Somewhere south of Mansfield the road stopped being a road and became a levee with asphalt on it.
Cypress came up on both sides, knee-deep in standing water, hung with moss that moved when nothing else did.
The dark out here was wet and green and total, a dark the highway department had never gotten around to arguing with, and the headlights only made a tunnel through it about ninety feet long.
Frogs the whole way.
A heron went up out of the ditch and crossed the beams and was gone.
The Sheriff’s dismissal was still cold on the back of his neck.
That was the thing he kept turning over, mile after mile.
Not the throne, not the pressure, not the century-old blonde who’d told him not to die.
The dismissal.
Eric had spent maybe ninety seconds on him and had gotten everything he wanted in the first thirty, and the remaining sixty had been the elder equivalent of tapping a wall to hear whether it was hollow.
Then the tapping had stopped, because the wall had rung solid and boring, and a bored elder was the safest thing a fledgling could stand in front of.
Underneath that, the hunger was awake.
Not the ordinary one.
He’d fed two nights ago and the ordinary one was quiet.
This was the other, the deeper channel the girl with the ankh had opened and failed to fill, and about forty minutes out of Shreveport it had begun to lean.
He’d have called it imagination if he hadn’t spent his whole first life learning to trust the thing under his ribs that noticed patterns before his mouth could name them.
It leaned.
When the road bent east it eased off.
When the road bent south and west it drew tighter, a pull with a direction and a distance, and by the time he passed the sign for Bon Temps it was no longer subtle at all.
Boudreau’s was a failing juke joint at the edge of town, off the parish road, with a gravel and mud lot and one porch light doing all the work.
The sign said BOUDREAU’S in letters somebody had painted by hand, once, and never gone back to.
There were four vehicles in the lot and two of them had been there long enough for the weeds to reach the axles.
Through the screen door he could hear a jukebox playing zydeco to an audience that turned out, when he came in, to be three men at the far end of the bar who didn’t look up.
He’d stepped out of the car and it had hit him before the door swung shut.
Blood, and not human blood.
Or human, but with something else in the middle of it, running through it in a bright thread.
The scent had a sound.
That made no sense and he had no better description for it, and standing on the gravel with his hand on the car door he’d caught himself listening to a smell, a high clear note held under the mud and the beer and the fryer grease.
The hunger came off its chain and went straight up into his teeth and stopped there, aimed at the doorway, and holding it back had been harder than anything since the cellar.
He held it back.
He walked in like a man who wanted a beer.
The woman behind the bar looked up when the screen door banged.
Mid-twenties.
Dark hair pushed back off her face, a bar rag over one shoulder, forearms a shade too muscled for the work.
She wasn’t guarded.
That was the first thing wrong with her, and it took him a second to understand that the openness was itself a technique, worn on purpose by somebody who had been in rooms with predators her entire life and had learned that the surest way to survive one was to give it nothing to trigger against.
She didn’t reach under the bar.
She didn’t step back.
She read him in the two seconds it took him to cross the floor and she came up with an answer, and the answer didn’t frighten her.
“You’re a long way from New Orleans,” she said.
“How do you get New Orleans?”
“The plates.
And you drive like a man who’s never had to reverse out of a ditch.” She flipped the rag off her shoulder and wiped a ring off the wood.
“Also you came in and you didn’t look at the room.
Everybody looks at the room.
You already knew there were three of them and where they were.”
“I had an errand.
Shreveport. This story is hosted at g.com.
I’m on my way back.”
“Nobody stops at a juke joint in Bon Temps unless they’re lost or looking for something.” She leaned on the bar with both forearms, close enough that the note in her went from a sound to a pressure.
“Which one are you?”
“Neither.
Just passing through.”
He sat down on the stool.
It was the single hardest physical act of his short second life.
Sitting put him at her level, put his face eighteen inches from the inside of her wrist, put the whole bright singing thread of her within reach of a hand that could move faster than she could see it move.
Every part of him agreed on what came next.
The bar.
The three men who wouldn’t reach their feet in time.
Ninety seconds and a drive.
He crossed his hands on the wood and left them there.
“Can I get you something?
We don’t serve blood.” She said it plainly, no apology in it.
“Just beer.
And the beer’s not great.”
“Beer’s fine.”
“Suit yourself.”
She put the bottle in front of him and he wrapped his hand around it and drank, and it was wet and cold and had no taste whatsoever, which was the point.
A man with something in his mouth is a man not doing anything else with it.
He drank a beer he couldn’t taste to keep from drinking something he might not be able to stop drinking, and she watched him do it with her head tilted, alert, not running.
She wouldn’t run.
He understood that clearly.
A deer that runs makes a wolf into a wolf, and this one had grown up knowing it, and staying put was the only move on the board that kept him a guest instead of a predator.
The zydeco record ended.
Another one started.
“You’re not like the others,” she said.
“Others.”
“The vampires who come through here.
There’s maybe one a month, and they’re all the same animal.” She began stacking glasses without looking at them.
“They don’t sit at the bar.
They stand in the middle of the floor so everybody can appreciate them.
They don’t order beer, because ordering something means admitting there’s a thing you can’t have.
And they never, ever leave tips.”
Her eyes went to the bills he’d put on the counter.
“So,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“Is that a question you ask all of them?”
“I don’t have to ask the rest of them.
They announce it.” She set a glass on the stack and started another.
“They come in and they stand there and inside of a minute you know exactly how they mean the evening to go.
It’s almost restful.
You know where you are with a man who tells you what he’s going to do.”
“And you’re not restful with me.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“I’m not anything with you yet.” She looked up.
“You haven’t asked me a single question.”
“No.”
“Everybody asks me something.
Where’s the good bar, where’s the motel, what’s a girl doing running a place like this.” She flicked the rag once.
“You’ve been sitting there twelve minutes and you’ve asked me exactly nothing, which is either manners or it’s the other thing.”
He turned the bottle a half circle on the wood.
The honest answer was that he wanted to know what she was, because whatever ran in her was the first thing since he’d opened his eyes dead that had promised the hole in him could be filled instead of topped up.
The honest answer was that she was a rung.
The first one he’d found, sitting in a failing bar in a town with one stoplight, wiping down a counter and asking him a fair question.
The honest answer would end with her dead, or with her gone, or with word going to somebody who’d take her off the board before he was strong enough to hold a board at all.
“Nothing,” he said, and stood.
“Not yet.”
“That’s a hell of an answer.”
“It’s the true part of one.” He put another bill under the empty bottle, because a man who tips twice is a man who intends to come back and wants it on the record.
“I’ll be back.”
“Well.” She picked up the bottle and didn’t pick up the money.
“I’m Reni.
It’s on the sign, but people don’t read the sign.”
“Caleb.”
“Drive slow, Caleb.
The deer out here are suicidal.”
The screen door banged and the bayou closed over him, wet and green and loud with frogs, and the pull stretched thin behind him and didn’t break the whole way to the car.
He sat with his hands on the wheel and did the arithmetic one more time, the same arithmetic, and got the same answer he’d gotten inside.
Not while Vivienne still believed the leash was fastened.
Not while the Sheriff’s shadow lay flat across every mile of Area 5.
Not while he was, provably, the weakest thing in every room he walked into.
He backed out over the gravel with the porch light shrinking in the mirror, and turned south, and drove.
Streets talk.
Want the next move before the cops, the heroes, or anyone else?
The Syndicate reads first.
Hustler.
$5.
Twelve chapters ahead.
Enforcer.
$9.
Nineteen chapters ahead.
Kingpin.
$15.
Twenty-six chapters ahead.
Drops are periodic.
Schedule’s on the page.
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P.S.
— there’s a back alley where the rest of this story runs cold and free.
address: unwrittenrealm.com.
you know what to do.