A dark mist sieved out of Valin's body, coalescing into Babette St. Cyr's form. She stared at Gabrielle, the sheen of tears on her face, but whether from rage or grief, Augustine couldn't tell. Valin collapsed bonelessly to the floor, a marionette with broken strings.

"Shit," he groaned. "That did not feel good."

With a soft sigh of relief, McKenna lowered her kosh to her side, perspiration glistening on her forehead. Sitting on her heels, she closed her eyes.

Augustine watched as Babette St. Cyr rippled over to Gabrielle and touched a hand to the woman's hair. Gabrielle shivered convulsively and wrapped her arms around herself as though she'd felt a cold draft.

"I will never forgive you," Babette said.

"And I ain't forgiving you," Valin growled, rising up on his hands and knees, gaze locked on the late Babette's inky, swirling form. "And neither will they."

Babette's attention shifted from Gabrielle to Valin. Her eyes narrowed. "'They'?"

"The spirits of those you poisoned," Valin replied. "They're waiting Beyond. Been waiting a long time. All I gotta do is let them in."

Babette flowed over to Valin, her eyes electric with fury. "You're talking shit, boy. You can't do no such thing."

"Watch me."

Power radiated from the nomad, setting the ghostly ether ablaze with a blinding white light. Squinting, Augustine averted his face from the source of that cold and dangerous brilliance-Valin himself-fear prickling along his figurative spine.

Electricity crackled through the air. Augustine caught a glimpse of an ethereal gate pinwheeling open near the ceiling and breathing ice into the room.

"Sweet Jesus."

"Hellfire!"

"For Gage."

From within the gate's jet-black and icicled mouth, Augustine heard a low, multivoiced sigh, followed by

"Sweet Jesus," Kallie's aunt repeated, voice stunned.

"Well done, luv," McKenna murmured. "Our Gage has been avenged."

"Doesn't feel that way," Valin whispered.

Augustine stared at the nomad. I had no idea he possessed power of that magnitude. I wonder if he knows his limits, his strengths. Could be interesting finding out.

"Aye, luv, I ken what ye mean, but give it time," Mc-Kenna sympathized.

"Seems justice does exist after all," Augustine murmured, sauntering over to Valin's body and sieving into him with a small contented sigh.

The nomad struggled up to his knees, then grabbed ahold of the bedpost to pull himself upright. Augustine informed him, surrounding himself with a security bubble. Valin ran for the door.

THIRTY-FOUR.

BOUND BY THE BARON.

Head throbbing at his temples and behind his eyes, Layne raced to the doorway, pulling a blade free from inside his jacket. But what he saw as he loped into the botanica iced his blood and made him grab a second blade.

Kallie, her long, espresso-dark hair veiling her face dangled limp and lifeless in the grasp of a white guy in fedora, suit, and shades along with a skull-painted face.

The white guy-Baron Samedi, Layne assumed, never having seen the loa before-was busy hauling something out from within the swamp beauty, a struggling female shape, black and glistening, and giving the loa the fight of his existence.

A small circle of people near the pair had backed a healthy distance away, their faces drained of color, expressions shaken.

Cold fingers clenched around Layne's heart. Adrenaline fueled his muscles, stretched out his long stride. With Kallie's soul removed and hidden, he had a suspicion that the loa planted inside of her had taken her soul's place in more ways than one, and without the loa, she might die.

He couldn't lose her. He refused to lose her. Not after having fought so hard to keep her alive and to give Gage's loss some kind of meaning. He didn't know if stainless steel had any effect on loas or not, but he was about to find out.

Layne heard someone running just behind him and figured it had to be a friend, since everyone else stood around Kallie and the Baron.

Shoving past a pair of chalk-faced onlookers, Layne brought both blades up for a double-sided stick to the Baron's throat, just as the loa gasped in horror and tossed Kallie aside. The female-shaped loa disappeared inside Kallie once more.

"By Bon Dieu's holy cock, I be hexed," the Baron cried, trying to shake a cobweb of darkness from the hand he'd plunged into Kallie's chest. "De damned girl be right. It ain't de loa. It be-" He and his cheval vanished in a stinky and sulphurous puff of black smoke before he finished speaking.

Layne skidded to a stop on the hardwood floor beside Kallie's crumpled body, then dropped to his knees. He brushed her hair away from her face and touched shaking fingers to her throat. He sucked in a rough breath when he felt a slow, steady pulse beneath his fingertips.

"Virgin Mary in a leaky boat," he said. "Stay with us, sunshine."

"Is she okay?" Belladonna asked, her voice tight with fear.

"She's alive," Layne said, resheathing his knives, then scooping Kallie into his arms. "But I don't know about okay." Cradling her unconscious body against his chest, he rose easily to his feet and turned around.

Divinity, McKenna, and Gabrielle had followed him and Belladonna into the botanica and they now stood alongside the frightened-looking hoodoo crew.

"Dear God. What went wrong?" the woman with the shotgun asked. "Where did the Baron go?"

"He mentioned a hex," someone else replied. "What do we do now?"

"He said it wasn't de loa inside Kallie, so you all be fools," Divinity snapped. "And as for what we do now, we figure out how to break a hex without using magic." She looked at Layne, lines of worry bracketing her mouth. "Take my girl to de back so I can look her over."

"No," Gabrielle said, resting a hand on Divinity's arm. "You can't. She's still in danger and she needs to get out of here before it finds her."

Divinity's eyes narrowed. She jerked her arm free of the mambo's touch. "What else have you done, woman? What kind o' danger be looking for Kallie?"

Sorrow and guilt shadowed Gabrielle's eyes. "You ever heard of the demon wolf of the bayou, Devlin Daniels?"

"Dat I have. A loup-garou, ain't he? One with powers beyond dose of other loups-garous because he was conceived in de crossroads, his daddy a diable posing as Papa Legba?"

Gabrielle nodded. "Close enough. He's my godson. And the Baron forced me to summon him to hunt Kallie down."

"Hellfire," Belladonna breathed.

"Den call him off," Divinity insisted. "If he be yo' godson, make him listen."

"I can't," Gabrielle choked. "The Baron bound him to the hunt and to Kallie. The binding only ends when Devlin finds her."

First loas and now loups-garous. Layne didn't like the sound of that one bit. "Do I need a goddamned silver bullet to put him down?" he growled.

"Silver's not necessary," Gabrielle said, and Layne had the distinct feeling she wasn't telling him the whole truth. "Regular bullets affect him. Devlin didn't ask for this any more than Kallie did. He's lost so much already. He can be reasoned with. Don't kill my boy-please."

"Ain't making any promises," Layne replied. "Not where Kallie's life is concerned."

Gabrielle nodded, jaw tight. "Then you'd better go. Maybe he'll lose her trail. Maybe I can convince the Baron to unbind him."

"We'll take my car," Belladonna said. "Continue the search for Jackson."

McKenna stepped past the mambo and Layne saw his Glock in her hand. She slipped it into his jacket pocket, then yanked one of his dreads. Layne winced. "Dammit, Kenn."

"You're a man-stupid idiot," McKenna said, her brows slashed down over her dark, fierce eyes. "But do what ye need to, luv. We'll take care o' things here. Ye just come back safe."

Surprised by her words, Layne bent and kissed her forehead. "Thanks, buttercup."

"Aye, and I'm sure I'll sodding regret this," she muttered.

Layne carried Kallie to the back door and followed Belladonna to her car. For a split second, he thought he saw a canine-shaped shadow disappear behind the Dump-ster and he moved a little faster, his heart drumming against his ribs.

He didn't breathe easy until he had Kallie and himself in Belladonna's car with Kallie reclining in the front passenger seat this time and himself folded into the back. The dark-haired hoodoo stirred and murmured something he couldn't quite catch, but didn't wake up. Since her face remained relaxed and peaceful, Layne had a gut feeling that Kallie was okay-despite the Baron's actions.

"Where we headed?" he asked as Belladonna started up the Dodge Dart.

She glanced tenderly at her unconscious friend. "Bayou Cocodrie."

THIRTY-FIVE.

DEMON WOLF.

Kallie was pretty damned sure they were being followed.

Ever since they had left Belladonna's car parked on a gravel back road a few miles outside of Gibson and had hiked into the rain-wet woods, following the dark and tree-lined banks of the bayou, Kallie had caught glimpses of stealthy movement from the corners of her eyes. Imagined she heard the soft pad of paws beneath every gust of wind rattling through the trees and palmetto bushes.

She wrapped her fingers tighter around the hilt of the knife she'd borrowed from Layne after he and Bell had told her about Gabrielle's godson when she'd awakened-with little memory of her encounter with the Baron other than pain and ice and a haunting sense of emptiness-about forty miles outside Bayou Cypres Noir.

A chill crawled up Kallie's spine. Demon wolf. She'd first heard the legend of Devlin Daniels a couple of years after she'd come to live with her tante.

If a person be evil or wicked or just plain bad and leave misery and grief in deir wake, den one night, de demon wolf will come for dem and he'll rip deir black hearts from outta deir chests. He be de voice of dark retribution, him. Now, be good and eat yo' peas, girl.

Since when does not eating peas equal dark retribution, huh?

Mebbe de peas don't, but yo' sass certainly qualifies. Now tais-toi, you, and eat.

But Kallie had never believed the story to be true or that the legend himself would turn out to be the godson of a mambo she'd met only a couple of days before.

Wind whipped through the trees and Kallie's hair, rustling leaves, fluttering Spanish moss, and rippling across the bayou's dark surface. Tree branches creaked. She smelled impending rain mixed in with the odors of moss and mud and decaying vegetation.

Layne walked just ahead of her and Belladonna on the spongy, rain-saturated trail, his dreads knotted behind him and out of the way, his posture alert, coiled for action. His wary gaze scanned the shadows.

"You sure we're going the right way, Shug?" Belladonna asked in hushed tones.

Her question nudged at the knot of anxiety lodged in Kallie's chest, amplified the countdown timer ticking away at the back of her mind. "Ain't sure, no," she finally replied. "Just following my intuition. What does your intuition say?"

"That your intuition is right. It's also telling me I should've broken in these boots before going on a long slog through a swamp. How far have we gone? Five, ten miles? My feet are killing me."

"One mile, Bell. Maybe two. And what the hell are you doing in new boots?"

"Breaking them in, apparently," Belladonna said with a sigh.

Kallie glanced at her friend. Belladonna clutched a borrowed knife in her right hand and held it half lifted, Norman Bates style. "What method of knife fighting you planning to use there, Bell?" she teased.

"A reliable method known as shriek-slash-and-run."

"Might save time if you skip the shriek and go straight to the slash."

"The shriek is essential, Shug. It stuns the attacker, making the slash much more effective."

"Less chatter, ladies," Layne said in a low voice. "Trying to listen for the approach of fanged death here."

"Right. Sorry," Belladonna whispered.

A sudden fork of lightning split the sky and bleached the land bone white. In that brief, stark-still frame, Kallie thought she saw distant rooflines through the trees. A hunter's encampment or a hidden village?

But just as the night returned and thunder grumbled low, Kallie's heart leapt into her throat when she spotted a sleek canine shape with gleaming eyes weaving among the oaks and willows and cypress, before disappearing into the underbrush.

She knew Layne had seen it too when he slipped his Glock from the pocket of his leather jacket and carefully chambered a round. "Keep close," he murmured.

"Hey," Belladonna whispered. "I think I see lights." She pointed to a spot up the trail and across the bayou with her knife. "Over there. Look. There must be a bridge."

Grabbing Belladonna's arm, Kallie maneuvered her quietly protesting friend-What the hell?-around to her other side, placing herself between Belladonna and the night-drenched trees.

And whatever they hid from view.