by Bryan Camp
Leon handed her a water bottle from Regal’s duffel bag, and she rinsed and spat, rinsed and spat, gagging still, until the water was gone and Leon half helped, half dragged her to her feet. He led her out into the light, Regal asking what happened and him trying to explain and everything going fuzzy and indistinct, music playing somewhere, just a single piano note plinking over and over again, and it smelled like popcorn with liquid butter and it smelled like rotten, stagnant water and it smelled like fresh-cut grass. Leon looked funny with that crown on his head, just like Regal looked sad with all that blood on her hands. Renai flicked her wings and they were made of rainbows, and Regal was shaking her and yelling in her face, and she was flying and she was flying and she was gone.
The next thing she knew, it was night and dark, and she was walking through the ruins of Jazzland with Ramses St. Cyr. They were heading toward a golden glow, so radiant bright that Renai could see the rays of light coming off of it, like a sun on the horizon in a child’s drawing. She’d flown here on the cascading wings of a rainbow—did that mean this was a leprechaun’s pot of gold? She laughed, but Ramses didn’t think it was funny. Or he hadn’t heard her. Or she hadn’t said it out loud.
She reached out to him, she had to stop him, she had to tell him not to do what he was about to do, she had to find out who he’d sold his soul to, but then, no, she didn’t reach out at all. Nothing happened, she just thought she should reach out and then decided not to. Something was wrong. She stopped, except, no, she didn’t do that either. She laughed again. Obviously, she was going to walk with Ramses until he did what he did so she might as well pay attention.
When they reached the source of the golden light, it was too bright to look at, so she looked down at her feet. Birds lay there, wings sprawled and still, and a cat, and two dogs, and a fox. They weren’t dead, she realized after a moment, their chests still rose and fell, rose and fell. They were asleep. A few steps closer, and there was one of the private security guards who patrolled the park after hours. He snored, a surprisingly delicate sound from a man so large.
But if whatever spell dominated this place could strike down a man that size, surely a boy of Ramses’ small stature would have succumbed. And sure enough, he swayed on his feet, lids drowsy and heavy, a slow smile creeping across his face. Was this it? Had he been dreaming his life away in this place the entire time she was searching for him? His head bobbed once, twice, and Renai wished he’d just sit down—if he fell to the concrete he might hurt himself—and then his chin dropped to his chest and he was asleep on his feet.
And then Ramses St. Cyr lifted his head and opened eyes made of fire.
He grinned, quick and confident and far too cynical for a boy Ramses’ age. “Not bad,” he said to himself, reaching across a shoulder and patting himself on the back. “Not bad at all.” And then he wasn’t Ramses at all, but a whirlwind of fire that wore a boy named Ramses like a comfortable pair of jeans. He reached out to the glow at the center of a ring of sleeping creatures and when he touched it, the glow faded enough for Renai to see it for what it was: a golden rod, about a yard long, capped with an orb and a pair of outspread white wings, with the carving of two serpents twined around the haft. Renai had seen it before, but she couldn’t remember where. Knew it belonged to someone she should know, but she couldn’t remember who. The being of fire inside Ramses St. Cyr looked down at this object of divine power, shrugged, and tucked it into the back of his school-uniform khaki pants.
He knelt down at the place where he’d found the rod and reached down into the hole it had left behind. His tongue crept out and wiggled at the corner of his mouth as his hand sought and searched, reaching deeper and deeper until his arm was down in the hole up to his armpit, and then his face shifted into a triumphant expression and he pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. The thing that wasn’t Ramses unwrapped it, humming to himself, stepping over the still-sleeping forms of the guard and the dogs and the birds. The cloth came free, and Renai saw that he held death in his hands.
She’d held it once, too, the gun, the cursed revolver that had trapped a fallen angel. She screamed and she made no sound. She ran and she went nowhere. She spread her butterfly wings, her fragile shards of rainbow, and fled, rising into a sky that held no stars, that was no escape. That gun, like all guns, was evil, an engine of only destruction, but unlike any other gun, it could kill literally anything, humans or spirits . . . or gods.
And now it was in the hands of a devil.
When Renai was herself again, she was sitting on an uncomfortable sofa whose springs were digging into her thighs, in a living room she didn’t recognize. She didn’t feel like she’d been asleep, more like a switch had been thrown in her mind: a moment ago she’d been wandering through roman-candy-scented rain clouds toward a stage where Donald Glover, in his Childish Gambino persona, wore furry pants and white paint streaks and sang a song he’d written just for her, and now she was here, in a loft apartment she’d never seen before, exposed brick walls and high ceilings and the flat-screen television mounted on the wall playing It’s a Wonderful Life with the sound turned off.
Her mouth felt full of cotton, and her limbs were as sore as if she’d finished a hard run and hadn’t bothered to stretch after. Her hair and her skin and her clothes were damp, from sweat, she thought at first, but then she heard the pock-pock-pock of rain drizzling outside. She knew she ought to feel some kind of way about all this, confused or angry or afraid, but instead a kind of languor sat in her chest and took the edge off of everything. So she sat there, calm, and waited for something to happen.
After a moment, one of the doors—which led into a bedroom from what Renai could see—opened and Regal came through, wearing a long blue coat with brass buttons, her arms filled with plastic masks. Her hair had been slicked back and forced into a tight ponytail, and she had a fake goatee pasted onto her face. The soles of her knee-high boots thumped on the hardwood floor.
“Why are you wearing a disguise?” Renai asked. Her words weren’t slurred as she’d expected, instead, her throat felt raw, like she’d just left the Dome after a Saints game.
“Glad to have you back,” Regal said, dumping her armload of masks onto the counter. “And it’s not a disguise, it’s a costume. It might be a re-reboot of Night of the Living Dead out there, but it’s still Halloween. You dress like the consequences of Tinker Bell and Joey Ramone’s busted condom, so you’re good, but if you think I’m going out there in street clothes like some goddamn plebe, you’re as confused as a cat with two assholes, my friend. I’m the Magician of New Orleans. I got a rep to maintain.”
Renai wasn’t fully collected yet, still recovering from whatever poison or drug had been on Aka’s tongue, but the more Regal talked, the more came back to her. The Hallows. The ghoul problem. The need to find Ramses. “Where’s Leon?” she asked. “And who are you supposed to be?”
“Leon’s on the phone, trying to reach Jude,” Regal said.
Oh, good, Renai thought. But why was it good? Why did that thought bring her relief? Renai knew something about Jude, something that she had to tell Leon and Regal. Something about Aka. But she couldn’t grasp it. She knew something about Ramses, but she couldn’t grasp that either.
“You really don’t recognize my outfit?” Regal cocked her head to the side. “Are you still tripping balls, or just bustin’ mine? I thought I did a pretty good job.” She struck a pose, one hand on her hip, the other pointing straight into the air. “How ’bout now?”
Renai shrugged. “Pirate? Vampire? Pirate vampire?” Except that didn’t make sense. There were no vampires in New Orleans anymore. Not since Jude had kicked them out, the same night that he—
And then she remembered everything.
She lunged to her feet, the pad of paper and pen that she hadn’t realized was in her lap falling to the floor. “I know what happened,” she said. “I know what Ramses stole.”
“Yeah,” Regal said, “you told us. ’Bout eighty times now. You chec
k out your drawings yet?” Renai reached down and scooped up the pad, saw that she’d scrawled a half-dozen drawings of the serpent-twined staff that she’d seen Ramses take, and that she’d written the words IN THAT SLEEP OF DEATH over and over and over again. “It’s called a caduceus,” Regal said. “The staff of Hermes. You gave us sleep, snakes, and staff, and Google did the rest. I know it’s a bad situation all around, gods are pissed, the dead are walking, yadda, yadda, yadda, but I gotta admit, I’d have taken that motherfucker, too. Sleep on command? Wake the dead? Hell, yes.”
“It wasn’t Ramses, though—”
“He’s possessed. Yeah, we got that part, too. And the gun. You want a cup of coffee or something, Sparkles? Because we kinda need to hit the ground running here, you know?”
“And Aka? You know she was at the card game with the other destruction gods?”
Regal nodded. “Yep. That’s why Leon’s trying to get in touch with El Juderino. To see if Aka slipped out early, or if the game is still keeping the others ocupado.” The other door rattled and opened, and Leon came in, carrying with him the funk of a recently smoked cigarette. “Here he is now,” she said. “What’s the word, Sweets?”
“No answer,” Leon said, tossing Regal a phone. “Called his phone and the casino number, from both my phone and yours. Best I can figure, he’s still dealin’ them cards.” He gave Renai a curt nod. “Glad to see you shook whatever that demon stung you with. She won’t get a second chance, you got my word on that.”
“Great,” Regal said, shifting from foot to foot with impatience. “Wonderful. And now that she’s functional again, will you please come pick one of these so we can get this shit-show on the road.”
Leon crossed the small room in a couple of long strides. When he reached the counter, he sifted through the collection of masks—some just cheap plastic dominos, others more elaborate ones that covered half the face or more—with a dubious twist to his features. “Remind me again why I need to make a fool of myself like this?”
Regal threw her head back and let out an exaggerated groan. “Because where we’re going, you’ll need to be in costume to blend in. Especially you, with your picture on the cover of every one of your inexplicably popular albums.”
“Hey, now,” Leon said, just as Renai asked, “Where are we going?”
The half smile he always seemed to have in response to Regal’s antics slid off of Leon’s face. “You didn’t tell her?”
“I figured it would be better if we discussed it on the way.”
“Tell her what?” Renai asked, though her tone made it more of a demand. She felt the storm spinning within her, driving away the last dregs of confusion and calm. Leon scooped up one of the masks at random, a half-face pink rabbit mask with big floppy ears. He gestured toward Renai in a well-go-on-then wave.
“Me and Leon got to talking,” Regal said, “while you were, you know, giving all the glory to the hypnotoad. You wouldn’t shut up about Ramses being possessed, and how without the stone you couldn’t find him and—” Leon cleared his throat and tapped his wrist, even though he wasn’t actually wearing a watch. “Okay, right. So we figured, it’s real goddamn convenient that the stone quit working right when we got close, right when a possessed theme park and a destruction spirit were waiting to ambush you. And we asked ourselves, who had the ability to watch you and orchestrate that whole thing? Who sure seems to know a lot about spirits and possession?”
“Jack fucking Elderflower,” Renai said. It all made a painful kind of sense. Cordelia had brought her to him. He’d worked so hard to convince her that his stone was the only way to find Ramses.
He and Cordelia had been playing her from the start.
Regal shot her the finger guns. “The very same. So we went to pay that immortal turd-stain a visit.” She reached into one of the wide pockets of her coat and pulled out a plain white envelope. “But this is all we found.” She held it out to Renai, tilting it to make sure she saw the name written on the front: RENAISSANCE RAINES. Inside, Renai found a digital recorder.
When she pushed the PLAY button, she heard hollering and laughter and slamming lockers and the strangely muted shout of someone speaking from a PA speaker, and she knew what was coming next before the woman started speaking. “Spooky Girl and Miss Feathers,” Opal Brennan said. “So bad news first . . .” Renai let the rest of the message play, but she didn’t need to. Renai had heard it all the first time around, when the oracle left it on her voicemail. She’d lost it when she lost her phone, but that wouldn’t stop someone like Jack, now would it? The question was, why had he left this message for them? Was it a clue? A threat? “Last time anybody heard from our boy,” Opal continued, “he was supposed to meet up with some friends to ride the Ghost Train.” And then, even though Renai knew there was more to the message, the recording ended with a click that sounded all too final. Which meant that Jack had wanted those to be the last words she heard. Wanted to emphasize them.
“This is some kind of sick joke,” Renai said. “He’s got her, you know that, right? That soulless bastard grabbed up an innocent woman off the street just so we would come running into his trap.” The spirit—already awakened by the way Regal and Leon had talked about her like she wasn’t in the room—kept whirling within her, rising in response to her rage, begging to be set free. Renai ached to let it loose. To cut a path across the whole damn city if she had to.
“We had a similar notion,” Leon said.
“And you came back here to change into costumes? Are you—”
“We came back for this,” Regal said, reaching out and snatching something off Renai’s forehead, pulling it off with the skin-tearing yank of a Band-Aid.
“The fuck?” Renai’s hand went involuntarily to her skin, checking her fingers for blood. Regal slipped the thing into Renai’s hand, a curl of thin paper that was sticky on one side, like a pore cleanser or a nicotine patch. There was a thin paste on it that smelled like berries.
“I used to party like a rock star,” Regal said, giving Renai a rueful grin. “After the third time I had to sleep in my car all night because my shitty friend never stayed sober when it was her turn to be the designated driver, I whipped these up. Makes your piss burn like lit gasoline for a couple of days, but that’s the price you pay for making out with strangers in bathroom stalls. I wasn’t sure what weird-ass roofie you swallowed when Aka slipped you the tongue, but I figured this would straighten you out. And it did, so we’re good to go.” She looked at Leon, who nodded, and then back to Renai. “Right? Right.”
“But we know it’s a trap. We’re really just gonna stroll right in like he owes us money?”
“Of course not,” Regal said, handing Renai a domino mask designed to look like a butterfly’s outstretched wings. “That’s why we’re wearing disguises.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was dark when they left Regal’s apartment, the air heavy with the moisture of a recent rain, the clouds still grumbling overhead and threatening more. They piled into Leon’s Rolls and set off, the tension potent and unspoken. Aside from Leon constantly glancing up at his rearview mirror to check on her, and Regal’s half-hummed, half-sung rendition of that girl-kissing song from that white-as-hell pop singer—changing the lyrics to replace “I” with “Sparkles” with no regard for meter—the ride was pretty quiet.
Renai spent most of it staring out the window at the gathering crowds, trying—and failing—to spot any ghouls, which was strange; given the number of people she knew died in the city each day, there ought to be plenty of animated corpses shuffling around in the streets. Regal and Leon had thought it was enough of a problem to summon her from the Underworld, even. So where were the undead?
If Regal or Leon noticed the absence of the ghouls, neither mentioned it. They both seemed content to leave Renai to her thoughts on the short drive across town, which—once she gave up wondering where the restless dead had wandered off to—she appreciated, because she felt like she was on the cusp of und
erstanding the greater picture behind Ramses’ disappearance. He’d obviously made a deal with some devil to save his life, a deal that allowed his body to be possessed by whatever Underworld spirit he’d traded his Fortune to. Whether that deal and that possession was part of Cordelia’s plan, or merely a convenient reality she’d taken advantage of, it was pretty clear that she was orchestrating some plot that involved Ramses, and either the caduceus, the cursed revolver, or both.
Renai had to hand it to Cordelia. The timing was perfect. A missing kid here, a spiritual prison break there, all of it building up to the Hallows, when the whole system designed to keep the living and the dead separate from one another was split wide open. It was like robbing a bank during Mardi Gras, when all the cops were on the parade route. The only thing she couldn’t wrap her mind around was the one that would lock it all in place. The end goal. The why. Cordelia was obviously some kind of goddess. She could come and go to the Underworld whenever she pleased. Why would she need all this confusion in this world and the other? What move was she hiding?
She tried to see it from every angle, trying to remember what she and Sal had been doing in the Underworld at the same time the other half of her had been in this world with Cordelia. When it occurred to her that her dual nature was why Cross had accused her and Sal of being at the prison when the demons were released—because they’d been at OPP in the living world collecting Miguel Flores from his moment of death—her vision caught a little slant in that now-familiar sensation of trying to hold two separate memories in the same brain at the same time, but with the addition of a sharp pain at her wrist. She slapped her own skin, absently, thinking it was merely a mosquito, but when she looked, it was far worse.
The yarn bound to her flesh by Celeste’s effigy magic was beginning to fray.