Blood on the Bayou (36 page)

Honeybee
. He called me “runt” last time. Hopefully the change indicates an improvement in our relationship. I pull my hand from the gun and come slowly back to my feet. “Nice shoes. Converse?”

“Gotta have my Converse.”

“I thought you were a work boot kind of guy.”

“Only when I’m working.” A grin blooms at the center of his corpulent face like a toothy flower, lips curling until I can see his cotton candy pink gums. He’s a flosser, this one. His mouth is practically glowing with health. I think about complimenting him on that, and maybe thanking him for the Harley while I’m at it to butter him up really good, but Hitch takes that moment to remind us of his existence.

“This cave is going to blow in five minutes,” he shouts. “Get out of here. Now!”

The Big Man casts an amused glance in Hitch’s direction. “High-strung, ain’t he?”

“Um . . . yeah.” I nod too long, caught between playing along with the Big Man’s low-stress, cheery vibe and catching Hitch’s much more reasonable terror. On the one hand, it seems best to keep the tension level low and the Big Man happy. On the other hand, I’ve heard this man sound perfectly pleasant while strangling people to death with his bare hands, so his chumminess right now might mean less than squat.

“But Hitch did rig the labs to explode,” I say. “We should probably get while the getting’s good.”

“Hitch did a good job. He proved he’s willing to do whatever it takes to save his family. Followed orders pretty much to a T.” The Big Man stuffs his meaty hands in his tentlike pockets. “Except for telling a few stories to you.”

“But I don’t count, right?” I force a grin. “Since I’m on your side and all?”

“You made that sound like a question, Annabelle.”

“I didn’t mean to.” My smile wilts at the warning in his tone. “Bad habit.”

“Lifting your voice at the end of a sentence makes you seem like a person lacking in confidence.” He stalks around to my right. I turn, keeping him in front of me, memories of Libby’s last moments making me unwilling to be any more vulnerable than I already am.

“Low self-esteem,” I say. “I’m working on it.”

“You should. No reason for a smart, pretty thing like you to feel dat way. Plenty of people would kill to be you.”

I nod again, acutely aware of the sweat gathering at the base of my neck. The siren seems to have faded in volume, but the urgency behind it feels more intense than ever. If Hitch’s estimate is right, we’ll all be blown to pieces in a couple of minutes, maybe less.

“Can we continue this outside?” I squeak, edging toward Hitch. “Maybe after you help me carry Hitch out to—”

“No need to carry him. Let the boy walk.” He wanders with maddening slowness over to where Hitch sits slumped in his chair, eyes closed, chin tucked, his defeat complete. He’s certain we’re going to die, and his certainty makes my tongue feel like it’s going to crawl down my throat. “You and I are on the same side, Annabelle. From now on, you come to me when you’ve got a problem. Especially a fairy problem. I understand you know where to find me.”

“Okay.” My knee jogs, my hands shake at my sides. We’re running out of time. Fast. So fast.

“I killed that fairy bastard Tucker said was messing with your head.”

Grandpa Slake is dead? I know I should be relieved, but all I can think about is the explosives in the other room and the seconds ticking away and what it’s going to feel like to blow up.

“Past time for that one to meet his maker,” the Big Man continues. “He’s got a history of stirring up trouble. After he worked them pixies into a frenzy, I couldn’t see a truce with him being worth
diddlyshit. He knew better. We’ve been trying to round those things up for a damned month.”

A month. Round them up.

I store the information away for later. If there
is
a later.

“Besides, you’re one of mine now.”

Sixty seconds. We can’t have more than sixty seconds. “Please, I—”

“Don’t worry. We’re working on the problem, and the pixies will lose interest. They’ve got a short attention span, and the fairies got other things to worry about with their leader dead,” he says. “So you go home and lay low, you hear me? Don’t work any magic, don’t talk to fairies, don’t cause any more trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dead. We’re dead. It’s over. My every muscle strings tight, braced for the explosion I know is coming. I could make a run for the corridor and be out before the Big Man catches up with me, but I can’t leave Hitch. I just can’t. So I stand and stare into the Big Man’s freckled face, cursing the universe that his ugly mug is the last thing I’m ever going to see.

“Take a few more weeks off, have a barbecue, have your kissin’ cousin over for a few beers,” he says. “I think you and Tucker are going to—”

“Please,” I beg, voice hoarse with fear. “We’re all going to
die
if we don’t leave now.
Now!
”

“All right. Settle down there,
Beb
.” The Big Man pulls a pocketknife from his pants, leans down, and
cuts the ropes at Hitch’s wrists. Hitch flinches as the tension releases, his head jerking up like he’s waking from a bad dream. “There you go, son,” Big Man says. “Think you’d better grab Ms. Lee and head toward the exit.”

Hitch launches out of the chair, closing the distance between us at a run. His hand finds the spot between my shoulders and shoves me—none too gently—toward the corridor where Marcy and Cane disappeared a few minutes earlier. “Run!” he says, urging me in front of him as he takes off at a sprint.

I dash for the entrance to the hallway, casting one last look over my shoulder as I haul ass. I half-expect to see the Big Man standing in the middle of the room with a grin on his face, confident in his ability to withstand an explosion. But by the time I turn back, he’s gone. He’s light on his feet for an obese man, and he knows his way around. Chances are he’ll make it out alive.

I’m not sure the same can be said for Hitch and me.

The corridor ahead of us is long. Very long. Longer than the one Tucker and I walked through to get to the main room. And wider, with oversized railroad tracks set into the floor. We run for what feels like three or four endless, adrenaline-mangled minutes, but there’s still no end and no exit and every second is a second of borrowed time and I can feel death crawling up my spine on razor-tipped feet.

“How much further?” I gasp.

“Almost there. There’s a staircase. Exit through the roof.”

“Comes out in the swamp?”

“Yeah. But no fairies. Iron mesh on the ground. Parked the cruiser close,” he says, his sentences getting shorter as he sprints faster. Overhead, the lights set into the ceiling flicker and go out, leaving us in near blackness.

My heart leaps, and I falter, not sure if I can run on through the dark.

“Come on. Almost there. Don’t stop.”

I recognize the thinly concealed terror in his voice and pour on another burst of speed. Beside me, Hitch matches my pace, his breath coming in long, even draws that make me suspect he could push harder. He’s holding back, sticking with me the way I stuck with him.

I want to say “thank you.” I want to tell him that I’m glad I knew him—at least for most of the time I knew him. I want to tell him that I love him. Because I do. In a way that isn’t healthy and I’m not even sure is romantic anymore, but is
still
love. He was my friend, my lover, and for a long time the only person who knew me. Hitch took the time to see every part, to learn every secret.

Even now, when his presence causes more pain than pleasure, when he’s become a stranger and the ties binding us together are shredding at the seams, there’s still something incomparable about looking into his eyes. More than anyone else in the world, Hitch is a part of me, and he always will be.

I pull in a deeper breath, deciding to let whatever comes out, come out, but I don’t get to say a word.

One second we’re running like hell through the near dark, the next the world is eaten alive by a boom so big and bad that the ground jumps beneath our feet and the hallway begins to crumble.

H
itch grabs my hand and holds tight, pulling me hard to the left, pressing me against the wall as a piece of rock ceiling comes down where I was standing. I whip my head around to face him. My eyes have adjusted enough to the black to see his lips move, but I can’t hear a thing. The first boom is followed by a series of baby booms that make speech impossible.

Still, I scream, “I can’t hear you!”

He yells something back, but all I catch is a rogue vowel and maybe a
p
sound. Or a
d
?

I shake my head as another boom hits, buckling the ground, sending me crashing into Hitch. His arms go around my waist, my legs tangle in his, and he stumbles. I try to regain my footing and pull him upright, but sharp chunks of rock and twisted rail jut up from the floor. My shin slams into something hard, my center of gravity shifts, and Hitch falls backward.

I’m tumbling after when large hands grab my elbows and pull me back against damp clothes and a solid stretch of man.

“Fuck you, Tucker!” I wrench my arms away. It’s
too dark to see much, but I’d be able to see
something
if there were anything there to see. If he weren’t in invisible-coward mode. Yet again.

Still, I
know
it’s him and not the Big Man or some other invisible. Even a second of contact was enough for my body to recognize his.
Blargh
. I can’t believe I kissed him. As soon as we get back to Donaldsonville, I’m going to wash my mouth out with soap. A fresh bar, one a fairy hasn’t pooped on.

I reach back to help Hitch, but he’s already up and reaching for me. I take his hand and hold tight, following him over the increasingly jagged floor, shoulders hunched against falling debris, ignoring the pocket of body heat that follows behind. Even when a hunk of rock is magically knocked to the side seconds before it hits my shoulder, I don’t look back. Tucker had his chance to help and he blew it. Now he’s just another name on the Betrayal List.

What a list
that’s
becoming.

I can’t believe Marcy strapped
explosives
to Cane’s
chest
. What the
hell
does she think this is? Some 1980s spy movie? An episode of fucking
MacGyver
? You don’t go around strapping
explosives
to people in real life. Especially not people you care about. Especially not people who—only weeks ago—you advised your surrogate daughter to marry.

Not anymore. Not family anymore.
I wince, but I can’t tell if it’s because of the second supersized boom that shakes the earth, knocking Hitch and me into the wall, or the inescapable truth that hits so much harder.

Marcy’s not my family anymore. She left me for
the Big Man. That had to be what she meant when she said I wasn’t “her decision to make.” The CIA story was a lie. Either that or she’s a double agent, working for the CIA
and
an invisible psychopath. A psycho she wasn’t sure would allow me to live. I could see the uncertainty and pain in her eyes when she walked away. She didn’t want to leave me to him, but she did. She made her choice. And now I’ve made mine.

No matter how much I love her, if I see her again, I won’t pull any punches. I won’t protect her; I’ll do what it takes to make sure she can’t hurt anyone. Ever again.

Hitch drops my hand to push away a falling rock and Tucker makes his move. His arms wrap around me from behind and suddenly I’m in the air, feet thrashing in front of me.

“Put me down,” I scream, loud enough that I can hear myself over the next explosion. Guess Hitch can, too. He turns—body tensed, fist lifted.

Before he can deliver his punch, a door flies open in the wall. Tucker pulls me back into a small, dark room that’s holding up better than the hall outside. Hitch follows close behind. My hand flies out. Rough, cool, metal—like the bottom of a cast-iron skillet—brushes my fingertips. Metal walls. We must be in a safe room, one of the thousands sold after the fairy emergence.

“This way.” Tucker’s arm slides from my waist. A second later, a fluorescent light flicks on overhead, casting Hitch and me in a faint blue glow. “There should be an escape hatch in the back. Follow me.”

“I can’t see you,” I snap. “How can I—”

Tucker flickers into visibility next to Hitch, making Hitch jump and his hands ball into fists. “Howdy.” Tucker grins that same good-old-boy grin, and holds out a hand. “Tucker.”

Anger and Confusion wrestle on Hitch’s face before Understanding swoops in and knocks them both out of the ring. “Your cousin?” he asks, lifting his brows in my direction.

“Not my cousin,” I confess.

“No shit.” Hitch ignores Tucker’s hand. “I knew you were lying about that. I didn’t know you were lying about—”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“This is the guy from the road today, isn’t it?” Hitch asks, putting the pieces together pretty quickly for a man whose life is in imminent peril. “I can’t believe you didn’t—”

“All right, lovebirds.” Tucker strides toward the far wall. “Let’s save the arguments until we’re out of this hellhole.”