When I was outside, I climbed halfway down the steps and plopped myself in the middle of the yurt’s staircase, shifting Kappa from my hip to my knees as I did.
I looked him in the eyes. “You are one heavy little sucker. You know that?”
He tilted his head. “Okay?”
“Huh?”
“Are you okay?”
That was a new one. Kappa usually asked if I was sad, angry, or happy. He knew about emotions—at least the basic ones—but I couldn’t remember him ever asking a generalized question about how I was doing.
Of course, he’d heard Conrad say it only a second ago. That was probably where he’d gotten it from.
Good to know that I’d managed to make both my friends worry about me.
Kappa saw my grimace and tilted his head further, craning it like a confused dog.
I laughed and flicked the fin on the side of his head that was pointing almost straight up. “Watch it, buddy. You’re going to break your neck if you torque it any further.”
When he heard me laugh, Kappa’s small shoulders relaxed and he wiggled his webbed toes.
“I’m okay,” I assured him. “I’m just…being silly.”
“Silly how?”
I could understand his confusion. My silly was usually a lot more fun than this.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I feel better now.” Sort of, I added in my head. “Do you want to go play in the water?”
Kappa bounced on my lap. “Yes.”
“You have to stay nearby.”
“Kay!”
“And come when I call you!”
“Kay!”
He stood up on my lap and did one of his amazing flying leaps that seemed to defy every known law of physics. He landed on the bottom of the shallow hill, then scampered into the water, disappearing with barely a splash.
I fixed my eyes on him, trying to keep track of where he was for as long as I could.
The blue of his skin was easier to spot in the water than the green patches on his head.
Was that why the lurkers didn’t tolerate the mutation? Was imperfect camouflage somehow a threat to their colony? Or did they just hate anyone who was different?
Hot lines of rage and sorrow sailed up my chest toward my head.
I took several deep breaths. I had to get those emotions under control before Conrad came out. I didn’t want him to smell me like that.
It was true that I didn’t like the idea that Kappa had been kicked out of his colony because of something he had no control over, but that wasn’t the main reason I was stuck on the steps of the yurt, forcing myself to control my breathing, while the April breeze chilled my wet clothes.
I hadn’t been triggered like that for a long time. It’d take a while for me to calm down.
And in the meantime, the woman who’d triggered me was inside the yurt, getting all chummy with my packmate.
“Come on, Emerra,” I muttered under my breath. “Don’t be like that.”
Ayla had said the wrong thing to me, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings, and it was a reasonable question. If I was in her place, I would’ve expected them to bring in an expert who could get things done. Anyone who was hoping for someone like that was bound to be confused when they met me.
And there was nothing wrong with someone being friendly to Conrad! Not one darn, stupid, idiotic thing! Sure, it had surprised me, but that was only because most people were scared of him. Ayla Davids was a Torr naturalist. She’d probably met lots of lycanthropes.
And I’ll bet Conrad liked meeting someone who wasn’t afraid.
My stomach soured.
I closed my eyes, rested my head on my fingertips, and scrunched them around a bit to massage my forehead.
It was going to be a long day.
When the door opened, I launched to my feet and stepped to the side of the stairs. Looking behind me, I saw Brodie standing on the top step with the door knob still in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I forced a smile. It made my cheeks hurt. “No. It’s fine. It startled me. That’s all.”
Brodie shut the door and came down toward me, stopping on the step above mine. He nodded toward the swamp.
“Is Kappa out there?” he asked.
My eyes scanned the surface of the water, searching for the two black bubbles of Kappa’s eyes. He was watching us.
“There he is.” I waved to him.
A tiny blue-green-brown hand emerged from the water and waved back.
Brodie returned the gesture. “Incredible.”
This time my smile was real. I sat down on the steps again, angling my body so I could split my attention between Brodie and Kappa.
“You’re right,” I said. “He is incredible.”
Brodie sat down. “How good is his vocabulary?”
“About as good as a child’s. He’ll ask you what a new word means, but you never know if he’s going to remember your answer. Sometimes it takes a few tries.”
“Does he remember how to speak his native language?”
“We didn’t even know they had a language,” I reminded him.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “we aren’t sure they do. There are two scholars racing each other to prove that the lurkers have some kind of proto-language, but it’s still only a theory.” He smiled and shook his head. “If they knew about Kappa, they’d eat themselves alive with envy.”
“Are you keeping up with their work?”
“As soon as I got this job, the Torr gave me access to everything that had been written about the lurkers. I figured I might as well read what I could since I’d be working with them for at least two years.”
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“Do you want me to tell you if I learn anything?” I waggled my eyebrows. “You could get a jump on those two scholars.”
“Maybe you should tell Ayla. She’s the scholar. I’m just a guy that knows how to do data entry.”
My smile faltered when I heard Ayla’s name. Brodie noticed. He looked away, shifted himself on the step, and cleared his throat.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so the awkward silence lingered, getting heavier every second.
“Uh, I’m sorry about what Ayla said back there,” Brodie said. “I know it sounded kind of rude, but she didn’t mean it like that. She’s not a bad person. She gets really passionate and excited about her work, and I’ve never met someone who’s so in love with knowing things and learning things.”
These points were offered in a rush, as if he was eager to prove his claim.
He went on, “It’s just…she can be a bit thoughtless sometimes.”
Some complete jerk hijacked my mouth to say, “You mean like forgetting to pick us up?”
Brodie’s cheeks went red, and he studied his shoes. “Yeah. Like that.”
I felt bad for the guy. It wasn’t like he was the one who’d forgotten us. He didn’t deserve to be snapped at like that, by me or any other jerk.
I decided to use my lie of the day. Again. “It’s fine,” I said. “The wait wasn’t too bad. I mean”—I motioned to my bog-buddy—“Kappa loved it.”
Kappa had crawled onto the slope of the hill with something in his mouth. He plopped down on his butt, spat it into his hands, inspected it, then returned it to his mouth and munched, all with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Can you imagine?” I said. “All that tasty, slimy food lying around everywhere. It must have been like heaven.”
Brodie chuckled. I smiled when I heard it.
With a shrug, I added, “And Ayla’s helping us now, so no complaints.”
“That’s good,” Brodie said. “I’m glad—and grateful! Thank you for coming out to help us.”
Kappa finished his snack, looked over his shoulder to make sure I was still there, then waded back into the water.
“Hey, Brodie,” I said, “why do you talk like it’s your problem, but Ayla doesn’t?”
The swamp was a lot quieter after the sun was up. I noticed because the only thing that broke the long silence was a distant bird call.
Brodie said, “I think that’s down to the fact that I’m a local, and she’s not. When she’s done with her project, she gets to go home. This is my home. This is my swamp. And the lurkers are a part of that. I don’t want to see any of them hurt, and I think it’d be a shame to have to move them.”
“How did you get your job?”
Brodie gazed at the thousand shades of green and gray that made up the swamp. There was a wry smile on his face. “Uhh, that takes a bit of explaining.”
“I’ve got time,” I said.
He glanced at me, then returned his eyes to the view. “When I was a young punk teenager, me and my friend decided to sneak into the preserve. There were rumors—Ayla was right about that. There are always rumors. We wanted to find the eternal feu follet—”
My ears did something strange there. I heard the words…and I heard them again, and again, and again, all at the same time, overlaid on each other—the same moment, four different ways.
“Will-o—”
“Crazy—”
“Ghost—”
I pushed my left tragus against my earhole and wiggled it around to see if I could reboot my hearing.
“One more time please?” I said.
Brodie grinned at me. “Feu follet.”
It happened again. This time I caught the words “fire” and “lights” but I couldn’t tell what to attach them to. The confusion of noise had to be coming from my gift of understanding—which, at the moment, felt more like a white elephant gift.
“Is that English?” I asked, already knowing the answer had to be no.
“That, cher, is Louisiana French. Cajun.”
Okay. And why hadn’t the gift translated “cher?” Either the darn thing was defective, or it was still struggling with the “feu follet” concept.
“It’s the ghost lights of the swamp,” Brodie said.
I recalled some of the gobbledygook I’d heard. “Will-o’-the-wisps?”
Brodie nodded.
“And there’s an eternal one?” I asked.
“There’s supposed to be. I’ve never seen it, and I’ve spent a lot of time out here, but the legends say that only some people can see it.” He put his elbows on his knees and leaned closer. “The feu follet choose you. You follow their light deeper and deeper into the swamp, and then they disappear, leaving you hopelessly lost.”
“That sounds like something I’d expect from a swamp,” I said. “Did you get lost?”
“Not before Vance found us.”
I laughed.
Brodie went on, “My friend got away, but Vance caught me and hauled me onto his Jon Boat, cussing about his back the whole time. ‘Course he knew me. Everybody knows everybody around here. He was taking a short-cut through the preserve to get me home when a lurker grabbed the edge of his boat and hauled himself up over the rim, into the lantern light. Vance stopped lecturing. I stared at it, my eyes this big.” He held his hands up around an invisible basketball. “It stared at me—eyes bigger, if anything. Then it dropped back into the water and disappeared. I looked up at Vance, trying to tell if he saw any of that or if I was crazy. He stood there, leaning on his pole.”
To imitate the grave man, Brodie shook his head with his lips pursed and a pained look on his face.
“‘Boy, you’re in trouble now,’” Brodie mimicked. His voice went back to normal. “That’s what he said to me. He took me back to his shack—”
“His shack?”
Brodie pointed in who-knows-what direction. “He has a place out on the end of the preserve, and, believe me, it’s a shack. A representative from the Torr was there the next morning.”
“And that was it for you,” I said, smiling.
“That was it for me,” he agreed. “As part of my on-going penance, I have to keep them informed about what I’m doing, so they knew I was studying computer programming. About a year ago, Mrs. Dean called and told me that the Torr had a job for me.”
“Are they allowed to do that?”
Brodie scrunched up the right side of his face as he considered the question. “I guess it was more like a job offer, but I wasn’t brave enough to refuse.”
My delight at his glorious storytelling dimmed. I didn’t like the idea of the Torr forcing people to do something they didn’t want to do. On the other hand, Brodie didn’t talk like he was a downtrodden man.
“Do you like the job?” I asked.
“Some of the time.” He looked right at me and smiled. “Most of the time, actually. Data work is data work, but I’d already signed up for that frustration, and I don’t know any other programmer who gets to work in a place like this.”
He lifted his arms, half gesturing, half embracing, all of Sauvage Preserve. His face radiated contentment.
“You really love it here, don’t you?” I said.
He let his arms fall back to his lap. “It’s like the feu follet. It only calls to some people. The people it calls to love it here. They’re comfortable. Everyone else hates it, and they try to avoid it. I’ve always been drawn to this place. So has Mrs. Carver—”
“What about Gladwyn?” I asked.
Brodie shook his head.
“Vance?”
“Let’s put it this way—I’m still a visitor. Vance and the lurkers belong here.”
A childish, dark, mean spot in my soul that couldn’t leave well enough alone made me say, “What about Ayla?”
Brodie’s smile vanished. “She doesn’t mind it—not like some people do—but I don’t think she likes it either.” He raised his eyes to the swamp again. I wondered if he was taking comfort from it. “She’ll go home in another year, and we won’t see her again unless she wants to apply for another project. While she’s away, I don’t think she’ll spare a single thought for us.”
A subtle tension had stolen into his body. The natural swaying and movement of relaxed limbs was missing, and his face was locked in a neutral expression. There was no way he was only talking about the swamp or the lurkers.
My heart broke for him.
His eyes suddenly narrowed and a slight frown appeared. “Where’s Kappa?”
Being the worrywart I am, my heart instantly clenched. My more-reasonable brain reminded me that I was looking for a bog-monster in the middle of a swamp; his camouflage was bound to make it difficult. My worried heart got custody of my eyes, while my brain got custody of my mouth.
As I scanned the surface of the water in a panic, I said in a reassuring voice, “I’m sure he’s out there.”
I called Kappa’s name. He didn’t answer.
A second passed. I stood up to get a better view. Brodie joined me.
“Oh!” Brodie pointed out to a set of black eyes lurking on the surface of the swamp. “There he is.”
I balled my hands into fists. “That’s not Kappa.”
“What?”
“That’s not Kappa. There’s no blue.”
The two black eyes sank below the surface of the swamp, leaving nothing but a set of fading ripples.
I ran up the stairs and burst into the yurt.
The moment I saw the scene inside, nine-tenths of my brain function glitched into nothingness due to shock.
Ayla and Conrad were still at the table together, but they weren’t looking at the map anymore. They were facing each other and standing unusually close together. Ayla was looking at him while touching her hair and laughing in a way that was a thousand miles beyond being friendly.
Fortunately, the last sliver of my functioning brain knew what was important, and it could roar.
“Conrad!” I cried. “They took Kappa!”
Conrad stepped toward me. “Who?”
“The lurkers! There was another one out there. I called for Kappa, but he didn’t answer. I think they took him.”
God bless my wolf-boy, I could tell by the way his expression hardened that he wasn’t going to waste a single second trying to reassure me or dismiss my concerns. He’d already accepted the situation, and he was going to act.
He turned back to Ayla.
Not the action I would have wanted. But at least his question was relevant.
“Why would they do that?” he said.
Ayla frowned. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. Are you sure—”
“Assume they did.”
Ayla blew out her breath and raised her hands in a shrug. “Like I said, it doesn’t make sense. If a stranger from another colony came into their swamp, they might take them in, but they’d normally kill someone like Kappa.”
My heart, that had been hammering a million times a minute, seized up. I stood there, unable to move from the sheer weight of my horror.
Conrad grabbed my hand, breaking me out of my immobility and tugging me toward the open door.
“We have to move,” he growled.
Ayla stepped toward us. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Don’t worry,” Conrad said without turning around. “I don’t get lost.”