Read The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) for Free Online Page B

ain’t superstitious and maybe it worked for the devil but it never did a damn thing for Yael. Some devils are too hot even for Hell.
    Oh, here he comes. Smells of tar, hot and sticky. Hair all a prickle and hackles a crackle. A hop, skip and a jump and he makes the needle fly out of the groove. Scratches old Howling Wolf, the little shit, then knocks over my tea for an encore. I feel you, beastie. I know you too well for this game. Don’t fuck with me now.
    Used to be teacups spinning like Disneyland in my kitchen, be our guest be our host be our flesh be our blood. Singing and dancing - who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Tra la la la la.
    His favorite, you know. Loved that song. The biggest baddest wolf of the lot. Adolf, whistling Three Little Pigs while he stoked the furnace with half of Europe. Not one of our monsters, but he wanted to be. Like Charlie. The other one, not my Charlie. Charlie is my darling.
    Yael knows the words. They whisper in the palms and through the beams of the house. The walls shiver and I know it’s time. Time to fly.
    Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling. Charlie is my darling, the young chevalier.
    Ash. Grease. They used to say it was the fat rendered from murdered babies, back in the merrie olde days of strappado and thumbscrews. Fly me to the moon and kiss the Devil right there in the puckered center of his demonic bunghole. Oh these dark Satanic thrills. Jarmara and Holt. Vinegar Tom. Writhing and whining and scratching - head and heels, arc en cercle - that’s how it gets you when the ergot bites.
    Grease is bacon. Ash is Grandma. She’s nearly out. One day I’ll be the ashes and I won’t care. Anoint me now in fat and frenzy - skyclad, black bra. Don’t want these old titties dragging on the ground. Smear Grandma over my head and heart and away we go, hey diddle diddle over the moon.
    Cold up here, the islands like jewels in a necklace of lights. Electric. Galvani jerking frog legs, young Mary mourning her dead babies, dragged from pillar to post by the poet. The lone and level sands stretch far away. The sea killed him - ding dong bell - swallowed him up in the blue and the black like so many before him. Darkness is upon the face of the deep. Black sea, bright sparks. The wind burns but the smell is all the same. Blood and hair. Hackles-a-crackle. It carries all the way down here; let those who have noses smell it.
    Miami. The buildings are nearly high enough to land on, but that’s not where I’m going. Into the suburbs. Spanish style. Little houses. Stucco shades of brick and straw - little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.
    Oh, they’re already there, but us old broads are invisible - me and Yael. Easy to slip past the flashing lights and the yellow tape. In through the wide open door.
    Ugly modern wallpaper. Either that wallpaper goes (splatters of red) or I do - and went she did. All up in iron-smelling arcs as high as the dado rail. Dark red and shiny all over the nice hardwood floor. Face down, head turned to one side, one cheek red, one cheek white. Red as blood, white as snow. Hi ho, hi ho.
    Click click click. Cameras capture her clouded eye. Used to think you could find the killer’s face in the back of the retina - last thing the victim saw. Tried it with those girls in London back in the day, but the next time Jack went a ripping he left poor Mary Jane in shreds, splattered all up the wall and even her eyeballs pulled halfway to pieces. Only a rose I pluck from my mother’s grave.
    Mother. Oh, I can smell it. So that’s what got your dander up, Yael?
    There’s another. They don’t know it yet. They won’t know it until they lift her onto the slab and open her up, but he’s in there. A boy. Curled like a question mark and dead as a doornail. Maybe he lived as long as the life took to leave her body but when she stopped breathing, so did he. Never to be born.
    Yael, hush your noise. There’s nothing can be done for either of them.
    Nothing but