She turned and whacked Luke on the leg as hard as she could.

He jumped. “Hey, what—?”

“And I wouldna had to feel it in the first place if you and Corley had done the job you was upposed to!”

“Hey, we did just what we was upposed to. You was there.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Well, you was watchin’. You saw what happened. The sacrifice was goin’ exactly accordin’ to plan when that cop showed up outta nowhere. I said all along we shoulda just flattened the old guy inside his car and have done with it.”

She hit him again. “Don’t you never learn? The old man had to be done in by somethin’ from the swamp or else it ain’t a sacrifice, it’s just a killin’. And we ain’t about just killin’. We got a purpose to what we’re doin’, a duty. You know that.”

“Awright, awright. I know that. But I still can’t figure why that cop had to come along just then. We never seen him out there before.”

“Maybe he was sent,” Semelee said as the thought struck her.

“Whatchoo mean?”

“I mean maybe whoever was protectin’ the old man today was protectin’ him the other night as well.”

“How can that be? We was the only ones who knew we’d be out there.”

“I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but someone’s protectin’ that old man.”

“You mean like with magic?”

“Maybe.”

Lotsa people’d see what Semelee could do as magic, so why couldn’t there be someone else out there who could do somethin’ different but just as magical? Might be all sorts of magical people out there no one ever dreamed of.

“I ain’t got no idea who right now, but I’m gonna find out. And when I do…”

She reached down and removed a palm-sized toad from the pocket of the discarded white dress. She held it up and stroked its back. This little feller was a relative to the big African marine toads some fool had brought into Florida sometime in the last century. It had only three legs—its left arm was nothing but a nubbin—but it had these swollen glands startin’ behind each eye and runnin’ down its back in a pair of lines. Those glands was full of poison. Every so often a dog would lick or bite one of its bigger cousins and die. This little guy came from the clan’s lagoon where his family had bathed in the glow of the lights for generations, and he was even more poisonous. Just a little drop on a tongue was enough to stop a grown man’s heart.