“You lie,” said tea-drinking man.
She looked up. He was standing over her now, his grin wider than ever she’d thought it could be, on one so stoked with regret.
“You are beset with it,” he said.
And then he spread his fingers, which crept wider than swamp witch thought they could — and down they came around her, like a cage of twig and sapling.
“Begone,” she said, but the tea-drinking man shook his head. He didn’t have to say: Only works if you mean it, that hex. And then, it only works the once.
And with that, he had her. Swamp witch fell into a pit inside her — one with holes in the side of it, that looked ahead and back with the same misery. She shut her eyes and did what the sad do best: fell into a deep and honeyed sleep, where past and future mixed.
She awoke a time later, in a bad way for a couple of reasons.
First, she was in church: Reverend Balchy’s church, which was not a good place for her or anyone.
And second, dragonfly was gone.
In the church this was a bad thing. For swamp witch knew that Reverend Balchy had against her advice gone in with the snake dancers’ way, turning many in his Baptist congregation from their religion, and welcoming in their place whole families of the Okehole corner rattlers that the Reverend used. Sitting up on the pew, swamp witch feared for dragonfly, for there was nothing that a corner rattler liked better than the crunch of a dragonfly’s wing.
Swamp witch called out softly, looking up to the water-stained drop-ceiling with its flickery fluorescent tubes, the dried, cut rushes at the blacked-out windows, the twist of serpent-spine that was nailed up on along the One Cross’s middle piece.
She poked her toe at the floor, and snatched it back again as the arrow-tip head of a corner rattler slashed out from the pew’s shadow. Swamp witch wouldn’t give it a second chance. She gathered her feet beneath her and stood on the seat-bench, so she could better see.
“Dragonfly!” she hissed.
There was no answer, but for the soft chuk-a-chuk samba of snake tail.
That, and an irregular thump-thump — like a hammer on plywood — coming from the hallway behind the dais.
Swamp witch squinted.
“Annabel?” she called.
“Yes’m.”
From around the top corner of the doorframe, Annabel Balchy’s little face peered at her.
“You come on out,” said swamp witch.
Annabel frowned. “You ain’t going to transform me into nothing Satanic, are you?”
“When have I ever done that?”
“Papa says—”
“Papas say a lot of things,” said swamp witch. “Now come on out.”
Annabel’s face disappeared for a moment, there were a couple more thump-thumps, and the girl teetered into the worship hall, atop a pair of hazelwood stilts that swamp witch thought she recognized.
“Those your brother’s?”
Annabel thrust her chin out. “I grew into them.”
“You’re growing into more than those stilts,” said swamp witch. Like the rest of the Balchies, Annabel was a blonde-haired specimen of loveliness whose green eyes held a sheen of wisdom. Looking at her, swamp witch thought her brother Tommy would no longer hold title as the family’s number-one heartbreaker. Not in another year or two.
“We got your dragonfly,” said Annabel, teetering over a little slithering pond of shadow. “He brung you here, in case you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know,” said swamp witch. “I’m not surprised, though. He’s a good dragonfly. Is he all right?”
“Uh huh. We got him at the house. Figured you could take care of yourself, big old swamp witch that you are. But we didn’t think he’d be safe among the Blessed Serpents of Eden.”
“They’re just plain corner rattlers, hon, and I’m no safer than anyone else when one decides to bite. But thank you for protecting dragonfly. Did he say why he brung — brought me here?”
“Figured it’d be the one place where the angel couldn’t come.”
“The angel.”
“In the yellow suit,” said Annabel. “With a vest underneath black as all damnation.”
“Him. Huh. He’s no angel.”
“That’s what you say. He’s huntin’ you, and you’re a swamp witch—”
“—so it follows he’s got to be an angel.” Swamp witch sighed. “I see.”
“Papa said you’d probably be wondering why we didn’t give you up to that angel.”
“Your papa’s a bright man,” said swamp witch. “The thought did cross my mind.”
“Papa said to tell you he don’t like the competition,” said Annabel.
Swamp witch laughed out loud at that one. “I believe it,” she said. “Oh, yes.”
Laughing felt good. It may not be the antidote to regret, but it sure helped the symptoms fine. All the same, she took a breath and put it away.
“He sent you to see if I was dead, didn’t he?”
Annabel looked down and shook off a rattler that was spiralling up toward her heel. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, a little ashamedly. “But he said you might not be. If, I mean, you was righteous.”
“So I’m righteous then?”
Annabel crooked her head like she was thinking about it.
“I expect,” she said. “Yeah, good chance you are.”
“All right,” said swamp witch. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll take no more chances. You still got that spare set of bamboo stilts I know Reverend used to use in back?” Annabel said she did, so swamp witch held out her hand. “Think you could toss ’em my way? I’d like to go see my dragonfly and maybe your Papa too.”
A moment later, the church hall was filled with a racket like summer’s rain on a metal shed. Swamp witch was making her escape, and that pleased the corner rattlers not at all.
Swamp witch dropped the two stilts by the Reverend’s porch and went in for her meeting. The porch was screened in and the Reverend was there, sitting on an old ratty recliner covered in plastic. Dragonfly was sitting quiet on the table beside him, in a big pickle jar with a lid someone had jammed nails through, just twice. Reverend looked as smug as he could manage, his face stiffened like it was with all the rattler venom.
Swamp witch understood there were days he’d been different: all stoked with holy-roller fire, straight-backed with a level gaze that could melt swamp witch where she stood. That was before he’d found the serpent spittle, before swamp witch had found her own calling.
Did he have any regrets? she wondered. Maybe taking the snake tooth into his arm, letting it course through him ’til he couldn’t even sit up on his own? Raising his young by nought but telepathy and bad example?
Did he regret any of it? She thought that he didn’t.
“Papa says you look like hell,” said Annabel.
“Thank you, Reverend. You are as ever a font of manly righteousness.”
Reverend lifted his hand an inch off the armrest, and his lips struggled to make an “o.”
“Papa’s cross with you,” said Annabel. “He called you a temptress.”
“Well make up your mind,” said swamp witch, laughing. Then she made serious. “We got problems here, Reverend.”
The Reverend agreed, making a farting noise with his mouth.
“This tea-drinking angel,” said swamp witch. “You reckon you know what he’s here for?”
“You,” said Annabel.
“You answered too fast,” said swamp witch. “What’s your Papa got to say?”
The Reverend’s hand settled back onto the arm of his chair, and he sighed like a balloon deflating. Dragonfly’s wings slapped against the glass of the jar.