Gather the Fortunes

by Bryan Camp

  “Ain’t no one in there.” Cross reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a short stub of a cigar, which he lit by rubbing its tip against the pad of his thumb. The smoke it emitted was acrid and foul, like burning tires. “Seein’ as every devil, black spirit, damned soul, and toppled god that’s supposed to be on ice in there done absconded in the fuckin’ night.”

  “What?” Sal asked, so surprised that he didn’t even curse.

  “Right before the Hallows,” Renai said, more to herself than actually expecting a response. “They’ll be able to go wherever they want.”

  Cross made a grunt of affirmation, grinning past the cigar clamped between his teeth. He tucked it into the corner of his mouth so he could speak. “Them we ain’t already caught by then, anyways.”

  “That’s why you locked the Gates,” Sal said. “To make it harder for them to escape.”

  Cross tipped an imaginary hat in the psychopomp’s direction. “For all the good it’s gonna do us. Them Gates is gonna be ’bout as useful as a half-inch dick come midnight. Which I guess was the plan, huh?”

  Which was when Renai realized what Cross had meant by her being a part of the escape. Judging by the high-pitched whine coming from Sal, he’d figured it out, too. “You think we did this,” she said.

  “Ain’t no ‘think’ about it. I know it for a fact. This place has got y’all’s stink all over it. Only thing—”

  “That’s from the other side!” Sal shouted. “Check with Plumaj! We collected a death from—”

  Cross waved a hand at Sal and muttered a word that sounded familiar to Renai, which was strange, since it was in a language she didn’t even recognize. Whatever the word was, it made the air vibrate like a thunderclap without sound and snapped Sal’s mouth closed mid-word. “Only thing,” Cross repeated, “I can’t figure is why you come back. You leave something behind? Or y’all just that caca-shit-for-brains stupid?”

  Renai truly didn’t know what to say. Not only was she being accused of something she hadn’t done—couldn’t have done if she’d wanted to—she felt like she was missing some crucial detail. Cross said he’d smelled them both here at the prison, while Sal claimed that the scent he was picking up was from the living side of things, when he’d gone to collect Miguel Flores from Orleans Parish Prison. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? Unless her memory lapses were far greater than she thought. Or Cross was lying to get them to confess. Or she and Sal were getting framed somehow. Beside her, Sal was grunting against the gag of his sealed jaws, but Renai couldn’t tell if the word he wanted to say was “run” or “wait” or “no” or “yes.” Probably something else entirely.

  So, certain that she couldn’t lie well enough to fool Cross, and knowing that he wouldn’t believe the truth of their innocence no matter how many times she proclaimed it, Renai opened her mouth and said what she’d been wanting to say since Sal first came through the First Gate without a soul to deliver, spoke the words that had been crowding her tongue throughout their search through the depths of the Underworld.

  “I want to talk to the Thrones,” she said.

  Cross’s mouth stretched open so wide that he dropped his cigar, laughed so hard that he had to bend down and clutch his knees. Renai would have thought the loa was faking it, if not for the strained, high-pitched giggling tearing out of his throat. No one would make that embarrassing a sound if they could help it. It would have been the perfect opportunity to make a break for it, except they had nowhere to go.

  When Cross recovered—still grinning and shaking his head—he sighed. “Thrones ain’t lookin’ to help you, no. What you think, you gon’ lawyer up?” He waved his hand at her, like shooing away a fly. “Fuck outta here with that noise. You got your head up in them TV shows too much, girl.” The way he said the word “girl” let Renai exactly what Cross thought of women. “This here is my place. My rules. You ’bout to tell me everything you know, everything you done. Your little dog, too. And when I’m finished, ain’t even your own shadows gon’ recognize you.”

  Shadows, Renai thought, and with it came an idea, a desperate grasp at a fleeting hope. She didn’t know if it would work, since Cross had closed the Gates. But she had to try. Cross came toward her, not hurrying, knowing he didn’t need to. Hands loose at his sides, a humorless grin plastered on his face. Nothing threatening—except everything about him was a threat. She tried to see the world from his perspective, tried to imagine what it must be like to be closed off from everyone and everything. To be bound—not only by his role as a god—but as only a reflection of another. To be perpetually an antagonist, to be seen, first and always, as a devil.

  No wonder his eyes never stopped weeping.

  When she found that tiny seed of compassion, she reached down deep and woke up the tempest within her. The power burst through her skin like the slap of scalding hot water, the winds lashing out and the rain pelting down, hammering Cross full in the chest and driving him back. His laughter howled like the tempest she’d hurled at him. He leaned into it, slanted almost sideways, and crept forward, his bare toes digging into the muddy Underworld earth, his coat flapping behind him. The tempest whirled around her, with Renai at its calm, still center. She felt Sal, fur sopping wet and shivering, huddle against the back of her legs. She gritted her teeth and pushed harder, trying to scour the flesh from Cross’s bones. He kept creeping forward.

  “Ain’t no storm can hold me back, girl!” he shouted. “Can’t nobody stop me but me!”

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” Renai said, and pulled her mirror from the nowhere place where it resided. She held it up with both hands, where Cross couldn’t help but look into its surface where his other half waited. Behind him, Cross’s shadow twisted and bent, the horns flattening and spreading into a hat’s brim, an arm stretching down to become a third leg. An old man, leaning on a cane.

  Papa Legba.

  Renai felt her magic take hold, her destructive capacity as a death spirit as wild and terrible as a hurricane. She gripped Cross with this power, as tightly as she could, and tore. She couldn’t pull him free from his Shadow; they were too linked, too complete a circuit to be separated, but she could break Cross’s hold on this place. She strained, bearing down on Cross with all her strength, not pulling back even when she tasted blood, and then, with a scream of rage that cut off midway through, the young, horned man melted into darkness and an elderly black man in a lavender suit stood in his place, nearly toppled by the tempest the instant he appeared.

  Renai didn’t restrain the storm’s power so much as she simply exhausted her strength, the wind and the rain vanishing in an abrupt silence, like a singer’s voice giving out mid-note. She wavered on her feet, nearly dropping to her knees, but her wings unfurled and fluttered, keeping her upright.

  “My oh my oh my,” Legba said, shaking the rainwater from his trilby hat and grinning his gap-toothed smile at her. Everything about him was different than Cross, even his voice. When Legba spoke, his tone was soft and kind and tinged with a Caribbean accent. “Strange weather we’re having, don’t you think?”

  Much as she wanted to beg the loa for his help, Renai needed some time to regain her strength. She dropped to the ground with her back against one of the fake trees, hands trembling and head spinning and skin slick with sweat. Sal wandered off to just at the edge of earshot, shaking himself dry and cursing and muttering, though Renai couldn’t make out what he was saying. Legba seemed content to wait for them, smoking from a clay pipe he’d stuffed with some sweet-smelling dried leaf.

  Renai kept telling herself that she didn’t have time to rest, and then kept struggling—and failing—to rise. She’d been on the track team in high school and remembered once going all weak and jittery like this during an especially hot summer practice. Her coach had taken one look at her and sent her into the locker room with a trainer, saying she was right on the verge of heatstroke. The trainer had told her she was lucky that she was a girl, that the football players got told to toug
h it out. Renai hadn’t been able decide if that was more infuriating to be thought weaker because of her sex, or more sad on behalf of the boys.

  The next day, she’d clocked the fastest mile she’d ever run.

  Eventually—second after precious second until midnight slipping away—her skin cooled and her heart stopped fluttering in her chest and she managed to haul herself, shakily, to her feet. Sal came trotting over. There were things she needed to know, questions about the Underworld and the holes in her memory and the circumstances of her resurrection, but before either she or Sal could speak, Legba pointed in their direction with the stem of his pipe and said, “The both of you got someplace else to be, no?”

  Sal sighed. “The Thrones, right? How pissed are they, on a scale of one to wiping-us-from-existence?”

  Renai felt a spike of guilt tinged with a flicker of hope. Part of her had known, from the moment that Sal came through the First Gate alone, that they didn’t have the jurisdiction or the knowledge or the power to handle Ramses’ disappearance on their own. That they were, to quote her father, “trying to stuff ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag.” But Mason’s offer had made her greedy, which had made her stupid. She’d been so focused on finding Ramses, so desperate to trade what he’d stolen for a one-way ticket into the Far Lands, that she’d done everything but plug up her ears and yell “I can’t hear you” to her own conscience. She had no idea why Sal had gone along with it. But now they were caught. Now the authorities could handle everything. Now Death could sort it all out.

  But then Legba went and ruined everything.

  “Not Les Morts,” he said, shaking his head. “This call come from the Marketplace.”

  “That means the living world,” Sal said to her, speaking to her without turning his head.

  “If there was ever a time for you to not mansplain at me out the side of your mouth . . .” Renai said, letting the rest of her threat go unspoken.

  Legba’s lips quirked, and he put his pipe back into his mouth to keep from smiling. After a few puffs, he took it out again and said, “I can’t reopen the Gates until after the Hallows begin, not without risking another struggle with my dark side, but this I can grant. No need to thank me.”

  He gestured at them with his cane, which clattered like a ceremonial rattle, and suddenly they were bathed in a harsh, hot glare. Renai tried to find the source of it, but it was like looking directly into a spotlight. Her eyes watered, and her heart started pounding, though in anticipation of what, she couldn’t say. Sal squeezed as close to her as he could.

  From somewhere far, far away, Renai heard the sound of a trumpet being played. It was just at the edge of hearing, but she swore that if she could just hear it a little better, she’d be able to recognize the musician. Maybe even the song.

  And then, with an abrupt explosion of momentum like a ride in an amusement park, Renai was yanked all the way to the top of the Underworld.

  And then out of it entirely.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A yantra woven, thread by thread, image by image, into a fine carpet. Chalk on a gravestone sketching out a shaky veve that won’t last through the next rain. A temenos built of marble that survives for centuries longer than the forgotten deity who made it sacred. A mandala sculpted out of colorful sand, poured with the grace of deep meditation. A Solomonic circle, drawn according to a precise formula. Ancient as the kivas of the Anasazi, modern as the copper mesh of a Faraday cage. Arcane symbols and geometries, ritual and craft and symmetry. Sacred spaces, messages, prayers, boundaries, traps. The universe made small, the soul writ large. Circles within circles, all with one purpose: to let the magic in and keep the darkness out.

  Renai knew she wasn’t in the Underworld anymore before she even opened her eyes. After the sterile, still silence of the other side, the living world roared and reeked and rioted all around her. She smelled the baking cake scent of lit candles, the bleach bite of cleaning products, the old pennies taste of metal polish, and the greasy, rich aroma of fried chicken. She heard the bluster of traffic, engines and horns and sirens, the rumble of an old AC unit, and the constant hum of electrical appliances. The plaintive croon of a brass instrument had stopped the moment she arrived.

  She found herself kneeling on a hard, cold floor, her skin itchy and too tight, like her anxiety had become literal, her flesh crawling. Her eyes she’d kept squeezed shut, a headache pounding between her temples, genuinely afraid to see who, or what, had the power to pull her—and only her, Sal got ripped away from her before she left the Underworld—past the boundary of the First Gate so easily.

  “You sure it’s her?” A voice she almost recognized, deep and raspy and thick with an old-school New Orleans accent.

  “Last time I trusted something from the Underworld, I ended up with a tattoo on my tit and a nasty case of the clap,” a second voice said, higher-pitched, but harder-edged than the first one.

  “That a no?”

  “That’s a no.” A throat cleared. “Hey. Creepy little death spirit. Your name Renaissance Raines?”

  When Renai opened her eyes, the world was a wash of primary colors, blues and reds and yellows, the blurred haze of thermal imaging. Streaks of crimson and deep pools of indigo filled the room; not heat, but magic. Wards and talismans and—surrounding her—the twisting geometries of a summoning circle. Two human-shaped figures stood side by side within their own smaller circle burning like fireworks. Then the colors slipped out of her vision. Slowly, like the afterimage of a blinding camera flash fading away, and she could see normally again.

  She’d been summoned by a petite white woman with short auburn hair and a tall, lanky black man with round spectacles and a trumpet hanging loose in his hand. The woman wore jeans torn at the knee and a T-shirt with a symbol that Renai was pretty sure came from Star Wars, and the man had on tan slacks, a white dress shirt that hung baggy on his lean frame, and a brown vest. She had rounded cheeks and smooth skin; might’ve been anywhere from her late twenties to her early thirties, maybe even older if she was a four-times-a-week-yoga-health freak. He had the complexion of a man aged by years of long nights spent in bars, but Renai’s assumption might have been biased by the instrument in his hand.

  The two seemed familiar somehow, but if Renai knew them, the memory of it had been wiped out by her resurrection. When she finally recognized the musician, it was from her memories from before her death: an album cover from her father’s vinyl collection. “You’re Leon Carter,” she said.

  The woman snapped her fingers three times in quick succession at Renai, a gesture both irritating and effective. “Try again, Sparkles,” she said. “We didn’t ask for his name. We asked for yours.”

  “Sparkles?” Renai looked down at herself and saw that she wore the floofy, lace-covered white dress and the red sneakers she’d been buried in. She tugged at it and felt the pull on her wings at her back. She flexed them, finding them smaller and more rigid than their counterparts in the Underworld, certainly nothing that would carry her weight. Reaching back, she ran a hand along the fragile, paper-thin tip of one wing, coming back with fingertips covered in glitter.

  Whether it was shock from being pulled across the First Gate, or some effect of the summoning these two had worked, or just simple exhaustion, Renai’s thoughts felt sluggish and thick. She wanted to ask why she should trust either of them, why she would confirm information as intimate and magically potent as her name for a couple of kidnapping strangers who obviously had both the knowledge and power to use it against her, and where they’d learned her name in the first place. What came out instead was “My name?”

  “Yes,” Leon said, patient and coaxing. “Tell us who you are.”

  “Oh, suck my dick with this pussy-footing shit,” the woman said. She made a twisting, grasping motion with one hand, and the chalk circle around Renai flared phosphorescent-bright.

  A sensation like the sudden need to vomit gripped Renai, and words came ripping out of her mouth, “My name is R
enaissance Dantor Raines! I’m a psychopomp and I’m searching for Ramses St. Cyr and I’ve forgotten so much of the last five years that it scares me!”

  “Regal, that’s enough,” Leon said. He grabbed the woman’s wrist and shook the gesture out of her hand. The compulsion to speak ebbed out of Renai. She’d managed to hold back Sal’s name, and her deal with Mason, and her desire for a one-way trip to the Far Lands, but only just. If Leon hadn’t stopped Regal—assuming something so fake-sounding was actually her name, but then again her own parents had called her Renaissance, so who was she to judge—she’d have told these two everything she wanted to keep secret, down to who she thought about when she touched herself on long, lonely nights and the time she’d cheated on an English exam in high school. The thought that this woman had that much control over her made her want to throw up for real.

  She locked eyes with Regal and saw a person who just straight-up did not give a fuck about her. Renai had seen that expression before. Sometimes because she was a woman, sometimes because of the color of her skin. Her youth, her piercings—back before resurrection had sealed the punctures in her lip, eyebrow, nose, and ears—her neighborhood, her idiolect, the education that taught her words like “idiolect,” all of it meant that people thought they knew her just by looking at her. Renai felt her spine straighten, her thoughts clearing like she’d been nodding off and had jolted awake. She smiled at Regal, but really it was just showing her teeth.

  Sooner she was done with this bitch right here, the better.

  “What do you want from me?” Renai phrased it as a question, but her tone made it a command. Regal smiled too, a mirror of Renai’s own. Good. They understood each other. That meant the woman finally saw her at least—instead of whatever image she’d looked down on.

  That, she could work with.

  Before Regal could say anything, Leon—who must have read the room based on the placating tone in his voice—said, “The dead are restless. Spirits can’t cross over, bodies up and walkin’ ’round. Couple, three days now, far as we can tell. Can’t none of us on this side figure out why, and if y’all sent us messages, we ain’t got ’em.”