Quietly cursing our luck, I helped my cousin Jake limp down the muddy, rutted road. I wished we were back in New Orleans instead of the ass end of swamp country. But Jake and I got a little too curious about late-night shenanigans in a boarded-up warehouse near his father Rudy’s auction house. We’d handled occult items during our three summers working there, so we both knew esoteric magic was real. But we never believed in the Outer Gods until we watched those damn fool cult members summon the Dream Witch Yidhra and her pack of enslaved shoggoths.
Beauty and her beasts. We did what we could with crowbars and gasoline. Yidhra vanished as the warehouse burned. She’s truly something to behold, but you don’t want to look her in the eye unless you want her inside your head. And you don’t want to be bitten by a shoggoth unless you want to slowly, painfully turn into one.
By the time we set foot on that soggy back road, it had been thirty-six hours since one of the monsters munched Jake’s shoulder. The ER docs stitched him up and gave him an antibiotics shot. But his arm swelled and started breaking out in ugly dark boils that stank of brimstone. I called Beau LeRoux, a local professor who often bid on esoteric items we auctioned, hoping he might know what to do. LeRoux said there was only one person in the whole state who might be able to do something for Jake: Madame Caplette.
My cousin’s whole arm puffed up like an andouille sausage and turned black with those horrible boils. The bones in his hand were soft, rubbery. Worse, the swelling spread from his shoulder to his neck. He’d lost his voice and had a tough time breathing. The corruption moved down his spine, and he could barely walk. I could tell it hurt like absolute hell.
“She’s gonna be able to help you, I know it,” I told him.
He grunted and gave me a half-hearted thumbs-up. We trekked on with him leaning heavily on my shoulder.
Jake was the closest thing I had to a brother. We’re nearly the same age. His parents took me to raise after my mom OD’d when I was just six. Adulterated heroin, back before it was cool. Dad was already serving a life sentence for dealing coke. Uncle Rudy’s too softhearted to tell many hard truths to a little kid, but he never made any bones about what took my parents from me. Hate’s a strong word, but that’s how I feel about the turds who peddle poison. Jake loved my mom, too, and so we’d both been vigilant about watching for dealers in the neighborhood. We were certain that the cultists were selling meth, but we kinda lost our focus on that after Yidhra showed up.
I was glad he took after his mama and was a thin, wiry kid; if he’d been a linebacker type like Uncle Rudy, I couldn’t have gotten him down the road. But woe betide any cocky dude who thought skinny meant weak; Jake boxed until he learned about chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He had a left hook like a lightning bolt. I prayed he’d be able to keep his arm.
The road wound through a copse of oaks furred with Spanish moss and lichens to a sprawling blue ranch house with a red barn out back. A huge magnolia tree bloomed in the front yard, the white blossoms humming with bees. The front door was open behind a closed screen.
An African statue of a man decorated entirely with cowry shells stood beside the galvanized steel mailbox of different shades of white, yellow, and brown. He held out a small bronze bowl that contained an assortment of blue glass beads; whether they were offers from or to visitors I couldn’t tell. I left them alone.
A knock-kneed girl of nine or ten in a purple jumper and bright pink Chuck Taylors came running around the side of the house, then slid to a dead stop when she saw us. “Gran-maaaAAAA!” she hollered, pelting into the house, curly black pigtails bouncing. “There’s people heeeere!”
A moment later, a stooped old woman came out of the house, squinting at us from behind thick old-fashioned bifocals. She leaned heavily on a staff of gnarled black wood. A cowry bracelet hung from her bony wrist.
“Who are you kids, and what do you want?” Her voice conveyed strength that seemed impossible given her apparent physical frailty.
“I’m Pepper Mouton, and this is Jake Garza,” I called back. “Beau LeRoux said he’d call about us?”
She stepped forward, looking over the tops of her spectacles at Jake’s arm. “Lord have mercy. Get that boy into the house.”
Once we got Jake settled on her couch, the old witch pulled a footstool over and began to examine my cousin’s boils.
“Shoggoth?” she asked.
I nodded. “He got bit almost two days ago.”
She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “I can heal him, I reckon. But I’m a mite short of heart-juice for the potion. It’s one more night to the new moon...it has to be taken when there’s nothing but starlight. Monique can take you there, but you have to do the harvest. I’m too old to go running around in the bayou after that critter.”
“What critter?” I asked.
“Sap Daddy. The beast come here with the Spaniards four hunnert years ago; they let it go in the swamp when it got too big to keep as a pet. And there it stayed, eating gators and getting bigger and bigger. When it died, something in the swamp kept it alive. It’s more plant than animal now, but that don’t make it no less dangerous. Sap from its heart and some other bits and bobs are just the thing we need here.”
“Can you keep Jake from getting any worse until we go out hunting?”
She nodded. “I ’spect I can.”
Madame Caplette took me to a back workroom that had been outfitted in mismatched kitchen counters and cabinets with open shelving above. The old woman stood upon her tiptoes and pulled down a cardboard box that she set on the Formica work surface.
“This here is what you’ll need for the collectin’.” She opened the box and pulled out a copper-clad glass jug with a black rubber stopper and a galvanized steel funnel. Both looked like they had come from some backwoods moonshine still.
“And this is for the cuttin’.” She unrolled a burlap bundle as long as my shinbone to reveal an African ceremonial knife. It had an elongated, leaf-shaped iron blade with a dark hardwood hilt and matching scabbard. The weapon looked positively ancient, and I could feel a strange vibration from it.
“Should I fill the whole jug?” I asked.
She nodded and pulled an old blue nylon gym bag that had to date from the 1970s down from another shelf. “As close to full as you can get, but don’t take more’n that, and don’t waste none. Sap Daddy is a genuine gold-egg goose for us, and we need him healthy. Well, healthy as a thing like him can possibly be, I s’pose.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“All you got to do is get him to settle down and cut one of the little heart-vines.” She gave the bag’s white shoulder strap a couple of yanks; apparently satisfied that it would hold, she started loading up the equipment. “But he don’t always come along easy. Monique is good with witch-song, but she’s real young. If the beast gets rambunctious, mind she don’t get hurt. And don’t you go dropping this here knife over the side of the boat, or I’ll make you go diving to find it again, you hear?”
“Yes ma’am. How do we find him?”
“Use the old pole boat I got in the shed out back—motor noise scares him off—and take it up the stream that runs behind my property. Monique’s real good at finding him, so don’t worry none about that. Just hang onto your boots and get the jug full up and bring it back here, lickety-split.”
The next night I dragged the old flat-bottomed skiff to the shallow water just after eleven p.m. and tied it to the old tree stump that served as a mooring. There was no breeze to speak of. A piney haze in the air dimmed the stars. Without any moonlight, the stream bank seemed oppressively dark.
“So, once we find this thing, how do we catch it?” I asked Monique as we carefully stepped into the boat with our gear.
“I sing to him, and he gets still,” she replied, setting her waterproof, hand-crank LED lantern on the wooden seat beside her.
“For real?” I put the old blue gym bag down in the cargo area, checked my shotgun, and stowed it along the inner hull. Madame Caplette had warned me that we might encounter some fairly large gators.
“For real.” She dipped her paddle in the water.
I pushed off the bank with the long white fiberglass pole. “Bollywood tunes, or lullabies, or what?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “It likes old Spanish Christmas songs like ‘Venid pastores.’ I guess they used to sing that stuff to him back in the old days.”
“So, no Lady Gaga?”
Monique gave me a sidelong squint that would’ve made Clint Eastwood proud. “Uh, no.”
“That’s good. ‘Bad Romance’ isn’t really in my range.”
“You’re weird,” she said.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
The girl fell silent, and I kept pushing us along. The only sound was the faint swish of the water and the frogs calling to each other in the cattails. A few fireflies flitted to and fro, blinking come-hithers.
A woman laughed right behind me. I nearly dropped the pole in surprise. The boat rocked as I whirled around. The frogs went silent, startled by the sudden slap and splash of the hull. Nobody was there.
“What’s the matter?” Monique frowned at me.
“Did you hear that?” I held my breath, trying to listen, scanning the weeds and dark water. Still nothing.
“Hear what?” she asked.
“That laugh.”
“Uh, no...” The girl was staring at me as if she wasn’t sure if I was messing with her or not.
“Seriously, you didn’t hear that?”
“No, ma’am.”
I swore under my breath and pushed the boat off again. “Never mind. Just my nerves, I guess.”
Problem was, I didn’t think I’d been all that nervous. Not enough to start hearing things, anyway. Jake’s life depended on this. Pressure? Sure. But this was something a 9-year-old could do. Had done several times, apparently. How bad could it be?
“Oh, there’s plenty that could go bad tonight.” Yidhra’s voice. Directly behind me.
I cussed and turned again, holding the pole like a spear. My heart was thudding. “Where the hell are you?”
Her head broke the surface a few yards behind the boat, just beyond my pole’s reach. She smiled. “I’m right here. Or am I?”
“What do you mean?” My voice shook.
“Maybe I’m not here at all.” Yidhra smoothly breaststroked forward, graceful as a naiad, still keeping her distance. Her long black hair fanned out in the water behind her. “Maybe I’m just a hallucination. Maybe you caught a virus that’s eating away at your brain, and you’re going crazy.”
“Uh, ma’am, who are you talking to?” Monique sounded worried.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry.
“Or maybe I’m here, and your songbird just can’t see me,” Yidhra continued. “And she won’t see me even when I cut her skinny little throat.”
“Leave her alone.” I gripped the pole with my left hand and bent down to pick up my Mossberg with my right. I trained the shotgun on Yidhra, who just laughed at me.
“What’s going on?” Monique sounded genuinely scared. “Is—is someone out there?”
I looked back at the girl. Her brown eyes were huge, and her cheeks were wet with frightened tears.
“Don’t worry.” I tried to sound calm and confident. “There’s a problem, but it’s my problem, all right? Just get us to Sap Daddy.”
Monique nodded and wiped her face. “Okay.”
“I might say some stuff to my friend in the water,” I continued. “Just...just ignore it. Okay?”
The request sounded stupid the moment I made it, but Monique simply nodded again, all her eye-rolling sassiness gone. One good thing about kids who’ve been raised around witchcraft is that while they might be annoyingly cavalier about some stuff, they know to take it seriously when real monsters come calling. Or at least they’ll go with real monsters as plausible, and not immediately assume that the person in the boat with you has just transformed into a hallucinating, gun-waving lunatic.
“A lunatic without a moon to howl at.” Yidhra laughed again. “How ironic. How sad.”
I set my shotgun down and poled us away from her fast as I could, my shoulders straining with my effort, but the death goddess easily kept pace with the boat.
“Shove off,” I said.
“You’re just heartbroken over your cousin, aren’t you?” Her voice was husky with fake sympathy. “Here you are, trying so hard to save him, and every minute that ticks off the clock is a minute he’s closer to death. He’s suffering so much, Pepper, so much more than you know. And you’ve put his future in the hands of a little girl and an old witch. Do you really think they can save him?”
“Do you have a point?” I spat.
“I think it would be a mercy to put him out of his misery,” she replied. “And take his soul for safekeeping.”
“Go to hell.”
“Perhaps I should put the old woman down. Perhaps I’m at her house, right this very minute, and before you can get your little boat turned around I’ll have her scattered all over her garden. You can watch Jake die horribly tomorrow.”
My heart pounded so hard that my vision shook. I stared at Yidhra, who was floating on her back, just her face and naked breasts clear of the water. “Why would you do that?”
She shrugged. “Because I can. Because you and your cousin disrupted my plans. I’m merely returning the favor.”
“If you hurt Jake or Madame Caplette,” I growled, “I won’t rest until I’ve destroyed you. I will see you burn.”
Yidhra laughed uproariously at that, splashing merrily. I focused on poling the boat as quickly as I could while Yidhra began to detail all the grotesque ways she would kill my loved ones, and their loved ones. I wished I had a pair of earplugs, but I knew she’d wormed her way into my brain. Not even a jet engine would drown out her voice.
We reached the mouth of the stream. It opened into the dark maze of a bald cypress swamp. The tree limbs dripped with Spanish moss. The water here was stagnant, the surface thick with duckweed and drifting mats of ragged algae. I could smell rotting vegetation and the rankness of reptile dung, either from gators or something much bigger.
“...in Tepes’ time, a good impaler could hammer in a stake without destroying any major organs,” Yidhra said, “and a young, healthy victim could suffer for two or even three days before he died. But I’ve heard that with modern piercing techniques and saline and antibiotics you can keep your playmate aware and in agony for nearly twice as long. I think I’ll try that with your Uncle Rudy—he’s not that young, but he seems pretty strong, don’t you think?”
A terrible image rose in my mind, a psychic sucker punch: my uncle hanging screaming from a huge wooden spike that someone had rammed up under his ribcage and out through his shoulder. My senses spun with vertigo, and I fell to my knees in the boat. Fortunately, I didn’t lose my pole. Or my dinner.
“What’s the matter?” Monique looked even more scared than before.
“Just got dizzy.” I blinked to try to clear my vision and got to my feet. “Where do we go from here?”
“That way.” She pointed out into the darkness. “I can feel him.”
I kept on poling the boat through the debris and cypresses as Yidhra’s descriptions grew even more horrifying and vivid. Sometimes the water around us turned into a lake of blood and dismembered bodies. Vegetal rot turned to a charnel house stench. Sometimes the Spanish moss transformed into festoons of steaming entrails. The trees became a thousand crooked gallows decorated with the corpses of the condemned. Sometimes the entire landscape around me looked like a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.
“I’m...having a hard time seeing straight,” I finally told Monique. “Make sure I’m going the right way, okay? If it seems like I’m going to wreck the boat, say something. Please.”
The girl gazed at me, and I flinched. It looked like someone had scraped her face off with a length of razor wire.
“Are you okay?” The part of my head that was buying Yidhra’s illusion marveled at how well Monique could speak without any lips.
I shook my head. “It’s my problem, not yours. Just don’t let me wreck us.”
A little while later, she inhaled sharply.
“What is it?” I couldn’t glimpse anything but the landscape of carnage.
“It’s him. He’s here, I know it.”
“Where?” I strained to see past the bloody veil.
“I dunno, I can’t—”
The girl shrieked as something big and strong rammed the bottom of our boat, knocking it sideways. Suddenly, I was plunging into the warm, sticky gore. I went under completely for a moment, fighting against what felt like a dozen dead hands grasping my arms and clothes, but I managed to surface, spitting foul gore from my mouth.
Monique was still screeching in panic. The girl definitely had a sturdy set of lungs.
“It’ll be okay!” I hollered up at her, part of me wondering if I was telling her a terrible lie. I still couldn’t see the beast, but I could feel the vibrations of something huge pulling itself across the muddy swamp bottom. “You know what to do...sing to it!”
I heard her take a deep breath. I figured she’d just start screaming again—hell, if I’d been in her situation when I was nine they could have strapped me to the roof of a fire truck and used me as a siren. What came out was a beautiful soprano note, a little shaky at first, but it got stronger and stronger and became a sound of such transcendent clarity you could compare it to the purest stream in the mountains above Shangri-la or the gleam of Caladbolg’s steel or the glitter of the Hope Diamond and all those other things would seem mundane and unimpressive. Monique had the kind of voice that could make the most cynical, hard-minded atheist instantly believe in a benevolent higher power, believe in anything.
She held the note a little longer, then took another breath and began to sing an old Spanish Christmas song. I didn’t understand the lyrics, but the words didn’t matter. The power was all in her voice, and as Monique’s music flowed over me, Yidhra’s horrible vision evaporated like fog in sunshine. The gore around me became innocuous swamp water, and what had seemed to be zombie hands grabbing at my legs was just a tangle of common riverweeds.
I looked up and found myself staring up into a set of toothed jaws the size of Madame Caplette’s Volkswagen. I’d have been petrified if the sight of the monster wasn’t such a welcome relief from Yidhra’s visions. It was the skeleton of a dragon reanimated by the swamp. Creaking green vines were muscle and sinew linking the ancient bones. Moss bearded the dragon’s jaw and huge scarlet rose mallow flowers bloomed in caches of muddy debris on its back and sides. I could see between its ribs, and where the dragon’s flesh heart should have been was a knot of dark, shiny vines that pulsed with a faint blue glow.
Monique stood ramrod straight in the boat, giving the song everything she had. I caught her eye and she pointed at the gear bag with a get on with it expression.
I splashed back to the boat for the bag, slung it across my back, and climbed the beast’s slippery vines to reach the heart. The heart was blocked by some stray vegetation; I cut as little of it away as possible, just enough so I could squeeze the jug and funnel into the chest cavity. I positioned the funnel beneath one thin, pulsing black vine, then slit it with the tip of the knife.
Black sap began to ooze from the core of the vine down into the funnel and the jug. The fishy odor was much more pungent in this fresh dragon molasses. My eyes watered. The vine clogged after a little while and I had to make another cut. My thigh muscles began to ache from the effort of clinging to the rib, but I hung on until the jug was full. I carefully corked the jug, slipped it and the knife and funnel back in the gym bag, and slid down to the water.
Once I was back in the boat, Monique continued caroling as I poled us away back toward the stream, avoiding the mossy wrecks of other boats that had ventured into the swamp after Sap Daddy.
“Do you think you can keep singing long enough for us to get home?” I asked. Whatever witchcraft the girl was able to weave in her music, it was doing a fabulous job of keeping Yidhra out of my head. I knew Monique couldn’t keep it up forever, but I’d enjoy what peace I could get while it lasted.
Monique nodded, looking a little mischievous. She took a deep breath and started belting out “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
I smiled and began to sing along with her.
Madame Caplette was waiting for us on the stream bank, looking impatient. “Why you singing that, girl? I told you not to waste your skills on them silly songs!”
Looking innocent, Monique pointed at me.
I shrugged. “She’s helping me out with a little problem tonight.” I threw the loop of the mooring rope over the tree stump and stepped out of the boat with the gear bag. “We got the sap; you want it?”
The old witch ignored the bag and frowned up at me. “‘A little problem’ my bony posterior! Bend down here so I can take a look at your eyes, girl.”
I did as she asked, and she took off her spectacles and peered into my eye, holding up her kerosene lantern for a better look.
Monique hopped out of the boat and peered at my face. “Ooh, your eyes have gotten all purple! They look like grapes!”
“Well, now, when was you gonna tell me you’re possessed?” Madame Caplette’s sharp tone of disapproval made my innards clench.
“Well, now, since when do you care?” I shot back. “It’s my problem, not yours.”
“It gets to be my problem right quick if your head starts a’ spinnin’ while I’m in the middle of the ritual. If I get distracted, your cousin gets dead. Do you want that?”
I flinched, realizing I’d been an idiot. “No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
Her expression softened. “Got a notion of who’s in you?”
“Yidhra.” The name tasted like cigarette ash on my tongue.
“And the beast that bit your cousin, was it in thrall to her?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that?” She scowled. “You didn’t think that all this would have been a thing I needed to know right when you brung him here?”
Heat rose in my cheeks. “No.”
“Lord Almighty.” She lowered her lantern and sighed at me, shaking her head. “Come on to the house. I got something that’ll keep it from getting any worse. It ain’t a permanent solution, but it’ll work for now. Looks like I gotta rethink everything, because it ain’t just Jake who needs healing.”
She took me to a back bedroom where she unlocked a large mahogany jewelry chest and pulled out a necklace made of blue glass beads with a large round turquoise pendant. When she held the necklace out to me, I realized the beads and stone were carved to look like eyes.
“Wear it close to your heart,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.” I slipped the necklace on over my head and tucked it under my tee shirt. The moment the stone and glass touched my bare skin, I felt the same kind of cool washing-over relief that Monique’s song had given me in the swamp.
I helped Madame Caplette set up a black iron cauldron on a tripod over a pine log fire in the middle of a big circle of packed earth in the back yard. We gathered fresh herbs from her garden then put the dragon molasses, plants, a jug of rum, some silver nitrate powder, and a whole lot of black pepper into the cauldron to boil.
Next, she had me and Monique dig two post holes inside the arcane circle just beyond the worst of the heat from the fire and pound sturdy wooden 6-by-6s into both of them. The posts were standard pressure-treated lumber like you’d use for a deck, but someone had screwed D-rings into the sides. I’d seen the same kind of thing in someone’s bondage dungeon once.
“You’re not gonna tie us up out here, are you?” I joked nervously.
The old witch looked grave. “Matter of fact, I have to. The evil in you ain’t gonna let go without a fight.”
I went back into the house and helped Jake stumble to the arcane circle. Monique was nervously twisting a bundle of hemp rope when I came back out. She helped me tie Jake sitting with his back to his post, and then tied me to mine.
Madame Caplette went back into the house and returned wearing a loose blue caftan. In one hand she carried an oak bucket that held a long-handled steel dipper and an owl-feathered rattle made from a dried gourd lashed to a human radius bone.
She stepped barefoot onto the dirt circle and set the bucket and cooler down just inside the circle’s edge, away from the heat. For the next hour, she got down on her hands and knees inscribing various arcane symbols in the dirt with the ceremonial knife. Some she put around the cauldron’s fire, others she drew around me and Jake.
Monique sat on a log near us, watching her grandmother work with rapt interest. Madame Caplette finished scratching the last symbol into the ground. Her knees and back popped audibly as she got to her feet and stretched, raising the muddy knife toward the still-dark morning sky.
I held my breath and nervously twisted my wrists in their ropes as Madame Caplette started the ritual. The old witch raised the owl-feathered rattle and the ceremonial knife. She began to chant, stomp and dance around the potion bubbling in the cauldron. A bucket of dry ice for cooling the finished potion sent an eerie low fog across the ground beyond the fire. Her motions were practiced and utterly confident. She slashed the air with the knife as if she were cutting down every last one of the forces of evil.
Jake moaned and struggled against his post. I couldn’t understand much of the chant, but I caught enough to know she was calling on the whole guédé loa family to help us fend off Yidhra and her minions. Loas don’t always have good will towards humankind. But they are of the Earth, and Yidhra pretends to be but is not. This was a clear supernatural turf war if ever there was one. Madame Caplette brought all her authority to the chant, and she wielded an ancient, powerful magic that was downright scary. Hairs rose on my arms and the back of my neck, as if a thunderstorm was gathering above us, but the sky was clear.
A shock rocketed through me as if Jake had slammed me with one of his haymaking left hooks. Suddenly there I was, back in the burning warehouse, facing Yidhra in all her terrible beauty.
“I’ve seen into your heart.” She smiled at me. “I know exactly what you want, Pepper. It can all be yours if you give yourself to me.”
She showed a vision of me holding court for socialites and politicians in a grand old house in Lakewood. Everybody knew my name because I’d personally funded all the drug rehab programs, homeless shelters, and job programs. All the misery and poverty in the city was gone because of me. I was smart, respected, cool. Any old thing I decided to wear became that season’s fashion. Pop stars like Beyoncé wanted to meet me. People asked for my autograph at parties. Our city was no longer the punchline of jokes about drunks or hurricanes. New Orleans shone as the brightest diamond in America’s crown, and I was its princess.
I saw it all so clearly, and I wanted it so badly. I just had to let Yidhra devour me, heart and soul, and the dream would come true. But deep down I knew it would be an illusion that only existed inside my own head. Because if the dark goddess could do all that, why hadn’t it been done?
“No,” I said.
“If you refuse me, your family will suffer like none before.”
She showed me visions of Jake screaming, his skin dripping off his body as the shoggoth corruption took hold and crushed his bones to mush before he became a formless, blister-eyed monstrosity. I saw Rudy flayed, his arms and legs smashed with a sledgehammer. I saw his wife Lori chopped to pieces in our basement. I saw myself doing all these terrible things to my aunt and uncle. The goddess would take hold of me and force me to torture them if I refused her. I’d end up locked away in some asylum, mad and savage and hated until I finally died.
I grabbed Yidhra by her long, beautiful hair and dragged her with me into the heart of the warehouse fire. She screamed and clawed at my face as we both burned, our skin blistering and blackening. The agony of it took the air from my lungs, but I had to protect my family. I had to. The pain of immolation was worse than anything I’d ever imagined, but I held the shrieking goddess in the flames. My will was stronger than flesh and bone.
I came back to the real world, gagging as Madame Caplette poured the hot, bitter, tarry potion down my throat.
“You got to swallow it!” she ordered.
I did as she told me. My clothes were soaked through with sweat, and my wrists and arms ached, raw from my fighting against the ropes all night. The eye-stone necklace still hung solid and cool around my neck. Dawn was breaking through the trees, and the early morning sky was lit in delicate reds and purples.
My cousin sat slumped over, still bound to his post. He was breathing. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the swelling in his arm had gone down.
“Jake,” I called. “You still with us?”
He slowly raised his head. “That was a real messed-up dream I just had.” His voice was hoarse, but strong.
“I think y’all are both on the mend,” said Madame Caplette.
“You know she’s gonna come back, right?” Jake stared at me, his eyes clear and unafraid. “She got a taste of both our souls, and she ain’t gonna give up so easy.”
“Well, she can’t be more persistent than any of the effin’ narco gangs who keep coming into our neighborhood, can she?” I replied. “If she wants another ass-kicking, by gods we’ll give her one.”
Jake smiled. “That we will, cuz. That we will.”