Every mortal who calls me wants something, and every one of them begs. This one negotiated. Three wishes I get to name and one no I have to obey, and I signed, grinning, because I did not think she would spend her no well.
Saint-Domingue, 1791.
Zora is owned. So is her three-year-old daughter.
Father Moreau kills her grandmother, puts Anaïs on a ship, and leaves her with one choice: stay where she is owned, or run.
Zora runs.
Hunted across the most brutal slave colony in the Caribbean, she goes to the lwa the priest fears. Baron Samedi, the lwa of death, sex, and the obscene, knows where her daughter was taken, and he does not hand anything over for free.
He expects a desperate mortal he can frighten and possess. He gets a woman who argues with the lwa in her own chest and keeps walking toward her child no matter what he takes from her.
And when he collects, he does it from inside the body he bargained for: while she runs, while she lies to soldiers, and when she comes.
Moreau is hunting more than Zora. He has learned how to empty a living person out and make the body obey, and he has found a way to turn the dead against the lwa themselves.
The plantations are burning. Zora has to reach Anaïs before Moreau reaches the spirit riding inside her.
THE BARON'S BARGAIN is book 1 of GODS IN CHAINS: 5 / 5 spice, possession, dubious consent, graphic violence, and the opening of the Haitian Revolution amid the brutality of plantation slavery.
