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, but 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.

“Really?” I asked. “You don’t seem okay.”

Gold flashed in his eyes. “What do I seem, Claire?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. Or show me,” I murmured, and took a step closer. For the first time I was near enough to feel the magic that spun around him.

Instinctively, I lifted a hand to touch the threads of it, to let them brush through my fingers—and Liam took a step back, putting space between us.

“You don’t want to do that.”

Before I could ask what he meant, Gavin stepped into the clearing.

“Sorry to interrupt, but we need to get going. We’re getting a later start than I’d intended.”

My chest went tight, stuffed with words that needed to be said before there were miles and miles between us again. Before I lost him again.

Liam shook his head, kept his eyes on me but spoke to Gavin. “I’m going with you.”

“Oh, no, you aren’t, brother mine.” Gavin took a step closer, a fight brewing in his eyes. “I didn’t haul my ass down here into the bayou so you could turn yourself over to Containment. I came down here to keep you out of trouble. You and Eleanor both.”

“I’m the one accused of murder,” Liam said, sliding his gaze to his brother. “You think I’m going to stay here, cower here, while someone frames me? Convicts me in absentia?”

“You seemed okay with coming down here after the battle.”

“That was different,” Liam said, each word carefully bitten off. “There were reasons—” He shook his head. “I can’t get into that right now. If someone’s willing to frame me, they’re willing to do worse. If I don’t go back, if I don’t challenge this, who else will stop it?”

“We will,” Gavin said. “That’s why we’re here, after all. You go back, you endanger everyone.”

“I stay here, I endanger everyone. Including Eleanor, Erida, Roy and his family. Plenty of hunters aren’t concerned about who they hurt to get their quarry. If I’m here, they might use him—or the kids—to find me. If I’m gone, he can be honest, tell them where I’ve gone, maybe even get a little money out of it.”

“And they’ll tail you back to New Orleans,” Gavin said. “Where Containment is waiting to haul you in. If something happens to you because I made the call to come down here, I won’t be able to live with that.”

Liam took a step toward Gavin. I’d seen them come to blows before, and I wasn’t sure if we were headed there now. “Someone murdered Broussard in my name. I can’t live with that.”

Gavin didn’t answer. The sounds of the bayou crept into the waiting silence.

“I go with you,” Liam said, “and you’re there to help me, or I go back by myself. Which do you prefer?”

Gavin cursed, then turned and stalked back to the house, fury in every step. I followed him, and Liam followed me, close enough that I could feel the punch of heat from his body.

Malachi and Erida waited on the porch.

Liam gave his hair a scrub with the towel, then tossed it over a railing, took a T-shirt from a waiting duffel bag, and pulled it over his head.

“Going somewhere?” Malachi asked.

“With you,” he said.

Malachi looked at Gavin, who glared back. “Stubborn ass is going back whether we like it or not. He might as well go with us.”

I guess that decided that. And I decided I’d probably better not think too hard about what it meant for me. I was going to have to either wait Liam out or decide he wasn’t worth it. And I wasn’t ready to make that decision.

Erida shifted slightly, drawing our attention to her. “I can stay with Eleanor, but I think we’d need to move again. Perhaps make it look like the house has been deserted for a while.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Gavin said. “At least until this Broussard situation is done.”

Erida nodded.

“And now that you’ve made a plan, do I get to speak in my own defense?”

We looked back. Eleanor had stepped onto the porch. Gavin moved forward to help her, but Erida held out a hand, shook her head.

Eleanor moved slowly to the rocking chair, using her hands as guides, then sat carefully down. “I’m content to stay out here,” she said. “The bayou is growing on me. But Liam should go back to New Orleans. His home is there, not here. This is his birthplace. And I’m not saying he shouldn’t come visit every once in a while.” She shifted her gaze, settled it near Liam. “I’ve loved spending this time with you. But it’s time for you to go home. As if you haven’t been planning that all along.”

Her gaze slid toward me, and I felt my body jerk, but refused to give in to the temptation to play with those words, to let them roll around in my mind, so full of possibility. He’d been planning to come back? When? How?

And, most important, why?

“Plans go awry,” Liam said, and that snipped off the growing stem of hope. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Eleanor smiled like a cat who’s done a fine job of pinning the canary. “My boy, I lived on this earth for decades before you were a glint in your father’s Irish eyes. You have business to attend to. It’s time you attend to it.”

She rocked once, wood creaking against wood. “Now, be on your way, and get that business done.”

And like the bayou’s Creole queen, Eleanor looked over the trees and water and waited for her bidding to be done.

•   •   •

Liam having no counterargument to his formidable grandmother—and who could?—we helped Erida prepare some of Eleanor’s belongings, including the book in which she’d cataloged the colors of the magic she’d seen over the years. Malachi found Roy, who steered a boat up to the dock. It was big and pale green, a former trawler with the net spars removed.

We helped Eleanor into the boat, and then they were gone, ready to move even farther downriver, farther toward the flat saltwater marshes and the Gulf of Mexico.

When the sound of the motor had drifted away, Gavin put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “To everything there is a season.”

The hand dropped away when Liam growled.

“You may not have had enough coffee,” Gavin muttered. “But it’s too late now. Let’s hit the road.”

•   •   •

We walked in single file: Gavin, me, Liam, and when he wasn’t doing above-the-ground scouting, Malachi. I could feel the weight of Liam’s gaze on my back, like his stare was a tangible thing. His silence was nearly as oppressive as the heat and humidity, but we were focused on making progress.

It didn’t help that I didn’t know what to say to him and he wasn’t ready to say anything to me. Every sticky mile made me more irritated about that.

“Anybody need a break?” Gavin asked. The trail veered away from the levee to our left, which held back the Mississippi, and toward the railroad tracks on our right.

Gavin walked to a short line of trees, pulled off an orange, sniffed. “Ripe,” he said. He plucked a few more, began passing them out. Even Malachi took one, and we climbed up the levee to eat them. The path up was steep, but the top was rounded. Below us, the river frothed brown as it rushed south.

“I always thought it looked like café au lait,” Gavin said, throwing off his pack and taking a seat.

“Which is how you ended up a hundred yards downriver one fateful Saturday afternoon.”

Gavin grinned at Liam. “Got me out of Sunday school, which was fine by me.”

I put down my backpack, sat on it, and began peeling my orange. Only then did I realize we hadn’t passed an orange tree on the way to Dulac. We were taking a different route back.

“We bypassed the marina,” I said.

Gavin chewed, nodded. “Didn’t want to push our luck.”

“You don’t trust Cherie?” I asked.

Liam made a sound of doubt and began to peel the orange rind in a single long spiral, just like he’d peeled the label from his bottle the day before.

“Cherie’s out for herself,” Gavin said. “And no one else. I can’t fault her for it in this day and age. But you have to stay wary.”

“She’s probably already sent people our way,” Liam said.

“She might have,” Gavin said. “But we needed information. That’s the risk we took.”

If she was going to tell Containment about us, I wasn’t going to hurry in getting booze sent her way.

“So where are we going?” Liam asked. “This isn’t a straight path to New Orleans.”

“Jeep’s at Houma,” Gavin said. “Vacherie Plantation.”

Malachi nodded. “I want to check on Cinda.”

“Who’s Cinda?” Liam asked.

“One of mine,” Malachi said, biting into a segment of fruit. “She was ill when we passed through the first time. I’d like to see how she’s doing.”

“And maybe Anh has some more of those rice cakes.”

Malachi gave Gavin a dour look.

“But obviously check on Cinda first,” Gavin amended. “Because the care of our Paranormal friends is more important than my stomach.” He glanced speculatively at Liam. “That work for your agenda, frère?”

“Fine by me.”

“You given any thought to where you’ll be staying in the city? Can’t get you back into your town house in Devil’s Isle.”

“I’ll borrow a house.” He would sleep in an abandoned home, he meant. “That’s safest for everyone. And I want to see Broussard’s house—the scene.”

“Wait until we talk to Gunnar,” Gavin said. “Maybe he can make arrangements for me, and I can get you in.”

“I can’t make any promises.” The orange denuded, Liam pulled off a segment and took a bite, then gazed over the water.

“You won’t do us or Eleanor any good if you get caught,” Malachi said.

Liam looked at him. “I’m a pretty good judge of what I should and shouldn’t be doing.”

Malachi slid his gaze to me. “I’m not sure that’s accurate.”

Gavin snorted, then covered it with a fairly unconvincing cough.

“I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

“Not opinion,” Malachi said. “Fact.”

Liam’s gaze went hot. “You have something you want to say to me?”

“No.” Malachi’s expression was utterly bland. “Should I?”

Liam tossed away the rest of his orange and stood up, gold blazing in his eyes.

“Ladies,” Gavin said, “this isn’t helping. Malachi, please quit antagonizing him. You’re too old to be acting like idiots. Well, I presume.” He looked at Malachi. “I’m not actually sure how old you are.”

“I think we need to discuss some things,” Liam said, his eyes still narrowed on Malachi’s. “Feel free to take a walk.”

“I’m available for a conversation,” Malachi said.

I rolled my eyes, then rose and pulled on my backpack. “Let’s walk,” I told Gavin. “We’ve got miles to go before we get to Vacherie.”

“The voice of reason,” Gavin said, following me down the levee. I glanced back once, saw Malachi and Liam—light and dark—facing each other like warriors preparing for battle.

“He’s not helping anything,” I said.

“He’s not trying to help. He’s trying to be a pain in Liam’s ass, and it’s working.”

“And what good does he think that’s going to do?”

Gavin looked at me. “You cannot be that naive. He’s trying to get Liam to pull out the stick that’s wedged thoroughly up his ass and talk to you. He’s obviously still in love with you, Claire.”

I snorted. “Whatever. He’s barely had two words to say to me.”

“Stick, ass,” Gavin reminded me with a smile. “He’s as stubborn as they come, and I’d know, seeing as how we’ve got the same genetics. My guess is the magic’s eating at him. Maybe also guilt about Gracie, anger at being stuck out here while you’re in New Orleans alone. If you can’t see that on his face, you aren’t looking. Or maybe that’s the problem—you aren’t looking. He stares at you like you’re the first water he’s seen in months. I know you’ve at least seen those looks he’s been giving Malachi.”

“There’s nothing between me and Malachi. We’re just friends, and Malachi’s antagonizing him.”

“Yeah, but you can’t antagonize someone who doesn’t give a shit. Trust me—he cares. He’ll just have to work his way around to figuring that out, or telling you about it.”

And how long was I supposed to wait?

•   •   •

It was twenty minutes before Malachi and Liam caught up to us again, and after noon by the time we reached Vacherie. We’d grabbed a few oranges for the road, but were still hungry.

“Rice cakes,” Gavin said again. “Just to confirm, that’s item number two on the agenda. Checking on Cinda being item number one.”

“You’re so magnanimous,” Liam said. The first words he’d spoken in miles.

“Diplomacy is my particular art,” Gavin said. Which nobody really believed.

We reached the edge of the woods and saw the house perched like a crown amid the fields. And from somewhere on the plantation, the sound of wailing and weeping carried toward us on the breeze.

“No,” Malachi said, pushing in front of us, his body bowed and tense. “No, no, no.” He ran forward and his wings unfolded with a sharp snap, then propelled him into the air.

Cinda was my first thought. She’d taken a turn for the worse.

I ran down the trail and toward the plantation, ignoring Gavin’s calls behind me. I flew out of the knee-high sugarcane and emerged in front of the barn to stand beside Malachi.

I saw the Tengu first, standing in a semicircle, hands linked, feathers lifted. Paranormals followed, crying and keening, then two men with a linen-covered board on their shoulders, a body laid carefully upon it.

He wore white, and his hands were crossed over his chest, his hair falling white around the shoulders of the men who carried him. It wasn’t Cinda; it was Djosa.

“No,” Malachi said again, an exhalation and a cry. Then he stepped in line with the rest of the mourners as they walked.

“Oh, shit,” Gavin murmured as he and Liam joined me.

More Paranormals joined the procession, and we watched silently as Djosa was borne from the barn to a grass path between cane fields.

I glanced at Gavin, unsure of the etiquette.

“It’s all right to follow,” he said. “But let’s keep our distance.”

The Tengu began to sing, a keening cry of sadness and loss as the group moved through the fields beneath the glaring sun. The Paras carrying Djosa must have been parched, but none seemed to complain. Given what little I knew about the Consularis, I guessed they saw the task as a privilege, a way to honor their fallen friend.

The sown fields gave way to tangled and gnarly woods, where nature was winning its battle against the forces of human agriculture. Humidity closed in around us again, and even the smells changed, became damper and greener.

We wound through the woods to a small clearing where I could just make out broken stones that littered the ground. This was a cemetery, a very old one that had probably been used by the plantation since its inception. There were no elaborate aboveground tombs here, and barely any markers. Just a small plot of land where the deceased could be laid to rest beneath live oaks and moss.

But they weren’t going to put Djosa in the ground. They’d built a small platform of two-by-fours and plywood, and carefully placed the board that held his body atop it. The Tengu moved closer, picked at his hair and clothes to resettle them. To arrange them.

A Para I hadn’t seen before stepped forward, began to speak to the crowd in their particular language. And it was a crowd, I belatedly realized, that didn’t include Cinda. I wondered if she’d been too ill to attend her father’s funeral.

Gavin pulled off his cap. I did the same thing, so my braid fell across my shoulders.

Drawn by the movement, the Tengu looked in our direction, caught sight of us.

They went crazy again—feathers raised like an animal’s hackles, voices that had been singing now screaming. With fear or fury, I wasn’t sure, but they didn’t want us there. Didn’t want us watching. The other Paras turned, shot nasty looks in our direction, made it clear they didn’t welcome either the interruption or our presence.

Without argument, we left them alone with their grief.