The City of Lost Fortunes

by Bryan Camp

  Jude hesitated outside the door to her apartment, unsure now that she stood here if she really wanted to go inside. No police tape blocked the door like it had at the voodoo shop, but then Jude had been the only person to come into this building for years. No surprise that the body hadn’t been discovered in just two days. She remembered, now, those few dark moments, the raging thunderstorm, the unseen assailant, the knife again and again. She didn’t know if she could really look at a corpse that had once been the face in the mirror without going mad. Renai was a soothing presence in the back of her mind, a playful reminder that hearing voices in one’s head sort of solved the whole insanity question anyway.

  Sal sat beside her, canine ears perked forward. “What’s the holdup?” he asked. “You think they might still be in there?”

  “Well, shit, Sal. I do now.” The plan, such as it was, that they’d ironed out on the way back to her apartment—the work of a few hours of creative resource gathering, given that she’d been resurrected without any cash or streetcar tokens—was for Jude to search the satchel for some way to fight something you couldn’t see, while the psychopomp sought the killer’s scent, both for identification and tracking. Her biggest hope was that, with her enemies thinking Jude dead, she’d have the element of surprise this time.

  She listened at the door for a minute or so, but heard nothing inside except the sound of the air conditioning clicking on. Sal let out an impatient sigh.

  “Are you sure you can do this?” Jude asked him.

  “This shape ain’t just for the pretty face,” he said.

  “Fair enough.” Jude spoke the lock open and stepped inside, the psychopomp at her heels. She held her breath, bracing herself for a wave of stench that didn’t come. Not that the apartment smelled nice, exactly. Dishes had been left in the sink for a few days and the cloying odor of dried blood hung in the air, but nowhere near the heavy, rotting corpse stink she’d been expecting. It was easy to see why.

  The corpse of Jude Dubuisson was gone.

  Sal went straight to the bloodstain, his nose pressed to the hardwood floor, sniffing audibly. Jude did her best not to hover over Sal, trying to keep calm. She picked at a seam, a nervous gesture that was Renai’s, not Jude’s. After a minute Sal huffed and sat back on his haunches, his ears low against his head. “Well, this is damned peculiar,” he said.

  “Any idea what happened?”

  “All I can really tell is what you already know. Somebody got killed right here and then carried away.”

  “Carried away? By whom?”

  “My guess would be Cafard.”

  Jude shrugged to show that she didn’t know who that was.

  “Scavenger god,” Sal said. “Every place that’s got enough of us godly types to be worth a damn has got some bottom feeder that handles the mess when one of us so-called immortals turns out to be, you know, not. But you do not wanna go find her, believe.” Sal turned his head to the side and let his tongue loll out in an expression that could only be disgust. “Scavenger gods ain’t much for hygiene. Kinda like this place.” That last was muttered sotto voce.

  A suspicion that had been worming its way through Jude’s thoughts returned. “How sure are you that I am who Barren says I am? What if this is a trick? A spell to make me think I died, another to change—”

  Sal rose to his feet and shook, a whole body gesture, like he was flinging water off his fur. He stilled and looked up at Jude. “Look, believe me, I wish that was the case. If you were just transmogre— transpara— if they just did some hoodoo and gave you lady-business, I could leave you here and go back to the day job. But that ain’t the way it is. I know Barren is as slippery as they come, but you ain’t no trick. This nose don’t lie.” He pressed his muzzle into Jude’s palm, snuffling. “This is Renaissance Raines, body and soul. Jude Dubuisson’s scent is all over this place and his soul”—Sal lifted his noise into the air, paused for a second, and then, letting out a surprised little grunt, tilted it toward the books still piled on the living room floor—“is right over there.”

  Wait, what? she thought.

  Following the psychopomp’s nose like a pointing finger, Jude moved aside books and papers until she found the doubloon stamped with a stylized heart that contained her gift. She glanced back at the spot where she’d died and tried to picture it. The stabbing, the fall, and then? Someone going through her pockets, tossing this over their shoulder when it wasn’t what they sought. She held the doubloon in her bare hand but didn’t feel anything, no surge of lost things, nothing. Replaying the moment of death in her mind was disturbing, but even more so were the implications. An invisible attacker wielding a knife.

  Maybe she’d been right to be suspicious of Regal all along.

  “Sal,” she said, “you’re going to have to help me out here. This isn’t exactly my realm of expertise.” She held up the doubloon. “This is my—is Jude Dubuisson’s soul?”

  The dog cocked his head to the side. “Yep.”

  “Then how am I in here?” She tapped her temple. “Barren said we were sharing this body. I figured that meant my soul was hitching a ride.”

  Sal chuckled. “Oh, hell naw. You’d have a whole mess of conflict going on if we’d’a put Jude’s soul in Renai’s body. Jude’s soul is male, for one. Demigod, for another. You think your thoughts and your meat is all you are? Shit ain’t that simple. That whole body and soul di-whatcha-call-it? The fifty-fifty split? Life is more complicated than that. It’s like this: What makes you you? Most people figure it’s your brain. Memories and experiences and whatnot. And when you die, you got a little ghost brain that leaves your body and goes up to heaven, right? Wrong. Brain stays put. Brain ain’t you. Brain ain’t even the whole of you when you’re still alive and in the body. You also got an energy, an engine that drives you from before you’re born until after you’re dead. That’s part of what I do. I collect bits and pieces of that energy so it can be stitched together into something new and stuck in a baby about to get born. That’s soul.

  “But even that ain’t you. The part that was around before this life and goes on into the next one, the essential part, the eternal part, that’s what’s riding around in Renai’s mind and body right now. Got all kinds of names. These days we just call it ‘essence.’ Barren gave you that computer talk?”

  Jude nodded, and Sal made a scoffing noise in his throat.

  “That’s bullshit. He’s just trying to be modern. Used to do one that was all about steam locomotives. You ain’t a program. You’re a song. Play it from a record, sing it out loud, repeat it in your head; it don’t matter. It’s always the same song.” He flopped onto the floor, his head resting on his paws. “But hell, I ain’t good at the metra— uh, mystical—”

  “Metaphysical?”

  “Yeah, that. The important thing is, we ain’t gotta track down your killer; what you got in your hand is all we need. We bring that back down to the Thrones—” Sal stopped talking, his head snapping up, his ears erect and tense. “Aw, crap.”

  “What?” Jude spun around in a slow circle, scanning the apartment. “What did you see?”

  “The brain stays put,” Sal said, repeating a part of his crash course in metaphysics. “If Cafard ain’t took you, then someone else did. And if they got enough soul and enough know-how, they can, like, jump-start you. Only it ain’t you, remember? It knows what you know, acts how you might act, but the essence of you is gone.” He stood up and started to pace. “The Thrones don’t send just anybody back. Even if you got a pretty little savior like Renaissance here.”

  Aww, Renai thought, good doggie.

  “If they gave you a second chance to bring them your soul, they probably didn’t want you rattlin’ around up here without your training wheels. I don’t suppose that thing in your hand is one of a kind, huh?”

  Jude heard echoes of the gods demanding their own pieces of her: devotion, passion, blood, heart. All of it sounded a lot like soul to her.

  Sal could see the answer o
n her face. “Shee-it. Guess we gotta follow this nose of mine after all.” He paused, then turned his face down to his paws, only looking up at Jude with his eyes. “After you, uh, freshen up, that is.”

  “What?”

  “I know we’re on a deadline and all—’scuse the pun—but that body spent the past few days in a tomb, Jude.” Sal lifted his nose to the air and gave a couple of delicate, poignant sniffs. “You’re a little ripe.”

  After a quick phone call to the abbey to make sure Lydia was okay and one to Regal that went straight to voicemail, Jude showered with her eyes closed, coaxing Renai to come forward and handle things. Partly because she wasn’t entirely sure where the line between guest and intruder was drawn in their relationship, but had a feeling that getting naked and handsy in a body that wasn’t her own would cross it. But also because, when raiding the closet for some clothes that would fit a nineteen-year-old girl, a giggling thought of Renai’s about getting into Jude’s pants had flittered up from the back of her mind. That combined with Renai’s memories of the first time they’d met left Jude feeling both flattered and skittish. So she was both scrubbed clean and happy that the experience was over when she left her bedroom, dressed in a “Save Our Cemeteries” T-shirt that had been too tight for Jude Dubuisson’s body but hung loose on Renai’s, and a pair of women’s jean shorts belonging to a few-night stand—a history professor by day and a French Quarter tour guide by night, if Jude remembered correctly—that Jude hadn’t known were still in her closet.

  Happy, anyway, right up until the moment she realized that the satchel had been stolen along with Jude’s corpse.

  It took about fifteen minutes of cursing and scouring the apartment before she stopped searching, but, in truth, she’d known it was gone the instant she saw the handful of magics that had spilled across the counter when the thief had snatched it up. It made sense, in a way. Jude had figured she’d been invited to the game because of something in the satchel, some lost thing that would enable the winning god to remake him- or herself into the luck god of New Orleans, so whoever had broken in here had probably had theft as much as murder on their mind.

  Which explained why they’d searched Jude’s pockets and why they’d taken the body: they were going to reanimate it and ask it where whatever it was they were looking for was hidden.

  Jude shuddered. It was a horrible concept to consider, so she didn’t. Instead, she made an inventory of the handful of magics left to her, aside from the physical charms and verbal spells she still seemed able to perform:

  the doubloon holding her gift, which only seemed to work when in contact with Jude’s body;

  a dragon-scale amulet that would let her breathe underwater;

  a pair of magically loaded dice that would show whatever number you wanted, if you knew how to roll them properly;

  a jar of kraken ink that would leave an indelible stain on anything it touched;

  an ancient Chinese coin, round with a square snipped out of the center, that did some very useful things to ATMs;

  a puzzle box Jude had never managed to open;

  and the journal of old maps that had come from Thoth’s library.

  Jude was very happy to see that the journal hadn’t fallen back into Scarpelli’s clutches, but as lucky breaks went, it didn’t inspire much confidence. It’s not like the thunderbolt or a magic wand had fallen out.

  Least it’s not a total loss, Jude thought, reaching down for something that had spilled off the counter onto the floor. The killer left us this, too. Not only was the MP3 player miraculously not broken; it had half a charge left of its battery.

  Ooh, Renai thought, is that mine?

  Sure is. I was going to leave it for your folks so they’d have something to remember you by.

  Fine as hell and thoughtful, too, Renai thought, her teasing tone somehow conveyed without a voice. Why are all the good ones married, gay, or disembodied voices inside my head?

  You were a lot shyer the last time we met.

  Death is a real confidence booster.

  Sal coughed.

  When Jude looked at him, the psychopomp licked his chops and then tossed his head toward the door. “If you two are done flirting,” he said, “we kinda got some things to take care of?”

  “Can you hear what we’re thinking?”

  “Nah. But pheromones don’t lie.”

  Jude scooped the assorted magics and the MP3 player into an old gym bag, stuffed a handful of cash and streetcar tokens into her pocket, and followed Sal down to the street, where a black gleaming car idled at the curb. Jude cycled through a number of emotions in the space of a few seconds: a spike of fear at first, which calmed when she didn’t taste the blood that would signal a vampire, then fear returning and skyrocketing right into panic when she remembered that the taste thing had belonged to another body. She readied herself to shout the word that meant burn and then run like hell, but then the car door opened, and the vehicle’s shocks groaned, the chassis rocking back and forth as someone huge and heavy levered themself out of the front seat: a gray hand, followed by a suit coat, a bald gray head, and a massive body, with תמא—the Hebrew word for truth—etched onto that cracked and craggy forehead.

  It was a golem dressed like a Secret Service agent, mirrored sunglasses and all.

  The golem’s voice wasn’t the resounding boom that Jude expected, but a rasping, hissing whisper. “Mourning sent me to collect you,” the golem said.

  Jude’s thoughts raced. “Collect—oh, you must be looking for Jude. He’s upstairs. I’m just taking his dog for a walk. You can go right on up. C’mon, boy.” This last was said to Sal, who hesitated only a fraction of a second before yipping and trotting along at Jude’s heels. They didn’t make it far. A single gray palm blocked their path.

  “Very specific instructions. Collect the first person to leave.” The golem opened the rear door and waited. Jude considered her original plan of yelling the word for burn and running, but quickly dismissed it. Fire wouldn’t do much to clay, and the golem moved much more swiftly and smoothly than anyone that massive had any right to.

  Be interesting to see if Mourning recognizes me, Jude thought, resigned, and slid into the back seat.

  “Dog stays,” the golem said. “Not cleaning dog piss off my seats.”

  It was very disconcerting to see a dog roll its eyes in disdain, but Sal did it. To Jude, he said, “Might take a while to track this scent anyway. I’ll let you know when I find something.”

  Before Jude could argue, the door slammed shut, the car leaning alarmingly back and forth as the giant got in, and then eased away from the curb. Just like that, she was on her way to see the last person in the city she wanted to see. Aside from her murderer, anyway.

  It occurred to her then, too late, that they might be one and the same.

  Chapter Twenty

  The golem didn’t speak much on the short drive downtown. Jude, hoping the magically animated statue might reveal something about Mourning’s plans, asked why Regal hadn’t been sent to pick her up. “Sloan woman don’t work for Mourning no more,” the golem said, which gave Jude enough to think about that she didn’t say another word until they parked illegally on Canal Street.

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked, sticking with the “I don’t know what’s going on—I’m just a teenage girl who walks the dog” plan until she knew it wouldn’t work. The golem said nothing, just opened her door and waited, patient as the grave, for Jude to get out. When she did, the golem closed the door, locked it with a chirp-chirp from a key fob, and motioned with one massive hand for Jude to follow.

  The golem led her around the corner of the building to a maintenance entrance. A homeless man in dirty, ragged clothing huddled against the door. As Jude dug in her pocket for some change, the man turned his face, revealing gray-streaked dreadlocks and the thin-wired spectacles of a scholar, dark mournful eyes that looked straight through Jude, a gaze turned inward: the zombie musician, Leon Carter.

  Ins
ide, Renai cursed.

  Jude knelt beside Leon and reached out to grasp his shoulder. The contact sent a shock between them, an electric current of pain that knocked Jude to the ground. Though he looked whole, inside the musician was nothing but a raw, seeping wound. Leon jerked his head back and forth to a beat only he could hear, like an addict’s convulsions. Jude didn’t need a magic talent to tell her that Leon had lost something profound.

  But what? Hadn’t Regal said Leon was fine?

  “What are you doing?” the golem asked.

  Jude looked up at the broad, impassive face. “We have to help him,” she said. “Don’t you know who this is?”

  “A nuisance. Like you.” The golem pulled open the maintenance door, shoving Leon out of the way. “Let’s go.”

  Jude stood and wiped the dirt from the seat of her shorts. She realized that Leon wasn’t staring inward like she’d thought at first. He was watching the Canal Place building, his eyes traveling up and up, as though his vision could penetrate the floors that separated Mourning’s office from the street.

  Mourning, she thought, of course. “I don’t know what he’s done to you,” she said to Leon, not caring if the golem heard, “but I promise I’ll make it right.” The golem ushered her none too gently into the cool and quiet of Canal Place, all but taking her hand and walking her to the elevators. Inside, Jude looked at herself in the mirrored walls, pleased to see that the wound from when Hē had killed Renai had healed without leaving a scar. She thought the young woman would be pretty pissed when she realized that the holes for all her piercings had closed up too, though.

  Renai was too worked up about Leon to notice. This is bad, Renai thought. This is so bad. The loa are gonna be beyond pissed. What’s wrong with him?

  I don’t know, Jude thought, but I’m going to find out. What’s Leon got to do with the loa? I know he made a deal with Legba but—