Cypress Swamp hadn’t changed since the last time we motored through it on the White Horse airboat. The difference was Thom’s absence, which throbbed like a sore tooth . . . or a broken heart. Cole had returned from transporting him to the enclave and brought a second boat to hold our overflow.
I had never seen this one. It was all matte black, and its engine ran at about one third of the volume. It screamed stealth mode, and it might as well have a price sticker on the bow or a receipt for payment stuffed between the cushions. I could smell the leather seats and the burnt mechanical tang of a new toy being put through its paces.
Cole, Janardan, Wu, and I took the new boat. Santiago, Portia, Miller, and Sariah took the old one.
We glided through the water, cutting a familiar path through the spotted green duckweed right up to the tree with my found day carved into its truck. This area of swamp was under constant surveillance thanks to all the night vision cameras tucked high in the mossy canopy and the sensors floating in the water. Too bad I was about to negate the need for our early warning system.
A cramp tightened my gut as we coasted to a stop. Nerves or a heightened awareness of this entry point into my world, I wasn’t sure. I unstrapped and walked to the bow of the airboat. “How do we do this?”
“We go in.” Cole toed off his boots and socks. His pants disappeared next and then his White Horse polo. He stood there in skintight boxer briefs and dared me with an arch of his brow. “Your turn.”
I lost the shoes and socks without a flinch. Pants were more awkward but still doable. The button-down shirt was harder to part with, and it only came off because I had gotten into the habit of wearing a form-fitting silk pointelle undershirt beneath my uniform. While I could tell myself all day long there was no difference between a bikini and a matching bra and panties set, I didn’t believe me. Not until my fingertips brushed the hem of my undershirt did his gaze shift from me to Wu, who leaned forward in his eagerness to examine the rukav.
“Maybe I’ll keep the shirt.” It hit my navel and offered me the thin comfort of knowing if I drowned in the swamp, my daddy wouldn’t see all my assets once they fished me out for him to ID. “It’s tight and thin. I don’t think it will slow me down.”
Wu sat back, his interest thwarted, and began examining my initials carved in the tree.
Thanks to the IUD, or perhaps our chat, his interest in me was running cooler. More professional. Just the way I liked it.
I already had my hands full with Cole. Hopefully someday I would mean that literally. I didn’t need the friction my weirdo charun biology added into the mix by tossing out pheromones like candy at Canton’s Christmas parade.
Having a stranger dig around in my lady bits was never going to rank high on my awesome scale, but I was starting to feel grateful to Dr. Lachlan for giving me back this slice of normalcy. Cole and I were just starting to figure things out, and it was a huge relief to know that when he wanted me, his interest was genuine.
“Be careful,” Wu murmured as I wrapped my arms around my stomach. “This is a highly unorthodox mission. Conquest has never backtracked to a conquered terrene. We can’t know what the repercussions might be.”
As much as I wanted to ask if his father had ever tried returning home, and what had happened, I chose to exercise a smidgen of faith that if I was about to do something totally stupid that would get me killed, he would step in and shoot down my plan. Since that hadn’t happened, I considered his silence as his blessing.
Cole stepped up to the edge, and I joined him, our shoulders brushing. The air vibrated around him, his anticipation stirring up my anxiety. I wanted this to go well, for his sake more than Janardan’s.
“I really don’t want to get eaten by an alligator,” I confessed. “It seems like a bad way to go.”
“I’ll keep you safe,” he promised. “I won’t even let the crawfish nibble your toes.”
“You say the sweetest things.” I laughed softly. “How will I know what to do?”
“Instinct.” He clasped hands with me. “Go cold. Let that guide you.”
Let her guide me. That’s what he meant. While I doubted Conquest was PTA mom material, though she might be compared to War, her memory of the child was steeped in pride and affection. I was willing to bet she would want her heir back at least as much as Cole, if not for the same reasons.
“Here goes nothing.”
Sucking in oxygen until my lungs threatened to burst, I stepped out over empty air. Water licked at my heels as I was swallowed down into the belly of the swamp. I sank like a stone, and that was wrong. I should have been buoyant, but the tug in my gut tightened the lower I plummeted until my feet hit the silty bottom.
Bubbles escaped from my nose and mouth, tickling my skin as they raced for the surface. There was no point in opening my eyes. I was too far down, and the visibility was zero. I would have to do this blind.
Reaching for the cold place was instinctive, the headspace impossible to summon at will, but I had to try.
I dug deep, recalling all the glimpses I had collected into Conquest’s life, and used those to bring the reluctant chill to my fingertips. Slowly, at a glacier’s pace, the familiar ice swept through my chest and dulled my thoughts into comfortable numbness until I was swept along, a passenger in my own body.
Through the haze, I knelt and swept debris from a metallic circle inscribed with peculiar markings that bumped under my fingertips. Hard to tell from this angle, but I estimated it to be three times the size of a manhole cover. As I ran my hands over the raised design, a low vibration started in my bones, a welcoming resonance that linked me to this object. As if it belonged to me. As if I had every right to be here. As if it recognized my dominion over it and this place. The sensation as I located the handle wasn’t the same as when Cole or Wu touched me, but it was a close relative to the feeling.
Gripping the rung as tight as I could, I heaved with all my might.
It didn’t budge. Neither did I.
Weird.
Despite the effort, and the flurry of oxygen bubbles fizzing through the water, I wasn’t suffocating.
Weirder.
A dull impact rocked me, and I understood that Cole had landed beside me. He existed in this same peculiar pocket where breathing water didn’t drown you and gravity had taken a vacation. His fingers brushed mine where they wrapped the warm metal, and I heard him say “I’ve got you” in my head, as clearly as if he had whispered it in my ear.
Weirdest.
With him at my side, I cut the tether on my hesitation and submerged myself in the cold place.
Fractals of ice obscured my vision, and the bite of frost expelled from my mouth when I started chanting in the fluid language the rest of the coterie spoke with such ease. The vowels tasted sharp, the words jagged. The Otillian cut my lips on its way out. I tasted blood as it swirled through the viscous water around us.
The tithe has been paid. The thought pinged through my head, but it wasn’t mine. Take what is yours.
Fingers and hands and arms all coordinated to wrench open the hatch. Darkness waited below, fathomless as a night sky and twice as endless. Another world slept below this one, and the temptation to crawl through creaked in my knees. Conquest was an explorer, and she was sated on that view, but I—Luce—was mesmerized by the peacefulness of the void.
Instinct snapped out an order to plunge my hand into the abyss, and icy fingers clasped mine on the other side. A woman with black skin and the tail of an eel swam beneath me, her clawed hand tight where our skin met. Her face was a grinning skull, a punch of white in a midnight complexion. Her ragged nails drew blood that chummed the waters around me in her desperation to climb to a higher world.
“Death,” I mouthed.
“Sister,” she spoke into my mind. “Well met.”
Cole’s arm struck out once her head cleared the seal. His meaty fist closed over her throat and squeezed with enough pressure to cause her eyes to protrude. “Phoebe first.”
Phoebe.
Familiarity rode the wave of recognition that this was the first time he had spoken her name.
Phoebe.
Sweet one.
That was what he named her when Conquest couldn’t be bothered to think up one, so certain her daughter would claim her title, her legacy, if she failed.
“Nicodemus,” she hissed through needlelike teeth. “I see you are well.” Reaching down into the blackness, she hauled an oblong disc beside her. “Is this sufficient to pay our toll?”
The egg-shaped pod floated up to us when she released its handle. Its hull appeared to be carved from charred wood as black as her eyes, and it stretched half my height.
Either Phoebe was a contortionist who traveled folded in half, or she wasn’t an adult.
Grief, love, and confusion splashed across his face as he captured the handle. “You placed her in stasis.”
Concern for him ripped through my hard-won calm, but whatever I had expected, it hadn’t been this.
“Yes,” Death hissed. “There was no other way.”
The cold place frayed around its edges, and Conquest’s hold on me began unraveling. Before that happened, I needed to know, “Where is Famine’s coterie?”
“Below.” Her eyes searched mine. “I promised them safe passage.”
“No harm will come to them unless they move against my coterie or me.” I held her stare as she watched me closely, curiously. “Do you need any help?”
God that made it sound like I was inviting her to invade my world, which, I guess I was.
“I find you much changed, sister.” Death tilted her head at an angle that would snap human necks. “I look forward to exploring this new facet once my people are secure.”
Cole hauled the pod to the surface while I watched the first of many more eels zip through the water. A portion of them belonged to Famine, and I felt their ink drop eyes on me. Following his example, I kicked off the ground and swam toward the surface. The seal pulled at me, unwilling to surrender me, and when I escaped its tug, darkness bathed my eyes once again, and my lungs burned for oxygen.
A dozen heartbeats passed where I was certain I would die in the same swamp where I had been reborn.
A silken body brushed alongside mine, nudging me higher much faster than I could have propelled myself. I broke the surface gasping for air and took the hand Wu offered to pull me over the side onto the deck of the airboat. Cole had hefted the pod over his head, too focused on his task to have noticed my struggle.
Panting softly, I collapsed near him. “Did you get nudged?”
Cole shot me a questioning look as he placed his burden down gently.
“That would be me.” Santiago’s head broke the water, his shoulders bare and his hair slicked back from his face. “I figured you might need a hand up to the surface.”
Except a hand wasn’t what I’d felt. “Thank you.”
“I accept monetary donations as well as payment in highly illegal gadgetry.” Santiago beamed. “I accept wire transfers, or you can just pat Wu down. I’m cool either way.”
The glare Wu shot Santiago belonged on a playground between two boys who didn’t want to share their super cool next gen toys.
Mildly surprised, I grinned at Santiago. “Thanks for having my back.”
“I was checking the ADCP and noticed you flailing. You were close to one of my lines, so I figured it would save me a future headache to bring you up before you wrecked all my hard work. You’re welcome for me saving your life.”
While that sounded more likely than an act of altruism on his part, I chose to be grateful all the same.
“Maybe you ought to head back down and monitor the situation.” I rounded my eyes like a terrible thought had occurred to me. “Who knows how many of those Iniids will pour out of the seal? The whole pod could get tangled in your cables, and you’d be out here for weeks fixing it all.”
Much to my amusement, Santiago clutched at the heart I wasn’t convinced he had and vanished.
“That was cruel,” Portia chided between snorted laughter from the other boat.
“Come on,” I called back to her. “It was at least a little funny.”
Behind me, Janardan had gone predator-still, his silvery eyes devouring the dark corners of the swamp.
“Every life sparks with its own energy, some brighter than others.” He brought his arm up where I could see the hairs standing on end. “I’m crackling with it.”
A chill seeped into my bones. An influx of energy could mean several things. None of them good when you were floating over a breach site like sitting ducks. Though his sensitivity to lifeforce might explain his connection to Death. Opposites attract and all that. “Miller, can you check the traps?”
Quick as a flash, he retrieved the laptop the coterie kept tucked in a dry compartment and got to work.
“I’m not picking up any signs of a disturbance.” He tapped a few keys. “The camera feeds are normal.” A few more clicks had the color draining from his face. “They’re too normal.” He stood in a rush, and the laptop thudded onto the deck. “We’ve been hacked. The feed’s running on a loop.”
“You said War wasn’t tech-savvy,” I snapped at Sariah as I scanned the area for signs of the disturbance Janardan was registering. “Are you shitting me right now?”
“What? No.” Her mouth thinned at my accusation. “She must have recruited for the job.”
That smacked of advanced planning when War couldn’t have known about tonight without an inside man.
“Remember Janardan? Death’s mate? The guy you knew about all along but didn’t say boo to us?”
“That’s different,” she protested. “You didn’t ask.”
“There were other charun working with War’s coterie in Alexandria,” Miller reminded me, his puckered expression confession enough that he wasn’t thrilled to come to her rescue. “She might be telling the truth.”
“Hello?” She lifted her arms and rattled her bangles. “What choice do I have?”
Honesty wasn’t a side effect of wearing the bangles, at least not without me demanding it from her, but I wasn’t about to admit that if she thought otherwise. Especially not when she was already applying logic to get around telling us the whole truth.
A dozen skeletal heads floated in the waters surrounding us, summoned by Janardan’s tone.
How many of them must be Death’s children? And what did procreation mean for her, exactly?
I looked to the pod containing Phoebe, to my own coterie, and experienced an uncomfortable revelation.
Fertility was not an issue among the cadre. They bred like rabbits and let their children run into snares for them. But Conquest . . . She only birthed one child, a daughter, her legacy, and she left Phoebe behind on her father’s terrene where she would be safe. A nod to his culture as well as hers? The rest of her coterie were recruited on different worlds, all of them outcasts or damaged in some way. She had collected her motley crew with a deliberateness that spoke of her intention to keep them. She had created what I had inherited—a found family.
The uncomfortable acknowledgement that she must have loved Cole, in her way, that she must have refused to twist the knife in his heart a second time with a second child, didn’t make her any less of a monster or her crimes any more forgivable. But it did give me a new stick with which to measure her against her siblings.
The boat rose under my feet on a gentle swell that had my stomach cramping. I recognized the sensation, as if the water level in the swamp was on the rise.
“War.” I met Cole’s eyes as understanding flooded them. “If not her, then her coterie.”
Janardan swung his head toward me. “We have no quarrel with her.”
“She wants me,” I confessed. “Since she can’t have me, she wants me dead.”
“I must locate my mate.” He stood and stripped, leaving a mound of colorful fabric puddled around his ankles. “She has yet to surface and must not be caught unawares.”
The water welcomed Janardan without a splash. He vanished from sight, and several of the skulls did too. For once, I was thrilled about charun taking on human aspects. We needed a way to tell the coteries apart stat.
Assuming these were emocarre and not viscarre, that is. Cohabitating with humans was fine, so long as the symbiotic contract between charun and host was spelled out for them. Parasites, however, would present an issue for me.
I should have asked, but my brain was punch-drunk on the influx of fresh information, and I was still reeling from the overload. I hoped I gave the appearance of knowing what the hell I was doing, because one look at Cole and that pod caused the world to drop out from under my feet.
I’m someone’s mate.
I’m someone’s mother.
Shut up, brain. Now is not the time.
It never seemed to be, but oh well. War wasn’t exactly taking scheduling suggestions.
The screams didn’t register at first. The species Death’s coterie had emulated was too alien for me to do more than wince as brain-melting shrieks ricocheted through my skull. The blood clouding the water as it churned in a feeding frenzy was easier to recognize, and it set my heart galloping.
“Protect her,” Cole barked as he touched the pod. “I’m going to check on Janardan.”
“Cole—” I bit the inside of my cheek as his head disappeared. “Goddamn it.”
A sleek Drosera surfaced three yards away, its eyes pinned on Cole’s back.
I unsheathed the falchion and leapt in after him, no thought required.
The water slowed me down, muted my force, but not so much I couldn’t shove the blade through the bottom jaw of the super gator who dared hunt him. The tip shone where it emerged through its thick skull. I shoved its twitchy corpse aside where two others nosed it with interest.
All too soon their attention shifted toward me. I slashed at them while I backpedaled. Across the way, Miller hit the water, carving through super gators, and met me halfway. He escorted me back to the stealth airboat and joined me onboard. I spun to search out the other boat and found Portia glaring a hole through his spine.
Without Santiago at her back, Miller had clearly grounded Maggie. As much as I sympathized with Portia’s frustration, I agreed with the call. And not just because it protected my best friend from what prowled beneath the boats, scraping the undersides with their armored hides.
Standing on the deck made me an easy target, but I was worthless in the water. Even if I could access the dragon under my skin, she wouldn’t be much help down here. This wasn’t the time or the place to test the theory that I might be able to shift and might be able to hold onto my inner charun. There was too much at stake.
But Cole was down there. He hadn’t come up yet. Neither had Janardan. Neither had Death.
“This rescue mission went to hell in a handbasket.” I looked to Miller and Wu. “Ideas?”
“I’ll secure the area around the boats until Cole and Santiago return.” Miller, already soaked, kept his clothes on as he reentered the water. He stared at Portia, but I knew he saw Maggie. “Keep her safe.”
“I will,” I promised as the enormous snake burst from his skin. His dusky coils surfaced in the water as he swam menacing circles around us. I cranked my head toward Wu. “Are you waiting on an engraved invitation or what?”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” He shrugged out of his jacket and shirt, leaving himself bare from the waist up in case we needed an emergency exit. “You can’t take on all of them. Water is the natural habitat for Drosera and Iniids. We can’t let them trap us out there where they hold the advantage.”
Portia, Maggie, and Sariah in one boat, Wu and me in the other. Still not great odds.
“We’re sitting ducks if we stay here.” Wu could fly out, but not with all of us. I would strap Maggie to him if it came down to it, and Portia would have to deal. “Portia and Maggie are as vulnerable as we are without a charun form.”
Portia was all human. More strength, better reflexes, but that was about it. No inner monster lurked within her. That was her job. She was Maggie’s inner monster now.
And then there was the pod we had to prevent becoming a coffin.
Commotion shot our gazes to the water, and I spat every curse word I knew and some I might have invented on the spot. Thank God Dad wasn’t here, or I would have been tasting soap for months.
War rose from the swamp, riding a massive Drosera sidesaddle. Its scarred sides heaved, and ravenous hunger burned in its eyes. She commanded the attention of all the gathered Iniids, and I knew what she was going to say before she opened her big, fat mouth.
Aw, hell. We were going to need a bigger handbasket.