by Mur Lafferty
He turned his head to them and hissed.
Zoë smacked his shoulder above a well-muscled leg that ended in four long claws. “Hey, quiet, you. You wanted me to make a plan; I did.”
“He wants us to get on him,” Opal said mildly.
“Oh.” She rubbed Bertie’s shoulder. “Sorry, Bertie. I guess it’s good Opal can understand you, right?”
His sinuous neck dipped low, and Zoë and Opal stepped on, climbing up to his broader shoulders. Zoë struggled a bit with her dress.
Zoë put Opal in front of her to make sure that the vampire could communicate with Bertie. It didn’t hurt that Zoë’s neck would be far out of Opal’s biting reach.
“What are we supposed to hold on to?” Zoë asked, but Bertie launched himself into the air.
“Oh shit,” she said, her breath catching in her throat as Bertie gained altitude easily. She grabbed on to Opal’s waist, but her dress shifted and one side looped itself around the wyrm’s neck like a safety belt, and she was anchored solidly to Bertie as he gained altitude.
“You OK, Opal?” Zoë yelled past the noise of the wind. Opal sat quietly, not having the problems Zoë seemed to have when it came to holding on. “So, ridden a lot of dragons in your time?”
Opal still didn’t answer, and Zoë made a face at her back and tried to enjoy the scenery, but by then Bertie had climbed too high. The city beneath them was a sprawl of colors and sound, and Zoë actually had her first feeling of appreciation for the city and what it had been through in the past decade.
Zoë felt Bertie rumble underneath her, and Opal turned to look over her shoulder. “He needs to know where to go.” Her face was utterly dead, as if she were describing a really boring meteorologist.
“Right!” Zoë said, and rooted around in her satchel, which lay against her hip. “Head southeast, Bertie! I’m not sure where we’re going, but we can find things from the air, right? At least we can maybe spot Gwen and Eir.”
They flew on through the night. As they edged closer to the city limits, Zoë could hear a plaintive call to turn back, that the city was sorry.
Riding a dragon. Yeah, not all it was cracked up to be. For one thing, every time Bertie dipped in elevation, Zoë was left behind momentarily in midair until the seat belt dress caught her and brought her down with him. Opal seemed fine holding on with her legs. For another thing, it got pretty damn cold at the higher elevations. Zoë had asked Bertie to fly lower and slower, and he had replied that it was fine for people to see him on the ground and think he was a Carnival float, but even the drunkest frat boy probably wouldn’t make the same leap if they were spotted in the air. At least, that’s what Opal said he said. Zoë was getting cold and cranky and anything the stoic vampire told her seemed suspect.
Not to mention that time on a dragon with a vampire who wasn’t very chatty left Zoë alone with her thoughts. She had been dumped. Or she had dumped him, mainly because he wanted it. And now she was off to help the guy who had dumped her.
But they hadn’t been in love, and while hurt, she didn’t feel completely lost and brokenhearted. And besides, the world was bigger than her and her hurt feelings. Arthur’s concerns were real, and he could easily die and become zombified if he couldn’t find the Doyenne and get her to help him.
Although it was moot at this point, she still wondered whether she would have stayed with him if he became a zombie. The zombies she knew were rotting things with gaping wounds attesting to their violent deaths. But Arthur’s shoulder wound was healed, with only the lurking virus inside the proof that his life could go away anytime if he didn’t treat it.
Would he rot? Would he stink? What would sex be like? She didn’t really want to picture it.
They’d only been going out for a month, but they had shared a number of life-or-death situations, and that has the tendency to form a bond. But now he was not her boyfriend anymore, and once they were done finding this zoëtist, they would be done with each other.
Except that they were neighbors. Damn. She wasn’t going to move. She liked her place.
“Hey, Opal,” she said into Opal’s ear, surprising even herself. The vampire turned her head, listening. “Tell me about Kevin, why you turned him into a vampire.”
It wasn’t a request, and considering what the vampire had just gone through, Zoë knew Opal had every right to bite her head off—metaphorically, she hoped. But still, the thought of losing someone to coterie lifestyles had her thinking.
Opal surprised her. “We were in the same book club,” she said. “And—”
“Hold up, a book club?” Zoë interrupted.
“We are both great readers,” Opal said coldly. “I found one that met at night to discuss Russian literature. I had known Dostoyevsky, so I was interested to see what people were getting out of his work these days. Kevin loved Russian authors, and we ended up getting along fabulously. I hadn’t turned anyone in years and was lonely.”
“Were you two ever romantic?”
Opal made a face, her first expression since Kevin died. “Heavens no. He had a wife, and I was looking for a child, not a lover. I turned him after the book club was done, you know, to keep the conversation going.”
“You turned him to keep talking about books?” Zoë was incredulous.
“Dostoyevsky wrote some very long books,” Opal replied patiently. “It can take over a lifetime to study all of them thoroughly.”
“And he had a wife?” Zoë said. “You took him away from her?”
“Zoë, if we only looked to turn people with no loved ones, we’d only be turning crotchety old people in the nursing homes whose families are dead and they’ve alienated everyone except for the people paid to care for them. Or sociopaths. Leaving loved ones behind is part of being a vampire.” Opal paused. “It’s something we all go through when we’re turned. It’s part of the pain of being reborn. Kevin was very angry with me for some time. But for everyone, the first few decades can be sad, especially if you’re seeing kids grow up or spouses remarry. And then even after you get over it, watching your family die is another blow. Kevin was still in the early moody period. But he was coming out of it, I thought. We were starting to be happy.”
“Do you regret it? If you could go back to last night and change what you did, would you?” Zoë asked.
Opal was quiet for a long time. Zoë wondered if she’d angered her or upset her or something to that effect. “I’m sorry,” Zoë said. “I’ve just been thinking about what I could have done to keep Arthur from getting bitten that day, but I don’t think I could have done anything differently.”
“I could have joined him,” she said softly, so that Zoë had to strain to hear. “We all understand the reasoning behind the balance, behind working with humanity instead of hunting them to extinction, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel the lure of the blood. Kevin was becoming a beast, and I could have joined him. And in the time between our leaving humanity behind and our eventual final death at the hands of Public Works, it would have been glorious.”
“But you didn’t,” Zoë said. She was slightly sickened by the longing in Opal’s voice to just give up control and go murdering people for food.
Opal turned to face front again. “No, I didn’t.”
With the conversation over, Zoë was alone again with her thoughts. The view below them was nearly all black now, with the few houseboats casting lights on the water.
But ahead, some blue and green lights were dancing in the darkness, almost too dim to see. Their eyes were accustomed to the dark now, and they caught them. “I think that’s it,” Zoë called, pointing. It was confirmed when a flock of sparrows—Gwen’s heralds that went with her everywhere—joined them briefly in the sky before diving down again to join the goddess.
Bertie, probably to be a jerk, dove after them, and Zoë held on with a death grip and tried not to scream as she was pulled after him.
“You can’t kill me, we have a book due!” she shouted as she hung on. Bertie rumbled a
nd vibrated, and Zoë realized he was laughing.
His wings flattened out and beat twice, stopping their ascent. Zoë smashed forward into Opal’s back, splitting her lip.
“Goddammit, Bertie, I’m renting a car next time,” she grumbled, putting a hand to her lip.
Opal rubbed her shoulder. “You have a hard head,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s to protect my brain so zombies don’t eat it.” Her dress loosened its hold on Bertie, and she slid off his back and rubbed her butt. “Riding a dragon is definitely more romantic in books.”
“You asked for it,” Bertie said calmly, startling her. She turned and saw him in his human form again. His human form and nothing else.
“So you left your clothes behind at the B and B, huh?” Zoë asked, her eyes firmly fixed on his face.
He shrugged. “Where else would they go?”
“Maybe one of us could have carried a pair of pants for you if we had known we needed to,” Zoë said, exasperated. She turned her back on him to look at Opal, who looked amused, but her eyes were riveted to Zoë’s bleeding lip. “Now where are we?”
Opal looked around. The waning moon shone on the trees that dripped with Spanish moss, silhouetting them against the sky. They were on a dirt road littered with potholes and grass, and ahead of them a fallen log lay across the road.
She pointed down the road past the log. “The place where we saw the lights is about fifty yards that way.”
Zoë took out her flashlight and turned it on. The dark trees seemed even darker with the pitiful beam of light challenging them, but at least they would see if they were about to fall into the swamp.
“Do you have a plan?” Bertie asked. “Most people don’t like visitors late at night, and if she lives out here, I’d bet she doesn’t like them any other time, either.”
“And a vampire and a naked dragon aren’t exactly the welcome wagon,” Zoë said.
“Not to mention a rumpled princess,” Bertie said.
“Did you see where Gwen and the others are?” Zoë asked.
“I lost them when the sparrows left us,” he said.
“Be quiet a second, I want to hear if anyone else is around.” Zoë shut her eyes and found herself automatically trying to expand her awareness, as she had in New Orleans. The sensation of being only inside her body, with its defined borders of bone and skin, was horribly restricting.
She wasn’t in a city, of course she couldn’t use the city’s power to eavesdrop or scout ahead. She felt very alone, despite how much the city annoyed her.
Using only her ears—how primitive!—she tried to see if she could sense any other person in the swamps. She could hear breathing from Bertie behind her. Animals rustling in the distance. But nothing that sounded like humanoid feet.
She smiled bitterly. It wasn’t as if she were a nature-loving tracking guru. She was drawn to cities for a reason, and rarely ventured out of them unless it was to travel to another one.
“Can you two hear anything?” she finally asked, whispering so that if there were people listening, they couldn’t hear her.
Opal shook her head. “This is a pointless trip, Zoë. We’re going to go to a house and the owner won’t answer the door because she’s smart. Other people will show up and you will have some sort of heart-to-heart with that man from Public Works, and it will be very sweet, right before he turns into a zombie. Then we will go back to New Orleans, probably walking because you will say something to piss Bertie off and he will leave us here, and I will just hope I can find a place to go before sunrise.”
Bertie stepped up. “You may want to keep it down, ladies.”
Zoë opened her mouth and then closed it, outrage boiling over. “Look,” she said, raising her voice. “I didn’t ask you to kill your child, you did that on your own. I know you’re mourning but don’t let it bleed all over us.”
Bertie put his hand on Zoë’s shoulder. “We don’t know what’s in these woods, can you please—”
“If he hadn’t been working for a human, someone who knows nothing of our kind, he wouldn’t have needed killing!” Opal shouted. “It was you and your precious books that got him killed, not me.”
“Really,” Bertie said. “I really think this would be better discussed in calmer voices.”
Zoë shook off Bertie’s hand and stepped closer to Opal, forgetting entirely that Opal could rip her in half. “That is complete bullshit and you know it. You’re just trying to lay the blame on me to soothe your ego, because you know if you had made a stronger bond with him, he’d be alive now!”
If Opal had a retort, Zoë didn’t hear it. Something hit her from the left, something fast and hard, and she flew off the road and landed hard against a log.
CHAPTER 20
Swamps
SWAMP TOURS
Most coterie who venture into the swamps are doing so in order to experience the lawless frontier, but some just want to see the beauty and learn more about the swamp. There is one coterie-only tour company, the Cypress’s Knees, that specializes in taking coterie around the swamps, giving water-loving coterie a literal taste, and introducing people to some of the local tree nymphs.
You will want to look out for the creature known only as the Sway, an ancient (meat-eating) nymph who prefers to stay out of the public eye, but whose advanced age has made her huge and treelike. Many coterie wish to see her, even though they know that if they anger her, she could easily capsize the boat and devour the coterie tourists (and she has done so, more than once).
If you’re lucky, you might be able to see the great roc, which nests in the swamp in the spring. Other creatures can include feral inugami, the elusive phoenix, and raccoon spirits. But if you think you’re going to see something like an ivory-billed woodpecker, that’s impossible.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Had Opal really hit Zoë? She couldn’t remember. Phil would kill the vampire if she had, though.
Something pricked her arm.
Had someone picked her up? Where was she?
Someone brushed the hair from her forehead, tenderly. Then a piece of tape was pressed over her mouth. When Zoë finally opened her eyes, the presence was gone.
She was in a small room, lying on a cot. A lantern hung from the ceiling, lighting two individuals on other cots. They were an old man and an old woman, shriveled, looking at least ninety years old. Their mouths had the caved-in look that hinted that no teeth were inside. They wore stained white boxers and T-shirts that looked as tired and worn out as they did.
The wall next to the door was lined with shelves holding huge jars of herbs, flowers, and salts. None were labeled, but Zoë recognized many of the herbs and powders from the voodoo shop she’d visited as a ghost.
She couldn’t have gone far from the road; the humidity in the room was the same as in the swamp, and the small windows near the top of the room were propped open. The chilly humidity made the sour smell of unwashed bodies and illness nearly unbearable.
She struggled to pull the tape off her mouth, but discovered leather cuffs at her wrists and a leather strap around her chest, keeping her securely on the cot. She winced as the movement upset the needle in her arm, shooting a pain up to her shoulder. Her neck went cold with alarm when she realized the needle was diverting her blood through a tube and draining it into a glass jar. Clearly the IV wasn’t to give her anything beneficial.
She looked away from the needle and tried to think past her pounding head. So she had been kidnapped away from Opal and Bertie. She wasn’t sure if the two would have lifted a finger to save her, but she had to assume they were either incapacitated, captured and held somewhere else, or in on whatever weird kidnapping was going on.
Instinct made her want to scream out for help, but the tape was firmly keeping her mouth shut.
She looked around the tiny room to get a bearing. The people on the other two cots were sleeping—this she discovered after watching them closely for signs of life. They were not restrained. The thin windows loo
ked to be made of cheap yellow plastic, but were too high and too small to crawl out of. The walls were covered with torn brown wallpaper over drywall, and the carpet was horribly stained and worn, and Zoë had no idea what color it had once been.
The door had no hinges, and had a small concave area to put your hand in to slide it aside to open.
She was in a trailer.
A boat motor rumbled outside, and the room dipped and swayed a bit. A modified trailer that’s also a houseboat, she amended. Houseboat. Someone was looking for a houseboat, she remembered.
The IV was worrying her. She had no idea how long she had been out, only that it was still nighttime. The glass jar was much bigger than one liter, and it was about halfway full. The needle was taped in place, and no amount of wiggling was going to dislodge it. The straps, while loose, were still firmly keeping her down on the cot.
She looked down at her dress, now filthy. But the fabric was still shiny and blue and firmly around her. It was before midnight, then. Not much time had passed since they had gotten to the swamp. She thought as hard as she could to communicate the way she did with New Orleans.
Hey. Dress.
She felt ridiculous, but if her Cinderella fabric had saved her on Bertie’s back, it might be able to help her here. Can you work me out of these restraints? I just need the left wrist, I can do the rest.
The hem of the dress twitched, and the bow around her waist untied itself and snaked over to the restraint. She didn’t remember a bow at her waist, but the dress apparently had use for it. She couldn’t believe it had worked. She wanted to laugh with relief but tried to keep the muffled noise low. The dress fumbled with the restraint, then just wrapped itself around the leather that was pierced by the buckle. It had nearly lifted it off the prong when a bell dinged somewhere outside the room.
The sash from the dress dropped, and the whole dress wilted around her. Its color faded from blue to dirty white, and the gems hanging from it turned to gravel.
Oh no. She twitched under her leather. Midnight. Apparently the fabric lost all its magic at midnight. What the hell was the point of a dress that dies at midnight?
