“Dey got a sister too. She a sharpshooter, she was. Tough as gator skin. She come along too. You put her in a tree with good line o’ sight, and she provide cover. Her name Margaud.”
After Lucky Landry left, Derek and his men and I created contingency plans for everything we could think of, giving each problem and plan a code name so we would be prepared to act on a moment’s notice. Silver was the code to kill every vamp we could find. Swim was the code indicating that each combatant would have to get home the best way he could. Bogus was the code for our allies telling lies and setting us up. Burn was the code to set everything on fire with incendiaries. FUBAR meant anything and everything. FUBAR was the code I was most worried about. It meant we’d all most likely die.
? ? ?
The boat shuddered under my feet, the Chevy engine adding its own vibration as well as noise enough to wake the undead, and the propeller at my back sucked air through its cage as we flew over the water—not in a plane, but in an airboat. The boat had almost no draft, maybe six inches when it was sitting still, and it was eco-friendly except for the noise, which was so loud it could deafen a catfish, and which precluded any form of communication except hand signals. The prop, mounted in the cage at the back of the boat, was wood, handmade by Amish people, which felt all wrong somehow, but added an artistic element to a boat that was designed to skim over the bayou, swamp water, or marshy land. This boat was painted in red and yellow with flames along the sides, similar to the flames on Lucky’s arms, and belonged to the twins. It had two bench seats with heavy-gauge steel arms and leather upholstery in the yellow of the flames. Built-in coolers, tackle boxes, and a shotgun rack completed the Cajun dream-boat.
Beno?t had led Derek’s men in two hours ago and they were in place on the Clan Home property. Auguste was my pilot, sitting in the bench seat above and behind me, working the controls. Margaud sat beside me, a sharpshooter’s sniper rifle in a sling across her back and a heavy military gobag at her booted feet.
The brothers might have passed for ogres, each weighing in at an easy three hundred pounds, hirsute, sour with last night’s beer, and both smelling of the fish they had caught and cleaned. Maybe days ago. The men wore T-shirts that might once have been white in another universe or decade, old-fashioned bib overalls, and work boots that looked like they had never seen oil, polish, or even laces.
Margaud was as beautiful as her brothers were ugly, with ash brown hair blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and looked too small to transport or position the rifle for firing, but she was muscular and fit and carried herself with a capable, confident air. The sharpshooter wore a homemade one-piece camo uni that had been made out of strips of thin cotton cloth in green, brown, black, and tan, like a hand-pieced quilt. Irregular lengths of green yarn rippled from it in the hard wind created by the passage of the airboat, and I realized that it worked like a ghillie suit, but looked a lot more comfortable. I had to wonder what a girl needed a ghillie suit for, but I figured it was for hunting. And if it wasn’t for hunting, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
The siblings were all human and all taciturn—expressionless faces and none talking much even by my standards. It felt weird going into battle with the silent Cajuns at my back, unknowns in a gig more full of unknowns than usual.
We spun through the bayou, whipping around clumps of trees and over long, swordlike grasses. I held on to the bench seat with one hand, watching the world fly by. The airboat hit something in the water with a hollow, solid thump under my feet, but Margaud didn’t react and the boat neither slowed nor sprang a leak, so I just gripped the seat harder. If we came to a sudden and total stop, I didn’t want to go flying into the dark water or up against a cypress tree.