Bleeding Violet (34 page)

My feet lost contact with the ground, but when Wyatt hurriedly grabbed the porch rail, I grabbed his outstretched hand and held on, parallel to the porch floor, the doorway behind
me attempting to suck the wet French heels from my feet.

My arms hurt from the struggle to keep tight to Wyatt’s hand, but my feet were my main concern: I’d be damned if I lost another pair of shoes today.

Without thinking, with no reason to believe it would work, I snatched Little Swan from my neck with my free hand, the plink of the silver chain snapping loud even over the roar of the storm. Her silver S-shaped form glowed in my cupped palm as I whispered to her, “Go get Swan. Please. Tell her the Mayor stuck me in the suicide door and now she’s—”

But Little Swan saw no need to fetch Swan. Her diamond eyes flashed red as she unfurled her wings and flew at the Mayor, trailing her silver chain.

My own personal lightning strike.

The Mayor didn’t know what hit her. She batted the air as though a bee were flitting about her face. Or a wasp. Little Swan moved so fast, even I couldn’t see her.

When the house stopped sucking us in, I knew it was because the Mayor had started to panic.

“Get it!” she screamed, as Wyatt and I dropped painfully to the porch. “Get it off me!”

But the Mortmaine could only watch helplessly as their
Mayor danced around the lawn, slapping at her own skin.

“Get it off !”

“Little Swan hardly ever gets a chance to play,” I said, as Wyatt helped me to my feet. “It wouldn’t be fair to rob her of such a choice playmate.”

The Mayor’s mirror eyes narrowed on me. “Call it off,” she hissed, less panicked now that she knew it was only me.

“Make me,” I said. A dumb thing to say, but extremity always turned me into a toddler.

She turned to her army of Mortmaine. “Stop her!”

“Her?” I recognized Wyatt’s elder. He recognized me, too. “The transy?”

The Mayor whirled on him, golden bits of her skin peppering the dark air.
“I said stop her!”

As the Mortmaine readied their weapons and advanced on me, Wyatt hurriedly removed a yellow card from his pocket and slapped it on the porch post. Golden light flashed over the house, and when the Mortmaine stormed the stairs, they rebounded at least ten feet, as though they’d run into a vertical trampoline.

“Ha!” I screamed triumphantly, staring at the Mortmaine picking themselves up from the wet lawn. “That’s why you
don’t like his ‘nonstandard’ weapons. Because they make him more powerful than you.”

“How?” the Mayor screamed in frustration.

“Magic,” I said again, because I knew it would piss her off. “You have it. Why can’t we?”

“I’m a god!” she cried, like a brat who for once wasn’t getting her way. “And this is my town!”

“The god of small towns? How silly! Anyway, gods have power only if you believe in them, and I’m not sure I believe in you.”

The Mayor screamed as Little Swan shredded her skin at a faster clip. As more of her face disappeared, she began to look more like the Grim Reaper I had taken her for earlier. The Mortmaine, as one, backed away from the sight of her skull.

Or maybe they were backing away from me.

“Aw, don’t be that way,” I told them. “We
are
darkside, after all, where all the weird shit happens.” I thought about it. “But I guess that would make
me
weird shit, wouldn’t it? That’s not too cool.”

“How are you doing this?” The defeated tone of the Mayor’s voice was encouraging. “I tasted your blood. There’s nothing special about you!”

“Maybe you tasted the wrong thing. Maybe I’m like Wyatt—maybe the special part of me is in my bones.”

“You can’t do this to me!”

“Why not? You’re not my god.” The old bitterness rose in me, the feeling of detachment, of outsiderness. “I’m not even from here. I’m just a stupid horrible awful transy, right?”

But the sound of her screams was no longer fun.

“That’s enough, Little Swan,” I called. “Playtime’s over.”

Little Swan peeled a final layer of golden skin from the Mayor’s cheek and dropped it into the grass as she flew back to me and settled into my hand. Her silver body blazed hot as an open flame, but I held her anyway and burned my mouth when I kissed her. The tang of metal flavored my lips as I tucked her into the pocket of my coat.

Everyone seemed stunned to realize that the Mayor had gotten her ass kicked by a necklace.

“Little Swan?” said Wyatt, incredulous.

“I used to hallucinate that Swan could rescue me whenever I was in trouble,” I told him quietly. “Then I moved here, and now it’s all real. And pretty damn convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

“Hell, yeah,” he agreed.

I turned to the Mayor and gave her one of my nicest smiles. “Look, I’m a simple girl. I’d rather not destroy a god, or whatever you are, just to prove I can. So why don’t we make a deal?”

Even the storm had stilled, awaiting my pronouncement.

“If you give me a key and drop the grudge you have against Rosalee and Wyatt for disobeying you, I won’t feed you to Little Swan for breakfast. How does that sound?”

The Mayor kept silent a long moment, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak, tugging her robe over her face/skull to hide what Little Swan had done to it, but she stood tall as if unaware of how to stand any other way. “Only Runyon knew the secret to making Keys.”

“Not that kind of key,” I explained. “One of the little silver ones you give out to people who truly belong here. That’s not too much to ask.”

After a long breathless pause, the Mayor reached into her black robe and retrieved a key. She walked slowly to the steps and handed it to me gingerly, her mirrored eyes glowing strangely within the shadow of her hood.

“Perhaps now that you have a key of your own, you’ll leave other people’s alone,” she said, gathering her dignity, even as
the Mortmaine gathered bits of her face off the ground—an unnecessary chore, as her face was already mending itself.

Not even Poppa had been able to mend himself.

Maybe she
was
a god.

I curtsied, trying to help her save face. After all, I had to live here now; why be ungracious? “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said the Mayor grudgingly.

She turned stiffly to face the Mortmaine. “Never mind the rest. Leave them be.” She walked off with her four bodyguards and vanished into the night.

The mood lightened considerably once she was gone. Wyatt even felt safe enough to remove the glyph card from the porch and wave it away to dust as the remaining Mortmaine regarded us.

“You’d better be glad you’re so damn talented,” Elder told Wyatt as he stepped toward the porch. “How the hell were you able to get Runyon to leave his host? Spirits never leave.”

“They do if they want something bad enough,” said Wyatt. He told them the story of our beach adventure, and then showed off his black cards. “I modified the anti-possession cards to get rid of the spirit leavings so Rosalee won’t get sick from ’em.”

“She’s already sick.” Elder was looking at Rosalee, who had risen to her feet and was holding herself upright against the porch railing, more by will than strength. I went to her, but she held me off with a glare.

“It’d be kinder to put her out of her misery now,” said Elder reluctantly, as he stared at Rosalee. “We have no way of knowing those cards of yours’ll work.”

“That’s why he needs to experiment,” I said. “You just said he’s talented. If his way works … wouldn’t it be nice not to have to kill everything touched by evil?” I looked at Rosalee. “Wouldn’t it be nice to know that redemption is possible?”

He looked Rosalee over, and even sick and exhausted, she coaxed a gleam of desire from Elder’s eye. “Fine. Experiment. If Rosalee don’t mind being your guinea pig, who am I to complain?” He jabbed a finger at Wyatt. “But you’re on regular schedule today. Six a.m. sharp. We have more tunnels to dig.”

“
Damn
those tunnels,” Wyatt muttered.

“What’s that?” said Elder sharply.

“Yes, sir.” Wyatt sounded resigned, but I was close enough to see the light spark in his eyes.

The remaining Mortmaine left, into the houses lining the street or through the hidden doors.

I turned to Wyatt. “When can we use the cards?”

Rosalee let Wyatt sling an arm around her waist. “We already started,” he said. “You put one on her in Calloway. Let’s get her home and settled and I’ll show you what to do next.”

We walked in the dark and rain and had to go through two hidden doors before we made our way back to Lamartine. At the house, the blood coating the walls brought Wyatt up short. I blamed it on the Mayor.

“She was trying to scare me,” I said.

He totally bought it.

We put Rosalee in her room, on her bed. I stripped Wyatt’s coat from her and removed her shoes, trying to make her as comfortable as I could.

“Here.” Wyatt handed over a bunch of those black glyph cards. “You put these on her, one at a time, and remove ’em every one to two hours, or whenever they turn white. The day the card stays black, you’ll know she’s clean. When you remove the card, it’ll be gross, so expect it, but
don’t let go in disgust
. And always burn the cards when you’re done, down to the ash. I’ll bring more when you run low.”

I looked down at Rosalee, lying sick and bedraggled on the bed. “He’s not entirely out of her, is he?”

“He is, but there’s … residue.”

I remembered then the black card still stuck to my chest. I removed it and then slapped from my hands the dust that its self-destruction left behind.

“It’s bad,” Wyatt continued. “The sooner we can get it all out, the better.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know. It’s never been done. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

He knelt next to Rosalee as I raised the sleeve of her sweatshirt. The card on her upper arm was completely white.

“Pull it,” he said, but when I reached for it, Rosalee jerked away from me.

“I can do it!” she said. “I’m not some invalid.” With considerable effort, she sat upright and pulled the card from her arm. It came free with a wet squish, trailing a tacky, semenlike substance. With a cry, Rosalee flung the card to the floor, wiping her fingers frantically against the bedsheet.

The residue clinging to the card molded into Runyon’s face as it hit the floor across the room. It caterpillared toward Rosalee, dragging the card behind it as it scritched across the wooden floor.

Wyatt stomped on the card, holding it trapped against the floor, and dropped a lit match to the tacky substance. Flames brought it up short and engulfed the residue, which dried out and floated up and away like ashes.

Wyatt turned to Rosalee. “
That’s
why you don’t let go in disgust.”

After he placed a fresh card on Rosalee’s arm, I walked him to the front door and helped him into his coat. “Thank you. For everything.”

“This has been the worst week of my life,” he said, tucking the Key under his arm, “but right now, I don’t think I ever been this happy.”

“That’s because you know the Mortmaine finally accept who you are. Must be nice.” I started crying slow, quiet tears. I was too tired to cry any other way.

“I accept you,” Wyatt said almost grudgingly, “despite what you did to me. You think I’m more accepting than your own mother?”

“Yes. You’re a romantic,” I said, sniffling into my hanky. “Not like Rosalee and me. We’re not at all sentimental. You saw her in there. I saved her life, and she still won’t let me touch her!”

“I’ll make you a deal.” He smiled. “You like deals, right? So listen: If Rosalee accepts you like I know she will, you come clean up the mess you made at our house and all down our street. If she don’t accept you, you still gotta come clean up the mess, but you can stay afterward.”

“You’d really let me stay with you?”

“You’d have to live under the bed and never,
ever
let Ma see you, but I can live with it if you can.”

I laughed waterily.

He opened the blood-streaked front door. “Be there after church tomorrow. Around two—no matter what happens.”

He’d reached the screen door when he changed his mind and came back and gave me such a hard squeeze, I couldn’t tell if he was trying to crush the life out of me or hold me as close as possible. Maybe I
was
a little romantic, because I was sure hoping it was the latter.

When he was gone, I went back to Rosalee’s room.

Poppa sat in the chair near the window, watching her. “She already looks better, doesn’t she?”

He was right. She sat up in bed much easier than before, less gray and ill now that some of that gunk was out of her system.

She held the red box in her lap, gripping it so tightly her nails had whitened. She cut her eyes at me. “Were you afraid in the suicide door?”

I removed my coat and sat beside her, but despite the narrow bed, she managed to keep her distance. “Not afraid.
Hopeless
. But then I thought about you and how you needed me, and I knew I had to get out.”

She opened the trickily hinged box and let me look inside.

On the red satin lining were two things. One was a picture of Poppa, Rosalee, and me—a tiny baby in her arms. Poppa was the only happy one in the picture. Rosalee and I had that sad mouth that made us seem like we knew something Poppa didn’t.

I looked at him in the chair, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

I removed the picture and held it as though it might turn to ash in my hand. “I thought you didn’t have any of you and Poppa.”

“I don’t deserve to.
This
I deserve to have.” She removed the second thing from the box: a red pill.

It was made in the same style as the pill I’d received at the river, liquid sloshing temptingly within the capsule. “Did you get that from Carmin?”

“Yeah. The day after you showed up. I thought it’d be for the best.”

“What does it do?”

“Guess.” Her eyes bored into mine.

I didn’t have to guess. I was my mother’s daughter, after all.

“I told Carmin I wanted something to take in case I ever found myself staring a hideous death in the face. Something quick to put me outta my misery.” Her smile was ironic. “I can’t believe he fell for that shit.”