Blood on the Bayou (27 page)

Hitch is operating so far outside the bounds he’ll be lucky if
he
doesn’t end up in federal custody. He’ll blow that lab up with people still inside if he has to. I know he will. I saw the look on his face. Stephanie and the baby are all he’s thinking about. Maybe there will come a day when he’ll look back on this decision and hate himself for it—I know he has respect for life, no matter how he’s acting right now—but either way, he’s in no position to be enforcing the law.

Maybe he realizes that. Maybe not.

My best bet is to keep Hitch away from Cane and—assuming we get a location on the cave—convince him to let me join him on his mission. I can get my stealth on, I know how to use a gun, and maybe I can help evacuate the lab before the
boom boom
starts. I know most of the people inside are probably not good people, but issuing death sentences without taking the time to investigate feels wrong.

Now, what to do about Marcy? If we get a solid lead from Lance or—

My phone vibrates, making my butt cheek hum for the fifth or sixth time in the past half hour. I pull it out—to make sure it’s still Deedee riding my ass for neglecting to schedule a visit—and find an animated cat crying crystal blue tears, with the message, “Ur cat needs ur love and u r not here for him,” underneath.

As if this is about my cat.

We both know what this is about, but I’m the only one who knows what a
horrible
idea it is for her to care about me, for
me
to care about
her
. An image from my nightmares—the one of blood running down Deedee’s face as her flesh is ripped away—floats through my mind, making my hands shake.

What the hell am I going to do? How can I make sure she’s safe? How—

The phone jumps in my hands and another text—this one of a different cartoon cat shivering in the snow—pops up on the screen, along with, “Gimpy outside Swallows. Acting weird. Plz come help him and show u really care.”

“Subtle, Deedee.” I curse myself for buying her a phone in the first place and start a text asking her how she knows my cat is outside Swallows if she hasn’t snuck out of Sweet Haven again, when a rustling behind me makes me spin around, phone held in front of me like the weapon I wish I had.

“Going to text me to death?” Hitch climbs up the shallow ravine next to the road, his curly hair sticking up and his iron hood clutched in his hand. “Who’s that?”

“What are you doing?” I stuff the phone back in my pocket with the message unfinished. “Put your fucking hood on!”

“Relax.” He ambles toward the truck as if he’s not exposing himself to early death or insanity with every second he spends unprotected. “There are
no
fairies around today. Have you noticed?”

“Um . . . yeah. I guess.” No good will come of telling him about Grandpa Slake. The best thing I can do for Hitch is help him get in and out of that lab without killing a bunch of people, and get him on his way back to New Orleans.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, even before Katrina hit.” He turns in a circle, scanning the tops of the trees. Above our heads, puffy gray clouds drift in from the west, threatening to pull together and make some rain. “Maybe this storm is going to be more serious than it looks.”

“Hitch, I—” I’m about to tell him something close to the truth, but then I hear it, a faint rumble-crunch from the direction of Donaldsonville. “Is that . . .”

“A car.” Hitch grabs my arm and starts back to the truck, moving fast for a man wearing thirty plus pounds of iron. “Is there a place to pull off the road?”

I fumble the keys from my pocket as I throw open the driver’s-side door. “Yeah, by the bridge. There’s a place to pull down by the river, but I don’t know how much cover we’ll have if—”

“We’ll have more than we have here.” Hitch slams his door closed and grabs the “oh shit” handle.

I slam on the gas, stirring up a cloud of dust the person behind us will see if it doesn’t settle before they reach the place where we were parked. But there’s no help for it. On a gravel road, dust is going to happen, no matter how slow I go. Might as well gun it and hope I get the Land Rover hidden in time.

We don’t know who this is, but I’d bet good money it’s someone Hitch and I don’t want to see. There are
only so many people who will risk driving a deserted road outside the iron gate. Maybe it’s the FCC “dick-weeds in iron suits” Lance was talking about yesterday. Maybe it’s the highwaymen I’ve been warned to fear—though the whole point of taking a gravel road and avoiding the old highway is to avoid said
highway
men. Maybe it’s people looking to move some black-market goods. All of the above are best avoided.

I hit the first turn going fifty, and the second going sixty. Our back end loses traction and the Land Rover skids toward the ditch, but the wheels catch and hold after a second and I guide us back onto the road.

“You drive like a maniac,” Hitch says, but he doesn’t sound afraid.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should. As long as we don’t die.”

“We won’t . . .” The trees open up and the end of the bridge comes into view. “Oh my god.”

Hitch tenses next to me and I know he’s seen what I’ve seen.

A sky filled with fairies. Hundreds of thousands of fairies. More fairies than I knew were in this swamp, more fairies than I knew were in the state of Louisiana. They form a shimmering, undulating wall of bluish green that seems to fill the world.

My foot eases off the gas as my jaw falls open. It’s like facing down a giant. But worse. A giant would be big and slow and something smaller and faster would have a chance of finding a place to hide. There will be no hiding from this megaswarm. They’ll hit us with the force of their numbers, then break up into tiny
killing machines to finish us off. We’re screwed. We’re dead. We’re—

“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” Hitch’s hands join mine on the wheel. “Hit the gas!”

My knee jerks and my foot smashes the gas pedal to the floor. Beneath us, the truck rumbles and groans as it regains the speed we lost and keeps going. Faster and faster, hurtling toward the wall of fairies so fast there isn’t time to worry about what’s going to happen if they don’t get out of the way. There’s barely time to scream before we break through.

Starbursts of blue and green splatter the windshield, but it doesn’t break and the road on the other side of the wall is clear. We gain another ten miles per hour as the gravel transforms to pavement, ensuring we’re halfway to the other side of the river by the time the megaswarm realizes we haven’t frozen in the face of their display.

I watch them swirl and reel in the rearview mirror, forming paisley shapes in the sky as they change direction.

“Hit the wipers,” Hitch says. “There’s something on the windshield.”

I glance down to see the fairy splatters on the glass beginning to smoke. I tug the wiper lever, giving the windshield a shot of fluid before pulling the lever down. The smoke vanishes, but before I can ask Hitch what he thinks it was, he shouts—

“Faster! They’re following us.” He lets go of the wheel, turning in his seat to stare out the back window. “Over an
iron
bridge.”

“That’s impossible. How in the—”

“Some are dropping, but not enough.” Hitch reaches for his gun, but a gun isn’t going to do us any good. Shooting at the swarm would be like jabbing a toothpick into an elephant’s toe. Stupid. Pointless. And I don’t even know if elephant’s have toes, and the fairies are gaining on us like cheetahs on crack and—

“Faster!” Hitch shouts.

“I’m
going
faster!”

“We’re only going to have a few minutes.” He spins back to face the front, scanning the rapidly approaching end of the bridge and the FCC building glittering in a patch of sun. “Is there anywhere we can drive straight in? A warehouse or a loading dock or—”

“There’s a garage,” I say. “It’s big and it was empty yesterday.”

“Go there.”

“But I don’t remember if there’s a door to close it up,” I say, adrenaline overload making my hands sweat. We’re going ninety and I can’t risk slowing down if we’re going to make it into the garage before the fairies get to us, but I don’t know if this is the best call. “And even if there is a door, I don’t know if we’ll have time to close it.”

“It’s okay.”

“And even if we close it, what if they force their way through? The building’s made of iron, but so is the bridge and—”

Hitch’s fingers curl around the back of my neck and his face drifts closer to mine. “Don’t think so much. You think too much.”

And then he kisses me—a feather of his lips at my cheek that’s over in less than a second—but for some reason the kiss breaks through the creeping hysteria. Or maybe it’s the fact that Hitch pulls on his iron hood, making me worry less about the future of his lips.

All I know is that my racing pulse slows just as we rocket off the end of the bridge, hanging in midair for a heart-swallowing moment before crashing back onto the gravel on the other side. The Land Rover’s rear end does another fishtail as I turn toward the garage, but—thank god for sturdy English engineering—I keep control and send us charging across the short distance separating us from the only possible safety. I keep the gas pedal on the floor, waiting until we’re under the overhang to brake and spin the wheel to the left.

The truck spirals, tires squealing and a burnt-coffee smell rising in the air. Before we’ve come to a full stop, Hitch’s door is open. He spills out, landing on his feet and sprinting for the control panel next to the door leading into the building. I jam the truck into park and rush for the entrance to the garage. If Hitch can’t find a button, I might be able to bring the door down manually. The ceiling is too high for me to reach the bottom of the door, but maybe there’s—

I spot a pulley system to my left and go for it, trying to ignore the killer swarm sweeping toward the garage. There are fewer fairies than there were before—the iron bridge must have deterred some of them—but there are still too many to believe. Every
inch of sky is filled with blue and green glowing bodies and bared teeth and so many beating gossamer wings they create a wind that lifts my hair from my neck, sending it swirling around my face as I grab the iron chain and pull.

Why blue and green?
a part of me wonders.
Why not gold and pink? Why not—

“No time!” I pull the iron chain harder and have the door headed in the right direction when it jumps in my hand and the door starts to rise. “Wrong way!” I scream over my shoulder to Hitch, but he’s already figured that out. A second later, it starts to close again.

But it’s slow. So, so
terrifyingly
slow.

I stumble back from the entrance, hands shaking, unable to look away from the monsters drawing closer with every second. Teeth and more teeth and this isn’t going to work. The door won’t close in time. At least some of them are going to get inside.

I turn, looking for a weapon—something,
anything
I can use to beat back the ones that make it through—but there’s nothing.
Nothing,
not a tire iron or a baseball bat or even a big freaking stick. I spin back to face the fairies, heart jumping in my throat, slamming against my jawbone, the sudden rush of blood banishing the headache that’s nagged me all morning.

Headache. No headache. Maybe that means—The first of the fairies makes it through the still partly open door, and I get the chance to test my half-formed theory.

Hitch fires his gun at the same time as I lash out with my mind and for a second I can’t tell which one
of us dropped the first one. Then the others start to fall, one after another, plopping down to writhe on the floor as I pour everything I have into keeping them from getting any farther into the garage. I imagine my own wall, a wall of electricity and heat and pain shimmering in the air in front of me, stinging and biting and shocking fairies senseless as it gets thicker and stronger, taller and wider.

A few of the Fey manage to get through and zoom past me to the edible man behind, but Hitch keeps firing and I know he’s wearing his suit. It won’t be easy for the fairies to get through that kind of iron. There’d have to be a lot more than ten or twenty to nibble a hole before they dropped dead of iron poisoning.

Finally the door closes with a thud, followed by a few hundred thunks as the fairies at the front of the swarm slam into the heavy metal. But the door holds and eventually the thunks are replaced by an angry humming sound as the Fey fall back to bitch and moan and, presumably, plan the next phase of attack.

I turn to check on Hitch. He’s still on the steps leading into the building, swatting a few remaining fairies to the ground and crushing them beneath his steel booties. “You okay?” I ask.

“Fine. You?”

“Good,” I pant, blinking as dizziness curls around my eyeballs and squeezes. I’m gobsmackingly drained. Good thing the door closed when it did. I don’t know how much longer I could have kept my energy wall up. I need that shot Tucker promised to bring me. Bad.

But how I’m going to make it back to Donaldsonville by five o’clock tonight with
The Fairy Apocalypse, Part Deux: Curse of the Killer Swarm,
waiting outside is anybody’s guess.

“Not going to think about that now,” I mutter.

“What?” Hitch asks.

“Nothing.”

“Make sure the rest of them over there are dead,” he says, stomping another fairy that’s trying to crawl down the steps. “Then we should get inside and tell these guys what’s going on, see if they have access to an armored vehicle.”

“Right.” I have to shout to be heard over the increasingly loud buzzing outside.

I can’t understand what the fairies are saying for some reason, but there’s no doubt they’re mad as hell and not ready to give up and fly away. The drone—punctuated by feral screeches—only gets louder as I dash around the garage, squishing any fairies that have survived my psychic attack.

I’m preparing to crush my tenth or eleventh Fey—an older male with a touch of blue hair on his chin—when I begin to suspect why these fairies aren’t making any sense to me.