Chapter Seven
Creed
Creed wanted some time to ask Gator about the ballistic vests he sent to the bed and breakfast for Auralia and Doli.
“Not his place to meddle” didn’t mean Creed didn’t want to. ’Cause he sure as hell did.
Not because he lacked respect, not because he questioned the women’s capabilities, just the thought of someone or something touching a hair on Auralia’s head in a way that might cause her harm meant Creed had to restrain the beast that wanted to roar, then to sprint forward, to drag and thrash and lay waste to anyone or anything that would come against her.
“See that Rougarou?” Creed looked down to catch Rou’s gaze. “If things were right in this world, you and I would change names, and I’d bear the name of the feared beast ’cause, honestly, that’s sometimes how I feel.”
These sensations were new to him, but they felt older than time, like they’d been handed down through his ancestors.
It was a man’s sense of protection that Creed was learning to manage now that he loved so deeply.
Thinking of Auralia today, a tremor rumbled down Creed’s bones until it crowded his toes in his boots. His ears filled with the sound of a hummingbird directly overhead—like a tongue trill that moved air from the lungs to the atmosphere.
It vibrated him. It made his gut clench.
What did Gator know? Why had he sent the ballistic vests? Why hadn’t he told Creed what was going on?
Then, of course, Creed realized the spot he’d put Gator in.
How could Gator have spoken up and warned Creed that Auralia was in danger? After all, they hadn’t said out loud that they were a couple.
That left Gator to do what he could, while honoring Creed and Auralia’s decision to keep their relationship a secret.
Gator was a good man, the best.
They’d been friends since their mammas found out they were pregnant at the same time. The Rochambeau family lived on the other side of a creek that ran clear and fast between their houses.
Crawdads liked to build their chimneys there in the soft mud.
The boys could lie on their bellies talking about their dreams—both those they’d woken up remembering, and those they formed for their futures—as they slid their arms into the holes all the way up to their pits to grab at the crawdads and fill the baskets with protein for dinner.
One of the dreams the boys had shared was to join the military, just like their dads had done, and like their granddaddies before them.
As for Gator, he could trace his ancestry clear back to the Comte de Rochambeau, who fought alongside George Washington at Yorktown.
For Creed, his many-greats-grandfather went to Mexico under the orders of Napoleon III.
Rather than head back to France, Hugo Duchamp took a job escorting a lady of French Creole descent, whose ancestry traced back to the Caribbean, as she returned home to her family's plantation in Louisiana. On the trip, they fell in love. Once she got her family’s approval, the two married and farmed a field of native pecan trees.
Every generation of the Hugo Duchamp family line joined the military and lent their talents to what they believed was the greater good.
Creed’s dad had served as a Marine, sustaining disabling injuries bad enough that he retreated to the Bayou to live alongside family support. He married and settled.
That’s how Creed ended up living in a little hut on the shores where the great Mississippi reached for the Gulf. There, the smell of salt and damp wood filled his nostrils. He was steeped in the ancient magic that sank into the soil and swirled in the foggy nights.
Incantations were called by the tree frogs and echoed in the music.
Creed remembered one day they were playing Hansel and Gretel.
But Gator and he played the roles of the witches who were also the heroes.
The witches had been minding their own business, performing rituals and making salves, when Hansel and Gretel (Gator’s twin brothers) showed up, playing the role of bratty kids, disturbing their carefully laid spell.
The twins started picking up all the goodies that Creed and Gator had gathered and ate them without asking permission, and without knowing their uses and powers.
Yeah, that was the way Gator’s mamma told the story, casting the witch as the righteous one and the children as naughty pillagers.
In Creed’s house, they saw priestesses and witches as wise women.
Creed’s own Mémère had taught Creed about the powers of plants even from the youngest age. She knew just what kind of poultices to put on his chest and just what kind of oil to rub into his back to make him feel better when he got sick.
In their game, Gator and Creed had grabbed up the naughty twins and sat them on a rock. Then the Duchamp and Rochambeau sisters created a circle of salt on the ground and placed rocks to form different shapes.
As the children played, an elder, stooped and leathery, walked along the shore, wearing men’s clothing that hung loosely on her tiny frame. She was collecting things in her basket. Seeing their game, she walked, looked down at what they’d done, and asked, “Who taught you this here?”
“We’re just playing,” Gator had said.
She’d looked him dead in the eye. “You can see, can’t you?”
Creed had thought that was an odd question because Gator—Jean Marie back then—had two eyes and was looking right at her.
Then she pointed at Auralia and then him, “Your visions are hazy; his are clearer.” She swung a gnarled finger around to point out the rest of their siblings, “The rest of you all didn’t come natural to the gift—a pity and a blessing as everything is like a coin, it has two sides.
” They were all kind of spooked. She told the twins to get out of the circle.
Then she picked through her basket, found three stones, and added them to the design.
When she finished, the wind picked up, the leaves turned to show their undersides, and dark clouds moved in from the Gulf.
“We need the rain.” She turned to Gator, “Leave your work in place until after the storm passes, then give the elements back to the water. And be careful playing at things you don’t understand. ”
Then, she walked away.
All eight kids tore back to the Rochambeau cabin like they were on fire and dove under the covers on the kids’ bed. And that’s how Mamma Rochambeau found them when the rain started, and she came in from the garden.
They told her the tale and described the woman.
“That was PittyPat Brown. You described her very well.” Creed had never heard of PittyPat Brown, but he tucked her name away.
Mamma Rochambeau looked hard at Gator, “She said you could see clearly? Creed and Auralia could see hazy? But she said the rest of you couldn’t see?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Auralia said. “But I see fine. Creed says he sees fine, too. And then she said the twins and Genevieve couldn’t see at all. That seems mean, doesn’t it, Mamma? I mean, of course, they can see.”
The storm was raging, and Mama Rochambeau opened the windows so she could pull the shutters closed and latch them. “Miss PittyPat has her own way of speaking. She’s old.”
That night, Creed asked his Mémère if she had any idea who Miss PittyPat was. He thought he knew everyone within walking distance.
“Where’d you hear that name, Honoré?”
“Mamma Rochambeau said it.” And he told her his story.
“Well, Miss PittyPat is long from this world. She died before any of you were born. She was a healer in these parts. And she was my midwife when I gave birth to your mamma.”
“Dead then?” Creed asked. And it felt very true and not at all strange that a ghost would walk down the beach and offer them her insights.
In their little neck of the woods, he never again saw the woman with the gathering basket. And that tale was just one of many such tales that filled Creed’s childhood.
But that one stuck out to him because it was so very true.
Creed and Auralia had astigmatic psychic vision, but Gator could sometimes sense things as clear as day.
How was it that he and Auralia could believe that Gator wouldn’t sense that they were a couple and had fallen in love?
It had to have been a love spell that kept them convinced that they could choose when they’d tell the world about their feelings.
Gator’s response today was not how Creed had seen things playing out.
But looking back?
Yeah.
Stupidly, willfully blind to think that they had space and time, and a choice.
Watching Deep jog across the field, Creed remembered the day when that might have changed everything about Deep’s life span.
Creed, Gator, and Deep were heading outside the wire when the Raiders were moving out on a mission. Creed and Gator often compared notes before they left the base, leaning heavily on things that they read in the ether alongside data they could gather from conventional sources.
That morning, Gator had seemed off his game.
He kept staring over at Deep with conflict in his eyes.
Since back when Creed and Gator hunted the swamps together, they’d learned to have whole conversations with a glance.
Creed took advantage of that skill, shooting a thought to Gator, “Deep deserves to know.” Know what?
Creed had no clue beyond a sense that Deep’s life was about to change.
Gator nodded and turned to Deep. “Hey, man, I’m not trying to jinx you nor nothin’. But today, I need you to listen to your gut. If you hear a whisper, you feel an inclination, act on it without thought nor hesitation.”
And sure enough, Deep later told them the story of how he’d felt someone grab hold of his chin and turn his head in time for him to see a grenade lying at his feet. He threw his hands over his head and dove out the door.
Not soon enough to stay whole.
But the reflex bought him enough distance that the doctors could piece Deep back together. Over time, he regained his tactical capacity to the point where he could function on Strike Force.
Deep brought Gator onto his team.
And this year, Gator and Deep both stood up for Creed when he threw his name in the ring to get one of the coveted spots on Cerberus Team Charlie.
What did Gator know about that day that made him send the vests to the women?
Creed made his way over to Gator, framing their conversation as a fact-finding mission.
He simply wanted to know how Gator saw today’s events spinning out, rather than an intrusion into Auralia’s capabilities as a reporter.
“Hey,” he lifted his chin to catch Gator’s attention.
“I wanted to talk to you about your gifts for Auralia and Doli. You picking up something different from me?”
“What have you got?” Gator asked.
Creed looked off at the distant sky that looked like it might be juicing up for a fight. There was a storm on the radar up in the mountains, and it was supposed to reach the dell well after today’s event.
“I woke up smelling smoke,” Creed recalled. “Last night, my dreams were about a whole lot of banging around, metal on metal – more like pots and pans and less about ammunition.”
“Tell me about the smoke. Do you remember the smell? Was it gun smoke?” Gator asked.
“Acrid. I’d say that in my half-sleep, I was thinking about a big old bonfire back home.” Creed looked over Gator’s shoulder and scanned the tree line. He had Gator’s six; it was a habit of war that he didn’t feel a need to change. “The vests?”
“Hard to say. I feel like Auralia and Doli need something protective around them, like I want to wrap a big ol’ mattress around them, but that don’t make no darn sense. I wanted to ask my friend Lynx, but she weren’t around. I may try and reach out to her again if we get a lull.”
Creed had heard tales of Lynx since back when Gator first got going with Strike Force.
She had started out under their protection after an attack that left her as the only survivor of a serial killer.
She’d seen the man, and since she was the only witness, the FBI had gone the extra mile to keep her safe.
Then other stories sifted into their conversations, about how she could snatch ideas from the ether and solve crimes and mysteries, grabbing the answers as if out of thin air.
But the tale that Gator told Creed one dark night camping in the back woods, just the two of them like old times, was the tale of how he met his now-wife D-Day and how Lynx had saved them from half a world away because she could link up to Gator and wear him like a coat.
Now, the linking-up thing, Creed had only heard about when the veil between the worlds was thin—Halloween and new moons, when hoodoo magic was incanted and floated like incense through the air.
Creed believed in psychic connections. His mamma seemed like she’d had some part of herself tethered to her children and knew what they were up to even when she had to leave the house to go to the laundromat or run errands.
And Creed seemed to have some kind of connection with Auralia, like when he reached for his phone to call her, and it rang with her on the line.
Or when Auralia was thinking about pizza all day, and he got a craving and decided to pick one up.
It was the “I love you, we’re on the same wavelength” kind of connection.
Did he want more?
Maybe. Sometimes. Much of the time, it would be problematic. They both had hazardous jobs; living in someone else's emotional sensory space could be distracting and dangerous.
Creed would take what he could get, especially when it came to keeping loved ones safe from harm.
He was, for sure, picking up something now, a low hum just over the horizon.
With the ether, at times, he knew as clearly as Rougarou did when someone had come strapped.
And sometimes it was as muddy as the Mississippi, where the crawdads burrowed deep.
Creed looked down and told Rou, “All I know is that you and me need to be ready for damned near anything to happen today.”