“How are you feeling, Jayne?” 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
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.
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 Jayne 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 enough 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
