Free Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) by Susannah Sandlin

wafting across the water as the gator hunters did their thing.
    At night, as she had relearned, the bayou came to noisy life, filled with croaks, growls, hisses, and splashes. The first night, still surrounded by blood and chaos, she’d jolted awake at each noise. Now, the sounds were comforting proof of nature’s resilience no matter how hard humans tried to destroy it.
    She strummed the notes of the song, picking it out in different keys until she hit the one that felt right today. Tomorrow, it might be different. Until a song told you it was done, it remained a moving, growing thing.
     
    I won’t go back, I won’t go home,
    ’Cause in this place, the dead still roam.
    In this old house lies a pile of bones.
    Throw them down once,
    Throw them easy,
    Throw them slow.
    ’Cause Whiskey Bayou, she won’t let me go . . .
     
    A distinctive, guttural hiss interrupted Ceelie’s song, and she watched, mesmerized, as a dark-brown bird with at least a five-foot wingspan made a wobbly circle overhead before coming to rest on a cypress knee rising from the water a few feet from the front of the cabin. It hissed again and turned its bright-red head, a black glittering eye, and its sharply hooked beak toward Ceelie.
    “Carencro,” she whispered. “Mauvaises choses.”
    A vulture, Tante Eva always said, was a sign of impending danger and sorrow. Despite temperatures in the midnineties and a hundred percent humidity, a line of chill bumps rose on Ceelie’s arms and shoulders as she and the turkey vulture, the ugliest of the carencro , stared at each other.
    She set her guitar aside and went in the house to hunt down the salt, finding an almost-empty box on the kitchen counter. The bird watched as if in disdain as she sprinkled a line of white granules around the perimeter of the porch, with a double line at the threshold of the door and the bottoms of the window casings.
    With a final hiss as if to tell her the low regard in which it held her rudimentary ritual to ward off evil, the vulture flapped its enormous wings and took off with a clumsy leap. For a moment, she thought it might fall in the water—hoped it would—but it rose, circling over the cabin a couple of times before disappearing. It wasn’t completely gone, though; it had left behind the stench of its latest rotten-meat meal and fine particles of something foul that wafted behind in its wake.
    Now there was only silence, ominous where earlier it had sounded clean and pure. The buzzard might be gone, but something else watched her. She felt it.
    Forget the heat. Ceelie took her guitar inside, closed and locked the door and the two front windows. She crawled onto the bed, wedged into an alcove beneath the small side window, and closed and locked that one, too. She coated the door threshold and all the windowsills with what was left of the salt.
    You’re being an idiot, Celestine . And she was going to have heatstroke in this house with no air moving, but between the memories and the buzzard, she was too jittery to open things up again. Tomorrow, if she hadn’t been baked alive overnight, she’d call Gentry Broussard and ask about the guy with the cheap air conditioners.

CHAPTER 7
    Saturday nights always kept LDWF enforcement agents busy, so nothing about the evening had surprised Gentry. People drank and hunted, drank and fished, or drank and steered boats around the parish waterways like they were nautical bumper cars. Sometimes they smoked crystal meth, argued, and shot each other, but that was the sheriff’s problem—unless it happened while they also were hunting, fishing, or boating.
    Gentry and Jena had already hauled out of Lake Gero two guys who’d run their boat onto the bank and were still sitting in the half-submerged hull arguing about who was at fault. The agents had issued four other DUIs and had impounded two boats no one was sober enough to drive. They’d fished a poodle out of Bayou Dulac. They’d caught a boater with enough marijuana