by Bryan Camp
Besides, she wasn’t finished with Jack Elderflower just yet.
“I’ll take care of him,” Renai said. “You two just get Opal out of here.”
“What are you planning, Sparkles?” Regal asked.
For the first time since regaining consciousness, Opal Brennan spoke. “She’s gonna do to him what he was gonna do to me,” she said. “Dump his ass over the railing for the gators.” Regal and Leon both started to speak at the same time, but Opal held up a hand. “Don’t try to bullshit me. I’m a psychic, remember? I know why he brought me here. I know what he was planning.” She rubbed at her wrists, raw from where she’d been bound. “Do whatever you have to do, but do it quick, please. I’ve got a wife to get home to.”
Nothing left to say, Regal handed her duffel bag to Opal, hooked one of Leon’s arms over her shoulder, and the three of them limped away, leaving Renai alone with the sorcerer who called himself Elderflower. Body and soul.
Waiting for a psychopomp.
The rules were the rules, even for miserable, callous bastards like him. It didn’t matter how many people he’d hurt, how many lives he’d sacrificed in his pursuit of immortality, didn’t matter how many centuries he’d stolen from the Thrones. Even for him, death wasn’t the end. So she pulled the hood of her leather jacket up onto her head, tucking her dreads in so she could see, and—before she could second-guess herself—spoke the ghost word. Thankfully even though she was a whole person now, it worked now just as it had before the Hallows: her vision shifting into shades of purple, that strange, buzzing tightness across her skin. Renai knelt beside him, glad to at least be asked to do something she knew how to do right. When her hands slipped inside him, it barely even hurt.
There was no Fortune, of course. He’d burned that away to avoid his death—or he’d traded it away in a deal with a spirit, like Ramses—but she found his Voice and his Essence just like any other dead. His Voice, which took the shape of an apple when she pulled it free of his body, tasted smoky and peppery and vinegary all at once, and filled her with a vitality that was almost frightening. That wasn’t surprising, though. She’d expected the alchemist to have amassed a significant amount of power. After all, the bastard could command spirits. It only made sense that he had magic to spare.
Unlike any other collection of a recently deceased, though, Renai didn’t leave any scrap of Voice behind. She couldn’t take the risk that his Essence—or any of the shades wandering the city during the Hallows—might enter his body and raise it as a ghoul before the gators had their fill. Nor did she want his memory to have any power once he was gone. So, no matter how much it made her feel like Cafard to do it, Renai consumed the whole of his Voice, apple core and all.
What did surprise her was that when she pulled his Essence free, he gathered himself into a fully formed image of his living self, down to a ghostly version of his iron and brass ring, a process that normally took the newly dead the whole journey to the First Gate. “Guess you spent so much of your life commanding those spirits and summoning those demons into your computers that you knew what to expect, huh?” She wasn’t gloating, really. Just treating him like the half-aware, half-asleep dead she was used to.
Yes, Elderflower whispered, in that unspeaking thought-talk the dead could manage, and I know what comes next, too.
Renai tried to hide her shock at how quickly Elderflower had mastered that little trick, which usually took the dead well into the Underworld to figure out. She was suddenly very glad that she’d eaten the entirety of his Voice. “Yeah,” she said, “what’s that?” She spoke out loud deliberately this time, even though she could think her words at him like he was doing to her, because she knew her voice—energized by his Voice, no less—would shake his Essence like thunder rattling a window’s glass panes.
Without an obol to pay Charon’s fee, I will wander the Earth a restless shade. Eventually I will forget myself, and become the very kind of feckless, gibbering demon whose will I subverted to my own ends.
Renai tucked her hands into the pockets of her jacket and nodded, feigning sadness, a heavy acknowledgment that he was right. As if she hadn’t been the one to end his life. She very nearly scuffed the toe of her combat boot against the floor but figured that would be overselling it. She knew what was coming next, both from him and for him.
Or, Elderflower whispered, we could make a deal.
Renai pursed her lips to keep from smiling. “What did you have in mind?”
I’ve got a vial back at my place. A little something special I keep for emergencies. You put me back into my body, pour the contents of that vial into my mouth, and leave. It’ll take an hour or so to do its work. I don’t have any magic left, I watched you consume it. I’ll slip away and you’ll never see me again. I swear it.
As if his disembodied ass has anything binding to swear by, she thought. Out loud she said, “What do I get?”
I’ll tell you where you can find Ramses St. Cyr.
“Counter-offer,” Renai said. “I bring you through the Gates down to the prison down in one of the deepest parts of the Underworld. That’s where the demons you summoned and enslaved will end up after I release them from all your computer equipment. I’m sure y’all will have a lot to talk about.”
And Ramses?
Renai shrugged. “Already know where he’s going.” She knelt to check Elderflower’s pockets, found a money clip full of twenties that she took for herself and a number of charms and amulets that she wanted nothing to do with. She put these back where she found them and then slid her hands and wrists under Elderflower’s armpits. The alchemist was heavier than she’d expected, but she was determined. He made a satisfying sploosh when he hit the duckweed-covered water below.
When she turned back to Elderflower’s spirit, he had his arms folded and a haughty look on his face. I didn’t spend centuries avoiding death’s embrace just to be dragged there by some pickaninny. I’ll take my chances among the living.
Ah, she thought, there’s that racism I’ve been waiting for. Makes this next part all the easier. She reached out, partly with her will and partly with her physical hand, and grabbed Elderflower by the upper arm. He tried to pull away, which just showed that he hadn’t figured it out yet.
“I’m sorry,” she said, unable to help herself from echoing what he’d said the first time they’d met. “Did you think this was a negotiation?”
And so, his Voice in her veins and his Essence by her side, Renai half led and half dragged Jack Elderflower out of Audubon Zoo and to Leon’s car. She was his psychopomp and he was her dead.
That suited her just fine.
Renai didn’t realize she’d gotten her hopes up that her motorcycle would still be waiting on the neutral ground until she got out of Leon’s car at the entrance to St. Louis No. 1 and saw that Kyrie wasn’t there. Renai just hoped that she was off enjoying the Hallows and not locked in an impound yard somewhere. She’d managed to convince Leon and Regal to leave her there at the cemetery gate after dropping off Opal—who had been less than thrilled to discover, when Renai showed up to the car with Elderflower, that she could now also see the dead—at her home, despite both of them insisting that she still needed their help.
“I appreciate the offer, really,” she said, leaning into the passenger side window to keep Regal from getting out, “but you can’t go where I’m headed. Besides, this one here’s liable to kill himself if he blows his horn with his ribs all busted up like they are, and we need you holding shit down with that ring.” She waited for their grudging acceptance before she continued. “Speaking of which, these are for you.” She held out the deck of cards holding the last of the fugitive spirits she’d captured. “I figure with that ring, you can command these spirits to take whatever form you want, dogs, birds, whatever. They’re nowhere near psychopomps, but if you need them to hunt down some bugs—”
Regal took the deck from her and slid it into the pocket of her costume coat. “Way ahead of you, sister. Those ghouls are fin-
fuckin-ito.”
Renai shifted over so she could see Leon and pointed to the Princess and the Frog backpack sitting on his backseat. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you brought that bag back here on All Souls’ Day for my—” Her voice caught in her throat and she couldn’t finish. “For Celeste,” she said at last. “It’s got, well, it’s got some things I’d like her to have.”
Some things I want to keep safe, she thought.
“Count on it,” Leon said, grinning in an attempt to hide a grimace of pain. “Come rain or shine, I’ll be here. You take care now, hear?”
“I will,” she said, pulling out of the window and rising to her full height. To herself, she said, “I’ll take care of everything.” She waited until Leon put the car in drive and started to pull away, before she raised her voice and said, “Hey, Regal?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t throw away your shot!”
The Magician of New Orleans leaned out the passenger side window as Leon Carter drove away, giving Renai the double middle-finger salute. “I knew I liked you!” she yelled, and then they were gone, leaving Renai standing at the Gates of the Underworld, wearing the jacket she’d gotten from the Thrones, a coin of Fortune in her pocket, and—aside from the newly dead soul waiting to be led to his just reward—all alone.
In other words, right where she belonged.
Oussou was right where he belonged, too: on the ground next to the First Gate, slumped over onto his side and passed out drunk. At least him being here meant that the Gates were open again. Renai grabbed Elderflower’s ghostly hand and stomped over to the loa, nudging him with the toe of her combat boot. When he showed no reaction, she did it again, a little harder. If anything he snored louder.
A couple of white guys passing by shouted drunken encouragement to her, an abrupt and startling intrusion that set her heart pounding until they were on the next block. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to have to put her back to a wall and fake a not-too-distant-but-not-too-inviting smile. She thought about the aura of disinterest that surrounded the half of her that kept to the living side of things, and wondered if it was worth the lack of memories, the sundering of self, to never again feel threatened by something as mundane as a drunken dick.
If that thought made her rougher than usual trying to shake Oussou awake, that was his fault for crawling so deep in his bottle that he couldn’t do his job. Was it even that late? She glanced down at her watch, the cheap cartoon thing that had somehow survived the lightning strike that Regal called her “epic-level bug zapper,” and saw that it was already well past midnight, which made it officially the Feast of All Saints.
“The hell is wrong with you?” she said, squatting down and dragging Oussou into a seated position. “Did you drink yourself to—” She froze, a spike of panic at that idea, and then she realized that she’d heard him snoring, could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath her hands. So he wasn’t dead. The rum sloshed around in the bottle that he clutched tightly even in sleep, a bottle that was nearly full. Wasn’t drunk either, then. Just sleeping. That’s when she understood.
Renai eased Oussou back so that he was leaning against the outer wall of the cemetery, careful not to bang his head against the brick. She’d planned on using the coin of Fortune that she’d been carrying with her all this time to bluff her way past the Gatekeeper with Elderflower in tow, past all of the loa if she had to, whatever it took to get down to the bottom level of the Underworld, to finally stand in front of the Thrones and beg them to tell her what to do about Ramses and Cordelia and all the shit that was going down. But Oussou was sleeping the sleep of the dead and nothing she possessed would wake him up. Only one thing she knew of could lay a god low like that.
The caduceus.
She grabbed Elderflower’s hand and led his silent Essence through the First Gate—even though the world of the living and the Underworld overlapped during the Hallows, rules were rules—finally knowing for sure where she’d find Ramses St. Cyr. The one place Cordelia could have been certain Renai wouldn’t find him, the place where his path, Renai’s path—everyone’s path—had been leading all along:
The Thrones where Death sat in judgment.
The moment Renai crossed through the First Gate, she learned that while the Hallows allowed the Underworld and the living world to overlap, some things really were different. Her wings, for example, rigid, decorative appendages in the living world, unfolded into the billowing, eager spans of delicate, living tissue she’d known in the Underworld. She had just enough time to grab Elderflower by his ghostly hand, and then she was in the sky, soaring.
She worried, at first, that being whole and complete would make it more difficult for her wings to carry her, as if the parts of herself that had existed only in the living world had an actual physical weight. She found the opposite to be true, though, the wings more responsive, more obedient, and more powerful. She rose higher than she ever had before and—the eerie fog of the Underworld dispersed by the Hallows—saw all of New Orleans spread out beneath her.
There were ghosts everywhere, not just the shades of once-living people walking the streets, but here the shadowy outline of a thriving black neighborhood—its main street lined with hundred-year-old oaks—razed to make room for an Interstate overpass, there the diffuse outline of an Opera House, burned and rebuilt and burned again. So much had been destroyed here, sometimes to make way for something better, but more often out of oppression or accident or negligence or greed. The storm rose up in her—the killing kind—ready to meet fire with fire, power with power.
All the tempest wanted was someone to blame.
Renai swept down out of the sky and into the garden of Holt Cemetery, the splendor of Nibo’s flowers a ghostly bouquet spread out across the cemetery. The loa himself was fast asleep, of course, slumped against the base of his tree, the Second Gate left open wide. Renai pulled Elderflower through the Gate, ignoring his whispered questions, and then took to the air once more. She bounced across the city, hurtling through the Gates and deeper into the Underworld, into Plumaj’s book, through Bridgette’s altar, past Babaco’s party, and then through the doorway of Barren’s streetcar.
Every sleeping loa she found made her more frantic, every gaping-open Gate urged her to get to the Thrones as quickly as possible. If the caduceus could overpower even Barren—who, among other things, was the highest of the Ghede—then its power might not have any limit. She was torn between two states, hopeful that she was finally on track, that she might find Ramses before the end of the Hallows and her tenuous compromise, and despair that she might already be too late.
After she crossed through the Sixth Gate at the foot of Canal Street, darkness nipping at the heels of sunset, the cemeteries rising up around her, it took all of Renai’s self-control to turn away from the Final Gate beneath the river—every instinct inside of her yelling at her to go, go, go—and fly toward the prison where she and Sal had barely escaped Cross. She landed, tempest whirling and heart pounding and Elderflower struggling ineffectually in her grip. She almost wished Cross would be here, just so she could release some of this anger, this power thundering inside of her.
But no one was there, just the barest facsimiles of trees and the walls made of ice, smoking in the living world’s heat. She let slip some of the storm’s power, a fierce gust of wind that pushed open the massive doors of frozen stone, revealing only darkness beyond. She pushed Elderflower toward it and released him, with her hand if not her will. “This is where you get off,” she said.
I can help you, Elderflower whispered. I know things.
“I know things too,” Renai said. “I know you willingly took the side of a goddess of destruction, knowing she was going to damn an innocent boy to a fate worse than death, knowing she intends to bring more harm into a world already full of it. I know you took a woman against her will just because you’re stronger than her, and that you intended to steal her power and destroy her utterly. I know that fo
r years you have amassed power on the backs of others, corrupting souls, spying and stealing and lying and blackmailing, and that you have felt no more guilt for any of these than if you had killed a bug.” She smiled, and though it felt good on her face, she knew it was terrible.
“Well, now you’re the spider and I’m the boot,” she said. “And I know you best carry your ass through those doors before I decide to get real nasty about it.”
When he was gone and the doors were closed and she was in the air once more, Renai could feel the other side of her tugging at her strings, the compassionate side, the part of her that tried to understand. She knew it was a warning, knew that she had to be careful of how fierce she let the storm inside of her grow. Flying toward the river and the Thrones and her last, desperate hope, she let the tempest build. It hurt, but the pain was nothing she couldn’t live with.
Nothing she couldn’t endure.
Chapter Thirty-one
If you find yourself on the edge of the River Styx, hope that your loved ones have placed a coin in your mouth, the obol that is Charon’s fee to carry you across. The same is true of Urshanabi, the ferryman on the river Hubur. If the waters of the Vaitarna seem—to your eyes—to be clear, sweet nectar, then rejoice, for you have lived a good life, but if you see a river of blood, know that you must swim across to Naraka to have your sinfulness purged. Give praise to Ojizō-sama, who protects the souls of lost children on the banks of the Sanzu River. Pray that when you meet Manannán mac Lir, he is content to carry you to the Blessed Isles in his boat without sails, that he isn’t feeling tricky and wearing his drab coat.
