Dead on the Delta (3 page)

Wretched Jin-Sang.

I thought supervisors couldn’t get any worse than his sister, Min-Hee, with her OCD fixation with filling out forms in triplicate. By hand. With “black ink, not blue, damn you, Lee!” But after four weeks, I’m counting the days until her maternity leave is up. Unfortunately, the FCC gives immune operatives six
months

of paid leave. Something about hoping the immunity to fairy bite can be transmitted through breast milk and blah blah blah. They also give you a hefty bonus if your child is immune. Shady government spending if you ask me, but it’s a powerful incentive for some women to squeeze out a few puppies.

Not me. No kids, no puppies, no kitties … well, no kids or puppies.

Somewhere between the crime scene and the Beauchamp house, I’ve acquired a tail, a fat black and white cat with a limp. It has no collar or tags, but it looks cared for and seems to have taken a “shine” to me, as Marcy would say. Too bad I’m not in the market for a pet.

I’m not good at keeping things alive. Not pets, not plants, probably not even intestinal bacteria. I forget to feed myself half the time until I start to get dizzy. Definitely not mommy material.

I assumed the cat would get the hint when I tossed it out of the trailer behind my bike a half a mile back, but so far, not so good. It still rambles along behind me, yowling, cursing me for making it walk. It’s so damned loud I can hear it over my punk rock cover of “Islands in the Stream” by Fairies Will Die—surprisingly good stuff for a band out of Detroit, but then I’m a sucker for a good cover.

“You’re asking for an alligator bite, cat.” I glance over my shoulder to see how it takes the news.

It yowls again and plays up the limp, as if it knows I’m looking.

“Go cry for someone who cares.” I turn back around and snag my drink—Coke bottle emptied halfway, with that medicinal rum I promised myself poured in to fill it back up to the top—and take a long, deep swig.

The numbness is a soft blanket pulled across my soul, shutting out the horror of the afternoon. The alcohol makes the unbearable heat even hotter and I’m dizzy by the time I reach the edge of the swamp, but that’s okay. Better dizzy than sober.

“Reeow.” The cat lets out a sound of triumph as I pull to a stop and climb off my bike, giving it the opportunity to leap into my trailer and snuggle up next to my blue cooler.

“Get out.” I toss it to the ground, but it’s back in seconds, growling as it once again claims the coldest seat in the house, shooting me an affronted look that reminds me of … myself. Probably similar to the look I gave Cane when he said he wanted to call in sick and make love to me again.
Gag.
We don’t
make love.
We screw each other’s brains out … or so I thought.

But when a man tells a sure-thing kind of girl he wants to make love, he means it. At least, I’m pretty sure he meant it. Sure enough to be scared.

After Hitch, I opted out on love. I’m too independent, too distant, too obnoxious to be lovable. Even taking into account that I have a decent sense of humor, shoot a mean game of pool, am generous with blow jobs, and know how to spiff up in my Sunday
best and play sweet with his mama at lunch once a week, there’s no way Cane could love me.

But what if he does? What will I do?

The FCC pays
very
well, but I live in a three-room shack without central air and ride a bicycle, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even muster the gumption to commit to a large purchase, let alone a relationship.
Any
kind of relationship.

I reach for the cat. It narrows its eyes and presses closer to its new best friend. He—I can see now that he’s
definitely
a he—seems ready to make a romantic connection with my blue cooler. His bad leg hitches up over the edge, claws catching on the handle, as intertwined as Cane and I were a few hours ago.

Damn. Just … blechk. I give up and grab my waders. The cat will either be gone before I get back or he won’t. I can’t waste any more time.

I struggle into my dark-green boots and pull the rubber pants of the waders up around my waist, hooking my arms into the suspenders. The khaki straps cut into my skin as I bend to snag my kit, but I’m still glad I went with the light green tank top. It’s better to wear a T-shirt for field work, but it’s just so damned hot. Better blisters than any more sweat. Even with perspiration that doubles as a natural fairy deterrent, there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

My sweat scares away the fairies. Something in the iron content keys them in to the fact that my blood will kill them. On a hot summer day, the
Fey won’t come within two feet of me. I’m that … potent.

“Just in case.” The cat narrows his eyes as I run the sweaty back of my hand over his fur. Fairy bites don’t affect animals the way they do humans, and the fairies probably won’t bother with something so furry when there are plenty of insects around, but no need to take chances. I don’t want the little bastard bleeding on my cooler.

He growls as I reach around him, fetching my gloves and a few tubes that have fallen out of my kit. Jin-Sang would shit himself if he saw the disorganization. He’d probably try to get me fired, if he hasn’t already.

“Later, cat.” I toss my iPod onto my seat—I can’t afford to drop another one in the water—and take one last swig of my drink, tipping it back until the lukewarm mix of sugary rum and Coke flowing down my throat makes my nose tingle.

I can’t bring it with me, either. Not enough hands and fairies like red—being the color of blood, that isn’t surprising. They’d swarm around the bottle and get in the way. That can be useful when I need a live specimen, but I’m only after water, egg, and shit samples today, though I will take a body or two if I find any floaters.

Ugh. I don’t want to think about dead things. Even fairies.

My drink churns in my stomach as I wade into the shallows, sticking to the shady areas, gathering
my samples, keeping an eye out for logs with eyes. I trudge farther and farther, deep into a part of the bayou where nothing human dares to walk anymore. Under a cluster of fungi sucking the life from a live oak, I find a few early eggs and scoop a sample into my blue test tube, ignoring the tiny, pissed-off faces of the fairies that flit close enough to smell that it isn’t a good idea to bite me and buzz angrily away. A few more vials of water and I’ll be done. All I need is poo.

As I search the patches of dry land for a mound of fairy dung, my mind drifts into melancholy territory. I think about white nightgowns and pink fingernail polish and a time when Caroline and I both loved unicorns. We’d been best friends when we were babies, but by the night of the camping trip, she’d barely been speaking to me.

She only agreed to go to piss off Dad. She thought if he and Mom came home from his conference in Mobile and found out we’d been smoking pot and drinking beer and being generally disreputable with two boys in a camper all weekend that he’d let her go to Smith for undergrad instead of making her stay in New Orleans. Dad and Mom were resigned to me being a failure, but they wanted better things for Caroline. She assumed that if her proximity to me put her at risk, they’d let her go.

She might have been right. If she’d made it home, she might have gotten the green light to head north and become a future Yankee of America. If the newly mutated fairies hadn’t attacked our campsite, if she
hadn’t been bitten and died in my arms, going from perfect daughter to dead body so fast she was gone before I could say goodbye.

Bodies. Caroline’s body, and now that tiny body they’d lifted into the ambulance. What had happened to Grace? How did she die? Was it over quickly or did she suffer? Was the murderer someone she trusted, or a stranger who—

“None of my business.” I don’t realize I’ve spoken aloud until someone answers

“Damn straight, bitch. This ain’t none of your bidness.” The high-pitched voice is accompanied by a bony fist. I duck in time for the punch to connect with my head instead of my jaw and hear the woman behind me cry out. I have a hard head … or so my mama always told me.

I drop everything and twist around, landing my own punch in the middle of the scrawny woman’s face before I’ve quite regained my footing. Bright red explodes from her nose—a crimson target in the center of skin as black as my cream-free morning coffee. The fairies are on her in seconds.

I might have felt bad—even though she hit me and called me a bitch—if she weren’t already covered in bite marks. This chick has been out here awhile. Her fate’s already sealed. A camp is in her future. The bitten aren’t allowed to live among the average population. Back in the early days of the mutations, a few of the infected transmitted the disease to friends and family. Fey venom can’t survive in human saliva
and doesn’t contaminate the blood—humans can’t spread it by biting each other or having sex or sharing needles—and there’s no airborne virus, so I have no idea
how
it spread. But the government said
it did,
and the soldiers in charge in the days of martial law came to take the infected away.

Even now that we’re back to a more standard “rule by the people” method of government, that’s still the way of things. Bite victims who don’t die right off the bat are sent to a containment camp. Keesler Air Force base over in Gulfport, Mississippi, is the biggest in our area. I visited it when I was in training. Nice facility, especially considering most of the people living there are raving lunatics.

But the immune officers keep the peace. Of course, they do have four hundred officers on active duty. The abundance of immune operatives at the camps is a big reason we’re so understaffed in the field. Sometimes, that’s just an irritation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of life and death.

Like now, perhaps. If I had a partner, I wouldn’t be alone out here with no backup, getting my ass kicked by someone half my size.

“Bitch!” Skanky chick swings at me again, her diamond chandelier earrings swinging wildly around her ears. The jewelry’s ridiculous paired with her stained T-shirt and sodden jeans, but there isn’t time for a fashion intervention even if I were that kind of girl.

I duck, and back away. She comes after me,
seemingly oblivious to the creatures grunting and screeching as they tear into her flesh. She fights her way through a tangle of tree roots, while the fairies suck and slurp and fall off of her in a drunken stupor, hitting the water with the
plunk
of pennies dropping into a wishing well.

Crap.
She’s a Breeze head. I should have known.

Her blood wouldn’t make the Fey drunk unless she’d been eating or snorting Fairy Wind. She isn’t just venom-crazy, she’s flying the wind, pumped up on a toxic high that will make her impossible to overpower. I’m only five eight and a hundred and forty pounds on a good week—when I’ve remembered to eat and not earned my morning vomit once or twice—and even six-two, two-hundred-and-ten-pound Cane would have had a hard time with this one. Unless he resorted to something more serious than fisticuffs.

Cane bought me a gun last year, when he thought New Orleans gangs were setting up a secret drug-running operation in the bayou. But I refused to get my concealed-weapons permit. I’m too lazy to take the eight-hour “super-secret carrying-heat class” he teaches on weekends. And I’ve always assumed I couldn’t kill a person, even if that person was trying to kill me.

I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong about that.

“Ahhh!” Skanky screams as she lunges for me. I try to step back, but slam my head into something hard. The next thing I know, I’m under water with the woman’s hands around my neck.

Swamp surges into my nose, but I have the sense to hold my breath after the initial invasion. I don’t try to swallow it or spit it out. I just drive my hands up, grabbing the woman’s wrists, digging my fingers into her tendons until her grip fails. As soon as her fingers spasm, I throw her off and surge to the surface, spitting out swamp and sucking in a deep breath.

“Don’t do it!” I scream, loud enough that even a Breeze head with a death wish and ears full of water has to have heard me. But she doesn’t listen. She comes for me again, and I do what I have to do.

She’s off-balance when I push her under. It isn’t hard to take her all the way to the bottom or stomp rubber-booted feet firmly into her back. She bucks and thrashes at first, but stops moving faster than I expect. Still, I don’t get off of her until I count to sixty. I don’t want to take a chance that she’s faking it.

Harsh, yes. But she tried to kill me, and I’m not Saint Mother Mary Margaret of the Immaculate Church of Forgiveness. By the time I pull her up, she isn’t breathing. I have a feeling I should be panicked about that, but I’m not. (Thank you, rum and Coke.)

I drag her limp body to the closest patch of land, struggling with my waterlogged boots and pants, and haul her up and onto her back. Lucky for me, a few chest compressions are all it takes to have her coughing up bayou and blood, and there’s no need to get into a mouth-to-mouth situation, because I have a good idea where that mouth has been.

“You’ve been eating shit, you know that, right? You know what Breeze is?” I roll her onto her stomach and pull her hands behind her.

She’s still too stunned to fight back, and I figure I’d better get her secure while I have the chance. But what to use? I can see my kit floating not too far from shore, but there’s nothing but specimen bottles and chemical solutions in there. I could use my tank top, but that would involve letting her go. Maybe she has something that—

“Nice belt.” I reach underneath her, pry open her buckle, and pull it, hissing, through the loops.

I tie her up and am feeling pretty proud of myself until I stand and see it. There, floating in the shallows, is an ancient camper … houseboat … thing. I scoped out this location a couple months ago and didn’t notice it, but it had to have been here. It’s hemmed in on all sides by gnarled tree roots bursting from the water like knobby-kneed girls sitting on the wall at a debutante ball. It must have floated in during the rainy spring and gotten trapped. Which is probably exactly what the owners had planned.