Dead on the Delta (2 page)

I’ve seen that firsthand. It’s as horrible as it sounds.

“Just … give me a second.” I motion toward the clutch of anxious policemen a few hundred feet away. They’re waiting for me to tell them what I’ve seen, to come back and pick up the dummy kit and collect the evidence they need for their investigation—dirt samples, tissue scrapings, bug larvae, etc.

Bile rises in my throat again.

I’ve only had to do this to a human once before. It was an adult male, dumped in the bayou outside
the grid. Come to find out, a gunshot wound did him in long before he hit the Ascension Parish county line. The coroner in Baton Rouge discovered the truth easily enough. Amazing what they can do with forensics these days, even with hacks like me occasionally collecting the evidence.

Shit.
I hate the thought of touching that girl. There are times—more than the non-immune would imagine—when I wish I wasn’t part of the lucky five percent. But I know I’m in the minority on that, as well. Most immune people think they’ve been blessed, that collecting fairy shit and egg sacs is a holy calling. They feel
lucky
when they’re called in to do non-immune people’s work for them.

Especially cop work. Everyone wants to be a crime fighter. I blame
CSI.
I’ve never watched it, but I’ve heard it’s like Breeze. Breeze—dried fairy crap mixed with bleach—is the new crack. Brown is also the new black and forty is the new thirty and up is the new down.

God,
I’m dizzy. I take a deep breath and immediately wish I hadn’t. I can smell her now, a sickly sweetness beneath the rest of it.

There’s some murmuring from the assembled company. The parish sheriff wants me to hurry it up. He has places to go, people to see, graft to collect from businesses vying for liquor licenses. His brother’s the head of the Alcohol Beverage Commission and the pair of them make a tidy sum extorting the thirsty.

I wonder if he knows it’s a kid out here, probably
the Beauchamp girl who’s been missing. I’m guessing not. If he did, there’d be less impatience. The Beauchamps are Important. Their classic (and gigantic) Greek Revival home lures visitors from all over the world. Camellia Grove Plantation is one of Donaldsonville’s biggest tourist draws, and we need it. Badly.

Most of the other rich folks moved north after the mutations, fleeing their Victorian houses, abandoning their restaurants, antique stores, and art galleries, leaving the rest of us to clean up their mess and reorganize the town. Only a few stubborn, hard-core wealthy stick around by choice. The rest of our citizens are here because they don’t have the resources to move somewhere else. The ratio of black and Hispanic to white in Donaldsonville has settled in at around ninety-eight percent to two, confirming that a pasty redhead like me is the true minority.

It’s statistics that I would be dating a black man; it’s good fortune that I’m dating a gorgeous black man who cares about me and makes the best jambalaya I’ve ever had. Cane developed a special recipe without the shellfish so I won’t puff up like a marshmallow the second shrimp protein touches my lips. He also brings me herbal insomnia remedies, fixes my leaky toilet, and calls to remind me to put out my trash on Friday morning. He takes good care of me.

I know his family thinks he’s too good for a girl who gets around on a bicycle, has no discernible
urge to better herself, and isn’t grandchild-birthing material. No matter how sweet they are at Sunday dinner, I’m pretty sure they want Cane to dump me. I honestly don’t know what I want him to do.

“Lee-lee?” Right. I want him to quit calling me that in public. Immediately. “We’ve got to—”

“One second.” My finger shakes, and the sweat dripping down my forearm makes me shiver. It’s nearly a hundred degrees and humid enough that my hair still hasn’t dried from my shower. I shouldn’t be cold, but I am. “I’m going to take another look. Then I’ll come back for the evidence bags.”

I turn back around, trying to take in the body with as much detachment as possible. Blond hair in braids—one tied with a heart-shaped elastic, one starting to unravel. No eyes left to judge eye color, not much of her nose either, and the soft curve of her upper lip ends in a jagged tear.

I drop my gaze.

No shoes, bare legs, and a white nightgown with red bows sewn on by hand. A few of them are missing. So is her right index finger. There isn’t any dirt under the remaining nails or on her feet. She looks pretty clean considering she’s been out in the bayou for …

I crouch down and inch a finger under the curve of her back. The dirt beneath her is drier than the surrounding ground. She’s been here half the night, at least. Her body blocked the light rain that fell sometime between midnight and two.

I’d heard it on the roof when I got up to chug
one final beer before finally falling asleep. I ran out of my sleeping pills a few days ago and have been forced to rely on booze to knock me unconscious until I make it to the field office in Baton Rouge to pick up another bottle of Restalin … or two or three. Getting to sleep and staying asleep has been a battle since I was sixteen, since the night I saw my first dead body and toted it home in the backseat of my car.

No.
Not going to think about that. Now isn’t a good time.
Never
is a good time.

I take one last look, searching for anything else that might help Cane identify the body as Grace. Her fingernails are painted a pale pink with sparkles, but there’s no jewelry, no defining marks that I can—

Scratch that, there’s something peeking out from under her sleeve. I lean over, snagging the elastic with two fingers.

It’s a tattoo, one of the temporary variety. Even the douchebags down at The Rusty Pin—who’d been all too happy to ink me when I was sixteen and so drunk I’d passed out on the table—won’t work on babies. I pull her sleeve higher, revealing a unicorn with glitter flowing down the tail. It looks like it’s shitting pink sparkles. Who knows? Maybe unicorns are real, too, and they crap cotton candy. After the fairies, we’re all a lot more willing to believe in imaginary things.

Hmm …
fairies.

They
will
feed on a human corpse, as long as it hasn’t been dead for too long. If the girl was killed somewhere else and carried here, there should still be bites on her skin. But aside from whatever critter’s been at her face—weasel maybe, or possum—there isn’t a mark on her. Not even a mosquito bite.

Of course, mosquitoes have been hunted to the brink of extinction. Fairies don’t mind getting their human blood secondhand. I watched a couple of Fey feed on a mosquito swarm in a containment unit during my first year of FCC training. Intense doesn’t begin to describe it. With their precious faces and delicate wings, it’s easy to forget that fairy mouths are full of fangs coated with deadly venom. For millions of years, those mouths were too small to close around human flesh. But after the mutations, that isn’t a problem.

I can see a clutch of the little sharks circling in the shade of the cypress trees down near the water. The pink and gold glow of their skin gives them away, an insect-luring adaptation that serves as an early warning to humans.

If you see the glow, it’s time to go.
Marcy teaches the rhyme to her kids right along with
Stop, drop, and roll
.

There isn’t much need for concern at the moment, however, even if I weren’t immune. Fairies aren’t fans of direct sunlight. They won’t come out of the shade unless there’s a tempting meal—two or three food-friendly humans, maybe more. It would probably be
safe for Cane to come down and collect the evidence himself.

Probably. And if not, you’ve got more blood on your hands.

Blood. Another one of my least favorite things.

I stand and climb up the rise to claim the dummy kit. Cane holds it out as I slip inside the gate, but doesn’t look me in the eye. He knows better than to make eye contact when I’m upset. He’s smart. And prepared. And probably going to make captain after his brother retires if I don’t mess up his life first. I don’t want to mess up his life. He’s a good man and he’s already been through hell with his first wife. I should leave him.

Instead, I let him put an arm around my shoulders, and pull me close.

“Is it her?” he whispers, voice pained.

I nod. “I’m pretty sure. White nightgown with red bows, pink nail polish, and a temporary tattoo of a unicorn on her right arm.”

“Shit.” He runs a hand up his forehead and back over his shaved head.

There’s a shushing sound as the rough skin on his palms brushes the hint of stubble, the same sound my fingers made a few hours ago. It makes me want to get even closer, to wrap my arms around his neck and pull his scratchy head down for a kiss.

But I don’t. I can’t. Now that the kit is in hand, real panic is beginning to set in. The world spins again, and my brain screams in protest. I take a breath and
turn it off, promising it a nice, strong toddy when we’ve finished the dirty work. I pull away from Cane and turn back toward the thing in the field, to the thing I will poke and prod and eventually drag within the iron gate for the coroner to collect.

I can’t think of Grace as Grace or I won’t be able to finish this. At least not while I’m sober.

T
he Beauchamps are standing on
the veranda of their massive, be-columned home as I bicycle by. Thanks to a fresh coat of paint each spring, Camellia Grove always looks bright and new, a virgin awaiting a bridegroom who never came back from the Civil War.

A creepy virgin, with vacant eyes and clutching hands.

I’ve never liked the house. Camellia Grove is one of the only plantation homes that wasn’t wrecked in the riots following the mutations and a true treasure of Louisiana heritage, but it’s also … haunting.

Today, the lingering creepiness is worse than usual. I can’t help but imagine a new spirit drifting through the live oak trees lining the drive, mocking the sentries’ aura of safety and permanence. Nothing is safe; nothing is forever. So I don’t slow to watch the lacy moss that hangs from the trees sway in the breeze. I just pump my legs a little harder.

Cane is still cataloguing the evidence, the coroner’s loading up the body, and Percy hasn’t mustered the courage to haul her ass back to the house and tell her employers what’s happened. I know she hasn’t. The Beauchamps are looking at me expectantly. Even from a hundred feet away I can see the tension in their faces. Barbara and her two adult children—James and Libby—shuffle to the porch railing, a trio of well-dressed zombies searching for something that will make them human again.

Barbara adopted Grace late in life, when her own kids were nearly grown. I remember the headline—local Christian saint adopts baby with heart condition from New Orleans. They’d showed the baby’s picture, a beautiful one-year-old girl with white-blond hair. Heart condition or not, I wasn’t impressed.

What about all the kids around
here
who need someone? Kids whose parents have been infected and are no longer fit to care for them? At the moment, there are over two hundred orphans at Sweet Haven, the halfway house where Marcy worked when I was sixteen. There are kids right here in Donaldsonville who need homes. But a lot of them are older, or fucked in the head, or black, or in some other way undesirable to a woman like Barbara.

I know her kind. I was raised by someone just like her.

But my hovering mama doesn’t speak to me anymore, not since the night I left our own well-appointed
home in New Orleans. Accident or not, my sister, Caroline, was dead and I was alive. I was never going to be forgiven. It was better to leave. I’d thought distance, time, accomplishment …
something
might make it easier to go back. But it didn’t, and I eventually gave up on med school and my mother.

It’s for the best, really. She wouldn’t approve of her daughter dating a black man and I don’t want to hide Cane the way I hid Hitch all those years ago. Hitch was poor, not “colored”—as my mother drawls when in the company of her fellow bigots—but, to her, that’s nearly as bad.

Barbara reminds me way too much of Mama Lee, making me grit my teeth as I get closer to the house.

The trio on the porch shuffle closer. Libby hunches and rubs at her arms, but Barbara is by far the most tragic figure. Her usually perfectly arranged blond hair is loose and wild, her face makeup-free despite the fact that it’s nearing two o’clock, and her clothes look like they’ve been slept in. She leans against her son, fingers tangled in his blue button-up shirt. James, at least, seems to be holding it together. He’s twenty-something, doing his residency at the heart hospital in Baton Rouge, and the head of the household. Mr. Beauchamp died before I moved to Donaldsonville, long enough ago that James is comfortable with the role of family pillar.

Good for him. It can’t be easy. Barbara’s a handful.

From the corner of my eye I see her waving at me, an impatient gesture that makes it clear she assumes
I’ll scurry to do her bidding. Unfortunately for her, I don’t scurry. Ever. For anyone.

I pretend I can’t hear her cry out for me to stop. There’s a reason I put in my earbuds and slipped on my official orange FCC vest before I left the crime scene. I want everyone to see that I am
busy.
And also can’t hear jack shit. I’m not going to be the one to tell Barbara her daughter is dead. I’m. Just. Not. Going. To. Do it.

I pump harder, breathing easier when I reach the bend in the road and put the Beauchamp mansion and all the pain hovering around it behind me. I would have taken the long way around the swamp behind the house and avoided the scene entirely if I weren’t late for my real job. But I
am
late, and I have to snag samples, whip up a report, and get to the FCC field office in Baton Rouge before five o’clock or—rare, premed-qualified, immune field agent or not—I’ll have my ass handed to me on a platter, cut up hors d’oeuvres–style with a sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. My deadline for turning in my new samples passed days ago and Jin-Sang is already going to give me shit.