by Bryan Camp
Renai tried to tell herself that she’d known that the magic tying her two halves together was only ever a temporary solution, that it made sense for something that was only supposed to last for three days to start wearing out after one. But she couldn’t deny that needle-prick of pain. She’d caused this. By remembering as both Underworld Renai and Living World Renai at the same time, she’d put a strain on the magic that it couldn’t handle. Which meant that if she pushed herself too hard, this strange compromise with herself that Celeste had forced on her could rip apart a lot sooner than the end of the Hallows.
To distract herself, she tapped Regal—who was on her third or fourth rendition of her “Sparkles Kissed a Girl,” each one more filthy than the last—on the shoulder. She sang one more line, something about “bathroom floor flavor ChapStick,” and turned around, leaning one arm across Leon’s bench seat.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“What have you got against Jack Elderflower?”
Regal made a face like she’d been the one who’d had to endure Aka’s tongue. “A restraining order would be nice,” she said.
Renai lifted an eyebrow and twisted her mouth. “For real? You got jokes? Now?”
Leon jerked the wheel, cursing, trying to avoid a pothole too late, and the Rolls bottomed out with an alarming thump. No screech of metal, though, so they should be okay, Renai thought. He slowed to a crawl, nonetheless. Regal, who had been thrown to the side, turned back to Renai, saw that her expression hadn’t changed, and frowned. “Okay fine. The truth about Elderflower. Well, first thing’s first, you might know him by another name. Jacques St. Germain?” She paused, as if that should mean something. Renai felt a salty response rising to her lips, but then the name did tickle at her memory, some half-remembered detail overheard from one of those tours in the Quarter that had driven Celeste from her shop. Only they had called him the Comte de St. Germain.
And they’d said he was a vampire.
“Wait,” she said, “that can’t be right. He’s—”
“Not a vampire, no,” Regal said. “There are no vampires in New Orleans, not anymore. They get that wrong in those tours. What they get right, though, is that he’s been in the city since the early 1900s, and he was apparently over a hundred years old when he got here. He claims to be a count, but that’s probably bullshit, just like all of his other names. The only thing I know for sure that’s true about him is that he’s an alchemist, among other things. You know, lead into gold, commanding spirits, attaining immortality. That whole deal. As for why I hate him? Well, the short version is, he and my father, they—”
Don’t say “had beef.” Please don’t say “had beef.”
“—they had beef. And I sort of inherited it. Elderfucker got his dick all bent out of shape when I tried to resolve things some years back, and I reacted poorly.” She got an almost-wistful expression on her face. “I may have actually cursed his dick to hang crooked? I forget.”
“Seriously?” Leon said, surprising Renai, who hadn’t even known he was paying attention.
Regal shrugged. “It was right after Katrina. I was in a bad place.”
“Ain’t nobody in a good place after the storm,” he said, “but you the only one out here hexin’ a man’s private business. You got you an unhealthy fixation, woman.” Renai could see his smile in the rearview mirror, but also his hands flexing and gripping the steering wheel like he could throttle some calm out of it. She recognized their banter for what it was and knew there was a reason they called it gallows humor.
And yet, amid all Regal’s cussing and irreverence, she’d said something important: Jack Elderflower commanded spirits. Renai remembered now that he’d said that all of his odd computer wizardry was because he sent out demons to do his bidding. Since she’d been raised Catholic, she had a very specific idea of what a demon was, complete with batwings and a pitchfork, but in truth, it was just another name for a spirit. Maybe he’d summoned and trapped a bunch of demons in his server racks in the same way Regal had bound a spirit to fuel her fire-stick. The same way Renai herself had forced a room full of lost souls to take the form of a deck of cards. Elderflower had told Renai he wanted a coin of Fortune, but maybe he’d had his eyes on another source of power.
Maybe Elderflower knew where all those demons who had escaped from the Oubliette had gone.
“So, anyway,” Regal said, “words were exchanged, my FEMA trailer got burnt down; things were tense. Then he up and vanished, and I haven’t seen his cowardly ass since.”
“Aight,” Leon said, turning the Rolls off of the bumpy, pitted stretch of Magazine and into the long, sinuous driveway of Audubon Zoo. “Y’all tighten up. We here.”
Renai didn’t know how long the Audubon Society had been putting on this “Boo at the Zoo” fundraiser for Children’s Hospital, but she was pretty sure it’d been going on since right after the storm, at least. As a kid, her folks hadn’t been big on Halloween—half from the manufactured panic about sociopaths putting razor blades in random pieces of candy, and half from the occult implications that they saw in the holiday—so it wasn’t until she was old enough to “run the streets” on her own, as her father had put it, that she was able to really explore Halloween for herself. She’d loved coming to Audubon Zoo on Halloween as a teenager, loved it with every ounce of her little goth heart: the crowd all wearing costumes, the goofy haunted house for little kids and the genuinely scary version for older ones, the transgressive thrill of being in a place after dark when it normally closed in the afternoon, all of it.
And that included, of course, the Ghost Train.
Unlike Christmas in the Oaks, a similar attraction that ran in City Park during Christmas, the Ghost Train at the zoo wasn’t a true locomotive, just an electric cart strong enough to pull a handful of four-seat cars in a line behind it, so every year the path through the zoo was a little different, a little more elaborate. Since they closed all the animal enclosures for the event, the Ghost Train could really go just about anywhere on the grounds.
Renai had a feeling this year’s ride would be far more trick than treat.
After five years of living with her aura of indifference in this world and the shades in the next, dealing with a crowd of living humans was an unsettling, unnerving experience for Renai. She hadn’t stopped at the front gate until one of the security guards blocked her path, hadn’t even considered that she’d need money until she was asked for it. Luckily, Regal had done some trick with a napkin that convinced the woman in the ticket booth that they’d paid.
Inside, she felt like hundreds of eyes were watching her, like everyone turned to stare at her as she passed by. It wasn’t until a young white girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve and shouted, “Mommy, that lady’s fairy wings are flapping!” that Renai realized that her nerves were wound so tight that her wings were trying to carry her away. The mother grabbed her child by the arm and tugged her away, face reddening and refusing to look in Renai’s direction, as if her child had somehow offended her, or more likely that Renai would “cause a scene.” Like she was dangerous, not because she had a spirit living inside of her or because she was an emissary of Death, but because of the color of her skin. Renai felt that old familiar flush of shame and anger, an indignity that was almost comforting after so long without it.
Girl, she thought, when you take comfort in some racist-ass Becky giving you the you-know-how-they-are stare, you got yourself some problems. She shook her head and tried to focus on what was in front of her.
The plan Regal had come up with was for them to split up, Leon in front, Renai behind, and Regal bringing up the rear, the idea being that Jack had no reason to suspect that either of the other two would be there with Renai. So when Jack approached her, either Regal or Leon would be in a position to grab him. Renai didn’t have any better ideas, so she went along with it, pretending like she didn’t know that it was an act-like-we-have-a-plan-so-we-don’t-freak-out sort of approach.
Overhead, th
under rumbled through the clouds. Renai almost wished it would rain, just so the crowds would disperse. She wondered if the little tempest inside of her could reach up and quicken a true storm out of the clouds above, but with only anxiety pulsing through her veins, the spirit seemed far out of her reach, and had been since Aka had sent her on a spit-induced acid trip. She could still feel it there, coiled down deep, but it seemed to be sleeping. Or waiting.
Focused on maneuvering through a crowd that could actually see her and didn’t shy away from her like the shades did, Renai jumped when Regal’s voice muttered from just behind her, “That you?”
“What?” She barely stopped herself from turning to look at the other woman.
“The thunder, is that you?”
“No,” she said, “not me.”
“I sure hope Jude is keeping those rain-dancing pricks busy at that card game.”
Renai was quiet for a second, unsure if Regal was being weirdly literal or just unconsciously racist, wondering if it was possible she was doing both at once. “Aren’t you supposed to be keeping your distance?” she asked, taking the next steps on her toes and craning her neck so she could see Leon’s rabbit-eared mask over the crowd. He’d turned around and was heading back toward them.
“Change of plans,” Regal said. When Renai looked at her, she was holding out her cell phone, which had a text from a blocked number. Up ahead, Leon held up his phone, giving it a disgusted shake.
THANKS FOR JOINING US, the message read. ALL ABOARD!
The line for the Ghost Train was a long, restless serpent of people that wound its way through the metal barricades set up around the carousel: an elaborate, massive wheel beneath a red and white awning, its rim and its center both decorated with paintings of endangered species and oval mirrors, its spokes twisted, gilt-covered poles that held the menagerie of alligators and elephants and rhinos and flamingos alongside the more traditional horses. Every time it started to spin, Renai flinched, unable to stop herself from imagining the huge thing rising up like the animated ruin at Jazzland.
Renai hadn’t really considered that there were unexamined benefits to her aura of indifference, but not ever having to wait in line was sure one of them. She felt her time as herself slipping away from her like there was an hourglass just outside of her vision, a timer ticking down. Not to mention all the dirty looks the three of them were getting from parents whenever Regal muttered something vile within earshot of their kids. She was going on and on about how she should have anticipated that Elderflower would have been able to track their phones, how his demons were everywhere that had wires or circuits for them to possess, only she used words that would have had Renai’s mother reaching for a bar of soap.
To make it worse, when they finally got into the lines that led to the cars themselves, some white family’s kid—obviously way too young for the ride—started screaming when he saw the bloody aprons and grotesque masks the zoo volunteers were wearing. One of them went so far as to lift his mask to show the shrieking child that it was all just a joke, but that only scared him even more.
The young boy’s fear wormed into her, into the half of her that had dwelt in the Underworld, into the compassionate side of her that tried to understand, to empathize. The one that used her power to wash away, not to kill. And so she felt the gulf between her and the destructive power she wanted to face Elderflower with widening, felt the strain of it tugging at the bindings of her flesh.
So it was almost a relief when they finally got onto the train—Renai and Regal squeezing into one seat, Leon taking up the other one by himself in that sprawling I-need-all-this-space-for-all-my-junk way that men sat—even though they were, in a sense, just walking into Elderflower’s trap. Once the train started moving, pulling away from the crowd into the relative silence of rubber tires on concrete and the oaks stretched wide overhead, Renai felt some of her anxiety ease. One way or another, they were about to get some answers.
The scenery was pretty tame at first, with fake bats hanging from the trees and speakers blasting out ominous laughter, but Renai knew it would get pretty intense before it was over. Mannequins set up to depict scenes of violence, volunteer actors portraying monsters and killers chasing after victims, then rushing toward the train itself. She didn’t know if it was because she’d been a victim of violence herself, or if it was because she’d seen the impact that death had on those around them, or if she was just too aware of the real monsters that the world seemed to ignore, but she didn’t relish the thought of those images the way she once had.
Maybe she just knew that this time the danger was real.
At least she wasn’t alone in that knowledge. As soon as they made a turn off the paved section of walkway and onto a gravel service road that was normally closed to the public—which had been pretty cleverly decorated to look like part of the fencing had been torn down—Leon took his trumpet out of its case, and Regal pulled her flame-throwing bat from one of her coat pockets, a set of knuckle-dusters carved out of bleached-white bone from the other. Regal reached into the nowhere place and took out her glass blade.
“So tell me, Sparkles,” Regal said, tapping her bat against her bone knuckles, “do you really not recognize my costume?” The question dragged a nervous laugh of out of Renai, and a chuckle from Leon. “Because it sort of feels like we’re about to die gruesome, and to be completely honest, if there’s no Hamilton in the afterlife, you’re gonna have to bring the big guns out to drag me to the other side.”
At that moment, Renai was struck by two very different conclusions at the exact same time. The first came from Regal’s words, the phrases “big guns” and “other side” colliding in her mind in a way that brought Cordelia’s end game, if not its specific target, into clear and almost painful clarity.
The second came as the foliage on one side of the path and the fencing on the other fell away and they entered the truly scary part of the ride, this year’s theme immediately apparent and—just as abruptly—the trap that Elderflower had left for them.
What Renai saw when the Ghost Train came around the bend and slowed to a stop was this: a Honda Civic staged to look as if it had veered off the road and crashed into one of the zoo’s massive oaks, an actor “pinned” by the car but still struggling and snarling. Other actors in decaying face makeup and torn, bloody clothes shambling toward the Ghost Train with the stuttering, rigor mortis gait of Hollywood zombies. Scattered among them, their empty eyes and vacant expressions aimed unerringly at the car where Renai and Regal and Leon rode, were dozens of ghouls.
A cold, slack-skinned hand clamped over Renai’s mouth just as she started to scream.
Chapter Twenty-nine
They are spoken of throughout human history, even as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Germanic peoples of the far north call them afturganga, the “after-walkers.” In the mountains of Tibet, doors are built with low lintels, in the belief that the Ro-lang, the risen, cannot bend at the waist. In the myths of the Middle East, it was wise to avoid ruins and abandoned places, for there dwelt the ghūl who seized the unwary. In the folklore of Algonquin speakers, they are called wendigo, the forever starving. They are known throughout the modern world as zombies, a name taken from Haitian voodoo. But a zombie is a living person whose soul has been stripped away, while these revenants, these ghouls, are corpses with only the barest shred of life. Monsters and victims both, these walking dead, these failed resurrections share one thing in common: their hunger for human flesh can never be sated.
Elderflower’s trap caught them as soon as Renai saw it. Ghouls who had been lurking in the stands of bushes to either side of the gate stepped out of hiding once the train paused, coming up from behind Renai and Regal and Leon, grabbing their mouths and seizing their hands in silent, inhuman coordination, dragging them from the train car with implacable strength just as it started moving again.
Effectively silenced, the three of them had no way to fight back. Renai managed to swipe at one of her assailants
with her knife—the blade passing through the meat and bone of the ghoul’s shoulder with no resistance—but succeeded only in lopping off a limb that still clung tenaciously to her face. The few people in the cars ahead of them who saw their abduction—plebes, Regal would have called them—thought it was all part of the show, waving goodbye or pointing the struggle out to their friends. Renai saw one asshole filming it all with his phone.
Renai was hoisted into the air by multiple hands, like she was crowd surfing, and she could tell by the swaying and shifting beneath her that the ghouls were carrying her somewhere, but since she could see only darkness above her, she had no way to guess where they were taking her. To Elderflower, she guessed, and if the muffled shouts next to her were any indication, Regal, at least, was heading in the same direction. Cold, rigid fingers pried at the hand holding the black glass knife, trying to pull it from her grasp, so she slid it away into the nowhere place so that the ghouls couldn’t take it from her.
Then she clenched her jaw and reached for the living tempest within her, the power that hung just out of reach. She was caught halfway between her two selves, each one fighting, straining for the storm’s magic. The half of her that was an ender of lives had a burning hatred for Jack Elderflower and what he’d done—what he was continuing to do—and was willing to scorch the earth for miles around if it meant her lightning would reach him. The half of her that was a giver of mercy was consumed by an aching compassion for the people whose corpses were now carrying her, people who—because their Fortunes were still coiled up inside their bodies while their Essences wandered—would linger forever outside the First Gate for no fault other than dying in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Here was the crux of all her trouble as a psychopomp. How could she stomach the anger she felt for the injustices of the world when she knew it was full of broken, frightened people? How could she love the world she lived in when it filled her with so much hate?