Christmas in Dogtown Read online

  She’d done some research on the rougarou legends since her afternoon at Uncle Aim’s. Some people thought the “swamp beast” was a bear. Others, a dog. Parents used the threat of summoning the rougarou to scare their kids into behaving. Hunters told stories of seeing white dogs in the swamp just before someone died. Old-timers believed it was real; her generation thought it was an old fool’s tale.

  Jeanne had cried when Resa confronted her, then begged her to keep it to herself. None of the cousins knew. The kids couldn’t find out. “I’ll support whatever you decide,” she’d finally said. Grudgingly. She wanted to be the grandmother of the next rougarou, which the firstborn of a Theresa-Chandler union would produce. That, Resa didn’t even want to think about.

  Parts of a whole, Uncle Aim had said. Did Chandler love her? Could she love him? She didn’t yet, or at least she didn’t think so. Whether she could, whether she wanted to, what a future living with him in Dogtown might look like—those were the big questions she couldn’t answer.

  Just before dusk, she pulled on a sweater and jeans, considered her tennis shoes with the unraveling laces before tossing them aside, and tugged on boots. Horrified at learning her daughter had sold her only winter coat, Jeanne had foisted a leather jacket on her and Resa pulled it on. An aromatic cloud of some middle-age-appropriate, matronly perfume wafted up as she zipped the front.

  She parked at the edge of the lot at the little Paulina diner and walked the three blocks to River Road, where cars had already parked in long lines along the base of the levee and across the two-lane street. She climbed the embankment to the Madere-Caillou bonfire frame and sought Chan’s tall figure among the relatives of all ages already milling around in the semi-darkness.

  “Merry Christmas, Theresa.”

  Resa turned and looked up at steady, moss-green eyes and the quiet smile of a good man. One whose past and future was so tangled with hers that there was no untangling them without cutting the ties altogether. She understood that now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Chan smiled—that same mixture of sadness and humor. “Because I don’t want you to stay just to keep it going. I don’t want you looking at me across the breakfast table in ten years, or five, or two, and feeling trapped. I don’t want you to wake up one morning hating me.”

  She didn’t know if she could love him, but suspected she was well on her way. She could never hate him.

  Resa looked up at the bonfire frame, down the levee at the teepees lined up as far as she could see, everywhere but at Chan’s face. “I put my house in New Orleans on the market this morning.”

  He lifted her chin so she had no choice but to make eye contact. “Why?”

  She wrapped her arms around him, and felt at peace when his slid around her waist and held her. Two parts of a whole. “Because a very wise man once told me that we’re born into situations and have to decide whether we want to be a part of them or end them. It reminded me of what I am.” What she’d always been.

  “And what are you, Resa?”

  Pulling away, she watched her cousin Mack hold a long fireplace lighter inside the base of the bonfire and set it aflame. Up and down the river, triangular bonfires sparked to life as far as she could see, a river of people with deep roots in this swampy soil, all waiting for Papa Noel to sail past in his boat as their fires illuminated his path through St. James Parish.

  “I am Dogtown.”

  The End

  About the Author

  Photo by: Dianne Ludlam

  Suzanne Johnson writes urban fantasy from Auburn, Alabama, on top of a career in educational publishing that has thus far spanned five states and six universities (including both Alabama and Auburn, which makes her bilingual). She grew up in Winfield, Alabama, halfway between the Bear Bryant Museum and Elvis' birthplace but was also a longtime resident of New Orleans, so she has a highly refined sense of the absurd and an ingrained love of SEC football, cheap Mardi Gras trinkets, and fried gator on a stick. Royal Street, the first in the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series, was released in April 2010 by Tor Books; book two, River Road, will come out on November 13, 2012.

  Fun Facts

  - She once trapped a rat (with a fireplace poker) in a popcorn tin, with a slice of German Chocolate cake (not recommended).

  - She knows the words to both the Alabama and Auburn fight songs (sacrilege!).

  - She can pop her right thumb out of joint because of a childhood injury playing pirate ship.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

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  About the Author