River Road

by Johnson, Suzanne

  Denis narrowed his eyes and I fingered the mojo bag again, almost sighing in relief as the magic-infused herbs blocked out his anger. I knew the fishing and gator hunting wouldn’t be as plentiful in the southern end of the territory, away from the federally protected delta, and so did he. But the Delachaise claim was valid. They’d been here first. It was my best offer.

  He jerked his head toward the Black Velvet. “Rene, he agree to dis?”

  “You gonna have to talk to him to find that out—she ain’t qualified to speak for Rene.” Robert Delachaise had slipped up on both of us, and I wondered how long he’d been listening.

  “You checkin’ up on us, tadpole?” Denis bristled toward Robert, and Robert stepped forward till they were practically doing a chest-bump.

  “You wanna fight, old man? I’ll fight.” Robert wrapped Denis’s long braid around his hand and pulled hard enough to make the older man’s head jerk, which got him a hefty shove in return.

  Holy crap. We couldn’t have a fish-fight in the middle of the Black Velvet parking lot. Heart pounding, I reached out with both hands and released a sharp burst of magical energy into each man’s arm. Just enough to get their attention, and about all I could muster without the staff. Hopefully, they didn’t know that.

  They both fixed dark, angry eyes on me.

  These oversized fish were pissing me off. “Do you really want me to have to settle this?” I pulled the elven staff from my backpack. As if on cue, it began to glow from within, a warm, golden light that practically dared them to mess with it.

  The mers’ disgruntled looks bled into uncertainty, and they each took a step backward.

  Robert broke first. “I’m outta here—I got to pick up a car in Happy Jack.” He wheeled and stomped toward his truck. “Old man there needs to talk to Rene. Decision’s up to him. Tell Rene I’ll see him later.”

  I nodded. “Denis and I are going inside to talk now.” I looked at Denis. “Aren’t we.” It really wasn’t a question.

  He shot Robert another killer look and stalked toward the door of the Black Velvet. I lowered the staff and sighed. This was going well.

  CHAPTER 6

  It took almost two hours of name-calling to negotiate exactly where each clan’s territory would start and end. Alex and Jean had to separate the mers when Denis threw a fried frog leg in Rene’s face—after dousing it in ranch dressing.

  In the end, Rene and Denis reached an agreement contingent on the water problem, whatever it was, being solved to their mutual satisfaction. Rene insisted the contamination was Villere-induced, and vice-versa. It would be my job to either find the problem or convince them there was no problem. Something made T-Jacques and one of Rene’s cousins sick. God forbid I should suggest they ate bad oysters.

  The Black Velvet staff had been round-eyed and jittery around the volatile tableful of alpha males and one lone, frustrated woman clutching a two-foot-long stick of wood in her left hand while she ate with her right. They trotted out plates of seafood kickers and crawfish pies, catfish and oysters and shrimp, and stayed out of our vicinity except to refill tea and water glasses.

  Mers, I learned, didn’t eat red meat but they could pack away prodigious amounts of seafood, especially when the wizards were picking up the tab. That had been my idea and I hadn’t gotten prior approval from the Elders. If I didn’t get reimbursed, I’d be eating ramen noodles until payday. But I wanted to try to negate some of this hatred of wizardkind, whatever had caused it, and if the price was a few platters of food, so be it.

  Finally, everyone left except Alex and me. In an hour, Rene would meet us at the Venice Marina for the trip to Pass a Loutre on his boat. He and Jean had tossed me aside like an empty oyster shell and gone off in search of Robert after carefully writing down the location of the Corvette.

  I was already exhausted from the stress of being polite and patient for so long—neither of which I’m very skilled at—and keeping everyone’s overwrought emotions out of my head. My muscles ached and my head pounded and I wanted a nap. Instead, I propped my elbows on the table, watching Alex scrape the remaining mountain of grilled stuffed crab claws onto his plate. The man ate like a plow horse but he managed to turn it all to those pretty muscles bunching and flexing beneath his shirt.

  Hey. If it’s in front of me, I’m going to look.

  “How’d you think it went?” I asked, watching as he squeezed lemon on his crab.

  “I don’t trust either of those guys to hold to his word—especially if you can’t figure out the water problem. If there is a water problem.” He guzzled the rest of his iced tea and handed me the check with an evil smile before he resumed eating. “Hope your credit card’s got a big limit on it.”

  That made two of us. If one man is sitting at a restaurant table with a hundred women, the waiter will always give the bill to the guy. It’s a proven fact. Wouldn’t have killed Alex to pay it—he made more money than me, a situation the Elders were soon going to be addressing, although they didn’t know it.

  Alex handed me the keys and I drove the rest of the way down Highway 23 into Venice. We parked near the marina just before two p.m., and spotted Jean leaning against the wall of the main building, smoking a slender cigar. Surrounded by boats and guys in shrimp boots, he didn’t look nearly as out of place as Alex and I.

  “Robert had automobile business to attend to, but Rene waits for us onboard the vessel,” he said, tossing the cigar aside and rummaging in my backseat for his pistol. I hadn’t let him take it into the restaurant. The Black Velvet staff really would have been alarmed had the muzzle-loader made an appearance. And I’d wager a case of ramen noodles that Robert’s automobile business involved filing off VIN numbers and removing license plates.

  To me, the Dieu de la Mer looked little different from the other fishing boats docked at the marina. Its hull was black, its name painted in white. All of the boats looked relatively new—probably because Katrina had swept their predecessors into a Mount Everest of nautical rubble. A windowed wheelhouse separated the short, raised foredeck from the long aft deck, and a complex arrangement of white rigging and netting stretched skyward.

  Rene watched us from the aft deck. “You ready? Gettin’ dark earlier now—we need to go.”

  Jean leapt aboard like Sebastian going after his favorite perch atop the fridge—all sleek and graceful. Alex was right behind him, throwing his shrimp boots onboard first. He and Jean headed immediately to the wheelhouse to look at their new toy. Guys. Didn’t matter if they were alive or undead; show them something with an engine and they turned into ten-year-olds.

  I stood on the pier, forlorn and abandoned, measuring the distance between me and the deck. I was five-four on a good day. I would not be graceful or sleek. There was a good chance I would end up in the water.

  Rene stood with a wide stance and his fists propped on his hips like some sort of Cajun pirate, smirking. “Thought witches could fly, babe.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I am not a witch.” Witches were to wizards as a common black bass was to a merman. It was an insult, and he knew it.

  Chuckling, he leaned over the side with his arm outstretched. I grasped his tattooed forearm and he jerked me aboard with no obvious effort, if you didn’t count my near-dislocated shoulder. Note to remember: mers might not be the biggest fish in the wetlands, but they were werecreature-strong.

  I’d been on a boat only twice. My grandfather had tucked me into a bright orange life jacket and took me fishing one time on Smith Lake in north Alabama. I’d kept my eyes closed the whole time. Later, Gerry, who’d raised me since school age, had let me ride the swan boats at New Orleans’ City Park. Of course, both of those boat rides took place before I was ten. I was a true wizard, meaning my swimming skills were theoretical. I understood the principle, but the execution left something to be desired.

  As we set out hugging the western shore, I joined Rene, Alex, and Jean in the boat’s small, windowed wheelhouse. I was clearly the fourth wheel—the fifth, if y
ou counted the boat’s navigational system. The guys hunkered over maps and asked Rene questions about the river, the bayous, the boat, the normal size of a redfish haul, the best time of night to shrimp, and the tricks of navigating the wetland marshes that had begun to spread around us as we left the world of automotive travel behind. I had nothing to contribute.

  I spotted a single life jacket dangling from a hook over a long bench in back of the wheelhouse. If we went down, it was mine. Jean couldn’t die, at least not permanently. He might drown, but he’d show up again in the Beyond, regain his strength, and eventually come back good as new. Rene could shapeshift into a fish, so death by drowning wasn’t likely. Alex liked the water, so he had to be a better swimmer than me.

  When Alex asked Rene how the hunting season for wild boar was going this year, I decided I’d find more scintillating conversation talking to myself. I walked to the side of the aft deck nearest the bank and watched the vegetation change from trees to tall reeds to flat marsh grass.

  “It is beautiful, is it not, Jolie?” Jean joined me at the portside rail, watching as the tree line rose and fell, occasionally allowing a glimpse of the patchwork of land and serpentine canals and bayous around us.

  “You spent a lot of time in these waters, didn’t you?” I tried to imagine Jean in a small pirogue, smuggling contraband to and from New Orleans in this maze of waterways that made up just a small part of his empire. How strange it must be to view the world over more than two centuries, seeing what people had done right and what we’d screwed up.

  He leaned on the rail, uncharacteristically silent.

  Curious, I lowered my empathic barricades enough to take his emotional temperature. As a former human, he broadcast his feelings like a megawatt radio station. He didn’t know about that particular skill of mine, and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.

  A whisper of melancholy seeped into me. Jean was lonely, and spending time on his old stomping grounds made him feel it more acutely.

  I fingered the mojo bag in my jeans pocket and let the magic smooth his emotional fingerprint from my mind, but a residue of my own sadness remained. I didn’t know how it felt to live well past all of the people I cared about, but I knew too much about loss and loneliness. Jean suddenly seemed a lot more human.

  “Where do you live in the Beyond?” I knew he spent time in Old Orleans, that preternatural free zone between the modern city and the Beyond proper. It was like a New Orleans theme park with all the city’s historical time periods represented in one finite area, on warp-drive. I’d been there once and didn’t want to go back.

  “I live in Old Barataria,” he said, his voice soft. “It looks much as it did when I commanded my men there. I have a fine house on the beach. There are no—” He waved his hand in the air. “Bah. I do not know the word for the towers men use to find oil.”

  “Derricks,” I said. The Louisiana waters were rife with them. Huey Long sold our coastline to Big Oil long before I was born.

  I watched him lean over the rail, so natural and at ease on the deck of even a small boat such as this. Where I had to concentrate to steady my balance as the Dieu de la Mer cut through the waterways, his stance was effortless and natural as we passed the outpost of Pilottown and approached the choppy east pass connecting the Mississippi to the Gulf.

  “What happened to your house in Barataria, when you left?” I asked.

  His jaw tightened. “The Americans burned it, even after I helped them win their little war.” That would be the little War of 1812.

  Jean was different than most of the historical undead, who were uncomfortable in the modern world. Even when summoned by a wizard or a magically adept human, they’d go back to their corner of the the Beyond without a fight. Not Jean. He liked keeping a foot in both worlds.

  “Would you really want to live in modern New Orleans, where so many things have changed and you have to hide who you are?”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder, then stood and slid an arm around my waist, tugging me against him. “Is that an invitation, Drusilla? I believe there would be many advantages to living in your modern world.”

  Fine. We’d had a nice conversation. I’d started to genuinely like him, even to glimpse what a burden he might carry. Now we were back to smarmy innuendo.

  “No, it is not an invitation,” I snapped, slapping his arm. “And everybody calls me DJ. Only you and my grandmother call me Drusilla.” Which should tell both of us something.

  “Bah.” He looked as if he’d smelled a rotten fish. “That is not a proper name for a beautiful woman.”

  “I think it suits her just fine.” Strong hands slipped over my shoulders as Alex joined us, standing so close I could feel his body heat radiating into my back. Had nothing to do with the weather; shapeshifters ran hot. Had nothing to do with affection, either. He squeezed my shoulders a little too hard for it to be a show of solidarity. I’d probably have bruises. He was marking his territory.

  We rounded a curve, crossing the easternmost branch of the river’s mouth, and wound our way to Pass a Loutre, a wildlife management area that wasn’t so much a place as a series of waterways providing entrance into the vast Birdfoot Delta. Other boats would pass occasionally, it being hunting season for various swamp critters, including, apparently, wild boar.

  Finally, Rene navigated the Dieu de la Mer across a secluded bayou and through a twisting, turning set of channels. I understood the old stories now, about fishermen unfamiliar with the area who’d sailed into these marshlands and never found their way out.

  The water was dark and murky, and the vegetation ranged from thick stands of trees overhanging the banks to, more often, wide swaths of marsh grass with vistas so broad I swore I could see the Earth’s curvature. Birds squawked and cawed overhead, and the air smelled of saltwater and algae.

  Alex had been silent after succeeding in his mission to drive Jean to the other side of the deck. We leaned on the rail, side by side. He spoke softly. “Are you really going to dinner with that clown?”

  The clown in question cleared his throat from his spot a few feet behind us, just in case Alex didn’t mean for him to overhear.

  “It’ll be fine,” I whispered. “We’ll have dinner, and then he swore he’d forget all the crap I promised him after Katrina.”

  Alex shook his head. “Just watch your back. And take the staff with you.”

  “Rene! Le bateau—arrêtez!” Jean bellowed suddenly, pounding on the side of the wheelhouse.

  What the hell? Alex and I ran to Jean’s side of the deck, and I caught my breath. Denis Villere sat on the bank holding a shotgun. A few feet away from him lay a man.

  A man who was way too bloody to still be breathing.

  CHAPTER 7

  After tethering the Dieu de la Mer a few yards down the bank, Rene joined us on the aft deck. Already in FBI mode, Alex was pulling on his shrimp boots. Denis hadn’t moved.

  “You”—Alex pointed at Jean and Rene—“stay onboard.” He frowned at my bootless feet. “DJ, you stay too, at least for now.”

  “I got extra boots probably fit you if you need ’em, babe.” Rene headed back into the wheelhouse and began digging through a bin. He emerged a few seconds later holding a pair of white rubber boots with big, glittery silver fish on the sides. Their sheer outrageousness was cool. I wanted them.

  “Thanks.” I sat down and pulled them on in place of my running shoes. I was going to have to buy my own shrimp boots when I got a chance. The last couple of years, there always seemed to be a swamp or a flooded house I needed to wade through.

  By the time I stood up, Alex had splashed ashore. He squatted next to the body as he talked to Denis in a low voice. Surely it had to be a body. The man’s lower legs were the only parts of him not covered in blood. Alex looked up at me and shook his head, and I shivered despite the sun.

  Alex and Denis exchanged sharp words I couldn’t make out. Finally, the mer thrust the shotgun at Alex, butt first. He looked mad as hell, which seem
ed to amuse Rene. What a jackass. Nothing about this was funny.

  Giving a wide berth to the area immediately surrounding the body, Alex waded back to the boat, cracked open the shotgun, unloaded it, and handed it to me. Smart man. I wouldn’t hand me a loaded gun, either. He stuck the shot in his pocket and climbed onboard, Denis’s stony stare drilling holes in his back.

  “Is there any way you can tell if our dead guy is human?” Alex asked. “If he is, I need to call the Plaquemines sheriff. If not, we need to call the Elders.”

  “I might be able to tell.” I lowered my voice. “You think Denis did it?”

  “He says no, that he was just coming to watch the water sampling to make sure Rene didn’t pull any funny shit, but who knows. Guy looks like he’s been dead a while, and he wasn’t killed with a shotgun.”

  “He ain’t one of my people, or a Villere either one,” Rene called from the foredeck, in case we didn’t know he was listening. “Man’s too tall to be a mer.”

  If the guy had been dead several hours, anybody could’ve done it, including Rene or even Jean. “How about an animal attack?” I asked Alex. “One of those wild boars you guys were talking about?”

  “No, he was definitely carved up with a knife. Something sharp that could cut through muscle and bone, like a filet knife.” Alex shifted his eyes to where Rene and Jean sat in the shade on the foredeck, looking daggers at Denis. “You know, like a hunter or fisherman might use. It would take somebody strong.”

  Well, hell. Could be Denis. Could be Rene or Robert or T-Jacques or just about anybody else in Southeast Louisiana. “Leave me alone a minute and see if I can feel anything.”