River Road by Suzanne Johnson Page A

shrimp boots onboard first. He and Jean headed immediately to the wheelhouse to look at their new toy. Guys. Didn’t matter if they were alive or undead; show them something with an engine and they turned into ten-year-olds.
    I stood on the pier, forlorn and abandoned, measuring the distance between me and the deck. I was five-four on a good day. I would not be graceful or sleek. There was a good chance I would end up in the water.
    Rene stood with a wide stance and his fists propped on his hips like some sort of Cajun pirate, smirking. “Thought witches could fly, babe.”
    I gritted my teeth. “I am not a witch.” Witches were to wizards as a common black bass was to a merman. It was an insult, and he knew it.
    Chuckling, he leaned over the side with his arm outstretched. I grasped his tattooed forearm and he jerked me aboard with no obvious effort, if you didn’t count my near-dislocated shoulder. Note to remember: mers might not be the biggest fish in the wetlands, but they were werecreature-strong.
    I’d been on a boat only twice. My grandfather had tucked me into a bright orange life jacket and took me fishing one time on Smith Lake in north Alabama. I’d kept my eyes closed the whole time. Later, Gerry, who’d raised me since school age, had let me ride the swan boats at New Orleans’ City Park. Of course, both of those boat rides took place before I was ten. I was a true wizard, meaning my swimming skills were theoretical. I understood the principle, but the execution left something to be desired.
    As we set out hugging the western shore, I joined Rene, Alex, and Jean in the boat’s small, windowed wheelhouse. I was clearly the fourth wheel—the fifth, if you counted the boat’s navigational system. The guys hunkered over maps and asked Rene questions about the river, the bayous, the boat, the normal size of a redfish haul, the best time of night to shrimp, and the tricks of navigating the wetland marshes that had begun to spread around us as we left the world of automotive travel behind. I had nothing to contribute.
    I spotted a single life jacket dangling from a hook over a long bench in back of the wheelhouse. If we went down, it was mine. Jean couldn’t die, at least not permanently. He might drown, but he’d show up again in the Beyond, regain his strength, and eventually come back good as new. Rene could shapeshift into a fish, so death by drowning wasn’t likely. Alex liked the water, so he had to be a better swimmer than me.
    When Alex asked Rene how the hunting season for wild boar was going this year, I decided I’d find more scintillating conversation talking to myself. I walked to the side of the aft deck nearest the bank and watched the vegetation change from trees to tall reeds to flat marsh grass.
    “It is beautiful, is it not, Jolie ?” Jean joined me at the portside rail, watching as the tree line rose and fell, occasionally allowing a glimpse of the patchwork of land and serpentine canals and bayous around us.
    “You spent a lot of time in these waters, didn’t you?” I tried to imagine Jean in a small pirogue, smuggling contraband to and from New Orleans in this maze of waterways that made up just a small part of his empire. How strange it must be to view the world over more than two centuries, seeing what people had done right and what we’d screwed up.
    He leaned on the rail, uncharacteristically silent.
    Curious, I lowered my empathic barricades enough to take his emotional temperature. As a former human, he broadcast his feelings like a megawatt radio station. He didn’t know about that particular skill of mine, and that’s the way I wanted to keep it.
    A whisper of melancholy seeped into me. Jean was lonely, and spending time on his old stomping grounds made him feel it more acutely.
    I fingered the mojo bag in my jeans pocket and let the magic smooth his emotional fingerprint from my mind, but a residue of my own sadness remained. I didn’t know how it felt to live well