Ghost Train to New Orleans

by Mur Lafferty

  Zoë looked at the black-and-white tomcat, who still moved among the others, touching noses, rubbing faces, hissing on occasion. “Do you think she left, or was she taken?”

  Eir didn’t answer, and moved away from them and ambled along the fence surrounding the park. Zoë exchanged a glance with Gwen, who had remained stoic through all this. Zoë tried to reach out for the city’s consciousness, and was rewarded with a sense of melancholy and an empty room.

  “Whatever it is, she’s gone now,” Zoë murmured. “I wonder if the cat knows Eir is here.”

  With their missions, whatever they were, the cats faded into the darkness again, leaving nothing but the huge tom sitting at the edge of the statue. He leaped from the base to the boot of the man on the horse, and then to the horse’s head, and sat primly, watching the sky.

  “Watch this,” Gwen whispered with none of her usual gravitas. Zoë glanced at her and then followed her gaze back to the cat and saw that Bygul had grown visibly. Whereas before he had been nothing more than an overly large alley cat, now he resembled something closer to a bobcat or lynx in size. Zoë looked over her shoulder: no one else was watching this bizarre spectacle of the growing cat in the park, but that was par for the course with coterie goings-on.

  When she looked back he was even larger, the size of a small panther.

  “Jesus,” Zoë said, and when Bygul leaped from the horse’s head and landed on the ground, he was the size of a lion, and Zoë imagined she could feel the ground shake. The fluffy great cat padded through the park lazily, until it was keeping pace with Eir as she skirted the edge of the park.

  “He knows she’s here,” Gwen whispered. “He wants to know if she’s heard anything, and she wants to know if he has. They will both be disappointed.”

  “Do you know where Freya is?” Zoë whispered.

  Gwen shook her head.

  “What do you do if you are a goddess and don’t want to be found?” Zoë asked. “Or, alternatively, if you do want to be found?”

  Gwen pursed her lips and took a deep breath. “Follow me.”

  Zoë took a look over her shoulder at Eir turning the corner of the park to head toward the lights of Café du Monde. “Will she be able to catch up?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you goddesses have some sort of magical connection?”

  Gwen cocked an eyebrow and pulled something out of her pocket. It was a phone identical to the one Phil had given Zoë. “No, I’m going to text her.”

  They noticed barricades being erected down the street, and crowds growing. “And the chaos of Carnival begins. Let’s watch the parade to give her some time,” Gwen said.

  Music began floating down the street, and Zoë and Gwen walked to the front of the crowd, people stepping back for Gwen without realizing they were doing so.

  The parade began to lumber closer, shouts and music drifting ahead of it.

  Zoë leaned over and saw beautiful, tall black women dressed in purple and gold, tossing strings of gold beads into the crowd. They grinned, and Zoë realized they were all vampires. Once she got through that mask, she realized the whole parade was made of coterie.

  A strand of beads landed around Gwen’s head, and she looked startled.

  After them came the band, lanky dancing horn players with purple top hats. They played marching tunes and danced, and the crowd screamed around Zoë and Gwen. Gwen remained stoic, searching the parade for something in particular, and then she pointed.

  “Him,” Gwen said, pointing to a grinning man atop a throne on the only float in the parade. Young women and men, fae, according to their frightening, alien beauty, clustered at his feet wearing jester costumes. His face was painted with black paint and gold glitter, like Sammy Statue’s, and he nodded and tossed a strand of black, glittering beads here and there.

  Zoë felt his eyes lock onto hers, and he grinned even more widely, if possible. She recognized him as the unnamed man from Jackson Square. He poked the back of a male fae at his feet. The subordinate turned and accepted two golden envelopes.

  The man jumped off the float and came up to Zoë.

  “Ms. Norris. I have a message for you.”

  “For me?” Zoë felt dumb, staring at the envelope with her name written on the front, in a very beautiful handwritten script.

  “Oh yes. And you.” He looked at Gwen, handing her an envelope similar to Zoë’s.

  “A message?” Zoë repeated.

  He laughed, booming and louder than the departing parade. A drunken group of frat boys stumbled by, and screamed at Zoë to show her tits, but Gwen fixed them with a stare, and they fell backward, scrambling away as if they had looked death in the face.

  “Ms. Norris, this is an invitation. There is a masque tomorrow night. We’d be most honored if you both would join us.”

  “We would be delighted,” Gwen said, taking both envelopes. “Thank you. And please thank the host.”

  “What was that all about?” Zoë asked.

  The float was past Zoë and Gwen now, and more dancers made up the end of the parade. Gwen pointed to a woman dressed entirely in feathers. She was under five feet tall and had skin the color of milk. “Look. A Valkyrie, a sister of Eir.”

  “Does every city have so many gods, or is New Orleans special?”

  “I believe New Orleans is special, but New York has our share. Many gods stay in their home city, but many travel to America, too. That’s why we are doing what we’re doing.”

  Zoë winced as a string of green beads hit her in the face. She bent and picked them up, amazed that people went so crazy for these cheap baubles.

  She slipped the beads over her head and took the envelope from Gwen. She broke the seal with her finger and pulled out the engraved—engraved!—invite inside.

  Ms. Zoë Norris and one (1) Guest:

  The pleasure of your company is required for January 24, the Year of Our Lord 2016.

  In this, our 237th Annual Masque.

  Come masqued. Bring an offering. Unmasquing at midnight, then revelries begin.

  “I thought these parties were invite-only,” Zoë said.

  “There is your invitation,” Gwen said. “Did you need something else alongside it?”

  Zoë’s face flushed. “Well, I’m not used to men coming up to me on the street and knowing my name and handing me invitations to parties. Everything I’d read said these older parties were invite-only, and tourists should plan for the public parties. Hell, I wasn’t even going to mention them in the book, except to say that you shouldn’t expect an invite.”

  Gwen shrugged and headed down the street, lifting her skirts and sidestepping a vomiting woman. “I got one.”

  “Yes, but you clearly know the host—I guess that’s what we’re calling him since you don’t want to tell me who he is—and I don’t. You need to find out why we both got invited. We need to tell our readers what they can expect during Carnival.”

  “Surely,” Gwen said. Her phone dinged, and she glanced at it. “Eir will be joining us. Her meeting with Bygul was less than satisfactory, it seems.”

  “Like you said it would be.”

  “Indeed.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The French Quarter

  JACKSON SQUARE AT NIGHT

  Once the sun goes down, New Orleans transforms. A couple streets up, Bourbon Street is wild with booze and strip joints, but in Jackson Square, things are slightly more sedate. The fortune-tellers go home, Café du Monde stays open for the night owls, the ghost and vampire comic tours meet, and the cats come out.

  Led by the Norse cat Bygul, who once pulled Freya’s chariot, the cats serve as the eyes and ears of the city. Being cats, they sometimes report to Public Works, sometimes report to the coterie leaders, and sometimes merely share secrets among themselves. They ultimately call to their gods, but Bast hasn’t been seen in the city for several hundred years.

  You can’t trust a cat to give you information, but you can always trust it when it decides to tell
you a secret.

  Listen to the cats if they decide to tell you something. They know more of what is going on in the city than anyone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Café Soulé was across the street from Antoine’s Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in the city. Two criers stood at Antoine’s door and called out to them, waving menus. Zoë squinted at one of them. He was tall and thin, with olive skin and a big smile. His black hair was gathered at the nape of his neck in a neat ponytail, and he wore white gloves.

  “Is that a zombie?” she whispered as she waved apologetically at them.

  Gwen nodded without looking. “Only one life force coming from that area, definitely. How did you tell? He’s very well preserved and fresh enough to be working in public with humans.”

  Zoë shrugged. “Something about the skin under his ear. Looks a little rotten. So I figured could be eczema, could be something else.”

  “You are developing a good eye,” Gwen said. They walked across the street to Café Soulé, which was in a four-story street block with the street-side wall able to open like a garage door, opening the restaurant to the street. Only it was closed tonight, and a thick, short black man stood at the door.

  “Are you sure it’s open?” Gwen asked.

  “The kid said it would be, to coterie,” Zoë said.

  When the bouncer caught sight of Gwen, he smiled, showing a gold tooth, and opened the door without comment. He didn’t even glance at Zoë.

  “Oh. That was easy. I guess,” Zoë said, irritated at being treated like the token human again.

  The restaurant was small, with one main dining room on the left and a few tables in the bar area on the right. It was empty aside from two women looking bored behind the bar and a third with a full mask over her face. One, a tall woman with red hair, waved at the empty tables. “Sit anywhere you like. Cheryl will be with you in a moment.”

  Zoë and Gwen took a seat next to the roaring fireplace. Zoë appreciated the heat that drove the clammy New Orleans humidity from her bones.

  “I’ve actually heard about this place, I’ve been eager to try it out,” Gwen said.

  “You have been eager?” Zoë asked, trying to imagine her friend “eager.” Then she paused. “You have been eager? How is that possible? You don’t eat food.”

  “And on Wednesdays, they don’t serve food,” Gwen said. “You should have eaten something before we came.”

  Zoë opened her menu, dreading what she was about to encounter. The menu read like an obituary column.

  1893, William D. Campbell, 37. Died of infection from minor gunshot

  wound. Catholic.

  1964, Mabel R. Greer, 12. Died of smallpox. Southern Baptist.

  2011, Hiroko Honda, 72. Died of heart attack. Agnostic.

  The list went on. At the very bottom, where human restaurants would have the children’s menu, written in a very small print, was FOR ZOËTISTS: CHEESEBURGER. TOFU SANDWICH. COKE PRODUCTS.

  Zoë turned the menu over and looked at the back, but saw only a list of drink options, from seawater to blood types. She groaned.

  “I can see your point about how well the human coterie have been respected,” she said. “My choices are limited. Remind me to commiserate with my vegan friends more.”

  “They do have a bar,” Eir said, making Zoë jump. The powerful woman had joined them without a sound, pulling out her chair with a smooth, silent motion. She was rigid, more so than usual, which was saying something.

  “I don’t plan on eating just cocktail onions and olives all night,” Zoë said.

  The waiter slouched up to the table. Zoë did a double take and then asked, “Uh, are you Cheryl?”

  The thick mud golem stood about four feet tall and shook its expressionless head. It pointed its stump of an arm behind the bar, where a dark-haired woman in a white feathered mask shook a cocktail shaker. The golem turned back and gestured with the pad it held in its stump. It turned first to Gwen.

  She frowned at the menu. “I’ve never had souls before, not prepared,” she said. “I’ll take whatever the chef recommends. You can tell her I’m a psychopomp.”

  The golem inclined its head a bit, and took its other stump and thumped the pad it held. Its hand left a smear of black mud behind, and it turned its face to Eir.

  “Rainwater, preferably pre–industrial revolution.”

  Zoë stared at them, her stomach making that uncomfortable forward roll it did when a particularly uncomfortable aspect of coterie life revealed itself. But she tried to ignore it.

  “Living it up here in the Big Easy, huh?” she asked Eir. She knew from hanging out with Morgen that water bottled from before humanity made machines to mess up the environment was the equivalent of wine that cost hundreds of dollars a bottle.

  Eir glared at her. “I don’t need sustenance often. When I do, I only get the best.”

  Zoë spread her hands, fending off her hostility. “Just curious what the occasion was.” The golem’s head was pointed her way, and she could see small indentations of eyes and a mouth, like those on a child’s snowman, on its head. These attempts at making the golem look more human had the opposite effect on Zoë. She shuddered and looked at the menu again. “I guess I’ll have the cheeseburger. And something from the bar with gin, I guess. I’ll leave it in the bartender’s hands.”

  Another smear on the paper, another nod, and the golem wandered away. It left muddy footprints behind.

  “I wonder how the health inspector views this kind of place,” she wondered aloud.

  “The health inspectors are paid handsomely,” Eir said. “They turn the other way during the nights that coterie restaurants hold ‘private parties.’ ”

  “Do they know what they’re being bribed to ignore?”

  “Most don’t, no, unless they are coterie working for the health department. It’s a good job for the fastidious, like air sprites,” Gwen said.

  The restaurant was starting to fill up. A family of demons, two zombies on a date, a succubus and her meal, and two drunk vampires.

  Cheryl, the masked bartending zoëtist, sent other golems to wait the tables, most of them made from thick Louisiana swamp mud, according to Eir, but one paper golem danced around the dining room, and one that appeared to be made from menus alone presented itself as the menu and waiter to the zombie couple.

  Their golem returned with their drinks, the bottoms of each glass pressed into its arm so it carried them as if they were missiles it had blocked during battle. Zoë took her lowball glass, trying to hide her distaste at the mud, but smiled when she sipped the drink. She didn’t know what was in it, but it was unlike anything she’d had before. Salty, red, and very cold, served over ice.

  Her companions took their drinks, Eir downing half of hers in a gulp. She nodded at the golem for another.

  “Did you speak with Bygul?” Gwen asked.

  Eir looked at her wineglass that held water so pure, it was nearly light blue. Her cheeks had flushed. It would be a book in itself to figure out what substances intoxicated the different coterie, Zoë realized. Her friend Morgen the water sprite could get drunk off seawater, as she was a freshwater sprite. Vampires got drunk off people with high blood alcohol levels. Zombies could go insane if they ate formaldehyde—something about the preservative would mess with their higher brain power—but she didn’t think that counted as drunk.

  Regardless, this very old water was having an effect on the healing goddess. Maybe because water equaled life? The goddess was so prickly that Zoë wasn’t sure how to ask without offending her.

  Eir finally spoke. “I found him, we spoke. He doesn’t know where Freya is either. He calls the cats to the square every night, to search for her. He’s worried that she is stuck wherever she is, since he isn’t there to pull his half of the chariot’s weight.”

  Gwen put her hand out and placed it on top of Eir’s. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Eir turned her hand over and took it, squeezing.

  Zoë narrow
ed her eyes. She began to wonder if Gwen had given every single reason she had wanted Zoë to hire Eir. She was surprised to think Gwen might have made a move that was more selfish than professional, but she guessed everyone had their weak spots.

  Despite her prickliness, Eir hadn’t disappointed Zoë yet. And there was that bit about saving Zoë’s life. So she wasn’t going to quibble.

  At least one of us has found love, she thought morosely.

  Zoë’s own drink had gone distressingly low. She picked it up, trying to hold it by the clean parts of the glass, and walked to the bar.

  She greeted Cheryl the bartender, who turned out to be the woman with her face obscured. How did she see out of that solid white mask? Zoë wondered if she saw through the eyes of her golems.

  “Yes, is there something wrong with your drink, ma’am?” the bartender asked, her voice sounding irritated as if she had been talking for some time while Zoë was off in her own little world.

  “Yes. Um, no. I mean, what’s in this, and may I have another one please?” She quickly downed the rest of the drink and put the empty lowball glass on the table.

  “It’s a Captain Spaulding, my own concoction. Some gin, a little brine from the Red Sea—pre–industrial revolution—and a little demon blood.”

  “Demon…” Zoë caught herself. They’d drink my blood in an instant. One nearly did, if you count swallowing me whole as drinking my blood. “So what kind of demon?”

  The mask shook as the woman laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. Sadly you can’t see my wink. It’s just the specific kind of gin, that’s all. It’s a distinctive taste. I’ll get you another one.”

  As she started making the drink, Zoë watched her. “So what causes the red coloring, then, if it’s not demon blood?”

  The blank face rose to focus on her. “Grenadine,” she said after a pause, then returned to the drink. “Tell yourself it’s grenadine.”