Ahead of me, I see a pop of white against the throng of color—a woman in a porcelain mask with red-black eye sockets and feathers in her hair. Her lips are white and painted like teeth, and her nose has been blacked out. A swirl of cobwebs dance around her cheeks and chin. She’s draped in white lace, and her hair is a mane of black and white streaks. I let my steps slow until I can make her out clearly, until her face turns to mine and I see her wink at me, until she begins to dance away.

She is Death riding a pale horse through cobbled streets. She is my next dot.

Without giving my reason time to catch up, I dart after her. She blinks in and out of my vision, a swirl of winter and bone. I catch her in my sight just as she’s rounding a corner or nearing another block, as though she is saying, with her whole form, Turn here or This way. Dauphine Street…Bourbon…Chartres—skeleton-white names on black street signs whir past me in a blur, and I lose track of where I am and where I’ve been. But I don’t stop. Because I am riding the heels of Death on her way to my mother, and if I stop, I’ll lose everything.

Without hope, what does anything else matter?

I see the steeple falling in my mind, see it crashing in a halo of fire and dust to the ground—the Tower come to life.

Some people just like playing with fire, I guess.

I see Sabrina’s Coke-colored kitchen and the way her hands flutter around the glass of her bottle.

We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I see the Devil leaning on his tree in the square, one leg up, arms behind his back—a Hanged Man.

I don’t have that kind of power.

I see the maze of the Quarter as it was in my dream, the woman with her cloak of stars wending her way to its center.

The only power is your own.

I see the empty baby cradle and the matchbook under my mother’s bed.

The Pelican Room.

I see the Halloween card with the gypsy and her orange hair.

If you won’t listen to me, maybe this.

Is Death leading me, or am I chasing Death? Is there a difference? It doesn’t matter because I know where we are going.

I know your type, he said to me once. Unable to see the grand design unfolding all around you. He said it beside the confessional in the oldest cathedral in America. He said it, and it was true. It was all true. Every word.