Authors: Stacey Jay
Dead on the Delta
The air around me churns, a mini-twister that, for a moment, catches me up and carries me along with it. Silken wings pulse against my throat—faster than a racing heart, more dangerous than an exploding locomotive—and then they’re gone. The fairy swarm from beneath the cypress surges past in a rush of glittering flesh and sharp teeth, snarling high-pitched, baby-voice snarls that would be hysterical if this wasn’t a matter of life and death.
Cane’s
life. Cane’s death.
I run, slower than the fairies had flown, but faster than I’ve run in years, closing the distance between me and Cane in seconds. The Fey are already on him, swarming around the hole near his palm as he bats and swings, but they haven’t started gnawing On the suit yet.
There’s still time. Not much, but enough. It
has
to be enough.
Praise for Stacey Jay
“Jay’s writing is light and engaging, and the characters are lively and likable.”
—
Publishers Weekly
on
Undead Much
“Peppered with gross-out humor, the camp flows freely… .”
—
Kirkus Reviews
on
My So-Called Death
“Super entertaining.”
—
Romantic Times
on
You Are So Undead to Me
| Pocket Books |
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Stacey Jay
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Pocket Books paperback edition June 2011
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Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson
Cover design by Lisa Litwack; illustration by Elena Dudina.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-4391-8986-3
ISBN 978-1-4391-8988-7 (ebook)
To my father, Bill, for the title and so much more.
Thanks so much to the
people of Donaldsonville, Louisiana, who charmed me utterly. Your hospitality was incredible. You are gems. Don’t give up on your town or rest until every chemical plant is adhering to clean air standards that protect your health and the health of the next generation. (Please feel free to threaten the nearby factories with killer fairies if you think it will help.) And please forgive me for any fictional modifications to your lovely town. Sometimes I needed things to be a bit different.
Thanks also to my critique partners, Stacia Kane and Julie Linker, both of whom are just plain kick-ass. Thanks to my adorable and hilarious editor, Jen Heddle, for the straight shooting. Thanks to Jennifer Estep and Jeri Smith-Ready for their time, and to the Debutantes of 2009 for a feast of such awesomeness that I’m still feeling stuffed two years later. Thanks to the entire staff at Pocket and to every reader who takes a chance on this book.
And, as always, a special thanks to Grandma Stumpy, my husband, and my two little boys, who inspire me daily to hope for the future. And a super special thanks this time around to my dad. In the mid-1990s Bill Branscum started a gritty contemporary mystery titled
Dead on the Delta
. He died before he could finish the book. I was nineteen years old and I promised I would finish it for him. It took me over ten years and this story now in
no way
resembles what you started, Dad, but this one is definitely for you. Hope you’re well and stirring up fun and trouble on the other side.
DEAD ON THE DELTA
L
osing your lunch sucks.
It sucks even more when you’re not hungover.
My view on upchucking is that you should’ve earned your punishment. But I haven’t earned it, and neither had she. I don’t need those last three years of med school to know the body at my feet was a child not too long ago. Before the animals got to her face, before the bugs crawled inside to investigate the holes the animals made, before—
I barely make the one-eighty turn in time.
The guilty contents of my stomach—cherry Pop-Tarts, coffee, and a touch of last night’s burger and fries—spill out onto the damp earth, adding another layer to the stench of the bayou. I can barely smell the body over the stink. A few of the fairies have laid their eggs early this year. They don’t usually drop their sacs until September, but there’s no mistaking the smell of fairy babies baking in the noonday sun. Smells like a homeless man’s crotch.
Not that I’ve ever been up close and personal with a homeless man’s crotch, but …
“Annabelle? You okay?” It isn’t the first time Cane’s asked. His voice is pinched, strained, not the sexy rumble that made my ribs vibrate less than an hour ago. We could still be tangled up in each other, bitching about the heat in my poorly air-conditioned bedroom if I’d only said “yes” instead of “no” to his offer to play hooky.
As my stomach voids itself and I continue to gag, I wish I’d kept Cane in bed. I wish I’d let him call in sick and stay with me, his big hands warm on my skin. But he’s been scary lately. He wants to stick a pin in our relationship and label the specimen.
I fear labels. I fear dead bodies more.
In the three years I’ve worked for Fairy Containment and Control I’ve seen my share of dead things, but nothing like this. I force myself to turn around, take another look. She isn’t much more than a baby and her face is … gone, eaten away by the scavengers our toxic patch of the Mississippi River Delta hasn’t killed yet.
The chemical spills along the river did their part to make the marshland from southern Tennessee down to Mobile unfriendly to living things. The mutated fairies have done the rest. Fairies can live on animal blood, but the Louisiana Fey hunt humans with a terrifying single-mindedness. Still, most people have the sense to keep safe. Almost no one ventures outside the iron grid that runs throughout Donaldsonville.
As soon as it was confirmed that iron repels fairies, the D’Ville city council cut any program not necessary to keeping people alive, declared downtown refugee central, and sank a million dollars into nailing iron cables to every roof. A sturdy fifteen-foot iron fence completed the protective measures, enclosing the original Donaldsonville of the early 1800s in a metal cocoon, taking the town back to its roots.
As a result, Donaldsonville is one of the few southern Louisiana towns that still welcomes the Adventurous Tourist to its historic buildings, Cajun restaurants, Delta Fairy Museum, and refurbished town square. Despite the modern-day highwaymen that terrorize the roads, tourism is our top source of revenue, and everyone in town acts accordingly. We’re friendly, welcoming, and pride ourselves on being one of the safest places in the South. If you score a ticket on an armored shuttle and actually
make it
to Donaldsonville, you can breathe easy.
This girl shouldn’t have died.
“Annabelle? Annabelle, do you need me to come over there and—”
“No.” My voice doesn’t sound like me. I sound … small.
“Crawl on back, girl, I can get a suit and—”
“No.”
“Come on, Lee-lee,” he says, using a pet name in public, a capital offense in the Annabelle Lee dating handbook. In a different context, I might have flipped him off. If he wasn’t thinking about risking his life
to come hold my hand and there wasn’t a little girl behind me. A
dead
girl, but still …
Still.
“Get the suit.”
“No! Stay there.” Even with an iron suit, Cane won’t be totally safe. The August heat makes the fairies crazy. They’ve been known to bite through metal in their hurry to find a meal. Ingesting iron kills them, but the bite still does its dirty work on the person inside the suit.
For seventy-five percent of the human population, Fey venom leads to insanity, with a slow build to batshit crazy that makes syphilis look gentle by comparison. Another ten percent develop ulcers on the spine that twist healthy bodies into torturous shapes before causing death. And yet another ten percent die instantaneously, hearts stilled within seconds of infection. The convulsions of the severely allergic snap the spinal cord and break teeth, making sure the dying suffer on the way out.
