I could not kill Michelle. I couldn’t scar her children the way she had scarred me. But I could join the Pack and make sure that no other little girl had to face my choices. No other little bouda would be hiding, scared and alone, dreading to be found and abused again. Not on my watch. Not as long as I breathed.
Gradually my sobs died down. We sat together, Raphael and I.
“For the record, I had him,” Raphael said. I could tell by his voice he was baiting me. There was comfort in the familiar needling, and right now I desperately needed it.
“Didn’t look that way from where I stood. He had you all wrapped up.”
“That’s what you think,” he said.
“That is what I think.”
“Handling that purple carpet must’ve done some permanent damage,” Raphael said.
“To you.”
He leaned over and murmured, “I’m not the one with purple stains on my butt.”
Oh, it’s like this, then? “Would you like to be?”
He grinned and nodded.
“Maybe you needed backup to help you with Roman,” I told him.
“I don’t need backup. I can take him with one hand tied behind my back.”
“He had one hand tied behind your back.”
“Maybe it looked like that from where you were sitting…”
That’s how Jim’s messenger found us, sitting on the ground, bickering and flirting. Jim’s teams had returned from the Warren, the poor neighborhood by White Street, and they had brought information about Gloria back with them.
I sat at a large conference table filled with food and reports. Jim sat across from me, and Chandra, Clan Jackal’s designated expert on ancient Egypt, sat to my left. Between us teetered small mountains of paperwork—all of the information Jim’s team had squeezed out of the inhabitants of the Warren. Derek joined us after the first fifteen minutes. We were looking for clues. Somewhere at this very moment, Gloria’s associates were preparing to raise Apep from the dead. We needed to know where that location could be, and Gloria was our only link.
We’d been at it for hours. So far I had made two piles: a big pile of stuff I’d gone through and didn’t consider relevant, and a very tiny pile of paper that might be something. I’d covered half a legal pad in notes. I was hungry again. The lunch hour came and went without us finding a smoking gun.
“It would be nice if there was a map,” Chandra said. “With a town circled on it.”
“And a note that said ‘Secret Hideout Here’?” Derek added.
I scrutinized the paper in front of me. Gloria had used a private shipping service, which was faster and more reliable than the post office, but which also forced their customers to declare the exact contents of their packages. In the event your package decided to sprout tentacles when the magic hit, they wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.
This particular operative, whose name was Douglas, had tracked down the shipping company Gloria used and offered their rep an outrageous bribe for the manifest of everything delivered to Gloria’s doorstep. Handmade soap, thirty bucks a bar. Expensive perfume. Pricy bath salts. Someone was living high.
Doolittle walked through the door. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I’m saving the world,” I told him.
Doolittle looked mournful. “I’ll make us some hot chocolate.”
I went down the list of deliveries: books, blah-blah, more soap, antimosquito cream. Hmm. Georgia was in the grip of a drought. I hadn’t seen a mosquito in ages.
“Mosquito cream,” I said.
Derek raised his pen. “Boots. She went down to Carlos’s Footwear and got herself a pair of rubber boots two days before you killed her. Some kids from the Warren nagged her for change and she told them to piss off.”
Fatal mistake. Never upset the street kids.
“So we have water,” Jim said.
“In the original myth, Apep lived in the river,” Chandra said.
“Could he be somewhere in the Chattahoochee?” Derek asked.
“No.” Jim tapped the paper. “Too risky. The Chattahoochee is too shallow and too well patrolled. Half of the city’s shipping comes through it. The army would napalm a giant snake the moment they saw it.”
“So we either have lakes in the north or…” Derek pulled out a map. “Or the Suwanee.”
“The Suwanee River would work,” Jim said. “It’s deep and black water.”
I dug through the manifests. “She put in an order with the teamsters for a large crate shipment to be shipped a couple of weeks ago. Supposedly glassware. It’s going to…Waycross.”
“Waycross, Georgia?” Jim asked.
“Yep.”
“That’s right on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp,” Derek said.
“There are also crate orders for Augusta and Tallahassee,” I said.
“We need a confirmation.” Jim dug through his papers.
Derek and I burrowed into our stacks.
“Pontoon!” Derek announced twenty minutes later. “She bought a pontoon boat.”
“When?” I looked through my notes on the shipping records.
“On the fourteenth. Took it off the lot.”
“She shipped a large crate of antiques down to Folkston on the fifteenth. Where is Folkston?”
“The east edge of the Okefenokee.” Jim rose. “We got her.”
“You can’t be involved,” I reminded him.
“No, we can’t help you fight,” Jim said. “There is a difference. Nobody says we can’t scout the swamp and mark the way for you. You won’t go in blind.”
“I’ll get on the phone,” Derek said.
They left the room.
Doolittle put a cup of hot chocolate in front of me. “Drink this before you go.”
I sipped it. It had to be half sugar. “It’s delicious.”
Doolittle patted my arm. “It’s good for you. A little sugar goes a long way.”
Little, huh?
“Thank you,” I told him. “You were always kind to me. Not many people are. I will never forget it.”
“You are coming back.” Doolittle fixed me with his stare.
“Sure.” I got up and hugged him.
Raphael, Roman, and I rode the ley line out of Atlanta. The magic current ran whether the magic was up or down, but when tech ruled, like it did now, the ley line speed dropped to a mere forty miles per hour. It took us several hours to get there. The magic finally spat us and our cargo out right between Waycross and Folkston into the open arms of a shapeshifter woman with a Pack Jeep. She was short, dark-haired, and had a sprinkling of freckles on her nose.
“Here is your ride.” She held out the keys. Raphael took them. “Go down that road, take the right fork, then the second left. You’ll come to the pier. There are two pontoon boats there. Take them. The way through the swamp is marked with strips of white fabric. Good luck.”
She walked away.
We loaded the cargo into the Jeep, and me and my Heckler & Koch UMP submachine gun called shotgun. Roman crawled into the backseat.
Twenty minutes later we pulled up before the wooden pier. In front of us a narrow channel curved into the green wall of trees and underbrush. Two pontoon boats floated on the water the color of black tea.
A crate sat on the pier. On the side someone had written in black marker, “A present from Uncle Jim.”
Raphael pulled the top off the crate. Pixilated ACUs—Army Combat Uniforms—in lovely randomized patterns of greens and browns, perfect for the swamp.
“I like this uncle.” I found the shortest set and stripped off my jeans.
Roman opened his eyes wide, as if he had never seen a woman in underwear before.
Raphael threw a set at him. “Don’t just stand there.”
“You want me to wear these?” Roman looked at the ACUs and put his hand over his chest, as if protecting his black robe. “That’s not right.”
“You have a problem with pants?” Raphael asked.
Roman pulled his robe apart, revealing a pair of black jeans underneath. “I always wear my pants. I just don’t want to deal with that retarded outfit. I don’t even know how to put it on.”
“Wear the fatigues,” I told him. “It won’t kill you. Not wearing them might.”
Roman sighed, rolled his eyes, and stripped off his robe and jeans, revealing a muscled torso. Well. Someone worked out. Roman pulled on the fatigue pants, grabbed the black boots, folded the bottom of the pants in a practiced move, and stuffed his feet into his boots.
Hmmm.
Next he took the ACU top and rolled up both sleeves in a perfectly even summer regulation cuff. Raphael stared at him. Roman pulled the ACU on and flexed. “Makes your arm bigger, see?”
“You asshole,” I punched him in the shoulder.
“Gentle! I bruise easily.” He rubbed his carved biceps and I caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his arm: a skull wearing a beret. Army Ranger.
Now I had seen everything.
I stood on the bow of a pontoon boat and held binoculars to my eyes. Raphael sat at the helm. Roman piloted the second vessel behind us. He’d brought some sort of leather harness, which he had fit over his ACUs, and stuck his staff through it. It looked silly protruding over his shoulder.
A river stretched in front of me, its waters blue-black and half hidden by lily pads and water weeds. Strange trees bordered it, couched in the brush and reeds, tall, their trunks bare and bloated at the root where they thrust from the water, then narrowing as they rose to spread in a canopy of fresh bright green. They looked prehistoric. This was not my country.
“Cypresses,” Raphael told me, when I had asked about them a minute ago. “They are buttresses against the hurricanes.”
We made our way through the labyrinth of waterways and false islands made of floating peat and covered with grass. The air smelled of water, fish, and mud. Somewhere to the left a gator roared, the sound ripping from its throat deep, powerful, and primeval, as if the swamp itself roared into our faces. There was a strange serene beauty in this ancient, wet riot of life, but I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate it.