Callie, Page 7

Fifty years.

  It had been fifty years, give or take, since Callie’s run in with Eva and Johnny’s Hell Hound. A lot had happened since then.

  After her first hunt with Eva, Callie had stayed in New Orleans for nearly two years learning everything she could from the much more experienced Keeper, then returned to find Chicago a city much changed by the Depression.

  Al Capone was long gone, having finally been arrested back in ’31—for tax evasion, of all things—and would be destined to spend the next eleven years locked up in Alcatraz. He would be so ill by the time he was released, that he would have no energy to rebuild his empire before succumbing to his Crossroads bargain in ’47.

  The jazz scene was still hotter than ever, with the population at large looking for escape from their financial woes—though the sound had changed dramatically since the advent of swing. Mafia activity was still as rife as ever, though without Prohibition criminals had been forced to switch from bootlegging to prostitution and numbers racketeering instead. And would-be Mafioso still made their Crossroads deals to get an edge over their rivals.

  Johnny, she found, was long gone. She supposed he had moved on to brighter prospects, now that Prohibition had burned itself out. But she knew he had not, nor would ever, forget her. They were unfinished business.

  One favor he had done her: he’d advised her to pull her parents’ inheritance out of the stock market, well before the crash of ’29, and now she was solvent, if not rich. She was certainly not starving and homeless, as so many in the country were. So she rented a small apartment above a jazz club, for a price only slightly less than egregious after she provided the head cook and owner a surefire recipe for authentic New Orleans gumbo that kept his patrons lindy-hopping all night. This suited Callie fine—long silences put her on edge. She fell asleep to the joint rocking beneath her like a ship under full sail.

  Then World War II came. Callie had never experienced such savagery, let alone dreamed it could exist. Being a child raised on the horror stories of the Great War had in no way prepared her for such a thing.

  She joined up as a Red Cross nurse, as her mother had done, for only Johnny Sinclair ne Mestopheles, short of Satan himself, could have considered the Nazi party a good idea. Only Mestopheles could have brokered the Crossroads bargains that put Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in charge of half the world all at once. It was such an unholy alliance Callie wondered daily if the End of Days hadn’t arrived sooner than Brighid expected.

  She hunted for Johnny in those days, knowing he had to be near, possibly close enough to scent her out. She heard the baying of the Hell Hounds at night beneath the dropping of the bombs and knew it would only be a matter of time before he found her.

  But he never came.

  After World War II there had been the Cold War, and Korea followed by Vietnam. So may wars, so many conflicts in the world--so many chances to track down the Master of the Crossroads. So many missed opportunities.

  She became a master hunter, but her proverbial white whale eluded her, just as it had Ahab. And just like Moby Dick, she knew Johnny was biding his time, waiting and watching until he deemed her ready.

  It took fifty years for the call to come. And when it did, it came from New Orleans.

  Eva was old enough and paranoid enough to eschew the regular methods of communication. Even in the 1980s, she did not own a phone. Instead she subscribed to a dragon’s hoard of newspapers from all over the world, scouring for potential demon activity that might threaten to leak into her city. It was not uncommon for her to send Callie to chase down leads. For some reason Callie could not fathom, Eva would not—or could not—leave New Orleans. Not that she ever appeared to want to.

  “What would I eat?” she asked the one time Callie had tracked her down to the pay phone in her local bar.

  The longer Callie knew Eva, the more paranoid her mentor became—almost as if she were seeing into a different world, instead of the one she physically occupied. Anyone else might have decided she wasn’t all there, like the war veterans Callie met, who still saw bombs falling or heard helicopters flying overhead in their nightmares.

  But Callie suspected Eva was simply growing more sensitive to the worlds opposite the Crossroads that crossed New Orleans like links on a chain link fence. She doubted Eva needed to set a Hell Hound on fire these days in order to make out its outline in the bayou moonlight.

  So she wasn’t surprised to find a postcard waiting for her when she returned home from seeing to a particularly nasty hive of hydra demon in Vancouver that had been mistaken for another Nessie, much to the chagrin of the locals. Callie’s boots still sloshed.

  The postcard’s message was cryptic, even for Eva.

  “Come for the gumbo, stay for a hair of the dog.”

  The picture depicted the cemetery of their first hunt. It fluttered from Callie’s stunned fingertips.

  Hell Hounds. Johnny had finally come for her, by going after her one friend.

  Callie didn’t bother to pick up the post card, or even to empty the Canadian lake water from her boots. Instead she lifted the military duffel she lived out of from the floor where she’d dropped it moments ago, and closed her eyes in forced concentration.

  When she felt her perception blur, not quite in either world, she focused her mind’s eye, and the light within her, to Eva. There was some resistance from the boundaries at her destination, but she knew the way, and after a moment the barriers softened, and Eva’s consciousness reached through.

  Callie opened her eyes, and found herself in New Orleans, and Eva’s apartment.

  “What took you so long?” Eva panted.

  She was on the floor, covered in blood.

  EIGHT