by Bryan Camp
“Like this,” Jack said, pantomiming a gesture like someone peering through a jeweler’s loupe. “Look through it, not at it.”
She copied him and saw Ramses St. Cyr once more. He sat in Opal Brennan’s classroom, head bowed to his work, taking notes from her lecture. Everything moved in double or triple time, like a movie on fast-forward. Renai couldn’t help but smile. Eventually this would lead her right to him. She started to thank Jack, asshole though he’d been, but he’d already turned back to his computers, their business obviously concluded.
The seeing stone found its home in Renai’s jacket pocket—the one without a coin of Fortune in it—and she found her way to the exit. The doors opened for her without the electric buzz, but the locks clunked tight as soon as each one swung shut behind her. As she made her way down the stairs and through the strange server room, Renai tried not to think about the power that this Jack Elderflower possessed, nor the fact that she had no idea who, or what, he truly was.
She did know, however, with that strange resonance that plagued her more and more since Ramses’ disappearance, what waited for Elderflower should his unnaturally extended life come to an end. The Sixth Gate, presided over by a skull-faced god who called himself Barren, was where the soul met the Scales of Judgment. If she had managed to lead Miguel Flores through all the other Gates, down into the vast depths of the Underworld, it was at this Gate that the coin of his Fortune would be weighed and measured. Where the life he’d lived would be compared to the destiny that had been measured out for him at the moment of his creation. Where his Essence would either be allowed to pass through to meet the Thrones, or cast into the nothingness of oblivion, personified by a beast known as the Devourer. Without a coin of Fortune to place on the scales, Elderflower had no hope for any destination other than the Devourer’s belly.
You’ll never meet anything more dangerous, Renai heard her father saying, than a person without hope.
Thinking about the Sixth Gate and the Devourer, and her fleeting memories of her own time there, brought to mind the man she’d—erroneously, as it turned out—thought was waiting for her when she’d first entered Elderflower’s weird-ass wizard’s tower. The man who was partly responsible for her being a psychopomp instead of just another dead girl. The man with a knack for finding lost things. The man she and Sal probably should have turned to as soon as Ramses St. Cyr went missing from his own death. Except he wasn’t just a man anymore, now that she thought about it. Hadn’t ever been just a man. These days, Jude Dubuisson was a god—the Fortune God of New Orleans, in fact.
And his fine ass owed her a favor.
Chapter Thirteen
Of the millions of moments you experience each day, only a handful are truly impactful. Glancing at the bulletin board at a coffee shop instead of your cell phone. Smiling at the stranger in the bar who will one day be your spouse. The flat tire on your way to a job interview. The pill you forget to take. We call this destiny, or fate, or luck, and its influence is incorporated into the unique pattern of each person’s life the moment they come into existence. But the book of your life is written in pencil, not ink. You might be visited by Budai, an exuberant monk in robes too small for his girth, who will share the good luck he carries in a cloth sack thrown across a shoulder, or by Mammon, the demonic figure whose gift of wealth is actually a curse. You might burn incense, the scent that pleases Dedun, Nubian god of wealth, or you might bake miso and attract the attention of a binbōgami, a dirty old man with only one sandal, carrying his fan and his broken toy and a cloud of misfortune. You might pause amid the alder trees and receive the favor of Leib-Olmai, or you might seek the blessing of Legba and discover instead that Kalfou has closed all the doors that were once opened to you. Lakshmi and her elder sister Jyestha, one who offers aid and the other who brings calamity. Ganesh, elephant-headed remover of—and creator of—obstacles. Fortuna, with her ship’s rudder, her horn of plenty, her wheel of fate.
Our lives are both predestined and uncertain. Fate and Fortune: two sides of the same coin.
Finding Jude Dubuisson proved harder than Renai thought it would. After filling Cordelia in on Jack’s method of finding Ramses and what he wanted in return—which earned a snort of derision from the little bird—Renai had told the psychopomp that she needed a few hours to herself. Cordelia hadn’t liked it, but when Renai couched it in terms of “call it a test,” she’d agreed to meet back up with Renai at midnight at the First Gate, freeing her to seek out the fortune god on her own. Renai couldn’t be sure if she wanted this solitude because she wanted Jude’s attention all to herself, or if she just simply didn’t entirely trust Cordelia—she didn’t—but now that she’d wasted three hours driving around to all the places she hazily remembered as Jude’s stomping grounds and failing to find him, she was glad Cordelia wasn’t here to witness her frustration.
She knew that as New Orleans’ resident god of fortune, Jude must still live in the city, but that didn’t mean you could find him on Google. The last time she’d spoken to Jude—she had a brief, colorful flash of memory of talking with him on the parade route the Mardi Gras after she’d come back from the dead—it had been Sal who tracked him down. The dog-shape her mentor wore had a nose that couldn’t be fooled, not even by gods, which made his inability to find Ramses all the more disturbing. Her current struggle to find Jude just showed her how much she’d relied on Sal’s nose. How much she’d allowed herself to become someone’s sidekick. In her search, she’d been to the now-vacant apartment in the Warehouse District that Jude had once called home, the office in Canal Place, just at the edge of the Quarter, and had walked past the tarot card readers and caricature artists in Jackson Square where he’d once had a table offering to find lost things for tourists.
Now she rode Kyrie away from the Quarter, aimless. They were on Canal again, headed in the direction of the cluster of cemeteries, the city of the dead, that lay at its foot. She wondered if one of the other six Gates was at Lake Lawn, or St. Patrick’s, or Odd Fellow’s Rest.
All this time as a psychopomp and she’d only ever been to the First Gate. Part of her was looking forward to midnight. Once the clock ticked over and it was officially Halloween, the Gates couldn’t stay locked. Not even the Thrones could keep the living and the dead apart during the Hallows. She’d be able to find Sal and he’d be able to find Ramses, and that would be the end of it. Simple. Clean.
If that was true, though, why had Sal been so insistent that they find the boy before that? Why did she feel so driven to solve this on her own? Why did the thought of the Hallows starting also fill her with a dread she couldn’t explain?
If only she’d been able to find Jude. Twilight had come and gone, taking her hope of finding the fortune god with it. Kyrie changed lanes, sensing Renai’s capitulation right as it happened. She might as well head to her meeting with Cordelia at the First Gate and wait for midnight. Without Salvatore to guide her, she’d need the devil’s own luck to find Jude. That thought, coupled with what she knew of Jude’s nature, gave her an idea. One last desperate shot before she gave up and admitted to Cordelia and the Thrones that she’d failed their test.
Kyrie seemed to appreciate her change in intent, because the bike dropped down into a lower gear and swung back the way they’d come—narrowly avoiding one of the red streetcars ambling down the tracks—and then went roaring down Canal, heading toward the river. They wove through the blaring, growling symphony of traffic and around the muttering, humming crowds, darting through red lights like they were hunting or hunted, the wide-open space of Canal getting brighter and brighter amid the towers of glass and neon, the hotels and the bars and the theaters—the Joy and the Saenger—lighting up the cloudy, moonless night.
When they reached their destination, Kyrie was so eager that she hopped the short curb onto the wide sidewalk and drove straight for the stairs. Renai twisted the handlebars and pulled Kyrie into a tight spin that made her back tire screech against the pavement, kicking up a brief pl
ume of pink smoke, intense enough that a handful of tourists actually noticed her for a moment, gawping at her until her aura kicked back in and they lost interest.
Renai patted the hot chassis of her bike. “Easy, girl,” she said. “We don’t know for sure he’s in there.” The more she thought about it, though, the more right it felt.
The building before her was huge, almost a city block in girth and at least three stories tall, more palace than tower. A line of palm trees—not native to the city but transplanted any place that rich people wanted tourists to associate with the license of the tropics—stood in front of a wide flight of stairs. Columns rose between the stairs and the face of the building, every inch granted to glass door after glass door. The devil’s house got plenty of doors, she heard her grandmother say, but ain’t none of ’em let you out the way you come in.
The cornice was lit up to display the sculptures that had been placed there in some pseudo-Greco-Roman style—at least, Renai assumed they were fake, since they were illuminated by garish purple neon lights. A woman in robes to the left, a couple of struggling figures on the right—though they were so twisted around each other it was hard to say who was restraining whom—and in the center: a huge male face, open-mouthed and wide-nosed, with some sinuous something either spilling from his lips or being drawn within. It was eerie in the daylight and full-on ominous in the dark, thanks to the shadows created by the spotlights, but Renai had a feeling most of the people who entered this place didn’t bother to look up.
Renai swung her leg off of Kyrie, whose engine still rumbled for a few moments even after Renai left the bike’s side and started up the stairs, the motorcycle’s enthusiasm infectious and getting her pulse throbbing. Though Renai had seen this place many times, she’d died before she’d been old enough to get inside.
Harrah’s was the largest casino in the state and the only one in the city that sat on land. If the people who worshiped luck and wealth had a church, this was it. The temple where they prayed their desperate prayers and sacrificed their fortunes one turn of the cards at a time.
The perfect home for a Trickster.
The cacophony of the place hit Renai full in the face the moment she stepped through the glass doors: the electronic dinging and whirling and whistling and bleating of hundreds of slot machines, all at once. A deep, compelling voice offering “new and better ways to play” from the TV screens that were everywhere—anywhere—she looked. Late ’90s pop music, like the place was one giant elevator. And over it all, people shouting. Shouting drink orders over the gibberish of the slots, shouting into cell phones over the shouting of drink orders, just shouting in joy or despair as the wealth poured in or the luck ran out.
It took Renai over a minute of stunned immobility before she became numb to the noise, before she could hear her own thoughts again. Her first coherent one was: I’ve made a big mistake. The Jude she knew wouldn’t be a part of all this naked greed, all this empty flash and gaudy excess. Not because he was above filling his pockets with the wealth of the gullible—he’d do it with a smile—but because his tricks were more subtle, his cons more slick. Of course, he was a god now. He might not be the Jude she’d known.
Renai—confronted with the immensity and the chaos of the place—reached into her pocket for her phone so she could check the time, sure that if she wasn’t careful, the few hours between here and midnight would slip through her fingers and she’d end up missing the time she was supposed to meet up with Cordelia. She realized just then that she didn’t trust the psychopomp not to cross through the First Gate without her.
Her phone showed a text had come in from a blocked contact. Her first thought was that it came from Opal, the only person who had her number, but the message was too strange even for an oracle. Take the elevator to your right, it read. Top floor. She looked in that direction and, sure enough, an elevator took up the space between the men’s room and the ATM. She hadn’t noticed it before, maybe because of the OUT OF ORDER sign taped to it.
Or maybe it just hadn’t even been there the last time she’d looked.
Despite the sign, the elevator dinged as soon as she pushed the button, and the doors slid open, splitting the sign right down the middle. Renai stepped inside, greeted by mirrored walls bisected by a bronze railing, thick maroon carpet, and a quartet of gilt statues shaped like large toads huddled in each corner. No, not statues but ashtrays, one with someone’s still-lit stub of a cigar left on its lip. They came up to her waist and were all profoundly ugly and strangely out of place, since smoking was illegal in casinos now. The doors shut behind her just as she realized there were no buttons anywhere on the mirrored walls.
Renai spun around, tension swirling in her chest that had nothing to do with the tempest sleeping deep inside her. No, this was a mixture of fluttery panic and frustration with herself for walking right into what felt like a trap. She’d gotten arrogant, spoiled by the powers of the storm and the ghost word. Too big for them britches, her father would have said. After a moment, all the restless energy inside of her spilled out as a sharp, cynical laugh. “Trickster gonna trick,” she said to her own reflection.
Someone else in the empty room cleared their throat.
Having grown comfortable with just this kind of weirdness since her resurrection, Renai turned her attention to the ashtrays: fat, golden-skinned toads with bulging eyes of some faceted red stone, clawed feet that gripped the piles of coins that held up their bulk, and their wide mouths weighed down in stern, possibly even angry, expressions. The only difference she could see was that one of them bit down on a foul-smelling stogie, whereas the other three had coins pressed between their lips: round and engraved with four Chinese characters surrounding the square punched out of the center.
“Hello?” she said in the direction of the one that was smoking.
The toad statue let out a stream of syllables in a language Renai didn’t know, but was pretty sure from the tone that he wasn’t pleased with her. One clawed foot came up and swiped the cigar out of his mouth, freeing him to mutter at her some more. When she didn’t answer, his faceted eyes squinted at her and returned the cigar to his mouth. When the statue spoke again, in English accented with what sounded like Chinese to Renai’s ears, his words were in the slow, carefully enunciated cadence of someone speaking to a child. A not-too-bright child. “Do. You. Have. Coin.”
Renai’s hand crept into her jacket pocket and clutched the coin of Fortune she’d collected from the corpse in the morgue. She’d refused to give it up to Jack Elderflower, but here she might not have a choice. It was this or try to escape from a mirrored, magical prison cell on her own. She fidgeted with the coin in her pocket, turning it over and over as if it would tell her what to do, as if she could stall long enough for a statue to betray its thinking. The toad stayed perfectly still, thin tendrils of smoke rising from its nostrils, ash flaking onto the carpet. Renai pulled the coin out of her pocket and—following the example of the other statues—reached out to put it between the cigar-smoking toad’s lips.
The toad yanked his head away, cursing loud and long in his native tongue. “Do I look like a child?” he asked.
“No,” she said, trying not to smile, unsure whether his grouchy outburst was a teasing exaggeration or actual foul-natured distemper.
“Then why feed me like one?” He tapped ash onto the floor and then held that same hand out, two claws clutching the cigar and his palm up, expectant. Since Renai saw no other options and her time was short, she gave him the coin, which he snatched away, bit to test it, and then—grunting in seeming surprise at its genuineness—swallowed it. The wall behind him faded away, revealing only darkness beyond. He moved out of her path, somehow shifting both his weight and the mass of coins beneath him. She saw now that it had always just been the two of them, that the other statues had only ever been reflections or illusions. “Top floor,” he said, waving her through as though she had any reason to trust the darkness he presented her with. When she started to p
rotest, he made a growling noise deep in the back of his throat. “You paid for entry, not for questions. Go now.”
With little choice, Renai stepped through the doorway into a space that felt hugely open, despite her inability to see. The light from the elevator vanished, leaving her in a dark silence that her adjusting eyes and ears strained to pierce. She was trying to decide whether she should use the ghost word’s strange vision or her cell phone camera to see just what she’d gotten herself into when a door about ten feet in front of her creaked open, spilling light into the huge, unfinished room she stood in—bare concrete floors and wood framing and exposed wiring—a doorway that seemed to be standing in a frame by itself.
Leaning against that frame, smiling his Trickster’s smile, was Jude Dubuisson.
Chapter Fourteen
The man leaning across the threshold of that impossible door looked every inch a New Orleans god of fortune, long and lean-muscled, with a smile as dangerous as a knife and eyes the crisp green of freshly printed money.
He wore a solid dark turtleneck under a bright blue vest covered in golden stars and silver crescent moons, impressionistic whorls and splotches of color, like a Van Gogh painting. With a clean-shaven jaw and his hair cropped close to his head, he was that difficult-to-place kind of light-skinned: maybe a black man fair enough to pass for white, maybe Latino, maybe Indigenous. Renai knew that Jude himself didn’t know, having never met his father.
His hands were half-tucked into tight piebald jeans—a patchwork of reds and yellows and blues rough stitched together like a jester’s costume, like a quilt turned inside out—that should have been ridiculous, but somehow he pulled them off. Might have something to do with how low he wearing ’em, Renai thought, trying to keep her eyes off the “V” in his hips, realizing as she did that she was biting her lip, that Jude’s grin widened like he’d read her mind.