Tonight, Bee would be descending with the sun.

The old city of New Orleans thrummed, still hazy into evening from the hot summer afternoon. The sky was smoky and the streetlights on, shining through the clipped and twisted trees of the French Quarter. Mardi Gras was long over, the months past worlds away from the current revelers, who ate and waited for the dancing to start. Bee was waiting too, but not for dancing. She watched the women’s legs and the men’s dark shoes, all jittering under tables, with someone else’s fascination. In filling Ratchet’s place, she was becoming her. Her nose twitched and her toes swung along with the blues coming from the next bar over.

So she sipped her coffee and watched freely. It seemed like no one saw her as she sat alone, wearing out-of-place leather clothing; it was as though their eyes skipped past her somehow, that in scanning the outdoor tables they blinked just where she should be.

A big fat crow flapped into the tree above her in a blink of black. She grabbed a rucksack from under her chair – enough tools and things for the night, a few days in a pinch, nothing like the trunk she usually traveled on – and stood up, holding out her forearm for the crow. When it cawed about the way to the meeting place she rolled her shoulders and set out down the alley. No one in the café turned. No one heard a sound.