Page 64 of Trusted Instinct
Auralia remembered that when she heard those stories, she’d started to cry. She was a little thing in this memory, maybe seven or eight years old. Creed had come over with a blanket and wrapped her tight, kneeling to look at her earnestly. “You know, Jean-Marie and I were talking about this. And you know that your brother is supposed to see clearly, that’s what Miss PittyPat told us, you remember that day?”
She’d nodded her head with a wobbly chin as she tried not to cry because she wanted to seem brave to Honoré
“Jean Marie says they’re part of the fairy realm, and they show up to cast protection on the land and sometimes try to lead a lost person to safety. So they weren’t leading them to their death but showing them the way home. I’m thinking Jean-Marie’s right and that the lost person was just too far away to get to safety before the morning came and the light dimmed.”
“I’m not scared,” Auralia had whispered. “I’m sad for all the families who cried.”
Why the hell am I thinking aboutfeu follet?
That memory shifted through Auralia’s mind as she, gripping her bag of air tightly in one fist, brought her right leg out the window and down into the water.
Something in the river wrapped her ankle and tugged.
Her brain, primed for something otherworldly, shrank into a tiny ball in her cranium.
A scream ripped from her lungs, and she sent it winging out in a cloud of horror that was whipped through the air and sailed downriver.
Auralia’s arm spasmed out as she reflexively caught hold of the headrest on the driver’s seat and clung to it with an iron grasp.
Something had grabbed hold of her ankle and was walking up her leg.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There was no obvious explanation for the weight that wanted to drag her from the car.
Somethingwas hand-over-hand moving up her leg.
With her memories already tuned to Bayou legend, her imagination conjured the rotting flesh of a drowned person come to life.
That Auralia didn’t piss herself was a miracle.
She couldn’t fathom this sensation.
She screamed again as a head emerged beside her, the current shifting to make way for this new obstacle on its journey.
A man, hair streaming with water, clung to her knee.
In shock, Auralia couldn’t move. Couldn’t register. Couldn’t breathe.
The man, holding tight to her leg, swung his head around, gauging, assessing, and planning, before he pulled harder on hercalf to leverage his own feet onto the side of her car and launched himself out to the side toward the opposite shore, some ten or fifteen feet away.
Did he realize she was there?
Did he register that her leg was the rope he used to climb to safety?
She sat there in shock, willing herself back in her body, back to the present, back to reality so she could understand this scene.
Had he been whipped down with the turbulent waters and happened to catch on to something?
Perhaps he was half-drowned, and he, too, had adrenaline brain, where everything that wasn’t connected to survival disappeared.
He pulled himself onto a rock and stumbled forward. Barefooted, in dress pants and a button-down shirt, Auralia realized that it was Morrison.
And only then did Auralia remember that the family’s SUV had plunged over the side of the bridge railing ahead of her car.
The current must not have washed their vehicle downriver the way she’d imagined.
As she’d dangled over the edge, there was nothing in her visual field that was beneath her other than water. In her mind, the family had been fine following the plunge. Modern-day high-end vehicle engineering being what it was with the surround of airbags, she thought that as they plunged, they’d float off. And as they did, the family followed the four steps for surviving a car in the water: putting the windows down, unfastening the seat belt, exiting the car, and assisting the person in the vehicle.
Or, if not that, then the family took a crazy ride around the curve that made the dell. They hit the shore and climbed out just fine.
