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

“Nobody can help. My dad is dying and nobody’s doing a damn thing. They’re just circling the place like buzzards. They won’t even let me take him to the hospital.”
    “Yeah, that’ll work,” said Charlie, not for the first time wondering just how the hell they were going to pull this off. The kid was spoiled, soft, and so out of touch that he even thought the hospital was an option. “They’ll poke him around and ask how he got like this in the first place. You really want to answer those questions?”
    Reese wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. Grayson handed him a tissue. They stood there for a moment, all listening to the rasping sounds of Lyle’s dying breaths, all caught up in their own private thoughts. None of them pleasant. Things had started to fall apart as soon as the news got out that Lyle was sick. Fights, robberies, kids testing their mettle. So far nothing awful had crawled out of the Okefenokee, but it was only a matter of time.
    Lyle made a gurgling sound. His mouth fell open, exposing a pale brownish tongue and the bloody dark sockets where his back teeth had used to be. Charlie watched, amazed to find that he felt nothing. The mean glee of watching Lyle flail around the house with a hammer felt like a dizzy childhood dream. This was real. Cold, flat, and finished.
    His chest moved a couple more times and then stopped. His eyes were open just far enough to see the fresh vacancy there. Reese let out a wail and ran for the door. Charlie stepped in his way, but Reese kept moving, like a doughy human battering ram. Charlie felt flesh squish against him and wondered how that even happened; how did you even get to that size without thinking ‘Hey, my ass feels like a sackful of silly putty. Maybe I should put down the fork’?
    “Sit down, Reese. This isn’t helping.”
    “I’m not doing it,” said Reese. He was crying again, thick tears pouring down his cheeks. He flailed out with both fists. Grayson tried to hold him but Reese reeled back against him, sending Grayson stumbling back against a chair, cracking his hip in a way that was surely no good for a geezer of forty-two. Charlie had a brief, ugly vision of this whole thing turning into a fist-fight over Lyle’s still warm corpse, and he fought down a sudden urge to laugh. There’s your dignity in death, you evil old fart.
    But Reese stilled, like he had no more fight in him. He’d never had much to begin with. He dropped down into a cheap pleather armchair and settled down to cry, like a person. Like a child who had just lost his father.
    “ Ow ,” said Grayson, glaring daggers.
    “Give him a break, will ya?”
    Reese looked up. “You have to,” he said. “My daddy just died. You can’t make me do shit.”
    Charlie sighed. Just once could the kid quit acting like such a goddamn maggot? His father had barely got done wasting oxygen and already he was attempting to play the whole thing for sympathy. Flat out manipulative.
    “Come on, Reese,” said Charlie. “I know this is hard, but we’ve known this was coming for a long time. It’s your time to step up.”
    The pleather creaked, an intention to run thwarted by Reese’s bulk. A panicky look scurried over his face once more and the tears started again. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t. I swear. I never did. Just let me go, Charlie. I’ll leave the state. I won’t get in your way; you can have it. You can have it all.”
    Charlie stared at him for a moment. “North Florida?” he said.
    “Yeah. All of it.”
    “You’re offering me your old man’s old turf?”
    “Yeah.” Reese nodded frantically. “It was always you, Charlie.”
    Charlie laughed, shocked to find himself experiencing a whole new emotion; regretting that Lyle was dead. And the poor dead prick wasn’t even cold. If only he’d hung on for a couple more minutes he could have watched his precious son and heir hand over his legacy to an outsider.
    “Kid,” said Charlie. “You know