by Bryan Camp
“So,” the vampire said. “Here’s my proposition.” He turned the doubloon in an idle circle in his palm. “Your blood is mine, precious. That much is certain. The only question is whether it is more useful to me in your veins, serving me, or on my tongue, feeding me.” The vampire snapped forward, far too quickly for a creature of flesh and bone, too fast for Jude to react, so close Jude could smell the blood-soaked gin on the vampire’s cold breath. Scarpelli inhaled deeply, eyes squeezed shut. He sighed and sat back, a parody of satiation. “I confess, I can scarce restrain myself. But it’s best to let such a complicated, nuanced vintage breathe, isn’t it?” He seemed to be talking to himself. For a while Jude sat, heart pounding, staring straight ahead, unable to move, unable to speak.
Petrified. Prey.
It had been foolish to think the thunderbolt would put them on equal footing. If the vampire wished him harm, he’d bite before Jude could even reach into his satchel.
They rounded a corner and drove through the flashing lights of NOPD cruisers and an ambulance. A huddle of uniforms stood around a cloth-covered shape on the ground, some smoking, some talking into the microphones on their shoulders. A leg poked out from underneath the sheet, a shoe with its sole falling away from the toe, like the lolling tongue of a dog.
No. It can’t be.
A vision flashed in front of Jude’s eyes with awful clarity: the young street performer, his painted jester’s mask sweat-streaked and smeared, terror etched on his face.
The Cadillac swept past the crime scene, and Jude forced himself to look back at the vampire. Scarpelli let out a soft chuckle and—perhaps following his gaze, perhaps actually reading his mind—answered his unspoken question. “Not one of mine, sweetmeats,” he said. “I don’t leave my leftovers out in the street like that.”
Jude leaned back into the leather seat, feigning nonchalance, the chilly air of the car seeping into his bones. Even before the storm, if he’d passed that close to a murder, he’d have felt the weight of all the years and the joys and the futures that the victim had lost. The gravity of all that loss would, like a lodestone, point back toward the killer. He wouldn’t wonder; he’d know if that dead body was Tommy’s, would know who was responsible. There was an emptiness in him now, a numbness in his hands where power had once lived. He’d hated his gift after the storm, called it a curse. Now that he was being forced to live without it, he fervently, urgently wanted it back.
Though he’d suspected they were heading in that direction, it was still an unpleasant jolt when the Cadillac eased to a stop in front of Jude’s apartment. So much for all my clever magic keeping my home hidden, he thought. Jude put his hand on the door handle, eager to be gone. “I hope you’re offended when I don’t invite you in,” he said. Unlike their supposed vulnerability to sunlight, a vampire’s need for an invitation to enter a person’s home had its basis in reality, not fiction.
Scarpelli pulled a business card out of his coat pocket, used it to wave in the direction of Jude’s front door. “That little inconvenience doesn’t apply to you, I’m afraid. You know, home is where the heart is, and all that.” He held the card—blood-red ink, of course—between two pointed fingers, which he used to tap Jude’s chest. “You wagered your heart away, remember?” Jude took the card, an address, nothing more, and opened the door into warmth and sunlight and escape. Before he could leave, Scarpelli spoke again. “Your blood is mine, sweetmeats. You can be one of them,” he nodded at the revenants, “or you can work for me for as long as you prove useful. Thirty years? Fifty? I’m nothing if not patient.”
Jude slid the card into his coat pocket, right next to the tarot card that bore his face. “I’ll think about it,” he said, hoping it was a halfway convincing lie.
“Think quickly,” the dead god said, “I expect your answer by tomorrow night.”
“Thought you said you were patient.”
The vampire bared his fangs. Only a fool would call it a smile. “I’m also very, very hungry.”
Back inside his apartment, Jude opened an Abita and drank half of it in long, thirsty swallows to rinse the taste of blood out of his mouth, then took a scalding hot shower to scrub the feeling of the vampire’s gaze off of his skin. Once he felt reasonably clean, he pulled on a pair of worn jeans and an old Saints T-shirt and went back to the pile of books and printed webpages sprawled over his living room floor. He flipped idly through mythology texts and books on tarot, coming to the realization that he’d relied on his magic for this in the past, too, happening across the information he needed instead of tracking it down. He got up for another beer and checked both his landline and the tourist’s pink phone, but the only person who had called was his mother, leaving a guilt-trip message on his old-school answering machine.
Where the hell was Regal? She’d changed in the last six years in some way he couldn’t articulate. He thought about calling her but decided he needed some time to organize his thoughts, first.
Scarpelli had a doubloon that entitled him to Jude’s blood. It was an invasion, somehow, a violation. Shameful and frustrating and infuriating all at once. It felt like being robbed, but worse, as though the vampire had stolen something intensely private, like nude pictures or shitty teenage poetry, something worthy of blackmail. He had to assume that each of the other gods still had one of his coins as well. His blood, his speech, his devotion. Hazy as his memory of that night was, he remembered that much. It wasn’t much of a leap to guess that his gift, which he’d lost on the same night as all of those doubloons, was tied to one of the coins.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to think past his own problems. He still didn’t know the ultimate purpose of the game, the prize Scarpelli was taking steps to claim. His first thought—the most satisfying one—was that the vampire had killed Dodge. He’d shown nothing but glee at the mention of Dodge’s death, had practically thanked Jude for giving the killer the opportunity.
But it didn’t feel right. If Scarpelli killed Dodge, why hadn’t he bragged about it, the way he’d bragged about the side wagers he made to undermine the game? For that matter, why restrain himself from killing Jude, if his strategy for winning involved eliminating those with better cards than his? Jude had a hand full of wild cards. The hardest part of Dodge’s murder to reconcile with Scarpelli as the villain, though, was the blood spilled across the card table.
There was no way the vampire would let that much go to waste.
Jude closed his eyes and dropped his head back, picturing the scenes he and Regal had seen through the door they’d summoned, everything else that had happened in the past couple of days shifting around in the back of his mind. Dodge’s poker hand: four QUEENS and a HIGH PRIESTESS, each one with Regal’s face. A fortune god dead on his table, his throat gashed open. Jude’s own cards on the table: four blank, one a vague, exploratory sketch. The cryptic explanation of the game’s rules. The vampire reference to Jude’s “trick.” Jude’s conversation with Barren in Odd Fellow’s Rest. Several puzzle pieces aligned in Jude’s mind with a clarity so perfect, he felt an almost audible click, and his eyes popped open.
He snatched his jacket off the chair where he’d dropped it when he walked in, nearly tearing the inner pocket in his haste to get at its contents. Inside: Scarpelli’s business card, and the tarot card Barren had given him. Compliments of the dearly departed, he’d said. The card was labeled THE MAGICIAN. The main image on the card was a man pointing to the sky and to the ground, a man with Jude’s face. It was the same gesture he’d seen on the sketched card in Dodge’s card room, the first card in Jude’s hand. It all made sense. The reason the game wasn’t over, the reason his cards had turned over blank.
He’d known that calling their game Fortunes meant the gods were playing with fate, but he’d underestimated them. They weren’t just revealing a person’s destiny; they were using the cards they were dealt to change someone’s destiny. These assholes were gambling with people’s lives. Everyone except Jude, anyway.
B
ecause if the cards had his face on them, the fate he was gambling with was his own.
Chapter Nine
Jude walked up and down the rows in the parking lot of the Riverwalk, looking for a car to steal. Technically, he told himself, he only intended to borrow one, since he never kept the ones he took. Not that he’d lose sleep over it if the owners and automobiles were never reunited; he had some very particular criteria he followed in choosing his rides: Cadillac, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, BMW—anything with the word “luxury” attached to it. Bonus points if there was a self-aggrandizing personalized license plate. He was looking to ruin some rich asshole’s day, not screw up some broke person’s year.
The little silver Porsche with tinted windows and “UENVME” plates the next row over was perfect.
He used the word Dodge taught him to unlock the door, then a sleep charm drawn with a finger on the dashboard quieted the alarm. He muttered a little prayer of gratitude that losing his gift hadn’t cost him the rest of his magic. Once he was in the driver’s seat, he dug through his satchel and took out a small tin box filled with long slips of paper. Written on each was a Shem—one of the hidden Names of God—in seventy-two Hebrew letters on one side and a different language on the other side. They were a gift from Mordecai Eichhorn, a rabbi with a nasty dybbuk problem that Jude had solved a few years before the storm. The papers still smelled like the mints the tin once held. He rifled through them, muttering to himself. Since the car was a Porsche, he needed one in German. He found it and slid the strip of paper into the ignition. The engine sparked and revved to life. If I could mass-produce these, he thought, I’d sell ’em to Google, buy an island somewhere, and never worry about any of this shit again.
Back at his apartment, he’d called Regal after his revelation about the card game and gotten her voicemail. He’d hung up without saying anything, then listened again to the message his mother had left on his answering machine. Paying closer attention this time, he’d heard a tense urgency hidden underneath her typical pleasant, innocuous rambling, the same sense of barely restrained panic that always compelled him to make a trip across Lake Pont-chartrain to check up on her. Hence, the need to borrow a car.
Aided by the “Hailing a Cab” section of a Berlin travel guide he pulled out of his satchel, Jude told the Porsche in halting pidgin German what he wanted from it. Its only response was to put itself in drive and pull out of the parking lot, heading for the interstate. At the first red light, it cycled through a few radio stations, stopping on WWOZ, where Allen Toussaint’s “Yes We Can Can” was playing.
Haven’t heard this song since—shit. Since the day before the storm.
He’d left the city, but he hadn’t gone far. Like most lifelong residents of New Orleans, Jude had grown complacent over the years as hurricanes came and went; even the ones that appeared threatening turned aside at the last moment. The names Betsy and Camille were invoked as ghost stories, but storms of that power hadn’t been seen since the ’60s. Like “the Big One” in California, like nukes launching from their silos, like airborne Ebola, a storm as strong as Katrina was the bogeyman, the monster under the bed, a worst-case scenario too horrible to be contemplated—unbelievable because it was too awful to be real. Six years ago, he’d been aware that a storm was in the Gulf, but he’d planned on riding it out the way he always had, with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a Walter Mosley novel. He’d had no intention of evacuating, had thought then as he did now: that he only needed the car for a quick trip across Lake Pontchartrain to check on his mother. He hoped like hell he wasn’t as fucking wrong today as he’d been six years ago.
Once he was satisfied that the Porsche was heading in the right direction, Jude opened the book on tarot he’d brought from home, the MAGICIAN card tucked inside as a bookmark. Holding the card up to the illustration in the book was like a “spot the difference” puzzle on the back of a cereal box. The images were eerily similar, a figure standing next to a table in a garden, one hand raised to the sky, the other aimed at the ground. The magician in the book wore robes of red and white, had the twisted loop of an infinity symbol over his head, and held a candle with a small curl of flame burning at both ends in his upraised hand. The magician on Jude’s card stood in the same position, but wore a scuffed leather jacket and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, an outfit he’d worn constantly in his misspent youth. Both magicians stood next to a small table, which held a staff, a sword, a coin, and a cup. They were the suits of the tarot, but they were also the tools a practitioner of magic would use. Like Jude’s former teacher, Eli Constant.
According to the text underneath the illustration, THE MAGICIAN represented duality, pointing up and down to signify a connection to both Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and the material. Drawing this card during a reading might mean that you were trying to live in two worlds without belonging to either one, or that you were trying to bridge the gap between them. The more he read, the more he had to admit that it was an eerily accurate description of his own life. Before the storm, anyway.
He’d been an outsider even as a kid. His unusual parentage had fucked him up in all kinds of ways that had nothing to do with the magic. The complete absence of a father left him with only half an identity, drifting out of every culture and community he ever wandered into, when it became clear that he’d never really belonged, since no one could tell by looking at him if his dad had been black, or Native American, or Hispanic—though no white person ever presumed he was white.
It went beyond race, though. As far as the world of mortals was concerned, he didn’t exist; he had no social security number, no birth certificate, no record of being real. He was “that kid” in his neighborhood: the one who didn’t go to school, who stayed out as late as he wanted, who got blamed for whatever trouble was caused. His mother was frequently absent—sometimes merely too distracted to parent, but just as often literally gone—so he’d more or less raised himself. His education had been in the hands of a string of perpetually ditched tutors. There were no family connections to speak of—save for an unmarried, childless aunt who always seemed to forget he existed—and no cultures to claim as his own.
Throughout his life, he’d always felt alone, but that didn’t mean he’d been lonely. He was both charming and clever, and he was strange in all the ways that children love and parents hate. He’d had many friends, but none that lasted. Scores of lovers, but never love. He snuck into people’s lives just as easily as he slipped out of them. More than his skin tone, more than being a bastard, more than any lack of authority figure or shared experiences, it was what he knew that set him apart. The knowledge that magic was possible, that the gods were real, suffused everything he said and did, and made everything else just that much less important.
When you have a bit of god in you, it can be hard to pretend you give a shit about prom, or taxes, or any of the other things that are important in the mortal world.
So THE MAGICIAN fit him well, as far as having one foot in the material world and another in the world of spirits, but the rest of the description—maintaining the order of the universe, using the four symbols of the tarot (sword and wand, cup and coin) to keep everything in balance—that wasn’t him at all. He thought back to the jobs he’d done and the tricks he’d pulled back when he and Regal had been partners, the one time in his life he’d felt like he’d belonged. The only balance he’d protected had been the one Mourning had cultivated. And now? Since the storm, he lived his life trying to make as little impact on as few lives as possible.
So maybe he’d been a magician once, but he sure as shit wasn’t one anymore. Which might explain why his cards had turned up blank; even magic cards couldn’t reveal your destiny if you’d abandoned it.
The thought of stepping off the path of fate brought an important detail into focus for him. He’d told Regal that being a god meant being trapped in a single identity, and that the only way out was death. It seemed that Dodge had offered a handful of deities a second option, though. Wi
nning the game, according to the vampire Scarpelli, meant becoming something new: the luck god of New Orleans. How many times had he wished for that very thing in the last six years? For the ability to become someone else, anyone else, so long as it was a clean start. He understood, then, something about the god who had killed Dodge.
What was a little murder when weighed against the chance to be free?
His mother’s room at St. Joseph’s Abbey looked—and, more importantly, smelled—the same as it always did: a stink of oil paints and chemicals that slapped Jude in the face as soon as he opened the door. The small room was dedicated to artwork. Stacks of canvases three and four deep leaned against the mural-splashed walls; a small bookshelf crowded with art supplies. Even the thin blanket on her small cot was streaked and splotched from being used as a drop cloth.
A huge half-finished painting of the New Orleans skyline at dusk filled the center of the room, stretched across three different panels. The image stunned him, because it simply didn’t belong. His mother’s work had focused on metamorphosis since he was a child, the natural cycle of a tadpole becoming a frog, the mythic transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree. It was her obsession. Her decision to paint a cityscape all of a sudden was as alarming as if she’d randomly decided to start speaking exclusively in French. More alarming, in truth, because she’d actually done the French thing for a month when he was fifteen.
According to Eli Constant, the cantankerous old sorcerer who’d trained them both before Jude had been born, Lydia Dubuisson had been the most skilled magical practitioner the city of New Orleans had produced in a generation. Something in the act of childbirth had broken her, Eli claimed, which explained why women were so often priestesses and so seldom sorcerers. That sounded like some patriarchal bullshit to Jude, who’d always thought her oddities had more to do with the metamorphic experience of fucking a god than being a mother, but those thoughts always made him feel guilty just for existing, so he seldom wandered down that line of thinking. Regardless of how or why, what really mattered was that at one time, she’d been the heir apparent to the most powerful magician in the city, and these days she’d forget to eat if the monks at the abbey didn’t prepare her meals for her. Jude had been way too young, barely ten at the time, to see the spell she’d cast to convince the monks she belonged among them, but as an adult, he was always impressed by its subtlety, at the seamless way she’d been integrated into the daily life of the abbey—almost as though keeping her healthy and safe was an act of devotion.
