by Bryan Camp
At the thought of Jude Dubuisson, Renai’s stomach did a pleasant little clench, and some of the chill went out of the air. No matter how hazy her memories from her time on the other side, there was no forgetting how fine that man looked. She laughed and shook her head. “Like that could’ve gone somewhere good. You ever meet a Trickster you could bring home to . . .”
She trailed off when she saw the crowded room through the reinforced Plexiglas window of the next door. A common room two stories tall with a row of cells along the back walls, a handful of round tables and seats bolted to the ground, and a flight of stairs leading up to a second-floor landing and another set of cells. Televisions hung on the wall far out of reach, humming and crackling with a light that was painfully bright to Renai’s ghost-word-touched eyes. The iron-barred doors of all the cells stood open, their occupants spilling out into the common area, seated on the tables with their feet on the seats, leaning against cell doors with their arms folded, pacing or standing in small clusters, staring up at the televisions or talking or both. A soft, welcoming glow emanated from one of the cells on the upper tier: Miguel Flores.
“I can’t do this,” she said, not realizing she’d spoken out loud until Sal clicked his tongue in disagreement.
“Sure you can,” he said, “it’s his time.”
“Not that.” She waved a hand in the direction of all the men in between her and the stairs. “How am I supposed to get up there? We don’t all have wings, Sal.”
“I got faith in you. Just be quick. It’s almost time.” And with that, he launched from her shoulder, swooping up to the second-floor railing with a few flaps of his wings.
So much for sweet, Renai thought. She took a deep breath and studied the area, trying to concentrate despite the ringing in her ears and the magic stretching and scraping against her skin, hoping she’d discover a path she could slip through without touching anybody. It shouldn’t be this hard to cross a room. Under normal circumstances, people moved out of your way, even if they weren’t really paying attention. It had taken more than a couple of bruised toes before Renai learned that that rule didn’t apply to her anymore. Under the influence of the ghost word, it would be worse.
Much worse.
Renai let out a disgusted huff. “Hell with it,” she said. She cracked her knuckles, shook her arms and legs limber. “Don’t think about it, girl, just move.” She hit the door at a quick walk—popping through in a burst of pain—and kept moving. Unlike everything else in the world when she was under the shroud of the ghost word, living people weren’t cold, they were bonfires, so the common room air hit her like the gust from an open oven. She managed to dance around the group closest to the entrance with no trouble, but that took her too close to an older black man telling a story to another handful of inmates, his hands waving around as he added details to his narrative. She did her best—turning sideways and straightening her spine—but his hand swept through her stomach. Warmth filled her, starting in her core and racing through her veins like a shot of strong liquor. That was the worst part; it felt amazing.
The older man shivered visibly and grinned at his spectators. “Whoa,” he said, “somebody musta walked over my grave.”
That’s closer to the truth than you know, Renai thought.
When she brushed up against another inmate after another couple of timid steps, heat flooding into her from the contact, she gave it up as a lost cause and broke into a run, tearing through the crowd of unsuspecting men like a sudden draft, siphoning away minutes or hours or days from their life span with every touch. She reached the stairway a few seconds later, full of energy and sick to her stomach at the same time. Sal started to say something when she got to the top of the stairs, but stopped when he caught the side-eye she shot him. Head hanging a little, he hopped from the railing back onto her shoulder. Renai followed the glow to Miguel’s cell, readying herself for what came next.
Laying on a thin cot built into the wall, his breath coming in shallow, whistling gasps, Miguel Flores was dying.
Miguel was a short, compactly built young man, with light brown skin and thick black hair slicked down with sweat. He clutched a woolen blanket to his chest, ink swirling and sketched across his arms, both the smooth, delicate lines of professional tattoos and the rougher, simpler designs of prison ink. No one lay in the bunk above him. “My man’s got a private room,” Sal said as they entered, “lucky break, right?”
Renai frowned. “No one should have to die alone, Sal.”
“No, I just mean you won’t have to worry about bumping into nobody else in here is all.” He hopped from her shoulder onto the top bunk, an involuntary squawk coming out of him, like an old man groaning when he stood up too fast. “Besides, he ain’t alone. We’re here.”
Like the others, Miguel radiated heat, but his fire burned low, his life span down to nothing but smoldering embers. He shined instead, a beacon to anyone with the eyes for it that he wasn’t long for this world. Renai leaned down to him, smiling in case he could see her despite the jacket’s magic. The dying could, sometimes. He whispered something she couldn’t quite catch, a word in Spanish maybe, and then, “Katrina.” Oddly, he grinned a little when he said it.
“No,” she said, “that was years ago. This moment is just for you.” She hated the way her voice sounded to her own ears, harsh and cold. She had to be this way in this moment, though. If she let herself care, let herself feel, there was no way she’d be able to do what needed to be done.
Miguel’s eyes went wide with fear, and even with the asthma filling his lungs full of gunk and squeezing the breath out of him, he managed to suck in enough air to speak four words in English. “Don’t want,” he said, gasping, “to die.”
Renai tried to keep her face impassive, but a frown tucked at the corners of her mouth. “Nobody does,” she said, “but everybody’s got to.” And then she reached inside of him and ripped his soul out.
Chapter Three
Often they are fields of untamed nature: Aaru, the peaceful land of reeds and plentiful hunting believed to be the soul of the Nile; Elysium, the always sun-kissed valley of unending bliss, and Asphodel, the merely pleasant meadow of unrelenting banality; Fólkvangr, where the slain warriors chosen by Freya feast and fight amid their stone ships and wait for Ragnarok. And sometimes they are gardens: Eden and Firdaws and Fiddler’s Green and the orchard where the Jade Emperor’s peaches grow. It is a euphoric tunnel made of light created by hyperactivity in the brain due to blood loss. They are the lands on and above Mount Meru where the virtuous await their next chance to attain moksha. It is the island of Magh Meall, the Summerland, the House of Song. Heaven. Paradise. A place of reward for living a righteous life.
It is not the end that awaits us all.
One of the first misconceptions about humanity and life that Renai had to let go of once she’d taken on the role of psychopomp was the idea that the human soul was a single object. Since she was a child watching cartoons, she’d been taught that when a person died, a glowing, incorporeal version of that person rose out of the body, usually crowned with a halo and clutching a harp. As she grew older, movies and depictions of Heaven had reinforced this concept until she’d come to believe that a soul was just a person-shaped light trapped inside the body in the same way she believed that her tongue had different spots for sweet and salty, or that bulls hated the color red: never considered, never questioned, and completely wrong.
Beneath her, the dying man let out one last truncated exhale and went still. What Renai held in her grip was a braided coil of light and quicksilver and shadow, the sum total of everything that made Miguel Flores unique: his identity, his destiny from his birth to this moment, his ability to influence the world around him. A whole human life in her hands.
It was her job to tear it apart.
As she worked at unbraiding the soul, she was struck by the memory of Sal teaching her to do this, his words so clear in her mind that she had to glance up at him to make sure he wasn’t
repeating his instructions yet again.
You start, Sal said, with the most crucial part of your dead, their Fortune. She gripped the strand of Miguel’s soul that was composed of light between her thumb and forefinger and unwound it from the other two, the rest of the braid going awkwardly slack in her fist when the first piece slipped loose. When it came free, it stretched and oozed, like warm taffy. Renai gathered it up into the palm of her hand, tugging it up and rolling it into a ball, her fingers moving quick and sure in an upsettingly accurate impression of a spider’s legs looping webbing around its prey. When she had all of it gathered into a golden sphere about the size of a fist, she set it to the side.
You get the dead’s Fortune into the Underworld, Sal had repeated many, many times, no matter what. That’s Rule Number 1.
Next came the person’s ability to influence the world around them. There were many names for this capacity: ka, spirit, medicine, juju. Sal called it Voice. She unwound the shadowy and the silvery strands away from each other, letting the shadow-thread drop in a coil on Miguel’s stomach, gathering the liquid silver of his Voice into a pool cupped in her two hands. None of this shit gets into the Underworld. Not one bit. That’s Rule Number 2. Miguel’s Voice rippled and swirled in her palms, pulling into a tight bead like a giant drop of mercury, growing more solid as she watched. It shifted colors and forms, first a bunch of grapes, then an apple, and finally settling into the shape of a peach. She bit into it, and her mouth flooded with tart and syrupy-sweet juice and a rush like a spike of adrenaline. The same sensation of warmth and vitality she’d siphoned away from the inmates she’d brushed against downstairs filled her when she swallowed. In the past she’d offered some to Sal, but he always flicked his beak away in a raven’s version of a head shake and told her that if he was meant to eat it, the Voice would have taken on a shape he could stomach.
Renai devoured the rest of the peach in a few eager, slurping bites, so full of energy when she finished that she half expected her skin to glow. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, a little chagrined at her enthusiasm. Voice was the part of the soul that let a person, if they had the training or the will or the faith, perform magic, so if the dead were allowed to bring even a fraction of what they possessed in life into the Underworld, they might find their way back to life. She reached down and placed the peach pit—fighting the urge to lick the last droplets of dew from its rough pockmarked surface—in the hollow of Miguel’s throat. A tiny portion of Voice was always left with the body, to fuel those little magics of memory and nostalgia, those whispers of guidance and support, all the subtle ways that the dead still influenced the world once they were gone. Whenever she’d asked Sal why they ate most of the Voice instead of leaving it all with the body, he’d only tell her, There’s two kinds of shit that would happen if we didn’t: bad and ugly.
The part of a person that most people would think of as their soul: their identity, their mind—what Sal called Essence—was what remained after death. That’s what psychopomps guided to the Underworld. Renai bit her lip, waiting. This part didn’t always go the way she wanted it to. Sometimes, the dead were just . . . dead.
After a tense moment, the shadowy thread on Miguel’s stomach rose, wavering like a plume of smoke. It grew bulging, too-large eyes, a face that only vaguely resembled the man he had once been, and long, spindly arms capped by massive hands. The rest remained a wisp, dwindling into a thread-thin tendril that vanished into Miguel’s abdomen. Renai plucked the golden sphere of Miguel’s destiny from the cot where she’d left it and squashed it between her palms until it formed a flat, round disk. When she held it up to the light, it had become a coin. Miguel would use it to pay his way through to the other side.
If you ever have to choose, Sal said, between the Fortune and the Essence, you pick the Fortune every time. Call that Rule Number 3.
“Not bad,” Sal said, in the present now and not just a voice in her memories. “Few more decades of practice and you’ll be good enough to start collecting the dead on your own.” His beak gaped open in a raven’s version of a grin. “Course, then you won’t get to see my pretty self all the time.”
Renai laughed. “Too pretty for prison anyway,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Rather than facing the gauntlet of the crowd below her, Renai went out through the prison wall, a sharp splash of pain and a quick drop that left her buried up to her thighs in the basketball court below. After a few more minutes of hurt and irritation, she made it out of the prison entirely, and could finally pull her jacket’s hood from her head, breaking the ghost word’s spell and returning her to the world of natural light and physical objects and the ambient sounds of traffic. The relief made her groan aloud. Once again perched on her shoulder, Sal shot her a look but said nothing.
The streetlights flickered to life above her; twilight had fallen while she navigated her way through the prison and collected her dead. She crossed to the side of the street where she’d left Kyrie parked, leading the Essence of Miguel by one hand and holding the coin of his Fortune in the other. Miguel had taken on a little more definition, his torso filling out, his face smoothing into a fuller, healthier version of the man she’d seen in the cell. He now wore a dark blue dress shirt with the buttons done all the way up his neck, the collar ironed to sharp points. At the waist he tapered off into a smoky wisp like a cartoon genie. That smoke thinned down into a hair-thin thread that vanished back the way they’d come. She tucked Miguel’s coin into a jacket pocket and straddled Kyrie, coaxing Miguel into a position that more or less approximated sitting in front of her.
At first, she’d spoken to her dead in a constant, soothing litany at this stage of their journey, worried that they were terrified, panicked. She’d come to find that it was a waste of her breath, since they were always like Miguel, drifting along beside her with a placid, dreamy expression. That slender thread connected Miguel to his body, allowing him to claim the parts of himself that he wanted to keep: his looks, his fond memories, his sense of humor if he had one, and let him leave behind the burdens he didn’t: his perpetually overreacting lungs, his regrets, whatever crimes he may have committed. Without fail, every one of her dead had chosen to leave behind their last moments. The nicest thing about death, she’d found, was that you didn’t remember it.
She envied that luxury.
Standing there with both feet on the pavement and Kyrie still sleeping beneath her, it all came rushing back. One of the things she found it hardest to reconcile about her new life was why, out of all the memories she’d lost, she’d kept these. She’d been closing up at the store—a tourist-trap voodoo shop in the Quarter that her aunt had owned—when she’d felt the sudden, frightening realization that she wasn’t alone. One moment she’d smelled cinnamon, and the next she’d been knocked to the floor. A sudden line of ice at her throat, a blade so sharp it didn’t hurt when it cut. Fear, and then panic, and then the struggle to breathe and—
“Hey, Raines, you forget something?” Sal asked, overly loud, like he was repeating himself.
Renai realized that she’d just been staring, her chest tight with held breath, her pulse pounding. She dropped into Kyrie’s seat with all her weight at once, the kickstand popping up and almost ditching the bike. She recovered and grabbed the handlebars, the motorcycle coming to life with a comforting rumble, like the purr of a massive cat. Sal’s talons clutched at her shoulder to stay upright. She kicked off and let Kyrie carry her away with a roar.
“You okay?” Sal asked after a minute, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.
She made him say it again, like she couldn’t quite hear him. “Long day,” she yelled back.
Except that wasn’t really true, either. With the potency of Miguel’s Voice flowing in her veins, she felt like she could sprint for miles without slowing, without even breaking a sweat. But as much as she wanted answers about her missing time, she wanted to talk about her own death even less. So she ignored the throbbing of her heart
, her every instinct screaming, run-run-run, and forced herself to drive slow, keeping Kyrie under the speed limit and obeying traffic lights, even though she usually didn’t. This part of the trip was more about giving the dead time to acclimate, to come to the realization that all of this was really happening. She couldn’t rush it just because she had a bunch of bad juju in her head.
Glancing down, she saw that Miguel had formed legs, like a tadpole abandoning his tail. His head swiveled back and forth as he watched the city roll by, and it looked to her like his vacant expression had been replaced by one more aware of his surroundings. He’d probably be wondering how he’d gotten out of jail, would be just coming to the realization that this wasn’t some strange dream.
“Soon,” she said to him, making sure she had a firm grip on his ghostly hand, “we’ll be there soon.”
A few minutes later, they turned off of Canal and onto Basin Street, riding along the edge of the Quarter. Renai did her best to guide Kyrie around the jagged cracks in the asphalt and the abrupt holes that pockmarked the streets, even though the bike had handled everything New Orleans’s disregard for infrastructure had thrown at her so far. Miguel shifted around in his seat, getting agitated now. She could feel the weight in the air of something unspoken, but she’d consumed his capacity for speech back in OPP.
“Relax, chico,” Sal said, when they eased to a stop at a red light, “you’ll get all the answers you want, I promise.”
“Careful, Sal,” Renai said, giving the raven a poke that earned her a pecked knuckle. “You don’t want to be making promises you can’t keep.”
Before Sal could reply, they were rolling again. Kyrie carried them past the eerily quiet Iberville Projects—closed since the storm and in the process of being torn down—and then hopped over the short curb of the neutral ground when they reached St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, idling to a stop on the recently cut grass. The high brick wall facing Rampart Street was coated in cracked white plaster, with the boxy aboveground tombs common to older New Orleans burial sites peeking over the top. The trees growing in the cemetery swayed in the breeze. A wrought-iron gate barred the entrance, topped by a filigreed cross. Miguel went tense—or as tense as an incorporeal spirit could get—at the sight of it, but he was far from the first of her dead to show reticence once their destination became clear. She pulled him off the bike and led him forward, as gentle as she was implacable.
