Dead on the Delta

Eight



Turns out driving is just like riding a bike. Except you get where you’re going faster and there’s less sweating involved. We’re off Railroad Street, through the historical district, and heading down the half-mile stretch of road toward the southwestern edge of the gate in minutes.

“The Beauchamp house is going to be on the left,” Stephanie says over her shoulder to Hitch, who’s thankfully taken the backseat.

I don’t want to sit next to him. Being trapped in a vehicle with his smell—that damned smell that keeps making my body remember things I don’t want to remember—is bad enough.

“We should stop by tomorrow morning,” Hitch says, “and show the parents the pictures.”

They’re stopping by the Beauchamps’? With pictures? Then this visit isn’t solely about the mess I made.

“There aren’t parents. Just a mother, no father,” I say in my most helpful voice. See how helpful I can be, FBI? See how easy it would be to just let my mistake slither under the rug and stay there? Forever? “Barbara Beauchamp adopted Grace when she was a baby. Barbara’s also got two grown children, James and Libby.”

“That’s in the file.” Stephanie doesn’t approve of helpful Annabelle anymore than unhelpful Annabelle. I can practically hear her frown deepen. “Hitch just didn’t have time to look over the Beauchamp case. He was too busy reading up on the protocol for your particular code violation.”

“And collecting all our data on the Breeze houses in the area,” Hitch says, throwing me a bone. Repulsive ex-girlfriend or no, he doesn’t seem as determined to play head games as his partner. “Y’all have quite an epidemic on your hands.”

It’s exactly what I was hoping to hear, but the news that there are other Breeze houses is far from comforting. Sure, it means the FBI has bigger fish to fry than yours truly, but it could take months to dismantle a Breeze network. A series of Fairy Wind–producing houses, all offering each other materials and sanctuary, acts like a toxic underground railroad, ferrying a mind-melting product north to freedom. Freedom to steal the lives of countless people with Breeze’s instantly addictive high.

A part of me protests that I’m the last person who should be preaching against addiction, but alcohol doesn’t make my brain bleed or my teeth fall out. Alcohol doesn’t make me dangerously violent or supernaturally strong; it doesn’t drive me to steal and kill in the name of my next fix.

And besides, I’m not an addict. I am a habitual consumer. There’s a difference.

“So you’re here to dismantle a Breeze network, and slap me on the wrist,” I say, hurrying on before they can confirm or deny that all I’ll be getting is a slap on the wrist. “But what about the murder? You think that’s related to the Breeze houses in some way? Is that why your unit’s involved?”

“Not that we know of,” Hitch says. “We’re looking into the Beauchamp case as a favor for the—”

“Should we share details at this juncture?” Stephanie interrupts, leaning forward to peer at Camellia Grove as we pass by. Darkness has fallen early at the plantation, hastened along by the live oak trees arched protectively over the house, mourners at a funeral that can’t take place until the autopsy is performed.

For the zillionth time today, sadness settles along my skin. No matter how much I believe in Cane and Abe or how much I hate having “Hitchanie” on the case, it’s good to know the FBI is going to be involved. I want Grace’s killer found. Soon.

“Unless you want me to suit up and do all the work myself, then she’ll have to be told what we’re looking for sooner or later. It’s up to you.” Hitch casually defers to his partner’s seniority once again, as if he doesn’t care if she decides to send him into a potentially life-threatening situation just because she doesn’t want to share information with a slacker FCC agent.

I’m getting ready to tell Stephanie exactly what she can do with her condescending, dangerous attitude—ex or not, there’s no way I’ll allow Hitch to put himself in danger—when she speaks. “No. You’re right. We don’t want to put you at unnecessary risk.” She turns back to me as I pull onto the dirt road leading to the iron fence. “We’re aiding the New Orleans criminal division of the FBI. They couldn’t spare a team, but they think Grace’s murder might be the latest in a string of serial killings. There are four other girls dead. All found in Louisiana, all between the ages of seven and ten with blond hair and blue eyes. They have a few suspects, men with a history of abuse who were in the right place at the right time. We’re hoping the family might remember seeing one of them on the property in the past few weeks.”

“God.” I don’t know what else to say.

“The killer usually leaves a clue at the murder scene as to where he’ll strike next,” Stephanie continues, hand moving to her seat belt buckle even before I pull to a stop next to Cane’s empty police cruiser. “We’re hoping we can find the clue in time to make this murder the last one.”

“There was a snow globe with a plantation inside buried near the body of the last victim,” Hitch says, his voice gentler than it has been.

He knows about my sister. He knows about the camping trip that ended with me lugging Caroline’s dead body into the backseat of my car while the two boys we’d brought with us ran screaming as the newly mutated fairies tore into them. We’d all thought the highway signs warning us to watch out for killer fairies were a joke. A lot of people had. A lot of people who were now dead.

I swallow and cut the ignition. “So I’ll get to go on a treasure hunt tomorrow. Sounds great.”

Hitch makes an angry sound. “Your sarcasm isn’t appreciated, but your help would be. A girl is dead, and—”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.” I turn to him, meeting his judgment-filled blue eyes, hurt that he thinks I’d be flippant about something so awful. Seems he has an even lower opinion of me than I assumed. Hitch must have forgotten that there’s a good person buried beneath my bullshit.

Or maybe he never believed I was a good person, maybe he stayed with me for three years for the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Not that there was much drug use—aside from beer and the occasional upper to get us through a long night at the hospital—or rock ’n’ roll. Hitch liked to play bluegrass, sing old country songs in a voice that oozed like molasses through the night, filling me with such simple happiness I wasn’t sure my body could contain it. And sometimes it hadn’t: sometimes the joy spilled over in tears, or laughter, or into Hitch’s mouth as I kissed him and kissed him, certain I’d never have to come up for air, that I could survive on the taste and feel of the man I loved.

I was never happier than when I was with Hitch. I can remember that happiness, even though I cut away a long time ago the part of me that grieved for it. I can understand amputating a poisoned limb, but you shouldn’t forget it had once served you well. It had once held your morning coffee, scratched the places that itched, smoothed softly over where you hurt and left pleasure behind.

But Hitch has forgotten, the disgust on his face proves it.

I drop my eyes to the floor at his feet. “I had to collect the initial samples on Grace this morning and carry her body back to the fence. She didn’t weigh much more than my cat.” I turn and hit the buckle on my seat belt. “Anything that will help you catch the person who killed her does sound great. Sincerely.”

Hitch sighs, and for a second I think he might apologize. But he doesn’t. Instead, he pops the top of his briefcase and begins rustling through a pile of neatly organized folders. From what I can see in the rearview, he’s now a color-coding and tab-using kind of guy. This from the man who was officially reprimanded twice during his residency for misplacing paperwork and only believed in folding clothes if there wasn’t a clear piece of furniture left to throw them on.

Maybe this isn’t Hitch at all. Maybe he’s been body-snatched by aliens, and this anal, dressed-up, cold-eyed version of him is a virus from another planet masquerading as my ex-boyfriend. The thought, though unlikely, makes me feel better.

Leaving alien Hitch in the backseat, I slam out of the car and follow Stephanie to the edge of the fence, scanning the dirt road beyond. The air blushes with sunset glow, and the pink and gold lights of the fairies flash brighter than they did earlier in the day. They’re moving faster, shaking off the sluggishness inspired by the August heat. Watching them dive and dance, pausing to pop a mosquito or tear into a wasp here and there, makes my heart beat faster. Cane is out there, walking among those beautiful predators, risking his life because I couldn’t be bothered to keep my damn phone turned on.

“I’m going over the fence. I’ll walk down to the … ” My words fade when I hear the distant, rhythmic rattle.

“What is it? Do you—”

“Sh! Listen.” The rattle grows louder. I watch the road beyond the fence, gravity easing its death grip on my shoulders when a tall, iron-clad figure trudges around the corner. The suit is ridiculous-looking—the tin man from Oz crossed with a robot from a ’50s horror flick—but I’ve never been so happy to see it whole and intact.

“That’s him!” I’m through the gate without another thought, running down the stretch of road that separates me from Cane. I’ll feel better so much better when I’m by his side, protecting him with my unappetizing-to-fairies stink.

I don’t slow until I’m a few feet away, close enough to see the suit is indeed hole-free … and the anger in Cane’s dark eyes. Oh. Dear. Even through the plexiglass shield covering his face, I can see that he’s pissed. Really pissed. In a way I haven’t seen him since Amity forgot his mother’s birthday last year.

Yes, my six-foot-two, buff, gun-toting lover is a big ol’ mama’s boy, and not the least bit ashamed of it. His mama raised three children on her own and put herself through nursing school while working two jobs to keep her kids in clothes and shoes. She’s a hero to Cane, his first true love … but he stood up to her. For me.

I’d barely poured my sweet tea at my first Cooper supper before Mae was grilling me about my past, my future, my goals, my faith, my family, and dwelling at length on my feelings about children. Did I want them? How many? How soon? Blah, blah, blah, until I was a stuttering mess.

I can understand her eagerness to grow a crop of grandkids—Abe is forty-two and married to his job, Cane’s nearing forty and his ex wasn’t able to have children, and Amity is thirty-five and still busy partying until three in the morning. I can feel Mae’s pain, but I am so not the girl she wants me to be. I care about Cane, but I don’t even want to think about babies. Ever. I’m with him for the laughs, the companionship, and the damned fine, totally protected, non-procreative sex.

But try explaining that to your man’s mama. It was easier to fake a stomach virus and run for home. Literally run, even though I’d been wearing high-heeled sandals. Cane, however, stayed behind and gave Mae a talking to. I know he did. He never told me what went down, but the change in Mae’s behavior made it clear that her son had asked her to back off. He’d done that—gotten tough with his beloved mama—on my behalf. It’s just one of the things that proves he’s a better man than I deserve.

“I’m sorry.” I wrap my hands around his iron-covered arm and fall into step beside him. “I’ll never turn off my phone again. I suck. I know I suck. I’m so sorry. I’d never want you to get hurt,” I say, all my noble, ending-our-relationship intentions vanquished by the relief rushing through my veins. I’m just so glad he’s okay.

More than glad. I’m giddy, dizzy with gratitude. I can’t wait to feel his skin against mine, to have his hands everywhere, to kiss him from the top of his scratchy head to the tip of his moon-shaped toes and show him how truly sorry I am. It might already be too late for a merciful breakup. If his safety is this vital to my existence, I’m probably already in too deep.

“You are in a mess of trouble, girl,” Cane says, his voice tinny, echoing inside his suit.

“I know. The FBI is here.”

“Already? I thought they weren’t getting in until eight.”

“Guess they got here early. That’s them waiting at the fence,” I say, glancing back to where Hitch and Stephanie stand just inside the gate. “I think I’m going to be officially reprimanded for … ” I freeze. The fact that Cane and I are alone finally penetrates my thick skull and injects my brain with a healthy dose of panic. “Oh … f*ck.” I was so happy to see Cane safe that I forgot the reason he was out here in the first place.

“Oh f*ck and a sack of shit,” Cane agrees. “I couldn’t find that woman anywhere. I walked every inch of your research area, even went beyond the borders just in case you’d wandered too far.” He sucks in an only slightly labored breath, despite the fact that his suit weighs close to one hundred pounds. “Didn’t see a damned trace of that Breeze head or the Breeze house, either.”

“What?” I shake my head. How can that be? The woman could have freed herself—or been freed by someone else—but she couldn’t have taken the houseboat with her. “That boat was locked in by tree roots. There’s no way it’s going anywhere until the water rises.”

We’re only fifty or so feet from the fence now. Cane slows almost imperceptibly. Next to him, the giant cypress that hovers over the split in the road sways in the breeze. The fairies lurking in its shade churn and hiss, angered by my existence. I shiver, glad I’m standing close to Cane. That patch of deep shade is the perfect place for a suit-penetrating swarm to get started.

“I don’t know,” he says, beneath his breath, “but I know we need to find that woman. Abe got a call from Keesler about ten minutes after Dom faxed your report to New Orleans, telling him you were going to be investigated by the FBI. Leaving an infected person tied up out there was a big mistake, Annabelle.”

Oh, no. He’s calling me Annabelle, not Lee-lee. I’m definitely in big trouble, but how big? “Is this official-write-up kind of big, or pay-cut kind of big, or lock-me-up-and-throw-away-the-key kind of—”

“Didn’t have a lot of time to look over the FCC regs,” he says, “but I’m thinking it’s going to depend on whether or not that woman is found and what state she’s in at the time. If she’s good, I think you’ll be good. But if she hasn’t made it through the afternoon … ”

My mouth goes dry and my tongue suddenly feels thick and stupid. For the first time, the immensity of my mistake hits me squarely between the eyes. That woman could be dead. Because of me. Sure, she’s a Breeze head and a bite victim and marked for an early grave, but she could have lived a year or two in one of the camps. Maybe more.

But what if tying her up led to her getting drowned or sucked dry by fairies or eaten by gators? Her blood will be on my hands. I’ll be a murderer, or at least a manslaughter-er. I didn’t intend to kill her—I was only trying to keep her from killing me or getting away—but in the end, will that really matter? To a judge and jury? A military judge and jury, no less?

Oh God. This is bad. Why didn’t I realize just how bad before?

My knees buckle and the ground swims before my eyes, but Cane catches me with an iron arm around my waist.

“Just hold up. This is going to be okay. This woman assaulted you, you weren’t thinking clearly,” Cane says, making me feel a tiny bit better. I do have a nasty bump on my head. “We all know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“I don’t think they know that,” I whisper, fighting a full-fledged panic attack. “I think that Stephanie woman wants to send me up the river.”

“It doesn’t matter what she wants. She’s got nothing on you. We’re going to find that Breeze house and if the woman who attacked you isn’t there … Well, we’ll make sure this thing is buried. They can’t force you to testify against yourself and no one else saw anything with their own eyes.” Something in Cane’s choice of words makes my stomach clench. He’s the most honest, life-valuing person I know, but a part of me wonders how far he’ll go to make sure a certain body is never found.

A body. I might have caused a person to become a body, just like Grace, like Caroline, like all those corpses littering the highways after the first mutations. Like the bloated bodies I helped pull from the wreckage after Hurricane Katrina, when immune teams took the brunt of the cleanup, hoping to spare anyone else from infection. We worked twenty-four-hour shifts until we could barely stand, and still there were more dead left to find.

That’s when the drinking during the day started. Just here and there, a little something to block out the horror and the smell of death. Just a little, a little, and the little became a hand to hold, a habit that stayed even when the death was gone.

Or mostly gone. Once you’ve seen certain things, when they’ve crawled inside you and made themselves at home, you can’t ever really be free of them. Not ever. I would imagine seeing the body of a person I caused to die would be like that, a thing I will never escape.

My breath comes in shallow gasps and my forward motion slows to a crawl.

“You’ve got to calm down, baby,” Cane says, the affection in his tone making it even harder to breathe. How can he love me? How? “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to tell these folks I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to look. You see if you can remember where you left her, I’ll get a drink of water, and we’ll head out again in a few minutes.”

“No, I’ll head out again in a few minutes,” I say, forcing myself to focus on tangible details, anything to distract my mind from the disaster at hand.

I catalogue the color of the stones beneath our feet, tick off the number of trees between us and the fence, then start in on the number of branches on the giant cypress. Even as my heart slows and I begin to pull myself together, a vague feeling of misgiving nags at the back of my brain. Something about the cypress is bothering me, something more than the fact that hungry fairies spin beneath it. But what? What …

“You’re not going out there alone, especially not now.”

“I’m fine,” I say, trying to sound it. “You don’t need to be out here after dark. It could take hours. If she wasn’t in my research area, then I have no idea where to start looking. I’m positive I left her … ”

Left. I usually make a left at the tree to go to my research area.

I turn in a slow circle, staring down the path to the right. Tire tracks. Bicycle tire tracks. Three of them. One for the wheels of the bike, and two for the wheels of the trailer pulled behind. They have to be mine. No one else would ride their bike beyond the iron gate. A car, maybe, but not a bike.

I bet if I get closer, I’ll see cat prints trailing beside, prints that would disappear when Gimpy leapt into my trailer and reappear when I stopped to toss him out, and then got back on my bike and went the wrong way. The. Wrong. Way. Damn that blasted cat.

“What’s wrong?” Cane’s iron-covered finger trails down my arm.

“I went the wrong way,” I whisper. I’d spent the entire morning tromping around the wrong part of the bayou.

This screwup is getting bigger with every passing second. I hadn’t missed that Breeze house in my earlier scouting. There is no Breeze house on my research land. Cane spent an hour in a tin suit and risked his life for nothing. That damned woman is still out there, sitting in the wrong part of the swamp, where I’ll have to go fetch her after I explain how I managed to perform my job as crappily as I did this morning.

The panic tries to surge back in, but I push it away with a promise to indulge it fully at a later date.

“You went the wrong way?” Cane asks. “You mean—”

“I wasn’t in my research area.” I meet his eyes through the thick glass of his visor, knowing it’s pointless to lie though a part of me is tempted. “I was somewhere else. You were looking for the suspect in the wrong place.”

“Shit, Lee-lee.” Cane turns, following the tire tracks. “Come on. I don’t need that drink of water.”

“No.” I stand my ground. “Go back to the gate. I’ll get her by myself. You’ve been out long enough.”

Cane keeps walking, trundling with a clank and an occasional screech through the gathering dusk. “I told you, I’m not going to let you fetch some crazy Breeze head by yourself.”

“Cane, come back.” I cross my hands at my chest, suddenly acutely aware of the audience observing our every move.

Hitch and Stephanie probably can’t hear us, but they can see that something stupid is going down. I have to convince Cane to come back to the gate and show them he has no part in the stupid. He’s a professional who was looking in exactly the place I told him to look. It isn’t his fault there was nothing there to find.

“I mean it,” I say, raising my voice a hair. “I’m not going to—”

“Lee-lee, don’t you tell me what—” Cane’s right foot shuffles forward, catching on a gnarled root that’s elbowed its way up from the packed earth.

The heavy suit throws him off balance; he stumbles, and would have fallen if he hadn’t reached out with one big hand. A hand that lands on a rock hard enough to rip a hole in the iron suit keeping all his yummy, salty, human skin safe from the hungry things buzzing through the night.

The air around me churns, a mini-twister that, for a moment, catches me up and carries me along with it. Silken wings pulse against my throat—faster than a racing heart, more dangerous than an exploding locomotive—and then they’re gone. The fairy swarm from beneath the cypress surges past in a rush of glittering flesh and sharp teeth, snarling high-pitched, baby-voice snarls that would be hysterical if this wasn’t a matter of life and death.

Cane’s life. Cane’s death.

I run, slower than the fairies had flown, but faster than I’ve run in years, closing the distance between me and Cane in seconds. The Fey are already on him, swarming around the hole near his palm as he bats and swings, but they haven’t started gnawing on the suit yet.

There’s still time. Not much, but enough. It has to be enough. I launch myself into the air, grab Cane’s swinging hand, and take a punch to the stomach that knocks the wind out of me, but I refuse to let go. I cling to his arm, covering the hole with my body, pinning his hand to my ribs.

As soon I make contact, Cane freezes, proving he’s an even cooler customer than I thought. He doesn’t panic, doesn’t lash out or run. He simply presses his palm closer and pulls me into his arms, until my back is glued to the front of his suit and my fairy-repelling scent lingers in the air all around us. The fairies hiss and snap. A few of them get so close to my face that I catch a whiff of their metal-flavored breath. For a second I’m sure my plan will fail, and Cane and I will both be savaged by the swarm.

But then, slowly, one by one, they give up and flutter away, back to the shade of the cypress where they fall to fighting over a few unfortunate horseflies. My heart races as the insects disappear into their mouths and the fairies’ detachable jaws ooze back to their closed positions. Rows of teeth transform into pretty, pouted lips, and their faces once again resemble something humanoid with flat, feral eyes.

I shiver and clutch Cane’s arm. It’s by far the closest I’ve come to being bitten. I’m almost completely immune to fairy venom and, were a fairy to choose suicide via Annabelle, I’d suffer nothing more than a headache and a barfing spell. But I’ve seen immune people at Keesler with fairy bite scars. The Fey die when our blood hits their stomachs, but in those few seconds between nibble and death, they can do some hefty damage. It’s only luck that I haven’t been bitten before.

Luck, and the fact that I don’t make a habit of diving into fairy swarms or prowling outside the gates at night. I play it safe—only going out during the day, steering clear of large concentrations of fairies—but tonight I’ll gladly put myself at risk. I’ll walk the bayou until the sun comes up, anything to make sure Cane stays on the other side of that iron fence.