Bleeding Violet (20 page)

“
All
of them?”

“Wasn’t very many to start with. Just me, the folks, and a couple of great-aunts. Wanna see my old house?”

It was just down the street, a one-story with orange shutters and a kid’s bike lying forgotten on the lawn.

Rosalee seemed to empty as she stared at the house. “See that tree?” She pointed to the cottonwood shading the lawn. “When I’d get in trouble, Daddy’d make me come out here and rip a branch off that tree, and he’d switch me with it.”

“Switch?”

She pretended to whip at my legs.

“He
hit
you with it?”

“Corporal punishment.” She stared at the house grimly. “You didn’t miss a thing not growing up in the South.”

“We moved to Dallas when I was seven,” I said to distract her. “I’ve lived in the South for nine years.”

“It’s not the same.” Her black eyes melted a little. “You were with Joosef far away from here. Happy. Free.”

“I would have been happy growing up here.”

“It’s dangerous here.” Her hands drifted up to hide in
her armpits. “I always thought that was why Daddy was the way he was. Because he was so desperate to protect me. And when you showed up, I thought, now I’m gone have to be like Daddy; how else can I keep her safe? But I couldn’t be like that. I couldn’t hurt you.”

Strange how she didn’t understand that her coldness had been more hurtful than any beating would have been.

“So I figured if I bided my time, you’d be scared away on your own. My hope was that you’d only
see
something scary and not get eaten by it. My hope was that you’d give up.

“Then you came home from the fucking
dark park
with a severed head. And you were so nonchalant about it. God, that pissed me off.”

But she didn’t look pissed. She didn’t even sound pissed. The more she talked, the deader she looked and sounded. As if her childhood home was drawing something vital from her.

“You were afraid for me?” I said, touching her arm.

“Partly.” She pulled away from my touch, her eyes never leaving the house. “But mostly, when you managed to keep yourself safe, I realized that the way I’d been raised was so
unnecessary
. All the switchings. The beatings. The spying. The interrogation.

“I’d go out for five minutes and it was where’d you go,
who’d you see, who saw you, why’d it take so long? Daddy’d ask me about boys I knew or boys he thought I might know and whether I’d ever let them do this or that to me, all these detailed questions. Guys ask me all the time, where’d you learn to fuck like that? I tell them, from my father. He gave me a lifetime of great ideas with all his questions.”

It was like free-falling through slime just
listening
to her, so I couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. I would have taken her hand, but she was still hiding them.

“Grandpa … he molested you?”

“No,” she said, her voice disturbingly wistful. “But maybe he should’ve. Maybe then he wouldn’t’ve hated me as much.

“But he didn’t like me like that. He didn’t want
anybody
to like me like that. I had to sneak out if I wanted to be with anybody, and I always got caught.”

She was shivering, goose bumps popping out on her arms, despite the heat. “I thought it’d be so great when I finally escaped that house, but it’s like I’m still trapped in the back room alone and—”

I stood before her and blocked her view of the house—its view of her. “You’re not alone anymore. You’re not trapped. Or should I burn down that house to prove it to you?”

She was so startled, she dropped her hands. “Don’t talk crazy.”

“I
am
crazy. That’s the point; I have a ready-made alibi.”

The thought of fire thawed the cold cast of her face and lit the dark oil of her eyes. “
Would
you burn it down?”

“Got matches?” Her interest was firing me up. “Because if that’s what you need, I’ll do it.”

She
wanted
me to do it. I could see it.
Just ask me
.

Ask me!

She opened her mouth. I was prepared for anything, except the shrill voice that interrupted.

“Hey! Rosalee? Is that you?”

A dried stick of a woman stood on the porch of the house next door to Rosalee’s childhood home, a woman with inexplicable old-lady hair, parted on the right and slicked to the side in a weird white bouffant.

“Hey, Miz Holly.” Rosalee had regained her balance, all the burning anticipation of arson drained out of her; her hands came to rest lightly on her hips. “Ain’t seen you in a long time.” She didn’t sound upset about it.

Miz Holly pushed up her glasses, all the better to see me with. “This the daughter I been hearing about?”

“Yes’m.”

“She’s so pretty. Just like you. Hope she only takes after you in looks. Or is she running wild in the streets the way you used to?” To me, Miz Holly said, “I could tell you stories about this one—”

“G’night, Miz Holly,” Rosalee said, bright and mean. “Tell your son I said hi. And your husband.”

“I … okay.”

We walked back the way we’d come. “I guess we won’t be sending her a Christmas card,” I said.

Rosalee threw an evil look over her shoulder at Miz Holly. “She was always ratting me out to my folks.”

“So you got back at her by sleeping with her son
and
her husband.”

Rosalee’s laugh was as evil and gorgeous as a serpent’s tooth. “Am I that transparent?”

“It’s what I would have done,” I admitted. “When I was back in Dallas, I decided to sleep with all the boys in my class in alphabetical order, and they totally went along with it. It’s like you said—it’s easy to fascinate men.”

She looked at me, half-shocked, half-amused. “You went to bed with all the boys in your class?”

“I never even got to the
B
s,” I said, swinging the bag of peaches. “Too many
A
s for little ole me. I got bored after Armbruster and called it off.”

“You’re definitely my daughter,” said Rosalee, chuckling, halting conversations midsentence as people marveled at the sound of her laughter.

I wanted to burn something for her so badly I felt sick with it. I wanted to tell her I’d do anything for her, but my heart was too full to speak.

I was her daughter.

Definitely.

On Wednesday I tried not to think about the trip to the shrink all day, but after school, when I could no longer avoid it, I began to shake. When Wyatt asked to drive me home, I let him, but a few blocks from my house, I made him detour into an empty lot so I could drag him into the backseat.

I wanted to eat up some time before I had to go home, but not much time was eaten.

“That didn’t take long,” I griped, retrieving my discarded underpants from the footwell.

Wyatt zipped up his pants, grinning and sweating and vibrant beside me on the leather seat. “Wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “Afternoons and backseats are for quickies. Everybody
knows that.” He slung his arm around my shoulders and kissed me hard on my throat, hard enough to stop my breath for a second. “I like your neck.”

The way he said it made me smile, as though he were admitting a shameful secret. “Really?”

“Mm.” He kissed my jugular. “It’s swanlike.”

“I love swans.” I pulled away from his admiring kisses and rested my chin against the top of the backseat, staring out the rearview window at the high yellow grass and pine saplings bending in the gusty wind.

I watched the gray sky and prayed for a tornado. “If I were a swan, I wouldn’t need a tornado.”

“What?” He was no longer touching me, but he watched me, waiting for that after-sex wall to come down.

“If I had wings I could fly away.”

“Why you wanna fly away?”

I looked at Wyatt, shocked by the sting of tears in my eyes. “I don’t want to go home yet.”

The threat of my tears didn’t worry him—he was beyond worry. Something bright and irrepressible crackled deep in his eyes, like fireflies in a beer bottle. “I don’t aim to take you home yet. I wanna show you something.”

He pulled me out of the truck, and the wind nearly stripped off my dress. The air was moist and unstable and promised rain. I stayed by the truck, trying to keep my hair out of my face while Wyatt surveyed the lot.

“There,” he said, and ran through the brilliant yellow grass to a flailing sapling ten yards away. When he reached the tree, he turned to face me and stepped sideways into the wind … and disappeared.

My first thought was of Runyon’s daughter and how she’d vanished off the sidewalk one day, vanished and was never seen again.

“Wyatt!” I ran forward, screaming, and when he reappeared in mid-sideways step, I ran smack into him. We both hit the ground on our butts. Unlike me, Wyatt was laughing.

“How cool was that?” he said.

I crawled through the yellow grass toward him, my right elbow jingling and jangling as I clutched the front of his green shirt. “You used the hidden doors, didn’t you?”

“They finally showed me how,” he said, so full of good cheer I wanted to shake him. “I only just got the hang of it.”

I shook him. “You scared the shit out of me! And do you even know how many laws of nature you just totally destroyed?”

“Not nature as
I
know it!” He lifted me off my feet and twirled me around the lot.

“Is this a happy dance?” I yelled, not wanting to laugh, but laughing anyway. “This is so transy. I’m telling everyone.”

“Tell ’em!” Wyatt set me back on my feet and kissed me all over my face. “When they start clowning me, I’ll just make my escape.” He slid to the right with a flourish and vanished. Seconds later he reappeared, sliding to the left. Then he started strutting around like he owned the planet.

I smacked the back of his head. “Stop showing off.” But I was grinning as I said it; his excitement was catching. “How are you able to disappear like that?” I asked as the happy dance worked itself out of his system.

“I didn’t disappear,” he corrected. “Not the way you mean. I didn’t pop out of existence. It’s more like … taking a shortcut. But instead of going down an alley, you go through a door.”

“A
hidden
door.”

“It’s funny, though, cuz they’re not hidden.” He was crazy excited, like a lit firecracker before the moment of explosion. “They’re
everywhere
.”

“But why do you have to go through them sideways?”

My cluelessness prompted him to give a demonstration.

We walked back to his dusty green truck, and he opened the driver’s-side door. “If you tried to go through this door like it was the front door of your house, you couldn’t get in. To get through this truck door, you gotta climb in. Hidden doors are the same way; they’re all doors, but they ain’t all shaped the same. Some of ’em you can only go through sideways, like that one over there.”

He gestured toward the sapling where he’d disappeared, obviously seeing something I couldn’t. “Or for
that
door”—he pointed past the front of the truck at thin air—“you’d have to fall through.”

I scanned the city-block-size lot, empty except for Wyatt’s green truck. “Are they all over the lot?”

“There’s six here, just in this one bit of space.” He shut the truck door and leaned back against it, regarding me with eyes as electric as any lightning bolt. “You know how many times I been dead-ended by some nightmare-looking thing and had to fight my way free? Fight to the death? But now I know—there’s always a way out.”

“There always was for you. It’s in your blood. In your bones, anyway.” I settled next to him and pinched his side, because I
could. Because he was there and because he was real. “Have you ever left the world the way Anna did?”

He pinched me back, smiling. “I don’t aim to go out of the world. The last person who did was that prick Runyon. To hell with that.”

“Do the hidden doors lead to weird places? Weird flying-leech places?”

“The elders told us to watch out for the doors near the Keys, cuz doors near that much power could lead to any damn thing. The other ones, though”—he waved his hand around the lot—“they just lead to places around Portero. The Mortmaine’ve mapped ’em over the years, but I don’t exactly have ’em all memorized.

“The door by the tree led upsquare to Torcido Road. But that one …” He was pointing beyond the front of his truck, a teasing glint in his eyes as he turned to me. “You wanna see where that one leads?”

To his startlement, I grabbed his hand and pulled him around to the front of the truck. Hell yes, I wanted to see where it led: Fountain Square, Detroit, Narnia. Any place was better than therapy.

He laughed. “Atta girl.”

I thought of the time Shoko had taken me home. “I hope I don’t hurl this t—” I gasped and grabbed my elbow. It didn’t hurt, but it was crawlingly uncomfortable.

Wyatt put his hand on my shoulder. “Feel like something just whacked your funny bone?”

“Yes! It’s been doing that ever since the hunt.”

He smiled knowingly. “The night you made a wish—the Key changed something in you. You’ll get that tingle every time you pass a hidden door.” He pulled me back, away from the door I couldn’t see, and the tingle became easier to bear.

“Holy shit, Hanna.” He looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. “If you were marked, you could probably go through a hidden door on your own.”

He showed me a fresh, almost wet-looking glyph on his well-defined upper arm, a green tattoo of a door with an eye in the center.

“No, thanks. I prefer my skin smooth and untouched.”

He bit my lip. “Liar.”

“Stop that.” I pushed him away, laughing. “Or did you change your mind about the door?”

“Hell, no.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me into the horrid tingling. “Step forward on three.”

My hand trembled in his as I gazed at the yellow grass whipping against our legs and the hidden door only Wyatt could see.

“One, two, three.”

We stepped forward and fell through the grass.

Everything went black for a second, my stomach in free fall … and then my knees buckled as gravity caught up with me on a sidewalk somewhere downsquare.