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child seemed enthralled by this and Ellen was glad it found larceny so entertaining. She didn't know what she felt. Joy at having saved another human life. Fear that she would never find Nick again. Anger that she had been forced to choose. Maybe grief.

Reverend Wintergreen was onstage at the Superdome, leading prayers. Ellen wasn't the only one who had lost someone, but she knew him. "Oh, yea," he said, looking down at what Ellen had brought him, "suffer the little children. . . . What's your name, my child?"

The joker child gurgled wordlessly into the microphone.

"It's PJ!" came a chorus. Actually, a duet - Ellen turned as Rick and Mick forced their way through the crowd of joker refugees near the front. The joker child wrapped its tentacles around both their necks. "You find PJ's mama?" asked the one with the goatee.

"No," Ellen said. She didn't know whether PJ was Rick and Mick's son or niece or maybe just some child they knew. "Uh . . . PJ was alone." Ellen paused. It was a long shot, but maybe not that long. Mick and Rick had known everyone on the seedy side in Jokertown, and New Orleans couldn't be that different. "I'm looking for someone, too." She took out the sketch.

It was waterlogged but intact. The twins studied it. "Oh, yeah, that's Joey," said the one with the goatee. "Foulest fucking mouth in the Quarter. She lives in a red shotgun over on Treme. By the old St. Louis cemetery. Can't miss it. Hoodoo marks chalked all over the front."

"She's Hoodoo Mama, right?"

Rick and Mick both laughed. "Joey?" said the first. "Nah, she's just a street punk."

"Hoodoo Mama's this old Creole witch, blind as a bat and older than grave dirt. Calls up hellhounds to serve her, and the dead are her eyes, even the pigeons."

Ellen nodded. As she left, a young black woman reached into a suitcase and handed her a pair of pink sneakers, which Ellen wore back into the storm to make her way to the hotel.

Nick was gone. Nick, the brave one. He'd been with her so many years, and now a piece of her heart had been ripped out, blown away by the hurricane. But when she stepped into the main foyer of their house at the Place D'Armes, she heard a voice. Not Nick's, but . . .

"Jonathan!" Ellen cried, throwing her arms around him. "Oh, thank God. I - I lost Nick . . ." She hugged Jonathan, not knowing what else to do, and grief finally came in great wracking sobs.

"Sorry." Jonathan sat with her on the couch, held her. "Um, he was a brave . . . uh . . . hat."

"My, uh, condolences," Michelle said, "I only just met him. . . ."

Ellen scrubbed the tears fiercely from her eyes. "I know where Josephine Hebert lives." She took a breath. "She does dead animals as well as dead people. There were some pigeons the other day that I think were her spies."

"The creepy ones on Bourbon Street?" Jonathan asked.

Ellen nodded. "She's got a bunch of zombies, too. Checks them out like library books."

"Well, I'm pretty much invulnerable," Bubbles said.

"Nice to be you," Jonathan said. "What if she suffocates you with zombie pigeons? She's just a kid, anyway. You already blew up an old lady on CNN. Want to do a punk kid for an encore?"

"No," Ellen said, taking a deep breath and trying hard not to think of Nick. "Personally, I'd like to wring her scrawny little neck. But Miss Partridge didn't think she was all bad, and all we need is for her to stop pulling this shit." She exhaled. "And the easiest way to do that is to get her on our side. We need to talk."

Jonathan and Aliyah hid behind Bubbles as she knocked on the door of a chalk-marked red shotgun on Treme opposite the cemetery.

There was no answer. Bubbles knocked harder. A minute later the door was opened by a very tall cadaverous bodybuilder who loomed over Bubbles menacingly.

"Look, Morticia," Jonathan said to Aliyah, "she has her own Lurch."

"Fuck off," the zombie croaked.

Bubbles only held up a beautifully scintillating bubble. "Listen," she said, "we'd like to speak with Joey Hebert or Hoodoo Mama or whatever she wants to call herself, and we can do this the nice way or the not-so-nice way."

"You fuckers got balls," the zombie finally croaked, "but I ain't playin'. You fuckers steal little kids."

"Lilith was taking them to other hospitals,"