Present Day

Jonathan had never wanted to reproduce. In fact, he would've tried to convince Elena to abort had he known she'd been pregnant, but the woman hadn't told him until she was nearly four months in, and by that time, she'd decided quite firmly to have it. He'd been furious, not as much for her decision to keep their child as for her laxity in birth control. She'd told him she'd been taking it, and yet in the midst of a heated argument, she'd admitted that'd been a lie. He'd done so much for her—adored her, given her money, provided her with a real home and belongings—and he'd done it all in spite of the offspring she'd already produced by some other man. He'd been willing to do much more, too, and might have even married her if she'd wanted, but after the pregnancy and the lies . . . well, it'd been too much. Off he'd gone, disappeared into the wild, and though he'd contacted her after things had simmered, offered to help support the then-one-year-old child, she'd been too stubborn to accept any help, hadn't even wanted him to meet their son.

Son. His son. Eduardo, she'd called him. Jonathan didn't like the name. He supposed Eddie was all right for a child, though. He'd gone by a nickname as a boy, too, only assuming "Jonathan" as an adult. In any case, he'd seen pictures of Eddie by surreptitiously searching Elena's social media feeds. Over the years, he'd kept up with them from a distance, never quite wanting to interfere in their lives and yet unable to shake the sense of obligation he had to his son, an obligation he'd hoped never to take on.

It hadn't been for his own sake that he'd never wanted a child. Jonathan himself was ambivalent about the things and, with the right woman (perhaps Elena), might have been persuaded to begin a family had it not been for the history he knew he'd bring to it.

His bloodline needed to die with him. The risks of children were too great.

He'd told her he hadn't wanted his own children. He'd told her! But Elena had been selfish. What exactly her motives had been—to keep him around (not that he'd been threatening to leave) or to give Tomás a sibling or some other reason only she knew—Jonathan couldn't say. But he'd made it very clear to her even before they'd begun sleeping together that reproduction was off the table for him. And she'd assured him she was in agreement, that she had taken the right precautions.

Lies.

Along came Eddie.

Poor child. Though Jonathan had offered to involve himself in the boy's life, Elena's refusal to allow that had actually been a relief. But he'd still worried, and so he'd watched, hoping that if they kept clear of Surette, all would be well.

Damn the woman and her dreams, and damn his anger for keeping him from telling the truth.

"Jack?"

Jonathan spun at the address. He sat at the bar in Gordon's, Surette's local hole-in-the-wall, a dark, grimy little establishment that hadn't changed in all the time it'd been there (granted he'd been there only twice prior to this occasion, once at the age of seven or so and another time in his early twenties). He'd gone to get out of Elena's house, left a note about heading out for a bit. She'd not wanted him to step foot beyond her door once he'd come through it, so the note had been necessary. He'd just left it on the counter while she'd showered. As much as he still cared for the woman, her despairing attention wass stifling. It was as if she didn't know where to put her anxiety and grief until he'd arrived, and she'd swallowed her pride and anger to fall apart over him.

Jack, though. He hadn't heard that name in decades.

"Jack LeBlanc? Well I'll be damned, it sure as hell is!"

Jonathan forced a grin as a man about his age strode up to him. This was no stranger, though it felt strange to see him again. Jeff Jacobs, whose tiny black eyes and acne-scarred face hadn't much changed, only weathered.

"Couldn't stay away, could you?" Jeff laughed. He clapped a hand on the bar, waved over the woman behind it and ordered a beer and some pub fries.

Jonathan found himself reluctant to speak; he didn't know what to talk about, understood neither Jeff nor anyone else knew why he'd returned.

Jeff waved toward a corner table, where a couple of men eyed him and Jonathan with curiosity. Then he turned back to his childhood friend. "Thought you were hell-bent on never showing your face here again," he good-naturedly remarked.

"I was," Jonathan at last replied. His thoughts carried him back to the summers he'd spent visiting his uncle and aunt and cousins. Davey and Jennifer had been a little too young to share his interests; he'd made friends early on with Jeff Jacobs, the son of the man who'd landscaped Uncle David and Aunt Stella's property. That enormous old house had always creeped him out, even as a child; he'd hated staying there, but his mother and father had insisted on those twice-a-year Christmas and summer vacation visits. After his parents had died, though, he'd sworn off Surette for good—or so he'd thought. The place was poison; it'd killed off most of his family. He'd been sure there was something deeply wrong, here . . . something that wanted him, too, and anyone else he cared about. Eddie's disappearance had tragically confirmed his suspicions.

"You remember that one time it snowed and we tried to sled that hill back of your family's house? Goddamn mud the whole way, just that light frosting and we thought we could sled in it. We come up out of the yard and your mama screamed she was so pissed off. Hell, we musta looked like a couple of swamp things comin up out of those woods!"

Jonathan's face tightened. He was sure his affect revealed his feelings, and yet he found dissemblance impossible. "Yes, I remember."

"What've you been up to all these years? What brings you back?" A sudden flicker of concern brushed through Jeff's eyes, and he added, "The house's been sold again. Last year. It sat vacant for so long, you understand, and we finally—"

"Oh, that's—no, it's all right. I'm not here for the house."

"Right . . ."

Though he recognized the thirst for answers in the man's descent into pondering, Jonathan neglected to satisfy it. His fuse for casual conversation was short; it'd in fact burned out the moment Jeff had spotted him, and not even some camaraderie-of-old could induce him to muster conventional politeness.

Jeff must've at last understood, because until his pub fries were up, he chatted about weather and a nutria burrow he'd had some trouble with. Once his order was on the bar, he grabbed it, made an excuse, and retreated to the table where his apparent friends were drinking. Jonathan suspected they spoke of him, but he didn't care. He paid his bill and left without so much as a wave to his once-friend. The skies were overcast, though rain hadn't fallen for at least a day. The streets and sidewalks remained semi-damp as if in anticipation the wait wouldn't be long, more rain was coming. Surely the waters of the bayou were flooding, now. The drainage ditch where Eddie had last been seen must be overflowing its banks or close to it.

He'd go there, Jonathan decided. The notion felt right.

The drive wasn't far. Though it'd been some time since he'd traversed Surette, the town didn't change, hadn't changed in all the years it'd been there, it seemed. Though his visits had been few, he'd run around enough to know the basic layout, and the elementary school wasn't far from his Aunt and Uncle's old home. He and Jeff had been able to walk to it, to play on its playground equipment and trek the wooded areas around it. They'd never messed with the drainage ditch, though; they'd instinctively known it posed danger. Elena had told Jonathan what little she seemed to know about Eduardo's disappearance. His backpack had been found in the drainage ditch where it hit a bend and moved toward a couple of huge concrete pipes. There'd been some kind of graffiti on the wall, a question about being washed in the "blood of the lamb." That was it—that was all she'd known. That and that if his brother Tomás had been on time picking him up, Eddie might not have disappeared. Well, Elena hadn't said as much, but the implication had hovered beneath her wording. Jonathan didn't think she blamed her older son, not particularly, and for his part, he knew that regardless of Tomás's late arrival, whatever had taken Eddie would've found its way to the boy. The minute Jonathan had realized Elena had moved to Surette, he'd feared for his son, but she'd wanted nothing to do with him, and so he'd stayed back. He regretted that decision, now.

Nothing to do about it, though. She'd let him in, at least, not forced him to some hotel, and her treatement of him had been strange, needy and yet cold, offering a stilted affection in some moments and snapping at him the next. He couldn't blame Elena for her conflicted temperament; her son was missing, after all, and then he'd shown up with the baggage of their rocky past . . . the woman was showing remarkable resilience, as far as he was concerned.

That son of hers, though—Tomás. The teen was ungrateful, sullen, clearly biased against him. Surely whatever his mother had told her about his younger brother's father (if she'd told him much at all) hadn't painted a rosy picture. But again, Jonathan couldn't blame the young man for his behavior. Tomás seemed protective of Elena, and that in itself was admirable and to be expected. Hopefully the warning he'd given the teen would sink in; hopefully Elena would take her remaining son and leave Surette, because even though they weren't blood-relatives, Jonathan was unsure how far this trail of extermination would hunt those he cared about. Returning to his family's hometown put him at risk, for sure—he knew that, had lived most of his life wondering when and where the sword would drop. But he was grown, and he'd spent his years morbidly aware of their limit. Jonathan wasn't unafraid. He'd made it into his early fifties, hadn't he? Seemed like luck was on his side, for the moment, anyhow.

After parking his sedan on a residential street that ran just behind the drainage chanel (he couldn't park at the school; it was a weekday), Jonathan strolled casually past quiet, middle-class houses. A dog or two barked, and a slow car ambled past, but beyond that, there was little action. That was just fine with him. He didn't think he'd recognize anyone else from the time he'd spent in this town, and in fact running into Jeff had been something of a surprise, and yet the place was small. He couldn't be sure who might pop out of the woodwork.

Leaving the street where there was a cut-through path, Jonathan pushed through low-hanging vines and swatted past brambles to reach his destination. The trees along the bank of the channel dripped with moss. This wasn't the bayou proper, not yet, but follow the ditches long enough and they led straight into swamp land. Why, he recalled one visit when an alligator had somehow found itself in his Uncle David and Aunt Stella's pool, a big one, too. They'd called animal control and not allowed the kids outside at all, not even into the front yard, for fear there might be more reptiles. If there were any such creatures in the drainage ditch, now, Jonathan thought as he gazed down into the murky waters running through it, the critters would be well-hidden. The rains had swelled the channel, and even though the water had somewhat receded, it still rose within a few feet of the upper bank.

Somewhere across the ditch and beyond the trees on the other side, children played; Jonathan heard their laughter and imagined them swinging along monkey bars and climbing slides (always up—why did children always go up rather than down, hindering those who wished to slide? Contrary things). The sound of them gave him a sense of peace. His son had been here.

His son! A boy he'd seen only in a few stray pictures on the internet, ones Elena probably hadn't intended to set to public viewing. The boy had been handsome; his mother's dark hair and eyes had dominated the child's appearance, and yet there'd been a softening, a gentleness about him that echoed his father. If only there'd been more time, more of a chance to get to know the child! Jonathan could only imagine how he'd insisted upon a relationship with the boy, if he'd only known where it'd end up. He'd thought his separation from his son would save the child; instead, it had only estranged them.

What had Eddie been doing here, in this ditch? Jonathan scanned the channel, its muddy, slowly-moving waters. Bits of trash swirled in small rivulets, sprialed where the flow stagnated. Thick branches floated along the surface, no doubt blown down from the stormy weather. If turtles or alligators dwelt there, now, it'd be difficult to differentiate them from the debris.

Eddie had surely been exploring. Jonathan knew most children enjoyed meandering through empty and forbidden places, and while the channel wasn't quite policed, it was a strange, barren, empty space when the rains held back. The child must've felt a need to wander.

The sensation pulled at Jonathan's chest. He ran a hand across his bristly cheeks, through his trim beard. He wondered whether Elena had been here since Eddie had gone and where exactly the phrase about the blood of lambs had been painted, but as he stood in wonder and a dull, aching sadness, something down amongst the debris, gradually easing its way through the hanging plants and criss-crossing branches, snatched his full attention.

A backpack—yellow—on the back of a . . . a back . . . a body! He was sure of it! A body! A child's . . . !

With no thought beyond the very irrational notion that the thing was his son and that his son could still be alive, that the mystery of it all was near solving and he could return to Elena and tell her everything was all right, the man scrambled off solid ground and down into the brown liquid, taking no heed of the warm squelching that entered his shoes and immediately claimed his legs and waist. Wading up to his shoulders, Jonathan crossed the channel toward what he was sure was a human figure lying face-down, and the understanding of what the position might mean rather quickly stalled him. Still, pushing on, avoiding thoughts of reptiles, the man at last reached the mysterious flotsam only to find that what he'd seen had not been a backpack (and it occurred to him, suddenly, that they'd found Eddie's backpack, which would mean it most certainly wouldn't be floating here) but a wad of several trashbags. What was worse, the figure he'd assumed was a human child was in fact the corpse of a dead animal, black and waterlogged.

Turning the thing, Jonathan realized upon seeing its shimmering canines and half-rotted eye soket that it was, beyond expectation, a wolf.

A strange sensation crept across the man's air-exposed shoulders, a shiver, though it was the rest of him, treading the disgusting murky waters of a channel full of filth and unknown lifeforms, that should have been shivering. There were no wolves, here. None. And this one, though dead, had surely been beautiful, with its thick black fur.

On impulse, Jonathan reached out to touch the thing's face, but as he did so, its eye rolled back up into its formerly empty, exposed socket; its jaws snapped; and something pulled at the man's legs, sucking him beneath the waters.

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