The house was dying. I could feel it in the floorboards, in the way the walls leaned toward each other like old people sharing a secret. Beauregard Plantation had been dead for ten years, since the war took the men and the Yankees took the land, but the house refused to acknowledge what everyone else had accepted. It stood there in the Mississippi mud, rotting slowly, holding onto something that was long gone.

I stood in the doorway with my duffel bag at my feet and looked at what was left of my family's legacy, and I thought about the scar on my face and whether it was uglier than the house.

"Thomas?" My sister's voice came from the staircase, thin and reedy like wind through dead leaves. Cora appeared at the top of the stairs in a dress that had been white once and was now the color of weak tea. She was twenty-three and looked fifty. "You came back."

"I said I would."

She descended the stairs slowly, each step groaning under her weight. She had always been frail, but the past year had taken something from her that I couldn't see. Something in her eyes. The light had gone out of them, replaced by a dull resignation that made my chest ache.

"Reverend Price is coming Sunday," she said. "He says he's going to perform an exorcism. Says the serpent's curse is still on this land, and that God is calling me to purify myself before—"

"Enough, Cora." I turned away from her and walked into what had been the parlor. The furniture was gone, sold or stolen or carried off by rats. The fireplace was cold. The windows were broken. But the floor held, and that was more than I could say for the rest of it.

I went to my old room and sat on the edge of a cot that had been dragged in from somewhere. The scar on my left face pulled tight when I smiled, which was rarely. I hadn't smiled since I left the army. I hadn't smiled since the snake bit me in the swamp behind the lines, while I was on night watch, while I was thinking about home and warm beds and Cora's laugh and everything I might get to have if I survived the war.

I survived. That seemed like the wrong choice now.

The swamp called me three days after I arrived. I don't know why. Maybe it was the rain, turning the dirt roads to mud and the mud to something that sucked at your boots like it wanted to pull you under. Maybe it was the sound—the constant, low humming that seemed to come from the ground itself, like the earth was breathing something slow and ancient.

I went with no plan and no purpose, just walking, letting the path take me where it wanted. The trees closed in around me, cypress knees sticking out of the water like the knuckles of something submerged. Spanish moss hung from the branches like old women's hair, and the air was thick with the smell of decay and something else, something sweet and reptilian that made my scar itch.

I followed the smell.

He was sitting on a log at the edge of a clearing, so still that I took him for part of the swamp itself. Old man, skin like cracked leather, eyes that were the color of the water—muddy and deep and full of things you didn't want to know about. He wore a hat that had once been black and a coat that had once been brown, and around his neck hung a necklace of snake teeth, each one filed to a point.

"You're a Beauregard," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I am."

"Sit down, boy. You're standing wrong. You're standing like a soldier, and this ain't no parade ground."

I sat. The log was damp and cold, and the mosquitoes came for my legs in a cloud that I could feel but not see, like they were made of something thinner than air.

"You got the mark," the old man said, nodding at my face.

"It's just a scar."

He laughed, and the laugh was like dry leaves skittering across stone. "Just a scar. That's what my daddy said, right before the serpents took him. That's what your granddaddy said, right before they took him too. You Beauregards, you all think you can talk your way out of what the land decides."

"What land decides?"

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small leather pouch, opened it, and poured a handful of dried scales into his palm. They were green and gold and shaped like tiny hexagons, each one no bigger than a fingernail. "This land has been watching your family for three generations, Thomas Beauregard. Your granddaddy shot a serpent that was twelve feet long and as thick as a barrel. Your daddy tried to breed them, to make them work for him, like they were horses or mules. And you—" he looked at me with eyes that were suddenly very clear, very sharp, very old—"you let one bite you, and now it's inside you."

I touched my scar instinctively. "There's nothing inside me."

"Isn't there?" He stood up slowly, his joints popping like small explosions, and walked to the edge of the clearing. "Come here, boy. Listen."

I stood and joined him at the edge. He put his hand on my shoulder and pressed me down, just slightly, and said, "Listen to the ground."

At first I heard nothing. Then, slowly, like a radio tuning itself to a frequency I didn't know existed, I heard it. A vibration. Low and steady, like a heartbeat that belonged to something much larger than any animal I could name. It came through the soles of my boots and up through my legs and into my chest, and my scar pulsed in time with it, like it was answering a call I hadn't known was being made.

"The serpents know you," the old man said. "They've been waiting for you. Your family owes them a debt, Thomas Beauregard, and the debt comes due with each generation. Your granddaddy killed one. Your daddy tried to enslave them. And you—" he turned to me, and his face was very close, and I could smell the swamp on his breath—"you let one bite you. That means they chose you. And what they choose, they keep."

"What do you mean, they keep?"

He didn't answer. He just turned and walked back to his log, sat down, and began filing one of the snake teeth with a small stone, the way a man might file his nails.

I stayed in the clearing until dark, listening to the ground, feeling the vibration pulse through me like a second heartbeat. When I finally stood up to leave, my legs were numb and my scar was burning, and I knew, with a certainty that settled into my bones, that the old man was right.

The serpents had chosen me.

I went back to the old man's shack that night. His name was Silas Crowe, and he lived alone in the swamp with nothing but his dogs, his traps, and the walls covered in snake skins that he had collected over sixty years. He showed me things I had never seen—serpents that could change color like chameleons, serpents that could strike faster than the eye could follow, serpents that seemed to understand language, that responded to tone and cadence the way a dog responds to its name.

"Your family has been working with serpents longer than anyone in this parish," Silas said, pouring whiskey into two chipped glasses. "The Beauregards didn't just own land. We owned the swamp. And the swamp belongs to the serpents. We just borrowed it from them, with interest."

"What kind of interest?"

He looked at me over the rim of his glass, and his eyes were very old and very tired. "Blood, mostly. And time. Every Beauregard pays with blood and time. Your granddaddy gave his eyes. Your daddy gave his mind. And you, Thomas Beauregard—you're going to give whatever they decide you owe."

"Decide? You mean like they're choosing?"

Silas set his glass down and stood up. "Come here."

He led me to the back of the shack, to a room I hadn't noticed before, small and windowless and filled with the smell of dried herbs and something else, something that made my scar twitch. On the walls were photographs—sepia-toned, faded, but unmistakable. Three men, each one standing in front of the camera with a face that was partially covered by something that looked like scales.

"Your granddaddy," Silas said, pointing to the first photograph. "Your daddy. And me."

I stared at the photographs. The man in the third picture was old, much older than I had expected Silas to be, with skin that was textured like reptile hide and eyes that were too still, too dark, too knowing.

"You're—"

"I was a Beauregard, once. Long ago. Your granddaddy and I were cousins. We grew up together, hunted together, and when the serpents chose him, they chose me too. But I ran. I ran further than he ever would have, further than your daddy ever could. And it didn't matter. The serpents always find their due."

He turned to me, and in the dim light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling, his face looked different. Not changed. Just seen more clearly. The lines around his eyes were deeper. The skin on his cheeks was textured like something that had learned to breathe air after a long time underwater.

"I taught your granddaddy to listen to them," Silas said. "I taught your daddy to fear them. And now I'm going to teach you to understand them. Because understanding is the only thing that makes the debt bearable."

I stayed with Silas for two weeks. I learned to sit in the swamp for hours without moving, to feel the vibrations through the mud, to distinguish between the different calls that different serpents made—mating calls, warning calls, the low humming that Silas said was the sound of the swamp itself, the sound of something vast and ancient and patient that lived beneath the surface of everything.

My scar stopped itching. In its place was a warmth, like a second pulse beating beneath the skin, slow and steady and connected to something much larger than myself. I began to dream in colors I had no names for, in patterns that made sense only when I was asleep, geometric and reptilian and beautiful in a way that hurt to look at.

On the fourteenth day, I stood in front of the mirror in Silas's shack and looked at my face. The scar was still there, but it was different now. The edges were softer, the skin around it textured like something that was learning to be something else. And when I tilted my head, just slightly, the light caught my eye and for a moment—just a moment—I saw the pupil narrow to a vertical slit.

I smiled. My scar pulled tight, and it didn't hurt.

"Ready?" Silas asked from the doorway.

I looked at him, and I saw what I had been too afraid to see before: that he was not old. He was transformed. That the texture of his skin and the stillness of his eyes and the knowledge in his voice were not the marks of age but the marks of something that had made its choice and was living with it.

"What happens to me?" I asked.

"You become what the serpents made you," he said simply. "You stay in the swamp. You learn their language. You become the guardian of the debt that your family has been paying for three generations. Or you walk away, and you spend the rest of your life running from something that will always find you."

I thought about Cora. I thought about the house dying in the mud. I thought about the vibration in the ground and the warmth in my scar and the way the swamp sounded at night, like a lullaby sung by something that had been singing since before men learned to build houses and plant crops and call the land their own.

"I'm staying," I said.

Silas nodded, and for the first time I saw something in his eyes that might have been pride. "Then let me show you what your granddaddy found in the deepest part of the swamp. The place where the serpents sleep. The place where the debt begins."

We walked into the darkness together, two men and a swamp that was older than both of us, older than the war and the plantation and the Beauregard name, older than anything that men had built or named or claimed. And as we walked, I could feel the serpents moving beneath my feet, slow and patient and infinite, welcoming their due home.