“Since we apparently aren’t sleeping tonight, what are we talking about?” he asked as he pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
“Serial killers, demonic possession,” I said. “Same as always.”
“Jayné got us a job,” Aubrey said.
I ran down the basics again while I finished eating and Ex and Aubrey started. The coffee smelled good—rich and reassuringly heavy—so I had a mug myself. I had to give it to Greece, the coffee was great. Ex pulled back his hair into a severe ponytail, tying it with a length of leather cord while I talked. The softness left his face.
“Officially, it’s one out of seven,” Ex said when I finished. “Or that’s what Brother Ignatius said back when I was in seminary. A little under fifteen percent of serial killings are the result of possession.”
“Creepy,” I said.
Aubrey and Ex looked at each other across the table. I could tell there was some kind of subterranean masculine conversation going on, and it annoyed me that I was being left out.
“What?” I said. “It’s creepy. What?”
“How are you feeling, Jayné?” Aubrey asked.
“Tired. It’s…” I checked my watch. “Two in the morning.”
“Three weeks ago in London, it would have been midnight,” Ex said.
“True,” I said. “Point being?”
Aubrey held up his hand.
“We’ve all been busting hump for… well, for months now. We’ve got six hundred books in the wiki and at least that many artifacts and items, most of which we don’t have any kind of provenance for. And we’re not a fifth of the way through the list of properties that Eric owned.”
I knew all of that, but hearing it said out loud made me want to hang my head.
“I know it’s a big project,” I said. “But it’s necessary. If we don’t know what we have to work with…”
“I agree completely,” Ex said. “The thing is, someone’s come to you with a problem. Sounds like it might be a little hairy. Are you… are we in any condition to take it on? Or do you want to finish the full inventory before we dive back into fieldwork?”
What I wanted was firmly none of the above. I wanted to stop for a while. I wanted to find a lovely alpine village, read trashy romances, play video games, and watch the glaciers melt. And there was nothing to stop me from doing it. I had the money, I had the power.
But this was what Eric did, and he left it to me, and walking away from it meant walking away from him too. I sighed and finished my coffee.
“If this lady’s on the level, she needs us. And if we wait until we’re totally ready, we’ll never do anything,” I said. “And I think we could all use a break. So here’s the plan. I’ll get us tickets to New Orleans, we’ll go save the world from abstract evil, and afterward we’ll hang out in the French Quarter for a couple of weeks and blow off steam.”
“If we’ve defeated abstract evil, I’m not sure how much of the French Quarter will still be there,” Ex said.
“First things first, padre,” I said, standing up and heading for the main rooms. In fairness, the padre part wasn’t entirely true. Ex had, in fact, quit being a priest long before I met him. Thus the Ex. Padre was what a vampire we both knew had called him, and sometimes the nickname still stuck.
The main room of the villa looked like a dorm room a week before final exams. Books filled cheap metal shelves and covered the tables. Ancient texts with splitting leather bindings, paperbacks from the 1960s with bright colors and psychedelic designs, medical papers, collections of theological essays, books on game theory, chaos theory. Grimoires of all arcane subjects waiting to be examined, categorized, and entered in the wiki that the four of us were building to support our work as magical problem solvers. Our laptop computers were all closed, but plugged in and glowing.
I sat at mine and opened it. It took me about three minutes to dig up an old e-mail from my lawyer listing all the addresses of Eric’s properties, and about thirty seconds from there to confirm that I did indeed own a house in New Orleans listed as being in the Lakeview neighborhood, and valued at eight hundred thousand dollars, so it probably had enough bedrooms for all of us. I wondered what it would look like.
I smiled to myself as I got on the travel site and started shopping for the most convenient and comfortable flights back to the States. The truth was, even as tired as I was, the prospect of going somewhere new, opening a new house or storage unit without having the first clue what we’d find gave me a covert thrill. Yes, it all flowed from the death of my beloved uncle, so there was an aspect of the macabre, but it was also a little like a permanent occult Christmas.
Well, except when evil spirits tried to kill me. I had some scars from those that kept me in one-piece bathing suits. But nothing like that had happened for months, and by the time I had four flights booked from Athens International to the Louis Armstrong International Airport, I was feeling more awake and alive than I had in days. Probably the coffee was kicking in too.
It was four in the morning and still a long way from dawn when I called Karen Black.
“Black here,” she said instead of hello.
“Hey. It’s Jayné Heller here. We talked a few hours ago?”
“Yes,” Karen said.
“I’ve talked to most of the guys, and it looks like we can get there in about two days. So Thursday, middle of the morning, but I’ll call you as soon as we’re in and settled. That sound okay?”
“That’s great,” she said. I could hear the smile in her tone, and I smiled back. Always good to save the day. Her next words were more sober. “We should talk about the price.”
“We can do that once we get there,” I said.
“I can do that,” she said, and paused. “I don’t mean to… When I called before, I was a little scattered. I didn’t say how sorry I am to hear about Eric. It was rude of me.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “And thanks. I was… I was sorry to lose him. I’m a little thin on family generally speaking, and he was pretty much the good one.”
“He was a good man,” she said, her voice as soft as flannel. To my surprise, I found myself tearing up a little. We said our good-byes and I killed the connection.
I spent the next hour with the fine folks at Google, reading up on serial killers who had claimed to be demons. I got a little sidetracked on a guy called the Axeman of New Orleans who’d slaughtered a bunch of people almost a century ago. In addition to claiming to be from hell, he said he’d pass by any house where jazz music was playing, which seemed a lot more New Orleans than lamb’s blood on the lintel.
Chogyi Jake woke at six, a habit that he maintained in any time zone. His head hadn’t been shaved in a few days, and the black halo of stubble was just starting to form around his scalp. He smiled and bowed to me, the movement half joking and half sincere.
“Getting an early start?” he asked, nodding at the dun-colored landscape drawing itself out of darkness outside our windows. The Aegean glowed turquoise and gold in the light of the rising sun.
“More like an early finish,” I said. “There’s been a change of plans.”
TWO
I stood on the street, a rented minivan against the ruined curb behind us. Thick, wet American air pressed in on my skin, indefinably different than the damp of Europe. I looked down at the limp MapQuest printout in my hand, then up at the ruin where the house was supposed to be. The walls were covered in dirt and grit, and they slumped ominously to my right. Grass higher than my hips swallowed the concrete rubble that had been a walkway. The windows were gone, the interior walls all stripped down to water-blackened studs.
I walked up two steps of warped boards. Flecks of green paint still clung to them. A huge X had been spray-painted on the door, something that looked like a date above it, letters and numbers to the left and right, and a three beneath it. I could watch Chogyi Jake make his way around the side of the house and toward the back, his shadow visible through the holes in the walls. There wasn’t en
ough tissue left on the house’s bones to stop the light.
“Are we sure this is the right address?” Aubrey asked.
I put the key the lawyer had express-mailed me into the lock. It felt like I was dragging it through gravel, but the mechanism turned. I pushed the door open to the smell of rotting wood and mold.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is the place.”
Ex said something obscene in a reverent voice. The rest of the neighborhood, spreading out around us for blocks, was the same. Ruined streets as much pothole as pavement, shells of houses with only a handful restored or in the process of being restored. Tall grass. I was standing in front of an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar wound, and that was just my house. Every ruined house or bare foundation for blocks around was the same thing.
Hurricane Katrina had rolled into New Orleans three years before. I’d been in the long breathless pause between high school and college at the time, waiting tables at Cracker Barrel and screwing up the courage to tell my father that I was going to a secular university whether he liked it or not. I’d seen the pictures on the news, same as everyone else. I’d given some money to someone as part of a relief effort, or I thought I had. I couldn’t remember now if I’d really done it or only meant to.
It felt like everything important in my life had happened since then: my whole abortive college career, losing my virginity to an unethical teaching assistant, the explosion of my social circle, losing my first real lover, dropping out, Eric’s death, my inheritance, then fighting spiritual parasites and evil wizards. And in all that time, no one had fixed this house. Or knocked it down.
Three years was a long, long time for a twenty-three-year-old woman. It apparently wasn’t much for a three-hundred-year-old city.
“Should we go in?” Aubrey asked. “Do you think it would be safe?”
“I wouldn’t want to bet on it,” Ex said.
“Why didn’t the lawyers tell us the place was trashed?” Aubrey said.
“Who would have told them?” I asked. “If Eric didn’t come check on it, they might not know.”
Chogyi Jake finished his circuit of the house. Yellow-green grass burrs clung to his linen shirt.
“Okay,” I said. “New plan. Everyone back in the car.”
It took under ten minutes sitting in the backseat with Aubrey beside me on the laptop with the cell connection to find a hilariously pricey hotel, make reservations, and plug the address into the rental’s GPS system. Chogyi Jake drove, and Ex rode shotgun. The jet lag was beginning to lift, my brain starting to unfog by slow degrees. The signs of damage that hadn’t registered during the ride out from the airport now became clear. The yellow-white-gray high-water mark on the buildings, the broken windows made more evident by the few houses where new glass had been installed, the ruined asphalt, the strange and ubiquitous X mark on the houses we passed.
We were moving from water to water. My ruined house was a few blocks south of Lake Pontchartrain, the hotel I’d picked a few north of the Mississippi. But as we headed south on I-10, the signs faded. The water mark fell and went away. The city looked hale and healthy, as if we hadn’t just seen a whole neighborhood that had gone necrotic.
“Were you ever here before?” Aubrey asked.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “They have Mardi Gras here. Women get drunk and expose themselves. I’d have been disowned if I’d brought the idea up.”
“I don’t think the exposing yourself part’s required,” Ex said from the front. “I’ve been through a few times, and no one seemed offended when I didn’t insist on seeing their breasts.”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I said. “It’s all about appearances. Dad thought this place was Gomorrah to San Francisco’s Sodom. He’d burst a blood vessel if he knew I was here.”
“What does he think of Las Vegas?” Aubrey asked.
“Gibbering hysteria,” I said. “Apoplexy. Doesn’t have much to say in favor of New York either.”
“Forgive the change of subject, but should you consider telling the lawyers that we’ve changed venues and why?” Chogyi Jake said as he pulled the rental over one lane and got off the highway at Orleans heading toward Vieux Carré.
“Fair point,” I said. “I’m on it.”
If anyone had asked me, back when I was a college dropout with no friends and a family that wasn’t speaking to me, whether it would be harder to deal with an arcane world of possession by bodiless parasites or having a lot of money, I would have guessed wrong. Riders and magic were weird and unnatural, but at least they were expected to be. Money was just as strange, but everyone assumed that if I had that much, I must have some idea how it worked. I felt like half of my day was taken up with doing things that real rich people manage by instinct. Like letting my lawyer back in Denver know where to send things.
The man who answered the phone went from chilly to obsequious as soon as I said my name. Two blocks later, I had my lawyer on the phone, saying she’d get an assessor out to the ruined property as soon as possible. She spoke with careful enunciation so sharp I imagined all the words being relieved that they’d gotten out alive. She was the same lawyer who’d first told me my uncle was dead and that I’d inherited everything. We’d never had a personal conversation, but I secretly liked her.
The hotel was smaller than I’d expected and grander too. A fountain burbled in a low foyer. Dixieland jazz jumped and spun through the air like a company of musical acrobats, each instrument doing something apparently different but all perfectly coordinated. Crystal chandeliers hung from high ceilings. But the bones of the place showed that it had been built before the age of steel infrastructure.
The desk clerk—a black man with perfect skin and a Jamaican accent that could melt butter—handed me my key card. He even got my name right, zha-nay. I usually get Jane or Janie. I felt myself blushing a little bit, and wondered how long it had been since I’d been seriously flirted with. The four of us agreed to meet back in the lobby once we were unpacked and settled. I headed to my room.
It wasn’t a large room, but it was beautiful. Silk wallpaper, crisp sheets, and wireless Internet. There can be no better. I tipped the guy who’d hauled my bags for me, then popped open my laptop and checked mail for the first time since we’d gotten on the plane in Greece.
The background check of Karen Black was in my inbox, cc’d to all the guys. I settled in to find out what I’d gotten us all into.
Karen Alicia Black was born a little over fifteen years before I was. Her father was a cop, her mother was a mother. No living family now, though. When I was getting out of Mrs. Detwyler’s second-grade class at Blackburn Elementary, she was graduating from Oberlin with a double major in criminology and mathematics. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cop for two years, then joined the FBI. A note in brackets pointed out that this was an unusually short period of time—the FBI preferred three years of professional experience. I had the impression that whoever was writing the report had developed a little crush on her.
Her record at the FBI was impressive—kidnapping, arson, serial murder—until 1998. The year I’d spent watching Titanic fourteen times with Nellie Thompson, a man named Joseph Mfume moved to Eugene, Oregon, from Haiti. In the newspaper clippings that were inserted in the text file, he looked about twenty-five, handsome in a goofy way. During the six months after his arrival, he raped and killed seven women in particularly grotesque ways. Karen Black had been part of the team that brought him down.
After that, her career started going off the rails. Two years later, she quit the FBI under a cloud. There were suggestions that she’d been asked to resign, but nothing that proved it.
Since then, she’d worked on and off for a private investigator and started her own security consultancy based in Boston. Her addresses were listed with pictures of the offices, and the same contact number that was in my cell phone. Her credit rating was decent, the frequent flyer programs loved her, she’d had a couple of bouts of the flu over the years and treatm
ent for chlamydia eight months ago. She owned a condo in Boston, she had no family, no husband, no kids. She’d been in New Orleans on and off almost since the hurricane.
The last two pages of the report were pictures.
The cool gaze that looked out from my computer screen could have belonged to an actress or a supermodel. Pale blue eyes, straight blond hair, a sly smile at the corner of her mouth that seemed to be part of the permanent architecture of her face. In the first image, she wore a black turtleneck and a leather overcoat that reached her ankles, a gray eastern-seaboard streetscape behind her. The next one was a more candid shot of the same woman outside a nightclub. She was in a low-cut emerald silk blouse and tight leather pants, and she had the figure to make the outfit work. Even without the cut of her clothes, I saw what the report’s author was responding to.
She radiated confidence and certainty. It was in her eyes and the way she held her shoulders. She had tracked criminals and stopped killers, and her success had left its mark on her.
And she had called me for help. I had the uncomfortable feeling I was about to disappoint her.
I closed the laptop and the French doors that opened onto the balcony. The lace curtains shifted in an air-conditioned breeze so slight I couldn’t feel it. Behind them, palm trees stood guard before a sky of perfect, almost Caribbean blue. The next thing to do was make the call, tell Karen we’d arrived, where we were staying, arrange to meet. It was what I’d said I would do. And yet, here I was, sitting cross-legged on my rented bed, looking at my cell phone and not reaching for it.
It couldn’t hurt to put it off, just for a little bit. The guys were probably settled into their own rooms by now, and talking to them would help take away my feeling of being desperately underprepared.
I took a quick shower, changed into my Pink Martini T-shirt and blue jeans that didn’t have the stink of travel on them, shoved my laptop into my backpack, and headed down to the lobby. There was a restaurant where we could grab some coffee and talk. Or, failing that, we were in New Orleans. Rumor had it that the food didn’t suck.
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