by Bryan Camp
Since Cross locked the Gates, Renai thought. Of course. ’Pomps are trapped in the Underworld, the dead are stuck here. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t find Ramses. Maybe he’s been here all along.
“And?” Renai crossed her arms and cocked her hip. “None of that explains why you brought me here.” Or how you knew my name, she thought.
“We can’t unfuck your shit until we know exactly how bad you taint sniffers fucked it,” Regal said. “Is that a satisfactorily succinct explanation?”
Renai kissed her teeth. “Girlfriend,” she said, “you keeping runnin’ that mouth and you’ll find out what I think is satisfactory. You really think Death needs your help? A couple of souls in need of a guide to the hereafter?” She gave them a dismissive backhanded wave. “Child, please.”
Regal smirked and raised her hand, fingers already twisting into the crooked gesture that had forced Renai’s earlier word vomit. Renai stepped to the edge of the circle, her breath misting its surface like she breathed on a mirror. “Go ahead with that truth juju on me, too,” she said. “I can’t wait to tell you just what I think of your ratchet ass.”
“Oh, I like you,” Regal said, dropping her hand and shooting a grin in Leon’s direction. “Guess that makes you good cop, Voice.”
Leon frowned at Regal, an I-told-you-so gesture that Renai didn’t have the context to fully understand. “Me and her,” he said to Renai, tipping his head in Regal’s direction, “we can’t stay clear of this. Ain’t even Death got a say in that. I’m the Voice of this here city, and Regal Constant is her Magician. When New Orleans got a problem, we aim to be the solution.”
Renai wished it could be that simple, that she could just accept their help. They were certainly offering more than anyone on her side of things. But Sal had told her from the very beginning that there were rules about cooperation with the living. That the Gates kept things separate for a reason. The living weren’t their enemies, exactly. More like their competition. If Sal were here, he’d refuse to help them, in language that would give Regal a run for her money. But he wasn’t. They’d summoned her, not him. And she wasn’t so sure she should take Sal’s every word as gospel anymore. He’d been acting strange for days and keeping secrets for far longer.
Besides, Legba had opened the way for her to come here. He had to have known who was on the other end.
Hell with it, Renai thought. Especially since they can just squeeze whatever information they want out of me. Renai sighed and nodded to herself, like she had come to a decision instead of merely accepting the inevitable. “The Gates to the Underworld are locked,” she said, “so nobody gets in and nobody gets out. Legba letting me come here was a special case.”
“Why?” Regal asked. She’d taken out a little black notebook, scribbling in it like some kind of cop.
Renai shrugged. “Maybe ’cause you two are so powerful and important?”
Regal started to say something, but Leon put his hand on her shoulder and stopped her. “Why did Papa Legba lock your doors, she mean to say. We do somethin’ wrong? You know a way we can make it right?”
Right then, when Leon’s first impulse was to blame some flaw in himself, to seek reconciliation instead of triumph, that was when Renai decided to trust Leon, to tell him everything she knew and accept his help. It would only be much later that she’d realize she’d done so because he reminded her of her father.
“It wasn’t Legba that closed the Gates, it was his other side, Cross.” When she heard his name, Regal literally snarled, curling her lips and growling like a cornered cat, but said nothing. Renai chuckled. “That’s him, all right. And as bad as you got it now, it’s about to get worse.”
Regal snorted. “Worse than a constipated soul chute and streets full of zombies?”
“Ain’t zombies,” Leon said, snapping at Regal like she’d dropped the n-bomb. “No spirit, no mind. Just a corpse that ain’t got the sense to know it oughta be in the ground. Name’a that is ghoul, not zombie.”
Regal muttered an apology, and Renai broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “Anyway, yeah. Worse. ’Cause Cross locked the Gates to keep the dark and nasties from slipping through into your side. But once the Hallows start, that won’t matter.”
“That this Ramses St. Cyr you lookin’ for?” Leon asked, just as Regal said, “What the actual fuck is a Hallows?” It took Renai a second to separate the questions enough to answer them.
She looked to Leon first. “No, Ramses is just a lost soul I’m looking for. Not connected at all.” But as soon as she said it, she doubted herself. A mortal who made a deal with a devil slips out of his appointed death—for a second time, no less—right when all the devils in the Underworld get busted out of jail? That was a massive coincidence. Regal held up her hands and widened her eyes in a I’m-still-waiting-here gesture that shook Renai out of her thoughts. “And the Hallows are when the world of the dead and the world of the living are aligned.” She couldn’t stop herself from letting a little bit of petty slip out. “Here I thought you knew everything.”
Regal frowned, shrugged. “I had more of a . . . hands-on education, let’s call it.”
Renai held up one hand, palm up, facing the other woman. “Let’s say this is the world of the living, okay?” Regal nodded. Renai held up her other hand. “This is the world of the dead. The Underworld.”
“With you so far.”
Renai touched the tips of her index fingers together. “When you’re alive, if you believe in the afterlife at all, you think it’s like this. You cross over from one world to another.” She pressed her palms together. “But in reality, it’s more like this. It’s all the same world, just two sides of the same coin. The dead and the living are always side by side, we just can’t see each other.” She entwined her fingers together, so that her two hands made one big fist. “During the Hallows, it’s like this. For three days, we can see each other, interact with each other, if we really want to.”
Regal snapped her fingers. “The three days from Halloween to All Souls’ Day.”
“Exactly. So starting at midnight, it won’t matter whether the Gates are open or closed. They won’t really exist at all.”
“Lettin’ your dark and nasty come struttin’ into our house,” Leon said.
“Like I said, it’s about to get worse.”
“So what do we do?”
“What we can,” Renai said. “I’ll meet you at the entrance to St. Louis No. 1 at midnight. You help me find my lost soul, and I’ll bring as many ’pomps as I can to solve your ghoul problem.”
“And the dark and nasty?” Regal asked. “If it’s over here when the Hallows end, won’t Cross keep the Gates locked?”
“We’ll have three days to figure that out,” Renai said. She checked her watch, just an hour until midnight and the Hallows began. “But for now, you gotta send me back. Don’t know what might happen if I’m still on this side in a summoning circle when midnight hits, but I’m in no hurry to find out, feel me?”
Regal started making passes through the air with her hands, tugging at the threads of magic that held the summoning circle together. “What I can’t believe is that this shit happens every year and my fuck-knuckle ass didn’t notice. Shouldn’t the dead, like, way outnumber the living?”
Renai grinned. “Yeah, well. There’s this world, the Underworld, and the Far Lands. To really explain things, I’d need three hands.” She left out the part where she honestly had no idea what the Hallows were like because those three days were a constant blank space in her memories every year.
Leon chuckled, while Regal started speaking in a harsh, sibilant tongue. Renai could feel the working breaking down around her, the implacable gravity of the Underworld pulling her home. “He said you was funny,” Leon said.
“Who did?”
“Jude Dubuisson. Said if we ever needed to talk to somebody on the other side to call you up.” He smiled at her. “Ain’t you wondered how we knew your name?”
Regal fini
shed her magic with a sharply barked word and a clap of her hands that cracked the air like thunder. All the candles went out at once and the bottom fell out of the world and Renai went hurtling back across the barrier and into the Underworld.
She cursed Jude’s name the whole way down.
When Renai came back to herself, she was once more in the Underworld, in the same one-car garage that Regal and Leon had summoned her to, still wearing the frilly white dress and red sneakers she’d worn on the other side.
Outside, she found the dew-slick grass and thick forest and idyllic atmosphere of the highest level of the Underworld. Exhaustion dragged at her. She’d been awake so long that she’d gone past tired into feeling like she had the flu, bones achy and head tight. The Voice and the Magician were lucky she hadn’t curled up inside their circle and taken a nap.
She started to leave the garage, but saw that her shoe was untied and so bent down to tie it. Why had Regal’s magic dressed her in the clothes she’d been buried in, anyway? Was that just how Jude remembered her, and that impacted the spell? Or was it significant in some way that she was missing? She wondered if these were the dress shirt and jean skirt she’d been wearing before transformed into something new, or if she’d left those clothes behind the way she’d left Sal. A giggly, sleep-deprived thought occurred to her, and she pictured herself shooting up from the depths of the Underworld bare-assed as the day she was born.
Amusement turned to panic, and her hand went to the side of her head so fast she smacked herself. She let out a breath when she found the cigarette still tucked behind her ear, relieved that she hadn’t lost the sliver of Fortune that held a moment of death. If she lost that, the whole trip beneath the Underworld would be for nothing. Her mother’s St. Christopher medal still hung around her neck, too. A flush of shame went through her when it occurred to her that her first concern had been over possibly losing the sliver of Fortune.
Outside, she wandered for a while until she found a landmark she recognized, the teal and white awnings of Commander’s Palace, its sign spelling out the name of the restaurant in individual bulbs, its corner tower appearing out of the fog like a lighthouse, a cemetery across the street. She checked her watch. Only half an hour until midnight, and this far Uptown, she’d never make it to her meeting with Regal and Leon if she didn’t use her wings. Hopefully Sal would remember telling her that if they ever got split up to meet back at the First Gate.
Renai clenched her jaw, hesitant to let her wings unfurl. Trust had become a precious commodity lately. She knew Mason had some kind of back-stab planned. He was a Trickster, that’s how they thought. They saw the world in schemes and traps. Like Jude. The fact that Leon trusted him, ironically, made him less trustworthy. Which sucked, because she liked the musician, felt comfortable around him in a way she hadn’t in a long time. Not since her resurrection.
Which brought her to Sal and the Thrones and the Gatekeepers. They were keeping things from her. It was a fact she simply had to face. They all knew more about her missing memories and Ramses’ disappearance than they were telling her. The only question was whether it was some misguided keep-you-out-of-it-to-keep-you-safe sort of lie, or something more nefarious. Regal? Well, at least Renai could trust her to speak her mind.
And that brought Renai to the real source of her anxiety. She couldn’t trust her own mind. Her missing memories, her lack of control, the strange, powerful tempest that lived within her. She didn’t know who she was anymore, didn’t know if she’d recognize herself if she looked in her mirror. Would she be able to forgive her own mistakes as easily as she washed away those of the dead she escorted through the Gates?
She had no answers to any of this, only doubts. No faith that she was doing the right thing, only desperation. And worse, no time for any of this. The Hallows were coming whether she was prepared for them—whether she’d remember them—or not.
And with that oddly comforting lack of options, Renai let her wings slip free. They billowed up behind her, far larger than they’d been on the other side, grabbing at the air like sails and carrying her up into the mist. She leaned into them, doubt swept away for just a moment by the sheer exhilaration of flight, and they carried her in the direction she wanted to go.
It took most of her remaining time to reach St. Louis No. 1, skimming along just high enough to move quickly and just low enough that she didn’t lose herself in the fog. She circled once and saw Salvatore—still wearing his dog’s shape—pacing back and forth by the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate. She descended as quickly as she dared, but Sal didn’t wait for her feet to hit the ground before the questions started.
“The fuck happened? Renaissance? You okay? Why did you change your clothes? Where have you been?”
In spite of her worries and her doubts and her fears of what was about to happen, his concern made her smile. She tucked her wings away, dropped to one knee, and hugged him, scratching her hands through his fur and squeezing him tight.
She had a plan, she wanted to tell him. If Ramses really had sold his soul to a devil, they could find both by finding the boy. The sliver of Fortune would end his life—which should have ended days, maybe years, ago—the devil could be named and caught, and everything could go back to normal. Simple. Clean.
Before she could answer any of the questions he’d fired at her, though, her watch beeped, and all across the Underworld, bells began to toll the hour.
Midnight.
When the Hallows began, when all the Gates opened and the world of the living mingled with the world of the dead, Renai was grateful for her brief jaunt to the other side. The sounds and the scents and the heat that swept over her might have overwhelmed her, otherwise. She stood, gathered the dangling strands of her dreads into a loose bundle, and started toward the physical front gate of the cemetery.
“Renaissance, wait—” Sal began, but Renai cut him off.
“I’ll tell you everything, I promise,” she told him, “but first there’s some people we have to meet.”
She gave him a little follow-me wave over her shoulder, a gesture she realized too late could be taken the wrong way, like she was telling him to heel. She winced, but if Sal minded, he didn’t say anything, just trotted to catch up to her so that they reached the gate at the same time. Through the wrought-iron bars, Renai saw a little brown bird with a spiky crest perched on a NO PARKING sign, and a young black woman whose back was to her, hair cut short and natural and pulled into a tight bun, wearing a worn leather jacket and jeans and black combat boots that Renai coveted as soon as she saw them.
“Discord,” Sal said, a growl in his throat making him sound more savage than she’d ever heard before. She glanced down at him and saw that his fur was bristling, his head hunkered low and ears pulled flat, his lips peeled back in a quivering snarl. He shouldered the gate open, a long, slow creak, and then time seemed to slow as things started happening very fast.
Sal raced across the sidewalk, quicker than Renai had ever seen him move. The woman in the leather jacket turned, just as the psychopomp in the dog-skin leaped, a dog-catching-a-Frisbee glide that would have been funny if the object of his attention wasn’t an innocent little bird that disappeared into his jaws when he snapped them closed.
And then the woman turned all the way around and Renai saw her own face.
Chapter Twenty-three
Renai’s vision doubled, and in a nauseating swirl that her mind could just barely handle, she saw both of herselves seeing each other, both disbelieving and confused and inexplicably full of rage.
Doppelganger, she thought.
Demon, she thought.
One thought belonged to a woman who had spent five years in the Underworld, and one thought belonged to a woman who had spent five years living in a world that couldn’t see her, and both thoughts were hers, and both thoughts belonged to the other that wore her face. She crept closer to herself step by inevitable step, pulled closer by curiosity and revulsion and an implacable gravity. She saw herself�
��dreads and white dress and red sneakers and surrounded by shades—and she saw herself—boots and leather jacket and Sal behind her, jaws gnashing and head thrashing back and forth, and she couldn’t remember which one was her and which one was her.
She reached out—and she reached out—and fingertips touched and palms touched and she pulled herself into herself. Scalding heat raced across her skin, so intense it felt cold; pain so sudden and powerful and deep that it felt like a frisson of pleasure, like the ache of desire. For one agonizing, blissful moment, she was no one at all. And then a strain, a pop, like a joint snapping back into place, and—for the first time in a year—a whole and complete Renaissance Raines opened her eyes.
Just in time to see the broken, bloodied lump of brown feathers being savaged by Salvatore’s teeth shudder and flicker and become a tall white woman—with a long, elegant neck that stretched down to lean muscled shoulders, hair black as night accented by a slender white streak running from scalp to tip, her body sheathed in a black and gold gown that dragged the pavement and hugged her hips and left her strong, toned arms bare—an abrupt transformation that stretched the dog’s jaws so wide that he released her with a yelp and backed away.
“We meet at last,” said the being who had pretended to be psychopomp pretending to be a bird.
Cordelia, Renai thought, and then, Discord.
With a howl, Sal leapt at her again, but Cordelia reached out—a motion that was both casual and confident—and grabbed him by the throat. She pulled back a fist and punched him over and over again, her arm moving so fast that it blurred, before finally, mercifully, hurling him back to the pavement. Renai heard something crack, and he flopped onto his side, gasping for breath.
