Black-Hearted Devil Read online

  He didn’t ask me why, just turned off the motor so we were sitting in silence, with the water licking the hull of the boat in a steady lap. I closed my eyes, breathing in the muddled scents of bog water, damp moss, and motor oil. It was, in a small way, not unlike the smell of Wilder himself.

  This deep into the swamp there wasn’t so much a breeze as the feel of the trees and water breathing together. The small hairs at the back of my neck stood on end, the air around us whispering into my ear.

  Wilder sucked in a breath.

  I opened my eyes and realized my hands were glowing. It wasn’t until the moment I saw it happening that I really felt the magic moving through me. My palms were tingly, as if they’d been asleep and were just now coming back to feeling.

  My hands were alight in the same yellow-green as the fireflies I used to chase through my backyard. It was a soft, pretty color, and one that didn’t spook me the way I’d been thrown for a loop by my own powers in the past. Right now I was in control. This wasn’t magic being fed by rage or fear, this was just me tapping into my natural gifts to meet a need, and it was as simple as breathing.

  I lifted my hands, looking at them front and back, smiling to myself.

  “That is so cool,” Wilder whispered.

  “It’s magic.”

  “I just forget this part of you sometimes. You’re so much the wolf to me, the Alpha, I completely forget you’re this whole other person, too.”

  That he was able to forget so easily after some of the things he’d seen me do with my powers was comforting. I sometimes worried I’d step over an invisible line one day and Wilder would never be able to look at me the same way.

  Right now he was staring at me like I was pure magic, and it made the tingle spread from my hands all the way through me and down to my toes.

  This stupid jerk really did love me.

  I thought my heart might swell to bursting in that moment. I had heard him say the words, and I’d said them back, but a little voice in the back of my head had kept telling me he didn’t really love me. That he loved the idea of me. He loved the princess, the Alpha, the pretty girl. But I’d always worried that the second he knew about the darker aspects he’d realize he didn’t love me at all and would run for the hills.

  I could see the reflection of my lights in his eyes, making the flecks of gold come to life.

  Lifting my hands over my head, the lights rose from my palms and shot up like tiny fireworks, swirling into the night sky like a tiny flurry of lightning.

  The lights went high up into the treetops and then vanished, leaving us in the darkness once again.

  “So. What was that all about?” he asked, his face still angled to the sky.

  “I was saying hello.”

  “You don’t say hello to me like that.”

  I smirked. “I usually know where you are, because you’re usually with me. This is a long-distance calling card. Sort of like a lighthouse sending its beacon out into the night sea.”

  “Stop getting all poetic, you’re making me feel like I should have prepared a book report.”

  I glanced around the treetops, trying to spot any lingering trail of the lights I’d sent out. They seemed to have vanished, but I kept catching the faintest hints of illumination through the branches. Those could have been my imagination, or they could have been actual fireflies.

  “What do we do now?” He toyed with the string on the motor, ready to start the boat up again.

  “Give it a minute. This isn’t as easy to gauge as something like a locating spell, where the beacon goes out and keeps going until it finds what you’re looking for. This is more like a hope and pray spell. She might answer, she might not. I just want to see if anything happens.”

  We sat quietly, the choir of frogs reaching a crescendo in their operatic endeavors, before falling completely silent.

  Everything was still, so quiet I could hear my heart beating and the faint intake of Wilder’s breath. Where the bayou noises had been eerie in their own way, this new cloak of silence was deafening.

  A single frog croaked so close to us I almost jumped out of my skin.

  Ribbit.

  It was like an ancient door creaking in the breeze. I scanned the nearby shoreline, hoping it would make a sound again. It abided my wish. Ribbit.

  I spotted the little dude sitting amid the roots of a nearby tree, his glossy black eyes shining. His throat swelled with another crackly moan. A small part of me dismissed it offhand. One frog among thousands was nothing to take note of.

  One frog among thousands when the rest had fallen silent, though, was something to take note of. Especially when I’d just put out a hello, here I am beacon. Coincidence was one thing, but in my life I found it was very rarely the case of what was really happening.

  “Hello, frog,” I said.

  “Ribbit,” said the frog.

  “Do you speak amphibian?” Wilder asked.

  I shot him a look and turned my attention back to the frog. “Are, uh… are you here for me?”

  The frog hopped a little closer, and I wrestled the canoe paddle out of the bottom of the boat and sank it into the water, pushing the boat towards the shore. As I performed this awkward ballet, the frog continued to stare at me and periodically croak.

  The boat bumped up against the tree roots, and the frog took a few bold hops closer to me.

  Yeah, no way a frog all the way out here, this far from tourist areas, would just come up to a boat of humans and be like, “Hey, what’s up?”

  He hopped right past my arm and kept going, but would periodically pause to turn around and look back, as if to make sure I was following. I used the canoe paddle to keep us moving along in its path, never getting far enough behind to lose track of it in the dark.

  Wilder had to think this whole thing was insane, but if he did, he was too polite to say anything. He had come all the way out here on this wild goose chase to meet a woman he couldn’t be sure even existed, after all. It would be pretty stupid for him to start pointing out how crazy this was now.

  We were probably well beyond the point of him commenting on the weirder aspects of my life, anyway.

  The frog continued to hop along until the tree line turned into an inlet, and there was a small, mossy area where I was able to pull the boat up to shore. At first it looked like any other part of the shoreline where you could actually set foot—something that was rare enough in the swamp—but then I noticed one of my little firefly lights.

  I climbed out of the boat, my feet immediately sinking deep into the mucky debris on the shore, soaking through my socks.

  Another light appeared, then another.

  I dragged the boat further ashore so Wilder could climb out without getting wet, and then he helped me get it well enough out of the water to not be a risk for floating off without us in it.

  By the time we were finished huffing and puffing the boat onto land, there was a whole swarm of my little green-yellow lights dancing around my head and landing in my hair.

  A moment later, she emerged.

  It had been several years since I’d seen her, but in that time, she hadn’t changed a single bit. She was a wee, hunched, fragile looking woman who had to balance on a wooden cane for support.

  Or so it seemed.

  I knew perfectly well she could hustle around the swamp without it, but she liked to keep people guessing, and I couldn’t blame her. No one ever worried about little old ladies hurting them. It was how she managed to escape notice, and defy expectation.

  Her long, long white hair hung in a long braid down her back, and from her ears dangled earrings made of tiny bird skulls and black feathers. Her eyes, even from the distance and in the dark, sparkled a vital light blue.

  “Memere?” I whispered. I had gotten so used to calling her by her formal title around others, I’d all but forgotten the way I used to just think of her as my grandmother.

  She smiled, and I was reminded of how much she looked like a wizened little
Yoda. My heart swelled. I had used the distance of time to create a false sense of her, based on the stories I’d heard from others. The fierce, terrifying witch people were in awe of. She’d grown to be ten feet tall with dagger teeth and a snarling countenance in my imagination.

  I realized the reason it had taken me so long to come back to her was because I had been afraid to.

  Now that I was here looking her in the face, I knew I’d been a fool.

  Let everyone else be afraid of her. She was my memere. I approached her, and she held her arms open. It felt like a trap, but for the time being I didn’t care, I just wanted to hug her. I had to stoop down, she was so small, but when she wrapped her arms around my neck, her cane pressed to my spine, I melted into the embrace, kneeling in the boggy, damp ground to get closer.

  She smelled of wood smoke and herbs, something sweet and spicy and vaguely mystical.

  I hadn’t spoken French in years, but as she muttered her greetings against my ear I could make out every word without difficulty.

  “You came home, chere.”

  “I did.”

  She leaned back and placed an old hand on my cheek, her skin so incredibly soft it defied explanation. Her eyes twinkled, and looked as if they belonged in the face of a teenage girl, set deep in the wrinkled flesh of a very old woman.

  “Bring your beau. Let’s go.”

  How she knew Wilder was my lover without so much as a word was one of those creepy La Sorciere things I didn’t want to dive too deeply into. She knew what she knew, and it was best to just let that be the case.

  We wove our way through thick brush and branches slung low under the weight of moss, until we found ourselves at a small clearing. The sky overhead was clear enough I could make out the stars.

  In the center of the clearing, a dozen or so old sycamore trees had grown together, their branches intertwined and their smooth skin fused into one mammoth organism.

  La Sorciere walked up to the tree and rubbed the bark as if it were the lucky belly of a Buddha statue. The tree let out an audible sigh, then the roots began to move and shift, and an opening appeared between two of the trunks, wide enough to climb through.

  I glanced over at Wilder, whose mouth was hanging open in unmistakable awe.

  “It’s nuts, I know.”

  “It’s amazing,” he corrected. “You really were a little Keebler elf.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Not a damn thing had changed inside the tree since I’d been gone.

  An old black cauldron sat in the middle of the room, a well-established fire crackling under it. The fire, and the close quarters of us being inside a group of trees, made the space warm and inviting.

  Out of habit I snapped my fingers when I entered the room.

  A white light flared to life overhead, giving the room a more house-like feel, though everything still glowed a greenish hue, and there was no way to completely ignore that the furniture, from benches to beds, was all formed from the gnarled roots of the tree itself.

  “This is really where you grew up?” Wilder asked.

  “From thirteen to eighteen. Yup.”

  He cast his gaze up, looking to the ceiling which was just the interwoven branches of the sycamores. Somehow, in spire of the smallish size of the space and the fact everything was made of things from the surrounding bayou, it didn’t smell damp or boggy. The inviting smell of the fire, and whatever La Sorciere was brewing in the pot, it was all so lovely.

  She jerked her chin towards a nearby bench, and I guided Wilder to it, pushing him down with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Memere,” I said, reclaiming her attention as she started puttering around the room. “This is Wilder Shaw.”

  She paused, then leaned her cane against the wall and shuffled over to us. She stopped directly in front of him and cupped his face in her small palm, tilting up his chin so she could get a better look at him. Turning his face side to side as if he were a contestant at the Westminster Dog Show she was determining the breeding quality of, she finally gave a faint, approving smile, and looking at me, winked once.

  Then, without a single word to either of us, she returned to the bubbling pot in the middle of the room, picked up a big wooden spoon and began to stir.

  “She likes you,” I said.

  “How can you tell, she didn’t say anything.”

  “Oh, I know.” And it was true. We’d barely been with her for twenty minutes and already the silent understanding that existed between us when I’d lived here had returned.

  Memere didn’t speak traditional French. It wasn’t the Canadian French my Grandmother McQueen now favored, or the Cajun French that popped up in Louisiana. It certainly wasn’t Parisian French. She had a version all her own. Even if Wilder had spoken French fluently, I doubted he would have been able to understand her.

  As it was, Wilder didn’t speak any kind of French.

  And Memere didn’t care if anyone could understand her. She lived out here all by herself and didn’t have much cause to speak to anyone. When I’d lived with her she was already in the habit of getting by without many words. The sentence she’d spoken by the boat, You came home, chere, was almost as many words as I’d heard her speak in my five years living with her.

  Honestly, it was sort of amazing how well you could learn to communicate with just looks after a while.

  I still found it a bit jarring sometimes how much people in the real world needed to talk talk talk all the damned time. None of them had all that much to say, when it came down to it.

  Memere ladled whatever was in the pot into small, hand-carved wooden bowls and offered one to both Wilder and I. It looked like a stew of root vegetables and alligator meat.

  Wilder looked at me with a brow lifted, asking if it was safe to eat.

  See? Wordless communication!

  “It’s delicious, I swear.”

  He took a bite and seemed to take a good long time deciding if I was right, or if I’d lied to him just to get a laugh at his expense. He would deserve it for all those cookie elf jokes. Jerk. But in this case, I wasn’t full of shit. Memere could make incredibly tasty food out here without the help of grocery store ingredients.

  Though I’d learned, since my time being back, I couldn’t have managed it out here without my two most vital menu staples: coffee and pasta.

  Wilder finally decided he liked the taste, because he smiled with satisfaction and polished off the rest of the bowl. I followed suit, eating my own stew. Memere watched us until she was sure we weren’t faking our enjoyment, then served herself. She’d made so much of the stuff I had to wonder if she’d known well in advance I was coming.

  We sat in collective silence, indulging in a tasty meal before the real reason for my visit had to be discussed. Once she cleared away the bowls and put them in a little root basin by the sink to clean later, she pulled up a stool made from a large tree stump, and placed it in front of Wilder and I, took a seat, and stared at me expectantly.

  “Couldn’t I just be here to say hi?” I asked, answering the question she hadn’t asked.

  Yup, we were right back into our old rhythm, as if I hadn’t left.

  She said nothing and I sighed. “No, of course you’re right.”

  Memere folded her hands in her lap patiently, her grizzled knuckle joints looked large and painfully swollen, but they didn’t seem to bother her.

  “Is she speaking to you, like… telepathically?” Wilder whispered.

  “No.”

  “So how do you know what she’s saying?”

  I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I just know.”

  “Telepathy would have been less weird, I think.”

  Memere smiled at him, then returned her bright blue eyes to me, still waiting.

  “I bet you already know why I’m here,” I told her.

  She mirrored my half-shrug gesture. Cheeky old witch.

  I let out a sigh, suddenly wishing for a way to avoid facing this situation. We’d come all thi
s way and now that we were here I wanted to avoid the topic altogether. Hey, maybe if I just stayed here forever none of the dead would ever find me and I could pretend there were no problems at all?

  That sounded awesome.

  Memere continued to stare me down, waiting patiently for me to get around to it. She had all the time in the damn world, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Finally I spilled it all. I told her about Mercy—first explaining that she’d been killed, since Memere might not have gotten the notice about that all the way out here—then onward through the rest of the drama she had missed, and explaining I had three undead shadows following my every move.

  She lifted up four fingers.

  Oh, right, four undead shadows, one of whom was still a mystery to all of us.

  “That’s it, I guess. That’s why I’m here, anyway. Santiago couldn’t figure out who had cursed me, and we figured if anyone could see who was responsible, it would be you. Can you help?”

  She nodded and got up from her stool, wandering off to the other side of the room, then returning with a slim-bladed knife and a small bowl filled with water. I let out an audible groan. “Do we really need to do this again?” Remembering the whole ordeal at Santiago’s place, I didn’t particularly relish the idea of doing this whole dog and pony show another time.

  Memere clucked her tongue at me then wiggled her fingers impatiently. I yielded to her much more easily than I had the last time I went through this. She cut a line in my palm and I squeezed my hand into a fist, letting the blood drip into the water.

  Unlike Santiago, when she was satisfied I’d bled enough, she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together until a spark ignited and a flame came to light on her fingers. She touched the surface of the water and suddenly the whole bowl was alight.

  The fire died as quickly as it had begun, and the entire bowl was bone dry.

  Memere stared into the empty bowl, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. She scraped a nail along the bottom of the wooden surface, then licked her fingertip, as if she’d found something in the dish worth consideration. She frowned.

  I frowned.

  I didn’t like her expression.