Blood on the Bayou (28 page)

“Hitch, come take a look at this.” I squat down beside the fairy, shocked again by how human they look when their jaws are closed.

Hitch appears next to me, hood in hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah, but look at that.” I point to the thing’s face as it struggles to sit up despite a nasty-looking burn
mark on its stomach. “Have you ever seen blue facial hair on a fairy?”

Hitch’s knees crack as he squats for a better look. “No. You don’t see facial hair of any color too often, but I’ve never seen—”

The fairy opens its mouth and hisses, letting out a stream of bright green fluid that sparkles even in the dark garage. Hitch and I flinch away, and the fairy’s spittle lands on the concrete between us. And starts to sizzle. And smoke. And eat a hole in the floor the size of a roll of quarters.

“What the—”

“Watch it!” Hitch pulls me back as the fairy’s jaw drops and a gurgle indicates he’s gearing up for another corrosive loogie. But this time, the spit only dribbles down his chest and soaks harmlessly back into his faintly green skin. He’s fading fast, which is the only thing that gives me the courage to lean forward and take a look in his open mouth.

“See that?” I point with a pinkie finger. “What the hell is that?”

“Careful,” Hitch warns, but he’s leaning in along with me.

“There’s only one row of teeth.”

“And the inside of the mouth and gums are blue.”

He’s right. The gums are especially bright, almost fluorescent. A normal fairy’s mouth looks a lot more like a person’s mouth—pink, aside from a touch of green at the gum line when venom is produced.

“Take a look at the wings,” Hitch says.

The fairy lies on his back, but I can still see his
wings. They’re smaller than most, and thicker, with clear bulbous growths at the tips and a glistening, wet, greenish look that reminds me more of a sea creature than an insect. Fairy wings resemble butterfly wings. They’re just bigger and made of sturdier stuff.

“It’s a new species.” Hitch scans the floor, taking in what’s left of the fairies I’ve already stomped. All of them have the same weird wings. In the adrenaline free fall after the door closed, I hadn’t noticed. “It has to be a new species.”

“One we had no idea existed,” I mumble. “But whose population numbers in the hundreds of thousands. At least.”

“Yeah.”

And the nightmare gets bigger. How is this possible? When there have been people like me out in the bayou collecting fairy-related biological samples for years? Someone should have seen one of these guys. Or some sign of them—a wing or a breeding ground or something killed by their acidic spit—
something
. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” He nudges the fairy over onto its stomach with his shoe. It doesn’t put up much of a fight. The greenish glow beneath its skin is fading, and it’s starting to turn as blue as its facial hair. The longer we look at it—taking in the horned ridge on its back—the more alien it seems. The normal fairies are so much more humanoid in comparison. “I wonder why the ones who attacked me didn’t spray the corrosive liquid,” Hitch says. “If it eats through concrete, it would have eaten through my suit.”

“I don’t know. But think about what these fairies and our fairies could do together.”

“One group to destroy the iron fences, one group to infect or kill everyone still living south of Hattiesburg.”

“Guess we’ll have to hope these fairies don’t like the other fairies.”

“I just hope their venom doesn’t make us crazy,” he says. “Or dead.”

“Those are good things to hope.”

He stands with another knee crack that makes me wonder if all that running he’s doing is sitting well with his joints. “Let’s go see why no one is coming to check who’s in their garage.”

I nod. “I wonder what happened to the car we heard coming?” I make a mental note to text Cane the second I get the chance. I have to warn him to stay out of the bayou.

“Hopefully it turned around and made it back to town.” Hitch turns away from the fairy dying in front of us.

Or the dying . . . whatever he is.

“Hitch,” I call, unable to take my eyes off the creature as it pulls in its strained final breaths. “What if they’re not fairies?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if they’re something else? What if there are other things out there? Things that are only now mutating that we have no idea how to protect ourselves from?”

“Remember what I said about thinking too much?” He appears at my side again.

I think about his words in the truck, and the kiss he gave me after. “I don’t think too much. I don’t think
enough
.”

“That’s part of the cycle. You think too much, until you drive yourself crazy with anxiety. Then you shut thought down and go on a bender until you’re too messed up or hungover to think any more.”

Hm. Well. Apparently he does know me fairly well, even after the years apart.

“I’ve been drinking less.” I avoid comment on the validity of his theory.

“I’ve noticed. I’m proud of you.” He grins his Hitch grin, the one that always makes me feel like one of the people who gets the joke. “I bet that makes you want to drink more, doesn’t it?”

One side of my mouth crooks. “Already thinking about whether I’ve got margarita mix in the freezer.”

Hitch laughs. Actually
laughs.
But then, what else is there to do? We’ve both done our share of crying the past couple of days.

I glance back at the blue-chinned fairy, but he’s not breathing anymore. I’ll have to come back and collect a few of the bodies for the FCC before we leave. Lance and his partner will have something I can use to carry the dead fairies in. Some Tupperware, an empty sour cream container, something. Assuming Lance and Friend aren’t dead.

Hitch is right. It’s strange that no one’s come to check on us. The garage door made a significant amount of noise, and then there’s the swarm that continues to roar outside.

“Come on,” Hitch says. “Let’s go.”

I stand to follow him and nearly jump out of my skin as my phone buzzes in my pocket again.

God. Deedee. She’s driving me
nuts
. I fish the phone out with a sigh, intending to send Cane a quick text and then turn my ringer to silent, but my latest messages stop me cold.

The first unread text is from Theresa, warning me that she had to take my cat to the vet, but that everything will be fine and to give her a call at Swallows when I get the chance. The second is from Deedee. It’s a picture of a sickly looking Gimpy, and beneath it Deedee’s written, “Me and Gimpy r at vet w/Miss Theresa. I’m staying w/him today. He got his stomach sucked, but he still mite die. And u don’t care. I mite live w/Miss Theresa. She says I’m a good head in a crysis.”

Theresa already has two children she can barely afford and doesn’t see as much of as she’d like because she works so much. But maybe she
will
take Deedee in. Theresa’s a good mom and no doubt better for Deedee than I could ever be. Hell, Sweet Haven is probably better for her.

Despite the fact that my cat has nearly died—yet again—it’s good that Deedee’s getting over her fixation with living with me. So I don’t understand why the screen looks blurry as I text Theresa a quick thank-you and a promise to call as soon as I can, then Cane a warning not to come into the bayou because of a code-red threat I’m about to call into the FCC.

It’s probably the smell of the weird fairy bodies
stinging my eyes. They have a noxious odor—sulfur and rancid lemon juice, mixed with freshly chopped green onions. By the time I shove my phone back in my pants pocket, tears are rolling down my face. I swipe them away with the back of my hand and start toward Hitch through a cloud of stink so powerful it feels like I’m swimming in it.

“Guess we know why we’ve never found any corpses,” Hitch says as I climb the steps to join him.

I follow his nod, scanning the garage where the weird fairies’ bodies are turning to greenish-blue mush that burns a fist-sized hole in the floor beneath them. I lift my imaginary pen and make an
X
in the air.

“Blessing the dead?” Hitch asks.

“Marking collecting samples off my list.”

“That makes more sense.”

“You know I’ll never find religion.”

“Godless heathen.” Hitch pulls his gun from its holster, and pushes through the heavy white door.

I
nside the building, the hallway with the red tile floor is weirdly quiet. It was quiet yesterday, too, but that was a different kind of quiet, a quiet that hinted at people breathing air in other rooms, of meals recently prepared and toilets recently flushed and other recent happenings that accompany the living of lives.

Today, there’s nothing but an eerie stillness, underlined by the hum of the fairies gathered outside.

As Hitch and I climb the stairs to the office, we get another look at our attackers through the glass walls of the stairwell. The swarm is massive—a biblical plague that fills the sky and blocks out what sun peeks through the gathering storm clouds. I swear it looks nearly as big as it did on the other side of the river.

“You’re sure you saw some of them falling on the bridge?” I whisper, not wanting to draw the fairies’ attention to the fact that we’re no longer inside the garage. If they can’t make it through the garage door, they probably couldn’t force their way through thick, industrial grade glass, either, but I’d rather not test that hypothesis.

“I think I did,” Hitch whispers back. “But it doesn’t look like iron affects them the way it does other fairies. Good thing that garage door is thick.”

“Good thing.” I swallow and keep climbing the stairs, trying not to imagine the Donaldsonville gates falling and this swarm spraying skin-melting bile over everyone I care about.

“I wonder why they’re gathered in a swarm like that?” Hitch steps off the top step and we move down another red tile hallway, away from the glass. “It was almost like they were waiting to attack whoever came down that road.”

I stop halfway down the hall. Attack.
Waiting to attack
.

“What’s wrong?” Hitch asks, stopping beside me.

“Did you see me making the fairies fall? With . . . my mind?”

His brow wrinkles. “When? In the garage?” I nod, and his brow smoothes. “No, but I was wondering how you took down so many of them. Guess your superpowers are working again?”

I cross my arms and shoot him a narrow look. “Are you making fun of me?”

He rolls his eyes. “Honestly, Annabelle, you think I have time to—”

“So you believe me, now?”

“I thought we established that on the drive over.”

We did? Maybe I should have turned down the Johnny Cash and focused on the conversation. “Well, yeah. Okay. So I figured out yesterday that inanimate objects aren’t the only things I can move. I mean, I
knew I could work with living tissue because of what happened with Stephanie in the basement, but—”

“Thanks for that,” he says. “By the way.”

I wave his thanks away. “You don’t have to thank me.” I hurry on before I lose my nerve or Hitch tells me we don’t have time for chitchat. “And I want you to know I don’t plan on doing anything to get between you and Stephanie. Even if you want me to.” Now that I know what’s going on with Stephanie and the baby, it’s even harder to imagine the tension between Hitch and me leading to a good place. It’s time to cut the cord. Once and for all.

Hitch’s eyes drop to the tile as he gives a single nod. “Okay.”

“So no more love or lips or . . .” I clear my throat, surprised by how tight it feels. “Other stuff.”

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

Hitch looks up, sadness in his eyes, but a hint of that unsinkable smile curving his lips. “Message received.”

“I know this isn’t the time,” I say, seemingly unable to quit babbling. “I just . . . I . . . I needed to—”

“I understand. You’re right. I’m not in any place to—”

“And also, I can control the fairies. Make them do what I want.”

Hitch blinks.

“And kill them by thinking about wanting them dead. And it works on normal fairies and the new fairies and I’m probably going to get better at killing
them once I get another shot. My first shot is wearing off early because I drank too much whiskey last night.”

It takes Hitch a second to adjust to the change in gears, but when he does I see the implications of what I’ve said rise in his eyes, popping up like targets in the interactive shooting range he liked to visit when we were in college. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah.”

“They’re trying to kill you before you can kill them.”

I nod. “Though how the new fairies found out about what I can do is anybody’s guess,” I say, mind spinning. “Maybe they saw what happened? When I killed the other fairies? Maybe that’s why they were waiting for me here, since this is the route I took yesterday?”

“They’re intelligent,” he says with a numb shake of his head. “And they’ve been fucking hiding it, those fucking, sneaky little—”

“They are sneaky bastards.” I’m trying to think of the best way to break the whole “they can also talk and I can talk to them, and I made a deal with one to find the cave, but he lied and tried to get us killed, and now I’m pretty sure that he’s going to keep trying to kill me, while venting his spleen on the people I care about in the meantime” news, when we hear the first non-fairy-buzzing sound since we entered the building.