Bleeding Violet (11 page)

“If you’re gone get all caught up in moral ambiguities,” he said, reading my mind, “maybe you shouldn’t hunt.”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “I’m not ambiguous about hunting. I
have
to hunt.”

“Why? You trying to impress me?”

“Of course not.”

“Then who?” he said, taken aback.

“Rosalee.”

A look of understanding came into his face. “My ma’s a badass too. Kinda sucks having that to live up to. But at least your ma is cool. Totally worth dying over.”

“Dying,” I repeated, looking at Bob’s body on the love seat. His ruined nose.
Wyatt
had ruined it.

He smiled at me like he knew what I was thinking. “Death so close you can smell it, right?”

I nodded. I’d never thought about my own death in such real terms. Would
I
smell this bad when I died?

Wyatt texted a message to the other Mortmaine about what he called the Melissa Situation, and how he’d dealt with it.

“Are you going to call the police, too?”

“Sheriff Baker?” The contempt in his voice was deep. “Baker handles speeding tickets and helping old ladies cross the street.
We
handle the weird stuff. And sometimes it gets really weird, Hanna.”

He pulled me up by the hand and, thank God, led me out of the horror house. “Part of my job is dealing with death, dishing it out, avoiding it. There’s no reason for you to put yourself in that position. Not even for Rosalee.”

I took a moment to breathe in fresh air, to let the Gulf breeze clean the crawling sensation from my skin.

We walked to his truck and leaned against it, facing each other in the faint light of the porch as the trees creaked in the wind.

“There is a reason,” I told him. “Rosalee thinks I’m so weak I’ll drop dead any second. So weak it’s easier for her to pretend I don’t exist. I can’t live like that.” Crazy how easy it was to admit things in the dark. “I have to prove her wrong.”

“You ever stop to think she might prove you wrong?” he said, and then reached his warm hand down my bodice again.

“You know, most boys settle for a good-night kiss after a first date.”

He laughed and shook the black card he’d removed from my chest like a Polaroid picture. But unlike a Polaroid, the card disintegrated and wafted away on the breeze, much as Melissa had. “You just watched me stab a guy in the face. Don’t you think we’re beyond the usual dating formalities?”

He’d get no argument from me on that point.

“You did good in there, by the way. Didn’t run. Didn’t even puke.” He seemed amazed by this. “I’ll set something up for you.”

“A hunt? With the Mortmaine?”

Wyatt opened the truck door, smiling in the light. “It’s so weird to see a transy amped up about hunting.”

After everything I’d seen him do, after watching him
kill
a guy right in front of me, he thought
I
was weird.

Unbelievable.

The following Monday, after school, I rode my bike to Fountain Square. Anything to avoid going home to Rosalee’s unrelenting cold shoulder, at least until I could melt it by regaling her with my fabulous exploits in the dark park.

Fountain Square was much more impressive than it had seemed on the postcard Rosalee had sent all those years ago, a wide space surrounded by buildings that gave it a closed, protected feeling: the courthouse to the north, St. Teresa Cathedral to the south, the library to the west, and the Pinkerton Hotel to the east.

The square was European-like, with old gray flagstones and colonnades and throngs of darkly attired Porterenes
ghosting about in tight little cliques. I understood their herd mentality better now, their need to always travel in packs, their black clothes that made them easily identifiable to one another, their wariness of outsiders—this was what living with monsters had made of them.

I parked my bike at the rail near the courthouse and weaved through the crowd. Various carts were stationed around the square, mostly selling ices and ice cream due to the stifling heat. One cart, however, was selling barbecue, and the sweet, meaty smell hung heavy in the air.

The fountain itself sat in the center of the square, at the bottom of a sunken amphitheater made of a paler shade of gray stone. Shallow, descending tiers, on which at least a hundred people sat basking in the sunlight, led down to a huge spout of water.

Wyatt and I spotted each other at almost the same time, my purple dress drawing his eye as effectively as his green shirt had drawn mine. He sat on the top tier above the fountain, huddled together with his friends.

I made my way down to him but had to sit next to Carmin, since Wyatt was sandwiched between Lecy and Petra. The stone was hot beneath me; I had to sit carefully to protect my bare legs.
Carmin and Lecy were discussing the list of names on the notebook in Carmin’s lap. I leaned forward to catch Wyatt’s eye.

He looked glad to see me, and as I beheld his smiling face, it seemed impossible that he could have carried out the pitiless slaying I’d witnessed Saturday, impossible that he could be both a hero and a killer.

People were surprisingly complex.

“I missed you at school today,” I told him.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said. “The Mortmaine won’t need me till afternoon.”

“How are you able to skip school like that?”

He didn’t shrug exactly, just shifted his shoulders as if he wanted me to see how broad they were. “It’s not skipping. I don’t even have to go to school. It’s a pain in the ass trying to do schoolwork
and
fight the forces of evil. I’m the only initiate who bothers.”

“Why
do
you bother?”

“I hate being stupid more than I hate school.” He smiled at me. His lips looked bitable. I hated that he hadn’t kissed me good night when he’d dropped me home Saturday, but after getting to second base with me twice in one night, maybe he hadn’t seen the point.

“I was gone call you,” he said. Something in his voice brought me over in goose bumps.

“Good. Saturday was … fun?” The pre-Melissa parts had been.

“I thought you wasn’t into him.” Petra’s interruption disoriented me; I’d forgotten other people were crowding around.

“I thought he was too
beastly
for you,” Petra said, wilting against Wyatt’s side in a way that grated, as though she didn’t have enough backbone to sit up on her own.

“He is beastly,” I said, flashing back to Wyatt’s dagger jabbing into Bob’s nose. “In part. I was just thinking about how complex people can be. How the good and the bad can mix up and make these intricate layers.”

“
Qué una
egghead,” said Petra, her broad accent doing weird things to the Spanish words.

“Really,” said Lecy, agreeing with Pet. She gave me an assessing look, a wreath of orange tiger lilies decorating her dark hair. “You’re too blond to be that smart.”

“Sunlight alters my hair.” I pulled the length of my spiraling ponytail over my shoulder so they could study it. “Some days it looks blond, other days it looks red, but it’s actually brown.” I frowned at the sun. “It’s a very confusing phenomenon.”

“
Such
an egghead.”

Wyatt poked Petra in the side. “You’re as much of an egghead as she is, Miss Honor Roll. How is that an insult?”

“I wouldn’t insult Hanna,” said Petra, as though wounded to the quick. “I barely know her.”

I had to focus on something else, anything but the two of them bantering like an old married couple, so I peeked at Carmin’s list. “What’s that for?”

Carmin was stressing big-time, tugging the tie at his neck as if he meant to strangle himself. “I’m trying to figure out who to invite to my birthday party, but it’s impossible. How the hell do I know so many people?” he asked me, as if I had the answer.

Since I had no answer for him, I asked a question of my own. “Why isn’t my name on your list?”

He gave me a considering look, his eyes almost the same shade of blue as the cobalt frames of his glasses. “Well, you did fight off that lure. …”

“
Who
fought off the lure?” Wyatt asked.

“Don’t be a glory hog, Wyatt,” said Lecy. “The Mortmaine don’t hold the patent for bravery. Go ahead and add Hanna’s name, Carmin.”

With an almost unholy amount of satisfaction, I watched
Carmin scratch my name into his already overcrowded list.

I was joining the herd.

“What’s with the guest list, anyway?” Wyatt asked. “You gone hold the party at the country club?”

“Don’t be like that,” said Petra. “This is a big deal. Carmin’s
sweet sixteen
party. He’s gone have a little tiara and everything.”

Carmin flipped Petra the bird, and someone screamed.

The screamer was on the other side of the amphitheater, but I could barely see past the fount of water, let alone the growing crowd of people standing above on the square.

“Did you hear that?” I asked carefully, unsure whether the sound had been hallucinatory.

“What?” said Carmin. “The scream?” He waved his hand dismissively. “It’s just a suicide door. Tweener-wieners always go apeshit over ’em.”

“It’s so junior high,” said Lecy derisively.

“Suicide door?”

“I told you about all the doors,” Wyatt said. “But suicide doors are special. Only the Mayor can open one, and she
only
opens ’em for cowards.” He laughed. “She’s gone open one for Pet any day now.”

Petra slapped Wyatt hard across the face.

In the silence that followed, Petra looked more shocked by the slap than we did. Certainly more than Wyatt did.

He smiled at her.
Smiled
. “I wish you’d do that more often.”

Petra flushed all over, blinked her waif’s eyes at him. “Really?”

“It’s good to see you show some spirit,” he said, in the same tone that had given
me
goose bumps. But he wasn’t talking to me.

Ex-girlfriend my ass.

I hopped up and followed the crowd in the direction of the scream.

I doubted anyone noticed my absence.

At the colonnade between the hotel and the courthouse, a deep mahogany door with a silver handle stood a foot off the ground, attached to nothing. I shoved through the crowd, wanting to see this oddity from every angle, but no matter how I looked at it, it remained a door hovering freely in the air.

A group of eleven- or twelve-year-old boys were goading and shoving one another before it. “You open it.”

“You first.”

“No, you.”

“I’ll open it,” I said.

The crowd immediately silenced and parted until I stood alone before the floating door, like a girl in a surreal painting. The silver handle was icy, despite the heat, and I had to strain to swing the door open on its invisible hinges.

A man hung by his neck inside a gray space the size of a coffin, his face blue, his tongue out as though he was making an ugly face at me, as though
I’d
put the noose around his neck. The rope wasn’t attached to anything; it disappeared beyond the outline of the door.

I wasn’t attached either. I could have floated away on the slightest breeze.

The kids behind me were squealing. I slammed the door, thinking I’d traumatized them, but the squeals were happy squeals. Horror movie squeals. Many of the tweens waited impatiently behind me for their turn to open the door, like it was all a game.

I walked back to the amphitheater as the cathedral bells struck. It was four o’clock. Broad daylight, yet it felt like three a.m. I gazed at the little kids splashing barelegged in
the fountain below, mere yards from a dead body shoved in a door. Not a care in the world.

I sat well away from Wyatt and his friends, but suddenly they were all around me. “Have some of my smoothie,” said Lecy, offering me a cold plastic cup full of orange slush. “It’ll calm your nerves.”

“Why?” Carmin asked, curious. “Did you put gin in it or something?”

“Yeah, Carmin.” Lecy rolled her eyes. “Tons.”

“Can I have some?”

“She’s kidding, you retard,” said Petra, putting her arm around me. Petra’s embrace would have shocked the hell out of me, but my shock had been used up for the day. “She’s shaking,” she told the others. Then she said to me, “Maybe one day I’ll take you to Evangeline Park. That’s where I always go when I get scared.”

“Whenever
you
get scared?” said Carmin. “They must make you pay rent up there.”

“Ha, ha, asshole.” Petra poked her tongue out at him.

“Hanna don’t need to go anywhere,” Wyatt said. “She’s tough.”

“You really are,” Petra assured me, as though I’d denied it.
“I thought for sure you’d run back to Finland after seeing that corpse.”

“Finland has corpses too,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like it belonged to me. “My poppa’s buried there. He died in our summerhouse in Turku. From bone cancer. I took him his breakfast one day and saw him just lying there. And it wasn’t like what the doctors said. He wasn’t at peace. He didn’t look peaceful; he looked weird and shrunken and
empty
. Like snake-shed skin.”

“Exactly,” Wyatt said, sounding worried about me. “A dead body’s just meat. No reason to get upset over meat.”

“Meat?” I scanned the square, tried to encompass the breadth of it. “Jesus Christ, where did I move to?”

“So your mind’s finally blown?” asked Wyatt. I thought he’d be disgusted by such a transy reaction, but he only seemed amused.

Amused!

“Maybe a little, Wyatt. Maybe the idea of living in a town full of magic and monsters is worthy of at least a
small
blowout!”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Carmin said, as though it were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard of.

“That door was standing in the middle of nothing—”

“Nothing that you could see.”

“—and a man was inside it, but that wasn’t magic?”

“No.” Carmin was adamant.

“So what was it? Advanced physics?”

I watched the four of them exchange a helpless look, the kind of look you reserve for a kid who wants you to tell her
why
she can’t see the wind.

“We’re Porterenes, Hanna,” said Wyatt. “Doorkeepers. Death is just another kind of door.”