by Bryan Camp
Jude stood, dismissed, dizzy at the sudden rush of blood to his head. He picked up his bag, swung it across his shoulder, mumbled some parting words. Mourning nodded and waved him off, already turning to other papers on his desk.
It wasn’t until later, after he’d stepped out of Mourning’s office and into the bathroom of a bar in the Quarter, after he’d texted Regal from the tourist’s phone to tell her that his meeting was done, after he ventured out into the street, that Jude realized that he hadn’t felt the tug of a single lost thing all morning.
That he had, in fact, forgotten his gloves at home.
Chapter Four
Jude sat at an otherwise empty table at the Clover Grill, staring at the coffee cup in his hands. The hot, thick smells of bacon grease and syrup mingled with the sting of bleach. A rush of noise filled the air, the clink and splash of washing dishes, the hiss and crackle and clank of the open grill, the plaintive croon of an ’80s pop hit from the jukebox, the murmur and chuckle and outbursts of conversation, of food being ordered. Like most diners open around the clock, the lights shone full blast, an aid to bleary-eyed insomniacs perhaps, or a reminder to the drunks that they’d finally left the bar.
Jude had always liked this place. He found an odd comfort in its tenuous cleanliness, its blatant disregard for health-conscious eating, its raunchy joke-filled menus. It also, like Jude himself, existed within the seams, tucked onto the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine where the tourist traps and college kid–catering bars and the gay clubs and the quiet residential section of the Quarter all collided.
Its patrons matched its eclectic location. Tonight, bright-cheeked twenty-year-olds drinking milkshakes sat on stools next to middle-aged women trying to keep their tattered feather boas out of their eggs and grits, while a pair of tight-muscled, soft-voiced men exchanged pleasantries with a man who might be homeless, considering his worn jeans and his gnarled beard, each of them at varying levels of sobriety and hunger.
All this surrounded Jude, and yet, to his surprise and delight, he found himself—for the first time in a long time—comfortably numb. He sat with a slight smile on his face, staring at the chipped ceramic mug in his hands.
In his hands.
Without gloves to block out his magic, he should be getting images of the waiter who brought it to him, of the person who had washed it, of the dozen or so people who used it that night and the day before. He should know their regretted angry words, the choices they wished they could take back, the things they had lost in the storm. He should be drowning in a well as black and as bitter as the coffee in the cup.
Instead, for the first time in years, his head felt clear and whole and empty of anything but his own thoughts. He’d wagered away parts of himself in that card game. His passion, his blood, his devotion. He didn’t know which represented his magic, didn’t know which god had snatched the affinity for lost things out of him, but it was the only explanation that made sense. Inviting him to the game wasn’t just a trap.
It was a robbery.
Regal rapped her knuckles on the table. “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?” she asked, singing the words at him. Jude blinked and looked up. She grinned her lopsided smile and eased into the chair across from him. “Jesus. I must’ve said your name, like, ten times. You okay?”
“I’m good. Really good.”
Her eyes searched his for a moment. “Know what? You look it. Couple of hours ago, you looked like a prolapsed asshole. Mourning cure your hangover for you?”
Jude spun his cup on its saucer, trying to decide how much to tell her. Mourning would probably send Regal hunting after Dodge’s killer, now that Jude had turned him down. She had a right to know what she was getting into.
Before he had a chance to answer her, a waiter stopped at the table to take their order. Regal got biscuits, a double order of hash browns, and a vanilla milkshake. Jude got a club sandwich and asked for more coffee. After getting the specifics, butter or gravy, fries or tots, his questions punctuated by “hon” and “sugar,” the waiter left, and Regal turned her attention back to Jude. She looked at his hands, then back at him.
“No creepy germaphobe gloves today?”
“Don’t need them anymore,” he said, and then, when he realized he’d have to explain what that meant, decided to tell her everything. “How much do you know about what I can do?”
Regal reached across the table and picked up Jude’s coffee, taking a sip while she watched him over the rim of the mug. “You find things, right? All you need to do is—oh, touch. I get it.”
“Right. Since the storm, it’s been out of control. I don’t know if it had to do with how much got lost, or if it was me, or what. But I felt everything. You can’t imagine what it was like. I couldn’t stand being around people without a way to shut it out. The gloves worked sometimes, but never for long enough. Last night at the card game, something happened. I’m not sure what, but it’s gone now. The power, the curse, whatever you want to call it. I’m free. I feel like me again for the first time in, hell, I don’t know how long.”
Regal went still and silent. Only her eyes moved, flicking back and forth, looking at the tabletop but focused on something beyond it. Then she shook her head. “That is the biggest crock of shit I have ever heard,” she said.
Though part of him knew it was exactly the wrong reaction, Jude let out a sharp bark of a laugh.
“Things get fucked up and you hide until it gets better?” She leaned in close to the table and spoke in a furious whisper, as though she wanted to avoid drawing attention. “People needed you, Jude. I needed you. What you can do. The good you could have done.” Jude opened his mouth to say something, but she kept going. “And you expect me to be happy? That you’re back, just in time to be caught up in all this shit? To get me caught up in it? Fuck that. Fuck you, too.”
“Regal, stop.” She quieted, but leaned back, folding her arms across her chest. “Fine,” he said, her anger awakening his own. “Be pissed if you want. But stop making it sound like I’m some kind of savior.”
“And you stop talking like you’re some kind of goddamn victim. What about that girl you found, the one in Ohio? You telling me you didn’t save her?”
“That was one time,” Jude said, low and growling. Rage and magic roiled in his gut. He breathed in through his nose, concentrated on letting it out slow. She’s provoking you, like she always does, he thought. “That was one time,” he said again, more calmly. “People get snatched from their lives every day. You know what I usually see? Nothing. No lost person at the end of my magic trick. No trail of cryptic bread crumbs to follow. A shallow grave? The morgue? Skipped town? Who knows. The point is they’re not lost. Just gone to where they’re supposed to be. It’s shitty and it’s not fair, but that’s the end of the stick some people get. Don’t come looking to me for happy endings, Queens. If I ever was that guy, I’m sure as hell not him anymore.”
She clenched her jaw. He watched as she chose her words. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, a slender thing that looked like a solid piece of glass, glanced at the screen, and set it on the table. “That’s exactly the point,” she said. “When you’re losing is when you’re supposed to fight the hardest, moron. Didn’t anybody ever teach you anything?” Jude had to fight back a smile. Even directed at him, her anger felt comforting, familiar. He’d almost forgotten how stubborn she could be.
The waiter returned, slapping plates of food in front of them, seemingly oblivious to the tension in the air. He filled the silence with his own chatter, polite nothings and questions he didn’t wait for them to answer. After a moment, he was gone again. Regal stabbed a fork into her hash browns with one hand, drowned them in Tabasco with the other. Jude sipped at his coffee, his hunger driven away by the tightness in his belly.
The longer his ex-partner ate without speaking, the more uncertain he became. How much of his reaction to the storm had been the twisting of his magic and how much his own frailty? Could he have withstood it if he’d been stron
ger? Could he have been healed sooner if he’d forced himself to face it head-on? “Look,” he said, dreading the admission even as it came out, “maybe you’re right. Maybe I took the easy way out.”
“Maybe?” Even with her mouth full of food, her disdain was evident. She swallowed and pointed her fork at him. “Only maybe here is maybe you once had balls. Sure don’t now.” Regal dropped her fork, pushed her plate away, and wiped her hands together. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore,” she said. “I’m too pissed to make any sense. No more about your damn gift, or the storm, or anything further back than two days ago. All I want to talk about is what’s next.” Regal checked her phone again, compulsively, then met his eyes. “Mourning got me up to speed before he sent me to get you. What kind of spell you got for getting in touch with this fortune god?”
“For—wait. You mean Dodge?”
“Duh. You were always good at that spooky hoodoo, that calling-up-spirits shit. Don’t tell me you lost all your skills last night.”
Jude hesitated a moment before answering. There was a kind of elegant directness to the idea that was so perfectly Regal. Looking for a murderer? Summon the victim’s ghost and ask. Problem was, it was also five kinds of crazy. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but this is way out of your depth.”
She let out a burst of sarcastic laughter, abrupt, like a slap in the face. “Fuck you again. Sideways. Maybe you were my teacher once, but those days are long ago. You have no idea what I’ve dealt with since you’ve been gone. You think I don’t know how serious this is? You think I’m playing games here?”
He ran a hand over his face, across his scruff of beard, and sighed. “It is a game, Queens. That’s what you don’t understand. To them, it is a game. All of it. And there’s no way for us to win.”
She scowled, that stubborn clench of her jaw that said he needed to come at her from another direction.
“Besides, have you considered what happens if you actually figure out who killed Dodge? What the final solution is? Because I promise you, Mourning isn’t planning on putting anybody in jail. We’re talking about gods, here. Capital punishment is the only kind they believe in.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question, dick. Don’t give me any bullshit about whether you should or what the consequences will be, just tell the truth.” Her voice got uncomfortably loud. “Can you summon the dead god or not?”
The customer behind Regal turned around, slow and wide-eyed, as if unsure he had heard what he thought he’d heard. Beneath the table, Jude’s fingers started twitching through the motions of a “nothing to see here” charm—his version of a Jedi mind trick—but stopped midway through when it occurred to him that he might not have much magic left at all. Instead, Jude grinned at him. “D and D,” he said. The man nodded but didn’t seem entirely convinced. To Regal, Jude said, “I honestly don’t know. Let’s say I give it a try. First things first. If I’m going to rip a hole in reality and reach into the afterlife, I’ve got to know which direction to reach.”
Regal lifted an eyebrow.
“In other words, did Dodge go to Heaven or to Hell?” She started to answer, but Jude spoke over her. “Last I saw him, he wasn’t repenting any sins, so let’s presume it’s a bad place. The next question is which one? Do you know where his people stay? Because all I know about him is ‘fortune god.’ Is he Norse? Because the punishment afterlife for them is a freezing wasteland beneath the roots of the World Tree. If he’s more Old Testament–inclined, then I should be looking around Gehenna, a burning valley of torment. Shit, I’d be lucky if he’s in one of the hundreds of underworlds I even know about, and not some weird god Hell that I’ve never heard of.” Jude picked up his coffee, felt through the mug that it was cold, and set it back down.
“I just told Mourning I wasn’t good enough to play at this level, and that was before I knew about this.” He held his palms up to her and wiggled his fingers, showing the lack of gloves, the lack of magic. “I don’t know how much juice I’ve got left. If any. Frankly, I hope it’s all gone. I’m out, Queens. And that’s right where I want to be.” He knew, of course, that he had to have at least a little magic left, since he’d cursed Scowl’s typewriter, but Regal didn’t need to know that.
Regal poked at the remains of her meal with her fork. Her jaw tightened and unclenched. “I get what you’re saying, I do. And I sympathize. But I got bad news for you. Orders have come down from on high. You think I’m here for the company? You’re not out. You can’t even see the exit from where you are. You know Mourning doesn’t take no for an answer. You help me with this, maybe it leads me somewhere that takes the attention away from you. You don’t? He sends somebody less pretty.”
Jude toyed with his coffee cup, swirling the brew around like his thoughts, wondering how he’d gotten here, what he could have done differently in the past few days, what words he could have chosen in Mourning’s office to avoid this.
He couldn’t come up with anything.
There were no favors to call in, no one left to ask for help. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no option but to walk right into what felt more and more like a trap. With that realization, something shifted inside of Jude. A decision made. He knew he should be afraid, knew most people would hate feeling goaded and led and caged like this, but Jude had to fight the urge to grin.
Fucking up other people’s plans was his specialty.
“You have to understand, you’re asking me to do something that can’t be done. It’s not just a matter of whether I should—though it does break just about every rule I ever learned—it simply isn’t possible.”
She sighed. “So you’re not even going to try.” It wasn’t a question.
The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Oh, I’m gonna do it. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. I just want you to fully appreciate how badass I am when I deliver the impossible.”
Part Two
Chapter Five
A yantra woven, thread by thread, image by image, into a fine carpet. Chalk on a gravestone sketching out a shaky veve that won’t last through the next rain. A temenos built of marble that survives for centuries longer than the forgotten deity who made it sacred. A mandala sculpted out of colorful sand, poured with the grace of deep meditation. A Solomonic circle, drawn according to precise formula. Ancient as the kivas of the Anasazi, modern as the copper mesh of a Faraday cage. Arcane symbols and geometries, ritual and craft and symmetry. Sacred spaces, messages, prayers, boundaries, traps. The universe made small, the soul writ large. Circles within circles, all with one purpose: to let the magic in and keep the darkness out.
It had been difficult for Jude to let Regal into his apartment. It wasn’t much, as magicians’ lairs went—bedroom, kitchen, and living room a version of any college dropout’s bachelor pad in the country—but he’d gone through a lot of effort to maintain his anonymity and privacy. The building was empty except for his apartment on the third floor, an abandoned carpentry shop taking up the first two. A handful of pretty clever magics had kept the building off any redevelopment maps in the wake of the storm—one spell added the address to the list of properties condemned and scheduled for demolition for anyone wanting to buy it, while another named it a historic site for anyone in the municipal government—and he’d worked a few charms to ensure that the bills for his power and the water came out of a couple of rich assholes’ discretionary funds, the cards they kept under aliases for various debaucheries and, thus, never questioned when they ran unusual charges. From the street, it either looked like a warehouse for a thriving construction company or a derelict housing complex, depending on who was watching. It might be a little shithole that some condo association would love to tear down and replace with one of the million-dollar units that were popping up all over the Warehouse District, but it was private and quiet, and it was his little shithole.
Aside from a couple of very drunken one-night stands, Regal was the only person aside from Jude
to see his apartment in six years. She hadn’t been impressed, just went straight to his fridge, got herself a beer, and asked when he’d be ready to get started. Even after a few hours of research and spellwork, it still felt strange for Jude to see someone else in his place.
“Most magic,” he said to Regal while they worked, “is bullshit.” She made a noise to show that she’d heard but didn’t look up. She knelt on the hardwood floor hunched over a chalk ideogram, which she was copying from an open book with geometrical precision. “All the fasting,” he continued, “the detailed inscriptions, the exotic ingredients, the archaic languages. It’s just ritual. You do it to convince yourself that the spell will work when your every instinct, your every experience, says that it won’t.”
Regal sat back on her heels and stretched, a couple of vertebra popping audibly. She rolled the chalk in her fingers but didn’t put it down. “So you’re saying I just wasted an hour of my life bumblefucking around on my hands and knees,” she said.
Jude hesitated before answering. “Look at it this way. Doing magic is, in essence, defying the laws of nature, right?”
Regal nodded, conceding the point.
“Something is one way,” he continued, “is supposed to be that way, but you speak the right words with just the right cadence and you make it be some other way. You mix a bunch of oils and compounds together that, chemically, shouldn’t do anything except give you the runs, but when you drink it, you’re five years younger or you can see things you could never see before. You put a picture and some bones and some herbs in a little bag, and the object of your affection falls in love with you. Imposing your will on the world around you like that only comes from true conviction. From faith. Most people have to look outside themselves for that level of belief. They need the ritual, but only because they think they need it.”