The City of Lost Fortunes

by Bryan Camp

  Regal was already on her feet, shrugging into a leather jacket and wearing a feral grin. “Jude Dubuisson,” she said, “you might be a Trickster and you might be an asshole. But never let it be said that you don’t know how to show a girl a good time.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  In India they were called vetālas. The Greeks knew them as striges. To the ancient Norsemen, they were draugr, the “after-goers.” They exist in every culture, always waiting in the night when men are at their weakest. China, Malaysia, Africa, Romania. Jiang Shi, langsuir, adze, strigoi. Vampire. They are the fear of death given shape and will. They are shadows and teeth and hunger. Because they do not know pain, they cannot be harmed. Because they do not hope, they have no weakness. Because they do not live, they cannot die. They are the blood-drinkers, they are the reason you fear the darkness.

  Regal’s enthusiasm waned considerably during the short drive Uptown to the address Scarpelli had given him, as Jude explained his more-of-a-trick-than-a-plan to her.

  “I’d like to revise my previous assessment,” she said. “You’re not half-a-Trickster. You’re batshit, balls-out, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony insane.”

  “See you at the crossrooooaaads,” Jude sang.

  Regal snorted. “Not exactly the theme song you want for rolling up against a vampire, especially when your quote-unquote plan involves us immediately splitting up. Haven’t you seen, like, any TV show ever?”

  “His attention will be entirely on me. I’ll see to that. Provided you weren’t just blowing smoke when you said you could be invisible when you wanted to be.”

  She waved a hand at him. “Practically invisible. But yeah, it’ll be enough for what you’ve got in mind. I’m more concerned about your escape hatch. Please tell me you’ve got something more solid than ‘Please don’t eat me’ prepared.”

  He did, in fact, but had neither the time nor the inclination to explain. He opened up the satchel and took out a rosary that an Irish nun named Hyacinth McQuillan had lost nearly a century before—an ornate artifact with marble beads and a silver crucifix—studying it for a moment before slipping it around his neck.

  Regal groaned and muttered something pessimistic.

  Rosary probably won’t help, he thought, but it can’t hurt. Besides, this thunderbolt in my bag is the ultimate exit strategy. “The first rule of being a Trickster,” he said, since he didn’t have time to explain the thunderbolt to her, “is to always leave yourself an out. If things turn ugly, I’ll give Scarpelli what he wants. I’ll tell him I’ll work for him. That option sucks—no pun intended—but it’s better than the alternative. But it won’t come to that.”

  She worried a thumbnail with her teeth. “I’m just still a little hazy on how you’re going to talk him into doing what you want.”

  Jude touched his doubloon with one hand, trusting Regal’s need to watch the road to keep her from noticing, and reached into the satchel. He pulled out the pearl that had sparked his idea for this whole trap. There was something odd about it, some deeper mystery his affinity for lost things was trying to push him toward, but he ignored it and, letting go of the connection to his gift, held the pearl up where Regal could see it.

  “With this,” he said. “Hold it under your tongue, and everything you say becomes incredibly convincing. Spells you speak become supercharged. It’s got a nasty side effect, though. I only used it once, and when I spat it out, I lost the ability to pronounce a couple of words.”

  “Lost the ability? What does that even mean?”

  “Supposively,” Jude said.

  Regal shot him a look, saw the expression on his face, and sucked her teeth. “Yeesh,” she said. “What possessed you to make a thing like that?”

  “Didn’t make it,” he said. “Obviously someone must have lost it, because I found it”—he patted the leather of the satchel—“in here.”

  “Wait, the bag finds lost things? I thought that was your—” She took one hand off the wheel and wiggled her fingers.

  “The bag doesn’t find them; it’s where lost things end up.” He slid the pearl into his pocket next to his doubloon, along with a stub of candle and a piece of chalk, and pushed the satchel out of his lap and onto the floor at his feet, suddenly wanting it out of sight for some reason. “And before you ask, I don’t know how it works, just that it does. It’s funny, you ask most people in this city about their lives, and they’ll split it up before and after the storm. Where they used to live, who they used to be. What they lost.” He risked a glance at Regal, saw that her jaw was clenching and unclenching. He looked away, watching the houses and oak trees blur by as they drove down St. Charles. “But not me. I’d screwed things up way before the flood. Before I started reaching into that bag, life was simple, you know? My biggest concerns were making sure I saw Kermit Ruffins at Vaughan’s on Thursdays. Crawfish boils and Saints games. I had a bunch of non-magical friends, a crappy part-time job at a coffee shop way Uptown on Oak, another one at a bar in Mid-City. The magic? Working for Mourning? That was just an occasional thing, easy cash and a little taste of . . . of being special, I guess. But I got greedy. Saw a chance for power and took it. Traded a god a blank check, and this is what I got in return.” He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Decided that if he was going to trust Regal to guard his back against a vampire, he could trust her with this. “This was the favor he called in, Queens. This is why I had to show up at the card game.”

  Even though he wasn’t looking at her, he felt her shift in her seat, knew her eyes were on him. “Dodge gave you—”

  “Regal, stop. Stop the car.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re here.”

  He could tell she had more to say, but Jude was out the car as soon as she pulled over, the satchel’s strap around his shoulder and his pulse already starting to ratchet up. The address Scarpelli had given him was a gated mansion on Carrollton Avenue, a massive, gothic-looking structure that waited down a long, curved driveway protected by high hedges and floodlights. Two hundred years ago, Carrollton had been its own town a half day’s walk upriver from New Orleans, built up on the land surrounding the McCarty Plantation. The growing city had swallowed it up, though, and now it was just a street, its history reduced to a plaque by the streetcar tracks. Jude suppressed a shudder at the realization that the vampire wanted to do much the same thing to him.

  Scarpelli’s long black Cadillac, its windows tinted and its wax job fresh, was parked in the curve of the driveway by the front door. Guess he’s home, Jude thought, the faint coppery taste of blood pricking along his tongue. Scarpelli’s house and land took up most of the block between Freret and Zimpel and stretched nearly all the way from Carrollton to Short Street. Palm trees sprouted up from the manicured lawn and leaned against the tall fence of black iron bars. Jude walked along the sidewalk past the front gate while Regal circled around the back, trying to act nonchalant, certain that more than a few cameras scanned the outside of the mansion. The hedges growing against and through the fence hid him from anyone inside but blocked his view of the house as well. He paced along, feeling like one of the big cats at the zoo.

  When they met up on the far side of the house, she hadn’t found a way in either. “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “I can go right in the front, since I was invited, but—”

  “But you need me to go all ‘stealth mode.’ Think you could boost me up there?”

  Jude looked up to where she pointed. Overhead, an oak branch, thick and old, managed to curve out over the fence before its weight pulled it back toward earth. Metal rods held it high above the sidewalk, guided it away from the street. The dense canopy of the rest of the tree spread above the branch, shrouding it and the concrete beneath it in darkness. If she could reach it, she was in.

  Jude interlaced his fingers and made a stirrup, and Regal stepped into it, lunged up, put her other foot on his shoulder, and just like that, slithered up onto the branch. Let’s hope the rest of this goes so smooth, he thought.
Hissing a whisper up to Regal, he said, “Abracadabra time, don’t you think?”

  In the movies, when you draw a blade from its sheath, it makes this wicked shhhing sound so you know how badass and razor sharp it is. In real life, the sound of edged metal against leather is closer to the noise of playing cards flicking against one another, if it makes any noise at all. When Regal reached to the small of her back—a gesture he’d seen before and had thought she was going for a concealed gun—he heard the quiet snik and saw the gleam of a dagger in her hand. It was visible just long enough for him to notice that the hilt of it shone pure white, before Regal held it close to her lips, speaking a few words to it too quietly for Jude to hear, and then it, and she, vanished.

  But not entirely. The space where she’d been crouched flickered, like the air over asphalt on a hot summer day, not something he’d notice if he hadn’t already been looking right at her.

  Regal’s voice came from the branches. “Pretty spec-fucking-tacular, right? I call her Vera.”

  Jude barely kept from rolling his eyes, remembering at the last second that just because he couldn’t see her didn’t mean that she couldn’t see him. “Be careful in there. I can still kind of see you. Like—”

  “Like in Predator, right? Vera is so goddamn metal. See you on the other side.” A rustle of leaves, a flicker just barely seen, and she was gone.

  Jude felt a tremor of guilt and suspicion as he turned and made his way back to the front gate. Guilt because he’d worked this into his plot against the vampire, having sensed an artifact of some kind on Regal all the way back in St. Joe’s bar a few days ago, and he’d hoped this would force her to show him how to use it. Suspicion because it hadn’t been an alien big-game hunter he’d imagined when he’d seen Regal fade out of sight.

  To him she’d looked like a shadow.

  Jude shook those inklings away. Neither the time nor the place, Dubuisson, he thought. Vampire, remember? He pressed the pearl to his lips, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then he dropped it into his mouth and rolled it beneath his tongue. A sudden flush along his skin, coils drawing taut within his flesh, within his mind, told him that the magic had taken hold. Jude wanted something he could not name, not vengeance or retribution or anything so easily articulated as that. He knew only that Scarpelli had taken something from him, something he wanted back.

  Whatever the cost.

  He considered pressing the intercom button on the gate, but if he could catch the vampire unawares, all the better. He spoke the lock open with a word, and with the pearl fueling his magic, the gate surged out of his way so urgently that it almost yanked itself free of its track. As he made his way up the driveway, he tasted blood, a faint presence that grew stronger the closer he came to the house. He found himself tapping his hand against his thigh, realizing after a moment that he was keeping his hand as close to the doubloon in his pocket as he could, in case he needed to dive into the satchel for the thunderbolt. Like he was a gunslinger just waiting to draw. Stupid, he thought, and forced himself to stop. All the same, he kept his hand near his pocket.

  Instead of strolling through the front door, he followed a concrete path around the side of the house where Regal would have come over the fence, which led to a side door. He forced himself to keep his eyes forward, to not search the dew-covered lawn for Regal’s heat mirage flicker. Just because he couldn’t see a camera didn’t mean one wasn’t filming him. He spoke the side door open—softly, so he didn’t rip it off its hinges—and entered the cool darkness of the vampire’s lair.

  Inside, he found an unsettling sterility, the crisp, chilly air devoid of any scent, the furniture ornate and expensive but uncreased, unblemished. It looked so perfect, so un-lived-in, that Jude wouldn’t have been surprised to find price tags still attached. Paintings hung on the walls, the generic, impersonal sort of art chosen by a realtor staging a house for sale. There were no mirrors, no photographs. Silence reigned within, broken only by the hum of the air conditioning and the refrigerator. Jude tried to picture the vampire’s bloated corpse reclining in an armchair reading or lounging on the plush expensive sofa watching a Saints game, but it seemed ludicrous. The entire house—like the vampire himself—was a disguise, a shell that held no life within. Jude’s very presence was an intrusion, his sweat and his heat and his pulse an invasion of the living into the realm of the dead. Jude imagined wrecking the place, shattering the vase of artificial flowers against the wall, dancing with muddy shoes on his pristine white couch.

  The old Jude’s fuck-you grin twisted its way across his face.

  He glanced into the kitchen at the gleaming silver tower of the vampire’s fridge and imagined one of two possibilities: either it was as empty, as sterile as the rest of the house, or it was filled with a hellish assortment of whatever unfinished meals Scarpelli might consider worth saving. He decided he could live with that mystery left unsolved, and made his way deeper into the lie of a house.

  Up a set of stairs covered with carpet so thick and clean it might have never been stepped on, Jude found that a large part of the second story had been devoted to a single packed room. Rows of waist-high display cases stretched along the walls and split the room into narrow aisles lit with a dull shine of moonlight through the window high on the far wall. A suit of armor and a wooden globe crowded together in a nook that had once been a closet, the walls adorned with the thin, curved lines of cavalry swords, the straight, squat lines of flintlock rifles, their uniformity broken by the occasional odd shape of an axe head or the jagged edges of an unusual blade.

  As he crept down one of the rows, he discovered that the cases mostly held coins, some the shiny full moons of recent mintings, pockmarked by the faces of rulers both familiar and foreign, others with chipped edges and smoothed, indistinct faces, gnawed by time. Jude’s breath rasped in his own ears, amplified by his nervousness, by the silence. He felt the urge to run his hands along all of these artifacts, since they were just so much steel and silver without his magic to overwhelm him with the stories of their loss or flashes of memory from their previous owners. If this were a movie, he’d yank one of those swords free, probably an out-of-place katana, but when Jude pictured it, all he could imagine was a clatter of falling swords and spears and shattering glass, and him standing in the ruin of the vampire’s collection when Scarpelli found him.

  He turned to leave and something flickered in the corner of his eye—maybe Regal, maybe just moonlight across a polished coin—startling him. He whirled, his hands plunging into pocket and satchel for his magic and the thunderbolt, but the instant his fingertips brushed against the doubloon, a sensation of loss roiled through him with such intensity that it knocked him to his knees and drove any other thoughts from his mind. Pain and grief and guilt, more than anyone should have to bear. Gun smoke and blood and shit and the burn of barely choked-back vomit. Screams and screams and screams.

  Jude grit his teeth and forced himself to his feet, following the thread of loss across the room to its source, a wooden box about a foot long and half as wide, smooth and varnished to a slick gloss. The cover was engraved with the initials A. E. C. and a symbol Jude recognized as denoting a curse. Alphonse Elijah Constant—Eli as he preferred to be called—the magician Jude had apprenticed under in his youth. Bracing himself for what the box might contain, Jude snapped open its clasps and removed the lid. Inside, a revolver, a worn and heavy-looking chunk of steel, lay nestled in the velvet-lined depression that matched its shape, along with a round metal disk and some kind of clamp. There were spaces for six bullets: two were empty, and one had been fired already, some unusual nostalgia driving someone to keep the brass shell casing.

  He didn’t know what Eli had done to this weapon, but there was only one way to find out.

  Just touching the gun grip hurt with that mingled sensation of hot and cold that came with either scorched or frozen flesh. He forced himself past the pain, waiting for his affinity for lost things to reveal the revolver to him. There was
nothing but pain for several long breaths, and then, like a dam breaking, the entire history of the gun roared into him in a torrent.

  It was a Smith & Wesson Model 3 American, assembled in 1880 in Springfield, Massachusetts, as part of a bulk order for the U.S. Cavalry. It found its way into the hands of Joseph Wright, a thirty-year-old veteran of the Fifth United States Colored Cavalry, the son of a free woman of color and a Creole—the old kind, the descended-from-a-rich-French-dude kind of Creole—plantation owner. After the Civil War, he was assigned to another regiment and headed north, where he and the revolver met. Increasingly disgusted with the treatment of the Sioux at the orders of his superiors, he deserted his unit soon after and returned home, to New Orleans, haunted by the things he had seen and done as a soldier.

  When he was nearly mad with guilt and alcohol abuse, Joseph’s mother begged Eli Constant for aid. In a ritual that lasted three days and turned Joseph’s hair entirely white, Jude’s former teacher drew the sins of Joseph’s life as a soldier from him like lancing the infection from a boil and sealed them in the steel and wood of the instrument of his worst crimes. Doing so cursed the revolver so that it would unleash Joseph’s sin on anyone who tried to use it for violence, with dire consequences. Joseph, free of the crippling burdens of his guilt—though never from the memories of what he had done—lived to be an old man, but more importantly a peaceful man, preaching against violence and enriching many lives. In 1930 his eldest son, packing some of his father’s things in preparation for a move, lost the revolver, and it had hidden itself among other antique instruments of war for nearly a hundred years, until Jude’s magic sniffed it out.

  Jude gasped in a breath and tore his hand away from the gun, away from the coin in his pocket. He jammed the revolver back into its case and snapped the clasps shut. He wanted, desperately, to leave it there where he had found it, but it bore his teacher’s name, and it was a curse he could not, now that he knew it existed, leave free in the world. Besides, hideous and warped though it was, it was a lost thing.