by Sierra Dean
“Hank is basically a walking bundle of rage and hatred.” Wilder glanced out the window so I couldn’t see his face. “I think he’s settled a bit since I let him take over the garage, but I also don’t think he’s forgiven me for picking you over him.”
I stared at the road so he wouldn’t think I was trying to read his face, but I wanted very badly to know how he was feeling about this statement of his. Did it bother him that his brother had so much animosity towards him, or was it something he’d just learned to accept?
I thought about Ben, and how utterly enraged it made me when he did and said the stupid bullshit he did on a regular basis, and how I still loved him furiously in spite of it all. Yeah, Wilder cared. He cared a lot, and he always would.
“I don’t think it’s Hank.” I glanced over at him, offering him a soft smile. “Didn’t even cross my mind.” I hoped he could tell I was being honest, because it was true, I hadn’t once thought about Wilder’s brother through all of this.
“If not him, then who? Cash?”
I scratched my cheek and watched the highway a while longer. Cash, my ex-boyfriend, had plenty of reasons to hold a grudge against me. I’d basically broken up with him for Wilder, and also because he just couldn’t deal with me being a werewolf, no matter how much he had claimed he was okay with it. Then there was the fact I’d exposed his last girlfriend Tansy for summoning a demon to eat her sorority sisters.
That was certainly a grudge-worthy level of stuff to have to deal with. I was sure he never wanted to cross paths with me again, but was he bitter enough to take revenge? I don’t know.
“Put a pin in that one.”
Before we could delve deeper into the list and start pointing fingers at girls I’d gone to university with, or Ben, or anyone I’d met in the last twenty-some years, the exit sign for the parking lot we were looking for appeared and I angled the car down a bumpy dirt road until we emerged at a little hole-in-the-wall boat rental place called Big Bess’s Boats.
I liked a good alliterative.
Bess, as it turned out, was not a made up character for the sign but rather a real live human being. True to the name of the shop she was a big woman in her early forties, round in the cheeks and the belly, with a mop of short white-blonde curls atop her head. She looked like a cherub, and smiled just as sweetly.
“Well hey y’all, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone wander in today. Near end of the season and looking like rain. What can I do for ya?” Her front tooth was crooked which added an element of undeniable charm to her big grin. I just wanted to hang out with her.
I was also spectacularly jealous of her button up Hawaiian shirt featuring rainbows and unicorns. Was this lady for real?
“Looking to rent a boat, please.”
“Sure, one hour or two?” She pulled out a sheaf of paper and started filling in the date on the paperwork.
I put my black American Express down on the counter. “We might be gone a few days.”
Bess lifted her head slowly and stopped writing, then glanced down at the credit card. “Are you two up to no good?” Her tone, previously so ebullient was now downright gritty with seriousness. She set the pen down and gave us a don’t fuck with me look that surprised me.
“You’ve heard of the Bayou Witch, haven’t you?”
“La Sorciere?”
I was taken aback. Most normies didn’t know her proper name, they just shared stories of her like she was an urban legend. If I hadn’t met her myself, I might not believe she was real either.
“Y-yes.” I glance cautiously at Wilder, whose expression remained stony and indifferent.
That solid poker face again.
“You kids going out looking for a legend and think it’s going to take you two days?” She cocked her head to the side. “Met plenty of folks who tried, and they all give up after a few hours.”
“We’re not plenty of folks.”
“So I’m gathering.” Bess tapped her pen against the desk, showing no sign of writing anything else until we satisfied her in some way. “Last thing I need is the two of you going out and only one of y’all coming back, you know what I mean?”
I glanced at Wilder. “You’re worried he’s going to dump my body out in the bayou?”
“Ain’t worried about him, sweetheart.”
Wilder cracked a smile, showing emotion for the first time since we’d arrived. “She’s got you figured out,” he told me. “Your sinister plan to bump me off is all for nothing.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“That’s not going to convince her otherwise,” he tsked.
“I hate you so much.”
“Temper temper, Princess.”
I looked at Bess with an exasperated expression. “You know what, you’re right. I am going to murder him and leave him to the gators. Is there an extra charge for that?”
“You’d still need to return both life jackets,” Bess said.
“He won’t need one.” I whacked Wilder in the arm and he chuckled.
“Are you really looking for La Sorciere?” She gave me an up and down look as if trying to figure out what a girl like me might want with a witch.
“I am.”
“Why?”
I put my hands in my pockets, hunching my shoulder self-consciously. I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit to her what I was doing here, but I also didn’t know any other places I could rent a boat this late in the year. “She’s my great-grandmother.”
Bess lifted one white-blonde brow at me. “Can’t say as I ever heard that line before. Had plenty of folks say they needed love spells, needed missing people found, needed the dead brought back to life.”
“We need the opposite of that,” Wilder muttered, just loud enough for Bess to hear.
“Have a feeling you two are trouble.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but we aren’t trouble intentionally, I promise,” I said.
“You gonna sink my boat?”
“I hope not, I can’t swim,” Wilder said.
I hit him again. “No, we’re not going to sink the boat.”
“Costs extra if you sink the boat.”
“Does that happen a lot?” I gaped at her.
“Can’t ever been too sure with people. Need to know the costs up front.”
“Can we just buy a boat?” I pleaded.
“Nah, rental only. Princess.” Seemingly satisfied that we weren’t here to murder one another, dump a body, or ask for a love spell, Bess picked up my credit card and resumed filling in the details on the form. “Two days, you think?”
“Lord help me if it’s any longer than that.”
“She ain’t easy to find.”
“Trust me, I know.” I shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Anything else out there causing trouble?”
When I’d last lived in the bayou there had been a roving pack of werewolves called the Loups-Garous who had an arrangement with another local tour guide to send unsuspecting folks out only to have them kidnapped, killed, or worse.
For a long time I hadn’t thought there was a worse than death option, but the Loups-Garous taught me otherwise.
As far as I knew Callum had wiped them out years earlier, but the bayou was a mystery of hidden spaces. Anything could be out there.
“Gators.” Bess shrugged.
“Just gators?”
“Snakes.”
I gave her a look. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
Bess lifted her head and paused filling in the rental form. “Everyone who goes in comes back out these days. Don’t ruin my track record.” She pointed to the wall where a sign read It has been 1498 days since anyone was eaten by a gator.
I blinked stupidly at it.
“I wanna get to 1500,” she said.
“We won’t ruin your record,” Wilder assured her.
She pushed the form across the counter to me. “Fill in the blanks and sign at the bottom please.”
I completed the form as she processed my
card. The reason I’d selected Bess’s establishment was because it was almost unheard of to have the option to rent a boat to go out on the swamp. Tours were different, it seemed like a hundred different companies would take your money to show you around, but not many would let you go on your own.
For good reason. Once you were into the thick of it, the swamp had a habit of shifting and changing around you like it had a mind of its own. You might think you knew where you were and how to get back, but the next time you turned around you’d find trees at your back you’d swear weren’t there a moment earlier.
That was the magic and the danger of the swamp, and why it simply wasn’t a safe option for most people to go alone.
Outside, beyond a rickety dock, I could see orange tags wrapped around the skinny branches of the trees. I’d checked Bess’s website before I came, and knew there were self-guided kayak paths that “brave” tourists could take. The boat rental was something I only knew about from one of my pack members who said Callum had once needed to enlist Bess’s services for something in the past.
If the McQueen name meant anything to her now, she didn’t let it show. I’d found, though, that a black card went a long way when it came to keeping questions off peoples’ lips.
She handed back my credit card along with a key on a yellow floaty tag. “Second slip, little motorboat. Gas can in the back is full, but be smart. There’s only one paddle, and strong as your man looks I don’t think you want to come back in the hard way.”
I took the key and my card and thanked her, then hustled Wilder outside before Bess could change her mind. The boat was a little fiberglass number with a basic pull-string outboard motor. The air around the dock smelled strongly of gasoline in a not unpleasant way.
Wilder beat me to the back bench and pulled the motor cord, firing up the engine. As promised there was a gas can, two bright orange life jackets, and a single canoe paddle on the floor. Alongside them were the corpses of about a hundred mayflies, and a sloshing bit of brackish swamp water.
Wilder waited until I had untied the boat from the dock and sat down before revving the accelerator handle on the boat and sending us puttering away from shore.
Within seconds the dock and Bess’s shack were out of sight and we were enveloped by the green shade of the swamp. The trees here were slender and close together, with large swaths of steel-gray sky still visible. A chill hung in the air, making my cheeks sting as we swept across the brown surface of the water.
Aside from the whir of the boat’s motor, the sounds of the swamp rose up, almost overpowering the meager thrum of the boat. Frogs cricked and croaked, bugs sang there sweet clicking songs with the eerie, haunting cadence of whispering ghosts. If ghosts could whisper.
In the quick-setting dusk a saw-whet owl called, it’s trilling voice asking who-cooks-for-you, which was how Lina had always mimicked it at Callum’s house when I’d been a child. “Who cooks for you?” she’d chuckle. “I cook for you, I cook for you.”
The whole area around us had been quiet as we’d upset the calm, but as soon as the swamp knew we were no match for it, everything came back to life almost immediately. Bugs buzzed overhead, nipping freely at our exposed skin.
The frogs were the strangest and most incredible of all the noises, their constant chirrup was an unearthly alien kind of noise. I remember it keeping me up at night when I’d first come to live here. Every kind of night sound had been so unfamiliar to me that they’d terrified me.
Now that I’d been back in the real world for so many years, I found myself uneasy once again, like the swamp was whispering its secrets around me. She’s back, she’s back, she’s back. Plots were being hatched against me and I no longer spoke the language.
More importantly, wherever La Sorciere was in all of this, she would know I was coming long before I got there.
I’d known that would be the case when I planned this excursion, but being out here in the setting sun made it all the more real.
“I should have waited until morning,” I said with a sigh.
“Would it have been any less freaky in the morning?” he asked.
“Out here? A little. But when we get into the thick of it, it’s pretty much spooky as shit all the time.”
“Noted.”
“You’ve never been into the bayou?” I asked him, astonished.
“I’ve been peripheral to swamps, but no, I can’t say I’ve ever gone out of my way to go into one. In human form anyway.”
We all did weird stuff in wolf form, I could accept that it was a different experience than what we were doing now. For one thing, you felt safer in wolf form. As a shifted werewolf, you were almost untouchable. It felt like nothing could hurt you. In human form, even though we were strong, there was a level of exposure that simply wasn’t present when you were a wolf. You felt fragile.
At least that’s how I felt as we motored along the aqueous causeways of the swamp.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been on a bayou tour.” I shook my head at him.
“Have you ever been on a bayou tour?”
“I literally went through puberty living inside a tree stump out here.”
“Right, but that’s not going on some tourist boat nonsense where the three-toothed guide tells you not to feed the gators, meanwhile he’s missing twelve fingers and has a name like Booger.”
I raised a brow at him. “So many stereotypes to unpack there, Wilder Shaw.”
“Hey, I was raised in a trailer park and my brother is a racist mechanic who owns seventeen white wife-beater tanks and has zero problem referring to them as ‘his beaters.’ I think I’m allowed to lean a little heavy on the stereotyping.”
“Your brother really is something else.”
“My point being, no one goes on swamp tours unless they’re from somewhere else. I’m betting you could quiz a hundred different people on the streets and the only ones who would say they’d been to the swamp would be people who live in the swamp and people who live in a different state. End of story.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You love me.” He grinned.
“I know, what the hell was I thinking?”
Wilder winked at me and cut the motor’s speed slightly. The trees had started to get bigger and denser, the moss draping overhead was so thick it blotted out what remained of the sun, leaving us in a green-tinted glass bowl.
We had to reduce our speed further as we navigated between the big trees. Here, we’d need to be extra careful. There were hidden bogs and islands all over, and there was always a chance we might find ourselves run aground if we didn’t keep an eye on the depth.
I glanced down at the water, which was too dark and murky to make out anything. Weeds scraped at the bottom of the boat, making a sound like fingers clawing at the fiberglass. I shivered and it had nothing to do with the cold.
“Where to, Princess?” Wilder asked, squinting into the dim light.
“If I say I’m not sure, will you get really mad?”
His gaze darted to me. “When you say not sure do you mean like ‘it could be one of two very similar looking trees’ or do you mean ‘I’m only ten percent convinced we’re in the right swamp’?”
“Closer to the first one.”
“But not not the second one.”
“We’re in the right swamp, calm down.”
“Just saying.”
“I’m not sure you’ve looked around recently, but the trees don’t exactly come with addresses on them. And the woman we’re looking for is a very old, very gifted witch who has spent decades in this swamp keeping herself hidden from the casual observer. Tourists never find her and that’s not dumb luck. She lives inside a tree, did I mention that part?”
“I sort of assumed you were being hyperbolic.”
“I am personally offended that you think I’d be hyperbolic enough to make up a story about how I grew up inside a tree.”
“Like a Keebler elf?”
“I’m breakin
g up with you.”
Wilder beamed. It was dark enough now we had to cut the engine down to almost nothing, and as a result the sounds of the swamp grew into an almost deafening buzz over the faint chuff-chuff-chuff of the boat motor.
After about an hour of being snacked on by mosquitos, a few close encounters with curious shoreline alligators, and more than one wrong turn, I was almost read to admit I was lost. Saying it out loud would do a number on my pride, but at least Wilder was the only one here, and it was hard to have a lot of pride around someone who knew me as well as he did.
Everything on the shore had been transformed into faintly glowing outlines, and the setting sun pierced through the trees in slim orange fingers. Soon we’d be alone in the dark, and if we hadn’t found La Sorciere by then we’d be sleeping in the boat with only lifejackets for pillows. Sharing body heat didn’t sound terrible, but there was nothing appealing about the prospect of sleeping in a damp boat in the middle of a swamp.
“Can’t you call her or something?”
“On her tree phone?” I looked over my shoulder at him and he rolled his eyes.
“I meant magically. Like, put out magic feelers or something. If she’s as powerful as you say, maybe she’ll feel you and come find us.”
I pursed my lips. She would have put up safeguards against things like finding charms or other trackers, but maybe he had a point. Could I just ask her to show herself? It seemed counterintuitive, especially considering how secretive she was. But there was always a slim chance she might actually want me to locate her.
I didn’t consider La Sorciere to be a sentimental person by nature. She never saw her own children, never asked about my Grandma McQueen, her daughter who also carried the natural witch gene. I often wondered if she’d loved me at all in those years I’d spent here. She wasn’t a particularly warm woman, but she’d made sure I was fed, clothed, and sustained. She’d not only kept me alive, but helped me learn how to take control of my powers so I would no longer pose a threat to myself or others. There was something in that to consider, I don’t know, caring?
“Stop the boat for a minute,” I instructed.