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

last name and a Y-chromosome.”
    “Same here,” she said, and then realized her mistake. “Minus the Y-chromosome, obviously.”
    He narrowed his eyes in an expression of comic confusion. “I was gonna say. You look pretty...female in that bikini.”
    “Was that a compliment?”
    Gabe scrunched up his nose. “Maybe? I’m not good at these things.” He was actually blushing . “Ask me something else.”
    “Okay,” said Blue, willing to go along with the game for now. “Did you grow up around here?”
    He nodded again. His bare feet, stretched out along the seat, were almost touching her. “I was born in Tavernier. The only time I ever lived outside the Keys was when my mom got married and dragged my ass up to Tampa.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Twelve, I think,” he said. “My stepdad is one of those kind of clappy evangelical types, you know? My mom was crazy for him; he looked like a movie star in those days. We were Catholic but that didn’t matter. They had us rebaptized in some purpose built pool at their church; the thing stank of chlorine.”
    “Fun.”
    “I know, right?” said Gabe. “It was like some kind of cult. After being dipped in chlorine for the Lord we had to go to church every Sunday and pretend to speak in tongues and shit.”
    Blue leaned back in her seat. His feet were so close that she thought about pulling his feet onto her lap, but that would just be strange. Too fast. “How long were you in Tampa?” she asked.
    He exhaled and glanced up at the sky. “Oh, I don’t know. Couple of years, maybe? Mom was trying to turn us into the Christian Brady Bunch but it was more like the frickin’ Munsters. He wanted to move back to Kansas, where he grew up. Back to his old church, which was even loopier than the one in Tampa. Seriously. They got into snake handling and stuff.”
    “Uh oh.”
    “Yeah, that was when I ran away for the first time. Didn’t get very far, but I told her straight that there was no way I was going to fucking Kansas and dicking around with a bunch of venomous snakes. I was like ‘You might not believe in Darwin any more, but I sure as hell do, and I’m not getting taken out of the gene pool early because Pastor Jim Bob or whoever thinks I should test my faith in the Lord by cramming a diamondback down my pants and trusting to dumb luck.’”
    Blue laughed, relieved to know she wasn’t the only one with crazy relatives. The lightness that had swept over her on the beach that night hadn’t yet diminished, even though it sometimes served as a sobering reminder of just how little of her twenty-two years had been spent actually being young. “What did your mom say?” she asked.
    He gave a short, hard laugh. “She signed me up for this ‘Christ Camp’ thing. Kind of like a brat camp but with added Jesus. They tossed you out in the middle of Montana with a handful of sticks, a roll of toilet paper and a shovel. Luckily I got a break before they packed me off out there.”
    “How come?”
    “My grandfather showed up,” he said. “Perfect timing on his part. I’d never even met him before; Mom had made out like he was the Devil. I know he hadn’t been there for a lot of when she was growing up – I swear, deadbeat dads run in our family or something – but the deeper she got into this church she started telling more and more lurid stories about him. Like he was the high priest of a satanic cult down in Key West, and that the cult members had raped her over and over again and made her eat her own aborted fetuses.”
    Blue stared at him.
    To her intense surprise he laughed. “Yeah, you think that’s fucked up,” he said. “But get this; none of it was true. Which is even more fucked up when you think about it. Like, how messed up in the head do you have to be to even invent things like that?”
    “Very,” said Blue, appalled that anyone would feel the need to borrow trauma when there was more than enough to go around in the world.
    “It was like a