Ghost Train to New Orleans

by Mur Lafferty

  “Hey, Zoë,” came a voice behind her. It was male, and she whirled in fury, prepared to fire Kevin on the spot if he even looked at her funny.

  It was Reynard, looking at her with eyebrows raised. “What the hell went on back there?”

  Zoë weighed many responses, but just decided to walk away.

  He followed. “I guess you figured out that I lied to you about the ghosts. Listen, can I please explain, and then you can decide if you hate me or not?”

  “I’m really not wanting to hang out with anyone involved with that world right now,” Zoë said, waving her arms vaguely and nearly knocking a tall woman’s mask from her head.

  “Let’s get a cup of coffee. I’ll explain. Then you can continue with your rampage through the streets and find some interesting shoes to vomit on,” Reynard said, pointing at a restaurant on the corner.

  “Like we can get a table,” Zoë grumbled, but followed him. Food might help sober her up.

  Reynard walked past the line—all human to the best of Zoë’s perception—and approached the host, a Japanese fae man with haunting eyes and shaggy black hair. Reynard showed something in the palm of his hand and the host nodded and smiled, and beckoned to them to follow him.

  Zoë felt the glares of the line. She turned to a couple and said, “He’s got dirt on the host. It’s not preferential treatment, it’s blackmail.” She thought she pulled it off except she had trouble saying “preferential” with her alcohol-soaked tongue. She jogged a bit to catch up.

  They took a seat in an intimate corner of Loup, and Zoë frowned at the water glasses on the table. She missed Captain Spaulding. He had been her only friend this evening.

  “OK. So you met me on a train and immediately began lying to me. What gives?” Zoë asked.

  He sat back in his seat and regarded her. “Let me make a guess. You’re a citytalker who knows very little of your own skills. You probably only recently discovered this skill, and you have no one to show you how to use it. How am I doing?”

  Zoë smiled widely, as if she were on a roller coaster and had to decide whether to scream or enjoy it, because she was moving along with the ride whether she liked it or not.

  “Pretty good. Now my turn. You’re an asshole who enjoys putting other people off their game, whether it’s by lying to them outright or showing that you know too much about them. You really love it when they ask you desperate questions like ‘How did you know that?’ Then you get to show your incredible intelligence and abilities and prove yourself their superior in all ways. How am I doing?”

  His eyes widened when she called him an asshole, but then he grinned, clearly enjoying her diatribe.

  “You got me. I do like feeling superior,” he said, inclining his head. “Now was I right about you?”

  “You still haven’t answered my question about why you lied to me.”

  “I wanted to see how you’d react to something new that could be seen as a threat. You already knew how to deal with vamps and zombies.”

  Zoë unrolled her silverware and placed her napkin in her lap. The waiter, a harried human woman with light-brown skin and East Asian eyes, came up to them and pulled out her pad. “Hey there, I’m Heather, what can I get you to drink?”

  “I’ll have a black coffee, a water, and can your bartender make a drink called a Captain Spaulding?” Zoë asked.

  The woman frowned. “I’ll have to ask her, but I’ve never heard of that.”

  Zoë nodded. “Shame. I’ll take a gin and tonic then. Just line up all three drinks in front of me.”

  Reynard smiled at her, then looked at Heather. “I’ll have the same.”

  “Be right back,” she said.

  “I figured you’d had enough,” he said.

  “Oh, I haven’t even begun to drink,” Zoë said, placing her hand over her heart as if she were making a grand proclamation. “My life is fucked up right now and if I don’t drink to cushion everything, I might go mad.” She squinted at him, as if trying to see through him. “Hey, did you organize the train robbery?”

  “What?” He dropped the fork he was fiddling with. “No, of course not. Why would I have hired ghosts to come aboard to capture me?”

  Zoë shrugged. “You lied once, I have no idea your motives for anything now. Now you’re pretending to know all about me, tell me something about you. Earn my trust. Go.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her chest and leaned back, hoping that her numb face conveyed a sense of skepticism.

  Reynard nodded once. “I’m a citytalker, like you. I work for a coterie organization that I’m not comfortable divulging to you right now. But I get information. I find cities useful for that. What I told you about the genocide was true,” he said.

  She nodded; Gwen had confirmed that.

  “So there are still people out there who want us dead. And the more people who know who we are, the more dangerous it is. Those ghosts were clearly after me.”

  The waitress arrived then with their six drinks. Reynard waved her away, saying they weren’t ready to order yet.

  “So let me get this straight,” Zoë said, picking up her water glass. “You lied to me to scare me about ghosts, and then ghosts attack the train and end up hunting you, making them scarier than you had originally intended, so the ghosts made a truther out of a liar.” She frowned. “Truth-teller. Something.”

  She took a sip of the water, then the coffee, then the gin. This could keep her going all night.

  Reynard thought for a moment. “I guess you can look at it that way. Anyway, what I really want to do is talk to you and see if I can get you to join our team. You’ll have the safety of my employers behind you, and we can use all the citytalkers we can get.”

  “Safety like keeping you from a train robbery?” Zoë asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Hey, I told you that I had protection in the vampire car, you just didn’t believe me,” he reminded her.

  Water, coffee, gin. “So you work for vampires?”

  “Among others, yes. The organization is made up of many coterie.”

  “So do I. Work for vampires and have some semblance of safety over me, although clearly it’s not guaranteed. And I’m getting a little tired of people hanging out with me who can eat me. Why would joining your monster organization be different from my own?”

  Reynard smiled, with the look of a gambler who had been saving his ace.

  “We’d teach you what it means to be a citytalker, for one thing.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Dining

  Café Soulé ****

  Those who glory in the past—namely gods and vampires—may prefer the Old World elegance of Antoine’s, but a quick jog across the street to Café Soulé will show you one of the best-kept secrets in the city: actual bottled souls for ingestion.

  The bartender is a zoëtist who controls most of the waitstaff, and makes incredible drinks with recipes she prefers not to share—but try the Captain Spaulding if you’re fond of gin. The meals cater to death gods and demigods on Wednesday nights, with the head chef having a knack for gathering wayward souls and trapping them for ingestion.*

  CHAPTER TEN

  Water, coffee, and gin.

  Somewhere in the evening, Zoë and Reynard ordered a spinach dip. They ate it, Zoë having the solid feeling that no souls had perished for the creation of their dish.

  “’M a very wide-awake drunk,” Zoë said, blinking several times.

  “You wanna see something awesome?” Reynard asked. He hadn’t drunk as much as Zoë, but still seemed more relaxed than before.

  “Always. I always want to see awesome. Why would you think otherwise? Who doesn’t want to see awesome things? Losers. That’s who. And zombies.”

  Reynard paid the bill and they left to join the ever-increasing crowd on the street. “You know they do ghost and vampire tours in the city, right?” he asked her as they staggered toward Jackson Square.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Zoë said. “I figured the visitin
g coterie wouldn’t enjoy that kind of thing, find it offensive, or something.”

  “No, it’s hysterical, let’s go.”

  “What the hell, let’s do it,” she said.

  Their conversation had veered away from the subject of Reynard’s mysterious employers to swapping coterie stories. Zoë found herself actually having a fun time, making Reynard laugh as she told how the zombies had accused her of stealing brains out of the company fridge. Was she rethinking her decision to leave the coterie world entirely?

  She was, however, still considering leaving Underground Publishing. But a tiny sober cell in her brain cautioned against committing to a new organization before finding out what exactly it did.

  “So talk to it!” Zoë said, giggling.

  “What?” Reynard asked.

  “Talk to it! The city! Ask it what’s going on! It won’t talk to me, maybe it’ll talk to you?”

  “It doesn’t quite work like that. You need to align yourself on a deep level before you can get clear communication. I haven’t done this with New Orleans yet, so all I get is the occasional image. That’s what you’re getting, right?”

  “Yeah. I thought I was doing it wrong. Hah! I’m awesome at this.” She straightened a little bit.

  “Right,” he said, smiling at her.

  They were a block from Jackson Square when they saw a group of tourists following a tall man down Decatur Street, listening to him talk about the French architecture. He had to speak loudly over the partying people, but he was heading for a quiet residential neighborhood.

  The man was dressed in a long black coat with ruffles on the cuffs, and his face was long and thin and very pale. He spoke in solemn words to the group, which consisted of tourists in various states of inebriation. Some listened, some snapped photos, and some giggled and jostled each other.

  “Uh-oh, frat boy alert,” Zoë whispered, pointing to two beefy young men in pastel polo shirts with the collars up.

  “Shh,” Reynard said. “Listen.”

  A woman at the back of the group looked at them and sniffed. “You have to pay for the tour,” she said.

  “Oh! I can do that!” Zoë said brightly. She pulled her wallet out of her satchel and grabbed a couple of fifties. “Do you think that will cover it?”

  The woman looked from the bundle of bills back to Zoë. “Yeah, I think that will do you just fine.”

  “Great!” When the tour began walking again, Zoë sneaked up to the front and pressed the money into the hands of the tall guy. “Hey, can we join the tour? We are a bit late.”

  His dour goth expression faded into surprise, and he accepted the bills and put them in his pocket. “Uh, sure.” He fished a roll of stickers out of his pocket and handed her two. “These indicate you’re with the tour.”

  “Awesome. Thanks!” Ignoring the stares of the rest of the group, she dropped back to the end of the line to join Reynard. “We’re good.”

  She handed him his sticker. She put her own on the outside of her leather jacket and patted her chest to adhere it. She crumpled the paper backing and stuck it in her pocket. “Now let’s learn about vampires.”

  After one block of hearing the man talk, Zoë was ready to leave.

  “If I know vampires, and I do, they would find this offensive,” she told Reynard, who watched her with an amused expression. “I mean, I think it’s hysterical. But I have my readers to think about.” She felt very grown-up for coming to this conclusion while she was drunk. “It’s racist.”

  “Racist? These people are essentially walking around the city worshipping them,” Reynard said. “How many vampires do you know, anyway?”

  “Three,” she admitted. “But one is the kind who’d get pissed at any little thing. Like a vampire tour.”

  “Look. This is a touristy thing to do. You’re writing a book for tourists, right? Don’t tell your vampire friends you paid to hear silly stories about them, that’s all.”

  Zoë snorted loudly, and some heads turned. She covered her mouth and whispered, “They’re not my friends. They’d love to see me die.”

  “Come on, just a few more blocks,” Reynard said. “Then I’ll walk you back to your hotel.” They rejoined the tour, which had gotten about a block ahead of them.

  The guide spoke in a whispery voice that still managed to carry to the back of the group. “Back in the eighties, those who practiced the goth religion pretty much took over this area of town, but we got it cleaned out. They practically worshiped Bram Stroker.”

  Zoë clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter. “Did he say Bram Stroker?” she asked in a stage whisper to Reynard.

  He nodded. “Mr. Stroker, high priest of the Holy Order of Goth.”

  The guide continued. “And when people take pictures of that tree, sometimes the photo is developed with the image of the woman hanging from the topmost branch where she died—”

  “Is that a three-legged dog?” someone interrupted.

  The man grimaced and turned. A large yellow lab that was missing its left hind leg was walking on the opposite side of the road. Step-step-hop, step-step-hop, he went happily down the sidewalk. He trailed a leash behind him, and limped along with purpose, not doing typical dog things such as sniffing or urinating. It had been such a long time since Zoë had seen a non-neutered dog that his bouncing testicles looked obscene. She giggled.

  “Yes, that’s Hank,” the guide said impatiently, waving a hand. “He’s fine.”

  “It looks like he got away from someone,” the woman in front of Zoë and Reynard said doubtfully. “He’s got a leash on.”

  “Nah, he’s always pulling that behind him. He belongs to the street. Everyone feeds him.” The man’s voice had lost its dreamy quality and had become nasal and annoyed. He cleared his throat. “Now, we’ll go to noted vampire Comte de Saint Germain’s—the first one, anyway. He played music here, hosted fantastic parties where he reportedly never ate a morsel of food, and then in the privacy of the night, was reported to have done dreadful things.”

  The dog stopped and turned its large head toward the group and watched them for a time, then turned back toward Jackson Square.

  “I wonder if Opal knew him,” Zoë said.

  “Who?” asked Reynard, who was staring after the dog, his face pale in the streetlight.

  “That Comte guy. She’s the only vampire who doesn’t scare me. Although she probably could,” she amended, remembering how unthreatening she had thought Gwen had been. “I wonder how that dog lost his leg.”

  “That’s no dog,” Reynard whispered. “That’s an inugami.”

  Zoë snorted with laughter. “ ‘That’s no dog, that’s a space station!’ What the fuck are you talking about?”

  The tour had continued without them, but Reynard hadn’t noticed.

  “Wake up, Zoë,” Reynard hissed. “That is a serious thing. You don’t fuck around with inugami.”

  She felt sullen. “Now I want sushi. And hey, I’ve had more than you. I can’t sober up just like that.” She frowned and considered him. “You weren’t really drunk at all, were you? That’s twice you’ve lied to me, bucko.”

  “Bucko” had sounded a lot more challenging in her head.

  “So what’s so scary about bouncing-testicle three-legged Rover? What is he going to do, chase us down and wave his testicles at us?”

  Unexpectedly, Reynard laughed. “Your innocence is really charming, but if you don’t lose it fast, you’re going to die.”

  “I’m not innocent, I’m drunk. Again, you’re not answering my questions,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Tell me now, or I’m walking.”

  “In short, it’s a vengeance dog demon. Very dangerous, very single-minded. Very little can distract it from its quarry.”

  “Dude said his name was Hank. Do vengeance demons commonly beg for scraps on the street? And why was it missing a leg?”

  “The guide was likely lying to get the focus back on him. And if the demon is not whole, it
has likely broken away from the master who commanded it. I have a really bad feeling about this,” Reynard said. “The ghost bandits on the train, now a vengeance demon.”

  “Those ghosts were corporate team builders who died in cowboy outfits,” Zoë protested.

  “And yet the bullet was real, right? We’re not safe here. Can you get back to your hotel all right? If you can’t, then you need to find a ghost.”

  “A ghost? Why in the world…” Zoe turned, but Reynard was off in the opposite direction from Zoë’s hotel—and in the opposite direction from the weird dog.

  “So much for seeing me back to my hotel!” she shouted after him. “That’s twice you’ve run off to save your own ass!”

  Seriously, that guy. It had been a fun distraction, talking to a human, but even human coterie had their drama.

  If he was so worried about people hunting citytalkers, why was he not doing more to inform her of the threat? Zoë chewed on her lip as she tried to navigate the streets home.

  Either he was truly a self-obsessed asshole, or the threat was to him rather than to citytalkers as a whole. Either could be true, really, she decided. And why find a ghost? He had lied to her once about ghosts, why should she believe him now?

  Crossing Bourbon Street was problematic, with women lifting their shirts, beads flying, and beer being drunk and spilled at similar rates. A crier in front of a strip club tried to entice her inside, but she felt the pull of hungry incubi inside. “No way,” she said, and hurried across the street.

  When the crowds had thinned a bit, Zoë did a search for “inugami” on her phone, with little hope, but she was surprised when she got several hits. They were created by Japanese families—zoëtists, Zoë assumed—and would avenge those families. She shuddered. She couldn’t think of a more embarrassing death than being killed by a three-legged dog with bobbling testicles.

  Her phone dinged; a text from Bertie asked if they were supposed to just go out and party or if they were going to have a meeting before they started researching. She groaned and picked up her speed. Maybe Freddie’s magic B and B would have a miracle sobering-up-and-hangover-remedy.