by Bryan Camp
Mortal or divine, dead or alive, this man could always get her feeling some kinda way as soon as she laid eyes on him.
And what was worse: he knew it, too.
“Renaissance Raines,” he said, in a deep honey-filled voice that made her insides squirm in a pleasant, distracting, infuriating way, “as I live and breathe.” A look of feigned concern washed over his face. “I do still live and breathe, right? You ain’t here on business?”
Renai felt her lips betray her by twisting into a grin. “Jude I used to know never tried to separate business and pleasure,” she said, walking closer to him, trying to summon some sashay into her stride. Jude moved, rising to his full height and shifting his weight so that his body blocked the half-open doorway. He reached behind him, pulling the door almost closed, but ensuring the lock didn’t catch. It was too casual a move not to be deliberate. “You hiding someone from me?” she asked. “Afraid I might get jealous?”
She’d meant it to be a joke, a flirtatious way of getting him to open up, but something in her tone or her choice of words made Jude frown, a flash of annoyance or disappointment that was gone as quickly as it appeared. “I think we both know that nobody can hide from you and your people, Renai. Not even me.”
Renai wanted to take her words back, wanted to rewind to the teasing back-and-forth that she’d somehow ruined, but that moment was gone, and she didn’t have time to try and get it back. Midnight was coming, one way or the other. “Couple of days ago I’d have agreed with you,” she said, “but it turns out we’re wrong. That’s why I’m here. Believe it or not, we’ve lost—”
Jude held up a hand to stop her, shaking his head. “Sorry to say, but I can’t help you.” Renai couldn’t say anything, not because he’d done something to her—though she knew he had the magic to silence her if he wanted—but because the sudden flush of frustration robbed her of the ability to speak. Her eyebrow’s arch said everything she needed to say anyway. He did actually look genuinely apologetic, but that only irritated her even more.
Jude held up his hands, as if he could ward off her anger, and then turned it into a rueful shrug. “Are you really that surprised?” he asked, a hint of laughter in his voice. “Things are different now, Renai. We don’t play for the same team anymore.”
Renai spoke through clenched teeth, heard her mother’s voice coming from her own lips. “You best stop talking out the wrong side of your mouth at me, Jude. I am not the one.”
“Not the one what? Not the one who serves the Thrones?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“I’m Trickster, Renai. They’re Death. They send you to evoke the appointed end at the appointed time, right? Well, I’m the lucky break that avoids you.” He pointed one finger at her in a slow, dismissive gesture and said, “Fate,” then turned that same finger toward his own face and said, “Twist.” He frowned and tilted his head in a what-can-you-do gesture. “I’m afraid it’s just that simple.”
Renai reached down deep for the power within her but found nothing there. Much as she’d love to hurl a little wind and flood at Jude’s annoying, smug face, he wasn’t wrong. And both she and the storm knew it. “If you weren’t gonna help, why did you even bother letting me up in here?”
“Didn’t know it was you. Just knew you could afford the buy-in. Which reminds me, your money’s no good here.” He dug in the pocket of his stars-and-moons vest and pulled out a coin, which he flicked into the air, sending it ringing and spinning straight at her.
Even before she closed her fingers around it, the psychopomp inside her knew it was a coin of Fortune, recognized it as the same one she’d given the toad in the elevator. She tucked it back into her jacket.
Before she could say anything else, before she could even think of anything else, Jude was talking again. She’d forgotten that he loved the sound of his own voice as much as she did. “The thing is,” he said, “even if I could help you, I really can’t. You’ve been wrong about this misplaced soul of yours from the beginning.”
Renai narrowed her eyes at him. “You wanna collect yourself and try again? You just said a whole lotta nothing.”
Jude chuckled, low and deep and hungry. “Just because you heard nothing doesn’t mean I said nothing. Why did you come to me?”
Renai took her time to consider her answer. There were a number of reasons. The fact that she knew him, that he owed her a favor, because she needed help she could trust. But he’d emphasized the me in that sentence. Why had she thought he specifically could help her? That was simple. “Because you can find lost things,” she said.
Understanding eased into her like a lock clicking open. “So if you can’t find him, it means he isn’t lost at all. It means he’s right where he wants to be.”
Jude tapped a finger to his temple and then pointed it at her. “That’a girl,” he said.
What started as a disgusted, dismissive growl from Renai turned into a full-fledged shout, a wordless cry of frustration. She couldn’t help it, it just slipped out of her. All that time and energy worrying about some child lost so bad not even death could find him, and that clowning motherfucker was running from her? Oh, no. Oh, hell no.
She took some small amount of satisfaction from the worried glance Jude threw over his shoulder at his red door, like her outburst might have disturbed whoever—or whatever—he had waiting on him in here. When he turned back to her, though, he was smiling once more. “I do have a consolation prize for you,” he said. Without waiting for a response, he beckoned her closer. Just a few steps took her near enough to breathe in his scent: crushed almonds and roasted coffee and dark, dark rum. He reached into the leather satchel at his waist—his bag of tricks, she remembered—that she hadn’t seen up until now, that she was pretty sure hadn’t been there until just this moment, and a thrill of something ran through her; danger maybe, but not quite fear. All she really knew about his satchel was that it held some potent magics, that he could pull just about anything out of there.
When he pulled his hand free, her first thought was that he held nothing at all in his fist. In the darkness of the room, and the blackness of what he held, the object practically vanished. But then he tilted it just so, and the light danced across its surface like the shine on a piece of glass, and she saw that he held a knife. He spun it in his open palm and held it by the blade, so that the handle was presented to her. She took it without stopping to think whether it was a good idea.
It looked at first to be made of smoked black glass, but as she studied it, she thought it was some polished stone, maybe even obsidian. The blade curved up from her bottom knuckle in a wide arc and then tapered to a sharp point, curved like a talon or a thorn. The grip wasn’t what she expected, a knotted cord wound tightly around a core of wood or stone, and the blade itself seemed more accidental than fashioned, its jagged, serrated edge more like something broken than something shaped. It was a wicked, dangerous thing, suitable only for rending, for destruction.
It felt absolutely right in her hand.
“See?” Jude said, startling her. “I’m still your boy if you’ve actually lost something.”
“And here I thought you couldn’t help me,” she said. She found it difficult to pull her eyes away from the knife, like the blade’s gleam would show her something other than her own reflection if she stared hard enough. It felt both familiar and unknown, like it belonged to those memories of hers that had been wiped away.
Jude pursed his lips and waved her off, playful, like they were pals, like he hadn’t just told her they were fundamentally opposed to one another. “Well, I do owe you one. After you helped me in the Underworld the way you did, I couldn’t let you out of here with your pockets turned out.”
Renai tried to keep her ignorance from showing on her face, but Jude seemed to read it there anyway, frowning at whatever he saw. “You don’t remember that, do you?” He glanced behind him again, like someone late obsessively checking their watch. She wondered how close to midnight t
hey were. “I’ll have to tell you about it sometime,” he said, backing slowly toward his impossible door, “you were a real badass that day.”
She followed him, matching his slow, inching pace, but not letting him get away, either. “Why wait? You got something better to do?”
“Not better, just urgent.”
He showed her his back, almost at the door now. “But I’ve lost my memories,” she said, a kind of breathless desperation making her words come out plaintive, needy. She hated the sound of it, but it made Jude pause, his hand pressed to the door but not pushing it open yet, so she kept going. “Wouldn’t those help me more than some knife?”
“Depends on the knife,” he said over his shoulder. “Besides, the memories are like the kid. They’re not lost. They just don’t belong to you no more.”
And then he turned, just enough for one last look, to shoot her a brief fuck-you grin, and then the red door swung open at his touch. In the brief glimpse through the doorway that Renai managed to steal, she saw a small room dominated by a poker table filled with horrors: a brown-skinned, shirtless man with protruding eyes, a smear of paint on his forehead in the same shade of dark blue as the crown of feathers he wore, and a beast’s cruel fangs curling down over his lower lip; a scrawny, dirty child with bright red skin and an elongated, dangling tongue that seemed somehow obscene; a woman of Native ancestry—judging by her light brown skin and thick black hair—who had two slender arms waving above her head in a slow, hypnotic dance and two more resting on the table; Seth, with his awkward, ugly face and his filthy red hands; and a person-shaped mound of cockroaches, writhing and skittering and repulsive.
Then the door slammed shut, and she was once again alone in the big, empty dark.
“To hell with this,” Renai muttered. Though she could barely see, she reached for where she thought the knob would be and, after a couple of missed attempts, managed to find it with her free hand. She twisted it and threw her shoulder against the door, expecting it to be locked—
—and went sprawling into the bright cacophony of the main casino floor.
She nearly lost the knife in her confusion. A glance back showed her the trick: the door she’d burst through led into a janitor’s supply closet, mops and bleach and rolls of black garbage bags. She let out a harsh bark of a laugh. “Guess that’s what you get for fucking ’round with those Tricksters,” she said, mimicking Sal’s sardonic drawl. She was surprised at how much she missed the psychopomp, even though it had only been a few days since she’d seen him. She hoped he wore his dog-shape when midnight came around, so she could throw her arms around his big stupid neck. And then she’d skin him for abandoning her like he had. She already had the perfect knife for it.
The blade seemed even more sinister in the fluorescent lights, tar-black and sharp as flint. Prehistoric. Primordial. For the first time in a long time, Renai felt the itch of eyes on her and looked up. Gamblers at slot machines, waitresses carrying cocktails on little silver trays, security guards in maroon jackets with walkie-talkies in their hands, all of them kept glancing her way and then doing double takes, seeing her before shaking their heads and turning away. Even her aura of disinterest couldn’t fully hide her if she waved around a black glass hell-knife, it seemed. Nor, she realized, could she drive a motorcycle while holding the damned thing.
Would it have killed that fool to dig a sheath out of that bag of his, too? she thought. She scavenged some thick cardboard and duct tape out of the janitor’s closet, rigging up a case for the blade that let her tuck it into the back of her jeans without cutting herself. It wouldn’t last long, but it was the best she had for now. Maybe Sal would know what to do with it.
She hurried out of the casino to where Kyrie waited, already running, to carry her to St. Louis No. 1, to midnight and the First Gate and the start of the Hallows. Renai felt as eager as the bike, her hunger and her anticipation of getting some answers leaving her light-headed. As they wove through the traffic of Canal—the crowd tame compared to what it would be tomorrow night—Renai’s thoughts turned to something Jude had said, about her helping him in the Underworld.
She was struck by one of those strange memory-visions: this time of the Seventh Gate, the Final Gate, the one that waited between the twin empty Thrones who ruled over the entirety of the Underworld. She could see it clearly, almost as if she’d stood there herself more recently than the five years since she’d died, the image more intense, more real than any mere dream or recollection.
She saw herself there, dwarfed by the massive rough-hewn empty chairs of the Thrones, her hair long and twisted into dreads, still wearing the lacy white Confirmation dress that she’d been buried in, Sal in his dog-shape at her side. Miguel stepped forward, stripped of Name and Shadow, the coin of his Fortune already off to wherever they went once their appointed psychopomp delivered them to the scales, prepared to face the decision of the Thrones. The Final Gate opened, a soothing, warm light that suffused Miguel and set him alight, made him luminous, like dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. She smiled, both the Renai on the bike lost in her own thoughts and the other Renai in the other world, because this was what she’d thought her purpose would be when she’d agreed to be a psychopomp, to guide souls to this moment, their just reward.
It was especially satisfying when that afterlife was a happy one.
Then she remembered that no one would get to the afterlife they deserved if the Gates stayed locked, and that tenuous grasp on happiness was snatched away from her. Anxiety and questions about Ramses’ disappearance quickly took its place. On the one hand, whether he lived or died wouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. She didn’t like considering a human life from that angle, but the truth wasn’t always pretty. Black boys his age died from bullets all the time in this city. If Ramses hadn’t avoided his fate, if he’d met that bullet two nights ago like he was supposed to, it would have been just another tragedy. He might have gotten half a minute on the evening news before they pivoted to forecasting the weather and next week’s Saints game.
On the other hand, she now knew that Ramses wasn’t just human, that he hadn’t slipped free of his appointed end by accident. That he had run from his death, from her, which ought to be impossible. He’d done something that threatened to upend one of the fundamental principles of existence: that when it was your time to go, you went. So while his life or death shouldn’t matter in one world, it ought to be hugely fucking important in the other. And yet, aside from a dirty-handed god who came asking for help on his behalf from a psychopomp trainee, no one on the other side seemed to give a shit.
The question was: Why the hell didn’t they?
By the time Renai pulled Kyrie up onto the neutral ground across from St. Louis No. 1, she thought she had an answer.
Oussou’s spot next to the cemetery’s entrance was still empty. Cordelia waited for her on the statue where Renai had first seen her, an innocuous little bird perched on a bronze shoulder. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t show up,” Cordelia said, before Renai had even gotten off the bike. Suspicion and ire replaced her usual jocular, facetious tone of voice. “Did you find anything useful?”
Renai felt the sudden, inexplicable desire to keep the black blade to herself. As she eased off of Kyrie’s seat, she tucked the knife’s handle underneath her jacket. “Nope,” she said. “No luck at all.” Strange, how quickly she’d gone from more or less trusting the little ’pomp to keeping secrets from her. She’d be glad when she had Sal back, when she had a partner she could rely on at her side. Still, she was glad that she’d had Cordelia to bounce ideas off of in her mentor’s absence. “I’ve been thinking, though. We looked high and low for Ramses, right?”
“Right.” Cordelia fluttered from the statue’s shoulder to Renai’s. “When the Thrones ask, we can say we did our due diligence.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Renai waited for the light to change and then crossed the street, imagining she could feel the moments between now and midn
ight ticking away. “I’m saying if we couldn’t find him, maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to be found, you know? That he’s running from us.” Renai stopped in front of the wrought-iron gate, peering through to the other side. Still nothing but plaster tombs and palm trees. Not yet time.
Cordelia hopped off of Renai’s shoulder and flapped up to a NO PARKING sign, putting her just over Renai’s head. “He wouldn’t be the first to flee the embrace of the grave,” she said. “What of it?”
“The best place to hide is where the person chasing you would never expect. So if death is hunting you . . .”
Cordelia’s beak gaped open. “You hide in the land of the dead. That’s actually quite brilliant.” Renai pantomimed dropping a microphone. Before she could say anything else, the alarm she’d set that morning went off. Midnight.
At first, nothing of note happened. Renai pulled out her phone and silenced the abrasive braying. She tugged on the gate and found it both locked and still merely wrought iron. She turned and looked up at Cordelia. “Are we supposed to knock or something?” The truth—the one that Renai had been avoiding thinking about until now—was that she didn’t really know what happened during the Hallows, even though she’d lived through five of them as a psychopomp. Those three days were another hazy gap in her memories. Not lost, if Jude could be believed, but not hers, either.
And then, suddenly, the Gates opened.
All of them, all at once.
When Oussou opened the First Gate, she’d only ever seen a glimpse of the other side, fog and wandering shades and a world that was both New Orleans and somewhere else. When the Hallows began, those two worlds weren’t separate any longer, if they’d ever truly been two worlds to begin with. The dead were all around her, silent and sad and blinking at their surroundings like they could see them for the first time. Renai turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. How could she have forgotten this?
