by Bryan Camp
“You gotta start thinking like a ’pomp, Raines. Don’t ask these kids if they’re okay. Look.”
Her jaw clenched, but when she turned back to the group, she understood what he meant. None of them had the smoldering-embers glow of a life on the cusp of ending. Each of them burned with health, with vitality. One of the girls, in fact, had a second flame kindled in her belly. Renai knew right away what that meant. She wondered if the girl knew yet.
She took a couple of deep breaths, tried to still her shaking hands. The teenagers were already on their feet, phones out and texting, eyes scanning the street with every other step. Shaken and crying and anxious to be gone, to be home. By the sound of their conversation, they had a good idea who the shooter was, knew it had something to do with one of the three boys—the tallest and oldest of the three with a head full of twists—and some “ratchet-ass ho” at their school. Renai found it hard to hear them past the roaring rising in her ears. Not now, she thought, not again.
Something moved within her that was more than just adrenaline. Something dark and cold. It wasn’t anger, that would have burned through her in a hot wave, and it wasn’t fear, that was a chill that raced across her skin and raised the hair on her flesh. It wasn’t an emotion, wasn’t a part of her at all. This was a fierce, frigid wind, a tightening coil of intent. A storm with a mind of its own.
She didn’t know exactly what this entity was or where it had come from, but she knew it didn’t belong inside of her. She’d had no magic of her own before her death, and being a vessel for a living storm wasn’t any part of being a psychopomp that Sal had told her about. It might be some miasma of the Underworld that had infected her, some unexplained “gift” from the Thrones, or some strange consequence of her unusual resurrection, but—unsure of its origins—Renai had kept its existence to herself. Whatever it was, it came and went without warning, roused by her anger and whispering promises of power in her mind. She knew she controlled it just based on the simple fact that it wanted to be released. Each moment it whirled within her, it begged for freedom, needing only once for her litany of no, no, no to be broken with a yes. Needing only her permission, a simple exhalation, for its mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world.
She knew it was her rage that had woken the storm. These five were just kids. Still in high school, based on the flashes of school uniforms she’d noticed. Caterpillars still in the chrysalis. Buds on the vine that had yet to bloom.
At least, they ought to be. The law said they weren’t yet responsible enough to drink or buy cigarettes. Or marry. Or vote. But nobody seemed to have a problem with them getting shot at. They were adult enough to have their lives snatched away without warning or reason. Adult enough that they were hurrying away in case someone called to report the gunshots, in case the cops actually showed. Adult enough to be startled, to be scared, to be relieved, and to not be surprised. The relentless, roaring whirl within her made it hard to breathe, and she recognized it for what it was: hatred.
She hated everything about this, from the idiot who wanted to solve his problems with a gun, to his targets who knew his name but wouldn’t snitch, to the city that tutted and fretted and turned a blind eye to it so long as it didn’t happen in the nice neighborhoods, to the industries that profited off of the myths of the gangsta and the hustle and the game, to the nation founded on the bones of slavery and bigotry, a nation that left its people impoverished and uneducated and addicted and hopeless in order to fuel decades of war and feed a bottomless greed. Hate rose within her so powerfully that it filled her lungs and coated her tongue. Hate tasted like the oil-slick, dead-leaves rot of floodwaters. It howled with a hurricane’s fury.
Hate seared her lungs like gasoline and a struck match, and the tempest within her stretched up to greet it.
She held the storm in, both doubting that she’d be able to restrain it again if she ever released it and fearing its intentions. Would it seek out the shooter and snatch his life away as easily as she’d taken Miguel’s? Would it stop there? Could it stop? Or would it grow? Scouring the flesh from his bones with the force of its winds, swallowing even the memory of him in its flood? What would sate this hate inside her? His home? The block? The city? What would be enough?
Renai felt a cold, wet nose press into her palm, and remembered where she was. She pushed the hate back down into the icy, empty place in the center of her where it lived, forced herself to take one deep breath, and then another. Clenched shut her eyes and imagined her mother’s kitchen: the gentle breeze of the ceiling fan swinging overhead and warm sunlight through the open curtains and the rich, buttery scent of a roux just before the trinity went in. The slow, hypnotic scrape of a wooden spoon against cast iron as her mother stirred and stirred and stirred.
Gradually, sullenly, the tempest retreated deep enough that Renai was able to release her breath. She opened her eyes to find that the teenagers had made their way out of sight, and Sal looking at her with his head cocked to the side. He didn’t ask; he didn’t have to. She could read the concern and the confusion and the question all over his doggie frown.
“You told me to look so I looked,” she said. “Don’t give me any shit about what I found.”
Sal’s ears twitched back, and he made an exasperated sound in his throat, but all he said was “Fair enough.”
Renai gestured down at the grass where the teenagers had thrown themselves. “So what now?” she asked. “If none of them was destined to get shot—”
Sal tilted his head at the house behind him, the one the teenagers had been standing in front of when the shots were fired. “These drive-by assholes always got shitty aim. I’m betting our boy is in there.”
It took a moment for Renai to catch the nuance of what he’d said. “Wait, ‘our’ boy?”
Sal pulled one of his hind legs up to scratch behind his ear. “Aww, hell,” he said, “if I’m gonna get my ass chewed out, you might as well learn something out of it. You stick by me, you don’t touch nothin’, and you save your questions for later, we clear?”
She dropped to one knee and hugged the psychopomp around his thin dog shoulders. A little girlish squeak came out of her before she could stop it. She knew she was at least as elated by the fact that he hadn’t made her talk about the weird shit going on with her as she was about getting to see some new side of being a psychopomp, but that didn’t diminish her joy in the slightest. These days she took her good moments whenever she got them.
“Aww-right, aww-right,” Sal said, pulling away from her as though he hadn’t draped a paw around her shoulder when she hugged him. “Don’t go fallin’ in love with me. I ain’t crowned you Queen of the Underworld or nothin’. You’re still just a punk kid who don’t know shit from Shenandoah.”
Renai stood, the world still tight and painted in shades of purple with the ghost word’s power. She couldn’t tell if she was growing more accustomed to its effects, or if the storm within her had numbed her, but it didn’t seem to irritate her as much as it had before. She followed the psychopomp down the brief path to the front door, in search of the dead boy that Seth had sent her after. “And I’m not a kid,” she said. “You have to stop treating me like a child.”
“Sure,” Sal said, “soon as you quit acting like one.” But he leaned his weight against her leg to take the sting out of his words, just before the actual hurt of pushing through the iron gate and the wooden door slapped against her skin. She might be growing used to the word’s discomfort, but moving through physical objects still hurt like hell.
Though none of the lights were on in the room beyond, the ghost word’s influence infused the darkness with a subtle lavender glow. This first room looked to be both dining room and living room, with a round table large enough for four on one side of the room, and a small worn beige sofa, an ancient pleather recliner, and a flat-screen TV on the other. School textbooks were strewn across the surface of the dining room table, and family photographs adorned the walls. Since someone over the years had taken o
ut most of the far wall, Renai could see into the kitchen from the front door: countertops and a gas stove from the ’70s, a humming, rattling fridge from the ’90s, and linoleum floors that gleamed as though they’d been scrubbed that morning. Sal had his nose to the floor, sniffling like he had a cold.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Something . . . weird,” he said. “See what the rest of this place is like.”
Renai gave the kitchen a glance as she moved through it but found nothing unexpected. Glass-fronted cupboards showed plates and spices and cereal boxes. A cast-iron skillet had place of honor on the stove, probably one of the first things to get packed in the hurricane box. Ramses’ report card from a charter school down in the Bywater hung on the fridge by a magnet, more A’s than B’s. A note signed MOMMA said she’d picked up an extra shift and would be home late. A short hallway separated the kitchen and the first bedroom, with a small bathroom off to the side. The first bedroom obviously belonged to an adolescent boy: unmade bed, school uniform polo shirt and khaki pants hanging out of a wicker laundry hamper, Reggie Bush and Jimmy Graham posters on the wall.
The last room in the house was another bedroom, this one belonging to Ramses’ mother—Juliette, according to the name tag Renai found on the vanity. That might have been the name of the Miss St. Cyr she remembered from her childhood, but she couldn’t be sure. Juliette’s room was as neat as the kitchen, the paisley bedspread made with military precision, the romance novels on the nightstand lined up in order instead of thrown into a stack. Renai turned to go when a photograph on the far wall caught her eye. The laughing young black woman in the picture had her arm thrown around the neck of a skinny preteen with a troubled expression on his face, an exaggerated scowl that he was hamming up for the camera. Next to them stood a black man in a white tank top, his crisp hat brim turned just so, a sweet and mild caught in his pursed lips. On the man’s shoulders sat a boy who couldn’t have been more than five or six, his grin wide and bright.
Renai was the one who had taken the picture.
It was 2006, the Carnival after the storm. She couldn’t remember much from that time, just that people hadn’t been sure they’d even have a Mardi Gras that year. She’d only been fourteen, not much older than Zeke, the frowning boy in the photograph. All of it came rushing back. Miss St. Cyr—Juliette—had swaggered up to Renai’s family’s spot on the parade route with her man and her boys and a giant daiquiri that she’d obviously already had plenty of. She’d made a couple of jokes about Renai—who she’d called “Nay-nay”—hooking up with Zeke, which was why he was pulling that face in the picture. She’d loved to give people those repeating nicknames, had called her younger son “Ki-ki.” When Renai had asked her mother later that day why Miss St. Cyr had given her son the kind of name you’d give a panda, Renai’s father had thrown his head back and laughed.
It’s just a nickname, baby, her mother had said, because he’s got the name of a king, just like Zeke.
So Renai had known Ramses, or at least her family knew his family, though she’d only ever heard him called Ki-ki or “Lil’ King,” if his dad was talking to him. Was that connection why Seth had thought she’d spare his life? Or was it just a matter of time before she’d collected the soul of someone she’d known, given how small a city New Orleans was?
Sal called her from the front of the house, interrupting her thoughts. She hurried to him, found him sitting on top of the dining room table, his ears laying flat against his scalp. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Check the window,” he said. It only took her a minute to see what he wanted her to notice, the irregular, dime-sized hole in the glass surrounded by a spider’s web of cracks. “Now follow the path,” he said. She put her face close to the glass, careful not to slip through it, and moved only her eyes, sighting along her outstretched arm.
“There,” she said, pointing to right where Sal was sitting.
“Right. Now come look at this.”
She went over to the table, where Sal aimed his snout at the chair directly across from the window. The topmost plank of wood was likewise punctured and splintered where the bullet had torn through. Without needing to be prompted, she let her hand travel the rest of the imagined path across the room, to where she found the hateful slug of metal buried in the Sheetrock. She went back to the chair, imagining how it would have happened. Ramses sitting at the table, doing his homework like he did every night, and then the shots—except there was no blood on the chair or the floor. Certainly no Ramses St. Cyr gasping his last breaths. Must have been one of the other shots, she thought, but then she noticed that the air around the chair seemed to ripple, like the shimmer in the air on an especially hot day. It felt wrong, hurt her eyes and churned her stomach and hurt somehow just at the edge her perception, like a wound in the world. By the expression in Sal’s eyes, he saw the same thing she did. It was then that she understood. This was it. This was the time and the place and bullet that was supposed to end a life.
Except it hadn’t.
Somehow, Ramses St. Cyr had escaped the death that the Thrones had planned for him.
The thought of Ramses adrift somewhere between the worlds of the living and the dead gave Renai a chill, not just of fear or revulsion, but of recognition, too. She was overcome by one of those moments of memory or imagination or prophecy, and saw herself guiding the Essence of Miguel Flores through the Second Gate.
Holt Cemetery had originally been a potter’s field—a burial ground for those who could afford nothing better—and it was one of the few cemeteries in New Orleans where the dead were laid to rest in the earth. In the world of the living, it was sad and gray: a few struggling patches of brown grass, a sprawl of crowded plots with leaning or broken headstones—sometimes no stone at all, just a wooden cross with a hand-lettered name—all tucked behind the fence of a community college’s baseball field. In the land of the dead, Holt cemetery flourished: every plot covered with vibrant flower beds growing over and into one another, a striking, vibrant riot of color, like a garden planted by Jackson Pollock. At its center a gigantic oak towered over the whole seven acres, and at the base of that oak waited the Gatekeeper, Nibo.
Like Oussou and Masaka, Nibo was a loa of the Ghede family. Renai pictured him as having dark brown skin and a long, lean frame wrapped in a tailor-cut three-piece suit: dark pants, a cream-colored waistcoat, and a light blue jacket covered with a pattern that belonged on an old white lady’s sofa: flowers in blooms of long thin petals in pastel shades of red, orange, and yellow and pale green vines snaking all over. In Renai’s mind, Nibo made every inch of that jacket work, a confident slouch to the way he leaned against the giant oak, like everyone who saw him in it owed him money for the privilege.
Nibo’s domain was of the unburied, the unremembered dead. They found a place here, tending Nibo’s gardens and resting and drinking the Ghede’s obnoxiously spicy rum. Some souls had nowhere else to go. Some were given the choice to remain here or to press on in search of greater reward. Miguel Flores, Renai knew, would make it through Nibo’s Gate and down into the next level of the Underworld.
But Ramses St. Cyr wouldn’t make it even that far if Renai couldn’t find him.
Chapter Six
Renai stared at the place where the dead boy should be, trying to process her reaction. On the one hand, a senseless death, a life ended far too soon, had been avoided. Ramses had managed to sidestep a fate he didn’t deserve. She ought to feel good about that. Overjoyed, even. Wasn’t this the definition of a miracle? Why, then, did she feel so disgusted? Now that she realized what the empty chair meant, she had to force herself to endure its presence, the trembling of the air reminiscent of an insect’s quivering mouthparts, an aftertaste in her mouth like weeks-rancid milk. She choked back a gag.
“My thoughts exactly,” Sal said, breaking the silence. He hopped down from the table and started pacing the other side of the room, his nails clicking on the hardwood floor. She was only too happy
to follow him away from that part of the house.
“Does this—”
“Happen a lot? No. This kinda shit simply does not happen.” She couldn’t tell if the tone in his voice was angry or confused or nervous, but Ramses’ absence had definitely agitated him. She chewed her lip. The tension of the ghost word against her skin finally tipped over from dripping-faucet annoying to nails-on-the-chalkboard unpleasant, so Renai pulled off the hood and broke the spell. Night crowded in and the pressure abated. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and then sank into the comfort of the old recliner, worn and accepting as a pair of old jeans. She tucked her hands into her jacket pockets.
“I’m not sure I get what’s going on here,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
Sal paused midstep, placing his paw slowly onto the floor and easing down until he sat on his haunches. When he spoke, he seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Does it not feel wrong to you?”
“Yeah, no,” she said, “it totally does. Just looking at”—she waved in the general direction of the chair—“is, like, ugh.” She didn’t know why she’d fallen into the cadence of an inarticulate teenager, why she felt the need to distance herself from Sal. To make herself seem not just innocent but too vapid to be anything else. She’d never felt the need to play a role for him before. But then, the psychopomp had never been cautious with his words before, either. “I just mean, like, shouldn’t we be happy for him? ‘Innocent bystander in a drive-by’ is such a bullshit cliché way for a young black kid to die. Shouldn’t we be glad he gets a chance at something more?” Some part of her, she realized, was hoping for just that. Hoping that she could convince Sal to walk away, to forget that this death had been avoided, wrong as the whole situation felt. That Ramses could be allowed to escape. Is this why Seth wanted me here? she thought. Am I just a puppet dancing to his tune?
