Nonetheless, I woke up way earlier than usual the next day, just as morning rays of light were cracking over the city skyline.
One year, seven months, and six days to go.
The last time I was awake to see the sun come up was three years ago, after I spent all night working up courage I didn’t need because the gun I’d stolen from my captor’s desk was unloaded.
Hades finally walked through the suite door, interrupting that morbid thought. And he was dressed in an outfit that made me double-take.
Was he….was he wearing cargo shorts and a white t-shirt?
I sat up in bed because I’d never seen Hades in anything outside of black-on-black-on-top-of-more-black.
But yes, that was exactly what he was wearing!
And even more surprising than that, he tossed a muslin Free People shopping tote at me, the contents of which made my heart stop: underwear, festival shorts, an athletic bra, and oh, my God, a t-shirt! An actual tattoo-covering t-shirt!
I didn’t know whether to scream for joy or be very, very worried that this was another installment of his especially cruel brand of punishment.
“Get dressed,” Hades ordered before I could decide either way. “I want to get there before noon.”
Okay….but where was “there.”
In the end, I neither shouted nor screamed. I reverted to my usual setting: quietly doing exactly as Hades told me. I kept all my thrill and worry to myself.
Smart Elephant.
I found another surprise waiting when we went downstairs to the parking garage. Derelict, idling in a black Ford F-350 I’d never seen before. But if Derelict had driven it all the way up here, it had to be from Hades’s private collection of cars.
Alarm bells clattered in my head as Hades exchanged keys with his minion, and Derelict drove off on Hades’s custom black-on-black Harley.
Smart elephants don’t ask….
But I really, really wanted to ask.
Especially eight hours later when we pulled up to a dock, instead of his New Orleans night club mansion. And I spotted something featured all over travel ads for New Orleans, but that I’d never actually seen before.
A swamp boat. And not a nice one, either—if swamp boats could ever be described as nice. Unlike the ones in the ads, this one consisted of a giant corroded aluminum flat-bottom boat with a huge back fan and four cracked leather car seats with cupholders, of all things.
And smart elephant…but no, no, I was still a Louisiana Black girl in a bayou I could not name if you showed it to me on a map. The words burst out of my mouth before I could stop them. “What’s this? Where are you taking me?”
Hades’s lips thinned in a way that made me suspect he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said, “Home. I’m taking you home.”
Home?
How many times as a child had I begged Mama Fairgood to take me home with her? So many apologetic nos from her had piled up over the years that I’d come to think of the place she disappeared to when she wasn’t with me as a sort of Shangri-La. A secret place where I wasn’t allowed.
I wasn’t a child any longer, but some dreams never die. I climbed into the homemade swamp boat.
Twenty minutes of bayou travel later, we pulled up to the magical place Mama Fairgood used to go when she wasn’t with me. The home of Swamp Boy.
It was nicer than I thought it would be. A whole lot nicer. A mid-sized Acadian-style house made of dark wood with a steep-sloped tin roof and darling log shutter windows. It stood so high up on stilts, you could have parked a truck underneath it outside of flooding season. Was this where the F-350 I’d never seen had been living?
“I spent all my off time renovating it after Waylon and me started the Reapers,” Hades explained off my confused look. “And I used to come out here once or twice a year with Derelict and Jam to fix it up before…”
He trailed off, but I could guess the rest. Before me.
He threw the overnight bag Derelict must have packed onto the well-maintained dock. Then held out a hand to help me out of the boat.
“You wanna take those inside while I tie up the boat?” he asked.
