by Chloe Neill
“This isn’t an accidental hill,” Malachi said, looking it over.
“No,” Gavin said. “Built by Native Americans five or six thousand years ago. It used to be higher. But again, the water’s rising.”
“How do we get over there?” I asked, glancing dubiously at the swamp that lapped at our feet, water bugs skimming like ice-skaters across its surface.
“In a skiff,” Gavin said. “I just have to remember where to find it.” He picked up a stick and began poking into the leaves, fronds, and moss that littered the ground and probably held more than a few spiders and snakes.
I stayed well back from the search. And sure enough, after a couple of minutes, Gavin hit something wooden and hollow, then used the branch to push debris off a gnarly-looking boat upside down in the dirt, well hidden from passersby. But not, apparently, from people in the know.
“How did you know that would be there?” I asked.
“Because it’s not my first time on Hopeless Mountain,” Gavin grumbled, and I knew I’d need to weasel the entire story out of him later.
“Let’s flip her,” he said, and we took positions along the boat, pushed it up and over, and found the oars wedged beneath the seats. We carried it to the water and set the nose firmly in the muck at the edge so it wouldn’t float away. Gavin watched for a minute, hands on his hips, waiting to be sure the bottom didn’t leak and fill with water.
“Who left you here?” Malachi asked.
“That’s a story that doesn’t need telling. Suffice it to say I woke up on the mountain one morning with a helluva headache and no skiff.”
“You swam for it?”
“After I gathered up the nerve. Place is teeming with gators. But I made it out again. Point is, if you’re on the correct side of the bayou,” Gavin said, “the skiff’s here for the borrowing. If not, you take your chances with the water.
“Boat’s fine,” he pronounced, then glanced over at the hunters, now on the ground and still unconscious. Then he looked at me. “Three in the boat at a time. You want to help or watch?”
“Land is fine by me.”
We moved Crowley first. Gavin and Malachi paddled the short distance to the hill while I watched Jimmy. Then they unloaded Crowley, made the return trip, and repeated the process.
“What do you think?” Gavin asked me, arms crossed as he looked over their work. He and Malachi had placed the two men beside each other against a tree, arms slung over each other’s shoulders like buddies sleeping off a bender.
“I think they’re going to be pissed when they wake up.” I slapped a bug on my elbow, hoping for at least a couple of reasons that I wasn’t going to be in the vicinity when that happened. “How long will they be here?”
“Probably less than twenty-four hours,” Gavin said. “If they don’t want to wade back to shore, shrimpers will find them.”
“I’m surprised there are shimpers this far out,” I said.
He shrugged. “Life was already hard in this area, so the war wasn’t much of a change. Anyway, these two couillons will only have to wait out the mosquitoes.” Right on cue, he slapped a bug on his neck.
Malachi and I helped Gavin turn the boat upside down and cover it again. Then Gavin picked up his backpack, slung it over one shoulder. “Let’s get moving. Just in case they had friends.”
• • •
Malachi’s conversation with the Paras had kept him out of the bounty hunters’ sight. Since he’d come back with a snack, we could forgive his missing the fight.
“Sweet rice cakes,” he said, offering a waxed paper package containing two small round snacks in pretty pastel colors. “It’s one of Anh’s family recipes.”
Gavin grabbed one and took a bite. “Nice.”
I took the other one, nibbled on the edge. It was sweet and soft, and textured on the inside like a honeycomb.
“I believe her parents were from Vietnam,” Malachi said. “They were here before the war and stayed when it was over.”
“They give you any information?” Gavin asked, stuffing the rest of the cake into his mouth and licking sugar from his fingers.
“Djosa says he saw Erida,” Malachi said. “But not Liam or Eleanor, and they don’t know where Erida was going.”
“Is he telling the truth?” Gavin asked.
Malachi nodded. “He might evade, but I don’t think he’d lie about the details. But he did have one suggestion—that we visit the Bayou Black Marina and speak with a woman named Cherie.”
“Hey,” Gavin said, brightening up, “I know her. She’s actually a friend of mine.”
When we both looked at him, he hunched his shoulders. “What? I have friends.”
Malachi’s brows lifted. “Seriously?”
Gavin looked at Malachi, then me.
“He’s been working on sarcasm,” I explained. “I think he’s getting pretty good at it.”
“You let Moses have a joke book, and you’re teaching Malachi about sarcasm. Of all the things you could illuminate about the human experience, you opted for those?”
“Man’s gotta have a hobby,” I said with a grin. “Didn’t you say that once?”
Gavin grumbled and led the way down the trail again.
• • •
It was the ugliest building I’d ever seen, and it sat like a sentinel at the edge of Bayou Black.
Maybe less a building than a three-year-old’s imitation of a building—flotsam and jetsam assembled into a rough cube perched on top of wooden piles to keep it out of the water.
But letting the water take it might have been a small mercy. The walls were shards of other buildings—red shiplap and weathered cypress and aluminum siding—and the windows were oddly sized and mismatched, probably salvaged from the same buildings. It was ringed by a rickety dock that connected land and sea and hosted a single skinny gas pump.
“That is . . . interesting,” Malachi finally said from our spot on the shoreline.
“It’s ugly as sin,” Gavin said. “And the proprietor’s a pain in the ass. But she knows her stuff.”
“And there will be shade,” I said, wishing we’d decided to hunt down the Arsenault clan on a cloudy day.
“Let’s go,” Gavin said, and we strode across the bouncing dock to the door.
The inside didn’t look any better than the exterior. Mismatched tables and mismatched chairs atop a sheet of linoleum that curled around the edges. There was a bar on the far end made of an old shop counter with a glass front, the case now filled with faded buoys and tangles of fishing nets.
Only one chair was occupied—by a man whose tan skin had the texture of sandpaper. He was roughly bear shaped, wore a T-shirt, jeans, and rubber boots, and worked on a bowl of food with grim determination. He looked up when we entered, apparently found nothing worth commenting on, and returned to his lunch.
There may not have been much to look at, but there was plenty to feel. An air conditioner roared in a small window on the other end of the room, and the bar was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. The striking difference made my head spin, and I didn’t mind a bit.
“Close the goddamn door.” The voice came from behind the bar. The woman—tall, broad-shouldered, and dark-skinned—stepped around it. Her hair was short and dark, her eyes narrowed with irritation. “You think electricity comes in with the tide?”
“I think if you’ve got AC in here,” Gavin said, walking to the bar as Malachi closed the door, “electricity isn’t a problem.”
“It’s always a damn problem.” She looked him over. “What’s not a problem is that sweet, sweet face. You are a beautiful example of a man.”
Gavin’s eyes narrowed. “It’s good to see you, too, Cherie. Can we steal a few minutes of your time?”
She looked over at us, took in me and Malachi. “Six ears is three times the price.”
“I can pay,” Gavin assured her. He pulled bills from his pocket and put the wad on the counter. She slipped the packet into a pocket of snug, worn jeans in a practiced move that said this was clearly not her first bribe.
“Your friends?” she asked, looking us over.
“Call them Tom and Jerry.”
She looked dubious, but gestured at a table. “Take a seat,” she said. She opened a cooler behind the bar, and condensation rose into the air like steam. She pulled out an unlabeled bottle of what I guessed was homebrew, popped the top, walked back to our table.
I guess the payment didn’t include beverages.
Cherie pulled out a chair and practically fell into it. The movement shook the entire structure, and I had to swallow the urge to grip the edges of the table for support. At least if the building crumbled beneath us, we would hit the water.
“Helluva morning,” she said, and took a long pull from the bottle. “PCC patrol rolled through here a few hours ago.”
My heart tripped at the possibility they’d already narrowed down Liam’s location—and made it farther and faster than us.
“PCC patrol?” Gavin asked. “Looking for someone?”
“Don’t know. They drove past on the levee road, didn’t stop.” Gaze narrowed, she looked at Gavin. “You here because of Containment?”
Gavin slid a questioning gaze to the loner at the table.
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “That’s Lon. Shrimper. Lives in his trawler half mile up the water. He doesn’t hold with Containment.”
“In that case, I’m here because of my brother.”
She chewed on that for a good fifteen seconds. “Word is, your frère’s wanted for the murder of a Containment agent.”
“Incorrect,” Gavin said. “He wasn’t in New Orleans when it happened.”
“Heard that, too.”
“That’s why we’re here. We need to find him. You know where he is?”
She shook her head, twirled her bottle on the table. “I haven’t seen him, don’t know anyone who has. Could be I could speculate. For the right price.”
Gavin’s patience was obviously wearing thin. “I already paid you.”
“For the time,” she said, and took a drink. “Not for the answers.”
For a long moment, she and Gavin just looked at each other, poker players gauging each other’s hands. “What do you want?”
“Booze. We can’t get shit but skunky beer up here.” Still, she took another pull on the bottle. “Skunky beer’s better than nothing, but it don’t help business much.”
She didn’t seem to get the irony of “better than nothing,” given that she was demanding more from us. But there was no point in complaining. Not when we needed information, and not when I could do something about it.
“Done,” I said. Getting goods into Containment was my particular skill, after all. And even if I wasn’t at the helm of Royal Mercantile, I still had contacts.
Gavin kicked me under the table, but I ignored it.
Cherie narrowed her eyes at me. “You answered fast. Maybe I didn’t ask for enough.”
“You didn’t let me finish.” I leaned forward. “Done—if you give us the right information.”
She watched me for a moment, calculating. “What kind of booze?”
“Depends on what they’re bringing in that week. But if it’s on the truck, I can get it.”
She wet her lips thirstily. “I might know where you can find a friend of his. Word is, there’s a woman living in a cabin near Dulac, only been there a few days. Word is, she doesn’t see in this world, but she sees in others.”
That was Eleanor, almost certainly. But I kept my expression neutral and didn’t let her see the victory in my eyes.
“That’s an unusual condition,” Gavin said carefully.
“It is,” she agreed. “The kind of thing that would interest Containment. Or maybe already has.”
“The PCC patrol?” Gavin asked.
“Don’t know, but that certainly seems possible.” Our time apparently up—or because she didn’t like the Containment talk—Cherie rose and pushed back her chair with a squeak of metal. “Word about bounties spreads fast around here. Take a break if you need it, but don’t stay too long.” She grabbed her bottle by the neck and headed back to the bar.
“Thank you, Cherie.”
She held up the bottle as she walked away, her back to us. “Get me some decent brew, we’ll call it even.”
“We’re going to end up owing a lot of people on this trip,” Gavin muttered when we’d stepped outside again. “Let’s get out of here. Being out in the open is making me twitchy.”
“Also,” Malachi said, “you may need new friends.”
CHAPTER FIVE
We made good time toward Dulac, but even still, it was slow going. The farther south we moved, the thicker the mosquitoes and the deeper the humidity. We found more water, but I was sweating it out as quickly as I was taking it in.
We walked for two hours, until woods gave way to grasslands and fields, land with a road and a few houses on stilts became occasional slips of earth between bayou or marsh. And that water was rising. From the middle of one road, we could see the remains of three aboveground tombs slipping into the advancing water.
“It was a full cemetery,” Gavin said. “But land in southern Louisiana is sinking. The Mississippi’s controlled to keep it from flooding, but flooding is what deposits the silt that puts land in the bayou. Without the silt, the Gulf gets closer; the water gets higher. The tombs are slipping into the bayou, like most everything else around here.”
“And there’s no one to pull them out again,” I quietly said.
Gavin nodded.
The thought of my loved ones’ remains sliding alone into the water was disturbing and incredibly sad—and it made me eager to find high ground.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” I asked.
“Depends on Dulac,” Gavin said, breaking a granola bar in half and offering a piece to me. I took it. “And whether we find anyone there.”
“They won’t be in the city proper,” Malachi said. “It would be too easy to track them—as we’ve done. There’s a cabin in the area we’ve used before. But if they aren’t there, we may still be looking when night falls.” He looked at me. “Either way, we’ll find a place to sleep.”
“Away from the water,” I said as a chunk of mortar from one of the tombs splashed into the bayou. “High and dry.”
“No argument,” Gavin said.
We crossed the road and moved into a drier area of knee-high grass that had probably grown unfettered since the war began.
“Let’s take a break,” Gavin said, pointing at a hand-operated water pump in the shade of a weathered barn with old gas and oil signs nailed to its sides.
We stepped into the shade, took off our packs.
“I’m going to check out the barn,” Gavin said. “See if there’s any sign of them, or anything worth grabbing.”
We hadn’t passed any evidence of people in a few miles; even the stilt houses had looked empty. So there likely wasn’t much to find. On the upside, odds were also low that we’d be taking someone else’s property.
Gavin disappeared around the corner . . . and then his body flew backward toward us, bowed in the middle like he’d taken a kick to the gut. He hit the ground with an audible “Ooof.”
And before we could move toward him, Erida stepped out of the barn’s shadow, a satisfied smile on her face.
I moved to Gavin, went to my knees beside him, patted his cheeks. “Hey, you all right?”
“No,” he said, eyes still closed, wincing as he rubbed a hand over his abdomen. “She still standing there?”
“Yep.”
“She look at all bothered by my jab?”
E
rida was tall, with dark curly hair that spilled over an army-green tank top, buff leggings, and knee-high boots. Her skin was tan, her features lush, and her eyes narrowed. This wasn’t the first time she and Gavin had come to blows—and it wasn’t the first time she’d won.
“No,” I said quietly. “But I’m sure she’s suffering on the inside.”
In truth, she looked perfectly unruffled.
But while Erida didn’t look flustered by Gavin, she looked pretty unthrilled to see me. I’d seen that look on her face before, a kind of flat disdain, the first time I’d met her in the New Orleans church we’d used as a meeting site before the battle.
“Ow,” Gavin said, pushing himself to his feet. “Was that really necessary?”
“I owed you from the last time,” she said, putting a hand on her hip. Her voice was faintly accented, and plenty arrogant. Not surprising for a goddess of war.
Swearing under his breath and gripping his ribs with one hand, Gavin walked back to her. “Let’s call a truce for now.”
She just lifted her gaze to Malachi, the question in her eyes.
“Peace is faster,” he said with a nod. “We’re looking for Eleanor and Liam.”
“What’s happened?”
“It’s involved,” Gavin said.
Erida’s thick, dark brows lifted. Then she shifted her gaze to the woods. “He’s at a fishing cabin up the road. Checking traps. He’ll be back soon.”
Liam was nearby.
We’d met Djosa, Anh, Cinda, the Tengu, then Cherie. We’d moved from Houma to Vacherie, from Bayou Black to Dulac. One person at a time, one place at a time, we’d been getting closer to him. And now we were nearly there.
For weeks, I’d wondered what it would feel like to stand right here, to be on the verge of seeing him again. Every muscle in my body seemed to tense in anticipation, in hope, in fear. So many emotions, all of them pummeling me.