by Bryan Camp
MEET ME OUTSIDE AFTER CLASS, the note read. AND YOUR LITTLE BIRD, TOO.
About an hour later, Renai sat on the steps out front watching the traffic pass by, M.I.A. in her ears telling her to live fast and die young, and images of the Fourth Gate—where the Essence of a soul was separated from its opposite, Shadow self—on her mind. Ramses’ teacher came around the corner of the building and waved at her, urgently, to follow. Renai plucked her earbuds out and rose to her feet only to find that the woman had already vanished back the way she’d come. Cordelia fluttered up onto Renai’s shoulder from the low stone wall she’d been pacing along. “Be wary,” the psychopomp said in her ear, “this one sees more than she should.”
Renai didn’t know what she expected to discover when she followed the teacher, but finding her smoking a cigarette, leaning against the railing that led up to a side door, wasn’t one of the possibilities she’d imagined.
The woman wore a loose black skirt that fell past her knees and a dark blue, almost denim shirt with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up her strong, wiry forearms. Her glasses were tucked up on top of her head, holding back stray strands of her salt-and-pepper hair. Hints of tattooed rose vines on each pale white arm peeked out beneath the sleeves. She breathed out a thin plume of smoke as Renai walked up. She didn’t turn to greet them, seemed lost in contemplation of the house across the street. Her cheerful, exuberant demeanor had vanished. When she spoke, it was as if she were talking to herself. To anyone else, Renai realized, that’s exactly what it would look like.
“Couple, three months ago,” she said, “one of my students was implicated in a shooting. Good kid, momma raised him to say ‘yes, ma’am, no ma’am,’ came to school on the regular, the whole deal. The police learned he was diligent in his attendance and showed up to my classroom to arrest him. I stood in the door and told them that if they thought they were stepping foot in my room, they better plan on putting cuffs on me, too.” She took a drag of her cigarette, held it, blew it out through her nose. “Now, I’m no fool. Just because he’s sweet as sugar in my class doesn’t mean he didn’t have a part in some bad thing. All the bad shit in this world was done by someone who was a good kid once upon a time.” She flicked ash off the tip of her cigarette, watched it go spiraling away into nothing. “And I’m not some ‘eff the po-leese’ cop hater, either. My uncle was a cop. You do what you do, you pay the price. They picked Deke up after school and booked his ass. But that’s not the point.” She glanced down at her watch, frowned. “The point is, school should be a safe place for everyone. Period.” She shifted her whole body around to face Renai, her gray eyes angry and hard.
“Which means you two, whoever the fuck you are, have found yourselves on my shit list for strolling into my classroom like it belongs to you. Please feel free to explain. And quickly, too. I got sub duty in, like, fifteen minutes.”
Cordelia started to say something, but Renai spoke over her. “We’re looking for someone,” she said. “One of your students. We think he’s in danger.” It wasn’t a lie, she told herself. They did, after all, genuinely want to help him. The fact that they also might have to end his life was simply a matter of perspective.
“Ramses,” the teacher said, not exactly a question, but her tone was looking for confirmation. When Renai nodded, she did too, but slower, like she was accepting more than agreeing. “Okay,” she said after a moment, “okay.” She stuck the cigarette in between her lips and reached down to take Renai’s hand. Her grip was strong and warm. “Name’s Opal. Opal Brennan.”
“I’m Renai.”
“I kinda figured you two were here about him,” Opal said.
“What makes you say that?” Renai asked, at the same time that Cordelia said, “How can you see us?”
Opal laugh-coughed out a puff of smoke. “So the bird talks too, huh? Sure, why not.” She rubbed at her eyes like she was trying to wipe away a headache. “I say that because he’s the only student I’ve got that’s, you know”—she waved the hand holding the cigarette in a way that included both Renai and Cordelia—“special. Like y’all. And I can see you because I can see everything. It’s my ‘gift.’”
Opal made little air quotes with her fingers when she said the word gift, pronounced it like it was a curse word. “I used to be a card reader in the Quarter. I was good at it. Real good. And then I helped out a friend who turned out to be an honest-to-goddess magician. Come to find out I was good at reading the cards because my spiritual sight or whatever you wanna call it was half-open. But then my friend opened it up all the way for me.”
She chuckled and took one last drag off her cigarette before she crushed it out on the metal railing and, making sure it had been extinguished, tucked the butt away in a pocket. “That was the end of fortunetelling for me. You’d think being able to clearly and accurately see someone’s past, present, and future would be lucrative, but actually it just weirds folks out in a get-the-torches-and-pitchforks kinda way. So here I am, finally using the Tulane history degree my daddy bought me and trying to change some lives.”
“What does ‘special like us’ mean?” Renai asked.
A flash of Opal’s earlier suspicion wrinkled the flesh around the woman’s eyes. “You know, otherworldly. Mythic.” She let out an annoyed huff. “You really gonna make me say the word? He was magic, all right? That’s something else I can see, now, too. Auras, if you wanna get all New Agey about it. How do you think I knew you weren’t just some spooky-looking girl with a bird on her shoulder when you walked in my room? Miss Feathers there shifts and glows like a lava lamp, and you’re always standing in shadow. Ramses is magic, just like the two of you.”
Before Renai could wrap her head around what that might mean—both in terms of what she knew about herself and how it might impact her search for the missing boy—the bells rang, faintly, in the building behind Opal. The seer frowned.
“Crap,” Opal said. “I really gotta go now. Give me your number and I’ll call you later on. I’ll ask around, see if anybody knows where he’s been the past few days. I’ll get Tameka to check his Facebook and Twitter and whatnot; that sneaky little shit has always got her phone on her. Don’t need to be a prophet to see that.” As they exchanged numbers, Renai’s mind spun, trying to think of something she could ask that might tell her where to look next, but when Opal pulled open the thick metal door and waved an absentminded goodbye, it was Cordelia who spoke.
“What did you see when you looked at the boy?” the ’pomp asked. Opal froze, didn’t leave, but didn’t answer, either. “You see something different for each of us, you said. What’s his aura?”
“He looked like fire,” Opal said, after a long, uncomfortable silence. “From head to toe and in his smile and in his eyes, Ramses burns.”
Chapter Eight
After they left Ramses’ school, Renai and Cordelia spent the rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon bouncing across the city, chasing Renai’s memories of the few times she’d skipped school when she was Ramses’ age. They lurked in shopping mall food courts and greasy spoon diners, stalked up and down the darkened aisles of movie theaters while superheroes battled onscreen, hunted among the sprawling oaks of City Park, the jogging and bike paths of Audubon Park, the sweating, hustling bodies on the fenced-in basketball court behind the Second District Police Station. Renai had never really thought of New Orleans as a big city, certainly not in comparison with a place like New York or Chicago, but she quickly realized it was plenty big enough to get lost in.
It didn’t help that she couldn’t seem to shake her uneasy recollections of the Fourth Gate, where the Gatekeeper, a red-haired white woman named Bridgette, forced the dead to examine themselves in her mirror and—if they could stand the truth that was revealed there—cut away their Shadow before letting them pass. It felt like her own mind was trying to tell her something important about Ramses, about the true version of him that Opal had seen. Something she’d once known and forgotten.
; Just randomly stumbling across Ramses’ path—a needle in a whole field full of haystacks—would take, as her grandmother would have said, the devil’s own luck. But with Cordelia letting Renai take the lead and Sal MIA, she had to turn over the stones she could reach. She had hoped that Ramses’ presence would give off that same sense of wrongness as the wound he’d left in the world, that he’d carve a wake through the living world that she and Cordelia would be able to smell and see and feel. But in all their searching, Renai didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary, and if Cordelia caught any such scent, she gave no sign—content to ride in a quiet little bundle of feathers on Renai’s shoulder and answering all her questions with a negative monosyllabic grunt.
All Renai found was a growing unease, a fear that Ramses’ disappearance was bigger than Sal had told her, that the missing boy—though according to Opal, he wasn’t just a boy—and the locked Gates and the silent Deadline and her mentor’s absence were all connected somehow, that she was in the middle of something she didn’t yet entirely understand. So once the afternoon turned to evening, she rolled past the St. Cyr house once more in hopes that the boy had gone home, and if not, that she might find some clue there about where he could be.
Instead, she found an NOPD cruiser parked at the curb.
Using the ghost word just long enough to get inside, Renai walked into the middle of a conversation between Juliette St. Cyr and a white lady cop that had been going on for at least a few minutes before she got there. Long enough that they were past the introductions and the please-have-a-seat parts of the discussion. The police officer—short for a cop but average height for a woman, dark red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, her intent eyes studying Juliette’s face without looking down to write on the pad in her hands—sat in the old pleather recliner, perched on the edge of it like a spring, compressed and tense. Her thigh muscles bulged in her uniform pants; Renai recognized a fellow runner when she saw one. She wondered if the officer knew she sat in the “good” chair, if she’d been offered that seat out of respect, or if she’d just taken it.
“—know I’m supposed to wait twenty-four hours before y’all say he missing,” Juliette was saying as Renai walked in, the older woman’s voice raw as if she’d been crying, “but I’m tellin’ you, my Ki—my Ramses ain’t the kind to go runnin’ them streets. He ain’t never cut school before, neither.”
“That twenty-four-hour thing is just something they say on TV, Mrs. St. Cyr,” the cop said, drawing out her vowels in a not-from-New-Orleans sort of accent. “You did right to call us. You say he skipped school today?”
Juliette, a decade older than the memory Renai had been picturing, nodded. She’d always been a very pretty woman, and age had merely drawn her tighter, her cheekbones more pronounced, her hands more knuckle and bone than in her youth. She had dark purple extensions in her long, straightened hair and was also wearing a uniform: the burgundy jacket of a clerk at one of the fancy hotels in the Quarter. “They called while I was at work this afternoon. They say he ain’t been all week, but that don’t make no sense. I got him up and out the house same time as always, this mornin’ even. He carried his books with him and everything.”
The cop, Officer Coughlin according to her name tag, fought a smirk. “Whenever I used to cut class—not that I made a habit of it, you understand—I always brought my school stuff when I left the house. Added authenticity.”
“Yeah?” Juliette asked, sniffling into a handful of tissues. “What high school you went to?”
To her credit, Coughlin smiled like she knew what Juliette was really asking, what anybody in the city meant by that question. “I stay in the Irish Channel,” she said, sidestepping the issue pretty deftly. She took her eyes off of Juliette for the first time and nodded in the direction of one of the photographs on the wall. “You think we oughta speak to his dad?”
“Ramses’ daddy?” Juliette got a far-off look on her face that Renai caught but Coughlin—unless the NOPD had a much more mystically sensitive training program than Renai assumed—probably misread. When you encountered the supernatural on a regular basis, your worldview shifted to accommodate the impossible as simply factual. So talking to a demigod or summoning a spirit or witnessing a miracle became just a thing that happened to you. Remembering one of these events might be profound or alarming or confusing, but only in the way that recalling a car accident or the birth of a child might be impactful. Things were different when the divine touched your life only once. Assuming you didn’t just deny it, didn’t push the moment down into a locked box that your memory never opened, that experience became fundamental to the way you saw things, the pivot that your world spun around. For Renai, a god showing up was a hassle. For most people, it would be an epiphany.
And whenever someone with only a single connection to the magical remembered that pivotal, miraculous moment, they couldn’t stop themselves from pulling the same dreamy, half-stoned face that Juliette St. Cyr wore when she thought of Ramses’ father.
Cordelia, who hadn’t said more than half a dozen words since they’d spoken to the teacher, chuckled from Renai’s shoulder. “Oh my,” she said, “you naughty kitten. Whose cream have you—” Renai jerked her arm and made a shushing noise. The little psychopomp huffed and settled her weight in a way that felt like turning her back, but at least she stayed quiet.
When Coughlin cleared her throat and said Juliette’s name, the woman blinked and seemed to remember where she was. “No,” she said, “Dom stay in Houston now.”
“Dom?” Coughlin asked, lifting her pad and pen slightly to finish the question.
“Dominic St. Cyr.” She peered at the cop’s notepad when Coughlin wrote down the name as if she were checking the spelling. “He found good work out there after the storm and just kinda stayed. We talked about all of us going out there, but I got a good thing at the hotel, and he ain’t making that good a money.” She shrugged. “You know how it go.”
Coughlin nodded as if she knew exactly how it went. “You think Ramses might have gone to Houston to see his father? Wouldn’t be the first time a young man—”
“Nah, Ki-ki wouldn’t do that just to see Dom. We was gon’ spend Thanksgiving with him, and they on that FaceTime once a week. I’m telling you, my boy got took.”
Renai couldn’t quite pin down exactly what changed about the police officer—she still sat just as straight-backed and still on the edge of the recliner’s seat, still watched Juliette with those intense eyes, but all of a sudden she went from being a coiled spring to a plucked guitar string, not just tense, but vibrating. “Do you know someone who might want to abduct your son, Mrs. St. Cyr?” Renai bet Coughlin sounded exactly the same when she recited Miranda rights.
“Sex traffickers!” Juliette snapped, like she’d been holding it back the whole time the cop had been in her home. “They told us all about ’em in church. I know you think they only go after pretty little white girls, but Ramses is different. He special.”
Renai felt as deflated as Coughlin looked. It wasn’t that Juliette’s theory was impossible, but it just wasn’t the solid lead that it had seemed. From Renai’s perspective, it was even more unlikely. No mere human would have the capacity to deny Ramses his fate, no matter how malevolent they might be. She’d heard enough. She flipped her hood up and used the ghost word to slip outside.
“Don’t you want to hear the rest?” Cordelia asked on the way out.
“Juliette doesn’t know anything we don’t already know,” Renai said. “She probably doesn’t even know who Ramses’ real father is. Not his real name, anyway.”
“You caught that too, did you? I suppose that accounts for what the teacher saw in his aura. There’s no end of fire deities, I’m afraid.”
But that wasn’t what had Renai’s mind whirling. The identity of Ramses St. Cyr’s father, the source of the boy’s power, didn’t matter to her as much as Juliette’s conviction that her son had been taken. Renai had collected enough sick children—had see
n enough mothers awaken with the knowledge of their child’s death already in their eyes—to know that maternal instinct was real and powerful, if not exact. She’d assumed that Ramses’ absence from his own death had been a kind of cosmic accident, worried that her presence had somehow thrown things out of balance. But what if Ramses hadn’t simply missed his own death?
What if he’d been abducted from it?
Despite these suspicions, she needed to follow through on the more simple explanations before she could turn toward the more supernatural side of things. And since it was now clear that Ramses wasn’t just missing from his moment of death but from his everyday life as well, she would need to start checking the hospitals and morgues.
Settling onto Kyrie’s seat, Renai turned the bike around in the street and headed for the closest one: Touro Infirmary. Cordelia curled into a quiet ball of feathers once more. Renai couldn’t tell if the little psychopomp was up in her feelings about something Renai had done, giving her the silent treatment as part of her “evaluation,” or just so bored that she’d fallen asleep.
As an emissary of Death, Renai had become familiar with the labyrinthine back halls and the convoluted bureaucracy that surrounded the process of dying in the twenty-first century. Sal often grumbled about how “fuckin’ complicated and sterile” dying had become, and—even without a frame of reference to judge against—Renai had to agree. People used to die at home, used to be cleaned and prepared for burial by the family. Now, unless you were in the room when it happened, death was like a disappearing trick on a magician’s stage. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. In a way, the morticians and coroners and hospice nurses she’d come across in her collections were all doing the same job as she was: easing an individual’s transition from one world to the next while keeping the lines between the living and the dead defined and inviolable.