by Bryan Camp
Jude knocked. Over the cacophony of the insects, through the wood of the door, Jude heard a solid, mechanical click. The sound of a revolver’s hammer being thumbed back.
Before it occurred to Jude to reach into the satchel for a weapon of his own, the door thumped and swung open with a long, agonizing creak. The room beyond looked exactly as Jude remembered it, though he only gave the surroundings a cursory glance. Nor was he very concerned with the dark mouth of the revolver’s barrel aimed straight at his chest. No, the woman wearing frayed jean shorts and a thin, sleeveless T-shirt from a local all-girls’ school who held the gun dominated his vision: short, with deep-set eyes of molten brown, like honey. Spikes of auburn hair plastered with sweat to the sides of her head. Full lips twisted into a grimace.
Regal.
For a long moment, the drone of the cicadas seemed to fade into the distance, and all was silent save the rasp of Jude’s breath and the tink-tink of glass bottles brushing against one another in the breeze. He knew he should say something, but he genuinely couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She clicked her tongue at him, like she was getting a dog’s attention. “Don’t know what the game is, boo,” she said, “but I ain’t playing.”
Jude nearly laughed. “That’s rich coming from you,” he said. “Looks like you’ve been playing games since the beginning, Queens.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That is eerie as shit.” She chewed at her lip. “Piece of advice? Don’t pretend to be someone who’s already dead.”
Jude started to answer, to try and convince her that he really was the friend she’d betrayed, when the anger bubbled up from deep within him and he realized he didn’t give much of a damn whether she believed him or not. He hissed the word that meant open at her revolver. The cylinder dropped down to the side, spilling bullets to the floor. Her eyes stretched wide, and Jude stepped forward and snatched it out of her hand. He emptied the remaining rounds into his satchel, snapped the cylinder shut and put the safety on, then slipped the revolver into his satchel as well. He fought the urge to wipe his hands on his pants.
“Fuck me with a blowtorch,” she said, “it really is you.”
“It really is me,” he said, reaching into his satchel for the dagger with the white hilt. “Piece of advice? Don’t try to kill someone who’s already dead.” Regal looked at the dagger in his hand and then into his eyes, and did the last thing he’d expected her to do.
She passed out.
It only took her a few minutes to come to, but that was all the time Jude needed to secure her wrists and ankles with a couple of lost silk scarves he pulled out of his satchel so that he could search the small cabin for his old teacher. He discovered neither the man, nor his corpse. If Regal had killed him, she’d dumped him in the swamp for the gators—something Eli had threatened to do to Jude many times, over the years.
When Regal shook awake, she glanced down at her bonds, closed her eyes, and groaned. “No,” she said, “don’t tell me I fainted like a wuss.”
Jude had to grind his back teeth together to keep from smirking. “Regal—”
“Got the vapors like some floofy dress-wearing Jane Eyre bitch.”
Jude squatted down so he was eye level with her and spoke the word for close. Her jaw snapped shut. “There are things that will happen now,” he said, “and things which will not. What will not happen is you will not start running your mouth fast enough to slip in the string of the words that activates one of Eli’s defenses. Nor will you distract me enough to get the upper hand. What will happen is that I will ask you some questions and wait patiently for the full and truthful answer.” He picked up the dagger from the floor, examined it, and stood. He backed away from Regal, not turning away from her for a second, and set the dagger on Eli’s workbench. “I also will not hurt you or even threaten you. If you choose not to answer me, I’ll leave you as I found you, hidden away in this sad little shack.” The words were pouring out of him now, unplanned, inspired. His Trickster nature taking over and spreading it on thick.
“Nod if you understand what will and what won’t happen here.”
She nodded.
“And will you answer my questions?”
She thought for a moment, lips pursed, before shrugging and nodding.
“Good enough,” he said, and spoke her mouth open once more. He dragged the cabin’s one chair over to face her and eased into it. “So. Where’s Eli Constant?”
“Dead.”
Jude swallowed down a burst of cayenne and burnt sugar. “Did you kill him?”
She seemed offended by the question. “Of course not. I’m—no. No, I didn’t kill him.”
“So you just set him up to be killed?”
“No! I didn’t have anything to do with his death.”
Jude lifted up his shirt to show her the pale scars pockmarking his flesh. “Why do I have trouble believing that, Queens?” He followed an impulse, an instinct about what she was doing here. “You wouldn’t be the first student of magic to kill her teacher to take his place.”
“He wasn’t my teacher, you dick-juggler! He was my father.”
When Jude looked for it, he could see the remnants of Eli in her. The shape of their eyes, if not the color. That wry quirk of the lips when they were laughing on the inside—at you, not with you. He leaned forward, the chair creaking beneath him. “Tell me what I need to know,” he said.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve literally got all day.”
Regal’s real name, she told him, was Alafair Constant. She’d been a teenager when Jude and Eli parted ways, had asked her father if she could take Jude’s place as his apprentice. After Jude’s mother, though, Eli had sworn to never train another woman. Regal seemed to think it had more to do with the fact that she was his child—not his daughter—that mattered, but whatever his motivations, Eli refused to teach her. This only made her more determined to learn, of course, so she’d taught herself, studying Eli’s books when he was out, seeking out those back alleys and back rooms where she could discover something, anything about magic.
Which was why, when she’d started working with Jude and with Mourning, she’d had to come up with another name. To become someone other than Eli Constant’s little girl. And so Regal Sloan had been born. She had a feeling that Mourning had known who she was all along, though, because after the storm, Mourning started grooming her to fill the hole Jude had left behind. Teaching her things, giving her gifts like the dagger. It had been nice, for a while, but then she’d started getting suspicious.
So, with the help of the dagger, she’d started spying on Mourning.
She’d learned enough about his intentions to know that he didn’t care who won the card game, even if it was a monster like the vampire or Cross, only that the winner was in his pocket. So she’d told him she was quitting. Mourning didn’t seem bothered by her leaving, just asked her to perform one last task for him. In return, she’d get to keep the dagger.
Her eyes wandered around the room as though searching for something out of place or unable to meet Jude’s gaze, and after a few moments, she looked back at him. “And that was the first time I betrayed you,” she said. Despite himself, despite his anger and hurt and suspicion, Jude believed the guilt he heard in her voice.
“Because your last task was to deliver my invitation to the game?”
“No. Well, yeah, but not exactly.” She rubbed her thumbnail against the pad of her index finger, worrying it back and forth. “You were the task, yes, but no, the invitation Mourning told me to give you wasn’t yours. It was meant for him. You were never supposed to be at the game, Jude.”
Now that he had seen through the eyes of a Trickster, Jude could see the twisting brilliance of it. In one deft move, Mourning had pushed him and Regal back together, had shifted the nature of the game in such a way that whatever Dodge was planning would be disrupted, and pulled Jude—and with him the satchel—out of hiding. By keeping himself out of the game, Mourning had put himse
lf in exactly the position he wanted to be in: in control. You didn’t need to be as strong as a horse to pull a wagon; you just had to be able to hold the reins. And unlike everyone sitting at the table, Mourning had nothing to lose.
“So if that was your last job for Mourning—”
“Why did I pretend I was still working for him? Because you actually showed up, with that magic touch of yours. It’s like you said back at St. Joe’s when I gave you the invitation: There’s a change coming. And I’ll be damned if I get left behind. My father was the Magician of New Orleans. It’s my birthright, and I’ll do whatever it takes to claim it. That includes lying to you so I could use your magic to find what I need. That includes giving a voodoo god my dagger so he could steal the satchel from you, because Mourning promised to name me the Magician when this is all over, and slippery as he is, he’s a man of his word. Even knowing you might die. Even after you’d just saved my life.”
She twisted her wrists in her bonds, showing her empty hands. Partly a shrug, partly a gesture of defeat. She fell silent.
Part of Jude wanted to untie Regal—he couldn’t call her Alafair, that was a woman he’d never met—and ask for her help. To forgive and trust her. Part of him wanted to reach out with his magic and drain every last ounce of luck from her, to litter her next few days with calamity and misfortune. Part of him wanted to drag her to the porch and toss her in the swamp. He wouldn’t be killing her, just leaving her in a position where death was the most likely outcome.
Just as she’d done to him.
Instead, he moved past it, focused on the reason he’d come to this shack in the first place: Eli Constant.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why this is happening now. First Dodge gets murdered, and now Eli is dead. You weren’t really clear on that, either. How did he die? He’d always said that he’d live—”
“As long as the city lived. Yeah, he told me that, too. Turns out it works both ways.”
When the implication of what she’d said hit him, Jude was glad he was sitting down. It wasn’t happening now. It had been going on for six years. “The storm,” he said.
Regal’s lips compressed to a grim line, and she nodded. “My father went years ago, just a couple of months after the storm. Said he couldn’t stand the silence, after she died.”
“She?” Jude could guess what she would say next, but needed her to say it out loud. Needed to know for sure.
“New Orleans,” she said. “The storm, the flood. It killed her. She’s been flatlined for six years, and this shit-heap game is supposed to be like those paddles on TV—you know, ‘Clear!’ and bzzt, the heart’s beating again? Give her a new Magician, Voice, and Luck god and she’ll snap right back.”
The last piece of the puzzle slid into place. The reason Mourning needed Jude, needed his gift; why the city was vulnerable to Scarpelli’s attempt to turn her; why Cross had wanted the satchel so badly. New Orleans died six years ago.
And when you died, you lost your voice.
Tears glistened in Regal’s eyes, her fists clenched at her sides. “I begged him to leave. Told him he wasn’t the city’s Magician anymore, that he didn’t have to lie down in his grave and die. But he refused. Said he would never turn his back on this place, even though everyone here with enough power to leave had turned their backs on him, even though—” Her voice cracked as she restrained emotions Jude could only guess at.
Regal clenched her jaw and turned away, unable to look at Jude, or not wanting him to see the tears coursing down her cheeks. He stayed quiet, knowing that she needed to say her piece, and while he didn’t owe anything to her, he owed Eli Constant that much, at least.
“My father was the most powerful, wise, and selfless person I have ever, or will ever, know,” Regal said, speaking in the clipped cadence of barely restrained contempt. “But when he died, he was nothing but a foolish old man. Because of you. He told me, ‘Jude will save us.’ Over and over. ‘Jude. Find Jude Dubuisson. He will save us. Jude will save us.’ But you didn’t. You didn’t even try.”
Jude rose to his feet and went back to Eli’s workbench, picked up the dagger that Regal had traded back and forth in exchange for his life, one way or another. He dropped it to the floor next to her. “This belongs to you,” he said. “When I’m gone, you can use it to cut yourself free, and we’ll be square.”
“Just like that? How do I know this isn’t some kind of trick?”
“Because I’m not done. I’ve got too many knives at my back already, Queens. I can’t afford for you to be one of them.” He reached down, pressed a finger against the hollow of her throat, and said the word for close. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I just don’t see any other way.”
As he walked away, out the door and down the long pathway across the swamp, back into the stink and noise of modern New Orleans, Regal cursed at him, an impressively vulgar and creative stream of obscenities, and then, when she realized what he’d done, the potent kind of curses, magics that should have blinded him and covered him with boils and broken his limbs.
But none of them had any effect. He’d left her with the power of speech, but he’d locked away her Voice. She might be the daughter of the Magician of New Orleans, but now she would be incapable of magic.
And just like that, all his options went away. Revenge against Regal, finding Eli, done and done. And if Eli was dead, Dodge couldn’t win the game, couldn’t be the city’s Luck again, so New Orleans couldn’t return to the city she’d been before, no matter what Mourning had said about symbols being restored. Which meant deliberately losing the game in the hope that his sacrifice would let Dodge win was no longer an option.
Leaving him with just one path: the Red Door.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jude decided that even if walking through the Red Door was inevitable, he didn’t have to do it right away. He had a whole day to prepare, to call in favors, to experience the city that he loved one last time.
He went back to his apartment and dressed for the occasion, solid black slacks and a pinstriped black dress shirt, a dark gray vest decorated with purple, green, and gold fleur-de-lis that he wore every year on Mardi Gras day, a solid dark purple tie, and a pair of black and white oxfords. Last, but not least, the burlap mask to hide him from Hē’s gaze.
Sharp as a knife, he thought to himself as he rolled up his sleeves, slung the satchel around his neck, and made his way downstairs to the Caddy he’d animated with a Shem to bring him to Eli’s cabin. For a moment, the options for how to spend his last day alive overwhelmed him, but then a rumble in his belly decided for him.
Beignets at Café du Monde—crispy, deep-fried squares of dough, covered with sticky-sweet powdered sugar and washed down with hot chicory café au lait, rich and bitter and thick; pecan-crusted gulf fish at Commander’s—a pan-seared trout filet, flaky and steaming, with crushed sweet corn and sweet wine–poached blue crab, a delicate mélange of sugary and brine and herbs; a Surf and Turf po’boy at Parkway Tavern—a feast of fried, spicy shrimp stuffed inside a roast beef sandwich, with thick, savory juices soaking into crusty French bread; a snoball—a Chinese takeout container filled with crushed ice drenched in chocolate syrup on Plum Street; and a cup of cappuccino and a slice of spumoni at Brocato’s.
And everywhere he went, Jude got lucky.
With the same senses he’d used in the Camellia Grill, Jude found those graced with an overabundance of fortune and those down on their luck, and used his powers to tip the scales, trading lucky breaks for misfortune and vice versa.
There were exceptions, of course. A fantastically fortunate older white guy who recognized that he’d been blessed—that “the universe smiled on him,” as he called it—and did his best to share the benefits with those around him, giving to charities and literacy programs and treating his employees with compassion. A couple of unfortunates who were real assholes and deserved every pound of crap the universe dumped on them. Those few Jude left as they were.
&
nbsp; Everyone else, though, felt the push of Jude’s influence on their fate, in one way or another. Each time he gave the life of someone in need a little twist, he felt a little more at peace with himself, and every time an overconfident, privileged ass-clown got knocked down a peg or three, Jude kept a taste of that good fortune for himself.
For what he had in mind, he’d need every scrap of luck he could hang on to.
As he followed his stomach back and forth across the city; as he crossed the river in a sprinkling of rain to ask Leon Carter to do him a favor that night; as he called Regal to make a deal; as he got the Caddy to drive slowly past the house where he’d grown up, the mask seemed to fool Hē, but somehow the Red Door continued to track him. Always in the corner of his eye, always just a few steps away. Bathroom doors and kitchen doors and fire exits and once, just for variety, an empty frame in a building under construction. Between one blink and the next, they were exchanged with a splash of red and an ornate twist of a doorknob.
Soon, Jude promised it, soon.
Evening was coming on when Jude finally turned the Caddy toward the Causeway—toward Renai, and Sal, and his destiny. Jude stared out at the setting sun as the clouds caught fire and the surface of Lake Pontchartrain burned into his retinas. He watched brown pelicans as they fished, gliding straight up, turning a slow, graceful arc in midair, then a tuck of the wings and a darting plummet that ended in a tight, comic splash.
He thought about Regal then—and about Cross and the vampire Scarpelli—and wondered if his traps had managed to hold any of them for very long. He thought about Renai and Sal, and what he was about to ask of them. He thought about his mother and all that she’d endured on his behalf. He considered the contents of his satchel, the revolver and the thunderbolt and his cards, pondered the wisdom of trusting his life, his soul, to a handful of lost things. He let it all tumble through his mind, the threats and the shadows, the players at the card table and the humans caught up in their dance, magic spells and hurricanes and city gods and trumpet players and absent fathers and fate and luck and life and death and the everlasting game that kept changing its rules.
