Which would be the worst thing possible for Gray and Caleb, so again, it was just as well they were back in New Orleans.
Zahira rose to her feet. “We should try to get some sleep. It’s been a long day for us all.”
“No lie,” John agreed. “Goodnight. See you in the morning.”
Once she was gone, Ryan grabbed his overnight bag. “Do you want the bathroom first, or…?”
“Go ahead,” John said. “I doubt I’ll be able to sleep much anyway.”
Ryan disappeared into the bathroom. John reached for the chain to pull the curtain closed, but paused with his hand on it. Watching planes cutting across the night sky, nothing more than lights ascending to and descending from the heavens, no clues as to the people they carried within. People who had lives and dreams and hopes. People who had secrets.
Operation Mephisto might have been highly classified. But someone out there did know about it.
They knew John had come across Jennifer and Marc Starkweather, who had posed as his parents before he was shipped off to state school. Knew John had talked to them more than once.
Plenty of people at SPECTR-NOLA had known about the encounter, from field agents to District Chief Fontaine. The Starkweather name would have gone into the files, along with his as one of the investigating agents. Had that alone caused a monitoring program of some kind to send up a red flag?
Jennifer had been afraid, the last time John had seen her alive. Said he was going to get them killed. Now she and Marc were dead from an apparent suicide pact, which John didn’t believe for a moment hadn’t been a murder staged to look otherwise.
The conclusion had become inescapable. Someone at SPECTR had killed them to cover up Operation Mephisto. And if they found out John had been investigating further, along with Zahira and Ryan…
Well. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they’d be next.
Seven
This is fucked up, Caleb thought at Gray. I mean, not that there was going to be any good reason for stealing people’s bones, but yikes.
Gray didn’t bother to answer. He was on high alert, absorbing information through every sense, searching for any sign of the fifolet. The two drakul paddled more slowly now, the canoe passing beneath the morbid wind chime. Other arrangements of bones, strung together with dried and knotted grass, appeared in the trees along the bayou. Ribs, long bones, vertebrae, even a lower jaw or two, all taken apart and put back together in whatever way suited the fifolet. It was almost artistic.
Maybe the faust had been an artist, and some creative instinct lingered after the demon subsumed them, horrible and twisted but still there. Caleb had never spent much time thinking about the people who had existed before they became monsters, except when it came to identifying them as part of the case. He hadn’t wondered about who the ancient rougarou had once been, or the doppelgänger, or any of NHEs they’d come across while road tripping with John.
If John’s possession all those years ago had been allowed to become permanent, neither he nor Gray would have wondered about him if they encountered him now as a ghoul, or a werewolf, or whatever.
Maybe the fifolet’s host hadn’t had any choice. The stories about Jean LaFitte, forcing demons into people to guard his treasure, might be just that—stories. Or they might be real.
“None of the demons initially had a choice, either,” Gray reminded him. “Nor did anyone ask me if I wished to walk this world.”
Fuck everything. Fuck people like LaFitte, and Walsh, and Brimm, and Forsyth, and anyone who forced and tortured and didn’t give a damn about anything but themselves.
Had John learned anything from Walsh? He hadn’t texted, but then again, he knew they were going out hunting. Caleb hadn’t actually expected him to. John was just being practical, not shutting them out.
John didn’t look at them now and think about what was done to him. They were different. Sure, neither of them had asked for this, and the experience hadn’t exactly been fun for Caleb at the beginning, but it wasn’t the same.
“I am not a demon,” Gray said, but there wasn’t the usual conviction behind the statement. “That is the difference. They were demons, and I am myself.”
That isn’t how John classifies things, though. It’s all Non-Human Entities to him; you’re just at the top of the food chain.
“I do not wish to think about this now.”
Gray had a point. They were on a hunt; they needed to keep their heads in the game before the fifolet ended up yanking their bones out for its twisted art project.
The waterway narrowed, the horrifically decorated trees closing in. Spanish moss trailed from the branches above, nearly brushing their head. The eerie quiet still remained, and the wind stank of rotting eggs and freezing metal. The fifolet had passed through only moments before.
An old shack appeared ahead, slowly decaying into the mud it stood on. Antlers decorated the outside walls, their points jutting aggressively from the weathered wood. An abandoned hunting camp, maybe? And if so, had the fifolet been one of the hunters who nailed his prize to the wall, or had it merely taken inspiration from them?
The smell of blood and wet bone tainted the air. A roughly constructed frame stood outside the shack, and on it some new creation of bone and twisted grass was taking shape. One of the fresh ribs had been added to it, but the others lay abandoned on the ground.
The fifolet had smelled them. Had it fled, or simply hid?
Let’s check out the cabin.
Gray didn’t answer with words, only the feeling of agreement and a subtle shift in posture to signal to Night. The canoe angled toward the bank.
Something detached itself from one of the cypress trees just as they passed. It was tall and thin, its bark-like skin perfect camouflage until the moment it moved. Caleb just had time to register a bluish light blink on like a firefly, before a hand with fingers like knives stabbed into the flesh of their shoulder. Then it was hurling them into the air with immense strength, their body tumbling, until the dark water of the bayou closed over them.
Gray’s feet hit the soft muck of the bottom. The sucking mud releases him reluctantly as he fights his way back to the surface. Water floods into the rubber overalls of the waders, weighing him down. His claws find purchase in cypress knees; a moment later, he stumbles through the shallows, brackish water streaming from their hair.
“Fuck! We need to get the waders empty.”
There is no time.
The wound in their shoulder closes as he casts about for the fifolet. The canoe is overturned, and there is no sign of Night. Nor of the demon, though given its camouflage it could be standing only feet away, pressed against a cypress, eyes only slits and lure gone dark. Its scent saturates the area, making it impossible to tell where it might be.
“What do we do?” Caleb asks. Impatient as always.
Gray prowls forward, scanning every tree, ears straining for any creak of wood or snap of twig. The bones clatter in the wind, concealing sounds of other movement. It is clear from the number of them that the fifolet has been here for a very long time. It might have haunted the swamp for years, preying on anyone that crossed its path, then vanishing into the vastness of the swamp. No mortal would be able to track it this far; it is only the fifolet’s bad luck that Zahira was asked to investigate the latest death.