“Ah,” Archie said. “Houndstooth started to sow ’is wild oats. As for the girl? Well, I will not say. Houndstooth . . . ’e does not need to know what I did to the girl when I found ’er trying to steal Ruby. But I will tell you this”—Archie looked at Hero, her face serious—“what I did to ’er will look like a kindness, compared to what I will do to anyone who breaks ’is ’eart like that again.”

Hero stared into Archie’s eyes, unblinking. “I understand.”

Archie clapped them on the shoulder, hard, smiling warmly. “I know you do. I can tell. I just ’ad to say it—you know ’ow it is. Ah, don’t be too scared. I think you are good for ’im! You should see ’ow ’e smiles at you when ’e thinks you are not looking. Plus, you keep ’im from thinking ’e is the smartest in the room.”

Hero smiled, ducking their head; then, they looked up, the smile suddenly gone. “Did you hear that?”

“What,” Archie said, “are they finally just comparing their cocks and ’aving done with it?”

But Hero was already on their feet, running to the water’s edge.

They were too late.

By the time Hero had reached the riverbank, Neville was half-submerged in the water. There came a fierce splash, and the boy surged into the air before landing, caught, in the gaping mouth of the feral bull.

He hung in the mouth of the beast, stunned. His left leg hung between the bull’s front tusks, the angle wrong. It bled freely, and his blood spilled over the hippo’s whiskers. Archie covered her mouth with both hands when she caught up with Hero as though to catch the boy’s name even as she shouted it. Cal and Houndstooth looked up and came running. The bull was still for a long, thick moment. Then, with a lightning-quick twist of its thick neck, it snapped its jaws closed.

The boy was dead. There could be no question, even before the feral bull shook him below the water. Archie turned away; Hero put an arm around her, shielding her as much as possible from the bloodied swamp water that sprayed the shore. Cal and Houndstooth stood frozen a few yards from the water’s edge, empty-handed. Cal’s toothpick dangled from his slack lower lip.

They did not see Adelia coming.

Neither did the hippo.

It wasn’t until the beast was bleeding that Houndstooth registered her standing next to him, her arm outstretched toward the hippo as though she was offering it a handshake. Houndstooth looked from her to the bull, which twitched and writhed spasmodically in the frothy pink water.