freak about you getting hurt?” As though the idea of upsetting Rosalee bothered him more than the leech.
I looked at Poppa, who was keeping pace with us. He knew Rosalee better than I did. But Poppa kept his thoughts to himself. Not that it mattered. I knew the answer.
“Hanna?”
“She doesn’t care what happens to me.” The truth of the words coiled around me like a funeral shroud.
Wyatt blew it off. “Rosalee’s a Porterene; even when we care, we don’t always show it. We got good poker faces.”
But I didn’t want to talk about Rosalee.
I shoved Wyatt back against a telephone pole and kissed him the way he’d kissed me at the fence, only much more thoroughly, tasting his eyebrows and the wells of his ears and the scar on his chin as well as his mouth. The slight tang of blood on his tongue spurred me on to deeper exploration.
“See what I mean about sex and death?” he said, gasping when I nipped his upper lip.
“I see what you mean about death,” I said between bites. “The sex part, you’ll have to show me.”
He grinned. “Oh, yeah?”
Chapter Seventeen
We kissed our way down Carmona Boulevard, past skinny old brick houses with high stoops and pointy iron fences that bit into my back whenever Wyatt and I leaned against them, which was often. We were determined to swallow each other whole. I wished Wyatt could swallow me—how comforting to be cradled within such a strong boy.
“Strong and powerful,” said Poppa.
“Hm?” I deferred my exploration of Wyatt’s mouth to find Poppa watching us from the stoop of one of the skinny houses.
“He’s powerful,” Poppa explained patiently as Wyatt kissed my neck. “His family is. They own a Key. This Key. No one else can make that claim.” Poppa was pointing to the house’s door knocker, an odd one: about a foot long, glossy black, and twisted like a cruller.
“What’s wrong?” Wyatt followed my gaze up the stoop.
“That’s the Key?” I looked at him. “The one from your story?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you said it was made of bone.”
“It is.”
“It’s black.”
He gave me a silent, incredulous look, as though I’d disappointed him. “Anna was different. I told you that. That’s why Runyon used her.”
“But that’s just it. Why do you have Runyon’s Key?”
“The Mayor gave it to us.”
“Why?”
“Hanna, come on.” Wyatt kissed me, and though it didn’t make me forget my question, it did remind me why I’d followed him home.
He pulled me up the stoop, past Poppa, and into his house.
Wyatt’s parents were sitting on a couch on the far wall of the living room, companionably sharing a newspaper. They looked up when we entered but were distracted when a little boy with fat cheeks plopped onto the floor in front of the TV, a bowl of nearly black cherries before him and a rag doll with wild orange hair tucked under his arm.
“Paolo,” said Wyatt’s mother sharply, “what’re you doing out of bed?”
“Ragsie can’t sleep,” said the boy, as he fed a cherry into the doll’s blue Magic Marker mouth. Which opened and swallowed the cherry.
The doll, by itself, reached into the bowl for more, picking over the fruit with its cloth hands.
“Don’t let Ragsie blow your mind,” said Wyatt, squeezing my hand, startling me out of my astonishment. “He ain’t even that interesting. Just eats all day like a little pig.”
He strode forward and ruffled the doll’s orange hair, then did the same to his little brother. “If you keep feeding Rags every five seconds,” Wyatt told him, “he’s gone get fat as all outdoors.”
“Cherries’re good for you,” said the boy, stretching sleepily on the floor, uninterested in the blood coating his brother. “Can’t get fat if it’s good for you.” He blinked his big little-kid eyes at me. “Who’s that?”
“Yeah, Wyatt,” said his mother. Both his parents were openly staring at me. “Introductions’d be nice.”
Wyatt pulled me into the room. “This is Hanna Järvinen. Hanna, this is my kid brother, Paulie. That’s Ragsie.”
The doll waved at me, regarding me with its red shoe-button eyes. I did not wave back.
“And those’re my folks, Sera and Asher Ortiga.”
Sera didn’t look like anybody’s mother, more like the person you hired when you wanted your mother killed. She was lean and watchful, with Wyatt’s clear brown eyes and a mouth like a scar, thin and unsmiling. Asher, on the other hand, looked soft and jovial.
“What happened to y’all?” he asked, taking in our wrecked and bloody appearance.
“It’s nothing,” I said, concentrating on not allowing my mind to be blown by the hungry little doll. “We just had to kill this … thing.”
“Ah,” Wyatt’s folks exclaimed in unison.
“She handled it great,” said Wyatt, slapping me on the back like we were buddies and not at all interested in getting into each other’s pants. “You’d’ve thought she
was from here.”
“Good for you,” Asher said, smiling at me. “Rosalee must be proud.”
“You know my mother?” I asked him.
Asher shot his wife a guilty look, then disappeared behind the paper. “We, uh … went to school together.”
Sera’s scar of a mouth curdled.
So Rosalee had slept with Asher. That meant that if I had sex with Wyatt, I would be carrying on a family tradition.
Sweet.
“We’re gone go get patched up,” Wyatt said, pulling me away from his parents. We had to step over Paulie, who had fallen asleep on the floor, his doll still stuffing itself with cherries.
“Nice meeting you,” I said to his parents as Wyatt pulled me up the stairs.
“You too,” Asher called back. Sera just watched me speculatively until I was out of sight.
Once we were upstairs, Wyatt kissed me again, violently, unmindful of the hallway’s gallery of family photos bearing witness.
“We should clean up first,” I said at one point. I’d been running my hands under Wyatt’s shirt, and he was so soaked with that leech-thing’s blood, my palms were bright red.
Wyatt took my bloody hand, hauled me into the bathroom—a cramped space with fuzzy green mats all over the floor—and turned on the shower. Then he cussed out my dress in Spanish when he couldn’t figure out how to get it off me. I had to show him the hidden zippers, and then I returned the favor and stripped him of his gory clothes.
The blood that had exploded onto him was partly mine; I liked the idea that he was covered in my blood, my scent. It made me feel possessive. Savage.
I backed him into the shower so forcefully, he smacked the back of his head against the green tile. He laughed it off, but I remembered my first time with Mika, how I’d bullied him. I didn’t want to bully Wyatt, didn’t want to do him as an antidote to nearly dying. I wanted a connection—a real one.
“What’s wrong?” Wyatt backed off, giving me space enough to really see him, to see into the brown glass of his eyes, to glimpse the depth of things I didn’t know about him. Which was nothing compared to what he didn’t know about me. No wonder he wouldn’t tell me why Runyon’s Key was on his door.