He had his hand on the front door and she was shyly looking down at the ground, and he would never know if he would have opened that door to have sex with her or not. Because the next thing that happened was a gunshot from inside.
He threw himself around her as her eyes widened and her cry was muffled by his hand on her mouth. She wasn’t used to violence, but werewolves live and die violently. Then he heard a moan and he thought the voice sounded familiar. Em was stunned enough not to realize that he was tearing the door off the hinges—or he hoped she was—and he flew inside to find Delano Bouchard flat on his back just off the kitchen beside a tipped-over desk chair, with blood gushing like a broken water main from his chest.
Delano was the town’s head building inspector. Alcide’s daddy had dealings with him all the time, survey matters. Alcide’s father liked him well enough, said he was tough but fair. Now he looked to be dying.
“Go get help,” Alcide yelled to Emmaline, but she was rooted in the splintered doorway, wheezing in terror.
“Lost . . . my nerve,” Bouchard whispered. In his right hand there was a gun. Alcide was so stunned he almost lost his balance as he flattened both his hands over the horrible geyser of warm blood. Bouchard had shot himself.
“Desk,” Bouchard ground out. His eyelids and chest were both fluttering. “Note. Take it. Let ’em know.”
“Oh, God, oh, my God.” Em sobbed wildly, unable to look away. Makeup ran down her face in trails of black and blue and silver.
Alcide picked up the landline. Wasn’t hooked up. He pulled out his phone. No bars. He already knew she didn’t own a cell phone.
“Chère, go get help,” Alcide said desperately. He looked at the desk and saw an empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad with CONFESSION written at the top; below, a paragraph of precisely hand-printed words in blue ink, and at the bottom, the man’s signature, which Alcide had seen on dozens of building inspection forms. There were blood spatters on it but the gush had mostly missed it.
“Note,” Bouchard insisted.
Alcide grabbed it. His hand was blood-scarlet, and now the paper was smeared with it, too.
A truck engine roared close; the motor died and doors opened and slammed; footsteps crunched the same gravel path Alcide and Emmaline had walked up to the motor home. The Camaro was parked behind some magnolia trees, well out of sight.
Bouchard’s spasming hand wrapped around Alcide’s fingers. His grip was weak. His eyes were bugging out of their sockets. Alcide had seen terror like this a few times before—during executions of werewolves. Boyd Lescaux killed wolves for things other packmasters didn’t even bother with.
“Kill me before he . . . gets here,” Bouchard begged Alcide. “Please.”
Then the inspector was dead, the fire of life extinguished from his eyes. His hand slid to the floor and flopped into the spreading pool of blood.
Alcide lunged toward Emmaline and grabbed her forearm. He spotted another door—back door—just behind the desk. One hand clutching the piece of paper, the other dragging his panicking girl, Alcide got himself and Em the hell out of the trailer. She was panting and crying and he scooped her up in his arms and ran.
Ropes of Spanish moss brushed his face. He was listening hard for more gunfire, or men coming after them. He got into the trees and set her down, then unfolded the bloody, crumpled paper and in the moonlight read:
CONFESSION
I, Delano Everett Bouchard, took a bribe from Zachary Ravel in return for signing off on his subcontracted framing work on Stillwater Project #13-721. But I cannot let that stand. A second inspection will reveal that the building is unsafe, and should be undertaken immediately. I have warned Ravel that I plan to recant, and he has warned me that he will strip the skin from my bones and shoot out my eyeballs if I do. I do not have the courage to see if he will make good on that threat, nor to drag my family’s name through the mud in a court trial. I am sorry.
I am of sound mind and body.
Delano Everett Bouchard
Oh, my God, that’s her daddy, Alcide thought. Then the trailer exploded and Emmaline was so startled that she lost her footing and crashed to the ground. Instinctively he threw himself on top of her and began to growl, looking back toward the orange-and-yellow flames and thick, oily smoke roiling up toward the moon and blotting it out like a river of blood. The trailer was ablaze, white-hot and untouchable.
Metal screeched and another explosion shook the ground. A hickory tree beside the trailer went up like a roman candle. The grass sizzled. He smelled gasoline and burning flesh.
Was that her daddy in the truck, coming to kill Bouchard just like he promised? Did he set that fire with his filthy, murdering hands?
Alcide got up and took Em’s wrist. She stumbled and staggered and turned back to look, like Lot’s wife in the Bible. She was wheezing and trying to scream and he wheeled her around and then he heard . . . He didn’t exactly hear, but he knew . . .
Werewolf.
Close.
Alcide’s heart hammered. Every sense ratcheted up to high alert. Warning of danger. Urging him to action. His bones began to ache and his blood to heat. His face tingled, his fingernail beds stung. He began to shake.
Oh, God, I’m going to change, he realized and he fought it down because if she saw, and another Were saw that she saw . . . Boyd Lescaux would kill them both.
No, no, no no no.
More trees caught fire, flames whooshing toward the moon. Reflected flames danced on shaking leaves. Pools of rainwater shimmered. Em was hunched over gasping, fragmenting into panic. That gave him a couple of seconds to try to force the change to stop. Then she straightened and looked right at him.
No!
The horror on her mud-caked face; her crazed, earsplitting screams. She scrabbled away from him, shrieking, making sounds he had never heard anyone make before. Falling and stumbling and bolting, flinging herself out of his reach.
He thought of the werewolf in the woods and ran after her, holding out his hands. Hair and claws and smoke and fiery death. He changed and ran, howling in rage.
The flames came after him; the town talked about that fire for years. He ran searching, still howling. He would have stayed in there and cooked if it meant he could find his Em. But she was like some ghost, vanished into the swamp, and when the sun rose he knew he had to face that she was gone. Not dead, he begged, and he prayed as he had never prayed before or since. He staggered for hours, and then he fell to his knees, clenched his fists, weeping.
Delano Everett Bouchard and his damned confession must be ashes. Everything burned away.
He thought hard about that confession, trying to concoct a story so he could tell his daddy about the bad inspection. But a werewolf had been out by the trailer and Alcide had no idea who it was or if he—or she—had seen either him or Em. He was so scared for her he spent too long trying to figure out how to tell his daddy about the confession without telling him how he knew about it. He was afraid he’d trip up. He didn’t know if she was still alive to protect, but there was no way he would take any chances.
And because of his cowardice, that building did collapse, and three people were severely injured. Eighteen, and he had blood on his hands, and his sweet Em was nowhere to be seen.
A week later, Zachary Ravel told Marie-Louise Crissertary, the social worker who visited him, that his sixteen-year-old daughter, Emmaline, had probably run off to find her whore of a mother, whom, contrary to public opinion, he had not murdered and buried on his soybean acreage. Then he told Miz Crissertary he would shoot her and it would be legal if she didn’t stay the hell away from him.
A year passed, two, three, five. Alcide searched every square inch of Shreveport for Emmaline. Tried to be discreet, but worry made him aggressive.
NOW . . .
“Em,” Alcide said in the bar, as she stood un
certainly before him. Though he’d had fair warning—had seen her reflection in the bar mirror before they came face-to-face—he couldn’t conceal his shock. She looked old and gaunt. Some kind of disease sallowed her skin. Her dirty, wet clothes hung on her as if she were a little girl playing dress-up in a garbage dump.
He slid off the stool and took a step toward her. She took one back. Then her eyes shifted from him to the two empty shot glasses on the bar, and the vacant seat beside his. She moved painfully toward it and climbed on, lowering a cheap boho bag to the floor. She kept her gaze fixed on her leathery hands.
“Two more,” Alcide told Dale as he sat gingerly beside her. He was dying to wrap his arms around her. But she, it seemed, was dying of something else. He took off his black leather jacket and settled it around her shoulders and she tried to smile in thanks.
Her shot glass full of bourbon didn’t touch the varnished wood; her hand darted forward like a rattlesnake and she snatched the drink from Dale and gulped it down. Her head dipped as if her skull weighed too much for her creased, crepey neck.
“Alcide.”
“Oh, chère,” he said, reaching for her, and she shrank away again.
“I got word. That he’s dying.” Her voice vibrated with a hundred different kinds of pain. A tear dripped off the end of her nose. Another followed, and she didn’t wipe it away. Her cheeks were sunken, and she looked like a heroin addict. Maybe she was a heroin addict.
He said to Dale, “We’re going to a booth. Please ask Jane Anne to bring us two steaks, rare, and baked potatoes.”
Em didn’t protest when he gently took her forearm and helped her off the bar stool. She was as hollow-boned as a duck. He could almost hear her joints cracking as he walked her to the back of the bar and helped her slide over the burgundy leather, as if she were his grandmother instead of a girl he had once loved. Still loved, he realized.
He sat across from her and splayed his hands on the table to watch her body language for signals. She didn’t sit back. She hunched over, and the pointer finger of her right hand almost brushed his left. But not quite.
“Who sent you word?” he asked.
“The person I wrote to,” she said, then clamped her mouth shut. “I think I’ll keep her out of this.” She looked down at the varnish. “He dead yet?”
“Nope.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that.”
I do, Alcide thought. He hated her daddy as much as he hated his former packmaster Boyd Lescaux. Colonel Flood had challenged him, and Flood had won. The reign of terror was over. But with the knowledge that Em’s daddy was dying, all the misery had rushed over Alcide like a flash fire. And so he had spent three nights in a row at Dale’s, pouring bourbon on the flames.
“Where did you go?” he said quietly.
“I don’t even remember.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He got out his lighter and flicked it on. She blinked as if she’d forgotten that people did things like that, lit cigarettes for each other.
“I was homeless for a while. I never told anyone my real name. I just couldn’t get over it. I got put away. They told me they’d pay for an operation to make me better,” she said, raking her fingers through sopping, tangled hair that was more gray than blond. “Didn’t help. Electroshock. Drugs. Then I wound up on the streets again. Then y’all showed the world what you were. Y’all and them vampires. Right there on the TV. I was sure nobody else was seeing it. That it meant I should just give up.” She raised her chin. “I thought about, you know, tying up loose ends.” Her hands were shaking. “He beat me, Alcide. And I swear to God he killed my mama and buried her in our field.”
“Oui, chère,” he said. Everybody believed that Ravel had killed his wife. Soon he would be dead, and Alcide was sure he’d go straight to hell.
Em stared at him. Her eyes were yellow and bloodshot. A tear cut a channel through the grime.
“I lost my whole life because you never told me what you were.”
His heart truly ached. It was like frozen lead in his chest. “I wanted to tell you. But it would have meant bad things for both of us.”
“I figured.” But accusation shaded her words. As if to say, You should have told me anyway.
“He’s suffering,” she said, accepting the light, drawing in the smoke. “My daddy. He’s dying in pain.”
“Good,” he said flatly.
She exhaled and smoke wreathed her head.
“I read about that building collapse. Or maybe I saw it on TV.” Her face clouded. “Was it . . . Mr. Bouchard’s?”
He had planned to lie to spare her any further pain, but instead he nodded. They sat without speaking. Their food came. She was three bites away from polishing off her steak when she huffed and muttered, “Oh, shit. I forgot that I’ve gone vegetarian.”
Alcide said, “I was supposed to stay away from you in high school. From human girls. That’s why I didn’t take you someplace nicer after the prom.”
“Oh.” Her voice contained a multitude of emotions. She tapped her cigarette ash onto her plate with trembling fingers. She pressed her forehead against the ends of her fingers and wearily rubbed, as if she had a headache.
“You got a place to stay?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t for years and years,” she said. “I’ve been sleeping in alleys. Thumbing around. I saw you come here a couple of nights ago. So I stuck around here. Working up my nerve. I was going to get cleaned up . . .” She covered her face. “I’m so ashamed for you to see me like this.”
“I did this to you.” He was stricken.
“You were the best thing that ever happened to me, until you were the worst. In between . . . there was always Daddy.”
“Let me get you out of here,” he said.
She nodded, her head nearly bobbing against her chest. “I’m so tired.”
He paid the bill and they left. He helped her into his truck and they drove away. He thought about taking her to a beautiful five-star hotel, the kind he had wanted to take her to the night of the prom. His mind spun ahead to her sliding into a hot bubble bath and soaking the grime and misery away. Saw her getting the works at the beauty parlor. New clothes. A job at the company, something simple to start, like filing paperwork.
Then he brought himself back to reality and parked in front of a modest but not trashy motel. He saw her shoulders go down, relax a little. He’d made the right call. She wasn’t ready for much more than this.
He paid for the room and got the key. Em sat down tentatively on the bed with her bag on her lap. He was willing to bet that was all she had.
She reached into her satchel and pulled out a plastic baggie. Tattered bits of blood-spattered notebook paper were pressed inside the filmy pouch like dried flowers in a diary. It was Bouchard’s confession.
He was speechless.
“I thought that burned up in the fire.”
“It didn’t,” she said simply. Maybe she’d taken it when he was changing. He had no idea.
“I came back to make it right,” she said, lifting up the baggie. “I want to make it public. I want to do it before he dies. I want people to hate him.”
Don’t you worry—they already do, Alcide thought.
“Of course, Em,” he said. “We’ll do it however you want.”
Then suddenly he knew it was all right to sit beside her on the bed. Their hips touched and a heavy sob convulsed out of her and he put his arms around her. She turned on one bony hip and pressed her face into his chest and wept like she must have wept when her maman disappeared and her boyfriend turned into a hallucination and she had nowhere to go but down way too deep.
“You led me on. You made me think you loved me,” she said brokenly. “When all along—”
He stroked her hair. She cried and cried and when she was spent, he pursed his mouth to bestow a kiss on the crown of her head
, a gesture she could not see.
“I was a kid, Em. Part of me hoped that it would be enough if I loved you. That we would get to have what we wanted because we were in love.”
“Romeo and Juliet was assigned reading in the ninth grade, Alcide Herveaux,” she mumbled, and they both actually chuckled.
“You know me. Never much for school.”
Silence fell on them. He wondered if she wanted him to leave.
“Who set the trailer on fire?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ve always assumed your daddy paid for the matches,” he said bluntly.
“How can people be like that?” Her voice was tiny and fragile. Shell-shocked. “How can my own kin be like that?”
“How can I be a werewolf?”
He held her chastely. There was no desire in him, and he could tell she didn’t feel any, either. She only needed holding.
“Did you get married? Do you have kids?” she asked.
He told the truth. “I’ve got someone.”
“I’m glad.” She took a breath. “I’m relieved.” She broke away from him and crossed her arms. “I’m dirty and I stink.”
“No. You smell like roses and magnolias,” he told her.
“Will you stay while I take a shower? Then will you take me to see Daddy?”
“Of course.” It was ten at night. But he would have taken her anywhere in the whole wide world no matter what time it was.
Em came out of the bathroom damp from the shower and back in her dirty clothes. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail, and when she caught him studying her, she averted her face, as if in shame.
They got in his truck and they drove out to the plantation home where she had grown up. For all of his being a criminal and an abusive asshole, Zachary Ravel had been a successful businessman. Em drummed her fingers on her knees, and it began to rain again. They didn’t talk on the drive, but when they turned onto the road that had once been lined with perfectly trimmed hedges, Em blurted out, “Shit!”
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