Killer Kisses (34 page)

“You’re late. The parents are frantic.”

“The boys are okay. A little shaken up, but the only one hurt is me.” She told him about the pack of black dogs.

Zack began to curse.

“Please don’t be angry with me. The windshield is smashed, but the bus is drivable. Tell everyone, the boys are on their way.”

“I’m not angry—I’m worried. Drive as quickly as you can. When you’re done, go straight home.” His voice was urgent. “Don’t go back to the bus depot. It’s not safe for you to be out tonight. I’ll be at your house when you get there.”

“No. Please
don’t
come. Not tonight. We need to talk when I can think straight.” Before he could insist, she snapped the radio off. The last thing she wanted was for Zack to see Joey like—this. She was on her own

Joab’s mother stood at the side of the road, waving at the bus. Charlene pulled up, opened the door, and called to his mother. “Something’s wrong with the boys, we need to move fast.”

The woman jumped up the steps, looked at Charlene’s forehead and gasped. “What happened?”

“Not now. Long story. I have to get these other kids home.”

An hour later, the full moon crested the horizon as Charlene pulled the bus into her driveway. Wild-eyed, Joey whimpered, huffed, and rocked back and forth in his wheelchair. She’d never seen him this agitated before. Maybe he wanted the pig. She whistled and clapped, but the normally social Trotter failed to appear.

Stay calm. One foot in front of the other. Focus on getting Joey into the house.
Over and over again she heard Mrs. Morton’s voice,
“Doesn’t he remind you of Lon Chaney when he played Wolfman?”
Then the medical examiner’s astonished voice rose up in her head, joining Mrs. Morton’s high whine,
“I’ve only seen this sort of thing in books about cryptozoology. Always thought it was the stuff of fiction and crazy people. Was you mother on any medications to control her um—condition?”

She covered her ears and whispered, “There’s a logical explanation for this. He must be starving. That’s why he’s so agitated.”
Stay calm. Act normal.
“Are you hungry Joey?”

His eyes gleamed orange, and he growled.

“I take that as a yes. Let me see what we have.” She pulled a container of raw hamburgers out of the refrigerator. “Dinner will be ready in a jiffy.”

At the sight of the box, Joey clawed the air and bared his teeth.

Shaken, she placed the entire package on the table within his reach and stepped back. She turned and plugged her ears with her fingers to cover the snapping sounds and snarling. At last, when the noises ceased, she glanced back over her shoulder. Joey slept with a smile on his furry face. Careful not to wake him, she rolled her brother into his room, covered him with a blanket, and locked the door.

Charlene stuffed her fist into her mouth to stifle her rising hysteria, and ran into the bathroom. She flipped on the overhead light, and the world came to a halt. She gasped at her own slanting green eyes filled with sparks of orange. She pulled off her jumper, determined to jump into the shower and scrub away the dreadful events of the day, and recoiled at the image of her hairy arms and legs in the full-length mirror. The little room whirled around her.

“I’m hallucinating.” She barely recognized her own voice, a low husky growl. She turned the light off and stood with her back to the door so she could think.
Think, Dammit! Use the scientific method. One step at a time.
When did these changes become noticeable? Was it the night Zack made her dinner? “The food. There must have been something in the food.”

Then, as if her mother stood in the dark space with her, Charlene heard her words. “Secrets within secrets, within secrets.”

Terrible memories sucked her back in time, back to her home in Baltimore. Her mother growing hairier, locked in her bedroom at ‘that time of the month’, the muffled sounds of howling, the syringes for her mother’s ’migraines’. The shame and fear her beloved mother was some kind of side-show freak, mutant, insane or worse. She recalled her race away from the unknown, her rush into the embrace of hard science, and the loss of it all to an out-of-control car. Unbidden, images of the syringes she found in Joey’s room after the accident came to mind.

Leave Eden. Go back to Baltimore, back to the life of science.
She pulled herself up on the sink. That was the only thing she could do.
Take Joey away from this place—get him some help.
She touched the doorknob and stopped.
Joey. What should she do about him? She couldn’t take him tonight—not like that. She couldn’t abandon him. What was this place doing to him? To her? If she left, where would she go?

Jethro’s words floated up in her mind. ”
Blood will tell, Charlene.”
Jethro. What was he hiding from her?

Anger boiled up in her chest, filling her with fresh energy.
Enough of this mumbo-jumbo.
She pulled her shoulders up straight, stood, and splashed cold water on her face. She stared at herself in the mirror. “I’m good at research. There is a
scientific
explanation for this and I’m going to find it.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

~*~

Secrets

After a sleepless night, Charlene fed, dressed and rushed the now back-to-his-usual-self Joey onto the bus. She raced to Jethro and Rebekkah’s house after daybreak—before her resolve wavered. After storming up the front porch steps, she pounded on the oak door.

“Jethro,” she shouted. “Get out here. Now!”

Moments later, she heard heavy footsteps, then the old man stood in the open entry, still in his nightshirt, wide-eyed and wrinkled from sleep. Rebekkah peeked from behind Jethro, her normally impeccable bun gone, her iron gray hair draped in shiny waves over her shoulders.

“What’s wrong? Is Joey sick?” Jethro craned his neck to see beyond Charlene.

She put her fists on her hips. “I don’t know. You tell me. He ate two pounds of raw beef last night and nearly snapped my fingers off. You think that’s normal?” She held out the holy books. “What are these doing at my house? What do they mean?”

Jethro sucked in his breath, his eyes flared green, and he took a step back.

Charlene moved in, matching him step for step. “What’s happening to Joey? And, who the hell is Oblis?”

“You want answers?” Jethro spat out. He turned and pointed at his wife. “Ask Rebekkah. It’s her Koran, her Bible. Don’t know why she had to go and do that.”

Thin-lipped, ashen-colored, the old woman refused to make eye contact with Charlene, instead staring at the floor as she spoke in a near whisper. “It was the right thing to do. She needed to know—about…about
him
, and
THEM
.”

Jethro stomped into the kitchen, cursing under his breath.

She stomped in right behind him. “Who is Oblis?”

He kept his back to her, grabbed a coffee pot, and began to fill it with water.

Charlene reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder.

The old man turned and stared at her, a stricken look on his face. “Please. You don’t want to know. Just knowing about them puts you in grave danger.”

She refused to look away, stared deeper into those color-shifting eyes. “Rebekkah thinks I need to know. If Fred Johnson wasn’t Joey’s father, then who the hell
was
?”

Jethro’s voice fell to a harsh whisper. “A sexual predator. He crawled out of a hole in the ground, slithered into town, and took our girls’ innocence.”

“How did he get away with it?”

“He went after our girls at night. Got them alone, told them he’d kill them if they cried out. Raped them and vanished.”

“The police didn’t help?”

He snorted. “State Police couldn’t track him.” Jethro looked off into the distance. “He was a disappearing, reappearing snake.” He shook his head. “A terrible, evil piece of work he was.”

Her lips trembled, but she forced herself to speak. “Was? Where is he
now
?”

He clenched his fists, and the black signet ring stood out in stark contrast to his white knuckles. “Dead and gone.”

Charlene wrapped her arms around herself, afraid to ask the next question, but unable to stop. “What happened? I need to know the truth—Grandfather.”

He flexed his left hand, made a fist, and adjusted the ring. “I caught him with your mother. I killed him.”

Charlene’s stomach dropped, and she grasped a counter to steady herself. “The boys--Joab, Jehud, Julius, Josiah, Justus, Jared, Joey—all his?”

Now weary looking, he nodded. “He left the girls—all of them barely eighteen. The families kept it secret—until the babies were born, all the same, all marked by this—this
creature
. I never had the chance to tell your mother why—why I did what I did.” Tears filled his eyes. “She ran away. I couldn’t find her—not until she contacted your Aunt Jessie. She was pregnant with you and wouldn’t speak to me. She thought I wanted to kill Joey, too. I would have never harmed my grandchild—no matter
what
his father was.”

He passed a shaky hand over his face, and Charlene’s heart twisted.

“She blamed herself. Thought she should have known better than to say hello to a stranger. But he had this
power
. He whispered in her ear and led her to the woods. When I realized she was missing, I tracked them and saw him with her. I went mad, killed him with my bare hands.” The old man broke down and sobbed. “Oh, my poor baby. My poor child.”

“Our child.”

Charlene looked up.

Rebekkah stood in the kitchen doorway, a haunted look on her pale face. Her voice shook. “My daughter. My beautiful daughter. How she suffered from her guilt and shame. And none of it—
none of it
was her fault.”

“Grandmother?”

“Yes, dear. I’m your grandmother. And that old fool
is
your grandfather.”

Charlene shook her head. “Why didn’t you just tell me at the funeral?”

Rebekkah gave her a sad look. “Would you have believed us?”

She had no answer.

“You had no history, no knowledge of your family.” Rebekkah shook her head. “Your mother didn’t trust us to tell her the truth. Why would you? We had to
show
you the truth of who we are and how we live our lives. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes, but—Joey, the boys—I don’t understand what happened to them last night. And where did that pack of black dogs come from?”

Jethro’s eyes widened. He shook his head, his voice gruff. “That’s enough for today. Go. Take care of Joey. Go to work. But know that we love you, are here for you. Blood will tell, Charlene. We are your blood and you
belong
here with us in Eden. We will care for you and protect you. Don’t forget that—Ever.”

~*~

The mothers on the route called soft greetings and gave Charlene sideways glances. The boys seemed more subdued, less exuberant than most mornings. It was as if a gray veil had fallen across the normally sunny skies of Eden. Charlene wondered if it was because she knew their secret or if it was because they knew that she knew.
But how could they?

She parked the bus in the side lot at the Regional School and made her way into the library. Shoshannah glanced up at her from the reference desk, did a double take, and took Charlene by the arm into her private office.

“Honey, you look terrible. What’s going on?”

“Oh, that good, huh? No wonder the mothers have been giving me strange looks.”

“I have never seen you looking so poorly. You always have a smile on your pretty face and your eyes light up when you say hello. You look like you lost your best friend.” She gasped. “Tell me you didn’t break up with Zack.”

Startled at the idea, Charlene shook her head. “This is about my grandparents—and Oblis.”

Shoshannah’s lips curled and she snarled, “Don’t ever say that name again!” Tears glimmered in her bright blue-green eyes. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I’m sorry. Please don’t speak that monster’s name.”

Painful understanding hit Charlene like a body blow. “Oh, Shoshannah.”

“I was just a young girl. After—after he was done—he left me for dead out in a field, my throat slashed.” She pointed to a scar on her neck, and her metal bracelets jangled. “Your grandfather—he found me—saved my life.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

“How could you? We tried to forget that terrible chapter in our community’s life, but…” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and sighed. “The monster took away our innocence—but we survived. He didn’t, thanks to
your
grandfather.”

Charlene spoke almost in a whisper. “My grandfather is a
hero
.”

“Yes. Yes he is.”

“And the children—no one cast them out?”