by Bryan Camp
“Tricksters! Why’s it always gotta be Tricksters? Like my thrice-be-damned Hallows ain’t complicated enough with—” He bit down on whatever he was about to say, his feathers ruffling in frustration. “So we got some coffee shop god after this missing dead kid, too. Wonderful. This Mason tell you what he wanted?”
Renai shrugged. “Just the location where Ramses is keeping whatever he stole from him.”
Sal blinked, and then, despite the fact that he didn’t have any, whistled between his teeth. “Well,” he said, “I hate to crap in your cornflakes, but there’s a teensy bit of a problem with that particular exchange.” Renai shrugged at him, spreading her hands in a spit-it-out-already gesture. “Your boy Ramses did us a runner. He wasn’t there when I went to get him.”
“Like, he died somewhere else, or—”
“He. Wasn’t. There.” Renai raised an eyebrow at him, and Sal dipped his beak in apology. “Sorry. Just been a shit day that’s like to get shittier.” He explained, then, how he’d gone to collect Ramses at the moment of his death, like any other, only to find that the boy wasn’t anywhere to be found. And that his escape, however he’d managed it, had left a wound behind, a stinking, shrieking place of wrongness that said that finding him wasn’t so much a matter of “if” as it was “how soon.”
When he finished, Renai couldn’t think of anything to say. She wanted to make a joke, but all that was running through her mind was a lame “disturbance in the Force” joke that she didn’t think would do the trick. Thankfully, Sal broke the silence for her. “So this death-dodging so-and-so caught a Trickster with his pants down and robbed him blind, huh?”
Renai flushed. She had a feeling she and Sal didn’t have the same idea of what Mason would look like without pants on. “Seems that way,” she said. “That give you any ideas on how to find Ramses?”
“Not a one. But it means I’m starting to like this little bastard in spite of myself.”
Renai grinned. “So now what?”
“Now is what I came here to do in the first place. Gotta check with all the ’pomps who made deliveries today, and hope that this fuck-up is of the misfiled-paperwork kind and not the breaking-a-fundamental-rule-of-reality kind.” He rose to his full height and turned, in little shuffling steps, until his beak faced more or less north, “Toward the Lake,” as a New Orleanian would say. Toward Holt Cemetery and the Second Gate, Renai knew. He glanced back. “You coming?”
“But what if it is?” she asked, unfurling her own wings.
“What if it’s what?”
“The rule-breaking kind of problem.”
Sal sighed. “Let’s cross that apocalypse when we get to it.”
Chapter Seventeen
Janus’s two faces keep watch in both directions at once. Qin and Yuchi ward off both evil spirits and mundane threats. A bull, a dragon, an eagle, and a giant all stand guard, together protecting the whole of Iceland.
They are depicted in stone throughout the world: the mace-wielding warriors called dvarapala; the fierce, nurturing lions called shí shī; the grotesque monsters called gargoyles.
Likewise stand vigil the ravens in the Tower of London; the decommissioned fighter jet at the entrance of a military base; the angel with the flaming sword outside the Garden of Eden.
They stand always at the gates: Protectors. Watchers. Guardians.
Renai followed Sal in a short flight across the city. The journey that usually meant hours of walking along whatever path the Underworld had dictated for the dead she was leading took only minutes on the wing. They mostly skimmed across the treetops, with few landmarks breaking the monotony: a church steeple here, the stretch of Bayou St. John there. She glanced down through the gap in the trees at the water that ran too viscous, too dark to actually be water. Sometimes the Underworld made the dead brave a narrow bridge over a bayou filled with blood or tar or molten iron in order to get to the Second Gate. Sometimes they were only given stepping-stones. Sometimes they had to swim. Renai couldn’t tell what kind of crossing waited for the dead in the brief glimpse she caught of it, but she was glad for her wings all the same.
Just on the other side of the bayou, they slid in a slow glide down to the ground, Sal barely waiting for Renai’s feet to settle on the earth before he scrambled to a perch on her shoulder. She didn’t need the directions he grunted at her—she knew the way to the Second Gate as well as he did—but she’d long ago grown used to Sal’s gruff demeanor.
After a few minutes of walking through trees and fog, past shotgun doubles—most of them homes, but many of them converted into law firms and boutiques and bookstores and coffee shops—and a supermarket, past the bright red bulk of a Museum line streetcar half-sunk into the mire, past a handful of wandering solitary shades, Renai cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“Thought I smelled somethin’ burnin’,” Sal muttered, but it was a knee-jerk response, devoid of both bite and mirth. Renai ignored it.
“Since we’re here, we ought to ask Nibo if he’s seen Ramses,” she said.
“And that wouldn’t be an obnoxious waste of time because . . .”
“Because Nibo is the loa in charge of the unburied, unremembered dead?”
Sal was quiet for a few steps, and then chuckled. “Not bad, Raines,” he said. “Not bad.” When the gray concrete and black iron gates of Holt Cemetery rose up out of the gloom, Sal tapped her shoulder with his clawed foot. “Since it was your idea,” he said, “why don’t you do the talking?”
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 stood the Gatekeeper, Nibo.
Like Oussou and Masaka—who Renai knew by reputation but had never met, since the twins always opened the First Gate from the living side of things—Nibo was a loa of the Ghede family. His long, lean frame was wrapped in a tailor-cut three-piece suit, dark pants and a cream-colored waistcoat. His light blue jacket was covered with a pattern that belonged on an old white lady’s sofa: blooms of long, thin petals in pastel shades of red, orange, and yellow with pale green vines snaking all over. Set in contrast with his dark brown skin and in the confident way he wore it, Nibo made every inch of that jacket work.
He leaned against the giant oak like everyone who saw him owed him money. As they drew closer, Renai watched him pull a pistachio from his coat pocket, crack it open, and pop the green nut in his mouth, letting the two halves of the shell drop to the ground. He did it with the mechanical, unconscious motion of someone cracking their knuckles, over and over. When Renai and Sal got close enough that he recognized them, Nibo’s typically dour expression brightened. His smile revealed teeth flecked with diamonds.
“Look at these muh’fuckas rightchea!” he shouted, his high, nasal voice shattering the silence of the graveyard. Once they crossed over to him, he spoke in a quieter voice. “I say, what you done brought your old friend Nibo, today?”
“You a poet now, Nibs?” Renai said, a smile teasing at the corners of her lips.
Nibo peered at her for a moment, until her meaning caught up to him. “Girl, you play too much. But f’true? Ain’t the rhyme that makes a poet, it’s in the soul.” He rested his fingertips lightly on the lapel of his jacket. “And you know poor Nibo has always had a sensitive soul.”
“Sensitive is one word for it,” Sal muttered.
“
Oh, hush, you,” Nibo snapped, not unkindly. “Them Thrones shoulda gave you an old hound dog shape to wear, the way you go moping ’round with that sour puss.” He craned his neck to peer past Renai’s shoulder at the empty path behind them. “Well, now, y’all done lost your dead already?”
“Something like that,” Renai said. “We were wondering if you’d seen him.”
Nibo reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a pair of gold-framed spectacles on a thin chain, the rings on his fingers winking with diamonds and amethysts. Holding the glasses up to his eyes, he took a step closer to Renai, studying her. Nibo’s impeccably shined shoes crunched on the pile of pistachio shells littering the ground at his feet. “Have I seent your lost dead, mmm? Guess that means he ain’t one a’them shades flittin’ about. You think he a’one of my little flowers?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Renai said.
He dropped the glasses so that they hung, dangling, from his vest, and slipped his arm, as casual as if he’d done it a hundred times, around the crook of her elbow. He gave her a gentle tug, more playful than actually insistent, and clicked his tongue at her. “Well, come on and have a look, then. Let’s see if we cain’t find this lost lamb a’yours.”
Nibo waved an arm at his garden cemetery and the fog parted, revealing a sparse crowd of the dead. They were working amid the flower beds, pulling weeds and pruning vines and watering the soil, but they didn’t appear to be toiling. Here and there, two or three were gathered, chatting in those eerie, whispery non-voices the dead possessed. One man appeared to be napping. “We got Buddy Bolden here, bless his heart. Genius with that cornet, but he come to us penniless and crazy as a shithouse rat. We got Robert Charles, too, him and a few others of them that died in the riot he was at the center of. Some of them boys from the UpStairs Lounge fire, too. Most of my flowers you wouldn’t know, though. That’s ’cause I tend to them that got no one else to care, them that died unremembered, unburied.”
Renai had to turn away, swallowing past the sudden lump in her throat. She knew that Nibo’s garden was a comfort, a best-case scenario for many of the dead, but no matter how many times she’d seen his “flowers,” as he called them, it struck her to the core every time.
“So what you say, gorgeous?” Nibo asked. “You see anybody you recognize?”
Renai reached up and nudged Sal with a knuckle. “You awake up there?” she asked.
“We never actually saw him,” the psychopomp said. “All we have is a name. Ramses St. Cyr.”
Nibo said nothing, just gave a curt nod, and the fog rolled back in. He crossed over to the oak, his footsteps crunching on discarded pistachio shells once more. From the pocket that wasn’t filled with nuts, he took out a black iron key shaped with the whorls and sharp edges of his veve, which he slid into a hole in the oak, turning it with a loud click. The base of the giant tree split and cracked into the shape of two doors. The Second Gate.
His meaning was clear, and disappointment sank to the bottom of Renai’s belly like a stone. Did you really think it would be that easy? she thought. She mumbled her gratitude to the loa and stepped toward the Gate, but he stopped her with a gentle hand on her forearm.
“I ain’t said no ’cause I won’t,” he said, his voice gentle and kind, “but ’cause I cain’t.” He held a glass bottle now instead of a key, filled with a mostly clear liquid that had particles of something leafy floating in it, like loose-leaf tea that hadn’t been brewed. She hadn’t seen him reach into his jacket for it or pick it up from the ground, because he hadn’t. One minute it hadn’t been there, and then it was. A nice little reminder that as friendly and as compassionate as Nibo was, he and all the other Gatekeepers were still loa. Still gods.
Renai took a breath before she asked her next question, doing her best to scrub the frustration from her voice. “And why can’t you?” she asked.
“If this boy a’yours had made it to my garden, I’d know him, clear as sunshine. But if he’s lost ’neath the waters? I gots ta be on the other side of things where my Voice has real power in order to call him up.” He raised the bottle toward Renai and then to Sal in a gesture equal parts “sorry” and “to your health,” before putting it to his lips and taking a few swallows. As the liquor swirled around, Renai could see the bundles of herbs and the split-open pepper pods that made up Nibo’s special recipe. The loa swore it could heal any wound, if you could stand its fire. Sal swore it would strip the paint off a Buick.
Nibo pulled away from the bottle with a grateful sigh, smacking his lips. “That’ll make you say shit and goddamn,” he said, letting out a loud woop. “That’ll make you say mothafucka!”
Sal squawked out a laugh and launched through the Second Gate, vanishing through the oak tree into the fog of the Underworld at its center. Before Renai could follow, Nibo spoke again. “Couple three days,” he said. “Once them Hallows start. Then I’ll be able to slip over to the other side and look for this boy a’yours. Deal?”
“Deal,” Renai said, grateful for the way Nibo had turned things around and made it seem like she was doing him a favor. She wouldn’t call Nibo a friend, exactly, but he was kind to her when he didn’t have to be. And yet, as she stepped through the Second Gate and down into a lower level of the Underworld, she couldn’t help thinking that if they hadn’t found Ramses by the time the Hallows started, it would already be too late.
Moving through the Second Gate had left them standing in Holt Cemetery once more, but a level deeper in the Underworld. The changes from one level to the next were small at first. Trivial, even. Renai would almost say irrelevant, except that no one, not even the dead, failed to notice that something was different.
The most obvious change on this side of the Gate was that what obscured their surroundings here wasn’t fog, but a thick, relentless rain. In the living world, she knew, the rain would be hissing against hot pavement and rushing toward catch basins, but here in the forest of the Underworld, the ground underfoot turned into a squelching muck almost instantly.
The other change was more subtle, a feeling more than an observation. Everything here felt less real than it did on the other side of the Gate: flatter and dingier and more vague, like the special effects from a movie ten years old. And things only got more and more abstract the deeper you went, she knew.
“Least it’s warm out,” Sal said to Renai over the hushed white-noise sound of the rainfall. “Especially since we’re only a couple of days away from the Hallows. Come next month, I’ll be freezing my nuts off.”
Renai let out a sarcastic huff. “Do birds even have—”
“The dog-shape’s got balls to spare, thank you very much. And ten nipples that hate the cold, too.”
Renai smiled and started to answer, but that was right when the first arrow came whizzing out of the sky and plunged into the soft earth, its shaft still quivering, humming like a plucked guitar string.
Then came another, and another. Sal cursed and took to the air, realizing just as Renai did that they’d gotten caught up in a trial of some soul—led by some other psychopomp—and though he didn’t need to say it, he yelled for her to run. Sal was small enough to hurtle through the hail of arrows in the air, but Renai’s huge, diaphanous wings would get chewed up if she unfurled them, so she tucked them tight against her back and ran.
Renai couldn’t say how long it took for them to escape—she lost herself in the motion, the slapping of her feet against wet earth, the tense and flex and swing of it, her concentration locked on ensuring her footing and breathing deep and trying not to flinch when an arrow sliced the air close enough that she could feel it slash by. She didn’t stop when she felt a punch of pain in her left shoulder, only glanced at it long enough to see that her skin there was unbroken. Whether the arrows were blunt-tipped or if she was impervious to them, she didn’t know, but either way she ran on with a wild grin on her face.
One of the things she’d learned on waking up in this strange new life of hers was that a storm lived
inside of her. It rose when she was excited, when she was horny, when Sal said something really, really clever. She’d learned to channel its power, to use it in her work, but sometimes—like when she hauled ass through deadly rain, for instance—Renai’s thoughts were empty of everything but the fierce joy of the howling of the wind and the pounding rain. So she ran, and at some point the arrows quit falling and the rain slacked off and she reached the low iron fence that surrounded the raised tombs of Lafayette No. 2, but she didn’t remember any of it happening. It was only when she stopped at the entrance of the cemetery—a gate but not a Gate—that Renai managed to push the spirit back down to where it lived inside of her, so she could see and think clearly once more.
That’s when she realized that she’d run so fast and so far that she’d left Sal behind.
Renai waited for a while at the cemetery’s entrance, catching her breath, squeezing the rainwater out of her dreads as best she could, expecting Sal’s raven-shape to come winging out of the downpour any second. She chewed at her lip and checked her watch every minute or so for ten minutes, and still he didn’t come. Okay, girl, she thought, in her mother’s voice, you might be pretty as a rose and strong as an oak, but God ain’t gave you roots. You got to get moving.
She knew what she ought to do. As a psychopomp, she’d gotten used to leaving people behind. She could hear Sal in her head: ’Pomps only move in one direction, Raines. Forward. Her main responsibility was always to the coin of Fortune she carried. No matter what happened, she had to deliver it to the end of the line.
That need crawled inside her, a physical thing, like a rumbling hunger and nagging, nervous tension and that maddening have-to-sneeze-but-can’t-itch all rolled into one. A contract scrimshawed onto her bones at the moment of her rebirth. She had no idea what would happen to her if she couldn’t find Ramses, couldn’t find his coin. Would the need fade? Would it consume her? Continuing to look for Ramses meant turning her back, but it’s what Salvatore would tell her to do. It’s what she’d been taught to do her whole life when she didn’t know what choice to make.
