A death dealer was what normal people, the unawakened masses oblivious to the existence of gods and monsters, called ‘psychics.’ Just like anything else metaphysical, a lot of psychics were charlatans, but sometimes, you found the real deal, and the first sign that they were real deals was they forsook terms like ‘psychic’ and ‘medium’ and called themselves death dealers. They were favored by the death gods for one reason or the other—maybe they’d made good offerings, or maybe they’d looked extra nice in a party dress. Whatever the reason, the gods had granted them the ability to see past the veil splitting life and death. The spirits favored them.
It must be one of the shittier talents to have. Who’d want to be bugged by the restless dead all the time?
“We could hit the psychic shops along the interstate, see if we can find one? Would take some luck,” Tanis said. “Since, like, ninety percent of them are crap.”
“Or you could go to death dealer country.” Bernie stubbed out the cigarette so she could attack a piece of fried chicken, making yummy noises as she tore a fat chunk of meat off the drumstick. “It’s only a nine-hour drive from here and you pretty much trip over ’em every street corner.”
Tanis hadn’t considered that, mostly because she’d been intent to get north, into the cold. But going west into bayou country wasn’t a terrible idea. It altered the plan a little, sure, but they could still get to less agreeable climates via Chicago instead of New England. “We could. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Bernie smirked, a big chunk of fried chicken skin gobbing up her bottom lip. She lashed her tongue over it, not letting a single crumble of Miss Belle’s artistry go to waste. “True enough. Besides, there are worse places I can think of to croak than New Orleans. Take me down to Delta town.”
“I WAS STARVING to death,” Naree announced, the entire lower half of her face covered in chicken grease. “Like, it was coming. I saw the big white light. I may have to give up on atheism now; I know Jeebus is real and he wanted to take me home because I had no chicken.”
Naree joking around was infinitely better than Naree huddled into a ball in the footwell of a Cadillac with tears running down her face. Or Naree looking out the car window and crying as the adrenaline drained from her system. Or Naree who, seeing the deterioration of Bernie’s arm, walked up to her and hugged her, despite barely knowing her, her voice breaking when she said, “I’m sorry.” It would have been nice if it’d been hormones making her sniffly, but no. The day had been that fucking foul.
“We’ll go to church when we get to New Orleans,” Tanis said in return, scooping up the last of the potatoes in her box. The dinner really had been good, even if it’d been lukewarm by the time she left Bernie’s room. They’d talked a bit more about which death dealers to look for once they got to the Crescent City, and they both agreed when it came to hearing the spirits, you’d do a whole heck of a lot worse than a vodouist. Tanis knew next to nothing about them, but she was willing to see if they’d help her.
She had some money. She had a heart in a box. What could possibly go wrong?
“I’ll change my mind by then, just so you know.” Naree reached over for Tanis’s biscuit, claiming it for her own. As she leaned back, Tanis noticed that the T-shirt could barely contain her middle, the fabric stretched so taut, the lettering on the screenprint had cracked, making the words illegible.
She’s swelling again. Growing.
Oh, baby. Slow down. Be nice to your mother.
“I think, maybe, I’m sated. For now. Ask me again in an hour,” Naree said. “Or don’t. Because I’m thinking sleep would be good. Really good. Best thing ever, really. Today was balls.”
Tanis got up to prep the room, hanging a Do Not Disturb on the door and locking it down. She and Bernie had come up with a plan to block off their room entrances with heavy furniture. Unless the Gorgons themselves appeared, which would put them front and center of the human populace and possibly land them in an Area 51-esque zoo, they were safe. Ish. The priests didn’t have super strength. That didn’t mean they weren’t smart or dangerous, but it did mean they wouldn’t be able to get past the dressers pushed up against the door and window without for-sure waking someone.
The way Bernie had her guns laid out, anyone stupid enough to break into her room would be peeing out of a new hole pretty quick. Tanis was just fine with her handguns, though she did put the Colt beside the bed in lieu of some of the more delicate pistols.
Tanis ducked into the bathroom so she could rinse off, not bothering with clothes when she got out. The room was cool enough, the air conditioner functioning, but there was still that hint of Florida swamp that said she wouldn’t need pajamas, especially not curled up with Naree’s radiating body.
She padded back into the bedroom, expecting Naree to be asleep, but she sat up in bed looking at her cell phone, intently reading from the screen. Tanis took that as her cue to plug in her own device, pointedly ignoring the new-voicemail icon at the top. Everyone she’d want to talk to was gathered in two rooms at the Honeybee Motel. Everyone else could wait a few hours for Tanis to distance herself from the last disasters before introducing new ones.
“The interwebs say I’m extra horny during the second trimester. Or second day, if you’re spewing lamia babies. They also say I could get nosebleeds, gum bleeding, heartburn, headaches, hemorrhoids—oh, fun!—and bigger boobs. Also my stomach will feel harder and at some point it’ll flutter. Wow, Mother Nature is a douchebag. Wait, is she real? Like do I have to worry about insulting her? If so, sorry Mother Nature. I was funning. We cool.”
Tanis smirked and climbed into bed, rolling Naree’s way to press a kiss to her cheek. Naree turned her face at the last second to catch her lips, blindly sliding the phone onto the end table, her hand reaching up to sweep through Tanis’ hair. Her fingers felt amazing on Tanis’s scalp, skimming over, rubbing circles before gliding down to Tanis’s neck to hold. Lips to lips, Tanis’s tongue flickering out to steal a taste. Naree sank back down into her pillow, flattening out on the bed. Tanis broke away from her only long enough to shut off the light, but then she was on her, crawling over her, her lean muscle fitting against Naree’s swells and valleys. She tugged the shirt off of her body and threw it to the floor.
“I need to purge it,” Naree rasped, her mouth moving to Tanis’s shoulder, her tongue slithering over her skin. “To make today go away. I need you.”
She didn’t have to ask twice. Tanis’s mouth found hers again, opening her up and claiming her, her hands sliding over Naree’s sides and down to her soft legs with their softer down. She hiked her up on one side, lifting her leg and opening her, filling the air with the sweet smell of wet human female. Tanis worked her way down. From the mouth, all minty with toothpaste, to the warm neck, with its jumping pulse. Tanis placed a kiss to that hard thud, to the pounding life, giving it a gentle suck. Naree bruised easily, as Tanis had found out in the past, and while she liked to mark her, it was better when it was colder out, when Naree could cover it up if she saw fit.
Down, down, down. Heavy breasts, breasts that filled her palm and fingers and still squished out over the sides. Tanis placed her face between them, licking over the inside curves, Naree breathing harder beneath her, her hands raking over Tanis’s shoulders. A nipple in the mouth, lathed, sucked, worshipped, then the other. Naree’s sex scents grew stronger, filling Tanis’s nose and thickening her, growing her, her hips humping down at the bedsheets below.
She kissed down over Naree’s stomach, over that firm mound where their daughter grew. She rubbed her face against it, her nose and her mouth and her tongue, realizing for the first time that she, too, was feeling maybe just a little eager for this thing. This little girl. It was theirs. It was as many parts Naree as it was Tanis, and that was sexy. Yes, it was terrible timing. Yes, it was terrible circumstances. But in some ways—more than Tanis had realized—it didn’t matter so much. The trials and tribulations were secondary to the beauty of their creation.
&
nbsp; I want more of her. Need more.
Tanis’s hands went to Naree’s thighs, stroking over them and spreading them wider before she was kissing the very heat of her. Tanis buried her face in her girlfriend, drowning herself in the familiar wet. Naree moaned, body rising to meet her mouth, and Tanis closed her eyes, falling into the rhythm of pleasuring her. Falling into abandon.
Falling into Naree and the love they shared, no matter how fucked-up their circumstance.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE CELL’S RINGER was off, so Tanis missed the first four calls from Number Unknown. It was only when she woke up early to drain the pants weasels that she saw the string of attempts, and even then she put it off, taking care of personal business first. She pulled on her jeans and Naree’s discarded T-shirt before snatching the phone and her cigarettes. There’d been no disturbances during the night, no Gorgon priests tapping at their window panes, and so she moved the dresser away from the front door. For safety’s sake, she kept a gun in her waistband, which would, she knew, eventually misfire and blow off her ass, but beggars and choosers, and Florida didn’t have open-carry.
Not that she would have dared. She didn’t exactly have a permit.
She lit up and called her voicemail, surprised to hear the slow, steady cadence of the female mountain herself on the line, Fi. Fi had that low, booming voice, and on a phone call, it seemed somehow bigger than usual. It was a six-foot-tall, six-foot-wide wall of muscle, just like its wielder.
“Tanis, Mother wants you. We are discussing a new Den.” Call one.
“Where are you?” Call two.
“This is important. Please call.” Call three.
“She has seen your departure. She is scrying now.” Call four.
“She knows, Tanis. About you and the child. She wants to send me for you. I can only stall so long.”
Call five sent a shiver of apprehension down her spine. Of course Lamia would send one of the few people in the Den Tanis actually talked to. Of course she would, because she was an awful, insidious bitch who cared nothing for loyalty or sisterhood. All she cared about were results, and Tanis might—might—hesitate to fight if it was someone she liked tracking her down. Lamia was nuts if she thought anyone would trump Naree, but it made a modicum of sense.
Tanis didn’t call her back, but she did text; Fi deserved at least that.
I can’t. I hope you understand.
The answer was efficient. Fi was an efficient person.
I know.
Tanis finished her cigarette and promptly headed for Bernie’s room, pounding on the closed door. “You up?”
“Yeah. Coming. Bit stiff today. Ha. Stiff, get it?” Bernie chuckled quietly from inside her room. There was the slide of the dresser and the jingle of latches. The moment she opened the door, Tanis winced. Bernie was gray. Not statue gray yet, but the tint was there, in her skin, in her face, and worse, the blackness at the tips of her fingers had crept up her arm overnight, to her elbow. People would mistake it for gangrene, but it didn’t smell like a moldering limb. It smelled... dusty? Like sand? Dry. Dry was the word, even though dry didn’t have a proper scent, but it was there. It was what Tanis thought of.
“As you can see, we’ve had a fantastic night.” Bernie lifted the dead arm and let it swing from the shoulder, back and forth like a fleshy pendulum. Bits of dust crumbled from her fingertips. “I do believe we are on the last train to Shitsville, doll.” Bernie smiled and motioned her inside.
“Fuck. Bernie, I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry.”
“Meh. We all gotta go sometime. I’m getting comfortable with the idea.” She shuffled back to the bed, slower than usual, her spine extra rigid as she slid her shotguns back into her duffel bag, one at a time.
“Fi called. Ma’s coming for me.”
Bernie didn’t look shocked, but she did look tired. “It’s ridiculous, when you think about it. She’s got Gorgons sniffing around and she’s worried about securing her baby daddy.”
Tanis cringed. “Don’t use that term. Please.”
Not daddy or father or... no. Mother. I think? But Naree’s mother.
It probably won’t matter. I probably won’t be around to see my daughter grow up.
“Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to be insensitive, doll. I’m just off.” Bernie glanced over at the alarm clock by the bedside. It was half past eight, later than Tanis expected to be on the road, but after yesterday’s steady progression of awful, they’d all needed their sleep. “Give me twenty and I’ll be set to go. I got donuts yesterday. That should hold us over until lunch?”
“Sounds good. I’ll go wake the princess. She was drooling into her pillow last I checked.”
Bernie grinned. “I like her. She’s good people. I’m glad you’ve got each other.”
“Yeah, she is. I need her to be okay.”
Which might mean giving her up.
Naree.
WHAT NAREE DID to the donuts was unseemly. The powdered sugar everywhere made it look like she’d used her face to bulldoze a mountain of cocaine, but she didn’t care. She merrily popped another, her free hand resting on her belly, which was, Tanis noticed, bigger. Big enough they had to get her some new shirts soon for fear of her popping out of all the ones she owned.
Or, why bother? Just let her stretch them out. The kid’s due within a day or two anyway.
With a cloudless sky, the windows down to keep it cool, and enough junk food to cause a diabetic coma, it should have been a dream of a road trip, but every car that passed had Tanis peering suspiciously at the drivers. Every car that followed them for any length of time had her reaching for the gun on the seat. Every one of Bernie’s pained sighs made her flinch. Naree’s fretful Googling about baby things, about the rapid changes she experienced in her body, made Tanis’s temples throb. She couldn’t relax, no matter how much she told herself that they still had a shot—that they were going to New Orleans to see a death dealer and maybe, just maybe, they could get one of the two sets of snake people off their asses.
Tanis drove on. Sometimes there was chatter, sometimes there was music. There was Popeye’s chicken at their afternoon refuel, and fast food burgers for dinner. When the sun disappeared and they were left with a starless sky and the wafting stench of Mississippi, Bernie sat up in the back seat, grunting and yelping. There was a cracking sound, followed by a hard thunk of something hitting the car floor.
“What happened?” Tanis demanded, eyes fixed on the unlit expanse of black pavement and bright yellow road paint. Naree flipped around in her seat to look in back and gasped.
“Her hand,” she whispered. “Oh, Bernie. I’m so sorry.”
“Eh. I wasn’t using it anyway,” Bernie croaked. She tried so hard to sound blasé, like this was just one of those things that happened because it was a day ending in Y, but the pain was there, an unmistakable undercurrent soiling her sweet, raspy voice.
“Christ.” Tanis didn’t know what else to say, because what was there to say? Her friend was falling apart in the seat behind her—literally, chunks of her body crumbling—and there was nothing Tanis could do.
Except drive faster.
It should have taken another two hours to get to the city, but Tanis cut that by forty-five minutes, pulling into a motel not in the expensive tourist part of town, but north of, where the houses were small and the roofs needed replacing. Forty dollars a night seemed like a good deal to her, and she got them a single room with two double beds. The carpet was old but the sheets were new, and there were three locks on the door and barred windows. It didn’t say much about the safety of the neighborhood they were in, but that didn’t bother her. Humans weren’t the real danger. Not this time.
Bernie had set herself up in an overstuffed recliner pointed at an old boxed TV set in the corner. It was on a metal cart that didn’t look strong enough to hold the TV’s weight, but by the layer of dust on the second shelf, it’d been doing just that for a long time. She’d wrapped her arm in a scrapped T-shirt
, from shoulder to the stub at her wrist, mummifying it either so her bits didn’t fall to the floor like in the car or so no one asked questions about her condition. The black veins were up to her shoulder and stretching along her collarbone, spidery and pulsing fit to explode. Naree was settled on one of the beds with a big bottle of water between her legs, her phone connected to the charger she’d just plugged into the wall. Her eyes glazed over as she stared at a newscaster predicting a ninety-four-degree day with six trillion percent humidity.
“I have to go out,” Tanis said. “Going to try to find a vodou shop.”
It was a hit or miss thing with the shops, but the good news about being half-lamia was that people who didn’t quite fit recognized each other quickly. If she walked into a place that catered to the erudite, they’d see she was special. Maybe it was an aura thing, or maybe the spirits were chatty, but she knew if she found the right place, she’d know.
Hopefully.
“Okay, text me if something comes up. Please be careful?” Naree climbed off the bed to waddle over to Tanis, her belly hanging over her drawstring pajama pants. Her T-shirt had rolled up off it, exposing a gently furred belly button that looked like it was pushing forward inside her navel. Tanis wrapped her arms around her and took a big sniff of her hair, getting a potent waft of hormone that she knew now as ‘human mother.’
“I will, love. I promise.” Her gaze drifted over to Bernie. She had her head back, her eyes half-mast. She lifted the shotgun at Tanis in a show of solidarity.
“Anyone comes near your family, I got a new face hole for them.”
“You’re a gooder, Bernie.”
I’m going to miss you.
AFTER WHAT BERNIE said, matters of mother and father were on Tanis’s mind as she wound her way through the streets of New Orleans. The French Quarter was bustling; not in the way the pictures of Mardi Gras portrayed it, with bare breasts and beads and drunken revelry, but the sidewalks were packed, the spill-over bodies walking mid-street without much care. The smells were plentiful—there was that below-sea-level funk of the river and old city sewer stench rising from certain parts of the narrow streets, but there was also the sweetness of confections and good fried food and fruity drinks. The novelty shops all smelled like candy. The titty bars smelled like cigarette smoke and perfume.
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