The harsh rasp of his words abraded my senses and sloughed away the persistent ache in my arms and shoulders, leaving my nerves raw, my skin sensitized. Relieved tears washed the day’s grit from my eyes as the throbbing receded. For the first time since waking, I unclenched my teeth.
“That’s enough.” I blinked to clear the golden flecks twinkling on my periphery. “I’m good.”
“Don’t fight me.” The order lashed across my senses. “You need this.”
As much as he did?
Before the peculiar thought took root, a second wave of power hit me low in the gut and shorted out my brain. Tingling awareness crashed over me, lifting me onto my tiptoes as though a part of me feared I might drown in his voice and struggled to rise above it. His energy surged, crested within me, then drained through my heels as my boots smacked the hardwood floor.
Impact buckled my knees, and I sagged onto the foot of my bed, flopping backward in a sprawl on the comforter where I shut my eyes for an unguarded moment and basked in the afterglow of my healing. Smoke tickled my nose, and I hoped it wasn’t pouring out of my ears.
“You’re getting better at this,” I breathed against the cool, plastic receiver.
A pleased masculine sound bordering on a growl filled his end of the line in answer.
“It’s like I’m going through withdrawals.” Seizures, hot flashes, sweating, nausea, restlessness, all illustrated the portrait of a junkie. “I don’t use anything stronger than aspirin. What could I be addicted to, do you think?”
He didn’t enlighten me.
“The symptoms worsen each year.” As though I were a longtime user surging toward an inevitable end. “Tell me what’s wrong. Explain how to fix it. You must have an idea. It’s your hoodoo that patches me up each time before I crawl out of my skin.”
“No.” Firm. Hard. This was his line in the sand. Always. It never budged, not even an inch. “You need me for that.”
So much for unclenching my teeth.
“Yeah, well—” a bitter laugh lodged in my throat “—you make sure of that, don’t you?”
That reliance chaffed worse than wearing wet cutoff shorts on a long walk home in the sweltering summer heat. I might be the junkie in this scenario, but he was my dealer, and I had no idea if what he dished out cured me or fed my dependency.
His low sigh tickled my ear. “I’ve upset you.”
Seconds fraught with electric tension lapsed while I thought up and discarded possible responses.
“Forgive me,” he breathed low. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your night.”
Slipping away. He was slipping away, and it would be another three hundred and sixty-five days until I feasted on the scraps of our conversation again. Ezra was the only lead I had on my real identity. I couldn’t afford to let my anger off its leash. I couldn’t risk spooking him. I had to keep him talking.
“Why did you?” I hated how much the answer mattered. “Call, I mean.”
“You know why.” A lick of wry amusement wiped away the sting of his denial. “The same reason you did eighty in a twenty-five zone to get home in time to pick up that phone you’re cradling in your arms.”
I glanced down and dang if he wasn’t right. I had curled around the base like a child cuddling a teddy bear. How had he known? What kind of surveillance had he installed in my room that he could watch over me? Or was he reliant on tech at all? Our relationship was hardly normal. More like paranormal. I had no idea of the limits of his powers. Who was to say they didn’t extend to astral projection or some other metaphysical chicanery? I had long ago accepted that if the man worked magic through an unplugged phone, then he wasn’t limited by the laws of physics like the rest of us.
“I can’t help myself,” I admitted after too long of a pause. I needed this, needed him. End of story.
I had no idea who he was, not really. Ezra was the name he had given me exactly once, his first and only mistake, and I had clung to that fragile lead on his real identity with bloodless fingers all these years.
Starting the September after I was found, he called each year on my legal birthday. My found day. The pain that morning had left me curled up in bed, so Dad let me stay home from school. Feverish, I’d drifted in and out of sleep for hours until I heard distant ringing. At first I thought it was a new symptom and ignored it, but its persistence urged me to my feet.
The sound originated in the attic, which Dad had forbidden me to enter after finding a black widow on one of the boxes of sheets he’d hauled down for me to use, but it kept ringing and ringing and ringing until I broke the rules to get relief. Eleven-year-old me had sobbed as Ezra shattered and remade her that first time. He had apologized over and over for the hurt while promising it was necessary, and I’d thought that made him my friend.
These days, though he was as good as his word and had perfected his methods, I wasn’t as sure.
“Come inside.” Despite the mystical possibilities, my gut told me he’d want front row seats for this experience. “Just this once give me what I wished for when I blew out the damn candle.”
So much for falling back on old habits. Sorry about the potty mouth, Granny Boudreau.
“Don’t ask for what I can’t give.”
Spinning the rotary wheel this way and that, I couldn’t help pushing. “Can’t or won’t?”
“Sometimes the two are the same. Goodnight, Luce.”
“Stay with me until I fall asleep.” I fell back on our oldest bargain, the plea dating back to that first phone call. Rolling onto my stomach, I groped under the bed until my fingers brushed against a plastic case. I had pushed too hard, he was done talking, but I wasn’t through with him yet. “In case the pain returns.”
The olive branch dangled there for painful seconds while I hauled out the boxy yellow Geiger counter I’d borrowed from a friend who worked for the CDC from under the bed. Char blackened the sides of the unit, and the glass covering the dial had shattered. Great. That explained the smoke I’d smelled.
Its negative radiation reading, however, left me as stumped as usual about the nature of Ezra’s magic.
Fabric rustled in the background as though he were making himself comfortable. “I shouldn’t.”
Triumph kicked my lips up into a fierce grin as I reached in my pocket for the voice recorder I used to make case notes on the go and positioned it near the mouthpiece. “But you will.”
He let the ambient noise soundtrack he played in the background of all our calls answer for him.
One minor detail, one tiny slip-up, and I would have hunted him down and gotten my questions answered. He knew it too. And I’ll admit I was flattered that he paid me the high compliment of respecting my determination enough to be wary of me. He had no idea the lengths I would go to in order to solve the mystery of him. Then again, maybe he did. After all, he hadn’t fed me one scrap I could use against him in all these years.
Ezra. Do you know how many guys named Ezra live in Mississippi? In the US? In the world? Factor in its use as a surname too and . . .
A muffled bzz bzz hummed through my right butt cheek like I had bees trapped in my pants.
I set aside the recorder and reached behind me to palm my cellphone. The number flashing on the display was one I recognized. Rixton. He wouldn’t call unless it was important, but I hesitated so long the call ended.
“I have to call my partner.” I punched redial before Ezra could answer. “Will you wait?”
The noise droned on, reminding me of a chorus of box fans, which I took as a yes.
“Rixton?” I lay there, a phone held to each ear, one modern and mundane, the other old and otherworldly. As ridiculous as I must look, trapped between the present and the past, the contrast felt right. “Everything okay with Sherry?”
“Report came in ten minutes ago,” he panted. “Body found in Cypress Swamp. Can’t get to her. Something’s in the water.”
Dread glazed my spine, and I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Like a gator?”
“Like nobody knows the hell what.” A door slammed in the background, the radio chattering with updates from dispatch, and a siren keyed up for a run. “I’m en route.” He hesitated. “You don’t need to be here for this, but I figured you’d want to know in case it’s our girl.”
Our girl. Angel Claremont. Sixteen years old. Honor roll student. Taken on her way to pick up her little sister from the John W. Rosen Elementary School.
I worried my bottom lip between my teeth until I tasted blood. “I’m on my way.”
I pocketed the cell, then ran one hand over my body conducting inventory. Gun, badge, pepper spray, baton. Carrying the old rotary phone under my arm, I scooped up the recorder then took the stairs at a clip. At the bottom, I turned right and opened the closet that hid Dad’s gun safe, spun the dial and picked up a shotgun plastered in screamo band stickers from my misbegotten youth. Unable to prolong the inevitable, I shifted my attention back to Ezra.
“I have to go.” Already my thoughts spun me away from him. “Never thought I’d say that.”
Usually I was the one scrambling for ways to sucker him into extending the call.
“Be careful.” A slight pause stretched before he added a gruff, “Please.”
“Always am, but I’ll be extra vigilant since you asked so nicely.” I lingered precious seconds longer while I worked up my resolve to sever our connection. “Until next year.”
He didn’t sign off, but then, he never did. I placed the handset back in the cradle and set the phone on the coffee table until it could reclaim its place of honor on my nightstand. On my way to the front door, I rewound the recording I’d made of our conversation, hit play and listened to static punctuated by my comments.
“You’re good.” I swept my gaze around the room like he might step from the shadows to accept the compliment in person. “You’re real good.”
I exited the house at a lope and scanned the bushes, but the floodlights mounted at each corner of the porch meant I had a clear view of the empty yard. Ezra must be close if he could see me through the window, right? But never close enough for me to get in my sights. After I secured the shotgun, I cranked the Bronco and headed toward the swamp. Not long after I turned onto Natchez, I spotted the whirl of red, white and blue lights. I pulled over when a siren screamed up behind me. An ambulance? The girl couldn’t be . . . could she?
I stomped on the gas until I reached the stretch of road congested by first responders, parked on the shoulder, then climbed out with my shotgun in hand. I greeted the officers I knew by name but kept my head down to avoid identification by those who might know mine thanks to my fifteen minutes of fame.
Just last month a fellow officer had asked to take a picture with Wild Child Boudreau when we both responded to the same domestic disturbance. Needless to say, I wasn’t about to cheese it up with the guy while our victim cowered in a corner of her kitchen, blood smearing her lip where her husband had busted it in a drunken rage.
Celebrity sucked. Or was this notoriety? Maybe fame wore differently for actresses or models, but when you’re famous for being Swamp Thing Jr., people dehumanize you.
I already had enough questions about my humanity without folks adding to them.
“Rixton,” I called out when I got close enough to spot my partner. “What have we got?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” He lingered at the edge of an embankment that crumbled into viscous water dappled with bright green duckweed. Two pickups had backed as close to the waterline as the soft earth allowed. Spotlights mounted on their tailgates illuminated an area a good thirty yards from the shore where a body floated. “It’s not a gator. Gators don’t move like that. But it’s so damn big, I can’t think what else it could be.”
Folks tended to forget that size records were broken for gators all the time. The current record-holder had been caught in Mill Creek, Alabama. At fifteen feet and nine inches long, it had weighed in at over eleven hundred pounds. This fella might be a contender for the title.
From here I couldn’t tell gender or any other details of the victim, and I wondered if whoever found her had done so by accident. Gator-hunting season ended earlier this month. That didn’t mean a poacher hadn’t gone souvenir shopping and gotten more than he bargained for. “Is she alive?”
“We can’t get close enough to verify. One of the EMTs swears he saw her breathing, but you know what hope and adrenaline does to people.”
“Yeah.” Hope was about as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. “We’re wasting time.” The fact she was floating meant one of two things. She was alive, her lungs full of oxygen, or she had been in the water long enough for the gases built up during decomposition to make her buoyant. Either way, we wouldn’t know until we got close enough to examine her. “We have to send someone out there. We got a johnboat coming?”
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks would send out a conservation officer if we requested assistance, but we didn’t have that kind of time. Not when the girl had been in the water for an undisclosed amount of time, and not with a predator swimming in her orbit.
“Trudeau’s putting it in the water over there.” He pointed out a familiar rusty pickup parked on firmer soil. “Better move it if you want to catch a ride.”
A smile bent my lips, and I patted his shoulder. The fact that Rixton hadn’t called dibs meant Uncle Harold had shot down his request to ride along. Oh, he’d try the same with me, but I was onto his tricks. Plus, he’d always had a hard time telling me and my big blue eyes no.
“No, ma’am.” Uncle Harold caught sight of me and practically made the sign of the cross to ward me away. “Your daddy would feed me to that thing if I let you get in the water with it.”
“I won’t be in the water,” I wheedled. “I’ll be in a boat. With you.” I lifted my arm. “And this shotgun.”
“The answer is still no, dumplin’.”
The moment it hit me he was prepping for a solo launch, I set aside the shotgun and jumped in to help. “Where is Dad?”
“My place.” Eyes downcast, he set about loosening the thick straps securing the aluminum boat to its trailer. “He’s testing the pullout couch Nancy bought for the grandkids.”
“Is he . . . ?” I didn’t finish. I didn’t have to, not with family.
“Nancy picked him up after you left. She settled him with a six-pack and one of her grandmother’s quilts. He’ll be fine. This year hit him harder than usual, that’s all.” He patted my cheek. “He’ll be right as rain come morning.”
Guilt soured the back of my throat, and I swallowed it down along with the questions lining up on my tongue. My birthday—no, my found day—beat Dad bloody inside for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I don’t know what he had seen in the swamp that night, what nightmares plagued him, but he had no issue with each of us celebrating in our own way. Me with the phone, and him with a good buzz.
“I should have sent him home.” But I’d had other, selfish things on my mind. That damn phone call.
“Don’t pick up that guilt. Set it down right now,” he ordered me. “You know where he is, you know that he’s safe. He could have taken a personal day, but he didn’t. He wanted you to see he was dealing. Don’t throw away a man’s pride.”
“Make you a deal,” I started.
“No.” This time he really did cross his fingers. “‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’”
“Come on, Uncle Harold. The name’s Luce, not Lucifer.” I anchored my fists at my hips. “It’ll be hours before Dad finds out about this, and he’ll be nursing the mother of all hangovers by then. We’re talking a good twelve hours before he’s both conscious and sober enough to feel righteous when he gives me a come-to-Jesus lecture. This girl doesn’t have that long.”
“Goddamn pigheaded Boudreaus,” he swore without heat.
Uncle Harold got downright blasphemous when he got his back up over what he considered tomfoolery.
A shrug twitched my shoulders. “I am my father’s daughter.”
“You remember that too.” His sigh confirmed he had accepted the inevitable. “Let’s go face down Baby Godzilla. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and he’ll eat me before your daddy hears tell of this.”
A couple of nearby uniforms offered us a hand as we hefted the lightweight boat, carried it down to the sludgy water and slid it in between a pair of fat-bottomed bald cypress trees. I stepped in first, and one of the guys passed over my shotgun. The boat rocked under me, but it was a comforting sway. Most folks in the area kept a boat like this flipped hull-up in their backyard for weekend fishing emergencies. I accepted the heavy spotlight Uncle Harold passed me, the one he used for night fishing, and tightened the rugged clamps on a crimped section of the bow. A flip of the switch on its neck blasted the night with a thick beam I trained so it sliced through the other spotlights, crisscrossing over the body and illuminating the scene from opposing angles.
“I don’t see anything,” I muttered. “Maybe all the racket scared off the gator.”
“And maybe we’ll find all those barrels of gold James Copeland and his gang supposedly buried out here back in the eighteen hundreds,” he scoffed.
We trolled within six feet of the body, then he cut the motor so we glided the rest of the way. I unhooked one of the plastic oars mounted on the inner wall and extended it over the water. Poking a corpse with a stick wasn’t how I’d anticipated spending my birthday, but in this line of work, you learn to adapt. I got in a soft jab to her side, and her lips parted on a groan.
Corpses have been known to sigh as air is expelled from their lungs, but this close I caught the fine muscle contractions twitching in her eyelids.
“Hot diggity damn,” I whispered, “she’s alive.”
“Praise God,” he answered. “Let’s bring that girl home.”
Uncle Harold also fell back on his Southern Baptist roots when confronted with evidence of what he considered divine providence.
“How do you want to do this?” I twisted to face him. “Still no sign of the gator.”
“Don’t even think it.” He fisted the back of my shirt. “You’re not sticking your hands in that sludge.”
I might have rebelled had a gentle wave not caused her left arm to give an involuntary bob under the surface. Metal glinted in the light, and I leaned forward despite Uncle Harold’s weight tugging on me. Rose-gold stripes the width of a hair elastic began at her wrists and banded her arms. The rest of the intricate design was hidden by the depth at which her extremities floated, but I had seen enough to know the concentric circles traveled over her shoulders and across her back to join at her nape, a tattooed cardigan that wasn’t ink at all. It was metal. Fine wire. An unclassified alloy.
Forget Ezra. This woman was like me. Our markings identical.
Ice pumped through my veins the longer I stared at her, and I embraced the diamond-sharp clarity in its wake. Cold detachment was my default setting whenever a situation at work spun sideways. The job was dangerous, and cool heads prevailed. Fear usually triggered this response, I learned that my first week on the street, and I was distantly aware that if I was shutting down then I must be terrified, even if I had ceased feeling the tremors. Gator or not, I couldn’t lose her.
“Whoever this is,” I said when I rediscovered my voice, “she’s not the Claremont girl.”
But the passing resemblance between the two explained why Rixton had been called.
A shiver in the water drew my eye, and my hindbrain zinged a warning through my limbs seconds before a crimson—thing—its scales a red so deep it edged into black, launched out of the water. I sat down hard, landing in Uncle Harold’s lap as a blocky head surfaced, its meaty jaws snapping closed over the space where my head had been a fraction of a second ago.
“That was not an alligator.” The quaver in my voice pissed me off. “That was— What was that?”
Ripples agitated the otherwise placid surface, and a gentle swell raised the level in a way that reminded me of how bathtubs overfill when you climb in one. But what the hell was big enough to disturb an entire corner of a swamp? Not the chitinous beast that had tried inviting me over for dinner. It had been massive, bulkier and more alien than any reptile I had ever seen, and yet . . .
A sibilant hiss like steam escaping a tea kettle spiked the air, a curious thump as plated skin rasped against the underside of the boat, and I swiveled my eyes toward my uncle. He indicated the girl in the water with his chin, and bile rose up my throat imagining what had turned him so pale.
The girl had woken and angled her head a fraction in our direction. Pale eyes white-rimmed with terror rolled around in her head like rocks in a soda can.
“Run,” she gurgled as murky water poured into her mouth. “Run.”