The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven by Jonathan Strahan

Author:Jonathan Strahan [Strahan, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781597804592
Amazon: 1597804592
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2013-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

JACK SHADE IN THE FOREST OF SOULS

RACHEL POLLACK

Rachel Pollack [www.rachelpollack.com] is the author of thirty-four books of fiction and non-fiction, including Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award. Her non-fiction includes 78 Degrees of Wisdom, often cited as “the Bible of tarot readers.” Rachel is also a poet, a translator, and a visual artist. Her work has appeared in fifteen languages, all over the world. She is a senior faculty member of Goddard College’s MFA in creative writing program.

Jack Shade, known in varied places and times as Journeyman Jack, or Jack Sad, or Handsome Johnny (though not any more), or Jack Summer, or Johnny Poet (though not for a long time), or even Jack Thief, was playing Old-Fashioned Poker. That was Jack’s name for it, not because the game itself was antiquated—it was Texas Hold Em, the TV game, as Jack thought of it—but because of the venue, a private hotel room, comfortable, elegant even, yet unlicensed and by private invitation only, in the age of Indian casinos no more than a few hours drive from anywhere. Jack knew that most poker was played online these days, split-screen multi-action, or in live tournaments and open cash games held in the big casinos of Vegas, Foxwoods, or Macao.

Jack didn’t like casinos. He’d never liked them, though for years he was willing to go where the action was. But after a certain night in the Ibis Casino, a game palace most players had never heard of and would never see, where “All in” meant something very different from betting your entire stack of chips, Jack avoided even the glossiest bright-for-TV game centers, and only played his quaint, private, no-limit match-ups. Luckily for Jack, though not always, luck being luck, there were enough serious money people who knew of Jack Gamble (or Jack Spade, as some called him, though not to his face) that he could more or less summon a game to his private table at the Hotel de Reve Noire, which despite its Gallic name was in New York, on 35th Street, a block from the J. P. Morgan Museum, where Jack sometimes went to sit with the fifteenth-century Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards.

Jack lived in the Reve Noire (possibly why some people called him Johnny Dream), but no one in the game had to know that. Let them think he came in from—somewhere else. Jack didn’t like people to know where he lived, an old habit that was still useful. The game, sometimes called Shade’s Choice, took place on the eleventh floor, the top floor of the small hotel, where despite the larger buildings all around, the full-length windows looked out to the Empire State antenna (Jack was one of the few people who knew what signal that antenna actually sent, and the messages it relayed back to the Chrysler Building’s ever-patient gargoyles), and in the other direction to a small brick house on Roosevelt Island, where Peter Midnight once played a reckless game of cards with a Traveler who outraged fashion in a black cravat.

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