Blood on the Bayou (17 page)

I
stumble backward, covering my bare chest with my arms for a moment before I realize I don’t care if the old fairy bastard sees me naked. He’s practically an insect, for god’s sake.

Besides, he’s naked, and
he
doesn’t seem to care.

In fact, he appears pretty damned pleased with himself. He’s smiling like the cat that ate the sofa, sliding his ass back and forth across my damp bar of soap, leaving a trail of light green behind.

“That’s my soap!” I point a serious finger at his face. “Don’t poop on my soap!”

His grin grows another layer of fangs and more green oozes onto my Ivory. I glare at him, trying to focus over the jackhammer of my pulse drilling away in my head. There is a
fairy
in my
bathroom
. Somehow he got inside the iron gate, through the iron grid, and all the way to my house without shriveling into a fairy nugget from overexposure to deadly metal.

“Crap.” My heart works even faster. What if the
gates are down? What if the town is filled with fairies? What if—

I spin to the tiny bathroom window and rip apart the blinds. Outside, the morning light is starting to turn pale yellow and the world is the picture of peace and quiet. Bernadette’s flowers nod in a gentle breeze and what I can see of the street is empty—of people
and
fairies.

Still, I have to be sure, and this thing obviously understands English.

I whip back around, pinning him with my toughest look. “How did you get here? Are you the only one, or are there others?” He responds with a screechy cackle and another wiggle of his bare ass. I step closer and turn off the water with a swift twist of my wrist. “Answer me,” I demand in the new silence. “Answer me, or I’ll do to you what I did to your friends.” Yesterday, I was focused on the fairies closest to the truck and missed this guy, but that’s a mistake that can be remedied. Quickly.

The fairy’s nasty grin falls away. His jaw unhinges and he bares his ancient teeth in a royally pissed-off hiss. His tiny hands fist at his sides and his skin glows a faint yellow, but he doesn’t attack, and when he’s done with his tantrum, he actually answers my question. “I come alone!”

English. He’s speaking English. It’s still blowing my mind.

“How did you get in?” I ask, trying not to lose my shit. Yesterday, I was protected by the suspicion that
he was a figment of my imagination. Now, I know he’s real. As real as the iron gate that should have kept him in the bayou where he belongs. “Why isn’t the iron in the town killing you?”

“Slake are strong.” He flutters into the air, hovering a few inches above eye level. “Slake will have the town and all the food in it. When we want it, we will have it.”

I shiver, knowing he isn’t talking about the food on the shelves at Piggly Wiggly. He’s talking about my friends and neighbors. “You’re a liar. The gate keeps the fairies out. I’ve seen what happens when they get too close. They die.”

“The young ones. Not we who lived through the growing time.” His chest puffs up and his shoulders roll back, as if he’s expecting to start growing again any second. “We learned to drink your poisons and survive. We will learn to live in your metal towns and feed.”

He must be talking about the mutations. That the fairies that lived through the mutations aren’t as sensitive to iron. But that still doesn’t hold water. “It can’t be only the newborn fairies that can’t cross the gate. We’ve always used iron to keep from being attacked. Way before eggs had time to hatch we—”

“Second growing time.”

“Second growing time?” I squint at him. He doesn’t look any bigger than he did the other day, or any bigger than the average fairy. If anything he’s smaller, shrunken and pruned in the way of the very old.

“Nothing a human would know.” He smiles and scratches his stomach. There’s no belly button—
fairies are hatched from eggs, so no umbilical cord. It makes it even stranger that, otherwise, his body could belong to a miniature geriatric. Fairies are remarkably humanoid in appearance, except for the wings and the shark teeth and the black, bulbous eyes.

With my eyes as dilated as they are today, all I need is a pair of wings and some fangs and I could be this dude’s much larger, much younger cousin. He even has a few wisps of red hair on his head that aren’t too far from my color.

I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly not as okay with continuing this discussion naked. This fairy isn’t an insect or even an animal. He’s a creature capable of thought and language and plotting things that will be bad for everyone I care about. I inch back to the dirty clothes basket, grab my discarded tank top, and jerk it over my head. Even with only panties on bottom, I feel better. “Why are you here?” I hope my tone lets Grandpa know I’m not going to be satisfied with vague answers.

“You know why.”

“You want me to leave town. If I don’t, you’re going to keep trying to kill me.”

He grins another mean grin. “Maybe not so stupid.”

He made a joke. Employed sarcasm. It makes it hard to swallow or think of what to say. Fairies having language is one thing; having a smart-ass sense of humor is another entirely. It makes them even more human. And more evil than I ever imagined.

They aren’t mindless killing machines driven by
instinct. They are thinking, feeling, humor-possessing creatures, who have simply decided they should be at the top of the food chain. And that people are their preferred meat.

“I’m not leaving,” I whisper, the sick feeling in my gut worse than ever. “Especially not knowing you can get inside the gates. I’m going to stay here and I’m going to kill every single fairy who dares to flap a wing in Donaldsonville.”

“You can’t kill us all.” His eyes narrow. “You don’t have the strength.”

“I’m tougher than I look.”

“Not when your mind is gone.” He flutters closer, until our noses are only inches apart. “I will come to you every time you sleep. I will fill your mind with blood. You will wake one morning and never stop screaming.”

What small sense of victory I feel for my spot-on deduction is banished by the reality of his words. He really
is
coming to me in my dreams, filling them with horror. And he’ll keep doing it until I’m exhausted and sick and crazy, and, if for some reason that plan fails, I know he’ll move on to killing people, creating more loved ones that I’ve failed to protect. If he can sneak into my house, he could as easily sneak into Cane’s or Fernando’s. Or slip into Sweet Haven and find Deedee on her narrow cot. One bite and their lives will be over. Literally, if they’re among the severely allergic.

Which means there’s only one thing to do.

Grandpa must read the decision in my eyes. He flits away, darting back so quickly that his wings hit
the tile with a soft
thwph
before he slides back down to the poo-streaked soap. “If you kill me, there will be others to take my place!”

I shrug and step closer, until my toes touch the cool claw foot of the tub. “Guess I’ll have to kill them, too.”

“If you kill me, the Slake will take this town.” He puffs up his chest again, trying to look fierce. But I can see the fear in him. Guess he didn’t expect me to fight back. Guess I really am smarter—or at least more murderous—than he gave me credit for. “They will not suffer the death of their king.”

“Like you won’t suffer Gentry.” This is it. My chance to get some real information. “What are Gentry?” He opens his mouth to hiss, but I stop him with a finger in the air. “Tell me, or I’ll kill you right now.” He closes his mouth, presses his lips together. I shrug again. “All right. I would say it was nice knowing you, but you’re a filthy, mean bastard who pooped on my last bar of soap. And you tried to kill me, so I figure it’s only—”

“The Gentry rule,” he says, arms beginning to tremble. I’m guessing with rage, but he could be cold. It’s cooler in the bathroom than the rest of the house and he
is
naked and wet. For a second I think about offering him a washcloth to wrap up in, but decide that would affect the credibility of my death threat and settle for another glare.

“And?”

“They are the most powerful Fey folk,” he says. “They lived long ago. We were their slaves.”

“How long ago?”

He crosses his arms, stilling the tremble. “Longer than you can imagine.”

“So you’re . . . thousands of years old.”

“I am time itself.” His chin lifts, and his nose pokes proudly into the air. “I am of the first. I am a god.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re an egomaniac.”

“I am a father to my people. I will not see them slaves. No new Gentry will rise.”

“You said the Gentry were fairies.” I point over my shoulder at my bare back. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not.”

“Not all Fey folk have wings.”

“I’m not a Fey folk. I’m a person.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He sniffs, scrunches his face into a pout. “You grow too powerful.”

“And whose fault is that? Your people are the ones who bit me and infected me with their stupid magic in the first place. I never wanted this.”

“The young ones are fools. They are forbidden to touch the poison people. But children never listen.” His proud head dips. Ruling a bunch of bloodthirsty kids can’t be easy. “Few will live to see a hundred years. Fewer a thousand.”

“Few of them will live to see next week if you don’t stay out of Donaldsonville, out of my dreams, and away from anything with two legs. The next time—the
very
next time—I hear about a person getting bitten in your territory, I’m going to come out there and kill every last one of you.”

He chuckles, but when he lifts his eyes he doesn’t look amused. Or scared. He looks . . . defeated. “You
kill the Slake; you kill yourself. Your magic is the magic of the Slake.”

There’s a very serious, very human expression on his tiny face. He isn’t the gross old geezer or the gleeful monster anymore. He’s realized that act isn’t going to work. Now he’s trying something new, something that sounds like the truth.

“Your power comes from the lesser Fey,” he says. “It is why we must obey your magic. But we have our own power. Long ago, the Gentry slaughtered us to protect the humans they loved. But when the Slake died, the Gentry died, too. All but the strongest, who used the last of their magic to make the Slake so small it seemed we had ceased to exist.”

“But you didn’t,” I whisper, awed by the story he’s telling. What if it’s true?

“We did not.” He stands on top of the soap, managing to look dignified despite the fact that his own excrement squishes between his toes. “We formed hunting parties to kill insects for the blood we needed. We survived in a world filled with predators. We endured until the poison came and our bodies grew large and the birth of new Slake led us into a second growing time. We will survive the challenges of the new world. And you, Annabelle Lee.”

“So if I kill too many of the Slake, I kill myself?” I ask, trying to sort out his logic.

“And your Gentry friends.”

Hm. “But shouldn’t that go both ways? If we have some kind of symbiotic magical relationship, shouldn’t you suffer for killing me?”

He grunts, and I detect a hint of respect in his beady eyes. “Slake will die when you die. But if you refuse to leave, it is a price we will pay. This is our breeding ground, the only place where Slake eggs survive.”

Well then. We’re back to this. He needs me gone, and I refuse to leave. That means one of us has to die, and I don’t plan on it being me. I should kill him now. Fast, like lightning striking, before he can fly away. Instead, I find myself asking, “Do you
have
to eat people? I mean, it sounds like you survived on insects for a long—”

“Mosquitoes.”

Ah. Mosquitoes. They’ve been getting their human blood second hand, but they’ve still been getting it. I should have guessed. I know fairies have a taste for the bloodsuckers.

“But we could go without,” he says, surprising me with the freely offered information. “We fed on other beings before humans walked the earth.”

“Then why don’t you go
back
to feeding on other beings?” I know reasoning with this man is pointless, but I can’t stop myself from trying. “Leave people alone. If you do, there’s at least a chance we could—”

“Declare a peace?” The fairy laughs, a grating screech that makes me wince. “Humans don’t understand peace. Or balance. They fight nature with bombs and medicines and poison. Now their poison has created a solution to the human virus. The Slake will feed and the earth will reclaim the rotted bodies of the dead and sigh with relief.”

“You make it sound so poetic.” My tone is dry, but inside I’m feeling anything but cool or unaffected. He’s talking about a fairy apocalypse. All-out war between the human and the Fey.

“It is justice. But you can be spared. For a time. Leave. And live.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t?” He crouches on top of the soap and runs a thoughtful finger over a patch of dried suds. “I have seen your sleep thoughts. I know your desire. I could show you the way to the cave of screams.” Something inside me perks up. He’s talking about the cave Hitch’s friend found. He has to be. “The man would leave. You could take the little girl and—”