by Bryan Camp
Yes, said the spirit, its moaning voice filled with a dark kind of glee. YES.
What kind of power is this?
The power of the flood, the storm spirit replied.
She could taste it as much as smell it, that brackish, rotten, oily reek of floodwaters, of rain constant and incessant and deadly. It seeped through her pores like sweat, spilled like tears from her eyes. Brown water puddled at her feet. She could hear the voice inside the ghoul hissing something, Cordelia’s twittering reply, but any meaning was drowned out by the torrential downpour roaring in her mind. Renai clenched her hands into fists, imagined that they were levees, felt the flood within her beat in time with her heartbeat against her palms, her knuckles, the bones of her hand. Whatever happened next, she knew, was going to hurt like a motherfucker.
Still, she smiled.
And opened her fists, releasing her floodwaters inside the flesh of the ghoul.
The waters burned like acid, filled with household cleaning chemicals and gasoline and factory-strength solvents, the flood ripped her palms and fingers and bones open and apart over and over again as it tore through the breach of her hands. It was agony, a torture of destruction that would have pulverized her flesh if it weren’t also a thing of magic. It was a greater pain than anything she’d ever felt before—but it was nothing she couldn’t endure.
At first, nothing happened. There was room inside the body, gaps and crevices for water to flow and seep and pool. When that filled, the release valves of his orifices began to leak, streams of dirty water oozing from his nostrils, his ears, between his lips. Renai clenched her teeth against the torment in her hands, straining to force the flood to even greater heights. The ghoul’s distended belly, flesh slack and pliant in death, bulged and stretched and rippled. The hand holding Cordelia released her and grabbed Renai by the back of the head, pulling her into a gruesome embrace, dragging her face toward its own. Toward its mouth. Its teeth.
The ghoul opened its jaws and lunged at her, but the flood burst out of it, a vomit of viscera and water and oil and rotting leaves that flowed through Renai without touching her, thanks to the ghost word, and knocked the corpse onto its back instead. It thrashed there for a moment and then went limp. As soon as Renai’s hands were free, she pulled back the flood, fighting to control its torrent just as hard as she’d been fighting to urge it on a moment before.
Remember, the storm moaned, twisting and writhing in Renai’s mental grip, you promised.
When the tempest was once more just a quiet churning in her belly, she pulled off her hood and returned to the physical world, amazed to find that her hands were fine, if aching and raw, instead of the gaping wounds she’d expected.
Cordelia hopped among the clogged-catch-basin junk the ghoul had spewed all over the morgue floor, searching among the leaves and brambles and empty potato chip bags and cigarette butts and chunks of flesh in her intent birdlike way. One eye on the ghoul, Renai watched her, not wanting to disturb whatever the little psychopomp was hunting. When she found it, Cordelia pounced, beak stabbing down to seize a target that Renai only caught a glimpse of, twitching stick legs and a fat insectile body, before it was snatched down Cordelia’s gullet and gone. Whatever it had been, Renai had seen enough of it to recognize that though it was tarnished—by the floodwaters or whatever power had animated the ghoul, Renai couldn’t be sure—the bug Cordelia ate had the same quicksilver appearance of a person’s Voice.
Renai, who hadn’t consumed any Voice of her own in going on two days now, felt a pang of hunger and then an immediate shudder of revulsion.
“Sorry,” Cordelia said. “Should we have split that?”
“Not at all,” Renai said, remembering what Sal had told her. “If it was meant for me, it would have been a shape I could eat.” She looked down at her ruined shoes and, even though none of the floodwaters had actually touched her, felt filthy and tired and drained. “Let’s get out of here before that nurse comes back and makes me mop this shit up.”
After a long, hot shower that left her skin feeling clean once more but did nothing for the cold hollow in her chest, Renai put on a pair of running shorts and an old Jazz Fest T-shirt and went into her all-but-empty kitchen to make coffee, knowing that she wouldn’t be getting much sleep for the second night in a row, certain she’d see the ghoul’s cloudy, rotting eyes every time she closed her own. She was surprised, at first, to find Cordelia perched on her counter, head buried beneath a wing in sleep, but then, with the Gates locked tight, it wasn’t like the ’pomp could go back to the Underworld where she belonged.
There was a place, deep in the Underworld, where Renai had once thought she belonged. The Fifth Gate, kept by a loa named Babaco, was a never-ending party in a mansion at the foot of Elysian Fields, a waiting place where the souls who weren’t ready to cross over into the afterlife—whichever one they might deserve—could pass their time in revelry. She didn’t remember much from her time there, couldn’t be sure that her memories were real, in fact, but she knew that it hadn’t truly satisfied her. Like most places in the Underworld, the revels at the Fifth Gate were a shadow of true enjoyment, a mere reflection. Come to think of it, so were most of the denizens of the Underworld, too. The loa and the Gatekeepers and Sal were vibrant, potent exceptions to the rule that said that most beings on the other side were dismal shades. Most psychopomps, too.
Renai still wasn’t quite sure which category Cordelia fell into.
Maybe it was unkind, but Cordelia’s presence didn’t inspire much confidence in Renai. In truth, without Sal guiding her, Renai had no idea what to do next. Every thought, every option felt leaden, purposeless. After her nightmares the night before had made sleep impossible, she’d lain awake in her empty apartment, staring at the ceiling and putting together a plan for how this day would go. She’d listen to the Deadline, meet up with Sal, they’d track down Ramses, and she’d somehow find a solution to the wound he’d left in the world that didn’t require his death. She’d been wrong about every single thing, and no one would give her a straight answer. Nobody was where they were supposed to be or who they were supposed to be, and she was just some cosmic accident who should have died years ago.
What hope did she have of changing anything?
Once she’d taken a few sips of coffee, she found her cell phone and played the message from Opal once more. The call reminded Renai that she’d asked the little psychopomp a question in the morgue, and that they’d been interrupted before she’d had a chance to answer. So after the voicemail finished playing, she cleared her throat, and when that didn’t work, reached out and nudged the little bird with a finger. Cordelia ruffled her feathers when she pulled her head out from beneath her wing, and Renai couldn’t read the bird’s body language well enough to tell if she was sleepy or irritated, or something else entirely.
She didn’t much care, either.
“Listen to this,” she said. She played the message again. When it finished, she set down her mug and leaned onto the counter so that she and the little bird were eye-to-eye. “You never answered my question before. If I get you to the Ghost Train, can you tell if Ramses was there? Can you track him?”
“Ghost Train? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Cordelia said, a note of prim injury in her voice. “This mortal seems incredibly well-informed, to know about an aspect of the Underworld of which even I am unaware. Are you sure she can be trusted?”
“It’s not—” She took a deep breath and a sip of her coffee before answering. “The Ghost Train is made-up. It’s a Halloween thing, like trick-or-treating or . . .” She trailed off, faced with Cordelia’s blank stare. It occurred to her that Cordelia was either incredibly uninformed about the modern living world, or she was fucking with her. Renai was starting to lean toward the latter. “It’s like a play,” she said. “A scary play that they put on every year for Halloween. Get it?”
“Ah, yes, I see,” Cordelia said. “In that case, the answer is no.”
“To what p
art?”
“To all of it. I am neither specially attuned to this boy nor able to follow his spoor like some woodsman stalking game.”
Renai’s eyes narrowed. “Weird. Because that’s just how Sal would do it.”
Cordelia clicked her tongue. “And what makes you think he and I have anything in common?”
“Um, you’re both psychopomps?”
Tittering, condescending laughter. “That is a role, not a denomination.” Renai spun her finger in a circle, a keep-on-going gesture. “There is more variation in the cosmos than merely gods and men,” Cordelia said. “There are spirits and demons, kami and geniuses and djinn. Some psychopomps are full deities who have been worshiped for millennia; others are mere scraps of magic, alive only so long as they fulfill the purpose for which they have been created.” Her head tilted to the side and studied Renai. “Did your mentor truly explain none of this?”
“He never explained anything!” The words burst out of her throat far more angrily than she’d intended, the darkness within her rising in response to her anger. She didn’t even really believe what she’d said. Sal had taught her how to use the ghost word, how to collect the dead and lead them to the First Gate. But nothing about the world in which she’d found herself.
Nothing about how to survive without him.
“And why do you think that is?” the little bird said, her voice quiet and measured, as if she were trying to calm a child throwing a temper tantrum. It only made Renai even more pissed off. She paced across the apartment, clenching and unclenching her fists. She tried to calm herself, tried to remember if she and Sal had ever had a conversation like this, but all she really wanted to do right then was break something.
“I’m starting to think,” she said, “that no one really has any idea what’s going on, all the way up to and including the Thrones, but nobody wants to admit it. Mortals, spirits, psychopomps, gods. Everybody’s clueless. We’re up here chasing our tails, and we can’t talk to the mysterious, all-knowing Thrones. Do they decide who gets to live and who has to die, or don’t they? There’s some weird shit going on, but don’t bother the Thrones, they need a little ‘me time.’ The Hallows start tomorrow at midnight and we’re all on our own. Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of harmonious balance? Isn’t somebody supposed to be in goddamn charge? What’s the point of all this if not even Death has their shit together?”
Cordelia merely stared at her with her unblinking bird’s eye, but Renai got the impression that the psychopomp was trying to hide a smile.
“Feel free to jump in with an idea whenever you feel the urge,” Renai said, “because to tell you the truth, I’m pretty sick of being the only one who seems to give half a shit about what’s happening here.”
“It seems to me,” Cordelia said, “that if you can’t get the answers you want by following the rules, perhaps you ought to try talking to those who have broken them.”
A strange frisson ran up Renai’s spine at Cordelia’s words, a sensation that was both invigorating and transgressive. “Do you know anyone like that?”
“Oh, yes,” the psychopomp said, delight evident in her voice. “One or two.”
Chapter Ten
The next morning, Renai went about her routine the same as always, though Cordelia’s presence and the still-silent Deadline left her feeling irritable and out of place, like she didn’t quite fit in her skin. She dressed in a pair of jeans with torn knees and an old Audubon Zoo T-shirt, from which she’d cut the sleeves and the elastic collar in a style her friends had called “gutter-punk chic,” which had struck her as both accurate and classist as hell.
As she laced up a pair of black combat boots with thick soles that added a few inches to her height, she told herself that her sartorial choices had nothing to do with the possibility of having to flood out another ghoul before the day was done. She pulled her hair back into a tight bun that would be hard for anyone to grab, and touched, absently, the bare skin along her collarbone, not realizing that she’d reached for the St. Christopher medal her mother had given her, the one blessed by a voodoo priestess named Celeste.
Everything felt off and out of control, but in a way that was more familiar than the fog of routine that had shrouded her mornings for longer than she could recall. Sure of nothing—not even her place in this world—except for the fact that she needed to find Ramses St. Cyr, she slipped into the leather jacket the Thrones had given her despite the high of eighty degrees that the weather app predicted, despite the fact that she swore she could still smell guts and floodwater on it even though none of it had touched her, even though she’d scrubbed the leather until her arms were sore.
She had to come correct for Halloween, after all.
Downstairs, Renai found Cordelia on Kyrie’s handlebars, speaking quietly to the bike, who already rumbled with life. Renai climbed on, the little bird launching into the air instead of swooping to her shoulder as she’d expected, and as soon as Renai had a grip on the handlebars, the motorcycle surged into the street in a spray of gravel and exhaust.
Ignoring red lights and swerving around a truck idling its way through the intersection, Kyrie squealed around a turn and headed through the Uptown streets all the way to Canal, where she made a tight left turn and headed toward the lake. Any remaining doubt Renai might have had about Kyrie’s intelligence vanished as the bike wove through midmorning traffic and tore down side streets with an abandon she had never displayed when she was following Renai’s guidance. Renai had always found Kyrie’s easy, casual glide to be relaxing, a chance to gather her thoughts and consider her next move, but this scorching, reckless path across the city forced everything from her mind other than phrases like “breakneck speed” and “whiplash.” She clutched the handlebars and squeezed the bike with her thighs and, for the first time, wished she’d worn a helmet.
When they dashed beneath the I-10 overpass and continued down Canal without slowing, Renai figured they were heading for the cemeteries at the foot of Canal Street, but Kyrie braked hard when they passed RTA headquarters—a massive four-story edifice where the streetcars were housed—went thump-thump-thumping over the crisscrossing streetcar tracks, and made an illegal turn across the three oncoming lanes of Canal, to come skidding to a stop at the corner beneath a skeletal oak, engine idling and then sputtering out, leaving Renai facing a DO NOT ENTER sign.
Hope that’s not a hint, Renai thought. She slid off the bike, a little wobbly-legged from the intensity of the ride. A yoga studio sat on the other side of the street, but she imagined the place she’d been sent to was the derelict building in front of her.
It rose three stories high, with sheets of weathered plywood covering the windows on the first two floors, cut so that they fit flush inside in a way that made Renai think that once, many years ago, someone thought they would be unshuttered again before long. A stratum of fallen leaves covered the brick steps that led from the front walk to a small landing that had once sheltered a garden, and now held only the desiccated remains of ferns and weeds that hadn’t lived long enough to grow over the cement railing that edged the landing. The front door was grandiose, with a boarded-up arch that stretched to the second floor and a small balcony above that, with a coat of arms embellishment in between. A diagonal slash with a stilted A on either side. The entire front of the building had been whitewashed to cover up graffiti and had then been tagged once more.
It was a sadly familiar sight: a building that had the desolation of a decade’s vacancy, which had been built so well that it might stand vacant for another century if no one tore it down to build condos that wouldn’t survive a hurricane with half Katrina’s strength.
“Welcome,” Cordelia said from the branches above, startling Renai so much that she had to stifle a surprised yelp. If the psychopomp noticed, she didn’t mention it. She glided down to the stone railing and settled in, as if she were laying in a nest.
“Where are we, exactly?”
“An abandoned building, same as any
other. This one just happens to be the refuge of a handful of the dead who chose to stay on this side of things rather than find their rest. Salvatore never told you about this place?” When Renai shook her head, Cordelia tsked to herself. “He seems to have neglected much in your upbringing. Well, denying the thunder won’t halt the lightning. Do you have any questions before you go in?”
“Don’t you mean ‘we’?”
Cordelia tittered, a sound halfway between a human’s giggle and a bird’s whistle and entirely forced. “Those are the fugitive dead in there, Renaissance. They’d flee the moment I entered.” Renai started to protest that she was as much a psychopomp as Cordelia, but the bird held up a wing and kept talking. “You aren’t steeped in the aroma of the Underworld as I am; they won’t know what to make of you.” She preened beneath a wing with the fastidiousness of a person checking their fingernails after a manicure. “Unless you’d prefer to wait for the Gates to reopen. Perhaps Salvatore will return with instructions from the Thrones.”
The thought of sitting on her hands and waiting made Renai grind her molars together. “No,” she said. “We’re here, might as well see what we can find out.” She pulled the hood over her head, shutting out the noise of traffic, the glare of the morning sun. She flexed her fingers and bounced on her toes, like some part of her expected she’d have to chase one of these fugitive dead—or flee from them. “Any advice?”
“Just remember that you are an emissary of Death, and these dead are under your authority. Respect is not given. It is compelled.”
“Got it. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, just like Aretha taught us.” Before she could lose her nerve, Renai spoke the ghost word, braced herself for the electric sting of passing through a physical object, and walked through the front door into the derelict building.
The wrongness of the place pressed in on her from every direction, the stench and the whine and the waver of the wound that Ramses’ escape had left in his living room, but less intense and spread all over the place, the way her uncle’s aftershave had lingered, faintly, throughout the whole house hours after he’d left.