WHAT A DREAM I HAD

NANCY HOLDER

Alcide Herveaux, werewolf and member of the Long Tooth pack, has always carried a torch for Sookie. Alcide famously has a disastrous history with women. Though he and Sookie had chemistry, Sookie had to kill Alcide’s murderous ex, Debbie Pelt. After that, Alcide’s love Maria-Star Cooper was murdered. Then her replacement, Annabelle, was unfaithful. Maybe this pattern of bad luck began with Alcide’s prom date, Emmaline Ravel. You be the judge.

—

NOW . . .

“That best friend must still be dying, Alcide,” Dale the bartender said. “Third night in a row you been in here.”

“Someone’s dying, but he’s no friend of mine,” Alcide muttered.

Dale put down Alcide’s first shot of the evening—what had once been an occasional ritual was becoming more customary—and Alcide threw it back. The bourbon was as hot going down as the slap that still burned his cheek. Dale placed another shot on the shiny varnished oak bar without being asked.

“You have any regrets in life?” Alcide asked Dale. The bartender grunted. And Alcide quirked a half grin. “I’m buying, if you need to lighten your load.”

Behind Dale, the ornate engraved mirror caught a slice of light as someone came in from the steamy Louisiana rain. Idly, Alcide glanced into the glass.

He froze with his second shot of bourbon raised halfway to his mouth. And as he absorbed the shock of what—who—he was seeing, the hard, cynical part of his mind spun lemon-sour thoughts: A dead girl walks into a bar . . .

But his heart broke into a million pieces all over again, and his very soul whispered, Em. Oh, Em.

Oh, Em.

A LIFETIME AGO . . .

Oh, Em. Ma belle.

Alcide was buzzing like a live wire. Emmaline Ravel was a spun-sugar princess in her pink prom dress, rosebud pink she said it was called, her blond curls just rushing down the sides of her face and over her bare shoulders like a waterfall, and she smelled so good, like honeysuckle and roses with a little dash of Old Overholt rye on her breath. They were Cajun kids and of course they’d spiked up the punch at their big fancy fais do-do. The guys had been merciless to him, laying bets that he’d get laid tonight, because what sweet little girl could resist Alcide Herveaux in a damn tuxedo? With that mop of curly hair and those big green eyes? Him with his little rosebud boutonniere Emmaline had bought him to match her dress, all liquored up and horny as hell?

He’d taken her to the prom in his daddy’s Camaro. Steak, dancing, waiting, waiting, waiting. Now that the prom was over, Alcide and Emmaline had finally pulled up at the brand-new construction site his daddy had done the survey for. Alcide was about to unlock the foreman’s motor home with the keys lent to him by his friend Roger, who worked for the construction company.

The motor home was like a real house, far fancier than the more modest Airstreams at most of the other jobs. This was going to be a long job and one of the principals owned an RV lot, so they got the foreman a nice place to stay. Front door, back door, kitchen, And a bedroom. Which, for Alcide, meant Score! It was someplace nice for a nice girl. Also, uninhabited. Roger had told Alcide that the foreman hadn’t moved in because the valuable equipment and material he would guard at night had not yet been delivered.

That morning, Alcide had put fresh sheets on the bed and had almost brought a vase of flowers but he didn’t want to look like he’d planned it that carefully, even though he had thought of little else since he’d asked Em to go to prom. There was no damn way he could take Emmaline to a fancy hotel like the other guys were doing with their dates; someone was sure to talk and if his packmaster Boyd Lescaux found out, there would be hell to pay. Hot-blooded Alcide had been specifically warned off human girls. Maybe other packs had human friends who knew about werewolves, and they even had human babies, but their packmaster said anybody in his pack who changed in front of a non-pack human would sign their own death warrant and the human’s, too. He did not hold to mingling, would have none of this crap of people intermarrying. Wolves were for wolves, period, no matter if you had a firstborn Were or what. Lescaux’s word was law and those who broke it knew it, and he’d just as soon kill a mouthy, horny teenaged boy as run free on a full-moon night.

But Emmaline wasn’t just any human girl; she was Alcide’s girl. And she had a crappy daddy named Zachary Ravel who smacked her around. Ravel subcontracted for several of the larger, statewide construction companies, and he was well-off. But Ravel was a bad man and a worse drinker and Alcide would seriously have loved to kill him. Em had no maman anymore and she had bruises all the time and Alcide just wanted . . . He wanted . . . He didn’t know exactly what he wanted, except to make life good for her. In the pack, mating meant marking and he wanted to extend his protection to her. But he was the worst thing that could happen to her. He told himself that a million times while he was getting the prom tickets and buying the tux and keeping it all on the down-low from Lescaux—thinking he was crazy but he was crazy in love and that had to matter, didn’t it?

So here they were, like newlyweds when the guy carries the girl over the threshold, and he knew she knew why he had driven her there, and that she wanted him as much as he wanted her.

His guilt was exactly equal to his lust. He began to think that if he did this he was a pig and he had better just take her bowling with the Baptist kids at their virginal little after-prom instead of acting exactly like the animal he was.

He had his hand on the front door and she was shyly looking down at the ground, and he would never know if he would have opened that door to have sex with her or not. Because the next thing that happened was a gunshot from inside.

He threw himself around her as her eyes widened and her cry was muffled by his hand on her mouth. She wasn’t used to violence, but werewolves live and die violently. Then he heard a moan and he thought the voice sounded familiar. Em was stunned enough not to realize that he was tearing the door off the hinges—or he hoped she was—and he flew inside to find Delano Bouchard flat on his back just off the kitchen beside a tipped-over desk chair, with blood gushing like a broken water main from his chest.

Delano was the town’s head building inspector. Alcide’s daddy had dealings with him all the time, survey matters. Alcide’s father liked him well enough, said he was tough but fair. Now he looked to be dying.

“Go get help,” Alcide yelled to Emmaline, but she was rooted in the splintered doorway, wheezing in terror.

“Lost . . . my nerve,” Bouchard whispered. In his right hand there was a gun. Alcide was so stunned he almost lost his balance as he flattened both his hands over the horrible geyser of warm blood. Bouchard had shot himself.

“Desk,” Bouchard ground out. His eyelids and chest were both fluttering. “Note. Take it. Let ’em know.”

“Oh, God, oh, my God.” Em sobbed wildly, unable to look away. Makeup ran down her face in trails of black and blue and silver.

Alcide picked up the landline. Wasn’t hooked up. He pulled out his phone. No bars. He already knew she didn’t own a cell phone.

“Chère, go get help,” Alcide said desperately. He looked at the desk and saw an empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad with CONFESSION written at the top; below, a paragraph of precisely hand-printed words in blue ink, and at the bottom, the man’s signature, which Alcide had seen on dozens of building inspection forms. There were blood spatters on it but the gush had mostly missed it.

“Note,” Bouchard insisted.

Alcide grabbed it. His hand was blood-scarlet, and now the paper was smeared with it, too.

A truck engine roared close; the motor died and doors opened and slammed; footsteps crunched the same gravel path Alcide and Emmaline had walked up to the motor home. The Camaro was parked behind some magnolia trees, well out of sight.

Bouchard’s spasming hand wrapped around Alcide’s fingers. His grip was weak. His eyes were bugging out of their sockets. Alcide had seen terror like this a few times before—during executions of werewolves. Boyd Lescaux killed wolves for things other packmasters didn’t even bother with.

“Kill me before he . . . gets here,” Bouchard begged Alcide. “Please.”

Then the inspector was dead, the fire of life extinguished from his eyes. His hand slid to the floor and flopped into the spreading pool of blood.

Alcide lunged toward Emmaline and grabbed her forearm. He spotted another door—back door—just behind the desk. One hand clutching the piece of paper, the other dragging his panicking girl, Alcide got himself and Em the hell out of the trailer. She was panting and crying and he scooped her up in his arms and ran.

Ropes of Spanish moss brushed his face. He was listening hard for more gunfire, or men coming after them. He got into the trees and set her down, then unfolded the bloody, crumpled paper and in the moonlight read:

CONFESSION

I, Delano Everett Bouchard, took a bribe from Zachary Ravel in return for signing off on his subcontracted framing work on Stillwater Project #13-721. But I cannot let that stand. A second inspection will reveal that the building is unsafe, and should be undertaken immediately. I have warned Ravel that I plan to recant, and he has warned me that he will strip the skin from my bones and shoot out my eyeballs if I do. I do not have the courage to see if he will make good on that threat, nor to drag my family’s name through the mud in a court trial. I am sorry.

I am of sound mind and body.

Delano Everett Bouchard

Oh, my God, that’s her daddy, Alcide thought. Then the trailer exploded and Emmaline was so startled that she lost her footing and crashed to the ground. Instinctively he threw himself on top of her and began to growl, looking back toward the orange-and-yellow flames and thick, oily smoke roiling up toward the moon and blotting it out like a river of blood. The trailer was ablaze, white-hot and untouchable.

Metal screeched and another explosion shook the ground. A hickory tree beside the trailer went up like a roman candle. The grass sizzled. He smelled gasoline and burning flesh.

Was that her daddy in the truck, coming to kill Bouchard just like he promised? Did he set that fire with his filthy, murdering hands?

Alcide got up and took Em’s wrist. She stumbled and staggered and turned back to look, like Lot’s wife in the Bible. She was wheezing and trying to scream and he wheeled her around and then he heard . . . He didn’t exactly hear, but he knew . . .

Werewolf.

Close.

Alcide’s heart hammered. Every sense ratcheted up to high alert. Warning of danger. Urging him to action. His bones began to ache and his blood to heat. His face tingled, his fingernail beds stung. He began to shake.

Oh, God, I’m going to change, he realized and he fought it down because if she saw, and another Were saw that she saw . . . Boyd Lescaux would kill them both.

No, no, no no no.

More trees caught fire, flames whooshing toward the moon. Reflected flames danced on shaking leaves. Pools of rainwater shimmered. Em was hunched over gasping, fragmenting into panic. That gave him a couple of seconds to try to force the change to stop. Then she straightened and looked right at him.

No!

The horror on her mud-caked face; her crazed, earsplitting screams. She scrabbled away from him, shrieking, making sounds he had never heard anyone make before. Falling and stumbling and bolting, flinging herself out of his reach.

He thought of the werewolf in the woods and ran after her, holding out his hands. Hair and claws and smoke and fiery death. He changed and ran, howling in rage.

The flames came after him; the town talked about that fire for years. He ran searching, still howling. He would have stayed in there and cooked if it meant he could find his Em. But she was like some ghost, vanished into the swamp, and when the sun rose he knew he had to face that she was gone. Not dead, he begged, and he prayed as he had never prayed before or since. He staggered for hours, and then he fell to his knees, clenched his fists, weeping.

Delano Everett Bouchard and his damned confession must be ashes. Everything burned away.

He thought hard about that confession, trying to concoct a story so he could tell his daddy about the bad inspection. But a werewolf had been out by the trailer and Alcide had no idea who it was or if he—or she—had seen either him or Em. He was so scared for her he spent too long trying to figure out how to tell his daddy about the confession without telling him how he knew about it. He was afraid he’d trip up. He didn’t know if she was still alive to protect, but there was no way he would take any chances.

And because of his cowardice, that building did collapse, and three people were severely injured. Eighteen, and he had blood on his hands, and his sweet Em was nowhere to be seen.

A week later, Zachary Ravel told Marie-Louise Crissertary, the social worker who visited him, that his sixteen-year-old daughter, Emmaline, had probably run off to find her whore of a mother, whom, contrary to public opinion, he had not murdered and buried on his soybean acreage. Then he told Miz Crissertary he would shoot her and it would be legal if she didn’t stay the hell away from him.

A year passed, two, three, five. Alcide searched every square inch of Shreveport for Emmaline. Tried to be discreet, but worry made him aggressive.

NOW . . .

“Em,” Alcide said in the bar, as she stood uncertainly before him. Though he’d had fair warning—had seen her reflection in the bar mirror before they came face-to-face—he couldn’t conceal his shock. She looked old and gaunt. Some kind of disease sallowed her skin. Her dirty, wet clothes hung on her as if she were a little girl playing dress-up in a garbage dump.

He slid off the stool and took a step toward her. She took one back. Then her eyes shifted from him to the two empty shot glasses on the bar, and the vacant seat beside his. She moved painfully toward it and climbed on, lowering a cheap boho bag to the floor. She kept her gaze fixed on her leathery hands.

“Two more,” Alcide told Dale as he sat gingerly beside her. He was dying to wrap his arms around her. But she, it seemed, was dying of something else. He took off his black leather jacket and settled it around her shoulders and she tried to smile in thanks.

Her shot glass full of bourbon didn’t touch the varnished wood; her hand darted forward like a rattlesnake and she snatched the drink from Dale and gulped it down. Her head dipped as if her skull weighed too much for her creased, crepey neck.

“Alcide.”

“Oh, chère,” he said, reaching for her, and she shrank away again.

“I got word. That he’s dying.” Her voice vibrated with a hundred different kinds of pain. A tear dripped off the end of her nose. Another followed, and she didn’t wipe it away. Her cheeks were sunken, and she looked like a heroin addict. Maybe she was a heroin addict.

He said to Dale, “We’re going to a booth. Please ask Jane Anne to bring us two steaks, rare, and baked potatoes.”

Em didn’t protest when he gently took her forearm and helped her off the bar stool. She was as hollow-boned as a duck. He could almost hear her joints cracking as he walked her to the back of the bar and helped her slide over the burgundy leather, as if she were his grandmother instead of a girl he had once loved. Still loved, he realized.

He sat across from her and splayed his hands on the table to watch her body language for signals. She didn’t sit back. She hunched over, and the pointer finger of her right hand almost brushed his left. But not quite.

“Who sent you word?” he asked.

“The person I wrote to,” she said, then clamped her mouth shut. “I think I’ll keep her out of this.” She looked down at the varnish. “He dead yet?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

I do, Alcide thought. He hated her daddy as much as he hated his former packmaster Boyd Lescaux. Colonel Flood had challenged him, and Flood had won. The reign of terror was over. But with the knowledge that Em’s daddy was dying, all the misery had rushed over Alcide like a flash fire. And so he had spent three nights in a row at Dale’s, pouring bourbon on the flames.

“Where did you go?” he said quietly.

“I don’t even remember.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He got out his lighter and flicked it on. She blinked as if she’d forgotten that people did things like that, lit cigarettes for each other.

“I was homeless for a while. I never told anyone my real name. I just couldn’t get over it. I got put away. They told me they’d pay for an operation to make me better,” she said, raking her fingers through sopping, tangled hair that was more gray than blond. “Didn’t help. Electroshock. Drugs. Then I wound up on the streets again. Then y’all showed the world what you were. Y’all and them vampires. Right there on the TV. I was sure nobody else was seeing it. That it meant I should just give up.” She raised her chin. “I thought about, you know, tying up loose ends.” Her hands were shaking. “He beat me, Alcide. And I swear to God he killed my mama and buried her in our field.”

“Oui, chère,” he said. Everybody believed that Ravel had killed his wife. Soon he would be dead, and Alcide was sure he’d go straight to hell.

Em stared at him. Her eyes were yellow and bloodshot. A tear cut a channel through the grime.

“I lost my whole life because you never told me what you were.”

His heart truly ached. It was like frozen lead in his chest. “I wanted to tell you. But it would have meant bad things for both of us.”

“I figured.” But accusation shaded her words. As if to say, You should have told me anyway.

“He’s suffering,” she said, accepting the light, drawing in the smoke. “My daddy. He’s dying in pain.”

“Good,” he said flatly.

She exhaled and smoke wreathed her head.

“I read about that building collapse. Or maybe I saw it on TV.” Her face clouded. “Was it . . . Mr. Bouchard’s?”

He had planned to lie to spare her any further pain, but instead he nodded. They sat without speaking. Their food came. She was three bites away from polishing off her steak when she huffed and muttered, “Oh, shit. I forgot that I’ve gone vegetarian.”

Alcide said, “I was supposed to stay away from you in high school. From human girls. That’s why I didn’t take you someplace nicer after the prom.”

“Oh.” Her voice contained a multitude of emotions. She tapped her cigarette ash onto her plate with trembling fingers. She pressed her forehead against the ends of her fingers and wearily rubbed, as if she had a headache.

“You got a place to stay?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t for years and years,” she said. “I’ve been sleeping in alleys. Thumbing around. I saw you come here a couple of nights ago. So I stuck around here. Working up my nerve. I was going to get cleaned up . . .” She covered her face. “I’m so ashamed for you to see me like this.”

“I did this to you.” He was stricken.

“You were the best thing that ever happened to me, until you were the worst. In between . . . there was always Daddy.”

“Let me get you out of here,” he said.

She nodded, her head nearly bobbing against her chest. “I’m so tired.”

He paid the bill and they left. He helped her into his truck and they drove away. He thought about taking her to a beautiful five-star hotel, the kind he had wanted to take her to the night of the prom. His mind spun ahead to her sliding into a hot bubble bath and soaking the grime and misery away. Saw her getting the works at the beauty parlor. New clothes. A job at the company, something simple to start, like filing paperwork.

Then he brought himself back to reality and parked in front of a modest but not trashy motel. He saw her shoulders go down, relax a little. He’d made the right call. She wasn’t ready for much more than this.

He paid for the room and got the key. Em sat down tentatively on the bed with her bag on her lap. He was willing to bet that was all she had.

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a plastic baggie. Tattered bits of blood-spattered notebook paper were pressed inside the filmy pouch like dried flowers in a diary. It was Bouchard’s confession.

He was speechless.

“I thought that burned up in the fire.”

“It didn’t,” she said simply. Maybe she’d taken it when he was changing. He had no idea.

“I came back to make it right,” she said, lifting up the baggie. “I want to make it public. I want to do it before he dies. I want people to hate him.”

Don’t you worry—they already do, Alcide thought.

“Of course, Em,” he said. “We’ll do it however you want.”

Then suddenly he knew it was all right to sit beside her on the bed. Their hips touched and a heavy sob convulsed out of her and he put his arms around her. She turned on one bony hip and pressed her face into his chest and wept like she must have wept when her maman disappeared and her boyfriend turned into a hallucination and she had nowhere to go but down way too deep.

“You led me on. You made me think you loved me,” she said brokenly. “When all along—”

He stroked her hair. She cried and cried and when she was spent, he pursed his mouth to bestow a kiss on the crown of her head, a gesture she could not see.

“I was a kid, Em. Part of me hoped that it would be enough if I loved you. That we would get to have what we wanted because we were in love.”

“Romeo and Juliet was assigned reading in the ninth grade, Alcide Herveaux,” she mumbled, and they both actually chuckled.

“You know me. Never much for school.”

Silence fell on them. He wondered if she wanted him to leave.

“Who set the trailer on fire?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ve always assumed your daddy paid for the matches,” he said bluntly.

“How can people be like that?” Her voice was tiny and fragile. Shell-shocked. “How can my own kin be like that?”

“How can I be a werewolf?”

He held her chastely. There was no desire in him, and he could tell she didn’t feel any, either. She only needed holding.

“Did you get married? Do you have kids?” she asked.

He told the truth. “I’ve got someone.”

“I’m glad.” She took a breath. “I’m relieved.” She broke away from him and crossed her arms. “I’m dirty and I stink.”

“No. You smell like roses and magnolias,” he told her.

“Will you stay while I take a shower? Then will you take me to see Daddy?”

“Of course.” It was ten at night. But he would have taken her anywhere in the whole wide world no matter what time it was.

Em came out of the bathroom damp from the shower and back in her dirty clothes. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail, and when she caught him studying her, she averted her face, as if in shame.

They got in his truck and they drove out to the plantation home where she had grown up. For all of his being a criminal and an abusive asshole, Zachary Ravel had been a successful businessman. Em drummed her fingers on her knees, and it began to rain again. They didn’t talk on the drive, but when they turned onto the road that had once been lined with perfectly trimmed hedges, Em blurted out, “Shit!”

The hedges were either dead or overgrown. Peeling paint curled off the steepled entrance of the house and the columns of the porte cochere were covered with graffiti.

“What happened? Did he get caught?” Em asked Alcide.

“Someone was bleeding him dry. That’s all I’ve been able to figure out.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been on a death watch myself. I came out here a few times to ask him if he’d seen you. I hoped there’d been a miracle and you’d survived the fire, gotten in touch with him. He just laughed in my face.”

When they stopped, he gave her a flashlight and she turned it on, leading the way to the front door. All the lights were out. She rapped twice on the door, hard.

Nothing.

She wrapped her hand around the knob, but Alcide caught her wrist.

“Mr. Ravel?” he shouted.

There was a long silence, and then he tried the door himself. It was locked. They went around to the side of the large house, all of it in terrible disrepair, windows broken, bricks pitted, to the side door, and then to the kitchen, the entrance blocked with mustard plants and rotting cardboard boxes. This time Alcide forced the door and Em trained the flashlight over cabinets and a stovetop strewn with cobwebs and dried leaves.

“Oh, God, Alcide, what if he’s dead in here?” she whispered.

“Mr. Ravel?” Alcide called again. “It’s Alcide Herveaux.”

Em opened the kitchen door to reveal a flight of stairs, and they climbed up. Em moved softly, but Alcide made noise. He didn’t want to surprise anybody. This was Louisiana, and homeowners could shoot intruders with impunity.

He didn’t know the layout of the house, so he followed Em down a hall to where a sliver of light glowed beneath the door and Alcide heard coughing on the other side. As they drew nearer, Em did, too, and she stiffened; this time he didn’t stop her when she reached to open the door.

Zachary Ravel sat not in his bed but on a ratty recliner with a tattered blanket pulled over his lap. A little calico kitten nestled in the crook of his elbow. There was a bottle of Jack balanced on the arm of the chair and he had been reading a book.

“Holy shit.” The book dropped to the floor. He half rose; the kitten protested. “Jesus.”

“Hi, Daddy,” Em said, as stiff and cold as any corpse.

He blinked. “God, I thought you were your mother.”

“You’re not going where she is,” Em snapped.

Alcide looked around the room. There were delivery boxes with canned goods and a box of fresh kitty litter. Beside the bed, the litter box was clean and there was dry cat food in a clean white porcelain dish and a matching bowl of water. Someone had been doing for him, or had been up until very recently. Maybe he’d been able to order things on a computer, take in the deliveries himself. All Alcide knew was that folks were talking in town that he was dying. He didn’t know how they knew. But the gossip had put him in mind of Em.

And that had sent him to Dale’s bar three nights in a row.

“Someone got you,” Em said, and Alcide heard the hurt and the fury. “Blackmailed you or cheated you. Beat you at your own game and took you down.”

“You look like hell,” he replied, looking her up and down with a strange, clouded smirk. “No one took me down. I went there on my own accord.”

Then he cocked his head at Alcide and said, “It was me in the woods that night, Herveaux. Me and a packmate of yours. Jeraud.” He crooked a smile. “Told me he’d tell Boyd Lescaux all about you and my Em unless I paid. And paid. And paid. Left me enough to get by on, but in this country, you get sick, you may as well shoot yourself as find the money for the medical bills.”

Em’s eyes were enormous, her brows raised, mouth slack. She stared at her father without moving a muscle, as if she had been turned to stone merely by looking at him.

“So, it’s all gone, and I did it for you.” He regarded her, and his expression did not soften. “I saw you run out of that fire. I knew you’d made it.”

Alcide blinked. “And you never told me?”

The old man choked out a rheumy laugh and fell to coughing. “I never did,” he said evilly. “I let you twist in the wind, you goddamned freak.”

Em swayed and Alcide put his arm around her to keep her from falling down. The night he’d shifted had been a life-changing shock for her. Here were two more, one for each of them.

If I had known, he thought. But would he have followed her? He’d been afraid to tell his father about the confession. Such a coward. Would he have risked everything to go after Em?

I would have.

“I’m a bad man,” her father said. “A wife beater and a murderer. I know I lost my temper around you, Em, and you deserved better than me. And I let you go too easy. But . . .” He coughed again. “I let you go.”

Alcide watched years of torment move across her face. They didn’t leave. When you went through life the way she had, you kept all your belongings that you could manage to hold on to. Here was more weight for her to carry: more terrible secrets. Misguided love.

Maybe. Maybe it was love.

He thought about the bloody pieces of the confession. He wondered what she would do now.

The kitten hopped off Zachary’s recliner and cautiously approached. It looked up at Alcide and fell over its own feet as it zigzagged to the cat food and began to nibble.

I would have gone to her, Alcide thought again. Left my pack, everything. He closed his eyes tightly. He was shaking.

“Will you come to see me before I die?” Em’s daddy asked. His voice was papery; he wouldn’t last long.

Alcide waited for her answer. He saw the pretty girl in the rosebud-pink dress, curly blond hair running all down her shoulders like a waterfall. He clenched his hands, waiting for that girl to show herself again, after all these years of hiding inside another skin.

“Come to see you?” she repeated. Then she smiled bitterly. “I just did.”

He spared you, Alcide thought.

But for the first time since she had walked into that bar, Emmaline Ravel walked straight and proud, right out of her father’s life.

Into something better, chère, he thought, as he caught up with her.

Into your own life.

They drove back to the motel, and this time, she stopped him at the door. She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand, reached up on tiptoe, and kissed him softly.

“Thank you, Alcide,” she said as she opened the door. When he swallowed hard, she cupped his chin. “I won’t be back.”

He moved her hand and pressed it over his heart. You never left, he thought, but did not say. Never, Em.

As if he had spoken aloud, she said, “I know.”

Then she smiled, and she was there, he saw her, he did, really, and life was about to unfold before her. When you’re eighteen, there’s a magic carpet that flies you to the moon on the first night of the rest of your undiscovered life.

He smiled back. For a moment, she hovered. And then very gently, very gracefully, she shut the door.