Bayou born, p.30
Bayou Born, page 30
“I’m not here for them.” I kicked off my shoes and stuck my toes in the warm water. “I hope being a woman down won’t put you guys out much.”
“She was scheduled for host leave next month.” He rolled his shoulders. “We’ll bump it up and adjust.”
I swished my feet and nodded. “How’s Miller?”
“Detoxing out in the swamp. Probably making a dent in the local deer population. The hunger strikes him harder than the rest of us.” He pinched the skin on the top of my hand. “Human flesh is so tender. Melts like butter in your mouth. Plus, their hair is strategically placed. You don’t even have to skin them.”
“Stop trying to scandalize me,” I chided. “I’m numb from the heart up at the moment. Save your anecdotes for another day, and I promise I’ll act properly shocked and maybe even barf on you for your troubles.”
Seeming amenable to this, Santiago let the matter drop. “You’ve been collecting our stories.”
“I’m hoping to understand who I was so that I can prevent myself from becoming that person again.”
His quiet laugh called me ten kinds of fool, but he slanted his eyes toward me. “Don’t you want to hear mine?”
“Only if you want to tell me.” I was too tired to pry it out of him, and I wasn’t sure—after Cole—that I could handle the reason for his hatred. “It’s your call.”
“I was a farmer, and my wife, Cassandra, a former priestess.” His voice softened. “Our property straddled the border between her clan’s lands and mine, a compromise that pleased both our elders since our mating was meant to bring unity to our people.” He quieted for a moment. “A great drought swept through the valley during that first year, and some thought that marked our union as cursed by the gods she had once served. They didn’t know—I didn’t know, not until much later—it had been Famine at work. Those same villagers who had tossed petals at my woman’s feet the day of our mating ceremony tried to take her from me to bring the rains, and I slaughtered them.”
I could see where this was going, and it was nowhere good. “They came for you again.”
“And again, and again. Until I was too weak to fight back, too wounded to defend our land.” His voice broke. “They killed her, fed her blood to the earth. They would have done the same to me if you . . .”
I barely dared to breathe as moisture gathered in his eyes.
“You and your coterie cut your way through them. You spared me when all I wanted was to die. Cassandra’s blood hadn’t yet cooled when you breached the next world, right there in my fields, while I cursed you and swore vengeance.” He wiped a hand over his mouth. “Sometimes I think you believed you were doing me a favor or paying a debt for using my field, knowing it would attract the attention of your sisters and that I was unlikely to survive their crossing.” He showed me his wrists, his ankles, his throat. “I’m not bound to your service, but I’m trapped all the same unless I decide to remain in one of the terrenes, but there is nothing for me there. There is nothing for me anywhere, so I might as well live so that when I die, I have stories enough to fill my eternity with Cassandra.”
“I’m sorry.” It was all I had. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
“Now you understand.” He palmed the boards under him. “Let us never speak of this again.”
“All right.” I owed him that much. “Truce over.”
He snorted an amused sound and lingered when I had expected him to rise and leave.
“Thom make it home okay?” Unable to stomach the water—or maybe it was the conversation—I curled my legs under me. “He called after dropping Dad with Uncle Harold, but that was hours ago.”
“He’s not out catting around if that’s what has you worried.” He glanced at a darkened window. “His tank is on E. He’ll sleep like the dead for the next forty-eight hours if we don’t pester him.”
“Good.” Thom had earned his sleep. “Did the, um, host make it off okay?”
“Why don’t you ask what you really want to know?” He dared me with only a hint of his usual malice. Poor baby, he really must not be up to full strength yet.
“I’m not sure I want to know anything,” I admitted, knowing he had expected me to ask after Cole. Well, I wasn’t falling for that trick. Not with him. “I had a shitty day and a crappy week, and I just didn’t want to be alone.”
Okay, make that a case of soap and a month of brushing with suds.
Santiago, who appeared to prefer spending time on his own, digested this.
“I have a couple of cane poles and some sliced hotdogs in a baggie if you’re game.” His muscles tensed as though in preparation for a strike, and he dared me with a belligerent, “Well?”
“Fishing sounds perfect.” I was tired and bloody and wanted sleep more than my next breath, but he had offered, and I wasn’t about to say no. “Let’s make this interesting. Loser has to clean the winner’s fish.”
“I don’t mind the crunch,” he informed me, shoulders easing when I didn’t raise a hand against him. “How about the loser has to clean the winner’s vehicle?”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
“Yep.” Santiago’s grin, the first real smile he’d ever given me, blinded. “Don’t worry. I have a detailing kit, and I stole Miller’s toothbrush last week. You’re all set. I’ll even let you pick the date.”
“Hey,” I complained, “I haven’t lost yet.”
“Yet being the operative word.” He glided to his feet in a fluid motion. “Be right back.”
The guarded look he cast over his shoulder cracked my heart. Hands in his pockets, bare feet leaving wet tracks on the wood, he reminded me so much of the tough boys Maggie taught who couldn’t expose their hurt without it costing them their pride.
Maggie. Oh God, Maggie. What have I done?
I didn’t budge from my spot, too afraid any small movement might send him storming off again, but I couldn’t stop from craning my neck to glimpse Cole’s bedroom window once Santiago rounded the corner. The urge to walk up to his door and knock, let him invite me in so I could outline Kapoor’s offer and use his steady presence to postpone the guilt over Maggie eating up my middle, almost won. I had my feet under me, ready to stand, until Santiago emerged with two poles gripped in one hand and a cooler held in the other.
“You coming?” He threw the question at me and didn’t wait around to see if it stuck.
“Right behind you.” Rubbing my neck, I resisted the urge to glance back one last time and gave Santiago my full attention. “So, do hotdogs really catch fish, or do you just like fondling wieners?”
“Play your cards right, and you’ll soon find out.”
Laughter tickled my throat, and I decided maybe one day I might actually like Santiago.
We fished for hours in companionable silence, and I drove home afterward without glimpsing so much as one ivory scale.
The agents had left the house by the time I returned and taken the bodies with them. The bloodstains remained, as did the busted furniture and gaping holes in the exterior walls. I rubbed my hands down my face and spun on my heel. Staying here tonight was out of the question no matter how much I pined for my own bed and my own room, a slice of normal in a life gone paranormal.
I had one foot on the bottom stair, determined to pack a bag and join Dad at Uncle Harold’s, when I heard it.
Briiiiiiing.
The urge to dash up the stairs never manifested. I was tired, sore, peppered with mosquito bites and smelled like fish and hotdogs. I clomped up to the second floor, entered my room and listened. For years, I had willed that phone to ring. I had prayed for the caller to think of me outside my found day and dial me up for an actual conversation. He never had, and I had believed he never would.
Briiiiiiing.
I gripped the heavy plastic handset, took a breath then lifted it to my ear.
“Luce,” the familiar voice growled. Tingles still danced over my skin, but they saved their pirouettes for Cole these days.
“Look, Ezra, it’s late, I’m tired, and you want something from me after giving me exactly nothing for as long as I’ve known you.”
The ambient noise in the background hummed.
“This is what I’m willing to offer you.” I sat on the edge of my bed and started unlacing my boots, which were soaked through and mud-covered, and let them thunk to the floor. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Let’s rewind to last week. Pick up where we left off.” I lay back and curled on my side, too drained to shower, change or even pull the sheet over me. “Can we do that?”
“Happy birthday,” he said in answer, proving he was a quick study.
“Thank you.” I yawned hugely and mashed my face into the pillow. My eyelids dropped like weights had been tied to the ends of each lash. Exhaustion thickened my voice, turned it as husky as a whisper. “Stay with me.”
I fell asleep listening to the static whir of box fans in my ear. And when I teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, about to tumble over, I thought I heard him murmur, “Always.”
EPILOGUE
The rooftop creaked under his weight, but no one was awake to hear, and even if they had been, the inhabitants had long ago assigned any noises he made to the house settling. Rolling his shoulders, he loosened the tension from waiting for Luce’s tired breaths to taper to the quiet huffs that indicated true sleep. Unready to sever their mental connection, he maintained it as he shook out his three sets of wings and stepped off the edge.
Hovering outside Luce’s window, he drank in the sight of her, parched for more despite having contacted her only days earlier. Faded jeans molded to her lower body, wrapping her full hips in a loving embrace. Mud drenched the cuffs and black smudged her bare feet. The skintight top she wore had rode up, exposing a gap of creamy skin between her belt and hem. Her arms remained covered, as always, as did his mark upon her. He regretted her modesty almost as much as he applauded her caution in flashing the heritage embedded in her skin.
Fingertip pressed to the glass, he traced the gentle curve of her spine. Caressed the soft brown hair with red highlights spilling around her shoulders. Her face pressed into the pillow, robbing him of a chance to catalog her features. The full curve of her bottom lip, the slight arch of its counterpart. Her delicate nose with its upturned tip. Expressive brows. Sharp, blue eyes that held the weight of eons in their depths yet retained their open curiosity.
Luce Boudreau was a paradox of his own creation, and though he ought to be her master, he suspected she had made him her slave.
A slight vibration in his pocket had him palming his phone. He had loaned his preferred ringtone to Cole, who had blamed the switch on Santiago, for the sole purpose of watching Luce remember him each time the other man’s phone rang. He would have to pick another, less distinctive one later. For now, he flicked the green icon with his thumb as he rocketed into the night sky. “Special Agent Kapoor.”
“We have her.” Kapoor vibrated with glee. “She’s joined the team. She’ll be fully active within six months.”
Six months. What was that in the span of the one hundred and eighty such months he had already endured? Or the thousands that came before time was measured in such increments? “Excellent.”
“Calling in that tip about the Uptons was a masterstroke. You led her right to us.” Kapoor hesitated. “I don’t think her coterie has put all their cards on the table. They may not trust her yet. Miller—”
“Miller is hers,” he assured the harried agent. “They all are.” We all are. “She can control him.”
“If she can’t?” he persisted.
“Then I will neutralize him.” Conquest would have mourned the loss of such a wonder as mortal eyes had never beheld, but his stubborn Luce would brand him a traitor for the execution of a man she considered a friend. No. He would hold that option as a last resort, and only consider it then because if Miller slipped her control, this world would end in the cradle of a serpent’s belly and Luce with it. “Let me worry about Miller Henshaw.”
“She’ll want to meet you,” he pressed. “What should I tell her?”
He pretended to consider Kapoor’s request then answered in a calm, measured tone. “Tell her yes.”
After all, he had fifteen years’ worth of belated birthday gifts to make up to her. Why not start by giving her what she wanted most?
Him.
Hailey Edwards, Bayou Born
