Bleeding Violet (12 page)

Early Wednesday evening found me again in Rosalee’s room, but I wasn’t being nosy this time. True, I was rifling through her tiny wooden dresser drawers, but I was looking for something specific. It wasn’t my fault her belongings kept distracting me: her bottle of Chanel No. 22—I hadn’t even known there were other numbers!—her bottle of lavender nail polish that was the same shade as my gauzy, sleeveless dress, which cinched so tightly at my waist that if I wanted to take a deep breath, I had to breathe from my chest. A pain to wear, but Wyatt would like it—what else mattered?

As I tried on a pair of Rosalee’s silver drop earrings, I spied the red box on her nightstand. Also not what I was looking for,
but maybe what I was looking for was inside the box. That’s what I told myself as I lifted it, noting the almost invisible golden inlay, the puzzlelike design. By the time I figured out how to open the box—

“Hanna!” Rosalee, in black yoga pants and ladybug slippers, stood in the doorway holding a glass of water.

I almost dropped the box, more startled that she had spoken at all, even to yell. It had been ages since I’d heard her voice.

“Put it down.” She snatched the box from me before I had a chance to obey. “You ever go near this box again, you die.”

“Literally?” I asked, staring at my hands. Portero was so strange, I couldn’t take anything for granted.

“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Rosalee locked the box away in the nightstand drawer. “What’re you doing in here?”

“I’ve decided to have sex with Wyatt,” I told her. “I was looking for condoms.”

Rosalee drank her entire glass of water in two gulps and didn’t say anything for a long time. Just when I’d decided she’d gone back into silent mode, she said, “That might not be a bad idea. If you put out for him, maybe he’ll look out for you. Tit for tat, so to speak.”

“That’s such a call girl rationale,” I snapped. “Not everyone uses sex for barter.”

She smiled down at her empty glass, a secret, bitter smile. “Unlike me?”

“
Very
unlike you.”

“I’m not a call girl.”

Now I was the one in silent mode.

“If I charged for sex,” Rosalee said, the bitter smile lingering like a canker sore, “I’d live in a mansion.” She unearthed a box of condoms from her nightstand and handed the whole thing over to me. “I translate manuscripts. German to English.”

As I stood waiting for her to disclose more precious information about herself, she said, “You need anything else? Lube? Instructions? Handcuffs?”

“No.”

“Then get out.”

I thought about what Rosalee had assumed about Wyatt and me, how she thought I was trying to use him for protection the way Petra had suggested I should. I guess I
was
using him, not for protection, but as a way to connect. Even a simple physical connection would be more than I had now.

I was tired of feeling cut off from everyone.

Wyatt had bought me a snow cone at Fountain Square, where we’d agreed to meet, and we now wandered the streets sucking raspberry ice in the warm, muggy twilight.

“I think we should have our sex talk,” I said, bumping against his shoulder. “I think it’s time.”

He fell over laughing. Not quite the reaction I was expecting.

“That’s almost word for word what Ma said to me when I turned thirteen,” he explained, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“You got the sex talk from your mother?”

“Yeah. I guess she didn’t think Pop was up to the task.” He grimaced. “So to speak.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t feel like
that
toward you.” I looked him over. “Not motherly.”

He pulled a purple flower off a crepe myrtle tree and tucked it behind my left ear. “So let’s talk.”

We trashed the cones and left the busy street for a quieter one, the only street in town that fall had managed to infiltrate.

“You mean talk about all our diseases and partners and all that?” he asked as we kicked through the drifts of decaying leaves littering the sidewalk.

“You’ve had diseases?”

“Hell, no! You?”

“Of course not. STDs are for losers. But I have had lots of practice. So much that it’s not really practice at this point. It’s more like art.”

Wyatt regarded me, curious. “How long you been practicing, braggart?”

I smiled. “I lost my virginity when I was fourteen, during Juhannus.”

“Yu what?”

“Juhannus.” I thought about it, but it didn’t translate into anything meaningful. “It’s a day in June—the longest day of the year.”

“The summer solstice?”

“That’s it!” Maybe it
did
translate. “In Finland, the summer solstice is a holiday. Poppa and I went back every year to celebrate, but we went back that year mainly because Poppa was dying, and he wanted to spend his last days in his homeland. The problem was, I didn’t want to spend the whole holiday watching him die, so I found this boy.

“His name was Mika. He was upright, like you. Upright and uptight. I had it in my head that I wanted my first time to
be in the sauna, but Mika thought the idea was sacrilegious—you’d have to be Finnish to really understand that part. But long story short, I told him my way or the highway, so he gave in and did it my way. And I almost died.”

“Why?” Wyatt asked, as if he expected the answer to enrage him, like he thought Mika had held a knife to my throat or something.

“It wasn’t anything Mika did; it was the sauna. Having sex in a thousand-degree room is
not
a good idea. I passed out in the middle of it, and Mika had to drag me out and dump me into the lake to revive me.” I laughed. “But that almost killed me too; I almost drowned.”

“Sex and death,” said Wyatt good-naturedly. “Like hot dogs and mustard. Hey, wait!” he said, when I would have crossed the street. “Let’s keep going this way. There’s a shop I need to stop at.”

“It’s your turn,” I said, as he draped his arm around my shoulders.

“I was fifteen.” He smiled in remembrance. “Shoko was my first.”

“Ugh!” I pushed him away.

“What the hell?”

“Shoko? That mean green woman from administration? She’s, like, ten years older than you!”

“Four.” He looked thoughtful. “You think she looks old? I think she looks hot.”

“Of course she looks hot, damn it! That’s not the point. Why lose your virginity to
her
? She’s so
bossy
. I bet she ordered you around the whole time.”

“You don’t even know her.” When I just stared at him, he ducked his head. “Okay, she’s a little bossy, but she’s cool! A great fighter—really knows her shit. She took me on my first hunt, and I was so excited. …” His ears turned red. “That’s why we ended up doing it, right there in the dark park. She figured it’d be the quickest way to calm me down.”

“Sounds real romantic,” I said, and kicked some thoughtless kid’s half-deflated football the hell out of my way. “Are you and Shoko still—?”

“No way,” Wyatt assured me. “I have better control of my nerves than I used to. Better control of my hormones, too.”

“So who else?”

He laughed. “Jesus, Hanna, you want a hit list?”

“Petra?”

The laughter dried up. He shrugged. “Yeah.” When I opened
my mouth, he hurried on, “But I don’t wanna talk about her.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “Is it too painful?”

“Me and Pet are just friends, Hanna. Seriously.”

By this time we had reached a tiny herbal shop, and Wyatt disappeared inside, leaving me to brood about questions like, if Wyatt was seriously over Petra, why wouldn’t he talk about her? Was the sex with her so pure and sacred he didn’t want to sully it by describing it to me?

A few minutes later, Wyatt came out with a package wrapped in brown paper.

“Good thing we came down this street,” he said. “I almost forgot I needed to get some stuff for the hunt.”

I pulled him to a stop, my hurt feelings and unanswered questions scattering on the wind. “
Our
hunt?”

“Yeah. I’m working on it.”

“When are we going?”

“I’m
working
on it.”

“Before next Sunday?” The two weeks would be up by then.

“Look,” he said, exasperated. “I’m having to sneak past a shitload of rules for you. Be patient, okay?”

What choice did I have? “Okay. I trust you.”

He looked startled. “You do?”

“Sure. I thought you were nice the first time I saw you. Nice boys tend to be trustworthy.”

“You think I’m a nice boy?” He seemed to find the idea hilarious.

“Aren’t you?”

We had paused by a tall, scraggly fence pasted over with missing-person flyers of happy faces that had probably stopped being happy long ago. Arc sodium lights lent an orangey-red, almost hellish tint to the flyers and to Wyatt’s eyes as he looked at me. Hellish, but intriguing. He slipped his hand up the slope of my bare shoulder around to the back of my neck, which he squeezed as he leaned toward me … and then his phone rang.

He groaned when he saw the number. “What, Pet? Why do I need to be there? No.
No
. Because you need to learn how to handle things on your own. I said no, damn it.” He hung up. “I swear to God she’s like …”

I watched him struggle to find the perfect words, wondering if I’d ever inspire that sort of passion in anyone.

“I can’t even say she’s like a four-year-old,” he griped. “My little brother’s four and I’d trust him to take care of himself better than Pet could.”

“She’s a transy too, right?”

“Not anymore. She’s been here long enough to get a key of her own and everything. But she acts like she just moved here.”

“Like me?”

“She’s nothing like you.” He leaned next to me against the fence, the package under his arm nearly poking me in the chest.

“A key of her own.” I remembered the key on Petra’s necklace, the key on Rosalee’s red bracelet. “A silver key?”

Wyatt pulled a thin chain that snaked from one of his belt loops into his back pocket. At the end of the chain were several keys, including an old-fashioned silver key, nearly identical to Petra’s and Rosalee’s. “Everybody gets one,” he said.

“
I
didn’t get one.”

“You gotta be born here.” He tucked his keys back into his pocket. “Or be like Pet. If you survive long enough, like a year, I think, the Mayor comes around and gives you a key. To welcome you to the neighborhood.”

Yet another thing that set me apart from everyone. I watched Wyatt pulling the edge of one of the flyers between us, ripping into some kid’s fake say-cheese grin. He was deep
in thought. I didn’t have to guess who he was thinking about. “Are you going to leave me and go to her?”

“What?”

“Well, you seem distracted.”

“Not because of Pet.”

“Then why?”

He stopped picking at the flyer and kissed me, pressing me back against the fence. His tongue was cold and raspberry-flavored and, like the snow cone, seemed to melt when I sucked it. He was like an eclipse, the way he blotted out everything except the sugary taste of him, the hard push and pull of his body, the way he made me want to climb all over him.

“Let go of my arm,” I murmured between kisses, wanting to squeeze him. I couldn’t get a good grip with just one arm free.

He pulled back slightly, frowning. “I’m not holding your arm.”

His hands were on either side of my face. Yet I couldn’t move my right arm.

I looked down at a long pink … appendage, attached to the inside of my elbow, where all the green veins stood out so prominently—a glistening appendage as long as my arm.

“Shit,” Wyatt breathed, his eyes following the attachment at my inner elbow to where it curled out of sight through a gap in the boards of the weathered fence.

“You can see it too?” I whispered, relieved that even a brain like mine wasn’t faulty enough to hallucinate something so heinous.

“Yeah, but don’t worry. I got it.”

Wyatt backed up into the street and took a running jump at the fence, throwing himself over it like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat.

A feeling of loneliness galvanized me. I grabbed the slimy thing attached to my arm, felt its rhythmic squeeze as it sucked blood from me like a mutant leech. I could
feel
it draining me.

No amount of tugging on my part compelled it to release me. Instead the appendage tightened and did some pulling of its own, yanking me forward to smack headfirst into the huge wooden fence.

Talk about an eclipse.

I was on the ground, dazed, but not too dazed to recognize Poppa, despite the fact that he was dressed in a vanilla suit he’d never owned in life. But I recognized the purple paisley tie I’d made for him—his favorite. He looked hale and fit, and so tall it hurt my neck to look at him. So neat and clean while I sprawled on the ground like a ragamuffin.

“It’s not my fault,” I told him, trying to straighten my dress with my free hand. “I can’t get up. This thing won’t let me up.”

“It’s not a thing.” How strange to hear his voice
outside
my head, for the first time in a long time—how deep and perfect. “You know what it is. Say what you mean, Hanna.”

I was dying, and he was scolding me.

Unbelievable.

Of course I knew what it was. I watched the Discovery Channel. I knew leeches when I saw them, even pink ones, and I knew how I
felt
—like a girl-shaped juice box, warm and surreal.

“You’re forgetting the herbs,” Poppa said. He knelt next to me, all grace and blond serenity as he opened the bundle that Wyatt had dropped. Poppa went through the contents. “Here we are. Panic grass.”

He tossed me a bound cluster of brownish-green grass. I caught it, and before I could wonder what the hell I was supposed to do with it, the grass burst into flames. I yelped and tossed it aside.

“No.” Poppa picked up the smoking, flameless clump and held it out to me. “Take it.”

Because it was Poppa, I took it, and it immediately burst into flames again.

“Steady,” said Poppa, as I struggled with the urge to drop it before the flames could …

But the grass wasn’t burning me. The flames in my palm were cool as air, but the flames engulfing the leech attached to my arm licked hotly over the creature, partly melting it.