by Bryan Camp
So Dodge hadn’t given him a magician’s bag after all. He’d given him a magic bag, one that held lost things.
No wonder he’d wanted it back.
Jude filed away that little nugget of information with all the other maddening puzzle pieces he hadn’t quite figured out the shape of and waited for the phone to get enough charge to wake up. When it did, it started pinging immediately, text after text from Regal, growing more and more insistent as he thumbed through them. When the vulgarities switched away from “WTF” and graduated to more creative swears, Jude quit reading them and called. She answered on the first ring.
“—ing inflamed taint of a ten-dollar whore have you been, Dubuisson? You know how much dog shit I gotta swallow with a smile if you turn up—are you laughing?”
He was, turned out. A knot in his chest that he hadn’t really acknowledged had loosened when he heard Regal’s voice, despite the fact that she’d been cursing at him. Maybe because of it. Tommy and the voodoo shop girl were still chains around his neck, but until the feeling had left him, he hadn’t realized how awful being responsible for Regal’s death had felt. It wasn’t a reaction he could explain, so he didn’t try, just told her that it was good to hear from her.
“Sure, whatever. So how did the funeral go? Legba show up?”
“He did. They all did, in fact, but it wasn’t Legba I ended up talking to. It was Scarpelli.”
“The vampire?” She faked like she barely restrained herself from vomiting.
“That’s him. He offered—well, insisted really—on giving me a ride home and gave me some creepy sales pitch about coming to work for him.”
Regal made a quiet incredulous noise.
“What?”
“Seems awfully fucking considerate of him, given the fact that you basically took a big steaming dump right in the middle of their magical poker evening. Figured he’d be pissed.”
“Surprised me, too. But he was actually glad for the way things went down.” He explained how the vampire had suggested that Jude had done something clever, played some kind of trick, and how he’d figured out that what he’d actually done was play a hand that represented his own fate. From there he told her about not being able to reach her and deciding to go see his mother, finding the strange mural depicting the past few days of his life, with its stalking shadows and the streetcar of the dead. He also told her how the door to the card game had trapped him, that his tarot deck poker hand now consisted of two printed cards and three blank ones. Right as he was about to tell her the rest of it, about Dodge and the doubloon and having his gift back, two things occurred to him at the very same time.
First, that Regal was acting strange. Throughout his recounting of his experiences since they’d parted ways in front of the voodoo shop, she hadn’t interrupted him or cursed once, just kept using those monosyllabic nothing words that you use when you’re encouraging the other person to continue speaking or not giving them your full attention. Like she was writing down everything he said or, worse, like someone else was listening in. He was forced to admit that their whole recent partnership had been off just like this conversation: him telling her what he knew, and her giving him nothing in return. So he kept the return of his gift, such as it was, to himself.
The second realization he spoke out loud when Regal prompted him to keep going, the silence drawing out too long as his mind spun. “The game’s not over,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s just like you said. We’re in the middle of a poker game. A batshit weird one that uses people’s fates, sure, but it still has rules. If I played my own fate, and my cards are slowly revealing themselves—”
“Then your destiny is still being written or whatever you wanna call it—”
“And the hand is still being played. Because until my future is decided, I could be holding the destiny equivalent of a royal flush.”
She whistled between her teeth. “That means . . . Christ on a bender, Jude. You might win.”
Jude chuckled. “Don’t celebrate yet. Could be just a busted straight.”
She snorted. “This is your future we’re talking about,” she said, playful and cynical. Then her tone shifted to one of quiet alarm. “Oh, dick biscuits. The shadow in your mom’s paintings. It’s trying to steer you.”
“What?”
“We’ve been working with the theory that the fortune god got his ticket punched because of his cards, right? But what if it was to rain shit down on you?” He could practically see her pacing, waving her hands as she talked, as she worked it out in her head. “What if one of these other gods is trying to influence your fate, and thus—”
“My cards.”
The rage came out of nowhere, like the storms in summer. He punched the dashboard, hard enough to crack something, and it felt good, so he did it again. He didn’t even realize he’d screamed until he heard Regal shouting his name. It wasn’t enough that he’d been yanked out of his quiet, miserable retirement and forced into this, not enough that he’d had his magic stolen right out from under his nose, not enough that he was so dangerous to the few people in his life that he might as well be radioactive.
Now some asshole deity was stacking the goddamn deck.
After a few minutes of clenching the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles cracked, sucking in deep breaths through gritted teeth, he calmed down enough to pick the phone up off the passenger seat, to tell Regal that he was all right.
“Road rage much?”
At her words, all the anger went out of him, replaced by something cold and hard and sly. “I need you to do something for me, Queens,” he said. “Can you check on Leon? If that shadow’s hunting me like we think, he might be next on its list. I’d go myself, but I don’t want to put him in danger if he isn’t already, you know?”
She was quiet for just a heartbeat too long. Like he’d made a chess move she hadn’t anticipated. “Sure, no problem. You want me to check on your mom, too? If you’re being follow—”
“No. I thought of that, too. Sent her somewhere safe.” Which was only kind of a lie. He hadn’t sent her anywhere, because the abbey was the safest place for her. Even if his shadow had managed to follow or track him there, sacred ground was no joke when it came to the supernatural. On top of that, he’d put up all kinds of wards and protections over the years. If anything managed to get to her there, it was so powerful that Jude had no hope of standing against it anyway. “Besides,” he said, as much for himself as for Regal, “she can take care of herself.”
“Right. My—uh, folks always said she had a lot of juice.”
“Your folks?”
“No, just folks. You know, people like us.”
People like Mourning, Jude thought. He made a noise that could have been agreement.
“So what will you be doing while I’m running your errands? Gonna lay low?”
“Thought I’d go back by the voodoo shop and look around,” Jude said. “Figure if I can’t shake loose whatever’s following me, maybe I can at least try to figure out what it is.”
She laughed. “And besides, it’s not like you can do any more damage there.” As soon as she said it, she sucked at her teeth, like she wished she could take it back. “Too bad you don’t have that magic touch of yours anymore, huh?”
“Yeah,” Jude said. “Too bad. Let’s meet up after.” He hung up.
There it was, an actual lie. Not withholding the truth, not selecting his words carefully or keeping his theories to himself, but outright deception. On the surface, it didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t he trust her? Why would she be working against him? He couldn’t even be sure that he wasn’t just being paranoid, that he might’ve been out of the game for too long and couldn’t read things clearly. All the little clues kept adding up, though. That sudden burst of anger when they’d been drawing the summoning circle. The fact that she’d known where he would be every time someone around him ended up dead. The way she kept treating him like an angle she was
working, not a partner. Trying to get him to tell her where his mother lived, when she knew he’d always kept that a secret.
The fact that she’d just called his outburst “road rage” when she knew he couldn’t drive.
He pulled out his English-German guidebook and gave the Porsche some new directions, telling it to drop him off at the edge of the Quarter and then park itself illegally somewhere. The Shem that animated it would only last another couple of hours at most. With any luck it would get towed. He reached into the pocket that held his coin. His gift. He’d go where he told Regal and see what he could see. At a touch, his magic swept back into him. He put his hand into the satchel, searching, finding the smooth, thrumming power of the thunderbolt.
And if his shadow turned up where he’d told Regal he was going? Well . . . he had an answer for that, too.
Chapter Ten
Every world is a circle with a center, a wheel with a hub on which it turns. Sometimes it is a feature of the natural world—a mountain or a tree. In China they feel the world spin where Mount Kunlun pierces the sky, just as the Lakota revere Inyan Kara in the Black Hills, and as the Anangu of Australia regard Uluru rock. Buddha found Enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree; Odin hung upon an ash named Yggdrasil; and the Serpent wound itself around the Tree of Knowledge in Eden. Where the natural world did not provide a focus, they built one: pillars and obelisks, towers and shrines. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, of Khufu at Giza. The Umbilicus Urbis Romae in Rome, Kaaba in Mecca, the Tower in Babel. Every world has its center, its sacred place where Earth meets Heaven, the point around which everything revolves. Places of Power. Of Truth. Of Sanctuary.
Jude walked the few blocks to Celeste’s shop through the last drizzle of the passing storm. He kept his guard up, hurrying his pace and watching the shadows. Watching for more than just the stalker from his mother’s paintings.
This part of the Quarter closed down at night once the tourists flocked to the bars and clubs on Bourbon Street. The gas lanterns were few and cast little light, and the thundercloud still overhead added to the darkness, turning the charming, inviting stretch of old homes and wrought-iron fences into a back alley, an abandoned tunnel. A travel brochure photograph in the daylight, an ink sketch from a crime novel at night.
The city wasn’t always a safe place, especially since the storm, and no amount of divine parentage made Jude bulletproof. For all her culture and jazz and cuisine, New Orleans also had poverty, addiction, and desperation in equal measure. She was a great place to find yourself, and a terrible place to get lost.
A reality punctuated by the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the voodoo shop’s threshold.
After a deep breath, trying to ready himself for what he would find, Jude unlocked the door with a word, ducked under the tape, and stepped inside. The shades were drawn, so the front room of the shop was even darker than the street outside. He reached out without thinking, found the light switch, and flipped it. For a moment, the room didn’t make sense. It was simply too surreal how normal everything looked, as though nothing particularly unusual had occurred. He’d expected mayhem, but the books remained on their shelves, the herbs and fetishes and candles in their glass cases. The scent of medicinal teas and oils and spices hung in the air, nothing sinister. The bell still tinkled above him when he slid the door shut, a crisp, merry sound.
The magazine the girl behind the counter had been reading still lay sprawled open, as though she had just walked away from it. But the girl herself was missing, replaced by a dark stain on the wood floor, by the numbered plastic placards left behind by the coroner.
Jude assumed the blood belonged to the girl in his mother’s mural, anyway. There was only one way to be sure.
Jude went down on one knee next to a rack of postcards with cute voodoo doll cartoon characters, took the doubloon out of his pocket, and unwrapped it, then pressed his fingertips to the stain on the floor. His gift surged through him and showed him all that the girl—Renaissance Raines, Renai to her friends—had lost.
Gone was the impulsive decision to enroll next fall in an art school in Savannah, gone was the sense of rightness that came when she dropped out and came home. Gone was the memory of the one class she’d really enjoyed—graphic design—and the lucky break of a part-time job at a local website startup; gone were a series of promotions and job offers, a career in web design. Gone were the first awkward fumblings of romance between her and a journalism intern, gone was the passionate, doomed affair she had with a Puerto Rican barista in the few months she and the intern, who’d become a sportswriter, were split up. Gone was the bittersweet experience of holding her mother’s hand through the last weeks of cancer, the pain of her mother’s passage, the warmth of her mother’s final words, that she was proud of the woman Renai had become. Gone were children and friendships, lovers and rivals. Years of movies and books and makeup sex and looking up into starlight and calling in sick to binge-watch television shows and overhearing a teenager listening to a song she hadn’t thought of in years while standing in line at the DMV and Mardi Gras parades and extravagant meals at Commander’s Palace and cold Popeyes on a hungover Sunday morning and Jazz Fest after Jazz Fest after Jazz Fest.
She had all of it taken from her, the entirety of the life she was supposed to live, and kneeling there on the bloodstained floor, Jude saw it through her eyes, heard what she heard, knew what she knew.
Saw the moment she lost it all.
She had just come from the back room, where she’d made sure the lights were turned off, the back door locked. She’d already flipped the sign on the front door and pulled the shades closed. All that was left was to count up what was left in the register, adjust the tally in the spiral-bound notebook under the counter, and she would be done for the night. She had her headphones in, the rippling piano and warbling sax and the smooth, smooth voice of Sunnyland Slim, an old blues singer who was warning her that the devil was a busy man. Something—a noise outside, a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye—made Renai stop counting, pause the song, remove the earbuds. Her pulse ratcheted up, the primate part of her brain leaping into fight-or-flight response over what her rational brain told her was probably nothing. She squinted at the door, saw that she hadn’t locked it like she’d thought.
Renai was halfway across the room when a shadow shifted across the wall and knocked her to the ground. As she fell, her MP3 player went flying out of her hand, and in the confusion of the moment, her biggest fear was that it would break, just as something sharp and cold sliced across her throat, as she tried to scream and her mouth filled with blood. Renai hit the floor face-down, struggling but pinned, unable to breathe. Her last thought in this world was that she had forgotten to blow out the votive candles.
Jude fell to the floor as well, the connection to Renai’s loss severing when his fingers left her bloodstain, though he gasped in quick panicked breaths that didn’t give him any air, like a fish flopping on a riverbank. Eventually—eyes watering, throat raw, heart pounding—he calmed himself enough to force a long, slow breath out, drew in a deep, ragged lungful. For a while, all he could do was lie on his back and suck in oxygen. The only thing that kept him from weeping was the roaring, inarticulate rage that filled his thoughts, the injustice of what had been done to her.
When he could, Jude rose to his feet. Renai’s MP3 player still lay where it had landed when it flew from her hand: on a bookshelf across the room. The police had taken her crappy pay-as-you-go flip phone when they’d collected the rest of her things, but this—a device full of pirated music she couldn’t transfer to anything newer—they’d missed. Jude picked it up, wrapped the headphones around the slim device, and slid it into his satchel. From his last lingering connection to her lost life, Jude knew where her parents lived. When this was all over, he’d sneak into the Raineses’ house when they were away, leave the MP3 player somewhere her folks were sure to find it. Maybe listening to the songs she’d loved would help them feel her there wit
h them, if only for a time.
It wouldn’t come close to making up for their daughter’s death, of course. Nothing could, not even vengeance.
A sense of conviction rolled over him, that his suspicions about the card game and his mother’s paintings had just been proven correct. Whatever had killed Renai had killed Tommy and Dodge, and it had done so because of Jude. He didn’t yet know who, or what, or why, but he owed it to them all to find out.
So he could take from the shadow what it had taken from them.
When Jude left the voodoo shop, he stepped out into the street and the sensation of being observed. He couldn’t just shrug it off as a lingering effect of experiencing Renai’s last moments; this was too potent, too immediate. The gaze touching him felt cold and dark in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air or photons of light. Despite the sweat trickling across his skin, he shivered, expected his breath to plume when he exhaled. Despite the flames dancing in the gas lanterns overhead, he could barely make out the other side of the narrow one-lane street. As he stood there, it grew more focused, more intense. It could only be one thing: the shadow from his mother’s painting was here, now—watching him.
And it was coming closer.
Jude fled a few blocks down to Bourbon Street and then slowed, threading his way through the crowd until he’d crossed a couple of streets, and turned onto Orleans toward the river. Every step, every turn, he expected to get snatched off his feet by a sharp-fingered hand made of shadow and malevolence. Every moment he wasn’t felt like a small miracle. A quick glance behind him and above showed no signs of pursuit, but the perception continued. He hurried down the wet and broken cobblestones of Pirate’s Alley. His pulse refused to slow. Unable to shake the sensation that a predator was right behind him, he went for the nearest sanctuary he could think of: St. Louis Cathedral. Another few dozen steps carried him through the sparse crowd in Jackson Square and to the front door.