“So you just gone blackmail me?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt unlocked his truck and climbed inside, his face conflicted in the overhead light. “I’m never gone get outta the initiate if I don’t stop breaking the rules.”
“You can follow all the rules you like,” I told him sweetly, “after you take me hunting.”
“I’m not even going to the dark park; this is just some shit detail my elder wants me to take care of.”
“But you’ll go on a hunt in the dark park soon, won’t you? Listen to me, Wyatt. I’m sick of hearing transy this and transy that. I mean to make a name for myself in this town, and you said it yourself—if I want respect, I have to earn it.”
“Yeah, throw that in my face,” he said glumly.
“If you don’t help me, I’ll go into the dark park alone and find something to hunt by myself.”
He looked into my eyes long enough to see that I was dead serious.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Come with me to Melissa’s right now. All you have to do is stay put and not bolt, and if you still want to hunt after that, I’ll set it up.”
I was buckled into the passenger seat before he’d even finished speaking. “So come on,” I said, bouncing like a little kid on the way to the fair. “Let’s get this show on the road!”
Chapter Thirteen
The crooked rows of cramped houses rolling past the truck’s window were unfamiliar. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Downsquare.” Wyatt braked for a reckless group of tweens sullenly crossing the road. “Portero was built around Fountain Square. So you can live upsquare or way upsquare, downsquare or way downsquare.”
I thought about this. “Where do I live?”
“You and me live in the square. In the middle of everything.”
“What about sidesquare? Can a person live sidesquare?”
“Maybe you could, transy.”
I didn’t even mind that he called me transy, now that I was getting what I wanted. I rolled down the window and let the warm, sticky air blow over me, and smelled the electricity as blue lightning flashed above the tree line in the distance. Such a stormy part of the state I’d moved to. Stormy and dangerous.
“Will there be monsters where we’re going?” I couldn’t believe I was asking such a question aloud in the real world.
“Just one,” Wyatt said, punching through programmed radio stations. “A stealthy one we been tracking for two years.” When “Welcome to the Jungle” blasted from the speakers, he cranked it. He could have been driving me to the mall.
“Shouldn’t we have weapons?”
“I got my push dagger.” He grinned. “Handy little sucker.”
“Shouldn’t I have weapons?”
“You’re not gone do anything,” he said. “Except watch.”
Wyatt parked the truck in front of a tiny, boxlike house behind a chain-link fence. He took something from the glove compartment—a photo, I think—and then we got out of the truck.
Weeds overran the sidewalk and caressed my ankles. I hoped they were weeds. The only light on the whole inky street came from the anemic porch light gleaming ahead of us. We walked to the front door, and I twitched the wrinkles from my dress as Wyatt rang the bell.
A strange design had been branded into the white door, a square with three squiggles inside it. “What’s that?”
“A glyph,” he said tersely, eyes focused on the door and whatever was on the other side of it. “My elder, the guy who called me, marked the door to keep the smell from escaping.”
“What smell?”
A middle-aged man with a huge belly opened the door, and a stench barreled from his house like a rampaging army.
“That smell,” said Wyatt.
“Mortmaine!” The fat man’s womanly voice should have been comical, but somehow wasn’t. “What’s the special occasion?” He peeked out the door in mock terror. “Is a hell beast lurking in the azaleas?”
“Good evening, Melissa,” said Wyatt politely.
Melissa?
“This is my friend Hanna.”
Wyatt had to elbow me in the ribs. “Ah. Hi. Melissa.” I spoke through my teeth, not wanting the smell to get in my mouth.
“May we come in?” Wyatt asked.
The fat man waved us inside, and I was unsure how I was able to trick my legs into following Wyatt into that house when my brain was screaming at me to run away. Inside, with the door closed, the smell was corrosive enough to rot the delicate fabric of my dress clean off me. I pulled out the hanky I usually kept tucked into my bra and held it over my nose, and if the fat man took offense, so be it.
Almost as bad as the smell was the condition of the house. Plagues of flies swarmed in the rafters and beetles trundled along the warped floorboards. Everything was gummy-looking—the big cushy furniture, the mounted fish on the walls. Even the light seemed diseased, flickering and failing.
“Have a seat.”
Wyatt pulled me down onto a dark couch that had probably been white once upon a time. I sat on the edge. I was on edge. Melissa, however—was his name really Melissa???—was as carefree as summer.
“You kids like a cool drink?” he asked.
“No, tha—”
“Yeah, that’d be good,” Wyatt said. “Thanks.”
When the fat man disappeared into the kitchen, I turned to Wyatt, who was sifting through his cards, singing “Welcome to the Jungle” under his breath.
“Are you crazy? I am not drinking anything from this house! That smell ! It’s like …” Words failed me.
Wyatt gave me an incredulous look. “You really never smelled a dead body before?”
I looked around the living room, where even the light seemed to be rotting. “A dead body in here?” I whispered. “With us?”
“Bodies.” He removed two black cards from his deck. “In the back rooms. And in the kitchen. Wanna see?”
“No!” The horror in my voice made him chuckle.
Chuckle!
“Why are we even sitting here with a serial killer?”
“Because you have to prove your worth,” he reminded me, pulling the backing off one of the cards.
I thought of the hunt and why I had to go on one. Why I had to succeed. The urge to flee slowly dissolved.
Wyatt seemed impressed by my ability to suck it up, smiling encouragingly as he stuck his hand down the front of my dress.
He did it so quickly, pressing one of the black cards to the skin beneath my left breast, that I barely had time to gasp. I didn’t want to get felt up in that horror house, not even unintentionally, but before I could shove him away, he was done. He did the same thing to himself, reaching into his shirt to press the other card over his heart.
“Here’s those drinks!” The fat man, cheery and chubby cheeked, waddled forward and set two tumblers before us on the coffee table, smiling as if he didn’t know he had a house full of corpses.
The icy drinks were grisly-colored, full of shifty, floaty bits. I didn’t even try to touch mine, not even to pretend, and neither did Wyatt.
“So, what’s the problem?” asked the fat man with his woman’s voice, settling his girth into the love seat opposite ours. “Why would the mighty Mortmaine pay little ole me a visit?”
Wyatt sat forward, waving a fly from his ear as he slid a picture across the coffee table. “Let’s talk about John, Melissa.”
The fat man pinched the picture delicately between his thumb and forefinger. His expression changed, became sad and wistful as he tucked the photo into his mouth and slowly ate it, relishing it, as though it were Swiss steak. “Even in a photograph, he tastes good.”
“Is that what happened to John?” Wyatt asked, his voice low and curious. “You ate him?”
The fat man’s cheeks reddened. “I had to. John wasn’t a good provider, and I’m eating for two. A mother has needs.”
As I watched this hellish ventriloquist act, it clicked into place for me: I wasn’t staring at a
man with a woman’s voice, but at a woman with a man’s body.
I would normally have been excited to see a person so strange as Melissa, but the excitement was lost in a sea of revulsion as she chased the photograph with a deep swallow from her tumbler of gore.
“Where’s John now?” asked Wyatt.
“In the bedroom,” said Melissa. “I don’t know why I keep lugging him from house to house. Hardly anything left of him worth lugging.”
“Hardly anything left of you, either, Melissa. Or your baby.”
The man rubbed his fat belly gently. “The baby is fine. I just fed her.”
“You been feeding her for two years. Ever stop to wonder why you haven’t borne her yet?”
When Melissa lifted her tender gaze from the fat man’s belly and locked eyes with Wyatt, the tenderness morphed into a disturbing regard. Wyatt didn’t seem bothered, just raised his chin and let her look her fill.
“What’re you thinking about, Melissa?”
“About you.” The hunger in Melissa’s voice prickled along my skin like needles. “About how good you’d taste. How good for the baby.”
In reply, a dagger shaped like an upside-down T appeared in Wyatt’s hand, his fist wrapped around the bone handle so that the blade rose between his middle and ring fingers like a wicked metal thorn.
Wyatt lunged over the coffee table and stabbed his handy little push dagger up the fat man’s nose.
The fat man went rigid, and then kicked his legs convulsively in a horrible tap routine. Wyatt freed his dagger and flopped back beside me as the fat man finally stilled and slumped over the arm of the love seat.
In the space where he’d been sitting gleamed a hazy outline, almost a blur, of a woman who, aside from her huge stomach, was so gaunt that she looked more like a fat-bellied third-world child than a mother-to-be.
Melissa gazed down at herself. Her exposure seemed to confuse her, but the confusion didn’t last long. When she noticed her host lying dead on the couch, she screamed, and without the limitation of flesh, her mere suggestion of a face contorted unnaturally. She literally flew at us. I cringed backward into the disgusting cushions.
“Shh,” said Wyatt, pausing from cleaning the blade of his dagger to squeeze my knee. “We’re cool.”
He was right. Melissa could only get within a foot or so of us, no matter how hard she strained. The reason was the card smoldering beneath my breast.
A black filigree spread from the card below my bosom, racing along my skin like a fancy, curlicued cage. Wyatt was protected by the same filigree.
“I can’t let her die,” Melissa was screaming. “I have to feed her! Please!”
Beside me, Wyatt counted under his breath. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen.” On thirteen, Melissa began to break apart. She wrapped her arms around her belly, protective to the last, but useless as pieces of her broke off and floated into the air like a dandelion dispersing.
When Melissa’s pieces had vanished completely, when the filigree erased itself from our skin, Wyatt bounced up and went through the fat man’s pockets. Found his wallet. Rifled through it.
“Bob Gardineau,” he said. “From upsquare. There’s one flyer that can come down. Gone have to get a crew in here to clean up. You wanna help?” He said it like he was offering me a treat, and then he saw the look on my face. “What?” He came to me, put his hand on my shoulder. “You need to hurl?”
“Did you have to kill him?”
“Yeah.”
No hesitation. Whatsoever.
I brushed away his hand. “I mean … it wasn’t his fault he was possessed. Couldn’t you have given him an exorcism?”
Wyatt’s expression was both amused and exasperated. “I’m not a priest.”
“Couldn’t you have asked Melissa to leave?”
“Spirits don’t just leave.”
“But you didn’t even ask.” His apathy was beginning to piss me off. “Maybe you could have made a deal with her.”
“I don’t negotiate with evil,” he said, all pompous.
“She was worried about her baby.”
“She killed eight people trying to feed a baby that’s been dead for two years. Not exactly mother of the year.”
“Even still … Bob didn’t kill anyone.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, relaxing his self-righteous pose. I didn’t know how important it was for me that he get off his high horse until I saw him sink to my level. And Bob Gardineau’s level.
I knew what it was like to have no control over your own actions. I’d done many things while manic that I regret to this day; smacking Aunt Ulla with that rolling pin was at the bottom of a very long list.
Wyatt sat next to me and took my hand. Plucked a beetle from my hair. His expression was as gentle as baby’s breath. “Maybe Bob didn’t deserve to die, but he still had to. You have to kill the host to force the spirit out into the open—there’s no other way to do it.”
“But it’s so … merciless.”
“I’m Mortmaine,” he said, somewhat defensively. “Mercilessness is part of the job.” It disturbed me that he saw things in such black-and-white tones. I sure didn’t. For me, the world was a confusion of color.
“If you’re gone get all caught up in moral ambiguities,” he said, reading my mind, “maybe you shouldn’t hunt.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “I’m not ambiguous about hunting. I have to hunt.”
“Why? You trying to impress me?”
“Of course not.”
“Then who?” he said, taken aback.
“Rosalee.”
A look of understanding came into his face. “My ma’s a badass too. Kinda sucks having that to live up to. But at least your ma is cool. Totally worth dying over.”
“Dying,” I repeated, looking at Bob’s body on the love seat. His ruined nose. Wyatt had ruined it.
He smiled at me like he knew what I was thinking. “Death so close you can smell it, right?”
I nodded. I’d never thought about my own death in such real terms. Would I smell this bad when I died?
Wyatt texted a message to the other Mortmaine about what he called the Melissa Situation, and how he’d dealt with it.
“Are you going to call the police, too?”
“Sheriff Baker?” The contempt in his voice was deep. “Baker handles speeding tickets and helping old ladies cross the street. We handle the weird stuff. And sometimes it gets really weird, Hanna.”
He pulled me up by the hand and, thank God, led me out of the horror house. “Part of my job is dealing with death, dishing it out, avoiding it. There’s no reason for you to put yourself in that position. Not even for Rosalee.”
I took a moment to breathe in fresh air, to let the Gulf breeze clean the crawling sensation from my skin.
We walked to his truck and leaned against it, facing each other in the faint light of the porch as the trees creaked in the wind.
“There is a reason,” I told him. “Rosalee thinks I’m so weak I’ll drop dead any second. So weak it’s easier for her to pretend I don’t exist. I can’t live like that.” Crazy how easy it was to admit things in the dark. “I have to prove her wrong.”
“You ever stop to think she might prove you wrong?” he said, and then reached his warm hand down my bodice again.
“You know, most boys settle for a good-night kiss after a first date.”
He laughed and shook the black card he’d removed from my chest like a Polaroid picture. But unlike a Polaroid, the card disintegrated and wafted away on the breeze, much as Melissa had. “You just watched me stab a guy in the face. Don’t you think we’re beyond the usual dating formalities?”
He’d get no argument from me on that point.
“You did good in there, by the way. Didn’t run. Didn’t even puke.” He seemed amazed by this. “I’ll set something up for you.”
“A hunt? With the Mortmaine?”
Wyatt opened the truck door, smiling in the light. “It’s so weird to s
ee a transy amped up about hunting.”
After everything I’d seen him do, after watching him kill a guy right in front of me, he thought I was weird.
Unbelievable.
Chapter Fourteen
The following Monday, after school, I rode my bike to Fountain Square. Anything to avoid going home to Rosalee’s unrelenting cold shoulder, at least until I could melt it by regaling her with my fabulous exploits in the dark park.
Fountain Square was much more impressive than it had seemed on the postcard Rosalee had sent all those years ago, a wide space surrounded by buildings that gave it a closed, protected feeling: the courthouse to the north, St. Teresa Cathedral to the south, the library to the west, and the Pinkerton Hotel to the east.
The square was European-like, with old gray flagstones and colonnades and throngs of darkly attired Porterenes ghosting about in tight little cliques. I understood their herd mentality better now, their need to always travel in packs, their black clothes that made them easily identifiable to one another, their wariness of outsiders—this was what living with monsters had made of them.
I parked my bike at the rail near the courthouse and weaved through the crowd. Various carts were stationed around the square, mostly selling ices and ice cream due to the stifling heat. One cart, however, was selling barbecue, and the sweet, meaty smell hung heavy in the air.
The fountain itself sat in the center of the square, at the bottom of a sunken amphitheater made of a paler shade of gray stone. Shallow, descending tiers, on which at least a hundred people sat basking in the sunlight, led down to a huge spout of water.
Wyatt and I spotted each other at almost the same time, my purple dress drawing his eye as effectively as his green shirt had drawn mine. He sat on the top tier above the fountain, huddled together with his friends.
I made my way down to him but had to sit next to Carmin, since Wyatt was sandwiched between Lecy and Petra. The stone was hot beneath me; I had to sit carefully to protect my bare legs. Carmin and Lecy were discussing the list of names on the notebook in Carmin’s lap. I leaned forward to catch Wyatt’s eye.