by Bryan Camp
Opal reached Lafitte’s—a bar housed in a former blacksmith’s shop once owned by the famous pirate brothers that gave the place its name—without any complications, but Jude waited outside for a few minutes just to be sure, scanning the skies as well as the streets. The building itself was a squat shape of crumbling plaster and exposed brick on the corner of Bourbon and St. Phillip, three storm-shuttered doorways gaping open in the summer air. Inside the darkness did nothing to relieve the heat; low ceilings without overhead light fixtures made it stuffy and cramped as an attic. The jukebox blared over the noise of a crowd that hadn’t yet gathered, because despite the heat and the gloom—or maybe because of it—this place would be spilling out into the street in a few hours.
Jude pulled off the mask before he approached the table where Opal sat, staring down at her cell phone and scowling. It came off with a tearing, clenching sensation, like duct tape with teeth, and—if the payment was anything like the last time he’d used the mask—every night this week he’d be visited by a nightmare of pulling his own face off millimeter by agonizing millimeter . . . nightmares he couldn’t wake from until he’d completed the ritual.
Magic always had a cost.
He pushed the consequences to the back of his mind and forced a grin, clearing his throat and shuffling his feet so Opal would notice him. He was glad for the darkness and the noise, since it would help keep their conversation private, but it also meant he’d startle her if he wasn’t careful. She looked up at him and, still obviously a little pissed at him, struggled not to smile.
“Buy you a beer?” he asked.
“A beer?” Opal said, incredulous at the suggestion, offended even. “Jude, I am surprised at you. I am a lady. I was taught never to allow such a vile substance into the temple of my body.” Opal’s tendency to drop into the cadences of old money New Orleans, like she was auditioning for the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, had endeared her to Jude, especially since he knew she’d once lived that life and had walked away from it long ago. The normalcy of it, of her, was reassuring, and he felt his forced grin relax into something more genuine. “I only drink bourbon of the highest quality, and I only drink it neat,” she said, “especially when a gentleman is buying.”
Jude took one last survey of their fellow patrons as he made his way to the bar. A couple of local drunks murmured to each other at the corner of the bar, sweating as much as the bottles of Abita each of them clutched. The bartender was a white guy, young and clean-cut in a college student sort of way. A pair of couples—three white women and one black guy—took pictures of themselves outside, posing with their go cups as though alcohol on the sidewalk was hilariously transgressive. Aside from them, he and Opal had the place to themselves. He nodded at the bartender and ordered a top-shelf bourbon for her and a rum and Coke for himself.
Jude let his mind wander as the young man made their drinks, realizing that now that he’d gotten here, he had to think of a way to get Opal to show him what he needed to know without scaring the shit out of her. Belief in tarot and mysticism was one thing. Telling her that magic spells really worked was something else entirely.
In the quiet of the cathedral after Hē had left, trying to digest what the angel had told him, Jude had come to a few conclusions. First, that despite what Hē said, it seemed to Jude that some of the other gods at the table thought he had the potential to win. The vampire seemed ready to bribe him into quitting, and something else—either one of the other gods or something working on their behalf—was stalking him, murdering people around him, trying to influence his fate. You didn’t go to all that trouble for someone who wasn’t a threat. The second conclusion was that Dodge might have had a similar purpose in mind behind inviting Jude to the game in the first place, that the fortune god had hoped to use Jude to stack the deck, only to have his trick turned on him. The third thing Jude had realized—and the reason he’d sought out Opal—was that if he had any chance of surviving the end of this fucking game, he really ought to learn how to play.
By the time Jude made it to her table, he had a drink in each hand and nothing to give Opal but the truth. He searched his satchel for his paperback book on tarot, slipped his cards out from between the pages—THE MAGICIAN and the upside-down HERMIT—and dropped them next to her glass. “Mean anything to you?” he asked. She studied them for a moment, then pulled her glasses down to her eyes and peered more closely at it. She looked up at him, an uncomfortable smirk wrinkling the folds in the corner of her mouth.
“You yanking my chain?” she asked. “You know I take this stuff serious, right?”
“I know,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. “What makes you think I’m not?”
Her lips pursed. “They’ve got your face, Jude. If this ain’t a joke—and it’s not a funny one, for the record—I’m not sure what you want from me.”
With one fingertip, Jude spun the HERMIT card around, so Opal could see the way the image insisted on being upside down relative to THE MAGICIAN. He waited for her reaction, a little bit of fear mixed with a lot of disbelief, before he did it again and again. She started to speak, and then her lips split in a wide, nervous grin. “How did you do that?” she asked.
“See for yourself.”
She picked up the card, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, as if trying to separate it from a twin. She tilted it back and forth, expecting some sort of hologram printing. Brow furrowed, she turned it over. The image shifted, and she cursed and dropped the card as if it had burned her. She checked the room to see if any of the other bar patrons were paying attention to them, cleared her throat, opened her mouth to say something, and then snatched her glass from the table. She finished her bourbon in two swallows, grimacing.
“That trick you do with lost things,” she said. “That’s not a trick, is it?” Jude frowned and shook his head. “Christ,” Opal said. She reached over the table and picked up Jude’s rum and Coke, drained it, too.
It was cruel of him, perhaps, to expose her to his world like this, but he didn’t have time for a more gradual reveal. He’d always had a feeling she was capable of handling the truth. She was a soothsayer, after all. “You okay?” he asked, less out of concern and more to get her talking again.
“Sure. I’m great. Economy’s in a nosedive, we’re desperate for a Road Home check that’s never gonna come, the mayor’s a thief, and the governor’s a monster. Not a single damn part of life makes sense anymore, why not throw in a little—” She waved at him and the cards, at a loss for words.
Jude laughed. “Magic. You can say the word; it won’t bite.”
“No,” Opal said. “No, I don’t think I will.” She toyed with her glass, staring at the few drops of bourbon left as if she’d find an explanation there. “What is it you want from me?”
Jude arranged the cards next to one another, tapping the table with the flats of his hands. “I need to understand what these mean, how they can be used to reveal a person’s destiny.”
Opal clicked her tongue and shook a finger at him. “Don’t show me real-life hoodoo and then talk like a tourist. Tarot doesn’t do that. It can’t. That’s not the point. Reading the cards is about understanding your position in life, your desires, the obstacles between the two. Not about predicting the future.”
“What if I told you that in the right hands, they can do just that?”
Opal took a long, deep breath. She glanced down at the cards, and then looked away, like they were shameful somehow. Obscene. Her lips tightened into a thin line. “I guess I’d tell you to find somebody with the right hands,” she said. “Shit. You know so much, why don’t you do it?”
“Not my gift,” he said.
She was close, Jude could feel it. She had the ability, the unusual perspective on the world that would let her see things others would refuse to acknowledge. Some people were born with that vision; some had it thrust upon them by events traumatic or miraculous. She just had to recognize it, to trust that the whisper in the back of
her mind was truth, not irreverence or madness.
“Let’s try this another way. Can I use your cards?”
She lifted an eyebrow, but took the cloth-wrapped tarot deck out of her purse and set it on the table. Jude flipped through it, searching for the only hand from the card game he could remember, the one Dodge had played, the figures bearing Regal’s face. The Queens of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins, and the High Priestess—Regal in white robes and an odd hat, two pointed curves and a sphere in the center, sitting between two columns, one white and one black. Jude fanned them out in front of Opal, face-down. “Close your eyes,” he said. Opal did so, but not without letting out a short, frustrated noise. Jude reached across the table and pressed the pad of his thumb to the center of her forehead, as though blessing or baptizing her, which, in a way, he was. He spoke the arcane word that Dodge had taught him, the word that meant open, and felt something shift within her mind. Opal shuddered and moaned softly, a dreaming sound.
Jude turned the cards face-up and told Opal to open her eyes.
“They’re in the wrong order,” she said, and then pressed her fingers against her lips, holding them closed. As though she’d said something she shouldn’t have.
“Go ahead,” Jude said, keeping his voice low, soothing. Hypnotic. “Tell me what you see.”
Timid, hesitant, Opal shuffled the cards around, so that they ran, left to right, Coins, Swords, High Priestess, Wands, and Cups. Exactly the order Dodge had played them, when they bore Regal’s face. Opal ran her fingertips across the surface of THE QUEEN OF COINS, like a blind woman reading Braille. The card depicted a crowned woman seated on a throne surrounded by fertile growth, looking down at the huge coin decorated with a pentacle that she cradled in her arms. “The first card is the past,” Opal said, unsure of herself, a child just learning to read. “A woman of power relying on the strength of another. That’s what the coin represents, and why she looks at it with sadness.”
Jude had to work to keep his breathing even. That described the Regal he had known before the storm exactly. She’d had her own abilities, her own schooling, but throughout their partnership she’d often deferred to him, to his innate sense of lost things. He’d always believed she was capable of much more.
Opal turned her attention to the next card, THE QUEEN OF SWORDS. Another seated royal woman, this one in profile, billowing clouds in the background. She held a sword in one hand, its point aimed straight up, her other hand held out as if welcoming someone to speak, a gesture that didn’t match the stern expression on her face. “The second card is for what is. It shows her place in the world. She has had to arm and defend herself. She has come into her own power. The storm clouds show how difficult this self-reliance has been.” Opal seemed to gain confidence as she went, though her voice grew hoarse, as if the experience was taking something out of her as well. “Third is for conflict, for the greatest obstacle in her path.”
THE HIGH PRIESTESS had been inverted, like Jude’s own version of THE HERMIT. Looking closer at the card, Jude saw that this Regal wore a cross on her chest, not a crucifix, with the Christ figure on it and taller than it was wide, but a cruciform, two perpendicular lines of equal length joined at the center. She held a scroll and a crescent moon lay at her feet. “She is her own greatest challenge,” Opal continued, her cadence slow and distant. “A title stolen or a destiny avoided. A choice she did not make and a choice she will come to regret.” Opal’s hand trembled over the card, as if she were trying to block it from her view. Not wanting to break the flow of her thoughts, Jude turned it over for her. She closed her eyes briefly and let out a long breath before continuing. When she spoke again, though, her words were clipped, strained.
She couldn’t take much more of this.
THE QUEEN OF WANDS held a staff in one hand, a blooming sunflower in the other. At the foot of her throne sat a black cat, its sapphire eyes closed to thin, menacing slits. “The fourth card tells what must be done. She must gain mastery over the order of thought”—here she touched the staff—“and the chaos of nature, of emotion”—here she touched the sunflower. “The black cat is a symbol of Venus in its sinister aspect, but it is unclear. Is this her ally? A harbinger of the conflict to come? I . . . I don’t know.”
She shoved that card away and pressed her fingertips against the final one, THE QUEEN OF CUPS. Another throne, this one beside a swift flowing river, another queen, who stared intently at an ornate chalice, twin handles curling up to its peak, where its lid rose above the queen’s head, its contents sealed away. “What is to come,” Opal said, her voice a panicked hiss. “Neither victory nor defeat. Power unused. Abilities locked away. Betrayer? Betrayed? Would she choose differently if she knew? Why—” She tried to say more, but her voice failed her, tears streaking down her cheeks. Jude grabbed her head with his hand, spoke the word for close.
Opal slumped back in her chair, drawing deep, rapid breaths, as if she’d just run a race. Her face was flushed, eyes wide and still gushing. Jude took a quick glance around, saw that their conversation had gone unnoticed, despite the tight quarters. The drunks were barely aware of their own words, much less their surroundings. The bartender had his back to them, absorbed in his cell phone. Thankfully, Opal was the whisper-truth-in-a-creepy-voice kind of oracle, not the thrashing-around-and-yelling-in-tongues version. When he turned back to her, Opal’s face was split by a wide smile.
“Opal?”
“That was . . . incredible,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything so clearly, never knew things so surely. Is that how you— Is that how the world looks to you?”
Jude grinned, but it was a rueful one. “No,” he said. “Far from it. That gift is yours alone. I put it away for now, but it’s a part of you. It will come back from time to time, if you want it to, if you trust in it.”
“If I want it? Oh, yes. I want it very much.” She looked at her phone, flipped it open. “I hope I helped. If you ever need . . .” She paused, chuckling a little at the eagerness in her voice. “Well, you know where to find me. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go home and make Sharon a very happy woman.”
“Before you go,” Jude said, “let me give you a little something for your trouble.” He touched a finger to the doubloon in his pocket and reached into his satchel. The past few years, over $200,000 had gone missing from NOPD evidence lockers. The small envelope he pulled out of his satchel was stuffed with about five grand of those lost thousands. He slid it across the table to her. Her polite “Oh, I couldn’t” fell silent when she saw how much was in there. “You and Sharon should take that trip up to Seattle to see her folks you always talk about,” Jude said. “You should leave tonight.”
Before she could say or ask anything else, Jude was out of his chair and out the bar, already wondering if Regal would be waiting for him when he got back to his apartment.
And if she’d bring his shadow along with her.
On the long walk home—the shadow thankfully absent—Jude worked his exhausted mind, trying to put things in their places. The first card was for who you were. Jude had been a magician once, trained by Eli Constant in the arcane arts, though the magic had always come too easily to him for Jude to really put much effort into his training. He and Eli hadn’t parted on happy terms. Then Jude had started working for Mourning, and then the storm. Jude hadn’t been anything resembling a magician for years.
The second card was for the present. When traffic forced him to stop on the sidewalk and wait for the light to change, Jude pulled out the paperback and flipped through it until he found the entry for THE HERMIT. An old man leaned on a staff with one hand and held a lantern in the other, looking down from a mountaintop. Instead of a flame, the lantern held a star. This card represented wisdom, the attainment of knowledge and purpose, a journey undertaken for greater understanding. Reversed, it meant stagnation, refusal to seek answers, an immature turning inward. Jude stuffed the book back into his satchel.
Even his destiny was busting his balls.
He couldn’t say it was wrong, though. He’d fallen apart after the storm. Sure, his gift had turned on him, but he’d been a disaster looking for a place to happen for years before that. His second card was as accurate as the first.
Thanks to Opal, he knew what to expect from the next three cards. The obstacle in his path, what he must do, and his ultimate fate. He didn’t need divination to know the problem he faced: the game, Dodge’s murder, the shadow that stalked him. He was a little curious how all that could be represented on one card. Maybe that was why his cards were taking so long to reveal themselves, not the paradox Hē believed he faced.
All of it whirled around in his mind, Regal and gods and cards and shadows and fate. Jude touched the coin in his jeans pocket and rummaged through his satchel as he walked, searching his various potions and amulets, hoping for some sort of edge. He had magics to make him invisible, or strong, or that would let him leave his body so he could explore the city without endangering himself, but the costs were just too high. Becoming invisible required him to be naked, which would leave him vulnerable in more ways than one. The strength was only a temporary thing and would weaken him twofold once it passed. If he left his body, he had no guarantee of finding his way back.
Other magics were no use at all—a locket made out of the scales of a river dragon that would keep him from drowning, a cardinal’s feather that would enable him to speak and understand the language of birds, a powder that changed fire to water or water to fire.
Then Jude’s searching fingers found a pearl with some particular magical qualities, and when he got to his street, looking up at the lights on in his apartment, he had an idea, a way to turn at least part of his situation to his advantage.