The moon hung swollen and wrong over Blanchett Graves, casting light the color of old meat left in sun. Harlan Crowe stood at the rotting dock's edge, watching cypress shadows writhe across water that moved too slow, too thick—like the bayou had swallowed something it couldn't quite digest and now lay bloated with the dead.
His skiff knocked against pilings that exhaled wood-rot and decades of stagnant water. Each gentle impact released a smell that coated the back of his throat: decomposition sweetened by swamp flowers, overlaid with something chemical and wrong. The Corruption's resin-stink, faint but persistent, like perfume applied to a corpse.
Harlan shouldered the Lebel, feeling its familiar weight settle against the bruise that never quite healed between his shoulder blades. Ten pounds of blued steel and oiled wood, the stock worn smooth by eighteen years of sweat and bayou grime. The rosary clicked softly at his hip—twenty-three teeth threaded on copper wire, each one carved from an infected skull, each one a partner he'd mercy-killed when the Corruption took them. The newest tooth, still faintly yellowed rather than aged brown, had belonged to a woman named Claudette. Three weeks ago. Cancer Alley compound. She'd begged him to do it before her eyes went full black.
He'd obliged.
The American Hunters Association safehouse squatted ahead, built on the only solid ground for miles—if you could call it solid. More like the bayou had momentarily forgotten to swallow this particular piece of earth. Gas lamps flickered in windows shuttered with iron, their light jaundiced and sickly. Harlan could hear the generator coughing in back, smell its coal-smoke cutting through the organic rot.
His boots sank in mud with obscene wet sounds as he approached. The consistency wrong—not quite liquid, not quite solid, but something in between that sucked at leather with small smacking kisses. He'd learned long ago not to lift his feet too high. Quick steps, shallow pulls. Let the bayou think you belonged to it already.
The door opened before he reached it.
Isolde Moreau stood framed in lamplight, her silhouette sharp and still as a heron hunting. She didn't acknowledge his approach, didn't turn. Just stood there with a scalpel in one gloved hand, the blade catching light in a way that made Harlan's hand drift toward his sabre's grip.
Then she stepped aside.
The safehouse interior smelled of gun oil and old tobacco, overlaid with something Harlan recognized immediately: fresh death, anatomical. On the central table, a grunt corpse lay splayed open with surgical precision. Its torso formed a grotesque flower, ribs peeled back like petals, organs arranged in careful sequence beside the body. Isolde had been cataloging them.
She returned to her work without greeting, scalpel sliding into the grunt's heart with a wet whisper. The organ contracted once, still trying to beat despite being separated from the body. Black veins pulsed beneath gray muscle tissue.
"Regarde bien," she murmured, not looking up. Her voice carried the careful enunciation of someone who'd learned English as a second language but spoke it with clinical precision. "The heart still beats, even torn out. The Corruption doesn't kill. It keeps."
Harlan grunted, moved past her to the Association board. New contracts pinned with iron tacks, each one offering blood money for horrors. Hives cleared: forty dollars. Meathead eliminated: sixty. Water devil nest burned: fifty.
And there, top center, official Association seal in red wax:
PRIORITY CONTRACT
BOUNTY: THE SPIDER
LOCATION: DESALLE MANOR RUINS
REWARD: $500 PER TOKEN (TWO AVAILABLE)
STATUS: MULTIPLE CONTRACTS ISSUED
Five hundred dollars. Harlan had never seen a bounty higher than two hundred. This thing—whatever nested in Desalle's collapsed cellar—the Association wanted it dead enough to bankrupt half the bayou's plantation owners.
Or it wanted hunters dead enough to use the money as bait.
"You taking it?" Isolde asked behind him. He heard her washing the scalpel in a tin basin, water sloshing pink.
"Might be."
"I already signed." She dried the blade on her apron—dark cloth already stained with layers of old blood, new blood, ichor, bile. A walking catalog of everything she'd dissected. "Four hours ago. Been waiting to see who else would be fool enough."
Harlan turned. She'd pulled off the gloves, revealing forearms covered in scarification—protective sigils carved deep, the kind her mother's people used to ward off loa. They hadn't worked. He knew her story the way everyone in the bayou knew stories: her mother had tried to bargain with the Corruption, believing it was Marinette-of-the-Dry-Arms awakened and hungry. The ritual failed. Her mother became the first Hive in New Orleans' Tremé, spawning grunts from her own corrupted flesh until Isolde burned the house down with her still inside.
The girl—woman now, thirty-one but with eyes older than the cypress—kept a leather pouch on her belt. Harlan had seen it before, knew what it contained: her mother's ashes mixed with Corruption resin. She'd never said why she kept it. He'd never asked.
"Partnership?" Isolde's dark eyes studied him with the same clinical detachment she'd given the grunt's organs.
"Don't do partners."
"You did. Twenty-three times." She nodded at his rosary.
"And they all died."
"Everything dies, chasseur. Question is whether you die rich or poor." She pulled a small journal from her coat—leather-bound, pages filled with cramped notation and anatomical sketches. "I want to study it. The Spider. Before it's banished. The Association reports say it speaks, remembers, weaves nightmares into flesh. If it was human once..." She trailed off, but Harlan saw the hunger in her expression. The same hunger that had driven her mother to the ritual circle.
"You want to understand the thing that killed your bloodline," Harlan said flatly.
"I want to understand the thing that is my bloodline." She closed the journal with a soft snap. "Maman dit knowledge is never poison. Only fear of it is."
Harlan should have walked away. Should have taken a lesser contract, hunted hives alone like he'd done for eighteen years. But five hundred dollars per token meant a thousand total, and a thousand dollars meant he could disappear upriver for a year, maybe two. Maybe long enough to forget the sound of children screaming from inside a cypress coffin while claws scraped the lid.
Maybe.
"Split even," he heard himself say. "You get your study time before the banish, but when I say we burn it, we burn it."
Isolde extended her hand. Her palm bore a half-healed cut, recent, ritual. "Agreed."
He didn't take the hand. Just nodded once and turned back to the board, pulling the contract free. The wax seal broke with a sound like a small bone snapping.
Behind them, the safehouse door creaked open.
Harlan's hand found the Lebel's stock before the footsteps registered—three sets, measured and confident. He didn't turn, but he heard Isolde's breath catch, saw her shadow shift toward the throwing knives at her belt.
"My dear Reaper."
The voice rolled through the room like bourbon poured over honeycomb—smooth, cultured, theatrical. Harlan closed his eyes briefly, exhaled through his nose.
Maudit.
He turned.
Dante Valcour stood in the doorway flanked by two men—fanatics with tattoos crawling up their necks, scripture and Association bounty tokens inked permanent into skin. Both carried themselves with the rigid posture of former military. Both had the too-bright eyes of true believers.
But Dante commanded the space. Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed too well for the bayou—vest and coat that probably cost more than Harlan's entire loadout. His dark hair swept back from a face that belonged on theater posters, all sharp angles and white teeth. Dual Dolch pistols rode his hips in tooled leather holsters, and a Romero Uppercut shotgun hung across his back.
He smiled when he saw Harlan, and the smile reached his eyes—which somehow made it worse.
"Still dragging that rosary of teeth?" Dante's gaze flicked to Harlan's hip. "Byron was right, you know. 'The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted.' How many of those poor souls died because you led them into the dark?"
Harlan said nothing. His fingers drummed once against the Lebel's stock—old cavalry rhythm, unconscious.
Dante's smile widened. He produced a silver flask from his vest, unscrewed it with a theatrical flourish. The smell of expensive whiskey cut through the death-stink. "Care for a drink before we dance with the devil? A toast to old times?"
"Non." Harlan's voice came out flat, final. "I drink alone."
"Pity." Dante took a pull, savoring it like communion wine. "You always were a solitary creature. Like one of those wounded animals that crawls off to die in private." He gestured with the flask toward Isolde. "And you've found yourself a witch. How delightfully gothic."
Isolde's hand drifted toward a knife, but her voice stayed level. "Anatomist. Not witch."
"Oh, I'm sure your mother would disagree. If she could still speak through all those lovely hive-mouths." Dante's eyes glittered with something that wasn't quite malice—more like anthropological curiosity about what reaction he'd provoke.
The temperature in the room dropped. Harlan saw Isolde's scarred forearms flex, saw her jaw tighten.
"The contract," one of Dante's fanatics said—the taller one, Avtomat rifle slung across his back. His voice carried the flat certainty of scripture recitation. "We require the Spider contract."
"Already taken," Isolde said.
"Fortunate, then," Dante replied, moving to the board with easy confidence, "that the Association issued multiple contracts. Seems they want this particular abomination banished so desperately they're willing to risk several teams." He pulled an identical contract from the board—same seal, same bounty. "Two tokens. Two teams. And may the best hunters extract."
He turned back to Harlan, and this time the smile carried an edge that had nothing to do with charm. "Tell me, Reaper—do you still dream about coffins? The sound of little hands scratching? I imagine it's quite loud in the dark."
Harlan's hand moved to his sabre hilt. The blackened blade whispered an inch free of its scabbard before he caught himself. Forced his fingers open. The sabre settled back with a soft click.
Dante laughed—genuinely delighted. "There he is. The killer underneath all that Cajun stoicism." He took another drink, recapped the flask, tucked it away. "We'll see you in the compounds, mon ami. Try not to die before we reach the lair. It would be so disappointing to banish the Spider without an audience."
He swept out, his fanatics falling in behind him like trained dogs. Their bootfalls faded into bayou sounds: cricket-song, distant hellhound howls, the wet breathing of water moving through reeds.
Harlan stood very still, listening to his own heartbeat, feeling the familiar weight of the Lebel across his shoulders. The familiar weight of eighteen years dragging behind every step.
"He knows you," Isolde said quietly.
"War." One word, clipped. Harlan moved toward the door, done with conversation.
"Wait." Isolde's clinical mask cracked slightly—just enough to show something underneath that might have been concern. "If he's taking the contract too..."
"Then we kill the Spider first." Harlan pushed through the door into humid night that clung like wet cloth. "Or he kills us. C'est la guerre."
The bayou exhaled around them—rot and resin, life and death fermenting together in darkness. Somewhere distant, a child's laughter floated across the water. Or maybe a hive's shriek. In the bayou, the sounds blurred together until you couldn't tell screaming from singing.
Harlan's fingers found the rosary, clicking through teeth like prayer beads. Twenty-three. Not enough. Never enough to balance the ones he'd failed to save.
"Encore une fois," he muttered to the drowned moon. One more time.
Behind him, Isolde gathered her equipment—silenced Nagant, poisoned knives, wax dynamite etched with wards that wouldn't save her any more than they'd saved her mother. The grunt corpse on the table stared at nothing with eyes gone full black, its heart finally still in the basin beside it.
The generator coughed. The gas lamps flickered.
And somewhere in the Desalle ruins, something ancient waited in its web of regrets, patient as rot, remembering every hunter who'd ever walked into the dark believing they'd walk back out.
The moon watched. The bayou breathed. The Corruption spread through veins beneath the earth, black roots drinking deep.
Harlan checked the Lebel's action—smooth, oiled, ready. Loaded five rounds of long ammo, the brass cartridges clicking home with satisfying precision. He could feel each one's weight, each one a promise of violence deferred.
Isolde finished packing her satchel, movements economical and practiced. She paused at the door, looking back at the dissected grunt.
"The veins remember everything," she said softly, almost to herself. "Every host, every kill, every mutation. It's not chaos. It's learning."
Harlan said nothing. Stepped off the porch into mud that sucked at his boots like a mouth.
Above them, the drowning moon turned the bayou into a fever dream of red shadows and black water. In the distance, Desalle Manor's broken silhouette rose against the sky like a shattered ribcage.
And in the spaces between the cricket-song, if you listened close enough, you could hear it: the wet clicking of something enormous, patient, weaving nightmares into silk.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
Because in the bayou, the monsters knew something the hunters hadn't learned yet:
Everyone comes back.
Eventually.