Dark Lily: Shadows, Book 4 Read Online Free Page A

surface’ll do,” Mitchell told him. “How long ’til we dock?”
    The captain screwed up his face. “Wind’s blowing against us. Maybe fifteen minutes.”
    Fifteen minutes , Mitchell thought. He’d spent five nights in a New Orleans Dumpster back when he’d been a rookie. He could survive another fifteen minutes on choppy water.
    “Engine’s making a funny noise.” Turning an ear downward, the captain attempted to listen. “Possible the spirits are taking exception to more snoopy strangers arriving on Bokur.”
    Mitchell raised a brow. “Snoopy or snotty?”
    “Some of both, I guess. For people needing money, tourist dollars are always welcome. But no spirit ever needed money, now did it?”
    “You haven’t met my grandfather.” Mitchell regarded him, frowning. “Are you telling me you believe the island’s haunted?”
    “Well, of course it’s haunted. Mind, that don’t mean you’ll be tripping over spooks and bogeys. It ain’t that kind of haunting. Here’s mostly a laissez-faire existence. Unless you rile or cross paths with the wrong specter.” He scratched his neck. “Ain’t you ever beheld a ghost before?”
    Mitchell thought of his newly acquired blues club and all the smashed glass on the storeroom floor. “I might have. Once or twice.”
    “Well, there you are then. If a fella knows what’s what going in, he’s got nothing to worry about.”
    Nothing except keeping down the gumbo he’d foolishly eaten for dinner.
    Sitting back for the remainder of the trip, Mitchell watched misshapen trees on both shores grow dark and menacing. Giant roots humped out of the water, mere inches below the delicate tips of Spanish moss that waved like shredded curtains from every limb and branch in sight.
    Phoebe had pumped a whack of information into his brain three days ago, including the name of a man he’d previously only heard in whispers. Crucible.
    It was all about territory and hierarchies in the world of law and order. City cops and government agents didn’t tend to mix well. Label the agent in question a phantom, tack on a small group of shadowy superiors—directors, Phoebe had called them—and the animosity level would surely reach unparalleled heights.
    Crucible had apparently been dogging Leshad for the past eighteen months, ever since Phoebe’s mother, Madeleine Lessard, had been brutally murdered. The woman had already been blind when Leshad had stabbed her, but that hadn’t stopped him from digging her eyeballs from their sockets. He’d left behind a rudimentary voodoo doll fashioned in the likeness of his victim and a calling card bearing the eerie silhouette of a man. Then he’d moved on.
    Madeleine Lessard’s death had been the first in what would ultimately become a long string of murders. Phoebe claimed it was the psychic connection that kept Leshad going, kept him killing. Thanks to her guilt trip, a similar connection now had Mitchell surviving a storm-tossed trip on a rocking bayou boat. His mother and her Catholic conscience had a great deal to answer for.
    The docking on Bokur was no less brutal than the final leg of the trip. Mitchell’s stomach continued to churn long after he made his way down the gangplank and onto a mud and gravel road that had no direction signs and wound back on itself as often as it ran straight. It broadened eventually into a strip of asphalt almost wide enough for two vehicles to pass. There were still no signs to be had, but he suspected it was all about increments on this island.
    Gusting wind blew rain and sharp pebbles at his windshield. Ahead of him, wicked slashes of lightning speared from roiling sky to heaving water. Hard on its heels, thunder rattled the ground and his Jeep. The force of the storm made the riverboat ride seem tame by comparison.
    Another spectacular bolt of lightning shot from the clouds. Angry bursts of wind grabbed his vehicle like claws and tossed him across the road. He avoided sideswiping a sycamore tree, narrowed