by Bryan Camp
The one Renai had first seen sitting at Jude’s card table.
All at once, like puzzle pieces locking into place, all the individual insects stopped moving, and—if Renai let her eyes unfocus and see the whole instead of a part—a tall naked woman stood there, her skin the glossy, almost wet black of a roach’s wings, so thin that her flesh stretched tight against her bones, her head bare and bald, her stomach an unhealthy concavity that signaled starvation. The illusion was constantly broken, though, a twitching antenna here, a roach shifting out of place there. Renai couldn’t help but notice that not all of the ghouls had given up their animating roaches: at least five of them still blocked the exit.
“Speak,” the woman-shaped pile of roaches said, her whispery, dissonant voice coming not from her lips, which didn’t move, but from the entirety of her body. “You have our attention.”
Regal answered first. “So, like, are you a bunch of bugs that thinks you’re a person? Or a person who got turned into a bunch of bugs? Because I have laid down some harsh fucking curses in my day, but—”
The mound of roaches turned to face Regal, not moving so much as shifting from one still pose to another. “We are the eaters of the dead,” she said. “We are that which devours. We are Cafard.”
Renai opened her mouth to respond, but there was such a strange, implicit threat in that statement that she didn’t know what to say. A drawn-out, uncomfortable silence followed, in which Renai realized she could no longer hear the noises of the crowd, that the zoo must have closed for the night.
“Cool,” Regal said, “cool-cool-cool. But you didn’t really answer—”
“Why did Cordelia bring all of you here?” Renai asked, something that Elderflower said nagging at her even now. “What ‘storm’ is she going to create?”
The shift from Regal to Renai was more abrupt, almost aggressive. If a human being moved like that, Renai would have called it anger. “None brings us here. We are always here. Here is ours. Ours to eat.” Before Renai could ask what that meant, Cafard aimed an accusatory finger toward Leon and Regal. “These stole the feast. Ours to eat. Dead, dying, ours. These took. Now we hunger. Soon we feast.”
Renai tilted her head so she could aim her words at her friends without taking her eyes off of Cafard. “Any idea what she’s talking about?”
Leon tried to speak, but only managed to say, “The city,” before he cut off with a low moan. Regal patted his shoulder and spoke for him. “Me and Jude and ol’ busted here are the heart and soul of New Orleans,” she said. “Not bragging, I mean it literally. All that shit-meets-ceiling-fan fuckery you got caught up in a few years back? That’s what it was about. Bringing the city back to life after the hurricane almost killed her.”
And now Jude’s got a card room full of destruction gods and storm deities who want to go for round two, Renai thought. Or at least, he did. Her hands curled into fists, the alchemist’s iron and brass ring biting into her palm, and another approach occurred to her. “How do you fit into Cordelia’s plan?” she asked Cafard. “Because whatever she’s offering?” She pointed at the pitiful corpse of Jack Elderflower sprawled out on the floor. “This is how she repays her promises.”
“We make no plans; we make nothing. Strife promises only our feast, and we follow only while we eat.”
“But why?” Renai’s voice was hoarse even to her ears. “Where does it end? How much do you have to destroy to be satisfied?”
“Is no why. No end. Is us. We are that which devours. Is all.”
“And when you’ve destroyed everything, and all you have left to eat is yourself, what then?” Tears were leaking from Renai’s eyes now, and even though she knew that there would be no conversion here, no victory beyond—maybe—survival, she couldn’t help but try to understand, the compassionate side of her unable to fully accept the existence of bottomless, conscienceless greed. “If you devour the whole world,” she said, hating the pleading tone she heard in her own voice, “what was the fucking point?”
Cafard’s hissing laughter was her only answer. Renai’s anger rose, and in response so did the spirit, its lightning crackling along her fingertips so eagerly that it made the itching threads wound through her skin stretch until they burned. Part of her knew she should pull back that part of its power. That it would solve nothing. She understood that part of the tempest was the wind that carried seeds to new pastures and rain clouds to drought-stricken earth as much as it was the destructive gales that flattened buildings. She knew that floods enriched and replenished soil as often as they washed away homes. She recognized that lightning represented the power of the storm that could do nothing but destroy, knew that this impulse within her was an echo of Cafard’s destructive nature. And she didn’t care.
She let it slip loose.
The lightning broke free from her as sudden and joyous as an orgasm, a flash of brilliance and scorching heat and thunder that streaked from her palm and struck Cafard dead center, lancing through her and forking out to capture the still-standing ghouls in its embrace. She shrieked—pleasure and pain and regret and release all at once—but deafened by the resulting clap of thunder, she only felt the strain of her shout in her throat. The release was so potent, so intense, that the storm’s rage inside of her calmed instantly, sated and coiled deep in her belly, a sudden void that left an oddly pleasant ache.
Renai sank to her knees, her nostrils filled with burnt ozone and a high-pitched whine in her ears, a languor suffusing her limbs. She was content to wait there for her eyes to recover, for the angry red streak across her vision to fade. When it did, she had trouble believing that the devastation in front of her was the work of her own hand. Where Cafard had stood, only a small pile of burnt roach husks remained, most of them simply obliterated by the bolt she’d struck the destruction goddess with. She’d had a similar effect on the ghouls, the fern-frond, fractal pattern of electrical burns stretched across their flesh, Cafard’s influence scorched out of each one.
Renai rose to her feet, slow and tentative, expecting that channeling so much energy would have drained her, but finding the opposite to be true. She ached, but it was with the endorphin-filled rush that came after an intense run. Smiling, she turned to Regal and Leon, her friends, the Magician and the Voice of New Orleans, and saw an emotion in their eyes that only the part of her that had lived in this world all these years was accustomed to seeing: fear.
Now we are become Death, Renai thought.
Regal pointed at her, and in that strangely postcoital calm in the wake of her lightning, Renai half expected some curse to follow, some hex that she, in all fairness, probably deserved. But nothing came. Regal gestured with her finger, saying something that was muted by the persistent whine in her ears. When Renai understood what she meant, she looked down, holding her arms out in front of her, and saw that on each wrist one of the strands of yarn binding her soul together had torn apart.
Chapter Thirty
When they could hear each other again, Renai, Leon, and Regal quickly found that none of them knew exactly what to say. They were surrounded by corpses, Leon could barely stand without help, and Renai was literally falling apart.
Renai could practically feel Regal’s mind churning, trying to decide on which aspect of the situation was best suited to her unique style of shit-talk. Or maybe she was just too afraid of the power Renai had unleashed to try to be funny. Renai really had no idea what was going through the other woman’s mind; she was a psychopomp, not a psychic. At that thought, she went to check on Opal, worried that the oracle hadn’t woken up in all the commotion. From what she could tell, Opal hadn’t been harmed, aside from whatever Elderflower had done to her to knock her out like this.
To both Renai’s and Regal’s surprise, it was Leon who broke the silence. “This here’s another fine mess you done got me into,” he said, leaning against the edge of the picnic table that Regal had practically carried him to. The corner of his mouth quirked up, a half grin that he fought to hide, as if act
ually showing a smile would pain him worse than the ribs he’d almost certainly fractured. He looked from Regal to Renai and back again, his amusement slipping away and replaced with disappointment. “Neither of you ever seen Laurel and Hardy,” he said, a statement he was hoping one of them would disprove.
“Oh, I caught the reference,” Regal said. “It’s just sometimes I forget how crotch-rot old your AARP ass is.”
Leon waved her away like her derision was a bad smell. “Only young people think bein’ old is an insult. Only all y’all’s new shit gets old. Like classic cars and this here horn; I was built to last, me.”
“Who’s Law-whatever and Hard-D?” Renai asked, not really sure what they were talking about but pretty certain it wasn’t a hip-hop duo like it sounded. In truth, she’d only heard about half of what they’d said, too busy examining Opal like she had a damn clue what she was doing. Keeping people alive really wasn’t her specialty. She leaned in close to Opal’s neck, where she saw what looked like a puncture mark, so small it might have been just an insect bite.
Leon’s groan started out mocking and developed into something real, clutching his side and sucking in a breath through his teeth. “Before your time,” he said, after a moment. “And speakin’ of—time ain’t somethin’ we got an overabundance of. So maybe we ought to turn our minds to the task at hand.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Renai asked, and then, gesturing at Regal with a curl of her fingers, said, “Can you come here a second?”
Leon dipped his head toward the ground, at the bodies that lay sprawled across the floor where Cafard had left them. “Takin’ care of these folk here,” he said. He was right; they couldn’t just leave all these corpses for someone else to clean up. While the average person looked right past the supernatural—which is why the dead had been able to wander around New Orleans for days without inciting panic—there was no longer anything unusual about these bodies, aside from the fact that they were lying in plain sight for some unfortunate, underpaid zoo employee to find the next morning. Renai nodded but didn’t have an answer for him. Instead, she pointed out the mark on Opal’s neck to Regal.
“Yeah, that’s a needle wound all right,” Regal said, her face twisting like she’d bitten into something rotten. “Good catch. Of course that fucking scrote-hole would be a woman-drugging piece of shit.” She started digging in her duffel bag. “You go help Leon,” she said. “I got this.”
Renai moved over to Leon, her hands in her jacket pockets. Ironically, problems like this—dead gods, formerly possessed corpses who weren’t where the authorities had left them, and bodies that couldn’t be identified because they were older than Social Security numbers—were exactly the kinds of problems that a scavenger god like Cafard usually handled, her solution exactly as grotesque as anyone would imagine. By the way Leon studied the splayed-out corpses and tapped his fingers against the buttons of his trumpet, she could tell he was considering some magic song that might be of use.
“Any ideas?” she asked, realizing in that moment that she didn’t really have a clue how his magic worked. It wasn’t like the powers the Thrones granted a psychopomp, or the potency the loa lent to the herbs and powders of a gris-gris bag. Nor was it anything like the sorcerous abilities that Regal and Elderflower had displayed. Leon’s magic wasn’t a separate power that lived in him, like Renai’s storm; it was him in a fundamental way that seemed more like a god than a man.
Maybe that was what it meant to be High John de Conquer.
“I got me a tune that can wake the dead, but I don’t know if it’ll work on ones such as these.” What he left unsaid was that he might not be able to play a single note, since he couldn’t take a full breath. Not that it mattered. There was nothing in these bodies to wake up, the tiniest scraps of Voice devoured by Cafard when she possessed them.
Which gave Renai an idea.
She took out the deck of playing cards that had once been the spirits of fugitive dead, thinking she could shift one of them back into its ghostly form. Since she’d only ever used the destructive magic of a psychopomp out of instinct, though, she had no idea how to manage it. She stared at one of the cards as if it could tell her what to do, its matte-black surface as iridescent as a raven’s wing, and as reflective as her broken mirror. She tried picturing it as a piece of origami, something that could unfurl like her wings, and she tried thinking of it as a hole, something she could reach into like the nowhere place that held her mirror. All that happened is that her wings quivered like they were trying to stretch as wide as their Underworld counterparts, and her knife kept appearing in her hand.
So, remembering how she’d transformed these spirits in the first place, she asked the spirit inside of her for wind—a weak breeze was all the spirit could manage to call up so soon after unleashing a lightning bolt—and flicked the card into the air, teasing it with her borrowed magic, making it dance. She thought about what she was now, an emissary of Death, and what Cafard had said about being a creature who could only destroy. And so she made her wind a sharp, cutting thing, bearing down on the playing card with what little strength she had, imagining her power destroying the card bit by bit, layer by layer, like the wearing down of mountains into valleys, like the erosion of rock into sand.
The black playing card dissolved into a fine powder, a gray cloud that coalesced into the shape of a person, the bits of them whirling and furious as a swarm of gnats.
Renai couldn’t tell if they’d been a man or woman in life, tall or short, fat or thin, black or white or some other ethnicity. In its truest form, the Essence of a person was none of these things, only Fortune had a gender, only the body had a sex and a sexuality and a skin color. Only in this world did these things matter. In death these definitions could be escaped, though most souls carried some of these traits with them, the ones they remembered, the ones they valued, the ones that had impacted them most in life.
In destroying and reshaping this lost scrap of Essence back in the haunted building on Canal, Renai had wiped away everything that the soul had been in life, leaving them with only those intrinsic qualities—kindness or tenacity, frivolity or avarice—that no one, not even Death, could take away. When Renai realized exactly what she’d done, it made her feel a shame so potent that it turned her stomach. You can’t fix it, she thought, in her grandmother’s voice. You can’t go back. So save your hissy fit for somebody who needs it.
“Why am I here?” the spirit said, in a voice that was a hissing TV-station-tuned-to-white-noise sound that reminded Renai of the Deadline.
Renai pointed to one of the dead bodies, the fat man whom Cafard had first abandoned. “We want you to take over that body,” she said, “and ride it back to the morgue where it was stolen from.”
“How they gonna know where to go?” Leon asked.
“Once they’re inside the body, inside the brain and the eyes, they’ll remember everything that the body experienced in life and in death. They’ll know.”
“Sheee-iiit,” Regal said, coming to stand beside her. “That plan is slick as hell, Sparkles. Tied up in a goddamn bow.”
“I have a choice?” the spirit asked, as if they had only heard the words Renai had spoken directly to them.
The itching red strings in Renai’s flesh started to burn as she strained in two directions at once. Part of her, ashamed at what she’d done, wanted to just release these spirits, fractured and lost though they were. The other part of her knew that she could simply exert her will over this shade and make them do whatever she wanted. She wavered for a moment before she remembered that she didn’t have the luxury of internal debates, didn’t have time for a crisis of conscience. So she compromised with herself. “Yeah, you got a choice,” she said, spreading the other black cards into a loose fan. “You can do as I say, or you can go back to being the six of Hearts.”
The scrap of Essence—the Shadow—of what had once been a complete identity swirled there for a moment, maybe considering their options, maybe needing
time to process Renai’s offer-you-can’t-refuse, but ultimately they chose the path of least resistance. Like a flock of birds—a murmuration of starlings, she heard Leon say—the Shadow bulged and flattened and thickened and thinned, and then curled into a single swirling tendril that descended on the white man in the suit and into his mouth and filled his lungs with a long, rattling, eerie inhale.
The man—no, the ghoul’s—eyes opened, and he lurched to his feet. Regal leaned in to whisper in Renai’s ear. “What’s to stop these turd-blossoms from just taking their two-hundred-and-change pounds of flesh on a joy ride and”—she made a whistling sound between her teeth and turned her hand into a plane taking off—“fuckin’ right off to Vegas?”
“You’ll stop them,” Renai said, not bothering to lower her voice, “with this.” She held up Elderflower’s iron and brass ring, the one with the Seal of Solomon that would let her command spirits. When Regal took it, Renai pulled another card from her hand and fought back a sigh, already weary and knowing she had far more to do before she could rest. “Okay,” she said, “who’s next?”
By the time Renai had destroyed and re-formed enough cards to reanimate all the ghouls that Cafard had abandoned, Regal’s instant sobriety patch had done its work and brought Opal around to consciousness. Regal had taken her for a walk, partly to help clear her head, and partly so she wouldn’t have to watch the gruesome monotony of rinse, possess, repeat that had been Renai’s past couple of hours. She had just scooped the remaining dozen or so cards back into a neat square and tucked them back into their cardboard box when Regal and Opal came back to the wooden walkway.
“Missed one,” Leon said, nodding at the jeans- and T-shirt-clad corpse of Jack Elderflower. In death he was as disappointing—Renai had hoped his body would crumble away to dust like in a movie, given his extreme age—and as much of a pain in the ass as he had been in life. Like the other bodies, they couldn’t just leave him there for the zoo to deal with, but unlike those once-animated corpses, there was nowhere that Elderflower was supposed to be. Not to mention the fact that the last thing Renai wanted was one of those renegade spirits getting their incorporeal hands on all the horrible shit rattling around inside the dead alchemist’s head.
