“You need me,” Harlan said, and both men fell silent. Both looked at him, Philbert with dread, Hames with flared-nostril rage. Both of them disbelieving of what he’d just said.
He thought of Felix that day in the clearing, all those years ago, the breadth of his shoulders, his chest, the way one strong flex might have ripped his shirt down the middle. The way the other two boys had caught wind of this new, grown-up threat in the air, lifting off of Felix like steam. He willed some of the sureness and self-possession into himself now; sat up straight, back stiff, shoulders spread.
“You need me,” he repeated, before either of them could speak. “Because if you had someone better than me, you’d have used him, and I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
Philbert’s eyes widened; Hames’s narrowed.
Harlan said, “You can’t risk anyone else knowing what this case is really about for you. It has to be me. Me and Fallon. Right? You trust us because you have to trust us, and we trust you, because we could destroy you if we wanted to.”
Dartmoor has always been heavily threaded with gator imagery and metaphors thanks to Mercy. He's the same sort of blunt, deadly, apex predator he used to hunt with his daddy, and Ava's got killer teeth and a death roll to match him.
But gators are far from the only predators in the swamps. One of the deadliest is one you aren't expecting, one that isn't big and flashy; one you might step on.
If the Lécuyers are gators, then their nemesis in Lord Have Mercy is a cottonmouth snake, and Boyle's not going to go down without a fight.
**It's still slow going for me, but I'm finally starting to feel a little more like myself. Still no date yet; we'll get there when we get there 😊
