Belle let the truck roll down the hill then pulled off the road and stopped. I grabbed the jerry can and climbed out. Maybe it was simply a case of me getting weaker, but the damn thing seemed heavier than before.
I walked across to the wire fence, shoved the jerry can onto the other side, and then carefully pressed down a strand of barbed wire and climbed through. Belle grabbed the rope from the back of the truck and then followed.
“Is that dam going to be deep enough?” she said, uncertainty in her voice.
I studied the exposed banks and muddy water for a second. “If it was used as a swimming hole in the past, it has to be fairly deep. With any sort of luck, there’ll be at least six feet of water in the middle section.”
“Good,” Belle said, “because in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a whole lot of heat radiating from that jerry can, and I rather suspect it means the spells are failing. Rapidly.”
“I suspect you’re right.” My voice was grim. “That’s why the deeper that dam is, the better it’ll be. The soucouyant may be agitated, but I doubt it’d be stupid enough to melt the one thing that’s protecting it.”
“Unless it hasn’t the capacity to sense water.”
“Oh, I think it has. It didn’t start getting active again until Monty dragged it out of the water.”
Belle frowned at me. “How do you know it wasn’t active in the water, given the water would have been cooling the container as fast as the soucouyant was heating it?”
A smile twisted my lips. “Guess.”
Belle grimaced. “The wild magic?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Sensible people would just salt this thing now and be done with it.”
“Except if they don’t find the other soucouyant on that farm, we may still need this one to track it.”
We walked up the dam’s bank and stopped at the top. “We’re going to need something to weigh it down,” I said. “Otherwise it might just float.”
“Not much in the way of rocks around here.” Belle paused. “What about a thick tree branch?”
“That’ll do.”
While Belle went to retrieve one, I walked around the bank to the jetty. Close up, it looked in even worse shape, but the water was at least darker toward the end of it, suggesting it was deep.
Belle came back with a thick tree branch. We looped the rope around it to secure it, then I carefully made my way onto the jetty. The wood creaked and groaned under my weight and at every step felt like it might just collapse. It didn’t, thankfully. I knelt, dropped the soucouyant into the water and then, once it had sunk, tied the rope to one of the struts, out of the immediate sight of anyone who might wander by.
I was making my way back along the jetty when the blast of energy hit and sent me stumbling. Belle swore and lunged forward, grabbing my arm before I tipped into the water, then hauling me back to the safety of the bank.
But the blast hadn’t come from our soucouyant.
It had a more distant feel than that.
I swung around, fear clawing at my gut. And saw a huge fireball erupt skyward—one that came from the area where Aiden and the others were.
Ten
“No!” The denial was torn from my throat.
Belle didn’t say anything. She just grabbed my hand, forcing me into motion when my mind and my limbs seemed frozen. She lifted the barbed wire, helped me through, and all but tossed me into the truck.
As the engine roared to life, I took a deep breath and tried to think. To feel.
And what I didn’t feel was despair.