school and college at the time, waiting tables at Cracker Barrel and screwing up the courage to tell my father that I was going to a secular university whether he liked it or not. I'd seen the pictures on the news, same as everyone else. I'd given some money to someone as part of a relief effort, or I thought I had. I couldn't remember now if I'd really done it or only meant to.
It felt like everything important in my life had happened since then: my whole abortive college career, losing my virginity to an unethical teaching assistant, the explosion of my social circle, losing my first real lover, dropping out, Eric's death, my inheritance, then fighting spiritual parasites and evil wizards. And in all that time, no one had fixed this house. Or knocked it down.
Three years was a long, long time for a twenty-three-year-old woman. It apparently wasn't much for a three-hundred-year-old city.
"Should we go in?" Aubrey asked. "Do you think it would be safe?"
"I wouldn't want to bet on it," Ex said.
"Why didn't the lawyers tell us the place was trashed?" Aubrey said.
"Who would have told them?" I asked. "If Eric didn't come check on it, they might not know."
Chogyi Jake finished his circuit of the house. Yellow-green grass burrs clung to his linen shirt.
"Okay," I said. "New plan. Everyone back in the car."
It took under ten minutes sitting in the backseat with Aubrey beside me on the laptop with the cell connection to find a hilariously pricey hotel, make reservations, and plug the address into the rental's GPS system. Chogyi Jake drove, and Ex rode shotgun. The jet lag was beginning to lift, my brain starting to unfog by slow degrees. The signs of damage that hadn't registered during the ride out from the airport now became clear. The yellow-white-gray high-water mark on the buildings, the broken windows made more evident by the few houses where new glass had been installed, the ruined asphalt, the strange and ubiquitous X mark on the houses we passed.
We were moving from water to water. My ruined house was a few blocks south of Lake Pontchartrain, the hotel I'd picked a few north of the Mississippi. But as we headed south on I-10, the signs faded. The water mark fell and went away. The city looked hale and healthy, as if we hadn't just seen a whole neighborhood that had gone necrotic.
"Were you ever here before?" Aubrey asked.
"Are you kidding?" I said. "They have Mardi Gras here. Women get drunk and expose themselves. I'd have been disowned if I'd brought the idea up."
"I don't think the exposing yourself part's required," Ex said from the front. "I've been through a few times, and no one seemed offended when I didn't insist on seeing their breasts."
"Doesn't matter if it's true," I said. "It's all about appearances. Dad thought this place was Gomorrah to San Francisco's Sodom. He'd burst a blood vessel if he knew I was here."
"What does he think of Las Vegas?" Aubrey asked.
"Gibbering hysteria," I said. "Apoplexy. Doesn't have much to say in favor of New York either."
If anyone had asked me, back when I was a college dropout with no friends and a family that wasn't speaking to me, whether it would be harder to deal with an arcane world of possession by bodiless parasites or having a lot of money, I would have guessed wrong. Riders and magic were weird and unnatural, but at least they were expected to be. Money was just as strange, but everyone assumed that if I had that much, I must have some idea how it worked. I felt like half of my day was taken up with doing things that real rich people manage by instinct. Like letting my lawyer back in Denver know where to send things.
The man who answered the phone went from chilly to obsequious as soon as I said my name. Two blocks later, I had my lawyer on the phone, saying she'd get an assessor out to the ruined property as soon as possible. She spoke with careful enunciation so sharp I imagined all the words being relieved that they'd gotten out alive. She was the same lawyer who'd first told