Bayou Moon te-2

by Ilona Andrews

  “I see. A husband, then. He was hurt. My sympathies. I hope he recovers.” The man nodded gravely. “But he doesn’t interest me as much as the two who brought him. One of them was Cerise Mar. I’d like to learn about her companion. I want to know everything about this other person. Looks. Age. Accent. Anything that you might find helpful to contribute.”

  He smiled at her, a bright dazzling smile. “If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll depart and let you get back to your cooking. That stock smells divine, by the way. So what do you say?”

  He fixed Clara with his stare, and she hesitated, suddenly panicky, like a bird caught in a glass cage. The menace radiating from him was so strong that deep inside she cringed and tried to shield the gaping hole that sucked at the bottom of her belly.

  “It’s an honest offer.” He leaned forward. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll vanish.” He weaved his long fingers through the air. “Like a ghost. An unpleasant but harmless memory that will fade with time.”

  His stare offered reassurance like a crutch, and Clara realized that he wasn’t bluffing. He wouldn’t harm her if she told him what he wanted to know. She felt the need to please him. It would be so easy …

  But he had hurt Urow. The thought sliced through her hesitation. He or someone who worked for him almost took her husband away from her. He would take her children if she let him.

  “I’m afraid that I’m rather pressed for time,” he said.

  Clara took a deep breath and threw the cleaver at him. As he caught the wide spinning blade by the handle, she swiped at the stock pot off the stove and hurled it at him.

  The boiling stock splashed over the man in a wide shower. She dashed away through the doorway, leading him away from the baby, away from Urow.

  An animal snarl of pure rage whipped her into a frenzy. She scrambled through the familiar cluttered rooms, through the den to Ry’s room, to the window. Her fingers grasped the windowsill and she pulled herself up.

  A steel hand clasped Clara’s leg and jerked her down with impossible force. She screamed as the back of her head hit the floor. He jerked her ankle up, nearly lifting her body with one hand. His eyes burned her with deranged fury. Somewhere deep inside a small part of her refused to accept what was happening, stubbornly chanting, It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real …

  The heel of his left hand hit her knee. Her ears caught the sharp snap of the broken bone. In the first second she felt nothing. And then the pain ripped from her knee through her femur into her hip, as if someone poured molten lead into her leg bone. Clara screamed, clawing at the air.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it,” he snarled.

  She barely heard him, trying to roll, trying to draw her ruined leg to her. Oh, Gods, it hurts so much, it hurts, oh, Gods. Help me!

  He wrenched her ankle higher. She saw the cleaver in his hand and shook, her eyes opened wide and frozen with shock. No. No, you can’t do this to me. No.

  The cleaver fell in a shining metal arc. Ice bit her, and then he was holding the bloody stump of her leg, her foot still in the brown shoe. He tossed it aside as if it was a log. It hit the wall and bounced, leaving a bloody smudge.

  Blood fountained from the stump in a crimson spray. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t breathe. All sound fled the world and time slowed to a terrible crawl. She saw the man’s lips move, and then he twisted, shockingly fast to her underwater-sluggish eyes. He leaped up over her, and through the window. Glass fragments showered her like a glittering rain, falling, falling …

  Urow’s face swung into view, his fangs bared, eyes burning with mad rage. She saw him drop the enormous crossbow. He had been meaning to mount the thing up on the roof for ages. It was too heavy for him to wield. How silly.

  His eyes met hers. His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear him. He looked so scared, like a lost child. Don’t be frightened, darling. Don’t be.

  She could feel the darkness encroaching, ready to pounce on her. She tried to reach out to him, to touch his face, but her arm wouldn’t obey.

  I think I’m dying.

  I love you.

  SEVENTEEN

  CERISE slumped in a chair, painfully aware of William waiting next to her like a dark shadow. He didn’t seem to want anything, he just … stood guard over her. It was absurd—she was in the family house—but for some odd reason it made her feel better.

  Across from her, Richard leaned against the wall, watching William with sharp eyes. The rest of the family mulled about. People came and went. Cerise didn’t pay much attention to them.

  “How strong are you, William?” Richard asked.

  “As strong as I need to be,” William answered.

  Richard’s face showed very little, but she had been reading his expressions since they were kids and she found concern in the minute bend of his mouth. Something about William deeply troubled her cousin.

  The door swung open, and Ignata stepped out, wiping her hands with a towel. Cerise rose from her chair.

  “Mikita has two broken ribs,” Ignata announced.

  “What about Aunt Pete?” Erian asked.

  Ignata squared her shoulders, and Cerise knew it was bad. “Mom lost her left eye.”

  The words punched her. Cerise rocked back. She should’ve dumped the damn body into the river. First Urow, now Mikita and Aunt Pete. Urow and Mikita would recover, but eyes didn’t grow back. She’d managed to disfigure her aunt for life.

  Ignata pulled at the towel, twisting it. “We aren’t out of the woods yet. The cadaver was full of tiny worms. When the body exploded, both of them were showered with bone shards and decomposing tissue. The worms are circulating through their bloodstream. So far all of them seem to be dead, but I don’t know if that will persist.”

  “Transparent worms?” William had a look of intense concentration on his face, as if trying to remember something.

  “Yes,” Ignata said.

  “The parasites will activate only when the temperature of the body drops below 88.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Do you know how to purge malaria?”

  Ignata nodded. “And we have Chloroquine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a type of medicine people in the Broken use to stop malaria.”

  “Give it to them,” William said.

  Ignata pursed her lips. Her gaze found Cerise.

  “Do it,” Cerise said.

  Ignata turned and went back into the room.

  Cerise glanced at William. “Did you know the body would explode?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew about the worms?”

  William nodded. “Sometimes the Hand does it to keep the altered bodies from being examined by their enemies.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “My memory doesn’t work that way. If you’d asked me specifically about worms or if the Hand ever infected their operatives with parasites, I could answer.”

  That wasn’t the way normal memories worked. William had done something to himself, Cerise was certain of it now. He was enhanced somehow, just like the Hand’s freaks. Either he was one of them or he’d made himself like them in the name of revenge.

  Cerise wished she could open his head and search it. Since that wasn’t possible, she would have to settle for going with her instincts, and they told her he wanted revenge, yearned for it, the way a man dying of thirst yearned for a drink. When he spoke about Spider, his whole demeanor changed. He tensed, his eyes focused with predatory alertness, his body ready as if it were a coiled spring. She wanted to find her parents with the same desperation.

  And now it had cost her aunt an eye. How the hell was she supposed to live with herself after that? How many more injuries would it take?

  Often wrong, but never in doubt. Right. “Richard?”

  “Yes?”

  “The Hand has a tracker. They may track the body down the river. Let’s put some sharpshooters on our side of the wards. If they show, maybe we could even out the score.”

 
; “Very well.” Richard turned, stabbed William with a long look, and left the room, Erian in tow.

  “You’re still winning,” William said.

  “Urow is hanging by a thread, my aunt is blind in one eye, and my other cousin has two broken ribs.”

  “Yes, but they’re still breathing.”

  Good point. So why didn’t it make her feel any better?

  Ignata reemerged, carrying a box. She set it on the table. “Wallowing in self-hatred or self-pity?”

  “Right now it’s hatred for the Hand,” Cerise told her. “When I switch to self-pity, I will definitely let you know. I should’ve dumped the body overboard.”

  “Oh, please.” Ignata rolled her eyes. “Mom had the time of her life playing with it. I’ve told her again and again: wear the damn goggles. Kaldar stole those special for her. I told her, Mikita told her: wear eye protection, Mom. But no, the lot of us are apparently stupid. We don’t know anything, and she can see just fine, and when she wears her goggles, the lenses fog up …”

  Ignata pulled the towel off her shoulder and threw it across the room.

  “It helps to throw something heavy,” William said.

  Ignata waved him off. “You, hush. Look, Ceri, we all make mistakes, and we pay for them, especially if they’re made out of arrogance.”

  Ignata plucked a vial from the box, and the scent of dirty socks and rotten citrus spread through the room. Valerian extract.

  “So as much as you’d like to own this particular mistake, it belongs to my mom. She owns it all by her own lonesome self and she knows it. If she had worn the goggles, she’d have gotten away with a couple of broken ribs like my brother.”

  Ignata counted off ten drops into a glass and poured some water into it from a bottle. “Drink. You need sleep.”

  Cerise took the glass.

  “I wouldn’t,” William murmured.

  Ignata fixed him with her glare. “You—be quiet. You—bottoms up. Now.”

  It was only valerian, and arguing with Ignata was like trying to reason with a pit bull. Cerise gulped the water in one big swallow. Fire and night rolled down her throat.

  “What did you put in this?”

  “Water, valerian, and a very strong hypnotic. You have about five minutes to get to your room and shower, or you’ll pass out where you stand.”

  “Ignata!”

  “Ignata-Ignata-Ignata!” Ignata waved her arms. “When was the last time you ate or slept? What, nothing to say? You have tonight to sleep, tomorrow to rest, and the day after tomorrow you’re going to take our posse to the Sheeriles, and after that, I won’t have time for you. I’ll be busy patching up everybody else. So you just go on! Shoo! And take your blueblood with you.” She pointed a long finger at William. “You, walk with her and make sure she doesn’t pass out someplace on the stairs.”

  Cerise sighed and headed up the stairs. William followed her.

  “She’s mad,” he said.

  “No, she is trying to keep it together and not cry. Her mother and brother could’ve died. There isn’t much she can do, so she’s bossing me around.”

  He frowned. “You mean, in revenge?”

  “A little, yes. My father used to tell me, ‘When you’re in charge, everything is your fault.’ She blames me a little.” Her feet grew heavier with each step, as if someone slowly poured lead into her bones. “She’d never admit it even to herself, but she blames me.”

  “So that’s what it’s like to have a large family,” he said.

  Now her head grew too heavy. Her eyelids tried to close on their own. She stopped by the door to her room. “Something like that. You haven’t seen the worst of it. Did they give you a room?”

  William bared his teeth. “Yes. Kaldar showed it to me.”

  He said Kaldar’s name like he wanted to strangle him.

  “I’m not mad at you about the worms,” she told him, trying to force her thoughts into a coherent pattern. She yawned. “I’m sorry, I’m very sleepy.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. He was standing a little too close.

  “What kind of blueblood says okay, Lord Bill? You need to work on your cover some more.” She yawned. “You would make a horrible spy. Promise me that while I’m asleep, you won’t injure any of my cousins, not even Kaldar.”

  William looked at her.

  “I’m exhausted and miserable. Promise me. No snapping people’s heads off their necks, no broken bones, nothing to make me regret taking you to my family.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “The little girl says there is a monster in the woods,” he said.

  Something lurched in her chest. “It’s her.”

  William was looking at her.

  “It’s Lark,” she said, her chest hurting. “She thinks she’s the monster.”

  William’s arms closed about her. She should’ve said something. She should have pushed him away. But she felt so tired and so down, and his arms were strong and comforting. He held her to him, and the dull ache gnawing at her receded. It felt so nice, that she just leaned against him. He dipped his head. She watched him do it but didn’t realize why he was doing it until his lips grazed her mouth.

  “Sleep well,” he said. “I’ll watch your family for you.”

  He let her go.

  Cerise closed the door and stared at it for a long moment, unsure if they had really touched or if she had imagined it. She got nowhere and sat on her bed to pull off her boots. She got the left one off, and then the bed turned upside down and fell on the back of her head.

  WILLIAM awoke to the darkened bedroom. The air was cool and a narrow sliver of moonlight sliced through the draperies to fall at the floor. For a moment he lay still, looking at the ceiling, his arms behind his head.

  He’d kissed Cerise and she let him. His memory had preserved the moment with near perfect recall. He remembered everything: the tilt of her face, the angle of her hair, the puzzlement in her dark eyes, the feeling of holding her against him, the delicate trace of her scent on his lips. He would kiss her again, even if her entire family lined up to shoot him while he did it.

  William rolled off the bed, moving on quiet feet, and tried the door handle. Still locked. They had shut him in like he was a child.

  He smiled, pulled open his backpack, and fished out the night suit. He stripped and pulled on the pants and the shirt. The fabric, stained with dark and light gray, clung to him like a second skin. The first time he’d seen the thing, complete with a hood and a face mask covering everything except his eyes, he’d told Nancy that as far as he knew, he wasn’t a ninja. She’d told him to wear it and like it. He still wasn’t sure if she had even known what a ninja was.

  William had to admit, the suit had a certain logic to it. True night was never just black; it was a shifting ethereal mix of shadow and darkness, of dappled gray and deep indigo. A man wearing solid black stood out as a uniform spot of darkness.

  He drew the line at the hood and the mask, though. A man had to have standards, and he had no desire to cover his ears or to breathe through a cloth. Besides, it made him look like a total idiot.

  Since Cerise went to bed, he’d been passed from one relative to another, with Kaldar checking on him every half an hour or so until he was ready to wring the man’s neck. Kaldar had the slick easy charm of a talented swindler. He said whatever popped into his mouth, laughed easily, and talked too much. During the evening William had watched him steal a hook from Catherine’s basket, a knife from Erian, some sort of metal tool from Ignata, and a handful of bullets from one of Cerise’s cousins. Kaldar did it casually, with smooth grace, handled the item for a couple of moments, and slipped it back where it came from. William had a distinct suspicion that if Kaldar was caught, he’d just laugh it off, and his demented family would let him get away with it. They knew Kaldar was a villain. They didn’t care.

  William found a small box with camo paint, and darkene
d his face, splaying the gray, dark green, and brown on in irregular blotches. That done, he slid his knives into his belt and swiped up the Mirror’s crossbow. He loaded it with two poisoned bolts from the quiver, careful not to touch the complicated mechanical bolt heads. The toxin was potent enough to take down a horse in mid-canter. The bolts’ heads were too large and oddly shaped, and his accuracy would suffer, but it didn’t matter. The crossbow was a weapon of last resort, to be used at close range, when death had to be guaranteed.

  Someone in Cerise’s family didn’t play by the rules. Someone had told the Hand about Urow. He was sure that many locals were aware that the Mars had a thoas relative, but only a family member would know that this thoas went to pick up Cerise in Sicktree.

  If there was a traitor in the family, he would have a direct line to Spider or someone on Spider’s crew. And given that Cerise had just arrived home with some strange blueblood in tow, the traitor should be dying to tell Spider about it.

  The traitor would wait until most of the house had gone to bed for the night, and the Mars seemed to suffer from a critical inability to be quiet. The giant house buzzed like a beehive for most of the evening. It was close to midnight now, and Cerise’s noisy family had finally settled down.

  William strapped the sleeper to his wrist. It was a complicated gadget, all clockwork gears and magic, embedded into a leather wrist guard. Four narrow metal barrels sat in a row on top of the sleeper. William pulled three thin wire loops from the underside of the wrist guard and threaded them on his index, middle, and ring fingers. He spread his fingers. The barrels rotated around his wrist like chambers on a revolver. If he flexed his wrist, driving the heel of his hand forward, the lowest barrel would fire, spitting a small canister armed with a needle. The canister held enough narcotic to put a large man into a deep sleep within three seconds.

  It was an elegant weapon. He would miss the Mirror’s toys when this was over.

  The traitor would head for the Mire. He was sure of it. First, he had already learned that nothing that happened within earshot of the Mar house stayed private. Second, Lark mentioned a monster in the woods. Cerise said Lark thought of herself as a monster, but he wasn’t sure she was right. The kid might’ve been confused. She might’ve seen something in the fog and the trees she couldn’t explain to her sister. Some of the Hand’s agents had enough enhancements to give a grown man nightmares, let alone a child. If Lark had found an odd, scary creature in the woods, he wanted to meet it.