“Please be careful,” he says. “Really careful.”
“I will.”
“Careful for a normal person, not Annabelle careful.” I’m halfway to an eye roll when he adds, “I won’t be able to live with myself. If anything happens to you. Because of me.”
Something in my core softens. “It wouldn’t be because of you,” I say. “This is my decision. I know what I’m doing.”
“No you don’t,” he says, sucker punching my soft spot. “But thank you, anyway.”
And what to say to that? Nothing. I’ve got nothing. Maybe Hitch is right. Maybe I am a clueless idiot, but I’m all he has.
So who’s the real idiot?
The thought is strangely comforting. I spin on my heel and book it to the end of the alley before he says something so insulting I can’t talk my way into feeling okay again.
The Land Rover Hitch rented is enormous and baby-poop green and drives like a shoe box on wheels. By the time I reach the iron gate, my bone marrow is rattling and my head feels like it’s about to explode.
I curse myself for forgetting to throw ibuprofen in my purse and then curse myself again for leaving my gate remote in the junk drawer. Getting out to punch the button won’t take that much time, but every second is precious. I can’t wait to get to the docks and get back and be one step closer to getting Hitch out of my life.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I’m not clueless, I’m insane. The fact that I was even a tiny bit excited about working with Hitch proves it.
Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the self-esteem water, too . . .
I’ve cut back on my daily alcohol intake, thought seriously about trying to beat my Restalin habit, and usually get eight hours of sleep a night. I’ve spent my suspension from the FCC studying up on the new regs for sample collectors, taking Bernadette for rides in her Mustang, cleaning all the expired food out of my pantry, and stocking the fridge with fruits and veggies that I might actually eat at some point. I’ve even upped my flossing to twice a day. I’m completely boring and committed to establishing good habits.
“But still crazy,” I mumble as I throw the Rover into park and jump out the door. By the time I smash the gate button and head back to the truck, the heat has stickied my skin and my upper lip is beaded with sweat.
The calendar might say it’s nearly fall, but in southern Louisiana it still feels like deep summer. The heat is brain-boiling, and the air hums with millions of insects. The flies and mosquitoes have had so many hot, humid months to breed that not even the fairies—who make due with insects and animal blood when they can’t get their fangs on the preferred human meal—can keep their numbers under control.
As I pull through the gate at the mandated five miles per hour, I see a few fairies floating in the shade by a knotty cypress, swooping in drowsy circles. One sees me and zips off into the bayou, but the rest keep playing a game that seems to involve kicking the smallest fairy against the trunk of the tree and seeing who can catch him before he hits the ground. A couple of them are into it, but the rest are giving the sport a half-assed effort at best.
The heat makes fairies lazy, listless. The Fey don’t care for sunlight and are usually pretty tame during the day, especially in the summer months. It isn’t until after sundown that they show their feral, predatory side and will swarm anything warm-blooded like a pack of rabid flying wolves.
Still, if I weren’t immune, I have no doubt a couple of the buggers would come whizzing over to force their way in through the Rover’s outside air vents. It’s only the abnormal concentration of iron in my blood that makes them turn flat, bulbous eyes my way and go back to their game with a few shouted curses about “stupid poison people.”
Stupid. Poison. People.
I hear the words, as clear as the squeal of the gate sliding closed behind me.
What the hell? My foot slips, stomping on the gas, making the truck leap forward with a roar. I slam on the brake and the Rover grinds to a stop, but everything inside me is still racing a hundred miles a minute.
I heard them. I heard the fairies talk. Words that I could understand. Scientists have yet to identify any spoken Fey language. The fairies communicate primarily via body language and scent cues given off during the mating season, with a few screeches and barks thrown in for emphasis. They slap each other around. They stink up the bayou every spring with pheromone spray. They. Don’t. Talk.
But they did. I swear to god they did. Just like last night in my dream.
The prune-faced fairy’s warning to get out of Donaldsonville before I’m a dead woman floats through my mind. I fight for my next breath, then turn back to the road and squeeze the steering wheel so tight it feels like the tendons in my hand are going to snap.
Because there he is, there he fucking is, floating in the air in front of my goddamned windshield.
I blink and choke and spit out, “What the fucking fuck!” thinking maybe words will make him vanish. But they don’t, they only give me an earful of how terrified and foulmouthed I sound.
The nightmare on the other side of the glass smiles, fluttering to the right and the left, grinning like a jaundiced demon, rubbing his paunch belly with one hand and flipping me off with the other. I stare hard at his tiny fingers. That’s his middle digit all right, poked up into the air—deliberate, intentional, and so human-looking it makes my stomach roil.
I’m crazy. I really am. I’m out of my bleeping mind and experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations. Symptoms of late-onset schizophrenia and psychotic depression zip through my head, but are quickly discarded by the wannabe doctor within me. There’s no history of that sort of crazy in my family. We’re a pale, pasty, depressed lot who hit the bottle more than we should; we’re not the people at the homeless shelter who think the aliens are lasering our eyes shut while we sleep.
Of course, most of the people I’ve seen like that are addicts in addition to being bat-shit crazy.
The drugs. Crap. It has to be the drugs. Whatever Tucker shot me up with must be making me hallucinate.
Or maybe it’s wearing off. Like with Grace. Maybe it’s time for another dose before you go off the deep end and start killing fluffy things for fun.
“Okay. Okay,” I mumble beneath my breath, wishing I had a phone number where I could reach Tucker.
Hell, I wish I’d taken him up on his offer to roll around in bed. Then I’d be with him right now, able to get immediate feedback on which kind of drug reaction I’m having. Too much or too little, it has to be one. It has to be.
I cling to the thought as I reach over to kick up the air-conditioning. Maybe the cold will shock me back to my senses. I close my eyes and think calm, hallucination-banishing thoughts, but when I open them again, the fairy is still there. He’s closer now, and taking his obscene gesturing to the next level. His hand is under his paunch, and I can imagine what he’s playing with beneath his saggy skin.
“Gross,” I say, as much to myself as the fairy.
He’s a figment of my imagination after all. I’m the one imagining this. Why, I have no idea, since I’m pretty sure I don’t have any deeply repressed desire to watch an old man touch himself, but . . .
“Not gross. Slake.” His voice is muted by the windshield, which seems weird for an auditory hallucination. Would my mind work in a detail like that?
It must be. There’s no other explanation. Don’t get any nustier than you are already.
Right on, mental voice. Fairies don’t talk, and there’s no way I could be seeing a character from a dream in real life. “You aren’t real. I’m going to stop seeing you now,” I say, hoping it will work the way it did when I was asleep.
“Am real. Am Slake.” His jaw drops and greenish liquid oozes from his gums to coat his fangs. Venom. Thicker and nastier than anything I’ve seen before. “Slake.”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I say, voice shaking.
“Hear and know.” He’s close enough to touch the windshield, close en
ough for me to catch a glimpse of the holes in his left wing and the wrinkles creasing his itty-bitty sunken cheeks. “We are the Slake. Our thirst is great. It will never be appeased.”
I watch his lips move, mesmerized by the way they pinch and stretch, forming words. He looks so real. As real as the trees behind him and the sky above and the road stretching out through the bayou toward the docks. It’s all the same, all as solid and three-dimensional and chock-full of detail. I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.
Shit. I can’t. I really can’t.
What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?
“Leave our land,” he growls. “Leave. Now.”
My breath comes out in a rush. At least I know what this is about. When times get tough, Annabelle hits the road. It’s what I’ve always done. I never stick around to suffer through the hard times. Hard times suck ass and make you want to off yourself and are best avoided at all costs. It was true after Caroline died, it was true when Hitch and I had the fight to end all fights, and a part of me must think it’s true now. That’s why my drug-addled mind created this freaky little man, to scare me into leaving Donaldsonville and all the hard stuff behind.
The mess with Cane, and Hitch popping back into my life are the least of my problems. Somehow I’ve fallen in with some very shady people. Invisible, magic people who could kill me before I even know they’re in the room. Being able to float a beer from my fridge out to my chair on the porch with my mind power isn’t going to protect me. Even being able to heal a gunshot wound won’t help if they hit me in the right spot. One bullet to the brain and my mind won’t be powering anything anymore. The smartest thing I could do is take a clue from my crazy and leave Donaldsonville before it’s too late.
“But what about the shots?” I stare the fairy straight in the eye, willing my subconscious to listen. “I have ten. I could go give myself one right now and hope you go away, but what about when they run out? And what about all the people in town? Fernando and Cane and Theresa and the guys from the bar and Bernadette and Deedee?”
God, poor Deedee. I haven’t been out to see her in days. Libby Beauchamp murdered her mom and now eight-year-old Deedee is one of the youngest orphans at Sweet Haven. She begs me to let her come stay with me every time we hang out. I know I’m not foster mommy material, but I can’t leave her with no one to visit her, no one to care that her entire life’s been ruined.
Not when I played my part in getting her mother killed.
“I can’t leave,” I say, voice stronger, ignoring the fairy’s increasingly pissed-off expression. “I can’t leave without knowing what the Big Man is doing, or why Tucker is in town. And what about the cave? Whatever’s going down there isn’t good. Someone’s already dead, and—”
“Die.” The fairy kicks the windshield. “You’ll die.”
“No. I’m not going to die.” I point a finger at his prune face. “I’m going to stick around and figure things out and make my life work. I am not a clueless idiot! I am not a loser! I am not a child!”
And I don’t protest too much. At all.
“We would have killed child if someone hadn’t killed her first,” he spits, his yellow face flushing red. “We’ll suffer no more Gentry!”
It’s what he said in my dream, but he’s a hell of a lot more pissed off about it now, and I can’t even imagine what my subconscious is trying to tell me. The only Gentry I know of live in England, where it’s too cold to have to worry about fairy infestation or venom infection or invisible people or magic or iron-gated towns where people are always on the verge of losing their minds with fear.
England. That’s where I’ll go. Or maybe Ireland. The Lees are Irish. My grandfather traced our ancestry all the way back to medieval times. He even forced my father to name me Annabelle after some ancient relative. I could go there, buy a cottage in a quiet village by the sea, take up sheepherding, and learn to act like I’m not crazy. Or drink enough that the townspeople blame the talking-to-things-that-aren’t-there on the alcohol.
“Leave.” The fairy points to the gate. “Leave.”
My hands squeeze the steering wheel even tighter. Maybe I should turn around. I could be back at the house and shooting up another dose of mystery medicine in fifteen minutes. But what if I’m wrong? What if more drug makes me worse instead of better? What if I end up rocking in a corner, slobbering on myself and talking to invisible fairies all day and never make it out to the docks?
Hitch is expecting me to call him in a few hours. If I don’t call, he’ll come looking for me, and if he finds me at home I’ll never be able to explain. If I try, I’ll be putting his life in even more danger than he’s put mine. The Big Man won’t hesitate to kill him if he finds out Hitch knows about the Invisibles or the shots or the magic or anything else. Of that, I have no doubt.
“I have to keep going. I have someplace to be,” I say in a calm, even tone.
“Go away!” The fairy’s shout ends in a familiar Fey screech. I decide to take that as a good sign.
I slam my foot down on the gas. The fairy shoots straight up into the air, barely avoiding becoming a squishy spot on my windshield as the truck roars down the road. I can’t help but be disappointed. It would have been nice to see his guts splattered, even if they are imaginary guts.
I check my rearview in time to see the old man flip me the bird again before whizzing off into the bayou. My hands relax and I breathe a little easier. It’s over. And it didn’t last that long. Not much longer than the dream, and I had a good hour and a half of normal in between the dream and the hallucination. If I book it and have luck on my side, I can make it to the dock and talk to the guys there before I start seeing things again.
“Better not count on luck,” I mumble as I give the Rover more gas, kicking the jostle into a full-on bone rattle.
Lucky isn’t a word that applies to my life. I need to think of a Plan B. They have to have toilets out at the docks. If I start seeing things, I’ll fake a potty emergency and go hide out in the lav until I talk myself down from the edge. Then, as soon as I get back to Donaldsonville, I’ll go on a hunt for Tucker. I know he’s living somewhere close enough for him to get to my house with wet hair. If I have to, I’ll search every formerly vacant house in the town until I find him and—
My thoughts are interrupted by a high-pitched screech and then another and another, until the screech becomes a roar, a wave of sound that smacks into the truck hard enough to make it vibrate. I scream and slam on the brakes, hunching my shoulders, squeezing my eyes closed, smashing my hands over my ears as hundreds of rocks thud against the side of the truck.
Thud, thud, thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
Not rocks. Rocks don’t thud; they ping or crack. But what else could it—
I slit my eyes—still afraid of shattering glass—in time to see another fairy hit the window. And another and another and another, pink and golden bodies slamming into the Rover’s side until they block the sunlight and hundreds of tiny shoving hands become thousands of tiny shoving hands and the world tilts on its axis.
No, not the world. The truck. They’re lifting a two-ton truck off its wheels. They’re trying to tip me over.
I whip my head toward the other window to see water rising all the way to the side of the road. The bayou’s deep here. If the truck flips, it’s going to sink until it’s submerged. Then I’ll have two choices: stay in the cab until it fills with water and I drown, or get out and make a run for the iron gate.
I’ll never make it. There’s no way. It’s like I was thinking in my dream last night. If enough of this swarm decides to bite me, I’ll bleed to death and immunity won’t matter.
“It was just a dream,” I shout as I hit the gas pedal. The truck rolls forward on its two right wheels, but the fairies don’t miss a beat. They fly alongside, pushing hard enough that the Rover’s center of gravity begins to shift. I slam on the brakes, surprising enough of the Fey that the left side dips ba
ck toward the ground.
Last night might have been a dream, but this is real. I’m not hallucinating the two tons of steel shifting and rocking around me. There’s no way the truck could be moving except—
“Me!” I shout, hope exploding in my chest like a firework. I can move things with my mind. I must be doing this. I must be hallucinating the fairies and—
The Land Rover lurches to the right and the fairies scream in anticipation of their victory and there’s no more time left for coming to logical conclusions. I force fear away and lash out. The part of my brain I’ve come to associate with supernatural phenomenon sparks to life, humming and sizzling, making the place where brain meets spinal cord hot enough for sweat to break out on the back of my neck.
I imagine the wheels moving back toward the ground, the truck righting itself, and for a second, I think it’s going to work. I’m moving in the right direction, I’m taking control. But then I see him—the old fairy, hovering behind the rest, his angry raisin face barely visible through the crush of wings and tiny fingers pressed tight to the glass. He lifts his arms and let’s out a series of barks that summon a round of howls from his army.
Suddenly I know this isn’t a hallucination. That old geezer is real. So is his army, and so is the death waiting for me as soon as the truck rolls over.
The fairies surge forward with renewed strength and the truck is going, going, going, and I know there’s no way I’m going to stop it and I’m already bracing myself for the impact with the water when the thought whips through my head.
The fairies. If you can’t move the truck, stop the fairies.
I talked Stephanie’s lungs back together. If I can heal; I can also hurt.
I lean into the window, pressing my hands against the glass, feeling the heat from all those burning Fey fingers against mine, and send everything I have out into the swarm. I imagine my energy spreading like poison gas, seeping into their bones, turning them to jelly. Visions of limp, useless arms and wings shoot from my mind, and before I have time to wonder if my last-ditch effort is going to be good enough, they’re dropping like feral, toothy flies.