He’d promised Jillian he would have an actual shower installed—with plumbing, she’d been sure to clarify that—before anyone else moved into the maison de fous. Dr. Jillian Ramsay, Ph-damn-D, was an International League for Interspecies Cooperation anthropologist who’d been expecting to sleep in a tent in the rainforest before she’d been redirected to Mystic Bayou to study how the humans and magique managed to live there in relative harmony for so many generations. The League wanted to use Mystic Bayou as an example of how other communities might create safe, productive environments where magique and humans could live together. The League believed that someday soon, modern technology would shove the magique out of the shadows and into the light of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The plan was to prevent pitch forks and panicked mobs by breaking out Jillian’s studies, which were now in full force. The League was sending dozens of researchers, scientists, and other paper-shufflers to make sure she got results sooner rather than later.

Jillian insisted that the League personnel being sent to Mystic Bayou over the next month would not be as accepting of the “Bohemian” showering conditions as she had been. And because Jillian was perhaps one of his favorite humans and definitely his favorite ILIC employee, he’d agreed to the minor renovation. Also, a mama nutria had birthed a litter of little baby swamp rats in the beaten copper tub by the sun shower, which had sort of proven Jillian’s point about the need for modernization. And walls around the bathing facilities.

So, he was converting Lottie’s old sun shower with brand new pipes from Burton Boone’s hardware store and one of those Time Life home improvement books from the 1980s. The faded hardback was the only one Miss Bardie would allow Zed to leave the parish library with, despite him being the mayor of Mystic Bayou and technically, her boss. But Bardie Boone was a dragon shifter who guarded her horde of library books the way most dragons protected their gold. And she’d never forgiven Zed for teething on a copy of Tom Sawyer when his adult canines were coming in.

Enclosing the shower in its own little cubby with walls and a critter-proof roof would take a few weeks. But still, he enjoyed working outdoors for once, soaking up some sun and fresh air. Since his election, Zed had often felt caged in his mayoral office. He’d jumped at the opportunity to be out in the sunshine, by the water, working with his hands. He enjoyed the veneer of quiet over the swamp, the illusion that everything was peaceful and serene and then the sudden bursts of noise—generally caused when some predator snapped up an unsuspecting snack—that reminded you that you were not in some safe little meadow.