by Chloe Neill
“Good evening,” said the man in front. “Looks like a good fire.”
“Roy,” Liam said, walking to him and offering a hand, which Roy pumped heartily. “Comment ça va?”
“Comme ci, comme ça.” He shrugged. “C’est la vie.”
“Looks like you’ve got a Peskie infestation,” Liam said.
Roy grinned. “Found ’em in one of my muskrat traps. Released ’em, for all the good it did. They been following me ’round since.”
“They like you,” Malachi said. “They’re grateful for the rescue. And they’re enjoying the crawfish.”
“Who doesn’t?” Roy said. “You speak their language?”
“Enough of it.”
“Roy Gravois,” Liam said, “Malachi, a general in the Consularis army. My brother, Gavin Quinn. Claire Connolly. And you know Erida and Eleanor.”
Roy nodded at us in turn, his gaze stopping when he got to me. “Nice to put a face to a name.”
I nodded, and couldn’t help but wonder which of them had mentioned me. “Nice to meet you.”
“Roy lives up bayou,” Liam said. “Takes the crawfish before they get down to me.”
“Problem is, you don’t bait your traps worth a damn.” Roy looked back, held out a hand to those who’d come with him. “My family: Adelaide, Claude, and Iris.” He pointed to each of the kids in turn.
“All members of the United Houma Nation,” Liam said.
“Born and bred,” Roy agreed with a nod.
“Roy,” Eleanor said, “would you like some gumbo? We made too much.”
Roy smiled at Eleanor. “I’m good. Just came by to return these tools.” He offered Liam the bucket. “Appreciate the loan.”
Liam took them. “You fix the generator?”
“Did. I tell you what I was doin’ with it?”
Liam shook his head.
“Took the windshield wiper motor outta the old Plymouth on the Fortner place. Hooked it up to a pole, then plugged it into the generator, made my own little spit. Roasted the rest of the wild boar last night.”
“Cajun ingenuity,” Liam said with a grin. “The boar good?”
“Mais ya,” Roy said, kissing the tips of his fingers.
The conversation carried on like that for a few more minutes—food, trapping, life in the bayou.
Like on the dock, he seemed comfortable here. Maybe that was something positive that had come out of whatever had happened to him during the battle; he’d been able to come home, at least in some way.
I wondered if it also meant he should stay here. Live here. Which made my heart ache painfully.
“Listen,” Liam said, “while you’re here, you should know—there’s possibly trouble on the horizon.”
“What kinda trouble?”
When Liam glanced at the kids warily, Roy nodded.
“It’s all right if they hear. If there’s trouble, I want them prepared. They can handle it.”
Liam nodded. “Containment agent in New Orleans was killed a couple days ago. I’m the prime suspect.”
Roy’s brows lifted. “Interesting you killed a man in the city while you were out on the water with me.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“They issue a bounty?”
“They did.”
The initial curiosity in Roy’s face faded, and his gaze narrowed. “They wrong accidentally, or on purpose?”
“We have the same question. Given I wasn’t even in the parish at the time, we think it’s on purpose. But we aren’t sure why he was killed, and we aren’t sure why they settled on me, other than because Broussard and I didn’t much get along.”
Roy made a snorting sound. “If we killed everyone we didn’t get along with, the world would be a much smaller place.”
Liam smiled.
“Have you seen anyone looking around?” Gavin asked, rising from his spot at Eleanor’s side and stepping forward.
“Haven’t seen an agent or hunter this far south in years. Present company excluded.” Roy grinned. “They know better than to come into the southern reach without a guide. End up lost and stranded on a good day, gator meat on a bad.”
“Be on the lookout,” Liam advised.
“For storms, for gators, for hunters, and for agents,” Roy said. “We’ll stay careful.” He looked down at Claude. “Right?”
When Claude nodded, Roy ruffled his hair, pulled him close. “Should get home, get the little ones to bed and check on Cosette and the baby.” He looked back at Liam. “What you gonna do about those charges?”
“Not sure yet.”
Roy nodded thoughtfully. “You need a character witness, you call me. You need someone to talk about your expertise on the water, you’ll have to call somebody else.”
With another jaunty wink, Roy and his family disappeared into the trees again, Peskies lighting their way.
• • •
We took turns adding branches to the fire, stoking it to keep the flames dancing in the humidity and occasionally slapping at the mosquitoes that hadn’t been deterred by the rising smoke.
I grew more comfortable as the night went on. Not that I was getting used to the bayou, but I was getting used to the sounds—the frogs, rustles, splashes that signaled things moving in the dark. And I was getting used to Liam sitting near me, to the gravity of his body only a few feet from mine.
Somewhere around midnight, Gavin stretched, yawned. “We should call it a night. We’ve got an early day tomorrow.”
“I’ll sleep at the cabin,” Liam said, rising.
Gavin nodded. “I’ll join you.”
“Claire can sleep in the house with us,” Eleanor said.
I looked at Malachi. “And where will you go?”
“I prefer to be outside.”
Yes, we’d spent more time together in the last few weeks, and I’d gotten to know more of his thoughts and moods. But he was still a mystery to me in so many ways. “Where will you sleep outside?”
“Wherever seems best,” Malachi said. “I’ll see you all in the morning.” And he walked into the darkness, disappearing beyond the edge of firelight.
“Let’s get you settled,” Erida said, rising. I did the same, and followed her into the house without another backward glance. Liam hadn’t made a move to talk to me, at least not yet. And while I was pretty sure we’d need to have some kind of talk, I wasn’t emotionally or physically equipped to do it tonight.
The steps creaked beneath us, and the porch and floorboards did the same. Erida pulled a rolled-up green sleeping bag from a high shelf, then pointed to a small, empty room off the kitchen. “You can sleep in there. There’s a cot in the back room. It’s folded up, but you can get it, bring it in if you don’t want to sleep on the floor.”
She said it like a dare, as if she expected me to refuse and demand a feather bed and silk sheets.
“Either way is fine,” I said.
“You may not think that after you see the cot. But the spiders are probably gone.”
I tried not to think about the possibility of dozens of legs crawling on me in my sleep. “The floor is fine. I’ve slept on worse.” I held out a hand, and she offered me the sleeping bag.
“I knew your father.”
That jerked me out of my arachnoid nightmare. I looked over at her. “What?”
“There were many of us in New Orleans. Hidden there, at least until we fled. We were, at first, convinced humans would come to understand the difference between Court and Consularis, and release from prison those who hadn’t chosen to fight. They did not.”
The words were spoken like a judgment, a declaration of guilt. There’d be no acquittal for humans from Erida.
“How did you know him?” I asked.
“He helped us. When he became aware of his power, like other humans i
n his position—he became more sympathetic. He was a good man. He—”
She stopped herself, went silent and still for a solid fifteen seconds. So still she might have been a statue of some ancient human goddess. And since she seemed to be grappling for words, I waited her out.
“He was kind,” she said at last. “He was good and he was kind. He helped those of us stuck in New Orleans when he could, gave us supplies. He gave us trust and friendship.”
But when she said “friendship,” there was something beyond friendship in her eyes. Longing, if I had to put money on it.
I’d seen my father with women, a date or two here and there with the divorced mother of a middle school friend, the woman who baked croissants at the European bakery on Magazine. But I hadn’t seen him with Erida. Hadn’t seen Erida before the moment she’d walked into Delta’s church.
“Friendship,” I quietly said.
She looked at me, met my gaze, and didn’t say a word. Much like Malachi, she held her cards close to the chest.
“Did you see his magic?” I asked.
She gave me a questioning look.
“I didn’t know he was a Sensitive,” I said. “I didn’t know anything about his magic, about what he’d done to help until . . .” Until Broussard had spilled the beans. And now Broussard and my father were both dead. “He loved me, but he didn’t tell me as much as he should have.”
“He was a bringer of light,” she said quietly.
I nodded. “That’s what I heard.”
“He didn’t know about you, either?”
I shook my head.
“I see,” she said, but her voice said she didn’t really see but maybe was trying to reconcile the man she’d known with the one I’d just described.
She wasn’t the only one.
“I also knew your mother.” Her gaze stayed on mine, but her expression had gone very cool.
I tried to maintain control of my own expression, to keep the fear that flooded my veins from overwhelming me, from showing on my face.
My father had told me my mother had died when I was a child, many years before the war, before Paranormals had even entered our world. I didn’t remember her; it should have been impossible for Erida to know her.
But the war had expanded what was possible. Stretched and contorted it. I’d seen a woman with red hair, a woman who looked like me, trying to force open the Veil at Talisheek. The same woman whose photograph had rested in a trunk in the gas station’s basement.
I had good friends, but I didn’t have a family, and I longed for that connection, for something that had been gone a long time from my life. But I was afraid of what I might learn. Because if there was some connection between me and that woman, it meant my father had lied to me my entire life.
And it meant the woman who’d tried to open the Veil, who’d nearly destroyed us, was my mother. So the questions I might have asked—Is she alive? Is she our enemy?—stayed strangled and unspoken.
I wasn’t ready to accept either possibility, so I shook my head. “My mother died a long time ago.”
Erida watched me carefully for a moment. “I see,” she finally said. “Then perhaps I was mistaken.”
The ice turned to heat that burned in my chest, tightened my throat. I nodded at her. “Sure.”
“Well,” she said after a long silence, “you’ll have an early morning. You should get some sleep.”
And then she was gone, leaving me with more questions than answers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chicory coffee was scenting the small house when I woke. Gavin offered me a spatterware cup that matched the one in his hand, while I blinked myself awake in the sleeping bag.
I sat up groggily and took the mug, the enamel still hot. The first sip was so sweet it made my teeth ache.
“Eleanor apparently didn’t get quite enough sugar in Devil’s Isle,” Gavin said with a grin. The shoulders of his T-shirt were dark with moisture from his still-damp hair.
“And apparently she’s making up for lost time.” I gestured to his shirt. “You take a swim this morning?”
“Me and the gators,” he said with a wink. “Water’s great if you want a turn.”
It took less than a second of consideration to decline the offer. “There isn’t enough money in the world to get me to take a bath with a gator.”
He grinned. “You step into the bayou, you might find just that, cher. Get that coffee in you and get dressed. There’s omelet in the kitchen, with crawfish pulled out of the traps this morning. We’re leaving in twenty.”
I didn’t have an appetite, but I gave myself time for a few heartening sips of coffee. Then I poured water into a basin in the small bathroom and cleaned up as well as I could. I’d slept in my clothes in case we needed to make a quick getaway, so I changed what I needed to, brushed my teeth, and twined my hair into a braid that would keep it out of my face for the journey home. Then I shoved everything else back into my bag and zipped it up.
I went outside, dropped the bag on the porch, and headed for the dock again. This time, it was empty, so I walked a few feet out over the water.
A low fog covered the bayou, thick as a cloud. It was speared by sunlight, which reflected off the fog and cast an eerie light across everything. Everything was still, like I’d walked into a photograph of a bayou frozen in time.
An arrow of white split the stillness—an egret flying from one bank to the other. It disappeared among the trees, and bullfrogs began to croak in the vacuum of sound.
It was beautiful here. Desolate and empty in some ways, teeming with life in others. This was a world that had existed before humans and had managed to survive them.
Today, we would walk away from the bayou, and from the people who lived there. I wasn’t ready to face the loss that would mean again—either walking away from Liam or watching him let me walk away. But I had to prepare myself, emotionally and physically. And I had to be ready for the journey and whatever we might face. With hunters on the prowl, there was a good chance I’d need magic before we got back to New Orleans. I had to be ready for that, too.
Sensitives absorbed magic daily, which would rot us from the inside out. Once a Sensitive became a wraith, there was no way back. Simply using magic didn’t help, as Sensitives’ bodies just tried to absorb more, to fill the vacuum that using the magic created. The only way to get rid of it was to consciously let it go, send it back into the universe.
It had been a few days since I’d done that, and that was dangerous. It felt like a living thing within me, something that wriggled and burned and ached to turn me inside out. Something that wanted more.
So I had to take steps.
As I walked back to the bank, I saw a short stool on the porch. Like the table in the cabin, the top had been cut from a slice of cypress. I grabbed it, found a quiet spot with a view of water and cypress, and took a seat.
I hadn’t brought the box I usually used to store the excess magic. I hadn’t wanted the weight of it in my backpack, and I hadn’t wanted it to accidentally open along the way and spill the magic back into the world, where it would keep creating the same problem. I needed an alternate holder. I found one in the cleanly cut cypress stump a few feet away. Probably the same tree sacrificed for the table and stool.
“Apologies in advance,” I said, then closed my eyes, let my mind drop down to the spot where I imagined the magic sank and gathered and filled. Its shimmering filaments hummed with power, as if anticipating more. The magic always wanted more. That I knew that now—that we were so connected I could sense its desires—was disconcerting. But it’s where I was. Removing it was the only control I had, so that was what I would do.
I gathered up as many of the threads as I could metaphorically hold and pulled them up and away from their hidden center. I struggled against them for a moment, against their tentacular grip on my body, b
ut demanded that they move, and they did. Movement, after all, was my particular gift. And curse.
I directed them away from my body, let them pour into the wood until I felt lighter, until the pulse of power was softer, a hum instead of a drumbeat.
Then I blew out a breath and opened one eye to take a squinting look at the stump.
I hadn’t blown it up. I hadn’t set it on fire, and it wasn’t glowing with otherworldly radiation. It just sat there, as stumps tended to do, and went about its stump business.
“Success,” I muttered, giving myself a mental high five. Then I stood up, stretched muscles that felt loose and relaxed, and glanced at the slow-moving water.
Like a lithe and nimble god, Liam rose from the bayou, body wet and slick and naked down to his now-damp cargo pants. Water dripped from his torso, sleeking down the curves of his hips.
It took a moment for me to grasp that he was real, and not some mirage conjured by my traitorous imagination. Eyes closed, he ran his hands through his hair, tightening every lean cord of muscle.
And then his eyes opened, and his gaze met mine . . . and we stared at each other until the air seemed to sizzle with electricity, with heat.
This time, he didn’t seem surprised to see me.
“Sorry,” I said, turning on my heel before the image of his body seared further into my brain. “I was just taking a look before we left. At the bayou,” I added quickly.
“It’s fine,” Liam said, but the tightness in his voice said exactly the opposite. He pulled down a towel hanging from a nearby branch, slung it around his neck. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I turned around slowly, looking for a sign of what he might be feeling. Was he glad I was here because he’d wanted to see me? Or because he appreciated the warning?
But once again, his face gave nothing away. And that left me asking, once again, what he was trying to hide. Or hide from.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“I’m fine.”
But there was a tightness in his voice, something behind the words, something he clearly wasn’t ready to talk about. A conflict I didn’t understand.