Twenty-Seven

Fallon took a hard slug of water – warm, plastic-tasting – and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. If he kept sweating like this, he was going to need some sort of sports drink. Salt tablets, something.

He checked the time on his phone again – he had ten minutes until he needed to leave – and then checked on the boy again.

Remy was still in his corner, though was no longer pretending to play with garbage. He sat cross-legged on the dirty floor, hands folded together in his lap, watching the comings and goings of the men. Someone had hooked up a generator and got the power going, so there were lights, now, harsh and flickering fluorescent tubes that beat back the dark, as night finally sank its teeth into the tail end of the evening. In the unforgiving glare of the overheads, Remy looked more like a haunted doll than ever: those bottomless black eyes, smudged beneath with sleepless bruises, cheeks narrow and hollow, expression impassive. He could have been thinking about Hot Wheels, or contemplating some Damien, Omen -style murder for all that Fallon could tell. Either seemed likely.

Nine minutes, thirty seconds to go. Fallon scanned the interior of the depot, and marveled at its transformation over the course of the day. Folding tables had been set up end-to-end in a horseshoe pattern, like a school bake sale, though it was all manner of guns, weapons, and tools laid out in orderly rows atop them, rather than cakes and cookies. One of Lloyd’s men was a welder, and put his wares to work – amidst showers of sparks and blinding flares of light – to create a cell that looked a lot like the sort of thing one used to go diving with sharks; its dimensions were such that it was just large enough for a man of Mercy Lécuyer’s size and stature to fit inside, without being able to dodge away from anyone or anything that reached through the bars. It sat near the hook and cable setup mounted to the ceiling, and it was all too easy to envision Boyle’s plans for it.

Speaking of which: where the hell was Boyle? He was due back an hour ago. If he’d succeeded – and Fallon seriously doubted he had, operating on instinct, or a hunch, or some such stupid shit – then this whole depot setup would prove superfluous.

Fallon entertained that fantasy a moment, while two wiry-armed, bare-chested men wrestled what looked like a fucking bear trap open and managed to lock it into place without either of them getting their hands caught in its teeth. If Boyle had caught Lécuyer just now, then Fallon’s part in all of this could be over. Maybe he could even return the boy to his mother, wash his hands of the club, this city, this whole sordid case, and go running home to Marianne. He’d never relished the thought of getting back to his wife so much.

But then someone sent up a shout of greeting, and Fallon turned, and there was Boyle, striding through the door with the air of a man who’d just stepped out of fighter jet for the first time: that was to say, rattled . His complexion was waxy and dough-pale, his eyes large and white-rimmed, his hands balled into fists that tightened, again and again, tendons leaping in his forearms.

“What–”

“Hey, Boyle, what do–”

“Boss, did you–”

Boyle lifted a hand to silence them, but Fallon thought it was his face more than the gesture that cut everyone off midsentence.

For Fallon’s part, his already-tight stomach twisted like a wind sock in a gale, and he mopped his face again, ineffectually, with the back of his arm. He glanced toward the door, anticipating the arrival of the crew Boyle had taken with him – but the door remained shut.

“What happened?” he asked when Boyle was nearer.

Boyle drew to a halt, propped his hands on his hips, and gave a single, sharp head shake.

“Where’s Baker and his boys?”

Another head shake.

Fallon’s stomach writhed some more. They were dead, then. Killed by Lécuyer and his boys.

Maybe the bear trap wasn’t so farfetched…but Fallon didn’t intend to be around to watch it snap on anyone’s ankle.

“There’s been a change,” Boyle said, and his voice was off. A shadow of its former authoritative bray, trembling at the edges. “We’re going to do a prisoner exchange. I need to talk logistics with his men.” He nodded toward Lloyd, and made to step around Fallon.

A change . No, a change didn’t factor into Fallon’s plans, which were – shit – five minutes from execution.

He grabbed Boyle’s arm, startled by the tension in it, and the way it jerked and flexed within his grip. For a second, he thought Boyle would spin and hit him. But Boyle pressed his lips to a flat, angry line, and said, “What?”

“I have to go.” When Boyle’s brows lifted, he rushed to add, “Just for a few minutes. I don’t have any cell coverage here. My wife keeps calling – nosy bitch. When I try to answer, the call drops every time. I need to ride up the road and see if I can get a better signal.”

He wanted to squirm away from Boyle’s gaze, the way it bored into his own and didn’t look convinced for a second. “Your wife?”

“I know, I know. I told her before I left not to call me, but she’s in some kinda panic. I think one of the kids is sick or something. If I ignore her,” he continued, as Boyle stared and stared, “she’ll eventually call HQ and report me missing, try to get a supervisor to get hold of me. She’s done it before. Like I said: nosy bitch. Just let me call her, and then we won’t have to worry about her anymore.”

Boyle stared, and stared, and stared…

Then, finally, nodded. “Fine. Make it fast.”

It was an effort to walk calmly out of the building, even more of one when he glanced over and caught Remy watching him with that spooky, doll expression that seemed at once plastic and knowing. Like Remy could hear his thoughts, and was judging him.

Jesus.

But he made it through the door, and out into the dark of the gravel parking lot; drank down air thick as stew while the crickets chorused all around him. He exhaled and shivered with relief. Threw himself behind the wheel of the rental, and slung gravel in his haste to turn around and head down the snaking drive toward the road.

His heart was going like a triphammer, and he breathed in short little bursts through an open mouth. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten out the door, and the immense relief of that was eclipsed only by the terrifying knowledge that, after this errand, he would have to go back, and that what would come next would be even more dangerous and difficult.

The driveway stretched for half a mile or so, far enough that, by the time he turned out on the road, the depot was no longer visible behind him. The Shell station where he’d agreed to meet Duet was another half mile from there, at a four-way stop that it shared with a tiny, lunch-counter sandwich shop, and a farm stand that sold locally-grown produce.

At this time of evening, the gas station was the only one of the three businesses that was open. He spotted a black Ford Explorer with black, practical wheels as he approached the intersection, and parked his rental beside it.

He waited a moment, once he’d killed the engine, doors locked, peering over at the Explorer to make sure he could only see one silhouette through the tinted windows; he could.

Duet waved at him, through two layers of glass, and with unease dragging at his feet, he climbed out of the rental and walked around to meet her at the rear bumper of the Explorer.

Despite only having three pumps, the Shell station bustled with activity: boaters and roughnecks in pickup trucks, mostly. A guy was feeding coins into the air compressor, and another was using the vacuum to clean out the cargo area of his old Bronco. Cars lined the front walk, and the door opened again and again, chime after chime, as customers came and went. The air was heavy with exhaust and cigarette smoke, and Fallon supposed this place was as safe as any, given his circumstances. Should one of Lloyd’s boys, or Boyle himself, happen by, they likely wouldn’t kill him in front of this many witnesses.

He started when he caught sight of Duet. She wore a tank top with a sport coat overtop of it, but her left arm wasn’t through the sleeve; rather, it was strapped across her chest in a sling, and he caught a glimpse of thick white bandaging on her bicep.

She noticed his gaze, and gave a wry half-smile. “Yeah. I had a run-in with Boyle’s pet hooker.” She made a face. “Okay, that’s not fair to hookers: I had a run-in with Regina Carroll. Can’t say I’m a fan.”

The last he’d heard of Regina – and he’d known right from the start that trusting her was stupid, but Boyle had been dead-set – she’d been “taken into custody,” Boyle’s words, by Lécuyer’s wife and the party she’d traveled south with. He hadn’t known the idiot had attacked an FBI agent first. “She cut you?”

“Shot me.”

“Holy shit.”

“Just a graze.” She touched the outside of her arm, and he caught the fast flicker of pain that crossed her face at even that light contact. “The doctor was being cautious.”

Caution was something he needed to exercise as well. He checked his phone, and found that he’d already been gone almost ten minutes. Scanned the parking lot, searching for anyone suspicious. “Okay, I can’t dick around here. What do you want from me?”

Her brows jumped, a little okay gesture, like he was being unreasonable. “Do you have proof of life of Remy?”

He pulled up the photo he’d sneakily taken on his phone just before he left, and showed it to her, the time stamp visible on the screen. “Whole and unharmed, despite the little shit’s best efforts to get eaten by a gator.”

“A what now?”

He shook his head; no way was he wasting time on that whole story. “Boyle’s holding him a half-mile up the road, at an old abandoned gator depot. He’s got two dozen toughs to back him up, and they’ve got a treasure trove of weapons. He said something about a prisoner swap…?”

Duet blew out a breath that fluffed her hair, and shook her head. “Yeah, Felix agreed to one, apparently. Him for the kid.”

“Boyle’s going to torture him. He’s got a whole setup going on.”

Her head turned toward the street, but her gaze narrowed and stayed on him. “I’d imagine he knows that.”

“Have you been with him? Talked to him?” At this point, Fallon kind of hoped Felix got the better of Boyle. He didn’t give two shits about either of them, but it was Boyle who stood to make his life a living hell. If he got to live, that was.

“No, just the brother.”

“The profiler?”

“Yeah.” Her gaze narrowed another fraction. “I hear you guys tried to kill him on the way down here.”

“Boyle, not me. None of this shit has been my idea.” He sliced a hand through the air for emphasis.

“Right. You’re just trying to live to diddle more kids another day, huh?”

“Look,” he huffed. Tension was winding tighter and tighter in his stomach, and he could feel the time slipping away. “This isn’t about us. Do you want the kid back or not?”

“Obviously.”

“Okay, well, then, if you call in–”

A truck started up behind him, loud as close thunder, and he jumped, might have even yelped, and spun around.

A man stood directly behind him, and his hair was a muddy brown color, styled into a mullet, and he wore a denim jacket with the sleeves cut out of it over a dirt-streaked wife-beater. But there was no mistaking his eyes; those were unfortunately familiar.

“Shit.” Fallon scrambled for his hip, the gun there, and behind him, Duet said, “Don’t.”

He didn’t need to look to know that she had drawn on him.

He held his empty hands out to the side, and breathed, and stared into those haunting, clear blue eyes that had blinked coyly at him in the Knoxville precinct; invited him into a bar bathroom; and then laughed above him in a dark room somewhere, when he was tied down, and drugged, and beaten, and he’d thought he was about to die. He didn’t know the young man’s name, but that didn’t matter: he was trouble , in every sense of the word.

As Fallon stared at him, Blue Eyes lifted a hand in a snarky little wave. “Hi.” One word, but his accent was decidedly British. Then, in a passable Cajun drawl, he said, “Remember me?”

“Christ,” Fallon muttered.

“For what it’s worth,” Duet said, tone dry, “I think this is a terrible and stupid idea.”

“Lucky for you, it’s not your decision,” Blue Eyes said. Then, to Fallon, grinning with all his teeth bared, like he meant to bite Fallon’s throat out, “Good news, Agent Pedo: you get to take me home tonight.”

“No. No, no, shit no, I’m not–”

But the boy’s grin widened, and he was , wasn’t he?

Fuck him.

~*~

Mercy pulled the Velcro strap so tight it forced a little of the air out of Ava’s lungs, and then smoothed it down into place. “How’s that?”

Ava glanced down at her chest, frowning. The vest was still too large – meant for a man, and a large one at that – but it was snug. “It’s hard to breathe.”

“That means it’s doing its job,” Mercy said, and when she lifted her head, he caught her face gently between both wide palms. “Hey.”

She smiled, despite the fluttering of her pulse, and the tension headache that gripped her around the temples; despite the low-grade nausea, and the churning of her stomach. “Hey.”

She’d braided his hair for him earlier, close to his scalp, out of the way, in two plaits whose long tails she’d banded together into one thick rope afterward. It left his face clear, without the usual black curtains of hair to frame it, and she could read the tension along his jaw and around his eyes. There was a softness to his smile, though, that secret tenderness that was for her and her alone.

The chaos in her stilled at sight of that smile. In her relentless pursuit of keeping the black tide of despair at bay, she had instead allowed desperation and fractious energy to mount, so that heart palpitations and breathlessness had become her constant state of existence. She hadn’t slept, but couldn’t imagine doing so; couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

All that mattered was getting this done . Getting Remy into their custody and cutting Boyle down.

But for the heartbeats that he held her face, the storm quieted, and she took her first deep breath in days.

He said, voice low and fond, “If you were a different sort of woman, I’d ask you to stay here. To stay safe.”

“But you know better,” she guessed, smile widening.

“I do. Pretty smart guy, huh?”

When she stretched up on her toes to kiss him, he leaned down, so she didn’t heave to reach so far. It was gentle, chaste for them, more about comfort than heat. After, he rested his forehead against hers, and put his arms around her, so their vest-covered torsos pushed against one another on each breath, a counter rhythm, her chest expanding as his receded.

He murmured something in French that didn’t need a translation.

“I know,” she said. “You, too. Let’s go get our baby.”

“Let’s go get him.”

~*~

Last year, Lucy’s mama, Holly, asked Remy’s mama if they wanted to go out to Michael’s uncle’s farm and visit with the animals. Cal and Millie had been fascinated by the cows and the goats, but Remy was most fascinated by the dogs, and Uncle Wyn took him on a tour through the kennels.

“Will he bite?” Remy asked, before offering his hand to the massive black Great Dane, Crassus, to sniff.

“Nah, he’s a good boy,” Uncle Wyn had said. “Brave dogs don’t bite. It’s the scared ones who nip ya.”

That was what Boyle brought to mind now: a scared dog. He prowled around the warehouse, inspecting the items Lloyd and his men had laid out on the tables, snapping orders, checking his phone, and all the time, he looked ready to bite someone.

He’s scared , Remy thought, and hoped the thing he was scared of was his daddy.

The door squealed open, and Boyle rounded mid-step to see who’d entered. It was Fallon, face shiny with sweat, hair stuck up at odd angles from countless passes of his hand.

“What the hell?” Boyle demanded.

“Sorry, sorry.” Fallon spread his hands in apology. “I couldn’t get her off the phone, but I handled it. She won’t bother me again.”

“Yeah. I’m glad your wife isn’t gonna be a problem anymore,” Boyle said, lip curled. Grab the kid. We need to get moving.”

Moving? Remy’s heart leaped. This place – a gator depot, he’d heard more than one of them say – was one that Daddy had no doubt been to when he used to live here, when he hunted gators with his daddy. So long as they were here, in one place, not moving, Remy had held out hope that Daddy might find him here. The fancy, big house where his Aunt Regina – he wasn’t sure if he believed she was really his aunt – had seemed like a place where no one he knew might find him. But gators, gator depots – that was Daddy all over.

Only, they were moving, now.

He stood as Fallon approached, before his arm could be grabbed and wrenched. Though he stepped forward obediently, Fallon still gripped his shoulder and shoved him so that he stumbled, held up only by the fingers curled tight in the fabric of his sweatshirt.

“Move,” Fallon said, but he sounded distracted. Frightened. He was breathing hard and loud through his mouth, like he’d been running.

One of Lloyd’s men intercepted them on their way to the back door. He was tall and on the skinny side, hair short in the front and spilling dull brown down the back of his neck past his collar. He was lugging a crate, and stopped right in front of them. Turned to look down at Remy.

“Is this the hostage?” he asked.

Remy blinked up at him – and then blinked again. Oh . The hair, and the clothes, and the voice were all wrong, but the face was one he recognized.

Tenny . He started to say it, and then bit down hard on the end of his tongue. He couldn’t reveal his identity out loud in front of all the others.

“None of your business,” Fallon told Tenny, and shoved Remy around him.

But not before Tenny shot Remy a wink.

Outside, the dark was blanketing and more than a little frightening after the harsh glare of the indoor lights. Remy blinked, and walked slowly, and his eyes adjusted quickly.

Three floating orbs of pale blue-white light resolved into lanterns suspended from the tow bars of three boats. Daddy loved boats, and had countless books of them, most of which Remy had paged through, Daddy always eager to answer questions and offer wisdom. He could tell that these boats were built to move quickly, with steering wheels, and dashboards, and two motors jutting off the backs, rather than one. The tow bars, he knew, were designed to accommodate ski ropes. Not the sorts of boats Daddy said were best for hunting, but for sporting – and for making a fast getaway, which was what they were doing, he realized, with a sinking sensation in his belly.

The water’s edge looked totally different than it had that morning, still, drowsy, dotted with dragonflies, and then, in a moment of sudden movement, boiling around the long, flexing body of the gator that had lunged for him. Now, the water and sky were the same deep indigo of night, save where the water flared and foamed around the legs of the men wading from the sandy beach to deposit crates into the boats.

There were lots of men, moving in lots of directions, loading the boats, calling to one another. A controlled chaos.

Remy looked at the dark, concealing water, and wondered if he might – but, no. Fallon put his arms around him and hoisted him up into his arms, carrying him through the water, cursing as it slapped up around his knees, his hips, and then the middle of his chest. He was almost swimming by the time he reached the first boat, and Remy’s whole back was wet. The water was shockingly warm, and it had a smell, part-metallic, part-green.

“Next time, pick a place with a fucking dock,” Fallon muttered, panting, as a man in the boat reached down to take Remy’s arms and haul him up and aboard.

“There used to be a dock,” the man said. He was big, and beer-bellied, and good-natured, as he deposited Remy on the bench at the stern of the boat and then reached to help Fallon crawl up over the side. “But it got rotten, and somebody took it down.”

“Fascinating,” Fallon muttered. He got to his feet and shook off like a dog.

A moment later, Boyle climbed up into the boat as well, without help, and more gracefully, heedless of the water streaming down his black military pants and boots. “We need to get moving.”

The big man moved to the wheel, turned a key, and the motors started up with twin roars.

“Wait, wait, hold on,” a voice called, and then another man hauled himself up the side of the boat, clear of the props, and joined them. He was soaked, as everyone else was, clothes plastered to a frame that revealed itself to be strong with lean, corded muscle, rather than the plain skinniness the jeans and white shirt and denim vest had originally implied.

It was Tenny, and he plopped down onto the bench beside Remy with a splat and said, “Okay, we’re good, everyone else is loaded, boss.”

Remy held his breath, and waited for Boyle to turn and see him. To realize who he was, and that he didn’t belong. Wondered if Boyle might even shoot him.

But Boyle only nodded, eyes scanning the water, and said, “Go.”

The big man pushed down the throttle, and they went.

~*~

“Little more, little more…right there, love, that’s good.”

Maggie killed the Jeep’s engine and sent Devin a cocked-brow look through the windshield. “What did I say about the pet names, Devin?”

“Sorry.” He grinned, not sorry at all, as he gripped the big hook on the Jeep’s winch and started unspooling the cable. “Old habit. It won’t happen again. Love.”

She sighed, and climbed out of the Jeep. Her boots landed in squishy mud that squelched unappealingly underfoot. “Are you sure this is gonna hold?” she asked, and clicked on her flashlight to find a hillock of moss that proved to be a better place to stand. She climbed up onto it and looked down at the water’s edge, where Colin was stripping out of his shirt.

He traded it for the hook from Devin, and, barefoot, dark mud squishing up between his toes in the glare of the headlights, he stepped down into the canal. “Yeah. If the boat’s going fast enough, it won’t matter. But we’ll chock the tires to be safe.”

She nodded, and stepped back into the mud to go around to the back and fetch them.

~*~

Toly capped the generator, and then stashed the empty diesel can in the back of the Rover. It had taken more than an hour to drive to this remote location, mostly because the road was nothing more than two ruts in the underbrush, and he’d had to climb out twice to hack through a screen of poison ivy; it was the first time he’d ever used a machete for its true, intended purpose. Vines, he’d learned, were more difficult to slash than flesh.

He'd made it, finally, though, the old, tumbledown stone chimney gleaming the color of bone in the headlights, and he’d gassed up all four generators: two on the near side of the canal, two on the far. Those he’d reached with the aid of an inflatable raft and paddles, the journey too short to trigger his motion sickness, but his belly squirming each time he looked down at the taut lines that plunged from the tree tops to the unbroken surface of the water. That was four monsters down there for certain, and maybe more swimming around free. Could they see him above them, despite the darkness of the night sky? Would they come up and take a chomp out of his raft?

“They’re not hippos,” he muttered to himself, scrambled out of the raft, and went to gas the far side generators.

He cranked them, and crossed back over. He’d asked Mercy before if the fuel would hold, and he’d nodded, as self-assured and calm as he’d been about every aspect of his plan – which to Toly sounded like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, impossible and improbable. “Nah, it’ll hold. It doesn’t take much to keep ‘em running. But when you cut the hydraulics on, and they start fighting all that weight, it’ll burn fast.”

City boy that he was, he found comfort in the steady diesel chug of the generators. Devin had rigged up all the wiring, cords wound up the trees and through the canopy branches that spanned the canal; he’d tested the winches, all four of them, mounted to piled-up railroad ties leftover from the house-that-never-was off to his left. He’d assured Toly they would work, and Toly had no choice now but to trust him, and to wait.

~*~

Where are we going? It was the thing Remy wanted so terribly to ask. But he knew no one would tell him, and he wasn’t sure he could be heard over the roar of the motors anyway. He’d slipped down against the bench, hair flattened and wind-scraped by the force of their speed. It was cold , going this fast, and he tugged the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, only for the wind to blow it back again.

Maybe Tenny was a mind reader, because he sat up straight and shouted, “Where are we meeting them?”

Boyle hesitated to answer so long that Remy thought he hadn’t heard; but, finally, he turned, and frowned at Tenny. “There’s a private dock up ahead.”

Fallon, bent over his phone, the screen highlighting the greasy sheen of sweat on his face, lifted his head and shouted, “That means they have road access! And they’ve had hours to put people into place!”

“I’ve already got men in place!” Boyle shouted back, and smiled, fleetingly, before that hard, concentrated look of frightened-dog tension overtook his face again.

So long as Boyle was afraid, Remy thought that he could be brave.

~*~

From her perch in the crotch of a massive, unusually squat cypress at the water’s edge, Ava heard the swish and crackle of approaching footsteps. A large body moving through the underbrush, much larger than a nutria, or a fox, or even most men.

She lowered her night vision binoculars and glanced down at the base of the tree just as Colin stepped out from behind a screen of yucca spikes and mounted the knees of the tree roots so he stood just below her.

“You doing okay?” he called up to her, nothing more than a silhouette and a wedge of moonglow face in the darkness.

“Yeah.” Except for the way adrenaline was making her teeth vibrate. “Everyone in place?”

“Yeah. We’re good to go. Just waiting on word from your man.”

She nodded, though he doubtless couldn’t see her up amidst the branches.

He was quiet a beat, then: “Ava?”

She bit back a sigh. She wasn’t angry with Colin, wasn’t even annoyed, but the tension cycling through her, the readiness, the need for action, precluded patience, especially given whatever Colin was about to say wasn’t anything she’d take to heart. “Are you going to ask me to stay in this tree and not go running off to do something dangerous?”

He was quiet another beat. “Probably a waste of breath, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Right, well.” He gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. I tried . “I don’t wanna have to tell Felix I let you get killed.”

“Don’t worry: you didn’t let me do anything. If I get killed, it’ll be my fault, and he’ll know it.”

He chuckled. “Don’t bet on that.”

She put the binoculars back to her face and scanned the trees around her; spotted three owls, and a pair of squirrels sleeping tucked in a nest.

After a while, his footfalls retreated, swishing back through the vegetation until they were out of hearing distance, and then she was alone with the chatter of the katydids once more.

~*~

In the passenger seat of their department issue Suburban, Izzy checked her phone and then relayed Fallon’s text to the others. “It’s a private dock, he said. Boyle thinks they’re a half-mile out by water.”

In the back seat, Dandridge said, “That’ll be the Harper place. It’s a B his hands were the same shape, sun-browned, and big, and so smooth across the backs, without all of Daddy’s fish hook scars. “It’s gonna be fine.”

Mercy grinned at him, and watched his frown deepen. “Why are you comforting me when you’re the one about to wet his pants?”

“I’m not–” Alex huffed, and scowled, and looked Very Serious. “Let me go instead. You’ve got Ava, you’ve got other kids, Ava’s pregnant –”

Mercy twisted his hand free, and laid it on the side of Alex’s neck, who stopped talking, and swallowed with a dry click. “I appreciate what you’re offering, I really do. But I’m not sending you in to get killed or hurt. This is my fight, not yours, and I mean to fight it.”

Alex swallowed again, and turned away, clearly unhappy.

Mercy let his hand fall to his side, where a weapon ordinarily would have been, but where he now encountered only denim. “You’re a good brother,” he said. “I should have said that before. Should have gotten my head out of my ass before.”

Alex turned back, jaw tensed, throwing blue shadows. “Stop talking like you’re about to die , man.”

Mercy shrugged. “I’ve been living on borrowed time most of my life, I figure. Don’t worry about me. Get Remy back. Make sure Ava’s safe. They’re the priority.”

Alex studied him a long moment, then shook his head, and turned away again.

In the distance, a manmade sound broke the wall of insect noise: boats. Several of them, headed their way.

~*~

Remy’s boat was third in line. Fallon was still bent over his phone, and Boyle was staring out over the windshield, scanning the dark water, the frothy white wakes of the two boats ahead of them. Someone shouted something wordless back that sounded like a warning, and a few seconds later, Boyle cursed, and ducked, and a massive branch passed overhead; trailing moss slapped at the windshield and swept over the heads of the men; Remy felt a tickle of it through his hair.

He also felt the sharp point of Tenny’s elbow in his ribs, and when he turned his head, Tenny nodded forward, a silent urge to look at something.

Remy saw lights. Lots of lights, two rows of them. They drew closer, and then closer still, and he saw that each light was affixed to a tall post, the support pillars of a dock that jutted far out into the water. Off to the side was a little structure, a roof on stilts, and beneath it, a boat had been lifted up out of the water to hang suspended. Men stood on the dock, a good many of them, guns slung across their backs, flashlights in their hands that they used to signal to the boats.

For a moment, Remy’s heart leaped with hope – but these weren’t Lean Dogs. They were more of Boyle’s men, hands lifting in greeting.

Tenny’s arm pressed into him, not sharply this time, but bracingly. Remy read it as a reassurance, and was careful not to look at his face, a caution he was glad of as the boat slowed, and Boyle turned around to face him.

Remy took a deep breath, and held it, and didn’t recoil when Boyle got down on one knee and leaned into his face, hand braced on the bench outside of Remy’s hip. Close enough to smell the sour, sweaty tang of unwashed skin, and to see the way the man’s pupils looked small, despite the darkness of the night around them.

As the boat slowed, the roar of the engines died down to a rumble, so that Boyle no longer had to shout to be heard. “Okay, listen up, you little shit. This can be easy, or it can be hard. You do exactly as I say, you stay right with me, and it’ll be easy. Do you understand?”

Remy thought of the water; thought of the gator surging up out of it, as if by magic, the flashing ivory of its teeth; thought of Fallon white-faced with terror, afterward, and saw the waxy, pale sheen of Boyle’s forehead.

I’m a good swimmer .

“Yes, sir.”

More shouts issued from the dock, and the boat swung around beside it. Tenny stood up from the bench to leap out onto the wood and start tying up the boat to one of the metal cleats there. Remy hated his absence, but saw that he was still right there close, a hand extending to help Remy out onto the dock.

Remy reached for it–

And Boyle snatched him by the wrist, and yanked him back. “No. You stay with me.”

Fear leaped fresh and hot in Remy’s chest, and he searched Tenny’s face, looking for guidance. He’d hoped that Daddy would come smashing into the depot at any moment, knock Lloyd and his men over like bowling pins, and sweep Remy up into one of his trademark bear hugs. But what he had now was Tenny, and for a second, Tenny’s eyes got big, a panic Remy felt echoed in his stomach like a shockwave; but then Tenny shook his head, and his face went calm, and he even smiled a little, and so Remy subsided into Boyle’s grip.

A grip that stayed cruel, despite his cooperation. Boyle moved him to the bow of the boat, and shoved him down amidst the cushions and the first aid kit, and rested a booted foot on his hip to keep him down.

~*~

Be ready for anything , Mercy had said.

Tenny was.

But still, when Boyle intervened, and held Remy back from touching him, he knew a moment of flashfire despair and panic. Oh God. Oh, Remy .

A moment of weakness. Emotion overtaking him.

They’re your family , he imagined Reese saying. You love them .

That’s what Reese always said, because Reese was a good person, a sweet person, and he loved these people.

Tenny didn’t.

Or, well, he’d told himself he didn’t. But the moment Remy’s hand didn’t touch his, he realized just how much he cared. That he – damn it, that he loved . He’d thought of that emotion as a stupid weakness for so long. And then along had come Reese, and he’d learned to love, yes. But he loved beyond that, too, in a different way. He could call Devin “old man” all he liked, but he loved him, too, in some ways because he’d been such a pragmatic father.

And then there were the brothers who hadn’t needed to take him in, but who had. Walsh chief among them, always stern, or sour, but whose wife had set up a comfortable place where Tenny and Reese could live, and who had agreed to pay for the horse that Tenny called his own.

And amongst his club brothers, Mercy had been a constant cheerleader, always encouraging, and finding uses for him.

So, yes. He loved these people. Despite all his intentions, they were his family. And when he failed – yes, failed – to take hold of Remy, his stomach sank.

That was a member of his family, and he’d failed him.

He knew a moment’s grief.

Then he thought: fuck, I’ve got to course correct.

Boyle shoved Remy down into the bow of the boat, and Tenny could no longer see him. In different circumstances, he would have pulled his gun, or his knife, but right now, he was playing by different rules. He was having to keep Remy alive; that was the priority, and his own safety, though no one had told him as much, was secondary.

“Hey, boss man,” he said, voice light, but curious. He scratched at his wig for effect, a comical parody of bafflement. “I thought we were gonna give the kid back.”

Boyle didn’t spare him so much as a glance. “Tie up the boat. Get to your post,” he ordered.

The boat was already tied up, but Tenny put a few extra knots in the rope, just to make untying the thing trickier when the time came. Then he moved a few paces down the dock and peered out at the water.

It was black as spilled oil in the darkness, dotted here and there with clumps of duckweed. The wakes of the boats had rippled and faded so that the surface wavered only a little, now, settling.

Tenny was an excellent swimmer, because he was excellent at so many things. He’d executed a hit on a yacht, once. It had been anchored out in the Med, and his support team had dropped him a quarter mile out, so he could approach unnoticed.

The shore was much closer here…but sight of that black, wild swamp water sent a shudder through him. There were beasts in that water.

“Twelve o’clock!” someone shouted, and Tenny heard the faint-but-growing sound of an approaching boat.

Unsteady footfalls on the boards beside Tenny heralded Fallon’s arrival, and Tenny sent him a sharp look. “What are you doing?” he hissed.

Fallon was as wild-eyed and winded as a horse fresh off the track. Sweat poured off his face in quantities that were going to leave him dangerously dehydrated. “I’m getting the fuck out of here while I can,” he hissed back.

Tenny gripped his wrist before he could turn and walk off; he dug his fingertips into the nerves beneath the skin so that Fallon gasped, and tried to twist away. Another pinch froze him in place with a whimper. “The only way you’re getting out of here is if Remy is safely delivered to his mother. Otherwise, you’re dead.”

“Fallon!” Boyle shouted.

The hum of the approaching boat drew closer.

“Go down there to meet him when he gets here.”

Fallon muttered a curse, and when Tenny let him go, he walked down to the far end of the dock.

Tenny checked – Remy was still down in the bottom of the boat, with Boyle’s boot still on his hip – and then did as subtle a survey of the others as he could.

There were twenty-two, including the crews in the boats.

He’d been outnumbered before – the storming of the Beaumont Building leaped immediately to mind – but not out in the open like this. The stairwell, with its corners and landings, had provided cover. Now, he stood fully-exposed on a dock, a clear target for anyone, and the boy he needed to rescue was on a boat.

Bollocks.

The drone of the oncoming motor became a roar, and a light appeared across the water, a speck that quickly blossomed into a beacon.

When the boat finally drew into sight, it was clearly Mercy behind the wheel, the other seats empty.

Tenny held his breath. He knew that Alex and Reese and Gray were belly-down in the bottom of the boat, wearing flak vests and heavily armed. But they wouldn’t stop Mercy from taking a bullet if someone shot him right now. He was a big target, white shirt glowing in the dark, and only growing bigger as he got closer, closer, closer…and finally slowed into a big, arcing turn when the men in the other two boats leveled guns on him and ordered him to stop.

He stood up, and showed his empty palms to their flashlights, his grin wide, and pleased, and terrifying.

“Howdy, boys,” he called. “Let’s do the damn thing.”

~*~

In truth, Harlan hadn’t expected him to come. At least not alone, anyway. He had men stationed on the dock, in the boats, and even on the near shoreline, hiding in the brush with rifles, prepared for all sorts of trickery.

But here was Mercy, alone, piloting a boat, holding up his empty hands, his broad chest covered in nothing but soft white cotton, without the bulk of a bulletproof vest beneath.

Harlan’s excitement fluttered into a heart-pounding crescendo that left him light-headed; reeling so that he had to grip the side of the boat for balance.

This was it. There were so many ways it could go wrong, but it was so close to going right, and he could taste it.

“Let’s do the damn thing!” Mercy called, grinning the way he had yesterday, in his dead father’s kitchen. That wide, shit-eating grin that said he was enjoying himself, and the sight of it now, on the cusp of victory, sent pleasant shivers down Harlan’s legs.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Drop anchor! Then get in the water and swim to the dock!”

“Sure!” Mercy killed the engine, and then dropped the skinny little anchor over the side. Then he moved to the stern of the boat, stepped up on the ledge, and executed a perfect jackknife dive into the water, his entry so smooth it didn’t even send up a splash.

In the moments before he breached the surface at the end of the dock, Harlan’s gut-churning excitement took a swift, sour turn. What if a gator nabbed him down there? What if he got this close to securing him, and then Boyle was robbed of his revenge by a stupid damn lizard?

But then Mercy’s head emerged, and his hands lifted in a shower of droplets; he wiped his eyes, and nose, and swept his palms back over his braided hair and swiped water from his brow.

It really was him, Harlan saw. He knew now that both brothers had helped to deceive him in Knoxville, and it would have been in character for Bonfils or O’Donnell to pull a similar stunt here. But, no, he saw, as Mercy gripped the board and levered himself up out of the water with the ease of a giant mermaid. Water sluiced down his body, glued his shirt to his chest and stomach, and there was no mistaking his particular build, or the sun lines on his face. This was authentically Felix, and Harlan’s stomach gave another overexcited quiver.

Fallon – the pussy – nearly stumbled backward off the dock in his haste to step clear of him. His arms windmilled, and it was only Mercy gripping the front of the shirt that kept him from going in the water.

“Whoa,” Mercy chuckled, still smiling, like he’d stepped into the middle of a birthday party, rather than a hostage exchange. “Watch your feet, man.”

Fallon recovered, red-faced in the lights mounted above, and moved as though to brush Mercy away – but he’d already let go, and presented his hands, wrists together, for the cuffs Fallon held in one hand.

Fallon hesitated.

Mercy said, “Come on. I won’t bite.” And he bared all his teeth in a manic smile that suggested otherwise.

Fallon frowned, and fiddled with the cuffs, and continued to hesitate. For a second, Boyle wished he’d left Fallon in the boat, and gone himself to bind Mercy. But he didn’t trust Fallon with keeping Remy back, either, and after a too-long beat, Fallon finally clapped the cuffs on Mercy’s wrists.

After, Mercy lifted his head, still smiling, and he caught Boyle’s gaze. He raised his voice, so that it rang out loudly down the dock, across the water, competing with the low rumble of the boat motors. “Alright, Hank, where’s my kid?”

“Hank?” several of the men wondered aloud, searching for someone who wasn’t there – who’d never existed, truly. Hannk the prospect had only ever been a sad attempt at becoming someone else – someone never allowed to flourish, because of this man coming toward him now, Fallon herding him along with empty arm gestures.

Wannabe .

A word that had haunted him from decades, that had chased him straight to Quantico, and into the hallowed training halls of the place where he’d finally found a sense of belonging. A place that had welcomed and wanted him; a place where he was put to good use.

And here he stood now, poised on the threshold of completing the most useful, the best act of his life. Mercy Lécuyer was a blight upon this earth, a criminal lowlife who’d tortured and killed more people than law enforcement could ever prove; a selfish monster who worried not for his city, his community, his country, but for himself. His whore, and his misbegotten offspring who were destined to become criminals as well.

He spared a glance down at Remy. First I’m going to destroy your father, and some day in the future, I’ll get my chance at you, he thought.

Then he returned all his attention to Mercy, standing above him on the dock, hands bound, but the line of his shoulders high and strong despite the fact.

“Here I am,” he said. “Time to hold up your end of the deal.”

Simple words, a statement of fact. Mercy was here, as promised. But they struck Boyle up under the ribs with a near-orgasmic shock of pleasure. A bolt of intense enjoyment because he was here . He’d come, as promised . Boyle had exercised power over him. The dynamic had shifted firmly, and irrevocably in Boyle’s direction, and it was all the sweeter because it had taken so long to come to fruition.

Boyle pulled his gun, and gestured at the men on the dock with it. “Get him in the boat,” he ordered, and felt his own smile threatening.

~*~

Daddy! Daddy was here! The last time Remy’s stomach had twisted so painfully with excitement, he’d been six, and Daddy had let him ride on the back of the bike for the first time. Heart racing, palms sweating, head spinning with how badly he wanted something. Right now, what he wanted most in the world was to feel Daddy’s big, strong hands lifting him up; wanted the two of them to get out of this boat, and into another one, and ride far, far away from Agent Boyle, and Agent Fallon, and all of these strangers who wished them ill. He’d lost track of how many days it had been since he was taken outside his classroom; he was hungry, and exhausted, and cold, and when he heard Mercy’s voice, his eyes filled with tears, because maybe, hopefully, finally, it was all at an end.

Daddy was here, and Daddy would fix everything.

“Get him in the boat,” Boyle said, and there was a shuffling of feet up on the dock, and then the boat dipped beneath an added weight. Stuffed down in the bow the way he was, Remy could hear the displaced water slop and slap against the hull, a sound like the washing machine when he pressed his ear to it. He curled up tight, and held his breath, and waited, because now Daddy was going to hit Boyle. Was going to pitch him out of the boat. Remy kept very still, ears straining for the first sound of violence.

Instead, what he heard was the loud whoop-whoop of a siren.

“Shit!”

“What the fuck!”

“You fucker ,” Boyle hissed. “You–”

His boot left Remy’s hip, accompanied by the sounds of a struggle; booted feet slapping against the floor of the boat, grunts of effort. A gunshot rang out, one sharp blast directly overhead, and the sirens whooped again, closer.

“Police ! ” a distorted voice shouted through a megaphone somewhere onshore. “Put your hands behind your heads and get down on the ground! Drop your weapons!”

Heart hammering with fear, now, rather than excitement, Remy twisted around to see what was happening.

Daddy had his hands around Boye’s throat. Something bright silver dangled from one of Daddy’s wrists, and Boyle still held his gun.

With a lurch, Remy saw blood pouring down Daddy’s left arm, bright and shiny in the dock lights, twin rivers of it that wrapped around his elbow and dripped off his forearm.

Boyle made a choking sound, and Daddy released him with one hand – his left hand, where blood was pooling in his palm – so he could pluck the gun from Boyle’s grip with the same ease and quickness with which he’d snatch something out of Cal’s fingers, and chucked it into the water.

Daddy! Remy wanted to yell, but he bit his tongue hard. He didn’t want to distract him, not when he put both hands back on Boyle’s throat, and the tendons leaped in his forearms, even the bloody one, and Boyle’s face went dark as he scrabbled at Daddy’s hands. Get him, Daddy, get him .

“Police!” the shout came from the shore again. Remy glimpsed flashing blue lights. “Drop your weapons!”

Crack-crack-crack. Gunshots.

Daddy jerked as if struck by an invisible hand.

Remy did shout this time. “Daddy!” He scrambled up onto his knees.

Mercy’s head whipped toward him. “Stay down!”

Fixated on Mercy, his wide eyes, the way a fresh red stain was spreading along the shoulder seam of his white t-shirt, Remy didn’t see Boyle move until it was too late.

A boot landed in the center of Mercy’s stomach – Boyle kicked him – and Mercy’s hands loosened enough so that, when he kicked off, Boyle broke free. He flipped backward over the side of the boat and into the water with an almighty splash, and then was gone from sight.

Mercy watched him go, swore – and then dropped to his knees and reached for Remy. “Remy! C’mere, you okay, bud?”

He was shaking, and no hug had ever felt so wonderful as the one Daddy wrapped him up in, there in the bottom of the boat. “You’re bleeding!” His voice came out a high and pitiful wail. He could smell the blood, hot and metallic. Could feel its warm wetness against his neck where Daddy cupped the back of his head.

“I’m okay,” Daddy said, and his voice was okay, sure and strong. “We gotta–”

Crack-crack-crack . More gunshots.

And crack-crack-crack , return fire.

“Don’t fucking shoot at the cops!” someone shouted.

Someone else yelled, “There, there, the boat’s not empty!”

Crack . A small, stinging pain blossomed along the outside of Remy’s right arm. Like that time he’d stumbled into a yellow jacket nest.

Daddy grunted, and his arms tightened around Remy, before they released him entirely.

Fear leaped in Remy’s chest as he pulled back. The pain in his arm was sharp, and spreading, pulsing hot with each too-fast beat of his heart. He clapped a hand to it, and that helped a little. But his own pain was secondary when he saw the big bloody hole in Mercy’s arm.

“Daddy!”

“It’s okay, I’m okay.” And though his face was pale, and slick with sweat, his smile was soft, and encouraging.

Crack .

The fake leather headrest of the seat beside them exploded in a shower of foam filling.

“Stay here,” Daddy said. “Stay right here, and I’ll be back.”

Before Remy could protest, he moved, up and over the edge of the boat, and was gone with the faintest slap of water against the hull.

There was blood all over the floor of the boat. Daddy’s blood.

Remy heard a harsh sawing sound, and realized it was his own breathing.

There was a thump, and the boat rocked, and someone loomed over him; someone had jumped into the boat with him.

It was Tenny.

He heard more shooting, sharp cracks, and echoing movement, coming from the dock, from the other boats, from the shore. They were surrounded by gunfire.

“Hey, come here,” Tenny said in his real voice, and ducked low, and reached out his hand. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

Someone howled, and it was a pained sound, like he was badly hurt or dying.

Remy took Tenny’s hand, and got pulled over to the edge of the boat, where first Boyle, and then Daddy had gone over.

“Take a deep breath,” Tenny said. “Hold onto me.”

Remy took a deep breath, and gripped tight to the back of Tenny’s shirt, and then Tenny leaped, and they were flying.

He didn’t remember to close his eyes. Tenny dove straight and neat, and barely disturbed the water, but Remy’s head was kicked back, and water rushed in to sting his eyes; it filled his nose and mouth, before he clamped his lips tight, and the world was black, and breathless, and the water was cold inside his ears, and hot where it slipped inside the neck of his shirt and soaked him straight to the skin.

For a moment, panic seized him the way Daddy had seized Boyle’s throat.

But then he reminded himself: I’m a good swimmer . And he really was; he couldn’t even remember learning, that was how young he’d been when he first started.

He forced air and water out of his nose and mouth, and when he blinked, he saw the silver bubbles leave him, and break upward, toward the surface. Beneath his tightly-clenched knuckles, Tenny’s shoulders worked in big, sweeping strokes; Remy could feel his legs kicking beneath his feet, and now that he was focusing on it, could feel the speed with which Tenny cut through the water, putting distance between them and the scene of the shootout.

It was dark under the water, but not as black as it had at first seemed. Tenny began to take shape, and something hulking off to their left. A gator? A gator! But, no, it was only a sunken long. Quicksilver fish darted from its hollows as they swept past.

Then Tenny tilted back, and his next few strokes carried them upward, and they breached the surface.

Tenny gasped, and Remy gasped too, and when air flooded his lungs, he felt how they were burning. He snorted water out of his nose, and shook his head, and blinked hard to clear his lashes.

“You okay?” Tenny asked.

“Yes.”

He heard more gunshots – and then something small struck the water, little splashes around them. Once, twice, three times, like insects diving…

Bullets, Remy realized.

Tenny gripped his shoulders, and turned him, so that he was between Remy and the dock. “Go, go, swim!”

Remy turned, and he swam.

He heard the swish and splash of water as Tenny followed him.

Heard more gunshots.

Heard a whine like a bee zipping past.

Heard a low, pained grunt.

Remy stopped paddling and turned around, treading water.

Tenny’s teeth were bared, but he shook his head. “Keep going. Go, Remy. Swim for shore. Go .”

His belly shivered with nerves, and he felt sick, and too tired, and his heart was beating in his throat .

“Go!”

But Remy turned, and he went.

He couldn’t swim like Daddy did, long arms reaching, cutting through the water; but he ducked his head, and pulled himself along, and kicked as hard as he could, and each time he lifted his head to take a breath, he saw that the shore was closer, closer, and closer still.

Behind him, he heard shouts, and more commands from the police bullhorns. Heard more gunshots, and the revving of motors, and more than a few screams.

Where was Daddy? Tenny? Were they even alive?

The water wasn’t cold, but his teeth were chattering by the time his foot struck mucky bottom, and he stood up in the shallows, water streaming off of him.

He waded to shore, knees and ankles tangled with duckweed. The long, trailing underwater roots wrapped around him, and he tripped, and went down hard on his knees, hands splatting in the mud.

It sounded like an action movie behind him. A flare of heat and pressure at his back, and a great booming roar signaled that something had exploded .

He flailed on his hands and knees with a wordless cry, and shuffled up from mud to sand, and then crashed through a tangle of cypress roots until he fetched up in a scratching blackberry hedge, and subsided, panting.

His whole body throbbed, sore, and achy. The wound on his arm burned terribly, but there wasn’t much blood on his sleeve, he saw, and he could still articulate his fingers and lift his arm at the shoulder. He wouldn’t die, he didn’t think.

He caught his breath for what could have been seconds or hours, then hauled himself to his feet and peered across the water.

He was shocked to see how far he’d swum. The dock, and its tumultuous activity – revolving police lights, running bodies – seemed a whole lake away. Somehow, he’d ended on the opposite shore, and not the shore where the police could have helped him.

He guessed he’d have to swim back across.

Or, more wisely, walk the perimeter of the lake until he reached them. It would take a while, but it would be safer.

One of the boats – the very boat he’d been on – boiled with orange and yellow flames, belching pale gray smoke up into the night sky.

Daddy? Tenny?

He didn’t know if–

A tight grip closed around his throat and squeezed.

A hand slapped over his mouth. He felt the heat and press of a body up against his back, too late to scream, too late to run. And the voice that whispered in his ear was terribly, unfortunately familiar. “Don’t make a sound, you little shit,” Boyle hissed. “If you try to get away, I’ll gut you. Understand?”

Remy sucked a breath in through his nose, and nodded.

Twenty-Eight

Alex didn’t know or care where Reese had gotten a Molotov cocktail, was only grateful that he’d had it, lit it, thrown it, and the resultant explosion of the empty boat’s fuel tanks had broken up what was fast devolving into a real shitty-ass party.

The shooting stopped.

The other two boats from Boyle’s party kicked into high gear and went racing away.

Alex finally dared to sit fully upright behind the wheel of their boat so he could actually see where they were going. He cut the wheel toward shore, intent on joining up with Duet and Dandridge so they could regroup and figure out where to go next.

A hand landed on top of his, and wrenched the wheel the other way.

Eyes still blurry and shimmering with the afterimage of the boat fire, Alex blinked up at Reese’s startingly stern expression.

“Ten’s still in the water,” he said, and his voice – only ever flat, or, at best, mildly pleasant, in Alex’s experience – cracked with emotion. With panic, Alex saw, when he got a good look at his eyes.

“Shit, yeah, alright.” He spun the wheel, gave the boat as much gas as he dared, and wished like hell he’d bothered to learn how to work one of these things properly.

Someone on the shore hailed them with a flashlight. Alex threw up a wave, prayed it was someone friendly, and kept going, chugging them along at Reese’s direction.

“Stop,” Reese commanded after a few minutes, and he went back and to the side of the boat.

Alex laid off the gas, but of course the boat didn’t stop . Boats were never still on top of the water.

He got it as still as it would go, though, and twisted around in his seat in time to see Gray join Reese at the side. Both of them leaned so far over he thought they might topple head-first into the water, but then they pulled back – and pulled Tenny with them. He had an arm across each of their shoulders, and rather than his usual lithe movements, one of his legs dragged awkwardly up over the edge of the boat, and he hissed a curse as they laid him down on the vinyl bench at the stern.

Though his jeans were dark and waterlogged, Alex could clearly see the darker splash of blood.

He jolted up out of his seat. “Shit! Where are you hit?”

Tenny’s face resembled that of a wax doll, bloodless and clammy, his lips tinged blue despite the warmth of the water.

“Thigh,” he gritted out through bared teeth. “It didn’t hit the femoral, it’s fine,” he tacked on.

“Shut up,” Reese said, and his voice cracked again, but in the other direction this time, soft and vulnerable. He knelt down in the bottom of the boat, produced a knife seemingly from nowhere, and cut Tenny’s jeans open with a few deft wrist flicks.

There was a lot of blood.

Alex said, “Shit,” before he could catch himself, and then thought, no, screw that . Gray was standing there observing passionlessly, and Reese’s hands were as deft and steady as a paramedic’s; Tenny had his jaw tensed, but looked down at his own wounded leg without any undue concern.

Reese mopped the leg with the sleeve of his own hoodie, then reached up and Gray placed the first aid kit in his palm without further prompt.

Alex turned and lunged for wheel. “Hold on. We’ll get to–” Well, not the dock, because if the damn thing wasn’t on fire yet, it likely soon would be, the way the boat was blazing. “We’ll get to shore.”

“ No ,” Tenny snapped, and he glanced back over his shoulder, incredulous.

The tendons in Tenny’s throat stuck out stark and tensed as Reese dumped half a bottle of alcohol on the bullet wound and then started swaddling it up tight. But despite his pallor and the amount of blood slicked over the bench and the floor of the boat, his gaze was stern when it met Alex’s. “We need to find Remy, and Mercy’s still out here, somewhere.”

“You’re bleeding out!”

“I’m not.” He glanced toward Reese. “I’m not, right?”

“No. But it was close.”

“See? Close isn’t dead,” Tenny said. He pointed with one bloodied hand, dictatorial as ever. “Head over toward that shoreline. I told Remy to swim for it.”

“Fine.” Alex turned back around, heart hammering. “But if you die, don’t blame me.”

Not that he would admit it, but Alex was impressed as hell. He’d never worked a case in which someone was shot, but every tale he’d heard firsthand had resulted in ambulances and lots of shouts of “agent down!” Tenny’s stoicism was incredible, but Alex really was going to blame himself if the idiot died.

He pushed the throttle, and sent the boat toward the far shoreline. Mercy had stashed a bag there earlier, “just in case,” and Alex knew there were more first aid supplies in it; hopefully, they could use them on Tenny, and they wouldn’t find Remy injured or…

No. He swallowed hard, and wouldn’t let himself think it.

Gray came up to stand beside him, high-powered flashlight aimed out at the water ahead of them.

“Is he really gonna be okay?” Alex leaned in to ask.

“He won’t die of blood loss,” Gray said, without emotion, “but infection’s likely, given he was in the water.”

Speaking of the water…it was flat, dull, and tea-colored in the flashlight’s beam. Alex could see nothing but clumps of duckweed bobbing along the surface. He slowed, images of Remy hiding below flashing through his mind, holding his breath, watching their shadow pass overhead.

“Remy!” he shouted, and didn’t know if he could be heard over the drone of the engines. “Remy!”

They slowed further, as they neared the shallows, and Alex swung wide, afraid of getting too close and being grounded.

“Look,” Gray said, light fixed on a point beyond the thin, dark sandy stripe of the beach, studded with knobby cypress knees and threaded with water grasses.

Alex powered the throttle all the way down, and it took him a moment to spot what Gray had: footprints. A pair of small sneakers. Boy-sized. Walking up out of the water and to the underbrush.

Gray leaped lightly out of the boat – “Hey, be careful” – and waded up out of the water, onto shore, and skirted around the footprints, following them from the side past the first screen of trees.

Alex strained his ears, waiting for a shout. Here he is. I found him .

Instead, Gray appeared a minute later, shaking his head. “There’s other prints,” he called. “A man.” Before Alex could ask, he added, “Not large enough to be Mercy.”

“Shit.”

A shuffling sound drew his attention to the side, and he saw that Tenny was on his feet, supported by Reese, arm across his shoulders.

“Jesus Christ, sit back down .”

Tenny ignored him. To Gray, he called, “Go look for Mercy’s pack.”

Gray nodded, turned, and melted back into the woods.

“I didn’t see Boyle again after he went overboard,” Tenny said, grimly. “It could be him. It has to be him.”

“What about Fallon?”

“He dove onto a boat before I went in after Remy. He’s probably halfway across the swamp by now.”

“Headed for our traps?” Alex asked, hopeful.

“Maybe.” Tenny turned to regard him, speculative. “They’d head that way quicker if they were being pursued.”

“We wait for Gray,” Alex decided, casting a longing look toward the opposite shore, which was now flooded with police light. A raft was launching out into the lake, headed toward the flaming boat, whose blaze was slowly dying down as it burned through the fuel onboard and ran out of steam. He wanted to go over there, check in, get Tenny into an ambulance and recon with Duet about next steps.

But he’d committed to this. To these people. To his brothers, and his brother’s club brothers. He couldn’t go play lawman now.

“If he can’t find Remy and Mercy, then we’ll give chase to Boyle’s people.”

Tenny’s brows lifted in mild surprise, pleased, and he nodded. “Yeah.”

“But you’re gonna sit your ass down and try not to die.”

Tenny rolled his eyes.

“Deal?”

“Whatever,” Tenny huffed, but Reese eased him down into one of the seats up near the bow, and he went without further fuss.

Gray returned a few minutes later, shaking his head, and Alex’s stomach sank. He waded back out into the water, and Reese helped him aboard when he reached the ladder.

“The footsteps go off through the swamp, and go down into a smaller canal, no sign of continuation on the other side. Mercy’s pack is gone. He’s following them.”

“Damn it,” Alex muttered.

“Let’s go,” Tenny said. “If it’s just Boyle, and just Mercy, Mercy’s got this. Nobody knows those godforsaken swamp woods better than him.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, by rote, and then it really hit him: if it was Boyle who had Remy, without any sort of backup, without supplies, in the dark, in the swamp, he didn’t stand a chance. Alex almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

“Godspeed, brother,” he muttered, and slammed the throttle down.

~*~

Ava had been sitting still so long that her ass and legs had gone from achy, to numb, and now she could no longer feel them at all. When it came time to climb out of her perch in the tree, she was going to have to move her feet with her hands and dangle for a few minutes before the blood rushed back to her toes. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore, save the span of canal and forest she continually scanned through her night vision binoculars.

So far, she’d seen two nutria, a host of bats swooping through the tree tops in search of mosquitos, and an owl that had plucked something small and shrieking from the ground before it settled into a branch across from her to eat. The night was alive with sounds, not least of all the many plops and splashes in the water that could have been fish or frogs; she never got a good look, even with the night vision. But none of the movements had been loud enough to warrant a predator: neither man nor gator.

She waited for so long that when she finally heard the whine of an approaching motor, she almost dropped her binoculars.

She fumbled the long-range walkie-talkie out of her hip pocket and pressed the transmit switch. “Incoming. Maybe a half-mile out. Too far to tell how many, but it sounds like more than one.”

The radio crackled, and Maggie’s staticky voice came through. “Copy that.” She sounded very military-professional. But her voice dipped into a more motherly register when she added, “You doing okay, baby?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll let you know when our guys get in range. Over and out.”

“Over and out,” Maggie echoed.

If their guys got in range, Ava added to herself. Their cells didn’t work this far out, and though the walkie-talkies had been a good substitute, they only had a two-mile range, which meant once Mercy’s crew headed to meet Boyle, they hadn’t been able to contact them.

Carefully, she gripped her boots by the ankles and shifted her feet off the branch so they dangled into open air. She tried to roll her ankles, and couldn’t, unsurprisingly. She straightened her legs out the best she could and started massaging the feeling back into her calves.

The motors – definitely plural – drew closer, and closer, and closer.

Pins and needles filled her lower body, but she could move her legs again, so she took up a better position on her perch, stowed the binoculars, and unslung the rifle from her back.

The scope offered an even better night vision view of the canal below, but it was narrow, and she could only peer through it with one eye. Still, she pressed the stock to her shoulder, wedged her upper back against the trunk of the tree, body braced and arms relaxed, ready.

The whine of the boats became a roar, just a few dozen yards away, now, and moving at unsafe speeds, by the sound of it.

For a moment, she considered the practicality of what she was doing. Her job was to serve as lookout; to radio to the cable team and let them know what was headed their way. The rifle was for if worst came to worst and she needed to protect herself. She wasn’t supposed to snipe anyone.

Her radio crackled to life with an incoming connection. Reese’s voice came through, patchy at first, but then stronger, like they’d gotten nearer. “Two boats headed your way. We’re third. Repeat: we’re in the third boat behind them.”

Ava one-handed the rifle long enough to say, “Copy,” then put her face back to the scope, and slipped her finger inside the trigger guard.

A boat, ghostly white in the darkness, blasted into view, kicking up a frothy white wake. Through the scope, Ava saw the boat’s prow, its windshield, and the men crowded behind it, standing clumped together.

She put one in crosshairs – skinny arms, lank hair – and pulled the trigger.

The rifle kicked so hard she might have gone tumbling out of the tree if she hadn’t braced herself. The sound of the shot came three heartbeats later, and she lowered the rifle in time to watch the man she’d hit tumble boneless down to the floor of the boat, falling against his friends.

Shouts rose up, more alarmed than angry, and then the boat was past, the second one hot at its heels.

She grabbed her radio. “Boats are passing me now,” she said into it.

“We heard a shot,” Maggie came back, right away.

“That was me. I got one of them. The first two boats are hostiles, Reese said the third one’s them.”

“Mercy? Remy?” There was a muffled noise and, away from the radio, she heard Maggie call, “Now, now, pull it now, they’re coming.”

When she could, Ava pressed her switch. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

But when the third boat finally came into view, slower than the first two, Alex’s big hand lifted in a don’t fire gesture, Ava counted only four heads, and none of them belonged to her son or husband.

~*~

“Here they come,” Maggie said into her radio. “Stand by.”

She sat behind the wheel of the Jeep, watching through the windshield, motor running but lights off, her foot pressed firmly on the brake. Devin had assured her that the cable was strong, and that if the boat was moving fast enough, the Jeep and the tree trunk on the far side of the canal would be plenty strong enough to keep things tight.

Still, she wasn’t taking chances.

She flashed the lights once to let the boys know they had incoming, though they could doubtless hear the engines approaching; Maggie could, even over the low idling of the Jeep. Then it was dark again, and Maggie braced her hands on the wheel, like that would actually do something.

Too late to second-guess things now: a flash of white in the corner of her eye. The boat.

Maggie could see the winch cord because she knew to look for it, a faint flicker of silver against the black of the canal. But the man piloting the boat didn’t see it, and certainly wasn’t expecting it.

It caught the windshield first, and snapped it off as if it was nothing more than part of a child’s toy boat. It broke into multiple pieces, some of which flew high, some of which tumbled back into the boat and struck the men aboard it. There were shouts of alarm – that turned to screams, because the boat’s pilot was standing behind the wheel, and the cable caught him across the throat, and cut through him neatly and cleanly.

Maggie saw his head topple, and his body flopped forward against the wheel, spinning it hard to the right. The others were seated, and avoided decapitation, but the boat surged, and bucked, and careened to the side, and struck the far bank with an awful crunch of collapsing metal and fiberglass.

Then the second boat roared up. The men aboard it had watched their comrade lose his head, and so they ducked. The cable took the windshield, but nothing else, and the boat sped past and away into the night, out of view.

~*~

Toly was adept at waiting. He’d waited plenty in his bratva days: spying, stalking, holding himself back, silent and unseen, until the moment came to strike. Usually, he waited in dark doorways, on cold rooftops; frigid corners in the deep of winter. Urban landscapes. The wilderness unsettled him, but after a half-hour or so, the routine of waiting soothed his country-jangled nerves and allowed him to settle in the driver’s seat of the Rover, scanning routinely and calmly through his night vision binoculars for anything out of place.

When his radio crackled to life, he was expecting it, hovering in that perfect pre-op calm in which all his movements felt precise and efficient, and in which his heartrate slowed to accommodate for the rapid-fire spinning of his thoughts.

Maggie’s voice came through the line: “Toly, there’s a hostile boat headed your way. The guys are in the boat behind.”

“Copy that.”

More crackling, and then her voice turned strained, as, holding the radio, he climbed out of the Rover and moved to the array of switches, finger poised and ready. “Toly, we can’t find Ava.”

For the first time, his perfect calm splintered. The night insects sounded suddenly loud – or, no, wait, that wasn’t a giant mosquito. It was a boat approaching.

He pressed the radio switch. “I thought she was up a tree.” A thought occurred. “I heard a rifle shot.”

“That was her,” Maggie confirmed. “But when I went to get her, she was gone. Her footprints went off into the swamp and then disappeared.”

What a lovely, unnecessary complication.

He shook his head, and said, “The boat’s coming. I’ll check in after. Keep me posted.”

“Copy, over and out,” she said, all business again, and Toly tucked the walkie-talkie into his pocket. Losing Ava was a whole new problem, but she’d struck out on her own, it sounded like, and Toly couldn’t abandon his post to search for her.

The approaching whine intensified to a deep growl, and Toly held his breath, listening intently. Now, he thought.

“Christ, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he muttered, and threw the switches.

The winches lurched, and engaged, and started to wind up. Limbs and pulleys creaked overhead as the cables started fighting with their payloads.

Toly tipped his head back and searched the canopy, waiting for the sharp snap of a broken branch, for the whipping strike of a snapped cord.

He unslung his rifle and walked around behind the Rover, peering around its windows in the hopes the car would shield him when something inevitably broke.

But the winches kept turning, and the pulleys kept squeaking, and the lines rose and rose up out of the water, dripping, vibrating as the gators fought.

Winches and diesel generators were stronger than a man’s arms, though, and, just as the boat blasted into view, the gators did what Mercy had predicted they would do: they stopped trying to stay under and fight the lines, and burst upward with strong swipes of their tails.

Whoever was manning the boat must have seen the water froth at the surface as the gators jumped. He backed off the throttle, and the boat dipped low at the prow as it slowed suddenly.

One gator struck the side of the boat with the end of its snout like a torpedo. It didn’t do any damage, but the driver whirled around with a confused exclamation. “What the hell–”

“Gators!” someone else shouted. “Holy shit, it’s gators!”

The winches kept turning, and hauled the other three gators, thrashing and hissing, up into the boat.

A branch finally did snap, and the line went slack, and the gator attached to it – a solid five-footer – fell down amongst the men in the boat, who started screaming bloody murder.

“Fuck me,” Toly breathed. “It worked.” He hustled forward, keeping low, rifle held in one hand, and cut the switches.

The winches stopped.

The gator who’d struck the side made a low, deep growling nose and thrashed its head side-to-side, fighting the line.

The others were in the boat, and one started rolling; another sent a man overboard with a swipe of its tail.

A gunshot cracked out, and Toly ducked, but none of the men in the boat had seen him.

“You shot the boat!” a man shouted, and he heard the engine rev back to life.

A moment later, it was gone, foamy white wake lapping at the shore.

Two of the gators had tumbled back into the water, dancing at the ends of their lines. Toly reversed the winches and let the cords play out again; the gators used the slack to dive once more, still hooked, but now even angrier.

One, though, was still onboard the boat, and he shook his head in wonderment.

Mercy’s words from earlier returned to him: “I don’t expect anyone to get seriously hurt, but these are thugs and killers and not swamp men. This here” – he’d gestured to the winch and cord setup – “is gonna scare the everloving shit out of them. And a scared man is a man who makes mistakes.”

“Diabolical,” Toly had assured, and Mercy had grinned, teeth flashing in the gloom of evening as he tested the give of the lines.

“I should hope so.”

~*~

Pain was just weakness leaving the body. Wasn’t that what the Marine Corps said? Mercy had heard it somewhere, and it came to him now, though it didn’t really matter: he didn’t know if there was weakness leaving his body, only a lot of blood, and the pain was secondary. There were bandages and alcohol in his pack. He cleaned up best he could, wrapped his arm, slapped gauze and tape over his shoulder, shrugged into the pack, and set off through the swamp, boots squishing pleasantly on the soft ground. The pain was a steady drumbeat, throbbing in time with his pulse, but nothing was dislocated or broken, and he could move. There’d been Gatorade and a few granola bars in his pack, one of the latter he crammed down against a wave of nausea, and the former he carried in one hand, sipping regularly as he walked.

He'd come so close to killing Boyle on the boat – but he would have his chance again. He was more confident now than he’d been in days, because now, Boyle was on foot, and, inept as he was in the wild, he was leaving a trail for Mercy to follow.

Better yet: though he didn’t know it, Boyle was cutting a path cross-country straight for the rookery, and, as Mercy had hoped all along, it was there that Boyle would be trapped.

I’m coming, baby , he thought in Remy’s direction, and lengthened his stride, the pain pulsing sharp and electrifying through him.

~*~

Ava didn’t know the swamp the way that Mercy did, and she wasn’t going to delude herself into believing that a mother’s love and intuition could overcome the gaps in her knowledge and experience.

But what she did know was that Mercy had set his trap for Boyle west of here, at a lake island where the birds congregated after dark: the rookery. And she knew that this canal would lead her there eventually. So, with her rifle, and her radio, and a backpack of ammo and essentials, she struck off on her own.

She’d listened to the radio long enough to know that Boyle, Remy, and Mercy were missing, and knew that Mercy would be hunting Boyle.

She intended to join them, stepping carefully in the dark, brushing aside curtains of moss, boots squish-squishing in the mud.

Hold on, baby , she thought, to both her boys, and lengthened her stride.

~*~

They heard a gunshot. Singular. One loud, booming crack that echoed through the forest, and which sounded too close to have come from the wild scene at the dock.

Boyle froze, hand closing punishingly on Remy’s shoulder, and he swore under his breath.

Remy wanted to twist away from him, but he knew that if he did, Boyle would snatch the back of his shirt, and maybe strike him in the head to daze him; maybe even throw him over his shoulder like he did that first day in the school, and as bad as this was, Remy didn’t want to be carried. Walking on his own was better than being completely captive.

“That was too close,” Boyle muttered, and shoved him without letting go, righting him roughly when he tripped on a hidden tree root. “Fuck them. Fuck your fucking family,” he fumed, and Remy figured that didn’t warrant an answer.

They’d been walking for some time. When they started out, Remy had been able to see the three-quarter moon overhead, but it had dipped out of sight now. He’d been shivering when he first came out of the water, but now his sodden clothes dragged at him like weights, and sweat slicked his skin beneath them. He didn’t dare try to take his sweatshirt off, though. Boyle probably wouldn’t allow it, for one, and two, they were slapped and scraped from all sides by low branches. Boyle’s arms, he noted when he reached to impatiently swat at a screen of Spanish moss, were criss-crossed with red welts and scratches.

They walked and walked. Boyle stopped frequently to shush him though he wasn’t talking, and held stock-still for long moments before shoving him forward again.

Finally, Remy said, “Why do you keep stopping?”

Boyle swatted him on the back of the head – but not hard. His voice was distracted when he hissed, “Shh, listen.”

Remy listened a moment. He heard night insects, several layers of them overlapping, and he heard a faint gurgling of water. Something rustled low in the brush ahead, and his stomach tensed with nerves. Daddy hadn’t ever mentioned wolves or lions in the swamp, but gators did walk on land sometimes…

“Listening for what?”

“Shut up.” Boyle shoved him forward, fingers digging into his shoulder, and Remy almost face-planted in the mud.

He knew what Boyle was listening for, though: Daddy.

If Daddy was alive – please, please, please let him be alive! – then Remy had no doubts that he was following them. And that, like Strider in The Lord of the Rings , he would be able to track them, as keen-eyed as an eagle in the swamps where he’d grown up. Even so, Remy put a little more weight into each step, trying to leave clear footprints in the soft ground.

He’d become aware, some distance ago, that his eyes had adjusted to the dark much better than Boyle’s. Boyle tripped over obstacles that Remy stepped over, cursing and flailing, and dragging harder and harder at Remy, because he refused to let go of him. Each trip seemed an opportunity for escape – but a too-narrow opportunity. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to put any distance between them, and at this rate, the way Boyle was panting, and cursing, and talking to himself – “I’m gonna gut that fucker. When I catch him, oh shit, I’m gonna…” – Remy was afraid he might decide Remy didn’t need his legs to remain a good hostage, and shoot him in the knees.

They walked a little farther, and Remy could see that the ground dropped away, suddenly and steeply, ahead of them. Boyle didn’t see it, because he kept blundering forward at the same pace.

Was this his chance? Finally?

Maybe. It was worth the risk.

Remy put his foot out into open air, and caught a glimpse of a deep, water-filled ravine. The other side sloped up gently, wooded with low-growing vegetation, and beyond a screen of trees, he saw the glimmer of moonlight on water. A lot of water.

First, though, the drop.

Remy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, clenched his teeth tight together, and let himself go.

“Oh, fuck!” Boyle yelped.

Remy flew through the open air, and he wrapped his arms tight around himself once Boyle released him, ducked his head, and was ready for impact when he landed hard on his shoulder, and started rolling downhill.

Boyle started yelling, and then kept yelling. Curses and threats to murder Remy and Mercy interspersed with yelps of pain and shouts of alarm.

Remy landed, finally, and gave himself a two-count to open his arms and be sure he’d reached the bottom. He had, just shy of the narrow strip of water that lined the lowermost point of the ravine. Boyle was still shouting – “motherfuck fucking shit fucking” – so Remy scrambled to his feet and cast a look around.

The water was a slowly trickling creek, and on the other side, the gentle slope he’d spied from above, a thinning of narrow tree trunks, and beyond that, a large and glass-smooth body of water, gleaming black in the moonlight.

Remy took off running. He was so tired, and his clothes were so heavy, his shoes full of water and threatening to slip off his feet, but he found a burst of reserve energy, and jumped the creek, and scrambled desperately up the hill toward the water.

Behind him, a splash. The sound of a body floundering in muck. Then Boyle shouted, “Stop! Stop, you little shit!”

Remy reached the first tree, and a chunk of its trunk exploded outward. He felt wood chips strike his face, and he closed his eyes and ducked his head on instinct. The report of the gun registered a beat later.

Boyle had shot at him.

“Stop!”

Remy crouched low, but kept moving, braced for a hit.

BOOM .

That was not the crack of Boyle’s handgun. It was a much bigger gun, and as the thunderclap of its firing echoed away into the trees, a feminine voice shouted, “ Get away from my son!”

“Shit,” he heard Boyle say, and then the gun fired again. BOOM .

Remy whirled toward the sound of it, and his eyes burned and blurred with a sudden film of tears. “Mama!”

~*~

There was an alligator in the boat.

There was an alligator in the boat .

Fallon had reached levels of stress, shock, and incredulity that made him question every single decision he’d ever made in his miserable life, which very well might end tonight, one way or another. Probably badly. Definitely painfully.

He wanted nothing more than to curl up into a little ball, close his eyes, go to sleep, and wake in his own loveless bed in Virginia to find that this had all been one long, awful dream. If that happened, he might even roll over and kiss his wife good morning, joyous with his mundane routine.

But when he closed his eyes, someone staggered backward into him, and someone else cursed, and someone else screamed, and he opened his eyes to find that the nightmare was all too real.

Everyone had scrambled to the edges of the boat to get clear of the gator. The thing was trailing a length of steel cable from its mouth, and a tree limb as big around as Fallon’s thigh lay at the bottom of the boat beside it; it had fallen from above, and struck one of the men – Lloyd had called him Rawlins – in the head. He’d collapsed in a boneless heap, and lay there still.

Lloyd was driving the boat, and he gunned the engine, so that the forest flew past them in a blur, which seemed like a real shitty idea after an unseen wire had decapitated the pilot of the first boat. They hadn’t stopped after it crashed to see if anyone aboard needed help or wanted to board their boat.

“Fuck this,” Lloyd had said, and pressed the throttle flat, and they’d raced away into the night.

Only for flying alligators to leap at them, one of which was now hissing and swinging its tail and turning in tight, agitated circles, lunging at them all.

“Somone dump that sonovabitch overboard!” Lloyd shouted over his shoulder.

Someone reached for its tail, and then staggered back into Fallon when the gator whirled and snapped. “Fuck that,” the guy said, and tried to keep backing up.

Fallon elbowed him in the ribs, then tripped, and nearly toppled backward. He had a flash vision of backflipping straight into the outboard props, then regained his balance with a tight grip on someone else’s arm.

The gator twisted away from them – and chomped down on Rawlins’s head.

Fallon turned away.

Someone shouted, “Oh, God!”

“Shit!”

Fallon swallowed hard, not sure if he could keep his gorge down. He could hear an awful, meaty sound, and the gator’s weight thumping on the boat’s floor, and he guessed Rawlins was either terribly concussed, or dead, because having his skull punctured – oh, God, the sound of it! – didn’t rouse him.

Fallon saw the water rushing past below, the white-capped, wavering lines of the boat wake, and considered diving in.

But thought of more gators made him shudder, and kept him rooted to the spot.

“Get it out!” Lloyd roared.

There was a flurry of scuffling, grunting, swearing, and then an almighty splash.

He turned his head in time to see the gator as they flew past…and Rawlins. The gator hadn’t released him, and the men had shoved him overboard, too.

Fallon shuddered again, and turned around so he could see what awaited them.

To his surprise and relief, the narrow canal opened up into a huge expanse of star-studded sky, and a vast lake, black beneath black, so they might have been floating if not for the moon-silvered silhouette of a small island out in the middle.

Lloyd backed off the throttle, and the boat slowed to an easy glide across the open water.

Fallon’s attention was fixed on the island, and the floating white specters that glowed amidst the mossy branches.

Ghosts , was his first, foolish thought. New Orleans was supposed to be haunted, wasn’t it? And here the ghosts were: not mere raps on hotel doors, or cold patches in a cemetery. These were good old-fashioned sheet-draped Hollywood spirits, floating and wavering, flapping …

Birds. They were birds. Hundreds and hundreds of white egrets roosting for the night.

How many times could his heart leap and stall and slow tonight? It was doing more work than a gymnast on a balance beam.

“Shit,” someone said, and Fallon gave himself a mental shake. He’d learned that cursing meant someone might be about to die, in this situation.

“What?” someone else asked.

“Look at all these damn gators.”

Gators?

Dear God.

Fallon looked out at the water, and his guts shriveled.

The moon was bright enough to reveal the humped backs of countless gators. They scattered before the boat, but there were so many of them, enough to run along their backs if they’d have tolerated that.

It looked like a feeding frenzy, gator tails slapping the water; more eyes than he could count reflecting the flashlight beams.

He hadn’t wanted to die the whole time, but, suddenly, he really didn’t want to die in this way.

“Look!” one of the men shouted. “A light.”

Fallon lifted his head, ears stuffy thanks to the high-frequency racing of his pulse, and saw that, yes, there was a light, high-powered, a white glow like an eye across the lake. A boat.

The phrase any port in a storm filled him with one last flicker of hope. They were definitely in a storm, and he’d take any port.

The light drew closer, until the sound of its motor reached them, their own light glinting off the backs of the gators that slithered and tussled each other out of the way.

With backup, and enough bullets, maybe they could start firing on the gators. Would injury send them fleeing? Or would blood in the water only put them into a sharklike frenzy? Fallon didn’t know, but he thought it was worth trying, as far as strategies went.

Lloyd swung the boat sideways, and lifted a big hand in greeting as the second boat drew closer. “Hey! Cody!” He waved, hand white-limned in the fierce glow of the other boat’s spotlight. “We–”

With all five fingers distinctly outlined, it was easy to see when the middle one exploded with a spurt of black blood, and then was gone.

Lloyd bellowed with pain and snatched his hand down into his chest. With his good hand, he attempted to gun the throttle, but then his head kicked back, and he fell back across his seat.

Whoever was in the other boat, they weren’t friends.

~*~

Through her night vision scope, Ava saw Boyle slip between blackberry-webbed tree trunks, and disappear from sight. Getting away! Again!

But…

“Mama!”

She swung the rifle over her shoulder on its strap, dropped to one knee, and opened her arms.

Remy hit her like a little cannonball, without slowing, warm, and sweaty, and crying out loud in a way he hadn’t done since infancy, big, gulping hiccups and sobs. He was rank from the swamp, from a lack of baths, and when Ava wrapped him up tight, and cupped the back of his head, she felt the scratch of twigs tangled in his hair.

Ava had spent so long suppressing her grief, her sense of doom, her throat-gripping panic, that it wasn’t until now, his small body wrapped safe and shaking in his arms, that she actually believed she would ever get to hold him again. She’d known that she would do anything, would die trying, but hope had been only the most ephemeral thread woven through her determination.

And here he was, alive and whole, even as he clung to her and whimpered “mama” into her neck, which he wetted with his tears. He was here. Against all reason, against the odds, she had him.

Ava turned her face into the side of his head and breathed deep the scent of unwashed scalp, and green water, and rocked him side to side as his crying slowly quieted. She’d thought when this moment came – if this moment came – that she would cry along with him. Instead, though she felt warm tears slip down her cheeks, she was filled with an overwhelming relief; a crushing exhaustion at war with the lightness in her lungs. She could have laid down here on the marshy ground and slept, her baby clutched to her chest.

But they weren’t done.

When he’d gone quiet, she eased Remy back, and wiped his face with her hands, smearing the dirt smudges across his cheeks. “You okay, baby?”

He sniffed hard, and though his lip trembled, he nodded. Brave boy.

“Whaddya say we go find Daddy?”

He nodded again.

Ava stood, and moved his hand to her belt. “Hold on to me, baby.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She lifted her rifle, and its scope, back to her face, and searched the forest in all its shades of phosphorescent green. No sign of Boyle, but she would find him, and she would kill him.

“Let’s go.”

They went, and as they did so, she thought she heard the far-off, mournful notes of dogs howling.

~*~

Maggie was manning the radio in the boat. Colin was driving. They’d dispatched the men left alive in the boat whose driver had been decapitated, taken down the cable that had done it, then headed downstream to pick up Toly.

Now, they neared the mouth of the canal that fed into the massive rookery lake – at least according to Colin – and they could hear gunshots.

“Shit,” Colin muttered. “Who’s doing that?”

Maggie started to answer, and the radio crackled in her hand. A voice came through, wholly unexpected, and she nearly dropped the radio in surprise. “Colin? Devin? Toly? Any of you guys there?”

“Holy shit!” Maggie swore, and then pressed the transmit button. “Tango?! Is that you?”

“Hi, Mags. Yes, ma’am, it’s me – well, it’s us.”

He was interrupted by a volley of gunshots in stereo: ahead of them, in the near distance, and much closer on Tango’s end.

“Is that you guys shooting?” she asked, heart still leaping after us . How many of them constituted us ? Was Ghost with them? Aidan?

“Yeah,” he responded. “We’ve got Fallon pinned down in a boat.”

Though her thoughts raced, she had no idea what to make of their presence here, now. “How…” she started, and was cut off by another volley of shots.

Colin slowed the boat, and leaned over to shout into the radio: “How the fuck are you here ?”

When Tango came back on, he said, “Long story – shit, yeah .” That sounded meant for someone in the boat with him. “Where’s Boyle?”

“He got away on foot.”

“Ah. Okay. Good thing we brought the dogs.”

~*~

Harlan swatted a branch out of the way, only to be slapped in the face by another. “Fuck! Fucking – fuck all of this !” he hissed under his breath.

He had his gun, but he didn’t have a light, and save for the moments when the canopy of interlaced tree limbs thinned, he couldn’t see well enough to know which way he was going, much less see well enough to shoot someone.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been shot .

That bitch Ava Lécuyer. That stupid cunt . If he ever got a clear shot at her…Or, better yet, got his hands on her–

His heel skidded on a slick patch, and then kept skidding. His boot splashed down into a puddle, or a bog, or a whateverthefuck that plunged him up to his knee in muck and brackish water. He cursed, and pinwheeled his arms, but couldn’t rebalance, and went down face-first onto the swamp floor for the second time tonight.

For one flashfire moment, he thought about staying down. Just…drowning. Getting it all over with. Failure tasted like mud, and it burned in his large muscle groups like lactic acid, and it cramped his gut like food poisoning. That’s what he’d done: he’d failed.

It was too huge and nauseating a concept to wrap his head all the way around at the moment. To think that he’d spent so many years, more than half of his life, chasing this one goal…no. He hadn’t failed yet.

He braced his hands in the mud, pushed himself up, and struggled out of the sinkhole.

After, he lay panting on firmer ground, overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion so intense he thought that if he closed his eyes, he would fall asleep right here, on a bed of moss and old, dead leaves.

But something rustled off to his left, so he got back on his feet, and pressed onward.

~*~

Bob Boudreaux was piloting the boat.

The rest of them were manning the guns.

It was Aidan who spotted Fallon in the enemy boat as they swung around broadside. “There, right there!”

Tango saw him. In the flash of the boat’s spotlight, his face a big-eyed, petrified white disc, Tango saw him not as the grinning, cruel-handed man he could only remember in fits, and snatches, and a sense of unbeatable dread, but as a sad and pathetic wretch. One living a lie, married to a woman he didn’t love, soulless enough to pay to rape boys held captive in a brothel. Just a loser caught between a barrage of gunfire and a lake full of hungry gators.

How had Tango ever been afraid of him? Ever shivered, and wanted to hide, and shrunk down into his own collar beneath his sly questioning?

A single gunshot cracked from the other boat, and a narrow splash proved it had gone wide and struck the water, harmless.

Bob gave the wheel one last spin and brought them alongside.

RJ swung the spotlight around.

“Now!” Albie shouted over the roar of the engine. He and Aidan were armed with Albie’s beloved Skorpions, and strafed the side of the boat, hitting fiberglass and flesh alike.

Tango had a Skorpion of his own, but he dropped it, and let it dangle on its strap in favor of pulling his usual sidearm: the .45 that had terrified him as a teenager, and become as comforting as a well-hugged teddy bear in the years since.

He was far from the best shot in the club, but tonight, with the spotlight beaming on his target like the helpful flare of heaven, he took aim, and fired, and had the pleasure of watching Fallon’s head kick back, red entry point blooming blood on his forehead, before the boats screamed apart.

When he twisted around to look back, he saw a pale body in the water, and then saw it get pulled under.

~*~

Walsh hadn’t come to America expecting to become important amongst the Yank Dogs, but he’d recognized the startled, impressed looks on James and Ghost’s faces when he had Knoxville’s finances sorted and in the black within a month of his arrival. Six months after that, Knoxville began investing in new businesses. Ghost had told him, a year in, over late-night drinks in the office after James had gone home, and Ghost had stayed, already president in all the ways that counted, that he had dreams – big ones. And he thought Walsh was the missing puzzle piece he’d needed all along to make them come true for his club.

He was then tasked with consulting with the other chapters, and showing them how to haul themselves up out of the typical MC poverty. No more money lost on hookers and blow and extravagant parties; smart investments, proper laundering, receipt management.

Walsh got them turned around – but, of course, none of the other chapters would become as successful as Knoxville. No one had ever expected the boss man not to be on top of the pile anyway.

But the other chapters did well for themselves these days, and it was why Bob had been able to equip them so well on such short notice.

He would have much preferred his Harley on a stretch of open road, but needs must. Walsh squeezed the brakes, cranked the handlebars, and ducked a low hanging branch as his Honda dirt bike bucked and jerked its way over the uneven ground. When he was clear, he stood up on the footpegs again to let his arms and legs distribute the shock better.

Mounted on a dirt bike of his own, Michael rode ahead of him, and, as promised, Crassus the Dane kept pace easily with their subdued swamp speed. Michael had his uncle’s current stud dog on a short leash attached to his belt, and Walsh kept waited for disaster – a branch, or a stump, or thick tangle of brambles to catch the tether – but so far so good. And despite the rev and surge of their motors, the hounds ahead could still be clearly heard.

They’d caught their scent, and they were running it to ground.

Walsh just prayed they wouldn’t be too late.

~*~

Harlan felt like he’d been walking for hours. No matter which way he turned, he couldn’t seem to get away from the glittering black expanse of the lake, nor its roaring boat motors, or its cracking gunshots. Eventually, though, the shooting ceased, and the boat activity quieted to low, idling murmurs.

He tripped on a root, nearly fell again, and made the decision to move closer to the water. There, at least, the trees thinned, and the moonlight shone on the white sand of the shoreline, and he could keep his feet. He glanced out across the lake, and saw the distant, dark shape of the island, and the even more distant pinpricks of boat spotlights. Well-away and with no chance of spotting him at this distance.

He let out a ragged sigh of relief.

That was when he heard the first howl.

It rooted him to the spot, and lifted all the fine hairs on the back of his neck. A lonesome, echoing awwwwoooooo , like a wolf in a movie. A second howl followed, and then two at once. They were–

Baying. Hounds baying.

He glanced back out across the water, at the distant lights, and could hear the bawling of the dogs get closer, and closer, and closer.

He needed to run, and run now. Climb a tree – or, well, shit, no. Then they’d have him treed and helpless. He could shoot them, then, and make a break for it. Maybe even take to the water. Whatever the plan of action, he needed to move .

Instead, his shivering, worn-out body refused to cooperate, and all the sweat that slicked his skin turned to ice as an image filled his mind, not of earthly dogs, but of hellhounds: bristling, red-eyed, razor-toothed. He’d let pride get the best of him, had pushed too hard, and now the devil wanted his due.

“No, stupid,” he muttered to himself. “It’s a K-9 unit. It’s Bloodhounds.”

A twig snapped behind him. “No,” Mercy Lécuyer’s voice floated out from the gloom behind him. “Those are Smokey Mountain Blueticks, fresh from Tennessee.”

~*~

Truthfully, Mercy had thought the dogs were police trackers at first, too. But Bloodhounds had droopier jowls, and so the quality of the sound was deeper, more bellow, less howl. Plus, by this point, he knew well the particular sound of a Bluetick. Or two, in this case.

By the time he walked up on Boyle where he stood at the water’s edge, the dogs were close enough for him to be certain, motors that didn’t belong to boats were echoing through the trees, and Mercy was grinning hugely, all his pain and exhaustion pushed down by sheer joy: his brothers had come. All of them.

And now, here, finally, was his quarry, run to ground at last.

Boyle turned around, clumsily, and then they stood ten feet apart, guns pointed at one another.

The motors drew closer: ATVs of some sort at a guess.

Mercy said, “I’ll give you this, Boyle. You’re a determined son of a bitch.”

Boyle gritted his teeth, a wet gleam in the moonlight, and lifted his gun higher. “You–”

The wraith that lunged out of the shadows was the size of a pony, coal black, narrow waisted, and leanly muscled. “I got to meet Mr. Chace’s catch dog,” Remy had said after his trip to Uncle Wyn’s farm, frowning a little over the unfamiliar phrase. “He was really huge. His name’s Crassus.”

He was indeed really huge, and in two bounding strides cleared the underbrush and clamped his massive jaws on Boyle’s gun arm with a snarl dragged straight up from the depths of hell.

Boyle screamed, dropped his gun, and was borne to the ground by the massive Great Dane, who firmed up his grip, put one giant paw on Boyle’s chest to pin him, and held fast.

“Attaboy,” Mercy praised, but didn’t dare approach further.

He didn’t have to wait long. Boyle’s continuous hoarse screams were quickly drowned out by the growl of engines, and two dirt bikes burst from the trees and then rolled to a halt on the sand of the beach. Kickstands went down, motors were killed, and the riders dismounted.

Mercy had expected Michael. “Mikey!” But Walsh was a surprise. “And King baby, too? Fuck me, what a surprise.”

There was enough moonlight to catch Walsh’s wry look.

Michael stepped forward, leash in hand, and said, “Down, Crass. To me, to me,” in a low and calm voice.

The dog whined, but released Boyle and went to Michael to accept his leashing, and a generous scratch between the ears.

Exhaustion hit Mercy anew, a sledgehammer in the back, right between his shoulder blades.

Speaking of…

He let his pack slide off his arms and to the ground, and from it, withdrew the twelve-pound, short-hafted sledge that was one of its many contents.

Boyle must have tried to scramble away, because Mercy heard Walsh said, “Stay on the fucking ground, you wanker . Do you not know when you’ve been bested?”

“No,” Mercy said, strolling up to join them. The hammer felt like it weighed fifty pounds, pulling at the gunshot wounds in his arm. He felt a clot give, and fresh, hot blood trickled down the crook of his elbow. “That’s always been his problem, ever since he was a kid: he never knew when to quit.”

Walsh stood with a boot pressed to Boyle’s throat, and Boyle’s face was darkening rapidly beneath the pressure on his windpipe.

“And,” Mercy continued, moving to stand between Boyle’s spread legs, shouldering the hammer, “he’s been obsessed with me for most of his life. I guess it’s flattering.” He smiled again, black spots pressing at the edges of his vision. “What do you say, Hank: you want the full Mercy experience?”

Boyle’s eyes bugged.

Mercy brought the hammer down, one clean, well-practiced arc, and shattered Boyle’s kneecap to shrapnel.

He didn’t even scream; he simply passed out.

Walsh lifted his foot with a disgusted sound, then spat on him.

Crassus panted happily.

The chug of a motor reached them, the flicker of a light. A boat approached. And when it was close enough, it was Devin’s voice that called cheerily over the radio intercom: “You boys need a lift?”

~*~

Mercy looked like hell. Toly spared him a glance from the boat he was in with Gray, willed his gorge to stay the hell down, and then did a double-take when he saw all the blood that slicked the big man’s arms. He wavered on his feet, and Colin and Alex both moved to support him as he stepped from Devin’s boat into the one where Ava and Maggie sat bracketing Remy.

“Daddy!” Remy shouted, and lunged for him, and even if he was waxen and half-dead on his feet, Mercy grinned at his son, and pulled him into a big bear hug.

Ava got up and went to them, and was enfolded into the embrace.

Toly glanced away to give them privacy, and swallowed hard when the boat rocked slightly.

“Do you need a Dramamine?” Gray asked.

“Niet.” Toly adjusted his grip on the dead man’s feet; Gray held him by the shoulders. “I don’t want to pass out and fall in.” Because in was boiling with gators, happily disposing of the bodies they kept heaving overboard. “Let’s finish. One, two–”

They both lifted, and the dead man went up, and over, and splash, and a gator grabbed his arm and towed him into the frenzy.

~*~

Ava could hear conversation behind her, and registered it as she would dialogue in a movie left running in the background.

Devin: “Sure you don’t want more of us to come along? The big man doesn’t look like he’s got more than an hour of consciousness left in him.”

Colin: “Yeah, we’re sure. Reese bandaged his arms. That should hold. But, hey, Dev: thanks, man. Seriously. For everything.”

Devin: “Ah, o’ course. Like this was a party I didn’t want to be a part of? I get it: this last thing needs to be family. Take care of him, though, yeah? And get them all back to the rendezvous point?”

Colin: “Yeah, of course we will.”

Sound of a hearty handshake that turned into a man-hug.

Reese: “You’re going to the hospital. Now .”

Tenny: “And do you see a bloody hospital out here? We’re all going back together, and I’m not going anywhere after that until we’ve got Mercy back again.”

Others spoke, voices overlapping and indistinct. But all Ava could focus on was Remy, in an uncharacteristic panic, face screwed up and eyes fever-bright after she and Mercy told him to stay with Grammie and Uncle Aidan because they had one last thing to take care of before they went back into town.

“No, no, no, no, no!” he cried, hands twisting in the sleeves of her jacket. “No, you can’t – no – Daddy’s hurt – Mama, no .”

Her heart ached . “Shh, baby, it’s okay–”

“Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

Oh, God. No, no, she really couldn’t. But they couldn’t take him …could they?

“Hey.” Mercy crowded in next to her, not flinching when his injured arm pressed against hers. “Hey.” He reached to lay a hand on the side of Remy’s face, and his vast palm swallowed it up. “Bud, it’s okay. We’ll be okay. I’m not hurt that bad.” Ava could hear the smile in his voice – and the pain. The exhaustion.

“Take me with you,” Remy begged, lip trembling, eyes filling.

She shared a glance with Mercy, and he gave the faintest shrug with his eyebrows. His face was too pale. They were running out of time. But he was leaving the decision to her; he, she could tell, had no problem with Remy witnessing what they planned to do.

Ava didn’t really either, when it came down to it.

She glanced at her mom, and at Aidan, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder across from her. They regarded her with near-matching looks of up to you , Aidan’s disturbed, Maggie’s resolute. Up to you .

Ava smoothed Remy’s too-long hair, and thumbed a tear off his cheek. “Okay. Shh. Okay, you can come.”

~*~

Harlan woke slowly and swimmily to a white, throbbing pain that seized his stomach in a vise grip. He needed to be sick, but couldn’t move, thoughts fuzzy, eyelids heavy, and so he swallowed, and went through his breathing exercises, and took stock.

The pain – at first an overwhelming, strangling shroud that seemed to pulse through his whole body – shrank and localized to his left knee. It was a sharp, deep, visceral hurt, throbbing in time to his too-quick heartbeat. He remembered being flat on his back, and Mercy above him; the wink of metal in the moonlight, and a crushing weight.

His arm throbbed, too, where a monster had sunk its teeth through fabric and skin. Even the bone felt tender, and he thought it might be cracked.

But he was alive. His wounds weren’t fatal.

Buoyed by that knowledge, he swam up through his cottony half-consciousness and heard voices.

“…starting to come around.”

“He didn’t move, though.”

“Nah, his eyelids fluttered.”

He forced his eyelids still, and tried to keep his breathing slow.

Booted footfalls made their slow, heavy way toward him, across a wooden surface – but one that echoed strangely. It wasn’t a floor, not a normal one, it sounded like–

Shit, it was a dock. He was on a dock.

A boot thumped into his bad knee, and there was no more feigning sleep; the pain was electric, and he screamed, and opened his eyes, and in the blue glow of a battery lantern, he beheld a beast standing over him.

A towering figure, lit from below, the shadows painting a demon’s mask around a wide, white knife slice of a smile. Its eyes burned, two black coals set in that devil face.

Harlan knew, suddenly, that he was about to die. Not in a panicked, prayerful, please-don’t-let-me-die way. But certainty swept through him, cold and final. He was going to die, and no amount of struggling or pleading could stop it.

It was oddly peaceful.

He was ready for his hunt to be over, and this would end it for good, even if it wasn’t in the way he wanted. Sometimes an end, any end, was a blessing.

But then the beast crouched down, and the light slid up its face like a wave, and the beast was Mercy, and his grin was one of deep satisfaction.

Peace fled, and in its place, his veins flooded with terrified adrenaline.

“Bonjour, Hank.” Mercy’s voice was a low and throaty purr that immediately brought to mind the dog who’d maimed his arm. “How’re you feeling?”

The pain in his knee spiked, a white pulse that shot all the way up to his hip, and wrapped around his pelvis. His vision fuzzed, and he realized Mercy was digging a thumb into what remained of his kneecap.

He clenched his teeth against a scream, but it leaked out anyway. He closed his eyes, and his head thumped back against the dock, and he wanted to die right now, to stop the–

The pressure let up, and the pain receded back to its ugly red throbbing.

He gasped.

Above him, Mercy tsked. “I expected more, honestly.”

“Felix,” a woman’s voice chided, somewhere out of sight. Oh, God, the bitch was here, too.

Mercy chuckled – but it sounded strange. “Yeah. Alright. Up we get.”

Huge hands hooked him under each arm, and Harlan was too weak to struggle or to help. No matter: Mercy lifted him as though he were a baby, and stood him up on his feet. Harlan cried out when his own weight compressed his smashed knee to smaller fragments. Mercy supported him, and he managed to straighten his good leg and hold himself up.

This isn’t real. This isn’t happening . The self-soothing words of a man whimpering like a beaten puppy.

But when he opened his eyes, it was, in fact real. He stood at the end of the dock his very own team had fortified and restored, the one that led up to a clearing where the same team had picked a cabin apart, board by brick. The place where, fifteen years ago, the man who held him had dumped fifteen bodies into a deserted stretch of swamp, and let the gators tear into the evidence of his murders.

“God,” he murmured.

“He’s not here right now,” Mercy said, “only men.” Then, without dropping him, he stepped around behind Harlan, grip moving the whole time, steadying him, trapping him. And Harlan saw their audience, standing just a few paces up the dock, right where it butted up against dry land.

Ava he had expected, thanks to her voice. And the brothers – Bonfils and O’Donnell, standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind her – weren’t a surprise.

The boy was.

Remy Lécuyer, dirty, and pale, long hair tangled around his eerie, doll-blank face, stood in front of his mother, her hands on his shoulders. He stared at Harlan, unblinking, and Harlan, belly shriveling with shame, looked away. He couldn’t…he just…

Voice raspy with pain, he said, “Your kid’s already just as fucked up as you.”

“Yeah,” Mercy said easily. “He’s already had to learn that no matter how much he minds his own business, some weird fucker’s gonna want a piece of him.” Before Harlan could respond, he said, “Col?”

“Yeah,” O’Donnell said, and sidled past Ava. He was holding three large rocks.

Shit, Harlan thought. If they were going to kill him – and of course they were – he’d prefer to be shot.

But O’Donnell didn’t pummel him with them. Instead, he stepped over to the edge of the dock, cocked his arm back, and hurled the first rock into the water. Harlan heard its deep plop as it hit the surface.

O’Donnell drew a deep breath and bellowed, “Big Son!” He chucked the next rock. Plop . “Big Son! Come and get it, you big son of a bitch!”

The third rock. Plop .

Silence.

O’Donnell propped his hands on his hips, and looked up over Harlan to meet Mercy’s gaze. “It’s been a long time, Merc. He might not come.”

“He’ll come,” Mercy said, sounding sure.

Who? Harlan wondered. Who’ll come? Dread welled up in his stomach, as powerful as the pain, because, really, he knew. Not the specifics, not who, or what, or how, but he wished, suddenly, that O’Donnell had bashed him in the face with a rock.

Mercy said, “How many hours – how many days, weeks, years did you spend watching me? Wanting to be my friend. Wanting to be me. But you didn’t ever learn anything, did you? You admired a swamp man, but it never even occurred to you to go out and learn the swamp for yourself.”

Harlan’s pulse galloped; sweat slicked his body beneath his clothes. He felt…reduced. Second by second, his confidence, his training, his sureness in his mission, drained out through the soles of his feet. He felt clumsy and drunk, his tongue thick in his dry mouth. He started shaking. “I – I don’t – I didn’t–”

Then he heard the movement in the water. Subtle. Sinuous.

“Heh,” Mercy breathed, hot against the back of his neck, his ear. “There he is.”

“Who?” Harlan rasped, unable to help himself. He thought he was having a heart attack. His vision swam; turning his head seemed to take forever.

“Jeeeesus,” O’Donnell breathed, and took a step back from the edge. “He’s real.”

“Pfft. Of course he’s real,” Mercy said. “You think I was making him up?”

O’Donnell sent him a raised brow look. “You tell stories like a Southern grandma, so, yeah.”

The water disturbance, a gentle swish-swish along the surface, moved closer.

Harlan blinked his vision clear, and at first he saw nothing but the dark rectangle of the canal, as dark and fathomless as space. But then he clocked the movement. The edges of that movement.

His bladder turned loose with a sudden hot rush.

Mercy said, “Fillette.”

Harlan heard movement, footsteps. Ava murmured, “Stay here with Uncle Colin, okay? Stay right here.”

The shape in the water came closer, and closer, the size of a Buick.

“Hey.”

When Harlan didn’t turn his head, slender fingers gripped his jaw, and yanked his head around.

Ava Lécuyer stood before him, thoroughly bedraggled, mud-smeared, jaw set, and her eyes were not the eyes of a human woman.

She said, “I want to make something very clear to you. I want it to be the last thing you ever hear.” Her head cocked, and nothing about that movement was human either. “There has never been, nor will there ever be, anyone on this earth more obsessed with Felix Lécuyer than me. You spent, what, twenty years chasing him? He’s mine. Always has been, always will be. You learned that tonight.”

She lifted her right hand, and the lamplight winked off the deceptively small, sharp, hooked blade of a linoleum knife.

Yes , he thought, cut my throat .

But then her hand darted, struck downward, and lingered, and dragged, and awful, bright, bloody pain opened up across his belly.

He looked down, and saw the flesh part, saw the blood well, black in the blue lantern glow.

“Go to hell,” Ava said. “And stay there.”

Mercy’s hands gripped tight on his shoulders, and shoved him.

The world spun, black sky, black water.

And then the water took him, like the cold, soft arms of a corpse bride.

~*~

“Oh my God – look at the – fuck, that’s a dinosaur,” Alex breathed, safely back on land.

Relief washed over Mercy as elation, and with it came the ugly dizziness of blood loss. He turned, and carefully lowered himself to sit on the edge of the dock, boots dangling over the edge. He lifted his arm – lead-heavy, no longer painful, only dragging, which wasn’t a good sign, he knew – so that Ava could sit down beside him, and tuck herself beneath it. She was shivering as though cold, despite the hot, sweaty feel of her cheek when she pressed it down on his shoulder.

“Good job, Mama.” He tried to pat her waist, but his hand didn’t want to cooperate.

In the water, Big Son had begun his death roll.

“You, too.” She turned her head and pressed her lips to his shoulder before resettling, her warm, familiar weight better than any drug against his side.

Mercy’s head felt cotton-stuffed, dry, and floaty, like he’d taken morphine. But it was pleasant. Dreamy. “He really is beautiful, isn’t he?”

“He is, baby,” Ava agreed. “Like you.”

“Guys,” Colin said, gently. “We need to go. We need to get Mercy to the hospital.”

“Yeah,” Mercy agreed.

Small footsteps moved down the dock, and a small hand landed on his other shoulder, Remy’s grip strong and sure. “Daddy?”

“In a minute. Just a minute.”

Ava took his half-numb hand in hers, and dragged it into her lap, laced their fingers together, right up close to their new baby. The second one who’d come to the swamp in the womb.

It felt like the closing of a circle. Felt final. Right.

“Come on, baby,” Ava urged. “We gotta go.”

Big Son turned, startlingly graceful in the water, a submarine that moved like a ballerina. He took three large chomps, adjusting his dinner in his grip, and then, slowly, moved away from them, propelled by the unhurried sweeps of his monstrous tail, bearing away the last any of them would ever see of Harlan Boyle.