AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now that I’d been back in the real world for so many years, I found myself uneasy once again, like the swamp was whispering its secrets around me. She’s back, she’s back, she’s back. Plots were being hatched against me and I no longer spoke the language.
More importantly, wherever La Sorciere was in all of this, she would know I was coming long before I got there.
I’d known that would be the case when I planned this excursion, but being out here in the setting sun made it all the more real.
“I should have waited until morning,” I said with a sigh.
“Would it have been any less freaky in the morning?” he asked.
“Out here? A little. But when we get into the thick of it, it’s pretty much spooky as shit all the time.”
“Noted.”
“You’ve never been into the bayou?” I asked him, astonished.
“I’ve been peripheral to swamps, but no, I can’t say I’ve ever gone out of my way to go into one. In human form anyway.”
We all did weird stuff in wolf form, I could accept that it was a different experience than what we were doing now. For one thing, you felt safer in wolf form. As a shifted werewolf, you were almost untouchable. It felt like nothing could hurt you. In human form, even though we were strong, there was a level of exposure that simply wasn’t present when you were a wolf. You felt fragile.
At least that’s how I felt as we motored along the aqueous causeways of the swamp.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been on a bayou tour.” I shook my head at him.
“Have you ever been on a bayou tour?”
“I literally went through puberty living inside a tree stump out here.”
“Right, but that’s not going on some tourist boat nonsense where the three-toothed guide tells you not to feed the gators, meanwhile he’s missing twelve fingers and has a name like Booger.”
I raised a brow at him. “So many stereotypes to unpack there, Wilder Shaw.”
“Hey, I was raised in a trailer park and my brother is a racist mechanic who owns seventeen white wife-beater tanks and has zero problem referring to them as ‘his beaters.’ I think I’m allowed to lean a little heavy on the stereotyping.”
“Your brother really is something else.”
“My point being, no one goes on swamp tours unless they’re from somewhere else. I’m betting you could quiz a hundred different people on the streets and the only ones who would say they’d been to the swamp would be people who live in the swamp and people who live in a different state. End of story.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You love me.” He grinned.
“I know, what the hell was I thinking?”
Wilder winked at me and cut the motor’s speed slightly. The trees had started to get bigger and denser, the moss draping overhead was so thick it blotted out what remained of the sun, leaving us in a green-tinted glass bowl.
We had to reduce our speed further as we navigated between the big trees. Here, we’d need to be extra careful. There were hidden bogs and islands all over, and there was always a chance we might find ourselves run aground if we didn’t keep an eye on the depth.
I glanced down at the water, which was too dark and murky to make out anything. Weeds scraped at the bottom of the boat, making a sound like fingers clawing at the fiberglass. I shivered and it had nothing to do with the cold.
“Where to, Princess?” Wilder asked, squinting into the dim light.
“If I say I’m not sure, will you get really mad?”
His gaze darted to me. “When you say not sure do you mean like ‘it could be one of two very similar looking trees’ or do you mean ‘I’m only ten percent convinced we’re in the right swamp’?”
“Closer to the first one.”
“But not not the second one.”
