Chapter 1: The Pelican and the Bayou

"Google Maps routed us through three parish junctions," Jarrin said, already three steps ahead of the dock and halfway through his apology. "I swear on my mother's gravestone that this island was not on the itinerary. Ninety percent certain it tried to take us to a Starbucks in Lake Charles. The other ten percent is the part where I'm not entirely sure what the screen actually showed."

Jazz stepped off the boat first, boots hitting the warped planking with a satisfaction Jarrin couldn't afford to match. Her red leather jacket caught the last of the October afternoon. Fishnet stockings and thigh-high boots. She had dressed for a costume party, and honestly, it was working in her favor. The woman had a fat ass and she knew it, and whatever crime against fashion this outfit committed against modesty, the effect was doing its job.

Behind her, Jarrin climbed down with both hands full, which was a feat in itself considering he'd managed to pack his own arrival into two overstuffed pockets and an impossible shoulder bag. The dock was long, wooden, and smelled like bayou water and something that could have been algae or could have been a dead raccoon. His guess leaned toward the raccoon.

"We could have been here twenty minutes ago," he said. "I stopped to follow a pelican."

"It's our anniversary trip, Jarrin."

"It is."

"Then it doesn't matter how you got here, it just matters that we're here."

Jarrin looked at the manor across the marsh. It was big, old, and had the particular quality of being so far from anything that it could only be either a private estate or a very committed squatter. The path from the dock to the front doors was overgrown, though the overgrowth was recent. Someone had been cutting the grass recently, even as the trees on either side reached aggressively for each other.

He followed her onto the path. The air smelled different here. Swamp air had a texture to it, a weight that settled on the shoulders and made the collar of his blue Hawaiian shirt suddenly feel like a suggestion. He unbuttoned the top button anyway. The black tank top underneath was doing most of the work.

The manor's front doors were dark wood and wider than they had any right to be, like whoever built this place expected their guests to arrive in processions. Jazz didn't hesitate. She pushed both doors open at the same time with a confident swing, and the party hit them like a wall of sound and fog.

The interior was enormous. Fog machines had been placed strategically throughout the main hall, turning string lights into something that looked like the inside of a cloud with a budget. A buffet table ran the full length of one wall, steam rising from dishes that had clearly been kept warm. Halloween decorations hung from the ceiling in arrangements that leaned heavily into the dramatic, which made sense for the holiday and the property, but the quality of the fog made it feel like someone had rented a haunted house kit and not read the manual.

They walked in.

The Scooby gang was scattered. No one was waiting for them.

Fred stood near the entrance to the east wing, arms folded in the instinctive posture of a man whose entire personality was detective work. He looked at Jarrin and Jazz with the kind of attention that people gave when they were cataloging threats. Velma stood two steps behind him, chewing something that looked unbearably dry. A cracker, probably. Or a piece of bread that had been abandoned in a pocket for a few days. Shaggy and Scooby occupied the buffet like a married couple at a catered event they'd been forced to attend, both holding plates with two servings each, Scooby looking guilty about it.

Daphne was across the room, talking with Preston about something Jarrin couldn't hear. She glanced at them as they entered, then turned back to her conversation without much interest.

Fred did not laugh. He watched Jarrin's face, then his shoes, then the bag he was still carrying. A full sweep.

"Jarrin," Jazz said. "Let me see if any of these people know what's going on."

She moved smoothly, angled toward the edges of the room where conversations clustered. Nobody knew who she was, and she was fine with that.

Jarrin parked himself near a pillar, close enough to the buffet that he could help himself and close enough to the conversation to pretend he was participating in it. A man near him had introduced himself as Preston, and he was holding a glass of something amber and looking at the manor as if the architecture had offended him personally.

"Greek revival," Jarrin said, gesturing broadly at the columns. "Obviously. The symmetry is giving it away."

Preston looked at him. "Colonial."

"Right, colonial. What I meant to say."

Velma appeared behind Preston, adjusting her glasses with a finger that didn't quite stop moving. "It's Second Empire. Mansard roof, ornamental bracketing. You can see the slate damage on the west face."

"Wasn't that a joke?" Jarrin said.

"No."

"Of course not."

He poured himself some food anyway, which gave him something to do with his hands and an excuse to look down when Fred's eyes came back. Fred was watching him again. That steady, patient gaze of someone accustomed to solving problems, which made the whole thing feel less like a party and more like an observation post.

Jazz was across the room. She had already circulated once, pulling a bottle of wine from thin air near a woman in a vampire costume, working the tables with the same precision she probably used to lift pockets at a casino. She moved with the kind of confidence that only came from a person who had spent years understanding how attention worked, where it went, and where it didn't. She knew exactly what she was doing, and the room was cooperating.

Fred wasn't cooperating. He was tracking her, and she could feel it.

A magician's greatest enemy was never the audience. It was the person in the audience who understood how the trick worked, or at least suspected it. Fred was that person. He wasn't trying to figure out how she produced the wine. He was tracking her hands, her eyes, the spaces between her moves, filing each detail somewhere that normal people didn't have access to.

She changed the rhythm. Slowed the card work, let it become casual instead of demonstrative. Let the tricks look accidental, like a party trick someone might do to entertain a table full of strangers. She watched Fred's eyes follow the cards, then deliberately moved the cards elsewhere and watched his head track them, too. Used. He was used to being the one observing, the one solving, the one people came to when the mystery was real. Let them keep being the ones in charge. She'd rather be the one doing the watching.

She found Velma near the bookshelf in the parlor. A quiet room with tall shelves and a lamp that cast a circle of yellow light. Jazz sat down in one of the chairs and produced a coin from nowhere. Velma raised an eyebrow.

"Show me," Velma said.

Jazz passed the coin between her fingers. Once. Twice. Four times. On the fifth pass, the coin vanished. Velma's hand was already reaching out before the coin was gone.

"How old are you?" Jazz asked.

"Thirty-one."

"Close enough." She produced the coin from Velma's pocket. "You're right about things. Everything. And you hate when people don't agree with you. Glasses, probably reading for work. Dry eyes. You chew when you're concentrating, and you've done it for a long time, which means it started as something else. A habit. A coping mechanism."

Velma took off her glasses and cleaned them on her shirt. "That was a parlor trick."

"It was both."

Velma put her glasses back on. Something flickered behind the lenses. The impression that she'd wanted to say something but had decided the wrong thing was better left unsaid. She walked away without another word.

Fred saw it. Jazz knew he saw it. He was standing in the doorway, watching the whole exchange with that same patient expression, but something had shifted underneath it. He couldn't categorize what had just happened, and that bothered him. It was a problem without a framework, and Fred's entire world was built on frameworks.

The party continued around them. A man in a police costume was holding court near the fireplace, describing what he imagined being a real officer was like. The fog machines were cycling again, painting the room in pale ghosts that moved across the walls like something alive.

Then the lights went out.

The man in the police costume was mid-sentence. His voice cut off. Somewhere in the silence, someone gasped.

A single scream came from the east wing. It was long, clean, and unmistakably human. The distinction between entertainment and crisis dissolved in the space of one second. Nobody needed to explain what was happening. Nobody needed to ask questions.

Fred moved first. He was already out of the main hall before the last echo of the scream faded. "Daphne, east wing. Velma, flashlight. Shaggy, Scooby, kitchen, stay together." No hesitation. A man who had done this before.

Daphne went with him. Velma was already fumbling for her flashlight with the efficiency of someone who kept one in her bag at all times, just in case. Shaggy grabbed Scooby's collar and pulled him toward the kitchen, which was the wrong direction but the one that kept them away from the east wing and, for the moment, that was enough.

Party guests scattered toward the lobby. Jarrin and Jazz stood together near the buffet table, the last ones left in the main hall as the room emptied around them. The fog machines were still cycling. The string lights were off. The buffet table looked suddenly absurd with its warm dishes and half-eaten plates in an empty room.

Jazz grabbed Jarrin's arm. "Stay right here."

He looked at her hand on his sleeve, then at her face. Jazz rarely let him decide anything, and he almost never decided anything at all. His default was to go where she went, to follow her like a satellite follows a planet, and she knew this. She probably counted on it. So when he said "okay" without a single protest, she looked at him differently.

"What?"

"Nothing. I was just surprised."

She held his gaze for a moment, then released his arm. "Good. Stay."

Twenty minutes passed. The lobby filled with party guests, all of them talking over each other in that particular style of panic that hadn't yet fully crystallized into terror. Someone had called someone, though the phone line was dead. Others had tried the front doors, which wouldn't open. The boat dock was gone. That last one was the one that stuck, the one that everyone whispered about when they thought no one was listening.

Then the Scooby gang came back.

Fred led them into the lobby with his arms full of evidence he couldn't explain. Two bodies, both found in the east wing. The first one in a hallway. The second one in a room that shouldn't have existed. He'd already searched the entire ground floor, and the second floor was empty. The front doors wouldn't budge. The windows had metal brackets welded to the frames from the inside. The dock was just open water now, no planking, no path, as if the island had been disconnected from the mainland between one moment and the next.

"The boat won't come back," Preston said. "Nobody called a boat. There was no boat called."

Fred set down his evidence. Two photographs, a flashlight, and what looked like a piece of fabric torn from something. "I need everyone to stay in this room. Do not go anywhere. Do not open any doors."

The room went quiet.

Jarrin looked at Jazz. She looked at him. Something was happening here, and the shape of it was clear enough.

He turned around.

The hallway behind them had changed. He was sure of it. Ten minutes ago, he'd walked past a bathroom with chipped blue tile and a half-empty trash can that needed changing. The door had been on his left, and the hallway had led straight to the lobby, a straightforward path he'd walked at least twice that evening.

Now the bathroom was gone. In its place was a kitchen. A cast-iron stove sat against the wall, warm to the touch even from three feet away. The door frame was the same width as the bathroom door, but the walls were three feet closer than they should have been. The hallway was narrower, shorter, wrong.

Jarrin looked at his own hand. He pulled back the sleeve of his Hawaiian shirt and pressed his fingertips together. A small bubble appeared. Transparent, shimmering, about the size of a marble. He popped it with a second finger.

The color left his skin. A perfect circle of pink, where the red had been stolen, stood out against his palm like a mark someone had carved into him. He stared at it. Jazz stared at it from across the hallway. Both of them understood at the same time.

Whatever had killed the first two people, it owned this building.