(Quick thank you for the reviews. I warn you now I'm not very good at updating and the chapters in this one will be longer then my usual...)

Grace Cooper woke up inside a shack. It was, to be fair, a very high class shack, the kind of shack that was large enough for three rooms and actually had some windows thank-you-very-much. The floor was mud and rushes, and the walls around it seemed to have been made of any and all materials on hand at the time. They lent inwards in a mildly threatening way. It was still raining; she could hear the rain pattering on the corrugated iron sheets that served as the roof. She tried to sit up, then thought better of it when her head started spinning. She lay quietly for a while, staring at the corrugated iron roof, out of the corner of her eye she could see a wooden poll supporting part of it and a lump of drift wood that had been lodged into a rusty hole in the iron to stop leaks. Grace shut her eyes.

Her head ached and her body felt numb and fuzzy, almost like a hangover except she didn't remember drinking anything. She didn't remember much of anything that had happened yesterday, but she was pretty sure drinking hadn't been involved. They'd been driving a truck load of food relief across the island to a village on the west coast somewhere, the coast that no tourists visited because the beaches were rocky instead of sandy and it was prone to getting hit by storms. So why was she lying in a shack with little memory of the night before and, she noted grimly, wearing somebody else's clothes? She groaned and rolled over onto her front. Something was very wrong here. Grace pushed herself up into a sitting position with another groan, trying to look on the bright side, at least she wasn't throwing up all over the place though it hardly matter when she felt as though an elephant had been dancing on her head all night and she had a horrible suspicion she'd been drugged.

There was no one else in the shack, so she staggered to her feet, gripping on a sort of rough stone table for balance. There was chalk on the walls, someone had drawn intricate symbols in white chalk over the un-even walls, and then she noticed the dried herbs and little animal skulls hanging from the rough ceiling, the scattered candle stubs, the large calabash rattle hanging from a hook on a wall. Grace stood there quietly for a moment remembering every bad horror movie she'd ever seen. She swore and lurched towards the doorway.

"Hullo." Said a bright cheerful voice from the doorway.

Its owner was a small skinny sort of boy, with a shaved head and a wide smile that was missing a few teeth. He was wearing a pair of shorts and boots and his own dark skin, which seemed a little bloodless in the grey rainy afternoon light. He stepped inside, shaking off his holey green umbrella and propping it against the gap in the mesh of driftwood, plastic and iron sheets that served as a door.

"I'm Yannick." He told her proudly, puffing himself up a little as he did. "And you're Miss Gracie. Would you like some tea, Miss Gracie?"

It was a combination of surprise and the less-then-sober state she was in that made Grace Cooper sit down by the little wood fire with the soot-blackened old kettle dangled over it by an elaborate structure of twine, stiff wire and carefully placed rocks with the boy. Yannick, the gappy grin still on his face produced two bright plastic mugs. He put them on the floor, struggled to balance the kettle over the fire and poured the steaming tea. It was a dark reddish-brown and did not smell much like ordinary tea. The boy passed her a mug then lifted his own, blowing on it before taking a careful sip. Grace glared at her cup skeptically.

"It's herbal," Yannick told her, making a particular point of the next bit. "Clears the head."

The boy was gulping it down now, and it didn't seem to be doing him any harm. Apart from may be his eyes, there was something wrong with his eyes that Grace couldn't put her finger on.

It didn't matter. She blew on her tea and sipped it. It tasted awful, but it seemed to help her head so she drank some more. As her head cleared it occurred to her that she should be terrified. She had after all woken up drugged in a shack in some shanty town somewhere along the western coast of an island now known more for its rebel groups and gun fights then its pretty beaches. Someone had stolen all her money, her passport, her shoes; she had no idea where her friends were or what had happened to her last night except for a vague hunch that it couldn't have been good. She should have been petrified; she should have been running for the hills her heart-rate going at a hundred miles an hour and her glands trying to kill her with an adrenaline overdose. But she only felt a dull outraged sort of anger. How dare they do…whatever it was they'd done?

Grace downed the last of the disgusting tea. Her head didn't hurt anymore but her belly still ached with a sort of dull throbbing. She wondered if the boy had any special teas for that.

She frowned and studied him for a minute. He seemed cheerful enough, happy enough, like any of a hundred well-behaved little boys she'd seen in any of the other shanty's they'd visited with their charity truck of food relief. Big honest grin, muddy pair of shorts, politer then anyone back home, so what was it that she had thought was odd?

"Are you alright Miss Gracie?" Yannick asked.

Something about his eyes. "Yes, uh thank you. I'm fine." She muttered.

"Only you don't look so well."

His eyes, the boy's eyes were gray and filmy, as if the liquid on them had hardened to jelly and gone off. Normally she would have been startled, but instead she felt a morbid curiosity.

"What's wrong with your eyes?"

"Nothing Miss Gracie."

Probably cataracts she concluded, miracle he could see at all out of those dull clouded eyes. Yannick obviously didn't want to talk about it so she handed her empty mug to him and watched him try to balance it on a small mound of other things that needed cleaning. He didn't look like a very obvious candidate for drugging and kidnapping relief workers, even if they were only of the truck driver variety.

"You er…don't have an older brother do you?"

"No Miss Gracie, never had a brother." He paused, still pawing at the pile of grime and apparently looking for something.

"I had a sister once." Yannick added helpful.

"Oh?" Grace tried to picture a slightly older, female Yannick as an international terrorist and failed. Then because it seemed like a polite thing to do she asked. "What happened to her?"

"She died, long time ago. Parents too."

"Oh." Grace said, a little embarrassed, what after all did you say to that bland statement that took away a child's family?

"But it's ok, 'cause Mister Johnson looks after me." Yannick continued brightly.

"Ah!" He emerged from the mound of all dirty objects waving the ripped and ominously stained remains of Grace's T-shirt. "Found your clothes!"

Grace wondered if the hut's resident witch-doctor had decided to sacrifice something in her T-shirt or whether last night had been a lot worse then she previously suspected.

"I tried to wash 'em, but it didn't really work." He told her proudly. "Then I tried to mend 'em, but Miss Ife said I was just making bad worse and I should leave 'em alone."

Grace stared at her old clothes. She'd got the T-shirt in Haiti; it had once been yellow and proclaimed in broken English words to the effect that the local football team was the best in the world. It was now a crusty brown, with most of the stomach missing and rips along the sleeves. Her trousers were covered in red-brown mud, and one of the knees had worn out. They looked almost designer they were so full of holes and in the places where Yannick had tried to mend them the legs were sewn together.

"Errrm, thank you. Do you have my bag in there? Or my shoes?"

They had been good shoes, nikes, nearly new, and she'd had her passport and her purse in her back pack.

Yannick shook his head slowly. "Didn't have no shoes when Mister Johnson brought you in, no bag neither."

Of course, the world was against Grace today so simple things like shoes would be out of the question.

"Er…"

"Yannick." The boy reminded her helpfully.

"Yannick," Grace continued. "How long was I asleep?"

"Two days."

"Ah." Two days, they hadn't been due back in Sainte Marie for a week. Another five days before anyone would miss her, before anyone would begin to wonder if something had gone wrong. Anything could happen in five days, so why wasn't she terrified? The most she could rouse herself to was a kind of mild irritation, five days in a mud hut with no sanitation and the only running water was the muddy trail the rain had made outside. And if Yannick's cooking was half as bad as that tea…

"This Mr Johnson, will he be coming back any time soon?"

The boy nodded. "He got to, he's the hougan."

"Ah." Grace said, pretending that she understood.

"Sort of like a Christian priest."

Grace tried to imagine a small-town vicar sitting in a room like this, alter, animals skulls and all. Somehow it didn't quite fit. Perhaps it was something to do with the hissing sound coming from under the alter stones. Grace had never liked snakes.

"So this place would be sort of like a Christian church then?" Grace suggested.

"Nope." Yannick said with an impish grin. "Much more fun."

Grace sat on the floor with the remains of her clothes on her lap, while the boy bustled about keeping himself busy with various chores. There were snakes under the alter, she saw him slide back the stone to feed them. Once it would have made her edge quietly to the other side of the room, but now all she could manage was a shudder that felt forced. Instead of trying to feel afraid of the snakes she picked at the bottoms of the too-short-trousers she was wearing. She wasn't surprised they didn't fit; she was a tall woman with long all-bones legs and knock-knees. Her stretched limbs made her look like a half-grown teenager even though she was almost 24, she had prayed that she would grow into them ever since she was 14 but apparently God did not listen. The trousers were too short and the T-shirt was too baggy, it sagged over her shoulders into a shapeless sack.

When Denzel Johnson eventually arrived about a half hour or so later she discovered that he was an old man, wrong side of seventy at least, which despite good health ruled him out of kidnap charges in Grace's book. She couldn't picture an old man with such an honest smile doing anything like that. He was a head or so shorter then her with thick white hair that looked as if it had been scraped off, shrunk in the wash and then stuck back on with liberal use of superglue. His ribs stuck out of his chest as if they meant to tear their way out of his saggy sun-hardened skin. He wore odd flip-flops, a pair of shorts and a dull coloured shirt that was missing so many buttons it was impossible to do up. He looked like any poor old local man, the sort that ended up outliving their families and were driven into the shantys when their savings ran out. Grace felt a little sorry for him.

There was a young man with him. He was slender and too well fed to be a resident of the shack. His hair grew in knots hacked off roughly at his ears which stuck out oddly under the top hat he wore which was at least a size too big for him and swallowed his face to the eyebrows. He wore an old black suit and had a small hand rolled cigarette balanced in the corner of his playful smile. That smile and the way that Yannick shrank a little when he came in made him suspect number one.

Denzel Johnson came and sat beside her, his genuine smile and the way he asked how she was feeling made Grace think that perhaps he could have been a small town vicar.

"Stomach hurts a bit."

"Yes," He said gravely. "It will for a time."

"What happened? I mean….how did I get here?"

"There was a raid." Mr Johnson said carefully. "The village you had stopped in was attacked."

The youth snorted. "Massacred more like, blood and body bits everywhere."

"Guido." Denzel said in a mildly scolding tone which made the youth sigh and roll his eyes.

"There was a raid," The hougan continued. "Three,"

"Four." Guido interrupted.

"Four days ago. You were injured but not so badly as the others so when we found you we brought you down here to be safe."

It was a good explanation; perhaps not water tight but there weren't any good alternatives she could think of so she tried to ignore the little nagging voice saying that no rebels in their right mind would raid a village to poor to feed itself.

Before Grace could say anything Guido, in a falsely casual voice, interrupted again. "Oh and by the way, you're also dead."

She stared at him, not sure whether to laugh or not. The two men were not laughing, Denzel Johnson was glaring at Guido who was picking at his finger nails and trying to look innocent. They weren't laughing, but what could a comment like that mean if it wasn't a joke.

"I was raped?" She suggested, her voice sounded too steady when she said it. "I've got AIDs or leprosy or something?"

"No." Denzel Johnson replied firmly. "Definitely not. But…"

He sighed, he hated these first few days, when they were scared and cursed and threw things at him and shouted that he was helping the loa with both hands. Perhaps he was. Perhaps it was wrong, but he only did what he had to do.

Denzel sighed. "Yannick, can you bring a mirror for the lady please?"

The boy scurried quickly out of his corner and climbed on the alter so he could poke about in the wooden rafters above. Before Grace could object that she didn't want a mirror, the last thing she wanted was to see what she looked like after living through a rebel raid, he was down and shoving a small mercifully un-cracked hand mirror at her. It had to be some kind of joke.

Her skin was paler then she remembered, bloodless, and there were large purple tinged rings under her eyes where the skin had begun to sag. Her long brown hair was lank and when she touched it, it felt brittle. But it was her eyes that made her stop. She remembered when they had been hazel, now they were grey and clouded as if the jelly in her eyeballs had congealed and gone off. A dead woman's eyes.

She was on her feet before she released she had moved. Someone was yelling something, she even caught some of it, incoherent curses and senseless stuff like 'what did you do to me'. It sounded a little like her voice, but now she thought about something in it was off as well. Then Guido slapped her so hard she couldn't tell whether she was still standing up.

The Guede helped the old hougan to his feet. The man was shaking like a leaf in a storm; the corpse had tried to attack him, to actually hit him! And there were holes in the wrought iron sheeting of the wall behind him that testified to her strength. But then they were all strong.

"Are you alright, brother?" The Guede asked cautiously.

Denzel was still shivering. "Yes, yes. I shall be. Thank you."

For a time they were both silent, staring at the now limp corpse. Sprawled where she fell on the floor.

"Yannick?" The hougan called.

"Yes Mister Johnson?" The reply came from behind the stone alter, followed by the boy's head peeking cautiously out.

"Be a good boy and go see about finding some wood to mend the gaps."

The boy did not need to be told twice, he raced from the hut as if they'd set dogs on him. Guido snorted.

"That one is a useless coward."

"He's only a boy."

There was a pause as both of them stared at Grace again.

"I have never seen one do that." Denzel observed.

"It doesn't happen often." Guido admitted. "I've heard of it. Sometimes when they were alive the only thing they were afraid of was death. And now they are dead."

"And have nothing to fear." The hougan finished with a frown. "I suppose it would be dangerous to keep this one?"

"Probably. All they really have is anger, and I won't always be here to put her back to sleep if she tries again."

"A pity." Denzel sighed.

"No." Guido disagreed. "You just don't like the idea of letting her loose so she rots away. You're too soft Denzel."

In her dream Grace saw the Cherokee man again, smiling down at her. His eyes were black as coals and his smile looked almost hungry. Then he opened his mouth and let out a harsh low sound, almost like a raven's call, and she felt as if she died again.