Free River Road by Suzanne Johnson Page A

knee. Swiping my finger through the blood-fueled ink I carefully drew an eye inside a triangle inside a circle, using his forearm as my canvas. As soon as the circle was complete, the ink glowed silver and seeped into his skin, clearly visible over his own tats.
    “Won’t wash off?”
    “Nope.” I hoped Denis was paying attention. “It won’t come off until I take it off, even when you shift.” I held Rene’s arm a moment longer, tracing my non-bloodied finger along an eel that curled its way between wrist and elbow. The skin was slightly ridged along the lines of ink. “How did you get these to stay?” Weres and shifters heal just about anything. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be able to have tattoos.
    “Put salt and vinegar with the ink and it holds okay. Or use acid. Fades a little so you have to add extra color.”
    I shuddered. Rene Delachaise had an extremely high pain tolerance. Good thing to know.
    “Do this if you’re gonna do it, wizard.” Denis knelt beside me with his own knife, and I readied the mixture. Once the blood was added, he turned his back. “Put it where I don’t have to see it and think of you.”
    I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be on the Villere Christmas card list.
    As soon as the tracking charm was applied, Denis stood, strode to the far side of the deck, and leapt into the water without a word. By the time I got to the rail, he’d disappeared.
    “How long does it take you guys to shift?” I folded the parchment squares and sealed them inside envelopes in my pack. I could use the leftover ink to track them down later, if needed. “That seemed really fast.”
    Shifting was easy and almost instantaneous for Alex as a true shapeshifter. Weres usually had a harder time.
    “Bout thirty, forty seconds for me, prob’ly faster for someone old as Denis,” Rene said. “We shift underwater.”
    “Thanks, by the way. You made that a lot easier.”
    “Wizard owes me a favor, that’s a good thing, babe.” He poked at the tracking mark on his arm. “What’s next?”
    I turned to see where Alex had gone. He moved slowly amid the vegetation inland from the body. Seeing photos of the marsh, I’d always assumed the grass was the height of, well, lawn grass, but some of this had grown so high I could see only part of Alex’s head.
    “Are you still willing to get the water samples?” I asked Rene.
    “Might as well. Gotta stay here anyway.” He pointed down the bank. “Around that bend is where one of my people got sick. Also where T-Jacques Villere was supposed to have been, so I figure he was the one poisoned the water.”
    “Is it going to make you sick to swim in there?” All the Elders needed was a litigious bunch of mers claiming we’d forced them to swim in contaminated water. The inter-species governing council hadn’t even been set up yet. Every group, including the wizards, thought they should be in charge of it.
    “Don’t plan on staying down there that long.” As he talked, Rene had been ridding himself of clothes and I took a deep breath as he shucked the jeans. I hated working with weres and shifters. They’d get naked at the mere mention of changing form. I’d seen way more of Alex Warin than I should have, not that the view was bad. And not that he didn’t like being admired, the dog.
    Still, I studiously dug in my backpack for the empty vials and tried to hand them up to Rene without getting an eyeful of merman.
    “You a little shy, babe?” Rene took the vials and, damn it, I had to see what he was going to do with them. It wasn’t like he had pockets. He’d hung a pouch around his neck, and placed the small tubes inside it.
    “Of course I’m not shy but—” I gawked, not at Rene’s hard, tanned body per se but at a particular bottle-nosed dolphin tat where I didn’t know tats could go. I felt myself turn the color of a ripe tomato.
    “Oh, I wish you wasn’t a wizard.” Rene laughed as he walked to the opposite side of the deck, where the