***Dragon's POV***
The rain stings like Esteban's belt—a remembered pain, thin and precise, splitting skin and pride alike. I burst onto the porch, the wrench in my hand slick with grease and sweat. The bayou's humid breath clings to my lungs, thick with the iron tang of approaching violence.
"¡Mamá! What's—?" The words die in my throat.
Dru's sprawled in the mud, her hair matted to her face like Spanish moss strangling a live oak, clutching the snapped rosary like it's a live wire. The chain glints in the stormlight, serpentine and cruel. My breath hitches—that scar on her wrist, same as the one snaking across my brow. The one he gave me with his wedding ring, the jagged edge catching on my eyelid as I screamed. Three years old. First lesson: flinching earns you worse.
Big Danni strides past, his shadow warping the veve (Vodou symbol) on his leather vest—Papa Legba's sacred crossroads, drawn in cornmeal and blood the night Mamá swore she'd never let Esteban near us again. Now it's a smear under his boots. He snatches the rosary from Dru, his voice a Haitian growl, "This is a cursed weapon."
The chain trembles in his grip, beads clicking like teeth. I know this rosary. Mamá kept it in her sewing box, wrapped in velvet—the one Esteban wrapped around her neck before we escaped. "Pray that God fixes your disobedience," he'd spat. Now it's here, weaponized, another blade in his endless arsenal.
A bead splits, spilling a dried black wing—mariposa negra (black butterfly). The ash swirls, alive, as if the storm itself is inhaling. It tastes like scorched honey on my tongue, cloying and wrong. The wrench slips from my grip, clanging against the porch step.
*Coward*, I think. *Just like him.*
Dru's laugh cuts through the ringing in my ears—harsh, bright, a machete slicing through fog.
Mamá stumbles outside, her rebozo (shawl) flapping like a shot crow. Her eyes dart to the tree line, where shadows ripple in a rhythm no natural wind could make. She'd begged me to run this morning, to take Dru and vanish into the Keys. "He'll kill you this time, mijo (my son)," she'd whispered, clutching my face like she could memorize its shape. But I stayed. Stubborn. Stupid. A son's fatal flaw: believing he's outgrown the monster's shadow.
"Él está aquí (He's here)," she whispers. Thunder cracks, and the Harley's roar answers—not the familiar purr of my Road King, but the guttural snarl of Esteban's custom Fat Boy. He'd built it from scrap metal and spite, its pipes tuned to mimic a death rattle. A symphony for the graves he'd yet to dig. My hands shake as I recover my wrench. Its ridges bite into my palm like a lifeline.
Dru rises, switchblade flashing. Her dress is caked in mud, but she stands like a queen of the drowned cities, all sharp angles and sharper resolve. Her Creole is a battle cry: "Li pa t ap dwe retounen? (He shouldn't have come?) Bullshit. Let's send his zombi (ghost) back in pieces." She's grinning, wild-eyed, and my heart splits. I love her for this—for the way she turns fear into fury, curses into kindling. But Christ, she shouldn't have to.
Big Danni pulls a pwen (Haitian ritual dagger) from his boot, its blade etched with Petro (aggressive Vodou) symbols that seem to writhe in the low light. I've seen that dagger before—plunged into the heart of a rabid gator last summer, its hiss dying as Danni whispered, "Ale nan pye Bondye (Go to God's feet)." Now it glints hungrier. He jerks his chin at the tree line, and I catch the flicker of bike lights in the storm. Lou Nwa. Our ragged cavalry. They've been circling since dawn, engines cut to avoid alerting Esteban's scouts.
Esteban taught me to steal at three—watches first, then lives. Taught me to lie with a smile, to kiss a knife's edge and call it love. Now he's here to finish the lesson. Mamá grips my arm, her nails biting. "Mijo, ven adentro— (Sweetheart, come inside—)," she pleads, her voice fraying like old rosary thread.
"No." I step closer to Dru. Her switchblade reflects the scar on my face, our twin marks glowing red in the storm's pallor. Mamá always said we were mirrors, Esteban and I. But mirrors lie. They show what you fear, not what's true. "I'm done running!"
Big Danni barks orders in Creole, "Bay mwen dife a! (Give me the fire!)" Three Lou Nwa riders peel into the storm, their bikes spitting mud. Ti-Jean (Little John), 19, baby-faced and lethal—grins as he passes, a machete strapped to his back. Gwo Pistoleer (Big Gunman), his Molotovs still dripping from torching Esteban's dock last week. Spyder, whose shotgun took two fingers—and three lives—in the Terrebonne ambush. I pray to gods I don't believe in that they'll see sunrise.
Spyder's shotgun hand—the one missing two fingers—brushes his rosary. Three Hail Marys, his ritual since Terrebonne. Today, he doesn't pray.
Fifteen men against his fifty? Odds I'd take any day—if those fifty weren't hopped on zombi powder (Vodou narcotic), cadavre amoureux—the 'loving corpse' powder that twists Vodou's bones into puppet strings.
Dru presses the rosary's broken chain into my palm. The beads are cold, like Esteban's laugh when he broke Mamá's finger for hiding me. "Love is a chain, mijo," he'd crooned. "Let me teach you how to wear it."
Our hands brush—scar to scar. The twin marks on our wrists pulse, the ones we've carried since the crib, numerals etched into skin like cursed clockwork. Today, they read **236**. I've memorized the way hers mirrors mine: the same jagged font, the same sourceless heat when the numbers shift. We used to joke they were lottery tickets to hell. Now, with Esteban's shadow clawing at the walls, they feel like a fuse burning.
"You ready, papi?" Dru glances up, rainwater catching in her lashes like liquid diamonds. She twists her wrist, the **236** throbbing faintly as stormlight fractures through the swarm. I see the girl who kissed me mid-stitch, her scarred hand pinning mine to the workbench. *"Six hundred three days? Hours? Heartbeats?"* she'd muttered, her breath sharp with rum and rage. *"Whatever it is… we'll outrun it."*
I kiss her—fierce and desperate, all teeth and promise. Her lips taste of bitter coffee and cayenne, but beneath it, the scars hum. A twin vibration. A lie. We never outran it. The numbers bled downward like an hourglass none of Mamá's herbs could flip. 603 to 236, and the digits sear hotter with every butterfly's wingbeat.
We still don't know what happens at zero.
The first gunshot cracks. Not a warning. A declaration.
******
***Dru's POV***
Haitians don't fear ghosts.
We make them fear us.
Uncle D taught me that lesson at three years old, his calloused hands wrapping mine around a rusted nail still warm from his pocket. The closet walls pressed close, smelling of Louise's lavender perfume and my own piss. "Move lespri pa renmen fè (Spirits hate iron)," he'd growled, and I'd screamed as I drove the nail into the door—once, twice, until the wood splintered and light poured in.
Now, as the storm rages, I dig that same nail from my pocket. Its edges are worn smooth, a talisman tucked between gum wrappers and grief. Dragon grabs my wrist, his touch gentling when I meet his gaze. His eyes are Esteban's—same bright blue circles around a pitch black center—but his soul? All Marisol. Tender where his father's rotten.
"You think I'm scared of this?" I shake the rosary, its crucifix dangling like a hanged man. A black butterfly perches on my thumb, wings fanning the scent of rot and jasmine.
"Bon (Good)." I step toward Mamá Marisol's bubbling ajíaco (healing stew), the pot brimming with okra and crab claws. "You taught me ghosts starve without fear, non (right)?"
Marisol clutches her medalla (saint medal), the silver Virgin Mary glinting. Her hands still bear burns from last summer, when Esteban's men torched her herb garden. "Oye, niña (Listen, girl)," she whispers, "this is darker than *Papa Legba's* tricks."
The nail thrums in my grip, alive as a struck tuning fork. I think of Uncle D's stories—how iron remembers the mine's blood, the forge's fury. How it hungers for vengeance. "Let's answer them," I hiss.
Uncle D laughs, a sound like gravel and grace. He's perched in the window frame, shotgun balanced on his knee like a lover. At sixty, he moves like shadow—a man who's buried more traitors than the earth can hold. "Li gen zo nan do li! (She's got backbone!)"
I drive the nail into the crucifix. Silver screams. The butterfly dissolves, ash swirling into the ajíaco. The stew boils black, hissing like a thousand serpents. Somewhere, Esteban roars—a sound that shakes the cypress knees rising from the swamp. Closer now. Always closer.
"Let him choke on it."
Dragon's hand finds mine, his palm scarred from engine burns and old battles. We're a matched set, he and I—broken things remade sharper. Outside, engines snarl. Lou Nwa's bikes form a crescent around the porch, headlights cutting through the swarm of wings. *Not enough. Never enough.*
Uncle D racks his shotgun. "Koulye a, nou pran batay la (Now, we take the fight)."
This is how curses die. Not in whispers, but in the thunder of hammers reloading. Not in pleas, but in the war cry of a stew pot boiling over with poisoned silver.
Marisol's voice tears through the storm, a throat-raw chant that makes my back teeth buzz. I know those Yoruba syllables—Uncle D drilled them into me after the closet incident. *"Ọgun alágẹdẹ, olúborí ogun—!"* Ogun the blacksmith, lord of war's victory. But Marisol twists them into something darker, Creole grit grinding against the prayer's bones. The medalla at her throat glows like a struck match, the Virgin's face bubbling into a shape I recognize.
Uncle D's tattoos shimmered last week—Ogun's axe bleeding into a crown of nails. 'You'll know him by what he devours,' he'd said."
*Iron don't bow*, I think, my own nail biting into my palm.
Her chant splits into three voices—Marisol's cracked alto, a man's growl that shakes the tin roof, and a girl's scream that's too damn familiar. My scream. The one I choked back when Louise's men cornered me in the cane field at fourteen. *"Fer brûlé pa ka menti!"* Molten iron doesn't lie. The words taste like blood and gun oil. I watch the ajíaco boil over, black froth eating the air.
Smoke stings my eyes, but I don't blink. Marisol's shadow stretches across the wall behind her, antlers sprouting from its skull, nails jutting from its spine. Ogun's here. Not the sanitized saint Louise prayed to, but the god Uncle D described—the one who'd rather swallow gunpowder than holy water.
The medalla melts. Silver runs down Marisol's chest—not melting, but multiplying, each droplet hardening into scale-mail sealing the knife scar Esteban left the night she stole Dragon from his crib. I've seen that scar a hundred times, pink and puckered while she stirred gumbo. Now it glistens, raw as fresh meat.
Ogun's shadow roars.
*Let him choke on it,* I'd said. But this—this is a god's promise.
Ogun's shadow turns its nail-studded head toward me. My nail burns, its rust flaking into my bloodstream. I grin. Let the bastard come.
Haitians don't kneel.
We baptize our blades in the forge.
We build our altars in the rubble.
Let the ghosts come. Let Esteban bleed.
******
***Dragon's POV***
The rain stops. Sudden as a gun cocking. The world holds its breath.
Then comes the hum—a low, wet vibration that prickles the scars on my hands. *Esteban's lullaby*. The night he branded me, he'd hummed it as I bled, "to sweeten the lesson."
"Dru," I choke out, but she's already staring at the tree line, her nail raised like a saint's blade.
The first black butterfly lands on the shotgun barrel in Big Danni's grip. Then another. And another. Dozens. Hundreds. They blot out the storm-gray sky, wings shimmering like oil spills. I gag—they stink, like rot and burnt sugar, the same stench as the villages Esteban razed.
Mamá taught me their name—mariposa negra—the night Esteban burned her santuario (shrine), their wings swarming as she screamed…
They only swarm where blood's about to spill.
Esteban's calling card.
"Cover your mouth!" Dru yanks her bandana over her nose. "Their scales—they're toxic." Too late. My eyes burn. The yard blurs, bikes and men melting into shadow puppets. I stumble, wrench slipping.
A butterfly's wings tap against my scar, a metronome counting down to ruin. Its scales powder the old wound, and suddenly I'm three years old again, choking on attic dust as Esteban's belt *cracks*—not the wrench's dull thud, but the hiss of leather splitting air. *"Mírame cuando te rompo, cobarde,"* he'd snarled. Look at me when I break you. The butterfly's proboscis digs into my brow, syphoning the memory like nectar.
*Thirteen lashes.* That's how many it took before I stopped screaming. Esteban counted them aloud in English, Spanish, Creole—a trinity of cruelty. Now the swarm echoes him, their wings snapping in unison: *Uno. Two. Twa.* The numbers slither into my ears, acidic, rotting the edges of my vision. I see Mamá's hands braced against the attic door, her wedding ring leaving dents in the wood. She didn't open it. She *couldn't*.
The butterfly's toxin bleeds deeper. The scar *pulses*, alive with Esteban's voice: *"You think that wrench makes you a man? I made you from spit and spite, mijo. You'll die my son."* The swarm thickens, wings fusing into a canopy of eyes—his eyes, blue-ringed and pitiless, the same ones that tracked me through the bayou the night I fled.
Dru's shout cuts through the haze—*"Dragon, fuck their wings! Look at me!"*—but her face fractures into a thousand shards. All I see is the attic's slatted light, the way it striped Esteban's boots as he knelt beside me, bloodied belt coiled in his palm like a lover's braid. *"You'll thank me for this,"* he'd whispered, smearing my tears across his thumb. *"Pain is the only thing that stays."*
The butterfly's legs scuttle toward my eyelid, *tap-tap-tapping*, and my heart jackhammers—not from fear, but the old, venomous *want* that terrifies me more. The want to let him win. To stop fighting. To be small again, because small things are harder to break.
Then I feel it: Dru's nail, driven into my wrist. A jolt of rust and rage. Her voice claws through the swarm: *"Mirrors lie, papi. Shatter the glass."*
The wrench trembles in my grip, its weight a rebuttal. Esteban never held a tool that didn't cut. Never built anything but graves. But this? This wrench smoothed the Road King's engine, fixed Mamá's stove, tightened the bolts on Dru's porch swing the night she said *"I love you"* between cigarillo drags.
The butterfly bursts under the wrench's arc, its innards splattering my cheek—not green, but red. Human red.
Esteban's laughter curdles the air. *"Still mine."*
Through the swarm, Esteban's voice booms: "¡Hijo (Son)! You think I forgot? You were three when you begged me to stop, three when you learned how weak you are." The wrench shakes in my grip. Focus. But the wings hum louder, drowning my thoughts…
Memories surge—Esteban's ring glinting as he backhanded Mamá. The way she'd folded like paper, her silence worse than any scream.
Dru's bandana muffles her curse. She's sweating, her pupils dilating. *The scales—they're in her lungs now.
Big Danni fires into the swarm. Butterflies explode in bursts of phosphorescent green, their innards painting the mud like witchlight. *Not enough.* They reform, thicker, angrier.
Esteban's bike emerges—a chrome monstrosity crowned with deer skulls. His smile is a knife wound. "Time to come home, cobarde (coward)."
I raise the wrench. Final lesson, old man.
*Let's see who's the teacher now.*
The wrench arcs—not a tool, but a verdict. The first butterfly bursts. For a heartbeat, the scar on my wrist flashes 235.
And the bayou holds its breath.
******