Heather Graham (18 page)

She wasn’t afraid of Jacques Moret, Ann thought.

Not for herself.

Yet...

She was afraid. For Ann.

Ann rose from Mama Lili Mae’s embrace. She faced the man in the doorway.

Blocking the doorway.

She squared her shoulders. “Well, nice meeting you, Mr. Moret,” she said.

And started to walk past him.

Mama Lili Mae’s bayou cottage was still some distance down the trail. Mark was through the muddy area that rose from the water, walking on more solid ground. His pace quickened as he mentally cursed her.

Little fool.

She shouldn’t have come here. Or if she’d wanted so desperately to come here, she should have talked to him.

She was okay with Gregory.

Wasn’t she?

He pictured her eyes, so very green. So wide. Filled with integrity, passion. Determination to save Jon Marcel at all costs.

At all costs.

He pictured her eyes...

Then Gina’s, as she had lain dead.

He started running.

He was almost there.

Almost.

But not quite.

The house was not yet within his sight when Mark heard the first ear-piercing scream.

And the rain began to fall.

“C
INDY!”

Gregory heard the scream, but the rain had begun. It was an instant and complete deluge, battering down upon him in giant, stinging droplets. The sound of it against the earth and foliage was deafening.

It brought the darkness.

Complete darkness.

“Cindy!” he cried out. “Cindy, damn you, where the hell are you, Cindy, answer me!”

His voice became blended with the violence of the storm. He cursed himself; he should have seen the rain.

“Cindy!”

He tried to shout. Already he had become hoarse.

“Cindy!”

His voice was fading.

So were his hopes.

He shouted once again.

Then he started trudging through the mud, cursing himself.

He stopped. Was it Cindy who had screamed? He knew the bayou; he thought he knew the bayou. Yet he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know now from which direction the scream had come.

“Cindy? Ann?”

He tried to rub the rain from his eyes, tried to see through the darkness.

There was someone...something...ahead of him. No, the figure was gone.

He had the uneasy feeling of a man being stalked. He turned in the rain. Turned again. “Cindy? Ann? Where the hell are you two girls? Sweet Jesus, ladies, answer me!”

The rain was his answer. And the wind, rising now, whipping around in the foliage.

No one was answering him, yet he knew...

Someone had heard him. Someone was...

Behind him.

He knew it for certain in the few seconds before the searing pain from the crack upon his head sent him sinking down into a pit of blackness...

And oblivion.

Mark cursed and swore. The scream had come long moments ago now, and he was nowhere near the house; he was, in fact, being pressed farther away by the rising winds and the flooding. He was beginning to feel as if he were out in the middle of the water itself for all the progress he was suddenly making.

The rain caused the lowland areas of the bayou to flood almost instantly. The cottages, like Mama Lili Mae’s, survived because they were built up on stilts. But the trail was now washed away, and the scope of the storm had settled over them like a giant black miasma.

He heard a sucking sound. Someone else moving through the mud, someone who had just all but passed him in the rain and mire. Someone he might have reached out and touched.

Instinctively, he changed direction, making his way to where the boats had been.

The rain was bad. The flooding was wiping away paths and trails and landmarks.

But he knew, staring at what had been the water’s edge, that he was in the right place.

And the boats were gone.

Moret...

Ugh! Ann shivered, running over the bridge and down the trail. He made her skin crawl. She had been certain that he’d been about to reach out for her. That he would stop her from leaving.

But he hadn’t touched her. She’d managed to walk past him in a fairly sedate and dignified manner—one with applaudable bravado. But at Mama Lili Mae’s door, she had begun to run. And she was certain that she heard his laughter following her.

“Gregory, Cindy?” she called, across the bridge and onto what she thought was the trail. No one was anywhere around. Was she even on the trail? Had it been so overgrown before?

“Gregory? Cindy?” She spoke the names more softly, rather than shouting them.

Where were the two?

She looked up. It was almost as if the sky were squatting down on the land. The billowing darkness was sinking down upon her.

She heard footsteps.

Behind her.

She whirled around. Nothing. No one. She felt eyes—night eyes—staring at her from within the brush.

She was losing her mind. “There are lots of little creatures in the woods!” she said aloud. And they were allowed to look at her, right.

That creature was out here. Old Billy. That old alligator. What had Cindy said? He was nearly fifteen feet long.

Ann didn’t know a lot about alligators, but surely, fifteen feet was big.

“No problem,” she muttered to the wind. “If I find the sucker, I’ll just talk to him. I’ll talk fast. Please don’t eat me, Old Billy, please, please, please, don’t eat me. Nice weather, eh? Maybe you like this kind of stuff.”

Footsteps!

She heard footsteps, running, she was certain. Near her.

“Gregory, Cindy!”

Her blood seemed to freeze as she heard the scream. She didn’t know where it came from. It seemed a part of the wind, of the air, of the angry gnash of the foliage as the weather whipped air and earth into a frenzy.

“Cindy?” she cried.

The first big splash of rain fell into her left eye with such force that she staggered back from it, blinking. Then the heavens let loose, and in a matter of seconds she was drenched beneath the deluge.

Which way to go? Where had the scream come from? Should she be trying to follow the sound of that scream, or should she be running as far from it as she possibly could?

With her arms huddled closer around herself, her teeth chattering, Ann started to move in what she thought was the direction of the house.

But there was no more trail. The rain had already risen high enough to make mush out of the ground. The water was going to keep on rising, she realized.

And pretty soon it would be just as if she were attempting to navigate a shallow channel of the bayou itself. “Oh, hell!” she whispered aloud.

She couldn’t just stand there.

“Cindy, damn you, where are you, are you all right? Where the hell are you?”

There was no answer; she hadn’t expected one. She couldn’t possibly have heard one.

Except...

She was hearing something.

She swirled around. There was movement in the brush to her left. Wasn’t there?

A sucking sound to her right when she looked nervously to her left. Which was the storm? Which was real?

Which was the danger...stalking her?

She didn’t know from which direction the menace was coming, but instinct, intuition, every fiber in her being warned her that she wasn’t alone.

And it wasn’t a friend trying to find her. Panic seized her. She tried to breathe in deeply; she inhaled rain. She gritted her teeth together hard, trying to weigh her chances in either direction. Where was the house? Where were the boats?

Where was there something that most resembled a trail?

She started to move, cautiously at first. There, to her right. The brush was moving. There might be something in it. An animal. A bayou creature.

A snake.

That thought didn’t help any. This country surely offered a good home for moccasins, maybe more.

This must be one big snake.

Snakes came in human form.

She turned blindly then, certain that she was in terrible danger, and that the danger was close. It didn’t matter in what direction she ran anymore, as long as she ran.

She reached out blindly, trying to part the rich green foliage that slapped back at her. She could hear it...yes, even above the storm. A pounding, a thudding, a sucking of sound against the earth behind her, coming closer and closer. Someone was after her. Closer, closer.

She veered course.

Along with the wind, she could hear her breathing. Against the cold of the storm, her lungs burned.

She burst into something of a clearing. The water was ahead of her. Not just a flooded trail; the water, the bayou. She spun around, feeling as if she were at the edge of a precipice, about to go tumbling over. Did she hear it anymore? The pounding? Anything?

Something...cracked, nearby. She strained to hear against the driving wind. She backed toward the water.

She shrieked as she came against flesh. Hard, unyielding flesh and muscle. A hand clamped down over her mouth. Strong, ruthless arms swept her back from the trail.

Mama Lili Mae stood on her porch, heedless of the wind ripping around her, of the rain that the wind lifted and slashed against her, despite the porch’s overhang.

She should have forced the girl to stay with her. The rain was coming. Anyone could have seen that.

Maybe not the violence of this storm, though. She hadn’t seen a storm like this one, rising in this kind of tempest, in years.

She shook her head; she couldn’t see a thing. They had to be all right out there. In spite of that scream she’d heard. They all knew this place well enough. That little Cindy had probably just had a little brush with a tree snake and sent chills down everybody’s spine because of it. They all had to be okay.

Jacques would find them. He’d gone after Ann Marcel when the rain had started. He’d been directly told by her to do so, so he’d come back with her, if the three of them hadn’t managed to get to the boats and take off already. Foolish. They should have come back. Cindy and Gregory should have known to do so. They should have.

They’d come back.

She shook her old head worriedly.

Maybe they wouldn’t.

She walked back into her house, through the living room, to her bedroom. At a corner altar, she lit purple candles. She knelt down, and began to sway.

And chant.

She took out of her pocket the little doll she had gotten from Ann Marcel.

One by one, she removed the tiny pins that had been stuck into it...

Chanting all the while.

The man who grabbed her wasn’t going to have to kill her. Her heart was racing a million miles an hour; it was going to arrest on her any second. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think; she was going to pass out.

No, no, she wasn’t going to die without a fight!

“Hey, shush!”

He was talking to her. He’d stalked her, he was going to kill her, and he wanted her to shush up while he was doing it. She kicked him as hard as she could manage in her backward position. She hit a shin. He swore, falling down into the mud.

Dragging her with him.

His hand remained over her mouth as he struggled to find a position splayed over her. She looked up at the face hovering over hers, rain slaking off it, hair so sodden it was almost like a hose above her.

“Shut up, will you, sweet Jesus. I come to save your damned life and you kick me. Women.”

Mark. Mark LaCrosse. He was here in the swamp with her. On top of her in the mud.

He moved his hand from her mouth.

“Mark?”

“Yes.”

She was so shaken that she took a swing at him. “Bloody hell!” he muttered, catching her flailing limb.

“You scared me to death. You stalked me through the woods and the rain—”

“Don’t be an idiot. I wasn’t stalking you—I was trying to find out who the hell it was.” He jumped to his feet, reached down for her, and dragged her up. They were both covered in mud. They must resemble two brown-colored Swamp Creatures.

“Damn you—” Ann began.

“Shush!”

Shaking, she went silent. They both stood dead still in the rain, listening. There was nothing but the continual downpour coming at them.

“Come on,” he told her.

His hand closed over hers. He started walking.

“Where are we going.”

“Back to Mama Lili Mae’s.”

“Cindy and Gregory are here somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean, maybe?”

“The boats are all gone. They might have left already.”

“Would they leave without me?”

“Have you seen them anywhere?”

She shook her head. “But I heard a scream.”

He stopped abruptly. “You didn’t scream?”

“No. It had to have been Cindy.”

He nodded. “All right. We’ll keep looking. But Cindy was with Gregory, right?”

“Yes. I—I went to talk to Mama Lili Mae. She wanted to talk to me alone, so Cindy and Gregory went for a walk together.”

“If they’re together, Cindy’s got to be okay. Gregory would never leave her. But we’ll keep looking as long as we can.” He turned and started walking again. She followed, keeping her head down against the pounding of the rain. He could lead now.

Oh, God. He could lead now. What a relief. They’d be out of this hell soon. He’d yell, he’d be miserable, but they’d be out of the swamp soon. She couldn’t wait to shower. In the hottest water she could stand. For as long as she could bear. She’d scrub her hair until there wasn’t a single vestige of this mud left in it.

He stopped suddenly, swearing. She rammed into his back, it was so abrupt a movement.

“What—”

“Son of a bitch. We’re not going that way.”

“Why?”

He drew her around him. Giant trees had uprooted. It would take a machete to cut a way through the tangle of bark, root and foliage that had ensued.

“Well, we’re not getting back to Mama Lili Mae’s,” he said.

“Will she be all right?”

“Mama Lili Mae? She’d be in better shape than me in almost any given combat situation,” Mark said dryly. “Maybe Gregory and Cindy did make their way back to the house. We’ll keep looking, but at least they’re together, whether they’re in the house or the rain and the muck.”