On why the Doctor didn't simply rip the talisman from Tiana's fingers.

Facilier. To facilitate. To make things easier. The right way was not always the easy way: in fact, it was usually the opposite. But people did love their shortcuts so. If everyone did their work by the book, his business wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in August.

The ladies and gentlemen of the scintillating mansions in St. Charles Street knew him as Dr. Facilier, peddler of gris-gris bags*, potions, voodoo dolls and conman extraordinaire – or at least that's what they told each other in drawing rooms and dinner tables and elegant masquerade balls. For when the company was bidden adieu to, the parents or husband or even children kissed goodnight and the curtains drawn, more than one of those elegant, god-fearing women would put away their French cloches and real ocean pearls to come to his door in the dead of night.

They'd never say so, but he could see it in the cards, in the curling ashes of the tobacco squid, in the shape of the divining shells, the diloggun: penitence and suffering and being in the world but not of it was good and well for the soul, but when Saint Joseph couldn't stop dear Henry from chasing the hired girls or Saint Monica would not make dear Richard stop giving his beloved Rita black eyes when he came home drunk, they would despair. And when he offered them the vicious revenge of Erzulie Ge-Rouge, the Red-Eyed, upon their unfaithful lovers and even the unbridled sexuality of Maman Brigitte, they were quick to pay up.

Of course, he would easily turn around and offer their husbands the favor of Maman's husband Baron Samedi, womanizer extraordinaire. It was a matter of who asked first…and sometimes, if he was really indecisive, who could pay better. It almost made up for not being able to conjure a thing for himself.

Almost.

Facilier. To facilitate. To find the loopholes and shortcuts.

Which meant that his undoing were those walking the straight and narrow. He'd believed this meant there never would be anyone capable of giving him the trip. But he'd been wrong. Oh, so wrong. Goodies did take their own sweet time to show up, but they were usually impeccably timed to knock carefully laid plans askew.

The first time he ever saw Eudora, whose name meant "generous gift", she already wore James Thompson's band on her ring finger. She was bartering for greens at the market, and were it not because the people felt it right in the gut to give a man wearing crocodile teeth a wide berth, she might have never seen her amidst the other shoppers. She had lifted her eyes for a fraction of a second, and he'd seen something like steel in her soul before she'd gone back to bartering down green bell peppers.

Steel was something he was used to seeing in women like her, women who not too many years ago would have been buying those peppers for Massa's kitchen and not for their husbands' table. He was not as old as Mama Odie, but he too had lived the days of whips, chains and desperation, and women who lived to see white streaks in their hair had that look of hers, like they'd been tempered by fire. But Eudora's eye had a glow of happiness and a glint of industriousness where the women of his youth (his real youth, not the extended one bartered from his friends) had the dull, haunted eyes of the zombies he would sometimes call up for a pretty penny. All work, all resilience, no joy.

The second time he had seen her, she'd offered him an apple. An apple might not mean anything to a Ponzi or a La Bouff, but it meant a very large something coming from an overworked, underpaid little seamstress. She'd thought he was shunned for his violet eyes, eyes that meant he was the offspring of something scandalous, and figured it could be the spoonful of sugar to make the bitter drought go down. Young, God-fearing Eudora Thompson wouldn't know he'd pulled out Booker Webb's corpse from its shallow grave with the same hand that touched her own when taking the little red fruit.

Facilier could not only count the kindnesses he'd received in his life, he could measure them too, and Eudora's outmatched the others by far (generous gift, indeed). But therein lay the catch, the cruelty of kindness, for Facilier was not a man used to generosity or self-denial, and found he would very much like generous gifts on a permanent basis.

It would be lies to say that he refined his art for love of her, because the demanding, selfish passion that settled in his chest could hardly be called love, to the point that gentle Oshún and peaceful Yemaya let his offerings intact. He had always wanted more, whether it be more tender mercies or more cold hard cash in his jacket pocket, but it would also be lies to say that he didn't think of curling a finger and summoning the respectable Mrs. Thompson away from her darling James one day, when he was too rich to be denied, like the plantation owners with their whips and their life-or-death powers. It'd be lies to say he didn't think of how James meant 'usurper' and how facilitating meant bypassing obstacles, and fast if you please.

But fast, when one was still a rookie, was bad. Fast meant recklessness. Fast was what got him, when Gabrielle Veilheux saw him ordering Abraham Mungin out from his grave an hour after the last mourner had left - he should have waited for dark, for the very witching hour of the night, even, but he hadn't, and now there was real reason to fear him. To the people of the Ninth Ward he became the Shadow Man, the man with the living shadow who'd give you what you wanted at the cost of what you had.

Eudora never spoke to him again, but neither she nor her husband ever crumpled under his gaze like so many others did. It was then that he learned that Jacob meant supplanter, but its modern derivative, James? The name James, in and of itself, meant nothing. Which meant that James would make whatever he would of himself, and of course unwittingly decided to make himself impervious to Facilier's influence forever when he chose 'hard worker'. And when he died his glorious death in the trenches, he left behind Tiana, whose name meant 'princess' and who frowned so viciously at shortcuts and rulebending, he could feel a physical pricking between his eyes whenever she so much as looked his way.

And she just had to set herself up as best friend to Charlotte La Bouff. Between Tiana's unsuspecting spiritual bodyguarding and Charlotte's depressing lack of troubles to be facilitated from, Facilier considered the La Bouff fortune as distant a dream as Eudora had been.

And then out from across the sea came Prince Naveen and his Lawrence, carrying enough troubles to make up for a hundred decades of Thompsons.

He hadn't expected Tiana to be involved. He still couldn't curse her or even exert his physical strength against her, not without risking serious burns, but he could use his mirages on her. He hadn't been lying: her dreams were lofty and exquisitely substantial for such an assiduously hands-on girl. He was surprised when even his intimate knowledge on the subject of Thompson psyches failed, but for a minute it hadn't mattered: the girl had taken her little green fingers from his amulet for a few precious seconds, and that was all he needed.

But of course, he'd had to gloat. He'd had to rub it into James and Eudora's daughter that he'd won, despite the shunning and the looks, despite the terror and the talks of damnation. He had jabbed her with his cane, because he'd still burn at the touch of the sinless: but he'd gloat, he was lucky, strong, proud.

But proud, like fast, turned even old bokors with blood on their hands into rookies. Proud meant reckless. And Tiana managed to shatter the amulet.

The straight and narrow was a hard path to walk, but the easy road, the way of shortcuts and just desserts, was just a skip and a hop from the tunnel into ruin.

*Gris-gris bag is a bag filled with sundry items and worn for protection. It can contain herbs, bones, clothing or bodily refuse from the wearer.
*Massa = Master, spelled as it would sound with a heavy Southern accent.

I drew on the phrase "I got hoodoo/I got voodoo/I got things I ain't even tried" from the song Friends on the other side for this. The way I see it, the good Doctor will give anything and anyone from any religion or pantheon a try: he'll be a friend to literally anyone on the Other Side who can give him something in return. But if voudu was the first thing he embraced, he'd probably consider himself a bokor, a voudu priest who works with the more sinister spirits, instead of just a general bad magician guy.