“I figure he keeping Shauna here.” Lucky pointed to a room away from the moving water, next to the swampy side and sticking out all by itself.
Derek looked at me, his eyes saying what I had figured out. We had way too few men. I stifled a sigh but decided I had to address that now, right up front. “Lucky, we don’t have enough men to launch an attack and get Shauna.” The witch’s eyes flashed fire and his power sparked painfully across my skin, like brushing against cacti. I added quickly, “So I’m going in to talk.”
“Talk is nothin’ to dese suckheads,” he spat. The power in the room skirled like flames and wind, hot, and pulling all the moisture out of the air.
Derek sat back, his arms outstretched along the chair arms, and looked at me, ignoring the angry father. I took his cue and repositioned so Lucky was visible only in my peripheral vision. Sometimes ignoring people’s anger made them calm down. Of course, sometimes it made them shoot everyone in sight. “We can go in just before dusk,” Derek said to me, “when the vamps are waking up and eating breakfast and the blood-servants are busiest. Disable the boats, set up a perimeter. Then you can come in, making a lot of noise. Distract them from anything we might do.” Meaning that if they saw the girl, they’d take her if it was possible, with me being the distraction.
I nodded. “How are you getting in?” I asked. “They’ll hear motors for miles in the flat water and land.”
Derek pointed to what looked like a trail on the map; it was marked with the designation Brown Fox Road. “We drive into there this afternoon and pole in on johnboats.”
Lucky snorted, a very Gaelic and totally dismissive sound, but the burning sensation diminished again. “Polin’ johnboat a skill, not somethin’ you pick up and do.”
Derek lifted a brow. “I poled my first boat when I was five, white boy. I think I still remember how. And my men will do fine,” he added to me.
I nodded. “Okay. Lucky, we need johnboats and something motorized for me to show up in. And before you ask or demand, no. You can’t go with us.” Instantly I felt that spiky power skitter hotly along my skin. “And that’s precisely why,” I pointed at him. “You’re too emotionally involved. You’ll end up getting the men hurt, and maybe Shauna killed.”
Lucky blinked, started to say or do something, then the magic skirled away and died. He dropped his head and stared at the floor for long seconds, his hands opening and closing in fists. “Yeah. Okay. My wife say de same. But I don’ like it.”
I felt it was much too fast a capitulation, but I didn’t smell an outright lie. I said, “Instead, I need you to get the equipment for us and find us two former military men, who still hunt, who still use their skills, and get one to be Derek’s guide and one to be my guide. If you can’t do that and keep out of our way, then the gig is off. You understand?
“I’m not stupid.”
Which didn’t answer my question, but I let it go. He gave me a time when he’d have the equipment ready, picked up Miz Onie’s landline phone, and made two calls. When he hung up he said, “Auguste and Benoît twins, in army dey was. Dey hunt alligator, most years. Dis year dey mama broke hip. Dey not have time to get tags.”
I understood. In Louisiana there was a lottery for the alligator harvest program, and tags to hunt on public swamp and land in gator country were issued only at certain times. If you missed that time, you didn’t hunt, or you paid your hunting license fee and hunted on private lands. The twins didn’t have access to private land, so this year they were sitting around. “Sober?” I asked.
“Mostly,” Lucky said. I figured that was the best I was gonna get.
“Dey got a sister, too. She a sharpshooter, she was. Tough as gator skin. She come along too. You put her in a tree with good line a sight, and she provide cover. Her name Margaud.”
After Lucky Landry left, Derek and his men and I created contingency plans for everything we could think of, giving each problem and plan a code name so we would be prepared to act on a moment’s notice. “Silver” was the code to kill every vamp we could find. “Swim” was the code indicating that each combatant would have to get home the best way he could. “Bogus” was the code for our allies telling lies and setting us up. “Burn” was the code to set everything on fire with incendiaries. “Fubar” meant anything and everything. Fubar was the code I was most worried about. It meant we’d all almost likely die.
The boat shuddered under my feet, the Chevy engine adding its own vibration as well as noise enough to wake the undead, and the propeller at my back sucked air through its cage as we flew over the water—not in a plane, but in an airboat. The boat had almost no draft, maybe six inches when it was sitting still, and it was eco-friendly except for the noise, which was so loud it could deafen a catfish, and which precluded any form of communication except hand signals. The prop, mounted in the cage at the back of the boat, was wood, handmade by Amish people, which felt all wrong somehow, but added an artistic element to a boat that was designed to skim over the bayou, swamp water, or marshy land. This boat was painted in red and yellow with flames along the sides, similar to the flames on Lucky’s arms, and belonged to the twins. It had two bench seats with heavy-gauge steel arms and leather upholstery in the yellow of the flames. Built-in coolers, tackle boxes, and a shotgun rack completed the Cajun dream-boat.
Benoît had led Derek’s men in two hours ago and they were in place on the clan home property. Auguste was my pilot, sitting in the bench seat above and behind me, working the controls. Margaud sat beside me, a sharpshooter’s sniper rifle in a sling across her back and a heavy, military go-bag at her booted feet.
The brothers might have passed for ogres, each weighing in at an easy three hundred pounds, hirsute, sour with last night’s beer, and both smelling of the fish they had caught and cleaned. Maybe days ago. The men wore T-shirts that might once have been white in another universe or decade, old-fashioned bib overalls, and work boots that looked like they had never seen oil, polish, or even laces.
Margaud was as beautiful as her brothers were ugly, with ash brown hair blonded by the sun, deep brown eyes, and skin tanned golden. She was petite and delicate and looked too small to transport or position the rifle for firing, but she was muscular and fit and carried herself with a capable, confident air. The sharpshooter wore a homemade one-piece camo uni that had been made out of strips of thin cotton cloth in green, brown, black, and tan, like a hand-pieced quilt. Irregular lengths of green yarn rippled from it in the hard wind created by the passage of the airboat, and I realized that it worked like a ghillie suit, but looked a lot more comfortable. I had to wonder what a girl needed a ghillie suit for, but I figured it was for hunting. And if it wasn’t for hunting, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
The siblings were all human and all taciturn—expressionless faces and none talking much even by my standards. It felt weird going into battle with the silent Cajuns at my back, unknowns in a gig more full of unknowns than usual.
We spun through the bayou, whipping around clumps of trees and over long, swordlike grasses. I held on to the bench seat handle with one hand, watching the world fly by. The airboat hit something in the water with a hollow, solid thump under my feet, but Margaud didn’t react and the boat neither slowed nor sprang a leak, so I just gripped the handle harder. If we came to a sudden and total stop, I didn’t want to go flying into the dark water or up against a cypress tree.
I had on ear protectors, my fighting leathers, and all my weapons, including the Benelli M4. They had all been brought by Derek, lifted from my gun safe in the closet of my freebie house in New Orleans. Even in what amounted to autumn in the Deep South, I was sweating, and my hair had come free from the fighting queue, blown back by the wind. It was long enough that I was seriously concerned about getting it caught in the prop, and sat holding it twined around my arm and clasped in one hand, a pose that could have serious image consequences if we were attacked en-route. Auguste had agreed to idle down a quarter mile out and motor in slowly, which would give me time to fix my hair.