by Bryan Camp
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when, after Jude told Renai and Sal her idea for how to proceed, the psychopomp plopped his dog’s haunches on the sidewalk and licked his muzzle. “This is as far as I go,” he said.
“You’re kidding.”
“’Fraid not. I look like a warrior to you? Psychopomps are guides, genius. I got enough juju to drag you back downstairs if you make a run for it, but that’s about it. I’m a lot of things, but impervious to harm I ain’t. So don’t take this personal or nothing, but consider yourself guided.”
“Would you do it for a Scooby snack?”
“Get bent,” Sal said, but his lips tugged back in a doggie grin all the same.
“What, then? If I’m hanging from a tree in there, I can’t do this without you.”
Sal whined and started wagging his tail, not the happy one, but the agitated “don’t know where that scary noise is coming from” wag. “You’re good with lost things, yeah?”
“If I’m in my own body, I am. You help me with that, I’ll owe you. What did you lose?”
“Me.” Sal scrambled to his feet and started pacing, an unnerving thing to see a dog doing. If he were a human, he’d be chain-smoking. “You ever see It’s a Wonderful Life? Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed? Course you have, everyone’s seen that fuckin’ thing. Well, I’m Mr. Potter. Not, you know, literally. I’m what happens if Jimmy was him. Shit, I’m not saying this right.”
“You were human once,” Jude said, trying to keep Sal talking, “and an angel showed you what the world would be if you’d never been born.”
“Close enough. And it was better. Way better. Wonder if that shit-heel got his wings for that. Anyway, that’s how I ended up doing this part-time psychopomp gig. Not much work for a fella who ain’t supposed to exist. I’m fine with it, really. Mostly. Once you make the choice, it all goes away like it never was, ’cause it never was, you know? But lately I’ve had this . . . itch, I guess. This feeling that there was one good thing in that crap life of mine that I miss, even though I don’t remember it.”
Jude squatted down, so her eyes were level with Sal’s. “I promise you that if I survive all of this with my abilities intact, I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
Sal’s wag was a happy one now, fervent and bouncing. “Jude, I could just lick you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. How about we shake on it?”
His dog’s paw was halfway raised when he realized Jude was smirking at him. “Aww, dammit. Why you gotta ruin the moment?” He shook himself. “Okay, stand back. For what you got planned, I gotta change.”
Sal opened his mouth, first a yawn, then a gaping stretch, jaws straining with the effort. Sides heaving, he coughed and hacked, a dark shape wriggling in the back of his throat. Sal spat it free, and then sank to the concrete, deflating, suddenly nothing but fur and teeth. The dark thing shook itself and stood on two spindly legs, revealed the raven shape Sal had worn when Jude first met him. The raven folded one wing and did a little bow. “Not bad, huh?”
Jude gave him a golf clap, poked the empty skin with the toe of her sneaker. “Does that hurt?”
Sal flapped his wings, drying the dog’s saliva from his feathers. “Nah. Getting the dog out of the bird, though? That hurts like hellfire. I should know.” Jude laughed. She turned away from Sal’s furry remains and looked back at the park. Her former body was somewhere in those acres of trees and darkness according to Sal’s nose, and hopefully the satchel as well. She had almost nothing in terms of planning or backup, and no weapons to speak of.
But she was half Trickster. She’d always been more lucky than good.
Jude tied her dreads back with a handkerchief, made a “follow me” gesture to the psychopomp, and stepped into the first of the park’s shadows. Sal spread his tail feathers in a wide fan and then hopped, with a couple of bouncing flaps of his wings, onto her shoulder. “Let’s go see a man about a corpse.”
Damn, Renai thought, good line. I had a whole thing about “going to raise hell,” but his is better.
It was then, with her backup treating this like an action movie, that Jude accepted that she might very well die again before the night was over.
Though her vision eventually adjusted to the darkness, only Sal’s whispered instructions kept her from wandering in a blind circle. She followed the psychopomp’s directions—trying not to think about the fact that he normally led the dead to their just rewards—past the indistinct shapes of public restrooms and picnic shelters—some brick, some fitted stone—quaint in the daylight but little more than ruins in the night. She stumbled around squat clumps of shrubs and over the limbs of oak trees that had sagged to the ground under their own weight, blundering through the obstacles that seemed to her like a charcoal sketch on tar paper, lines and clots of black on black. She had ways of conjuring up some light, but they were more likely to reveal her to her enemies than illuminate her path. Water gurgled somewhere out of sight, an artificial fountain in one of the ponds that pockmarked the greenery.
Her heart leaped against her chest, her every footstep careful, her limbs straining to move, to run, her whole body trembling in anticipation. Not with fear. She should be afraid, she knew, picking her way through the darkness toward whichever god waited for her in the night, whichever deity had killed her once already. The first attack had been a coward’s strike, though, an assassination. Killed unawares, like a sick dog. Things would go differently this time. Instead of the acid bite of fear, Jude tasted the cayenne and burnt sugar flavor of flames on her tongue.
Jude rounded a curve in the path and saw light up ahead, felt the sauna’s heat-like pressure against her skin that told her magic was being performed. It didn’t feel like Scarpelli’s cold, sterile magic, nor did the light have that echoing choir quality that Hē produced. Not one of the enemies she knew about, then. Someone else. Something else. She stepped off the path and into thick, damp grass, walking toward the light. The chirping insects around her fell silent, replaced by the sounds of flames crackling, of drums pounding, of voices chanting.
Jude peered through a gap between branches and saw who she faced, and suddenly wished she had something—anything—more martial than a bottle of ink in her duffel bag.
Three figures capered around a bonfire in the small clearing: a hulking, vaguely man-shaped thing made of vine and branch and bark, like an oak tree that had gained sentience; an emaciated, filthy man with the head of a canine, rabid saliva frothing from his jaws; and Celeste Dorcet, wearing the red suit she’d had on in Mourning’s office, but with bare feet and Jude’s magician bag slung over her shoulder. The drumming was the sound of the tree-man thumping oaken arms against his own trunk. The canine-headed man slapped the ground and tore up fistfuls of grass and earth, howling. Between one blink and the next, Jude saw the loa who rode Celeste, a handsome young man with horns curving up from his forehead: Cross.
Within her mind, Renai let out a little gasp of dismay.
I take it you know them? Jude thought.
Cross you’ve already met, Renai thought. The one riding the tree is Grand Bois, the loawho presides over nature. The third one is Baron Criminel, who is the Petwo side of Barren, like Cross is for Legba. They are the three sorcerers, and that means there is some serious dark magic happening here.
“Sheee-it,” Sal muttered in Jude’s ear. “You gone and pissed off just about every death god in the city, ain’t ya? Got you trussed up good, too, just like I said.”
Almost hidden within the canopy of the oaks overhead, hanging by a rope or a vine by one ankle—his unbound leg tucked up behind the other and his arms restrained behind his back—was Jude’s corpse. An odd gag or mask of some kind obscured the lower part of his face. Jude felt a small whisper of pride, when it became obvious that the body, even devoid of the essence that rode in Renai, was refusing to cooperate. Apparently being a little bit of a bastard went straight down to the bone.
Jude dug in her pocket for the doubloon and held it up to the
raven, who snatched it with his beak. Sal’s weight vanished from her shoulder in a flutter of wings that sounded thunderous to Jude’s strained nerves. If the raven was discovered before accomplishing his task, the whole fragile plan fell apart.
What we need, Renai thought, is a distraction.
No. Stick to the plan. Shove me out and then run like hell.
Your “plan” is more a loose collection of ideas that boil down to “try not to die.” And what it needs, like any good plan, is a diversion. Besides, I feel crappy about that dice thing in your boss’s office. Good luck!
And then, without a chance to offer any word in protest, Renai cast Jude out of her mind and body with the ease of shoving aside an unpleasant thought . . . which, in a way, was what Jude was.
It was very strange to be a being of pure essence. Some quality of the Underworld had let Jude practice self-deception about having a body, but now there could be no illusion, no hiding the lack of form, of substance. For one thing, there was a great sensation of detachment. Things were happening that should interest Jude but didn’t, somehow:
Renai stepping into the bright clearing, deepening her voice and swaggering her hips in an impression of Jude that was simultaneously hilarious, eerily accurate, and unflattering.
Cross pointing, shouting, and the two other loa moving forward, Bois extending a snare-like tangle of vines from one of its sharp-barked hands, Criminel dropping to all fours.
Renai yelling the word that meant burn and throwing a wave of searing flame at the two loa, and then running into the trees—not the way they’d come, but deeper into the park.
And yet, Jude’s gaze turned inward, into the essence of what it meant to be Jude Dubuisson. It was a mess. A conflicted, wounded thing. The parts that ought to be strong were made weak by pain; the parts that ought to be clever were hobbled by doubt. And straight down the center, a jagged, ugly scar. For an entire life, one side of Jude had pulled away from the other, a being of two worlds trying to decide which one to belong to. A duet fighting to sing a song written for one, discordant and competing and off-key. Tearing a soul apart wrestling with a decision that—Jude realized for the first time—didn’t have to be made. Because Jude had never been merely one soul or the other but both, and so both worlds were Jude’s for the choosing.
The structure of Jude shifted, and the rift between the old Jude and the post-storm Jude began to close. Between the mortal and the divine. Became the swaggering, hungry, sly, provocative, and subversive creature Jude was always meant to be. The thorn in the side of the tyrant. The trap awaiting the prideful and the wicked. Neither creator nor destroyer but both.
Hanging there in the space between male and female, alive and dead, between human and god, the Trickster’s song that was the essence of Jude Dubuisson restored itself to harmony.
With the rush of an indrawn breath, Jude slammed back into himself: hanging upside down among enemies, bound and gagged and with a stabbing ache in his side, but himself and whole once more. The pain revealed itself to be not a phantom of his attack, but the raven jabbing him over and over again with his beak, trying to drive the doubloon deeper into the wound between his ribs. Jude jerked against his restraints, trying to tell Sal that it had worked, that he could quit poking him already. The attempt to speak scraped his rough, dry tongue against a foul-tasting burlap pouch filled with herbs that had been stuffed into his mouth: a gris-gris bag, the magic that had restored a semblance of life to his corpse. Among the catalog of bruises and wounds across his body and the danger to his friends, the nasty bag of dried leaves and ground seeds filling his mouth was a minor inconvenience, but in terms of escape, it rendered him helpless.
If he couldn’t speak, he might as well still be a disembodied essence without a voice.
A rasping howl cut through the night, brash and heavy with a drunken glee. “Ain’t I told you,” Criminel said, his words coming from somewhere Jude couldn’t see, “ain’t I told you he’d come looking for his body, even if he ain’t got nothin’ but his dick in his hand?” It took Jude a second to realize that Criminel wasn’t talking to him, but to the tree-shaped loa. Jude strained his neck back until he could see them. Bois had one of its tree-branch arms stretched out behind it, clutching a struggling Renai and dragging her through the underbrush.
Criminel dug a toe into Renai’s ribs, a casually cruel gesture. “Except you ain’t got no dick in that body, do you?”
They thought, Jude realized, that she was him or, rather, that Jude’s essence still rode inside her.
“Not unless she ask nice, she don’t,” Cross said. He and Criminel shared a laugh that made Jude’s skin crawl. He strained against his bonds, trying to loosen their grip, only rubbing his wrists raw against the vines in the process. Below Jude’s head came a creaking groan, a massive pine swaying in a strong wind. Criminel glanced up into what Jude assumed was Bois’s face.
“The fuck you know?” Criminel snapped. He looked back down at Renai. “He says I should just cut you and be done with you,” he said. “But we danced that dance already, you and me.” He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt, studying it with menacing idleness. “Maybe this time we’ll see about making it stick.” He held it up for Renai to see, giving Jude a better look, letting him recognize the blade by its white hilt.
The dagger Regal had used in Scarpelli’s mansion.
So it was Baron Criminel that had been the one waiting for him in his apartment, the knife in the dark. Had they stolen it from her? Or was she working with them? A mixture of frustration and guilt and betrayal washed through him. Somehow, he knew, he’d fucked everything up. And now they were going to kill Renai, because of him. Again. Though he knew that his struggles were fruitless, he continued to strain against the vines that gripped him, sweat—maybe blood—running down his back, pooling in his palms. He grunted into his closed mouth, telling them all to go do something unpleasant with their mothers.
Cross stood, abruptly, and spun in a circle. For a moment, Jude didn’t see the horned young man’s face, nor the face of Celeste, the voodoo mamba. Instead, he saw Papa Legba’s wrinkled, ancient frown. Then it was gone and Cross was in control once more. He snatched Jude’s satchel off his shoulders and threw it to the ground next to Renai. “Don’t forget what we come for,” he said, the menace in his voice aimed at Criminel, not Renai.
The satchel. That’s what this was all about. The gods at the card game had been gambling for something inside, something that would let them become the Luck of New Orleans. Cross must not have been able to find it. If Jude found it for him, maybe he could trade it for their freedom. Or at least Renai’s.
Of course, if he had the satchel, he’d have the thunderbolt again.
“Now,” Criminel said, “I ain’t gonna ask you nothin’ but the one time. And when I ask, you gonna sing.” He reached down and grabbed a fistful of Renai’s dreads, yanked her head back in a torturer’s stretch. Even twisting in the trees, Jude could see the fear in her eyes. “You hearin’ me, fool?”
No, Jude thought, not again. Renai had suffered enough for him. This he simply could not endure.
Rage surged through him and swept away everything else, a wave that rose from his stomach, crested in his pounding heart, and broke against his clenched teeth, the magic surging through his veins and churning in his gut, straining to be called forth into wrath and ruin, expanding against his skin until Jude feared he would burst. He longed to scream defiance, to vent his anger and let curses of terrible potency spill from his mouth. If he was to die, let it be on his feet, with a smile on his lips and mischief in his eyes, like the bastard of a magician he’d once been. Like the Trickster he was born to be. The burning thunder inside him became painful, a cramp in his belly and shards of glass in his throat, a fever across his skin.
Before, he would have fought to quiet this rage, to overcome it. But now that he knew himself as he never had before, he knew that his wasn’t the anger of a man losing his temper, but of a Trickster overc
ome with indignation. A righteous fury. He closed his eyes and took a long breath. Held it. Let the fury and the power overtake him. Let himself tremble at the moment of crisis, a coiled spring, the instant before an explosion.
He relaxed in his bonds, tension easing out of his body like spilled water. Magic radiated from his skin like sunlight, hot and pure. This was the opposite of the chill of the Underworld, the dark emptiness of the Devourer’s maw. It wasn’t despair, nor was it acceptance: it was looking destiny in the eye and giving it the finger. This was the essence of him, the thing no one could take away. So what if they tortured him, killed him? He’d been dead before. If being swallowed by the Devourer was his fate, he’d carry the flame that had kindled within him back to the depths and burn the fucker’s throat on the way down.
Bound, threatened, outmatched, and bleeding, and still Jude grinned that old fuck-you grin.
He reached out with a part of himself he’d always denied. Felt something respond, and with a sense he had no name for, he grasped it, caressed it, and twisted.
And felt his luck change.
He swung by one foot in gentle, erratic arcs like the pendulum of a clock that no longer kept time, the vine creaking with every change in motion. He’d loosened the knots in the vines tied around his wrists in his struggles, slickened them with sweat and blood, but still they held. At least, until his magic put the weight of his swing and the sliver of free movement and a particularly harsh yank of his arm all into perfect alignment, just enough for one hand to—suddenly, blissfully—pop loose.
Moving without much thought, relying on luck and instinct and a passionate desire to cause the bullies threatening Renaissance Raines a great amount of harm, Jude pulled off the rag that kept the gris-gris bag sealed in his mouth; dug out the moist, small burlap sack; and spoke the word Dodge had taught him that meant open.
The remaining bonds around his wrist and the loop around his ankle loosened. Jude twisted as soon as his limbs were free, as he dropped to the earth, and managed to turn just enough in his brief plummet to avoid breaking his neck. He struck the loose dirt and thick grass with a bone-jarring thud, an impact that knocked the breath from him, a gasp of red-hot vapor forced from his lips. A spasm shook his chest as he fought to draw in more air. He sprawled in the dirt, arms splayed wide, desperate but unable to stand. Criminel appeared above him and lifted him by the front of his shirt with an effortless strength.
