Authors: Ilona Andrews
Bayou Moon (37 page)
Still, the kid needed a shock to the system. Proof that he was done with his family. A rite of passage. William pulled a knife from the sheath. “Cut it.”
Gaston’s eyebrows crept up.
“Cut the hair.”
Gaston glanced at him, glanced at the knife, and took the blade, his teeth clenched. He grasped a strand of hair in his hand and sawed at it with the blade. The black strands fell on the ground.
Lark crouched and picked them up. “It’s not good to leave the hair out,” she said quietly. “Someone could curse you with it. I’ll burn it for you.”
“Thanks.” Gaston grabbed another handful of his hair and sliced it off.
Murid opened her mouth.
Here it is.
William tensed.
William tensed.
“It’s almost time for lunch.”
He nodded.
“It would be good if we knew what they were cooking in the kitchen,” she said. “If they’re cooking fish, we need to head to the house. Fish doesn’t take much time. If they’re cooking a pig, we have another half an hour.”
“I can go and ask,” Gaston said.
William sampled the wind. “They’re cooking chicken.”
Murid turned her expressionless dark eyes on him. “Are you sure?”
“Chicken and rice,” he said. “With cumin.”
“That’s good to know,” Murid said. “We have time, then.”
William had an odd feeling that something important had just happened, but what he had no idea. Behind him Gaston sliced another handful from his mane and deposited it into Lark’s hands. William loaded the next crossbow and fired. He would figure it out sooner or later.
LAGAR closed his eyes. It did no good—Peva was still there, even in the darkness of his mind.
“Look at your brother,” his mother’s voice whispered like the rustling of snake scales across the floor. “It’s because of you he’s dead. You weren’t smart enough to keep your brother safe.”
Slowly he opened his eyes and saw Peva’s body, blue and nude, on the washing table. A single lamp hung above it, its harsh glow concentrated by the fixture into a cone. The light clutched at the faces of two women, bleaching them into pasty masks. He watched them dip thick cloths into the buckets of scented water and rub the mud from Peva’s limbs. The dirty water ran off Peva’s skin into the groove on the table.
Peva was dead. He would never rise, never speak again. There was a horrible finality in death, an absolute and total ending. There was nothing to be done. No way to help it.
Lagar rolled his head back and took a deep breath. They spent their lives jerking and clawing their way to the top, and for what? To end up like this. On the table.
Tomorrow Cerise would come for him. Tomorrow evening either he or she would be on the table, just like this. This wasn’t what he wanted. In his dreams, when he was alone with nobody to spy on him, this wasn’t what he wished for.
“Why do you bother?” Lagar’s voice caught, and he forced the words out, raspy and strained.
Kaitlin stared at him from the gloom, a squat ugly thing, wrapped in her shawl. His mother. Like an old poisonous toad, he thought.
“Why do you bother?” he repeated. “He’s dead. The soul’s gone. Peva’s gone. Nothing left but this . . . shell. Dump it in the ditch. Give it to the dogs. He isn’t going to care.”
She said nothing, clamping her lips together. Disgust swelled in him. Lagar spun and left the room, slapping the door shut behind him.
CERISE padded out onto the verandah and closed the door behind her, shutting off the busy noises fluttering from the kitchen. Earlier, tired of making plans and choosing weapons, she’d come down there hoping to cook. Being in the kitchen, in the middle of bustle, standing over the fire, smelling spices, tasting food, and catching up on the Mire gossip usually comforted her. Today she cooked in a daze, listening to her aunts and cousins, while her mind cycled through tomorrow, wondering who else would die.
Then, before she knew it, dinner came. The entire family had gathered at the main house, those who lived in the outer buildings, those who lived farther in the swamp, everyone came for the dinner before the fight. Every seat was filled. The kids had to be sent off to a smaller kitchen to eat there, just to make room.
Then she sat at the head of the table, in her father’s place. She listened to the chatter of familiar voices, looked at the familiar faces, watched small fights break out and dissolve into teasing, and knew with absolute certainty that tomorrow some of these chairs would be empty. Guessing and calculating which ones made her colder and colder, until she was shivering, as if a clump of ice had grown in the pit of her stomach. Finally Cerise could take it no more and snuck out.
She just needed some peace and a little quiet. She started along the balcony, heading to the door that led to her favorite hiding spot.
Steps followed her. Maybe it was William . . . She turned.
Aunt Murid chased her.
Figured. William snuck around like a fox. She’d seen very little of him. First, Murid took him off, then Richard and Cerise rode out and climbed a pine, to get a better look at Sene. At dinner William ended up in a corner, with Gaston next to him. She barely recognized the boy with his hair shorn off. What the hell was Urow thinking? Gaston was family. What was done was done, but it still felt rotten.
Cerise stopped. Aunt Murid stopped, too. Cerise read hesitation in the older woman’s posture and tensed. What now?
“Your uncle Hugh is a good man,” Aunt Murid said softly.
Well, that came out of nowhere. Murid didn’t speak of her younger brother, especially since he’d left for the Broken about twelve years back. He’d visit at the house every few years for a week or two and then leave again. When Cerise had gone to get the documents from him, he looked pretty much the same as she remembered him: fit, tall, muscular. His hair was an odd salt-and-pepper shade, but aside from that, he was pretty much a male version of Aunt Murid. But where Murid was harsh, Uncle Hugh was mild and soft-spoken.
“I only saw him for about an hour,” Cerise admitted. “Just to get the papers for Grandpa’s house. He looked well.”
“I’m sure he did. Come, I’ll walk with you.”
They strolled along the balcony.
“Hugh was difficult as a child,” Murid said. “Some things he just didn’t understand. Our parents and me, we tried our best to take care of him, but his mind just didn’t work the same way. You had to spell things out for him. Obvious things. Hugh always liked dogs and other animals better than people. Said they were simpler.”
Cerise nodded. Where was this going?
“He wasn’t mean,” Murid said. “He was kind. Just odd in his way and very violent.”
“Violent? Uncle Hugh?” Cerise tried to imagine the quiet man flying off the handle and couldn’t.
Aunt Murid nodded. “Sometimes he’d take offense to things, and you wouldn’t even know why. And once he started fighting, he wouldn’t stop. He would kill you, unless someone pulled him off.” She stopped and leaned against the rail. “Hugh wasn’t like other people. He was born different and there was no help for it. It runs in our branch of the family, on my father’s side. I don’t have it and my dad didn’t have it, but our grandfather did.”
So Uncle Hugh was a crazy person and it was hereditary. Cerise leaned on the rail next to Murid. He never seemed crazy, but then she barely knew him. All she had to go on were childhood memories.
Murid swallowed. “I want you to understand: If you were Hugh’s friend, he would take a bullet for you. And when he loved, he loved absolutely, with all his heart.”
The older woman looked at the night-soaked cypresses. “When Hugh was nineteen, he met a girl. Georgina Wallace. She was very pretty, and Hugh was very handsome. So she took him for a ride. They saw stars together for a few weeks. Then Georgina decided that she was all funned out and broke the news: she was engaged to Tom Rook over in Sicktree. Hugh was her last fling before the wedding.”
“Ugh.”
“Hugh didn’t understand. He loved her so much, and he couldn’t imagine that she didn’t love him. I tried to calm him down and to explain that sometimes things didn’t turn out. I tried to explain that Georgina lied, but he couldn’t let it go. To him, she was everything. She accepted him, she made love to him. In his mind, that meant they belonged to each other forever. Hugh thought she was his mate. His soul mate.”
Cold washed over Cerise. “What happened?”
“Hugh took off. The next morning they found Tom Rook and Georgina, and Tom’s brother, Cline. Tom and Georgina were torn to pieces. Cline survived. He’s crippled for life, but he survived. He said a huge gray dog broke into the house and ripped into them.”
“Hugh set one of our mastiffs onto them?”
“No.” Murid closed her eyes. “Not a mastiff. Cline never left the Mire. All he knew were dogs. But I saw the tracks the animal left. It was a wolf. A big gray wolf.”
“There are no wolves in the Mire,” Cerise said.
“There was one that night.”
Cerise frowned. “What do you mean?”
Murid looked at the swamp. “That night Hugh left for the Broken. There are a lot of Louisianans from the Weird here, and in the Weird’s Louisiana they kill people like Hugh. Do you understand, Ceri? They kill his kind. They strangle them at birth or drown them, like rabid mutts.”
The realization hit Cerise like a rock between her eyes. Uncle Hugh was a changeling.
It couldn’t be. Changelings were demonic things from scary slumber party stories. They were mad, murderous, evil things. There was a reason why the Dukedom of Louisiana killed them—they were too dangerous. They turned into wild animals, and they slaughtered and ate people. Everything she’d heard about them made them out to be monsters.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t picture Uncle Hugh as a monster. Uncle Hugh was family. He built the wooden tree house where she used to play. He trained the dogs. He churned ice cream. He was calm and strong, and his eyes were kind and she’d never seen him angry.
“Has he killed anyone else since?”
Murid shook her head. “Not unless the family asked him to.”
“Does Father know?”
Murid nodded.
There had to be a reason for this story. Maybe her father made him leave. Maybe Murid saw this as a chance to bring her brother back.
“Changeling or not, he is my uncle. He’s welcome in the house anytime.”
“He knows that. He’s in the Broken by his choice.”
Okay. “Then why did you tell me this?”
“Hugh is a very strong man.” Murid looked into the distance. “Very good with a crossbow and a rifle. His reflexes are better honed, and he barely needs any time to aim at the target. Death doesn’t bother him at all. He accepts it as a fact and moves on.”
William.
Her heart hammered against her ribs.
No. Please, no.
“Uncle Hugh is very fast, isn’t he?”
No. Please, no.
“Uncle Hugh is very fast, isn’t he?”
Aunt Murid nodded.
“And his eyes glow in the dark?”
Murid nodded again. “He could always tell me what was cooking when we were at the range, because he could smell it from the kitchen.”
The range was a good ways from the house. Far enough that if you were at the house and you needed to get the attention of somebody down there, you had to yell at the top of your lungs. Cerise cleared her throat, trying to keep her voice even. “You took William down to the range with you today.”
Murid looked away at the swamp. “Chicken with cumin and rice.”
“I see.” Things made so much sense now. Cerise bit her lip. William was a monster. The orphanage, the military, that wildness she sensed in him—everything made sense.
“You have to spell things out,” Murid said. “No games, no hints. You have to be very, very clear with him, Cerise. Be very careful and think before you act. He’s dangerous. Hugh didn’t change shape often, but William does, because he knows how to hide it. He’s been trained to fight and whoever trained him knew how to make the most of William’s strengths. So far he’s behaving himself, but if you’re alone with him and you don’t have a blade, you don’t stand a chance. Don’t send him the wrong messages and don’t get yourself raped. William may not even know it’s wrong to force a woman.”
Her memory thrust the lake house before her. Oh, he knew. He knew very well.
“If you let him, he’ll love you forever and he won’t know how to let go. Make sure you truly want him before you take that plunge. And ...” Murid hesitated. “Your children . . . If you were to have any.”
Their children would be puppies. Or kittens. Or whatever William was.
“Families aren’t for people like me.”
Oh, dear Gods. She finally found the man she wanted, after all this waiting, and he turned out to be a changeling. Maybe she was cursed. “It can never be easy, can it?”
Aunt Murid leaned toward her. “I had my chance with a man. I didn’t take it, because it was too hard and too complicated. Look at me now. How so very happy I am, old and alone. Fuck easy, Ceri. If you love him, fight for him. Nothing worth keeping is free in this world. If you don’t love him, cut him loose. Just don’t take too long to decide. Our future might be short.”
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