Free The Map of Moments by Christopher Golden

straight ahead, unwilling to acknowledge the stares he knew he must be receiving from the handful of staff and guests in the hotel.
    To his relief, Max made it to his room without encountering anyone, and was surprised to find that his key card still worked, despite the soaking it had endured.
    Once inside the room he leaned against the door and let out a long breath, grateful for the sanctuary, and wishing that he would never have to go back out again. He emptied his pockets of wallet, keys, change, phone, and map, and then stripped. He dumped his shoes and pants into a plastic bag he found in the closet. It was intended for guests who wanted to send clothes out to be laundered, but Max would simply throw them away. He was tempted to toss his shirt, socks, and underwear into the bag as well, but for some reason, that seemed excessive.
    He laughed, and even to his own ears it was an uncomfortable sound.
    The room service menu was limited to basics and a few more elegant specials, but the last thing Max wanted was haute cuisine. He ordered a bowl of gumbo and a hamburger with French fries, then opened the complimentary bottle of water on the bureau. A drink had seemed like sucha good idea this morning, during Gabrielle's graveside service. Now the thought of alcohol made him queasy. He tipped the bottle back and drank, and that spring water was the best thing he had ever tasted.
    Max took a hot shower, scrubbing himself clean of the day's strangeness. He only wished he could wash away his grief and confusion. Afterward, he put on clean underwear, cotton sweatpants, and a T-shirt, and waited for his food to arrive. They had said twenty minutes, but room service estimates were invariably wrong.
    His eyes were drawn to the bureau, where the map lay folded beside his wallet and useless cell phone. It had to still be wet. He glanced toward the door, trying to will his food to come, but when no knock followed he went to the bureau and stared down at the map.
    After a moment he picked it up and unfolded it. It would dry better if he left it open; that was what he told himself. But what he really wanted was to confirm that those words of the First Moment were gone. He opened the map and stared at City Park, and sure enough, the First Moment was no longer there.
    The next one was even clearer than before.
    The Second Moment:

The Pere's Kyrie

November 2, 1769
    “The Pere's Kyrie,” he read aloud. Though he'd never been religious, he knew a Kyrie was a kind of prayer meant to be sung. And in French,
“Pere”
meant father. But whose father?The questions ran deeper than that. Ray had talked about following the map, gathering magic—
-yeah, he said magic
—like static, opening a window into the past so Max could get a message to Gabrielle, maybe even talk to her. No matter how much Jack Daniel's he'd drunk, and no matter what the old guy had given him in that little stone bottle, that part of the conversation remained clear in his memory. Follow the map, and then find some “conjure-man” named Matrisse.
    He'd never heard such bullshit in his life.
    That was what he ought to be thinking, and he knew it. But the map had dried now, and though it looked like a common tourist map of New Orleans,
it felt
like old parchment, dry and rough in texture. It was as if the map he held and the one he was looking at were two entirely different things.
    Add in his hallucination in City Park, and logic brought him to answers he had difficulty allowing into his mind. Two plus two equaled four, always and forever.
Dumb-ass. After Lakeview, you should've come straight back here.
But he'd run across assholes with guns …and then he'd used the map.
    Should've known better.
    But how could he have known better? He hadn't believed a word crazy Ray had said.
    “That's a lie,” he whispered to himself. He threw the map on the bureau. Because he had been drunk enough and full of enough sadness that he
had
believed, just a little. Hell, he'd wanted to