The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Author:Bryan Camp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Chapter Fourteen

The next morning Jude woke to heaven, the scent of fresh chicory coffee and the sizzle of breakfast cooking. He’d slept with the rosary still around his neck and decided to leave it there, a good luck charm if nothing else. He changed into a Tipitina’s T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, both of which were reasonably clean, and left his bedroom just in time to see Regal click off the stove and pour the contents of two skillets, an omelet from one and hash browns from another, onto a plate. She looked up at him and gave him a sheepish sort of grin, the closest she’d come, he presumed, to an apology for the way she’d invaded his apartment of late. If she hadn’t obviously showered and changed clothes, Jude might have thought she slept on his sofa. “Coffee’s in the pot,” she said, as she squeezed past him on her way out of the kitchen, already scooping a forkful of food off of her plate. Jude surveyed the wreckage of her breakfast preparation, noting that she’d only cooked for one.

“Where’s mine?” he asked, knowing she’d hear the smile in his voice, even though her back was to him.

She mumbled something with a full mouth, something that sounded a lot like “In the fridge, fucknuts.”

“But I saved your life, Queens.”

She swallowed and raised her eyebrows with exaggerated innocence. “Really? Let’s zoom right past the part where you saved me from a life-threatening situation you got me into in the first place, and ask: Did you save my life in nineteen-fucking-fifty? No. It’s twenty-eleven. Women can vote, black man’s in the White House, and you make your own breakfast, hero. And be quick, it’s already the crack o’ noon, and I want to check out this bookstore before the thunderstorm they forecast rolls in.”

A glance at the clock told him she was right, it was just shy of noon. He wasn’t surprised he’d woken up so late, because he hadn’t slept well at all. He made himself a cup of coffee and started on his breakfast—half a carton of takeout shrimp-fried rice dumped into a hot skillet with a couple of eggs fried on top, the breakfast of champions—and while his hands were busy going through the motions, his thoughts turned to the night before.

After Regal had dropped him off at his apartment, he’d crashed into bed and fallen right to sleep, plagued by dreams of fire and shadows, culminating in a strange one where he’d lain on a prison cot eating dozens of hard-boiled eggs, one after another, surrounded by everyone he knew chanting that Trickster was always hungry, while the vampire Scarpelli loomed over all of them wearing mirrored sunglasses and shouting in a Texas drawl not his own that what they had here was a failure to coagulate, and Dodge told him that sometimes nothing was a pretty cool hand.

After waking from that bit of madness, Jude had given up on sleep and gone to the pile of research Regal had left on his floor, scooping up anything that talked about Tricksters.

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