Cast No Shadow 3

Cast No Shadow

Chapter 3: Job Interview

The Den of Beelzebub, otherwise known as Tiana's Place, was a soaring two-level Colonial mansion flanked by water, once a sugar mill, but its roots showed not one bit as Dr. Facilier trudged up to its radiant façade.

A fluid green neon script elegantly declared to him where he was, as if he needed the reminder. The place was an intricate array of Art Nouveau and Art Deco charms, in the form of glowing yellow-lit arched windows. A towering mansard finial soared toward the (still starless) New Orleans sky braced by palm trees and engaged white columns. Facilier could make out a chandelier through the foyer window.

Oh dear God.

He took in a deep breath of balmy evening air and stepped inside, following an irritatingly happy laughing couple whose carefree quality made his weights feel twice as heavy. Facilier considered picking one of their pockets, but then remembered he had no Shadow to do the trick on his behalf. Thus he shoved his hands in his pockets and proceeded to slip around them and disregard the gentleman at the reservations desk with surly resolve. "I'm the new guy," he tossed over his shoulder, not bothering to doff his top hat.

He had once magically manufactured the restaurant as Tiana had dreamt it to be, in order to try and convince her to return his Voodoo blood talisman. He had given creative flair to the accuracy of her vision.

Even so, Facilier had vastly underestimated what Tiana's will could produce.

Jazz music blasted forth into the festive air of the restaurant. A full brass and woodwind band performed on the stage at the end of a long nave-like stretch of tables. In the center of the blue, sky-like ceiling was the sparkling champagne-hued chandelier that had beckoned the Shadowman inside.

God. He loved champagne. It was his favorite.

For higher-paying customers, there were continuous cloister-like opera-box bilevels of private tables, each with its own spherical electrical light. To the back left of the stage was the door to the kitchens, and past it a nondescript stairwell.

Despite the opulence of the place, there was a strain to it: only half the tables at best were filled, and none of the private booths. Many of the lights were turned off. Cobwebs gathered as subtle signs of disrepair on chairs that were empty.

So even Tiana's grand dream was susceptible to the vicissitudes of the American one.

Despite signs of a level playing field, Facilier's heart thundered in his ears. He had always been bold, confident in his competence and talent, and excited by the capacity to snake into a risky situation and wiggle back out of it without a single scratch. But now, with no Voodoo powers, no command of people's wills and limited insight into their deepest desires, he was no longer the brash puppeteer that he had been. He was on enemy territory with an unloaded gun. And it was both degrading and terrifying.

And on that note of rampant performance anxiety, a queasily familiar slick-cut sunbaked tan male form was weaving its way toward him between tables full of laughing socialites and drab downtrodden alike.

Facilier was not ready for Naveen. He would rather face Tiana first. The daughter of the same humble, grounded backwater roots as himself. The person who would aim fiery moral sermons at him and lapse into wonderfully familiar poor grammar from time to time and probably smack him good across the face. Not the vapid shallow happy-go-lucky pretensions of Little Boy Silver Spoon. Not now. Facilier would rather be spat upon by Tiana than bought a drink by Naveen.

"Get away," he snarled, as the tall wiry European monarch approached. "Not you, damn it all. I ain't ready." He even held up a hand, palm outstretched, to fend off the grinning ass.

"I'm sorry," replied a voice much deeper and softer than Facilier remembered of his favorite frog prince. "Do we know each other? I thought you were the fellow they sent over to replace my sister-in-law's sous chef."

Sister-in-law?

Facilier's hand drooped to his side. He got a sharper look at the young man before him. Very young. Shy of twenty. Taller and slenderer than Naveen. Longer hair. Otherwise, his doppleganger. "Oh Powers," he uttered. "Don't y'all tell me Prince Naveen had a brother."

"Precisely!" the boy declared. "I am Prince Arshad. Of Maldonia!" He clapped Facilier heartily on the back.

"HAH, haha," the witch doctor chortled, suppressing the urge to let that laugh descend into hysterical giggling, as well as the urge to crack an inside joke with himself and ask Arshad if he wanted his palm read. "Y'all have not a clue who I am, do ya?"

"You are the new sous chef. And you look tired and sincerely humble. That is good enough for me, sir." The boy, Arshad, only warmly smiled. There was something twinkling in his sunflower-hued gaze. Something that almost made Facilier ask if he was being serious, or if he knew more. Something that also brought to mind horses which were gifts, and mouths. Something like that. He couldn't rightly recollect the whole adage.

"Hohoho my." Facilier settled with rubbing his temples. "Strum me a ukulele."

"Well, I don't know, good sir." Arshad draped an arm around the weary Voodoo man's shoulders and began to escort him toward a stairwell in the very back of the restaurant, by the kitchens and exit, with an electrical sign that read Employees Only. "I am going to take you to your living quarters, they are on the second floor and lead out to a balcony that overlooks the river. Anyway, no, the tiny guitar, that is my brother's territory. I am more for piano. And saxophone, and dancing, when my parents are not visiting. They do not approve of antics, you see. They are, how you put it, very 'Old World.' They shipped me to the States for a few months because my sister-in-law's restaurant is in financial trouble. Depression and all. Ashidanza, 1929, it was a bad year for your country, hein? And I am here also because my nephew no longer needs my guidance getting through the European private school system, and because my sister-in-law's best friend Miss Charlotte LaBouff is very pretty and has been telling me since I was six and a half years old that she will marry me-"

"Yeah, that's, that's fascinatin', Prince Arshad." Well, his voice is less grating, but he babbles just like his brother. "But I've had a bit of an upsettin' day, y'see-"

"Oh that is too bad. I am so sorry, Mr. Michel. You are so colorfully clad, I would never have imagined you the sort to be down and out."

"Eryeah. Thank you kindly." Huh. At least he has taste. "So I need to speak to the lady manager before I get settled in up yonder. There's some…preexisting history between her and me that might be a bit of a problem with respect to my new position."

"I do not believe that there will be a problem!" Arshad declared in a tone of inexplicable radiance that Facilier was beginning to believe was a rather unsettling, but also soothing, quality of the kid's character.

"I do." A new voice. Female. Thin, tight, and tremulous with shock and rage.

Facilier and his new and considerably unlikely friend turned in unison to face the woman whom the witch doctor had swindled, bereaved of dear friends, mocked, and nearly killed.

Brandishing a guest roster and a meat cleaver in arms crossed over her chest like some femme warrior pharaoh, clad in a knee-length yellow dress which certainly wasn't her ice-white befurred befeathered flapper dress of dreams, but which burned like a vengeful sun…was none other than Mrs. Froggy Princess.

And whoa there. That was one glistening sharp meat cleaver.

Facilier gulped.

"Git. OUT. Whoever you are. This is NO joke. How dare you. Who do you think you MESSIN' with? The man you're impersonating is dead. DEAD! An' he HAS been for YEARS! I SAW to it."

The Shadowman regained his indignant arrogance. "Never assume, Tiana, sweetheart," he bristled. "Makes an ass of u and me. Much to your chagrin, baby doll, my heart's still pumpin', and accordin' to your little Dubbya Pee Ay, I can cook food in yonder kitchen." He jerked his head at the back of the swanky joint.

"Well you're fired, Shadowman," she retorted, eyes glinting with tears of fury. And then she blinked back evidence of being emotionally jostled, stepped forward, and delivered the wrathful slap across the mouth that Facilier had been expecting. "And don't you call me babydoll."

On the stage, the jazz musicians ceased their playing to gawk with the rest of the restaurant.

"Est-ce que je dois prendre Naveen?" Arshad, stepping away from the both of them with a gliding gesture, calmly queried into the electrical still that fell between the witch doctor and princess.

Facilier rubbed his injured lip and cheek. "Je parle le francais aussi," he contemptuously drawled. "Prenez votre cher frère Naveen, I don't give a rat's ass."

"Yeah. You just might wanna go get him," Tiana forced through her teeth, and Arshad retreated an unknown direction; unknown because the witch doctor kept his eyes imperiously trained on Tiana's somewhat Amazonian form.

His tongue poked cheekily through the gap in his teeth, followed closely by a darkly appreciative whistle. "Oho, y'all learned the real language of the Crescent City, didja, babyd-" And then he bit his tongue.

Because Tiana's cleaver had found its way to the tip of his crotch.

"Easy now," he entreated, hands raised and voice immediately vaulting two octaves.

"Back yourself out of this restaurant now," she hissed, eyes caustically ablaze.

"I got nowhere to go, darlin,'," he retorted, backing, instead, up the stairs to the loft that Arshad had indicated moments earlier.

"You're a resourceful man. You'll find a cardboard box or a rock, or a shelter. Scores of men thousands of times better'n YOU have."

"Tiana. Eleven years have passed." By now Facilier was halfway up the stairs. He oiled his rusty persuasion joints to appeal to the proprietress's compassionate instincts.

"Eleven years I was asleep in hell, and it just spat me back up tonight, and I haven't a clue why nor HALF a clue how to begin makin' my way among strangers."

In the back of his mind, however, it occurred to him that climbing to the highest level of a hostile zone with no escape and the enemy aiming a very pointy thing at his manhood was probably not his most brilliant of strategies.

"Well cry me a river," Tiana thundered.

Allllrighty. That was a spectacular failure.

His lips pursed sourly. "Thanks for caring. By the way, cherie, everyone's lookin'."

"Let 'em look. They're loyal customers. They'll be about as pleased to see you as Louis would be to see those gator teeth round your neck, once I tell 'em who and what you are."

"They're leopard fangs," he lied about the exoticism of his attire for the second time that night. "…Who's Louis?"

Keep her talking. She'll soften. Right, yeah. Hooray for being quixotic! Allons-y!

"The trumpeting bayou alligator who was Ray's friend," Tiana seethed.

Aw damn and hellfire….

"And who is Ray?" He already had an inkling. Hence the mental eruption of expletives.

"The beautiful soul you smashed under your shoe."

Yeah damn. That was what he was afraid of.

Facilier winced. "The, ah, shadow-bustin' firefly?"

Fireflies. He had felt a funny rare weird stirring in his chest when he saw those, earlier that evening. A feeling he'd not felt since his mother was alive. A feeling only that insufferable little girl had been able to assuage.

Facilier tripped and landed hard on his rump on the second to last step to the loft. Tiana's cleaver was aimed at his heart now.

Shit.

"Yes, him. He was so much more than that, Shadowman. He was good and kind and he probably woulda been the FIRST person to FORGIVE you, but guess what, thanks to YOU, he ain't here. So since you wouldn't just GIT, I'm lockin' you up here and calling the police!"

"And tell 'em what, puddin'?" Facilier, now cornered, began sinking into a viciousness bred of panic. "That a dead man who was always a myth in this city to begin with got sent down from a government job office to hauntcha? Usin' magic?"

He stood and leaned into the cleaver, with a coldly livid smile.

"You can't do it," he continued. His pupils dilated like a shark's at scent of blood. "You didn't even mean to kill me the first time."

" 'Don't assume anything,'" she flung his quip back at him, steely. The cleaver slid down and pressed against Facilier's exposed belly.

"Then let me ask a question before I do." Suddenly in a flash of palpitating manic clarity, Facilier realized something crucial. He wondered if he still smelled of magnolias and dry wall rubble. "Was it you?" he hissed. "Did YOU have my emporium torn down?"

"Someone had to take out the trash." The knife twisted slightly, paper-cutting a sliver of blood out of Facilier's midriff.

He didn't blink. "Well then, I think you've paid me back in FULL, you little bitch. Y'all robbed me of everything that mattered to me, just like I tried to use you, an' now I'm adrift in a world that I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Comprenez-vous? C'mon now, poppet. I can still look deep into any heart. I know you. So what'll you tell the police, Cinderella? What're the repercussions of demolishing the home of a body who's ALIVE and ABLE to give or WITHDRAW consent? HM?"

"Your grave-"

"Is totally destroyed. You ain't got NO proof I was EVER dead."

Tiana was finally rendered mute.

Oho, that's right, little girl. That's right. That's what you get.

"Magnifique. Now get me a bandaid, princess." Facilier pointed at the cut across his belly button, and rested his hands on his hips with a triumphant leer.

But his victory was short-lived. A pair of lean iron arms wrapped around his injured torso and heaved him bodily into the loft. Facilier struck out with a startled cry but found himself pinioned, arms twisted behind his back, against a dusty wooden floor.

He thrashed around and took in the room: empty and plain, with about half a dozen cots, some occupied by other men, otherwise homeless by the look of their patchwork attire.

Arshad sat on one of the beds looking apologetic.

Then Facilier heard the voice of his assailant in his ear. "We'll think of something to tell the law." A high thickly accented tenor. The scent of too much cologne. A lot more gravitas and strain than Facilier remembered of Prince Naveen of Maldonia. But then it had been eleven years, and well, Naveen wasn't exactly his bosom buddy. "Do not you worry, old friend."

"Darnit, boy, your breath smells like I don't KNOW what, but ain't nothin' like your flowery perfume," Facilier harshly jested, unwilling to submit. Seemed like ever since he'd come back from the dead, his willingness to suck up and kiss ass had been severely impaired. He waved a hand in front of his wrinkled nose to up the Ante of Cheeky Smartass a little more.

"Ha, well! Sniff away! And get comfortable down there, Dr. Facilier," Naveen declared. "I am keeping you thus until Tiana calls the tops."

"Cops, Naveen," Arshad corrected his brother's stilted use of American slang. He was obviously trying not to smile, and he coughed to conceal a snorting laugh. Then he rolled his golden eyes toward a pair of heels that strode past Facilier's ground-level line of vision. "Tiana…"

"Don't start, Arshad. Y'all too sweet for your own good," Tiana cut him off. "Unfortunately, Naveen…there's nothing we can do. Shadowman has a point, in his usual slimy way."

"HO, but 'it's not slime!'" Facilier parroted back a very old witticism at his antagonists. He brayed a rather mad laugh that roused half the sleeping employees in the loft. "'It's mucus!' HAHA. HAAAA. YES, sir! HAHAHAHA."

Huh. He sounded a little insane, didn't he?

Oh well. The loony bin was probably a warmer destination than this place.

His assailants collectively winced at his manic outburst. Then Arshad shrank away from a murderous look courtesy of Naveen. "What? You are sitting on him. That would make anyone a little distraught--"

"You knew who he was from the START," Naveen chastised. "You MUST have remembered from all the stories of how Tiana and I met! Shad-Shad! You can not be charitable to every little cockroach that scurries by! He is dangerous!"

"Just look at him, Navie," Arshad countered. "I know what he tried to do to you and Teenie. But. He's so pathetic."

"HEY, now, ahaha, this here cockroach ob-JECTS…" Facilier wiggled under his captor like a snake or slug, and freed a single arm. He reached for his skull-emblazoned tophat, which had spilled off his head at some point when Naveen lurched him into the loft. The elder prince moved to step on it-or Facilier's fingers-but Arshad picked it up and discretely placed it behind him on the cot he had claimed. The younger prince aimed his brother a gently reproachful stare. "See? Pathetic. And in no need of your help reaching that state more fully."

Naveen sighed. "Pathetic? My dear brother! Do you know what he is CAPABLE of?" He cast an agitated glance around the loft. "Where is that shadow? I bet he is fixing to make his shadow attack us! It can trip and kick people at the very least! That creepy shadow with a mind of its own!"

Facilier's delicate internal balance finally pitched decidedly in a bad direction.

"It's GONE, ya damn sonbitches!" he roared. He kicked his legs fiercely until Naveen sat on them. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth and he licked it back, embarrassed, trapped, and desolate. "My Shadow is GONE! GRAH! DAMN IT DAMN IT STOMP ON IT AND KILL IT DEAD, YOU PEOPLE ARE IDJUTS! I AIN'T GOT NO POWERS NO MORE!"

He remembered his mother again.

Her image came unbidden to his mind, in a loft being sat upon by a vindictive former acquaintance with a cut in his belly in 1935.

He remembered his mother telling him he, Michel, was actually born a twin.

That his brother was still-born.

That said brother had brown eyes.

That said brother probably would have been a kinder boy than he, and wouldn't have tortured frogs.

Or her heart, every time she looked at him.

He remembered Odie adopting him. He remembered the first day he turned Odie's magic into his own, and, hoping to prove his dead mama wrong and spit in Odie's face, made his Shadow sentient. And freed it to express the most selfishly hateful impulses in his own soul.

So he had a twin alright, and that twin was even eviler than he.

Take that, mama, goddamn you. Goddamn you, because your Great Disappointment ain't the one who did the leavin'. Not in the end.

"GERROFF ME!" he erupted again, arching his back like a recoiling serpent, and nearly bucking Naveen. "Y'ALL SO PURE AN' CLEAN BUT YOU TORTURE YOUR ENEMIES IN AN ATTIC, WHERE NOBODY CAN SEE, HUH? GEROFF! I'LL GO. I'LL GO. JUS' QUIT! MY POWERS ARE GONE!"

Arshad shrugged as if to indicate that Facilier had just further confirmed his own claims.

"…What?" Tiana thinly gasped. For the second time Facilier roared that one crucial bit of knowledge, it registered.

"Y'ALL HEARD ME! I'M NOBODY NOBODY NOTHIN'! I'M JUST A GODDAMN SCRAWNY HOMELESS SINNER NOW! I'M!...I got NO way to hurt a SOUL! No power, NOTHIN'! I'm…god damn it! GOD DAMN IT!" Facilier's head slammed forward into a floorboard and he bit down on his tongue until he tasted blood. "Hell, hell, THIS is hell, not where I WAS, THIS is HELL." He felt hot moisture rolling down his jutting cheekbones again and, like an infant cold and aching and bound by helplessness, fresh out of the womb, wished to have never been reborn.

The still, lifeless mimicry of his shadow proved his words facts.

The room fell quiet; dishes clanging and music flowing had resumed uneasily downstairs. The roused kitchen attendants whose shifts were over, who wanted nothing more than rest, exchanged tired glances at this display of maudlin theatrics, and lay back down, shortly resuming their listless slumber.

Arshad whet his lips. "Tiana. Naveen. My name…means 'close to heaven'…and I would like to live up to that. I am pretty sure the both of you would like to as well. You can keep an eye on him best by keeping him under your employ, since you have no way of sending him to prison anyhow. You incarcerate him here, and what is better, you show kindness when it is most needed."

Naveen sighed and softly laughed. After a moment the sniveling Facilier felt the weight lifted off his back. The older prince walked over to his brother and ruffled his hair. "Arshad was a cleric or saint in another life, I think," he said.

"Hardly," the younger prince immediately countered, staring at his feet.

Tiana shook her head slowly. "Assuming this is all true…he can still step on people without a lick of magic."

"Why the hell would I do that?" Facilier lifted his head and resentfully sniffed back further humiliating tears. "Jeopardize my own needs by burnin' bridges here? I got no pride left. Just NEEDS."

Needs, not wants. Wants had become luxuries. Falsehoods.

Tiana gazed at the Voodoo master for a long moment. Then she rendered her verdict: "…Now that I will take as gospel truth. Arshad?"

"Yes, Teenie?"

"You're about his size. Lend him some clothes. Looks like we got ourselves a sous chef." And without another word, she descended the stairs.

Naveen poked his brother's chest. "Be careful," he ordered, and then he followed Tiana.

Facilier dragged himself laboriously up onto his hands and knees. He groaned and touched his belly. The cut was superficial. Shallow. A bluff.

He knew Princess Ribbit couldn't do it. And boy oh boy was he going to capitalize on her soft-heartedness in the time to come.

The Voodoo master sneered twistedly to himself.

Until a nutmeg-hued hand clasped his own and helped him to his feet.

Prince Arshad. "Are you alright?"

"…Fine. Just. Dandy." Facilier took his hat from Arshad. He placed it on one of the cots. He looked for a long wary moment into the unsettlingly kind, accepting eyes of the person who had just, in numerous ways, advocated him. The two of them were almost the same looming height. "…Why are you really here in the States, boy?"

Arshad grinned, a dazzling white-toothed affair, removed his v-neck sweater and white button-up blouse, and finally the sleeveless cotton muscle shirt underneath it. He handed the shirt to the witch doctor. "Level with me. It's really 'Dr. Facilier,' yes?"

"Yessir, that is correct."

"Do you know the real reason why my parents cut off Naveen?"

Facilier pursed his lips. "Hah. Bein' a fiscal leech to his rich parents at age 20."

"That was only part of it. The other part concerned me."

"….Enlighten me."

"If you are still here tomorrow, I will." Arshad winked. "I'm heading to Naveen and Tiana's. Pardon me if I don't quite trust you enough yet to give you the address. That will come."

And the boy, who could not have been more than eighteen years old himself, descended from the loft.

An hour later, Michel Facilier was in the kitchen of Tiana's Place clearing space behind the stove and disregarding the gawking stares of his fellow kitchen employees. The spirit of industriousness had not quite yet bitten him in the ass. But he figured he might as well not give Miss Froggy more ammunition against him.

A sturdily curvaceous form blackened the doorway to the kitchen. She planted her feet in an ominous demi-sumo stance, and folded her arms across her chest. "Excuse me and the new sous chef," she informed the staff, which hustled out at once upon her urging. And then she "hmph"ed for good measure.

Facilier mentally girded his loins and turned, a look of smug menace on his face. He eyed Tiana keenly, his gaze like two hard cold amethyst jewels taking in the echoes of crow's feet around her large bright eyes and the peppering of gray in just the front strands of her now short-cropped thick black curls. She could only be in her thirties at this point, if he recalled correctly, and she was still, annoyingly, probably the prettiest woman he had ever beheld, but the passing of eleven years and the steepage in an era of hardship had wreaked their mark.

Time really was a heedless bitch.

"And my, my, what an honor it is to be alone with the lady of the house yet again," Facilier sneered. "Welcome to almost-middle-age, pretty lady. I'm surprised y'all ain't wearin' a tiara. Heh. "

Tiana spared no acid. "I don't buy your shufflin' sambo crap, Shadowman. I don't buy that you have a single honest reason to be here. Unlike Arshad, who is too trustin' for his own good, and unlike Naveen, who is too busy trying to manage this place right and left, I am not takin' my eyes off you for a SECOND."

The Voodoo master hoisted a stack of pots and pans out of the pantry. "Whoof! Ugh. Look. Ain't no lies on the form I filled out for the whitey who sent me here, Magical Madam Malledonia."

"My name…as you WELL know, you INSANE, DISRESPECTFUL, CHEATIN' FILTH of a man. Is Tiana."

"Alrighty then, Tiana, DAR-lin'," Faciler growled, pitching his voice sultry and predatory. "The point being, I have been a chef as long as I have been OTHER things, and I need money, and so long as I don't act up, you, missy, are, legally speakin', bound to give me some green. We've sorta already HAD this conversation."

"Fine. Then do you think you can handle a gumbo?" Tiana angled a dark penetrating stare at the witch doctor, head to toe and back. The suspicion surrounding her frame was almost material. "Or should I worry about it being…palatable?"

"LISTEN, Sugar Princess," Facilier suddenly, savagely snapped, slamming down the pots. "You may rightly hate me, but don't patronize me. I've brewed potions for goin' on twenty-fi' years that would turn your hair white, an' way the hell back when, I was an oyster shucker right along with the brightest an' best of Louisiana's child labor force, so believe you me, I can cook a stew. Feel free to lock away the cyanide and arsenic if you so terrified I'll be stupidly obvious enough to poison all your customers. Or yoouuuu." The fiery tirade ended on that note, with a sarcastically portentious wiggling of his long digits, and a sinister gap-toothed smile.

Then Facilier rolled his eyes and turned around, hoisting the dishes into the sink and proceeding toward the spice rack. "I neeeeeeed a ladle," he pronounced imperiously, with a snap of his fingers. He assumed the airs of a Baptist preacher, flinging back his head in the throes of facetious religious transportation…and also shaking his extremely scrawny posterior. "Can I GIT. A ladle? SAY hallelujah: a LA-dle. Hooooyes, Lord, there it BE." He reached.

Tiana was not particularly comforted. Or impressed. Or amused. Or intimidated. Because she was…well, Tiana. "Have a ladle," she hissed, snatching and shoving her best into his spiderlike hands, "an' you know where you can shove it if you don't do your job fast and well."

The Doctor did not produce a comeback, aside a morose "like to see you try, Beignet Fairy."

"Oh I will," she snarled, storming out of the kitchen. "Don't forget, I have a trumpet-playing gator with a grudge to sic on you, at my disposal." The doors swung closed decisively behind her.

Fury broiled inside the witch doctor at this ultimatum. With the coveted ladel, he stirred half a bottle of Tabasco into the gumbo pot that sat on the stove. He wrinkled his nose at the vessel; it was at least two decades old, black and cast iron. He couldn't see his reflection in it, and for some reason that unnerved him. Perhaps it reminded him too much of a gravestone. His own.

Facilier huffed and stepped away from the stove. Sweat beaded his forehead and dampened his already untamed, un- jellied shock of black curly hair. He wiped away the excess moisture and paced around the kitchen while the gumbo came to a rolling boil. Energies swirled around inside his chest and wiry limbs, pent-up energies of a schemer unused to conventional boundaries and limitations. With a sudden explosion of those forces, Facilier took a running bound into the air, heels tapping together, past the ice box and shelves of utensils and pots and pans and sinks, and landed with effortless grace on nearly the opposite perimeter of the room. "Heyyy," he murmured to himself with a thickly smug, narcissistic smirk, "look who definitely ain't dead."

He glanced at his own shadow: it was, whether depressingly or comfortingly he wasn't sure, normal. Complacent and mindless. No extraneous or individual gestures. It mimicked his every move. No ally and attendant from the Other Side.

"Huh," he added, feeling undeniably naked at the stripping of the powers that had defined him for over two decades. Now this was a feeling of oppression he had to shake off.

Like a grasshopper, the Shadowman bounded, twirled, cartwheeled and sashayed back to the gumbo pot. An inner peace, the pleasure of which surpassed even the manic elation he had always felt conjuring Voodoo powers, saturated him as he danced.

'That's an interesting way to cook a stew, Doc. And in my daddy's gumbo pot."

Oh. Her again.

"Yes, ma'am?" Facilier queried through his teeth. He straightened and placed his hands on his sharp lean hips, tossing his hair out of his face. His sweaty borrowed shirt, trousers and apron clung to his slight frame as he angled an insubordinate scowl at his boss. When Tiana only glowered back, he added, "It's only been ten damn minutes, woman! I'm going as fast as I can, don't you know, I'm cookin' myself in here!" He fanned himself.

"Forget the stew. It was just a test run, and it's closin' time anyway. There's a child out at one of the tables. She won't say a single word, but she's clearly waiting to see someone who works here."

"And you think that someone is me becauuuse?" Facilier arched an eyebrow. "If she got a mama claimin' I'm the daddy, I don't even know if I can say one way or the other-"

"SPARE me," Tiana cut him off disgustedly as she shut off the stove's gas. "All I know is she has no interest in any of the other kitchen workers I just banished out to the floor, and she's holdin' a Tarot card like it's her soul. The, ah, Empress card?"

…Oh.

Aw, damn me for a fool.

Facilier let out a protracted groan. "Riiight," he sighed, at the end of that sound of an expiring reptile. "That's what I get for lapsing into sentimentality." A palm smacked his forehead. Repeatedly. "Damn DAMN kid. I'll killer."

Tiana quirked her lip so that one of her dimples stood out prominently. "If you were trying to hide that you know this child, I must inform you that you have lost your skills at subterfuge."

"Nono, nooo. I own up to it. Oh, Powers. Do pardon me, cherie." The witch doctor scratched the moist skin under his two-fanged necklace and then sidled past Tiana and out of the kitchen. She followed, her flesh fairly crawling at having been called a diminutive by Dr. Facilier himself.

Facilier came upon the eldest prince of Maldonia making all kinds of grotesque faces at his little friend from the cemetery, playing his newest ukulele at her, and cracking horrid puns at her. As if somehow this encroaching clownishness would magically unlock the child's inhibitions. Naveen's intentions were good, but Facilier, a master of magnetic persuasion, had to roll his eyes at the sophomoric performance. "Ye gods," he muttered.

The displaced monarch turned toward the encroacher when the child, eyes lit up with sudden hope, did the same. Naveen's face was comically perplexed as he stood and met Facilier halfway to the child's table. "Do not tell me it is actually you she wants to see?" He pointed theatrically at the witch doctor.

Who pursed his lips patiently. "It's lookin' like that is the case."

"Ashidanza…But I am ravishingly handsome, and you are like a skull with skin."

Thanks, pretty boy. Sorry to bust the diamond-encased bubble, but not every woman fawns over you for breathing…

"Naveen," Facilier retorted in dulcet tones, "I hate you with a passion that burns like the French Disease." He batted his eyelashes for effect.

Naveen blinked. "The French what?"

Tiana's cheeks were distinctly bright. "Never you mind," she growled, slipping between them.

"No, no, what? I am still learning the local customs!"

Facilier snorted. He wiggled his hips and arched his eyebrows, his expression fairly screaming "get it?"

And Naveen's face surpassed Tiana's for ruddiness. "Oh."

Tiana blasted out an exasperated sigh. "Shadowman, either talk to the child or GIT."

"Well. Seeing as I have nowhere to git TO, I'd best put on a good show."

Naveen's embittered manservant Lawrence had once nervously exclaimed of Facilier, "You're so quiet!" and the witch doctor was proving that fact right now. He moved with the silent predatory elegance of a praying mantis as he approached the little girl who had followed him from the cemetery to its almost offensively opposite, the glamorous restaurant. He wasn't sure why-perhaps his clever charisma and natural way of calibrating himself to the emotional needs of potential swindle-ees, or perhaps something more innocent-but regardless, he was kneeling to the child's eye level before he had even reached her.

Okay, Magician, build rapport with the client, he cued himself, and tilted his long slender face up and to the side in an attempt to meet her eyes.

It proved a difficult task. The child's eyes, flecked in cherry and honey amber, immediately averted whenever confronted by his amethyst gaze. Evidently, his empty threats of hours earlier had made their mark.

He wanted to be angry at this kid who'd filched his Tarot card. He wanted to hate and terrify her. He wanted to displace his resentful fury at all the changed, cold world onto her fragile frame like she was a poppet with "whole world" embroidered across its belly, and pierce it and burn it and rip out its stuffing and…and. He wanted to. He ached to.

He couldn't.

So Facilier acknowledged the silent plea for space and sat back on his lean haunches. "Hey again. How y'all doin'?" he ventured at last. Either he was putting on airs of remarkably convincing gravitas, or he truly was, for once, dead serious.

The little girl shrugged in response.

"Aw, now. Come on. You can give that sass to those weirdoes over there. But y'all followed ME all the way from a place where they bury DEAD people. Ya gotta give me more effort than," and he gave a Vaudeville-esque exaggerated shrug of mimicry, "this. Eh? Come on now."

Nothing.

Facilier rubbed the moisture out of the nape of his neck. "Ah, huh…You can put that card on my tab. I was wantin' it back because I thought I had a chance to use the deck properly. Person who gave it to me's dead…so is what I coulda done with it. So is the…whole world it was part of. Long gone. Just…forget it. Keep the darn thing."

I'll find a way to get it back later. Best you get, little missy. Ain't gonna apologize.

Several minutes passed with rain on the tin roof of the emptied restaurant the only sound. Facilier was keenly, annoyedly aware of the audience behind them. Especially when Naveen coughed and Tiana made more noise than necessary clearing dishes off one of the tables the waitresses had missed.

And that was when Facilier realized the real problem at hand. "I think what we have here is a little case of stage fright," he drawled over his shoulder, with a look ten times as dirty as any dish at the tables. "Your royal highnesses," he added sardonically, with a scornful to-fro bob of his head.

Tiana, sharp as a tack, registered the prompt at once, but her husband, whose sleeve she fiercely tugged, who was gazing at the poor little girl with large sympathetic puppy eyes, was slower.

"Go discuss the French Disease with your wife in another room, grits-for-brains," Facilier snapped. He made a less than polite gesture in the direction of the kitchens to punctuate the point.

Naveen scowled, thrust his hands on his classically sculpted hips, and murmured a string of likely colorful phrases in a smattering of French and Malledonian; Facilier picked up the French parts, snorted, and facetiously saluted the prince as the princess successfully dragged him elsewhere.

"JE-sus," the witch doctor muttered. "Ain't no wonder the aristocracy's dying." He shook his head at the child as if they were conspirators in crime forced to bear the idiocy of the masses surrounding them. It wasn't hard to play that role. After all, this was the way Facilier actually felt about most of the people-expendable souls, leverage-that he encountered. "ANYwa-"

But he didn't finish the sentence before the desired effect took place: The little girl's face lit up like a tree full of radiant fireflies. She took one of his hands, attenuated almost amphibian fingers and all, excitedly in both of her own, and pumped it. There was an unspoken "pleased to make your acquaintance once more" in the gesture.

"Well, hey, there, missy," Facilier chuckled, forehead furling in incredulity. He was unused to an easy audience. Lots of mirages and bamboozelry typically predicated this sort of ecstasy at his very existence. But then again, his audience was usually a pack of hardened, desperate, empty-souled adults craving something beyond rational bounds. Easy prey. Not a child, with a child's piercing intuition and a child's self-sufficient joy in small daily pleasures. Children were, contrary to popular belief, the hardest sort to fool in the way that Facilier was used to fooling.

The Voodoo master shook his head clear. "Ah. Listen. No one else here now. You can talk. Gimme your name, sugar."

Again the stony silence. The child shook her head.

"How am I gonna call your mama to take you home if I don't know your name?"

Another shake of the head. More emphatic.

"Ah. No mama?"

A nodded affirmative.

"Mm. Me neither."

The little girl immediately grabbed Facilier's face, as if she were a preacher keeping an errant soul from flying to hell. Her eyes were moist.

For a second time in five minutes Facilier was startled and his wide purple eyes showed it. "Whoa whoa. Easy. I'm just dandy, don't you know. It was a long time ago. She gave me them cards, you know." He repressed the urge to burst into laughter at the child's silly fervency. "…you know you've got eyes like pennies in a fountain. Very pretty."

The little girl released her formidable grip and shyly hid her face in her hands. She reached for the tablecloth of the table at which she uneasily sat. She grabbed the pen from Facilier's apron and began to write in crude, sometimes backward, letters.

Ah. Shit. He raked his fingers through his hair. "I am going to blame you for ruining that tablecloth," he informed the little girl. "Cos my boss already don't like me."

The girl didn't seem to hear him; instead she pointed fiercely at the table until it was a wonder there wasn't a tiny finger-shaped dent in the wood.

Facilier was amused and even strangely delighted at this peculiar human being against all of his meanly whittled selfish instincts. He bit his lip against more gutteral chuckles and investigated the chicken scratch.

You has eyes like violets, it read.

Facilier felt like he had just been tossed in an icy shower after a long carousing gin-filled night in the French Quarter. It was a feeling both relieving and unpleasant at once and he wasn't sure why. It had something to do with the sudden uselessness of his stunned verbal faculties and the feeling that it mattered to him, to an alarming extent, that this kid liked him so much. "Uhm," he said, most articulately.

And then the little girl pinched his arm. Sulking.

"OW, damn, child, what was THAT for?!"

More sulking.

"Oh. Ahem. Thank you?"

Another instant incandescent smile.

"…Aaaalllrighty then. But it's have. You HAVE eyes like violets. HAVE. I…oh hell. Never mind. I'm a witch doctor, I ain't no goddamn schoolteacher. But you can write, good. Think you could whip me up a name? I got eighty thousand dishes to wash tonight." He arched an eyebrow directively at the child.

She bit her lip. After a long moment, she wrote, It starts with E.

"E? Oh, magnifique. That's right helpful. 'E, practice your grammar.' 'Now, E, don't you talk my arm off.' 'That's a good girl, E.' Tuh. So that's all I'm gettin' outta you?"

E, as she had christened herself, let out a silvery giggle. Her pigeon toes turned farther inward in delight.

Facilier gazed back at her in blatant dismay. Some damn little kid had stumped the Shadowman. What was the world coming to? Maybe he should have stayed "dead."

E doodled a little heart next to her first, sweet yet grammatically erroneous, sentence. Then she doodled the twin sets of eyes on Facilier's set of tarot cards in the center of that heart. She beamed.

The Doctor rubbed his temples. "I give up. Y'all can STOP EAVESDROPPING NOW," he brayed at the door to the kitchens. He turned toward the doors with that rather menacing, curling snarl of his lip that signified his ultimate vexation and displeasure. "Like I'm some kinda pervert," he muttered. "Well supposing I am, but not like THAT…"

Naveen and Tiana poked their heads out in succession guiltily. "Maybe we can phone the police," the latter suggested.

There was an explosive racket, a scuttling, at E's table.

Facilier turned back in alarm: to find the little girl dashing in blind panic out the front of Tiana's Place. He glanced back at the others, utterly bewildered, then growled and stood.

"Follow her!" Naveen cried, booking it toward the door.

"No, really? Your genius slays me!" Facilier snarled, pursuing the monarch and easily, with his dancing litheness, overtaking him. He caught the prince's arm at the door. "If she don't wanna be followed, let her BE. You two wanted her goin' home, well, problem solved! She ain't here no more!"

"But it is raining!" Naveen protested, his accent pronounced and his grasp of English impaired in his distress. "She is, is, how you say, only a child! What if it is a long train ride to her home? Eh?! She was not dressed in finery! She cannot be from around here! She cannot go home alone on the train or worse, by, by feets!"

"By FOOT, cretin. FOOT. Anyway, if she got here, she can get BACK where she WAS. I'm done. Enough philanthropy for tonight. I carried my weight and I, sir, am goin' to BED." Facilier whipped around and away from the nauseatingly charitable couple and headed for the stairs to the loft.

He left behind him the voice of Naveen castigating him as a "selfish godless brute," and the sensible soothing murmurs of Tiana. So why couldn't he leave behind the face of the strange child who called herself E and wrote kind messages to him on a tablecloth?

About his damn purple eyes, his first ever Voodoo trick? His fruitless attempt to apologize to his dead mother? Why?

"I'm goin' batty," Facilier groaned at the ceiling in the dark, long after the doors to the restaurant had clicked shut with the departure of its proprietress and her husband.

He sat up in bed, and he spread out his Tarot cards. He ran his fingers along the borders, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, shuffled, and pulled.

The Devil. Well that was no surprise. So the Powers were telling him he'd relinquished himself to his darker, more negative impulses. That like a cancer from within, he had devoured himself and flung himself into the jaws of his contemptuous, otherworldly "Friends." The Devil was the shadow that must be cast, wherever there was light. A fact about the deepest chambers of any human heart.

So he was weak. Given to tempting, hedonistic things. Fine. Who gave a shit? He'd looked that fact square in the eye ages ago.

He shuffled The Devil back into his pile. He pulled his present. Ace of Swords. Huh. Duality. The potential for great good or great evil. The bearer of the sword determines the direction taken on the crossroads of a life. The bearer of the sword wields it either with wickedness and caprice, or with protective, honorable service.

So he had to make a big decision and soon. Facilier saw no point in stewing now, when he wasn't certain of the topic of the crucial choice he would have to render. He shuffled Ace of Swords back into his deck with a shrug.

Then Facilier turned over the card of his future. And this was the card that drew his attention, the card of faith and gentle guidance, the card that he had never pulled for himself before…

… the Star.

You has eyes like violets….

Facilier put his tarot away with shaking hands and tried to shed the epiphany like a lizard shedding an old skin. He curled up on his side facing the ladder to the loft and, swallowed by the shadows that had once been friends, did not sleep at all.