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“Lord help me if it’s any longer than that.”
“She ain’t easy to find.”
“Trust me, I know.” I shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Anything else out there causing trouble?”
When I’d last lived in the bayou there had been a roving pack of werewolves called the Loups-Garous who had an arrangement with another local tour guide to send unsuspecting folks out only to have them kidnapped, killed, or worse.
For a long time I hadn’t thought there was a worse than death option, but the Loups-Garous taught me otherwise.
As far as I knew Callum had wiped them out years earlier, but the bayou was a mystery of hidden spaces. Anything could be out there.
“Gators.” Bess shrugged.
“Just gators?”
“Snakes.”
I gave her a look. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
Bess lifted her head and paused filling in the rental form. “Everyone who goes in comes back out these days. Don’t ruin my track record.” She pointed to the wall where a sign read It has been 1498 days since anyone was eaten by a gator.
I blinked stupidly at it.
“I wanna get to 1500,” she said.
“We won’t ruin your record,” Wilder assured her.
She pushed the form across the counter to me. “Fill in the blanks and sign at the bottom please.”
I completed the form as she processed my
card. The reason I’d selected Bess’s establishment was because it was almost unheard of to have the option to rent a boat to go out on the swamp. Tours were different, it seemed like a hundred different companies would take your money to show you around, but not many would let you go on your own.
For good reason. Once you were into the thick of it, the swamp had a habit of shifting and changing around you like it had a mind of its own. You might think you knew where you were and how to get back, but the next time you turned around you’d find trees at your back you’d swear weren’t there a moment earlier.
That was the magic and the danger of the swamp, and why it simply wasn’t a safe option for most people to go alone.
Outside, beyond a rickety dock, I could see orange tags wrapped around the skinny branches of the trees. I’d checked Bess’s website before I came, and knew there were self-guided kayak paths that “brave” tourists could take. The boat rental was something I only knew about from one of my pack members who said Callum had once needed to enlist Bess’s services for something in the past.
If the McQueen name meant anything to her now, she didn’t let it show. I’d found, though, that a black card went a long way when it came to keeping questions off peoples’ lips.
She handed back my credit card along with a key on a yellow floaty tag. “Second slip, little motorboat. Gas can in the back is full, but be smart. There’s only one paddle, and strong as your man looks I don’t think you want to come back in the hard way.”
I took the key and my card and thanked her, then hustled Wilder outside before Bess could change her mind. The boat was a little fiberglass number with a basic pull-string outboard motor. The air around the dock smelled strongly of gasoline in a not unpleasant way.
Wilder beat me to the back bench and pulled the motor cord, firing up the engine. As promised there was a gas can, two bright orange life jackets, and a single canoe paddle on the floor. Alongside them were the corpses of about a hundred mayflies, and a sloshing bit of brackish swamp water.
Wilder waited until I had untied the boat from the dock and sat down before revving the accelerator handle on the boat and sending us puttering away from shore.
Within seconds the dock and Bess’s shack were out of sight and we were enveloped by the green shade of the swamp. The trees here were slender and close together, with large swaths of steel-gray sky still visible. A chill hung in the air, making my cheeks sting as we swept across the brown surface of the water.
Aside from the whir of the boat’s motor, the sounds of the swamp rose up, almost overpowering the meager thrum of the boat. Frogs cricked and croaked, bugs sang there sweet clicking songs with the eerie, haunting cadence of whispering ghosts. If ghosts could whisper.
In the quick-setting dusk a saw-whet owl called, it’s trilling voice asking who-cooks-for-you, which was how Lina had always mimicked it at Callum’s house when I’d been a child. “Who cooks for you?” she’d chuckle. “I cook for you, I cook for you.”
The whole area around us had been quiet as we’d upset the calm, but as soon as the swamp knew we were no match for it, everything came back to life almost immediately. Bugs buzzed overhead, nipping freely at our exposed skin.
The frogs were the strangest and most incredible of all the noises, their constant chirrup was an unearthly alien kind of noise. I remember it keeping me up at night when I’d first come to live here. Every kind of night sound had been so unfamiliar to me that they’d terrified me.
