Bleeding Violet (13 page)

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 into 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?”

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.

What had I ever shared with him?

Almost shyly, I stepped into his arms beneath the hot
spray. “You remember asking me in what way I was weird?” I asked, letting my fingers drift along his face, careful of how I touched him.

He was focused on me, studying me. “I remember.”

I took a deep breath, blinked water from my eyes. “I can see my Poppa. I can talk to him. Even though he’s been dead for a year.”

“For real?” He kissed my nose. “I knew there had to be a reason nothing freaks you out.”

Porterene insouciance would never cease to amaze me. “That’s all you have to say?”

He kissed my ear. “Cool?” He kissed my collarbone twice. “Real cool?” He pressed three more kisses into my armpit. “Double-dog cool?”

We clung to each other, laughing in the heat and steam, the last of the leech blood swirling down the drain. We clung to each other … and it
was
cool.

Very
cool.

We stayed under the shower until the water turned cold. Then we shut it off and stayed a little longer, despite the hard, unyielding tile. We could have been lying on a porcupine
and still we would have tarried. I didn’t mind the discomfort, though to Wyatt’s credit, I didn’t notice how sore I was until after we staggered into his room. But despite how good the sex was and how well we’d meshed, I found myself avoiding him.

It was always that way for me. After I opened myself to someone, I needed a few minutes to close down again, to restore my sense of privacy.

Wyatt lay on the bed, brown as toast in his white boxers. He’d given me a ratty green robe to wear while my clothes were in the washer, but he hadn’t felt the need to clothe himself. He was too busy smiling at the ceiling, lying atop the fluffy whipped cream of his bedspread like boy-shaped biscotti.

“I don’t think I ever been this tired after sex,” he said, in tones of wonder. “Between the leech and you, I’m all tapped out.”

“That’ll last ten minutes,” I said, rolling my eyes. “There’s no such creature as a tapped-out sixteen-year-old.”

“I’m seventeen.”