14. Bayou Rules
Chapter fourteen
Bayou Rules
Eli was at the kitchen table when the bond shifted weight.
He set the pen down before he finished the sentence he was writing. The tremor in his off-hand had reached the point where the pen had stopped doing what he was telling it to do. He laid both hands flat on the cypress, palms down, and let the tremor settle.
The silver thread eased a quarter degree. It didn’t go quiet. It went blurry.
A bond was supposed to come through clean, a single clear note one could lay a finger on and know the other person by. This one had a hand pressed over its mouth.
Marcus was moving her again.
Across the table, Tara’s pen stopped midway through the protection pattern she’d been absentmindedly drawing.
“What is it?” she said.
“He’s moving her.”
Celie sat at the head of the table with one hand resting against the rim of the black scrying bowl Miss Delphine had brought out earlier. Her eyes stayed closed while the rest of the kitchen waited.
“East a little,” she said quietly. “Closer to water.”
Eli leaned over the Louisiana map. “South-southeast?”
“Mm.”
“How far?”
“Fifty miles, maybe. Sixty.”
Eli dragged the coastline map free from beneath a pile of notes. The tremor in his hand showed worse now that he was tired.
Tara reached across the table automatically and steadied the papers before they could slide.
Eli glanced at her once, then bent over the map and marked the new location.
***
By noon, nobody had left the kitchen in hours.
Around five that morning, Eli had finally said the thing none of them wanted to hear.
“We can’t break her out blind.”
Silence after that.
Then:
“She has to help us.”
So the work changed.
Eli sat hunched over a spread of journals and loose pages, trying to build something that could hold onto the sigil he’d pressed into Serena’s palm in the grove. A trail. A tether. Something that would stay with her no matter where Marcus moved her next.
Glenn’s notebooks were stacked at his left elbow.
Three of them. The smallest bound in cracked leather, the other two cloth-covered and water-stained from the fireproofed lockbox Bodie’s men had pulled out of the smokehouse the night after the fire.
Eli had been reading them since Bodie set them on the cypress.
What he was reading kept widening. Glenn had not been a one-off corrupted wolf.
Glenn had been documenting decades of his own modifications, the warlocks who had taught him, and the Beaumont names that ran through every margin.
Marcus was in three of the notebooks under three different aliases across more than nine decades.
The tremor in his left hand had gotten worse as the morning dragged on.
Across from him, Tara sketched stabilizing patterns across butcher paper with quick, confident strokes of chalk.
Eli kept watching her hands while pretending not to.
He’d spent years reading about bayou work in fragments and half-translated notes. Tara moved through it from memory. No hesitation. No second-guessing.
At the head of the table, Celie sat motionless with one hand against the black bowl. Her breathing had gone slow and steady hours ago.
Beside her, Miss Delphine turned pages in a small leather book and whispered into the quiet whenever Serena reached strongly enough through the bond to hear them clearly.
Names. Old ones.
Things the shadows around Serena might answer to.
Eli hadn’t found the right one yet.
Mel drifted through the kitchen every other hour like clockwork.
***
Miss Delphine left Celie’s shoulder at noon.
She came around the table to stand across from Eli. She set her book down at his left elbow, closed. She did not sit. She waited.
He pushed his glasses up with the knuckle of his off-hand
“Eli, honey.” she said.
“Miss Delphine.”
“Step out with me.”
He looked across the table at Tara. Tara looked back without moving her hand from the chalk. He set the pen down and stood up.
His knees weren’t his most reliable thing this morning.
Miss Delphine took him to the back porch.
She closed the screen door behind them, slow. The latch caught with the small click his mother’s screen door always made. The morning had come up hot and damp. The cicadas were screaming the high, sustained note of their song when the heat was about to break.
Miss Delphine set the book down on the porch rail and looked at him over the rim of her glasses.
“The shadows Serena carries have a name, and I think you know it.”
Eli stayed still.
He did know. The evidence was overwhelming.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
Miss Delphine studied him for a moment.
“And the others?”
Eli’s jaw tightened.
“Not yet.”
She nodded once like she’d expected that answer.
“You planning to tell her?”
That landed harder.
Eli looked out past the porch into the preserve before answering.
“When she’s safe.”
“Mm.”
Miss Delphine picked up the book again, fingers resting lightly against the worn cover.
“It’s her story to know, Eli. And hers to share after that.”
“I know.”
“I won’t speak of it again, but there may come a time when it should be known to some.”
The tension in Eli’s shoulders eased slightly.
Miss Delphine noticed. Of course she did.
“You cannot carry it for her forever,” she said more gently. “That girl deserves the truth about herself from someone who loves her.”
Eli swallowed once.
“Yes, I know.”
She touched his forearm briefly before stepping back toward the screen door.
“You should eat somethin’. And stop tryin’ to pretend that hand isn’t getting worse.”
Her eyes flicked once toward the kitchen behind him.
“Let Tara help you with the mapping before your fingers stop cooperating altogether.”
Then she disappeared back inside.
Eli stayed at the porch rail a moment longer while the cicadas screamed in the trees.
Then he followed her back into the house.
***
Tara had moved one chair over.
A clean piece of paper sat at his place. A fresh pen with the thinner nib he used for rune-trailing by hand. His coffee had moved from the right side of the table to the left.
She didn’t comment. He didn’t either.
He picked the pen up with his off-hand because he wanted to know whether the off-hand was going to take it. The off-hand took it for three strokes before the tremor came back.
Tara’s hand came over and rested on his hand with the pen without taking it from him.
“Bayou rules,” she said. Quiet.
“Mmm. yes, bayou rules.”
She didn’t take the pen out of his hand. She just held her hand over his. The tremor eased back into the bone.
Their fingers brushed once when she shifted to give him room.
He didn’t lift his eyes. She didn’t either.
The work resumed.
***
The screen door opened softly behind him.
Bodie stepped into the kitchen, easing the door shut.
Eli looked up automatically.
Bodie nodded once at him before looking past him toward Rowena.
“Rowena.”
“Bodie.”
She didn’t look up from the bowl she was working over at the counter.
“On the porch?” Bodie asked.
Rowena rinsed her hands in the sink and dried them on the towel hanging off the oven handle.
Then she walked past both men and out through the screen door without another word.
Eli watched the door swing shut behind them.
He stayed where he was.
Outside, Bodie leaned against the porch rail while Rowena stood facing him with her arms folded. Their voices stayed low enough that Eli couldn’t make out words through the window over the sink, but he recognized the rhythm of his mother listening.
Bodie ran his fingers through his hair.
Something had happened.
Something Rowena hadn’t shared with the rest of them yet.
After a few minutes, the screen door opened again.
Rowena came back into the kitchen first.
Bodie stayed outside.
She crossed to the counter and picked the cloth back up from beside the bowl, like she’d only stepped away for a second.
Eli watched her hands for a moment.
“Cypress edge?” he asked, eventually.
Rowena glanced at him. Not surprised he’d figured that much out.
“Cypress edge,” she said. “A Beaumont sat on the south line for a good hot minute today. Mel made him. He stayed clear of the new wards I added. He knew they were there.”
Eli sat forward.
“The new ones.”
“The new ones.”
“Knew them how.”
“That’s the question Bodie is going to bring us an answer to. Guesses won’t do us any good here.”
“Why are they so interested in what happens with Serena?”
She adjusted the cloth over the bowl carefully before adding, quieter now, “I’m not sure they are.”
Eli went still.
Silence stretched briefly between them.
“Okay,” Eli said finally.
Rowena studied him for another second as if she expected an argument.
He didn’t give her one.
After a moment, she nodded once and went back to her work.
Eli looked down at the ledger again, though his attention stayed fixed on the conversation still waiting somewhere out past the porch rail.
***
The thread went out a little after dark.
Eli was alone at the table when it happened; the others gone to whatever rest they could find.
One breath, the silver was there, smeared and faint but there, the dim certainty of her he had been holding for days.
The next breath, it was gone. Not muffled.
Gone, the way a radio drops to static when the station quits, and his whole body was up out of the chair before his mind had named the fear.
He stood in the dark kitchen with his hand flat to his sternum and reached down the thread into nothing.
Three seconds. Four. Long enough to learn what four seconds of nothing did to a man.
Long enough to understand, in a cold clear way that had nothing to do with the maps spread across the table, that a night was coming when the thread would go quiet and not come back, and that no amount of careful work was going to outrun a warlock who could decide to be finished with her between one of Eli’s heartbeats and the next.
Then it came back. Faint. Frayed. Hers.
Eli sat down very slowly. He did not wake the house.
He pulled the map toward him with his good hand, and the thing the four seconds had burned into him was not despair.
It was a number. They did not have the week they had been quietly telling themselves they had.
They had days, maybe, and the warlock got to decide how many.
He picked up the pen. The tremor was bad. He wrote anyway.