Faith Hunter - Easy Pickings

I looked around, and discovered that we had come out in a different place from where we went in. It felt like a few hours had passed too, but my subjective time sense was getting all mixed up, so I wasn’t sure. We were near the Mississippi, the sour smell of its power wet on the air. “I have to eat,” I said. “Shifting uses up a lot of calories.”

“Calories?” Pretty Boy asked, like he’d never heard of them. “Shifting uses up magic, no?”

Jo startled. “Oh. Oh. Yeah, of course it does. No wonder . . .” I ignored her and jerked a thumb the direction I wanted to go. “Let’s take a walk along the waterfront. There are some really good restaurants and diners there.”

Minutes later, we had taken two turns and I came to a dead stop, staring through a window. The diner was one I knew. And in my world, the proprietor, Antoine, was dead. In my world he’d been an African witch or shaman or something, and he’d been killed by one of my kind. By a skinwalker masquerading as a vamp who had gone nutso and started eating people and vamps. Long story I decided not to tell Jo. She might not understand. Whatever Antoine was, he was a magic user and a really good cook. The smells wafting from his diner were amazing. Stomach growling, I led the way inside. “Don’t shake his hand. He reads magic.”

Joanne shot me a look and put her hands in her pockets. Laz looked interested, but did the same as we skulked through the door. Antoine’s was one long narrow room with a bar on the right and red leather upholstered booths on the left. The place was packed with everything from city blue-collar employees in work boots, to men and women in suits, banker types, out for a bite before heading home to family or empty apartments filled with cats and books. In the far corner sat five cops. A musician perched on a tall stool in a corner played guitar, something Spanish-flamenco and hip all at once. I smelled grass and lots of beer and steamed shellfish and fried foods.

The cement floor that had been worn in my world was brightly painted in this one—like yellow sand and streaks that might have been yellow grass. Just like the underworld we had just left. The walls were a fresh tan. The ceiling was midnight blue painted with stars and runes and magic stuff. The bar was black Formica with sparkles in it, and a mirror ran the length of the wall behind the bar. Glass shelves in front of the mirror were stocked with a jillion bottles of liquor. A fine set of cooking knives with green stone inlaid handles and wicked-sharp blades, ones I remembered well, lay in an open, velvet-lined tray, gleaming in the overhead lights.

Conversations wove through the air with the scent of food and inside it smelled even better than out, the heavenly steam of beer, grease, and seafood so fresh it still carried salt and sea.

The black man behind the counter, Antoine, wore a crisp white jacket, a tall chef’s hat, and a smile. We took the only empty table in front and a waitress, a skinny gal took our order even before we were seated, Jo on the inside, me on the aisle, and Pretty Boy across from us.

“Three Dixie Blackened Voodoo Lagers, three colas, three waters, a serving of everything fried and a couple buckets of crawfish,” I said. Jo raised her brows and I shrugged. “It’s good. I’m buying.” The waitress nodded and wove her way through the crowd clotting the doorway. We had just beat the next rush. Lucky us. Less than a minute later she slid six red plastic baskets lined with newspaper to soak up the grease, onto the table, followed by the nine glasses. There wasn’t room to eat but I did anyway. A lot. Hot onion rings, hush puppies, and boudin—round fried balls of meat and spices and rice the size of golf balls; it tasted like heaven. Beer-batter crust that crunched like God Himself had made them in His own kitchen. Highly spiced, sizzling with oil. I drank one beer fast to cool my mouth and kept eating. At some point, Pretty Boy Laz started eating too.

“Boudin, dat is, right dere,” he said. “Good, yes?”

I nodded. “The cook is Antoine, and according to someone I knew here, he knows everything there is to know about this town.”

“Handy,” Jo said. Which was exactly the word I had used when I was introduced to him.

The waitress was back and set two steel garden buckets of crawfish on the table, beer- and sea-flavored steam curling up, hot with pepper and spices. I drew out a crawfish, its red shell curled, pretty sure the crustacean had been tossed alive into boiling beer. I bent the back, hearing the shell crack, and pulled the meat out of the tail, eating, fingers messy and greasy and stinky, loving it all. I saluted my dinner companions with the two pieces of mudbug shell. “Suck de head,” I said, just like Rick when brought me here on our first . . . date? Whatever. And Rick was now not human in my world. I wondered what he was here, and pushed that thought away. I slurped the liquid—spicy with hot peppers, garlic, and onion, and beery—and smacked my lips. Took another crawfish. Jo muttered “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Or crawfish,” and dug in. Pretty Boy broke his mudbug like an expert and sucked it down, which indicated he was what he claimed—a local boy. For a minute or ten we were all silent except for licking fingers and breaking shells. It was good. Really good.

When I had eaten enough to quell the pain in my stomach, I asked Jo, “What do you see when you look at Antoine? In my world, he was a good guy. But his smile is different and so is his bar.” I pointed up with my greasy fingers. “And he’s got magic stuff painted up there.”

“Magic stuff. That’s the technical term, right?” I licked my fingers one more time before eyeing Antoine and his magic stuff. Wow. Morrison, the light and love of my life, probably would think poorly of me eyeing another man’s magic stuff. On the other hand, he wasn’t here, and although I had no doubt I would be telling him about Joanne’s Adventures in Wonderland, I could probably manage to edit the phrase magic stuff out of it. Maybe. I hoped.

This, I recognized, was procrastinating. Probably the fault of the food: another crawfish had somehow worked its way into my fingers and mouth while I’d been eyeing things, and Jane’s order of “everything fried” had been inspired. I’d gained six pounds just watching her eat, nevermind what I’d inhaled myself. I finished my crawfish, licked my fingers again, and this time wiped my hands on a grease-laden, falling-to-pieces paper napkin just for good measure.

Then I triggered the Sight.

Hairs stood on my nape and raced all the way down my spine, over my arms, and up to my cheekbones, sending a deep shiver through me before I registered what I Saw on a conscious level. Part of it was just the room: the vivacious colors, the pounding lifeblood in diners’ veins, the physical hunger and groaning sated delight of people coming in for a good meal. I didn’t normally use the Sight in crowds, and wasn’t accustomed to the sheer humanity of it all.

But mostly it was Antoine’s flat dead black and silver aura that freaked me out. It reminded me vividly of another aura I’d seen, approximately forever ago in terms of my growth as a shaman, but not really all that long in absolute time. The colors hadn’t been the same, but no two auras were exactly the same in color anyway. It was the feeling of them: dull, slithering, dangerous.

The word came out of my mouth before I could stop it: “Sorcerer.”

Jane crunched a crawfish so hard it sounded like commentary. “No. I know witches and maybe Antoine was one in my world, but that’s no witch.”