by Bryan Camp
Mason’s smile was terrible to behold. There was joy there, but it was the fierce joy of a predator about to pounce. “Then, yes, we have a deal, Renaissance Raines. Remember the name, and send word when he’s told you what I want to know.” And then he was gone, leaving behind a faint whiff of incense, the glowing red afterimage of his sword burned into her retinas—which didn’t merely fade away, reinventing itself as a throbbing ache behind her eyes—and a message. A name.
It took Renai more than a few minutes to recover from Mason’s outburst, first to calm her racing heart, and then to let her vision return to normal. It took a while longer—turning their conversation over and over in her mind—for her to come to the conclusion that she’d probably done exactly what the smiling god had wanted her to do. Trickster gonna trick, after all. Only then did she open the message and read the name Mason had given her.
“Ramses St. Cyr,” she said. “I don’t know what you stole, but I hope it was worth dying over.”
Renai let the door slam shut behind her when she left the coffee shop—phone and flip-flops tucked away into the messenger bag slung over her shoulder—unconcerned that she might lock herself out of her favorite place to steal Wi-Fi and stale muffins, since she’d learned long ago that nothing ever stayed locked in the Underworld.
Not that anyone but her on this side of things even used doors. The shades drifted through walls like they—or the walls—were made of smoke, and none of the other psychopomps seemed to much like being inside for some reason. Probably because most of them wore animal shapes, even on this side where they weren’t bound by the rules of the living world. The gods, the few of them that she’d met in the last five years anyway, seemed to do whatever they damn well pleased, popping in and out of existence like the doors and the walls and the laws of physics were all equally trivial.
Outside, the Underworld was a city reclaimed by wilderness. The coffee shop stood at the edge of a clearing, its purple-tiled roof unusual in both color and material, its bike rack filled with bicycles that never moved, its nearest neighbor, a two-story home with a full porch on its second story just barely visible through the Underworld fog. A silver-painted fire hydrant jutted up out of the ground amid a handful of cypress knees, half a foot of black pipe visible from where the earth had settled. Directly opposite the front door, where the two lanes and neutral ground of Bienville ought to run, a stand of cypress grew thick-waisted and tall, a curtain of Spanish moss dangling down to the swampy, wet ground below.
Renai had never been able to decide whether the buildings of the human-built New Orleans had been superimposed on the natural world so that the dead would have a frame of reference on this side of things, or if the spirits of the trees—towering cypress and thin, rigid pine and broad, domineering oaks, mostly—had crossed over to this world when they’d been torn down in the other to make way for concrete and steel, for asphalt and streetcar tracks and drainage canals, digging their ghostly roots into the land of the dead. Whatever the reason, there were no roads in the Underworld, no cars and no planes, which meant an eerie silence hung in the pristine air, unbroken by the incessant, tidal roar of engines and tires on concrete she’d known all her life. When she’d asked Sal about it, he’d acted like she couldn’t handle the truth, which is what she figured he did when he didn’t know the answer.
Thinking of the gruff psychopomp, Renai glanced at her watch—a relic from her childhood, a cheap elastic band and a tiny digital display embedded in the molded-plastic trash can of a green cartoon monster who said “Get lost!” when you squeezed a button on the side—and saw that the conversation with Mason had taken longer than she’d thought, long enough that she didn’t have time to walk and wade through the long span of Underworld swamp that separated her from the First Gate where she was supposed to meet her mentor.
Smiling, Renai dug her toes into the cool, dew-kissed grass and let her wings unfurl—those impossible gossamer spans of magic and light that she’d possessed since her resurrection—letting them unspool from the strange nowhere space where they lived when she wasn’t using them. Wide and diaphanous, they caught the slight breeze and tried to tug her into the sky as soon as she released them. They weren’t the feathered and dove-white angel’s wings her fourth-grade religion teacher had taught her to expect upon her death—these were shaped and colored like those of a monarch butterfly: a deep sunset orange with thick black lines streaking across them like veins and flecked with spots of white at the edges—but Renai thought these suited her more. She’d never had the temperament of an angel before she died, and she certainly had no interest in being one after her resurrection.
She was pretty sure it had been an angel who’d killed her, after all.
Lifting into the air took less effort than holding on to the earth, so flight, she’d found, was as simple as letting go. In truth, her gentle swaying ascent was more floating than flying, the tumble and flutter and glide of a butterfly instead of the powerful swoop of a superhero that she’d envisioned when she’d first discovered her wings. Nor could she manage to climb much higher than the treetops, her bare feet skimming across the leaves like something out of a kung fu movie. She’d tried to fly higher once but found that the sweet-scented easy breeze that bore her up quickly became a punishing gale that threatened to tear her from the sky if she dared to challenge it. The experience had reminded her of a story from when her sophomore English class had studied Greek myths. A quick Wikipedia search had found the winged boy’s name: Icarus. The dense fog of the Underworld might diffuse the sun’s warmth across the whole span of the heavens, but Renai knew the point of his story had nothing to do with beeswax and heat, so she kept her flights to the winds that wanted her there. She wasn’t about to go out like some white boy who couldn’t respect boundaries.
Once she rose above the canopy, most of New Orleans sprawled out beneath her in a patchwork green-and-gray carpet of foliage and mist. The office buildings in the CBD, the eggshell-white curve of the Superdome, and the big hotels in the Quarter all stretched up higher than the monotony, of course, as did Touro hospital Uptown and a handful of buildings behind her in Metairie, but the majority of the city was so flat and close to the earth that the fog shrouded it all.
Renai usually didn’t fly this high, finding it unnerving at how quickly she lost her sense of direction without all the familiar landmarks and the comforting pattern of city streets, but she didn’t have time for comfort. Fortunately for her, all she had to do was head toward the Quarter—south as the psychopomp flew, but “Toward the River” in a New Orleanian’s cardinal directions—and wait for Sal. The First Gate would announce itself when it opened.
It took less than five minutes for her to get across the city, even moving at her slow, delicate pace, her home much smaller from above than she’d ever realized with her feet on the ground. When she reached St. Louis No. 1—estimating her position based on the Hotel Monteleone sign on her left and the Dome on her right—she hovered there, wishing Google Maps worked in the afterlife. This side was as devoid of cell towers as it was roads, though, so she’d never been able to get a signal, even though she checked whenever she unlocked her phone.
It was strange. Wi-Fi and sound sometimes seeped through from the other side, and her charger worked in any electric socket she tried, but phones simply refused to make a connection. It felt deliberate, like something the Thrones had done to keep the living and the dead separate. Maybe the Thrones had some reason for allowing the internet in the Underworld, but Renai thought maybe they just didn’t know it existed. That thought was far from comforting.
But she knew firsthand that even Death made mistakes.
The First Gate opened behind her, a trumpet blast of noise that made her whirl around just as a spear of light pierced the fog and stabbed up seemingly forever. Her guess had been close, just a city block or so away.
She flew toward the open Gate, descending as she glided closer. The inscrutable heavens of the Underworld pulled away to reveal
a stark night sky speckled with a handful of stars, the glow of light pollution and the hot stink of car exhaust and the muted roar of the Quarter all spilling through.
Renai breathed it all in, basking in the heat and the life of the place. Of home. It didn’t do anything to help her headache, still throbbing since Mason’s deity tantrum in the coffee shop, but she reveled in the sensation all the same.
Once, when she’d been high above the cemetery like this when the Gate opened, she’d tried to cross back through to the world of the living, only to find that the image of the other side was just that, an image, intangible as a sunbeam shining through a dusty room. She’d managed to hide her tears from Sal that day, but only just. She’d hoped, for a while, that Sal and the Thrones would let her be a true psychopomp—the kind who crossed over and guided the dead through their whole journey—once she proved herself, but after five years, she’d let that hope die. Now her only hope was that she could find her way to the other side of the Final Gate and into the Far Lands.
All too soon the Gate swung closed, leaving the Underworld silent once more. Renai slid down through the fog and into the plaster and brick tombs of the cemetery. Her descent was slow and gradual, even though part of her wanted to drop from the sky and land with one fist pounding the earth like a superhero. She could fly, damn it, why shouldn’t she enjoy it? Because, she told herself, in her older sister’s have-I-taught-you-nothing voice, if you twist your knee or break an ankle, there ain’t no doctor on this side who can fix it. But if you feel like carrying a limp for all eternity just so you can play Iron Man, you do you.
So, badass winged psychopomp she might be, but she eased out of the air like an old man wincing his way down the stairs. She hopped and skipped to a stop once she reached the ground, her wings flexing and trying to carry her back up. She folded them away, which felt more like an act of will than a physical movement. Her wings didn’t just lie flat on her back when she didn’t need them, they vanished entirely, which was equally weird and convenient. On the one hand, she didn’t have to worry about tearing one of her gossamer-thin wings every time she sat down or got dressed. On the other, her wings literally came from nothing and returned to it, even though they were unmistakably a part of her when she stretched them out. Kind of like people. Here and then gone.
It was this thought—the from-nothing-and-returning-there aspect of both her wings and the human spirit—that followed her on her brief walk to the cemetery’s entrance. There she found Salvatore, wearing his raven-shape, perched on the shoulder of a dead Latino man whose wide eyes seemed to be trying to take in the whole Underworld all at once. As most of the dead did when they first arrived, he tried to speak with lungs and vocal cords and a tongue that he no longer possessed, and so said nothing at all.
“Renai,” Sal said, “this is—” He stopped midsentence, his feathers ruffling.
“What?” Renai asked.
“Renaissance, where the fuck are your shoes?”
Renai laughed. “Seriously? What, you afraid I’m gonna catch cold? You got a lot of fashion tips for a ’pomp who goes around naked in both his shapes. Boy, bye.” Sal started to answer, but Renai put her hand right up to his beak, a gesture both playful and confident. “Not now, Sal. We got work to do.” She turned her hand over so that her palm faced up. “His coin?”
Making the gap-beaked gape at her that was his raven-shape’s version of a smile, Sal pulled the coin from beneath his wing and dropped it into her hand. As soon as it touched her skin, the whole life of the man whose Fortune it represented flooded through her. Miguel Flores filled her heart and mind, his loves and his family, the joys and sorrows of the child, the boy, and the young man, his struggles and triumphs and fondest memories, his weaknesses and failures and crimes. She saw him at his birth and at his death. She knew him, as his father would have said, from asshole to appetite. Because of this connection to him, Renai felt the words that the dead man kept trying to say.
Lady of the Elegant Skull, he called her, except the words he wanted to use were in Spanish. She didn’t speak the language, but that didn’t matter here. Since the dead didn’t speak, only shared meaning and intent, their communication transcended language. The name he gave her carried with it a flicker of an image: a skeleton wearing a brightly colored dress, tight in the shoulders and bodice but flaring wide at the hips and cascading to the ground in a wave of embroidery, flowers, and lace, like something out of Gone with the Wind, her eyeless skull grinning from beneath a wide-brimmed, fringed hat. Renai recognized the figure from pictures of Day of the Dead celebrations.
The dead, she knew, saw what they wanted—Sal would say what they needed—to see on this side of things, and that sometimes included her. That knowledge had unnerved her at first, the thought that in the eyes of her dead she might be an icon, a goddess, a beloved ancestor. She’d found it hard to connect to the souls she was meant to guide, and that made it easier for them to stumble off their path. To become a shade: irrevocably lost, forgotten, identity wiped away until they were as featureless as the mist they’d wander through forever. They were erased so entirely that even Renai couldn’t remember them once they were gone.
Though Renai couldn’t remember even the number of the dead she’d lost, she knew it was too many, so now she leaned into their narrative, played whatever role they created for her. Whatever it took to keep them on the path. She dipped into a curtsy, ridiculous in her bare feet and khaki shorts, but in the dress Miguel saw La Catrina wearing, it would fit perfectly. “Come, Miguel,” she said as she rose to her full height, “we have a long way to go.” The fog swirling along the ground at the dead man’s feet parted, revealing a single paving stone jutting out of the grass. Miguel took a tentative step forward, resting one foot upon the stone, and the fog parted further, as though his footfall had thrown up a brief gust of wind. The stones continued deeper into the cemetery, a full stride apart and worn smooth by innumerable footsteps from previous travelers.
With a flutter of dark wings, Sal leapt from Miguel’s shoulder and flew to Renai’s, his claws clutching at her bare skin, sharp, but taking care not to scratch. “How come you never curtsy for me,” he muttered into her ear. She shook her shoulder to shush him, though she grinned just the same. She worried, for a moment, that it would spoil the solemn mood of the beginning of Miguel’s journey, and then she remembered that to him, her fleshless skull was always grinning.
Renai turned and walked down the path of paving stones, which led all the way to the far edge of the cemetery and then through a hole in the wall that she knew didn’t exist in the living world. A glance back told her that Miguel was following, struggling against a wind that Renai couldn’t feel, that didn’t disturb the fog on either side of the dead man’s stone path. A wind that existed for Miguel alone. She hoped he had the strength to endure it, to endure all the trials ahead of him.
She hadn’t lied to him; he had a long way to go before he could rest.
The way through the Gates was never the same, and yet it was the same every time. In guiding her other dead, Renai had seen endless staircases and impossibly long hallways, narrow bridges and perilous mountain paths. Once, when guiding a child who’d died far too young, she’d walked down a road made of yellow bricks.
She knew her own part well, the Gatekeepers Miguel would face, the parts of himself he would sacrifice along the way, but each person saw the journey from their own perspective, translated the trials and challenges of the Underworld into their own unique dialect. She knew that the most difficult part for her would be facing forward, restraining the urge to constantly check that Miguel hadn’t strayed from the path.
In the Underworld, she’d learned, you never looked back.
Chapter Sixteen
Over a span of a few hours that felt like they lasted for days, or over a few days that were squeezed down into a matter of hours—time was squishy on this side of things—Renai and Sal led Miguel through the Gates and into the depths of the Underworld. Each
of the Gates stood at the center of a different New Orleans cemetery, and each one opened into a deeper level.
Ascending was simple. All Renai had to do was release her hold on the earth and she would rise, easily, almost involuntarily, as though she was naturally buoyant here, as though she belonged on the level of the First Gate, right on the threshold of the living world. The only way she’d ever managed to descend was through the Gates.
The journey through the Gates, a unique series of trials and choices and tests for each of the souls that Renai led, had taken on the casual familiarity of routine for her over the years. Some of the dead stayed behind in the Underworld, forever tending the garden that Nibo offered at the Second Gate or attending Babaco’s eternal revels at the Fifth. Others were unable to meet the demands of the other Gatekeepers—like Plumaj, who took their Name at the Third Gate, or Bridgette, who took their Shadow at the Fourth—and were lost. Some managed the entire descent, only to be weighed upon Barren’s scales at the Sixth Gate and found wanting. As much as it wounded her to lose one of her dead, though, they weren’t, ultimately, her responsibility.
Their Fortunes were.
Whether a soul ended up a lost shade or a denizen of the Underworld or, like Miguel Flores, made it all the way to the bottom of the Underworld and through the Final Gate to the Far Lands, Renai’s duties were the same. Each day she met Sal at the First Gate, took possession of a coin of Fortune, and carried it all the way to the Thrones at the very bottom of things. There, she handed the coin to Papa Legba, the voodoo loa of the Crossroads, the being who opened the Final Gate to the Far Lands. What Legba did with the Fortunes, Sal had told her, was way above her pay grade. His too.
Once she’d delivered the coin, Renai would—with a wave and a “smell ya later” to Sal—let her wings unfurl and carry her out of the cold, silent darkness of the Thrones’ domain. As she rose through the different levels of the Underworld, the world around her changed. One minute she flew blindly through an impenetrable night, the next in the depths of a thundercloud, the next through thick, cool fog eerily illuminated by moonlight and streetlamps. When she reached the top level of the Underworld—as close to the world of the living as she could get and where she chose to spend most of her time—Renai would stretch her wings and glide toward the one place she wanted to be, the place she’d never be able to go to again.
