January's first thought was, She was out there after all. Blood and rum and graveyard dust. And then, Don't be silly. Even if curses had such power, that dust was laid down only three hours ago.

Olympia Snakebones, the voodoos called her.

"This has to be a mistake." Paul Corbier poured coffee from the blue earthenware pot on the sideboard in the cottage's rear parlor, and carried cups to the table. Though it was near three in the morning the shutters stood wide to Rue Douane, and music from a ball still in progress-Creoles, without a doubt-down on Rue Bourbon mingled on the gluey darkness with the cicadas' eerie roar. "I know Olympe. She would not have done this."

January said nothing. Neither did the woman who sat opposite him, a tall woman whose serpent eyes accorded strangely with the skirt and blouse of blue calico, such as the market-women wore. Like all women of color she kept her hair covered, as the law required; but like all free women of color she turned the simple headscarf demanded by a white man's law into a fantasia of folds and pleats whose hue and complexity rivaled the flowers of the field. Alone among the women of color she had worked her tignon into seven points, like a halo of brightcolored flame points around her strong-boned Indian face. By this she was known, the crown of the city's reigning Voodoo Queen.