“
Y
OU ARE NOT CRAZY,” Piet said. He must have read the expression on my face.
I knew he would have reached out for me if his arms weren't already full of the baby. “But no one sees what I see.”
“That's because you are so damn special no one else can do what you can. We see big beetles or small flares. Some of us can feel their magic while ordinary folks only see the strange. I can put out the flames, but, hell, Tate, you can see what's hidden behind ancient spells and alien sorcery.”
Just what a woman needs in life, insight into a world that doesn't exist for most people. “Why couldn't I be a weather magi or a truth-seer? That might have been fun, especially on first dates. No need for a Google search.”
He smiled, a rare flash of white teeth in the dark. “But now you can communicate with them, without your fancy-dancy linguist or a celebrity animal trainer. Your talent is growing, adapting. And not simply because someone handed you a custom-tailored gift. You are the one who is learning.”
“So are you, learning to control your power.”
“I think the bugs are letting me affect them, to a point, after their initial surprise.”
“And I suspect it is the luminaries who are learning to talk to me, not the other way around. The elf king spoke our language. So did the lord stallion. We did not learn their tongues.”
“Either way, you are expanding your abilities, which is great. Now tell them to go home.”
We both looked up, high, to see a tiny meteor shower streaking away. I didn't have a feeling of success, that they'd listened to me and left for good. They had somewhere else better to be, that was all. “That's what I've been trying to do, but they don't understand. Or don't want to. I think they want their moâ”
My cell chirped.
Uncle Henry called from the police station. His voice was a near growl, he was so mad at having to leave the poker party. He was in pain, too, I could tell, from the lies he'd had to spout.
The Harbor Patrol intercepted a complaint from a boat headed east, he told me. I held the phone away from my ear so Piet could listen in, too. The yachters stopped to watch a fireworks display off the area east of Paumanok Harbor, but a spark hit their teak deck and started a fire.
“Did the boat sink?”
“They killed it.”
“The firefly?”
“They couldn't catch your freaking fly. They killed the flames. Then they turned around and headed back to Shelter Island. They intend to lodge complaints of negligence with the Coast Guard, though, as well as NOAA, the DEC and whoever else will listen. The area wasn't marked, patrolled, or on any alerts they should have received. And it wasn't the Fourth of July.”
“So they got too close to some fireworks. That's not so bad, is it?”
“Not so bad?” He shouted loudly enough for Piet to wince from beside me. “When there was no firecracker barge, no rocket booms when they went off, and no one standing on shore with a lighter?”
“Don't tell me, the salt marshes?”
He didn't tell me. He didn't have to. “Do you know how many people listen to the ship-to-shores and the police scanners? Do you have any idea how many people are headed out there now, in the dark, in kayaks and canoes and traipsing across those sand-spit causeways, to see the show?”
“We're on our way, Chief,” Piet called over my shoulder. “But maybe you want to put up roadblocks to keep any more spectators away.”
“What I want is to go back to my poker game. You fix this, you hear?”
Elladaire heard, too, and woke up disoriented and distressed. That was bad enough, but what did we do with her now? She wasn't a puppy we could lock in the kitchen or a dog that would be content with a good-bye cookie.
“Your cousin?”
Susan worked until the kitchen at the Breakaway closed, then stayed to shut the bar. Her mother and Uncle Roger kept farmers' hours, so they'd be asleep by now.
“Mrs. Garland?”
I shuddered at the thought. “Do you know what trouble I'd be in if Edie's not one hundred percent flame-free out of your range for what could be hours? Or what Eve Garland could do to her? She'll have to come with us. She'll go back to sleep in the car, and then we can leave her with one of the cops at a roadblock, or dragoon a local who gets turned back from the shoreline into sitting with her. We'll have to walk into the wetlands.”
“No problem.”
“Yes, there is a problem. You don't understand. We'll have to
walk
into the wetlands.”
“I have high boots.”
And I had a bogeyman from my childhood nightmares hiding out there. My father'd warned me about the creature when I was five. And again now, when I was thirty-five. My stomach was already doing somersaults and my knees were locked, shouting, “Hell, no, we won't go.” I'd say we had a big problem.
Â
Big Eddie blocked one of the access roads with his K-9 patrol partner and squad car. The dog wore an orange vest. Big Eddie wore a gas mask and an oxygen tank on his back. As soon as we got out of our car, I understood why. The same stench from the beach near my house filled the air here, only stronger. Poor Eddie with his incredibly sensitive nose had to be suffering. The dog, with no training and no urge to exert himself by finding or detecting anything, ever, slept in the back seat of Big Eddie's car, unaffected. Good thing Main Street and the developed areas of the Harbor were so far away.
The young policeman almost snatched Elladaire from Piet's arms, removed the gas mask and inhaled deeply. “Ah, baby lotion and urine and, um, chocolate kisses? A touch of perfume. Chanel, I think.”
That would be mine.
“And dog.”
Mine, too.
“Maybe a smidgeon of smoke and aftershave. Something English. And beer, Sam Adams.”
Piet.
“Thank you, thank you. I really need this. Can I keep the kid to clear my head?”
I handed him the diaper bag. “She gets worse.”
“Can't be worse than this.”
“So what is the awful smell?”
Big Eddie didn't know, and that hurt him worse. He spent hours every week studying new scents sent from laboratories all over the country, via DUE, of course, to learn to identify them. This wasn't from any lab. It wasn't something easy, either, like low tide, a dead dolphin, or decomposing deer carcass. He knew what those smelled like, and this was different, which made it more painful.
“It's a lot of everything,” he said, inhaling the eau de bebé. “Chemicals, botanicals, organics.”
“Like the old twenty questions.”
Eddie looked blank.
“You know, animal, vegetable, and mineral.”
“Yeah, but none from around here, that's for sure.”
I didn't need his nose to tell me that. I did not want Big Eddie and his big nose telling me some huge slavering beast lurked in the marsh, either. On the other hand, I'd welcome a name, an identification of what waited there.
“Isn't there such a thing as swamp gas?”
“We're telling people that's what this is. It isn't.” He held up two sealed bottles. “I've got samples ready to be analyzed, and the Harbor Patrol is bringing up water specimens.” He sniffed at Elladaire's hair, not looking at us. For the first time in memory, our psychic sniffer couldn't do his job.
I patted his slumped shoulder. “Don't worry. It's not your fault. It's most likely something new.”
“Oh, I know that, Willy. Everyone knows you brought it here.”
“I didn'tâ”
Piet pulled me away. “We'll figure it out.”
We left Eddie with a bottle of organic baby milk and our cell numbers. Then we started away from the car's headlights. Into the dark. Off the road. Oh, hell.
“You could have stuck up for me, you know,” I sniped at Piet rather than think about what else was on the deer path ahead of us. “Partners and all that.”
“And let the kid think he failed at his job? Besides, you're not going to change anyone's mind no matter what you do.”
“I could explain how I don't create the aliens, I just sense their presence. Once they come and find me.” Of course that meant I wasn't half the imaginative artist I thought I was. “You're right. No one will believe me.”
“But they trust you to fix the mess.”
I don't know if trust was the right word. Demand, insist, and blame defined the locals' attitude better. I trudged on, feeling as if the weight of the world rested on my shoulders.
No, that was the backpack I wore, with everything I could think of to bring: flashlights, fresh water, clean socks, cookies, a hammer, bug spray, a little field guide book of fishes, another of insects, nets, Reese's Pieces, a small first aid kit, duct tape, a steak knife, and an extra cell phone in case mine went dead.
We didn't need a flashlight. The moon was out and bright. Except the golden orb in the distance wasn't the moon, unless blue cheese caught on fire.
We didn't need cell phones. Nothing worked this far from a tower.
We didn't need a map, either. We just followed the not-moon and the dreadful scent.
I put the hammer in my hand.
“What are you going to hit with that?” Piet asked. I could hear the smile in his voice.
“You if you don't shut up. This is serious. We don't know what's ahead. All you've got to protect us is a canister of nothing.”
“Very official looking nothing, though. And I thought you felt the bugs didn't mean us any harm.”
“They don't. It's who or what else is out there that might be dangerous.”
“I have a pocketknife.”
“How big?” I wanted to know.
“Not big. But it's got a bottle opener and a nail file.”
“That's not funny. Heaven knows what we'll find.”
He held a low branch of some pricker bush out of my way. “What's the worst you can think of?”
Oh, he didn't want to know the worst I could imagine. Eight-headed monsters, eight-foot ogres, gore-dripping fiends, unattached hands that played piano. And those weren't real. Vampire bats, black widow spiders, quicksand, collapsing sides of the ditches, so you fell in the water and your boots filled up so you couldn't get out and drowned and your body got swept out to sea to be scavenged by crabs and seagulls.
“Okay, give me the hammer.”
I started to hand it over. “Why?”
“So you don't sink so fast in the quicksand.”
I thought I showed great restraint in not hitting him over the head with my weapon. Or throwing it at him when he got too far ahead. I ran to catch up and tripped on a root I hadn't seen. He came back and helped me up. Then he unbuckled my backpack and slung it over his shoulder as it were no heavier than his empty canister. “We're wasting time.”
Yeah, like I was in a hurry to meet Dad's creature.
We didn't see anyone else as we walked toward the fireball, the stink, and the shoreline. We didn't see any snakes, ticks, or spiders either, but I knew they were out there. If those were the worst we encountered, I'd consider myself lucky. And lucky I didn't faint when a raccoon burst out of the reeds and humped across our path.
I thought I was in good shape from walking the dogs all summer, but I was out of breath after the first half hour, maybe from holding it to lessen the smell. Maybe from getting ready to scream.
At least the ground was level. It had to be, to serve as a flood plain. Unfortunately, it was about three miles of level deep to the bay, and maybe five miles wide. If our path ran out, we'd be forging through tall Phragmites, jumping ditches where anything could be lurking.
The path held, and was pretty dry considering how much water flowed around it, reflecting the light in silvery bands. I thought I heard an owl, then small things in the reeds, but nothing bothered us.
As we got closer to where the ditches opened onto the bay, we could see boats in the distance, their lights bobbing on the water.
We could also see what they'd come to view: a shimmering ball of fire hovering over a section of the wetlands about half a mile west of where we stood.
I tugged on his arm. “Turn them off before they start any fancy acrobatics. Don't you dare think about my body now. Full power, Piet, full concentration. Shut them down.”
He chuckled, but took my hand and picked up the pace toward the swarm. “Do you actually have a body under all that armor?”
My mother's yellow rain slicker reached to the tops of her rubber boots, which were a size too big for me, but better too big than too small, I figured. I had on a baseball cap under the slicker's hood, to keep bats out of my hair, and thick gardening gloves to protect me from poison ivy and thorns and those piano-playing severed hands. I was hot and sweaty and not at my fashionable best. Or bravest. I clutched Piet's hand so tightly he'd lose circulation in his fingers soon. He, of course, looked calm, cool, and macho in high leather boots, tight jeans, and a long-sleeved work shirt. Then he looked pissed.
“We're too far away. You try.”
“Try what?”
“Talk to them, damn it. Distance doesn't matter for telepathy.”
While he searched for a path going in the direction of the light, I concentrated on telling the lightning bugs to pretend to be lightning, and leave.
Instead,
Mama
echoed in my head and the fireball flattened into a streaking rocket, headed toward us.
“No, don't let anyone see you!”
They tried to look like a cloud in front of a sliver of a moon, but still coming in our direction.