by Bryan Camp
Behind her, the iron gate creaked open on rusting hinges. She spun, just in time to see Salvatore’s dog-shape twisted and frightening—fur bristling, saliva glistening on his muzzle, teeth bared in a snarl, a beastly growl deep in his chest—before he leapt at her with a howl of fury. Time seemed to slow. He rose through the air, neck muscles straining, fangs coming straight for her throat, and then he sailed past her even as she flinched away. But he hadn’t lunged for her at all.
It was Cordelia he sought.
His jaws chomped down at the little bird with an audible snap. But as horrific, as confusing as that was, Renai only had eyes for the girl who stepped through the cemetery gate after him.
She had long dreads that were bound up in a loose bundle away from her face, her dark brown skin in stark, alluring contrast with the dazzling white dress she wore, a thing of lace and satin, like she’d just come from a wedding, or a prom, or her Confirmation. Red sneakers peeked out from her hem.
Renai knew her, knew every quirk of her lips, the exact shade of her eyes, knew where she’d gotten that tiny scar dimpling one eyebrow.
Renai knew everything about the girl in front of her and nothing at all, because the girl in the white dress was Renaissance Raines.
Part Two
the next world
Chapter Fifteen
Sometimes they are benign spirits. Heralds and watchmen. A first-comer that the Norse called a vardøger and the Finns called an etiäinen: the scent of your perfume or the sound of your voice announcing your presence to others before you’ve actually arrived. Other times they are more ominous, spectral doubles that appear only as ill omens, as harbingers. Lincoln saw his as a death-pale reflection in a mirror, but you might meet your fetch or your wraith or your haint in a nightmare, or a vision, or on the internet. Sometimes they are sinister beings meant to replace you. When the Scottish trow replaced you in the cradle, you were called a changeling; when your loved one notices your replacement today, they say she is suffering from a Capgras delusion. Replicants and clones, illusions and shadows and doppelgängers. They have your hair and your eyes, your scars and your smile, the same embarrassing laugh and the same morning breath. They are no mere twin or reflection. They are you, and they are not you. They are a perfect copy of all your imperfections. Their wonder and their horror and their power lies in their impossibility. Their conflicts. Their contradictions.
One of those contradictions was a young woman named Renaissance Raines, and she sat in a coffee shop in Mid-City—or more accurately, in the part of the Underworld that looked like New Orleans—waiting for death.
She nestled deep in a plush leather armchair, her legs tucked beneath her and her attention fixed on her phone, scrolling through Twitter and trying to ignore the gawking, relentless stares of the shades all around her.
Even though it was late October—just over a week until the Hallows began—she wore a dark blue Captain America tank top, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, desperate for the first true cold front of fall to arrive and tease the temperature out of the nineties. She’d coiled her dreads high and tight on top of her head to try and keep cool.
As she flicked one finger across the phone’s screen, her other hand toyed idly with the St. Christopher medal that hung on a silver chain around her neck. In one sense, she had the coffee shop all to herself: no one sipped a latte while tapping away at a laptop keyboard, no one pulled shots of espresso from a hissing, clanking machine, no one had a banal conversation just a few decibels too loud. She was the only living soul in the place.
In reality, there was nowhere in the Underworld that she was ever truly alone.
All around her, the vaguest impressions of people flickered in and out sight, as intermittent and inscrutable as a spiderweb dancing in the breeze. These shades—the restless dead who had crossed over into the Underworld but failed, for any number of reasons, to continue on to the Far Lands—were drawn to her, watching her every move, following her wherever she went. In her five years in the Underworld since her resurrection, she hadn’t been able to puzzle out a reason for their attraction to her. As far as she could tell, she was as unreal to them as they were to her; she was just the flame to their moths.
The shades were one of many of the details of her post-resurrection life that she’d had to force herself to accept, like her disjointed, scrambled puzzle pieces of a memory, her duties as a psychopomp, or the strange dreamlike flashes she’d get of an other Renai—one who’d managed to cling to a place in the world of the living.
Despite being crowded with wisps of forgotten dead—or maybe because of that fact—the small sitting area of the coffee shop was almost silent. The only sound, save for her own breath and the occasional click or ping from her phone, was some weird indie-pop/Lord-of-the-Rings-soundtrack/angelic-choirs-chanting music filtering through from the living side of things. She’d been listening to it long enough that she’d almost started to like it. Since it came from the other side, though, it sounded distant, muted, like she was underwater or the speakers were in a passing car, instead of on top of the used-books-and-board-games shelf right next to her. She could drown it out with music from her phone, of course, but after five years of being the Underworld’s only flesh-and-blood girl, she’d grown fond of any intrusion from the world of the living into the silence of this place.
That had been one of her first and hardest lessons when she’d awoken to this new life in the land of the dead, that while the dead could communicate with each other—eerie whispers that were closer to telepathy than creating sound—the ability to speak belonged solely to the living. At first, she’d thought it was just that the dead, who no longer had bodies, didn’t have the vocal cords necessary to create sound. But her mentor, a psychopomp named Salvatore, taught her that what the dead truly lacked was the ability to influence those around them, a capacity that he called their Voice. Sounds were just ripples in the air. Someone’s Voice could take the form of spoken words, or sign language, or written text, or art, or music; anything that could impact others. Voice, simply put, was magic. And only the living possessed it.
Which was why—along with the three cups of coffee she’d drunk in the last hour—she nearly pissed herself when a deep honey-filled voice behind her said, “Is this seat taken?”
Renai managed, barely, to control her bladder and her voice, though a little croak of surprise snuck out of her throat.
The speaker didn’t wait for a reply, just threw himself into the chair across from her with a grateful sigh and propped his feet up on the small table between them, his Jordans worn and dirty, as if he’d walked every impossible mile between this world and the other. He wore a long-sleeved purple dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and tight black jeans. Although the experiences of death and resurrection and the pressures of living in the Underworld had been hell on her memories, Renai recognized the man across from her immediately: Jude Dubuisson, Trickster and fortune god, fine specimen of the male form, and the reason she was sort-of-but-not-really alive instead of moving on to the afterlife she’d earned.
“You got a lot of nerve dropping in on me like this,” she said, her voice raspy from disuse, “after the shit you pulled.”
The smug, satisfied expression slid away from his face in dismay. It was almost worth the frustration of seeing him, sudden and unwelcome, after all these years. Jude straightened in his chair, his hands held up in defense, his eyes stretching wide. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “I thought we were friends.”
“Friends? Friends?” The words came out louder and far more shrill than she intended, and she was standing over him before she realized she’d risen to her feet. The shades surrounding them backed away in a group, not so much moving as being pushed by the force of her voice. “When someone gives up her chance at an afterlife so that your triflin’ ass can return to the world of the living, would a friend just up and vanish? For five goddamn years? Because that don’t sound like a friend to me. That sounds like some fuck-boi Trickster bullsh
it to my ears.”
Jude’s head dropped, staring down at his hands. For a moment, Renai saw herself standing in front of the Thrones once more, those empty chairs that represented all the power of Death, trading her eternity to save Jude from annihilation. It was one of the few memories from her death and resurrection that wasn’t hazy and incomplete. She’d done it willingly, happily even. The next thing she remembered clearly was Sal telling her that he’d train her as a psychopomp, but that she couldn’t ever go back to the world of the living. That her place now was among the dead.
Blinking away the memory, Renai looked down at Jude and saw his shoulders shaking. She felt, at first, a deep swell of pity, but she pushed it away. She’d need a damn sight more than some crocodile tears before she even considered forgiving him. Which was when she realized that the sounds coming from him weren’t moans of remorse or swift sobbing breaths, as she’d expected.
He was laughing at her.
Renai checked the nearby tables for something she could hit him with. “Are you for real?” she said, so furious that she moved past anger and into genuine confusion. Jude had been shady and way too pretty for his own good, but she hadn’t known him to be cruel. Then again, she hadn’t known him to be the kind of person who would abandon a friend, either. Maybe godhood had changed him. “Just who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Who, indeed,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t as deep, that had a hint of an accent that Renai couldn’t place. A voice, in other words, that didn’t belong to Jude Dubuisson. Nor, when he looked up, did his face. This man had darker skin, though not by much, thicker eyebrows, and a hooked nose. Still far too pretty to be trusted, though. And that smile, when he turned it toward her, that smile was just as dangerous as Jude’s.
And as thrilling.
“I have to admit,” he said, “I always knew Dubuisson was a bit of a bastard, but I never knew he had full-on betrayal in him. That’s a real surprise.”
“Yeah, well, Trickster gonna trick.” She pursed her lips at him. “Who’re you?”
“I am He Who Keeps the Flocks. Ram-Bearer. Slayer of Argos. Thrice-Great.” Renai pressed her fists to her hips and raised an eyebrow at him. Some of his charm wilted away. “Comrade of the Feast? Bearer of the Golden Wand?”
Renai kissed her teeth. “You’re about to be He Who Catches These Hands if you don’t cut the bullshit. What’s your name?” She really hoped he didn’t call her bluff. She didn’t need a name to know that she spoke to a god. Didn’t need to know which god to know that she was in way over her head.
He waved a hand at her, as if shooing away her demands as he would a fly. “Names and titles are, obviously, of no use to you. You may call me Mason. And I owe you an apology. I wore the shape of one I thought to be your friend because I’m desperate for your help.” He frowned. “Shame, though.”
Renai relaxed her hands but kept them on her hips. She hadn’t missed the fact that owing her an apology wasn’t nearly the same thing as being sorry. “How’s that?”
That dangerous, seductive grin returned. “It was quite a pleasing shape to wear.”
Renai barked out a laugh in spite of herself. She started to tell Mason that his own shape was plenty pleasing, but the last thing she needed was to start flirting with another damn Trickster.
“Why would you ever need my help?” she said, instead. She flopped back into her chair, throwing one leg up over the arm. She fought the urge to smile when she noticed Mason’s eyes take in the long stretch of her bare toned leg. Tricksters were all the same. “Seems to me a man who can wear somebody else’s face just so he can ask a favor might be better served by doing the thing himself.”
Mason sighed and reached into the chest pocket of his dress shirt, pulling out a smartphone. “Certainly have to explain myself less,” he muttered, low enough that he could pretend like he hadn’t meant her to hear it, loud enough that she knew he had.
She didn’t recognize the logo on his phone, expecting a bitten apple or a single word or a multicolored letter, but Mason’s device had a symbol embossed in gold: a circle with a downward pointing cross and a swoop, like horns, above. She thought, at first, that it was the Love Symbol from when Prince had just been “The Artist,” but no, that wasn’t it, though she only got a brief a glance at it as Mason swiped quickly on his screen and then slid the phone back into his pocket.
Just then her own phone made a soft ding. “I’ve just sent you the name of someone who will soon come under your jurisdiction,” Mason said. He held up a hand to stall her protest before she had a chance to voice it. “All I need is some information. He’s . . . acquired something very important to me. I’d like to know where he’s keeping it. If you insinuate yourself as his guide, he should be more than willing to share.” His grin grew feral, hungry. “After all, it’s not as though he can bring it here with him.”
“What’s in it for me?” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She didn’t know why she’d jumped right to quid pro quo. Maybe it was because Mason had worn the face of a man who had betrayed her, maybe she was getting tired of just doing whatever Salvatore told her to. Once asked the question, though, she was glad she’d chosen that one out of all the others whirling through her mind. She’d been waiting years for an opportunity like this.
If the question surprised Mason, he gave no sign. “What is it you want?” he asked, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr.
Once, she’d have found that question difficult to answer. She’d gone to college because that’s what you were supposed to do, but had died before she’d had to declare a major. She’d gotten a job at a voodoo shop run by her eccentric Aunt Celeste, not out of any real desire to convert, but to piss off her Catholic parents. Her father had once told her that she had the soul of a thunderstorm, a powerhouse of passion and energy that was willing to drift wherever the wind took her. He’d meant for it to galvanize her, to goad her into taking control of her life. Young Renai had simply shrugged and agreed with him. After five years of lonely monotony though, five years guiding the souls of the recently departed through the Underworld—those that made it all the way through, anyway—without any hope of reprieve or advancement, Renai had gained a sense of purpose. She finally knew what she wanted.
“I want to die,” she said.
Though he hid it well—a hand raised to his mouth that he turned into a scratch of his cheek, a lick of his lips instead of an answer—her statement surprised Mason. Whatever he’d expected her to say, he hadn’t planned on this. Rendered a god speechless, she thought. Achievement unlocked.
When he recovered his composure—which happened in the time it took Renai to blink—Mason had painted his Trickster’s grin back on. “That should be simple enough to arrange,” he said. “Though I’m not sure why you would ever need my help.” He repeated her own statement back to her, emphasizing the same words she had, implying, as she had, that Renai might be better off handling the task herself.
“Easy now. I’m not having a Hamlet moment here. I know exactly what dreams may come. That’s the problem. Every life gets one trip through the Gates, one chance at eternity. Mine has come and gone. Traded my ever-after away on some trick who didn’t deserve it. The Thrones brought me back, but you know as well as I do that they don’t ever let go of someone for good. Maybe it’s tomorrow, maybe it’s fifty years from now, but I’ll die one day. If I’m not heading for the Far Lands, where do I go when my time comes? The Devourer? Trickster, please.”
Mason chuckled. “So if I can secure your passage to one of the Far Lands without the oversight of the Thrones—”
“Not ‘one of’ them,” Renai said, making the air quotes with her fingers even though she hated when people did that. “I get to pick. That’s the deal.”
Closing his eyes, Mason reached up and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, the gesture of someone whose glasses had grown tedious, even though he wore none. “I suppose,” he said, without opening his eyes, “that you’
ve already chosen your destination?”
“The Fortunate Isles.”
The corners of Mason’s lips curled down in a small frown, and he clicked his tongue in a thoughtful, staccato rhythm. “I see you’ve done your homework,” he said.
When the ancient Greeks died, they were either tortured in the pits of Tartarus, languished in the boring, tepid Meadows of Asphodel, or—if they had lived an exemplary life—rewarded with the comfort and bliss found in the land of Elysium. A true hero, presented with the paradise of Elysium, might choose to return to the world of the living. Only after three lives and three deaths, earning a place in Elysium all three times, was one worthy of the Fortunate Isles.
It was the heaven even people in Heaven wished they could get into.
“Does that mean you can’t do it?” Renai asked, trying to keep too much sass out of her voice.
“It’s not beyond my reach,” Mason said, choosing his words with care.
“Then we have a deal.” Renai glanced down at her phone, saw that Mason’s text had come through. “I’ll bring you whatever this soon-to-be-dead guy managed to steal from you—”
“No!” Mason hurled himself to his feet, his voice like a thunderclap. He towered over her as if he’d doubled in size. The light in the room dimmed, or seemed to, because he held a golden sword in his fist that burned like it was made of the noonday sun. “You will not touch it, you will not seek it. Swear!”
Renai found it hard to speak, her heart pounding so hard that her pulse squeezed her throat with every beat. “I swear,” she managed to wheeze out. “I’ll just find where he hid it, that’s all.”
