do, but my parents named me after my grandmother. Knowing them, there wasn't any discussion of the moon involved."
"Regardless, names have power and purpose. Cassandra means prophet"
"How... convenient."
She laughed again, as if I were the funniest person to come into her shop in years. I took in the herbs, the beads, the snake. Maybe I was.
Hissing erupted from beyond the chicken wire. "Relax, Lazarus. She's a friend."
"Lazarus? As in risen from the dead?"
"Names have power," was all she said. "What's your question?"
I frowned at the snake, which was staring at me again. The idea that the reptile might not die or, if dead, would rise, was a very creepy thought indeed. Weren't zombies a part of the whole voodoo thing?
And snake zombies... Well, I didn't even want to go there.
"There's a flower in the swamp," I said. "A fire iris?"
"Yes." Cassandra moved down the row of shelves and began to pull out a little of this and a little of that, sprinkling the unknown items into a gris-gris bag. "Very powerful."
"What does it mean when someone leaves one on your bed?"
She paused, fingers poised over a basket of what appeared to be dried chicken bones. Then, as if she'd had second thoughts, she took a pinch of red dust instead and scattered it on top.
"Not 'welcome to the neighborhood,'" she murmured. "Can you bring me the flower?"
I cleared my throat "It's gone."
"Hmm." She turned to a completely different set of shelves and continued to mix and match. "Another question?"
She hadn't answered the first. Not really.
"Do you know anything about a wolf in the area?"
Her hand froze above a glass jar of what looked like black olives but probably weren't "Who are you?"
"I told you. Di - "
"Not your name. Why are you here? In New Orleans?"
"I'm a cryptozoologist. I was hired to find the wolf in the swamp."
"Why?"
"That's my job. Finding unknown animals"
"A wolf isn't unknown."
"In Louisiana it is."
"What if there isn't a wolf? Or at least not a wolf as you know them?"
"Even better."
She cast me a quick glance, then busied herself tying a string around the top of the gris-gris. "There's a legend about the Honey Island Swamp."
"The swamp monster?"
Her derisive hiss was echoed by the snake in the cage. "Nothing more than an overgrown nutria rat, which scared some half-wits over two decades ago."
Interesting theory - and one that explained the legend nicely. Cassandra was both refreshingly levelheaded and disturbingly strange.
"I meant the legend of the loup-garou," she continued.
Now we were getting somewhere.
"The werewolf."
"You've heard the tale." She stared at me for a long moment "But you don't believe mere's any such thing, do you?"
I ignored her question to ask one of my own: "Have you seen a wolf?"
Cassandra moved to the front window and peered at the street "There's something out there. Something that comes and goes. Something that kills and is never caught"
"Wolves don't kill people."
She turned, and her now-sober eyes met mine. "Exactly."
"What's the legend?"
In my world, legends often skirted the truth. I needed to listen, to analyze, to pick and choose what was real and what was not
"Over a hundred years ago a man was cursed."
"Why?"
"He was a man. Isn't that enough?"
I smirked. I really shouldn't like her so much. If she wasn't nuts, she was at least a charlatan.
"Every crescent moon he runs as a wolf."
That much I knew; the question was - "Why not the full moon?"
"A loup-garou is special."
"Why?"
"You have an awful lot of questions for someone who doesn't believe."
"I'm curious."
"He was cursed," she repeated.
"Why?" I sounded like a broken record.
"Because he owned people, and he would not set them free."
Slaves. I should have known.
Voodoo came to this country with those brought here in chains. I had to say, if anyone had bought and sold me, I'd have cursed their ass, too.
"So his slaves voodoo-cursed him to become a wolf under the crescent moon?"
"Not a wolf, a werewolf."
"What's the difference?"
"A wolf is an animal, but a werewolf is monster. An evil thing, ruled by the moon and possessed by bloodlust. They're given life, but they can't live. They can hate, but they can't love. They think like a human and kill like a beast, no longer caring about anything or anyone but themselves."
I guess I didn't want to meet one in a dark alley.
"Why the crescent moon and not the full?" I asked.
"Besides the fact that this is the Crescent City?"
Frank had mentioned that. I'd thought it nothing more than an interesting coincidence. However, when dealing with curses, coincidences