Bleeding Violet (21 page)

Definitely downsquare, I decided, noting the seedy shops in need of paint squatting next door to saggy-porched houses. The people looked as worn and lived-in as the shops and were wholly unimpressed with our sudden appearance.

Except one girl, halfway down the block.

She’d fallen against the beige wall of a dollar store, holding her hand over her chest as she watched us with bugged eyes. I took her in at a glance: yellow shirt and blue jeans, no visible scars, innocent eyes.

“Stupid transy,” I said gleefully, when she turned and ran. At least I was no longer
that
person.

“I know where this is,” Wyatt said, looking around. “There’s Gourmandise.” I followed him across the street to a sweetshop, whose display of sticky treats and chocolate confections
made me want to press my nose to the window and lick the glass.

Wyatt dragged me around to the back of the shop. “I saved the owner’s nephew once,” he explained, “and so she gives me free goodies. But she don’t want people seeing her be nice; it’d kill her repu—”

His words died away as we both beheld Petra on the back stoop of the sweetshop, kissing a boy.

The spark that had been blazing in Wyatt’s eyes all afternoon fizzled out. “Pet?”

Petra came up for air, flushed and merry; she became even merrier at the sight of Wyatt’s shock. “Well, hey there,” she greeted him. “The freaks don’t only come out at night, I see.” She looked at me. “Or the loonies.”

I sighed. “Hi, Petra.”

“God, curb the enthusiasm, Hanna.” She turned to the huge brick of meat in the floury apron she’d been making out with. “Babe, that’s Wyatt and his girlfriend, Hanna. Guys, this is Francis Allen, but call him Frankie. Otherwise he gets pissed. And Frankie, watch out for that one.” She pointed at me. “She’s got a few screws loose.”

Frankie was a real bruiser, at least six feet tall, with hands
big enough to palm the moon. He looked at me with interest, his eyes small and penny-colored. “Loose screws, huh? What are you? Schizo?”

“Manic-depressive,” I told him.

Frankie turned to Wyatt. “You don’t mind that your girlfriend’s got loose screws?”

Wyatt didn’t even look at me; all his attention was focused on Petra. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

Each word fell on me like a whip, each syllable laid open my skin.

“That’s smart,” said Frankie. “Commitment is for old married people. Pet here knows I’m just using her for sex.”

Petra gave her man a fond squeeze. “You’re such a bastard.”

“Girls are like the ice cream at Baskin-Robbins,” said Frankie, enjoying his bastard role. “You have to try ’em all before you can pick a favorite.”

“I know Wyatt’s favorite flavor,” said Petra. “Chocolate-vanilla swirl. With nuts, right, Hanna? Uh-oh. Frankie, look at her. See the steam coming outta her ears? Go get us some lattes, quick! That’ll cool her down.”

“We don’t want anything,” said Wyatt, feeling free to speak for me.

“Your loss,” said Frankie. “One latte coming up, babe.” He hustled into the shop.

“Why’re you being so rude?” Petra skipped down the stairs toward Wyatt, ballerina-like in her black tights and flat shoes. “Frankie works here. He can hook us up.”

“Where’d you find that guy?” Wyatt asked heatedly. “Under a rock?”

“He just likes to kid,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the mere thought of him. “Frankie’s really very sweet.”

“As toe fungus. Why don’t you just admit you’re trying to make me jealous?”

Petra laughed in his face, a good long laugh that knocked Wyatt down a peg or three. “Like I knew you were gone come sneaking around in the alley behind a shop where my boyfriend works.
Qué una
ego, Wyatt. I am so over you.”

Wyatt tried to pretend he wasn’t hurt. “
Be
over me, but I hope you don’t think for one second that that prick is gone look after you.”

“Which prick would that be?” said Frankie. He stomped down the steps; the latte in his giant fist looked like a sippy cup. “This prick?” He passed the drink to Petra and hauled her
to his side, where she posed like a little kid next to a mountain. “You need me to squash this guy?”

Petra tut-tutted. “Wyatt ain’t easily squashed, babe. Besides, Hanna’ll do a better job than you ever could.” The two of them looked at me.

But not Wyatt, still not Wyatt, who was frowning at the gray sky stretching over the alley. “You hear that?”

Frankie looked up, alarmed, like he could hear it too. Whatever it was. Petra and I exchanged clueless looks.

“Hear what?” she asked, sipping her latte.

“A flapping,” said Wyatt, straining to hear. “Like wings. Like—”

“Blech!” Petra spat out her drink and dropped the cup; its contents exploded redly onto the ground. “The
fuck
.”

“Sorry,” said Frankie. “I must’ve given you one of the red teas by mistake.”

“That didn’t taste like tea! It tasted like bl—”

Frankie kissed her. For a bruiser, he had an intriguingly delicate technique. “I’m sorry,” he said, cuddling her close, their blond hair tangled in a windblown knot. “Next time I’ll let
you
make it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Petra said, in this blissed-out tone. As she pulled Frankie back for more kisses, the strong wind blew her cup to my feet. The liquid coating the paper cup was pale and frothy, not at all red like I’d seen. Or imagined.

When Wyatt looked away from the sky to find Petra and Frankie all over each other, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the alley back to the hidden door that—oddly—we had to drop through again.

Back in the lot with the yellow grass, we climbed into Wyatt’s truck, and the whole time he didn’t say one word to me. He just drove me home in silence, smoldering volcano-like on the edge of eruption.

When he pulled up to the curb on Lamartine and waited for me to get out of his truck, I finally spoke. “If you’re not over her, you should just say so.”

“I don’t wanna talk about her.”

“Why? Because she’s not into you anymore? Because she couldn’t care less if—”

The volcano erupted. “You think she cares about that
asshole
? That he cares about her?”

“You don’t know anything about him, Wyatt.”

“You saw the way he spoke to her.”

“He didn’t say anything worse than what Petra says on a daily basis,” I reminded him. “If you ask me, they’re perfect for each other.”

“Nobody did ask you!”

So unfair that my happy-dancing Wyatt was being held hostage by this sore-headed prick.

He turned away from me and gripped the steering wheel so hard it creaked. “Something about that guy is wrong.”

“And I know what it is,” I said. “It’s that he’s sniffing around your property, and you can’t stand it.”

“I’m over her, Hanna.” He said it to the steering wheel. I was glad he was unable to look me in the eye when he lied to me.

“You wouldn’t even admit that I was your girlfriend.”

“Are you?” He looked at me then, and his eyes raked over me, a stranger’s eyes. “We never even talked about it.”

“I didn’t think we had to. I thought you liked me as much as I like you. Am I wrong?”

He muttered something that sounded like “Stupid fucking question,” but otherwise refused to answer.

“You’ve shared all these hard-core secrets with me, secrets even your best friends don’t know. Or Petra or Shoko or any of the girls you’ve—”

“Hanna, I like you, okay. There, I said it—I like you!” He glowered at the dashboard. “You can be my girlfriend if you want.”

“I don’t need you to do me any goddamn favors, Wyatt!” I said, reduced to shouting at him. “What do
you
want?”

He didn’t answer. Just sat, silent and unhappy. A herd of laughing kids zipped by the passenger-side window on Rollerblades. I hoped they never went from laughter to heartache as quickly as I had.

“Indecisiveness is a very unattractive trait in a man,” I said, quoting my grandma Annikki. “Even when he’s just a boy.”

“I don’t like to give up on people,” he said at last. And that was all he said.

“Then don’t give up on her. She needs you. I don’t.” I grabbed my pack and hopped out of his truck, feeling as though I’d left a part of myself behind with him—hopefully, the part that gave a damn. To hell with him.

To hell with everyone.

I slammed into the house and then froze when I found it much too dark. All the windows had been shuttered. A dim beam of light from the floor lamp, however, was aimed toward the hall leading to Rosalee’s room. A deep, slow scratching
rasped from the hallway, like a lazy dog begging to be let in, one scrape at a time.

I crept toward the hall, unnerved by the odd scratching, and came upon Rosalee in her sweats, hunkered down on one knee before the door of the linen closet, as graceless as I’d ever seen her, caught in the single beam of light like a burglar picked out of the darkness by an intrepid homeowner.

She even had a weapon, a knife she was using to carve a glyph into the door of the closet—a series of jagged peaks, like a child’s drawing of mountains or the sea. A name was also carved into the door: Bonnie.

Rosalee lowered the knife and reached for the doorknob. It rattled briefly beneath her shaking hand, and with a quick twist, the door was open. Whatever she saw inside, or didn’t see, seemed to deflate her.

“Rosalee?”

The look she gave me startled me, her eyes like cat eyes, reflecting the light of the lamp; but then I realized her eyes weren’t reflective, they were
blue
, the same electric blue I’d seen after I’d made my wish.

“Rosalee?” Fear made my voice sharp.

“Bonnie?”

She blinked, and between one blink and the next, her eyes were black again. Puzzled. She stood and turned on the hall light. “What’re you—?” She was brought up short by the knife in her hand. She flung it to the floor, just missing her bare toes.

She scurried away from the knife, from the hall, brushing past me. “Uh … Hanna … you’re back early. How’d you like Dr. Geller?”

“You’re possessed!”

“Hanna—”

“You are!” I yelled, following her as she went all over the house, turning on lights. I grabbed her arm at the stairs, brought her to a stop. “Did you hear me? You! Are! Possessed!”

She gripped the banister, as if it were the only thing that could keep her upright. “I know.”

“You know?”

“After you hit me on the head, it came back to me.” Her voice was small. “
He
came back. You woke him up.” But she didn’t say it accusingly; she was more bewildered than angry.

I was afraid to ask, but I had to. “Who did I wake up?”

“Runyon Grist.”

The name hung in the air between us, like poison.

Rosalee fled the house, seeking more light than a hundred-watt bulb could provide, but once on the porch, she slumped into the corner, hiding there like a shadow.

I sat across from her beneath the shelf of red chrysanthemums and tucked my feet under my dress, waiting for her to speak. I waited a long time, watching her face slip from composed to exalted to scared and then back. Weird seeing such emotions on a face normally devoid of all feeling.

“I guess I was about your age,” she began haltingly. “I snuck out with this boy. Billy. Or Benny. Whatever. We drove to Houston to go to this Digital Underground concert, and I didn’t get home until maybe two or three in the morning. I
didn’t have a house key, so I had to sneak in through my window. But I couldn’t. Daddy was at my window, waiting for me. Told me he’d slut-proofed the house and that I’d have to spend the rest of the night elsewhere. I remember it was raining that night, because Daddy stuck his hands out the window and said he washed his hands of me. He was always saying stuff like that.”

She trailed off in thought, perhaps remembering other stuff he’d said.

“Since he wouldn’t let me in,” she continued, “I just walked around, letting the rain fall into my eyes and down my throat, hoping I’d catch some sickness from the clouds and die. But I didn’t die.” I couldn’t tell if the thought amazed or saddened her.

“You went to Runyon’s house,” I prompted her.

She began to fiddle with the key on her red bracelet. “Not on purpose. I don’t think so. I just ended up there. This was right before the Mortmaine put down the wards to keep people out. I knew the Mayor had forbidden anybody to go inside, but that’s why I went inside,
because
it was forbidden. I figured the Mayor’d strike me dead or something. I was hoping she would.”

The Mayor who, according to Wyatt, could force a man to stick around even after he was dead. “What did she do?”

Rosalee snorted. “I never even saw her. It was Runyon I saw, sitting in the living room like something from a daguerreotype, old and sad and faded. I’d heard all the stories about him.” She grimaced. “How he raped and tortured some transy woman.”

I thought of Anna and what I’d been told. “Is that what everyone thinks? That she was a transy?”

Rosalee removed her sweatshirt; she kept it a lot colder in the house than Portero probably ever got, even in winter. “Well, she wasn’t from around here, that was for sure; nobody knew where she’d come from.” She looked at me. “Why? You know something different?”

“No,” I said quickly. The Ortigas and the Mortmaine had to be keeping Anna’s origins secret for a reason. At any rate, it wasn’t my secret to tell.

“So I knew all this bad stuff that Runyon had done, but seeing him just sitting there in his little house, it was hard to imagine him hurting anybody. He was just so average, you know? Not to mention he’d been dead for a zillion years already.”

“Was he … rotting?”

“No.” She thought about it. “He looked the way he had when he’d been alive, I guess. Except not as fit. He used to be Mortmaine, but when he was confined to his house, he let himself go. So by the time I saw him, he looked like an accountant or a file clerk. Pudgy and white, like somebody who sits inside on his ass all day. He had these long sideburns down to his jaw, and an old-fashioned Oliver Twist outfit—all he needed was a top hat.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah. I said, ‘You must’ve really loved your daughter.’ Because the idea of it blew me away, the lengths he’d gone to just to make a way to get her back.