Seasick. The Creole riverboat captain called it mal de mer and laughed his way to the bridge.

Ignoring him, Mitchell worked on surviving the nightmarish journey. The boat, a ferry that could, if squeezed, hold twenty vehicles, probably ran slow and easy most days. Unfortunately, there was a summer storm raging in the bayou. Everything on the water pitched and rolled, including Mitchell's stomach. He might not eat, drink or even stand up ever again.

"Y'all are gonna need to be extra careful on the drive to town." The captain paused during one of his rounds to lean in the window of Mitchell's Jeep Wrangler. He gave the well a pat. "This be one fine set of wheels you got here. Wouldn't want 'em to wind up in a bog."

He had a gap between his front teeth, a bowed body and blotchy, careworn features that, if nothing else, gave Mitchell something to fixate on besides his raw stomach.

The man shook his head. "You won't be finding no place for sleeping as fancy as this piece of machinery on Bokur Island. No, sir, you surely won't."

"Any flat surface'll do," Mitchell told him. "How long 'til we dock?"

The captain screwed up his face. "Wind's blowing against us. Maybe fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes, Mitchell thought. He'd spent five nights in a New Orleans Dumpster back when he'd been a rookie. He could survive another fifteen minutes on choppy water.

"Engine's making a funny noise." Turning an ear downward, the captain attempted to listen. "Possible the spirits are taking exception to more snoopy strangers arriving on Bokur."

Mitchell raised a brow. "Snoopy or snotty?"

"Some of both, I guess. For people needing money, tourist dollars are always welcome. But no spirit ever needed money, now did it?"

"You haven't met my grandfather." Mitchell regarded him, frowning. "Are you telling me you believe the island's haunted?"

"Well, of course it's haunted. Mind that don't mean you'll be tripping over spooks and bogeys. It ain't that kind of haunting. Here's mostly a laissez-faire existence. Unless you rile or cross paths with the wrong specter." He scratched his neck. "Ain't you ever beheld a ghost before?"

Mitchell thought of his newly acquired blues club and all the smashed glass on the storeroom floor. "I might have. Once or twice."

"Well, there you are then. If a fella knows what's what going in, he's got nothing to worry about."

Nothing except keeping down the gumbo he'd foolishly eaten for dinner.

Sitting back for the remainder of the trip, Mitchell watched misshapen trees on both shores grow dark and menacing. Giant roots humped out of the water, mere inches below the delicate tips of Spanish moss that waved like shredded curtains from every limb and branch in sight.

Phoebe had pumped a whack of information into his brain three days ago, including the name of a man he'd previously only heard in whispers, Crucible.

It was all about territory and hierarchies in the world of law and order. City cops and government agents didn't tend to mix well. Label the agent in question a phantom, tack on a small group of shadowy superiors -- directors, Phoebe had called them -- and the animosity level would surely reach unparalleled heights.

Crucible had apparently been dogging Leshad for the past eighteen months, ever since Phoebe's mother, Madeleine Lessard, had been brutally murdered. The woman had already been blind when Leshad had stabbed her, but that hadn't stopped him from digging her eyeballs from their sockets. He'd left behind a rudimentary voodoo doll fashioned in the likeness of his victim and a calling card bearing the eerie silhouette of a man. Then he'd moved on.

Madeleine Lessard's death had been the first in what would ultimately become a long string of murders. Phoebe claimed it was the psychic connection that kept Leshad going, kept him killing. Thanks to her guilt trip, a similar connection now had Mitchell surviving a storm-tossed trip on a rocking bayou boat. His mother and her Catholic conscience had a great deal to answer for.

The docking on Bokur was no less brutal than the final leg of the trip. Mitchell's stomach continued to churn long after he made his way down the gangplank and onto a mud and gravel road that had no direction signs and wound back on itself as often as it ran straight. It broadened eventually into a strip of asphalt almost wide enough for two vehicles to pass. There were still no signs to be had, but he suspected it was all about increments on this island.

Gusting wind blew rain and sharp pebbles at his windshield. Ahead of him, wicked slashes of lightning speared from roiling sky to heaving water. Hard on its heels, thunder rattled the ground and his Jeep. The force of the storm made the riverboat ride seem tame by comparison.

Another spectacular bolt of lightning shot from the clouds. Angry bursts of wind grabbed his vehicle like claws and tossed him across the road. He avoided sideswiping a sycamore tree, narrowed his eyes at the challenge and upped the speed of his wipers. He was considering getting into the spirit and adding some Deep Purple to the mix when he saw it. Or thought he did. Just for a moment. A face in the teeming blackness directly ahead.

Mitchell hit the brakes, hard. Controlling the resulting spin that sent him into a patch of mud, he blew out a breath, leaned forward and squinted at...nothing. Not a damn thing. Only interminable darkness and more pitchfork lightning than he'd ever seen in his life.

"Okay, that was weird." He scanned and rescanned what was visible in the Jeep's headlight -- not much -- before easing back onto the road.

His grandfather would say this was what he got for abandoning his family obligations and becoming a cop. Favors begged that sent him to Voodoo Island where ugly faces popped up out of --

"Shit!"

The face appeared again in the next lightning strike. It had a body attached to it this time. But the real shock came when he realized both things were suspended three feet above the pavement.

Mitchell jerked the steering wheel to the right. Lightning shot through the sky, momentarily blinding him. He glimpsed another shape coming toward him on the passenger side. Glimpsed it, but couldn't do a damn thing to avoid it as the driver's side of his vehicle rammed into the trunk of an enormous live oak.

It took him several moments to rejig his brain. Black moss covered half the windshield. As Deep Purple kicked in, he told himself no way had what he thought he'd seen been out there. No fucking way.

He had himself mostly convinced when lightning illuminated the swamp again. And there it was. A wooden doll with a painted face. And wild, gleaming eyes that bored straight into his.

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