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She feels him before she ever sees him. All she gets is this quick, cold sensation, like a shadow cast over her heart.
“Fancy seeing you here, Miss LaBouff,” the Shadowman greets lowly. His voice is all sorts of slick, oozing charisma and underserved charm. He’s up to no good.
He’s always up to no good.
“Don’t speak to me,” Charlotte says haughtily, turning away. Between her hands there’s a glass, still too full for her to have an excuse to slip away without being too obvious. She desperately wants to, but anyone born and raised in New Orleans knows better than to cross the Shadowman. “I don’t know how you came back, but you hurt Tia and Naveen. I want nothing to do with you.”
“You wound me, Miss Charlotte,” he says, and from the corner of her eye she can see him putting on a performance, hand to his heart. As if he has one. “There’s no hard feelings on my side, and they did manage to kill me, while I only attempted to off them myself. Business is business.”
“You’re looking mighty alive for someone dead,” she shoots back, very straight on her seat. God, she’s tired. She wants nothing more than to walk out that door and go home, but at home there’s a worn Big Daddy talking business while half their possessions are stripped from the mansion below. Her gold bracelet winks in the light, and she tries not to feel guilty about having it. “And don’t call me Charlotte.”
“What can I say?” He’s grinning at her, wide and smug. His eyes catch on hers, a hint of unnatural purple surrounding his dark pupils, and she turns away: she hadn’t realized she had been looking. “I’m a very persuasive man, Miss LaBouff.”
At least he dropped the Charlotte. “There’re some things in life that shouldn’t be persuaded,” she grouses, unwilling to offer him any pity. “Life. Death. Love."
“So you’re still sour about that.” If they were both on their feet instead of sitting in a darkened parlour, she has little doubt he’d be removing his hat, holding it to his chest with two hands in a mockery of contrition. Instead, it sits on the surface of the bar table, skull and crossbones mocking her. “Awfully sorry, my dear. Like I said, business is business. How’s it going for you, anyway? Any luck in finding your dear prince?”
She gets up, abrupt. “I’m done with you.”
“Are you?” He’s still watching her from his seat, a twisted smile perched on his lips. Charlotte has the feeling this is going exactly the way he wants it to. “I heard the most interesting things after I got back, you know. Pests all over Eli LaBouff’s plantations, ruining the sugar crops. Tragedy, innit?”
Charlotte clenches her fists. “Don’t stick your nose where you ain’t called, Shadowman.”
There he goes, placing his hand over his heart again, as if he’s truly wounded by her words. “I only wished to offer my help.”
“Help?” She huffs out a laugh, bitter and short. “Like you offered Tia, you mean? I don’t need that kind of help.”
“Of course not,” he says, and watches idly as she gathers her things. “But, Miss LaBouff?”
She hates that she stops to listen, jaw clenched, one foot out of the door.
He smiles at her, slick and charming and hungry. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
***
“I ain’t taking your offer,” she says sourly. Another night, another place: her friends are out there dancing, and she has half a mind to join them if only to get away. Her limbs feel too numb for it, though. Today, they’d sold the rest of Big Daddy’s cars; the resulting stack of cash had dwindled quickly to pay off their creditors, and very little of it had remained.
The Shadowman stands against the wall, hat turned down to cover his eyes. “I did not ask, my dear.”
“But you’re thinking it,” Charlotte says sourly. “I can tell. I’m not falling for your tricks again.”
“Come now, Miss LaBouff,” he says smoothly, “I have a spot of sympathy for the poor and destitute. Perhaps I am only here to offer my condolences.”
She bristles at him, barely managing to keep her mouth shut: she wants to walk away again. His shadow is flickering on the wall, playing with the lights, but she’s certain it doesn’t match his posture or position, and so she takes it for what it is: a warning. “I already said I want nothing to do with you.”
“And yet you spoke to me first,” he says. A sharp glint makes his eyes seem to shine from within the depths of the hat, shadowed from the rest of the room. No one sees him here, she thinks with a chill, and she would think it a silly thought if she did not entirely believe it to be true. If he does something to me, no one will notice. “How’s your daddy doing, Miss LaBouff? All healthy and fine?”
Her hands clench as she turns to him, incensed. “ If you had anything to do with this--”
“Nothing of the sort.” He waves her words away smoothly, though that smirk is still there, curling at the edges of his mouth. She’s never yearned so much to throw the contents of her glass at a man. “I’ve told you more than once, Miss LaBouff: business is business. And I’m sure we could reach an agreement.”
“An agreement.” She feels cold, suspicious, angry. “So that’s what you’ve been angling for.”
He shrugs gallantly, shadows rippling behind him. “Would you blame a baker for advertising their services? A doctor? A musician? I only offer only a solution, my dear.”
Some very unladylike words spring to mind about where he can shove that offer; Charlotte presses her lips together so that they won’t escape. “Leave me alone.”
“Sure thing, sunshine,” he says. “Let me know how your dear daddy’s heart behaves, hm? I’m sure it’ll get better real soon.”
“You can’t heal.”
“Can’t I?” He raises an eyebrow; behind him, his shadow is laughing. From between his fingers a coin flicks in and out of sight, travelling paths down his bony fingers before showing back at the start. “Funny little thing about black magic, Miss LaBouff: everyone thinks it’s gotta be all curses and whatnot, but between you and I? We ain’t that limited.”
She does not want this hope. She doesn't want it spreading bittersweet in her chest, whispering dangerous what-ifs in her ear. “Liar,” she accuses, no proof to back her up.
“Came back from the dead myself, didn’t I?” the Shadowman states more than asks, and detaches himself from the wall, a skeleton of a man drawing a shallow parting bow before her. “The offer stands for now, dearest Charlotte. But the price to bring back a dead man is far greater than you’d be willing to pay, so I’d suggest you decide fast.”
“Wait,” she says, hands reaching, hopeless.
But he is already gone.
***
It’s not that she’s stupid.
Charlotte is clever enough, when she has to be. But unlike Tia and most of her other friends, her cleverness does not come from work, or experience, or from being real good at sums or reciting poems and other things. Charlotte is good with people. Charlotte is good at reading them and catching cues, and angling her body just so to turn a catty remark into a well-meaning comment. She’s learned from Big Daddy, after all: the people are the heart of a city, and if you conquer the people, you conquer it all.
But Big Daddy is not well, and for once in her life there is no money to fall back on, and Big Daddy keeps buying her all the dresses she can’t help but covet, and she doesn’t know what to do.
The Emporium looms above the street, its shadows choking the street like menacing hands. She shouldn’t be here at all. She should go to Tiana, and warn her that the Shadowman is back and putting his fingers in all sorts of troublesome pies, and offer her help in getting rid of him again even though she couldn’t help anyone the first time around. She should go home, and be by Big Daddy’s side as he coughs and wheezes and tries to move around and handle business anyway, and learn to control the greedy shine in her eyes when she sees something that she wants, she wants, she wants, before he notices it again.
And then there’s the shame. Tiana still thinks that the only issue lies with Big Daddy’s health, and that everything can be solved with bed and rest and a big hot pot of soup, and the papers haven’t made as much of a show out of the whole thing as they could have. Barely anyone knows anything. How could they? Charlotte shows everywhere with her new dresses, with a pretty new necklace wrapped around her throat, with the latest models of designer hats; the outside of the mansion looks the same, though all of its insides have been stripped bare. She wants and she wants and she wants, and neither Big Daddy nor her ever learned to say ‘no’ to her demands, unspoken or otherwise, and Charlotte is weak. She does not say no, Big Daddy, you shouldn’t, and she doesn’t say I don’t need that new dress, I don’t, and then when the time comes to sell more things away to cover Big Daddy’s medical costs, her things are the last on the list. Even though her jewels could fetch a good price. Even though her dresses have miles and miles of silk and satin, ready to be repurposed onto a thousand new ones by pairs and pairs of willing skilled hands. Even though the amount of downy pillows on her bed alone could keep them fed for another good while.
So, she’s here. Squirming in her new bedazzled pink dress, on her gleaming new red shoes, guilt and greed warring in the pits of her stomach. The Shadowman knows how to pick his customers, after all: for all that Charlotte is clever with people, for all that she can read them and compel and beguile, he has turned it into a calling, a profession, turning all her knowledge of it against her.
“I’m not going in,” she tells herself, tries to convince herself, hands tight around her glistening, beaded purse. It’s brand new, like the rest of her things: a gift from Big Daddy, the price tag hastily ripped away before either of them could think twice about returning it. “I’m just here to tell him to leave me alone. That’s all.”
Charlotte is not stupid, but this is a stupid plan. How is she supposed to tell him that without stepping inside? How is she supposed to tell him, to reject him, to send him packing to the dark depths from which he came from, when standing at a place full of magic that might very well save Big Daddy?
This is a very stupid plan, she tells herself, as if she hasn’t been thinking it all the way here and come anyway. Walk away, Lottie. You can find another solution. You can go back and stop being selfish and sell all your dresses and your jewels, and pay the best doctor in New Orleans and even a tidy little house for Big Daddy to rest in. Walk away now, and you won’t even have to see him. Tiana refused his charms, and so can you. Walk away.
But her feet don’t move at all. Behind her, the door opens in a slow, deep creak that rattles her down to her bones, but there’s no welcome, no greeting. The message is clear: if she has anything to do at this place, it has to be her reaching out. Not him.
Charlotte takes a deep breath, and walks in. The floor groans beneath the red of her pumps, a sound deeper and louder than the door’s; candlelight replaces the last vestiges of the sun outside. It’s only polite to close the door behind her, no matter how much she dreads to lose her only escape route, but there’s no handle to ease it shut. She pauses, hands laid flat against the stretch of empty wood. Walk away, Lottie. Last chance.
The door shuts carefully, sounding out a tell-tale click despite the lack of a handle or a lock, and a frisson of fear lights her up like electricity. Charlotte closes her eyes, fighting to regain her courage, and huffs out a breath. This is ridiculous.
“Shadowman,” she calls, not turning around. “I have nothing to pay you with.”
A rustle, at her back. Shadows, moving outside of candlelight. There’s something in this place that is living, awake, hungry; for a moment she fears that the darkness below her feet will swallow her whole.
And then: “There’s always a way,” he says, distant and smooth and low, and Charlotte turns.
She wouldn’t have thought him real if he hadn’t spoken, if she hadn’t already known his form. There’s something deathly still about him, inhuman, corpse-like, as if he’s one of his puppets with his strings cut off. He sits at the very end of the hallway, an eerie light casting shadows over his face. Nothing about him moves: nothing except for his eyes, too bright and too clever in the dark, watching her closely.
“I don’t,” she insists, unwilling to look afraid or hesitant in front of the Shadowman. “Big Daddy and I lost our money. You knew that already.”
His head tilts to the side, hat following the motion. There’s a suggestion of a skull painted on his skin, or perhaps shining through it, but then it’s gone. “It’s not about money, Miss LaBouff.”
“It was about money last time, with Tia and Naveen,” she says defensively, taking a step forward, and then another, striding past puppets and drums and candles and shrunken heads that were once human, with a confidence that is only mostly false. She has the terrible feeling that their eyes are shifting to look at her as she passes, regardless of whether they actually have eyes or if they have been stitched shut. “You’re telling me that’s not it, now?”
He straightens at her approach, long spindly limbs gaining a bit more life. “It wouldn’t be very fair to ask for something out of your reach, now would it?”
The reminder stings. She wants to rewind time to two years ago, when all she had to do was open her purse and smack down a fat wad of cash to get anything she desired. “I ain’t harming anyone, either. I know you deal in blood.”
“So prejudiced,” he laments, though she knows, she knows the story between him and Naveen. He could ask for it. She knows he could.
Worst of all, she’s not sure she wouldn’t say yes.
“What do you want, then?” she asks frostily, no-nonsense. Tiana would be proud, even if not of the situation itself. “You don’t do things without a price.”
“Perhaps I just want to help,” he offers glibly.
Charlotte snorts, unladylike. “Even I ain’t falling for that, Shadowman.”
“Shame,” he says, and a pack of cards appears from thin air. He spreads them on the table, flips them between long, long fingers: she spots golden coins, diamond necklaces, large green bank notes lost amongst the pictures, before he makes them disappear again with a smug flourish. He shows you the things you want to see, she remembers Naveen telling her once. “I might even have considered it.”
“What do you want,” she asks again, between gritted teeth, “if not money?”
The Shadowman can probably guess she’s moments away from walking right back out: he drops the act. “Come now, Charlotte LaBouff,” he says. “What I want is power.”
“I don’t have any.” Big Daddy is the powerful one, the one everyone listens to; not her. And as soon as the news of how badly off they are now drop, even that last vestige of power will soon wither away.
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. Let us give this a try, shall we? A show of good faith, half the price on me. Give me that pretty trinket around your neck and a kiss, and your dear daddy will be having a miraculous recovery by tomorrow.”
She hesitates, hand gripping at her necklace. She can bear to part with it, just this one, she can, but-- “A kiss?”
His showman grin turns into a sneer. “Don’t flatter yourself, darling, I ain’t looking forward to it either. But a price is a price, and we both have our debts to pay.”
Her suspicious look doesn’t let up. “And you’re sure he’ll be fine by tomorrow?”
“I work fast,” he says, grim smile unrelenting. “And my ‘friends’ work faster.”
She takes a deep breath. “Fine,” she says, and then repeats it, if only so she can remind herself of what she’s agreeing to. “Fine. I agree to your terms, Shadowman.”
A beat drums deep in her blood, pounding on her ears. The shadows are flickering, flickering, a great deal of things moving at her back, singing and laughing and dancing, laughing at her, and yet she cannot look away from where he stands. It’s as if he’s become too many people in a single body, too many faces and colours layering over each other until she can’t remember his features anymore; it blinds her eyes as they try to keep up, and the only thing that remains steady is the purple-bright rings of his eyes. She squeezes her eyes shut, covers her ears: she does not want to see what she is unleashing out on the world.
And then the constricting feeling around her chest disappears. Her ears pop. The Emporium’s parlour goes back to its usual appearance, rickety floral wallpaper and peeling wood and humidity stains and all, and it is as if nothing ever happened at all.
“Put this under your daddy’s pillow,” Facilier says, hoarse and rough, looking human again. Whatever he has done, whatever spirits he has called, it must have taken something out of him as well; she has never seen him look so tired, so worn. “Now your payment, Miss LaBouff.”
“Yes,” she says, and she barely sees the object she’s trading for the weight of her necklace. She steadies herself, gathers her courage like when she kissed a very green and very slimy Naveen a lifetime ago, and leans down to press her lips against his.
He tastes of sweet smoke, of blood, of death. The kiss tugs at her own veins, pulling something out, and she wonders if that part of herself she is losing is the true price. She keeps them there for a moment more, so he cannot say that she cheated him; then, she pulls away.
She does not look at him. She does not look at her reflection in the many mirrors littering the parlour. She does not look at the thing in her hand, pulsing away against her skin like a heart. She looks at nothing at all, blind to the world as she walks away.
***
“Oh, Big Daddy,” she says, wrapping her father in an exuberant hug. “It’s so good to see you recovered!”
Big Daddy twirls her around, rewarded with girlish giggles and shrieks for his efforts. “It’s like I am young again! The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it!”
“I’m so glad!” she says, and they keep twirling and twirling, twirling on the once great entrance of their home. It’s so bare it brings tears to her eyes, but not in such a great amount as a healthy Big Daddy does. She sniffles shamelessly, hugging him tighter mid-flight; the waterworks will not stop once they start and they both know it. “Big Daddy, I missed seeing you like this.”
“You and I both, Lottie,” he says affectionately, and at last he sets her down. Her newest pumps clack gently on the floor, the lack of waxing awfully apparent in the way she can no longer see their reflection. “Things are gonna get better from here on, you’ll see.”
But they don’t.
Big Daddy is healthy, larger than life as ever, and yet she can see him shrinking by the day, taking from his mouth to give to hers. His suits are worn, no longer the pristine white pieces he used to be so proud of: he trades them in for more sober numbers, ones that won’t show wear and tear so easily, and on that very same trip he gets her a new pair of pink pearl earrings and a matching hat she’d made eyes at not two days before. He reduces his meals, and then takes her out to eat with that saved money, watching indulgently as she feasts on a fresh batch of beignets, always insisting he’s really not hungry over a long-empty glass of water.
The people love Big Daddy, they do. And he loves them back: that’s the problem. He can’t help but give extra cash to the expecting newsboy, or to the waitress, or to anyone who looks particularly down on their luck, and Charlotte tries not to resent them because she’s seen how Tia lived before and she knows every bit of money helps. But they don’t have the money now. Not for themselves, and not for others, and Big Daddy’s business partners won’t agree to any deals if there isn’t cash and appearances to back them up, and so they’re disappearing one by one.
“Shame,” the Shadowman says, silky voice haunting her from the shadows. Charlotte is out on the town, pretending that if she just sees her fill of all the new dresses and hats often enough, then she won’t want them anymore when she goes past the stores with Big Daddy; the twin hands of greed and guilt clutch at her heart. “I’m sure that would look lovely on you.”
“It would,” she says. She’s going for haughty, and somehow misses it and ends up landing straight in wistful, and she hates how weak that tone makes her seem in front of this man. A string of rubies glints at her from within the jewelry store, and rubies have always been her favourites. “But everything does look lovely on me.”
There is no sound to his footsteps, nothing to indicate he is coming closer other than the grinning shadow looming near hers. “Your daddy doin’ good, then?”
She shifts to the side, giving him space. “Yes,” Charlotte says, reluctant. She doesn’t want to look at him but can’t help the side glance, the quick once-over to take in his shaded eyes and the coarse curls peeking out of the hat. “I suppose I should thank you for that, but I did pay the price.”
“Half-price,” he says distractedly. She looks ahead, just like he’s doing, and meets his eyes on the reflection of the glass. “Had to handle the sacrifice myself.”
She recoils. “Sacrifice?”
“Nothing human,” he sneers. “Though if you had come to me any later, it might very well have been. The loa I deal with ain’t exactly generous in their trades.”
“Your ‘friends’,” she deduces.
“Yes.”
She casts him a look, taking him in. He looks worn, gaunt, thin at the edges, but she can’t tell how much of it is new and how much of it was there before: the Shadowman has always been said to straddle the lines between the living and the dead, and she’s never seen him in full light before. “Why are you here?”
“Why else?” he asks tiredly. “A bargain.”
“Not with me.”
“No,” he grants, and now he’s the one looking at her, as if he can see through her dress and her skin and her bones, all the way down to the depths of her hidden core. She wonders what he might make of it. If it’ll be a tainted thing, stained with selfishness and greed, or if there might still be any good parts to it, now that she has lost so much. “But I’d be willing to make one, if you so desired. What do you think, Charlotte LaBouff? Fancy a new dress? A new string of pearls?”
She rolls her eyes at him, smoothing down her hair when a gust of wind goes by. God, she hopes no one is actually seeing him talk to her: all that effort wasted on appearances would go right down the drain. “I might not have the money for it, but neither do you.”
“It’s not about money,” he says condescendingly, as he did once before. In the background, she sees his shadow shift and dip a hand into a passerby’s inner pocket, wallet swiftly removed. “I don’t need money if it comes down to dresses or shoes, Miss LaBouff. But you, dearest? I’m certain you could use some. Wouldn’t want to lose that big ol’ roof over your head to get yourself some fancy new rags, now would you?”
“We’re not that badly off,” she says thinly, though in truth she’s not even sure if it’s a lie. Big Daddy would tell her, right? Big Daddy would let her know if it was too much, if they were at risk?
But no, Charlotte realizes with a sinking feeling, no, he would not. Big Daddy has always protected her. Big Daddy has always kept his business away from her prying ears. The only reason why she’d even started noticing something was wrong was because the mansion’s art kept disappearing under her nose, all the decorations and paintings and statues except for the steady blue gaze of Mamma’s portrait.
She bites her lip, gnawing the lipstick from her skin. “What would it cost?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Your pretty little dresses?”
“Yes,” she says. Shame makes her eyes prickle, tears threatening to flow. She hopes they do not. She really, really hopes they do not: she’s not above using them to get what she wants, but here they would meet nothing but derision. “No. I don’t know.”
The Shadowman nods. She’s not sure why she expected something more than that: a push, an offer, a set price, tempting her and tricking her; even a victorious grin. “Think it over,” he says instead, low and soft so that only she can hear it. “Make your choice. And when you do, you know where I am.”
***
She doesn’t want to go.
No, that’s a lie. She very much wants to go. Or, at least, she wants the results of it, the consequences of it, the empty ache of when something in her lets go of morality and shame and she reaps the golden rewards. What she doesn’t want is the guilt that comes with it: the knowledge that she is doing something wrong with a man who has harmed so many. A man who has harmed Tia and Naveen, the friends she loves the most; who would have killed Big Daddy, if things had gone according to plan and he’d had the chance.
She offers him the ring from her finger and a drop of blood to go with it. It’s not the only blood that’s offered for this, she knows, because he soaks her red shoes in it until they smell like rust and tells her to go dancing until morning, and when she kisses him deep, deep enough to feel that tug at her soul, he tastes of it again. She does not know what these bargains take out of him, and neither does she ask.
She doesn’t care.
She doesn’t care and she doesn’t care, and she cares for nothing other than a beaming Big Daddy showing off a gift to her from one of his old partners, for the weight of the jewels as he drapes them heavy over her neck and her wrists and her ears alongside her brand new fur stole.
“The tides are turning, dear Lottie,” he tells her again, pressing a loving kiss to her hand, and she pretends that the twist of her stomach at hearing those words is not there. Big Daddy has said the same thing before, not too long ago, and nothing changed. Big Daddy has said it before, but all that ever made a difference was Charlotte going over and making a bargain with the shadows and depths of New Orleans, and not his endless business meetings.
So Charlotte goes again.
And again.
“Back so soon, Miss LaBouff?” the Shadowman asks, sneering, as if it’s not his fault, as if he did not approach her first. She fists her hands into his hair and kisses him as deep and as filthy as her mouth and tongue can go, and offers her blood and her trinkets and the price of her right words in the right ears, and then come the rewards. Dresses, cars, jewels. Nights out with Big Daddy, sitting beneath the glimmering splendour she’s missed so much while Big Daddy reignites his connections with her at his side; business opportunities in the distance, waiting for them to just reach out and take them.
She doesn’t care if something in her is missing, stained, damaged. That there’s a dark curl of greed and excitement as she struts into the shaded hallways of Dr Facilier’s Voodoo Emporium as if she owns it, that the price is mounting as her requests grow in size and in number. All that good luck must come from somewhere; all that wealth once belonged to someone else. She doesn’t care.
“Put in a word with Monsieur Charmain,” the Shadowman tells her, cheeks gaunt and skull-like. He hasn’t been sleeping, she thinks. Hasn’t been eating, either. “Make sure he visits those gardens you like to wander about so much. Shouldn’t be too hard, hm? A small price to pay for your newest dress, Miss LaBouff.”
Monsier Charmain falls ill. Monsieur Charmain dies soon after. Monsieur Charmain, heirless and lonesome, leaves a portion of his businesses to Big Daddy to thank him for his efforts in arranging the best doctors during his stay, all paid for with Big Daddy’s hard-saved money that he wouldn’t hear of having returned, and so Charlotte keeps going back, and back, and back, and throws the Shadowman’s hat into the depths of his parlour and curls her hands around the collar of his shirt as she climbs into his lap and asks for more.
“There’s a price,” he says, gasping, and she grinds her hips into the junction of his spindly limbs, bares his neck to the unflinching attack of her lips and teeth and tongue. “Th-- There’s a price.”
“Isn’t there always,” she sneers back at him, and pretends she doesn’t like it when he shudders beneath her, when she presses his hands to her sides and he keeps them there, crushing the fabric.
More, more, more. It doesn’t matter that the money is swiftly returning, filling the halls of the LaBouff mansion once more; it doesn’t matter that Big Daddy can finally, cautiously buy back one of his cars, and then another. She drapes strings of rubies and pearls around her throat before her visits, wraps her fingers in luscious gold: they drag down the Shadowman’s chest as she rips his shirt apart, scattering buttons into the darkness, and he shudders under the coldness of her touch.
“Give me the emeralds from Evelyn Green’s neck,” she asks, begs, compels, crawling over him while tearing everything else on his table down to the ground. “Make Madame Margret regret the things she said about me. Give me new dresses. Give me invitations. Give me everything."
And he does. He does, he does, he does, and the more she wants, the more he gives her, bought with the price of blood and gold and filthy kisses that tug at her soul, and she asks for more and never comes away wanting.
And then, Big Daddy dies.
It’s sudden. Unexpected. They’re out dining, under spotlight at Tia’s restaurant, surrounded by people, and he goes very still, very stiff, trembling. And then he falls.
And he is dead.
She screams. She claws at the hands that try to hold her back, kicks at the friends that try to keep her away from him. It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, and things had been going so well for once, Big Daddy’s business back on track, and they’d been celebrating. Fizzy, bubbly champagne and simmering red meat and decadent desserts covering the table, and now they’re spilled all over the floor, dirtying the glittering skirts of her dress as she tries and fails to reach his side.
Tia’s hands are gentle on her, trembling. “Oh, Lottie,” she says, and she might also be crying, but Charlotte doesn’t care and why aren’t they letting her get to Big Daddy, why-- “I’m so sorry.”
Charlotte doesn’t want sorry. Charlotte doesn’t want gentleness, or apologies, or to be soothed and settled and comforted: Charlotte wants Big Daddy to wake up and sit against the table leg and laugh like it was all a grand joke before pulling her into one of his endless hugs. But all that she gets are doctors coming to declare him dead, and funeral arrangements to be done, and stolen photos for newspaper first page articles, and mourning gifts and well-meaning words from people that don’t mean them, and there are always people. Watching, holding her back. Watching, pulling her away. Trying to take care of her, when she doesn’t want them to; trying to wipe her tears, when there is no end to them. They circle like vultures, and Charlotte knows, she knows that she’s an unmarried heiress with little money to her name; she knows she has no job and no experience and the only thing that’s keeping them from swooping in is that Big Daddy isn’t even on the ground yet.
“Come stay with us for a while,” Tiana offers her softly, Naveen with a hand on her shoulder. Charlotte knows that they’re seeing the emptiness of the big manor house, the blank spaces where all their paintings used to hang, that they had been slowly but surely filling back in, and she doesn’t want their pity.
“I’ll think about it,” Charlotte says with a false, tremulous smile, already knowing she will not take it. Tia had been too proud to take her help before, over the course of their growing years; she remembers wanting to help, wanting so badly, and Big Daddy holding her hand and telling her that Tia’s family would not take anything they didn’t feel like they’d earned. She’d thought it stupid, then, and she still thinks it’s stupid, now. Charlotte will take whatever is offered and then more, but not this. “But I think I’d rather stay. This is still my home.”
It’s her home, but for how much longer? The creditors are fewer, but with Big Daddy around, they at least knew there was a good chance of getting their money’s worth and didn’t bother pushing too hard. Now there’s only Charlotte, and Big Daddy had always kept her away from the business side of things, so she knows nothing. All she knows are the growing piles of correspondence untouched by the entrance, and the people clamouring at the mansion’s gates, and the pitying looks she gets whenever she tries to venture more than one step outside.
She wants Big Daddy back. No matter the price.
And there’s someone who has been very good at giving her everything she wants.
***
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Facilier tells her, grim and flat. She thinks that once upon a time, he’d be jumping at the chance, taking all he could squeeze away from her, but his return from the dead has made him more careful, more cautious, more somber. “I can’t do it.”
“You said you could,” she accuses. Her eyes have run out of tears, but her makeup always seems to be running down her face these days, tracing paths down her cheeks. “You told me you could, before.”
“I said," he says, “that it was a price you’d not be willing to pay. But it doesn’t matter here. Think, Charlotte. Your daddy’s death is all over the papers. You think they’d sit back and clap at a dead man walking?”
She wants to claw his eyes out, drag her nails over his cheeks and his mouth and his neck until they’re a bloodied mess. “I don’t care.”
“You’ll care when they kill him again, ” he says. She hates that he’s right. She hates that he’s making sense. “And then they’ll come after you, because no matter how much the whole city pretends to love him, there’s very few people who’d actually bother to bring Eli LaBouff back.”
“I’ll deal with it,” she says shakily. “I’ll handle it. Just do it. No matter the price. Please.”
He presses his lips together, drawn pale, drawn tight. “It’s a bad idea, Charlotte.”
She’s not sure when it became Charlotte instead of Miss LaBouff. She’s not sure when it stopped mattering. “I don’t care.”
Facilier nods, a stiff, jerking thing. “Tomorrow is Saturday,” he says, and she doesn’t see why that matters, but then he continues, “and if it’ll work on any day, it’ll be then. But it’s on the Baron’s hands.”
***
She smuggles him bottles of rum and clairin from the mansion’s stock, the very same they can’t sell and can’t admit to having without the weight of Big Daddy’s old money and influence. The law is cracking down on liquors, and they hadn’t been very subtle before their fortune dwindled: she’s fairly sure the only reason they haven’t come after her is for the same reason the creditors have held back so far. Facilier heaps them with fire-hot peppers, sets them aside on a hidden corner of the Emporium’s pantry, and when he opens the door she sees other similar bottles, long-since steeped until the alcohol grew hot and red.
He takes one of them, swigs a long drag from it. She stares on, horrified, and he grimaces more at her face than at the taste. “’S an offering,” he says, and she can smell its strength from several steps away. “Traditional.”
If she kisses him now, her mouth will burn. So she busies herself instead with taking the things he’d asked of her: a tidy box of sweet-scented cigars, a wrought-iron cross, coffee beans and roasted peanuts and a knife. When she turns to face him back, the Shadowman is more skeleton than man, and she shivers at the lack of recognition in his eyes.
“Wait,” she says, before her courage can fail. “Before we go. I need to-- I need to know it wasn’t you.”
He raises a dark eyebrow, the gesture almost lost in the near-dark. There’s a shovel draped across his spindly shoulder, a basket of candles on his arm. “Me?”
“Big Daddy.” She looks away, unable to hold his too-bright gaze. “His death. Tell me it wasn’t you.”
His voice is almost nasal, now. “Why would I?”
“You almost did, last time.”
“Why, Mademoiselle Charlotte,” and she trembles, shivers, shakes, because there is something dark curling in his voice, and it is not him, “if you’d rather stop now, just say the word.”
She swallows, gripping her offerings tighter. “No,” she says, subdued. “No, we can move on. Please.”
The cemetery is empty at this time of the night. It’s not meant to be open, or at least Charlotte doesn’t think so: she has no memory of lights or open gates any of the times she drifted by after a long night out. The Shadowman’s shadow is gone: his presence has been replaced by curls of cigar smoke, smelling sweetly of hickory and spice, and she hugs herself against the night cold as she struggles to follow his long, spidery strides. There are bigger things to worry about than his missing shadow, than the way his gestures and his way of speech have changed; bigger worries than the way the skull laid out over his features has become more than an occasional glimpse.
Like how they’re digging up Big Daddy’s grave.
Like how she can hear drums in the distance, pounding like the fast beat of her heart.
Like how there’s a sacrifice waiting for them inside, and the Shadowman does not take back his knife.
***
She’s bloody, trembling.
Grinning widely.
A laugh escapes her, and then another. There’s grave dirt under her fingernails, blood coating the entire front of her now-unusable red dress, and yet the laughter keeps rushing out, escaping from between her pressed lips. Surely, she’s gone mad. Surely, this is where it ends: she’s done the unforgivable, the impossible.
The Shadowman stares at her in consternation, offers her a sloppily-poured cup of rum, and then another. She downs them quickly, the alcohol burning down her throat, and for all that he might have meant for it to warm her up, all it does is leave her empty, wanting.
“Big Daddy is alive,” she laughs, giddy and girlish like the past few years have been a lie, and she pushes the Shadowman back against the wall, his head hitting the wallpaper. She could have sworn the pattern was floral, but now she’s seeing all the hidden skull shapes, all the ways his once-missing shadow spreads against it, welcoming her into its fold. “I knew I could trust you. I knew you could do it.”
“Not that I don’t enjoy the confidence, dearest,” Facilier drawls, eyes flicking to where she’s pushing him further, pulling him closer, “but that could have gone very wrong, very fast.”
“But it didn’t,” she says, and bites a sharp kiss into his throat. Her hands are shaking as she pushes his jacket from his shoulders and down his arms, trapping his hands in place before they can reach for her. “And you gave it to me, just like I asked.”
He gave it, and he took it away. Out of the cemetery, down into the docks: a boat loaded with money and clothes and a ferrier and a new identity, all while Big Daddy was still blinking death away from his eyes. She’d given him one last, sobbing hug, and promised to write, and left him with red handprints wrapped around the lapel of his suit, because this is one gift she doesn’t get to keep.
And she hates it.
And she craves it.
And she wants it.
So this is punishment, kind of. A thank-you wrapped in poison as she drops to her knees, drags her nose up the lines of his thigh while he’s trapped between his jacket and the wall, and mouths at the growing hardness she finds there.
“Charlotte,” he says, and he actually sounds rushed, startled. “This isn’t--”
“Shut up, Shadowman,” she says, as haughty as she can make it: it’s been a while since she used such a tone in his presence. “It’s all about price, right?”
“You already paid.” His voice is strained. “You-- you should wash off the blood.”
“No,” she says bluntly, and bites at his inner thigh over the fabric of his pants; he jerks in place, hands straining to reach her. “I don’t have anything to change into.”
Behind her eyelids, she can see a man dying. Behind her eyelids, she can see her hands shaking, gripping the knife tight. The Shadowman’s fingers had curled over her eyes, poisoned words glib at her ears. It’s easy, he’d said, in a voice that wasn’t quite his. Just go for the throat, and let him bleed. He has his own debts to pay. Her hands find the buttons of his trousers beneath the red sash at his waist, and she fumbles them open.
And then he releases his arms from the jacket, and pushes her away.
She falls back, startled, displeased. The old wooden floor is cold against her palms. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s been a challenging night, Miss LaBouff,” Facilier says stiffly, his back very straight, and he does not call her Charlotte like she’s gotten used to. “Run along to your little mansion, now. Wouldn’t want anyone noticing the state of your attire, now would we?”
She picks herself up, an inelegant sneer twisting at her lips. Her lipstick is probably all gone. Her hair is likely a lost cause. The blood on her dress makes it fit for burning, and very little else. She pats herself down all the same, composing herself as if she hadn’t felt him harden against her lips not two minutes ago; rejection and rage burn fire-hot at her lungs, and she wants to make him pay. Her voice turns all cloying, all sweet, honey-like. “I have something else I want.”
“Don’t you always?” he asks, sounding just as bitter as she feels. He straightens the folds of his clothing she’d messed up, the shadow behind him quiet enough it could have belonged to any other living thing. “What is it now? A new car? New pearls? I will not be bringing anyone back from the dead again.”
Charlotte has mastered polite disdain since before she could walk, and she uses it now, flicking a dismissive look at him from beneath her lashes. “A simple childhood wish of mine, Dr Facilier,” she bites out, less overly-sweet than she intended as she picks up her hat and her gloves from the parlour’s table. “I’m sure you know it quite well, considering you’ve used it for your plans before.”
She’s darkly glad to see his eyes widen.
“Find me a royal husband,” she says, framed against the doorway and the lightening sky outside. “Chop, chop, sugar. I do want a spring wedding, after all.”
***
“Lottie,” Tia says, too gentle, too indulgent. “How are you holding up?”
Charlotte stuffs a beignet in her mouth, and then another. When Big Daddy died, she hadn’t even been able to look at the things, much less stomach them, but after a spot of grave-digging and ritual sacrifice she finds that they don’t really bother her anymore. “’M fine,” she garbles out, from between the pastry and the sugar. She hopes it doesn’t come out sounding as insincere as she feels: she wouldn’t even know where to start if Tia insisted on getting the whole story out of her.
But Tia is only looking at her in equal measures of concern and fond amusement, no trace of suspicion in her eyes. “I know it’s hard,” she says softly. “When my own daddy died, I--”
Threw yourself into work, Charlotte finishes mentally, stuffing in another beignet after the other has barely gone down her throat. Grieved for a week, then wiped your eyes and rolled up your sleeves. Pretended everything was fine, when it was really not. But Charlotte is not Tiana: even if this still were about Big Daddy, none of Tia’s methods would bring her any comfort.
She swallows down a strained gulp, when Tia doesn’t finish her sentence. “I know.”
A fleeting frown runs through her friend’s face. “You don’t have to pretend to be fine.”
Like you did? Charlotte thinks, but doesn’t say. She opens her mouth, ready to dismiss her concern, and what comes out instead is, “It’s not about that.”
Tia draws back, looking faintly surprised. “Really?”
It’s sad, how far apart they’ve grown. Charlotte remembers being six and pudgy and happy and spending all day, every day, by her best friend’s side, surrounded by princess dresses and fairy tales and the nice warm smells of a good meal cooking on Tiana’s daddy’s stove, but that was then.
This is now.
She circles her finger through the powdered sugar left in her plate, drawing out the half-remembered veves she’s grown too familiar with. “I’m getting married. I think.”
“You’re--” Tiana opens her mouth, shuts it, and then furrows her brow. “Who? When? I haven’t heard about this.”
“You wouldn’t,” Charlotte says. “I just... decided it recently.”
A stupid decision. A rash decision, driven by her stung pride and the stiff rejection of a man standing above her, and just the thought of it turns her mood darker than it’s been all morning. Her fists clench, and Tiana covers her hands, easing the fingers apart one by one.
She tries to meet her eyes, searching her thoughts. “Why now, Lottie?”
"Because now.” It’s not even a lie, honest! She’d already been considering it, toying with it, disgusted that she was even forced to consider it an option. All the Shadowman’s actions had done was push her into committing. “With Big Daddy’s d- death, people won’t leave me alone. I figured if I got married, then--”
Then she’d have the threat and assurance of a husband to drive away suitors and creditors alike. Then, perhaps, she could finally breathe. Her daddy’s business is serious business, and no one ever listens to Charlotte when it comes to serious business, least of all if she continues being an unmarried socialite, and so something has to give.
“I’m sorry,” Tia starts to say, but Charlotte is already shaking her head.
"I’m sorry,” she says, and gives her her best wobbly, encouraging, I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it smile. “It’s your day off. Let’s do something fun before I hand you back over to your prince, alright?”
Tiana opens her mouth, seeming like she has a lot more things to say that Charlotte doesn’t want to hear, but Charlotte doesn’t let her. She picks several more beignets and stuffs one on Tia’s mouth and another on her own in one quick motion, feeding a hunger she doesn’t really feel, and by the time Tia manages to swallow it down the conversation has long since moved on.
***
"Find me a royal husband, ” he mocks beneath his breath, incensed. He’s stalking the halls of the Emporium when she gets there, shadows swirling in his wake. “That frustrating little--”
She shoves the bag with the day-old beignets at his chest, and he scrambles to catch them before they hit the floor. “Consultation fee,” she says dryly. “But by all means, sugar, do finish that sentence. I’m sure it’s bound to be enlightening.”
He scowls at her, bag secured. “This one ain’t that easy.”
“Meaning you actually hafta work to earn your pay for once, Shadowman?” she sneers, fluttering her lashes at him. “Besides, I ain’t exactly lacking suitors out there. One with royal blood can’t be that hard to manage.”
“You’re overestimating how many royals there are out there, dearest,” he tells her derisively, and she bristles at the tone. “They don’t really breed on the bayou, ‘specially not marriageable ones.”
“Don’t care,” she says, waving his words away. “It ain’t gotta be anyone special. Just someone with enough title and power to chase away all those nosy flies.”
His eyes glint at her words, and she only half regrets giving the game away so soon. “Flies?”
She snorts, slinging her purse into one of the chairs by the table. Her eyes track the length of his neck down to the dip of his collarbone, framed by the teeth in his necklace, and she snaps them away like she can’t still picture it with her eyes closed. “You’re forgetting who I am, Shadowman.”
“No,” he says, heavy gaze studying her. “I am not.”
“’Course not.” Her mouth twists bitterly. “Who’d spread all the things you want on the ears of the high and mighty, if you did?”
“Don’t pretend this arrangement," and here he sneers at her condescendingly, and her lips twist into a red-painted scowl, “is not mutually beneficial, dear Charlotte.”
She crosses her arms beneath her chest, pushing her assets upwards. “So I’m Charlotte again, now am I?”
She raises one victorious eyebrow when he falls for it, hook, line, and sinker. His eyes flicker down to the deep plunge of her neckline, and when he looks up again, she’s looking all sorts of smug. The corner of his mouth creases in displeasure. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“No,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And I don’t care. Give me what I asked.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then make it work! ” She stomps her foot, patent pink heels digging deep into the worn wood floor. “You brought Big Daddy back. What makes this so different?”
“Your dear daddy was on New Orleans ground,” he groans, dragging a hand down his face. “Even if I work my magic overseas, it’ll be at least months before one of your so-called royals comes visiting. Unless you’ve got a target in mind in good ol’Lousiana, like the froggy prince from last time--”
“Not Naveen,” she says sharply, cutting him off. “You don’t get to mess with him or Tiana. I’ve told you that before.”
He spreads his arms wide, nostrils flaring. “By all means, sweetheart. Any other requests you might like to add? Want him to be made of gold? To play banjo and violin? For me to take him for a ride and check if he’s real good in the sack?”
“I don’t actually need him to stay," she says, looking down her nose at him like he’s stupid. She almost wants to let him keep believing it, to try and see how against the idea he really is, but she’s running out of time in business matters and she can’t afford to draw it out any longer. “I don’t plan on keeping him ‘round for long.”
His arms drop, tone falling flat. “What?”
“I’ll just lock him in the basement,” she says. “Or, oh! He could be my next payment. Next time I ask for something big."
Even his shadow has gone still. “What?” Facilier repeats.
"Do try to keep up, sugar.” She rolls her eyes again, fluffing her hair. “I might be pretty great, but no one is looking to marry me for my personality. They’ll try to take Big Daddy’s business as soon as I let ’em, and I’m not going to. So--”
The glint in his eye is making the pits of her belly flutter all dangerous-like. “So you’re using them.”
“Are you gonna try and lecture me on this, Shadowman? ” She scowls. “You ain’t a saint yourself, either.”
“Not at all, dearest Charlotte,” he says smoothly, and bows low to press a dragging kiss to the back of her hand. His voice is low and burning, intense enough to send red heat up her cheeks. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he meant it. “With a motive like that, darling? A woman after my own heart.”
“You mean you have one?” she shoots back haughtily, and snatches her hand from between his.
Facilier smirks at her, unmoved. “Widely debated, I hear.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I might have someone in mind for your little request, though,” he continues, ignoring her comeback. “But you ain’t allowed to lock this one up.”
“You just said-- ”
He waves her off. “Royal, some sort of title, power. Done, done, and done.”
Charlotte sucks her lip between her teeth, glaring at him from under her lashes. Something about his sudden change of mind makes her feel wrong-footed, as if she’s missing something right in front of her. “Big Daddy’s business--”
“Couldn’t care less.”
“The money--”
“Bigger things to worry about.”
She squints at him suspiciously, uneasy at the way he’s not looking at her. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch," he says, “is that you’ll get exactly what you want. No interference from husband dearest, and vice-versa. No lovey-dovey relationship to brag about to the town at large. This ain’t gonna be the fairytale marriage of your dreams, sunshine: just the bare marriage rights, the power to chase those flies away, and the royal titled husband that your little heart so desires. Nothing less. Nothing more.”
It makes her queasy to nod and agree, hands clenched tight together until they go as white as the fur of her stole. She thinks of her childhood dreams, turned to dust. She thinks of Big Daddy, once dead, now far away. She thinks of all her suitors, all her creditors, all the vultures begging for more and more and more, and how the only way she ever clawed out of the first bout of her misery was to sell all the bits and pieces of soul to this man.
She supposes it says something when she barely hesitates. “The price--”
The Shadowman straightens slightly, his shadow going the extra mile of dusting off its coat. “Something you ain’t willing to pay, Charlotte? ”
“No.” Charlotte straightens as well, spine stiff. “There isn’t.”
“Good,” he says, and his grin tears into something wide, maniacal, mad. “Then let’s get hitched, sugar."
“What,” she says flatly, and it’s all she gets to say. There’s a pushing sensation at her back even though there’s nothing there, like a gust of wind or the pull of gravity, and she’s forced to either step forward or fall, and the Shadowman steps into motion like they’d practiced it. He takes her arm in his like they’re out for a stroll before she manages to find the ground once more, and his shadow slithers into a living, writhing pool around her feet.
“You, me,” he continues smoothly, moving them forward. She can’t move her legs. She can’t move her legs, but they’re being moved for her, and horror and panic choke at her throat until no words come out. “No big Mardi Gras wedding, I’m afraid, but if you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
“You’re insane,” she shrieks, finding her voice. “Why would I ever marry you? And in March? At least wait until April!”
His free hand comes up to tick off points as he lists them. “Spring wedding,” he says, “royal husband, titled, got power in spades, and way bigger things to worry about than your dear daddy’s little business. Real nice suitor, if I do say so myself.”
“You-- You--” She half-screams in frustration, the noise muffled behind her teeth. “You’re not even royal!”
“Sure am, sugar,” he says, all wide-eyed and glib innocence. “On my momma’s side.”
“If you say it’s ‘coz she was a Voodoo Queen--"
“Royal,” he repeats in a sing-song voice, and his shadow takes the chance to trip her up again. She’s all pressed up against his side, legs straining to fight the unnatural impulse to both move and keep up with the absurd length of his accompanying footsteps. “Counts for the daughter of the King of Mardi Gras when breaking a curse, so it gotta count for Voodoo Queen descendence, too. Shoulda been more specific when messing around with the Shadowman, dearest. Thought y’all learnt your lesson once before.”
She flinches as if struck, but she can’t step back. “Stop.”
But he doesn’t let her stop. They keep going, keep moving, headless of her wishes: all there is to them is shadows and feet and movement over the grey cobblestones, blurry under the flickering street lights. But they’re not blurry because of the light, Charlotte realizes.
There are tears in her eyes.
“Stop,” she repeats shrilly, desperate now, pushing him back, straining to get herself away. She doesn’t want him to see, but her makeup is going to run all over if she doesn’t take her handkerchief to it yesterday, and his shadow has her prisoner as much as he does. “Stop, stop, stop!"
Perhaps it’s the panic in her voice, but he does stop this time. It’s so sudden that she goes flying forward, but Charlotte is lucky: there’s a lightpost nearby she clings onto, instead of relying on him not to let her hit the ground. She leans all her weight on it while digging into her cleavage for a handkerchief, and tries her best to turn away.
“You ain’t gonna earn any sympathy with tears, Charlotte,” he says, and she chances a look. He’s not leaning on anything himself, but his slouch certainly implies it, and she hates that he looks so casual when she’s wiping so roughly at her own face. “You asked. I delivered. Isn’t that what we always do?”
Charlotte glares at him balefully, handkerchief now stained with black. “I wanted a princess wedding.”
He throws his arms up, rolling his eyes. “You didn’t ask for a princess wedding!”
“It was implied!” she shouts right back. Her heel twinges from the stumble, and it only makes more frustrated tears spill out. “Why else would I want to marry a royal? Have you seen half the princes and dukes going around?”
“Money!” he says. “Fame! Status! Power! Plenty of reasons! It’s what you said this was about!”
“Well,” she says, blowing her nose noisily. “There is that. But I still want the princess dress, and the ring, and the--”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Stop. You’re tellin’ me,” he drags out slowly, as if to keep his patience in place, “you don’t want to get married. Not because I’m the big bad villain. Not ‘coz your little princess heart longs for true love. Not because it ain’t something you can show off around the town. But because of the dress? ”
“And the ring,” she sniffles. At this point her handkerchief is a lost cause, and so she sniffs once, twice more, and tucks it back into her cleavage, its purpose served. “At least."
“You have a hundred princess dresses.”
She glares from beneath her running mascara. “So?”
“I ain’t being facetious here, sweetheart,” he says, knocking the bottom of his staff on the cobblestones beneath. She hadn’t even noticed him summoning it. “It’s a conservative estimate. I would know: I got you half of ‘em.”
“It’s a wedding dress,” she stresses out condescendingly, and he squints, eyeing her sudden lack of tears. She throws in one last sniffle for good measure. “It’s special. Traditional. Pretty. Besides, I’m not wearing any of those right now, and I sure as hell ain’t getting married in red, Shadowman. No way, no how.”
“You’re fine with mackin’ on the Shadowman behind your future husband’s back,” he says disbelievingly. “But you draw the line at marrying in red?"
She shoots him a disgusted look. “I don’t mack on you ‘cuz I want to.”
"Sure," he drawls, and with a pair of flaming cheeks she knows they’re both remembering her going on her knees for him, no price in sight. His mouth twists, either to shoot out a cutting comment or to keep the argument going, but she’s already moving past him so he doesn’t get to see her face, the folds of her dress stalking around her heels. She doesn’t turn to see if he’s following: she can feel him at her side, a presence in the night.
“I want the princess dress,” Charlotte repeats stubbornly, after long moments without either of them saying anything.
“’Course you do.”
"And a ring. Diamond.” They’re going past a jewelry store, the same one where she’d seen him a lifetime ago: a glimpse through the window, and she’s already seeing his shadow in its interior, perusing through the options. "Real big.”
She can feel him rolling his eyes. “As usual.”
“I want--” Charlotte gnaws at her lip, tasting waxy lipstick. “I want a real nice place for the reception, too. Tons of light, chandeliers and stuff. And guests. Happy guests.”
“Wanna ask over froggy prince and his wife along?” he asks glibly. “I’m sure that would go over so well.”
“Shut up,” she snaps, spinning on her twinging heel. Her finger is already shoving into his chest before she completes the turn. “It’s my wedding, and it’s my bargain. I’m the one paying the price, so what I say goes, and I say I want guests.”
“I ain’t even working any magic for this one,” he grouses, trying - and failing - to push her poking finger away. “We don’t have a contract.”
Charlotte squints at him suspiciously. “And that’s it, isn’t it?”
“What now?" He’s rolling his eyes, again, and she wants to smack that stupid hat off his head so bad.
But she’s got something even better to use against him. She crosses her arms triumphantly, lips curling. “You don’t wanna do magic.”
“Newsflash, darling,” he says, wiggling his hands dramatically at her. “I’ve been doin’ nothing but working magic with you. You ain’t exactly giving me a choice, here.”
"Exactly." Her smirk widens, and his eyes narrow: Charlotte might not know a lot, but she knows people, and they’ve bargained so often that she’s probably the closest anyone’s ever gotten to knowing him. “You can’t refuse, can you? Your-- your debt, or your ‘friends’, or even your death thing, it’s got a hold on you. You gotta keep working contracts, no matter how much you hate ‘em. And you hate me, but you’re marrying me anyway, just so you don’t have to pull your magic to do it - at your own personal cost.”
She’s studied the lines of his jaw enough to see how it clenches, how much pressure he must be putting on it to keep his mouth shut. His shadow is shivering behind him, telling her all she needs to know that she was right, even as he shakes his head and looks at her pityingly. “Projecting a lot there, dearest Charlotte.”
“Am I, now?” She flutters her lashes at him, twinning closer. His shadow perks interestedly as the man himself goes all stiff under her touch, her hands sliding inside the collar of his shirt. “Oh, poor pitiful me. Forever trapped to a big bad man who has to give me everything I might ever want. What a disaster.”
“I’m not--” He glares. “I don’t have to do everything you say.”
“Sure,” she coos condescendingly, just like he did to her. She pats his chest lightly, palm against the hard fangs of his necklace. “You suggested this one, even. How was it you said?”
He’s unmoving enough that she can press her lips to the hollow of his throat. She drags them up, and up, lingering red traces of lipstick transfer left behind on his skin all the way up to his ear, and then she leans in even closer.
Her grin widens, turning dark beneath what Eudora had once called her man-hunting eyes. “Let’s get hitched, sugar."
***
She does him slow. Gentle-like.
It’s punishment.
Their wedding table is a ruin beneath them. There’s cake on the walls, splattered down on the floor, precious, wasted wine spilling everywhere. His eyes were very wide when she backed him against it, like he expected her to be a bed-and-roses kind of gal after she tried to get on her knees for him.
It makes her laugh.
“Come now, sugar,” she purrs, climbing over his long, lanky limbs. There’s a goblet of wine in her hand and she drinks it on the way up, uncaring if it spills down her neck and stains the front of her dress: she wants it to spill all the way down to him, too. It’s sweet on her tongue, and even sweeter going down, pooling a dull heat between her legs: she can’t remember the last time she indulged like this, even though there are cases and cases of forbidden wine down on the mansion’s basement. So many things only money can buy. So many things only power can buy. “Wouldn’t wanna disappoint your wife.”
She kind of gets him, now: why he does what he does. The most powerful man in New Orleans is under her fingertips, and the thought alone is as heady as the wine, filling up her insides. She squirms in place, seeking friction, and ignores his baleful look once she finds the perfect spot on his thigh.
“My wife,” he says dryly, even if a bit strained, “can’t be bothered with waiting until the guests are gone?”
It’s funny.
It’s funny, because their guests are just another slight against her pride, shadows and illusions pretending to be people. They laugh when she laughs; they cry when she cries. And now, she laughs, high and hysterical at a joke that is not meant to be a joke, and the room, wide and shiny with large crystal chandeliers - illusions too, because who would host a wedding like this at this time of the night? - becomes an echoing chamber of laughter and mockery and clinking cutlery.
This is how her wedding goes: she manages to get cake all over herself, and her perfect princess wedding dress is ruined. He never cared much for his clothing but she takes care to ruin it for him too, in the greatest vengeance she can muster when the whole world is muddled and spinning: she soaks his suit in red, red wine she sucks off of him under the ever-watching stares of their guests, and the buttons snap and roll off on the once-polished floors never to be seen again, and they keep drinking between each thrust and roll of the hips so that they can pretend that it’s the wine that they’re enjoying and not this.
And then, it’s as if it never happened.
Morning comes, and Charlotte wakes up alone in her own bed. Morning comes, and she’s on one of her silky light pink nightgowns, like she’s still all virginal and pure other than the dull ache throbbing between her tights, and a tight, dark curl of satisfaction grows on her chest. It’s going to be a good day.
It always is, when she makes a deal with the Shadowman.
***
His long, steady hands are covered in chicken blood and ashes, sleeves rolled up, and the table is covered in an assortment of gris-gris she doesn’t bother to look at before sweeping them all aside and climbing on top. She should stay away. She should stay away, by all means and rights, but now the very thought is laughable: she wants this so bad that her insides are like a gnawing, hungry chasm, and she has long since stopped denying herself.
“Neglecting your duties, husband?” she pouts at him, eyelashes fluttering.
“What,” he says, glaring, “are you doing here?”
“Someone spoke ill of Big Daddy near me,” she says, as if things haven’t changed, as if they’ve not somehow become more, and places a red-heeled shoe against his heart. “I want them dead. Also, that new French perfume.”
He brushes her leg aside, irritated. She still doesn’t miss the roughness of his callouses against her pantyhose, how they catch on the silky strands and stain them with colour, nor the deliberate way in which he sets it to his other side. He’s between her legs, now.
Perhaps he thinks to intimidate her with it. The thought is almost as laughable as their wedding had been.
“Go home, Charlotte.”
She leans back, elongating the curve of her neck becomingly. “No.”
His hands stay on her thighs as he leans closer, the glower of his expression meant to terrify her away. “If you got rid of everyone who bad-mouthed your daddy, I’d be the first in line.”
“Oh, really?" she says, and closes the trap of her legs on him. He ruts forward with a grunt at the force, the slim lines of his hips cradled nicely between hers. “Then shut that darlin’ mouth of yours, husband.”
His face darkens. “I ain’t just gonna--”
She supposes he wasn’t expecting her anymore. Got the big name, the returning money, the mysteriously disappearing suitors and creditors. Got her pretty dresses and her gleaming pile of jewels and shiny motorcars and chauffeurs to go with them, and now when people speak to her, they don’t go all condescending anymore like they’re talking to a child. She doesn’t quite know how they know: her marriage to the Shadowman is not an advertised fact. Maybe they think he tricked her. Maybe they think he keeps her chained up, a puppet for him to use. Maybe they think she’s miserable and weeping on the inside, but that he still bothers to keep an eye on her enough that they don’t quite dare try and cross her.
But Charlotte is Charlotte, and greed is the first language she ever learned to speak, and she always wants more. She kisses into his sneer, all lips and tongue and teeth, swallowing down his words before he can speak them. “You got your contract to fulfill, Shadowman.” She says it all sweet-like, affectionate, and watches with dark satisfaction as he shudders with disgust at the tone.
Facilier narrows his eyes at her. “We haven’t made any more bargains.”
“No?” She bats her lashes at him, pulling at his filthy hands until they’re rucking up her dress, slipping beneath. Her clothes are going to be ruined: she finds she’s gaining a taste for it. “Are you sure?"
“Beyond sure, sunshine,” he says irritatedly. Despite his words he follows her silent orders, her squirming pleas, because of course he does: call it curiosity, or self-preservation, or plain old want, but he has always been very good at giving her whatever she might desire. “I ain’t even seen you since--”
The wedding.
"Exactly," she says, with no small measure of satisfaction, and nods her head towards the wall. His shadow stands at attention, a curling smirk splitting its head in the middle, and it locks the Emporium’s door without any further request. “You have a lot of marriage bed rights to make up for.”
His eyes widen, dark pupils snapped away from his traitorous shadow. “You don’t want to.”
“I do want to.” Her lips curl, all fresh and pink and plump, and she turns them over on the table. He’s not expecting it. He’s still not expecting it when his back hits the wood, or when he’s all sprawled out on it with her getting all comfortable and wiggly on top, or when she takes his brief disorientation to press a lingering kiss to his chest, hands busy with undoing his slacks. Misdirection, he calls it, on the few moments he bothers to explain to her the difference between magic and sleight of hand: Charlotte doesn’t think he ever thought she’d use it against him.
Funny, how he keeps underestimating her. He really should know better by now.
She kisses him, then, and keeps kissing him. Sweet and loving and deep, like this is all about love and feelings and happily ever afters, instead of chasing the taste of death like the bitter dregs of a cup of wine and drinking the vestiges of sweet smoke in his lungs. He’s dazed beneath her when she pulls away, the wet sound of their parting lips loud amongst their breathing; she caresses the gaunt angles of his cheeks and decides she likes him just like this. She decides that she wants him just like this - dishevelled, undone, messy, flushed with unwilling colour. Out of control, and hating it, and wanting it.
And this has always, always been about want.
So she takes him a second time.
And a third.
And a fourth.
And a fifth.
And when he tries to leave the cradle of her legs, morning light shining too bright from beneath the parlour’s door, she pulls him right back in.
Her smile is a dangerous thing. There’s something about this that makes her reckless and selfish and greedy, her darkest impulses fed by the hundred bargains tugging at her soul, and Charlotte has never been good at resisting the call of her desires.
“Where are you going, husband?” she purrs, drawing him back, trapping him again between soft thighs and questing arms. She presses a kiss to his neck, and another, and another, travelling waxy kisses down his chest until he’s hard beneath her once more. He’s glaring like he doesn’t want this, like her neck doesn’t have its own matching set of bite marks, like he isn’t just as ready and as aching as her, but his hands dig tight into the skin above her ribcage as she slides herself home, and he keeps his mouth shut. “This contract ain’t ending anytime soon.”
It’s all his fault, really. Charlotte has always been all about wanting, wanting everything and anything and never letting go. She wants and she wants and she wants, and he was the one who taught her how to take it.
So she does.