by Bryan Camp
“I can’t do that,” Jude said.
Mourning went very silent and very still. He stood, his hands balled into fists, knuckles pressed to the surface of his desk. When Mourning spoke, his voice was as cold and sharp as a blade. “Can’t? Can’t? You find yourself in the fortuitous position of not needing to concern your conscience with questions of can and cannot, should or should not. There is simply that which you do, which, at further benefit to you, is simply what I tell you to do. Give me the Voice. Now.”
“I gave it away,” Jude said.
A jagged crack snaked its way across the glass of the desk. Mourning’s tongue flicked out and ran along the pristine whiteness of his teeth. Jude could see a burning aura burst around the bright god, knew his rage before he smelled the burnt cloves stink of it. Mourning stood and clasped his arms behind his back. “You. Gave. It. Away.”
“Yeah,” Jude said.
“And the subsequent right to proclaim the next avatar of luck for this city? Did you so generously donate that to the common welfare as well?” Though Mourning stood on the other side of the room, Jude could feel the waves of heat coming off of him, the pulsing, tangible presence of a bonfire.
“Not exactly.”
“What, exactly, did you do?”
“I named myself.”
Mourning released a sharp bark of a laugh, though it contained no humor. “Of course you did. How else could you have managed to survive that particular tangle of fortune? I must admit, I did not anticipate such an expedient resolution of so convoluted a situation. I’m impressed, truly.” Mourning spread his hands wide, as though welcoming Jude in for an embrace. “However, you needn’t tax yourself further. You have neither the discernment nor the capability to sustain that role. Likewise, there is no need to strain your powers of deliberation in determining a suitable successor. The decision has been resolved on your behalf. Transfer the mantle to me.”
“Sorry, but no.”
The air around Mourning began to waver, the space between his fingertips crackling and sparking. “You will explain yourself. You will choose your words very carefully.” He leaned his fists against his desk again, a jungle cat preparing to pounce.
Jude managed to keep his hands in his pockets and his voice relaxed by summoning every ounce of courage and every scrap of luck he possessed—his own luck now, the last of his stolen good fortune used up in Dodge’s card room—even though his heart pounded and his balls shrank. His last shred of humanity—his fear—screamed at him to flee, but he ignored it, and it quickly died. He wasn’t a human, not even a demigod. Not anymore. He was Trickster.
And Trickster lived for this shit.
“I swore to work for you,” Jude said. “I agreed to be ‘engaged in your service.’ But I never said I’d be obedient. I never promised to be prompt or disciplined. You gave me a task that I have chosen to respectfully decline. If you ask again, I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. I swore to work for you, but being a good employee was never part of the agreement. If you don’t like my performance so far—” Jude shrugged, unable to stop the grin from spreading across his face. “Fire me.”
Mourning’s desk shattered into a cloud of glittering sand, which was caught on a wind that swept through the office and whirled around the two of them. Like thousands of tiny blades, the sandstorm of glass cut and gouged, devouring the armchair Jude usually sat in, scouring a round groove in the marble floor. The stone beneath Mourning’s feet cracked and buckled, his perfect, chiseled features cracking as well, betraying his emotions at last, revealing his rage. “Mr. Dubuisson,” Mourning said, his sibilants coming out as a hiss, “you do not know who you are fucking with.”
Jude took as deep a breath as he could with the wind screaming hot and furious around him. He struck out, over and over with his gift, twisting the moment with the last dregs of his own luck to keep Mourning’s maelstrom of wind and glass at bay. If he failed, even once, it would tear him to shreds. Despite all of this, Jude stood his ground and spoke the simple, deadly truth. “Wrong on both counts, Mourning. Jude Dubuisson died. I’m someone else now. Someone new. And I know exactly who you are. You’re Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. You’re Loki, god of fire and deceit. Typhon, Serpent of the Abyss. You’re Raven, the bright-plumed bird who stole fire from Heaven. S. Mourning: the Star of the Morning, First of the Fallen. Lucifer.”
Black wings arched from Mourning’s back, proud, strong wings shimmering with the rainbow iridescence of an oil slick, shivering and then striking against one another like a thunderclap.
For a brief instant, Jude regretted that he hadn’t asked Leon and Regal to come with him. They couldn’t have helped, but it would have been nice to have an audience for this. Even the powers of an entire city were no match for this. Jude had just one chance, one power that might conceivably stop a god as old and as mighty as Mourning.
“I stand corrected,” Mourning said, his voice cutting easily through the keening wind. “You know me well. And yet, with all this knowledge, you choose to enter my domain and challenge my authority? What weapon, I wonder, could you have stumbled across to make you so brazen? What blade, what fang, do you believe could threaten me?”
Jude reached into his satchel and pulled free the thunderbolt, felt it come alive in his hand. “Recognize this?” The whirlwind tearing around the office died, a glitter of glass falling, tinkling, to the marble floor. “The thunderbolt that cast you out of Heaven? That drove you from the slopes of Mount Olympus? Wanna see if third time’s the charm?”
Holding the thunderbolt felt, Jude decided, exactly how he’d imagined gripping a lightning strike by the balls would feel. It crackled and burned and roared, filling him with a terrible strength but constantly twisting and writhing in his fist as though it wanted to strike him instead. If Jude tried to wield it, it might very well kill him. If he unleashed it here, unrestrained, it could take out half of the French Quarter along with Mourning. He needed to walk the middle path between too timid and too reckless. It was the only way.
Mourning’s laughter hissed like a serpent’s scales winding through dry grass, like a whetstone sliding against a knife. “You lash out at me, at me, with a weapon that has already failed twice?”
But his laugh and his words were hollow. A bluff.
“Never said it was a weapon,” Jude said. He gave the bright god his best fuck-you grin, and Mourning blinked, flinched even, because Mourning knew the same truth about the thunderbolt that Jude did.
It wasn’t a weapon; it was a key.
Jude thrust the thunderbolt forward, spoke the word that meant open, and let the power he’d kept hidden away in his satchel serve its purpose at last: to punch a hole through the fabric of the world. Jude had expected wind and noise and fire, but a terrible silence came through from the other side of the door he’d opened, a profound and dreadful gravity. Everything in Mourning’s office leaned toward the opening now, a subtle shift in the angles and seams, turning the space around them into a funnel.
The world on the other side of that door was filled with beige modular cubicles, always a Wednesday afternoon three hours before the end of the day, with a stack of reports on the viability of forming an action committee to research the findings of a previous committee’s decision to produce more detailed, hourly reports on the decisions of action committees that had to be scanned for errors that were never there, typed into a computer that could only access the company filing system, surrounded by the murmur of a thousand other employees in gray suits with gray ties, whose low voices spoke only to repeat the findings they had read in their reports.
Or it was a waiting room—DMV, doctor’s office, you were never really sure—your ticket always ten numbers away, a woman on the phone next to you loudly recounting the minutiae of her day, a litany of mundane household tasks and petty disagreements that never had a point or a conclusion but were regaled with the excited tone of meeting a celebrity; “Hey Mickey” playing on the PA speakers over and over, the name of t
he band always on the tip of your tongue.
Or it was sitting in a car waiting for a train to pass, traffic on either side of you blocking you in, nothing but mindless matching games on your phone, nothing but overly aggressive car commercials on the radio, the graffiti on each train car always the same pointless squiggle, a train that stretched to the horizon in one direction and all the way to Pittsburgh in the other.
Or it was a weekday stuck on a living room sofa, the television only ever showing debt reduction commercials and law firm commercials and an episode of a soap opera you’d somehow already seen before.
It was never a prison cell, or a cage, or a trap. Nothing that would compel you to escape, no puzzle to engage your mind. It was simply unchanging. Relentlessly, perpetually boring.
Hell for Tricksters.
And it dragged at Jude and at Mourning and everything else in the office. Jude stood near the event horizon of its pull, was backing away step by agonizing step, but the bright god had dug his hands and feet into the marble floor right next to the door itself, was twisting and distorting as the world on the other side tugged at his very essence. Jude’s mind whirled, unsure how he could loosen the bright god’s grip without putting himself in danger. The thunderbolt still twitched and blazed in his hand, waiting for its final command. If the rift was open too much longer, it would begin to grow, could change the entirety of New Orleans into that beige sameness.
The door to the waiting room banged open and Scowl came rushing in, and Jude saw his chance. He reached out and seized Scowl’s immediate future and, with the last of his strength, gave it one mean little twist.
Scowl’s hooves skidded for purchase on the marble floor as he saw what he’d rushed into and tried to reverse direction too little, too late. The horned little man struck Mourning right in the face before he went falling into the rift the thunderbolt had opened. For an officious little prick like him, though, Trickster hell might feel like Heaven.
Mourning managed to catch himself on the lip of the rift, holding himself between one world and the other with incredible, implacable strength. Unbelievably, he looked at Jude and smiled. “Out of all my names, you left out the most important one.”
He folded his wings, seemed to relax, to accept his fate.
Jude tried not to listen, certain that this had to be one last trick, one last attempt to save himself or drag Jude down with him. Instead, he thrust the thunderbolt forward once more.
At the same moment, each Trickster spoke just one word.
Jude said the word that meant close, sealing the door to the other side and shutting Mourning away inside its awful gravity and rendering the thunderbolt an inert rod of cold metal.
Mourning said, “Father.”
Part Seven
Epilogue
It is Lundi Gras, the day of the Bacchus Parade, and for New Orleans, it’s very cold out. This past August made seven years since the storm, but no one, least of all Jude, is thinking about hurricanes, or failing federal levees, or loss. It is Carnival, and all is right with the world. Joy is a palpable sensation running through the streets, a drunken elation that’s lasted almost two weeks straight. Right now, it seems like the celebration might last forever.
Jude stands on the neutral ground Uptown, his breath misting in the air, surrounded by roaring, chanting crowds screaming into the night, thinking about the seams he’s been stitching together, about all the work he’s still got ahead of him. The impact of bass drums shakes his bones, sets his blood throbbing in time with the beat called out by the throaty growl of brass horns. The parade rolls by: the marching bands in their proud uniforms and crested helmets; the dance squads marching in step, their tap shoes clacking in unison on the asphalt; the flambeaux with their long torches spinning above their heads, fueled by the propane tanks strapped to their backs; the revelers walking the route, costumed throngs with drinks in hand and bags of beads slung over their arms; the huge, brightly colored floats, like royal barges tugged down the river of St. Charles Avenue by rumbling, oil-reeking tractors; the floats, flickering lights and blaring music and masked riders; the floats, depicting scenes from myth and legend and cultures ancient and modern; the floats, casting off masses of beads and stuffed animals and trinkets into the oak branches and the waiting arms of the crowds below, worthless save for the connection, the celebration, that they inspire.
Jude leans against his staff—a long, slender stave of oak—that holds some of the magic of Grand Bois, the loa Cross had sealed inside an oak back when Jude had fought the three of them in Audubon Park. Jude had siphoned some of Grand Bois’s power as payment for releasing the loa from the prison of the oak tree, opening the way out that Cross had closed. Bois was not the first lost thing he found and made right in the months since he’d become the Luck of New Orleans, nor the last.
Sipping an Abita from a plastic cup, Jude watches the King’s float roll by, some celebrity actor dressed in red and silver and white getting to pretend to be King for a day, even though Jude knows the city’s been ruled by a Queen for the better part of a year.
Though Jude has come only to watch, he raises his arm and shouts at the float. The comedian King throws two fistfuls of doubloons, glittering and ringing against each other over the noise of the revelers, into the air above the crowd. Jude snags one out of the air and glances at it—stamped with the god of wine who gives the parade its name on one side, the actor’s face on the other—grateful that it doesn’t bear the image of his own heart. Beside him, a familiar voice says, “Nice catch.”
“Just lucky,” Jude says, without turning, playing it cool.
“You wanna get lucky?” Barren asks, suddenly all sweetness and enthusiasm. “Honey, all you had to do was ask.”
Jude can’t help himself then, grinning and glancing over. His shock at what he sees must show on his face, because it makes his visitors laugh. Barren has painted himself a metallic silver and inserted glowing red orbs into the sockets of his eyes, a perfect depiction of one of the killer robots from the Terminator movies. Renai is wearing a form-fitting blue jumpsuit with yellow numbers on her breast, a bulky technological contraption strapped to her wrist. Sal, in his dog’s shape, is wearing a red bandanna and some kind of armored harness.
“I get Barren’s costume,” he says, “but what are you two supposed to be?”
“I’m a vault dweller,” Renai says, excited until she sees that Jude still doesn’t get the reference. “Don’t tell me gods don’t play video games. They love Fallout down in the Underworld.”
“I just watch,” Sal said, holding up a paw. “No thumbs.”
Jude shrugs, snatches a handful of beads arcing overhead, and hands them to a passing child. “Funny running into y’all like this.”
All three of them seemed to want to say something, but Barren spoke first. “Jude, we need to talk to you. You’ve been unusually hard to find.”
“Yeah,” Jude said. “I’ve been dodging your calls.”
“Why?”
“Just fucking with you, I guess.” Jude bobs his head to the beat of a passing marching band, the trumpets blowing loud and clear, ignoring the shock and then anger that rolls across Barren’s skull-face. “You know how we Tricksters are,” he says, when the young musicians move on.
Barren sighs. “This is important, Jude.”
“It’s Papa Legba,” Renai says. Jude softens a little at the concern in her voice, which is, no doubt, why Barren brought her along. “He’s losing control more and more lately. Cross has gotten stronger somehow.”
Jude finishes his beer and throws the plastic cup into a nearby garbage barrel. He blows warm air, tinged with just a bit of flame, into the cupped bowl of his numb hands. He misses—for the first time since he lost them somewhere—his old leather gloves. “And? What would you like me to do about it?” Jude’s stomach rumbles. One of the downsides of being a Trickster. He’s always hungry, now.
“Your goddamn job, maybe,” Sal grumbles.
Renai puts a c
alming hand on Sal’s head. “You have to help him, Jude. He’s your father.”
Jude lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, unable to stop himself. “Sure he is. Sure. Mourning tried that one on me too, at the end. Bet if I had them in a corner, Dodge or the angel or Thoth or even the vampire would claim to be dear ol’ dad if they thought it would jam me up. Thing is, I don’t care who my father is, not anymore. I know who I am.” He waves a hand at them, stilling the arguments rising to all three of their tongues. “I tell you what, I’ll look into it. For old time’s sake. Because of all the shit we went through.” He looks out over the crowd, the laughing, screaming mass of happiness that was Carnival, and smiles. “You ask me though, I’d put my money on Mourning. These days? Only the son of the devil could be such a busy man.”
Renai, at least, gets the reference, but before she can say anything, Jude is already gone.
Jude enters what had once been Mourning’s waiting room without bothering with the elevator. His satchel, his bag of tricks, slaps at his side as he moves behind the desk, to where the diminutive secretary’s sad, wilting potted plant is all that remains of the imp. Jude taps it with the end of his staff, reaches out with his Trickster magic, and changes, letting his portion of Grand Bois’s essence slip from the oak of his stave into the . . . whatever kind of tiny tree this is. The new little life stretches and preens, not yet fully conscious, but growing.
Management has been complaining about needing a receptionist for weeks, now.
Jude steps through into what was once Mourning’s office, its only brightness the sunlight shining in through the huge window that takes up the back wall. Everything that made this Mourning’s place got sucked into the void with him, except for the checkerboard marble floor, and that has now been largely covered up by the warm reds and oranges and browns of a huge Persian rug. A new desk stands where Mourning’s once did—an edifice of mahogany, covered with papers and books and the various tools of the magician’s trade. At the very edge, a nameplate in black and white reads R. CONSTANT, MANAGEMENT. The door, as it always has, disappears behind him when he walks through it.