what I had gained, and so much more. I had a life and a place and people I cared about—and somehow, I’d managed to get those things on my terms.
I turned to Meadow. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Excerpt from HOW TO DATE YOUR DRAGON
A Mystic Bayou Novel
CHAPTER 1
* * *
JILLIAN
Jillian Ramsay, PhD, was driving a panel van without air-conditioning through an area known as the Devil’s Armpit.
She wished that was an exaggeration, or a misprint on the map. But there it was, in bold print on the highway sign, “You are entering the Devil’s Armpit.”
She supposed she should be thankful that her destination wasn’t the Devil’s Armpit, an unusually sulfurous section of southern Louisiana that smelled of rotten eggs and damnation, but a small town just beyond it—Mystic Bayou. She hoped the more attractive name also indicated a more appealing odor. Dr. Montes hadn’t left anything in his field notes about bringing air fresheners with him. But then again, she’d come to learn Dr. Montes’s methods were less polished than anyone hoped.
Jillian fanned her face and dabbed at the perspiration dotting her upper lip. The air-conditioning had crapped out within fifteen minutes of her leaving the New Orleans airport, but after a flight from Chile involving two layovers and a lengthy argument with customs over her audio-video equipment, she just didn’t have any fight left in her.
She rolled down the window, just a crack, hoping the muggy late May air would be cooler than the interior of the van. Almost immediately, her nostrils were flooded with the smell of what could only be described as Satan’s BO.
“Mistake! Huge error in judgment!” she gasped.
Jillian rolled up the window, her hands so sweaty that her fingers actually slipped off of the handle a few times before she sealed herself inside the van. Eager for some form of odor-free distraction, she used her hands-free dialer to call Sonja Fong at the League office. She grumbled as the call went to voicemail, again. But when the machine went beep, Jillian tried to make her tone more suited for a friend she was actually fond of, as opposed to a telemarketer.
“Hey, Sonja, it’s me again. I’d really appreciate a call back, so maybe you could explain to me what’s really going on back there. The League keeps assuring me that everything’s just fine, as they turn my life completely upside down. But I keep getting the feeling I’m a heroine in one of those awful seventies horror movies, where the unwitting outsider ends up a human sacrifice. Cell phone reception is getting pretty spotty, so if you can, call back soon. Love you, bye.”
Jillian pursed her lips. This was not a very auspicious beginning to her first real field assignment. She’d flown all the way to Santiago, only to get a call that her mentor and boss had been seriously injured on his assignment in northern England, and the International League for Interspecies Cooperation was sending her in his place to southern Louisiana. Her in-depth study of the mohana and their mating habits would just have to wait.
All that background reading on malevolent sex-obsessed dolphin shapeshifters for nothing.
Nearly an hour later, Jillian had sweated completely through her clothes and was beginning to worry that she was lost. The gnarled trees dripping with Spanish moss were all starting to look the same. She was pretty sure she’d passed a carnation-pink shack on stilts twice, and she’d realized those “logs” resting against the banks of the swamp, dangerously close to the road, had legs and very large jaws. She was beyond jet-lagged, couldn’t remember her last application of deodorant and was starting to think maybe the League could go jump into the murky, gator-filled water looming on either side of the highway.
Just as Jillian started to search for a place to either do a three-point turn or sleep for the night, another sign came into view. It read, Welcome to Mystic Bayou, Home of the Fighting Marsh Dogs, over a caricature of a large rat with its fists raised a la the Fighting Irish.
Jillian nodded. “OK, then.”
Maybe it was better for her to stay lost.
Jillian opened the van window again, hoping that maybe the air in Mystic Bayou was more palatable. She took a tentative breath. She could almost taste the sweetness on the air, redolent with honeysuckle and dried grass and earth. She took several gulps of it, lifting her mass of honey blond hair off her sweaty neck. She balked at the reflection in the rearview