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When Olympe came out of the back entrance of her yard in the sticky night, the wolf was waiting for her.
There were few people in New Orleans' population of color, among either the librés or the enslaved, who walked about safely and freely after curfew—not that it stopped those who had urgent business to conduct, romantic entanglements to pursue, or simply wanted some free time away from the prying eyes of the white world. Olympe, however, was one of those whose business often took her out openly at night, and her years as a well-practiced runaway—as a child on Bellefleur, and later running away from her mother's protector—had given her little fear of anything at all.
So she merely looked at the wolf with a sneer, and said, "I do not need you."
The wolf, of course, said nothing. It settled in at her side, a massive brindled black-and-gray beast. Wolves like this had long since been hunted out of Louisiana; what remained were small and furtive, crossbred with coyotes and dogs. From what she had heard, creatures like this still roamed the West and the North, places Olympe had absolutely no interest in visiting. Its eyes were gray and the coldest she had ever seen.
The creature ghosted along beside her as she walked through the muddy streets of the city in the oppressive, cloying dark. It was as alert as she was, ears pricked and swiveling, nose turned to the wind. It was true that this was an especially dangerous time for a free woman of color to walk about the city, with Mardi Gras winding down and the streets, even these side streets, unpredictably populated with drunken white revelers. When Olympe stepped back quietly into the inky shadows under the plane trees to avoid a passing night watchman or a carousing riverboatman, the wolf moved with her, disappearing as thoroughly in the dark as she had learned to.
Just before she reached her destination, the house of a freeman whose wife was in labor, the wolf peeled off from her and faded softly into the shadows of the alley, its self-appointed work done.
"So I'll tell my brother about you then, shall I?" Olympe threatened after it. "Or keep it to myself, and lay a poison bait for you next time?" But the wolf was gone as if it had never been.
*
Ben and Rose, Olympe knew, saw little of what went on in the part of the city she lived and breathed, because they had learned not to. Rose believed only in her science. Ben had not entirely lost his credulity, but for him, all miracles came from his God or from the Devil. He wasn't condescending or cruel about it; if anything, she had always believed that Ben had too little cruelty in him. But the doors of his mind were shut to certain aspects of her world.
But Olympe walked through a world that was alive with other voices, other wills ... other ways of doing things. She concocted an ointment for runaways to smear on their feet to hide their tracks and brought it to the hidden room under Ben and Rose's house. (She could have lied, but as always, she told him what it was, endured his gentle indulgence in her superstitions, and did what she wanted anyway.) She spoke sometimes with the river panther of the Mississippi, old and scarred and vastly, endlessly huge, capable of drowning an entire city if it ever rose. She endured, though not always with the best grace, Ben's policeman friend following her around the city on massive gray wolf paws when he thought he needed to.
She didn't believe, at first, that he had no ulterior motives for doing so. She still wasn't sure if she believed it. Her life was secrets built on secrets, some only her own, some that she kept for others. The last thing she needed was the white world sending prying tendrils like smoke into the few corners of her life that had always been hers, and never theirs.
But the wolf was there, as immovable a part of her world as the leaf-crowned women who lived in the plane trees, the old man snake of the swamp who whispered to lure travelers astray, or the vast river beast who drowsed in the mud of the Mississippi bottom. Some neighbors were human, some were not, and one learned to deal with them as one must.
She glimpsed him around the city sometimes, as a wolf or a man, bent on his own business. Once, when Ben and Rose were stalked by danger from yet another of Ben's escapades, she saw him across the street from their house on Rue Esplanade, lying on watchful alert in a patch of shadow with pricked ears. Their eyes met, the wary acknowledgement of one night hunter to another.
There were those among the human population who believed, no doubt, that she could summon wolves at her command, and snakes and roaches as well. She only laughed at this. It would be very convenient if she had been given a wolf-servant to do her bidding, instead of being afflicted with an unpredictable wolf-policeman with his own allegiances, bent about his own business and prying into hers for reasons of his own.
*
But she wouldn't have minded a wolf, even an inconvenient one, when she answered a pounding on the back door to find a distraught woman who caught up handfuls of Olympe's skirts.
"They took her, Ma'm 'Lympe, they took my Essie, the filibusters took my little girl ..."
"Calmly," Olympe soothed. She knew the woman, whose name was Carmela: had been bringing small cures to her family for years—wart remover, a wash for the weak eyes of the youngest child, a charm buried in the backyard to fend off the ill luck that had dogged her husband, who had crushed his foot in an accident on the docks and was now lame. "Wait here. I will be right back." She went into the house swiftly. She had been up late, grinding medicine; it was a simple matter to put it away and snatch up a draft of nerve-soothing remedy that she mixed with the dregs of the evening's coffee.
"Trouble?" Paul asked quietly, appearing from the back room with their youngest held against his shoulder.
"No," Olympe said gently. "I may have to go out for a little while. Go back to bed."
Paul nodded, long since used to his wife's nocturnal comings and goings. He vanished into the back room.
Olympe blew out the candle and went into the backyard.
Between sips of the gritty, weak coffee laden with laudanum and herbs, Carmela spilled her story. Essie, her eldest, watched the younger ones while her father, these days, drank away the pain of his injured foot, and Carmela worked punishing hours as a cook's assistant trying to keep their poor but free family fed and housed. But lately Essie had been sneaking off to see a boy, leaving the second-eldest sister in charge of her little brothers. Tonight Carmela had returned home to find her oldest daughter gone and the younger in tears, having snuck after the missing Essie and seen that she had not, in fact, met with her boy, but had been lured off by two white men.
There were only a few endings to this story, most times, none of them good.
"I came straight over," Carmela said, wiping her eyes. "Can you help her, Ma'm Lympe? Please?"
It was heartbreaking, the faith they had in her to fix the unfixable.
"Who are they?" she asked.
Carmela didn't know their names, but she was able to provide descriptions, and Olympe recognized them, by reputation at least. They were, as Carmela feared, a pair of kidnappers and slave-traffickers who worked their filthy trade from a back room at a saloon on the edge of the Swamp.
Olympe glanced thoughtfully at the moon. It was unlikely they would have the girl out of the city yet. It might still be possible to help her.
"Go home to your children," she said, clasping the woman's hands. "I will do what I can."
Whatever that was, she mused grimly as Carmela left her yard. She thought briefly that she might go wake up Ben, who would certainly be up for a good rescue mission as always.
But ... having Ben along constrained her. He always wanted to do things in certain ways. Quite likely, he would argue for summoning the city guard, for all the good that would do. And it would take time to go get him anyway, time that Essie didn't have.
She tucked a few supplies into her skirt and left the yard.
If she looked around briefly on the moonlit street for the sight of a wolf ... well, it was no harm that there wasn't one in sight. That would have constrained her as well.
Olympe had always done her best work alone.
*
The moon was sinking when she reached the Swamp, but that was all to the good. The later it got, the more the streets would have emptied out and the fewer risks of being disturbed. She made her way without interference to the ramshackle building where she knew the pair plied their trade.
The door was closed, but light glowed through a window of warped and filthy glass that looked like it might have been stolen off a steamship port. Olympe drew as near as she dared, squinting through the filth to see within. She was able to make out two larger male shapes and one smaller, slumped at a plank table. The girl's tignon was off, her hair spilling loose—enough to make it clear, however, that it was a girl. The tignon on the table was the red and blue one that Carmela had described.
She was in luck. They were still in the process of plying the girl with drugged wine; it seemed that Olympe had moved quickly enough to spare her the violations that the night would have surely held, let alone the dire fate awaiting her tomorrow.
In the dark under the window, Olympe crouched and thought about her options.
This was a situation when Ben would be useful, but she dared not run across the city and fetch him; they could very easily be gone when she got back, and the girl with them. There were only two men. She could not fight them successfully and she knew it, but it was possible that she might be able to rely on shock and surprise. She only needed a moment. After that ... she fingered the small jar of salve in her pocket.
Only a moment.
She straightened up, drew a single deep breath, thought of Paul and her children, and whispered a prayer to her patron deities. Then she flung the door open.
"Oh, Mamzelle Essie, Mamzelle Essie," she wailed, lunging into the room while the white men spun around in shock. "She run away again and she's Miz Aguillard's personal maid," she burst out in English, hating the taste of it in her mouth, and especially hating the whining drawl that she put in it. Keep them off balance, move fast, don't let them think. "She beat me awful ev'ry time Mamzelle Essie run away, she mean, my mistress—come on, Mamzelle Essie, I just get you home 'fore Ma'am sees you gone—"
She grasped the girl's wrist and wrenched her up off the bench with a single heave, still babbling a torrent of words that even she was hardly listening to. The girl came woozily, not entirely unconscious, but weaving—and as Olympe paused for breath, she coughed, and the sharp, sweetish stink in the air made a connection in her mind.
Oh, no, she thought. It wasn't in the wine; it was in the air, mostly opium, mixed with herbs she identified, with senses beginning to swim, as ones that were customarily used to stun or kill insects around campfires.
The men were both wearing dampened bandanas over their faces, something she had not been able to see from the outside.
Olympe stumbled toward the door, dragging a swaying Essie. She had stopped bothering with her patter and was now only trying to get outside. Her hasty but careful plan for escape, involving her salve and hiding under the trees, had disintegrated into a desperate urge to get them both somewhere, anywhere that wasn't here, if either of them were to have a chance.
"No you don't, bitch," a rough, muffled voice said, and something solid and painful connected with the side of her head. Her tignon cushioned the blow somewhat, but she still staggered, losing her grip on Essie, and went down—landing with her face nearly in the fire, a full gust of the drugged smoke blowing back on her.
Olympe raised a hand to her head as if dazed—and it wasn't all pretense. She fumbled for the knob end of one of the pins stuck in her tignon, drew it out, and stabbed it in the leg of the man who was just bending over her to pick her up.
He stumbled back with a startled roar of surprise and pain, cursed her, and kicked her. The pin itself would do little, but the poison on the tip would be acting on him in moments. If she could only avoid him—
Mustering her strength, she got to her knees, just as a third man barged into the room through a dangling, filthy curtain. Olympe felt as if she had taken another kick to the gut. She hadn't counted on three.
"What's goin' on out here?" the new arrival bellowed.
"Looks like we got two for the morning boat, Jim," the second man said, pulling up Essie by her hair.
The door was still standing open to the night, and through that door, death came for them on wolf paws.
Olympe only saw a little of it, the great wolf springing on the neck of the one holding Essie, jaws wide open. The man went down with a scream, and then Olympe lurched to her feet, grabbed Essie around the chest, and stumbled out into the night.
Behind her, she heard snarling, and screaming, and a gunshot, but she trusted Shaw was a fair hand at looking after himself.
*
They were still in trouble.
Her head was swimming so badly from the drugs and the blow she had taken that she couldn't seem to keep herself oriented. Essie had passed out completely now, and was deadweight dragging her down. Olympe was starting to realize that the wiry knots of muscle that had stood her in good stead all her life were starting to go soft; she was no young woman, and had been living a softer life the past few years than the rest of her life had prepared her for.
All of which sent her into a desperate frenzy to get them off the streets, somewhere, anywhere. She wasn't sure if she could find her way home like this, and if anyone saw them—two women of color, one reeling as if drunk, the other being dragged like stone-drunk deadweight—a night in the Cabildo's stinking cells would be the very best of the possible outcomes.
She fell again, and gritting her teeth, breathing through the nausea and pain, started to struggle back to her feet. She was so dizzy that it took her a moment to realize she'd had help. Hands, hard-callused but not ungentle, setting her on her feet and holding her while she wobbled.
"You all right, Miz Corbier?"
She swallowed a few times until she was sure she would not be sick, then opened her eyes to Shaw's face, the long bony features and the cool gray eyes she had seen more often in a wolf's face than a man's. There was a smear of blood across the edge of his mouth that she doubted was his. And in his face, on the angular blankitte features she could not help but hate, there was nothing but concern for her.
Not Miz Olympe, but Mrs. Corbier, as a white man would address any white woman.
"Yes," she said, getting herself together. "I can handle myself. Get the girl."
As he bent to pick up Essie, it was impossible not to notice that he was stark naked, every inch of his pale, scarred body on shameless display.
"Sorry," he said, looking a little abashed. "That's how it works."
"I know that's how it works. No, wait ..." She was belatedly remembering something that, with her mind severely rattled, she had nearly forgotten. As Shaw started to shoulder Essie's deadweight and then paused, she dug her small jar of salve out of the folds of her skirt.
"What's that?"
"It ..." With her head swimming, she couldn't find the words to properly explain. "It ... makes so they cannot follow us. We put it on our feet."
"Well, ain't that a right useful thing," Shaw mused in his terrible French. He dabbed some on the bare, callused soles of his feet, while Olympe smeared her own.
And then they went quietly through the streets, a procession that had, if possible, grown even more conspicuous than two disarrayed and seemingly intoxicated women of color walking home alone.
If they were accosted despite the dubious usefulness of her magic, Olympe mused, as the drug began to clear and the muddle in her head resolved into a painful throbbing above her right ear, he could transform again and vanish into the night, leaving them to their fate. It would probably be the easiest thing.
Or rather, she thought, glancing sideways at the tall, conspicuously naked man stalking with predatory grace at her elbow and a flopping, drugged girl draped over his shoulders, the easiest thing would be to have never bothered with them at all.
*
Olympe opened the side door into the yard, and Shaw set down Essie with great gentleness by the water pump.
"You want her took home, I can handle that," he whispered, then glanced down at himself. "Maybe get some pants first."
"No, I'll make sure she comes out of the drug first. But somebody need to tell her mother she's out of that place."
"I'll see to it." As she swayed a little, resting a hip against the pump, he said, "You need help with her, I can stay. Them blows to the head can mess you up something fierce. Had a few myself."
"I think it's best if you don't," Olympe said, and he nodded a little, acknowledging the point.
She didn't mean to let him leave without saying something else, but she didn't know what, and when she looked up from checking on Essie's breathing and loosening the girl's clothes, the yard was empty in the dark, the gate latched neatly.
*
Her head was still dully throbbing two days later when she braced herself and pushed through the noise, the stink, and the palpable rot of white American authority to Lt. Shaw's desk in the Cabildo.
He was there, to her relief; she hadn't wanted to have to come back. She had no good memories of this place. She paused by the door until the fellow blue-clad guardsman talking to him over the desk had moved on, and Shaw bent his head to laboriously work over the paperwork he was filling out. Then Olympe went up to the desk.
"Michie Shaw," she said. "Lieutenant."
He looked up, surprise flickering through the gray eyes, then wariness. He knew as well as she did that it was unlikely for Olympe to enter the Cabildo of her own free will for any non-dire reason.
But sometimes things did change.
"The girl okay?" he asked in French.
"Yes, she's home with her mother, no worse off for her ordeal, 'cept for a headache and a bit of extra caution."
"An' you?"
"Same," she said, unsmiling. She laid a hand on the desk and lifted two fingers to reveal the small jar underneath, then slid it his way.
Shaw's bigger, longer hand covered hers, and the jar vanished.
"That what I think it is?" he said quietly.
"I thought you might be able to use it," she said, very softly. The noise of the Cabildo covered them, in the way that two people in a crowd could sometimes be more alone than two on an empty streetcorner. "You won't be invisible. That kind of power is out there, but it ain't mine to use. This'll just make you hard to find."
"I'll take it," he said solemnly. "Thank you, Miz Corbier."
"Thank you, Lieutenant," she said, and turned without a backward look to push her way out of the Cabildo and take a great gulp of the marginally fresher air of the city beyond.