Richard Benoit owned a shop on a street, but the shop was at the front of his own home, which was accessed through a back room and also by going around to the back of the store and down some stairs to a lower level. A tiny brass bell above the door rang when Booth pushed it open.

The room was dark, with low shelves on the sides stocked with voodoo-related artifacts, and the front was a long display case with padded lining, the dark red color emphasizing the ingredients inside. It looked like it slid open from the inside of the bar, and on the far left there was a space between the counter and the wall for passing through. On the counter was a register, and on the far wall was a door leading to another room and a bunch of filing drawers.

"Whoa." Booth grimaced and waved a hand in front of his face, looking around. "What's that smell?"

"Herbs, ingredients." I offered offhandedly. It was hard to particularly care when I'm trying so hard to remember another memory, especially because the smell wasn't quite offensive, just different.

"I imagine everything smells in here," Brennan answered in mild-mannered agreement, stepping up to the glass counter and looking down inside curiously. I don't think she was in search of anything in particular.

Meanwhile, Booth found a brown-framed photograph of two people, both African American, standing in front of a shining red car, sitting on top of the counter and to the right, out of the way of customers but still proudly on display, saying look, we have awesome wheels. I could almost see the red and pink hearts he was emitting as he leaned over it, studying it reverently. "Whoa. Please just tell me that car survived Katrina," he almost begged.

The door to the back room was pushed open. The African American man from the photograph stepped through into the room on the opposite side of the counter. "We used it to evacuate," he told Booth with a small smile. His English was punctuated by small pauses, like it was a second language.

Booth rolled his eyes and looked up from the frame, sighing and leaning his weight onto crossed arms on top of the counter. "Did you restore it yourself, or did you use voodoo?"

Low, where the man couldn't see, I kicked up at the back of Booth's leg. He flinched and tried to conceal it with a faux smile.

Instead of being offended, the shop owner laughed pleasantly. "Ah. An unbeliever." He smiled over the three of us, although he seemed a little confused as to what we'd be doing in his shop. "What can I do for you?"

"Are you Richard Benoit?" I asked bluntly, holding up the small carved box from Sam Potter. When Benoit nodded once in an affirmative answer, I lowered the box down onto the glass counter for him to look at. "I want to know everything you can tell me about this specific combination of ingredients."

Benoit lifted the top of the box to look inside at the bones, roots, and littler pieces involved in the mojo. His eyes widened and his eyebrows went up, but he remained measured and careful. I noticed that he didn't try to touch any of them. "This is a dark spell," he said vaguely. I wondered if it was because he didn't know much or if it was because he was covering for something. "Forbidden magic. Very strong. This is Secte Rouge." He closed it down firmly and made sure that it wasn't going to open again. "I certainly wouldn't make anything like this," he established firmly.

"But… you have the ingredients here?" Booth confirmed, arching his eyebrows and darting his eyes down through the glass to look at things marked with prices on tented unlined cards.

Benoit shifted, made uncomfortable by the implications. "Well…" he tried to hedge. I glared, and it made him break back to honest answers. "The individual ingredients are not malignant. It is how they are combined, and what intention they are used for, that makes a spell good or bad."

Brennan looked over Benoit carefully and then seemed to decide he was being honest. She looked from him to me, and then to the voodoo bag's contents. She held out a hand towards me at about shoulder level. "Do you recognize her?" She asked Benoit.

Benoit looked me over and I forced myself to give him a generic smile. It pulled at the cut in my lip and stung, but not enough to complain about. I was used to stinging by now, anyway. Benoit did a slight double-take at the strangulation bruises around my neck, but he knew better than to make any remarks. "No," he decided, shaking his head. "Should I?"

I sighed. "I'll get back to you on that."

Booth shoved his hands into his pockets. "Anyone else work here?" He craned his neck to try to look through the crack in the door leading out of the shop room, like he thought he might be able to see another figure if he looked hard enough at the right time.

"My daughter, Eva." I liked that name, I decided quickly. "What is this about?"

Booth pushed the hem of his jacket out of the way to get his credentials out of the pockets of his slacks, flipping the billfold open to show the trademark bureau image in gold, with Special Agent Seeley Booth written across the inside. "We're conducting an investigation," he answered without giving much away at all.

Benoit was sufficiently surprised. I think Booth liked that he was shocked by the FBI credentials, because he seemed pretty smug as he was putting them away. Benoit twisted to yell over his shoulder. "Eva!" I couldn't hear a response from inside, but the shop owner turned back around, his arms now up almost defensively. "What kind of investigation?"

"Is it true that this is the only place a person could buy black gum root?" Brennan asked, pretending that Benoit hadn't asked the question. She just wanted to double check what Sam had told us earlier about this being the shop to go to in pursuit of more leads to fill in our blanks.

Benoit nodded, shutting his eyes for a moment. "Yes," he admitted, opening his eyes and sweeping over the room, reminiscent and nostalgic. "Most places like this are all gone now. It's… not a coincidence." His words seemed dark, overshadowed by something slightly more sinister, but he didn't specify what he meant before the door opened further and a gorgeous African American woman stepped through, long brown hair tied in a tight bun, wearing an orange shirt with a modest neckline. Her ears had long brown earrings with several beads pierced through.

"Yes, daddy?" She asked, dipping her head to her father as she came to stand beside Benoit.

Benoit looked from Eva and to me, holding out a hand in my direction. It was too clear an indication to mistake. "Have you ever seen this lady before?" He asked her.

I looked at Eva and smiled tensely again, my lip burning at the pull. It was supposed to mimic my ID photo on my driver's license. Although I probably hadn't ever showed her my license even if we had met, it seemed like the right sort of thing to do.

Eva shook her head, her earrings dangling. Her eyes were a deep chocolate brown. "No. Why?"

I shrugged but tried to sincerely smile at her in thanks for at least trying to remember. "It's complicated," I offered, truly unable to say anything more accurate.

Brennan looked into the box and picked up the black gum root, a dried out and shriveled old plant that looked more like the color of smoke than actually black. She held it flat in one hand and looked past it down to the ingredients in the display case, finding what looked like it in a bigger quantity, and pointed to the small bowl holding it off of the padded velvet. "We need to know who's bought this recently," she said, pointing.

Eva frowned at Brennan and looked up to her father, who was only a few inches taller. "Don't they need a warrant?" She asked, slightly defensive over the questions.

"Ah…" Benoit chuckled, but it was awkward, not sincere. He gave his daughter a pat on the shoulder. "Eva will pull up what you need on the computer." Eva looked irritated and about to argue, but her father looked down to her and sternly added, "Eva…"

Eva sighed, exhaling deeply in acceptance, and she moved back to the filing cabinets, taking a key from on top and slipping it into the lock on top. She twisted it to the side in one hundred eighty degrees and left it in while she pulled open the second drawer down.

"What you said before." While Eva looked through the shop records in the filing cabinets, rifling through the folders, Booth drew Benoit's attention back to us. "What did you mean, not a coincidence?"

"Most places like this, where a houngan – a priest," he amended when Booth looked a little bit confused. "Can get what he needs… they are all gone now." Benoit's eyes drifted over to the picture of the Cadillac for just a second, like he was remembering trying to save people and getting out of the flood.

Brennan saw that his attention had strayed for a moment and she followed his gaze, making the same connection. "Because of the hurricane and flood?"

Benoit dipped his head in a sort-of bow. It was almost like he was grieving a loss. "Which occurred because of a lack of balance."

"And the lack of balance was caused by Secte Rouge's interference, right?" I tried to confirm. I felt like I'd learned more about voodoo in the past two hours than I had in months beforehand. I suppose being directly in the middle of a case where voodoo culture was so integral was bound to be educational.

Brennan tried not to smile so that she wouldn't offend Benoit or his daughter, but she still had the skeptical turn up of her lips that gave away her amusement. However, since she was trying not to offend, I didn't feel the need to kick her. "Mr. Benoit, are you suggesting that Secte Rouge somehow conjured up a hurricane?"

"Secte Rouge voodoo is much more powerful than ours." Eva turned around and she bumped the drawer to send it sliding back inwards. She held a list of names all written in black pen, and she left the key in the lock. She approached her father's side again before she held out the list of buyers to Brennan.

"No, Eva," Benoit chided gently but sternly. Eva looked down as she was lectured. "Not more powerful," Benoit continued to correct. "Destruction is easier than harmony, but not more powerful. There are a lot of misunderstandings about voodoo."

Booth snorted, finding his own amusement in his misperceptions. "Yeah, that whole zombie stuff must put a crimp in your public relations, I bet."

I growled softly and ducked my head so that I could whisper to him without anyone else seeing my lips move. "Don't make me kick you again," I threatened.

"Graham Legiere," Brennan said suddenly, her eyes widening. I looked away from Booth and over to the anthropologist, whose eyes had roamed from the top of the list down to the bottom and the most recent names. "The medical examiner…" Brennan tossed the list back onto the counter and turned around, her jacket flying up in back with how quickly she moved to get out of the shop and back out to the van.

I stopped, blinked, and processed it. Graham has some explaining to do, I thought to myself, frown deepening as I hummed, raised a hand in halfhearted goodbye to the Benoits, and turned to follow after my mentor.

Graham lived in a bright pink two-story house in a newer neighborhood that had been left relatively unharmed by Katrina, and there was a four-door Sedan in the driveway to the left of the house. There were roses growing along the front of the house in a neat, ordered line. We parked along the front, pulled to the side of the street.

Brennan walked up the porch steps two at a time quickly, with a lot of confidence for someone going to someone else's house for the first time, especially when considering the context. Since none of it seemed new to me, either, I hazarded a guess that during the time gap we couldn't consciously remember, we'd both been here at some point.

Brennan tried the handle and twisted it effortlessly, giving it a nudge to push inwards and open to the front hall. "It's not locked," she murmured, before raising her voice to call for the examiner while stepping inside. "Graham? It's Temperance!"

There was a gold-framed painting hanging on a tame golden-painted wall. Directly in front of the door was the large staircase going upwards to the second floor. To the left was the living room, which was furnished with a wide and long ornate rug with earthy colors, not too unlike Brennan's. The couch and armchair were both covered in red velvet, and both faced the glass coffee table. On either side of the couch there was a round table, each with different photographs on it, and the one on the far side of the room had a little bronze statuette of a ballerina. Across from the couch was the fireplace.

I walked in after Brennan, wrapping my hand around the handle out of habit and then realizing that it didn't take any effort to turn. I looked down to it and saw the real reason we'd gotten inside so easily – the lock was broken, and just on the inside of the door there were red smudges, like someone had pulled it shut on their way out with blood on their hands.

"It's not unlocked, it's broken," I corrected Brennan softly, looking up and following the scientist into the living room, standing at the start of the rug while she looked down at one of the photographs. Assuming we've both been here before, and the blood on the door… was this where we were attacked? Why would Graham attack us? I didn't know him all that well, but he seemed like an honestly nice guy, if a little bit crass.

"What if he's not here?" Booth asked me, looking over the door with the same hint of unease. He shoved his hands in his pockets but he looked up the stairs suspiciously.

"Well, he's probably asleep," Brennan tried to reason without casting unnecessary shadows. "He's been working nights." Right… our schedules overlapped in the couple hours as shifts began to switch out, going from the morning and afternoon staff to the evening and nighttime rotation. "Graham?"

"Graham!" I shouted, less like a question and more like a summons. I looked up the stairs, spotting what looked like dried blood on the wooden banister, and rolled my shoulders, making a note to go upstairs at one point. My chest was beginning to feel tight – brought on by stress, and not a good sign.

"Cracker!" Booth added as soon as I'd said the examiner's first name.

While I snickered, looking over the living room for any other signs of blood, Brennan straightened from the little decorative photographs and she scowled at Booth. "That's not funny," she scolded us both.

"Sorry," I said with a smirk, trying but failing to actually seem chastened. "I wish I could sound more repentant," I offered, trying to at least let her know that I was taking her seriously. Brennan shook her head slightly at me, but she didn't dignify my bad attempt at assuagement with another response.

"You know what?" Booth brought up what I'd been silently thinking since I'd seen the blood on the door. "Maybe he roofied you."

I shook my head, trying to make everything seem more sensible. It was a hard thing to do when I wasn't even sure what "sensible" was in this case. "Dr. Brennan was going to go out with him, so maybe that would explain her amnesia, but not mine. If I was here, I had a good reason that didn't involve food or drink."

"I'm sure he bought the black gum root to… look into its medicinal properties." Even though she tried to remain steadfast in her belief that Graham wasn't a bad guy here, Brennan was starting to sound just a little skeptical, and I heard a bit of frustration at the fact that she couldn't be more certain.

Booth snorted, rolling his eyes and grumbling. "Yeah. Because we all know how effective that is." His contempt for voodoo was getting really old really quickly.

Brennan must have shared my thoughts on that, because she was quick to put Booth back in his place in as peaceful a way as possible. "Voodoo healing is quite effective," she assured him. "No crazier than acupuncture or exorcism."

Booth threw up his hands defensively to try to block the little digs at Catholicism. "Hey, hey," he complained, looking between his arms at her as if she was actually coming at him with a sword. "Easy on the Catholics, okay? Just easy." He looked past Brennan and over her shoulder, and he immediately sobered from his irritation.

I turned around to see what he'd found. A tall, oval-shaped mirror, held just above the ground in a vertical stand, reached almost six feet from the ground, but was shoved back in the corner to be as far out of sight as possible. A black woolen blanket, folded in half sloppily, was thrown over the top and pinned between the frame and the wall, keeping it upright while the rest of the blanket dangled down, covering up all but a few slivers of mirror along the right edge.

"You know, a lot of cultures believe that if someone dies, the mirrors should be covered up so that their souls don't get trapped." My feet remained rooted firmly where they were, although the mirror wasn't a very nice decoration. Under normal circumstances, I may have moved to take the blanket off, but now I felt an irrational sense of dread at the thought. I took a step back and looked towards the stairwell in front of the front door. "There was blood on the banister," I added, just a bit nervously. No signs of horrible, bloody murder down here… but all I knew was that every sense of intuition in my head was demanding that I drop all thoughts of going upstairs. I wanted someone else to go with me, but was too prideful to ask.

Brennan looked over at the stairs as if she was in a trance, her face going almost unnaturally blank. Her eyes didn't seem to focus on any one thing in the room, and quickly, she started to reach out with one hand to touch the wall and stabilize herself. I wondered if that expressionless state was how I seemed when I had a memory flash. The scientist looked up and dropped her hand, walking rapidly, albeit with trepidation, to the stairs.

She's remembering something.

Booth groaned, tossing his head back to voice his complaints to the popcorn-styled ceiling. "Here we go again," he grumbled. I ignored him and started to follow Brennan. If whatever it was happened to be so awful I was terrified without understanding, then it had to be particularly traumatizing. No way did I want Brennan going up without backup of some kind.

I half expected for the stair to squeak or protest, but as my weight pressed down on the first step, there wasn't any noise except for Brennan's uneven footfalls higher up as she neared the top. I looked up to see her back, her hair lit up with emphasis from lights on in the upstairs hallway.

I raised my arms above my head to block a blow and felt a hard collision with my forearms.

I stumbled a bit, almost entirely forgetting to lift my other foot to continue up, but caught my breath and tried to go through the motions without hurting myself. I can deal with getting shot at and stabbed and beaten to a bloody pulp, but falling up the stairs would definitely be a new one for me.

The pressure was too much and it sent me staggering back. My left foot passed through air and I pitched forward, grabbing at the banister. My hand, slick with the blood on my palm smeared up to my wrist, slid down but caught with traction and I cut myself off mid-shout, half sick with nerves and pain.

I scowled, trying to figure out what it was that I was remembering. My progress on the stairs slowed significantly, and if it bothered Booth that I wasn't moving very quickly, he didn't vocalize those qualms. I was attacked on the stairs. We had been here.

"Dr. Brennan!" So much blood soaked the floor, and my footing slipped with a morbid squelch. My stomach knotted in nausea. I was standing, slipping in a pool of my friend's blood.

"Dr. Brennan," I called immediately with an unhealthy note of panic when I realized that even that brief clip couldn't account for all of the blood. But she's here, she's alive, she's okay. No one could have lost that much blood and survived. I tried to force myself to speed up, almost to the top of the stairs as Brennan disappeared around a turn into the hallway, and the toe of my shoes caught on the edge of a step. I fell forward, doing an impressive impression of a windmill to stay bipedal.

I failed, falling down onto the top landing hard and banging my knee. I hissed, registering not only the new pain, but also the aggravated soreness from previous injuries.

"Whoa. Maybe you shouldn't be doing stairs right now," Booth commented. His words were flippant, but his tone was concerned, and he bent over to offer a hand up. In his eyes I saw sincerity and a hell of a lot more worry than he was letting on.

I didn't take his hand, instead picking my feet up and scooting back onto the even ground of the second floor before trying to stand up again, this time with the help of the wall. "I can't stop now," I mumbled, holding onto the flat wall with curled fingers to dig too-short nails in for balance and purchase. "I'm remembering more."

The upstairs hallway was long and didn't have a carpet, but there were spots on the wooden floor that made me think they'd seen grisly action, too. At first glance, it seemed like all of the doors except for one were closed, maybe locked. The whitewashed door on the far right was left ajar. Brennan stood several feet away from it, staring at it in warring confusion and fear.

"You may be remembering Wednesday, but you're forgetting how to walk." I ignored the somewhat annoyed remark since I knew that if he was really irritated, he wouldn't be hovering at my side, ready to catch me before I hit the ground if I fell again.

His face was unrecognizable. I could barely tell it was a "him" anymore. Scraped up, skinned, flayed and held up on the wall. I stood in front of Dr. Brennan with my chest heaving, my wrist burning and blood dripping down my arm and to my palm. "We have to get out," I whimpered, my throat sounding raw and wrecked even to my own ears.

It was only Booth's change in demeanor that let me know I'd made some sort of noise, or done something else to communicate distress. What I had thought I'd seen for only a second had been horrific, abhorrent – muted in colors that I couldn't even subconsciously remember. Who the hell could have done that to another human being?

The FBI agent stepped closer, even though he was usually pretty good at keeping a reasonable distance. "You okay?" He asked, trying to catch my eyes.

My tongue tasted of iron and Brennan was off-balanced, dizzy from a hit to the head, maybe even concussed. I could barely think beyond the primitive fight-or-flight reactions, so I was probably sporting some head trauma, too.

I looked away from Booth, dismissing his attempts at making eye contact. I know that's one of the things you're supposed to do if you think someone is having a panic attack – make eye contact to see if they're still with you – and to tell the truth, I wasn't certain that I wouldn't if I wasn't careful. "I don't know why," I rasped with a dry throat, looking at the crack in the door that opened just enough to see the light turned on inside and a shadow cast inside the threshold. "But I'm terrified."

"Something bad happened here," Brennan whispered, transfixed by the door. "And… we got away." In a trauma- and terror-induced panic, but we'd managed to get away, regardless of how close it probably was, going by our states.

Booth looked between Brennan and I, not quite understanding why we, despite being known for a degree of recklessness, couldn't bring ourselves to move forward, open the door, and see what lay behind it. He stepped up to it and put a hand on Brennan's shoulder, edging her to the side so that he could go past. He gave the door a little, light push to swing it inwards, opening into the room, and looked around.

I knew the moment he saw something, because his eyes widened and he all but bolted inside. Brennan followed after him quickly, breaking into an almost run. Unable to resist the horrid curiosity or the nagging need to know, I followed to the side and swung in, leaning against the doorway. I wasn't sure I could trust myself yet to keep control of my senses enough to stay coordinated.

First I noticed that it was a bedroom, and a luxurious one at that. There was a king-sized bed in the middle of the room, still completely made, even with the cream-colored bedspread. Secondly, I saw the mirror – the flash of color in the only half-covered oval vanity mirror, angled to see the ground. There was so much crimson and so little pale flesh, but I could see spots of skin and darkened denim.

I turned my head to the right to see what the mirror was reflecting and I almost screamed. As it was, I was shocked into letting go of the wall and backing up quickly, so fast that I slammed my back into the open door, which bounced against the wall before hitting me again. I stared, abhorred, unaffected by the door's return assault.

A mutilated corpse was pinned to the wall, crucified, with long industrial nails clear through the wrists and ankles and into the wall behind him. Just behind the nails, long-handled knives, covered in blood from spray, were dug through the limbs to make the crucifixion more obvious. A fifth knife was stabbed through the heart, impaled on the wall through the body's chest cavity, but first it seemed like it'd been used to not only eviscerate the victim, but also to skin the face off. There were slivers of spots where I could have sworn I saw the stained bone of the skull, and the rest seemed just like bloody tissue and muscle.

So, yeah, the entire floor by the wall is soaked in this huge puddle of congealed blood, along with what looks like the internal organs from the victim's gut. It was morbid and grisly and without a doubt the goriest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life, even taking into account every case I'd been on with Brennan and Booth.

Around his neck was a little off-colored dark red pouch with yellow string, dangling a few inches above the knife in his chest – another voodoo mojo. What was definitely supposed to be a sigil of some kind was painted on the wall messily in blood that had run while it was wet.

"Oh, yeah," Booth agreed with Brennan's earlier statement, sounding as winded as if he'd just run a marathon. "Something bad."

When the police arrived, I sat down at the top of the stairs, pressed to the side and leaning against the wall so that CSI and officers could go up and down the staircase as they needed to. There wasn't anything here that I could do. I'm cool with bones, but there was so much flesh and blood – the whole thing was too gruesome to describe, and it didn't help that, according to reason, the disemboweled, flayed, and crucified man on the wall is – was – my friend.

Booth and Brennan both stayed near, taking spaces nearby me at the top of the stairs, leaning against the wall while still standing and watching as the responders went through the motions of processing the crime scene. They were giving me my space, not trying to make me talk, but they were nearby.

The nail in my arm. I'd woken up with a nail half-in my forearm. Was that what had happened? Had some sorcerer – um, bokor – tried to crucify me? And Brennan, too? I remembered being in front of her in a flashback, like I'd been shielding her from someone. Somehow, the three of us – Brennan, Graham, and I – had all ended up in Graham's home, but then a fourth person had come and put up a hell of a fight to kill us. Brennan and I got out – not uninjured, but with our lives intact.

I stared at my hands, interlaced and locked around my knees, which were drawn up to my abdomen. I was rocked to the side with my head against the wall and my hair falling in front of my face so that I didn't have to keep monitoring my own expressions. It's okay for me to freak out a little here, but I need to be able to be freaked without anyone else realizing that I'm freaked.

Heels clacked on the wood hallway. "What exactly were you doing here?" The familiar voice of Rose Harding was now cold and mean. I looked up dully. She was glaring with eyes like flint, her arms crossed as she went from Brennan to myself, seeming to dismiss Booth at the moment.

Probably accusing us of murder. I'll be the first to admit that I think I could commit murder, if the circumstances were right – defending myself or a third party, maybe, but I'd try not to make any attacks fatal. I value human life, alright? I get that some people are evil and I support the death penalty, but that doesn't mean I think that I have the right to carry that out myself. Accusing me of this, though? That was ludicrous. If I ever had to kill, I'd be quick and that would be that. No need for torture or gore.

Brennan shifted so that her weight was on her other leg and she leaned forward, away from the wall. "It's Graham, isn't it?" She asked, almost dreading it.

Harding's eyes narrowed. "Tell you what, Dr. Brennan, I'm going to ask the questions, and I have some in particular for Miss Kirkland."

"Oh, come on, detective," Booth objected quickly. Normally I'd think I could defend myself, but this kind of accusation? And from someone who could arrest me? If Booth was trying to defend me against legal action, then I wasn't going to complain. "They were working with the guy."

"How closely?" Harding returned without pause.

Brennan scoffed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just answer my questions, please." That definitely sounded more like a formality than anything, and suddenly, Harding didn't seem like as much of a friend anymore. She looked down at me while I twisted around, craning my neck to look up at her instead of face down the stairs. "Dr. Brennan had her flight and hotel booked for months, but you came out of nowhere. What made you suddenly decide to visit? Was it a social call? Business? Revenge killing?"

I pushed myself up onto my feet and then stepped up the couple of stairs until I was standing on even ground with the other three. I did this very quickly so that I could look Harding in the eye. If she was going to accuse me of slaying an innocent man, then she was going to have to show me that respect, damn it.

"You think I came all the way out to New Orleans to try my hand at crucifixion?" I hissed with my eyes blazing. "I'm interning with the Jeffersonian and this was supposed to be an education experience that doubled as a public service – until I woke up with no clue how I was nearly murdered, that is!"

Booth put himself in the middle of the argument quite literally by walking in between Harding and I to force us to give each other breathing room. "Look, Legiere bought some black gum root from the voodoo store," he said, trying to be cooperative and placating at the same time. "We just stopped by to ask why."

"Why?" She demanded. Harding is not one with a lot of patience, and I'd never thought that she was good at waiting, but her mannerisms could do with a bit of improvement, especially considering that she saw firsthand the state Brennan and I were in before we were patched up.

"That's what we came here to ask!" Brennan agreed with a quick nod, misunderstanding.

Harding fixed Brennan with a calculating stare before she twisted to point down the hallway to the bedroom behind her. "You wanna look behind me and remind yourselves why I'm a little low on sense of humor?!" She asked heatedly. This lady's getting aggravated by everything that comes out of our mouths.

"What?" Brennan frowned, a little bit offended. "That wasn't a joke."

"No, she's not wisecracking." Booth put a hand on Brennan's shoulder. Brennan looked at his hand, up his arm, and to his face like she was trying to decide whether to karate chop him or not. He didn't see the expression that she was giving him. "She just tends to be a bit, ah, literal."

"On Tuesday, Dr. Brennan went out with Graham somewhere," I interrupted firmly, putting myself back into the conversation. I sidestepped far enough to see Harding more clearly and get Booth out from between us. "I don't know where, I just remember that they were going to go out for dinner. I must have kept working, because I found a voodoo mojo shoved in the mouth of a John Doe. We were pursuing that lead and Graham happened to buy one of the rarer ingredients that are harder to get."

"This, uh, voodoo consultation." Harding's contempt wasn't hidden at all, and I had to wonder if it was directed at me and what she perceived were my excuses or at the religion itself. "Did it occur before or after amnesia?"

Booth shuffled to the side again, going out of range of Brennan's shoulder and having to let his arm drop to his side. I pointedly stared at his shoulder. Does he think we're going to get into a catfight? "Look, the amnesia's real," he told Harding lowly, quietly warning her off of that particular line of questioning.

Brennan took a deep breath and she uncrossed her arms, letting her hands fall back to her sides uncertainly. She must have felt a bit out of place here. It wasn't a crime scene we were free to roam, as it wasn't under Jeffersonian or FBI jurisdiction. "Graham purchased a rare ingredient at a voodoo shop on Pontchartrain Ave."

"So Graham made voodoo spells, shoved them into corpses' mouths, then pretended to be surprised when he found them?" The local detective deadpanned cynically.

"No one ever said Graham was a murderer," I said, pinching at the inside of my right wrist again to try to keep a hold on my temper. Yelling at someone who already wants to arrest me isn't the brightest idea I've ever had. Now I'm beginning to understand why Brennan hates it when people jump to conclusions – it's really freaking irritating. "Maybe if you could give me a reason why you're accusing me of homicide, I'd be more inclined to cooperate!"

"You didn't say you had a record," Harding remarked scathingly, swinging her head back around to fixate on me again.

I blinked once. "Excuse me?" There was no way she was seriously going to hold the charge from the Eller case against me, was there?

Apparently, she was. "You shot an unarmed man at the beginning of the year." She reminded me. Ugh! I hate when people make assumptions about the context. When she says it like that, I sound like the bad guy. Ken Thompson was trying to light Brennan and I on fire! I'm as interested in the Salem witch trials as the next person, but I'm not so interested that I want to know firsthand what their deaths were like. "After breaking into his house!" She added with more emphasis, like that made the offense so much worse.

"I acted in self-defense! I saved Dr. Brennan's life!" I threw out a hand towards the anthropologist furiously, drawing myself up as tall as I could and hoping that maybe I'd scare Harding off. "He was a murderer who was trying to torch the place to eradicate all of the evidence – the circumstances were extenuating, and I wasn't prosecuted!"

"Ma'am?" A female police officer stepped just out of Graham's bedroom, holding something up with gloved hands. The gloves were turned pink.

"Split cast, huh?" Harding turned just long enough to see what it was and then snorted. "More voodoo. Bag it as evidence." The policewoman nodded and turned to go back into the bedroom with the rest of her unit.

"Secte Rouge?" Brennan asked knowingly, looking after the woman even after she was gone through the doorway.

"What do you know about Secte Rouge?" Harding challenged immediately, like she was threatened by the very thought of someone knowing about the subculture.

Booth shot me a look before I could find a way to offend Harding any further and he reached out to beckon Brennan to come over. "If you're done with us, detective, we're going to go," he said with an air of finality, shutting down this interrogation.

I turned and reached out to the wall, hoping I wouldn't be hit with another flash of memory on the way down the stairs, and now with the added trepidation of knowing I'd been knocked down them before.

"I'm gonna tear this place apart," Harding threatened behind us, watching us retreat. Unless she was actually going to make an arrest, she couldn't force us to stay there any more than we could force her to release information. "And if I find one piece of evidence that ties your daughter to this scene, I will take her into custody!"

Though it was clearly aimed at Booth, I took it to heart and reached over my shoulder, offering a very rude gesture with my hand in response.

I think a lot of the gravity was lost on Harding when her attention was divided to Brennan. "Wait," the anthropologist protested, trying to defend me. I stopped on the stairs and looked up to them. Booth paused while Brennan turned around, facing Harding up on top of the stairs. "You really think that someone could go into a trance, commit a murder like that, and not remember it?"

"No, I don't," Harding admitted evenly, before looking over Brennan's shoulder and locking eyes with me. "But I sure as hell think someone can fake amnesia."

"You sure as hell faked being a halfway decent detective," I sneered. If she was going to throw out verbal jabs, I wasn't going to be meek and just take them. I gave as good as I got – better, even. "You want to arrest me because you can. Because it's easy."

Booth held out his arm and moved like he was going to give me a soft nudge. He didn't even have to touch me before I responded to it, starting to step down again. "Let it go, Holly," he murmured quietly, only meaning for me to hear. "That's great. Thank you, detective," he added sarcastically.

We had no place to take refuge, and as Harding moved to gather evidence against me, the best thing that we could do was continue working the murder of John Doe three sixty-one. That's where the voodoo first came in; given that Graham's slaughtered corpse had a mojo around its neck, I'm guessing that everything goes back to three sixty-one. The sooner we find out everything we can about who he was, the sooner I can go back to not being on the bad side of people with the power to arrest me.

James Embry was more than willing to help us with whatever we needed. News of Graham's death had reached the hospital quickly, as he would be autopsied and commissioned for burial at his very own morgue. The formerly second-in-command, now promoted pathologist, handed over a fairly heavy-looking stack of file folders corresponding to the cases we had worked through on Tuesday.

"These files are everything you two and Graham worked on the day before yesterday," he said, carefully not letting go until he was sure I could handle the weight with my sprained wrist. I was pleased to find that there was a silver lining, and the weight didn't bother me.

"Thanks for these." We were still allowed to work here, but really we just wanted three sixty-one's file. I stepped back from James and nodded between him and Booth. "James, this is Special Agent Seeley Booth. Agent Booth, this is Dr. James Embry. He worked directly underneath Graham."

Booth held on to the railing behind him. We were standing in front of elevators at the second floor of the hospital, and he was against the banister that looked down to the main doors into the building. "Condolences on your sudden promotion," he offered dryly.

"Um…" James reached over his shoulder to scratch the back of his neck, swallowing uneasily. "Why do you think the job had anything to do with Graham being killed?"

"Well, the girls both have voodoo amnesia," Booth started, waving at Brennan, who shot him an unimpressed look for his trouble. "Legiere is voodoo dead." Now I sent him an exasperated glare. Nice tact, Booth! "And the last thing they worked on together was a voodoo ritual murder, so I'm thinking there might be some kind of a connection."

Instead of taking offense to the way he was being spoken to, James just nodded in quiet acceptance of the logic and twisted his arms back around like he wasn't sure what to do with his limbs. "Legiere's body," he started to ask hesitantly. "Is it, uh, as bad as they say?"

Brennan tipped her head, thoughtfully considering it. "How bad are they saying it is?"

I knew she was just trying to answer the question, but there was no way I could actually let her try. It was impossible to say how bad it was. It was something out of Saw or Scream, except a hundred times worse because it was real and the victim was a friend. Even just thinking about it made my stomach twist. "Uh-uh. No." I shook my head at Brennan and cradled the stack of files while flipping up the tabs to read the labels. "Don't try to objectively answer that. No matter what you say, it's just not going to be accurate."

"No matter how bad they're saying it is, it's worse." Booth warned James.

James nodded quickly, shutting his eyes to give himself a minute to mourn. "I just want to mentally prepare myself," he explained quietly. "Um, I… start his autopsy in a few minutes."

I pursed my lips and tried to figure out something I could say to help make that better, but there wasn't anything that came to mind. I sighed and let the last tab fall flat on the stack again. "We're missing a file," I claimed, effectively changing the topic of conversation away from Graham's murder. "One of the last things I remember is doing a cursory exam on John Doe three sixty-one."

"According to records, these are the only cases you worked on the day before yesterday. Four sets of remains; two were easy – drown victims, processed and booted for burial. The other two were both males, John Does three forty-nine and three fifty." James pointed at the case and did a count to make sure I had four folders. I did, but none of them had the right information.

"We sent three sixty-one's x-rays to the Jeffersonian," Brennan told him insistently. It would be pretty hard to send x-rays of a victim that didn't exist.

James rose his shoulders helplessly. "I'll check again," he volunteered with a small sigh, turning away to go find the records again and be sure.

I yawned widely, stretching my jaw. The strain from this case was tiring me out – although, for all I know, I was only sleeping in the bathroom for a few hours. Apparently I can just fall asleep in the weirdest places. I don't think I'll make it a habit. It wasn't very comfortable.

"Can I make a lifestyle suggestion?" Booth asked, leaning back so the highest rail of the banister was pressed against his back, neck craned back to look up at the glass skylights.

"Go ahead," Brennan muttered, probably knowing he'd give his opinion whether or not she wanted it.

"You know… vacation. It's from the Latin word vacatio. It means 'freedom' or 'release." Booth was definitely giving Brennan a meaningful look, but she didn't seem to notice it. "You might want to consider that next time."

"Learning Latin?"

Instead of laughing at Brennan's quick-witted response, I raised my eyebrows at Booth and shifted the files so that I was holding them more comfortably. "Booth, I have the scores to get into some of the best colleges in America, and instead I was working as a barmaid. To me, this is all one long vacation."

"This is the opposite of vacation!" Booth cried, seeming scandalized by what I'd said. "No wonder you snapped, went insane, and totally lost your mind!"

"Aw, Booth, thanks for all that compassion," I snapped, offended. "I don't think I'll ever be able to express how much it means to me that you don't think I crucified anyone – oh, wait." I glared at him flatly. What the hell am I supposed to say to something like that?! Was I supposed to thank him sincerely, or not be offended?!

James came back before I could start again, and it was only my desire for privacy that had me holding my tongue. Booth made a joke in bad taste, but that doesn't mean I have to broadcast that to everyone in the hospital.

"Uh, there's no John Doe three sixty-one." James shifted foot to foot, looking between Brennan and I nervously.

I looked over at Brennan, at a loss for that. "Well… we have x-rays that claim there is," I responded lamely, not entirely certain how I wanted to go about explaining this to anyone.

"Whose x-rays did we send to D.C.?" Brennan asked with her eyebrows knit together, her eyes narrowed at the linoleum by her feet.

"No, I mean, the file is gone." Ah, well, that made a bit more sense. Not much sense, but a little bit.

The storage room of the morgue is usually much more organized, but given the influx of cadavers, there's mostly just a lot of steel tables arranged in aisles and rows with tags on the black body bags that remained zipped up. The room was kept at a cooler temperature so that decomposition wasn't sped up any more than it had to be, but in a building with so much electricity and heat, it was only by a small degree.

Sam was in the back of the room, standing over a table with a zipped up bag and a – holy hell, there's a giant snake over his shoulder. It was dark brown, almost black, with lighter brown spots along its body. It was wrapped loosely around his neck and draped over his shoulders twice around, its tail still hanging half down his back. Sam had his right hand out, the snake's neck supported in between his thumb and fingers, hissing softly and maintaining a gravity-defying position with superior strength.

"Gah!" I threw my arms up as soon as I saw it, like I was going to pull an Indiana Jones or something and fight off a cobra. "Please tell me that's not poisonous!"

"It's a domesticated python," Sam answered calmly, not even needing to glance up. James stopped at the doors by the morgue to wait while Brennan and Booth both went ahead. I stayed behind them both for fear of the snake. "It is not venomous or aggressive."

I lowered my arms and followed behind Booth, but for my life, I couldn't take my eyes away from the snake. I nearly jumped out of my skin when it opened its mouth for a louder hiss. I swear it was looking at me.

"There are places where you'd be dinner, pal," I muttered, hoping that Sam didn't hear me threatening his pet.

Brennan passed her cell phone back to Booth. "Hold that," she instructed, another press of the button setting it on speakerphone so that we could both hear the dial tone as it repeated itself. Booth took the phone obediently and Brennan reached out to pick up a tag from the nearest body bag, looking over the basic information in search of our murder victim.

"Zach Addy," Zach answered after another ring, drawing out the "A" in his first name.

"Zach, it's me," Brennan said quickly to get that over with. She didn't speak too loudly, trusting her phone to be sensitive enough to pick up the sound of her voice when she was multiple feet away. "Anything else on John Doe three sixty-one?"

Zach seemed pleased to be hearing from her, and I guess he didn't have trouble making out her words, either. Her speakerphone was pretty loud. "Yes, Dr. Brennan. We found some damage to the pubic bone – some kind of strike marks."

Brennan turned down the aisle that would lead directly down the row to Sam, picking up all of the tags she passed briefly to check them over before dropping them to fall back beside their respective corpses. Booth and I both followed – checking them again would be redundant. "Did you get Angela to reconstruct the pattern?"

"Yeah," Angela cut in before Zach could answer. "Hi, sweetie. I'm here. I tried to make a digital positive, but it didn't work."

"Why?"

"Voodoo, probably," Booth remarked with a roll of his eyes. He seemed pretty content to blame everything on the bokor who had been shoving voodoo bags into or around his victims.

Angela took a second before she answered, probably having heard Booth's comment and trying to decide what he meant by that. When we'd told her what we were doing here, she hadn't believed us. "The extrapolation protocols can't resolve the gradient fluxes in the bone shadings."

"What's that?" James asked suddenly, frowning to himself as he puzzled over it.

"That's mumbo jumbo," Booth replied, pointing down at the phone with his free hand. "It's scientific voodoo."

Brennan ignored both of them. "Can you do it manually?"

"Off an x-ray? Hmm… not really."

"Can't you send the actual remains?" Zach asked with a tired sigh.

"They don't exist," Brennan informed him bluntly.

It took only two seconds before Zach had an answer to that, but he was just as bewildered as I had expected. "That… makes no sense!" He protested.

"Voodoo," Booth repeated persistently. "It's probably voodoo."

"Voodoo?" Now Angela sounded skeptical, but she was definitely listening. Maybe she wouldn't dismiss our crazy story of amnesia, mojos, and crucifixion if we tried to tell her again.

Brennan looked up from the tags and glared at Booth, almost like she was saying, great, do you see what you've started? "Quit saying 'voodoo,'" she instructed sternly, giving the phone a look as if she thought Zach and Angela could see her expression, too.

Booth snorted. "Yeah," he said sarcastically, rolling his eyes dramatically. "Because, you know, it's not a factor."

Brennan made a face like she was about to press the point. The last thing I want right now is for them to start fighting. "Okay," she said quickly, looking down to her mobile in Booth's hand, trying to wrap up the conversation before it could devolve. "Let me know what you find. Bye."

Booth took the hint and snapped the phone shut to sever the call connection. Sam murmured something to the snake as he stood up straighter, pulling the python with him and stepping back behind another table, repeating the process and letting the snake hover over the covered corpse.

The FBI agent eyed Sam carefully. "How do we know this is not the guy shoving mojo bags into dead people?"

"Those spells are the work of a sorcerer." Sam's eyes were closed and he remained impossibly calm, despite everything Booth's said that could have irked him in today alone. "Priests – houngans – can make healing mojos, but I'm not allowed."

"But snake shaking, that's fine?" Booth questioned cynically, looking at the snake as it hissed. Booth held up his hands to the snake in surrender and focused more on the python and less on Sam.

I huffed. Are we really going to get into this again? "You do realize that serpents are an important part of the voodoo pantheon, right?" I asked Booth, doing my best to stay calm. Making him look silly was good enough revenge, anyway, and by his expression when he turned to look at me, he hadn't known that. I gestured towards the python, but couldn't stop myself from grimacing. I hate snakes. "In voodoo, there's a serpent God called Damballa."

"Voodoo pantheon?" Booth repeated as a prompt, looking back over at the big python in a new, almost interested light.

"Yeah," I nodded, pleased that he at least wanted to understand a little about it. "Like, uh… like Odin and Baldur in the Norse pantheon. Put simply, a religious pantheon is pretty much the group of the Gods worshipped in a polytheistic religion."

"Huh. Now why is it that you know so much about religions?" Brennan stepped closer to Sam and the snake in order to check the tag on the one that he was practicing the snake over, and didn't seem to mind that there was a freaking python two feet away from her. "I didn't think schools went that far into detail."

"They don't," I admitted. "But I like Norse mythology. It's cool… especially Loki."

Booth nodded slowly. "The God of Mischief," he recalled, before looking back over his shoulder at me and chuckling. "Yeah, you would like him."

I offered a little shrug. I can't help it if my preference for Scandinavian Demi-Gods is predictable or not. "At least I know more than what's on The Avengers," I continued pointedly. Booth had the decency to look a little bit sheepish. "Sure, Loki's a hedonistic, righteous, and self-serving kind of guy, but he's funny as hell in some stories. And that legend where he used mistletoe against Baldur?" I smiled slightly to myself, nodding in approval. I still can't condone murder, but since I don't believe it actually happened, I think I'm allowed to appreciate the intelligence behind the plan. "That was clever."

"The snake pulls the evil out of the soul, freeing the spirit – the loa." Sam explained for Brennan. When I looked back over to them, I had to lean back, rocking on my heels to get away without actually moving. Brennan had her hand held up to the python, careful not to frighten it, and Sam was letting it slide further over his shoulder to slither onto Brennan's forearm. The anthropologist looked on as if it was just a curious phenomenon. "I must do what small things I can. The floods washed away too much of what was good."

Brennan held up her other arm as the snake draped itself over her forearm. Booth tried to hide a shudder, as freaked out by the python as I was. "Hey, Bones," he called, just a little bit frustrated. "How's about, while you're both murder suspects, you act more like a normal woman and less like Lily Munster, okay?"

"TV reference," I said before Brennan could ask.

Booth stepped forward but edged away from the snake, reaching out to grasp Brennan's elbow lightly. The snake hissed softly again and Booth pulled Brennan more slowly. "Goodbye," he crowed to placate the serpent. "Good snake… bye-bye." I smacked myself in the forehead lightly with my hand.

Brennan looked at the snake, still a bit curious, and she lowered her arms slowly. Where it had been over her arm, it remained in an upward curve, a little over two feet of python remaining horizontal in the air past Sam's shoulder despite its lack of support. A shiver ran up my spine at the unnatural sight, and Sam reached up to take over holding it again, letting it rest over his hand.

"Now, call me crazy, but I'm suspicious of snake man," Booth confided lowly on our way back to the doors to leave the morgue. No John Doe three sixty-one here; time to carry out our investigation elsewhere, and by that, I mean it's probably time for us to get dinner, get sleep, and then try again in the morning, when we're refreshed and not ready to kill each other if one more person mentions voodoo.

Brennan, understandably, groaned when Booth said that and she turned so that she was facing him to quickly rattle off exactly why he was suspicious of the priest. "That's because you've been inculcated by the mainstream culture's prevailing Judeo-Christian tradition into instinctive skepticism of alternative mores." She turned back around when Booth looked a bit surprised, smug with herself.

"Yeah," Booth said, crossing his arms a little defensively. Stingily, he mumbled, "Thanks for that explanation."