Bayou Blues (21 page)

He’d forfeited his right to a happy ending the moment he had someone try to drive me off the road.

If he wanted a war, he had it.

I was not a born private detective.

Several times while we were tailing Deerling, Wilder had to remind me not to get too close, and whenever we got too far back, I started to worry we would lose him. Lose him
where
I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t a big town, and now that we knew what car he was driving, we should be able to spot him easily.

“If he goes to the church, we’re not going to be able to follow him,” I said. There was nowhere near the big building we could park inconspicuously, and considering what had happened the last time we walked on Tim’s lawn, I wasn’t too keen to repeat the performance. One arrest in a week was enough for me. If I had to tell Callum I was back in jail, he’d never trust me again.

As it was I was walking a fine line with him allowing me to spend the extra two days in Franklinton on my own. I wasn’t about to squander that opportunity by being an idiot.

We drove past the turnoff into Franklinton, bypassing the road that would have taken us directly to the church.

“Where’s he going?” Wilder asked.

Like I’d know.

After another fifteen minutes of driving I was dead certain we weren’t going anywhere near town, which made me think Deerling was going to lead us somewhere useful. For all I knew he might be going to pick up baby supplies at Walmart, and God knew he’d have to drive a long way to get there. Yet I didn’t think that was the case.

I was grateful that the farther we got from town the more traffic picked up on the highway. I let a car get between us and was careful to not draw attention to us. Still, fear circled around me like a shark in bloody water. No matter how many precautions we took I felt certain he knew we were back here.

Another ten minutes and I was wringing my hands on the wheel, ready to turn around. I could only follow so long before it got obvious, and we were damn near crossing the line. I had almost announced an ultimatum, when Deerling’s signal went on and he exited the highway onto an obscured dirt road. He made the exit so quickly I was already driving past the road when I realized what had happened. I pulled over to let the car behind me pass, and shut the engine off.

“What are you doing? Go back.” Wilder craned his neck to look over his shoulder.

“Yeah, let me drive blind down some dirt road where we have no idea what’s at the end, and we could be driving ourselves right into a trap. Sounds like a peachy-keen idea.”

He frowned, glancing back again. “So what’s your plan, since you obviously have a better one?”

I drummed my fingers on the dash and chewed my lower lip. I didn’t
have
a plan. To this point I’d only thought far enough ahead to keep following Deerling until he led us to something. Now we’d arrived at that potential something, and there was no easy way to stay on his tail.

“We could wait here until he comes back out?” I suggested weakly. Even as I said it, it sounded pathetic.

He gave me a look that said he wanted to say more, but he was too polite to actually spit it out. Considering the things he was willing to say, I had to imagine it must be something pretty unpleasant for him to bite his tongue.

“We can’t drive in there.” I wanted to know what Deerling was up to as badly as Wilder did, but not enough to waltz into the dark unknown, where we both might end up dead. “We are
not
driving in there.”

I’d barely finished speaking, and Wilder was out of the car. We were a little ways beyond the turnoff, far enough that anyone leaving would probably think our car had broken down, but close enough we could see the drive. Wilder was halfway there by the time I got out of the car and engaged the auto locks. I had to jog to catch up to him. Long-legged, speedy son of a bitch.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

“You said we’re not driving in. I’m not driving.” A few yards from the turnoff Wilder hopped into the ditch and made his way up the opposite slope. I checked for traffic—stupid since I was already across the road—and followed him. The voice in my head that constantly made me toe the line and do the right thing was having a
field
day with this.

Bad idea, bad idea
.

Yeah, no fucking shit, guardian angel. But if the best she could do was scold me as it was happening, a fat lot of good that did. Typically, by the time I was in trouble, it was too late to go back and reconsider.

Bitch, you’re on your own
.

Like I wasn’t before.

I dodged a branch swinging back out of Wilder’s path and caught up to him inside the woods. “What the hell?”

“Genie, you can come with me, or you can wait in the car. I don’t care. But nothing is stopping me from following that prick and finding out what is dragging him all the way out here.”

He kept going like I wasn’t there. Periodically he would stop, sniff the air and alter his path slightly. It was funny. I’d been around wolves almost my whole life, but some of them tried harder than others to play human. We all used our skills to varying degrees, but Wilder seemed to slip them on as easily as a pair of gloves. It was rare to see a wolf as comfortable with his own animal as Wilder was.

I wanted very badly to know what it was like to run with him.

Running with the pack back home, or on my own in the swamps, were experiences I was familiar with. Once I’d learned to put a tether on my magic when I shifted, I was able to enjoy being a wolf and letting the wild part of myself off its leash. But I was never truly
free
. I needed to be aware of what I was feeling because if I lost control, the magic might go haywire. Someone could get hurt.

People could die.

That kind of threat looming over me made it hard to totally let go. Yet somehow, I suspected Wilder had no problem being as reckless and carefree as his wolf form allowed for. I wanted to know if running with him would make me feel equally alive.

We moved through the woods quiet as smoke, me contemplating the sinews of his back, wondering what his wolf looked like. There was no rhyme or reason to our lupine forms. A fair-haired guy like him could have a wolf as black as coal. Sometimes hair color was the same in both forms, but it was rare.

My own wolf, I’d been told, was salt-and-pepper gray. I’d never seen myself in that form, but
La Sorcière
had described it to me once.
Like winter coming in the dead of night, snow blotting out the stars
.

It sounded better when she said it.
Tu est comme l’hiver venant du plus profond de la nuit, la neige voilant les étoiles.

The French sure did have a way with words. Everything
La Sorcière
had said, when she deigned to speak at all, was like liquid poetry rolling off her tongue. The simplest words were magic.

I was so lost in thought I walked directly into Wilder when he came to a sudden halt. I raised my hands up, bracing them against his lower back, and was shocked by how soft the cotton of his shirt was. Before common sense could stop me, I trailed my hands down slowly, enjoying the feel of the material and his warm skin, until I realized what I was doing and stepped away.

He smelled like cheap hotel soap and fresh sweat. The lingering fragrance of motor oil was barely there today.

Wilder glanced back at me, his gaze darting down to my hands, though they weren’t on him anymore. He smirked and gestured to something on the ground ahead, leaving me no opportunity to dwell on the incident. I skirted around him for a better look.

Was that…?

Ahead of us, growing in a wide circle too evenly spaced to be natural, was more magnolia. The white blooms were almost blinding against the otherwise dark green backdrop of the tree leaves. The life of the flowers was already dwindling. The shell-like waxy white petals cupped yellow pollen, the tender edges of each flower starting to brown.

The smell in the air was overpowering. Lemons and honey, reminding me of Lina’s perfume, but turned up to eleven. Even with Wilder right beside me, the soapy scent I’d gotten off him moments earlier was lost to the sugary-sweet fragrance from the blossoms.

I wrinkled my nose, my eyes watering from the wall of perfumed air we’d walked into. The odor was thick, bordering on toxic. This was exactly why werewolves didn’t spritz on CK One on their way out the door every morning. Scent was much more intense to us than it was to humans, and it was the sort of thing we couldn’t turn off. We might be able to ignore our inner wolves, but some of the features weren’t optional.

Once I got over the impact of the magnolia tree border, I realized that’s precisely what it was. A strategically planted hedge. And since we were in the middle of the woods, I didn’t think someone had placed it here for its aesthetic value.

Crouching down, I brushed fallen leaves back off the ground. Purple flowers winked up at me.

“Look at you,” Wilder declared, lowering himself to my level. “Little bit of Nancy Drew in you after all.”

“Does that make you Bess or George?” I rubbed the petals of the wolfsbane and raised my fingers to my mouth, tasting them. I knew what it was, but it felt like a small act of defiance to prove to myself I couldn’t be defeated by their flora.

“Why do I have to be one of the girls?” he asked, sounding fake hurt.

“Because her boyfriend was useless.”

He smirked and helped me to my feet. “Better a useful woman than a useless man, I say. Which one was the flirt?”

“Bess, I think.”

“Then call me Bess.”

His hand paused around my wrist, and I fought to swallow. When I finally got the lump in my throat down, my stomach gurgled. How the hell had I ever managed to date, let alone keep a boyfriend, when I was apparently only capable of acting like an idiot around men?

You’re not an idiot around Cash.

No, and I wasn’t in a position right now to think about why. I slipped my hands out of Wilder’s and was about to speak when something behind him caught my eye. At first, seeing only a flash of movement, I was terrified it might be the spectral woman haunting me. I wondered if I’d be able to ignore her so Wilder wouldn’t think I was batshit crazy.

I wondered if he might be able to see her too.

Then the figure moved, and I let out a small gasp of surprise.

A little girl, her hair strawberry blonde and tangled, stood about ten feet away, clutching a battered teddy bear. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. She was sucking her thumb, but when she noticed me staring, she stopped and pulled her thumb from between her lips with a small, guilty smile.

“Hello.” I waved, hoping not to frighten her.

She looked as though she might put her thumb back in her mouth but thought better of it. Instead she glanced over her shoulder, beyond the magnolia to something I couldn’t see. She seemed to be considering making a run for it.

“Do you live near here?” Wilder stared at me when she didn’t answer, shrugging but clearly at a loss for how to deal with this tiny interloper.

“You can’t be here. You gotta go before they see you,” the girl announced. Her voice was raspy, more like a 1940s lounge singer than a child.

“What?” I took a step back. She’d erased any protective impulses I had towards her with one sentence.

This time when she spoke, her voice was singsong. “No one is supposed to see us, Daddy said. He said if anyone sees us, God will be mad, and he’ll make us move again. Please don’t—”

“
Genie
,” Wilder’s voice rang out, cutting the girl’s warning short, but I didn’t even get a chance to look at him. He pushed me, and it was probably the only thing that kept the blow from cracking my skull open.

I crumpled to the ground, covering my head in case a second wave of assault came. The last thing I saw was the little girl’s dead-eyed stared as I was dragged away.

My arms screamed in pain.

I blinked away tears and tried to adjust my position to relieve whatever was causing all my discomfort. My first thought was that Cash had rolled over on my arm while we slept and now the weight of his body had cut off my circulation. It had happened before. We didn’t often sleep in perfect harmony. Usually one or the other of us was making things uncomfortable.

As the room came into focus, so did the memory of how I had gotten there.

I was hanging from the rafters of an old wooden hunting cabin, trussed up like a pig for the slaughter. My hands were tied behind my back, and my legs and shoulders were tethered to the contraption holding me off the floor. The rigging would have put a BDSM rope-play fan to shame.

I didn’t think there was anything sexual about this. They knew precisely what they were doing. When I moved my legs or shoulders, they pulled on each other, rather than the ceiling ropes. I couldn’t separate my hands enough to relieve the rough pressure of my bonds, let alone grab anything. If I moved my head at all, a rope around my neck would tighten enough to remind me it was there.

This wasn’t amateur hour.

“Wilder?” My voice was barely a whisper. I was worried anything else might make the apparatus strangle me.

Micro adjustments were uncomfortable, and rather than relieving any of my pain it just moved the pain to new locations in my body.

Tears sprang up in my eyes, and I tried to blink them away, but they fell, dropping to the dusty floor where a pool of blood had already started to turn brown. My head throbbed from where I’d been hit, but I seemed to have healed. Beneath it was a huge black stain, haphazardly cleaned.

The brown blood was mine, I could smell it.

The black stain beneath it? I didn’t want to think about what had happened to the last person they’d strung up. I just took small relief in knowing it was too old to be Wilder’s.

“Wilder?”

Nothing.

What if he’d been taken somewhere else? It didn’t matter that the blood here wasn’t his. He could still be dead someplace else.

“
Wilder.
” My voice rose, and just as I’d thought, the rope tightened, rough twine digging into the exposed flesh of my throat. I gurgled and stopped yelling. More tears spilled. I wanted to keep shouting for him until he answered, but logic told me yelling myself to death was a stupid way to go.