Slightly Spellbound (23 page)

I rolled free, got my feet under me, and kicked until my head splashed out of the water. I sucked air for several long seconds with every one of my muscles burning like I’d run a marathon. The rushing sound in my ears made it impossible for me to hear anything else, but I felt something slick against my arm and jerked.

It was Mercutio’s head, and he meowed. I grabbed a clump of vegetation with one hand and the root of a fallen tree with another.

“Hang on,” I said as Mercutio pushed against me. He wanted me out of that water. I was all for that plan, but my arms shook and it took me several tries to haul myself up onto the bank.

“Did you see him?” I said, panting. “A granddaddy alligator got me. He ate about a third of me in one bite.” I sat on the bank, shaking. “Alligators don’t play,” I said through chattering teeth.

Something slithered toward me, and Mercutio rounded and chomped down. A water moccasin had come out of the creek, but Merc’s as fast as a snake. He bit through its neck and shook it back and forth until the snake went limp and quit trying to bite us. Mercutio spit the snake out with a hiss.

“Yeah, I know, Merc,” I said, falling back onto the muddy grass, staring up at the black sky and trying to catch my breath. “You don’t play either.”

A shotgun blast somewhere over my right shoulder made me wince. “Oh, for pete’s sake,” I mumbled. “I forgot we’re in the middle of a gunfight.” I sucked in a breath and rolled onto my side, making everything hurt. “The trouble is, Merc, I’m fresh out of guns.”

As expected, Mercutio didn’t see this as a significant obstacle. He waited for me to get to my feet and then padded along with me as I sneaked across the property toward the rusted car on blocks.

Beau’s shotgun and whatever shells he had left seemed like a good place to start if re-arming myself was the plan, which it was. I found him only half conscious.

“Who’s there?” he murmured.

I didn’t answer. I picked up his gun and rifled through his clothes till I found a box of shells.

“No!” he said, realizing it was me. “I heard you screaming and that big old gator’s thrashing tail hit the water. He got you.”

“He did.”

“He got you!” he repeated like I hadn’t agreed with him. “You’re at the bottom of the creek.”

“Okay,” I agreed amiably. The fight had gone out of Beau, and entering into a battle of wits with someone who’s unarmed wasn’t very sporting.

“You a ghost,
chère
?” he asked, his voice a soft rasp.

“Yeah. Where are the rest of the Duvall ghosts? I need to meet up with them.”

“Gone.”

“I know. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your momma take them back to Dallas with her?”

His head lolled to one side and I thought he’d passed out, but he answered in a tired whisper. “No, nor that crazy bitch stepsister of mine either. We’ve been looking for her for days. Momma thinks she’s got a charm to conceal herself from us. We thought you were helping her stay hidden.”

Was that why they kept attacking me? And if Oatha didn’t have the ghosts or Vangie then where in the world were they?

“All right, Beau, lie on down and rest so you don’t give up your ghost, too.”

His eyes shut, and Mercutio and I crept around the house, stealthy as spies. When we shoved our way into the house, however, there were only two men left standing. Mercutio bit the leg of one, which caused the guy to fall down. I stepped on his forearm to keep him from raising the gun, and I shoved my shotgun between the shoulder blades of his cousin.

The cousin who bled from several nasty lacerations lowered his gun.

Bryn had his back to the wall, which sported dozens of large holes, but his own injuries looked minor.

“Hey,” I said.

His gaze traveled up and down me. The shredded hem of my dress’s skirt hung in tatters, clotted blood clung to my shoulder, and fresh blood and muddy water dripped off my injured leg onto my filthy feet, making brown puddles on the floor. I imagine I’d looked better. I reached down and put pressure on the couple of punctures that were oozing the most blood. I hoped my fae super healing would kick in soon because now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I felt a little woozy.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“All things considered, I can’t complain,” I said with a weak smile. “Better now that we’ve got things under control.”

Bryn opened his mouth, but the sound of sirens drowned him out.

“Oh sure,” I said wearily. “Now they show up.” I shook my head. “That’s just how I wanted to spend the rest of my night. Explaining myself to local law enforcement.”

“Tamara?”

“Yep?” I asked, lowering the shotgun to point it at the ground. I leaned against the wall for support.

“You know what I want you to say when you’re questioned?”

For a moment, I felt hopeful that Bryn would have the exact words to keep us out of trouble. He’s a brilliant lawyer, after all. “No, what should I say?”

“Not a word.”

I sighed and shook my head. “Oh good,” I said. “’Cause the police take it so well when people refuse to answer questions about a shootout.”

26

THE SHERIFF AND his deputies rounded up everybody who was left at the crumbling house and on the property. Apparently whoever had taken the bodies of the people who’d died earlier in the day had gotten away because there were no dead.

Everyone except Beau, his cousin with the cuts, and me was taken to the police station. Dr. Suri gave Beau a blood transfusion, a pain shot, a tetanus shot, and a shot of antibiotics. He shook his head, packed Beau’s bleeding wounds, and packaged him onto a stretcher for transport to a hospital in Dallas.

When Smitty, one of the Duvall deputies, asked who’d shot him, Beau claimed he didn’t know, saying it was too dark to see. He said it was probably an accident, just a misunderstanding. Even in shock and under the influence of morphine, he stuck to his statement. Then they put him in the ambulance and he closed his eyes. I don’t know if he knew I was alive or not.

I was next on Dr. Suri’s exam table. Smitty let out a strangled curse when he saw the teeth marks on my leg. He took pictures of my leg and of the shotgun wounds to my shoulder with a big police evidence camera.

Dr. Suri wasn’t happy. “Where is Mr. Bryn Lyons?” he demanded.

“He’s at the police station. Why?”

“What was this girl doing out of bed? She had a very bad head injury today. Very bad. And broken ribs.” Dr. Suri shook his head. “Miss Tamara Trask,” he said, pronouncing my first name with his accent so the first part almost disappeared and
mara
rhymed with
star-uh
. “What could you have been doing tonight? Staying in your bed, that’s what I was telling you to do.” He shined a bright light in my eyes and I blinked.

“Sorry, Dr. Suri.”

“Now what has happened to this leg? It looks like something bit it very hard.”

I smiled. I like Dr. Suri’s accent. He talks really cute. Also, he’d given me a good idea.

“It was the alligator that ate the horse.”

Both Smitty and Dr. Suri stared at me.

“Alligator?” Smitty scoffed.

Dr. Suri drew up a syringe of morphine, but I scooted away.

“No, no,” I said. I knew I couldn’t keep my wits about me if he gave me strong pain medicine.

“I have to clean these wounds. Without medicine, it will hurt very much,” he said sternly.

I pushed the syringe away. “It doesn’t hurt at all,” I lied. “The ibuprofen and the blood and fluid you gave me through the IV made me feel all better.” I clenched my fists to brace myself as he cleaned the wounds.

“What were you saying about an alligator?” Smitty asked, with his little spiral notebook and pen in hand.

“I don’t see how it thought it could eat me after that horse. But it had me thirty percent eaten—thirty, maybe thirty-three percent—when it gave up. He was driving the horse trailer.”

“Who was?”

“Or maybe he was the passenger.”

“Who?”

“The alligator. The horse was maybe the driver. Till he got ate.”

Dr. Suri had started cleaning the wounds, but that made him pause and shine the light in my eyes again.

“A bad head injury you say, Dr. Suri?”

“Very bad!” Dr. Suri confirmed. “She should be in bed.” Dr. Suri made a motion for Smitty to turn around as he tugged the hem of my dress higher.

“I need to see her injuries,” Smitty objected.

“Like hell,” I said. “Out.”

“Hang on.”

“Please step out, officer,” Dr. Suri said. “I will document the injuries in her chart. Go now. I have very much to do here.”

Smitty grumbled but left the room.

Dr. Suri got me out of my ruined dress, which I kept silent about on account of him being a doctor and having already seen me naked once. When the half-Barbie voodoo doll fell out, his brows crinkled together. He picked it up and set it next to me.

“Oh, my friend gave me that. She’s making homemade toys for the Houston Homeless. So far I think we’re better off buying them from a toy store, but she just keeps going on. Some people are stubborn as all get-out.”

I wasn’t sure Dr. Suri believed a word of that, but I figured he’d just chalk up any crazy thing I said to my head injury. Sometimes concussions are handy.

He washed my wounds, put bandages on them, and gave me a shot of antibiotics in the behind, which hurt more than the scatter from the shotgun blast had hurt my shoulder. He put me in a clean patient gown and wrapped a white sheet around me.

Then he started asking me questions about who and where I was. I worried that if I seemed too out of it, he might ship me off to a Dallas hospital, so I answered all his questions right and added, “I’m feeling kind of better.”

“I’m quite worried about you, Tamara. Quite worried.”

“Thanks, Dr. Suri, but I’m doing okay. You patched me right up,” I said with a smile. “I sure appreciate it. And Bryn and I both appreciate you coming to see Mr. Jenson. He’s doing really well. He follows instructions. I’ll try to do better with that.”

He nodded and gave me a bottle of pain pills. “I’ll come to see you both. I expect you to be resting.”

“Sure thing,” I said, climbing off the exam table. “By the way, Dr. Suri, what part of India are you and Mrs. Suri from?”

“Punjab.”

“What’s it like there?”

“Hot.”

“Like here,” I said. “I told Bryn India’s kind of like Texas.”

Dr. Suri laughed. “Well, the heat, yes, but it’s quite different otherwise.”

“Sometime I’d like to see pictures and hear about what it was like growing up there. You think Mrs. Suri would mind if I came for a visit?”

“No, she won’t mind. Unless you come before I say it’s safe for you to be out of bed. That she’ll object to very much.”

“Got it. As soon as the police let me go, I’ll do my best to get to bed.” I tucked the Tammy Jo voodoo doll into the folds of my sheet and limped out of Dr. Suri’s exam room. Smitty turned me over to another deputy since he was going to wait on the cousin with the cuts. Just as Beau had done, the cousin said he didn’t know what had happened at the house. It was like everyone had a head injury.

When I got to the police station, Zach was there in plainclothes. And Bryn was in Sheriff Hobbs’s office being questioned.

The young deputy named Garth helped me to a chair and I perched on it, trying not to sit on the spot where my antibiotics were making me sore.

Zach leaned against a post and listened.

“I don’t remember what happened,” I said. It was what I answered every question with. When Sheriff Hobbs came out, I guessed Bryn had been just as unhelpful because the frown on the sheriff’s face stretched practically to his collarbones.

“A man was shot three times, Tammy Jo. You know anything about that?” the sheriff asked.

“No, sir.”

“Somebody shot him in the balls,” the sheriff said.

I made a shocked sound. Zach raised an eyebrow.

“My deputies and I all agree that that particular injury seems likely to have come from a woman. Now maybe she had good reason to shoot the man in the groin.”

“Maybe she did,” I agreed.

“But whatever the reason, the whole truth’s bound to come out.”

I sincerely doubted that. Voodoo dolls, long-distance magic spells, sacrificing horses in black magic rituals? No, I didn’t think the Cajun witches and wizards would have much interest in telling what had really happened while they were in town.

“Sure,” I said, nodding.

“So why don’t you just tell us why you shot Beau Theroux?”

“Me?” I asked with wide eyes. “Why in the world would I shoot him? It was probably one of those girls from Louisiana he had with him. Maybe he was two-timing somebody or something of that nature.”

“Now, Tammy Jo, everybody out there had shotguns. And Theroux’s wounds weren’t from any shotgun.”

“Maybe the people with other kinds of guns drove away. How many sets of tire tracks did you find?”

“What were you doing out there?” the sheriff asked impatiently.

“I don’t remember. On account of my concussion.”

“What concussion?”

“I got it today. Or I think I did. Dr. Suri said so.”

“Who shot you?”

“Nobody.”

“Deputy Smith said Dr. Suri plucked several pieces of buckshot out of your shoulder and arm.”

“Was that what that was? And you say someone shot me?” I scratched my head, noted that my hair was stiff with mud and was standing up at odd angles, and stopped. “I wonder who it was. If you find out, I hope you let me know. I’ll give him or her a real piece of my mind.”

Zach glanced down at the ground, but I saw the corners of his mouth curve up. I continued to look bewildered for the sheriff.

The sheriff made an exasperated sound. “Sutton?” he said, whirling toward Zach.

Zach’s smirk disappeared. “Yes, sir?”

“You take this girl on home. I don’t trust these slippery—these tourists from Louisiana, and I doubt whatever happened out there was settled tonight. They could decide to pay her a visit to keep her from remembering what really happened, and the town council would never let me hear the end of it if I let someone from Duvall get killed in their own house. Come to that, neither would my wife. You take Tammy Jo home and you stay with her till I’m satisfied.”