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

Lyle’s kidneys were shutting down, if they hadn’t quit already.
    Reese opened the door. The first thing Charlie thought was that the geezers had been wrong; there was no way Reese was anywhere near twenty. The kid hadn’t shaved in days and was showing a dumb, downy adolescent beard. There was a rosy rash at one corner of his mouth that just served to highlight the still pink, fresh scars of recent acne all over his anxious, flabby little face. He looked all of about sixteen years old.
    “Oh my God,” he said, fresh tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh my God, you weren’t kidding? ”
    “Everything’s going to be all right,” said Grayson, changing his tune as he placed a calming hand on Reese’s shoulder.
    “What’s in the box?”
    “Just some things - ”
    “ - things? I’m not doing it, Grayson. I won’t and you can’t fucking make me...”
    Charlie tuned Reese out with a practiced ear. The smell of imminent death was now so strong he could hardly see straight.
    Lyle was on the bed. Someone had put a blue plastic sheet over it to protect the covers, towels draped on top to absorb whatever came out of him when the moment came.
    “He’s blind now,” said Reese, in a voice like he couldn’t believe this was happening. “He couldn’t see anything yesterday and then he said ‘I’m done,’ and that was the last thing he said.”
    Charlie approached the bed. There was blood crusted at the corners of Lyle’s mouth; Reese said his teeth had been falling out. The near skeletal figure on the bed was wearing a stained old t-shirt and a pair of checked pajama pants, neither of which did anything to hide the angles of his bony, broken frame. He had been a big man once, both physically and by reputation, holding the neighboring packs in check by threat of violence and murder. The mad dictator, Grayson said, and Charlie thought of those smashed palaces in Iraq and Libya, tacky as shit like Lyle’s old place, with that coffee table that was just a sheet of smoked glass somehow balancing on the tits of three gilded plaster mermaids.
    God, Lyle had loved that that fugly-ass house, right up to the point where he could no longer stand to be in it any longer. No wonder everyone was talking about the Black Dog; the whole thing had been straight up spooky. First there was the smell, then the toilets started backing up and flies started appearing from nowhere, until by the end they were swarming so thick on the insides of the window panes you could hardly see out. Before that Lyle had gone round the house with a sledgehammer, smashing lumps out of the plaster and the Spanish tiles he’d once been so goddamn proud of, screaming that he was going to find whatever dead thing in the crawl space that was causing all of this.
    “It’s a goddamn possum,” he’d said. “Or a fucking cat. Y’all quit looking at me like I’m cursed or something.”
    Only he was, and they all knew it. He’d messed with the wrong wolf witch.
    Charlie touched Lyle’s hand. “Hey. Lyle. It’s me. Charlie.”
    Lyle’s breathing didn’t even change; it kept to the same steady, snoring rhythm as before. His skin was clammy and cool, and when Charlie lifted his hand to take his pulse, the hand had a strange weight all of its own, like a foreshadowing of the dead weight it would be in a matter of hours. Or maybe even less.
    “He can’t hear you,” said Reese.
    Dammit. There’d be no final whispers, no satisfaction in telling Lyle just why he’d suffered this way. And like Gloria had always said, without the why there was nothing. Just a dying man hanging onto the last rags of life. “No,” said Charlie. The inside of his ribs felt scooped hollow, his stomach the same lead balloon it had been when Lyle had told him just what was on the end of that fork. “I think he’s in a coma.”
    “Oh my God.”
    “Reese, quit saying that. It’s not going to help.”
    Reese let out a loud, snotty gasp. “Help what?” he said.