by Bryan Camp
“Fucked” didn’t begin to describe it.
Whatever Dodge had planned was going to play out the way the fortune god wanted it to play out, yet Jude felt oddly, impossibly, calm. There was peace, he realized, in surrender.
He looked around the table, at the inhuman, immortal eyes watching him. Waiting. Expectant. Anticipating his reaction like five cats with a new mouse. Would he cower? Murmur some polite obsequy? Prostrate himself in prayer?
Fuck that.
“Who you gotta worship around here to get a drink?” Jude asked.
Laughter came from all around the table: a thumping bass drum from the fortune god; a throaty chuckle from the woman with the pipe; a dry rasp from the bird-headed god; and from the corpse-skinned god, a high, tittering squeal like a car engine on its last gasp. The angel’s silence was equally unnerving.
Dodge pulled a flask from nowhere and poured some of its contents into his own cupped palm, then made a “there you go” gesture in Jude’s direction. Jude took a sip from the glass that appeared in his hand. Rum and Coke and a hint of lime, just what he’d have chosen if he’d been asked. The other gods, Jude saw, already had their various libations to hand. How long have they been waiting on me, he wondered.
“Anybody else got a last request?” Dodge asked, his voice deep and booming, excessively cheerful. He looked from face to face, his eyes sharp and shrewd. “Splendid,” he said, when no one answered. “Let’s begin.”
He set the deck down and swept up his own hand, fanning the five cards out and rearranging them as he spoke. “The game tonight is Fortunes. Nothin’s wild, everything’s open. Prosperity trumps calamity. Side bets are binding, so tally ’em up before the next hand. Last one standing takes home the big prize. Big and little blinds vary every hand, dealer’s choice.” He nodded to the god to his left, the one with the corpse’s skin. “Scarpelli, first bet’s to you.”
Scarpelli inclined his head, baring his teeth in an approximation of a smile. His yellowed incisors stretched long and sharp. Jude took another sip of his drink, to try to wash the sudden taste of blood out of his mouth. Vampire. This gets better and better. Emaciated fingers scooped bits of what looked to Jude like chips of broken china from the pile in front of him, tossed them onto the center of the table. Each had a single, stylized image carved into it. They clacked against one another like dice until they came to rest. They were teeth, Jude saw. Human teeth.
Then it was his turn.
The regard of the room full of deities fell on Jude, as implacable and severe as the Mississippi’s current. He had a pile of coins in front of him, big and colorful and stamped with a variety of images: Mardi Gras doubloons.
Jude did the only thing he could; he slid his cards forward, understanding enough of what Dodge had said to know that he didn’t know nearly enough about the game to play. “Fold,” he said. With all those godly eyes on him, the word came out strained, like the last breath squeezed from the lungs of a dying man. After what felt like hours, their heavy stares fell away from him.
“You got balls, little one,” Dodge said, chuckling and puffing on his cigar. “You ain’t even gonna look at your cards?”
Jude shrugged, tried to look like he had any damn idea what he was doing. He took another drink of his Cuba libre, a long swallow that slid down sweet and hot, a burning blossom in his stomach. They were playing some kind of poker, which meant Jude only had two hands to learn what was going on before he had to put some skin in the game. He regretted that phrase as soon as it occurred to him. In this game, it might be far too literal.
Dodge cleared his throat. “You’re up, Wings,” he said, that bright, sharp grin splitting his wide face. “You’re always up, though, ain’tcha?” The angel frowned and the vampire laughed, and the sound was like dirty nails scraping across Jude’s skin. The angel somehow managed to make pushing cards half an inch across a table look haughty.
“Wings folded!” Scarpelli said, his voice high and tremulous. He chuckled at his own joke.
“Why can’t you ever play nice?” the woman next to the angel asked. She had a heavy Caribbean accent, stretching “can’t” out so that it sounded like “haunt.”
“What’s it to you?” Scarpelli’s voice stayed soft, but there was no hiding the menace in his tone. “You think those pure hands would ever get dirty for you, Pops?”
Jude looked at the woman next to the angel and, instead of a human woman sitting before him, saw the god who rode within her: a slim, wizened old man, with furrows of smile lines crinkling his ochre skin. Pops, he thought. As in, Papa Legba, loa of the crossroads? Has to be. Wouldn’t be a party without a little voodoo.
“It seems to me all our hands are a little dirty, no?” Legba said, grinning around the pipe clenched in his teeth. Jude blinked and saw the woman once more. She traded two of her cards, seemed to like what she saw, and placed a small leather pouch among Scarpelli’s wagered teeth.
The last god Jude recognized, as any New Orleanian would have, from the Mardi Gras parade that used his name and image: Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of scribes. He wore a Jazz Fest T-shirt, its open collar showing where his thin, feathered ibis neck tapered to human skin at the shoulders. He held his cards cupped in thick, meaty hands, his bird’s eyes moving in quick twitches behind a pair of round spectacles. He folded, as well.
Dodge flicked his own cards to the table as soon as Thoth laid down his. “Always deal myself rags,” Dodge said, chuckling.
As the gods showed their hands, Jude raised his glass to his lips, surprised to find himself holding it, his glass refilled, his face hot and numb. How much had he had already? Clever trick, that. He stretched and set the drink down an arm’s length away, so he couldn’t pick it up without meaning to. This game would be hard enough to survive with his wits intact.
He studied the cards flipped over on the table, only vaguely understanding the rules of the game. They used a tarot deck: swords and wands instead of spades and clubs, coins and cups instead of diamonds and hearts. The shapes, he had learned from listening to the card readers in the Quarter, were meant to be male and female, each suit one of the four elements. The rest of it lost him, though. He’d never paid enough attention to know what the other cards meant, what combinations would constitute a good fate or a bad one.
Legba won the first hand, the vampire won the second, and Jude kept folding, kept finding his drink in his hand. The cards were dealt a third time, and once again the gods turned their eyes to Jude, their attention like six feet of earth pressing down on him.
His bet.
Jude spread the doubloons out in a fan in front of him, certain that they represented more than just money. The gods played for the highest stakes. Each one he touched sent a shock along his fingertips despite his gloves, like the snap of static electricity. He still had no idea what the cards meant, didn’t even know what he’d be wagering. Fuck it, he thought. Dodge is probably stacking the deck anyway.
He chose the coin stamped with a stylized heart and tossed it to the center of the table.
“I’m in,” he said. Then the gods were laughing, all of them, laughing. At him.
Shame and the trembling suspicion that he wasn’t as sober as he’d thought burned like ice water in his veins. Dodge rolled his cigar between his fingertips, staring at the smoldering tip, the only god not laughing.
“You made too small a wager, sweetmeats,” Scarpelli said, sadistic glee in his voice. “A heart. What would we want with a broken little thing like that?” His bloodshot gaze went from Jude to Dodge, and after a moment, he clicked his tongue. “If you don’t tell him, I’ll be delighted to.”
Dodge spoke without looking up from the contemplation of his cigar. “Too small a wager means you forfeit the choice. That’s the rule.”
The vampire tittered, something dark and violent in the sound. He splayed his gaunt fingers across the skin of his dark, blotchy face, a haunting parody of reflection. “I want your blood, of course. Every last drop.” A doubl
oon stamped with a raindrop of crimson rose up onto its side and rolled next to the one Jude had thrown forward.
Dodge said something that sounded like “hey,” but shorter, a mere huff of breath, and the angel’s eyes closed in contemplation. When the angel’s lips moved, the words sounded to Jude like his own voice, a shout echoing back through an empty cathedral. “The Lord demands his faith,” the angel said. Another coin made its wobbling journey across the table to join the first two.
Jude glanced down at the cards he’d left face-down on the table. Part of him wanted to laugh. The whole thing was too surreal. Everything riding on a hand of poker that didn’t make a damn bit of sense. It had to be a joke. He just couldn’t figure out whether he was the audience or the punch line.
“I’ll have his speech,” Legba said. Jude saw the loa again and not the woman he rode, his kind smile twisted and hungry. Another coin.
Thoth turned one glassy bird’s eye toward Jude, a cawing gull’s screech coming from his beak. It didn’t seem to matter that Jude didn’t know what Thoth demanded, because the table did. Jude’s final coin rolled away from him.
Dodge toyed with his cards, considering, his gaze distant. The moment drew out, and Jude no longer felt like laughing. His limbs were numb, leaden; his lungs refused to fill, like he drew breath through a straw. Sweat squeezed from every pore. He couldn’t stand to look at the gods anymore, their teeth and eyes too bright, something dark and nasty slithering in the shadows, or maybe it was the shadows themselves, shifting and pregnant with something he was unable to face.
“The first wager was enough for me,” Dodge said at last. One by one the gods put their markers on the pile of coins, covering it with a burial mound of their own wagers, teeth and feathers and scraps of paper and serpent’s scales. It felt like a hole opened in Jude’s stomach. Of course they wanted to play. He had skin in the game now, and everyone wanted a taste.
Legba laid his cards down, a nonsense poker hand of jumbled suits and tarot symbols. The other gods followed, amid appreciative murmurs or sighs of disappointment. Some of the images seemed familiar, the faces of people Jude had seen before—the cashier at the place where he made groceries, a former pro athlete who sold used cars now, the local weather guy who’d lost his shit after the storm. Dodge turned his cards over one at a time: THE QUEEN OF COINS, THE QUEEN OF SWORDS, THE HIGH PRIESTESS, THE QUEEN OF WANDS, and THE QUEEN OF CUPS—each of them wearing Regal Sloan’s face.
The vampire made a noise of disgust and flicked his own cards to the center of the table without turning them over. Between that and the fortune god’s smug grin, Jude guessed that whatever Regal’s fate was, it was a winning hand for Dodge.
Jude ran his thumb along the edge of one of his cards. He still hadn’t looked at them. What did they matter? All that mattered was what was going to happen to him next. He doubted it would be as simple as debt. Whatever these cards showed, they would decide his fate. The gods had demanded pieces of him. If they split the pot, they’d tear him apart. The best-case scenario was that one of these deities was about to own him, asshole to appetite.
Jude leaned forward, reached over his cards, and picked up his drink. “Like the song says,” he muttered, “‘drink a little poison ’fore you die.’” He drained the glass in one raw, burning swallow, let out a ragged sigh of mingled pleasure and pain, and—with a wink in Dodge’s direction—showed his hand. For a moment, he thought his vision had failed him.
They were blank.
The angel hissed like a cornered cat; Legba cursed in a language Jude didn’t know; the vampire laughed and laughed and laughed. Jude had no idea what empty cards meant, but whatever it was, it was a dead man’s hand.
He stood, staggering, fear and liquor robbing him of balance. He yanked up his satchel off the back of his chair, knocking it over onto its side, nearly followed it to the floor. The gods only watched him, waiting. He backed away, reaching for the door. They still hadn’t moved. His hand found the doorknob and twisted, felt it opening behind him, and finally he did fall, the bottom dropping out of the world.
He fell and fell into a shifting, profound darkness, a shadow that swallowed him whole.
Awareness and light came abruptly, found him tangled in sweat-heavy sheets, his muscles aching, breath coming in quick gasps. His heart pounded, and he tried to calm himself, tried to tell himself that it had only been a nightmare, even though he knew that he was lying to himself. He lay there, watching the ceiling fan as it swayed with each spin, as the predawn light revealed the room around him bit by bit, thinking about Dodge, and Regal, and Mourning, and the seams where worlds collide. He lay there, trying to divide the impossible from reality: meeting Regal in the bar, the card game, those wagers each of the gods had demanded of him circling his mind. Trying—and failing—to convince himself that it had all been just a bad dream.
He lay there until his phone rang long enough that he had no choice but to answer it, and Regal told him that Dodge had been murdered.
Chapter Three
When they are the giants who are the children of the angelic sons of God and the earthbound daughters of Men, we call them Nephilim. When they are the result of a vampire’s lust for a human woman, we call them dhampir. Ancient Egypt had Imhotep, son of a mortal and the architect god Ptah. India had Arjuna, son of the human Queen Kunti and Indra, the god of lightning and thunder. The Welsh had Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Culann. Phaethon wrecked the chariot of his father, Helios. Gilgamesh built the walls around Uruk. Theseus and the Minotaur fought in the Labyrinth, one fathered by the sea and the other descended from the sun. They are heroes and monsters; the products of lust or accident, grace or fate. They are demigods: the power of a deity bound in the fragile clay of a mortal. Always greater than those around them; always weaker than what they might become.
Even after a long, hot shower and half a pot of coffee, Jude stumbled around his apartment in the grip of the kind of hangover that would have driven him to prayer, if the only god he knew on a first-name basis wasn’t already dead. As he dressed—jeans and a worn Saints T-shirt and a thrift store suit jacket—it occurred to him that he had no memory of getting home the night before, that there was just an empty space between fleeing Dodge’s game room and waking in his own bed. Blank like the cards he’d turned over. What kind of a fate was he supposed to make with empty cards? Limitless potential, or no future at all? A winning hand or a losing one? Where would he even start to figure out something like that?
Mourning might know, he thought.
Images from the night before came back to him, like single frames snipped out of a film. Vampire. Cards. Doubloons. Angels and voodoo loa and gods. All of them hungry. He began to seriously consider the many benefits of the coward’s path: wholehearted, self-preserving flight.
He could pack a few things, magic the nearest ATM into giving up all its cash, and just go. Fuck Dodge, fuck Regal and Mourning, fuck this whole lost and ruined city. Break whatever hold New Orleans had on him and get the hell out, like he should have six years ago when it all went to shit. He’d walked away once. He should have kept walking. Should have run. He might have made it. But this wasn’t six years ago. Running from murder, from a god’s murder, would look all kinds of wrong to all the wrong sorts of people.
He found the magician’s bag buried under his crumpled clothes from the night before and was about to rummage through it for a hangover cure or an escape plan, whichever magic his fingers discovered first, when the pretty pink phone that belonged to Mandy the tourist buzzed with a text. He knew what it said before he read it. Regal, parked downstairs and waiting for him.
Somewhere in the Caribbean, that’s where he’d go. Blue water and hot white sand. Rum and native girls and a long, slow slide into oblivion. Go to Zihuatanejo, he thought, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Except not even an empty beach in the middle of nowhere would be far enough to escape Mourning’s reach. Jude couldn’t hide anywhere this side of the grave.
Maybe nowhere on the other side, either.
Regal said nothing when Jude slid into the passenger seat, barely even waited for him to close the door before she stomped on the gas and headed downtown. He tried to think of something clever to say, but he needed a few more hours of sleep before he could manage anything approaching wit. She didn’t seem to be in the mood for it either, worrying at a thumbnail with her teeth, cursing under her breath at the slightest delay.
Jude stared out the window, a hand across his brow shading his eyes from the too-bright morning, trying to remember something—anything—that had happened after he’d turned over those blank cards. The absence was maddening.
Regal turned off Canal and onto North Peters, easing over to the curb. She threw the car into park, then popped her door open and burst out of the car in one continuous motion, practically humming with nervous energy. Jude followed her out into the oven’s blast of heat and the rushing, blaring noise of traffic.
Canal Place towered overhead, thirty-two stories of concrete and glass, an upscale mall with a movie theater on the first few floors, a plush hotel higher up. And something else, something almost no one, not even those who walked on the supernatural side of the street, knew about. Something old and sly, something that wore a man’s shape and called itself Mr. Mourning. Jude had an idea who—and what—Mourning was, but it was a thought he’d never shared with anyone.
This close to the Mississippi, Jude imagined he could catch the river’s rich, brackish scent floating along on the hot summer breeze. A few minutes of walking would bring him to the Quarter, a few minutes more and he’d be back in the Square, at St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson rearing back on his horse, pointed spires and roosting pigeons and crowds of tourists. He pictured himself hiding there, claiming sanctuary, wondered if any ground was sacred enough to protect him.
