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Or so Mr. X. told me.
I've found that when I hear those words, it's an object I donotwant to become intimately acquainted with. I've unearthed more magical murder weapons in these swamps than I care to recall.
But a canning jar?
It was so anticlimactic.
But who am I to judge what someone deemed important? The color is green—cash that is. That's what I'm chasing and the only thing I care about. A girl has got to eat—especially one severed from her foster family. Humans “age out” of the foster-care system. Paranormals like me who don't make the grade? We get kicked out, cut off, and completely ostracized from everyone we ever knew with no chance of returning.
Life’s a bitch sometimes, isn’t it?
The most exciting aspect of this mystery container was that it supposedly fell off the pirate Edward Teach'sQueen Anne's Revengewhen it sailed into Louisiana and moored at Port Hudson.
A pirate jar. Imagine.
Even I had to admit that holding something that had once belonged to Edward, or more commonly known as the revered pirateBlackbeard,would score high on the list of coolest things I've ever retrieved.
But the secrecy surrounding it made me think that whatever the contents—treasure map, sand from a sacred place, or the eyes of his enemies—the less I knew, the better.
As usual, just another night plodding through noxious swamp muck and risking my life hobnobbing with the gators and copperheads. No big deal.
The fetid, salty-sweet stink of old, rotting fish carcasses and human sewage filled my nostrils as I approached a runoff channel. It was a hundred yards off, but I could scent the corpses of aquatic life and algae turning fouler as I approached.
When did the tides rise high enough to push an item from the harbor this far back into the marsh? Did an animal find it interesting enough to carry it to a burrow? Had it grown into the roots of a cypress or tangled underwater in a mangrove forest?
Every search carried the possibility of a fairytale made real in my life, which you'd think would make me more excited about the quest than the payout.
But I've lived my whole life smack dab in the middle of a Grimm brothers' dark story, and I'm one of the monsters—sort of.
My footing slipped, and I landed almost hip-deep in a muddy sinkhole. The curse in my throat froze when a fresh scent hit me. An aroma so repulsive, I would have swum in sewage rather than face it.
The stench of musk, cypress wood, sex, and hunger made my stomach roil, and heat worked up my thighs to pool in my center.
It was the one aroma I never desired to encounter again. The smell ofhim.
The love of my life.
I sucked in a deep breath of fishy, sweaty stench to clean him out of my nose and sniff the air again, but that unmistakable scent remained.
Kye Driftwood.
The man I thought I'd spend the rest of my life with. My former partner-in-crime, spy-movie snuggle buddy, and running companion.
aka, my Mate. Or the asshole who was supposed to be.
But moon after moon, when I didn't change, eventually, he stopped telling me everything would be okay. And soon after that, he stopped speaking to me altogether.
In short order, he took another mate—one he deemed worthy of being the pack Alpha’s wife—and gave me my walking papers.
I was barely out of high school when my world got fucked and I hit rock bottom.
Everything's a little lesshappily-ever-afterwhen you don’t turn out the way everyone expected.
But his presence sparked the question at hand.
Why the fuck was he here?
With all the other smells and my focus on divining the jar's location, I wasn’t sure if the smell was fresh or old, and it careened through my brain, almost forcing everything else out.
