Music and Malice in Hurricane Town Read online

  Sometimes, when Jude especially wanted a fight, she’d sit in the Royalty section to protest against the segregation of the streetcars. How many times had she witnessed a doddery old lady clutching one of the poles and trembling as she tried to stay upright, while perfectly strong and healthy vampires, witches or descendants sprawled comfortably on their chairs not giving a damn? It was hard not to be angry about stuff like that, hard for Jude anyway. And she didn’t understand how it could not be hard for everyone else too.

  “It’s just the way things is,” Sharkey would say, whenever she brought it up. “And there ain’t a bit of use stressin’ and frettin’ about the way things is.”

  When they returned to the Hurricane Quarter, Jude left her friend at the station.

  “See you at HQ tomorrow,” he said, giving her a hug. Benny had called off their band practice tonight on account of the jazz funeral but from tomorrow, they would be practising at headquarters every night once again in preparation for Cajou Night. “Look after yourself, yeah?” Sharkey added.

  Jude waved him goodbye and then walked down Moonshine Boulevard. It was permanently party central here, but especially busy in the run up to Cajou Night. People travelled from all over to join the city for the celebrations and they’d already started to arrive.

  Locals and tourists alike danced in the street to the music of a brass band playing on a nearby corner, revellers sang heartily along from the wrought-iron balconies of the bars lining the streets and hundreds of multi-coloured plastic beads rolled around in the gaps between the cobbles, clogged up the gutters or hung in rainbow strings from the black lamp posts and bronze statues of jazz players. It seemed there was nothing a drunk enjoyed more than to hang their beads off something.

  Jude walked on to her local grocery store, pausing to pick up the ingredients to make her pa’s favourite gumbo before heading home. Their tiny apartment was perched atop a gumbo store in a row of two-storey houses, all weathered with age and run down with neglect. The window shutters were rotting; the front porches were worn from the tread of feet; the beads hanging above the lintels were faded and grey. The apartment itself was cramped and muggy and the little wrought-iron balcony clinging to the side was rusted and probably unsafe. But it was a place to call home and as she climbed the rickety staircase Jude felt a great swell of satisfaction that she’d managed to keep a roof over their heads for another month.

  When she reached the front door, she saw a box of food had been left on the doorstep again. There’d be no note with it. There never was. It was from her guardian angel – the mysterious benefactor who had helped on and off for the last eight years, ever since her pa’s accident. At least, that’s what her pa insisted on calling it even though it had, in fact, been an attack.

  At first it was just food, always seeming to arrive at the time when they needed it most. But as the years passed, other things began to appear in the packages too: sheet music, books and little plastic trumpets dangling from orange cajou beads. It was as if the angel somehow knew Jude’s tastes and tried to provide her with the things she would most like.

  Whoever this person was, Jude had never seen him or her. The parcels always appeared when she wasn’t in or during the night. But sometimes, when she sat out on her balcony playing her trumpet in the evening, she felt sure there was someone there, just out of sight on the street below, watching her…

  She picked up the box and shouldered her way inside. “Guess what we’re having for dinner?” she called.

  Then she froze in the doorway, staring into the room. Suddenly her heart was beating too hard against her bruised ribs and a familiar dread crept its long fingers right down her spine, making her shudder.

  Was it going to be today?

  Was this the day it finally happened?

  The kitchen had been left in a mess and there was a broken mug with a bloody handle on the floor, a dark brown coffee stain soaking into the peeling lino. The bin hadn’t been emptied and a couple of bloated flies buzzed around it lethargically. The house was silent. And too still. Like the flies were the only living thing in the place, coming to feast on the death that Jude was so afraid she would find inside. Part of her wanted to turn and flee. To run straight back down the steps and never have to face it.

  Instead she forced herself to step further into the kitchen. “Pa?” she shouted.

  But still there was nothing except the deafening silence and the dull droning of the flies. Jude put down the box of food and her bag of groceries and then forced herself to take the short yet impossibly long walk down the corridor.

  Finally she entered the living room where she found her pa slumped in his chair. There was blood on his clothes and a white-hot jolt of shock flooded through her. For a moment she was sure he was dead, that he’d actually done it. But then she realized he was breathing and staring at the wall, his one remaining hand held loosely in his lap, smearing blood on to his tattered robe. Not dead yet, for what that was worth. It was her greatest fear that one day he would take it upon himself to end it all but it seemed she could breathe easy for one more day at least.

  His hair was unbrushed and too long and he hadn’t shaved. He was still a large man but he tended to curl in on himself these days. When he had leaped into the swamp eight years ago, the gator had taken off his right arm at the elbow, as well as a big chunk from his right thigh. By the time he was pulled from the water, two of the fingers on his left hand had gone and a slash ran from behind his left ear right down to his collarbone.

  “Never run near the water,” he’d always warned Jude and her little brother Daryl, when they lived at the edge of the Firefly Swamps. “You might fall in. Them gators are beautiful creatures but they’re also wild beasts who’ll tear you limb from limb.”

  Jude and Daryl had always been careful around the swamp and there had never been any incidents. Until the day of Jude’s ninth birthday party, when the stranger came to their home. Jude could still hear his voice sometimes, inside her head.

  “Well, well. Is it somebody’s birthday?”

  All she had to do was close her eyes and she was back there. She could feel the moss on the trunk of the ancient tree she leaned against. See the fireflies winking and blinking their soft golden glow over the murky water, smell the shrimp grilling on the barbecue. Hear Daryl calling her name from the pier behind her…

  Jude shook her head and tried to banish the memory as she turned her attention back to her pa. A gator man all his life, he’d once seemed big and strong and invincible. Now his body was a ravaged mess of scars, his hair had turned prematurely grey and he was constantly hounded by pain that only the green fairy could soothe. But they both knew it could have been worse. Daryl had not been so lucky. Whatever remained of him had long ago rotted into the swamp.

  “Pa?” Jude said from the doorway. “Can I—”

  “Don’t need your help,” he grunted. “Leave me in peace.”

  She took a tentative step into the room and tried to keep her voice steady. “At least let me bandage your—”

  “I said I DON’ T NEED YOUR HELP!” he roared, grabbing a nearby glass and throwing it at Jude so hard and fast that she instinctively ducked.

  Her ribs screamed in protest and she gasped at the pain that spread up her right-hand side. She was only dimly aware of the glass shattering against the doorframe above her. Her right hand went on the wooden floorboards to steady herself. She tried to straighten up but the attempt made it feel like a rib was about to burst right through her skin. Her insides felt all torn up. Her heart felt that way too, whenever Pa turned on her like this. Before the attack he’d barely ever so much as raised his voice.

  “What are you carrying on for?” Pa grunted from his chair. “Glass didn’t even hit you.”

  Jude gritted her teeth and tried to stand again. This time, to her relief, her ribs allowed her to. She still felt wary of making any sudden movements, though, and leaned against the door for a moment to catch her breath. She could feel her pa watc
hing her from across the room, taking in her split lip.

  “Fighting again,” he grunted. “It’s no good, Jude. You should cut it out.”

  “What do you care anyway?” she replied.

  She turned and limped back to the kitchen. Ignoring all the aches and pains in her shoulder and side, she emptied the bin, shooed away the flies and opened the windows. Then she struggled back down to the floor and cleaned up the broken mug. It left a stain on the floor, but it was so stained and dirty already that it hardly seemed to matter. She made the gumbo, and she and her pa ate at the kitchen table in silence.

  Once they’d finished, Jude cleaned up and then walked into the corridor. She’d almost reached her bedroom when her pa spoke from the kitchen doorway.

  “I do,” he said hoarsely, then cleared his throat and added, “Care, that is.”

  Jude looked back and saw that he was staring at the floor rather than her.

  “I do care,” he said again.

  “I know,” Jude replied. “It’s OK.”

  It wasn’t OK at all, but sometimes you just had to pretend. Lately it had seemed to her that her pa’s eventual self-destruction was no longer a possibility but a probability, a certainty in fact. Like a steam train racing straight towards her, only she couldn’t get out of its way, no matter what she did. She could hear it coming for her, feel it in her bones. No one could go on in that state forever and the new medicine she’d been getting from Sofia wasn’t enough. One day it would happen. The only thing she didn’t know was how. Would he hang himself? Drown himself in absinthe? Obtain a shotgun from somewhere? She was so terrified that one day he’d be gone and it would be Jude’s fault for not being able to help him. And she would be alone. That thought scared her most of all.

  She slipped into her bedroom, glad to get away from everyone and everything for a little while. Her room was barely more than a cupboard, with just enough space for a narrow single bed, a stack of drawers and a mirror.

  Before going to sleep, she took her most treasured photograph from its place beneath her pillow and spent some time looking at it. The picture was faded now, but it was the only one she had left of her brother – back when they had all been happy. It was such a distant and impossible memory that Jude sometimes had to look at the photo to accept it had ever happened at all.

  She then fell into bed and slept like the dead until the sun woke her up, streaming in through her window. Her eyes seemed glued together and she had to prise them open with a groan. Her whole body was just one big ache from the beating she’d taken the day before. Everything seemed to have got worse during the night and she had to sit up slowly and get out of bed carefully, like a person made of glass.

  Dressing was even more difficult and ten minutes had gone by before she finally managed to struggle into her dungarees. But as her trembling hands did up the buckles, her pocket moved. She looked down and saw a turbaned head nestled in there.

  With a cry, she dragged out the cajou queen poppet and flung it across the room on to the bed.

  The poppet remained motionless on the sheets. When several minutes had passed and it had made no move to attack her, Jude crept closer and stared down at the horrid thing.

  It was just as she remembered from the charm gates, except for the fact that it was no longer screaming its head off. Carefully, she picked it up. Her first instinct was to throw it out of the window, burn it or stick it straight in the trash. But even ordinary poppets could be powerful magical objects, let alone screaming ones, and the last thing Jude wanted was to bring a curse upon herself. Her thoughts immediately went to her witch doctor friend, Sofia. If anyone would know what to do about this, it would be her.

  Jude picked up the poppet. And an explosion went off inside her head.

  She dropped the doll and reeled back, gasping. Her bedroom spun away from her and she was suddenly at her old home in the Firefly Swamps. The evening air was sticky and there was blood all over the wooden walkway, and she couldn’t stop staring at the disembodied arm lying limp and loose on the planks – the largest piece of Daryl they’d been able to find.

  “Come on,” Mr Treventi, her music teacher, was saying, tugging at her hand. His voice shook and there were tears on his cheeks. “Come away from there.”

  The swamp vanished to be replaced by her pa’s ruined face as he told her she could no longer take up the scholarship at the music academy. Then she was ten years old, playing the trumpet on the street corner for pennies. Then she was eleven and cleaning up her pa after he’d got drunk and pissed himself, the heavy, stinking wetness of his trousers in her hands…

  Then she was seventeen and Leeroy was glaring at her, his eyes glittering in the dark, his body too close to hers on the tiny balcony outside her bedroom. “You ungrateful bitch…”

  Jude groaned and screwed her eyes up tight. It felt like the memories were being dragged from her, like there were fingers, flicking and rifling through her mind, lingering over the memories that were the most painful and awful. Those unbearable ones that Jude tried to keep buried deep down.

  Anger and resentment bubbled up inside her and she pushed back against the unseen presence, reaching out with her own mind to poke and probe at this alien thing that had somehow insinuated its way inside her. She felt a shock of surprise that wasn’t hers, and then a confusing flash of images and sensations: a diamond ring clasped between long white fingers; a sweet stolen kiss in a smoky room; an explosion of jazz; indigo petals; the exquisite agony of a blade slicing through flesh.

  Then there was a hard mental shove, as if two hands had pushed her firmly away. Jude was back in her bedroom and she could feel the juddering bam-bam of a heart beating inside her chest that was not her own, rocking her where she stood. And there were eyes staring out from behind hers.

  She looked in the mirror above her dressing table and saw an old, pale woman looking back at her. She was dressed in a blue bloodstained evening gown, with an elaborate cloth turban wound about her head and big gold hoops in her ears. Her long white gloves were sticky with blood, her face was wrinkled with age, her mouth pursed into a thin line.

  “You…”

  The old woman’s voice rasped in her throat and she broke off coughing, before starting again. “You will … help me … Jude Lomax.”

  “Oh my gods, what the hell do you want?” Jude could feel the colour draining from her face. “How … how did you get here?”

  “Murdered,” the cajou queen replied, blood dribbling between her lips. “Must find out … who did it…”

  Jude grabbed the poppet and fled from the room, pausing just long enough to pull on her swamp boots. She tore from the apartment and away down the street, straight to Mojo Alley – a crooked, narrow, winding place where all the best witch doctors and cajou people traded their wares. Jude had avoided Mojo Alley her whole life until recently, when she’d ventured there out of desperation for her pa. Traditional painkillers and medicines didn’t seem to help him much and Jude couldn’t bear to see him writhing in such agony, so she’d finally been driven to seek magical help. And that was how she’d first met Sofia.

  She sprinted down the street as fast as her aching ribs would allow and burst into Madam Zombie’s House of Herbs, the bell above the door clanging in protest. The small dark room within had a sloping wooden floor and smelled strongly of the herbs, powders and ointments that lined its walls. Sofia’s familiar, a glossy black raven named Benedict, was perched on a skull on top of a bookcase in the corner, peering down at the store with bright beady eyes. Sofia herself was behind the counter and thankfully there were no customers.

  Sofia Moreau was a stunning witch. Not only was she extremely tall, but her black and gold hair was arranged into hundreds of micro-braids that hung all the way down to the small of her back, even when they were swept up into a high ponytail. She had flawless chocolate-coloured skin, laughing brown eyes and a curvy figure that Jude could have happily killed someone for. Of course, she also had half a dozen beauty charms in th
e form of earrings dangling from her right ear. Jude had never seen her without them and had no idea what she looked like naturally.

  Today Sofia wore a black corset that showed off her big bust and small waist rather spectacularly, along with black leather trousers that looked like they’d been spray-painted on, and towering stiletto boots that added several more inches to her already imposing height. A collection of magical amulets hung from chains around her neck and her Royalty cajou charm dangled from a cuff that she wore at the top of her right ear. She was only a year older than Jude at eighteen and as a witch and a member of the Royalty Jude had been determined to dislike her at first. She wanted to hate all Royals because it was easier that way, but the more she got to know Sofia the more she realized that not all Royals were evil and dangerous. Not like the stranger who’d come to her home eight years ago, his crown charm glowing a bloody red in the dusk.

  “I’m a friend of your father’s,” he’d said, only Jude knew he was lying because her pa’s friends were the animals that lived in the swamp or other gator men. He’d never be friends with a member of the Royalty. And he’d be furious if he ever found out that Jude was friends with Sofia. If he knew that his medicine came from a witch, he’d refuse to take it ever again.

  “Hi, Jude,” Sofia said. “What’s—”

  “I need you to help me!” Jude cut her off.

  She pulled the cajou queen poppet from her pocket and threw it on the counter between them. Sofia took one look at it before hurrying to flip the door sign over to say that the store was closed. Then she turned the key in the lock and came back to the counter.