He headed out the door.
"Be careful," Sommer said. "There may be more out there!"
Bron stepped out cautiously, peered around. No one seemed to be near the porch. The goggles magnified the light, but the brush outside was so thick that it formed a living curtain. In many places, one couldn't see a dozen yards into that jungle.
He crouched outside on the porch, peering into the night. The swamp had begun to cool, and the croaking of frogs, while still a dull roar, had lessened. He looked up. Bright stars pierced the night, and he watched an owl soar over the cypress trees, hunting on silent wings.
He searched down in the water. His grandfather was floating not forty feet from the dock. There were two rubber rafts down on the dock, too, with quiet little electric motors. Everywhere there was movement—frogs croaking like madness and making small waves, alligators floating like logs in the still swamp. They were no longer hunting, no longer sliding up behind frogs in the darkness. Apparently they'd had their fill.
Off to his left, Bron spotted a pair of raccoons tripping along on a rotten log that poked out into the water. They were dabbling about, hunting for crayfish or minnows in the shallows.
Bron wondered if he should go search for Olivia, but decided against it. There was no telling where she had gone, which direction. He might search, but even these goggles wouldn't help much. They magnified the starlight, but they didn't show the heat of living bodies, like some military goggles might.
Bron didn't know how many Draghouls might still be out there, but he reasoned that they were under orders not to kill him. That gave him a huge advantage.
Maybe there were none. He decided to take a risk. "Olivia," he shouted. "If you can hear me, come on in!"
For just an instant, the nearby frogs went silent, and then they sounded again.
He wondered if Olivia could hear him. With so many frogs croaking, his voice wouldn't carry far.
Even if she did hear him, would she come? Or would she be afraid that he'd been possessed?
Bron went into the shack, brought the lantern out. If Olivia was within sight, she might spot the light, and she'd see him standing beside it, and that would beckon her as well as anything that he might say.
He tried waiting a few minutes, and then remembered something that Mike had said. Bron went into the house, took one of the pistols, and brought it to the porch. He pulled the trigger, and it wouldn't budge. He looked at it closer, realized that the safety was still on. He flipped it into the off position, and fired into the air, three times slowly.
That quieted more than a few frogs.
He hoped that Olivia was alive, and that she had heard.
He waited for her on the porch for long minutes, and Sommer came out of the cabin. There was a look of fear and awe in her face. "You sure put those Draghouls down."
He nodded.
She handed him a drink, and Bron realized that though it felt a tad cooler outside, he was still sheathed in sweat. He pulled the tab, drank it down. Applebeer.
"We don't have a lot of time," Sommer said. "Lucius will get here before dawn. We don't want to be here when he comes."
"One of the prisoners tell you that?" Bron asked in surprise. He hadn't heard her questioning anyone.
Sommer tapped the side of her skull. "The girl knew, their leader. Now she can't remember...."
"What else does she know that I need to know?" Bron asked.
Sommer peered out into the darkness. "Too much," she whispered. "She knew entirely too much of evil."
They stood in silence for a moment, serenaded by the myriad calls of frogs, and Bron suddenly realized that the world had changed around him.
"They underestimated you this time," Sommer whispered. "They underestimated you by far. They should have put you out. You can't fight them when you're sleeping. Oh, you might leech them a little, but not enough to hurt. They won't make that mistake next time, though."
"Who said there's going to be a next time?" he asked.
Bron suddenly had an urge to hide, to get far away from here, possibly to go somewhere he'd never been before. The Outback in Australia sounded good just now.
Sommer's eyes filled with tears. "Lordy, boy, the things that you don't know!"
He glanced at her.
She said, "You can hide from someone like Lucius for awhile, but not forever."
Behind the house, a cry sounded above the clamor of frogs. Bron turned, and Olivia called out, "Bron? Are you all right?"
"Yeah," he said. "We're clear."
Olivia crashed through the brush.
He lowered his weapon as he shined a flashlight. She stepped out of the forest, then clambered along a thin trail.
"There was one more following you," Sommer told Olivia in alarm. "Did you lose him?"
"Yeah," Olivia said. "Yeah, I lost him permanently."
"How?" Bron asked.
"Let me put it this way," Olivia said. "If you ever get stuck in quick mud at night, don't thrash around too much. It just makes the gators hungry."
Olivia walked past him, peered into the house, and covered her mouth as if she might retch. All of the prisoners were down, but the expressions on their faces revealed utter horror, as if each of them were peering into the depths of some private hell. "Oh." Olivia went in, came out with a pistol in hand.
"They're all alive," Bron said.
"Not that they'd thank you for that kindness," Olivia said.
Just behind the cabin, in the brush up on the hill, a coyote began to howl, joining the chorus of frogs, the hoot of owls. The noise of the swamp was maddening, so different from anything that Bron had ever imagined.
"We should get going," he warned Olivia, but she looked at the Draghouls and just shook her head.
"We can't leave them," she said. She looked up at Sommer. "She should have told you that."
Bron suspected that he knew what she was suggesting, but he shied away from it. "We can't take them with us."
Olivia shook her head, looked down at her pistol, and gritted her teeth. "I don't know if I can kill them. Can either of you?"
Sommer looked to Bron. He was the man of the group, and somehow he knew that it made him the designated shooter.
"No," he said, in fear and revulsion. He'd been carrying a weapon now for half an hour or so, and he imagined that if it came to a gunfight, he'd use it. Exchanging shots at someone out in the dark, hidden behind trees—that would be a fair fight. But sticking the barrel of a gun up to a man's skull when he was tied up, and then pulling the trigger? "No," Bron said again.
The women looked at each other, and Sommer said, "I can do it. Heaven knows, they all deserve to die for what they did to Pappy. You two stay out here, if you like. I wouldn't want you getting your hands dirty."
Sommer was already holding a rifle strapped over her back. Now she took it off wearily, began to walk into the cabin.
"Wait!" Bron said desperately. "Isn't there something else we can do? Can't you, can't you just make them forget what happened here?"
Olivia gave him a patient look, as if Bron were still just a child.
"They're Draghouls," Olivia said. "You don't leave them alive. If you do, they'll just breed more of their kind—or worse, they'll come after you with a vengeance. Sure, I could rip their memories—empty them down to nothing. But Lucius's men would just load their own memories back in, possess them all over again."
"Then why don't we do that?" Bron demanded.
"No time," Sommer said. "Possessing even one of them would take hours at the least—days if you want to do it right."
Olivia pleaded with him. "You don't know what kind of people you're dealing with. They're not...." words failed her.
"Let's show him," Sommer suggested.