by Bryan Camp
Jude stopped talking, realizing that he’d given very nearly the same speech to his former teacher—a powerful magician named Eli Constant—years before. Eli hadn’t appreciated Jude’s thoughts on the matter, which was a nice way of saying they’d never spoken again.
Regal smirked and shook her head.
“What?” he asked.
“You, that’s what. You’re just such a man sometimes.” There was a weariness in her voice that made it clear she didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Things are easier for you, so it must mean that you’re enlightened and the rest of us are just wandering around with our eyes closed, right? You ever think that it’s not who you are but what you are that makes magic such a cakewalk for you?” She held up a hand when Jude tried to speak. “I know, I know, we’re not supposed to talk about it because you’re such a sensitive little pussy willow about it, but you gotta face facts, my friend. Your daddy was a god. You don’t need all this shit like the rest of us because you’ve got liquid faith running through your veins.”
The old Jude would have held his ground, would have grinned his most disarming smile and said something clever about godhood and being hood rich. If he’d learned anything in the years since his gift had turned on him, though, it was that he didn’t understand himself as well as he’d once thought. He’d contemplated the many ways his unusual upbringing might have impacted him, of course, but had come to the conclusion that his facility with magic came from a childhood free of adults convincing him that magic wasn’t real. He’d always thought of himself as merely a man who saw the world differently than everyone else. Maybe it was more fundamental than that. Maybe he wasn’t merely a man, at all.
If his magic lived not in his mind but in his bones, it might explain how his affinity for lost things could be taken from him, or why its absence was a persistent ache, like a phantom limb.
“Might be you’re right,” Jude said, breaking a silence that was just starting to become uncomfortable. “Maybe there is something different about the way I do magic. In fact, I hope you’re right, because I’ll be honest, all this shit?” He waved a hand at the circle they’d constructed. “I’m making this up as I go.” They had spent hours studying the files from Mourning and rifling through most of Jude’s books on the occult, but the results hadn’t been promising. There were whole books devoted to the diagrams meant to invoke the supernatural, and a half-dozen ways to call up the dead. When it came to dead gods, though, they’d found nothing. If it had ever been tried before, no one had bothered to write about it. Probably because they hadn’t survived the experiment.
Regal rose to her feet, careful not to disturb any of the letters she’d written on the floor. “On that less-than-comforting note,” she said, brushing chalk dust onto the leg of her jeans, “walk me through this spell step by step. Because I’m starting to think you’ll shit the bed and get us sucked down into the Ninth Circle of Hell.”
“You planning on betraying somebody?” Jude asked.
Regal whipped her head around, her face a mask of fury. “The fuck you just say?”
Jude held up his hands. “Take it easy. I’m fucking with you. You screwed up your Dante is all. Sorcerers like us end up in the Eighth Circle, not the Ninth. Number nine is for betrayers.”
It took a couple of deep breaths for her rage to smooth into a frown. “So you read a fucking book. Congratulations.”
Jude managed to bite back a reply, but only because he wasn’t sure how she’d react. Her sudden intensity had startled him. Had she thought he’d said something else, something offensive? Or was mentioning betrayal the nerve he’d struck? It’s been six years, he reminded himself. Maybe she’s not the same old Regal after all.
Whatever the reason for her outburst, she slid right past it. She’d already turned back to the spell, tracing designs in the air and muttering to herself. When she spoke, she didn’t look at him, instead pointing to the three concentric circles that made up the bulk of the diagram: a white, powdery line of salt, a gleaming ring of chain, and thick gray ash. “So these inner circles hold whatever you summoned here and keep it from doing anything nasty, right?”
“Right,” Jude said, “salt for purity and cold iron for binding and ash because we’re dealing with the dead.”
“And this writing in the outer circle is what does the summoning?”
“No, the actual call comes from the magician. Your will. That writing’s what forces whatever you summoned to go back to wherever it came from.”
She studied the spellwork a moment more. “There’s nothing specific, though. How do you know you’re willing the right thing here?”
“For that, you need a focus. Something that represents what you’re seeking. It varies. If we were trying to call one of the loa, it’s basically a bribe: food and rum and a good cigar. For the dead, you need a part of their once-living body: a lock of hair, a splash of blood, a shard of bone. In order to bind a demon, you’d have to know its true name. For Dodge?” Jude shrugged. “I improvised.” He reached into his satchel and—couldn’t find what he was looking for. He paused, puzzled. It occurred to him only now, in the ability’s absence, that he’d never had to actually search for anything in the bag, just stuck his hand in and found it. Now, for some reason, he had to sift through the satchel’s contents until he found what he sought: a pewter statue of a bald, smiling fat man covered in shiny gold paint. One of the statue’s hands gripped a cloth sack tossed over his shoulder; the other was outstretched and had a small hole drilled through it to hold incense sticks.
Regal lifted an eyebrow. “You’re gonna summon Buddha?”
“This is Budai, not Buddha,” he said, digging through his satchel once more, frustrated and distracted by the need to search.
“This is fun for you, correcting people like an asshole instead of answering their questions?”
Jude chuckled. “It is a little fun, honestly. Budai is a Chinese fortune deity. Ah, here we go. Remember this?” His fingers finally closed on the envelope that held his invitation to the card game. He peeled the red seal off the parchment, careful not to crack the ornate R, then licked the wax and pressed it to the statue’s bald head, holding it until he was sure it would stick. “There, see? A bald, fat fortune god with Dodge’s name on it.” The expression on Regal’s face said she was unconvinced. “It’s symbolic. Gods love symbolism.”
Jude put the fortune god statue in the center circle and stepped back, reaching down deep for the magic, the part of his mind he’d strained to keep closed for the past six years. More to prove to himself that he could than anything else, he pointed one by one at the candles they’d placed at five points on the innermost circle and, with a wave of his hand, lit them. It was a simple, basic magic, but relief flooded him when it worked. His gift might be gone, but not his magic. Not all of it.
With the candles burning, the shape of the summoning spell clicked into place for Jude, like a puzzle’s image becoming clear. He reached out, with his hand and his intent both, toward the statue. At the barest touch of his will, it twitched, as though it had been anticipating this moment. He pushed harder, and it moved, rocking back and forth at first, like a fat man getting the momentum to stand, and then it spun, whirling, balanced on the tip of one foot. The wax burst into bright red flame, hissing like a road flare. Jude ignored it, picturing the fortune god’s money-colored eyes, imagining his booming laugh. He clenched his jaw and willed Dodge to appear, straining a part of himself that had no name, like willing his eyes to adjust more quickly when the lights went out. He felt the reverberation of a reply. The statue melted, oozing across the wooden floor in a dark red stain, the color of movie theater blood. It soaked into the floor, and everything went still, even Jude’s breath.
This was wrong. Whatever was coming, it wasn’t Dodge.
With a splintering groan, the floor bowed up, as if something huge shifted beneath it. There was a crack—a sound in the air, a sensation in Jude’s mind, a hole in the world—and then a shape rus
hed up, stretching and growing and creaking in jerky, halting movements. Between one moment and the next, the floor in the center of the summoning circle thrust up into three straight edges and an ornate, antique twist of metal. A door. A red door.
The Red Door to Dodge’s card room.
“Well,” Regal said, “how do you want to do this? Rock-paper-scissors, or age before beauty?”
“As in, who opens the door? That’s a bad idea. Most magic might be unnecessary ritual, but the protection stuff is really fucking necessary. Circles keep nasty shit in, so long as you stay out. You break the circle? All bets are off. I’ve had spirits take the shape of weeping children, dying friends, anything to try to get me to enter. Demons usually go for impossibly sexy and very naked, promising to do anything you can imagine. The point is, you never, ever break the line of a summoning circle.”
“Sure, I get it. Don’t cross the streams.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but,’ here.”
“But we’re not going to get a whole lot of information questioning a door, are we?”
“No, we won’t.” Jude studied the door, considering his options. When Dodge had given him the satchel, the fortune god had also taught him a couple of words in a magically potent language. One of them meant open, the other meant close, and without them, the satchel would be useless. The words worked on pretty much everything, though, not just magic bags. Back when he’d been a full-time magician, Jude had whispered open password-locked computer files and had commanded wounds to close. He hesitated now, though, because using the word could unseal the protective circles of the summoning spell along with the door, a door he wasn’t even sure he wanted to open.
He explained this option and his reticence to use it to Regal, who shrugged.
“This magic word of yours that’ll open any door, is it ‘friend’ in Elvish, by any chance?”
Jude laughed. “First Ghostbusters and now Tolkien? You might be a little bit of a nerd, Queens.”
She grinned. “How else do you think a good little Catholic girl gets mixed up in all this occult shit? Little Regal Sloan wanted dragons and fairies to be real so bad, she went a little nuts trying to find them. We can’t all be miraculous bastards like you. Some of us had to break some rules to get here.” Her grin faded, and she was suddenly very far away. It occurred to Jude that in all the time he’d known her, they’d always been in the moment. Some lesson about magic or some problem Mourning had been hired to fix. He felt like he knew her well, but didn’t actually know very much about her.
He knew her well enough that he saw her face shift when she came to a decision, when she hissed, “Fuck it,” and—too quick for Jude to stop her—reached across the summoning circles. Jude felt the tense knot of the spell’s protection loosen and unravel and braced himself for a reaction that didn’t come.
Regal looked almost disappointed when nothing happened, even more so when she jiggled the knob and found it locked. She managed to look sheepish when she looked over her shoulder at him. “Little help?” she asked.
When Jude tried, it turned easily and the door creaked open onto darkness. He shot Regal a look. He wanted to scold her, but with all the shit he’d pulled in the past, anything he said would be nine kinds of hypocrisy. “Let’s get this done,” he said, and stepped inside.
He breathed into his cupped palm, igniting a trickle of flame he could use as a lantern, relieved to find that this magic remained potent, too. So magic is like sex and air, he thought, don’t matter until you ain’t gettin’ any. The room revealed itself to be just as he remembered it, faded wallpaper, the card table, the creepy cat clock, but he and Regal were the only ones there. It was more than just empty; their presence felt somehow transgressive, like rifling through someone’s possessions when they weren’t home. The clock was still and silent.
As he walked farther into the room, a shudder ran through him, a flicker of ghostly figures, a flash of sound and scent. He leaned back and encountered it again, laughter and ice tinkling in a glass and cigar smoke and cinnamon. After shifting back and forth, he caught just the right angle, found that if he held himself just so, he saw shapes at the card table, Thoth and the angel immediately recognizable by their unique silhouettes and, strangely, a shape sitting in the chair he’d occupied. After a second, Jude realized that the shape in his chair was his own.
“How the hell are you doing that?” Regal asked.
“I really don’t know. It’s not on purpose. You can see it? From where you’re standing?”
“Yeah. It’s like it’s dark in here, but for just a second, the light comes on, and it’s full of people. Well, sort of people, anyway. Only they’re all frozen in place.” She pulled out her phone and, by the sound of it, took a few pictures.
“Let’s look around some more,” Jude said. “Maybe the room is—this sounds stupid—but maybe it’s trying to show us something.”
Jude moved slowly around the room, stopping every time he encountered a shiver of a moment, then shifting around until it came into focus. The first four slices of time were during the card game. He could tell that time was passing because the cat clock’s hands kept jumping ahead. In each moment, Jude waited for the artificial shutter noises of the camera on Regal’s phone to stop before moving on to the next. The fifth came when Jude was almost to the other side of the card table, and it captured the instant when he’d been forced to show his hand, the laughter among the gods, the fear on his own face. Jude didn’t linger.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Regal said.
“Yeah?” Jude could tell by the tone of her voice that the unnatural quiet of the room was getting to her, so he let her talk, even though he didn’t really think this was a good time to get distracted. In all honesty, he was glad she’d broken the silence.
“We keep calling them gods, but they’re not. Not all of them, I mean. Sure, Thoth is a god. Legba is too, I guess. But an angel? Christ on a bender, a vampire? He’s not a god. He’s a goddamn monster.”
“Look at it this way: you’ve got this . . . being, right? It’s got the power to change the world around it. Not like other people; this guy can change the rules. What do you call that?”
She made a noncommittal grunt. “Neo? Superman?”
“Sure. If he’s a good guy, he’s a hero. If he’s a bad guy, he’s a monster. That’s a little morally relativistic for my tastes, but just for the sake of argument.”
“I know you’re talking bullshit when you start pulling out the ACT vocabulary.”
“Not bullshit,” he said. “Bastard son of a god, remember? I’ve done my homework.” Jude stopped talking for a second, shifting around, thinking he’d seen a flicker of the card game. After a few tries, he moved on and picked up where he left off. “Okay, so take Hercules. He ends up on Olympus with the other gods, but he wasn’t born one. Just the power to be a hero. That’s the only real difference between your average person on the street and a hero or a monster: power. And if a hero or a monster’s got the stones to proclaim, ‘I’m a god’—”
Regal chuckled and muttered the “Ray, if someone asks you if you’re a god” quote, which Jude pretended not to hear.
“—and not get smacked down, and he’s got the juice to live longer than anyone who remembered him when he wasn’t a god . . . well, guess what? That’s the recipe for godhood, at least as far as gods with the little ‘g’ are concerned. Vampires just happen to be monstrous, shithead death gods, that’s all.”
“That’s really all it takes to be divine?”
Jude shrugged.
“Well, goddamn, sign me up. I can be the goddess of drunk texts and regrettable hookups.”
“You’re skipping the fine print. Being a god means becoming the personification of an idea, but it also means that’s all you’ll ever be. Like an actor getting typecast, only it goes on for centuries.”
“Spooky. But don’t you mean it goes on forever?”
Jude pressed his lips together. “Everything dies eventual
ly, Queens,” he said. He’d nearly reached the other side of the room, stood next to Dodge’s chair, now. “Even gods.”
When the final moment came into focus, the stink of blood filled the room in a wave so sudden and powerful that Jude whirled around, certain they’d been ambushed by the vampire Scarpelli. When he moved, though, the smell vanished along with the rest of the scene. Dread climbed up his spine. He eased back into the right position, and the stench returned, along with its source, Dodge, slumped face-first onto the table, a dark, sticky stain spreading across the green felt.
“Christ,” Regal muttered. “Don’t get any deader’n that.”
Jude didn’t answer, just let her take her grisly pictures, and then he moved back toward the door, back through time: Dodge murdered; Dodge still alive and Jude’s blank cards on the table; the game rewinding until he stood back in that first moment, with Dodge still shuffling the first hand. Something about the whole situation tugged at him, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
“What a waste,” Regal said.
“How do you mean?”
“We’ve got everything we need right here. If we could see the seconds we wanted instead of these random ones, we’d have the murder happening right in front of us.”
And there it was. Not what she’d said about the moments being random; the longer he spent in Dodge’s place, the more he felt that the seconds had been deliberately chosen to show him something specific. No, what sparked a connection in Jude’s mind was her comment about everything being in this room.