29. Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
We left the backyard with Brett’s body. A haze hung over the street, hiding us as we got to the van with him.
“What should we do with the body?” Jack asked, glancing between what had once been Brett and the van. “I don’t feel comfortable dumping a body.”
“Let us handle that,” Brigitte replied. She pointed to Baron. “Pick it up.”
Baron made a face. “My love, I want to do nothing but your bidding —”
Brigitte’s eyes flashed with annoyance. “Pick. It. Up!”
Baron scowled as he leaned over to heft the body. “If my back hurts later, you’re going to have to rub it.”
Brigitte rolled her eyes. “You’re a loa. Your back won’t hurt.”
“You don’t know.” Baron looked wounded, and yet he showed no sign of strain when he threw the body over his shoulder. “Where should we take him?” he asked Papa.
“Bayou country,” Papa replied without hesitation. “We’ll drop him in a gator hole and then hit one of the hootenannies out there.”
Baron broke into a wide grin. “Good idea! I haven’t had proper moonshine in … how long has it been?”
“Three days,” Papa replied.
“Feels like forever.”
Before I could say anything, they were gone. I gaped in their wake. “What about Detective Barry?” I asked. “How are we going to explain all of this to him?”
“I’ll handle that,” Jack offered. “He won’t be happy, but I should be able to feed him enough information to point him in Brett’s direction.
We’re already halfway there. If we treat it as a manhunt and make him the face of what happened — leaving out the supernatural elements, of course — it will appear as if Brett knew we were on to him and fled. ”
It was an interesting idea. “They’ll never find him.”
“No, but they will assume it was the right theory when the murders stop,” Jack said. “We can’t tell him the truth, but we can get him to a place where he believes the case has been cracked. That’s the best we can do.”
“What if he remains suspicious?” I asked.
Jack shrugged. “That’s something we’ll have to deal with at a later date. We can’t tell him the truth. He won’t understand.”
“Okay. You’re the one I’m worried about. He already doesn’t like me.”
“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” Jack countered. “He looks at you and sees failure.”
“Well, great,” I said.
He chuckled. “Not that you’re a failure, just that the system let you down when your sister disappeared.” He cast a worried look to my father, who didn’t respond. Mere mention of Holly was normally enough to have my father clamming up.
“I’ll handle Barry,” Jack said. “You’ve already done enough heavy lifting on this one.”
I didn’t know that I agreed, but I nodded.
Jack offered us rides back to the French Quarter, where Knox’s truck was parked. The way the bounty hunter looked at me suggested he was waiting to see how I responded. Before I could answer, my father interjected.
“Let’s go back and get a drink,” Dad said. “I’ll buy. After we celebrate our victory, you two can do whatever it is you want to do.”
Frustration reared up and grabbed me by the throat, but I managed to slap it back down. “We’re not going to do anything.”
No one said anything.
“Right?” I prodded Knox.
“Probably not,” Knox agreed. “At least not tonight.”
My lips curved down. Probably not? Probably? At least not tonight? What the hell was happening? Before I could decide how I wanted to handle this, Lex slung an arm around my shoulders and clamped his hand over my mouth.
“A drink sounds great,” he said, sending me a playful smile. “Whatever comes after sounds great too.”
I hadn’t agreed to that, but I was outnumbered.
“Fine,” I said on a sigh. “We’ll go back and have a drink.” Hell, maybe I would have 10 drinks. It was New Orleans after all.
TRUE TO HIS WORD, DAD BOUGHT a round for everybody. He boasted about what a great daughter I was and then dropped a kiss on top of my head before leaving.
“I love you,” he said, pausing a beat. “As for the shifter, well, I won’t tell your mother there’s hope for her grandchild dreams.”
I glared at him so hard he laughed.
“Oh, who am I kidding?” he said. “I’m telling her.” And that was the last thing he said before leaving.
Charlie and Jack left next. They were going on a big shopping trip the following day for their new house. They were excited, and Charlie didn’t want to be hungover when picking out colors. Jack just wanted to spend time with his wife.
When it was just the three of us, and we’d debated whether or not the thing the coven called to on the riverwalk was the real Axeman or a random ghost, things started to get uncomfortable.
That was when Lex decided to leave. Or, rather, make his way to the other side of the bar.
He’d already picked out his conquest for the night.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said before going, offering up a friendly ear flick. “Hopefully, we won’t have another ghoul nest to clean up.”
The ghouls. I hadn’t thought about them since we’d started putting things together. Had they been part of all of this?
As if reading my mind, Knox lifted his finger to order another round of drinks. “Do you think the ghouls had something to do with Brett?” he asked.
It was just the two of us now. “I don’t know. It seems a stretch that two big things involving the same family aren’t tied to one another.”
“It does,” he confirmed, nodding in thanks to the bartender dropping off beers. He took a big swig of his. “Is it something we should chase?”
We? When had this become a we situation? “Maybe we just keep our eyes open for more ghouls.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” He took another big swig, as if gathering his nerves. “So … there are fireworks tomorrow,” he said.
I had no idea where he was going with this, so I took the opportunity to take a drink.
“I was thinking we could go together,” Knox continued, not looking at me. Man, he was just as awkward as I was in social situations. It would have been cute if I weren’t so freaked out. “You know, to the fireworks,” he added.
I took another drink. “What would this outing entail?”
Now he looked at me. “Don’t ask me to explain it,” he said. Actually, it was more of a plea than a request. “I’m right where you are.”
“Does that mean you don’t have time for romance but can’t seem to stop yourself from thinking about it?” It was a bold question, and yet I felt the need to ask.
“Yup.” He bobbed his head. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t even know I wanted to do it until … I just didn’t know.”
“Hmm.” I took another drink. “Let me ask you something before I answer that. Do you think Brett placed the calls, or was it the sort of spell he cast? The calls the people got, I mean,” I added so he wouldn’t think I’d lost my mind.
He considered it. “I think he had enough money to get his hands on a phone with a number that wasn’t registered.”
I wanted it to be more than that, but it made sense. “One more question.”
“Oh, good.” He smirked. “I love questions I can’t answer.”
I ignored the sarcasm. “If the ghost at the séance wasn’t the Axeman, who was it, and why was it warning me to stay out of its business?”
Knox looked genuinely perplexed. “We should get on that.”
“We?” I challenged.
“We,” he confirmed.
We held each other’s gazes. I was not ready for this. Despite that, Erzulie’s words echoed in my mind, along with the vision I’d seen weeks before. Maybe there was no escaping fate.
“I would love to go to the fireworks with you,” I said.
“Yeah?” He smiled.
All I could do was smile back. “Yeah.”