by Bryan Camp
At first, their journey into and through Eden was exactly as pleasant as a stroll through Paradise ought to be. They walked down a wide, straight path—two lanes of paved road separated by a wide, grassy neutral ground that led straight to the NOMA in the living world—delineated by a springy, resilient moss that stretched through the grassy meadow of the Garden. The branches of fruit-bearing trees hung low with riches, and flowers bloomed in shades of red and orange and purple. Off to her right, a clearing filled with clover led to a lake, its surface rippling in the breeze, its waters so clear and bright that they had to be fresh and pure.
Renai breathed in, taking the heady, perfumed air deep into her lungs, and felt all her muscles relax, limbs loosening and stretching, her wings begging to be unfurled so they could bask in the warmth of the sun. Ahead of them, where the angular and columned entrance to the museum would be in the world of the living, a massive crystal bubble rose over the trees, a divine hothouse or some future civilization’s utopian dwelling or something Renai couldn’t even imagine, but whatever it was, it was beautiful and grand and perfect. The mossy path led to the structure and around it and past it, and Renai knew, with some sadness, that she wouldn’t be going in, and the tree they sought was elsewhere. Still, she thought, this is easier than I thought it would be.
Though she hadn’t said it out loud, she regretted those words as soon as they formed in her head.
The sweet-scented breeze picked up, the temperature cooling and the pressure dropping so fast that Renai’s ears popped. Remembering that all she had between her modesty and the world was a lacy white dress, Renai zipped up her jacket, knowing what was coming next. Clouds, dark and thick with rain and already flickering with lightning, rolled in over them like a dark shroud being draped over the globe of the world. The rain came down in one gushing roar, so thick Renai could barely make out the shape of Cur stepping in front of her, his shield at the ready, so loud, she could feel more than hear his snarl as he drew his sword. It was a sweet gesture, and also kind of stupid. What was he going to do, she thought, stab the rain to death? She stretched up on her toes to shout into his ear.
“Get to the Tree!” she yelled. “This is all for nothing if we don’t stop her!” Cur didn’t question her judgment, didn’t argue that she needed protection, didn’t even catch her eye to see if she was sure. He just gave her a single curt nod, and then ran off into the deluge.
That confidence filled her, made her feel stronger, more certain of herself than she really was. Which was good, because she’d need all the swagger she could muster if she was going to bluff her way past whatever storm god was up there. The one good thing about this ambush was that it meant that they still had time, because if Cordelia had already done what she’d come here to do, why would she still bother to try and slow them down?
Sure is a good thing I turned down Seth’s power, she thought, letting her wings unfurl, bracing herself for the yank of the wind’s pull. I’d hate to be evenly matched or anything. Her wings filled out with a sharp crack, loud as a gunshot, though she’d angled them into the wind like a knife, cutting its strength so that they didn’t tear from the strain, didn’t lift her up until she was ready. But despite the sarcastic thoughts she lashed herself with, she turned her face up to the menacing clouds and smiled. Never let ’em see you sweat, she heard her mother say, and her grandmother’s voice said, They can only tell you who you is if you believe ’em when they say it, and Sal told her to give the fuckers hell, Raines.
So she reached into the nowhere place for her broken stone blade and shifted her wings and let the winds carry her up into the heart of its fury.
Renai first thought, once the clouds had enveloped her completely, was that the inside of a thundercloud was just like the dark fog that blanketed the Underworld, wet and cold and windy, but strangely familiar. And then lightning streaked past her, a white-hot bar of sizzling threat, and her second thought was: the fuck it is.
She reached down for the spirit inside of her, but it wilted away from her, cowed by the display of power surrounding her. She’d gotten used to the idea that the magic living within her was alive, a spirit that was as conscious as Kyrie or psychopomps in their own limited ways. But now she was disappointed to also learn that it was a fucking coward.
A second bolt of lightning flashed by, then a third, each one closer than the last, and then the hail started, a pounding rain of ice pellets that—if they connected with anywhere not protected by the thick leather of her jacket—hit hard enough to bruise. Renai gritted her teeth and climbed higher, fighting the buffeting winds for every inch, more curious about her opponent than truly afraid.
One thing was certain: Whoever it was, they were trying to summon up a goddamn hurricane.
After a few moments that felt like hours, Renai realized she could hear voices on the wind. A man and a woman, speaking in short, sharp syllables, grunting and cursing. Renai couldn’t tell if they were fucking or fighting, but whichever it was, it was desperate and real. And then, moving in their direction, she burst out of the cloud cover and rose into the crystalline-clear sky above.
Two of the storm gods from Jude’s card game were locked together: the furious-faced woman with multiple arms whirling around her head and the fang-toothed man with the feathered headdress. Her fists struck at him again and again, each blow releasing a peal of thunder. He held a hatchet that glowed incandescent, and lightning flashed every time he hurled it at her.
Renai took one look at them and pushed her knife back into the nowhere place, knowing it would do her no good against them, no matter how sharp an edge it had. Renai had no idea how Cordelia had orchestrated this argument, how she had teased them into conflict in this moment and this place, but Cordelia knew that there was no way Renai could fight them off or broker a peace between them. Not in time.
They broke apart and rushed back at each other, howling with voices like hurricane gales, lashing out with fists and feet and elbows and foreheads and fury. Nothing could stand against that kind of destruction. Nothing could endure that kind of punishment. Nothing could reconcile that much rage.
But Renai had to try.
She reached out to the spirit inside of her, not for its strength, but for its knowledge. She could feel the similarity between her spirit and the hurricane beneath her. That same great whirling fury, the same desire for destruction, and beneath it all, the same pain. Each of these gods—Tlaloc and Guabancex, her spirit whispered to her—were bending the storm to their will, pouring in their strength and their magic and forcing it to return that magic in the form of wind and lightning. But in doing so, it was being made to tear itself apart. Its whole existence was this moment, this fleeting eternity of pain and fear and aggression, knowing that when it was of no more use to these gods, it would dissipate into oblivion, and yet it feared and longed for that moment with equal passion.
Renai leaned in to the compassionate side of herself, feeling an alarming looseness to the pull of her bindings, a pain that wasn’t the pull against her stitches but of her selves starting to tear apart. As though the constant wavering back and forth between her two selves had loosened her restraints so much that she could weaken them more and more with each strain. She pushed past it, even as she danced on the wind and dodged the hail and the lightning of the storm gods’ conflict. She ignored her own pain and her own danger and focused on the quickening hurricane below, on its fragile, infantile mind. Through the spirit inside of her, she reached out to it, asked it why the gods were fighting.
It was the first time in the hurricane’s entire existence that someone asked instead of commanded.
It—no, she—hadn’t always been a hurricane. Pieces of her had been Elderflower’s demons, spirits of the wires sent out to steal bits and scraps of information and secrets, holding them inside of her mind, no matter how badly it burned. Other parts of her had been psychopomps, those quiet, bobbing wisps of light that led the Essences of the newly dead along the path of the Underworld. Bef
ore that, she’d been Shadows and shades, the cast-off remnants of a human’s regrets and follies, gathered together into a thinking, feeling bundle of magic and locked away in the Oubliette until some higher being called her up. Before that, when the other half of her Essence was asleep, or distracted, or drunk, or careless, she’d been alive.
For a single heartbreaking instant, Renai saw the whole system laid out before her. Humans grew and lived and died in all their wonderful complexity, and then the Underworld split them apart. Into the parts that were deserving and the parts that were made to serve. Gods and psychopomps and magicians and priestesses and alchemists, anyone with the will and the Voice and the desire to command these spirits, they got to bend and twist and break these others through control of a compulsion that was deep and cruel and completely unaware. Masters unburdened with the awareness that they owned slaves; slaves who couldn’t even exist without the master’s say-so.
She thought about what she’d done to the spirits she’d turned into playing cards, all the Shadows she’d helped her dead cast off, and was nearly sick. It hurt, worse than anything she’d ever felt, to realize how complicit she’d been in this system of torture and domination and pain. Understanding led to rage, a righteous hatred of the centuries upon centuries of this hierarchical bullshit.
And with that, deep within her, Renai’s fury and her compassion at last found common ground.
Her two selves joined together in a wholeness that felt impossibly good, unbreakable, and complete. She knew, at last, who she was. Not a taker of lives, nor a forgiver of sins, but a liberator—a breaker of chains. The yarn bindings slipped free of her skin and went twirling away in the wind.
“What do you want to be?” she asked the hurricane. “If you could be any kind of spirit or shade or demon or djinn, what would you choose?”
In that whispering non-voice of the dead, the storm answered. Renai reached out, not to compel, not to control, but to grant. She gathered the hurricane in her arms and destroyed the storm utterly, like Grace, the blacksmith at the bottom of the world, shattering the hurricane so that she could make something new. What she did wasn’t so different from what the two fighting gods were doing, except where they had to impose their will upon the thoughts and magic of the scraps of spirit to force her to take the form of winds and clouds and lightning, Renai merely had to ask. Where the gods had to drag the magic to them, it flowed, willingly toward her. Faster and faster as the hurricane realized that she was keeping her promise.
Nothing she could have said or done would have distracted Tlaloc and Guabancex from their battle, but they certainly noticed when they felt their power dwindling away. They turned on her, then, in that instant—conflict forgotten in the face of the threat to their authority that she represented. Lightning flashed. Wind howled.
And faded away into the pile of ash cupped in Renai’s hands.
She didn’t know if they understood what was happening, or knew only that she’d done something they hadn’t seen before in all their long lives, but they shared a single glance and vanished. Renai hung there in the sky, her wings—also a spirit enslaved to a purpose they hadn’t chosen, though not by her—keeping her aloft. She promised them they would have their chance. She gathered the last remnants of the storm, the sky returning to its pristine brightness, the sun’s warmth glowing on her skin, pulling it all together, and changing the last gasps of wind into a leather pouch that held the ash that had once been a great and wrathful hurricane. It occurred to her that she’d done almost the same thing, unconsciously, with the remnants of Salvatore’s Essence, that otherwise the scraps of his personality would have eventually been gathered into a shade, a Shadow, a slave. She vowed to set him free as well.
They were all going to go free.
Chapter Thirty-six
Renai descended back down into the Garden of Eden both found at last and utterly lost. She’d made peace with who and what she was for the first time in her existence, but had no idea where in the immense, maybe infinite Garden she’d landed.
The mossy path was nowhere in sight. She folded the spirit shaped like wings back into their nowhere place—asking, now, instead of telling—chose a direction at random, and started walking. As she struggled through the beautiful, idyllic underbrush of the Garden, she reached out to the spirits around her, first her wings, then the living magic bound into the shape of her leather jacket, then the thunderstorm that slept in her belly, asking about their lives and deaths and service. The wings and the jacket each thanked her for her concern, but said they’d rather stay as they were than change. Her wings, she learned, had once belonged to Arke, the messenger of the Titans. The tempest, though Renai knew the spirit heard her, had nothing to say.
A dryad, overhearing their conversation and impressed by Renai’s compassion for the spirits around her, slipped out of her tree and offered to guide Renai. She followed along in a kind of trance, like a runner’s high, balanced between understanding and rage in a way that wasn’t truly sustainable but didn’t take much effort to maintain, either. It took a while for Renai to reach the path that the dryad promised, and a while longer to reach the huge oak that was the Dueling Oak in the living world. But in truth, it had taken her far longer than she’d thought it would take to get there.
Days and worlds and lives further than she’d ever thought she’d go.
The oak towered and sprawled, its branches in all the heavens and its roots in all the hells. In the shadow of its canopy, Cur lay on his back, one of his eyes bruised and swollen, blood trickling from his mouth, a massive six-legged mare pinning him to the ground with her hooves. Somehow, the black horse was familiar to Renai. On a nearby stone bench, Cordelia sat with one leg draped over the other and her dangling foot kicking, indolent and beautiful and terrible.
She turned at Renai’s approach, and a smile danced across her face, so bright that Renai would have sworn it was genuine. “Well, there you are,” Cordelia said. “We were beginning to think we’d have to plod on without you, weren’t we, dear?”
Her companion didn’t reply, didn’t smile, as still, as menacing, as wrong as any ghoul, his eyes full of fire. In one hand he held an old, ugly revolver. In the other, a short staff engraved with two snakes and capped with a pair of outstretched wings.
Days and worlds and lives further than she’d ever thought it would take her, but Renai had at last found Ramses St. Cyr.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Known as Uktena to the Cherokee, a vast horned snake of terrible power who possessed a magical gemstone in his forehead. In the Bible he is merely “the serpent,” tempting Eve to take her bite of the forbidden fruit. To the Celts he was Cernunnos, sometimes a snake and sometimes a man, but always with the virile, arresting horns of a ram curling upon his head. The Sumerians named him Ningishzida, the ancient serpent who sometimes wore the head of a man. In ancient Egypt they called him Apep, the gigantic snake who fought each day to devour the sun, to destroy the source of light and life. The Greeks called him Python, coiled and huge in the center of the earth. Known to the Norse as Níðhöggr, the terrible dragon who gnaws constantly at the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
Horned and immense and malicious and inevitable. The Serpent who will devour the world.
Renai stood there, hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, toes curling inside her black combat boots, waiting for the axe to fall.
Cordelia had everything she needed. The boy. The gun. The staff. She’d had time alone here, with the Tree and—Renai assumed—the serpent Apep coiled around its roots. She’d waited for Renai. All that time and energy and plotting had gone into this moment. But if Cordelia had restrained herself from putting her plan in motion until Renai got here, it couldn’t just be to gloat.
“It was such a struggle waiting for you to get here,” Cordelia said, “you know I am not a patient deity.”
Damn, Renai thought, maybe she did just want a victory lap.
Cur struggled beneath the horse’s hoo
ves, groaning. “I’m sorry, Renai. I tried.”
Cordelia crooked a finger and the mare stomped down on Cur’s chest, though she also let out a snort that said she hadn’t really wanted to do it. That was interesting. “If he speaks again, crush him,” Cordelia said, her polite veneer cracking and revealing something cold and cruel beneath it. Then she smiled and the mask had been replaced. “You know, you were a very difficult little death spirit to manage,” she said. “Every time I thought I had you pointed in the right direction, you wandered off somewhere else. It was quite distracting.”
“Sorry to be so much trouble,” Renai said.
“I didn’t say you were trouble, dear. I am a goddess of chaos. I thrive on trouble. You were a distraction.” She gestured, and an emery board appeared in her hand. She began to file away at one of her nails. “I nearly swapped you out for that Magician girl once or twice, and I daresay she would have been more effective in your place, but well, here we are. We must make do with what we have, am I right?” She flicked a finger, like she was halfheartedly pretending to conduct an orchestra, and Ramses—or more accurately, the demon inside of Ramses—raised the gun and pointed it at Renai.
“Wait,” Renai said, talking to the demon now, the lost and tortured spirt that possessed Ramses, “just a second.” Her hands were in the air, something she didn’t remember doing, but that’s what you did when someone aimed a gun at you. She moved closer, slow step after slow step, her heart pounding in her chest. “I don’t know what she told you about that gun, but it’s cursed. It’ll draw you into it and trap you in there forever.”
