by Bryan Camp
Jude pulled away from the vision, his heel scraping against the wall of books as he stepped back. A tremor ran through them at the disturbance, a shudder that threatened to topple the precarious balancing act around him. He heard a rustling, like the sigh of trees in a high wind. He let go of his doubloon and lowered his hand, slowly, not wanting to disturb the books further, not wanting to suffocate beneath a pile of literature any more than he wanted to break his neck at the bottom of a busted staircase.
“Careful,” Regal hissed from the next aisle over. “The hell was that?”
“Sorry. This hall is a tight squeeze.”
“Then suck your gut in or go back. We’ll never make it out if these bastards start falling.”
The last shreds of his fading connection to Isle of the Cross told Jude more about the collection itself: that it was ancient and had gone by many names, that it had started with the burning of the library of Alexandria, that it had grown when the Maya codices were destroyed by Diego de Landa, and when Hanlin Academy burned, that it collected worthy works that had gone unpublished or whose authors had died when they were still unfinished.
And that it was, somehow, incomplete.
A brush of fingers against his doubloon sent Jude back down a different aisle than the one he’d taken, tugging him along until he found a rectangle of darkness at waist height, an empty space on the bookshelf, the absence of a single slim volume. When his hand entered the gap between the books, he felt—faintly, more like memory than actual sensation—the one that was missing: frigid air and blue flames, slashing fangs and the taste of blood.
A couple of pieces came together in Jude’s mind. The glowing spine of the book Scarpelli was using to turn the city. The name of the bookstore. The peculiar properties of his satchel. The Red Door to Dodge’s card room ignoring the restrictions of space and time.
Without allowing himself to consider that the absurd idea that popped into his mind was very likely impossible, Jude pulled off the satchel and set it on the ground, knelt beside it, touched his doubloon with one hand, and reached in with the other, letting that fragile, tenuous connection to the lost book guide him. He stretched, his arm going in past the elbow, then to the shoulder. The air touching his arm went suddenly cold, and a creeping shiver that came from childhood swept over him, that knowledge of eyes watching from the closet, of claws stretching forth from beneath the bed. He touched a slim leather-bound book, grabbed it, and snatched his hand free, slamming the satchel’s flap closed like he was cutting off pursuit.
His gift sent the history of the book flowing into him: it was a journal of sorts, a series of maps of south Louisiana compiled by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, in the early 1700s. Beginning with hesitant, preliminary sketches of the Gulf Coast and ending with the first official design of New Orleans drafted by Adrien de Pauger in 1721, each individual piece held great historical value. As a whole, though, it contained within it the entire conceptualization of a city. If a city had blood and bone, this slim journal would be its DNA. After Bienville’s death, the collection passed down from one family member to another before being swept away in the 1927 flood, when it found its way to Thoth’s library. Jude couldn’t quite tell if the vampire had bought, borrowed, or stolen it.
He eased his way out of his magic’s grip, starting to get the hang of accessing it through his doubloon instead of through his own will. The journal he slid into his satchel, not wanting to leave it where Scarpelli could find it again, hoping that in reaching past the wards Regal had drawn, he hadn’t liberated the vampire. Or worse, given Scarpelli access to his bag. He stood and pulled the strap back across his shoulders, turning around just as Regal came around the corner of the aisle.
She didn’t, Jude noticed, look surprised to see him. Had she been watching him and backed out of sight when he’d stood up? Was he just being paranoid? Before he could say something to try and tease the truth from her, she waved an urgent “come here” gesture at him and whispered, “Come on, I found something.”
She went back the way she had come so quickly that Jude had no choice but to follow. After a few twists and turns, she brought him to a dead end, the hallway coming to a stop with another wall of books stretched straight across. She pointed a thumb at it. “So here’s the thing. When I first saw this, I immediately turned around. Building can’t go on forever, right? But then I thought about it. Unless my sense of direction is totally fucked, we’ve been going toward the middle of the building, not the outside.”
Jude nodded. “You’re right. You find any more like this?”
“Nope. All the others seem to curve toward this, like—”
“A labyrinth.”
“Exactly.” She held her arms out, gesturing at the walls of books. “So if this is the center of the mouse maze, where’s the cheese? Any of these books look special to you?”
Jude peered closer at the titles, really just trying to shift his posture so he could reach into his pocket without Regal seeing, but something in one of the titles gave him an idea. He stepped back and looked at the wall as a whole, and it seemed even more likely that he was right. “Hey, Queens?”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re nerdy enough to build a labyrinth out of books, what would you need for it to be complete?”
“I don’t know. Minotaur?”
“What? No. Christ, that would be awful. You know how bad those things stink?”
She backed up until she could see from his perspective, thinking. He knew she got it when, after a moment, she barked out a laugh. “Secret door?”
“Yep.”
“So what? You think we find the right book and—” She pantomimed tilting the top edge of a book back from the shelf and made a clicking noise.
“Or . . .” Jude stepped forward and spoke the word for open. One of the books slid in about half an inch—The Infinite Page of Reality, a novel by Jorge Luis Borges—and the door made of books creaked open. They walked through into a huge space, dimly lit and stretching up far higher than the building’s confines allowed. If the space they’d just left had been a labyrinth, this was the inside of a lighthouse, a tower with a staircase of books spiraling along the wall to the top.
It reeked of cinnamon.
The next few moments happened very quickly. Jude saw Hē standing over Thoth—who lay supine with blood gushing from his ibis neck—a blade that curved in a shimmering arc on either side of the angel’s fist, a stream of brackish water fountaining up from the wound and into Hē’s gaping mouth. Regal shouted a curse—not a vulgarity, but an actual curse—a vicious word that would strike the angel blind or cover Hē in painful boils if it took hold. Jude followed the same impulse, though the word that rose to his tongue was the word from the night before, the one that meant burn and, remembering where they stood, he choked it back before it fully left his lips, reabsorbing its power in a swallow that left a scorching line down his throat.
The stream rising from Thoth slowed to a trickle and then stopped. Hē’s mouth snapped closed then, the draining of some vital essence from Thoth now complete, and the messenger whirled, the strange weapon flashing as it left Hē’s hand. Jude lunged for Regal, who was concentrating on some complicated hand gestures whose meaning Jude could only guess at, knocking her to the floor as the angel’s blade whispered over them, the wind of its passage tickling the hairs on Jude’s neck.
A cracking of the air signaled Hē’s wings unfurling, and, gasping for breath because of the flames he’d swallowed, Jude came to his feet at a run, the angel already rising out of reach. Jude dug in his satchel, unsure what he sought but hoping that he had some magic that could trap or wound the angel. A glance toward Regal showed that she was back up and searching along the wall that they’d had at their backs when they’d come in here just moments before. Looking for another way out? Jude thought, but then saw the line of shredded paper that the angel’s weapon had left as it scraped across the wall of books, and realized that Regal was looking for Hē�
��s blade.
The angel had risen almost to the top of the tower, moving toward a skylight at the summit, and Jude had just enough time to consider the consequences of casting the thunderbolt at the angel and missing, when both of Hē’s arms swept forward, a curve of blade flickering out from each hand in a swooping arc. Jude saw in the same instant that they weren’t actual blades at all but some kind of magic—some weaponization of light or will—and that Hē hadn’t aimed at him or Regal but at the walls themselves.
The angel slipped through the skylight and away as those shining blades ripped through priceless volumes, tearing and ruining and violating, but more importantly, undermining the walls of the tower. Books started raining down; the entire structure shook beneath their feet. They’d never make it out the way they’d come in.
Only one way out, Jude thought.
He ran to Regal’s side, pulled her off the stairs she was already scrambling up. “Too high up!” he shouted, and hurried to the door they’d come through.
“You crazy?” she yelled, her voice coming out a panicked shriek.
“Might be,” he muttered, yanking the door shut. He closed his eyes and concentrated, his hand on the door made of books. He pictured what he wanted, strained for the change he needed, felt the ornate twist of a knob in his palm. Without opening his eyes, trusting that the magic had worked as he wanted it to, he said the word that meant open and wrenched open the Red Door to Dodge’s card room. Regal rushed through behind him, and he slammed the door shut just as the tower collapsed behind them.
Crazy like a fox, he thought.
For the next few moments the sudden silence was broken only by the two of them gasping for breath.
Regal recovered first. “Yay, we’re saved?” she said, in a quiet, sarcastic voice.
“Everyone’s a critic.” He rose from his hands-on-thighs crouch and tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge, still buried beneath a mountain of lost books. He closed his eyes, trying to focus, but as the adrenaline leaked out of him, the enormity of what he’d just witnessed crashed down on top of him.
Hē had murdered Thoth. Any inclination Jude might have to second-guess that thought—to consider the possibility that the angel had somehow been framed, or that the strange fountain had been some kind of rescue attempt—came crumbling apart when he ran through his vision of Renai’s last moments, her strange thought about blowing out the candles making far more sense when viewed as her rationalizing the sudden scent of cinnamon in the voodoo shop.
It all came into focus, like a stubborn knot unsnarling and unspooling when just the right thread got pulled. If Hē killed Thoth and Renai, then the angel—a fallen angel, it would seem—was the shadow in his mother’s painting and had also been the one who killed Dodge, and so that whole message-from-on-High that Hē had fed him in the cathedral was suspect, including the proclamation that Jude couldn’t win the game.
But right then, just when Jude started to feel a little hope, the clock on the wall started ticking.
Chapter Fifteen
A one-eyed god pierced by his own spear and hanged from a tree in order to gain the knowledge of writing. A humble god crippled by disease who cast himself into a bonfire, that he might be transformed into a new sun after the old one perished. A healer god, stabbed and beaten and executed, so that he could redeem the sinful. A titan chained to a boulder, his liver eaten by an eagle each day, regenerating each night, after he gave man the power of fire. Again and again, the lesson is the same: Only through pain do we gain knowledge. Only suffering grants us wisdom. Only in sacrifice can we become powerful.
“Shit,” Jude said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
His words unconsciously coordinated with the ticking of the cat clock on the wall. They only had less than a minute before the other doors started to appear. After that, Jude could only guess what would come next, but he assumed that the other gods would return to their seats—the ones still alive anyway—and the card game would resume. And his last cards would reveal themselves before he’d had a chance to make his fate a winning one.
“I’m guessing that’s not good,” Regal said.
Jude didn’t bother to answer, just tried the door again and found the way still blocked. He took a calming breath, trying to still the anger and fear that twisted in his gut. His pulse slowed, and the knob started to vanish from his grip, like a hand clasped in a dream, slipping away upon waking. The red of the door faded away into dingy floral wallpaper.
Tick, tick, tick.
Jude kicked the wall. It felt good, so he did it again, but obviously it did nothing to solve his problem. Think, stupid, he hissed at himself, you just made this work. Up until Thoth’s library, the door had shown up as if it had a mind of its own, as if it were following its own whim. Hadn’t it? No, not exactly. He’d summoned it with a circle—and the thought of trying to do that from inside the card room was a violation of physics he couldn’t wrap his brain around—but he’d also made it appear that first night, during the game. It had vanished when he’d entered, had only come back when he’d turned over those blank cards and tried to—
“Escape,” he said, not realizing he’d spoken aloud until Regal agreed that yes, escape would be nice, thanks. When he glanced at her, she was scanning the room, her fingers curled in a rigid, unnatural gesture that looked like some combination of a martial arts pose and a letter in sign language. A half-dozen or so balls of light orbited her hands, each about the size of a quarter and whirring and crackling with energy. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, like a cat preparing to pounce.
Tick, tick, tick.
Jude stopped trying to control his fear, let it come flooding back in. He let himself imagine what would happen if the gods returned with them still in the card room, let himself remember the way they had laughed at him when he’d been forced to wager away the pieces of himself he couldn’t afford to give up. The panic that had risen in him as he backed away from the table, silently begging to be somewhere, anywhere other than here. Clinging to those feelings, Jude did purposefully what he’d done before only by instinct: he reached for the Red Door and yanked it open, shoving Regal through into hot, humid night. He risked a glance behind him and saw the vampire Scarpelli framed in a doorway of his own. Smiling.
Jude dove through the door and slammed it shut, colliding with Regal in his haste and sending them both sprawling onto a wooden porch. With the soft poomf of a roman candle, the orbs spinning around Regal’s hands went flying off in uncontrolled arcs, streaking away to collide against trees and cars and streetlights with silent detonations that crumpled hoods and shattered glass. A car alarm started blaring.
Guess that’s what she was planning on doing to Hē, Jude thought. Wonder if it would have worked. Out loud he said, “We’ve got to get out of here,” as he struggled to his feet.
“Duh,” she said, waving away his offered hand and standing on her own. “Soon as we figure out where in bumfuck Egypt you brought us.”
The overly rich stink of rotted fruit came to him on the hot breeze, peaches left on the branch until they had fallen to the dirt and spoiled. The sagging and busted porch they stood on jutted into the overgrown yard and wrapped around to the back of the house, which had cracked and fading pink paint on the outer walls and kudzu dangling off the rain gutter. To the left of the door, the spray-painted circled X—the symbol that let rescue crews know that the house had been searched, and whether any bodies had been found—remained, just as it had the last time he’d been here. The house he’d grown up in, where he’d lived just before the storm. The house that had once been home.
“I know where we are,” Jude said. “Streetcar’s that way.”
Regal walked with him the few blocks to St. Charles, talking the whole way about how strange it was that jumping back and forth to Dodge’s card room had taken hours, but felt to them like just a few minutes, how she needed to go straight to see Mourning and tell him what they’d learned, how much she wished she’d been able
to find the angel’s weapon before the tower of books had come down on them. Jude nodded and murmured, but he felt drained, exhausted in a way that ached all the way down to the bone.
His luck held, because the streetcar came rumbling down the track right when they got there, Regal already on her phone calling for a ride to take her back to her car as Jude climbed inside. He collapsed into his seat and hoped the streetcar’s rocking sway didn’t lull him to sleep.
Jude still had questions; he knew who killed Dodge, but still couldn’t quite figure out why. His own fate was still in question, and the schemes of the other gods were still in motion. He couldn’t concentrate long enough to make sense of any of it, though, and nearly missed his stop in the midst of his distraction.
When he stepped off the streetcar, the barometer had dropped, a chill in the air warning that the storm that had been threatening all day was about to break. By the time he made it back to his apartment, the rain started to come down, the wind howling.
Must be a bad one, Jude thought, when he discovered that his power was out. Not that he needed lights to crash into his bed and sleep for ten hours, which is what he felt like doing. So, once his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he picked his way across the research still stacked in piles across his living room floor, making his way toward his bedroom. He dropped the satchel on the kitchen counter as he passed, already kicking his shoes off. The first one thumped against the floor, but the second one made an odd sound.
As though it had struck and come to rest against something—or someone—that Jude couldn’t see.
Jude whirled for his satchel, touching the leather just as a strong hand grabbed him and yanked him back, knocking his bag to the floor. He heard some of its contents spill out, heard a grunt of breath behind him. He needed a weapon, needed to know what he was facing. He didn’t taste blood, didn’t smell cinnamon, but then he realized that it didn’t matter. Whether his assailant was vampire or angel or anything else, everything burned.
