Dark and Shallow Lies

by Ginny Myers Sain

Hart is a psychic empath. Honey says it’s the greatest psychic gift but also the worst. She says it will tear him up if he’s not careful. It’s not just that he knows what other people are feeling. He actually feels it, too. Every bit as strong as they do. It gets inside him somehow. And I know what it costs him, constantly taking on everyone else’s pain.

great-great-great-granmè, who was a famous New Orleans voodoo queen. A friend of Marie Laveau’s.

then name her?

God

Zeus. Not god

“I never thought my mama would blow my daddy’s head off in our kitchen.”

Oh shit

Hart’s father was an abusive bastard. Everybody knew it.

Nah someone else should have shot him first

“You don’t need to be afraid of Dempsey Fontenot,

Is it one of them?

My mother killed herself. But Honey never says it like that. I was eight years old when she did it,

Damn. Everyone's a tragedy

“I don’t imagine poor Dempsey Fontenot ever got anybody.”

“Everybody wishes dey knew what happened to ’er.” Something shifts in Wrynn’s voice, and she doesn’t sound sad anymore. She sounds afraid. Her words are hushed and breathless. “But dey don’t wanna know. Not really.”

“Do you have a guess, Wrynn?” I ask her. “About what might have happened to Elora?” Wrynn looks at me and nods. “Only it ain’t a guess.” Her eyes are dead serious. “I waited one hundred and one days, so I can tell da secret now.” Something skitters in the back of my mind, like a spider. Some bit of a story I’ve almost forgotten. “What happened to Elora, Wrynn?” She buries her face against my side. “It got ’er, Grey.” “What got her?” “Da rougarou.”

The soft sound of someone crying. I freeze and squint into the darkness, in the direction of the dock. And there it is again. Muffled sobbing wrapped in a blanket of mist. The thick, damp air plays tricks, distorting the sound. It seems to come from nowhere in particular. And from everywhere all at once. Then it stops.

No. One Southerner to another- absolutely not

“The dead? They lie. Just like the rest of us.”

“There are things out here in the dark, Greycie.” He finally releases me, and I stagger backward a step or two. He’s still got ahold of me with his eyes, though. “Dangerous things.”

ITs him

Hart keeps watch. Case keeps his distance. And Evie keeps making those pretty wind chimes.

“Having great ability isn’t something to be afraid of, Sugar Bee. But it is something to be careful with.”

“I was born here,” he says. “Same as you were.” But that doesn’t make sense. “Then how come nobody knows about you?” His eyes darken, like when a cloud passes in front of the sun. “I’ve been gone a long time,” he tells me. “Just came back around last winter.” “But nobody even knows you exist.” “You know.”

Dempsey’s son?

In numerology, eleven can be the number of power and wisdom. But it’s also the number of imperfection. It’s chaos and disorder. A world in disarray. The undoing of the ten. Everything out of balance.

In the tarot, eleven is the card of Strength and Justice. It represents the courage to stand strong in the storm and face your own worst fears.

“Knowing is hard,” he says, “but it’s a thing you can survive. The not knowing will kill you in the end. It’s the secrets that fester.”

They sound like whispered secrets. And warnings.

Heed them

Like he doesn’t know where he is or how he got here.

But then that feeling fades away, and this beautiful fog rolls in to take its place inside my head.

It's Hart

“You don’t go on living just the same,” he tells me. “You have to go on living in a completely different way.”

But it’s hard, because it’s a really strange thing to find out the monster under your bed was never really a monster at all.

Twelve is the number of completion. The closing of a circle. The end of the cycle. Twelve months in a year.

I dig around until I find the one she’s wearing in the photo. The one I’ve always kept. Then I slip the other one out of my hair. The one Zale found in the dirt back at Keller’s Island.

“Leo told me that your mama could start fires. With her mind. He said he’d seen her do it. Once. A long time ago.” Hart’s stopped shaking. Finally. “Can you do it, too?”

I remember Honey’s old warning. The lightning hunts us. She’s been telling me that forever. Since I can remember.

Moonlight bounces off something white. Long finger bones. And a skull. A faded overall strap with a brass button.

What the fuck

With her, it wasn’t just snakes. She had that same way with people. All those times he made me feel safe but hazy. Slightly drugged. Or drunk. Peaceful. But off-kilter. Like I couldn’t think straight. Did I let him do that to me?

Yes

“Laise tout ça pour les morts.” Leave all that for the dead.

People do terrible things when they’re hurtin’.” He lays a hand on my cheek. “Doesn’t make ’em all bad.”

“I’m not talkin’ about my mama. I’m talkin’ about my daddy.” I take a few stunned steps backward. “Ember and Orli.” I breathe their names into the silence, and Hart nods. “He drowned ’em. In an old bathtub out behind our place. All filled up with rainwater. And then he left ’em there to rot in the heat. Covered up with a blue tarp.” He wipes at his face with bloody hands. “Till he had a chance to get rid of ’em.”