Ghost Train to New Orleans

by Mur Lafferty

“It wasn’t logic that made them hunt, it was bigotry. They didn’t want humans to have any access to magic. They saw it as offensive, heresy, what have you.”

  Beside Zoë, Arthur stirred. His eyes opened briefly, and he caught sight of Gwen and, across the aisle, the dozing Eir. He spied the blood on Zoë’s shirt, and frowned in concern.

  “What the hell did I miss?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 18

  Coterie NOLA

  This city is called the unofficial coterie capital of the world, for good reason. Carnival and Mardi Gras make it easy for coterie to walk freely in the public eye no matter what their physical appearance. This city accepts, even embraces, the “weird”—aka any nonhuman.

  Vampires are the dominant coterie, and have influenced much of the mythology in the city. Many of the myths are true, some are false. Visitors are encouraged to determine what is fact and what is fiction.

  But don’t go searching out the more prominent celebrity vampires. They are not fond of visitors who do not bleed.

  The city is famous for its food, and naturally the hedonistic partying makes it good for any deity or demon that feeds off human energy, especially the succubi and incubi. Its port status leaves it open for water-loving demons and sprites; however, the events after Hurricane Katrina have left the city in less of a welcoming mood with regard to water sprites. So keep in mind that visiting water sprites may face intolerance.

  Zoëtists are encouraged to check in at Public Works, as New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the US, and zoëtism and voodoo are sister specialities.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ghosts. Guns. Heroics. I’m fine, by the way,” Zoë said stiffly. “Why the fuck are you taking Benadryl on a coterie train?”

  “I just wanted to sleep. Public Works had to inspect this train before it started its service, and Fanny assured me the human car was safe.” He blinked, clearly still under the influence.

  Fanny was his boss at Public Works, a huge woman who intimidated all who met her, except Zoë, who had seen that she was a goddess nearly immediately. Even Arthur didn’t know. (A fact Zoë felt vaguely guilty about keeping from him, but he wasn’t as open to working directly with coterie as she was.)

  “It clearly wasn’t safe against wannabe cowboys boarding the train with guns, trying to kidnap a human,” Zoë said. “They shot me and another woman, and would have kidnapped Reynard if he had been in here. But he ran away to his daddy vampire.”

  Arthur passed a hand over his face. “I’m pretty sure this is a dream.”

  “No, Arthur. But go back to sleep. I’ll yell at you in the morning,” Zoë said, sighing. “I need to talk to Gwen.”

  But they didn’t talk. Arthur dozed off, Gwen looked out the window, and Zoë found a new sweater in her bag to replace the torn and bloody one she was wearing and headed to the bathroom to wash up.

  She paused in the bathroom to study the gunshot wound. There was a puckered scar on her shoulder blade, but nothing else. “Is this even really happening?” she asked the mirror.

  Zoë was strangely comforted by the utter lack of response from the mirror. Bathroom mirror normality: achieved.

  They were in Georgia before the subject of Reynard came up again.

  “Why did he lie to me, Gwen? If he’s a citytalker, he’s likely to want to find more of us, right? Wouldn’t he want to recruit me or something?”

  Gwen looked up from the window.

  “That guy had me fearing ghosts more than I’ve been afraid of any coterie,” Zoë continued. “I thought I’d be possessed the minute I stepped off the train. And what was with those fake cowboys? Does that happen a lot on ghost trains?”

  “It happens, especially to ghost trains,” Gwen said. “This is one of the few places ghosts can have corporeal bodies, after all. If they can’t get jobs, or tickets, or if they just have a desire to sow some chaos, they will.”

  “But they weren’t even real bandits! They were corporate assholes that wanted to play at cowboys and Indians! Or cowboys and vampires.”

  “They keep the clothes they wore in life, so they are forever dressed as cowboys,” Gwen said.

  Zoë was tired of all of this. Or perhaps she was just tired. She checked her watch. “Sheesh, it’s three a.m. I have to get a nap or I’ll be useless tomorrow. Today. Whatever.”

  “Feel free to nap, I’ll wake you if we’re attacked,” Gwen said. Zoë smiled at her, but realized the goddess wasn’t joking.

  “You really don’t joke, do you?” she asked.

  “I’m quite bad at it,” Gwen agreed. “Morgen once said I was so bad at humor that I had looped around to unintentionally hysterical.”

  Zoë nodded. “I can see that. Think Anna can get me some coffee when I wake up? I don’t like the idea of heading to the snack car again.”

  “I will arrange it,” Gwen said. “That first-class ticket should be worth a cup of coffee, after all. We’ll be in New Orleans in about two hours, go to sleep.”

  “Thanks, Gwen. Really.”

  Zoë leaned back again. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. The bullet train moved in a dreamlike motion, more like a ship on a gentle ocean than a swaying and rackety corporeal train.

  Are you an idiot? Wake up!

  Her eyelids snapped open, but felt as if weights were attached to them. The train had stopped, but it was still dark outside. “What? Where—Oh. Atlanta.” She knew it instinctively, the city’s personality was all around her, she could nearly taste the flavor of Atlanta, metal and heat and activity, a soft peach with a sharp aftertaste. “What’s wrong?”

  There were no more words, just a strong taste of fear. Zoë shook her head to separate her own feelings from those of the city.

  “Atlanta is really worried for me,” she told Gwen, who watched her with interest.

  “The final purge was in Atlanta,” Gwen said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the city was perpetually paranoid for citytalkers. We’re probably safe here.”

  Zoë sat with her back to most of the car, and heard the zoëtists come aboard. The emotions and warnings of Atlanta were nearly overwhelming, and the people behind her, handling bulky luggage and snapping at each other, were secondary.

  “I get it, I get it, please stop,” she muttered, holding her head in her hands. The city gave her the tangy taste of anxiety and the secure warmth of secrets, none of which Zoë could differentiate from the others.

  When the train started up again, she breathed a sigh of relief as they left the heart of the city.

  “That’s her,” came a whispered voice, high and girlish. Zoë closed her eyes, dreading the next encounter. She opened her eyes when she felt a small touch on her shoulder.

  She opened her eyes and nearly leaped out of her seat when she saw a little humanoid about six inches tall and made of dirt perched on the back of her seat. It held a daisy out to her with one chubby hand, and moved its other arm to its head, where it made an attempt to pull off a hat, but the hat was made of the same material as its head, so it just feebly tugged at it.

  Zoë laughed at its attempts at politeness and took the flower. She looked behind her and was startled to see a young boy smiling uncertainly at her. He had sandy-blond hair and freckles and looked to be about eleven. She glanced at the little golem, which was shimmying down the edge of her seat to the floor, and then back up at the boy. “Do I thank it, or you?”

  “Uh, me, I guess,” he said, coloring. “Mom told me to give it to you. I mean, I wanted to, too, just that she told me what you did for our friends. You fought for them. Without golems.” His eyes were shiny, and Zoë realized he thought she was a zoëtist.

  “Oh, well, yeah. You’re welcome. It was nothing, really,” she said, realizing that she had been shot trying to defend these people, and it actually was a pretty freaking big deal.

  He leaned forward over his seat, his eyes wide. “Mom said there were ghost cowboys, is that true?”

  Zoë winced. “Sort of. They were the ghosts of people who wanted to be cow
boys. But the guns were real enough. They were really kind of sad, but dangerous anyway.”

  “Was it exciting? How much did you fight?” he asked.

  “Galen!” The call was sharp, and brought him up short. He bowed once—he bowed—and turned back to the group of women he traveled with, his little golem jumping off the back of Zoë’s seat and lumbering up the aisle to him.

  Zoëtists were almost exclusively female; the fact that there was a young boy learning the art was interesting. Zoë made a note in her book to ask Ben about how genetic the gift was, and if most boys went without it. She had come to believe it was a learned magic, but from what Gwen had said, it had a hereditary aspect.

  She thought of her birth parents, and how she wanted now to know them even more than ever. She had been adopted as a baby, and her parents had told her that they adopted her from a young teen mother who had signed away all rights, including the right to contact Zoë in the future. The documents were sealed, and her parents had told her enough about the girl that Zoë hadn’t wanted to know her. They let her know that she had escaped an existence of drugs and poverty, of prostitution and disease. They’d never said her mother was a prostitute, but had implied as much. She had never much liked the idea of being born to a teen prostitute, and on bad days she hated her birth mother, but on more generous days pitied the girl her mother had once been.

  Never had she questioned the truth of the story. But now that she realized one or both of her birth parents were likely talkers, and very possibly had been in hiding after the final purge, it seemed a more insistent reason for putting her up for adoption than not being able to afford a baby. She wondered if her adoptive parents knew. Probably not; few regular, non-coterie humans knew of the coterie and their skills. And the coterie world liked it that way.

  “Ma’am, I’m Beverly,” came a shy voice, breaking her from her reverie. “I’m Galen’s sister, and I wanted to thank you as well for caring for our aunt.”

  The girl was clearly related to Galen, tall and blonde, lanky but starting to look like a woman. A little person made of newspaper sat on her shoulder and held on to her ear, waving at Zoë with its arm.

  “You’re welcome. It really happened so fast, I’m just glad no one was hurt badly. And thank Eir.” Zoe pointed across the aisle at the goddess, who had collapsed on the table in front of her. “Well, thank her when she wakes up, I guess. Where are you heading?” Zoë asked.

  The girl smiled shyly. “New Orleans. Are you attending the festival?”

  They thought she was a zoëtist, Zoë remembered. “I thought I might,” she lied, smiling. “I have relatives in the area, so it seemed a good excuse for a visit.”

  The girl nodded. “I hope you visit Café Soulé in the French Quarter,” she said. “My other aunt owns that, and she’s the most powerful in my family.” She dropped her voice and leaned in. “But don’t tell my mom I said that.”

  Zoë grinned and promised to check out the restaurant, and made a note of it in her notebook. “Any night I should visit?”

  “Wednesday nights are best, actually. The human crowd is always told there’s a private party, and the coterie come out.” She glanced back at her traveling companions. “We should be there tonight. Well, if my mom lets us out. She won’t let us hang with the real coterie until we’re twenty-one.”

  Zoë thought back to her own youth, and nodded. “Can’t blame her, at that. I didn’t have any coterie to hang out with and I was wild enough back then.” Then she winced.

  Beverly caught her mistake. “No coterie at all? Where did you grow up, a cleansed city?”

  I am such a terrible liar. And I’m not even sure where the cleansed cities are, so I can’t go down that route. Shit shit shit shit shit—“ No, my parents just kept me super sheltered. Never trained me. I didn’t even know I was coterie for some time. They were paranoid, you know. Grew up in the sixties.” She tried to give Beverly a knowing look, and to her great relief the girl nodded.

  “My mom was too young to remember the biggest battles, but her mom was on the front lines when the tide turned for the zoëtists. Where did you train, if not with your parents?”

  Zoë did not like being the topic of conversation anymore. She was running out of lies to keep straight. So she went for a slight truth. “New York. A man named Ben. Mom told me not to train with a man, but he had some pretty cool stuff to teach me.”

  Beverly’s eyes went wide. Uh oh. “Benjamin Rosenberg? He’s legendary! He’s the last living mentee of the Doyenne. Did he teach you his secret spells? Are you looking for a mentee? I don’t eat much, and I can handle mud, paper, air, and plant golems.”

  The girl’s newspaper golem on her shoulder was jumping up and down, reflecting her excitement, and the girl tried to sit in the seat across the aisle from Zoë, beside Eir, but her mother called her back sharply. Beverly’s face fell. “I’ll be right there, Mom,” she said. Then, lower, “Still, I want to talk to you and learn what I can, OK? No one knows what Ben Rosenberg knows, and they say that centuries of knowledge will die with him.”

  Zoë waved at her as she left, and then leaned over to poke Arthur. He grunted and opened an eye.

  “We being attacked?” he mumbled.

  “No, but—”

  “Then it’ll wait. Can’t think straight anyway,” he said, and went back to sleep.

  Zoë sighed in frustration. She felt he might want to know that the loss of Ben would mean the loss of centuries of knowledge, like, possibly, how to keep a zombie bite from festering.

  Atlanta to Pensacola was, unbelievably, nothing to write home about. The bullet train stopped for a lengthy break because several people were going to catch the other ghost train, the Kasumi, which provided service up and down the state of Florida.

  Zoë didn’t get a good sense of Pensacola’s personality. She got several images of basketball for some bizarre reason—to her knowledge, Pensacola didn’t have an NBA team, but basketball seemed to be the only thing it thought about. She didn’t even know if the city registered her arrival.

  Not every city was easy to figure out, she guessed. Well, none of them had been thus far.

  Zoë managed to doze for an hour between Pensacola and New Orleans. She woke up, startled, around five a.m., when Gwen said her name.

  “What?” she asked, rubbing her face and reaching for the cup of coffee that sat in front of her on the table. She was beginning to enjoy being waited on by a ghost who had taken a liking to her.

  Damn that lying snake Reynard, anyway.

  “We will be there soon. We will need your leadership when we get off the train. It would be prudent to have a plan, as I anticipate Kevin will want to challenge your leadership now that we are far away from Phil. He is still angry that you summoned him during the robbery.”

  “You think?” Zoë grumbled. “I hate that guy.”

  “So do you have a plan?” Gwen asked.

  Instead of answering, Zoë looked around the car.

  The thralls had not changed at all from the beginning of the trip to now. Even during the ghost attack they had sat passively. The one Zoë had landed on after she was shot sat, blood all over his jeans, his blue eyes staring blissfully out the window. She wondered if she ought to tuck a hell note into his shirt pocket to cover the dry cleaning bill.

  The zoëtists had fallen asleep, leaning against each other. Zoë thought for a moment they looked like a pile of puppies, and envied their familial bond.

  Her adoptive parents hadn’t been terribly physically affectionate. They’d hugged and kissed her, but Zoë had almost sensed a mental clock hanging above them, marking the proper time that a hug should go, or a cuddle. And anything longer would get stiff and uncomfortable.

  The ghost porter, Anna, was walking through the car, alerting people that they were nearing the end of the line. She paused and smiled at Zoë, and Zoë smiled back.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Zoë said.

  Anna smiled. “My pleasure, ma’am.”
/>   “Zoë, please. Call me Zoë.”

  Anna nodded and continued through the train car.

  Zoë turned back to Gwen. “My plan is what it’s always been. My priority is to make a good book.” She frowned, and reconsidered. “OK, my priority is to stay alive. But after that, it’s to make a good book. If Kevin is against either of those plans, then I will have to deal with him.”

  “And you’re prepared to do that?” Gwen asked.

  Zoë nodded. “If I have to be. I’m pretty sure knowing that he’s a coward will be in my favor.”

  The zoëtist children were now awake and packing up their tablets and game systems, and Zoë caught the young zoëtist Beverly’s eye as the girl made sure she had all her things. Café Soulé, the girl mouthed, reminding Zoë, and Zoë the Liar, Zoë the Not-Zoëtist-Despite-Her-Clever-Name, nodded and smiled.

  I really need to come up with a better lie.

  She wished she could see outside as the train shot into New Orleans, but it was still well before dawn when they came to New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. Zoë stretched and got up, shouldering her satchel and removing her luggage from the overhead rack.

  Arthur had finished her coffee and was grumbling something about a shower. She ignored him.

  Anna walked by again, and smiled shyly at Zoë. “I would really love to talk to you more, can we arrange that? I’ll be in the city for four days on vacation.”

  “That sounds great,” Zoë said. “I’m meeting that girl Beverly at Café Soulé, maybe you can meet us there? Tonight?”

  Anna looked delighted. “I’d like that. There is one way I can enjoy food, and tell you everything I know about being a”—she glanced around at the chattering zoëtist family, and lowered her voice—“talker. But you might think it’s a bad idea.”

  “Hey, try me, you never know.”

  “Well, in order for me to eat again, and to share everything I know with you, I’d have to, you know.” She looked to the side and didn’t meet Zoë’s eyes. “Possess you.”

  Zoë felt her face freeze. “Let’s talk about that when the time comes, OK?” she said.