by Bryan Camp
“You retain,” he continued, “the ability to question orders. You are still capable of compassion. Simply put, I’m speaking to you because, of all the others I might have asked, you alone are still alive.”
Oh, Renai thought, so when you said I was the person you thought I would be, what you meant to say was that I’m Death’s Little Mistake. A flash of annoyance sparked within her, prompting her to ask the question she didn’t really want to ask.
“And if, after careful review of my options, I still make a choice you don’t like?”
Seth’s frown deepened, but he nodded, as if this, at last, was the question she ought to be asking. “Then you will have done me no favors, and so I will owe you none in return. I may offer some small token of gratitude for your time, if I believe your consideration was genuine, but I assure you that I won’t hold a grudge. I recognize that you are under obligations of your own.”
Wonder how small a token we’re talking about, she thought, and then heard, in her grandmother’s voice: Always free cheese in a mousetrap, but I ain’t never seen a mouse happy he found it. She looked down at his hand, as if she could read the name through the paper, as if it would matter either way if she could. Seth had the five dots of a quincunx inked in the place where his thumb joined his hand: four bluish pinpricks arranged in a square, a fifth in the center. Another jail tattoo, the dot in the center representing the prisoner surrounded by four walls. She couldn’t decide if the tattoos were part of the mask Seth wore to disguise his true form, or if they represented something profound about him. Couldn’t say which she thought would be worse. What choice did she really have, though?
Putting her hand close to his soiled skin made every muscle in her abdomen clench, but she reached out and took the slip of paper from him anyway. He made her tug it out from beneath his finger, keeping just enough pressure on the paper that if she pulled too fast it would tear. “I’m not saying yes,” she said, “and I’m not saying no. I’m just saying I’ll consider it.”
The ugly god smiled, warm and cheerful and genuine. “Excellent! I’m sure that when you see . . .” He trailed off, raising a hand as if to ward off what he’d intended to say. “No, I’ve spoken my piece. The decision must be yours.”
On the bar where she’d left it, her phone lit up and trilled, the alarm she’d set to remind herself when it was time to leave. When she looked up, Seth was gone. The paper remained in her hand, though: RAMSES ST. CYR. The name tickled at her, like it was one she should recognize. She silenced the alarm and slid her phone and the slip of paper into her jacket pocket, deciding to file this whole conversation under “shit to deal with later.”
Death waited for no one, after all.
Outside, her noble steed waited on the curb, black and gleaming and powerful. Murder and resurrection had stolen just about everything from Renai, but sometimes when the gods took with one hand, they gave with the other. The Thrones did, at least; they’d given her the leather jacket she wore—far more than the simple garment it appeared to be—and after she’d found that buses passed her by if she was the only one at the stop, they’d also given her a ride. Not a “steed” in the truest sense of the word—even Renai’s difficulty at being noticed probably wouldn’t hide a horse galloping through city streets—the Thrones’ gift had taken the shape of a motorcycle: a Honda Valkyrie. Unlike an actual motorcycle, though, this bike rumbled to life as soon as Renai swung a leg onto her, always seemed to know exactly where Renai wanted to go when she gripped the handlebars, and never ran out of gas. Renai called her Kyrie. She didn’t know how intelligent Kyrie was, or if she had an actual name of her own, or why the motorcycle felt so strongly like a “she.” She also chose not to think about what sort of fuel powered a motorcycle from the Underworld.
As Kyrie sped away from Pal’s with a roar that could only be called eager, it occurred to Renai that she avoided thinking about a lot these days. Her old life; her duties in this new one. The dead and the Thrones and the other gods she’d met, however briefly. The changes she’d endured since her resurrection. She’d made a habit of pushing it all down deep into the cold, empty well in the center of her, far enough from her present moment that she hardly thought about anything at all, letting one day bleed unexamined into the next. Years had gone by like this, with her learning almost nothing new about the world she’d found herself in, just doing as she was told. Following the rules she’d been given.
She leaned into the slide as Kyrie turned from Orleans onto Broad, leaving behind the green sprawling canopy of the live oaks growing in the neutral ground for a wide stretch of asphalt open to the afternoon sky. She patted her jacket pocket absently, making sure that she still had the slip of paper Seth had given her.
He had described a much different person than the one Renai saw in the mirror. Seemed to think she was capable of defiance when she didn’t even bother to question. But was it apathy that dictated her actions? Or fear?
Kyrie’s tires thumped and bucked over the streetcar tracks running down Canal, shaking away Renai’s thoughts. Those bumps meant she was almost there, so it was time to get her game face on. She unzipped a small pocket on the front of her jacket that she never used—small and awkwardly placed, probably for a cell phone—and pushed the little scroll of paper inside, zipping it back up, knowing she didn’t want to lose it, knowing she’d get distracted by it if it wasn’t somewhere secure.
She did her best to clear her mind of doubt and questions, of everything but her only true purpose in this world of hers. A few minutes later, Kyrie swung past Tulane and Broad, turned and bumped up onto the sidewalk on Gravier across the street from a squat, ugly cinder block of a building, her engine grumbling to a stop. Renai kissed her fingertips and tapped them against Kyrie’s chassis as she swung her leg off the bike. The metal was cold to the touch despite running full throttle in the late October warmth. Something else she and the bike shared. The building was yet one more thought she’d been avoiding, a task she chose to think of in the abstract until the moment came. Hands clenched into fists in her jacket pockets, Renai forced herself to look across the street.
In its distinct lack of personality, the building that Renai didn’t want to think about could have been a cheaply designed office complex or a parking garage, if it weren’t for the half-sized windows and the coils of razor wire woven through the surrounding fence, but when she allowed herself more than a glance, it looked exactly like what it was.
The place Kyrie had brought her was Orleans Parish Prison, and Renai had come here to take a man’s life.
Chapter Two
Half an hour later Renai paced up and down the sidewalk across from OPP, bored and pissed and starting to wonder if she’d gotten the time wrong. In her earbuds Destiny’s Child sang that they’d been through the storm and the rain, that they were survivors. Since the dead didn’t really respond to texts, music was about the only use she got out of her phone, smart as it claimed to be. She’d programmed a bunch of numbers into it back when she’d first gotten it—the hospital where her mom worked, her cousin’s place in Houston, the house Uptown she still thought of as home—but had deleted all of them after she’d almost called her mom once. She still couldn’t be sure if she’d really pressed the CALL button by accident or if it had been subconscious desire, but forcing herself to hang up had been harder than the first time she’d taken a life. She didn’t know if she had it in her to resist the temptation to hear her mother’s voice again.
At the thought of taking lives, her attention wandered back to the building across the street, and then flicked away again, back to her sneakers and the unexpectedly smooth sidewalk beneath them. Her pacing resumed. An NOPD cruiser pulled up to the curb, so close that she could feel its engine rumbling. Renai felt a nervous, obsequious smile stretch across her face, immediately pissed she’d done it and then remembering it wouldn’t matter, that the white cop behind the wheel wouldn’t notice her any more than the drinkers in Pal’s had, that she was the next best th
ing to invisible. Sure enough, he studied the computer screen built into his passenger seat as if she weren’t there at all. She’d never thought she’d be free of the second look, the immediate suspicion that the color of her skin elicited, but now that it was gone, she found it strangely unnerving. She was pretty sure there was a French word for it, something about the feeling of being in a foreign country.
Girl, Renai heard her mother say, you always could find shade on a sunny day. Turned out she didn’t need a phone call to speak to her mother after all.
Just as “Survivor” ended and Lorde said she’d never seen a diamond in the flesh, a raven swooped out of the sky—framed by the glowing red letters of the Falstaff tower—and landed with a little hop on the top of the police cruiser’s light bar. About time, Renai thought, shutting the music off and tugging out her earbuds.
“You’re here early,” the raven said, tilting his head to the side, “you got a hot date or something?”
Renai raised an eyebrow. “I ain’t so much early as you are barely on time, Salvatore.” And there was Renai’s mother again, in the yes-I-did-just-use-your-full-name sound of her own voice.
The bird dipped his head and raised his beak, a gesture that made Renai think of someone rolling their eyes. “Barely is still on time in my book, Renaissance.” The raven had an accent that was halfway between old New Orleans and some Brooklyn gangster on TV, an accent that came from Chalmette—one of those places on the outskirts of New Orleans that wasn’t exactly in the city, wasn’t quite a neighborhood, and wasn’t quite its own town—not far from the Bywater neighborhood where Renai’s extended family was from. What Sal and Renai shared was that they were both psychopomps, guides who led the dead to their just reward.
That was where the similarity ended. Sal was, like every other psychopomp Renai had ever met, a spirit stuffed into a temporary physical body. In that, he had more in common with her motorcycle than with her. Renai, on the other hand, was a living, breathing human who taken on the role of a psychopomp after her resurrection. What was a definition for Sal was merely a title for her. As far as she knew, she was the only one of her kind. Some might say that made her unique. Others would call her a mistake.
“Besides,” Sal continued, “it ain’t like he’s exactly goin’ nowhere.” He dug beneath his wing, nipping at a feather. “Not on his own, anyway,” he muttered.
Renai sighed and held out her arm, inviting the raven to perch there. A rustle of feathers and a clench of talons later, and his weight settled onto her shoulder, far more than even a bird as big as Sal ought to weigh. She didn’t know if he was a once-human soul wearing a raven’s shape or an animal’s soul who had learned human speech or if he was something even stranger, but he’d taught her all she knew about being a psychopomp, and in this strange new life of hers, he was her closest friend. So she didn’t much care what he was, so long as he kept showing up.
“You got the name?” Sal asked, not lowering his voice even though he was right next to her ear.
“Miguel Flores,” Renai said. “5:12 p.m.” She knew more: his location in the prison, the circumstances of his end, and all the other details she’d need to be able to find him, but all Sal ever seemed to need was a name.
He aimed a wing in the direction of the prison. “Then let’s hop to it, Raines.”
The cop turned his engine off and got out of his cruiser, talking into the handset on his shoulder. Despite the fact that Renai had to step out of his way as he walked past her and up the stairs leading to the NOPD office building, he didn’t spare a glance for either of them. Usually, when Renai went out on a collection, she could depend on what she’d come to think of as her personal aura of disinterest to move around undetected. She’d stood in hospital rooms next to grieving loved ones, in bedrooms next to sleeping spouses, in nursing homes next to hospice nurses, and on roadsides next to paramedics, as unnoticed as she’d been in Pal’s. Walking into a prison, though, would take a little more effort.
She pulled up the jersey hood of her jacket and spoke the word the Thrones had taught her when they gave the jacket to her, a difficult-to-comprehend collection of hissing syllables. It meant a lot of things all at once: unseen, unheard, unknown, untouched. Renai had come to call it “the ghost word.” She hated using it.
As soon as the magic took hold, all the color went out of her vision, shifting into varying shades of a dark, shadowy purple. Her skin felt too tight and impossibly sensitive, all the intensity of a tab of molly with none of the euphoria. The air around her grew chilly, then full-on cold, as if the well of emptiness inside her leached warmth from her surroundings. A whine began just at the edge of hearing, like tinnitus or the antique computer monitors at her old elementary school. The power lines overhead glowed, incandescent as a lightbulb, crackling and popping like an open flame. Sal’s oil-black feathers turned white as bone.
Grinding her molars against the assault on her senses, Renai hurried across the street and the small, almost-empty visitor’s parking lot, right up to the razor-wire and chain-link fence. Hands deep in her jacket pockets so Sal wouldn’t see them clenched into fists, head down so the hood would hide her purse-lipped squint, Renai stepped through the metal.
Once, on a dare, Renai had touched the tip of her tongue to the two prongs of a nine-volt battery. The pain that resulted was brief, potent, and numbing. The jacket’s magic, activated by the ghost word, allowed her to move through physical objects as though they’d become fog, but doing so felt like the whole world was made of batteries and she was all tongue. The fence left stinging lines hatched across her body. Walls and doors would be worse. She forced herself to breathe and kept moving.
For a brief moment when she first entered the prison, a strong stink of antiseptic cleaner and body odor overwhelmed the pain of piercing its outer wall. She soon grew accustomed to the smell, though, and the hurt returned to the forefront of her focus. Thankfully, the dull roar of hundreds of people talking and stomping and arguing and bullshitting drowned out the insistent whine plaguing her ears. With a clenching of claws and a pointed beak, Sal guided her forward. Every person she saw—white, black, or brown; guard or prisoner, teenager or elderly—glowed with the fire, the life, that burned within them. Renai knew from experience to keep her distance, did everything she could to make sure she didn’t even come close to touching any of them.
By the time she followed Sal’s directions through two cinder-block walls, up a flight of stairs, and through enough steel security doors that she lost count, the pain of slipping through so much solid matter compounded until Renai’s breath came in heaves and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. If the raven felt any discomfort at all, he gave no sign. Is that because he’s a death spirit and I’m still alive, she thought, or because I’ve only done this for five years and he’s older than the dirt in God’s garden?
Two inmates, one a younger black guy with his hair done up in twists and the other an older white man with a weak chin that made him look like a turtle, stood in the middle of the hallway with a couple of janitorial carts, one for collecting trash and the other for mopping floors. They were too close together for Renai to be sure she wouldn’t brush up against one of them if she tried to slip past, so she stopped, chewing at her lip, fighting the urge to leap out a window, to break the spell and reveal herself, anything to make the experience of using the ghost word end.
“Didn’t you use to have dreads?” Sal asked.
“What?” It just spit out of her before she could figure out what he meant, incredulous and hurt and confused all at once.
Sal aimed his beak at the janitors. “Like him. Don’t get me wrong, I like your hair fine the way it is now. Suits you. Just never got around to askin’ why you cut the dreads off.”
Renai wondered if he’d hit the wall if she threw him at it or just pass through it. “You really think this is the best time to be asking me about my hair?”
“Ain’t like they’re gonna hear us,” he said. “I’m just mak
in’ polite conversation is all.”
What you’re doing, Renai thought, is trying to distract me so I’ll keep calm. It was sweet, in a dumb, insensitive kind of way. “New Orleans is technically a city, but really it’s a small town,” she said. “I figured I was bound to run into somebody who knew Renaissance Raines. More importantly, someone who knew she’s supposed to be dead. Thought it might be best if I looked like someone different.” Which was true, but also a lie. She’d cut her locks off herself and dealt with the funky, unevenly tangled mess that followed until her hair grew out into something she could manage on her own because she couldn’t stand the idea of going to a different hairdresser than the one she’d known her whole life. Not that Sal ever needed to know that.
He let out a playful little snort. “People need to notice you to recognize you.”
She allowed herself a grin. “You’re real good at sharing information I already know, bird. Where were you with those gems when I first came back?” She shrugged the shoulder Sal perched on, giving him a playful nudge. Before she could tease him more, the men finished their discussion and moved in opposite directions. Renai backed against—and partly through—the hallway wall to let the white guy pass. It felt like falling backwards into a pool of fire ant bites. She really couldn’t take much more of this.
“Almost there,” Sal said, once she was moving again.
“So we talked about my hair, what’s next, girlfriend, my love life?”
“You got enough of one to discuss?” He indicated a left turn at the end of the hall by pointing with his beak.
“Not even enough of one to lie about.”
“That’s too bad,” Sal said. “I always expected you to end up with our old pal Jude.”
