
was no good. He could still see Mae’s face as she laughed over morning coffee with him, or as she
closed her eyes and gasped in passion when she lay beneath him. He could remember her flashes of
anger as she recounted to him some act of violence done to one of her followers, a crime that would
never even come to trial, and told him that the only way it could be made right was through the
intervention of the loup-garou, the Louisiana werewolf, the last route to justice when human justice failed.
For the last thirty years, Achille had administered that justice.
Transformed, with supernatural strength and with a precise psychic power that gave him unquestioned
proof as to the guilt or innocence of a man’s conscience, Achille would stalk the night until he had seen to
it that true justice was finally done, the balance of good and evil restored.
And now, when he himself had been violated in the most awful way, he was helpless. He was
imprisoned in his own principles. He wanted to let his fury out, to let it swell and grow and burst until the
corruption of it drained from his soul and made him a free man again.
Every day, every night, was a struggle against his anger. Each second that he let Ely live was actually a
victory for him. But it was hollow, unsatisfying, a victory that stung like defeat.
Achille took up his Smith & Wesson and went back outside, to vent a little of his venom on the
unfortunate weather vane.
When Mae was killed, Achille wasn’t as rational as he was with Joe Ed. At first, he was too stunned to
mourn. He couldn’t speak coherently or see anyone, he refused to go anywhere. He shut himself in the
cocoon of Mae’s house, the house he’d shared with her for so many years as her lover and for so brief a
passage as her husband.
Even his friend Andrew Marley, who could usually get Achille to see the reason in anything, couldn’t
communicate with him. The Voodoos, and the heartbroken but strong young woman who was Mae’s
successor as queen, had given her a wonderful funeral in her faith. The young queen had performed the
necessary and solemn rites for Mae, freeing her soul to fly away in freedom. Achille couldn’t bear to
attend this ritual, but the Voodoos, dealing with their own pain and loss, had well understood.
Another tribute that Achille never saw was the requiem mass that Andrew, who was the Episcopal
bishop of the diocese, had said for Mae. Andrew said that the Voodoo Queen had done so much for the
city of New Orleans that she deserved as many memorials as the people who loved her wanted to have.
Mae had been a good friend to Andrew and they rarely saw any conflicts in their respective religions.
“We’re all trying to be the best people we can be, to make the world a better place,” Mae had told him
once. “Doesn’t really matter how it happens, so long as it happens.”
His closest friends, Apollonius and Zizi, tried to watch over Achille, fearing for his sanity and his physical
health. Zizi once brought a big pot of gumbo over to Achille, and found him asleep in the middle of the
afternoon, the silk scarf Mae used to wear tangled in his hands, its bright colors running with tears. Zizi
merely left the gumbo in the kitchen and quietly left the house.
“He looked horrible,” Zizi told Apollonius. “Even asleep. He’s not eating, I can tell by how thin his face
looks. And his eyes have dark circles. Just lying there, he looked tortured, as if he were screaming in his
sleep.”
“Did you try reading his dreams?” Apollonius was referring to the psychic bond common between