Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [67]
“Pair the men,” Lagar said. “From now on, nobody stands watch or goes anywhere alone. Send Chrisom to town and have them buy some ervaurg traps.”
“The nest kind or the shredders?”
“The shredders.” There was no need to be subtle. “Put a shooter up in the attic to cover the garden, make three teams of two, and comb it. Let’s see if we can find that rifle. After you’re done searching, trap the place.”
Lagar waved him off, and Chad departed at a brisk run. Lagar crouched by the tracks and spread his hand, measuring the distance between the scratches. The front paws were almost ten inches across. Lagar moved into the thicket. There it was, the deep indentations, marking a place where an animal had crouched. He glanced back to the claw marks. Seven and a half yards.
He touched the edges of the paw prints and dipped his fingers into the imprint to measure its depth. Round, thick fingers. If this was a cat, then it was male, four yards long and weighing near seven hundred pounds. His mind struggled to picture an animal that large. Was it something from the Weird? Why did it come here?
Lagar walked out of the thickets and rubbed the claw marks with the sole of his boot until only slick mud remained. Panic was the last thing they needed.
He paused before reaching the porch, stopping where mud had been churned by many feet two weeks ago. The rain had obliterated the tracks. They had taken Gustave down here. He fought for his freedom, fought for his wife, but he lost.
Lagar tugged at a loose strand of hair, thinking of the way Gustave looked when the web spawned by the Hand’s magic finally let them wrestle the sword from his fingers. It had been a sweet sight, Gustave helpless in his fury, but they paid for it with four of their men.
Four men who worked for him. He knew their families. He gave their wives money for their dead husbands. The way Emilia Cook looked at him when he gave her her cut made him want to drown himself. Like he was the scum of the earth.
A crazy thought danced in his mind. Walk away, abandon the manor, leave the Mire, and go someplace new, where nobody knew him. He was barely twenty-eight.
Lagar hunched his shoulders. A sardonic smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He had paid too much for this false diamond. Like a runner who had given all of himself to the race, he had reached his finish line but found he couldn’t stop.
The sound of a horse at full gallop startled him. He ran to the porch in time to see Arig shoot by him on a gray gelding.
“Lagar!”
Unable to stop the horse, his brother circled the house, slowing down, and leaped to the ground, red-faced and huffing.
“What?”
“Mom says you got to go out in the swamp. Something happened to Peva.”
WILLIAM sat at the bow, as far away from the corpse of the hunter as the length of the boat would allow. Why she insisted on dragging it with them was beyond him. He’d asked her about it, and she’d smiled and told him it was a present for her aunt.
Maybe her aunt was a cannibal.
The rolpie pulled with steady force. There was a serene, almost severe beauty to the fog-smothered swamp, a kind of somber, primeval elegance. The haze obscured the chaotic vegetation, filtering it to individual congregations of plants. Isolated groups of cypresses adorned with maiden hair moss loomed out of the fog and sank back into it as the boat passed them. The water resembled quicksilver, a glossy, highly reflective surface that masked the pitch-black depth.
“Is it deep here?” William wondered.
“No. Looks that way because of the peat in the bottom.”
Magic brushed against him, like a gentle feather. “What’s that?”
Cerise smiled. “A marker. We’re on my family’s land, getting close to the house. We’ve got the house and some outlying land warded. Good wards, old, rooted into the soil. They don’t go very far, though.”
He squinted at the shore. A large gray rock sat at the edge of the water, about two feet tall and a foot wide. An identical pale stone sat halfway in the water. Ward stones. He’d seen them before: magic connected them like mushrooms in a mushroom ring,