Bayou Blues (14 page)

The driver’s attention shifted from the hood to my face, and I saw him mouth a swear.

I curled my fingers into a fist, winked at him, then mimed an explosion by opening my hand wide.

During a brief, shuddering pause nothing happened, and I was terrified nothing would. Had I done it wrong? Was my focus not strong enough? Had I—

The hood of the truck blew off, ripping back towards the windshield. The truck braked too suddenly and veered to the shoulder of the road, flipping on its side and rolling three times before it hit the ditch.

Once the sound of squealing tires and grinding metal on concrete faded, Wilder stopped the motorcycle. My heart hammered, and I could feel the twin beat of his through his shirt. He pulled off his helmet and gawked at the scene, then at me.

“Jesus Christ, Genie, what happened?”

The red light faded from my fingertips. The driver emerged from the truck and dragged his passenger out after him. They were dazed and wobbly, but still alive, which had been the whole point.

“I told you. I’ll do whatever it takes to get your brother back. Now let’s get the hell out of here before they realize we’re just sitting here waiting for them.”

As Wilder put his helmet back on, I glanced once more at our would-be assailants. Standing on the opposite side of the highway, just outside the beams of their headlights, was a woman.

My heart leapt, and I almost told Wilder to wait, until I saw her form shift and shudder like a poorly edited movie frame. One minute she was whole, the next she was burnt pieces flying through the air. She came together and fell apart over and over, so quickly it was a like a trick of the eye. She’d found me, even here.

I blinked, and she was gone.

“Go,” I demanded. “Get us out of here.”

Franklinton was a dive.

It was so much worse than I’d expected. The recession could account for some of the town’s problems, but others were the fault of neglect and desertion.

Even in the early predawn hours it was obvious the place was damn near a ghost town. Their one gas station was closed with a
For Sale
sign in the window, and most of buildings on the main drag had similar displays.

It was the kind of place that made a person sad by proximity, like everyone there had unanimously decided to give up and abandon ship, but the town had been left behind to die alone.

On our way in I’d seen a few lit windows in trailers set just off the highway, but nothing to make Franklinton count as a town, not anymore. At best it might be called a hamlet these days.

Hand-drawn signs along the road told us the Church of Morning was a half mile away on the other side of town. Wilder stopped the motorcycle in front of an empty hardware store. The small Main Street was totally dark, with only one streetlight on halfway down the block.

Wilder turned the bike off, and we both sat in the silence for a moment drinking in the wrongness of the town around us. Finally I couldn’t bring myself to wait around any longer. I pulled off my helmet and got to my feet, placing the helmet on the seat I’d vacated. Even the air smelled off, a little rank, like the inside of a car that’d been sitting in the sun all day. I had spent years living in a swamp, and at the height of August I was used to this kind of heavy scent. I’d never experienced anything like it in a settled community.

The stillness of the place made my skin crawl. It was too quiet, too empty, more like an abandoned movie set than a place real people might live. Why would the church pick this as their home? If they wanted their doings to be public, why were they hiding where no one might stumble across them?

Wilder removed his own helmet and stood next to me. He sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose. “That’s rank.”

“Not quite right, is it?”

“Nothing about this is right.”

Took the words right out of my mouth. “You think we should scope it out before we charge in?”

“I figured that’s what you’d want to do.”

I smiled. “Less than a day and you’re already pretending to know what I want?” My laughter snagged in my throat when I glanced at him. The dim light from overhead caught his lashes, showing off how long they were. The kind of lashes Revlon and Maybelline used to sell mascara to women.

He blinked, and they grazed his cheeks. I glanced away. A pretty face was just a pretty face. I didn’t particularly
like
Wilder, so I needed to remember why we were here and get on with it.

He made that difficult by saying, “I think I could spend a hundred years with you and never know you any better than I do right now.”

“Sun will be up soon.” I turned the conversation back to business. “I think we should go scout out the church grounds when the place is deserted, see if we find any trace of Hank there, or anything that might tell us where he is. I want to know what we’re up against. And if we can get in and out of town without Deerling and his lackeys knowing we were here, all the better.”

He nodded. “We better get walking, then. It’s only a little ways up the road, and the bike makes a lot of noise when you consider there isn’t any.”

Anywhere else I would have laughed at this concern. His bike was relatively quiet after all. But given how barren the landscape was and how deafening the silence seemed to be, I understood why he wasn’t willing to take the risk.

“Good thing you didn’t wear heels.” He smirked.

Heels?

Argh. This idiot was going to drive me crazy.

“I left them back at home with my skintight leather cat suit. I didn’t realize we were breaking into the Tower of London to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Next time I’ll dress up.”

“The Koh-i-what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” A lesson on the finer points of priceless diamonds could wait for another time. “Did you bring a weapon or anything? I’m guessing the church will be empty at this hour, but I don’t want to take chances, especially considering those guys on the highway seemed to be gunning for us specifically.” A lot of supes liked to think they were tough enough on their own against humans and guns or knives were for pussies. In a one-on-one brawl this was probably accurate.

I was sticking to my initial plan, which was primarily recon. We knew Hank was in town somewhere, and the church was the most likely place, but there was no way to know for sure. We couldn’t waltz in, guns blazing, not unless we wanted to get ourselves killed.

But the two guys in the truck worried me. If they worked for the Church, there was a chance they might have called ahead and warned someone we were coming. I was just hoping we might be able to get a look at the building before anyone else showed up. We could figure out a more aggressive plan of attack when we had more information.

Wilder returned to his bike and opened one of the leather saddlebags on the side. From inside he withdrew a small handgun, much more compact than I would have expected from a big guy like him. He checked to see if it was loaded and made sure the safety was on before tucking it in the back of his pants and lifting his shirt to cover it.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Probably as satisfied as I’m going to get, considering the situation.”

Frankly, even if we had a bazooka, I wasn’t going to feel prepared enough.

We trudged onward, soon wandering off the cracked sidewalk and into the middle of the street. The town was so empty it felt like we were on the set of a zombie movie. My nerves were on edge because it reminded me far too much of my previous experience with the walking dead. Zombies might not be real, but if you get enough powerful necromancers in the same place, it doesn’t matter that the bodies are being animated by magic. It feels like the end of days.

This was different. There were no bodies around us, living or otherwise. No ambient noise, nothing to indicate anyone else existed in a ten-mile radius. We were driven only by the glow on the horizon that was too bright to be morning. It must be the church.

A chill crept up my spine, and I couldn’t shake the sense of dread following after me. Obviously this was all wrong. We shouldn’t be here in the first place, not by ourselves and not so unprepared. But even with a dozen other werewolves in tow I didn’t think anything could keep this situation from being super creeptastic.

Not to mention I half-expected a truck to peel up behind us at any moment and run us into the ditch.

I kept close to Wilder, but his presence did little to make me feel better. Once the teasing had stopped, he seemed to remember what it was we’d come here to do. His jaw was tight, and a look of determination had come over him.

It was hard to feel comforted by someone who appeared to be on the verge of a killing spree, no matter who that homicidal urge was directed towards.

The uneasy sensation continued to make my heartbeat flutter, and more than once I checked behind us. But every time the road was empty. These guys weren’t just a group of idiot redneck fanatics. They’d found me more than once while I was driving, and they’d been able to capture Hank. Werewolves could smell humans coming, so it begged the question of how they’d managed to bag a full-grown male werewolf.

This wasn’t amateur hour, and Wilder and I were going to need to be smart and careful. I was glad I’d joined him, now, because
careful
didn’t seem to be a major concern to Wilder.

It took me a minute to admit to myself that I was also frightened of seeing
her
again. The mysterious female figure who appeared to be haunting me. With her face burned to charcoal ruin, I couldn’t figure out who she was or what she wanted from me. All I knew was she scared the crap out of me, and I refused to believe she was all in my mind.

Crazy people see the dead following them.

I wasn’t crazy.

I followed Wilder as we made our way off the street and passed the edge of town where the sidewalk literally ended and the gravel shoulder of the highway began. The light from the church got brighter as we drew nearer. They certainly weren’t trying to be subtle about their presence
here
, which made me wonder yet again why they were in Franklinton at all, if they weren’t trying to hide. There was no way to find this place when I looked online, but now that we’d arrived, it was lit like an airport landing strip guiding us in.

It took us almost fifteen minutes to get from the town limits to the site of the church, but once we had the place in view, I could tell why we hadn’t seen anyone in town. And I immediately regretted not mapping out a Plan B.

A dozen cars, everything from beat-up pickups to a shiny new Mercedes, were parked in a neat row in the paved church lot. Not a lot of people, but it was probably the entire remaining population of the town.

Living in the south, I’d seen more than my fair share of churches, but all the same this one took my breath away. It wasn’t as big as a megachurch, but it dwarfed the small-town chapel that had likely once been in its place. I guess that website of theirs drew in a lot more donations than I’d suspected.

The building was a good three stories tall, and the entire exterior was pristine, glittering blue glass, the kind used in huge office towers. Around the front were evenly spaced magnolia and gardenia trees, their white flowers all in full bloom, giving the air a fragrant sweetness of honey and lemon that overwhelmed any other scents and brought a flood of memories swirling back to me.

La Sorcière
had taught me all about the magical properties of flowers. Both gardenia and magnolia promoted peace. But gardenia was also used to protect from outside influence. These zealots could pretend to be oblivious, but I suspected the trees hadn’t been planted just because they looked pretty.

My theory was confirmed when I glanced between the magnolia trees and saw the tall stems of pretty purple flowers swaying lightly in the night air.

“Wolfsbane,” I announced.

It was long believed by magical practitioners to protect against vampires and werewolves. Thankfully not all herb lore was accurate. But its presence alone was all I needed to know they weren’t fooling around. They had fail-safes in place.

Fuck
. “Why the hell is the church lot
this
full after four in the morning?” Too early for regular service, too late for midnight mass. Right on time to be weird and concerning. It also put a serious damper in my plan to scout the area. With this many people around we wouldn’t be able to check the perimeter and look for signs of Hank.
Fuck times a million
.

Wilder’s focus faltered as he realized our plan was now ruined, and he regarded the lot, taking in the number of cars and the fact all the interior lights of the building were blazing. The church being busy at this hour wigged me out.

Delphine once told me that nothing good happens after two a.m. She’d been referring to booty-call texts and online shopping. But I was willing to bet her concept extended to insane, antisupernatural cultists as well. There was no way they were in there having a predawn bake sale.

“What do you want to do?” Wilder turned his laser focus onto me. It made me nervous, like being the only student to show up to my final exam and I was naked and speaking the wrong language.

I had to think fast. My first plan had been my best, but there
had
to be a way we could still find out some information. I didn’t want to turn tail and run just yet. “Let’s go around the back. I think we’re looking at the lobby right now. There’s a chance we might be able to actually see inside from the back, get a better idea of what’s going on.” I was proud of coming up with a decent Plan B under pressure.

He nodded, and without waiting for me, marched ahead into the tall grass skirting the parking lot. The dry leaves rustled lightly as we moved through them, but nothing so loud I thought it would arouse suspicion. We made our way slowly but with purpose around the perimeter of the building. It took a surprisingly long time thanks to how big the place was, but we eventually found ourselves looking in through the big back windows of the church. We were situated on an angle, well outside the reach of the light, so no one glancing out would be able to spot us.