Bleeding Violet (33 page)

“Yeah.” I squeezed his hand. “But we can work on our trust issues later.” I turned to Runyon. “If you give Wyatt the Key, he’ll open the door, and we’ll all go through. On the other side, you leave Rosalee, and we’ll leave you there with Bonnie. What could be simpler than that?”

I let them think it over. “So is it a deal?”

Runyon spoke first. “Deal.” He handed Wyatt the Key, but then he hovered over him as if expecting us to go back on our word the way he had.

“What’s the glyph?” Wyatt asked him.

“This is for Calloway.” Runyon made a series of shapes with his hand that Wyatt copied, using the Key to trace them above the doorway Runyon had already opened. “And you’ll have to write Bonnie’s name over it,” Runyon added.

Wyatt did, and for the first time, the shapes visualized, hanging goldly above the new scene that appeared in the doorway—the ocean shore at night.

Since Portero had no beaches, I knew this was a good sign.

Runyon knew it too. He gasped and hurtled through the doorway. Wyatt and I exchanged a startled look and then followed, needing to keep Runyon, and more important, Rosalee, in sight.

The disorientation I’d felt when I’d gone through the hidden door for the first time was absent, but as I passed through the doorway, I had to fight against an odd pressure, a resistance, as though plastic wrap covered the opening.

And then I was through, shoes filling with sand, greeted by the noisy rush of water.

I made sure the doorway was still open behind me, and when I’d reassured myself that Runyon’s completely wrecked living room would still be there, waiting uninvitingly for our return, I looked around.

The stars were closer here and brighter, crowding the night sky as waves broke gently on the shore. The salt smell of the ocean was pervasive, the air softer and warmer than in Portero, too warm for my coat.

Wyatt had leaped through the doorway before me and had already caught a protesting Runyon by the arm.

“Let me go to her!”

“Go where?” I asked, struggling through the sand in my heels.

Wyatt pointed out a tiny hut way up on the beach, out of the tide line. The hut had been built among a sparse grove of lanky, palmlike trees. The pale, nubby bark that composed the hut had come from the grove.

A golden light passed before the glassless window of the hut, as though someone with a candle was moving about inside.

“Bonnie!” Runyon kept trying to break for the hut, but Wyatt had a firm grip on him and refused to let go.

“We had a deal, asshole,” Wyatt reminded him, brandishing the Key in his face.

With a groan of impatience, Runyon left Rosalee’s body. Strangely. Through her eyes. He billowed out like smoke as though the inside of her head was on fire. When the smoke cleared, Rosalee collapsed to the sand.

Runyon, after he solidified, looked as Rosalee had described him, two-dimensional and sepia-toned like an old photograph,
a pudgy unimpressive man with muttonchop sideburns and an old-timey suit. He sped away toward the hut, moving as Poppa moved, gliding ghostlike over the sand.

I dropped to my knees beside Rosalee and removed the backing from the black card Wyatt had given me earlier, but when I tried to stick it down Rosalee’s sweatshirt, she smacked my hands away.

“Momma, you need this.”

“It doesn’t matter where you put it.” Wyatt said, trying to make peace. “Just put it on her arm.”

“But you always put it down my …” I remembered how willy-nilly he and Runyon had placed the cards on their own bodies during their battle royale, how Wyatt had slapped the freeze card to my forehead.

I caught the knavish curl of Wyatt’s mouth as I pressed the card to Rosalee’s arm. “I
knew
you were being fresh,” I muttered.

But Wyatt was too busy counting under his breath to defend himself—not that he could have. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen.”

Runyon, who had nearly reached the hut, began to scream. I had no idea why until he glided back toward the shore where Wyatt and I waited with Rosalee.

Through the light fanning from the doorway leading back to Portero, I saw that, without benefit of a host or the Mayor’s curse back in Portero to hold him together, Runyon was breaking apart. His arms had already disappeared to the shoulder, and more of him broke away as I watched.

He made a beeline for Rosalee, but he couldn’t get near her, nor any of us as we huddled together on the sand, not while we wore the black cards.

Runyon howled, hovering in the air as whatever passed for his body disintegrated, dirtying the air like a mini dust storm.

“I can’t fail now!” he cried. “Not after all these years!”

“Face it,” said Wyatt coldly. “If Bonnie wanted anything to do with you, she’d’ve come out by now.”

“But I came for you!” As Runyon turned and screamed at the hut, at his daughter hiding inside, even more of his body crumbled to dust, until he was just a torso with a head attached. “I’m sorry it took so long, but I’m here now! Bonnie,
please
!”

“Let her alone,” said Wyatt. “Let her remember what you were like before you turned into a murdering rapist.”

When Runyon turned to face Wyatt’s stony expression, he was only a head floating under the stars, a desolate, grinless
Cheshire cat. “Tell her … tell her I’m …” His head blew away on the breeze before he could finish.

Wyatt fanned the swirling dust away from his face. “Good fucking riddance.”

I agreed, not the least bit sorry that Runyon was gone. I don’t think Rosalee was either, but since she hadn’t looked up from her knees since Runyon had left her body, I couldn’t tell. She hadn’t even bothered to shake Runyon’s dust out of her hair and clothes, but when I brushed at her shoulders, she jerked away.

“We ready to go?” Wyatt said, rising to his feet.

“What about Bonnie?” The light was still moving about in the hut. “Don’t you think she’ll want to come with us?”

“Hanna.” Wyatt gave me a surprised look. “Bonnie went missing more than a
hundred years
ago. She’s long dead by now. Runyon was off his rocker thinking he could find her all these years later.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. “But then … who’s in the hut?”

Wyatt’s scientific curiosity got the best of him. “Let’s go see.”

“I can’t leave Rosalee alone. She—”

Rosalee lifted her head, eyes flashing. “Go with him, for Christ’s sake. I don’t need a keeper.”

So I went with Wyatt to the window of the hut, even though all I wanted to do was bury my head in the sand. Apparently, Rosalee and I were back at square one.

Wyatt and I looked through the window and saw that the golden light was a many-winged bug with a glowing thorax—a baseball-size firefly. The bug gave off enough light for us to see that the crudely fashioned hut was covered in the hash marks of someone counting the days. Years.

That someone was on the bare wooden cot in the corner. Her bones were, anyway, neat and white and untouched.

“She must’ve died alone,” Wyatt said, staring wide-eyed into the room.

I felt weirdly jealous of Bonnie. At least Runyon hadn’t given up looking for her, even when he must have known in his heart that his search was pointless. Who would look for me if I vanished? Not Rosalee. Not the way she was now.

We walked back down to the beach.

Rosalee wasn’t there.

I almost wasn’t even surprised. As Wyatt ran up the dark beach in search of her, screaming her name, I tried to resign
myself to the idea that she didn’t want me, that the past weeks of kindness had been more about Runyon’s feelings for Bonnie, not Rosalee’s feelings for me.

And then I saw her standing in the starry surf up to her knees and realized I wasn’t even close to being resigned.

I waded into the warm ocean water and grabbed her. “What are you doing?”

She wrenched away. “Let me go!”

“Come out of the water first.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” She gripped her wild, curly hair in her fists and pulled it over her face. “God, he was right. He was so right. Love
is
a trap.”

“Don’t give me that shit! If love is a trap, so is fear. You’d rather send me away or be mean to me than take care of me. You’d rather beat me up and play errand girl for a fourth-rate demon than be a mother to me.”

“Yes!” Rosalee got in my face. “That’s it exactly. I’d rather be
dead
than be a mother to you.”

“Liar! Why can’t you admit the truth?
You’re afraid
. You’re afraid to love me!”

Rosalee slumped into the water, as if the current had stolen the strength from her legs. When she spoke, I could barely hear
her. “He promised me I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.”

“And you believed him?” I hated throwing the Mayor’s words to me in Rosalee’s face, but about this, the Mayor was right.

Rosalee and I were a couple of dupes.

“He would have said anything to get his daughter back.”

A wave rolled over Rosalee’s head, but when it receded, she didn’t resurface.

“Rosalee?” I reached into the water and pulled her up by the strands of her floating hair.

She shoved me away. “Don’t.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you drown yourself !”

“Then take me home! I just … wanna go home.”

“So let’s go,” said Wyatt, startling us both.

He waded in after us and helped Rosalee to her feet, talking all the while to cover up the awkwardness. “I think there’s a hidden door near Nightshade that leads to Lamartine. Or somewhere near there. I can have you home in a couple of minutes.”

As Wyatt half carried Rosalee back to the shore, he said, “And you know I wasn’t trying to kill you, right, Miz Rosalee? That stuff with Runyon … that was family stuff. You know?”

“I know,” she said, as if she cared about Wyatt’s family stuff or even that he’d nearly killed her. As if she cared about anything.

We tramped through the lit doorway, glaringly bright after the darkness of the beach, and back into Runyon’s old house, tracking in sand and salt water. All the doors Runyon had opened had vanished, except for the one we’d come through, maybe because Wyatt had opened it, not Runyon.

Wyatt gathered his coat and the rest of his glyph cards, and when he used the Key to slash the hovering glyph, the door to Calloway vanished too.

Outside it was blustery, but the rain had stopped, if only temporarily. I was now happy to have the coat that had been such a burden on the warm beach, despite the wet hem dripping onto my freezing bare legs. But I wasn’t happy for long.

Rosalee collapsed on the porch.

“Momma!” I dropped next to her, panicked to see her curled in a ball. It reminded me too much of Petra.

Rosalee shivered, coatless, as she’d gone from our house straight to Runyon’s through the doorway. She was shivering, but not just from the cold.

“Don’t … feel well,” she said.

Wyatt draped his coat over her. “It’s the spirit leavings,” he told me. I didn’t like the worry in his voice. “We have to—”

“Have to what?” But when I looked up, I saw why he’d stopped.

The empty street had filled with Mortmaine trooping onto the lawn of Runyon’s house. The Mayor led them, striding forward, her robe swirling cinematically around her, mirror eyes flashing in the dark, full of Wyatt’s reflection as she came to a stop and faced him.

“Fuck the Mayor?” she asked him, her voice low and venomous. “Is that what you said?”

I stayed crouched beside Rosalee in the shadows as Wyatt stood to my left facing the Mayor, knees knocking together.

“I apologize, ma’am,” he said, his voice steadier than his knees.

“You disobey my command to report to the suicide door, you insult me, and then you come here and break my ward, and all you can say is ‘I apologize’?” The glint of her bared teeth was like light on steel. “What brought about this need to flagrantly disregard your duties?”

The mention of duties tightened Wyatt’s mouth. “My duty to my family and friends, you mean? I haven’t disregarded those, ma’am.”

“To hell with your family and friends! Your duty is—”

“To follow blindly? To never think for myself ?”

“Your duty is to the Mortmaine, initiate!”

Wyatt exploded. “I got the Key back and defeated Runyon and I did it
my way
, so don’t tell me about my duty! I know what it is—it’s to protect people who can’t protect themselves.”

“And who will protect you, Wyatt?” said the Mayor softly.

Wyatt’s fire fizzled out. So did mine, and she wasn’t even talking to me. Her voice carried a promise of ruin, like a tornado on the horizon. You knew there would be damage—the question was how much.

I rose and stood next to Wyatt; I couldn’t let him take the damage alone. “
I’ll
protect him. The way he protected me.”

The Mayor’s mouth dropped, the shock in her face spreading to the Mortmaine lined up in the yard, like the red card Wyatt had used on the lure; any minute I expected them all to explode.

“How did you get out of the suicide door?” Her disbelief was a living, pettable thing.

“Magic.”

Her eyes narrowed. “There is no magic.”

“Maybe not for you. But I’m from out of town.”

“Is that how you were able to free that murderer?” she said, humoring me. “With magic?”

I thought about it. “I suppose death is a
kind
of freedom.”

“You killed Runyon?”

The rain might have chosen that moment to fall in torrents anyway, but I think her voice called it down.

“I thought you hated him for what he did to Anna.”

“Who cares about her?” she screamed, dry and untouched by the rain that drenched everyone else on the lawn. “She wasn’t even from here. Runyon
was
, and he disobeyed me. That can’t stand.” She stalked closer, to the bottom of the porch steps, so close I could see my reflection in her left eye and Wyatt’s in her right.

“The house needs a new occupant,” she said, smiling angrily. “Maybe two. You like each other so well”—she pointed at us and we flinched—“why not spend eternity together?”

Behind us, the front door blew open with a bang like gunfire as the house turned into a vacuum. A selective vacuum—the only things it drew in were Wyatt and me.