by Bryan Camp
Dodge tipped his glass back, draining it, and then his smile turned cold and hard. “You know we ain’t done yet, right?”
“Yeah. I had a feeling.” Dodge was, after all, as much a Trickster as anybody else in the room. Being dead didn’t change that. The only thing separating Dodge from the others, apparently, was that Dodge hadn’t underestimated Jude. “So what’s your play?”
All illusions of coarseness or obtuseness smoothed away. “I can’t move on if I’m still me.” He tapped the FOOL card. “Ask me for this. Make your demand of me to make you what I am. Once you’re the city’s Luck, I can shed my skin like Thoth did and become something entirely new. It’s a win-win for the both of us.”
“What makes you think I’m not her Luck already?”
“In name only, chief. You got the stones for this gig, I’ll give you that, but you ain’t got the juice yet. Let me give it to you.” He reached across the table, a harsh light emanating from his skin. “Just one touch,” he said, “and my divinity is yours.” To Jude’s eyes, Dodge shone as brightly as Mourning—brighter. If the overly fortunate pricks he’d stolen luck from had been noon on a cloudless day, looking at Dodge now was like staring straight at the sun.
Jude’s hand started to move before he caught himself. He stifled a grin.
Bastard almost got me, he thought. “And what else?” he asked.
Dodge quirked an eyebrow, but he kept his arm outstretched, his expression sincere.
“What else comes with your divinity is what I’m asking. How much of you comes along for the ride? Just your luck? Or will I have your thoughts and goals and impulses rattling around in the back of my head? Or is it like the loa and their priests, with you holding the reins and me as the horse?” Jude crossed his arms, watched as the mask of compassion Dodge wore splintered, replaced by an ugly, hungry smile. “You going to possess me, body and soul, like a vampire with a fresh corpse? If I take your hand, who walks out of that door, Dodge? Me or you?”
The room filled with the scents of a forest: pine and earth and a hint of rain. When Dodge spoke, his mouth was filled with the needle-sharp teeth of a fox. “Which door would that be?” he asked, his voice now tinged with a French accent.
Jude stood, pulling the satchel onto his shoulders as the doors began spinning around and around the room like a top and the walls turned into a candy-apple smear, as if the two fortune gods stood in the eye of a hurricane.
Dodge’s room, Dodge’s rules.
The dead fortune god shrank in front of him, his bulk melting away, leaving his face sunken, starvation thin. Tawny fur sprouted from his bald head, his cheeks, the backs of his hands. The room stopped spinning, and suddenly everywhere Jude looked—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—was made of identical red doors.
“I wish there was another way,” Dodge said, “but you know as well as I do, death sucks. And I can’t abide it any longer. I won’t. If it helps, I promise you won’t feel a thing.”
If ever Jude needed his luck to hold, it was now.
“Tell you what. I’ve got something else I need to take care of. Let’s just say you owe me one,” Jude said, reaching out with his magic, twisting his luck, feeling for the one particular thread of one particular lost thing.
And found it.
“Don’t get up. I’ll show myself out.” With that, Jude closed his eyes and reached behind him, for the doorknob his gift tugged him toward, the one where he heard, faintly, the sound of a trumpet being played.
From across the room came the scratching of claws against table felt, as Dodge rushed at him, realizing too late that Jude already knew the cardinal rule of being a Trickster. Jude flung open the door, filling Dodge’s card room with the sultry, sticky, potent air of a New Orleans summer night, with the music of Leon Carter’s trumpet. It was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. Second only to the sound of the Red Door slamming shut for the last time, behind him.
He grinned at Leon—and Regal, who was standing beside him—and, knowing they wouldn’t entirely understand and not caring, said, “Rule number one: Always leave yourself an out.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jude waited until the red faded away entirely from the maintenance entrance of Canal Place before turning his attention to Leon and Regal, the source of the music and the lost thing that had guided him home: his trumpet and her lost voice.
Sweat dripped from the musician’s dreadlocks, and his shoulders sagged when he lowered the horn from his lips. He must have been playing for an hour straight, at least. They stood there in silence for a moment, musician and con man and sorceress, zombie and Trickster god and mortal, all of them standing at the crossroads, each living in the seam between one world and the next.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? Jude thought.
“Is it done?” Leon asked.
“Yeah,” Jude said. “Just about.”
“What’s left?”
“What’s left is this douche-canoe and I have an arrangement to settle,” Regal said. “How ’bout it, Dubuisson? I’m here, as requested.”
Suspicion crept across Leon’s face, perhaps knowing who Regal had once worked for, certainly recognizing what building they were standing outside of. “What’s she mean, Jude?”
“She means,” Regal cut in, “that dick-nuts here called me up and promised that if I showed up to this spot and waited with you—you’re awesome, by the way, big fan—that he’d give me what I most desired. So, you know”—she tapped her throat—“any time you’re ready.”
“Are you sure that’s what you really want?” Jude asked.
She rolled her eyes. “This is unadulterated fuckery,” she said. “I don’t even know why I came.”
“Because I’m charming as shit,” Jude said, rolling the pearl around beneath his tongue. “But that’s not the million-dollar question. We’re trying to figure out what it is that you want most in this world. The goal you were willing to do anything to achieve. Remember?” He tapped his finger against his lips, realizing a moment too late whose gesture he was copying. “Oh yes, I know. Your birthright.”
He looked into Regal’s eyes, into Alafair Constant’s eyes, and spoke through the pearl beneath his tongue: “You are the Magician of New Orleans.”
A hot wind swirled around them, energetic, alive. It centered on Regal, tousling her clothes and her hair, spinning faster and faster, a hurricane’s gale now, that roared and danced and lifted her feet, briefly, from the ground. It pulled tighter against her, a corkscrew of motion that no longer touched Jude or Leon, that vanished inside of her, only evident by the expression on her face that it twisted inside her still, an ever-winding coil of energy. Standing this close to her, Jude felt the presence of the power coursing through her like a physical thing, like the humming of a high-intensity wire.
She was silent for a moment, and Jude basked in it, relishing the anticipation of her reaction. When she spoke, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting.
“That was such a dick move,” she said.
Jude’s face fell. “What?”
“The fuck good is the title without access to my magic, you . . . you . . . you bastard?”
“Hold that thought.”
While Regal spluttered in surprise, Jude turned to Leon, suddenly realizing there was a complication in what he had to do next. The musician seemed content to just wait out whatever was going on, but when you were a zombie who hung out with voodoo gods, you must learn to take weird shit in stride. “Leon, you mind putting your trumpet away for this?”
He quirked an eyebrow but did as Jude asked. As soon as Leon bent over, looking away from him, Jude fished the pearl out from beneath his tongue and cleaned his spit off of it with a fold of his shirt. He braced himself for the loss of language to come, but nothing happened.
Must not have said anything she disagreed with, he thought.
When Leon finished closing the clasps of his case and stood, Jude took the zombie’s hand and rolled the pearl into his palm. It glowe
d softly in the night. “Swallow it,” he said.
“Dude, what the fuck,” Regal said.
Leon hesitated.
“I’m serious,” Jude said. “Trust me, Sweets.”
The zombie slipped the pearl into his mouth and tossed his head back as though he were dry-swallowing a pill. Jude pressed his hand flat against Leon’s chest and spoke the ancient word that meant open. He felt the pearl spread itself wide, like a flower blooming.
The changes were so gradual and subtle, Jude might have missed them if he weren’t looking for them. Light flickered in the depths of Leon’s eyes where before the cold impassivity of the dead lurked. A solidity hung in the air, as though Leon grew steadily heavier, more imbued with gravity. Vibrations shuddered through the ground at Jude’s feet, through the wall behind him, through the air in his lungs and in the marrow of his bones, waves of energy with Leon at their center. The weight on his heart of New Orleans’s loss lightened, eased. When it was gone entirely, Jude felt like he could breathe for the first time in years.
“What was that?” Leon asked, his voice infused with a depth, a resonance, beyond anything a human throat should be capable of. “What did you do to me?”
“What it was,” Jude said, slipping his hands into his pockets and leaning against the concrete wall of Canal Place, “is what you are now. The Voice of New Orleans. Lost for far too long, but found at last.”
“What does that mean?” Leon asked, nearly whispering, as though afraid of his own words.
Jude shrugged, scuffed one shoe with the toe of the other. “It means that New Orleans is alive again. She’s got her Luck, and she has her Voice, and she’s got her Will back, too. Well, mostly, but I’m getting to that. What it really means is up to you, Sweets. To all of us. You’re the Voice of New Orleans now. You speak for her, and she speaks through you.” He nodded at Regal. “Just like she’s the Magician of New Orleans, who makes the city work for her and lets the city work through her.”
Regal started to say something, but Jude answered the question he thought she was about to ask. “Me? I’m the city’s Luck.” Two pairs of eyes widened in shock, and Jude grinned and kept going. “Which is a wicked story that we don’t really have time for right now.” He bounced to his feet, pretended to look at a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Hey, Queens, you know the medallion that gets you into Mourning’s elevator? You got one on you?” Regal slipped it out of her pocket and held it up for him to see. “Mind if I borrow it?” he asked.
“Sure, no problem. Soon as you give me my magic back, fuckwit.”
“Deal.” One long stride closed the distance between them. Jude snapped the sunburst medallion out of her fingers with one hand, touched her at the hollow of her throat with the other, and whispered the word that meant open, restoring the part of her soul that was her voice, and with it, her magic, her ability to enact change in the world. He shot her a wink and turned toward the doors to Canal Place.
“This has been fun,” he said. “We three should get together again soon. Really get to know each other.” He watched their reflections in the window as they exchanged a combination of startled glances and shrugs that said that he’d managed to shock them, confuse them, and change their place in the world in a handful of moments. The Trickster in him—he was pretty much Trickster down to the bone now—was thrilled. “Gotta go clock in now, though,” he said over his shoulder. “The new boss is a real ball-buster, I hear.”
He whispered the door to Canal Place open, paused when Regal and Leon both said his name at the same time. He spun on his heel. “Yes?”
“You don’t want some backup in there?” Regal said, with a nervous glance up in the general direction of Mourning’s office.
“Yeah,” Leon said, “he ain’t no one to be triflin’ with.”
Jude knew how foolish he must appear to the both of them. How cocksure and very, very likely to die. But if he’d learned anything from watching the other fortune gods at the card game, it was that playing the role of Trickster didn’t really work if you only went halfway. If you gave them even half a chance to call your bluff.
“Don’t you worry about him,” Jude said, patting the satchel hanging at his waist. “He and I are about to come to an understanding.”
When Jude stepped into the waiting room, Scowl, the ram-horned secretary, glanced up from the papers on his desk and greeted Jude, for the very first time, with a smile.
“Come on in, Mr. Dubuisson, come on in. If you’ll just take a seat, I’ll see if he’s ready for you.”
Jude forced himself to lounge on the uncomfortable wooden bench Scowl gestured toward, hands clasped behind his head, legs stretched out in front of him, and tried to ignore a sinking feeling in his gut. He’d been expecting some form of retribution for the last time they’d met, but this? Was Scowl fucking with him? Everything but the secretary’s demeanor was the same, the tidiness of the desk, the archaic rotary phone that he spoke into, even the fussy part of his hair. But the change in attitude was baffling.
Scowl replaced the receiver with a soft click and turned that unusual smile back to Jude, who noticed for the first time that the secretary’s teeth were filed down to sharp points. “He will see you now,” he said, waving a small hand toward Mourning’s office.
Jude stood, unable to resist the parting shot that escaped his lips. “Glad to see that swift kick in the stones helped dislodge the stick in your ass,” he said. He was nearly to the door when Scowl spoke again, saying only Jude’s last name, all civility gone from his voice. Jude turned. Scowl stood on top of his desk, his hairy legs bent underneath him, a fist gripping his disproportionately huge cock.
“When he’s done with you,” Scowl said, thrusting his goat’s hips, “I’m going to shit on or fuck whatever he leaves behind. Whichever is more unpleasant for you.” Braying laughter followed Jude through the door.
Mourning waited behind his desk, shimmering like starlight in the darkened office, framed by the skyline of New Orleans. For the first time, Mourning’s radiance wasn’t overwhelming. Those sapphire eyes, though, were still far too bright. Far too knowing. Jude wondered if his eyes looked the same, now. He thrust his hands into his pockets and stood, calm enough to wait, to force Mourning to speak first. The bright god stared at Jude for a long moment, studying him.
“It seems you have me at a disadvantage, sir. I do not recall instigating this particular assignation and, thus, your presence is unanticipated. As my assistant has been so inappropriately remiss, might you be so inclined to redress this imbalance and grant me the pleasure of your name and a succinct summary of your situation?”
“This a joke?”
“Most assuredly not.” The smile Mourning gave was meant to be disarming, but Jude had dealt with enough Tricksters that night to see right through it.
“Jude Dubuisson, Mourning. Talent for lost things? Tracking down a fortune god’s murderer? None of this ringing any bells?”
“Ah, yes. Dubuisson. New Orleans. That business with the card game.” Mourning flipped through a thick file that hadn’t been there a moment before and clicked his tongue as he read. “As for my inability to recognize you at a glance, you must consider the scope of my influence.” Without looking up, Mourning snapped his fingers. The skyline behind him changed in a camera flash, New Orleans becoming the brightly illuminated skyscrapers of Chicago. Another snap, another flash, and the city outside Mourning’s window was San Francisco. Snap, Tokyo. Snap, Prague. Snap, Mumbai. Snap, Johannesburg. Snap, Algiers. Snap, Mexico City. A final time, and the skyline was New Orleans once more. “As illustrated, Mr. Dubuisson, my managerial interests are perhaps more global than you were aware. Do forgive me if I require a moment to distinguish your particular entanglements from my other enterprises.” Mourning closed the file and steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “Now, am I to presume that this unscheduled visit indicates that your conflicting engagements have been satisfactorily resolved?”
Jude dipped his head, a silent, gru
dging nod. This was the true game, the true contest, and he couldn’t lay all his cards on the table. Not just yet.
A wry frown bent the corner of Mourning’s lips, a gesture so unusual that Jude thought it might be genuine. “How laconic of you,” he said. “How terse. Might I request some measure of elaboration, if only to secure my own intense curiosity? I assure you, you currently have the full thrust of my not inconsiderable attention.”
“The fallen angel Hē murdered Dodge Renaud, and others, in an attempt to find and consume the lost Voice of New Orleans. I stopped those plans. Made an end of the angel.”
“How fascinating. And how menacing. You say you managed to slay this creature?” Mourning glanced down at his desk, tracing his finger in a circle along the glass. “You needn’t have exerted yourself further by presenting yourself immediately. A night’s respite is the smallest balm you should grant yourself after such an ordeal. Let us preclude more intricate elaboration of your imminent duties until the morrow, yes?”
“No.”
A flash of anger ran across Mourning’s face, so quick, so intense, that Jude almost believed he’d imagined it. “Beg pardon?”
“I said no. Let’s get this over with.”
Mourning said nothing, but if the expression on his face wasn’t yet another mask, Jude had actually managed to surprise him. Another first. “Very well, then,” Mourning said, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle on his bleach-white tie. “By all means. You are, of your own accord, obligated to me for a period of service of no less than two hundred years, beginning”—he turned his wrist to look at the face of his watch, waiting for a specific moment—“now. Do you concur?”
“That was the agreement.”
When Mourning looked up from his watch, Jude thought he might be truly seeing the blue-eyed god for the first time. There was a hunger in the curl of his lips, something cunning in the slant of his eyebrows, in the way he leaned back into his chair. “Now, then. As I am once again the director of your actions, I should very much like to divest you of some of the more—ah, shall we say—demanding responsibilities that have come into your possession of late.” His gently mocking tone vanished, the mask sliding completely away to reveal something old and hard and dark. “Give me the Voice of New Orleans.”