“Don’t know what else to do.” But Garrigue’s voice was slightly steadier. “If he really be changing any damn time he like-”

“Got to be rules. Le Bon Dieu, he wouldn’t let there not be rules-”

“Then we got to tell them, you hear me? They got to know what out there, what we dealing with-what coming after them-”

“And what we are? What they come from, what they part of? You think your little Manette, my Patrice, you think they ready for that?”

“Not the grandbabies, when I ever said the grandbabies? I’m talking the chirren-yours, mine, they husbands, wives, all them. They old enough, they got a right to know.” There was a pause on the other end, and then Garrigue said flatly, “You don’t tell them, I will. I swear.”

It was Arceneaux’s turn to be silent, listening to Garrigue’s anxious breathing on the phone. He said finally, “Noelle. Noelle got a head on her. We tell her, no one else.”

“She got a husband, too. What about him?”

“Noelle,” Arceneaux said firmly. “Antoine ain’t got no werewolf for a daddy.”

“Okay.” Garrigue drew the two syllables out with obvious dubiousness. “Noelle.” The voice quavered again, sounding old for the first time in Arceneaux’s memory. “Ti-Jean, he could be anywhere right now, we wouldn’t know. Could be at them, be tearing them apart, like that woman-”

Arceneaux stopped him like a traffic cop, literally-and absurdly-with a hand held up. “No, he couldn’t. Think about it, Rene. Back in Louzianne-back then-what we do after that big a kill? What anybody do?”

“Go off… go off somewhere, go to sleep.” Garrigue said it grudgingly, but he said it.

“How long for? How long you ever sleep, you and that full belly?”

“A day, anyway. Slept out two whole days, one time. And old Albert Vaugine…” Garrigue was chuckling a bit, in spite of himself. He said, “Okay, so we maybe got a couple of days-maybe. What then?”

“Then we get ourselves on up to the cabin. You and me and him.” Arceneaux hung up.

It had long been the centerpiece of Arceneaux’s private understanding of the world that nothing was ever as good as you expected it to be, or as bad. His confession of her ancestry to Noelle fell into the latter category. He had expected her reaction to be one of horrified revulsion, followed by absolute denial and tearful outrage. Instead, after withdrawing into silent thought for a time, and then saying slow, mysterious things like, “So that’s why I can never do anything with my hair,” she told him, “You do know there’s no way in the world you’re going without me?”

His response never got much beyond, “The hell you preach, girl!” Noelle set her right forefinger somewhere between his Adam’s apple and his collarbones, and said, “Dadda, this is my fight, too. As long as that man’s running around loose”-the irony of her using the words that Alexandre Duplessis had used to justify his murder of the conjure man Fontenot was not lost on Arceneaux-“my children aren’t safe. You know the way I get about the children.”

“This won’t be no PTA meeting. You don’t know.”

“I know you and Uncle Rene, you may both be werewolves, but you’re old werewolves, and you’re not exactly in the best shape. Oh, you’re going to need me, cause right now the both of you couldn’t tackle Patrice, never mind Zelime.” He was in no state to tackle her, either; he made do with a mental reservation: Look away for even five minutes and we’re out of here, me and Rene. You got to know how to handle daughters, that’s all. Specially the pushy ones.

But on the second day, it didn’t matter, because it was Noelle who was gone. And Patrice with her. And her car.

After Antoine had called the police, and the house had begun to fill with terrified family, but before the reporters had arrived, and before Zelime had stopped crying for her mother and little brother, Arceneaux borrowed his son Celestin’s car. It was quite a bit like renting it, not because Celestin charged him anything, but because answering all his questions about why the loan was necessary almost amounted to filling out a form. Arceneaux finally roared at him, in a voice Celestin had not heard since his childhood, “Cause I’m your father, me, and I just about to snatch you balder than you already are, you don’t hand me them keys.” He was on the road five minutes later.

He did not stop to pick up Garrigue. His explanation to himself was that there wasn’t time, that every minute was too precious to be taken up with a detour; but even as he made it, he knew better. The truth lay in his pity for Garrigue’s endless nightmares, for his lonesome question, “It gone be like that time?” and for his own sense that this was finally between him and the man whom he had carved to obscene fragments alive. I let him do it all back to me, he lets them two go. Please, Damballa, you hear? Please.

But he was never certain-and less now than ever before-whether Damballa heard prayers addressed to him in English. So for the entire length of the drive, which seemed to take the rest of his life, he chanted, over and over, a prayer-song that little Ti-Jean Arceneaux, who spoke another language, had learned young, never forgotten, and, until this moment, never needed.

“Baba yehge, amiwa saba yehge,

“De Damballa e a miwa,

“Danou sewa yehge o, djevo de.

“De Damballa Wedo, Bade miwa…”

Rather than bursting into the cabin like the avenging angel he had planned to be, he hardly had the strength or the energy to open the car door, once he arrived. The afternoon was cold, and he could smell snow an hour or two away; he noticed a few flakes on the roof of Noelle’s car. There was flickering light in the cabin, and smoke curling from the chimney, which he and Garrigue mistrusted enough that they almost never lighted a fire. He moved closer, noticing two sets of footprints leading to the door. Yeah, she’d have been carrying Patrice, boy’d have been too scared to walk. The vision of his terrified four-year-old grandson made him grind his teeth, and Duplessis promptly called from within, “No need to bite the door down, Jean-Marc. Half a minute, I’ll be right there.”

Waiting, Arceneaux moved to the side of the house and ripped down the single power line. The electric light went out inside, and he heard Duplessis laugh. Standing on the doorstep as Arceneaux walked back, he said, “I thought you might do that, so I built a handsome fire for us all-even lit a few candles. But if you imagine that’s going to preclude the use of power tools, I feel I should remind you that they all run on batteries these days. Nice big batteries. Come in, Jean-Marc, I bid you welcome.”

It was not the shock of seeing Noelle tied in a chair that almost caused Arceneaux to lose what control he had and charge the smiling man standing beside her. It was the sight of Patrice, unbound on her lap, lighting up at the sight of him to call “Gam’pair!” He had been crying, but his face made it clear that everything would be all right now. Duplessis said pleasantly, “I wouldn’t give it a second thought, old friend. I’m sure you know why.”

“Fontenot,” Arceneaux said. “Never knowed the old man had that much power.”

“Oh, it cost me an arm and a leg… so to speak.” Duplessis laughed softly. “Another reason he had to go. I mean, suppose everyone could change whenever he chose, things might become a bit… chaotic, don’t you agree? But it certainly does come in handy, those nights when you’re suddenly peckish, just like that, and everything’s closed.”

Noelle’s eyes were terrified, but her voice was surprisingly steady. She said, “He broke in in the night, I don’t know how. I couldn’t fight him, because he had Patrice, and he said if I screamed…”

“Yeah, honey,” Arceneaux said. “Yeah, baby.”

“He made me drive him up here. Poor Patrice was so frightened.”