by Bryan Camp
Jude squinted against the sudden darkness, saw that he’d gotten there before Regal. The bar had only three other customers this early in the afternoon, a Vietnamese man playing a touchscreen game on the bar and a young, blond white woman talking to the scruffy Latino guy behind the counter. The bartender’s hands were busy chopping mint for the mojitos St. Joe’s was known for, but his eyes remained fixed on the girl, a slight smile on his thin lips. She stretched, her shirt pulling up and revealing the dimple of flesh where her lower back met the curve of her buttocks. Jude pushed down a sudden surge of lust. He looked away and leaned against the bar, trying to keep his distance from all of them.
The man playing the video game was middle-aged but prematurely toughened by years of smoking and hard drinking. He stared, vacant, tapping the screen and feeding it dollar bills and taking long drags off his cigarette without ever changing his expression. Jude’s fingertips tingled. Right beneath his sternum something sharp and insistent, like a fishhook piercing the core of him, yanked taut and yearned toward the man, toward his sense of loss. The man called himself Lee—the latter half of “Willy,” not Bruce—even though his parents had named him William, after his father. Lee hated William Sr. and wanted no connection to him. But he’d always felt like he’d lost something, in not having a father he could admire.
Jude cursed silently and clenched his hands into fists. Sometimes things leaked in even with the gloves, especially around strangers. This was a mistake. He shouldn’t have come here. To hell with Regal and whatever she had for him. Just as Jude decided to leave, the bartender noticed his presence and slouched over, with a curt nod and a “Whatcha need?” Jude ordered an Abita and eased onto the stool, keeping his gloved hands out of sight below the counter.
Regal’s got until I finish this beer, he told himself, and then, like she’d timed it that way, the door opened and there she was, framed by the fading sunlight.
She’d cut her hair. What he remembered as an auburn silky drape down to her shoulders was now clipped short and spiky. The rest of her hadn’t changed, though. Her deep-set eyes remained that clear, molten brown, like honey. The grin that slanted across her full lips still straddled the line between amused and mocking. She was a small white woman, both short and petite, who moved across the room with the confident glide of someone twice her size and the grace of a woman who knew how to handle herself.
“Dubuisson,” she said. “It’s been too long.” Despite everything—the sleepless nights, his unease at being out in the world, this life colliding once again with his own, the tendrils of loss twisting and curling into the cracks in his resolve, despite it all—the sound of her voice made him smile. Regal Sloan. His partner and closest friend in a life he’d left behind. Or tried to.
“Hey, Queens,” he said, the old nickname slipping unexpectedly out of his mouth. She smirked and started to speak, but the bartender interrupted with Jude’s beer. Regal ordered one for herself, and they said nothing while they waited. When the bartender returned, Regal, still standing behind him, reached over Jude’s shoulder, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, the brush of her breath against his neck. Jude forced himself not to flinch away from her invasion of his personal space, knowing it wasn’t true flirtation so much as an attempt to make him uncomfortable, to keep him off his game. She folded a napkin in half and traced a two and a zero across it with her fingertip. Regal pushed the napkin to the bartender, who scooped it up as payment without questioning it.
“Keep the change, boo,” she said.
Jude took a sip of his Abita, savoring the crisp sharpness on his tongue. Same old Regal, he thought. He didn’t realize he’d said it out loud until she laughed.
“Way I remember it,” she said, “you taught me that particular trick.”
“Taught you all the tricks you know, rook.”
“Memory slipping in your old age?” She picked up both glasses. “Let’s talk in back.”
Jude dug a twenty out of his pocket and dropped it on the other side of the counter between a couple of bottles where the bartender would find it later, and then followed her, discomfort roiling in his gut like water about to boil. As he slid past the blonde at the other end of the bar, whose thumbs were now dancing across her cell phone, the bitter taste of blood filled his mouth. Great, he thought. Just great.
The next room seemed like a different bar, with patio tables spread across the bare concrete floor and bright paper lanterns strung above. The lanterns rustled in the breeze from the large box fan rattling in the corner, stirring the soupy air around more than providing any relief from the heat. Regal set Jude’s beer in front of him, slurping the foam off the top of her own. He wondered if she had seen his gloves yet and if the glass was safe to touch without them. He thought about taking one off under the table, unsure if he could do it without her noticing.
“So,” Regal said, after licking her lips, “you got your shit together, or you still hiding from the storm?”
Some would call Regal blunt or tactless. Some had harsher names for it. Once, a middle-aged hausfrau had called her “a gash-mouthed cunt” in front of her two young daughters. Jude knew, though, how carefully Regal chose those barbs of hers. It was how she kept people back on their heels. That same housewife had been selling the virginal menstrual blood of her eldest to a voodoo woman.
Still, it hurt that she’d jabbed at Jude’s weak spot like that, like he was just another prick in the way of her doing the job. Made him a little angry, too. But mostly it proved that she had more on her mind than a drink with an old friend.
“That guy’s gonna catch hell when his till comes up twenty bucks short,” he said. “I only ever used that trick to fuck with the kind of assholes who have it coming. Broke-ass bartenders trying to make rent money don’t exactly qualify.” He worked at keeping his voice level. It wouldn’t help anything to lose control here. His temper was something else—or so Jude’s mother had always said—that he’d gotten from his absent father.
She cocked that same grin at him, only this time it seemed insulting. “You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?”
“First,” Jude said, raising a finger as he counted, “I know the blonde out front will be dead sooner than not, sucked dry by the vampire that’s got her enthralled. Second, you’ve got a bit of magic hidden on you, a weapon by the feel of it, something sharp and nasty. Third? There’s a change coming, something that’s got even the boss man rattled. And fourth, you’re stalling. That’s what I know.”
She turned her head back the way they had come, squinting as if she could see through the wall that separated them. “Does it bother you?”
“What, the girl? Of course it does.”
She shook her head. “Actually, I was asking if it bothered you to be such a know-it-all prick all the time, but let’s talk about the girl. Bet you wanna go rescue her, don’t you? Gonna swoop in and save the day?” She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Not every woman is lost without her big, strong man, you know. That hero complex of yours is gonna get you in deep shit one day, bucko.”
“Thanks for the advice,” he said, taking a swallow of his beer. “Timing could be better, though.” This wasn’t the way he’d hoped this conversation was going to go. Regal seemed tense. Unsure, even. She mocked him for wanting to save the girl, but she hadn’t stopped staring in her direction, either.
“How did you know all of that?” she asked.
“Because whoever dear old dad was, I’m my father’s son,” he said. “Some things I just know.” Which was bullshit, of course. The taste-of-blood vampire warning was just a residual thing, an unintended side effect from a protection spell he’d done years ago. Everything else he’d said had been presumptions and educated guesswork, his tongue moving faster than his brain and hoping to get lucky. Regal knew a little about his father, though, so convincing her he knew a bunch of stuff he didn’t know—couldn’t know—wasn’t much of a gamble.
Tell someone you’re
the bastard child of a god, and they’ll believe you’re capable of just about anything.
“So, quit with the foreplay,” Jude said. He leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. “Mourning sent you to talk me into coming back, didn’t he?”
“No.”
Jude raised an eyebrow. “So you just thought you’d look your old buddy Jude up after six years and knock back a few?”
“Okay, yes, Mourning sent me.” She bit her lip, uncertain. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Fuck Mourning.” Jude felt his control slipping, anger and magic threatening to wriggle free, to take shape as fire and storm. He shouldn’t have come. This was the last thing he needed.
“It’s not what you think,” she repeated. Regal stuck two fingers into her back pocket and took out an envelope sealed with red wax. The paper looked thick and old, like parchment. She glanced up, then her eyes darted away, unable to meet his. “You’re pissed, I get it. I didn’t want to get involved, but you know how it is. Mourning wants something, he doesn’t exactly ask, you know? But this message isn’t from Mourning. We were just hired to find you and deliver it.”
Jude wanted to say that he didn’t care. That he didn’t want any part in any of this, just wanted to go home and drink until he forgot all the impossible things he knew. Things that had been a part of that other life, like magicians who called things up out of the darkness to do their bidding, or hoodoo women who cast curses for a fee and then charged double for the cure, or monsters that walked the daylight pretending to be human and hunted in the night. Things that were only partly human, or not human at all. Things that even the gods had abandoned.
Instead of saying any of that, though, his curiosity won out. “That envelope isn’t ticking, is it?”
She laughed, but it was an unconvincing, desperate sound. She said nothing else, just held the message out to him, shaking it a little when he didn’t take it.
“Who sent it?” he asked.
“No idea. All I know is I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, sliding the parchment across the table, “and tell you that the favor’s being called in.”
Jude cursed under his breath. He owed a lot of debts, to more people than he’d ever be able to pay back. But only one of them would refer to his debt as a favor: Dodge Renaud, the fortune god of New Orleans. Sure enough, when he picked it up, the envelope was sealed with red wax impressed with an ornate R.
Fucking perfect, Jude thought. He started to take a sip of his beer and instead tilted it up, gulping, draining the glass, no longer concerned with whether she saw his gloves or not. He found, to his surprise, that his hands didn’t shake.
Six years. That was a decent span of time for normal human problems, hangovers and avoiding exes and pretending you were happy with your shitty pay at your shitty job. Six long years away from dancing to the whim of gods and all the nasty bullshit that came with it. For six years he’d stayed low, stayed quiet, tucked down in a seam of a life so boring, he’d convinced himself that he’d vanished entirely, that petty problems would be all he’d have to deal with for the rest of his life. He should have known better.
Six years went like the blink of an eye if you lived forever.
Chapter Two
The envelope held exactly the sort of simple, cryptic message Jude had always gotten from the fortune god: a sketched map of the edge of the Garden District closest to the Quarter, specifically the nine streets named after the Muses of Greek myth. Instead of names, though, the streets on the map were labeled with the symbols of each Muse’s domain—a scroll, a frowning mask, a smiling one, a flute—with a bright red X halfway down the block between Clio and Calliope. That told him the place, and a Polaroid of the clock on the central spire of St. Louis Cathedral told him the time: midnight.
As for Jude’s other questions—the who, what, and why—he’d have to show up to find out for sure. That was Dodge’s way.
The mention of his debt, though, first sent Jude back to his apartment—once he had endured a few barrages of Regal’s vulgarity-strewn interrogation and made a strategic retreat, leaving her at St. Joe’s—so he could collect the satchel Dodge had given him long ago. Whirls and angles of protective charms were cut into the faded brown leather, and the dozens of pockets inside bulged with magics both potent and petty: amulets and gris-gris pouches, vials of milky liquid and stones etched with ancient writing, and only a god knew what else, since it had already been full when Jude got it from Dodge. Back then, he’d thought that the satchel’s contents had been worth owing a god a favor. He’d craved the control over his own fate he’d believed it promised. Now, his only real hope was that Dodge would take the bag back—along with the odds and ends Jude had added to it while it was his—and call it square.
As plans went, it was a pretty shitty one. Power always had a cost, and the fine print never included a generous return policy. But it was all he had.
Twenty minutes or so of wandering around the Garden District while he consulted the crudely drawn map led Jude to a spot where no one else would stop: a cracked stretch of sidewalk and a fence overgrown with thick, clinging vines. On the other side of the fence, accumulated junk rose in a mound of mattress springs and broken chairs, half burying the sharp fins and graceful curves of an old car frame. The detritus and the overhanging foliage nearly hid the decrepit building lurking there. It was a shotgun house like most of the old homes in this part of the city, only one room wide but stretching four rooms back, the porch leading to the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen and then out again. This one was more ruin than structure.
After giving Jude only a brief glimpse into the yard, the streetlight overhead buzzed like a huge hornet and went out, plunging everything into darkness. Jude stepped toward the fence, and a crawling sensation along his skin told him that he’d just crossed over the threshold of a magical ward. There was a shimmer in the air, and where a moment before there had been only unbroken chain-link fence, he now saw a rusted gate swinging open. Jude couldn’t help but appreciate the craftsmanship of the spell. It was similar to the shroud he’d pulled over his own apartment, but where Jude’s magic merely kept the building out of public notice, this actively pushed people away. Any random passerby would cross the street to avoid this place, without noticing that they’d done so. Even with an invitation, it had been hard to find.
As Jude entered the yard, a shape moved in the shadows, quick and low to the ground, bursting forward in a blur of wet fangs and fierce barking.
Jude spoke a single word in a language whose name he didn’t know, and the dog’s mouth snapped shut. It slumped to the ground, lowering its muzzle to the dirt. The dog whined once, let out a deep sigh, then lay still. It was large and shaggy, with the high, pointed ears of a German shepherd. Jude grinned and shook his head. Anyone or anything powerful enough to see through Dodge’s magic would be able to handle the dog—if it was only a dog—as easily as Jude had. Which meant it was really only there to jump out and scare guests as they arrived.
Because on top of everything else, Dodge was kind of a dick.
Jude dropped to one knee and scratched the beast between its ears, hoping there were no hard feelings. Even through the gloves he could sense a deep, aching loss from the creature, so he pulled away before he could feel anything more distinct. Definitely not just a dog, then.
Jude rose to his feet and stepped onto the rot-wood porch, hesitating for only a moment before reaching for the knob. The handle turned, but the door, swollen into its frame, refused to budge. Jude put his shoulder into it and went sprawling into a dark, cramped space filled with cobwebs and the musty, nose-tickling stink of mold. Inside, entropy had long been at work, leaving behind crumbling Sheetrock and exposed brick, years of grime and dust. Jude stood in a long hallway, barely able to make out the outline of a door at the far end. When he reached it, doing his best to ignore the scuttling shapes amid the debris on the floor, he saw that it had been painted, recently, with bright red paint. H
e pulled it open, his pulse thundering in his ears. Light spilled out into the hallway, and Jude heard the snap and rustle of cards being shuffled, the clink of ice against glass. He smelled tobacco smoke tinged with a faint hint of cinnamon.
Inside, floral wallpaper covered the walls, faded and curling at the seams. The air in the windowless room sat thick and heavy, saturated with a haze of cigar smoke. On the wall, a clock in the shape of a cat kept time, its bulging eyes and curled tail moving in sync, a motion made somehow eerie by its wide, toothy leer.
In the center of the room, a single light bulb dangled over the green felt of a poker table. Dodge sat at the far side, fat and bald and ever smiling, his spray-tanned white face flushed with too much drink. He looked every inch a New Orleans god of fortune, his twinkling eyes the crisp green of fresh-printed hundred-dollar bills, his grin fluorescent bright.
Against his better judgment, Jude stepped inside. The door closed behind him without anyone touching it. He studied the players as Dodge dealt the next hand: a fat man with long, gaunt fingers and skin the purple bruised color of a corpse; an angel, wings soft and white as powdered sugar, eyes as blank and cold as frozen milk; a middle-aged black woman wearing a straw hat tipped at a jaunty angle, a pipe clamped between her teeth; and a brown-skinned man with the head of a bird, his beak curved and cruel as the blade of a scythe.
All this, and yet what inspired the most fear in Jude were the cards left face-down on the table. The empty seat at the game.
Waiting, it seemed, for him.
Jude dropped into the empty chair, leaving his cards face-down in front of him. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a choice. He could run. He could beg. He could demand to know what was happening. But none of those choices felt worth a damn. One god he could handle. Well, maybe—and probably not even then—but if it had only been Dodge, he could at least lie to himself that he had a chance. But a room full of gods?