Free The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) by Anna Roberts Page A

maybe it was because of the ill-concealed excitement in their tone.
    He turned on his heel and yelled back to them. “Smell that?” he said, breathing in a mouthful of heady-sweet sickness. “Huff it on up. That’s the wind of change, fellas. Wind of change.”
    Charlie laughed, spun around and kept on going. Change. Such an exciting word that that asshole in the White House had managed to wring two fucking terms out of it. Tell people that the world is about to somehow shift and heave under their feet and watch them scurry around like ants. Nobody wanted to admit it, but there was a fiesta atmosphere in the air, adrenaline flowing like champagne fizz, quickening tongues and bating breath. Big news. Big change.
    He found Grayson waiting by the truck, sad-dog brown eyes behind Buddy Holly glasses, a cigarette held between knuckles that already had the tell-tale bunchy look of early arthritis. Turning was hell on the bones.
    “So?” said Charlie. “He dead yet?”
    Grayson blinked. “Did I ever tell you how much I appreciate your sensitivity to social atmosphere?” His British accent struck a discordant chilly note in the swampy Florida air.
    “Says the man catching a deathbed smoke break,” said Charlie. “You just left Reese alone in there with him?”
    “They were having a moment. Father/son stuff.”
    Charlie shook out his own pack of smokes, flipped one round upside down. For luck. For what that was worth. “If it was anyone but Reese,” he said. “I’d suspect the kid of holding a pillow over the old man’s face.”
    “Please. Reese might not be the sharpest crayon in the box but he’s not that fucking stupid.” Grayson looked out across the parking lot at the assembled bikes and trucks and shitbox cars. “Jesus, look at all of them.”
    “Lyle was...is...a respected guy.”
    Grayson arched an eyebrow. “Respected? Or feared?”
    “Potato, potahto.” Charlie rested his cigarette on his lip as he lowered the tailgate. Smoke billowed up into his eyes, stinging. “It’s not too late to call the whole thing off.”
    He lugged the toolbox off the back. The lid was rusted and the handle in danger of falling off, but he knew the things inside gleamed like treasures. He had spent hours sharpening the blades, sometimes going so hard at it that tiny sparks danced off the edge of the metal. Beautiful clean edges, so sharp that you could touch them to skin and not even know you were cut until you saw the red trickle out.
    “I bought a new couch,” said Grayson, seemingly apropos of nothing.
    “Okay?”
    “It’s a nice couch. Italian leather. And I was thinking of retiling the kitchen.”
    “Mazeltov,” said Charlie. “What’s your point?”
    “My point is that I like my life,” said Grayson. “Or at least I don’t hate it nearly as much as I used to. You just wait – when you get to my age you’ll start measuring happiness in terms of comfy chairs and indigestion remedies.”
    “Nope. When I’m your age I’ll be dead. If this all goes south then I’m going down to Islamorada to hook up with some old smuggling buddies and to drink myself to death on umbrella drinks. You know – with fuckin’ pipecleaner flamingos and shit.”
    Grayson frowned, notching the line between his eyebrows deeper. “Ever the optimist.”
    “That’s me,” said Charlie, stamping out his smoke and heading for the motel room door. “You gotta look on the bright side.”
    “Yes, because it’s always a barrel of monkeys when a mad dictator croaks. The power vacuums, the infighting, the pretenders to the throne circling like vultures. Not to mention the extremes of lawless violence. If we’re really lucky we’ll only end up shot in a basement like the Romanovs.”
    The smell got stronger as Charlie approached the door. Number seven, a lucky number that wasn’t doing anyone inside any favors, not if the smell was anything to go by. It was close now; there was a poison tang to the smell of blood that said