mad, tearing up through the narrow streams away from the river, deeper into the swamp. The trees flew by. If they wrecked, he’d have to jump into the water. At least he’d get a soft landing.
The gray man shuddered, groaning quietly. Cerise had insisted on dragging the hunter corpse on board, and looking at the two bodies, William wasn’t sure who looked more dead, the hunter or her cousin.
Urow’s eyes snapped open. William knelt by him. The swelling had spread through the shoulder, up his chest. William touched the affected flesh. Hard as a rock. If the swelling reached Urow’s neck, the man would suffocate. His own body would strangle him.
“Blueblood,” the gray man said. “Thank you for shooting the line. One in a thousand shot.”
“Not a big deal,” William said.
Urow’s lids slid closed. He trembled again and passed out.
Cerise took half a second to glance at him. Her eyes were full of ghosts.
William came to stand by her. Her scent washed over him and he savored it quietly.
The stream had narrowed, and she couldn’t maintain the break-neck speed. Even if the narrow waterway allowed it, the rolpie couldn’t take it. When she surfaced to gulp a breath, her sides heaved and foam dripped from her lips. Cerise saw it, too, and eased on the reins.
The gray man didn’t have long. “Can we bleed the poison out?” William asked.
She shook her head. “I knew this was going to happen. Urow thinks that because he can lift a small boat by himself and he looks scary, it makes him a great fighter. He has no training. He doesn’t battle, he brawls. Just waves his arms back and forth and hopes he’ll hit somebody.”
“When the shit hits the fan, brute strength doesn’t cut it.”
“You think I haven’t told him that?”
“Then why did you have him pick you up?”
Cerise clenched her teeth. “Because I’m an idiot, that’s why. He wanted to be useful. He sat there and bitched and moaned about how he never gets to do anything for the family and how if I just let him come and help this one time, he would feel that he belongs. Urow’s invited to every family celebration. He’s always welcome at the main house. He gets a portion of the family profits, just like everybody else. One of us goes to visit him at least once a month. How much more included can he be? I should’ve just said no, but he pushed all the right buttons and now he is dying and I don’t have a scratch on me.”
William looked at her face. Her lips pressed together in a rigid line. Her skin turned pale and her features looked sharper. She seemed smaller somehow, and she smelled like a cornered animal. He wanted to grab her and clench her to him, until she looked normal again.
William raked through his brain, wishing he knew the right things to say. “Let’s say you’re a soldier. They call a code-white mission and you volunteer. You assumed responsibility for your own safety and put yourself on the line. If you die, it’s on your neck, not anybody else’s. Nobody made you step forward and accept the mission. Your cousin volunteered. If he dies, it’s not your weight to carry.”
He checked her face, but she didn’t seem any better.
“It’s like a fight,” William said. “You attack or you dodge. If you hesitate, you’ll die. If you make a mistake and get cut, you ignore the pain until the enemy is dead. You made a decision and took a wound. Slap a bandage on it and move on. You can feel sorry and second-guess yourself later, after you’ve won and you’ve got leave, a bottle, and a woman.”
Cerise stared at him for a second.
He probably shouldn’t have said that last bit.
A powerful bellow rolled through the swamp. The hair on William’s arms rose. Something ancient, huge, and brutal hid in the gloom, watching them with hungry eyes, and when it roared, it was as if the swamp itself gained voice to declare its might before swallowing them whole.
Another bellow joined the first, rolling from the left. William raised his crossbow.
“The old gators are singing,” Cerise told him.
He peered at the darkness between the colossal cypresses guarding the stream, but saw nothing except twilight gloom.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “For trying to make me feel better and for saving Urow. It wasn’t your fight.”
“Yes, it was,” he told her.
Something shifted in the branches to the left. William raised his bow. Whatever the thing was, it was humanoid and fast.
The shape scuttled through the branches, wearing gloom like a mantle, and leaped to the next tree. Stocky body, black hair. A second thing dashed through the branches on the right. This one within crossbow range.
“Don’t shoot,” Cerise said. “It’s Urow’s children.”
The one on the left sprinted and dived into the water off the branch. The gray body shot through water, and the boy launched himself onto the deck.
They swam like fish. William made a mental note never to fight one in the water.
The kid rose, dripping water. His face was young, sixteen or seventeen, but his body was thick and muscled like that of a bear. The boy glanced at the gray man’s body and bared his teeth in a feral snarl.
“Copper poisoning,” Cerise barked. “Tell your mother, Gaston.”
The boy dived into the water.
The stream made a tight turn and opened into a pond, cradled by giant cypresses. A house perched on stilts, with a small dock. Built of logs and stone, with a roof sheathed in green moss, the house looked like it had grown from the swamp like a mushroom.
A woman ran onto the dock and clutched a rail. Bright red hair fell in a braid from her shoulders. Urow’s wife.
Cerise snapped the reins, pulling a burst of speed from the exhausted rolpie. They docked with a bump.
The woman glared at them. William had a feeling that if her eyes could shoot fire, both he and Cerise would’ve been burned to a crisp.
“Damn it, Cerise. What did you do to him?”
Cerise’s face clenched into a rigid mask. She turned her back to the woman. “William, can you help me lift him?”
“Follow me,” Urow’s wife snapped and took off.
William grasped Urow under his arms and paused, unsure how to get four hundred pounds of deadweight onto the dock. Another of Urow’s kids surfaced and pulled himself onto the boat. This one was older, layered with thick slabs of muscle like his father. He grasped his dad’s legs and together they hauled him onto the pier and to the house.
“Hurry!” Urow’s wife yelled. “On the floor here.”
William followed the boy through the door. They maneuvered through the cramped inside into a dimly lit room and lowered Urow on the stack of quilts.
Urow’s wife bent over her husband. The swelling was half an inch from his throat. “Mart! Herbs!”
The boy ran into the kitchen.
Urow’s wife dropped on her knees, threw open a large box, and pulled out a scalpel sealed in plastic. “Cerise, tracheotomy tube, now.”
Cerise tore at another plastic bag.
The red-haired woman crossed herself and sliced her husband’s neck with the scalpel.
William escaped outside.
WILLIAM stood on the dock and watched hundreds of tiny worms crawl up the roots of the cypress. The worms glowed with gentle pastel colors: turquoise, lavender, pale lemon. The entire pond was bathed in the eerie glow. He once had a drink in a bar with LED glasses that lit up when you tapped the bottom. The effect was strikingly similar.
He’d waited on the dock for at least two hours. At first he caught brisk orders filtering through the walls from the inside, then magic had brushed against him. Now all was quiet. He couldn’t tell if the gray man had survived. William hoped he had. The gray man had children, and children had to have fathers.
He had no father. He’d never find him, even if he wanted to look for him, which he didn’t. At Hawk’s some
